383. Question Time: Farage vs. Reform, is Labour still socialist, and how to ‘out-Trump’ Trump

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27:09So, now we've returned from Aleister's pauser, and back from the break. I want to hit you again with something we've done a lot of international, understandably, but here's a question from Jonathan Pembrokeshire. With numerous dubious policy decisions, including drastic cuts to foreign aid and benefits alongside increased defense spending, is there anything socialist left about the Labor Party? It feels like Frash has dragged everyone around. Let me continue to develop that. I was talking to labor activists over the weekend. Actually, had not a very damaging, but a small car crash, and that size was waiting for insurance documents and police and things.

27:44I had this long -compossession labor activist who was saying that they weren't Corbinistas. They were very central labor, but they have been really shocked that Labor hasn't raised the cap on two children on benefits, really shocked by what they've done on international development spending, instead of seeing an incredible opportunity as Trump cut for the UK to move into that space to just sort of copy it and almost suggesting from number 10, actually one of the labor MPs that they'd done it in order to impress Trump that it was one of the things they were, along with the invitation to state visit, they were saying to Trump, look, we've cut international violence went to.

28:32And essentially they came out of this thinking that they're really worried that summer and ritual reeds don't really care about social justice and that they're making a mistake of chasing right wing votes. When in fact, they should be paying more attention to traditional labor voters on these issues. We talked about our party last week that University College London had done, which suggested that labor was just as vulnerable to losing votes in that direction, the direction of your car crash person as opposed to on the right. I think part of this is that the media ecosystem in which we exist, I still think is very, very much to the right.

29:11So when Kierst Armor says at a private meeting as he did yesterday, the welfare bill is unsustainable and it's unfair and it's not working, there's a left wing case that you can make for welfare reform, but that gets reported as this will upset, this will anger people on the on the left of the Labour Party. And I think the other thing is that this is again something that we talked about Peter Carl and by the way, I really urge people to listen to the interview Peter Carl, not least for his own life story is so kind of moving in in so many ways, but when these Labour ministers are out and about, I bumped into Matthew Bars and you're on Matthew Bars and who was the ambassador?

29:52Absolutely, who was the US American ambassador under Obama and who's remained very close to Britain and spends a lot of time in Britain. And I bumped into him the other day and he said, he said, listen, can't you go and help these younger ministers sort of have a community? He said, what do you mean? Well, they all sound so nervous and they sound like they're reading a script and they sound like they're not really, there's not enough confidence there. If I were to do that, I would say to them, look, whatever you're talking about, find a way of mentioning things like the workers rights package, which is traditionally what you would call quite a left wing approach to the, so Angela Rainer pushes that, but it's not part of the language.

30:35Everybody knows about Winterfuel payments, everybody now knows that they're planning these disability cuts, but does everybody know that they're making these changes to give workers more rights? Which actually when you poll it is very, very popular. The fact that Labour have managed to deliver more NHS appointments than they said they were going to within the first year, done it already. That is the sort of thing that you have to keep reminding people has happened. I would argue that what Ed Miliban's doing in the Great British Energy Space is actually all being, he's got people sort of pulling trying to hold him back a bit, I think that is you could put into the left wing bracket, private education.

31:13Every business event you and I do, we get in the Q &A, there's always somebody saying, you know, why are Labour punishing me just because I'm well enough to send my kids to private school? That is, if you like, traditionally on the left. So I think there's lots of things that they're doing. Waterbosses bonuses, I mean there's loads of stuff but they're not loud enough in the debate about what they're doing with them. Imagine what Trump would do with all that sort of stuff. I still think though, there's something we need to keep coming back to, which is there is a bit of a question about where that moral compass lies.

31:43And also above all, let's look at the big strategic question, why did they not use this moment threat on defence to say, okay, now is the time to get rid of this ridiculous straight jacket we've put ourselves in around tax? In the way that basically Germany, as you say, has just done something quite brave on the fiscal break, they had handed them on a platter the biggest opportunity that they could ever be handed to say, okay, now we need to look again at VAT income tax and corporate stress and they duct it. And I guess the fundamental point, and this by the way, and maybe our listeners skew a bit more left than than right, but I think a lot of them are kind of people who really, really, really want this government to succeed.

