[Music] We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations. A new world order. This is multi-polarity charting the rise of the new multi-polar world order. [Music] Coming up this week, Victor Orban has been taking secret flights, dodging the CIA's aviation monitoring to jet into Moscow. The Hungarian honcho is now fashioning himself as a shuttle diplomat in the Russo-Ukraine war, just as his country takes the rotating presidency of the EU Council. What was the goal of his clandestine trip? And did he still get the air miles? Meanwhile, in the French parliamentary elections, Emmanuel Macron's calculation was effectively like the old puzzle about a man who has to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain from one side of the river to another. Today, he's like a man stood on the far bank of the river, watching a fox murder a chicken as it swallows all the grain. Finally, in Britain, the maths was easy. An apocal nukin for the Tories has bought labour to power on a one-word slogan of change. But with the coffers bear, is the change Starmer's looking for, spare? But first... ...to the victor the spoils. So, this week and last, Victor Orban has been pulling a few surprises out of the heart. It all started when he was taking a trip to Ukraine. I think it was actually a surprise trip to Ukraine. He just turned up in Kiev. What people were initially saying was that Orban had gone there because the Hungarians have just assumed the rotating presidency of the European Council. And he was going there effectively to kind of show the face and to make everybody in Europe happy. And this kind of premise I made sense. It was always assumed that the Hungarian presidency was going to be a little bit spicy, a little bit controversial. So, why not lead with a kind of a smile and a wink and a nod? It's good politics. Well, it may be normal politics, but it's not Hungarian politics. It soon turned out that there was an enormous op going on, a big Hungarian op going on. Orban started to ask President Zelensky about a potential peace deal. Now, he didn't get much out of Zelensky. I think the Ukrainians were quite surprised about the whole situation. And so he came back and, you know, at that point, I guess, people kind of sort of were updated and said, "Okay, well, you know, he's pushing the peace thing. They've got the presidency now, so maybe they're trying to exert a little bit of pressure on the Ukrainians to consider peace." Well, that wasn't the end of it. A few days later, this was last week, Orban flies to Moscow. Completely unannounced. Nobody even knew he was going until the last minute. We'll get back to that in a moment, because this stuff's quite closely monitored. And it leaks really only a few hours before the flight, effectively. Orban turns up in Moscow, meets President Putin, and asks them what their peace terms would be. And actually, frankly, you know, there's all this stuff going around that Orban's Putin's poppered, and he's, you know, Putin's pulling the strings again. I actually got the sense from the Russians that they were a bit surprised by it, too, when Putin made a statement on the Russian position. It seemed to me like they hadn't re-prepared them. They didn't re-packaged them for a Hungarian delegation. They kind of were saying the talking points that they were saying a week before. So I think the Russians were actually quite surprised by this trip, too, if it were to me, my guess. Then, finally, a couple of days after that, Orban flies off. By the way, it's not just Orban, it's him and the foreign minister and all the senior people in foreign affairs and Hungary. They fly off to Beijing, and they meet President Xi. And again, they say, "What do you think of this peace process, et cetera?" They get a much more positive reception from the Chinese than from the Russians, and much more positive reception, I'd say, from the Russians than from the Ukrainians. Anyway, on the day of recording, the Hungarians are currently in DC for the NATO summit. Obviously, Hungary is an active NATO member. There are NATO bases on Hungarian soil. It's a fairly important NATO member, given its location in the world. So they're going over to the NATO summit, I guess, to present some sort of a peace plan. They won't get much interest for it at the summit shortly, but, you know, there is a presidential election this year, and one of the presidential candidates is running on a Ukraine peace ticket. So we might see some massive merchandise there. I'm not the only one speculating about that. But I think, kind of, at a meta level, this is really fascinating. We can talk about it in more detail in the moment, how it happened and all this stuff about avoiding phone taps and everything. It was crazy stuff. But at the end of the day, this is just a really fascinating instance of diplomacy. I don't think the world has seen anything like it in my memory, certainly, where a small country that's affiliated with a variety of organizations, NATO and the EU in its presidential capacity at the moment, just takes these secret trips to try and gen up peace, to try and go around, basically, the Americans and the Europeans, and try and start the process of peace talks. Now, we can talk in a moment about whether it'll be successful or not. I think it will not be successful in the short term, but it's clearly open the box because everyone's talking about it. So, yeah, I mean, it's been a really fascinating week. Watching the reaction just very quickly before I turn it over to you, the reaction's been insanely negative, obviously. But again, all the media publications and stuff have kind of been caught with their pan stand. They're scrambling for talking points and so on. And that's related to the fact that the Hungarians managed to pull this off as a surprise, whereas usually everyone knows what everyone's doing on the world stage, and so there are no surprises in this kind of a field, not so on this one. Yeah, even I've been surprised, Philip, about just how swift the backlash has been. Obviously, I understood that when Viktor Orban went around and started being reported as seeking to broker a peace deal, that wasn't pre-packaged by the European elites and the establishment parties within the EU and individually EU nations. I understood that they weren't going to be happy with that. They like to see themselves as controlling the situation. And crucially, they like to see themselves as having the only pertinent view on this. Like, their position is the correct one and there's literally nothing else available. So, if you introduce somebody else with an alternative view, their fury kind of merge. