← Leaders with Francine Lacqua
Leaders with Francine Lacqua
In the City: Is the Anti-Immigrant Reform UK Ready to Take Charge?
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- [00:01]
Zia Youssouf
The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works.
- [00:06]
Francine Lacqua
At IBM, we've seen this firsthand.
- [00:09]
Zia Youssouf
But by embedding AI across hr, IT and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by
- [00:23]
Francine Lacqua
putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business.
- [00:27]
Zia Youssouf
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- [01:05]
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- [02:10]
Francine Lacqua
Studios podcasts radio News. Welcome to in the City. Each week we unpack a story that's crucial to the world's financial capitals. I'm Francine Lacqua.
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David Merritt
And I'm David Merritt.
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Francine Lacqua
And Dave, this week, a conversation with Zia Youssef, businessman turned rising competition in the Reform UK party.
- [02:31]
David Merritt
That's right. And this comes as a new survey by Ipsos puts the Reform Party, which is led by Nigel Farage, on 34%. That's nine points ahead of Labour and the Conservatives a distant third. So if the figures in the survey were to be replicated across the country in an election, Reform UK would win a majority. It's quite a change from the results we saw less than a year ago at the last general election.
- [02:56]
Francine Lacqua
So we wanted to get Zia Youssouf on to talk about what he thinks is behind reform's rise in popularity, but also more importantly, what policies we could expect from a reform government, especially in challenging geopolitical time like these.
- [03:10]
David Merritt
And after the conversation with Zia, you'll hear from our UK politics correspondent, Lucy White. She's been covering reform's rise in policy platform, and we wanted to get her perspective on our conversation.
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Zia Youssouf
Welcome to the City of London.
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Bethenny Frankel
The City of the City.
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Zia Youssouf
The City of London.
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Francine Lacqua
The next station is Bank. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.
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Zia Youssouf
The financial heart of the country.
- [03:39]
Cincinnati Insurance Announcer
The City.
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Zia Youssouf
The City.
- [03:41]
Lucy White
Welcome to in the City.
- [03:44]
Zia Youssouf
Stand clear of the doors, please.
- [03:49]
Francine Lacqua
Thank you so much for joining us.
- [03:51]
Zia Youssouf
My pleasure to be here.
- [03:53]
Francine Lacqua
Now, you have quite an unconventional actually past. You were a businessman. You worked for a lot of the big American banks, and then you set up a company which you then sold and went into politics. Tell us about that.
- [04:04]
Zia Youssouf
Yeah. So I'm the son of Sri Lankan immigrants into the UK. They came to Britain in the early 1980s. My father just qualified as a doctor. They had to go wherever the work was. I was born up in Bells Hill in Scotland. I studied at the lse, worked at a couple of American investment banks, quit that job to start a tech company, grew that for nine years, a successful outcome, thankfully sold it to an American bank. Then when Nigel Farrar said he was coming back into British politics, I could see there was a glimmer of hope for the United Kingdom, the country that I love. So I decided I wasn't going to jump ship. I was going to stay here and fight to try and turn the country around. And that's what I'm doing.
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David Merritt
This podcast dives into the issue that really matter around here in the Square Mile. And reform is about reforming politics, about reforming the economy. Is your City background core to the policies that you're.
- [04:56]
Zia Youssouf
Well, it was definitely. Look, it was the formative stage of my career. You know, the first five years after I graduated were spent on a trading floor on one of your terminals, 12 hours a day, pretty much. And I loved it. I was so grateful for the teams I got to work in. They really invested in me. And look, you also get a real sense of, I got to go and visit great companies like Airbus and companies like Daimler and, you know, British engineering companies like Spirak Sarka, and you really get an understanding when you walk around these factories of what makes a great company, what makes a Less good company. And one of the things I think Reform has got in its leadership team is frankly, just people who understand or have a reasonably good understanding of how the world actually works.
- [05:34]
Francine Lacqua
But it was my understanding, actually, by speaking to people that were close to this, that you were. So when you were chairman for 11 months of reform, your job was to professionalize the party. So this gives an idea that actually, you know, you were there to make it more credible, to give more policies, so that people understood what Reform actually stood for. At the moment, it feels more like culture wars.
