Video: The Men Who Broke British Politics
Added 2025-08-24 21:20:57 +0000 UTCHey all!
Here's my latest video, currently titled The Men Who Broke British Politics (although, as ever, we might tweak that should it not prove the most clickable title!).
It's a dive into the intertwining careers of Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer, the two competing strands of politics they represent, and how both have brought UK politics to the very edge.
It's a very British story on the surface, but I'm sure those of you in other countries will be able to find some themes very relevant to your own contexts too!
It's been quite the undertaking getting this one out; particularly as I'm just back from paternity leave! So I have a slightly fuller house, and am getting far worse sleep(!) than I was the last time I wrote one of these release posts.
But, I hope you'll enjoy the video!
Thanks as ever for your generous support!
Tom
Comments
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Elon Musk
2025-10-13 23:58:04 +0000 UTC"but they know that the right wing media will attack as soon as they try to do anything" But that's going to happen no matter what. Why is Labour's political strategy stuck in the PR-obsessed '90s? They ran on ending austerity; just do that! (With the caveat that I'm not a British citizen or resident and don't want to overstep the line with my criticism)
Sam Aronow
2025-08-30 20:43:32 +0000 UTCIts difficult - i think labour / left wing govs would like to do more but they know that the right wing media will attack as soon as they try to do anything - so Labour have to move very carefully. I'm an Australian - the Murdoch media are very pervasive here... If the labour gov trys to do more than it said it would at the last election - its just a red flag for those platforms to go nuts. This means that the Liberals (Tories) win the next election and continue to destroy society as we know it... fun times. :\
Karen Aitchison
2025-08-27 14:35:42 +0000 UTCCongratulations with the baby! "I'm sure those of you in other countries will be able to find some themes very relevant to your own contexts too!" Oh yes. There is *so* much overlap with Dutch politics. The Dutch Labour Party had a similar success as Labour under Tony Blair with the now infamous 'third way politics'. After that they burned through a lot of Keir Starmer-type professional/consultant class leaders. Most of them, like Starmer, thought it was a good idea to "listen to the forgotten working class", which meant: be racist, just not as racist as Geert Wilders (who is far to the right of Nigel Farage.) And also be pretty right wing on economics, because of the Soviet-Union or something. There were some ups and downs, but mostly downs. Meanwhile Wilders' PVV mostly kept growing, although with some growing pains too, like when a lot of voters ran away to Forum for Democracy. When that party fully went for the more esoteric side of fascism (hyperboreans and all), most of the PVV voters came back. There's a difference though: Wilders doesn't do tv shows at all. He just spews bile on Xitter. So in the end, this year Labour merged with the GreenLeft, the green party. They finally got the point political scientist had been screaming at them for years: voters give political party issue ownership on certain topics and vote for that party if they think it is the most important. So if you make "immigration" (i.e. racism) the main topic, voters will vote for the party that has issue ownership on that and that the PVV. Starmer clearly has missed that memo. So for the upcoming elections PvdA/GroenLinks as the new party is called (just the two names combined), is are all in on housing. A lot of the old third way elite secretly liked being racist and ran away kicking screaming, also often using the antisemitism argument, because of support for Palestina in the new party platform. Fortunately, Israel's actions are so clearly genocidal, it doesn't get any traction. The christian-democrats of the CDA went pretty much through the same cycle, until they only had 5 seats in the 150 seat parliament left. Then they elected Henri Bontenbal as a leader, who decided to copy Angela Merkel (like her, he is both a devout christian and a physicist) and be a boringly and steadily center-right as possible, without any trace of populism. They are currently exploding in the polls. This is also because NL is a bit ahead of the curve of the UK, because PVV already became the biggest party and was in the government. Wilders runs the PVV much like Farage does Reform. A political party needs at least two members under Dutch law. For the PVV those are Geert Wilders and Foundation Friends of the PVV, which has only board member: Geert Wilders. Because Wilders run the party like a dictator and demands total obedience, he had absolutely no capable candidates to be minister. One didn't even get through the security screening, because he is a possible Israeli spy (or at least informant.) So the coalition became a total mess with constant inviting and no results whatsoever, because populist sloganeering is very hard to turn into actual laws. So while the PVV is still doing pretty well in the polls (plenty of racists/islamophobes), there is a downward trajectory and no party wants to govern with him anymore, not only out of principle, but also because it is just unworkable to form a government with a party that is basically a one man show and has no decent cadre. A caveat I must make is that in the proportional representation of NL, Wilders can never get absolute power. If Reform would get an actual Trump/Orbán style majority, it would probably be a lot worse for the PVV. (Sorry for the long post. Wanted to type a few lines, became an entire essay.)
Martijn
2025-08-26 11:54:03 +0000 UTC