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. I believe I'm right in saying that there was a meeting held in Hungary related to Hungary's presidency of the European Council, and several nations sent lowly functionaries to this meeting instead of minister-level representatives as is customary. There's always also been talk. I think it is just that at this stage talk of ending Hungary's presidency for this act of freelancing. But I think if we look at it, I think what Mr Orban or Prime Minister Orban has done is actually very sensible. What he's not trying to do is broker a peace deal as far as I can tell. What he's not trying to do is negotiate on behalf of either party or act as a go between the two key parties here. From what I can gather, what he's done is actually very sensible. He's just trying to find out what the various positions are. So, he can then communicate that with other leaders who might then be able to step in and think, "Okay, there's a potential landing place here." You know, he's gone and communicated it with China. He's, as far as I understand, communicated with Charles Michel within the EU. And I guess he's going to communicate that with the powers that be in Washington as well. And I think this is valuable. Nobody's talking to the Russian side at the moment, which is preposterous, given the situation, whatever you've used on the situation in Ukraine and who is to blame for that. It's of paramount importance given the strategic position of Russia and the enormity of what's happening to maintain relations. That's the purpose of diplomacy. It's a bit like free speech, you know? You're not really in favor of free speech if you're only willing to give free speech to those people who say things that you like. The whole point of free speech is that you allow people to say things that you don't like. In fact, that you find hateful, you know, because you're committed to free speech, okay? And it's the same with diplomacy. It's useful if all you're going to go around doing is backslapping and handshaking with people you get along with and like. That's not really diplomacy. It's kind of like mates getting together to arrange some stuff. What's important about diplomacy, the hard bit about diplomacy, is dealing with people you don't like, dealing with countries. You don't like dealing with countries that you perhaps like, but it's a difficult moment, for instance, like Brexit negotiations. This is diplomacy. And I'm happy to see that at least somebody in the EU is doing it. I would say though that the reason, my view is the reason that this is called so much fury, quite apart from the fact that it's the general kind of aristocratic outrage that somebody else could possibly be able to do something that isn't them. That kind of general sense that we are the rightful owners of this process. Not only we can deal with it. There's something very much like that going on in the mentality. I think the most important thing is here that EU populations are nowhere near as sold on the EU's and Britain's and the US's position on the Ukraine conflict as the elites of those countries and organisations are. The American people are nowhere near as sold on the need to continue this rather than reaching a compromise, which, yes, will involve concessions on both sides as President Biden is, for instance, in his administration. The British people, I guess, are nowhere near as focused on continuing this as opposed to reaching a peace deal as the British government is. And it's the same within the EU and most EU countries, accepting, of course, the Baltic nations, Poland and those nations who are known to have very strong feelings on the matter. And I think what's happening here is all ban is at risk of completely humiliating and upstaging the establishment EU parties. He's at risk of doing what, you know, the voters of Germany, the voters of Britain, the voters of France, the voters of the United States, might quite like. And that's finding out whether there's a peace deal to be had and if so, looking to try and secure one. But the actual people representing, the actual individuals representing those electorates, those electorates in Germany and France and Britain in the United States, aren't doing that, and they're pretending that no such option is available. So all ban is at risk of really humiliating these people here, and I think they understand it instinctively. They get what could potentially happen. Their electorates will say, well, why aren't you guys doing that? Like, what's wrong with going and finding out what their position is? What's wrong with trying to find a peace deal? And at that stage, their whole position on this conflict starts to break down. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right on that. But that, I think understanding that aspect of it is why we need to understand why it was so important that this was done in secret, which, as I'll say in a moment, is highly unusual for this type of maneuver, and it's actually very impressive that the Hungarians pulled it off. On the way back on a flight from Moscow, Victor Roban was interviewed, I think it was by a German journalist. I could be wrong, it may have been a Hungarian journalist, but I think it was a German journalist. And he went through all his rationales, and they are what you think, Hungary. He wants peace, Hungary promised in the recent elections that they had campaigned for peace. They want their presidency in Europe to be a peace presidency and so on. But one thing that he said that is, if you know Hungarian politics, it's so Victor Roban, he said, he kind of bragged a little bit, and he said, "You know, we pulled this off with absolutely no one knowing until the last minute." And he said, "That's very difficult in a world where, quote, the big guys listen to all the telecommunications." Very Roban move. That's why I think people compare him to Trump sometimes. He said, "The quiet part out loud." But the point here is very important because the thing is, when most people do large-scale things on the international stage, when it involves kind of senior leaders and so on, everyone's kind of keeping an eye on