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- [00:01]
Jasia Monk
Some follow the noise.
- [00:03]
Luke Trill
Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com I think the Conservatives are in real trouble because if you look at their age profile now, the only group that they're winning with is the over 75s. They are struggling because they have a sort of lack of purpose now, because if Nigel Farage has not only proved that reform UK can have, you know, hard aligned stances on immigration, things like crime, other cultural issues, but he's also proved in the local elections he can win. And now the good fight with Jasia Monk.
- [00:59]
Jasia Monk
It has been a while since we've covered the United Kingdom on the podcast, and since I'm currently in England, I thought I would have a conversation about the really interesting political developments in the country here. Keir Starmer won the elections last year, giving Labour a very large majority in Parliament. But his victory was actually quite narrow and his government has run into significant trouble very quickly. At the same time, the Conservative Party is still delegitimized from over 10 years of rather chaotic rule and its current leader, Camille Badenoch, does not seem to be succeeding in imposing herself on the political system. And as a result, the current leader in the polls is Nigel Farage's Reform Party. There is now a very real possibility that that the two party system between Labour and the Conservatives, which has dominated British politics for over a century, may perhaps be about to be eclipsed. Well, to help us understand why that is happening, I invited Luke Trill, the director of More in Common's British operation, More in Common uk, to the podcast. We also talked about immigration and how immigration became so central to the concerns of British voters, as well as one of my favorite topics, British decline. Why it is that this wonderful country that I have a lot of fondness for feels like it is declining so much more strongly than other European countries, why it feels so much less vibrant today than when I started at university here some 25 years ago. Luke Trilb, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:08]
Luke Trill
Thanks for having me.
- [03:09]
Jasia Monk
So you are a very knowledgeable observer of British politics. We had the Conservative Party in power for a very long stretch and it had very clearly run out of energy by the end of its government. And Keir Starmer, moderate leader of the Labour Party, was able to come in with a huge historic parliamentary majority. And yet, less than a year into his time in office, he has grown to be quite deeply unpopular and his government seems to be flailing. What is going wrong for the Labour government?
- [03:51]
Luke Trill
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think it's important to actually look back a little bit when you're thinking about why labor is struggling. Because basically what you've seen in British politics since 2016, which is when we had the referendum on Brexit, whether or not to remain in the European Union, is that the British public have basically been saying repeatedly, we are not happy with the status quo, that things in Britain feel too hard, too expensive, things aren't working as well as they should do. And so 2016, you have that vote, which is essentially people saying, we want change. We're not happy with the model we have at the moment, particularly people outside of London and the southeast. And then what you have is basically a series of change elections, as I call them. So 2016, Brexit is a vote for change. Then in 2017, Theresa May calls a snap election. She's expected to win it easily. And actually there's a surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn, quite a left wing leader of the Labour Party. Theresa May managers just about to win a minority government, but that's a vote for change. Then 2019, Boris Johnson sweeps to power with quite a big majority, winning these former Labour seats in the north of England, former mining towns, places like that, again, on a sort of vote for change. People saying the model isn't working. And Boris promised to do something different, which was to focus on those areas of the country that felt neglected and left behind. You then had a parliament where that didn't happen for lots of reasons. And the Conservatives became very unpopular. And then 2024, it's another vote for change, but this time it's for Keir Starmer's Labour Party. And Keir Starmer literally ran on a change slogan. It was the lettering that they used throughout the election campaign. And what's happened since is people don't think they've got the change that they voted for. I think that is the fundamental driver of the discontent with Labour. Now, you might argue that, well, he's been in office for less than a year. Isn't it a bit unrealistic to expect to see that change? But I think they made some early missteps and one of them was in the framing. They came in and basically said, look, you know, there are gonna be tough choices. We're gonna have to balance books. We've gotta clear up the mess from the Conservatives that came before, to which the public reacted. Well, we've had the language of tough choices since the financial crash in 2008, we thought we were about to get off the treadmill of tough choices. We elect labor to improve public services, make life a bit easier. So I think the framing didn't work. I think the second thing is they made one particularly bad policy decision which was to announce that they were taking away what's known as the winter fuel allowance. This is a payment which goes to pensioners every winter, used to go to everyone. And the Labour Party said, we're going to means test it so it only goes to the poorest pensioners. And their argument was, why are we subsidizing millionaires? Problem is, as listeners will know, that left a huge number of people in between millionaires not receiving it and the poorest pensioners and was really unpopular, not just with pensioners, but right across the public. And they also made the error of announcing that into a vacuum. They did it before they'd had their first budget, before they'd had other policy announcements. So that winter fuel decision, I've sometimes described it as the Labour government's original sin because it came to define their approach to office from the outset. So that was another. They now said they're going to u turn on that, by the way, they're going to make more pensioners eligible. And then the third thing, which is sort of, I guess, slightly beyond their control, is that the geopolitical situation has been just so full on and intense for people. And again, one of the big things which is, I guess frustrating, has frustrated Brits since Brexit, is that politics has felt so exhausting. You know, we've gone from Brexit rouse about Brexit, the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine, party gay. It's felt like one long drama and they haven't seen that stopping. So I think it's that combination of things, some things within Labour's control, some things without which have led to the public move. Just thinking, this isn't what we voted for Labour for. And so that now I'm sure we'll come on to this, they're looking for someone else or another party to deliver that change.
