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The great realignment of UK politics, with Emma Trimble
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The old rules of UK politics no longer apply. A two-and-a-half party system has become a five party system, and no one is quite sure what comes next. The only certainty is we are facing an unprecedented and tumultous era, and nothing (including revolution) is off the table. To discuss this 'great realignment', Will is joined by political commentator and podcast host for the New Culture Forum, Emma Trimble.
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Transcript
Shift to a Multi-Party System
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will for the first time in 2026.
00:00:25
Speaker
yeah UK politics has always been a two to two and a half party system and that's how it should be when you have first past the post voting. It's now a five party system with five parties all hovering somewhere between 10 to 30 percent of support.
00:00:44
Speaker
It reflects Fragmentation, which has been driven by a deep feeling of frustration with politics as usual in the country. Basically, everyone hates everyone.
00:00:55
Speaker
And if I was to put that down to one driving factor, we can call it the false advertising hypothesis. None of the major parties are doing what they say they will do on the tin.
00:01:07
Speaker
The Labor Party, the ruling party of government, no longer represents labor, or in other words, the working class. They are now the party of wealthy, educated, graduate elites. The Conservative Party is no longer conservative in any meaningful way, run effectively by the wet Tories that have overtaken the party.
00:01:26
Speaker
The Liberal Democrats certainly aren't liberal, favouring digital authoritarianism. The Greens don't really care about greenery anymore. They're now just an Islamo-Communist alliance.
00:01:38
Speaker
you're not doing what you say you'll do on the tin in politics, that leads to mistrust. And there has currently never been greater mistrust of politicians than there is right now. To help me understand this fragmented, tangled web that is British politics, and if there is indeed any hope in 2026, I'm delighted to be joined by a political commentator and host of a new podcast with the New Culture Forum, Emma
Fragmentation in British Politics
00:02:02
Speaker
Trimble. Emma, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:02:04
Speaker
Thank you for having me and thank you for the plug. of Of course, we can well we can have another plug later. up I noticed that you are stretching out the festive season for all it's worth with those Christmas ah decorations still in the background.
00:02:16
Speaker
I don't think the paper chain quite counts. How do you reflect on that summary when we think about that fragmentation in British politics and how it now effectively has gone to something unprecedented, a more European style five party system?
00:02:30
Speaker
What do you put that down to and and how do you think that will impact on on how politics is is operated this year? but I think increasingly for decades, the the parties have failed to respond to the mood of the British public. ah Immigration is obviously the the key example of this. Time and time again, the British public have at the ballot box and also in polling showed that they do not want mass migration.
00:02:55
Speaker
and whether it is the Labour Party or the Conservative Party, it's been shown that the the political elite, it doesn't matter what you which party you vote in, and you get the same thing.
00:03:09
Speaker
And I think that that has led to a lot of frustration. We saw with Brexit, not just here in the UK, but also in the United States, the beginning of what has been described described or was actually quite a but in popular discussion before before the pandemic, what people have called the great realignment. We started to see a great realignment in our politics where the left and right divide wasn't quite making sense anymore.
00:03:32
Speaker
It wasn't just purely about economics, culture. There was, you know, there's a resurgence of interest in cultural issues, particularly in the twenty twenty s So I think a lot of of big political and historical events have taken place and the political parties have slowly drifted further and further away from what people actually believe and what the actual spectrum of views are amongst the electorate.
00:03:56
Speaker
And as a result, despite the fact that we have the first past the post system, because obviously in other countries you have proportional representation models where you have multiple, almost an endless number of parties entering into various coalitions and so on. And that's why they have multiple parties.
00:04:12
Speaker
But for us, this has been a fragmentation of the existing parties where you have the the left of the Labour Party fragmenting off to form your party. And then we've seen some of that also, I think with the Greens, their shift away from being more focused on environmental issues and being more of a sort of and a new hardcore socialist party.
00:04:34
Speaker
And then on the right, of course, you have the fragmentation into the Reform Party. And so I think what we're seeing now is actually the frustration of the the frustration of the great realignment that happened during the pandemic has has reemerged for a reckoning, as it were.
00:04:51
Speaker
It's in some respects difficult to comprehend how those voices have been ignored for so long, particularly to your point on immigration, when there has been an overwhelming sense that immigration is a the most important battleground issue in politics in the UK and b there is widespread support for a dramatic reduction in immigration, particularly from culturally incompatible countries.
Disconnect between Elites and Public Concerns
00:05:16
Speaker
Why has it taken so long for both the Labour and Conservative parties to be able to recognise that, which has opened the door for reform? I think some of it is is the effect of the political bubble. You only have to look at the the recent interview that Kamala Tomini did on GB News with Priti Patel, where she accused Orm of being national socialists, and or even Anna Firth, former Conservative MP, when she was talking about the defection of Andrew Rosendale.
00:05:46
Speaker
insisting that Britain isn't broken. I think that the political elite, and it's not just the political elite, it's also the media elite, the liberal metropolitan elite, that are so completely out of touch with the people who are bearing the brunt of these societal changes, particularly mass migration.
00:06:03
Speaker
they are not affected by this. They're living in bougie areas where the the crime is only really now starting to to creep in. And I think, you know, maybe we're starting to see that that the effects of mass migration are starting to break through on every sort of social strata.
