 Hello and welcome to Downstream, the show that if Andrew Breitbart's formulation of politics being downstream of culture is true is essentially the Bekton sewage works of new left media. Julius Noraro once said that the United States is also a one party state but with typical American extravagance they have two of them and it's been occurring to me for a while now if the same might be applicable to the United Kingdom. Excluding Tony Blair's back to back victories, the Tory party have governed the UK for all but 18 of the last 100 years. And while the media often presents elections as labours to lose, the truth is perhaps that Britain is a one party state which occasionally lets the other side have a go just in the interest of fairness. And with the Hartlepool by-election just a month away, I'm joined by the journalist Sam L to discuss how the Conservative Party became the most successful party operation in the Western world and what it might take for the left to top of them. Sam, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much. Well, I understand that you've got a pressing engagement at roughly six o'clock, so we've got to wrap up 15 minutes early. Do you want to tell the audience what it is? I mean, to my shame, I'm cutting this interview short to go play eight aside, which I just confessed to Ash and she's jumped right in. I was like, you know, strictly between us off the record, what are you doing? And I was like, right, I'm going to talk about that right away. I mean, so in the interest, in the interest of disclosure, I've been really angling to do the show for a long time now and it's not actually my first attempt at doing it. Shortly before Christmas, I was joined by my Navarra Broskies, James and Aaron to talk about what it is that makes the Conservative Party so successful in this country. And as we try to crack open this question, it just slid into a conversation about Keir Starmer and what the Labour Party does wrong and what it is they should do better. And it seems to me that, you know, the Conservative Party have been doing pretty well long before Starmer or Corbyn or Miliband or anyone else came on the scene, and indeed long before there was a Labour Party to speak of at all. And I'm not just trying to exculpate myself, but I don't think this is just a failing specific to Navarra media, though, you know, God knows we've got plenty. It seems to be a feature of British media overall that despite the Conservative Party winning a hell of a lot more than they lose. We tend to think of Britain as a country of temporarily embarrassed Labour voters who wants the party get their act together will come back around. Theories themselves as a party, political philosophy, a campaigning organization and a culture are oddly invisibilised. And as I started reading your work, Sam, some of which is published with Navarra media. I was like, wow, okay, someone finally is trying to grapple with these questions and not just in, you know, the closed off walls of political theory seminar. So let's start with the big ones. Why are the Conservatives so good at winning elections? Well, it is a difficult question and obviously isn't one simple answer that we can then solve when Labour will rise to power. I mean, I wrote a long piece for the New Republic recently on this, on the Conservative Party's moniker as being the most successful party in the world and certainly in the Western world. The genesis for that piece was really seeing over the course of 2020 in Boris Johnson's first year in charge, the complete disaster of his handling of the pandemic, one of the highest death rates in the world, one of the worst economic forecasts in the G7, the third strictest lockdown in the world, really failing on every single front, even in Johnson's own terms. You know, he said compromises must be made between liberty and safety, but failing on every front. And yet over and above it all, the Conservative Party remained remarkably popular and Johnson was always comfortably ahead in the polls. And it was, it's infuriating to watch and baffling to watch. And especially when you look at a lot of the Conservative Party history books which say that the reason for the party's success are certain inequalities like pragmatism, competence, party unity. Over the last 10 years and then especially during the pandemic, we've really seen those revealed as complete illusions. And yet, even as they have disappeared, the Conservative Party is very much still here and as ascendant as ever. Yeah. I mean, so I definitely want to get into all of that, which is one of the kind of defining characteristics of conservatism. Who do they serve? You know, what is their electorate? On the left, we often say that the party of capital, the party of ground rent is also a bit more to it. But I want to get into whether the Conservative Party live up to their own branding and in preparation for the show, I went back to reading the Tamworth Manifesto, which really is a page turner. And for unfamiliar readers, the Tamworth Manifesto is Robert Peel's 1834 letter to his constituents, and it is considered the foundational text of British conservatism. And it followed on from the reform bill, which