- [08:46]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, I wonder. Part of what happened here is that Starmer won the election last year by addressing some of the most salient negatives about his political party. So under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party had become very unpopular for big stretches of the population. It was far to the left of British public opinion. People didn't trust Jeremy Corbyn to be a competent Prime Minister Keir Starmer won the leadership race in the Labour Party, somewhat surprisingly, since he had been a relatively loyal member of Corbyn's shadow cabinet and didn't really say that he would change the direction of the party all of that much. But then, somewhat surprisingly, he actually was quite ruthless in moving the Labour Party to the political center, in expelling some of the most recalcitrant allies of Jeremy Corbyn from the party, in part for making anti Semitic remarks of various kinds. And all of that did help to address the significant political weakness that the Labour Party had had in the previous years, which is one of the things that allowed the conservators, who were in some amount of disarray themselves, to stay in power for that long. But it turns out that addressing your negatives is a good way of becoming an opposition and waiting. It's not a good way of preparing for government. So when the Conservatives ran out of road after years of internal fights, after a number of dysfunctional governments, Starmer looked like a very plausible alternative. He had convinced the British public, but he's not extreme. He is clearly a competent public servant who had served in important roles before, and people thought, yeah, we can kind of imagine him doing better than the chaos we've been seeing for the last years. But of course, the moment you're in government, you're no longer assessed by whether or not you are a plausible alternative to the current government. You're assessed on whether or not you have a proactive political vision. That's something that parts of the Tory Party had with Brexit. I mean, it wasn't a very coherent vision, and we can debate about whether or not it delivered what it promised, but it certainly was promising change. You had Jeremy Corbyn offering that in his way. Not a vision that was very popular, but certainly, again, offering change. And actually, you go back to the moderate government of New labor and Tony Blair, and they also offered that it was a clear contrast program to the governments of John Major and Margaret Thatcher, especially in the cultural realm. And it was built on a substantive cultural and economic vision of its own, even if one that wasn't particularly radical in political terms. It wasn't far left or far right, but it was actually a coherent philosophy of its own. Starmer seems to lack that right. And so perhaps there's this sort of superficial similarity to the New Labour government by saying, look, this is a leader of a Labour Party who goes through real political costs internally to move a party to the middle, who looks quite decisive, and that sets him up for government. But there's also this important disanalogy that he lacks, that vision for what his government is actually trying to achieve and what it means in cultural or other terms that New Labour had when it came in in 1997.