00:06:22
Speaker
But the fact is that these people just didn't care. They didn't care about how this was affecting people at the bottom of society. They didn't care about the cultural impact. And I think part of that is because of the the framing for so long around you know the importance of economics. they were they There was a a general sense, I think, amongst the the intelligentsia, the elite. I'm not sure how exactly you want to to frame it because it isn't just limited to to the political politicos.
00:06:53
Speaker
of an atmosphere and a culture of denigration towards British tradition, British inheritance, all of the things that make Britain, Britain.
00:07:03
Speaker
And what we tried to do was to whittle it down to these insipid, watery British values. that were completely inoffensive to anyone, but of course, realistically didn't stand for anything either. and And so I think that we, in many ways, have just simply been hamstrung in being able to even even begin to push back against it in terms of making the argument for why mass migration is a bad thing. People would were shut down, accused of being no knuckle-dragging troglodyte racists.
00:07:36
Speaker
Just look at the way that people were demonized for voting for Brexit. I think we've moved a long way since 2016. It's been 10 years, which seems completely shocking. and But I think a lot of it is is ah is that culture of of repudiation that Roger Scruton talked about.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting that you mentioned how these sorts of globalist values have been almost retrospectively applied to Britain by metropolitan elites as a way just to push their worldview.
00:08:04
Speaker
You know, people like Sadiq Khan will say, you know, British values are tolerance and diversity and, you know, and openness and kindness towards the world, when really that's never been what British values are about. That's just a way of applying a progressive worldview to your country's history or your country's sense of meaning.
00:08:28
Speaker
And I think people feel that that that sort of gaslighting doesn't really, isn't really working anymore. But also there's no sense of where those values came from. They didn't come out of nowhere. they're not I think for a long time we were living under the delusion that these were somehow universal values that could just be taken for granted and that other people when they came here would just come to accept them you know by virtue of them being...
00:08:55
Speaker
universal in some way. I mean, I don't know, there's a remarkable naivety there. There was a refusal to accept that other countries and other cultures were fundamentally different from our own.
00:09:07
Speaker
And then when you're faced with mass migration from countries that don't believe in those values, what is a liberal democracy supposed to do when you have hundreds of thousands of people coming in from countries that have intolerant attitudes to all sorts of different other groups in society and are actually intolerant towards Britain and intolerant towards our history and our culture and what we stand for and who are actually you know and completely unwilling to to be tolerant in the way that the way that tolerance has become part of British culture. I'm willing to accept the liberties of of other people to you know draw pictures of the Prophet Muhammad, for example.
00:09:49
Speaker
So i think I think that we have gotten ourselves into a into a serious mess by not being willing to actually to actually state that the thing that we're protecting is the thing that are that led to those values in the first place not the values as an end in themselves if that makes sense Yeah, the UK and I would add several other European and Western countries are getting a pretty brutal lesson in the paradox of tolerance at the moment that if you tolerate the intolerance, eventually intolerance will reign supreme.
Is Britain Broken?
00:10:23
Speaker
You mentioned as well before, Emma, that line, Britain is broken or the question, is Britain broken? And this has been an inside the beltway conversation for the last few weeks where all of the major all the leaders of the major political parties have been asked the question do you think britain is broken it's been a key dividing line unsurprisingly between the conservatives and reform badenock has come out and said that she does not believe britain is broken unsurprising given that if she was to say that she would have to concede that it was the conservatives that played a large role in breaking it and obviously the entire raison d'etre of reform is that britain is broken and that revolutionary change is all radical change is needed do you think britain is broken
00:11:07
Speaker
i I think that it is beyond dispute that Britain is broken. i've I've seen some conservatives quibbling over exactly what that means. But the fact that crime is rampant, the example I like to use is I saw ah a guy in quite a bougie part of North London being mugged for his steak outside of a co-op.
00:11:26
Speaker
crime Crime is rampant. Everyone who lives in London especially has tens of stories of of crime that they have witnessed and and how awful the city has become.
00:11:37
Speaker
that where do you even begin? i mean, like really, where do you begin? Whether it is on mass migration, whether it's on unemployment, every every aspect of our society seems to be fragmenting. People are deeply, deeply unhappy.
00:11:54
Speaker
ah It doesn't seem to be even up for debate whether Britain's broken. And I think that the problem is that with the Conservatives' refusal to admit that is a denial of the role that they have played in getting us into this situation in the first place. I mean, just look at the number of migrants who came under Boris Johnson.
00:12:15
Speaker
When British people vote for the conservative party. They vote for Boris Johnson. They voted for Brexit because they want, one of the reasons is because they want sovereignty. They want control over their borders. They want to be able to decide who comes into their country or not.
00:12:30
Speaker
And then you see a betrayal on the level of the Boris wave. So when people say that Britain is broken, I think you only have to look at the seriousness, the jeopardy that our democracy is in. And that's what I find very worrying is that the conservatives don't seem to recognize quite how serious the problem is because people have lost trust in both of the main parties.
00:12:54
Speaker
They have lost trust in the conservative party. And if, for example, reform were to get in and things were not to go to plan, it would be quite a serious issue that, and this is one of the reasons why when people are talking about Tory 2.0 and the concerns that if they take in too many conservatives, that actually the trust will be broken down for the reform party as well, which I think is a concern that I'm sure Nigel Farage is is very alert to, and he will walk that line very carefully.