32:27And a lot of them I think are saying, look, you know, we want to hear more about, if you like, what John, when John plus gets used to talk about the traditional values in the modern setting as defining new labour, we'd like a bit more of the traditional values and a bit less of the, we're doing this because we worried about the red wall so called. Now, Rory, I've got a question for you. The question is about King Charles and Soft Power in murder, Gossworth, Trip Plus member, could King Charles play a soft power role in programming, peace in Ukraine, given his relations with Zelensky and Trudeau.

33:00It's quite a leap, but I actually want to talk about King Charles and music, Rory. The fact that King Charles has put out these musical choices is this not pushed you towards accepting that music is actually a, I mean, he says it all, it says that music is just so special and so in particular, all of our lives and there's you, and actually I've got to say Bob Marley and the waylers were like a door, Bob Marley. Could you be loved? Good choice. Kylie Minogue, I know who's going for the Pomeranian World Connections, Jesus Stradion, Grace Jones, Lovion Rose, excellent choice, Beyoncé. Do you know the only criticism I've got Rory when you speak to him?

33:38He said this was about celebrating the Commonwealth. Why was there no backpipe in his musical choices? His mother would definitely have had the backpipe. No, that's good, but I'm very, very pleased that you engage with that, saw that and like that. He's also done great stuff on poetry, theatre. No, I think that's one of the really positive aspects of it. Well, you need to be educated, why life without music is not a proper life. I absolutely hear you. I'm an unsurvilised human being. I don't have the depths of your Beethoven soul. I completely, if only I listen more to Abba, my sense of the world, but no, I think that's probably true.

34:19And it's also true, you can make the same case on football. I think these are two big weaknesses in my life. No, I think not liking football, even though I love it. I understand life for that music is life not worth living. How do the problems say I'm just basically tone deaf and it's very difficult to communicate to someone what that actually feels like or his life. As I think I've said before, my father couldn't understand he believed that everybody could paint and everybody could play music and dedicated his 92 years to this slightly quixotic task of trying to convince non -musical, non -artistic people to do watercolors and compose music.

34:57I think it's possible weirdly that we are sort of different, but it kind of differently wide. And I think it's probably true 80 % of the world, music is central, 90 % of the world food is an incredibly important part of that lives, but not maybe 100%. I'm also a bit bit lame on food, I know. I'm pretty lame on food. I did Ruthie Rogers podcast this week and I admitted I'm really not into food. I don't know why he talked to me. We had a very nice chat. Are your boys into music? Yeah, yeah, Sash is learning the trumpet at the moment and enjoying that. And I've really enjoyed singing. I mean, he's got, he's got to work a little bit more getting, getting in tune, but he loves belting out tunes.

35:31So I think there's hope there, hope the next generation right now. Back to serious stuff. He's serious. Andy Mahadev Velfast, why are the mainstream media and European politicians afraid to push back against accusations of free loading when the post -warble two agreement was the US -wapified Scudian brother? So let's start with that because that's an important point. But the moment what Trump is basically suggesting is that it was just US naive at the end of what he was mooching off them and the Americans were paying all this money. What of course he forgets is that America did this deliberately so it could exercise power.

36:07It invested a NATO because it wanted to contain the Soviet Union. And it didn't want Europe to go weaker the knees or neutral towards the Soviet Union. They wanted Europe to be on the American side. And Eisenhower spoke explicitly about the US having that security responsibility. They didn't want the goal to develop his own nuclear weapons. They wanted Europe to be dependent on US nuclear weapons. And you can see actually even today in two examples, Ukraine and Syria, it's quite clear that Trump is saying to completely contradictory things. On the one hand he seems to be saying, I'm an isolationist.

36:44I don't care what happens outside the US. Go ahead, you pay for it. We won't pay for it. But on the other hand, when people actually step up and offer to pay, he doesn't let them because he wants to have his cake needed. He wants to say, I'm not going to pay any money, but he also absolutely wants to be able to take Russia's side on Ukraine, which is why when Europe steps up and says, okay, we'll find $50 billion a year. Can we please buy American kit and keep the satellites going? He says no. And when Saudi cats are in Turkey step up and Syrians say, okay, you're saying you don't want to spend a single American dollar in Syria.

37:21You please provide the money. He won't let them do it. He puts sanctions in place to prevent it because in that case he's taking a position against Syria, just as he's taking position against Ukraine, while pretending to be isolationist and neutral. Interesting. Very interesting. Let's just stick it over there. Heidi Legg, how does Mark Carney position himself when so many democratic nations rejecting the liberal machine that seems to choose candidates further upstream? How does a candidate like Mark Carney stand out as his own person rather than a plant from the global elite? How can he show that he truly wants Canada to be wealthy?