- [12:25]
Luke Trill
Yeah, I think that's really fair. Look, if you look at Starmer's Labour Party, it is essentially being defined by what it's not. And the first definition of what it was not was Jeremy Corbyn. And I don't think you should underestimate the achievement that Starmer made in detoxifying the labor brand. When Starmer took over, Labour had just had a major report published into anti Semitism in the party. The party wasn't trusted, on the economy, on defence, and he did take steps to detoxify the party there. He also defined himself against the Boris Johnson era, in particular, Boris Johnson having parties during Boris Johnson having parties. But there'd been parties in Downing street during the pandemic which turned the public mood. You had Liz Truss, who came in with her mini budget, which led to economic turmoil. Starmer was the safe, responsible, ethical pair of hands defined against all of that. But you're entirely right that then coming into government during the election campaign, they ran what was often described as a Ming vase strategy. That is, you know, can you get to one end of the room, to the other carrying a Ming vase, not doing anything that might upset the balance. And in some ways that meant they boxed themselves in quite a lot. They ruled out lots of different revenue raising opportunities so they wouldn't reverse Tory tax cuts, which has led a bit, I think, to the difficult choices they're facing now. But it also meant. And if you talk to people in and around government, they will sort of say, we sort of expected more of a plan when Labour came into office. And that hasn't been there. It seems to have taken. They seem to be getting there now, but it seems to have taken them a year. And as we know in public opinion terms, that first year is really important in defining them. And when you talk to people, which I do kind of day in, day out in focus groups, they will say similar. They sort of don't understand what the point of this government is, if that makes sense. They sort of say, I don't know what they're trying to do. And we've asked people, what does the Labour Party do when it's at its best? And they say three things. They say, look after the working class, improve services and tackle poverty. And yet lots of the rhetoric that the Government has given, hasn't matched that, nor has the policy prescription. As I say, it's been a lot about kind of tough choices, a lot about sort of technocracy. And I think it's important to remember that Starman himself.
- [15:01]
Jasia Monk
And again, that is actually an interesting contrast to New labor, which on the left is often criticized for being neoliberal. Or there's a famous line that Margaret Thatcher said or supposedly said about Tony Blair being her biggest political victory because he took over some of the embrace of a market economy and so on. But when you look both at the rhetoric of the New labor government and a lot of the things that they actually did, it was relentless emphasis on investing in education, on cutting waiting lines for the National Health Service in Britain, which is always a big political issue, on improving public services and on cutting child poverty and so on. And it is interesting that even for Starmer, clearly in certain ways has modeled his government on the moderation of New labor, there isn't the same rhetorical emphasis on those things. And in part because of Britain's more dire financial state in 2025 compared to 1997, he doesn't seem to believe that there's much financial playroom to actually invest in those things. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month.
- [16:13]
Luke Trill
Of course, if you enjoy overpaying.
- [16:14]
Jasia Monk
No judgments.
- [16:15]
Luke Trill
But that's weird.
- [16:16]
Jasia Monk
Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com no, not at all.
- [16:32]
Luke Trill
And exactly as you say, people confuse New Labour's moderation with a lack of vision. In fact, Tony Blair was a crusading Prime Minister. Right. If you look at, as you say, public services, but also the focus on child poverty that that government had, the work that they did around things like devolution were massive in changing how the country is governed. And as you say, some.
- [16:58]
Jasia Monk
So devolution to a non British audience was giving a lot of power to national parliaments in Scotland and Wales and so on.
- [17:07]
Luke Trill
Exactly. Establishing the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh assembly at the time, reforming the House of Lords, which is our second chamber, because up until kind of extraordinary that we had, we still have a few, but hereditary peers, that is people who inherited their seat in The House of Lords, he took out most of the hereditary peers, a big constitutional form, big public service reform, some of it in areas like education, that the Tories actually carried forward, giving more school freedom, having more knowledge, rich, robust curricula, that sort of thing carried on. And yet you don't get that same sense of mission from this government. I think, and you're right, I mean, the financial circumstances are tighter than they were. There are lots of problems, there are lots of fires that they need to extinguish. But I do think part of it comes back to Starmer, personally. Right. You know, Starmer is a very senior lawyer. He was a Director of Public Prosecutions. You know, he's someone who believes, you know, you do what the evidence says and you work off the back of that and you prosecute your case off the back of that, rather than having necessarily a guaranteed end point. And there are some people who say, look, Keir Starville was kind of never meant to be Prime Minister. He was meant to stabilize the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn and the Tories would get one more term because they had such a big majority and Labour was so far behind. So in some ways, because of the Tories messes, the mini budget, partygate, all of that, he's sort of an accidental Prime Minister and I think it's taken him a while to warm up to the job as well. I would add one more thing which is, as we know in politics, people often fight the last war. And I think there has been a. The Labour Party has been so scarred by the experience of the 2015 general election when Ed Miliband lost to David Cameron. And their analysis has always been, it's because the Tories came in in 2010 and they set the terms of the debate, they talked about the mess Labour had left behind, that they were taking difficult decisions in the national interest. And you've seen labor try and replay that rhetoric. The difference is 15 years on, people are tired of that rhetoric. And again, the thing which I will often hear, folks, is like, why do they keep talking about the Tories? We got rid of them, right, For a reason. We want to know what you're going to do instead.
