True Patriot Love - July 08, 2026


[Sneak Peek] TPL Media's UK Update： Is Keir Starmer Finished？ What's Next for Britain？

Hosted by
Shara Micucci Mike Wixson
Guests
Steve Swift
Mentioned
Keir Starmer Rishi Sunak Tony Blair Lib Dems Labour Trump
Golden Age of Hockey Night in Canada： A Decade of Dominance #CBC Food Prices Are Rising… But Why Is Canada Paying More？

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

149.09

Word count

1,490

Sentence count

61

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Less than two years after winning a landslide election, Keir Starmer is stepping down as the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Who will replace him? And what will his replacement be? This week, I speak with journalist Steve Swift to find out.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's get into it. So, who is going to be the next ruling party of England?
00:00:08.880 Drum roll, please.
00:00:14.500 I am delighted, as always, to be joined by Steve Swift, who gives us the scope of things happening in the UK,
00:00:22.340 as many things have been happening in the UK, many parts of Europe, certainly here in Canada.
00:00:27.160 The world is in a tizzy, as it were, and England is experiencing that in its own very special way right now at the top parliamentary levels.
00:00:37.680 Less than two years after winning a landslide election, Keir Starmer is taking his leave.
00:00:44.560 Steve, thanks for joining us. How have you been?
00:00:47.260 I've been top hole, thank you.
00:00:49.940 That pip-pip.
00:00:52.400 Thank you for legitimizing.
00:00:56.020 I'm all right.
00:00:57.160 It's an extraordinary situation and we're in a kind of, well, nothing's happening at the moment, so we're in a bit of a honeymoon period, but it's kind of, people are thinking, just look what we could have. Just look at the delights we could have. But it's a bit strange. It is our sixth prime minister in, is it 15, 10 years?
00:01:21.920 I believe it's less than that.
00:01:23.660 I think it's closer to nine.
00:01:25.040 Maybe I'm wrong to correct us in the...
00:01:27.080 But yeah, you've certainly had a high turnover there.
00:01:31.060 You have more turnover in your parliament than we do at Tim Hortons here on a staffing front on average.
00:01:37.620 But put that aside, let's try to examine it for a minute.
00:01:40.660 I mean, Starmer came in like guns a-blazing, huge support, the nation expecting so many things.
00:01:49.000 And like I say, less than two years later, what did this? Was this personality? Was this actual policy? How did we end up here, Steve?
00:01:59.900 Well, I think the people of Britain forgot what they voted for, which was, let's just get the Tories and Rishi Sunak out.
00:02:09.800 you know they wanted somebody who was a manager so you know they wanted a 1945 Clement Attlee
00:02:18.200 manager he's nothing like that but they wanted somebody who could steady the ship they didn't
00:02:24.260 want that kind of well the Tories have had so many different and different prime ministers
00:02:29.860 we need somebody who can just take it easy he got a massive um a massive majority in the house
00:02:37.120 He always looked to me, I think I've mentioned this to you before, like he was faintly apologetic and that he was worried that something was going to happen.
00:02:49.040 And I think it's certainly on my social media feeds, I generally talk to people who wouldn't be fans of the Labour Party and wouldn't be fans of Keir Starmer.
00:03:02.240 and the general feeling is that he doesn't do anything he hasn't done anything he's done an
00:03:08.700 enormous amount and the party has done an enormous amount I mean the list is huge but they've just
00:03:14.900 not got the word out and the general dissatisfaction of can't feel that in my pocket can't you know
00:03:22.680 and events as well you know wars and that kind of thing but he didn't sell it well enough and
00:03:29.520 And he's not the kind of big character that we needed.
00:03:34.620 I do think part of this is personality.
00:03:37.800 I do think there's a certain amount of strategy that could have been put into place to find somebody
00:03:43.280 that maybe the right personality up against Starmer at that time might have also had a landslide, depending.
00:03:50.840 I think you're right.
00:03:51.720 The nation wanted a change.
00:03:53.040 They were tired of the merry-go-round, and they wanted something just to change that might stop that pattern.
00:04:00.760 I think we see that in many parts of the world.
00:04:03.800 One of the things that comes to mind is that if he had sort of interacted a little better from a PR perspective,
00:04:12.660 posting what the Labour Party had done, where they had gotten to, and what kind of achievements were coming about, 0.97
00:04:20.260 But that was not enough, as you say, up against an economy that is suffering so hard right now, social media that is easily, you can fertilize so much idiotic and inaccurate social media with people just being broke. 0.91