37:54I want you to answer this because you've been deep in Canada, but let me just do the little explainer to explain how weird it is. So it would not be conceivable in British politics for Mark Carney to do what he's just done. So Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England, and successful banker. Mark Carney is, I guess, approximately 60, and he hasn't been an elected MP. He ran to be Prime Minister without even being a member of parliament. He was just a grand public figure, be like Gary Linnaker suddenly deciding to run for leadership at the Labour Party without being an MP.

38:29He has ended up not just winning the leadership, but becoming Prime Minister and now his impoverished position. And again, it took a lot of luck and politics, if we've been talking about this before Trump completely destroyed Pierre -Polyarves chances. It seemed like a hospital party. Sure, Mark, you can become the leader of the Liberal Party for a few weeks, but you're then 20 points behind. You'll go to defeat from Pierre -Polyar. What health point have you been doing a few weeks as Prime Minister and then being leader of the opposition? Instead of which, he's managed to put all that off. Okay, every once in a while.

39:00The question, how does your position himself? I think he does a national version of what he's been doing in the party context. Pierre -Polyarves has been, I mean, some of the polls, Bruce Anderson was telling us on the episode we did for members. He was saying, this is the Canadian polls from the strategist, some of the polls, Pierre -Polyarves was 25 points ahead just a few weeks ago. And he's now well into single figures. We're now virtually within the margin of error. So if Mark can't, he, when he's a position himself, I would say, take the messaging that has won himself this landslide in the leadership election and take that messaging into the national frame.

39:41And part of that is about, this is not about the Liberal Party, this is not about bringing the whole of Canada together. We are facing a really strong, powerful enemy. I think the fact that he called it out to what it is, and he linked Pierre -Polyarves, I thought, very cleverly to Trump. You know, basically, you either stand up for Trump or you stand up to Trump. I'm standing up to it. I think he positions himself as serious, grown up, experienced, not a politician. It becomes a strength that he says, I'm new to this game. I've just, I know a lot about politics, because I've worked in central bankies over.

40:16I'm not a politician. Polly Everett is a kind of lifelong. He exists to be a politician. And then he's going to find some, you know, good chunky policy ideas that make people feel this guy can get stuff done. Look at you say that Polly Everett has crashed. He's not crashed. It's still, you know, what he will try to do is to make Karne part of the Liberal Party globally lead to all that stuff. And I'm not sure it's going to be very effective. We shall see. It's going to be very interesting in here. And I think it'll be soon. I think it's going to be, I think he won't hang around a corner election.

40:48Final question for me, and thank you for this, because it comes back to some themes you've been touching on last few days. Alison Matthews, Glasgow, Trip Plus member. Thank you for being a member of, of Trip. Where is the US opposition to Trump and Vance? I see the odd thing on social media, but nothing of significance. Where are the Democrats? Now, can I just begin with my framing on this, which relates to our conversation yesterday? We have entered this reality TV social media world, which Trump has sensed that he can release other people. It's not just him doing it. Obviously, Musk has been given cover to do it.

41:27Vance has been given cover to do it. Donald J. Trump, Jr. has been given cover to do it. They're all rolling. And we'll see more and more from Pete Heskith and others as they get going. And that's why he's brought in a lot of Fox News people into his central team. And I think that we don't quite understand how much this world is changing because we don't look enough at places like Russia. We still think that the way to respond is, you know, recent articles in the New York Times, whereas in fact, what's being created for better or for worse is a reality TV thing with an enormous audience, particularly on Facebook, which dominates a lot of this, but also on Twitter.

42:09Where what they want to see is you punch back. And in some ways, Kamala Harris and Tim Walsh were their best in the campaign when they were doing their own version of this, doing things like these guys are weird, viral videos, good stuff was Saturday night live, mocking them back. And one of the questions for Democratic politics is very disturbing because if, you know, you, me, Kierstama, everybody feel the only way we can fight back against sort of Trumpian right is to, as it were, play them at their own game. You turn Democratic audiences into people sort of watching popcorn and thinking, nothing's real.