- [05:55]
Zia Youssouf
So I disagree a bit with that. When I joined the party as chairman, when Nigel asked me to do that job, there basically wasn't a political party, frankly. So one of the things I don't think people necessarily appreciate about Reform's journey over the last year. It was only in June last year, Nigel announced he was coming back to run to be an MP in Clacton, and the party had no MPs. We had about nine councillors. We were polling at around 10%. Today, we're polling at 30, 34%. The bookmakers have us as the favorite to be the next government. Nigel favorite to be the next pm. We've got north of a quarter of a million members that's grown fourfold. And so we've built all of this. We've got 400 branches across the country. You know, you mentioned that Ipsos poll. That Ipsos poll puts Reform just six points away from having more support than Labour and the Tories combined.
- [06:39]
Francine Lacqua
So, I mean, he's a controversial figure. I can't see many business people around him, apart from you. Is it because the opposition is weak or is it because Reform is really doing the right things? I mean, is this like a moment for Reform?
- [06:53]
Zia Youssouf
Well, it definitely is a moment for reform. Richard Tice, the deputy leader and former leader, he's also a successful entrepreneur and businessman and has contributed immensely to this journey and to policy formulation like the ones that we've just have. So look what we have at Reform. Look, it is a small team. We only have five MPs. Now. They're formidable MPs, but we only have five. But we have immense support across the country and what we have done already as a result of those May the first election, this wasn't a poll, this was an actual election. So I wouldn't understate what's just happened now. We've still got a lot of work to do. We are still years away from a general election, I can tell you. Partly because I've got Asymmetric data on this. There are so many brilliant people coming forward wanting to help reform both behind the scenes and to be front of house and frontline.
- [07:38]
Francine Lacqua
I don't know whether reform has the A list, the A game. I mean, everyone's trying to kind of find space for itself and speaking to a population that's maybe fed up with something.
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Zia Youssouf
Yeah, look, it's perfectly reasonable to say that the British public are utterly sick and tired of the two old parties. Given this is Bloomberg and we're talking about the economy, Britain should be one of the most prosperous countries in the world. We still have great assets in this country, a dynamic financial system. We still have, I think, the best people, the best language, the best time zone. We have the rule of law in an excellent way here. And we have a talent base in areas like finance and AI, for example, in the AI era, which should mean that British people writ large are benefiting. Instead, what we're seeing is an unprecedented brain drain. British people and wealthy non doms are fleeing the country at an unprecedented rate. They're going to Singapore and Dubai and they're even going to America. We've got to turn all of that stuff around. The only way that's going to happen is if you have a first principles approach and you're really focused on how you're going to get the economy growing again on a per capita basis. And that's what Reform are doing.
- [08:48]
David Merritt
This process of kind of professionalising the image of reform feels like a big challenge. A lot of the headlines have been on infighting, controversies around individual members. Yourself stepped back from your role just this month saying how you were feeling burnt out. You know, you've done high pressure jobs in the past. Tell us a little bit about that process this week, why you left and then why you came back so quickly.
- [09:08]
Zia Youssouf
So, look, I basically not had a day off in 11 months and I'll, you know, people listening to this business brings a certain level of pressure. Politics is a whole different level of pressure. And as I said, not just building and assembling a political party from scratch in real time, also doing everything else that a political party needs to do. In terms of why I came back, look, number one, I received, I was inundated with just lovely heartfelt messages from reform supporters, voters and members who expressed just how important the reform movement is to them. It's not just a political party. For many people it represents the last hope the country has, this great country has, whom so many people have laid down their lives for, to turn itself around and look as I said I was exhausted and my decision making at the time wasn't great. We reversed that very quickly. Look, I came into politics in no small part because of Nigel, and I'm gonna continue to spend all my time trying to make him the Prime Minister.
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Francine Lacqua
I know you criticize Sarah Pochin, right, who was basically urging Sir Keir Starmer to ban the burqa in the interest of public safety. And you said it was dumb for a party to ask the PM to do something that the party itself, your party itself, wouldn't do. Do you stick by that?