everything, in a sense. And so not really much happens that's not a big surprise. It occasionally does, like the Ukraine war was a big surprise. But even the Ukraine war, we had like two months of prep or three months of prep, that it might happen because everyone was watching everything, as they usually do. On this, there was a couple of hours prep. My understanding is it leaked to a Hungarian news website because the polls were called up at the last minute and asked if military planes and a government plane could fly over their airspace. And then where it started getting around, that something was going on. So they kept it contained until that last minute. And doing that in and of itself is a very impressive thing to do in a day and age of mass communications and so on, you can imagine. But the real point is that if you can manage to shock the system like the Hungarians did, no one's really prepared for it. Because you see, when something international is going on, typically, and as I said, everyone's usually watching everything, and so everyone gets a sense of when something's going to happen, then one side will start kind of building up the media war and they'll be prepping the ground for the whole thing. None of that happened. So the media had to actually scramble around the Hungarian visit. And now, of course, they came up with some talking points, and it was mainly, he's a Russian stooge and all that, and that's fine. But they were acting from a point of view of disadvantage. And as well as that, because it was such a shock, the trip itself became the main story. Whereas if this was more managed, let's say, in the media, you'd be very quick to try and not make the trip itself the main story. You make something else the main story. So they've been enormously successful here. And I think that the process in and of itself has to be kind of understood to understand the reaction and to understand why I think this really will change the landscape a little bit. I don't think there's any really walking back to pre-Hungarian peace op at this stage. The last thing I'd say about it, because it's worth throwing in there, and it's something that hasn't been as commented on in any of the media. But now, look, I think that the Hungarians planned this meticulously for the NATO summit and also for the EU presidency. This has clearly been in the works for some time. So hats off, guys. What they did not plan for, because they couldn't have known, was that the Biden story would blow up, that Biden's effectively seen all. He's got dementia. Now people are saying his Parkinson's seems actually quite likely, because apparently there was a Parkinson's doctor visiting the White House. Anyway, he's got something and he's not composite mentors. And obviously the Hungarians didn't plan for the fact that that would explode. But what perfect timing? Because not just as you say, Andrew, the populations and so on will be watching. And saying why aren't our leaders doing this? We don't want this war anymore. Most of us don't want this war anymore. There's only a small minority now that still think that the war should keep going. So certainly they'll be asking that. But at what point do people start asking? You know, more informed people as well, start asking. Did Biden make a decision about this war when he was seen all? Because it was only two years ago, and the guy looks complete vegetable at the moment. So two years ago he probably had some cognitive issues. And of course it was an age. It was a rumor at the time, but it was dismissed as, you know, right-wing talking points in its verses area we covered in the show last week. But the fact of the matter is he probably was kind of seen all. He probably was tending toward these kind of angry outbursts that have been coming out in the leaks to the press that we've seen now. We've heard all about how the Biden White House is operating. And it's very volatile. And the guy doesn't seem like he's in control of himself. Well, did he make a decision on the war? Did he make a decision on sending weapons to Ukraine and telling them to back down from making peace with Russia? Did he make this decision when he was in compass mentors? And does that mean you have to ask yourself, even if you're a very pro-war politician or a relatively pro-war politician in Europe, you have to ask yourself, "Have I just nailed my flag to the mast?" And the ship is being sailed by, you know, a guy who's drunk effectively. Now, there's no getting out of it now if you're a Macron or a Schultz or anything. Your flag is up there. It's nailed firmly on the mast. But you've got to start asking yourself. And the people who haven't fully nailed their flag to the mast, they have to ask themselves, "Is this war the product of a decision by a senile, slightly delusional old man?" I mean, I think that that's going to be increasingly asked as the kind of after-effects, the afterglow of this Hungarian peace thing starts to fade away. "Giranta, meet Jacobins." "Listeners will know that I'll be aware that on Sunday, the..." "Business will know that I'll be aware that on Sunday, the second round of the vote up..." "Fuck me, what's wrong with me?" "Okay, just chill out, Andrew." On Sunday, just gone. The second round of voting for the French National Assembly took place. "Listeners will be aware that this was a snap election caused, many say, in a peak of petulance by..." "French President Emmanuel Macron, when his party took a savage beating in the earlier European Parliament elections." In the first round of voting for the French National Assembly elections, the Resombland National, the Marine Le Pen Party National Rally, as it translates into English, had won. They had managed to secure some 33% of the vote in the first round, compared with 28% for the popular front, which is a united coalition of various left-wing parties, from old-fashioned socialists to Stalinists, from what I can gather. And 21% for Emmanuel Macron's Ensembler Party, and a lowly 6.5% for the traditional center-right party, the equivalent of the Republicans or the Conservative Party in the UK. So everybody going into this Sunday thought that this was going to be the moment that the National Rally, Marine Le Pen's party, and her youthful party leader, Jordan Bardella, came of age, essentially, and rested control of the French National Assembly, and were able to appoint a Prime Minister and a