- [19:47]
Jasia Monk
In the 1980s, there was a very left wing manifesto and a very detailed manifesto that the Labour Party wrote while in opposition. That was famously called the longest suicide note in British history. And then, I believe, in the election in which Ed Miliband was the leader of the Labour Party, in the last days of a campaign, he somehow engraved 10 promises on some weird stone and somebody called it the largest tombstone in British history or something like that, which is always the key, memorable thing of that campaign to me. So Britain has a majoritarian political system, which is to say that elections to the House of Commons work broadly in the same way as elections work for the House of Representatives. In the United States, you can have multiple candidates run in a particular constituency, but the one that's elected is the one that gets a simple majority. It doesn't have to be a majority of all votes, it can be a plurality of the votes. And this generally encourages the formation of a two party system. It generally means that it's hard for lots of small parties to arise because voters fear that they're wasting the vote if they vote for those candidates. So you would expect in Britain that if the Labour Party is floundering and the Prime Minister is unpopular, those votes would go back to the other major political party, which in this case is the Conservatives. The Tory party, who have a young, reasonably charismatic, quite interesting leader. Cami Badenok, who was born in Britain and raised mostly in Nigeria, came back to Britain at the age of 16, is outspokenly conservative on many cultural issues, while also embodying a more modern Britain in key ways, including just the fact of her ethnicity and her origin. And yet that is not what seems to be happening. Instead, what we're seeing is a kind of really freeway debt heat in the polls between labor, the Conservatives under Camille Badenac, and finally the Reform Party led by Nigel Farage. Tell us a little bit about Nigel Farage, about the Reform Party, and about why it is that he seems to be the big winner of this political moment for now.
- [22:12]
Luke Trill
So Nigel Farage is not a new figure in the UK political scene. And I think that there's actually an argument to be made that he is perhaps the most influential person in British politics in the last quarter of a century. So Nigel Far Farage was previously the leader of a party called the UK Independence Party, which basically whose goal it
- [22:38]
Jasia Monk
was to win independence for Britain from the European Union, which, for better or worse, it did.
- [22:44]
Luke Trill
Which they did. And their eyes spooked David Cameron into calling the referendum in order to keep the Conservative coalition together. 2016, against the odds, they win the referendum to take Britain out of the European Union. 2019, he comes back to the political scene with a Brexit party, which is basically to campaign against Theresa May's soft Brexit deal. He thought it was keeping too many ties with the European Union. That leads to the defenestration of Theresa May and Boris Johnson coming in and Farage agrees to stand down Brexit party candidates. Then, during the last Parliament, there is basically growing frustration on the right of politics that the Tories aren't doing what they were elected for, particularly on immigration. A big part of our Brexit campaign wasn't really about Europe, it was about lowering levels of immigration. And under Boris Johnson, net migration rises to almost a million a year. And that's not overall, that's net, which is significant levels of migration. And Nigel Farage is part of this new party called Reform uk. And it's interesting, until the very last minute, literally until about this time last year, Nigel Farage won't commit to whether he's actually going to run for election for Reform uk. And then he decides in the election campaign, sensing the Conservatives weakness, that he should get in, he takes over as leader and the party gets five seats in Parliament, which is not many. There are 650 seats in the UK Parliament, but they get 15% of the vote. So really significant vote share for a third party, almost exclusively at the expense of the Conservatives. And the reason the Conservatives have their worst result in history is because of Reform UK taking their votes. They're losing votes on the right to Reform UK and on the left to Labour, the Liberal Democrats as well. What's happened since the election? Well, this is the really interesting thing, is that normally what you would expect is a government gets a bit of a honeymoon, that the Conservative opposition can go away and lick their wounds and figure out who they are and who their new demographic is. And that's sort of how it plays out. Instead, the political cycle has gone into overdrive. As we've talked about, Labour had become unpopular very quickly. That hasn't given the Conservatives chance to recover. And Reform UK as the new party, the untainted party by government, have been the big beneficiaries. And they have gone up in our polling from 15% to in the general election to around 28, 29% now actually leading in the polls, not just with us, but with other pollsters as well. And in the local elections, which were last month, huge success, won councils outright, where this is the sort of level of government under Westminster, they won control of them, won elected mayoralities outright. Really significant performance.