- [10:16]
Zia Youssouf
I didn't criticize Sarah. Let me be clear about something. Number one, Sarah's a phenomenal MP I speak to almost every day. She's a good friend. I was instrumental in getting her selected, getting her elected, and she's gonna be such a formidable asset to the country. Look, that tweet, which I sent out, which I definitely regret now. The point I was making, this tweet, I was frustrated because I didn't know that question was gonna get asked. And in hindsight, perfectly reasonable for me to have not known. I'm not an mp. So I regret that tweet. I don't mind saying that.
- [10:45]
Francine Lacqua
Can you just give us a sense? So when we speak to a lot of people, they say, oh, I'd like to know a little bit more about reform, but we don't really know where they stand on the economy. So it's. You talk common sense without a lot of, I guess, policy details. So can you give us an idea of what you would do, for example, for this UK doge? Like, the money is very limited, right. For any Chancellor to play around with? So what, where are you finding efficiencies?
- [11:09]
Zia Youssouf
Well, that is a line that the establishment always uses, right? The money. My favorite one is, quote, difficult decisions need to be made. How many times have you heard that?
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Francine Lacqua
Right, But I mean, we ran the numbers at Bloomberg. I mean, there's just not a lot of money.
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Zia Youssouf
Well, hold on, hold on. So. So let me give you some big numbers. That, that. So 15 billion in foreign aid, right? 5 billion a year in terms of free accommodation to asylum seekers and illegal migrants, and that's per year. The 12 billion in net zero costs that will be found directly inside government departments. The real number is much higher. And I can go into. Into that. So this straightaway is almost 40 billion. And you're going to have. And there are so many other line items in the budget when you start peeling this stuff back. I mean, you look at the big consulting firms, some of your listeners might not appreciate this, but the big four accounting firms and the strategy consultants won eight and a half billion pounds in national government tool contracts over the last five years alone. So the notion that there is no money to be saved is for the birds. Now it is also true this country is almost 3 trillion in national debt. But the bottom line is the British economy is not growing. I mean, talk about 0.7%. That's less than the population is growing just from immigration. If we do not get the British economy growing meaningfully on a per capita basis, this country is headed to an extremely bad place. The way we're going to do that is by cutting spending on things that are wasteful. We have to get our welfare bill under control and difficult conversations do have to be had about it. Of course there are some people who need benefits. Of course that is true. But it has never been easier to get onto benefits. So we have to get the welfare bill per capita down to where it was back in 2019. That will free up a lot of money to reduce the tax burden on working people. And we also have to, by the way, be really honest that we need wealthy international job creators, wealth creators to be here. We don't need them fleeing, we want them here in the uk. That's a big part of what our policy announcement was today. If you talk to Sir Demis Acebis At DeepMind, for example, you know Jensen Huang from Nvidia was talking about, he used the term Goldilocks situation for AI. In the UK we have a significant percentage of the world's finest AI engineers graduating from, from our universities, likewise in areas like biotech. And then we also have to start manufacturing here again. We can have a new manufacturing revolution with cutting edge manufacturing techniques in the country. And we need people who understand economics, understand business in charge of making the most important economic decisions in this country.
- [13:35]
Francine Lacqua
When I speak to global investors, and I'm talking about, you know, Blackstone, Blackrock, even some of your old shops, Goldman Sachs, I mean they're quite bullish on the uk. It's a bad neighborhood out there. The US because of trade and tariffs is, looks like less attractive investment right now.
- [13:49]
Zia Youssouf
Great, great. But here's the point. The British economy has had virtually no growth now for a very, very long time. And you can look, arguing about whether it's 0.3 or 0.7 is pointless. The reason why people in this country feel like they're getting poorer is because real wages have done nothing now for about two decades, real GDP per capita has done nothing for about two decades. This is the other thing in business, there's accountability, right? If you're chief executive and you're paid a lot of money and you're very powerful, if you make bad decisions, the markets will see to it you are not the CEO for very long, right? In politics and inside the bureaucracy, not only do you not face consequences, you're promoted, you're put into the Lords. That's what has happened on these big military contracts that have gone massively and overspent. HS 2. This country is paying 8 times more per mile of high speed rail than China or France. Eight times more. Why is that? If we win a majority in the House of Commons, with Nigel as the Prime Minister, we can make sweeping reforms. We will have a great repeal act and we can go and solve these problems root and branch.