Cabinet. But not so in what seemed to be quite a shock. In fact, the popular front, the melange of left-wing parties, won the second round of the vote, or at least they got the most seats. In fact, they only secured 25.8% of the vote, and yet secured 180 seats, compared with the Marine Le Pen National Rally Party, which managed to get about 12 percentage points more. They managed to get 37% of the vote, but only managed 142 seats, which was less than Emmanuel Macron's party, which managed to get 159 of just 24% of the vote. One Earth was happening here. Well, the French system works on a two-vote system where basically you vote with your heart, the first round. There's many candidates for each constituency, or each district, or whatever the Americans call it. And then after the first round of voting, unless somebody reaches a kind of a majority, everyone except the top two is eliminated, and then you go back to the vote to vote with your head. Which of these top two do I prefer? Now, what happened was the popular front, the left-wing party, and Emmanuel Macron's party ensembler, actually did some deals with moving candidates about in a way that allowed them to outflank Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party in the voting system itself, and that's what essentially led to a popular front win in terms of the number of seats. I find this amazing. I find it fascinating. And this is something that I'm sure you'll comment on, Philip, that in the run up to this election, there was a whole range of pressure from the EU and establishment sources and big finance through the markets, that if Marine Le Pen won with her, you know, her program of increased spending and rolling back some of Emmanuel Macron's so-called, you know, business and market-friendly reforms, then it would lead to France getting hammered in the bond markets. There were also issues with the EU opening up an investigation into France's rules-breaking fiscal deficit. So the way that they... So, well, what do you do if you're worried about these guys getting into power? Oh, well, you bring a whole bunch of kind of far-left wingers, a bunch of Corbynites, a bunch of people that would make Bernie Sanders look like Newt Gingrich. You bring them into the government because that's obviously going to be far better for France's fiscal position. That's going to be far better in terms of France's appeal to the bond vigilantes. That's going to be far better when it comes to sticking to EU rules. They essentially put themselves in a position out of fear of Marine Le Pen that now they have, as I say, what I think could be reasonably called a kind of a far-left coalition in charge of the government. But I think you'll have more to say on that, Philip. I mean, yeah, it's absolutely crazy. It's just as you say, like, "Oh, we're really worried about the fiscal situation and economic management. Let's put a bunch of trial skills to enjoy." It's absolutely not. I mean, it shows how insincere they are. Yeah, it's a bit like worrying that your wife is maxing out the credit card and divorcing her for Kim Kardashian, you know, right exactly and handing her the credit card. So, I mean, just to give some sense, I looked into the popular France policies, the new popular France, or whatever they're called. And it's a combination of enormous public sector pay increases and price controls. I mean, I'm more open-minded about price controls than your average economist, but if you're trying to please the ECB and the Bardon vigilantes, that sounds like Chavez's economics from Venezuela. I mean, it just makes differentially look like complete clients. I mean, it really does. None of them are serious. They're just power-hungry. Well, they are ideologically driven about this far-right quote-unquote thing, and I'll get back to that in a moment. But basically, yeah, there was a mixed market reaction, which was really interesting. So, the stock market has been selling off the CAC-40, and that definitely shows that markets, you know, organic markets where the traders are making the end decision, because equity markets aren't manipulated by governments. QE can influence them and so on, but they're not day-to-day manipulated by governments. And it's showing that the equity markets are saying, "Well, Jean-Luc Melanchon is a Trotskyist. I mean, that's what he is." And, you know, their platform is extremely far left. I mean, it really is in Chavez territory. It's way further left than the left-wing of the Democrat party. I don't think even Jeremy Corbyn would have tried price controls. Just putting that out there. So, yeah, it's very left-wing. But at the same time, the bond markets have pretty much kind of rallied. So, they fell enormously on the back of the La Pen fears that were ginned up by the press. We've talked about that in the past. And then they rallied. So, they said that this outcome is better for the bond market than the La Pen, than a potential La Pen victory. And, of course, the stock markets are not controlled by the government. The bond market is. We discussed this on the show, and we discussed the La Pen stuff. It's controlled by the ECB. And so, what the markets are saying is that the ECB is willing to backstop this, whatever, comes out of this coalition. Or even if it's on Parliament or whatever, what we currently see, the absolute freak show that the Parisian elite have created in their country, the ECB is willing to backstop it. And that's completely confirmed by the fact the ECB haven't made a peep. We haven't heard a single, I haven't heard, a single official, you know, from the ECB or from the European Commission or anything saying, "Wow, you've just elected a bunch of Trotskyists. Maybe we should talk about the fiscal situation, not a peep." So, the establishment is backing this. They're backing it completely. Why are they doing this? Well, desperation, first of all. Okay, that's really important. And to understand why they're willing to tolerate Trotskyists, you have to understand a little bit about who these elite are. Now, we all know who the liberal elite are in various countries, but in France, they come with a particular je una se quoi, shall we say. Well, actually, it's not je una se quoi, because we can't actually say exactly what it is. They go, they're the normallions, right? They go to the econ normals, the up there universities, the econ normals superior, which is the top