- [26:11]
Jasia Monk
And that's one important thing to note here, is that there's no real equivalent of states and governors in the United Kingdom, unless you count Wales and Scotland. And so having control of a council sounds somewhat trite in America. Think, okay, so they took control of some city councils or something. Like that. But councils are really very powerful political organizations. So it's somewhere between being mayor of a geographic area and being something like governor of a geographic area when you are the leader of a local council.
- [26:40]
Luke Trill
Exactly that. And on some of these councils, they won 50 seats from nowhere, taking almost all of the seats on the council. I mean, it was a truly unprecedented result in British politics and the first time in our history when neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party have topped the popular vote in a domestic election. It happens sometimes in European elections that UKIP did very well or the Brexit party. This is the first time. So it's a really seismic moment in politics. And there were some of us who were sort of like, how real is this reform wave? Are people actually going to vote for them? It turns out it is very real for the moment. And the interesting thing is, so to describe Reform uk, I would say they are basically a party of the populist right, but I would sort of distinguish them from sort of more radical right parties in Europe. So they are not the UK equivalent of the AfD. Nigel Farage is still broadly fundamentally committed to democratic norms. I would say if you look at Reform supporter base, there's about a fifth of it which says we're ashamed of the fact Britain is a multi ethnic democracy. But four fifths don't think that they're sort of more moderate, they're very culturally conservative. And immigration is the big driver of voting for Reform uk. If you ask people, why are you voting for Reform UK, around seven in 10 say because of immigration. It is way higher than any other issue. The second highest is. I'm just disillusioned with the two main parties and then the rest of it doesn't really show up. So largely motivated by immigration. Took a lot of their vote in the last election from former Conservatives who'd voted for Boris Johnson. What's interesting is that now if you look at Reform uk, their voter profile is changing. So that jump from sort of 15% party to 28, 30% party means that their newer voters are. They're taking more voters from Labour, for instance. So they're taking around 12% of the labour vote from the last election. They are more moderate in their outlook on lots of things. They tend to be more motivated by disillusionment. What I'll often hear in focus groups is, well, I'm not sure about reform, but the conservatives had 14 years and messed it up. I'm not that happy with labor, so I may as well roll the dice. And that kind of Roll the dice mentality on reform comes up a lot in the focus groups, attracting many more women now. In fact, the group who has moved to reform most significantly since the general election is Gen X women, sort of women around retirement age who are also the most likely to say that Britain is on the wrong track. So they're building a much broader support base, capitalizing on that sense of disillusionment that the status quo isn't working, winning lots of those voters that Boris Johnson won for the first time in 2019 for the Tories in the north of England, former industrial towns who feel neglected by the status quo. And worth saying as well that Nigel Farage personally is a big draw for them. He is seen as more authentic, more relatable than lots of politicians. People think he says it like it is and that is driving a lot of their support. And they have now pushed the Conservatives into a clear third place in most of the polling. In fact, there is a risk that the Conservatives go the same way as the Republicans in France and other centre right parties and essentially fade into irrelevant and at the moment are leading Labour.
- [30:46]
Jasia Monk
So how likely do you think it really is that when the next parliamentary elections come, which in Britain always depends somewhat on the choice of a Prime minister, though it is unlikely that Starmer is going to call for elections anytime soon, given how poorly he's doing in the polls, Reform is going to eclipse the Conservative Party and possibly form a new government. The last time that we've seen one of the two dominant parties get eclipsed by a newcomer was of course, when the duopoly of the Conservative Party, which has been a major part of British politics for a very long time. And the Liberal Party gave way to Labour's rise in the early 20th century, leading in the title of one famous book, the Strange Death of Liberal England. These are once in a century events and we've been in other political moments where it felt as though this kind of change may be around the corner. And usually like third party bids in the United States that turns out not to happen at this point. Let's put it this way. What percentage chance would you give it that Reform is either the first biggest or the second biggest parliamentary party after the next elections.