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David Merritt
I was just going to ask how you're going to do it. So you have a repeal act for what specifically so.
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Zia Youssouf
Well, that's what we're working on as we speak. I think this country has way too many laws, way too many regulations. A lot of those have to be repealed. We can get into it. The ECHR that prevents multiple convicted illegal
- [15:09]
David Merritt
migrants being, barring thousands of staff in Washington, across multiple government departments, people being barred from entry. It's been pretty extreme. Do you see a version of that here with the reform government?
- [15:19]
Zia Youssouf
No, not necessarily. I mean, if you zoom out a minute, right, what's happening is endless outsourcing. We're now at the stage where a contractor is now running the recruitment program for the British Army. While that's happening, the cost and the headcount of the Civil Service has ballooned by 50% over the last decade in government. In the Civil Service, literally, you're ramping up spending on outsourcing and agencies and contractors and ramping up the size of the Civil Service. I think you can halve the size of the Civil Service and actually deliver a better service to taxpayers.
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Francine Lacqua
A couple of things on Doge. I mean, do you have an early update on your Doge project in working with 10 councils that reform now controls? So what sort of savings have you actually identified concretely?
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Zia Youssouf
Yeah, so look, we already have one. Number one, it's early days and a lot of what we're doing is analysis. But I'll give you one example. One of our cabinet members in West Northamptonshire Council was presented with a Microsoft contract for millions of pounds and told, hey, you've got like, three days to sign this off, otherwise there'd be penalties. Now, that's funny that there'd be penalties for a contract that you haven't even signed yet. He pushed back and did a really good job and saved £965,000 on that contract straight away. And that was within the first week of arriving in the council. And what does that tell you? It's actually a reason to be bullish on the UK because there's so much waste. The sort of people who are sitting there signing those contracts off, historically a big Microsoft contract where it's obviously massive gross margins. Right. Clearly, most of these companies have been taking counsels and taxpayers for a ride. I don't really blame them because it's up to the councils, it's up to the civil servants and the politicians to fight the corner for the taxpayer. As soon as a reform person turned up, they did that and they saved £965,000 within the first seven days.
- [17:02]
Francine Lacqua
What do you say to the accusation that actually, because you've also promised tax cuts, it feels a bit like, reminiscent of.
- [17:09]
Zia Youssouf
So. So at local level, we certainly haven't promised any tax cuts.
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Francine Lacqua
But you have at the. At the national level?
- [17:15]
Zia Youssouf
Yes, that's true.
- [17:16]
Francine Lacqua
Right. I mean, some people are worried that this is the spell of a Liz Trust disaster type.
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Zia Youssouf
Liz Truss did not announce any spending cuts. Nigel stood up and gave a speech a few weeks ago and announced 3 to 400 billion pounds in spending cuts to happen inside his first term as Prime Minister.
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Francine Lacqua
So your tax cuts are funded full stop.
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Zia Youssouf
That's exactly right. Here's the irony. We're formerly the only people who have a leadership team with experience are balancing some quite large budgets. What we're saying is we need to dramatically cut spending on things. Like I said, the 12 billion on net zero that'll be found in budgets, the 15 billion in foreign aid and the 5 billion in terms of asylum, there's a lot more. I mean, you look at the money that is hidden inside these quango budgets, you look at the money that's being spent on these, on these consultancies and these agencies, vast amounts of money. That's the work that we're doing. Now.
- [18:05]
Francine Lacqua
You're also trying to. I mean, I had a question on, you know, trying to basically take reform into the mainstream. And while you're leading in the polls, there's still a lot of voters, whether fairly or not fairly, that associate your party with racism. Are they wrong?
- [18:19]
Zia Youssouf
Of course. And I think that that's now. So if you, if you are leveling that claim, reform, you are now, according to that Ipsos poll, leveling that claim at More than a third of the public in the uk. Any human who has been in the UK for more than five minutes knows that that claim is absurd on its face.