one, produces business people, various people. The econ normal at Le Administrator is the civil service, and going into public service in general. They're called e-narks, or they're called normallions, or whatever you want to call them. When they go to those universities, they're always sort, all this kind of like gentle, cultural marks of stuff. Look, when people hear that in the West, they'll think, "Oh, yeah, that must be the stuff that we always hear about in America, that the right-wearingers are complaining about." No, no, no. Don't misunderstand me. There is a massive tradition in France about talking, it goes back to 1968, about talking about all politics through a kind of a Marxist lens. It's just a thing. Marxism, post-modernism, the offshoots, the post-structural stuff, the offshoots of Marxism, that's like the fashionable way to talk. Lacanianism, a lame bad dew if people follow this stuff, don't know exactly what I mean. And these guys turn these radical ideologies into parlor games for the elite, for the rich, really, for the rich and the elite, and they play these parlor games. I had the pleasure of reading Emmanuel Macron's dissertation. It's full of this stuff. It's this post-structuralist thing he's citing, like, I don't know if Gramsci's cited or whatever. They play games with these radical ideas. It's a fashionable thing to do, and it's very French. And what they don't seem to get is that when you have somebody like Melichon, it's not a normalian playing games with Gramscian interpretations of a cinema or something like that, which is what all these guys talk about. When Melichon says off with their heads, or what the popular front has said, 90% taxes on the wealthy, they mean it, guys, they mean it. They mean it, and they're going to do it to you. They are not normallians who were reading Gramsci or reading Paul Verrellio, or Jacques Lacan, or Elaine Biju. They're not them. These guys are proper communists, or at least they're proper socialists. They're real socialists, and they want to do the things that they say. So there's naivete there as well. I think the final thing is that they think that they can block this. They think that the coalition will be so dysfunctional that it won't be able to get its house in order, and that Macron will be instructed to not join it unless it's really, really watered down, in which case they won't join it. And they'll end up with a hung parlums, and they figure a hung parlums better than Le Pen. OK, fine. But come on. You've just allowed the far left into what is called in France, the cordon sanitaire. The cordon sanitaire used to be there. That's the kind of, I don't know if they're direct English translation for it. A sanitary cordon, I guess it means. It's a quarantine. Sorry, it's a quarantine. And the idea is that you basically quarantine the far left and the far right. Well, the quarantine's not working anymore. Usually you'd use central parties to do that. The quarantine's not working anymore, so they've left the quarantine. They've left the far left put on the hazmat suits. And now there's only one thing to be quarantined. Well, the far left have all the electoral momentum. Macron's party, as you say, ensemble is going down the toilet, and the far left is coming up. Look, maybe they don't form a government this time. But the far left is now a real political force in France. Trotskyism is now a real political force in France. And who engineered it? The elite did. Because as you said, they utilize the voting system. Very explicitly, the Financial Times has this, this isn't a conspiracy theory. It's in the Financial Times. They got rid of candidates, left us candidates in some seats, centrist candidates in another, and they forced the vote toward one candidate. This was a fully engineered program by the French elite. Well, the last thing I'd say is there was a fascinating article in the Financial Times this week where they quoted an anonymous executive, a chair, of a CAC 40 company, so one of the top 40 companies, the largest 40 companies in France. And I want to read this in total. Like many of his fellow citizens, the executive backed the left-wing alliance to bar a far right candidate from winning his constituency. His satisfaction gave way to deep displeasure, however, when Jean-Luc Melanchon, head of the Alliance's far left member, Le France, is in some knees, boasted he was the elections winner. By the way, he was, he was in chart, he's in chart, he's the main face of the popular front. Quoting the executive, "What got my goed up is the people like me who voted for the NFP to block the RN, then had to watch Melanchon claim victory barely five minutes after the polls have closed," he said. This guy has been lied to by his friends. Of course, Melanchon declared victory. It's a massive victory for the French far left, and the executives voted for it. There's that old Lenin phrase, "Let the capitalist sell us the rope that we will use to hang them." That is precisely what is going on here. The Loveless landslide. Well, across the English channel, to give that body of order its correct name, there was also an election, a general election, to elect the House of Commons and thus a new Prime Minister. Lizners will be well aware a week ago, when this podcast will go public, the Conservative Party led by Rishi Sunak suffered a crushing defeat. They actually lost in a kind of apocal swing, 251 of their previous seats to go all the way down to 121 seats. Labour, on the other hand, gained 211 seats to go up to 411, which gets them pretty damn close to Tony Blair's all-time record, but when he was elected in 1997, he got a 418 seat in the House of Commons, which I believe I'm writing to him, was an all-time record. So, Kia Starmer, when this crushing victory, he's been handed a significant, significant majority. Because of the British system, because we don't have an American-style separation of powers, you can now just do just about what they have. He wants because he's got this huge majority. But that's not the full story. The full story is much more interesting. For instance, Labour actually only managed to secure 33.7% of the vote. So, of all of those people who voted, they barely managed to get over a third of them. And this was on a turnout that was lower than it has been for 23 years. It was just under 60% turnout, which is the lowest since the 2001 election, which Tony Blair won, the