00:13:22
Speaker
But one of the reasons I think why people are so concerned about that is because that trust is broken. Trust in our democracy is broken. And that's very worrying when you also have rising sectarian and sectarianism in your country and you've got independent pro-Gaza MPs,
00:13:40
Speaker
in in parliament, you have rising politicization of the Muslim vote, you have MP councillors in places like Tower Hamlets running to be but members of parliament for the bank Bangladeshi National Party and Bangladeshi elections.
00:13:57
Speaker
it's ah It's a very dangerous situation that we have created for us. I say we have created for ourselves. Successive governments have inflicted upon the British public.
00:14:08
Speaker
So for any any politician to say that Britain isn't broken is isn't broken and and for any politician to refuse to To take that seriously and to take people's experience of how badly things have gone wrong seriously, think is actually, you know, demonstrative of the fact that people like Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, they're all right. Yeah, and of course, Suella Braverman in the last couple of days has announced that she is
National Malaise and Decline
00:14:35
Speaker
defecting to reform. We'll get to that in a moment.
00:14:37
Speaker
The way that I look at the Britain is Broken conversation is that you have two low ebbs which are occurring simultaneously. You've got this cultural and spiritual decline where people feel like they are not connected to what it means to be British anymore. There's this sense of malaise on a cultural level.
00:14:56
Speaker
And you have economic decline in that GDP per capita has remained stagnant pretty much since the financial crisis. People feel poorer. It is a, would argue, ah yeah a poor country now, the United Kingdom, which is still pretending that it is a rich country. then moving back to Poland.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. It doesn't have the capacity to be able to do what rich countries can do. An expansive welfare state. an aggressive foreign interventions, foreign policy, or or providing a lot of money on the international stage.
00:15:24
Speaker
If you were rich, but culturally poor, you could almost get away with it. Somewhere like a Dubai, I would argue, is something akin to that. If, on the other hand, you were culturally united, you know, let's say World War II, England against ah an enemy, but economically and and militarily in a very difficult place, you can almost get away with that as well. But it is The fact that culturally and economically, both of these crises are occurring simultaneously, which I feel is is where we are now now at.
00:15:55
Speaker
I think that's a really good point. And I think actually that maybe that fed some light on the experiences of those who are sort of at the bottom, have been at the bottom rung of society and bearing the brunt of this. People in places like the Red Wall,
00:16:11
Speaker
in poorer parts of of East London who have not only experienced dispossession when it comes to the area that they live in and and their culture, but they also you know already didn't have great economic prospects. So they were the first actually to experience that dispossession on both fronts.
00:16:31
Speaker
The lack of hope economically and also being stripped away against against their will of of the of the capital that isn't financial, that cultural capital, that yeah sense of community and sense of home, which made it bearable to be poor.
00:16:50
Speaker
I think that it's it's not it's almost, it's a I not all don't want to go so far as to say it's a recipe for revolution when you when you have that toxic combination that you describe, but it's certainly a recipe for some serious political unrest.
00:17:04
Speaker
Well, I think yeah it depends how you define revolution, but... is there Well, what we're seeing with reform is a kind of revolution, politically. I'm not talking about violent revolution, obviously.
00:17:16
Speaker
No, but many people are. Someone like David Betts, who we've had on the show before, has said that pretty much all the conditions that you would expect to precede a civil war are now in place in many European countries, including the United Kingdom.
00:17:30
Speaker
It is a feeling, to your point earlier, that people are not being listened to, that usual democratic means are no longer sufficient. And then you add on to that a sense of urgency that the changes that are occurring in the country are reversible.
00:17:43
Speaker
And in this instance, it is the demographic shifts. which people feel going to irreversibly change the nature of the country and if you put that feeling of frustration with immediacy together i'm not necessarily saying that it will be cavaliers and roundheads facing off against each other on opposite sides of the field but it is certainly a case that that you can see a future sadly where there will be more and more large-scale civil unrest in this country Yeah, i mean, we've already seen it kicking off in response to, i think it was a cricket match between India and Pakistan, and then there was violence on the streets. You can only imagine what would happen if one of these countries goes to war with another one of the the countries, and then you end up with sectarian violence spilling out in Britain.
00:18:28
Speaker
It also has an impact on what we can do in terms of our own foreign policy because we have large communities of of expats from from other countries here in the UK.
00:18:40
Speaker
And, you know, I think we have, and David Betts, I am completely convinced by his argument. I think people need to be taking what he's saying very seriously, partly because we have, I say again, we, successive governments for the last 30 odd years have since Tony Blair really have have inflicted an experiment on the British public and on this country that is completely unprecedented. And what David Betts, I think,
00:19:16
Speaker
conveys, importantly, is a sense of history. I think that in in this, and I mentioned Francis Fukuyama's end of history thesis all the time, obviously he turned out to be completely wrong, but after the Cold War, there was this this this view that we had arrived somehow at the end of history, that history had stopped and that liberal democracy was the destiny of mankind and therefore we could experiment a bit.
00:19:42
Speaker
And I think that that's what led to the hubris that allowed us to experiment with multiculturalism. But the fact is that you can't, countries do change, populations aren't fungible. You can't You can't drastically alter the population of a country without that having a vast historical impact. And you can get to the point, as David Betts has pointed out, where the change does become irreversible, where you do have to reckon with the consequences of your decisions.
00:20:10
Speaker
And now even if we closed the borders today or yesterday, even, we're still going to have to reckon with the consequences of the multicultural experiment that I say has been inflicted on us.