- [18:35]
Francine Lacqua
But there's. There must be a perception. I mean, the perception is still there. You can't deny that it might be
- [18:40]
Zia Youssouf
there for people who are brainwashed by certain media outlets that they might watch. But look, frankly, we're coming across that less and less and less. And the more that we have been attacked with ad hominem attacks, partly it's because they can't engage us on the arguments. Secondly, the result of all of this silliness being so ideologically possessed that that's the only argument against us, is that the country continues to go to the dogs. And I put it to you that the more people hear from Reform, the more they hear from Nigel and RMPs, the more they like us. That's the evidence. And the opposite is true of other political leaders in this country.
- [19:13]
David Merritt
Can I pivot a bit to again, back where we are in the City of London and what we care about more than anything on this podcast is what, what the future holds for the city. So what people think about you, you say is important. Do you care what the City thinks about you as a former banker? And what plans would you have in place to improve the fortunes of the financial services industry?
- [19:31]
Zia Youssouf
We need to. You know, the City of London was once the greatest financial centre in the world. We need a strong City of London. I think it is. It is massively overregulated, no doubt about that. You saw our crypt, for example. We've got to lean into the technologies of the future. Yes, of course there needs to be some regulation, but it's gone way, way too far. We need to do things on taxation. And look, the first tax that we want to cut is the one for people earning less than 20,000 pounds a year. One of the reasons why the City of London is suffering is people are worried about law and order. People are terrified of walking around late at night, they can't wear a nice watch anymore, they can't even hold their phone out in public. They have to grasp it with two hands, as if their life depends on it, because in some cases it actually does. So we have to do all of those things. And one of the interesting things I'll tell you as well, I spent a lot of time in Runcorn during the Runcorn and Helsbury Parliamentary by election. And there are some pretty deprived areas, not all of it, but there's some pretty deprived Areas of Runcorn. And there are people there we would hear time and again on the doorsteps, people saying, look, we set our alarm clocks in the morning, we do everything right, we pay into the system. So, so did my parents. And life has just become endlessly more difficult. The cost of the weekly shop keeps going up. Those energy bills because of that virtue signaling keeps going up. And then they see someone next door on the same estate who's on benefits with four kids, whose front garden is a complete mess, doesn't do any work, and they say, why do we bother? And I hear, exactly, no. I met one of my friends who still works in the city with a sizable income, I don't mind saying, you know, a sizable six figure household income between him and his wife. And he said exactly the same thing. He said, you know, we both work really hard, yes, we earn good money, clearly much higher than the average. But we got two kids, we can barely afford to send them to the school we want to send them to. Our relationship is starting to fray because we don't really get a chance to engage each other because we're so busy. And then we see all that, we see this sense that people are getting away with not working, not contributing. And the phrase that stuck in my head was they both use the phrase why do we bother? And I think that that's a big reason why reform is getting to be successful.
- [21:33]
Francine Lacqua
Come on.
- [21:34]
Zia Youssouf
And why we're going to fight, why we're going to fight for working people. It's really important that the social contract is the thing that is breaking.
- [21:40]
Francine Lacqua
But I mean, why do we bother? They don't want to be on benefits. Like, I understand that this is a huge concern and immigration, you know, in this country needs to be fixed. But why do we bother? If you're, if you have two jobs, you're an okay position. Things maybe need to change, but it's tough to say why do we bother?
- [21:56]
Zia Youssouf
Well, the tax burden on everyone that I just described, right. Even though, and I'm using that example advisedly, right. Because they're at very different extremes in terms of the bell curve of economic distribution and salary. But the sentiment that they have is that they are being taxed evermore and they are getting less and less and less for it, that when they want to go and see a gp, it's incredibly difficult. Having children has never been harder economically for people in this country, which is why birth rate has collapsed below replacement. And this real sense of unfairness. We know people don't mind paying taxes if they feel like they're getting something valuable in return.
- [22:31]
David Merritt
So obviously it's been a very significant weekend in the Middle East. Part of preparing for government potentially would be your geopolitical policies. Kirsten Armo's getting fairly good reviews around the world. I spent a lot of the time in the United States about how he's been triangulating on the Ukraine issue and on the Middle East. Now, do you have a policy? Do you support the United States strikes on Iran? And if you were in government, how would you navigate this very delicate and difficult moment for the world?