second election victory, which was, you know, at a time when politics wasn't a big deal, people were pretty bored, people knew that Labour Party were going to win easily, because they had this huge majority. And yet, despite the unpopularity of the Conservative government, Labour only managed to get 33.7% of the vote. They actually had every advantage possible for a political party to have coming into this election. The economy is pretty bad, and people are very dissatisfied. There's been a lost decade and a half in terms of GDP per capita, like the growth, i.e., the size of the economy divided by the number of people. So, people aren't feeling as if they're getting richer at all. Inflation's been very high until quite recently. You also had a Conservative Party who's been in power for a long time. And in any political system, you always get this kind of time for a change swing back of the pendulum, even in good times. In addition to that, they faced Rishi Sunak, who, for all his qualities, and I think he's probably quite a decent man. He's a family man. He's apparently very hardworking. He's pretty intelligent. He's absteminous. He's a pretty good guy, all round, it seems. But he's an awful politician, by all accounts. So, they were also running against, they were running in a bad economy and a long-time government against a poor opponent. Labour also had the advantage of facing one of the worst election campaigns in living memory. I can't remember a worse election campaign than that, which the Conservative Party ran. I think even political experts would probably have to go back to 1983, since there was a worse election campaign. And despite all of this, they only managed to get 33.7% of the vote. So, what's going on here? I actually think what this election shows is that, first of all, the Reform Party obviously cost the Conservative Party a huge number of seats. Basically, the Reform Party got more votes than the Liberal Democrats, who secured 72 seats. So, they got more votes than the Liberal Democrats, but they only secured five seats. They needed the thick end of a million voters to get a single seat, whereas the Liberal Democrats needed considerable less than that. And what the Reform Party did is, even though they didn't secure many seats, they cost the Conservative Party a lot. But I think there's something more going on here. And that is people are losing faith with all the mainstream parties. We spoke in France about how the National Rally and the Popular Front are kind of taking over from Macron's kind of centrist party and the old-fashioned centre-right. I think something very similar is happening in the UK. OK, Reform only got a bridgehead. They didn't go much farther than that. OK, Labour secured this absolutely massive majority. But I think that kind of masks what's really happening here. And because of the British system, the first past of the whole system, it's brutal on parties that can't make it to kind of 28-30%. And they just end up getting wiped out. And I think what's clearly happening in Britain is there's a general dissatisfaction. The turnout was extraordinarily low. And the big parties simply didn't perform as one would have expected them to. So I think we did an episode a few weeks ago, actually a few months ago, I suppose, at this stage, where we predicted that this coming electoral cycle will be the beginning of the next phase of Britain's decline. I think we are being proved correct daily on that. We can go through some of the reasons in a moment. I just plugged to the listeners, go back and listen to the podcast. I think it was pretty pracient and we probably made some observations there that will apply to Britain over the next four years. The first thing I'd add to your very good summary is that Labour, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer got less votes than either time Jeremy Corbyn stood for election. Now that may sound like a gacha, but it's not just a gacha, because it means that Keir Starmer has no mandate. He very aggressively took out Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbynites out of the party. He really took them into the alleyway and hit them over the head with a baseball bat a few times. I mean, that's really what happened. He's widely seen within Corbyn circles to have betrayed Jeremy Corbyn. I think he probably did. He pretended to be his friend and then he stabbed him in the back, which is, you know, I suppose politicians do it all the time, but most people aren't so keen on it. And the fact of the matter is he got less votes than Corbyn. So that suggests that if Corbyn was running, he probably would have secured more votes this time. Then Starmer because the Tory party are in such a battered shape and the economy is so bad and so on. So for the next four years, the far left will be able to constantly wave those results in the face of Keir Starmer. And his government and say, "You guys are a bunch of funnies. You're establishing candidates that you didn't take over the party like Blair did to get elected. Blair could always make the case." I took it over to get rid of all that old screwy Labour stuff that couldn't get elected since the '70s, and I dusted it off and I turned it into a clean new product that could be sold to the population. That's not the case here. He took it away from the old left or the far left, or whatever you want to call them, the Corbyn people. He took it away just because the establishment didn't like Corbyn. And then he got less votes because Corbyn is more popular, which doesn't surprise me at all, by the way, because whatever you think about Corbyn's politics, he believes what he says. People like people who believe what they say. Keir Starmer couldn't be more the opposite. That guy will clearly say everything, and everybody knows it. I think everybody, even the people who strongly support Labour. Well, on top of that, because that will be what plays out. That will be the kind of, you know, the political theatre that plays out in front of all the fundamental issues that come out. The expectations that have been set up, especially for the elite, in Britain, for this government, are so out of whack. And the reason that they're so out of whack is because the establishment press have pulled out all the stops to try and normalise Labour as much as possible. They want to turn Labour. In my opinion, there is a group of people, a very