00:20:24
Speaker
So i think we're, I mean, I don't like to make predictions because I'm usually wrong. I didn't think that COVID was going to be a big deal. But i I think that we are at the beginning of a new period of our political history.
00:20:41
Speaker
So we, at the end of the Cold War, we entered into the sort of end of history period. And I think particularly around 2020 with the pandemic, with the rise of these radical ideological movements like Black Lives Matter, then the Ukraine war, then what's going on in Israel
Reform Party's Rise
00:21:01
Speaker
and Palestine. I think that that collectively those experiences have woken people up to the realization that we are living within history. You see the same thing now with
00:21:12
Speaker
with with Donald Trump and how Donald Trump is dealing with his foreign policy and geopolitics when it comes to combating the threats from Russia and China. The fact that our, out here in the UK, that our political parties are fracturing and that our political alignment is is fragmenting and we're seeing this ah totally unprecedented rise of the new political parties we're seeing in reform.
00:21:37
Speaker
It could be a very dangerous situation, but I think it's it's necessary for us to to to wake up from this long sleep that we had had fallen into since the Cold War.
00:21:49
Speaker
And so, it it you know, what's so what's the Chinese proverb? Please bless us with living in and an uninteresting times or something like, the we're going to be cursed with living in very interesting times.
00:22:00
Speaker
I agree. yeah I think it was a spiked podcast I was listening to who referred to that complacency as taking a holiday from history. And they referred to the European country specifically as being guilty of taking a holiday from history since the end of the Cold War.
00:22:14
Speaker
And now we are we are recognizing that you can't do that. Unfortunately, there are eternal realities that you have to deal with. Well, it was um it's almost like they they had had gone into a version of what we all did during lockdown.
00:22:28
Speaker
They just sort of checked out of of of of reality for a while. And now, as with lockdown, we're having to pay the the price of that because you can't do that without costs being very high.
00:22:41
Speaker
And actually, I think what you saw in in with European leaders responding to Donald Trump was doing in in Greenland when they were screeching about the international rule-based order shows that actually a lot of European leaders are still very much asleep.
00:22:58
Speaker
And if you were to picture it, it's like something from a from a fairy tale. It's like the children are asleep in the house and the wolves are prowling and and trend scratching at the door.
00:23:09
Speaker
And I think we're seeing at least here in the UK, unlike in some other European countries, although we have seen similar phenomenon occurring on the right in in other European countries.
00:23:21
Speaker
But I think what we're seeing in reform is with Nigel Farage, and awareness an awareness of of the need to overcome that complacency, which is something, you know, the British people haven't been asleep.
00:23:34
Speaker
It's only the elites that have taken that holiday from history, as you described it. Well, let let's turn to reform because they are driving the political conversation in the yeah UK.
00:23:45
Speaker
Farage has been very successful in driving the conversation, arguably because his party is the one that really naturally cares about the issues that the British people care about. So it may be more more that than than any sort of great political genius.
00:23:58
Speaker
How confident are you that the Reform Party can do what would be a once in a hundred odd year event and upend that sort of two and a half party system?
00:24:09
Speaker
But then B, if they were to get in, how confident are you they could actually implement the type of change that the country needs? Well, with respect to actually getting into parliament and what that might look like, it has happened before that parties have have died quite suddenly, like the Liberal Party.
00:24:27
Speaker
But also you have had occasions, whereas with the SDP, that there was a great surge and then it turned out to be a bit of a flop. And between now and the next general election is quite a long time. a day is, a minute is a long time in politics.
00:24:45
Speaker
And if you think of where reform is versus where reform was, ah even just at the beginning of this year, the you know the very start of January, how many MPs do they have now? Eight? Eight.
00:24:57
Speaker
So things change very rapidly. Who knows how many MPs might defect to reform? Who also knows what actions Keir Starmer might take in order to protect himself and the power of the Labour Party?
00:25:13
Speaker
so we've already seen that they're willing to cancel local elections. in areas where reform would have done very well. We've already seen that Keir Starmer is willing to put himself the before party, never mind party before country, when it comes to blocking Andy Burnham.
00:25:28
Speaker
from running in this most most recent by-election. So all sorts of things might change. It's very difficult to make a prediction. However, if reform do keep on this momentous trajectory and they manage to get enough seats to maybe, I mean, could they form a majority? I don't know how how likely that is, but maybe they could go into some kind of coalition with what remains of the sort of like skeleton of the of the Conservative Party, that seems kind of unlikely.
00:26:01
Speaker
But I think that reform, if they kill off the Conservative Party, it really is sort of last chance saloon, isn't it?
00:26:15
Speaker
they they They have to do well in the next general election. And I think that people who are broadly on the right, as as well as people who care deeply about all of these issues to do with immigration, multiculturalism,
00:26:28
Speaker
And also other specific issues like the group grooming gangs, for example, things where the British public have been completely ignored and sidelined. I think that there is enough rocket fuel to propel reform to success. I'm not sure entirely what that success looks like.
00:26:46
Speaker
the The question is whether, say hypothetically, they get into into government and ah voted in the next general election, they have a large enough you know number of MPs to to be significant or even to appoint a large number of people to the House of Lords, for example.
00:27:05
Speaker
So say we have a reformed government, I think one of the reasons why, and this is why it's a fine line for for reform to walk, they need to bring in conservative defectors is because they need to do what Trump did in his second term and they need to hit the ground running.