- [22:58]
Zia Youssouf
The first thing to say is reform is about focusing on the uk. I tweeted out yesterday, a country that cannot even defend its own borders, has no business and will not be taken seriously, lecturing any other countries about their.
- [23:10]
David Merritt
Where should defence spending be then? When you're looking at the priorities and where money is going to be saved. But should we be ramping up to three and a half percent?
- [23:18]
Zia Youssouf
Yes, we want to be ramping up spending on defence. So the way you're going to spend more on defence, ultimately, in absolute terms, by growing the economy. Right. So that's the first thing. If you don't have a fast growing economy and a buoyant economy, you will not have a strong defence. Secondly, we need to spend it in smarter ways. So let's take drone warfare, where there's been some high profile cases. For example, Russia had a whole load of its nuclear aircraft fleet decommissioned by Ukrainian drones. Ukraine is firing three to 6,000 drones every single day. I'll let you take a guess as to the total number of military drones available to His Majesty's Armed Forces. Want to take a guess how Many? Less than 2,000. Right. We are so ill equipped in this country for modern warfare. We obviously have amazing men and women who give their lives and give their careers to service for this country. And so we have to grow the British economy and if we do that, we will have a strong armed forces.
- [24:09]
Francine Lacqua
Yeah, maybe. Just final question, is there a country or a politician that you admire?
- [24:13]
Zia Youssouf
I admire the United States and I do admire President Trump. I don't agree with everything he does or says, but I do admire him. I think he's a very determined man and I think he has done a lot of good for America, even though I don't agree with everything he does. I'd also say Giorgio Meloni in Italy, I think is someone who has done a great job. But look, Britain is a proud country, it has an amazing history. This is the other thing I wanted to close on is we're not in the business of saying Britain's in managed decline. And that is the axiom on which every politician in Westminster pretty much outside of Reform knowingly aren't knowingly operate. We think Britain can be an awesome country again, that we can be excited to live here and so can our kids and their kids, but it's going to take a lot of work and time is running out.
- [24:54]
Francine Lacqua
Zia Yousef, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [24:56]
Zia Youssouf
Thank you.
- [25:00]
Francine Lacqua
So that was a conversation we taped with Reform UK's Zia Youssouf earlier this week. Now, Lucy, as our UK politics reporter, you've been tracking Reform's rise in popularity, but more importantly, trying to understand what the party stands for, what when it comes to economic policy.
- [25:15]
Lucy White
It's interesting, it's seen quite a change over recent years. So Reform UK can trace its roots really back to the UKIP party, the UK Independence Party, which was again headed by Nigel Farage. Nigel left that party after essentially becoming one of the very few sort of instantly recognisable figures in UK politics. And he founded the Brexit party that was sort of continuing in the same vein as the UK Independence Party. But to, to, to bring the UK out of the European Union essentially was no deal. He wanted a very clean split from the European Union after achieving that. Well, we did have a deal of some sort.
- [25:51]
David Merritt
The Brexit.
- [25:52]
Lucy White
Yeah, the Brexit bit, not the deal bit. We found him, you know, wanting to rename the party essentially, and he landed on Reform uk. As he sees it, the UK is broken, the UK needs fixing and that covers pretty much everything from reform of the welfare state to cutting back on migration, which has always been a huge vein in Nigel Farage's politics.
- [26:13]
David Merritt
So that's the thing. So in the past it was the sort of the one issue thing was like get Britain out of the EU and then that mission accomplished. I mean, he failed to become an MP all that time, didn't he? And now they've actually got some MPs now that they've got a bit of a broad, well, technically a broader agenda. But, you know, listening to our conversation with him, I guess what struck me was that we were asking about lots of economic policies and they had this big new non dom thing that came out, but everything kept on coming back to that same thing, which was always been the Nigel Farage policy number one, which is about immigration. Are they still actually really a one issue party?