influential group of people in the media, in finance. They don't dominate it for sure, but they're a vocal, active group, who want to replace the Tory party as the standard bearer in Britain with the Labour party. And they like the kind of very centrist Labour politics. They want to get rid of all the stuff that goes on around the fringes of the Labour party that scares them, they hate Brexit, go down the list. They think Labour is the vehicle to do this. It's delusional, but that's what they want to do. Well, they've raised expectations really high, so we can't go into detail because we're not doing a full episode on this. But I just want to kind of lay out three things that are indicative of what's going on moving forward. The city of London, or at least the less informed people in the city of London, have been told that the new Labour government is going to be their best friend. This has been widely touted in the Financial Times, and they're being told that Labour can seemingly rejuvenate the financial services sector in Britain, which is ailing at the moment. It's losing a lot of market share to the Americans and so on. It doesn't really have a clear purpose anymore either. There's a lot of problems in the city. This is just complete lies. Labour is coming in to scrap the carried interest loophole. Whatever you think of that, maybe you think it's a great idea, I don't mind. But the fact of the matter is that it is going to probably destroy the private equity and hedge fund industries in Green Park in London. Because these are highly mobile industries, I'm not leaving. The bigger boys in Canary Wharf, who clearly made this deal, that go ahead with the carried interest loophole, but play ball and everything else, they are convinced that there's going to be this huge deregulation drive. I don't understand this, right? Jeremy Hunt spent the last however long he's been chancellors. Two years, three years, four years, three years, call of thought. He spent that last amount of time tearing up all the regs. He did two series of reforms, the Edinburgh reforms and the Manchin House reforms. They were geared in this direction. If anyone tells me that Jeremy Hunt was secretly holding back on regulations and labour is coming in to do the hardware game, rubbish. Jeremy Hunt totally did as much as he possibly could, taking into account the politics of the Bank of England and the Treasury. He totally did, 100%. You couldn't be more certain than anything. So the financial services people are going to be very disappointed. They also might see capital gains tax rises. Labour haven't committed to them, but they haven't taken them off the table. In my opinion, capital gains tax rises are there as the emergency lever to be pulled if the budget doesn't balance properly. Second point, Rachel Ruse came out within, I think, about five days of the election, five days of the election, and revealed to the world that things were even worse than expected in Britain, with the public finances and with the economy. We've been saying this since we started the show. Well, Rachel Ruse has just magically discussed it, and so she's prepping the public, prepping them for what? Austerity. She's prepping them for austerity, probably tax increases. Probably tax increases. And remember, Labour have committed to not raising taxes on working people, and I think they will try to stick to that commitment as far as they can. That means they're coming after the elite, the very elite that just elected them. Sense a bit like France, kind of a light version of what's going on in France, is very amusing. Final one. Kier Starmer's come out and said there will be a cast iron commitment to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence. This reflects the fact that Kier Starmer is a selected candidate by the establishment, and the establishment right now is really into NATO and staff, as everybody knows, and so Starmer's being told you have to do this by the defence people who backed them. Well, let me just read out a quote from the article here. "However, he is yet to set out how he will fund the defence pledge, or when it will be delivered." Thank you Strategic Defense Review. To be launched next week, must come first, and quote. Okay, someone's coming out of this disappointed. Labour are already tightening up the budget. Rachel Reeves is already saying the situation is worse than we thought. Now you have to come up with that extra spending to hit the 2.5% of GDP target. One of two things is going to happen there. Either they're going to raise taxes, which I think is what's going to happen. Probably capital gains taxes, and probably income taxes at the top end. They're going to do that to finance the military budget, and again, they're going to disappoint the entire elite that got behind them, or they're going to bury this defence pledge within a few weeks. And they're going to tell the defence people that there's no money left, that the piggy bank's empty, in which case they're all alienated, and they're all burned. Okay, that is how this government's going to play it. Perpetual disappointment in every single class, from public servants who want pay increases, to finance bros who want their carried interest loophole, to defence people, everyone. Everyone is going to be disappointed with this government. Meanwhile, the left are going to be screaming in their face, "We got more votes than you." Yeah, I think it's long been the view of this podcast and me individually, to those who read my Twitter and occasional scribblings for Bornbrook and the daily skeptic, that this government is going to have very little room, indeed, to do anything with the economy. There's certainly going to be no room to do the usual deficit-funded spending on public services that left a centre of governments in Britain have wanted to do. The room's just not there. As we've said for months now, Philip, it's far more likely that Labour will have to engage in austerity. And that doesn't just mean austerity as in spending cuts to public services. Osterity can also mean a far higher tax burden for the same level of public services. You know, we shouldn't just redefine the term economic austerity to mean the kind of the hair shirt for the NHS and schools and roads and rail and that sort of thing. No, it can also mean a much higher tax burden for the same level of public services. And I think that's what there's