00:27:21
Speaker
They don't, they will not have the luxury a faffing around. They need to get things changing from the very, very first day in office, because if they don't, like I say, they will be seriously jeopardizing trust in democracy over all because they are last chance saloon.
00:27:42
Speaker
And if they don't succeed, then the British public will think that it is impossible through democratic means to have their will executed. And that will be a very, very serious political crisis. I think it will be a crisis of as democratic and political legitimacy.
00:27:59
Speaker
I think, however, and I i say this obviously as as somebody who recently became a member of reform, not politician for them. But i I became a member of reform, partly because I think the Conservative Party doesn't stand a chance of any electoral success, and that gets more and more obvious by the day.
00:28:17
Speaker
But also because I am confident that Nigel Farage is is ah is the kind of leader that we haven't really seen, and I hate it when people mention Thatcher over and over again, but we haven't really seen a political figure as successful or with the same stature or with the same charisma as his Nigel Farage has since Thatcher.
00:28:37
Speaker
And i have confidence that if they if they were to get into government, that they are putting very so very cleverly with MPs like Danny Kruger, laying down the groundwork to make sure that they can hit the ground running when they get in. I think they understand, and that's the most important thing, that they are they are the only people who do understand how serious the situation is. And that counts for everything as far as I'm concerned.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah, you mentioned Danny Kruger, and I think that's an example of a good appointment from the Conservatives. People like Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman also seem like pretty natural fits. But there is a concern from many people that reform is just becoming a life raft for, you know, old, disaffected Tories who don't have any other options.
00:29:24
Speaker
And people point to people like Dede Doris, like Zidim Zahawi, naimm zahai Jake Berry as examples of people who basically got the country into this mess it is in now and they are potentially just repackaging the old conservative offering under a new reform banner. How do you respond to that?
00:29:43
Speaker
I think Layla Cunningham actually has responded quite well to this question because I also, I mean, I thought it was weird to welcome Nadine Dorris with open arms. Jake Berry is also a ah strange, a strange, strange defection, shall we say.
00:29:59
Speaker
But the point is that they've become members, that they're not They're not, you know, senior figures in the reform party. They've not defected. It seems that they, maybe Nadine Doris is slightly different because she was welcomed with open arms, but someone like... They they they will need 350 odd and MPs. It's very, very likely or it were possible that these sorts of people will be put up as candidates.
00:30:20
Speaker
Well, the the argument that Leila Cunningham made is that anybody can become a member of the party. And so you would expect some defections from the conservatives over to reform. I mean, who knows exactly what proportion of their membership base are former ah disaffected Tories.
00:30:38
Speaker
But I agree. i think I think people like Jake Berry and Nadine Doris are... peculiar a peculiar choice. I know that obviously if even a few days before Jenrick defected, Layla Cunningham wrote a piece, I think it was in the Telegraph, saying that she, I think she said she didn't she wouldn't be in a in a party with Jenrick or something to that effect. And obviously she she did change her mind on that and she has explained, I think it was in her interview with Trigonometry, she explained why it was that she changed her mind on Robert Jenrick.
00:31:08
Speaker
But I think that the the optics of that are a real problem for the Reform Party. Because as you say, Nadim Zahawi is a good example of this. A lot of people were very unhappy because of his views on vaccine passports.
00:31:23
Speaker
And even though he's sound on things like the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, which I think is is very helpful if he's going to be in some kind of foreign affairs spokesperson role, he is quite a big, serious defection. He isn't he isn't just a normal member.
00:31:38
Speaker
And a lot of people who are freedom-loving members of reform, at least judging by social media, seem to be quite disgruntled by, by or maybe maybe not even disgruntled, but confused by his defection.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, Layla particularly, and Nadeem actually, also represent another concern that bubbles maybe just beneath the surface for many supporters of reform, and that is their Muslim faith.
Cultural and Demographic Debates
00:32:05
Speaker
Now, personally, I've had conversations with Layla in green rooms and and around the traps. I think she is an impressive and and and personally likable woman. She is Muslim. is Muslim.
00:32:19
Speaker
Zaire Youssef is Muslim. This is a party where a lot of its supporters have, I think, legitimate concerns about Islamism and many Islamic communities in the UK and the impact that the rise of the proportion of Muslims as part of the total population would have on things like the treatment of women, minority groups, separation between church and state.
00:32:42
Speaker
What do you think about reform bringing into the tent so many senior people who who support Islam? Well, I think my my understanding from listening to some of Leila's interviews is that she's Muslim in a kind of Anglican way.
00:32:58
Speaker
She seems to to wear her Islam very lightly, shall we say. ah She's been very outspoken against things like the burqa, which I think most reform or many reform voters would agree with her, whether, you know, ah irrespective of whether or not she is sort of identified as Muslim.
00:33:20
Speaker
Nadim Zahawi, I'm not sure, is he is he a religious Muslim? i mean for example I think it may be similar to Layla Cunningham. You know how we talk about cultural Christians. i think that, you know, they could almost be associated as perhaps, well, cultural Muslims or or they they they're not they're not as hardline potentially as as, you know, other people. but so They're certainly not.
00:33:41
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think Layla Cunningham, as you say, she's very impressive, very formidable. I recently just did a recording of Talk Women for Talks, Talks June version of Loose Women.