- [26:44]
Lucy White
It's interesting because I think Zia Yousef has been one of the key figures in trying to professionalize reform uk. And so he has really been wanting to broaden out that kind of spectrum of policy from just being an immigration focused party to really looking at kind of economic policy. You know, as you mentioned, we saw the non dom issue raised earlier this week where they are trying to attract wealthy, non domiciled people back to the country to, as they see it, raise tax revenue here. And Zia last month talked about cryptocurrencies, you know, how he wants to make the UK a real cryptocurrency hub. And we're really seeing a much bigger breadth of policies across the party. But as you say, what they're really kind of, what, what they always hone back to is that issue of migration. That's the kind of anger that they're trying to tap into among the British electorate of people who feel that they've been hard done by because we have seen such huge numbers of migrants come to the country.
- [27:39]
Francine Lacqua
It's really important in the UK to remember, of course, this is historically almost a two party system and so they really want to break away from that. But are they more right wing than the Tory right?
- [27:51]
Lucy White
It's uncertain social policies? It certainly seems so. I mean, we've heard various of their MPs, I mean, they've only got five MPs at the moment, but we've heard some of them talk about, you know, wanting to tighten up abortion legislation, for example, make it harder for women to get abortions. We've heard some of them talking around a sister dying and sort of coming at that from a very, you know, kind of socially right wing angle. But it's hard to kind of say exactly, because on certain economic policy they are trying to challenge Labour from the left as well. Because, you know, you've seen them sort of talk about reinstating the winter fuel payment to elderly people that Labour pulled when they first got into power. I think rather than looking at it as an issue of right and left, what they're really looking at it from is trying to tap into that kind of base of working class people who feel like they aren't recognised by either of the mainstream political parties and trying to figure out what they want and what might appeal to them, while also keeping, you know, the wealthy, high net worth, traditionally right wing voters on side.
- [28:56]
David Merritt
So that sounds like pretty good definition of populism to me, isn't it?
- [29:00]
Lucy White
Absolutely, yeah.
- [29:01]
David Merritt
And that's a playbook. So, you know, and we talked in the conversation, didn't we, about, you know, do you admire President Trump, and he said he certainly does, he admires Elon Musk and the. Obviously he calls himself now the Doge of the uk. So are they just kind of cherry picking from the kind of populist regimes, obviously, the Trump being the, the biggest one and trying to repeat that playbook here in the uk.
- [29:18]
Lucy White
It certainly seems that way in certain of the policies that they have taken forward. I mean, this, the Non Dom's Britannia card that they're talking about, giving people a Britannia card, giving them the right to live in the UK is pretty much a sort of direct translation of the trump card, even though it's an awful lot cheaper than the trump card.
- [29:36]
David Merritt
£250,000 every ten years, is it? Rather than, what was it, five million? Did I get that right?
- [29:42]
Lucy White
Yeah, several million pounds, for sure.
- [29:43]
David Merritt
You know, Britain's a bit cheaper than the us, basically.
- [29:46]
Zia Youssouf
Sorry.
- [29:46]
Lucy White
Whether they're doing us down or not, I don't know. But no, it's, it's, it's, it's difficult to, to see, you know, kind of how the UK would be able to bring in millions and millions of pounds of it.
- [29:59]
David Merritt
And again, we asked him in there in the conversation around more specific economic or even things that were useful for the City of London and I don't know, I just don't think they had much meat on the bones there, do they?
- [30:11]
Lucy White
Well, I mean, it's important to remember that we are four years away from another general election and you could level the same criticism and the concern. Exactly. So, you know, it's a long way off yet, but they are kind of coming at this, really from ground zero. You know, they've never had more than one MP before, now they've got five. But, you know, there's still a lot of questions around who's going to be their Cabinet if they do get into power, who would be the Chancellor? You know, there's a few names in the pot already who could probably fill that position, but, you know, there's a whole cabinet that they'll have to fill and it's relying a lot on trust from the electorate to think that they would vote a party into power when they have absolutely no idea who any of the people are.
- [31:02]
Francine Lacqua
Lucy, so interesting. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this week's in the City from Bloomberg. This episode was hosted by me, Francine Lacqua with David Merritt. In the City is produced by Samara Saadi and Moses Andam with sound design by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer. Special thanks to Zia Youssouf and Lucy White. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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