00:04:39.960 You know, so I think that was part of the part of the dilemma there. 0.79
00:04:43.780 Yeah, and I think that I don't know who was in his team
00:04:47.200 to give us the good news because we never got it.
00:04:51.420 So, you know, it was always reactive.
00:04:54.340 So if someone said, well, you're doing this,
00:04:57.060 they would say, no, but we've put this in place.
00:04:59.760 And then people would say, oh, have you?
00:05:02.300 Oh, okay.
00:05:02.800 I didn't know that.
00:05:03.560 Okay, that changes the perspective a little bit.
00:05:05.940 Yeah, but he didn't do it enough.
00:05:08.400 That was desperately needed by this party, I think,
00:05:10.960 from day one that they had a strong press personality because you just point out starmer
00:05:16.640 himself is a little bit lacking in uh charisma i think yeah i mean he's you know he's a lawyer
00:05:24.560 you know he's a human he's a lawyer so um or a solicitor and i think that that kind of
00:05:33.200 will steady the ship feel and very early on after and we had this with tony blair's government
00:05:39.720 actually, only in a different way. He came in, had a huge majority and then said, well, it did
00:05:46.420 the usual thing of, well, we've been left no money by the Tories. So there's very little we can do.
00:05:52.340 That was early on. And what the country is desperately in need of, or was desperately in
00:05:57.280 need of, was somebody to say, come on, things are going to be okay. And we might be getting that
00:06:04.380 now. Maybe now. Here's the thing. You do have financial stress. Britain is under extreme
00:06:14.460 financial stress in many ways, much like we are here in Canada. You're facing what is
00:06:20.800 outrageous inflation. Unemployment is at new highs. Yes, there are new trade deals being
00:06:27.840 created around the world that are unsure. Really, whoever takes over does have a challenge.
00:06:34.380 I don't know. And I think, once again, the same deal here in Canada, any party to take over the debt of the previous party post-COVID, post-economic slashing globally, realignment after what's happening with Trump, anybody who comes into power is faced with some real challenges.
00:06:54.460 How do you think whoever comes into power now is going to be faced with the Brits?
00:07:01.560 they've got very very little wiggle room as you say you quite rightly encapsulated it
00:07:08.020 very well and they've got such little wiggle room and people always say well you can pull
00:07:13.240 the levers of power but if you pull one and nothing happens what do you do or if you pull
00:07:19.320 one and it stops what do you do and he's got whoever comes in and I think it will be here
00:07:24.820 we'll talk about this in a minute I'm sure you've got very little room so what you need
00:07:30.560 is someone with a personality to make us feel good.
00:07:35.160 So even if we feel that I can't go and afford another holiday
00:07:39.260 or I couldn't afford to remodel my house
00:07:42.340 or I can't even afford some of the basics,
00:07:45.020 but when I see that bloke on TV, I feel better.
00:07:51.320 What are the issues that you think, before we get,
00:07:54.320 and I think that we're probably,
00:07:56.400 we're not going to be able to make a bet
00:07:57.800 on who comes to power, I think, Steve, unfortunately.
00:07:59.940 but what do you think the major challenges what's on the minds of Brits right now what's the top
00:08:07.860 focused issues uh you know I'll give you some examples here in Canada the economy is one
00:08:13.440 housing is one another one is uh crime and safety where do you sit um most of the of the items you
00:08:23.520 just mentioned yes our live issues for us but linked to migration and reform
00:08:31.160 being a party that's that's coming up from behind not doing as well as they
00:08:38.840 thought they might but we'll talk more about that maybe later on but the
00:08:43.660 Economy, housing, jobs linked, seen through the prism of the kind of immigration situation, migration situation, and with a really, a really kind of polarized reform on one side, Greens on the other, you know, acceptable right wing, acceptable left wing, and Labour and the Tories in the middle,
00:09:12.880 with a two-party system okay there's Lib Dems but with a two-party system that isn't really
00:09:20.140 working at the moment so as far as the economy goes we have a GDP that's not performing it's
00:09:29.260 performing badly but it's not performing as badly as some other countries we could describe
00:09:33.260 or we could compare to but things like needs young people not in education training or employment
00:09:42.260 That's huge. We're getting reports from actually ex-Blairite cabinet ministers saying education is not good, needs are not good. And there's a feeling of police being underfunded.