00:33:53
Speaker
And that i was the first time I'd met her and I just, I found her very impressive. I thought, I think she's a a very formidable and articulate speaker. She seems to be very sound on most of the big issues, including when it comes to things like grooming gangs and, and, and and the burqa. I think she actually probably goes further on, on the question of the burqa than most many, many people on the on the right would, possibly, I think, including Zia Yusuf.
00:34:22
Speaker
So, I mean, I'm not sure how how religiously Muslim they are. this I mean, Layla Cunningham certainly isn't an Islamist, which I think is- no No, I don't think anyone's suggesting that.
00:34:33
Speaker
the I think dan Dan Wotton said that she was an Islamist. Right. and think That's incorrect. Yeah, it's ah it's an inflation of the term, like calling someone a fascist, I think. But yeah, um yeah the the reason why people, I think, are concerned about this is because they...
00:34:49
Speaker
as as many people even outside of reform are concerned about the effects of mass migration and they and they are worried maybe that a politician like Layla Cunningham or Zia Youssef will you favor the Muslim community over over the British community. But I think you just have to listen to what Layla says and and you will understand that you know it's not she's not partisan or religiously partisan in that way, or at least it seems.
00:35:18
Speaker
Do think Islam is compatible with Western liberal democracy? No. No, I don't. um And the reason one of there's ah there's a very sort of like theological reason why I think that's the case. i mean, it's possible for Muslims, like I say, to to hold their religion very lightly.
00:35:34
Speaker
But Islam itself, I think that Islam islam doesn't have a distinction between religion and politics as we do in Christian Western nations.
00:35:46
Speaker
Christianity has, there for theological reasons, so secularism arose from the Christian understanding of the secular, which is a sort of a theologically protected space where you know really we don't try to attempt to perfect our society in line with God's law in the way that in in Muslim countries and Islamic states caliphate, there's no you know although those that is Islamism, but it Islam itself
00:36:18
Speaker
it's it's' there's there's no distinction between religion and politics. And so you do end up with with religion touching on every single aspect of your life and that has an impact on people's liberties.
00:36:31
Speaker
And so in that sense, I don't think that Islam theologically is compatible with the foundations of of Western society because the foundations of Western society are Christian and and Islam and Christianity are quite theologically different.
00:36:45
Speaker
So I know that's a very technical reason to explain that they're incompatible. but i But I do think that there are there are Muslims who who do integrate into our society and like I say, sort of hold hold their hold their religion quite lightly.
00:37:01
Speaker
and maybe some people would say, well, they're not really Muslim then. Fine. I mean, i just it's not important to me how how authentically Muslim someone is. But I think theologically there are there is ah is a serious incompatibility there.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yeah, which is why I think the problem comes at scale when you have Muslim-majority countries where that separation between, I guess, mosque and state can no longer they ignored. That's where problems emerge. If you have, you know, people, and I think that's a nice term, who hold their Islamic faith quite lightly, that doesn't change the over the underlying structures of a Western liberal democracy, which is underpinned by a separation between church and state.
00:37:40
Speaker
But, and this is why I think people are so concerned, you do now have so many parts of the united kingdom which are muslim majority areas and they are concerned that when you have a muslim majority area the norms of the cultures from which those people have come from will ultimately take precedence and you're seeing that with the norms around how people dress how people behave how people act you know in the most shocking of ways when it comes to say that the grooming gang scandal problem comes when you do hit that scale, which is which unfortunately the trend line, when you look at mass migration and where people are coming from, is only heading in in one direction.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that that's and that's the reason why people are so sensitive about having Muslim political. I mean, some some people, i think, would object, at least I'm going by the sorts of things I see on social media. I think some people object to Muslims being in positions of political authority within reform because they want reform to stand for them as as but you know as as the as the majority white British population that they feel that they have been disenfranchised and they think that those positions, like for example, Mayor of London, that whoever is running for Mayor of London should be
00:38:59
Speaker
you know, in of English descent or whatever. But I think, and this is an argument that gets made over and over again, and I think people are actually quite sick of this argument, but there is some truth to it, which is that if you are from an ethnic minority background, there are some things that you can say that other people can't get away with saying.
00:39:19
Speaker
that maybe Layla Cunningham can afford to be a bit more robust on the Burkaban because she's from a Muslim background and because that criticism is is almost, it's coming internally.
00:39:30
Speaker
And she's arguing that, you know, these things don't come from Islam, but come from culture. And you can quibble about that, but it's easier for her to say that because she's coming from a Muslim background.
00:39:42
Speaker
so But I think that the the reason why people are so sensitive to this issue is because they feel that Islam is becoming such an increasingly dominant force within our politics. Like I mentioned, these independent MPs, we've seen MPs in parliament talking about wanting, I think it was Tamir Ali, wanting a a blasphemy law.
00:40:07
Speaker
ye But lay let people like Layla Cunningham and I don't i mean i don't know what Nadim Zahawi or Zia Yousaf's view is, but I presume it's probably not the same as Tahrir Ali.
00:40:19
Speaker
Layla Cunningham for certain is not going to be arguing for that kind of thing. She's arguing ah in in in terms that I think would be familiar to the majority of people in Britain, irrespective of whatever their religious background is. So yeah, I think it's a complicated issue. Yeah, it is Well, you you you nodded to, i think, a growing ethno-nationalist components of the right in british politics and i must admit i struggle with this one because i absolutely concede that there is this bizarre double standard that if someone is to say that england should remain majority white anglo-saxon they will often be slandered as a racist but if someone who is african-american for example is to stand up and and and
00:41:08
Speaker
call for the importance of protecting that particular ethnic group, then that's just completely fine. If a Japanese person, i' would suggest, argued to keep Japan overwhelmingly ethnically Japanese, I don't think that would be seen as controversial because for...