42:48These are all a bunch of bluffers. But while that was a funny hit back and the whole thing becomes like watching a pro wrestling match. I was yesterday at that thing, you know, remember a year ago now we did that thing at Methodist Hall with 1800, six farmers. I did it again solo yesterday and some fantastic questions. But one of them actually was about whether there should be populism of the left and whether there's anything that we can actually, people like me can actually learn from Trump. And that's something we also discussed with Tommy Vita on Ponceiro America this week. And the whole premise of him wanting to talk to me was actually goes absolutely agrees with Alison that the Democrats are frankly all over the place.

43:30There's no strategy for recovery. There's no analysis really going on. There's no, as far as I can tell there's no formal review of what happened and leaders are the leaders are emerging. There are either the people that we've known forever like Bernie Sanders or AOC or whatever otherwise new names that are coming up. But it doesn't feel terribly, terribly organized. So when I said an answer to this question at Methodist Hall, I said if we define the kind of Trumpian way in Moses' name, three P's, populism, polarization and post truth, then we don't want to go down that road. We don't want to become a left wing progressive version of that.

44:08But where we should, can and should learn from them, is in relation to the incredible organizational skills that they've got, not least through the whole media ecosystem, think tankery and all that stuff. But also whether we like him or not and you and I don't, Trump is in his own way a genius communicator, even if you strip away the lies and even if you strip away the nonsense and the bullshit and the bullying. And that you may say we can't strip that away because that's part of it. But just technically to watch him as a communicator. Now what is it about? When we were talking about Matthew Barsen saying go and help Labour ministers talk like human beings, whatever you think about Trump, there's something compelling about the way you communicate.

44:51Now you can't sort of imitate that, but what you can't take from that, what is it that he's got about it? And it's it's being interesting, it's being entertaining, it's about saying things that people don't necessarily expect, it's about having a very strong powerful turn of phrase that commands attention. Now he does it for bad, but you can use all of those factors for good. As you know, I'm full of praise for the way that Starmer, Macrom, Merz and Tuske and Ling what's going on now. But in terms of how they project and communicate to the public, I still think it feels a little bit last generation, not next generation, it's the next generation that we've got to get on side for what's coming.

45:32Part of the problem is the risk of becoming sort of defenders of the status quo. That is absolutely right. And defenders of the status quo that we actually don't like and didn't create. That's the point. What's under the Democrats at the moment? There's a risk that they're defending a status quo for which they're not actually responsible. There is stuff wrong with the way government works. There is stuff wrong with institutions. Be the reformers and not the defenders. Exactly. So you know, we've had a question from anarchist sheep. Would we benefit from having our own version of doge? Now there's a classic question right.

46:05I get very, very wound up, understandably, by people coming to me saying, well, yeah, but you know, isn't Elon Musk right? Isn't government inefficient? Well, course government's inefficient. You know, you and I have worked in government. We torn a hair out about government. There's a lot that's inefficient about government. And we see it all the time. And anybody goes into a busy hospital, can immediately spot quite a lot of things going on around them that wouldn't be the way they'd managed it. How on earth do you say to people? Look, okay, yes. Yes, it's also true that quite a lot of international development assistance was also misspent.

46:36But that doesn't mean doing this, right? Doesn't mean a situation where we now have all the HIV AIDS medication currently stuck in ports with it, expiring. So it can't be used to save lives. The same with vaccination on the most basic diseases. I was talking to a farmer in Zimbabwe who is now funding all the entry retroviral treatment for his own workforce out of his own pocket because 35 % of people have HIV AIDS and Trump has stopped all of that. It's going to explosion across the world of this. We've seen it with Musk shutting down the federal drug administration. I was talking to someone in the FDA shut down all the testing centers, including the basic food testing centers and then have to reopen them.

47:25Fires, you know, nuclear controllers. We talked to Michael Lewis about this. This was his fifth risk. Then he had a higher. I mean, it's completely irresponsible, insane. You know, the other one we hear about, well, isn't it right that, you know, Europe should pay a bit more on defense? Yeah, sure. Let's say you had for some reason been, I don't know, supporting a charity and you were supporting 50 % of its income. And you wanted it to raise more of its own money and be less dependent on you, Alastair, right? Fair enough. But the way to do it is say, here's a five year plan. I'm going to reduce every year.