- [32:08]
Luke Trill
Well, I'm not going to be drawn on percentages. What I would say is that the volatility of the electorate at the moment means that if we have this chat again in 2029, which is the last possible date that a general election could be, and Nigel Farage was Prime Minister, I would not be surprised if we had this conversation and he had beaten the Conservatives quite considerably, I would not be surprised. And equally if they fade away a bit like the SDP did in the 1980s when SPD, I was doing the German one, SPD, they got 50% in some of the polls and then only won 30 or so seats in the 1983 general election. So I genuinely think anything could happen. The one thing I would say though is that I think the Conservatives are in real trouble because if you look at their age profile now, the only group that they're winning with is the over 75s. They are struggling because they have a sort of lack of purpose now, because if Nigel Farage has not only proved that Reform UK can have hard aligned stances on immigration, things like crime, other cultural issues, but he's also proved in the local elections he can win. And we know one of the things holding back conservative voters from voting for reform was was it a wasted vote? In fact, someone said to me in a focus group, look, I'd like to vote for reform, but a bit like cars in this country, you know, we have Ford and we have Volkswagen, so why would I go for something different in a third party? You know, we have Labour and the Conservatives. And proving he can disrupt that duopoly, I think is sets him on course super well. Now, is there an opportunity for the Conservatives perhaps? Because I think one of the mistakes that people sometimes make is they assume that reform voters are simply more extreme conservatives. And that's not quite true because on cultural issues, conservatives and reform voters are very similar. So immigration debates around gender identity, criminal justice, basically the same. On economic issues, reform voters are actually much more left leaning. So they are much more supportive of nationalization and state intervention in the economy, much more supportive of redistribution. In fact, Nigel Farage has just come out and said, and one way of
- [34:43]
Jasia Monk
understanding this, perhaps so to butt in for a second, is as the tension between a culturally right leaning milieu that in economic terms is actually very distinct from each other. And I think you see that in the United States with a Republican Party. So in a sense you can think, I think of a lot of the people who vote for the Conservative Party as the kind of old style Republicans who have stuck with the Republican Party rather than moving to the Democrats. So that is the idea of a kind of country club Republican, right? The idea of a voter in the English case who probably lives in the home counties or some relatively affluent part of the country, who probably has a detached home that they value very greatly, who has gone to university or Perhaps has a very good job as a skilled laborer who has a real sense of being a member of the middle and probably the upper middle class, somebody who would be considered posh, perhaps, who's likely to send the children to private schools and so on and so forth. And then you have this rising right wing electorate everywhere in the Western world, which is the working class that used to vote for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, for labor in Britain, for the Democrats in the United States, that was a very straightforwardly proletarian working class electorate. But that has now come to feel so culturally alienated from the ruling parties of the political left that they've moved to the right. But they often do want policies that benefit them, that benefit working people. They don't want tax cuts for the richest people in the country. They don't want policies that most help big corporations. They want to somewhere also see a benefit for them. Now in America, since these electors are still united in the same two political parties, the compromise seems to be that Trump is emphasizing economic policies that appeal to those working class voters, but as in his pending budget bill, still basically ruling in favor of those more affluent voters. But in Britain, those two things have started to come apart. And that, I think, is why you see reform voters moving further to the left on those economic issues. Is that broadly right, do you think, Luke?