00:41:23
Speaker
reasons that range from historical guilt to this just self-flagellating instinct at the heart of so many majority white anglospheric countries. but You do have this kind of this suggestion that that ethnic nationalist arm is kind of far right or fascist.
00:41:40
Speaker
How do you feel about that argument that says that England should remain a majority white Anglo-Saxon country and b English ethnic this ethnicity matters, should be protected and should come with specific, say, political benefits like, for example, the right to stand in Parliament where an immigrant should should not have that same right?
00:42:01
Speaker
I think there was a lot of things wrapped into that. So I think in the same way as most people British people, I think would acknowledge they would want France to remain majority French or Japan to remain majority Japanese or Nigeria to remain minority majority Nigerian or whatever, that it's it's not unreasonable to want Britain to remain majority, in well, England to remain majority English. Because ethnicity is not just about race, it's it's wrapped up in culture and language and and ancestry.
00:42:39
Speaker
So i think that I think that that's not an uncommon view, that the the desire for for Britain to or for England to remain majority English. I think that's quite different from the views of some who seem, and I'm still trying to work out exactly what's going on on this, because this has emerged quite quickly, this ethno-nationalist right.
00:43:01
Speaker
I think that's quite different from those who seem to want to deport anybody who is who who doesn't have English ancestry or who is from else elsewhere. So I think that there's a there's a middle ground position, which is is civic nationalist in the sense that it's not opposed to people coming here and making it this country their home and being loyal to this country and integrating into the parts of ethnicity that are mutable, but it's still but still wanting for those who have ancestry in this land to remain the majority. So I think that that's slightly different from from the farther reaches of that perspective.
00:43:49
Speaker
but But I i i don't, i'm there are those, i think you're I think I know what you're referring to there when you're talking about running in parliament. I don't i think if somebody has, beat like Layla Cunningham, for example, Layla Cunningham was born in London. I see no reason why she shouldn't be able to run in the mayoral elections.
00:44:08
Speaker
I don't, so I, and I and i don't i don't think that my so my senses, and this is totally anecdotal, I don't think that most English people would agree with that far further right position.
00:44:25
Speaker
I think most English people are somewhere in between, as somebody in Japan might be, to say, we don't mind people coming here, but we want to stay the majority. you know But it's it's it's ah it's a very complicated landscape that has all of a sudden emerged to the right.
00:44:43
Speaker
And it's not clear to me at all, really, what is going on there yet. Well, ah again, it goes back to where we started this conversation where it feels to
New Political Alignments
00:44:53
Speaker
me like the political parties in the United Kingdom have different, are made up of different groups, which once were capable of being held together under a broad church philosophy,
00:45:05
Speaker
And those groups have have gone in directions that are divergent to the extent that it is impossible to keep these parties together because they have people that just are fundamentally at odds on the key issues.
00:45:18
Speaker
So if you look at, say, the conservatives, you know, that they may have always been a broad church between those sorts of wet, liberally types and social conservatives. And that alignment has just, or that relationship has just become impossible to maintain.
00:45:35
Speaker
Similarly, the Labour Party is this now very unusual mix of the old style social, or those those old Labour types who believe in in you know welfare redistribution and the new progressive you know city urban elites.
00:45:54
Speaker
similar with the greens you'd have you know old style greenies who are chaining themselves to trees and you have you know the islamo-communist side of it and these these these alliances are now increasingly impossible to keep together and i heard an interesting hypothesis the other day it basically suggested that for those reasons you will see the labor and conservative parties just fade into relevance and a new alignment take place between the Liberal Democrats, who will basically collect up all of the managerial, you know, kind of progressive-y types from both the Conservatives and the Labour Party.
00:46:34
Speaker
You'll see reform take the kind of old Thatcherites and the social conservative right-wingers. And you'll see the Greens take all the loony lefties you know that come from the Lib Dems and and from from Labor.
00:46:47
Speaker
And you basically have a new political alignment around reform, Lib Dems, Greens. Where do you see politics going both in 2026 and then beyond that when it comes to those political alignments?
00:46:59
Speaker
I think it seems that what you've described there, I think sounds very feasible, particularly the way that the Labour Party is going. I don't think the Labour Party is in quite as weak, as much of a weakened state as the Conservatives are.
00:47:12
Speaker
but i But it's interesting, you you mentioned the sort of Islamo islamo left. I think you have a kind of... not quite a mirroring going on, but even when we were discussing the kind of ethno-nationalist right and in this weird situation where Tommy Robinson, who was kind of held up as the litmus, the sort of like the the icon, the litmus test of whether something was far right or not was whether lying to Tommy Robinson. And now you have ethno-nationalists criticizing Tommy Robinson for being a wet civic nationalist.
00:47:43
Speaker
and I think that the some of this has got to be a kind of synergy between, you like so we so we saw the racial politics on the left and people warned, well, if you do that, you're going to end up with racial politics on the right.
00:48:02
Speaker
And you had obviously the the rise of Islam you know in our political landscape has become far more prominent in the like since the last general election, partly because of the Israel-Palestine thing.
00:48:18
Speaker
And although I think that krista I don't want to make these put these two things on par with each other, because I do think that Christianity has a very important role to play in in politics, that's different conversation.