47:59There's going to be a thing and you're going to raise up. Not, I'm stopping all funding now. Thank you. Holes things, collapses. And that's what reveals who they really are. They're not really trying to help Europe become self -sufficient. They're not giving them time to do it. They're just knocking them off the cliff. You're point about you as in Barbouin farmer and the HIV AIDS. I'm really struggling. Maybe some Americans who could help us try to understand this. Why are the former presidents so silent? I mean George Bush, that was one of his biggest, the biggest parts of his legacy. And we all know what he thinks of Trump.

48:31You can see it on his face when he sits there at the new organisation. But he's just decided he's just going to sit it out and say nothing. I just wonder, would there be something very powerful if Biden, Obama, Clinton and Bush got together and warned the American people, this is unbelievably dangerous, what's happening? We have to wake up. Or do they just think, you know what, we're the past. People won't listen. I don't know. The answer is it depends how they do it and how smart they are and how alert to the modern media environment they are. Do it wrong and the story will be, here's a bunch of elite has -beans.

49:04Do it with real wit and inventiveness. Troll them back. You could actually do a surprising amount of damage. But the question is, how fleet footed are these people going to be? My friend Greg Nugin who's a very good to a marketing guy and he says we should stop calling it doge and call it dodge as in dodgy as fuck. Because it is, it's totally the whole thing's corruption. Scaramage is right. They've opened the golden era of corruption. So dodge, we do, well let's stop calling it doge, we're going to call it dodge. You've put your finger on something we're going to end on and I think it's so important.

49:41So what Peter Pompare and Seth points out and Russia in 2000 and is the analogy I think with Trump today is that the reality TV stuff, all the chat about invading Greenland and Canada being the 51st state and all the noise creates a sort of pseudo debate and it distracts you from what's really happening. So it creates a kind of illusion of a kind of democratic debate. Mimo Congress is becoming completely irrelevant and the really big questions which you've just raised out of power and money happen off stage a complete yoke. All these fireworks are happening on social media but what really is happening with musk, with the data in the tax office, with subsidies, with personal relationships, with conflicts of interest, with Bitcoin and that's what happened in Russia.

50:39All this stuff was happening on TV and the journalists were like I just can't, what is happening in gas and oil? How's a bramavitch working with Berazovsky? I thought Berazovsky and there's now a bramavitch owns this, now Putin's doing this. And so I think that's it. Let's keep trying to see the policy behind, see what happens behind this kind of illusion. It's also why going back to our discussion on the main podcast this week about China is why ultimately we have to train ourselves to have deeper and broader attention spans. And sometimes just to say oh he said something really stupid again, let's ignore it.

51:21Not plays game, not poke around the turd the whole time. Now where you and I disagree with Michael Wolfe, I don't agree and you don't agree with Michael that you just wait him out, you can't wait him out, you got to fight him but I think at the moment this goes back to the question about the Democrats, if you fight on every single front that they're throwing out or the chaff that they're throwing out there, you'll just you'll dissipate your energy, you'll dissipate your strategic thinking. So I think part of our role should be to resist talking about Trump every week, to resist talking about everything that he does, but to try to maintain an attention span on the things that actually beneath the surface are of even more lasting damage than the absolute crap that he comes away, it comes out, we're going to insert his desk with his big marker pen.

52:07And then the problem is how do you know when it goes from being a performance and propaganda to reality, how do you spot that moment which people missed with Putin, where he goes from sounding like a ethno nationalist saying he's going to take Ukraine to the moment where he actually begins believing it and evades Ukraine. So how do we spot the moment where Trump goes from saying what I'm going to take Greenland and everyone thinks well he's always saying that kind of stuff to the moment where the troops get on the plane and he takes Greenland. Yeah well you have to win the big battles on Rue and that's why actually the European response for all the sort of social media bullying, intimidation etc thus far I think has been the right way.

52:53Anyway, quite depressing but Jade Evance, I know he says that the left wing has banned comedy, it's one of these many lies, but comedy was alive and well with Matt Ford last night and I'm on the last leg this week following the mooch. Oh so, Brinnard, lots more positive. Well done you. I spoke to Rory Bremner last time, you remember the great guy does his amazing limitations of voices and he was saying one of the challenges for comedians is satirizing this world, is getting more and more difficult because it becomes so absurd and grotesque, it's very difficult to outdo Trump himself. When Trump himself is posting videos of him as a gold statue in guards that were dancing girls and beards, I mean what's the satirist supposed to do?

53:39Okay Rory, we're