- [37:17]
Luke Trill
That's entirely right. In 2019, Boris Johnson actually managed to bring together the sort of traditional conservatives with the more left leaning on the economy. Socially conservative former Labour voters, we call them Red wall voters because of the types of seats they won in the north of England that were traditionally Labour, that has now splintered and reform is picking up that kind of socially conservative, but more, more left leaning on economic issues. And Farage is leaning into that. Traditionally, his parties have been more libertarian in their outlook. So the UK Independence Party was cut lots of government spending, lower taxes, lower welfare reform is not that it is very much, as I said last week, he announced he would extend child benefit to third and fourth children, something that even Labours haven't done, although they're facing pressure to do it. And the Conservatives then are being left with that sort of economic right, socially right rump. But the challenge for them, and we haven't talked about this yet, is not only are they losing their socially conservative votes to reform, the Liberal Democrats, who are our third party, have taken a lot of their kind of fiscal responsibility voters in places like the south of England, in the home counties, in Oxfordshire, Hampshire, around there at the last election, the Liberal Democrats actually won 72 MPs. It was a historic result from them. Basically they took the type of conservatives who were like, I vote for the Conservatives because I broadly want lower taxes, I want a stable economy. You know, I just want things to be governed well. And obviously the mini budget in particular under Liz Truss blew that reputation apart. And so they've lost those voters. So they're left with quite a narrow core now, having sort of losing voters on both ends. And it is hard to see at the moment, as I say, politics is very volatile. What is their usp? You know, why would you, you know, if you want to be kind of more socially liberal but economically right leaning, you go to the Liberal Democrats. If you want the sort of reform, social conservatism with more state interventionism, you go to Reform. And the interesting thing is I often say when I do focus groups of Reform voters and we're not talking about immigration, I often say they could be Corbynites in the way that they supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the left leaning labor leader, in the way they talk about big business, the rigged system, the unfairness of capitalism. There is a. That they are really owning that space reform. But of course that's causing tensions in their own party. And obviously we've seen the fallout between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, which is somewhat a microcosm of the different splits in the right wing coalition. We had a smaller example of that in the UK just yesterday when Reform's chairman, a guy called Zia Yousef, who is an entrepreneur very much in that kind of tet bro mold, chairman of the party, has modernized the party a lot, said yesterday he was quitting the party because it was no longer worth his time investing in it. In part, that seems to have been triggered by a row about whether Reform UK should have banning the burqa as a policy. So it's interesting that we're seeing that split within Reform UK that we're seeing in the US or almost in real time.
- [40:53]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, very interesting. So you've mentioned immigration a number of times. What is the public concern about immigration when you speak to voters in focus groups? What is the kind of median voter saying? I'm sure that there are some voters who are welcoming any amount of immigration into effectively one very few limits on immigration. I'm sure there's others who, as you said earlier, reject the idea of Britain as a multiethnic society completely, but that doesn't seem to me to be where sort of the center of gravity in British public opinion lies. So the kind of middle down the road, average voter who perhaps has never voted for reform, but might now be starting to think about voting for reform, sort of. What is their description of how immigration has changed the country and what they're concerned about?
- [41:41]
Luke Trill
It's a really good question. So I think it is fair to say the median voter, and actually this includes voters for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, parties more on the left think that overall levels of immigration are too high in the UK at the moment. They reached, as I said, almost a million under Boris Johnson, dropped down now to about half a million. Net migration, but still too high. And what people tend to talk about is a mix of the pressure on services, so, you know, difficulty getting doctor's appointments, housing in particular, and also failures of integration. Britain has not been very good at having an integration policy, right down to, you know, things around English language. So that's one chunk of concern. But interestingly, for most people, when they're thinking and talking about immigration, the bigger concern is channel crossings. That is illegal immigration. That is people who get on small boats or dinghies from France and come over the Channel and claim asylum in the uk. And when you ask people what should the government's bigger priority be, reducing legal migration or should it be tackling illegal migration? 74% say it's illegal migration. And I think there's lots of reasons for that. One, there's a sense that we're not controlling our borders, which is obviously similar to debates in the us. And also the Channel has quite an important role and image in people's minds as the sort of boundary of the country. The Channel was something that we defended during the Second World War. And also it just goes against people's sense of fairness. This is sort of almost. In Britain, we like to queue and that this is a form of queue jumping. You know, you're not waiting your turn. You know, Brits support asylum policies. If you look at support for taking in Ukrainians, people from Hong Kong, people who act as interpreters for us in Afghanistan, very high. But it is. This approach is particularly wrong. And the government have compounded that. Not just this government, the last government too, with what I think was the worst policy you could come up with for social cohesion, which was to house asylum seekers whilst their claims were being processed in hotels in towns, largely in towns in poorer areas of the country because it was cheaper. These are often the local Heritage Hotel. People will tell me in focus groups, you know, I used to go there once or twice a year for a wedding. I now can't go at all tends to be young men in town centres and has created a lot of resentment and the government has now committed to ending that policy. But I think that's why it's become such a big issue. And interestingly this week we had in our tracker of Britain's top issues, the number of people selecting immigration or channel crossings eclipse the NHS in levels of concern for the first time. So it is definitely a salient issue. But as you say, most people in Britain aren't pull up the drawbridge. No one wants to put a wall. Also very few people want to put a wall in the English Channel. I should say it is more numbers are too high. We need to focus on skills based immigration and we need to make sure our asylum and refugee policy is genuinely helping those in need and that when people come over we have expectations on integration following the law and if you don't play by the rules, you can't stay in the uk. I think is broadly media and public opinion.