00:48:29
Speaker
But I do think that there are some who slightly slightly mirroring the the, and I don't mean this in the sense that Islam and Christianity are equivalent anymore, I want to emphasize that, but I think that the threat of of of of Islam's influence on our politics is maybe leading some to feel the need to reintroduce ah Christianity into our politics a bit as well. So you have this sort of really multipolar political situation developing where you have all of these different different touchstones, I think, which will come with their own tripwires as well. Things are really, I mean, it's more it's it's more than just a great realignment.
00:49:17
Speaker
things are becoming infinitely complicated complicated very, very quickly, which is why I say I haven't quite worked out what's going on because because there is so much going on. And like you say, you know it's not it's not unreasonable for people to want to say that they want yeah Japan to be majority Japanese or England to be majority English.
00:49:42
Speaker
But there is something else going on on that side of the spectrum as well. So I think in the in the next year and then between now and the next general election, I think things are going to get a lot more complicated and a lot more heated.
00:49:55
Speaker
And i I think that what we're seeing maybe is coming out of the sort of the 2020 to 2025, we saw this big sort of a heap of identity politics.
00:50:09
Speaker
And I think what we're going to see between now and the next general election is a very complicated fallout from all of that. Do you think as part of that fallout, A, the Conservatives are finished, and yeah b the Labor Party, whilst being in government, is ultimately heading in the same trajectory?
00:50:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think, the guy i like I said, I don't like making predictions because usually wrong, but my instinct is that the Conservative Party can't pull itself back from the big position that it's in. I think it's it's dead and gone already.
00:50:42
Speaker
i think that the Labour Party within 10 years, maybe less, will be in a similar position of of being beyond resuscitation.
00:50:54
Speaker
And I think in that time we're going to see an increase in sectarian politics, in and independent MPs, particularly in local councils. think you have to remember that and lot of this a lot of ah lot of these independent MPs are being elected in local councils as well as MPs to parliament.
00:51:10
Speaker
So I think we're going to see an increase of that because who knows really in terms of a reform government, maybe they might be able to put a handle on that.
00:51:21
Speaker
But i I suppose what I'm trying to say is i see icy entropy and i think that it's very difficult to predict how that will what that will look like once the dust settles.
00:51:36
Speaker
But I think what you've described is very plausible with new were existing existing parties almost taking over the mantles or the places of those older parties, but being slightly more aligned to the actual politics of the British public. That would be the ideal.
00:51:54
Speaker
And that just by a thread, the British public's trust in democracy well will you know hold hold on just sort of by the skin of its teeth. But I think I think it's just very difficult to know. i mean, that's not the answer that you want. It's not a particularly interesting answer, but I really think that we are, we're in we're we're living through a period of history that historians will look back on with interest.
Efforts to Improve the UK
00:52:20
Speaker
ah they right look A lot of the issues that we've talked about paint a pretty bleak picture. are there reasons for optimism in the United Kingdom? I think reform give us reasons for optimism.
00:52:31
Speaker
I think the fact that people are working so hard and have worked so hard, I mean, things could be so much worse if since 2020, all these organizations like the Free Speech Union hadn't popped up in to defend people. Who knows where we would have been? You know, that there are still people who are building things, who are trying to to make the country better, to try and save us from the, this like I said, the situation that has been inflicted on us.
00:53:00
Speaker
I also think that Trump gives cause for hope, and I know a lot of people have been very critical of what he's been doing in terms of his geopolitics, but I think the fact that there is a Western world leader who is taking the threat of Russia and China seriously, that gives me hope because it's better than there being no Western leader that takes that takes the threat of that seriously.
00:53:21
Speaker
And there has been quite a lot of pushback, for example, against that massive embassy that Keir Starmer wanted to sign off on. Chinese embassy. So I think, you know, it's a bit like Churchill say, I can't remember what the Churchill quote is where he he talked about fighting and and dying, choking on his own blood or something like that. yeah yeah You know, it could all go very, very badly wrong, but you never know with history, things turn on a knife edge and a small number of people making a lot of effort can go a very long way.
00:53:55
Speaker
And as I say, it's a long time between now and the next general election. So I think part of part of the the struggle that lies ahead of us, I think is very different from the from the struggle that took place over the last five years, I think we're going to need to start finding the words to articulate what it is that we're about.
00:54:19
Speaker
and in to to get clarification on this on this complex landscape that is now emerging. And I think we need to do that as quickly as possible so that we're able to actually understand what's going on and respond appropriately so that you know we don't make any terrible mistakes.
00:54:38
Speaker
Because I think really I haven't i haven't heard anybody discussing these things in any, with any kind of clear, but with any clarity, really. I mean, I i don't think anybody really understands the the subtext of what's going on. Because so much online as well, and and so much of what's online is siloed.
00:54:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very good point. Well, i think you are certainly someone who is a very valued voice in that public discourse around what ah you know what the future should look like and and try to make sense of a very, very difficult and fragmented landscape today.
00:55:12
Speaker
Emma, where can people hear more from you and and and engage with your work? Well, the New Culture Forum has just launched a new interview show. It's the Air to Peter Whittle's interview show.
00:55:23
Speaker
So you can find that on the New Culture Forum's YouTube channel. And also I'm on Twitter at Emma underscore A underscore web. Lovely. Emma, this has been fascinating as always. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:55:34
Speaker
Thank you for having me.