likely to be. I also think that you're right that the left-wing, those who, as you quite rightly say, were absolutely battered by Keir Starmer. I mean, it was really, it was ruthless stuff. They're going to be screaming. Yeah, like, we got more votes for you. Our programme was more popular than yours, especially as they're not going to be able to give any red meat to the left-wing of the party. Maybe not red-leaved. Any meat substitute, plant-based food product to the left-wing of the party. So, what they're going to do instead, and I think this is where the rub comes in, is they're going to have to placate the progressive wing of the party somehow, which actually is the majority of the membership and the majority of the MPs. It's only the kind of the elite, which is brownite or blareite. What they're going to do instead is they're going to engage in a programme of radical social reform and constitutional change. And we're already seeing the process of that now. Some people might like that. However, it is also true that the average person, or not the average person, that's the wrong way to put it, but more than 50% of Britons, if you look at opinion polling data, hold social views that are more right-wing than the leadership of the Conservative Party. So, when you take all Britons, you know, when you poll all Britons, including people who vote green, people who vote Labour, people who vote Liberal Democrat, people who vote for the Communist Party of Great Britain, when you take all of those people, they have social views, more than 50% have social views, more conservative, more right-wing than the leadership of the Conservative Party. So, if you then engage in austerity, if the economy and either the stagnation or the slow reduction of living standards continues grinding on, if straining and groaning public services continue creaking and cracking and getting even worse, and at the same time, in order to placate your base, you engage in fairly serious, progressive social reform legislating on things like hate speech, and Islamophobia and making companies publish their wages broken down by race, and LGBTQ rights and all the rest of that. I mean, people might think that's a good thing, fine, all power to you. The point is it's going to be really unpopular, and the point is now, you're going to have all those right-wing media outlets like the Daily Telegraph, like the Daily Mail, all of those right-wing Conservative MPs, which now aren't trying to prop up a government and can say what they really think. They're all going to go at this, they're all going to criticise it, they're all going to unearth the scandals and the outrages that are related to it, related to migration, related to the small boats channel crossing, and at the same time they're doing all of that, the economy is kind of being ground to a pulp slowly, and people's living standards are gradually getting worse and worse. It's not difficult to imagine that creating over a few years, I mean, at first, Labour will enjoy a honeymoon period and it'll be quite long. I think people will be surprised that it'll last into 18 months, perhaps even two years, that it's not difficult to imagine Britain, given what opinion polling shows us on views, given what Labour are likely to do, it being quite a seething, angry place come the next election in 2029. And there's something worse going on there here, but there's something to bear in mind here. As I said right at the beginning of this segment, Labour really didn't do very well. They barely managed to get over a third of the vote from a very low turnout, a very, very low turnout. And that was with all the advantages and the advantage of having keyest armor as opposed to Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn was hugely disliked by the media. Jeremy Corbyn was hugely disliked by the media. He was distrusted by many people, and he wasn't necessarily the most organised person or the best leader of MPs. Keyest armor was very organised. Keyest armor was very much liked and supported by the media. And despite that, they really struggled. Meantime, in four constituencies, elected Muslim independent MPs. So people who were not affiliated to any party, which if you know anything about the British system or perhaps the American, it's extraordinarily difficult to do. You can imagine as an American listener how difficult it is to become a senator without the support of the Republicans or the Democrats or to become a congressman likewise. It's very similar in the House of Commons. It's really difficult to do. Four were elected running on Gaza tickets. Four. Now, Labour traditionally has relied on the Muslim community for a lot of its votes and a lot of inner-city constituencies. Now the genius out of the bottle that these communities, which are much more organised, are really well organised. You know, they've maintained a lot of their cultural identity in a way that white British people haven't. They have maintained a lot of community cohesion in a way that we perhaps work in class, white people have forgotten which we used to have but don't anymore. And now they realise that they can organise and get their own folks elected. The genius out of the bottle, it's an example for others to follow. At the same time, the Green Party in Britain made inroads. It's been restricted traditionally to its stronghold in Brighton, but it won another seat. And it finished second in a whole raft of seats, including several in London as well. So Labour looks like it's going to start facing an increasing challenge from the left as well. And as you said, Philip Pilkington, I think the next election, you know, things really could break down quite badly and get very angry indeed. You know, I don't think, you know, the media in Britain are pushing this as the kind of the end of the chaos. Now we have the adults in the room, the steady hands have returned to run the country and bring it back from its disorganisation and dissolution. But you know what I remember? I remember three and a half, four years ago, hearing something very similar when Joe Biden took over at the White House. Remember, the adults are back in the room after the disaster that was Donald Trump? How did that work out? How did it work out? Think about that. You've been listening to Multi-Polarity. Subscribe or follow for fresh episodes every week. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