- [45:27]
Jasia Monk
What do you think reforms immigration policy would likely be if they did get into power? Again, clearly on one side, part of the party support base does consist of those voters who aren't comfortable with Britain as a multi ethnic society. Nigel Farage has tried to draw a political line between him and that political position in a number of ways, including by expelling some people who more openly argue for that kind of position from a political party. As you mentioned, Zia Youssef, who was until very recently the chairman of Reform, is himself from a Sri Lankan background and is Muslim, I believe. So there are obviously non white and non Christian politicians in the Reform Party. What is Farage's promise on immigration and why would he be able to keep that promise? What would he actually do if he did win that majority?
- [46:24]
Luke Trill
Yeah, I think this is, I mean you've hit the nail on the head with the balancing act that Reform faces with lots of their more online ideological supporters would like them to embrace a sort of mass deportation policy as has been advocated by some of the people Farage has distanced himself from. Farage instead has leaned much more into, well, firstly ending the use of the hotels. But in particular they have this policy approach of net zero migration, which is the idea that numbers coming into the country should balance numbers who are leaving the country. That has been their framing. And they have also said that they would take Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights. So Britain left the European Union, but we are still in the European Court of Human Rights which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights which has been blamed for some of the inability of the UK to deport people who shouldn't be in the UK or who have committed crime. So that's their policy. At the moment, it actually looks like the Conservatives are leaning towards a commitment to pulling out of the European Court of Human Rights as well. Kemi Badenoch is making a speech on that today. But it is a kind of. It is very hard line and certainly more hardline than any immigration policy that the UK has had. But it isn't quite what Farage, well, reforms more, I think it's fair to say, extreme supporters would like. And I think Farage has got to do a job. You know, Farage's task now, if he is to become a credible candidate for Prime Minister, is to pass that credibility test, right? He's got to show that, yes, I'm sticking to my principles, unlike other politicians, but at the same time, I'm not going to do something which is going to crash the economy or which is going to put the UK at risk. And when you ask people about specific types of immigrants, people will say, well, no, we don't want fewer care workers, we don't want fewer students, we don't want fewer people coming into skilled roles. So I think that is going to be the line that he has to walk. And when you ask people, we often ask people in that group. You were just talking about not voting reform at the moment, but might consider it, what are the biggest barriers to voting reform? And broadly, the things which come up are, number one, it is that credibility point. Number two, it is Nigel Farage's relationship with Donald Trump, who is very unpopular in the uk, and number three, it is the sort of allegations and proven instances of racism among some Reform candidates and members. And so Farage has to shut that down and to show that they are a proper mainstream party, he's taken some steps to do it. So Tommy Robinson, who is an English nationalist, had been convicted of a number of crimes. Farager said he is not welcome to join Reform uk. That triggered a row with Elon Musk, actually, who has, to some degree, backed Robinson's cause. So he is putting, I think, briefly,
- [49:42]
Jasia Monk
Elon Musk called for Nigel Farage to be deposed as leader of a Reform Party, or something along those lines.
- [49:48]
Luke Trill
Yes, he did. He did. But it's fair to say Nigel Farage is significantly more popular than Elon Musk in the uk. And so, you know, but that is the line that Farage is trying to tread. And there are other areas, you know, around, you know, sort of Ukraine and the economy, where reform have tended to be out of line with public opinion. And you're seeing Farage trying to scrape some of those barnacles off the reform vote.
- [50:23]
Jasia Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. To listen to the rest of this conversation, in which Luke and I really drill down on the causes of Britain's decline and what to do about it, in which you hear me complaining about the dampness and the coldness of British housing, Please go to jasamung.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamonk.substack.com thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [51:18]
Luke Trill
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [51:34]
Jasia Monk
It's Mushrooms with Me, Maddie Matheson. You know what's better than thinking about dinner too hard not stop that and just choose mushrooms. Five minutes done. Dinner's that easy and you feel like a genius. It's not magic, it's mushrooms. Stop stressing at mushroomcouncil. Com.