expanded the franchise, it changed the electoral system. And famously, he accepts the reform bill, but promises that it won't result in too much change. So there won't be any rejection of what he calls the ancient rights. And there won't be any rejection of deference to prescriptive authority, and that the Conservatives will never ever stand for a perpetual vortex of agitation. So is it still the case, or perhaps was it ever the case that we can define conservatism as a political project which seeks to preserve the status quo and the present political settlement, whatever that might be? Yeah, well, I think that it's, you know, there's obviously on the one hand the reputation of the Conservative Party as being very amenable to reform as long as it's carefully planned and plotting and nothing too ruptuous with the status quo. And over and above it all again, you've got this priority of preserving power, preserving wealth, and resisting the redistribution of wealth. And as different forms of power and wealth have evolved, the Conservative Party has had to evolve as well. While, you know, in the first part of the 19th century was very kind of had mixed feelings towards capitalism. As it became ascendant and the elite was associated with capital elite, it had to come on side and yet capitalism itself is an incredibly disruptive force. So its tagline is creative destruction. And so the idea of having a Conservative Party that wanted to conserve structures of power and a status quo while also being the party of capitalism became an immediate contradiction. And I think that accounts for a lot of the turbulence that has always existed within the Conservative Party. Because they've managed to survive an awful lot of things that you would consider to be the death knell of the Conservative Party. A really big one would be the rise of a capitalist class rather than simply a landowning class, universal suffrage, the post-war consensus. These are all things which taken on their own and reading some contemporaneous accounts. You did hear a lot of the Conservative Party finished. Similarly, with Brexit, this was seen as it's going to tear the Conservative Party asunder and it may never recover. It actually led to a rebirth of renaissance and an electoral landslide. So can we talk a little bit about this ability not just to survive all these, you know, kind of premature declarations of extinction, but also to adapt and reinvent and reimagine themselves? Yeah, well, I think if I had to try and really pinpoint how has the Conservative Party remained so successful for so long? You know, if you look at the last 125 years, the Conservative Party has been in power for over 80 of them, which is a remarkable record of victory. And I would say that the three reasons that I can really isolate, one is the most obvious that it's the party of the elite. It has the wealthiest backers and in general in politics, following the money is a pretty good rule. The second though is that you have got this uniquely cozy relationship between the Conservative Party and the press. You mentioned the Tamworth manifesto. I was reading Edmund Fawcett's new book about conservatism called Fight for a Tradition. And in that there's just a line that that manifesto was written with the help of the editor of the Times back then. So this idea of a bond between the Conservative Party and the media establishment really goes back to the birth of the Conservative Party. And then the third reason is that there might also be a slight conservative tendency within British as a country. That's not the complete story. There's still quite remarkable levels of support for well funded public services for raising taxation. But there is also a certain class deference. There's a in the history of Britain, you know, it's a part of the brand that, you know, we're a country that's never had a revolution in its modern history that we don't need a constitution. All those favour continuity and the Conservative Party, despite, you know, especially over the last 10 years really seeming like a party of chaos, nonetheless has managed to present itself as the party of continuity. I mean, so if I'm getting you right, do you think that the Conservative Party's longevity is tied to the remarkable resilience of our ruling class? We've had a almost continuous monarchy for the last 1200 years, apart from that little blip of the English Civil War, which everyone's tremendously embarrassed about, and to sort of aristocratic transfer of power in 1688. But other than that, we've had a remarkably resilient aristocracy. We didn't dispatch of them in kind of elegant way that the French did in the 18th century. And we still have a monarchy, even though it's constitutional and its powers are limited, limited by parliament, we've still got one. Yeah. And I mean, the Conservative Party is in so many ways an anachronism and has always been an anachronism. I mean, in the in the 1930s, it was nicknamed the cousinhood because of how many of its MPs could be placed on the same family tree. It was something like three and five belongs to the aristocracy and most of them could be placed on the same family tree. And although the Conservative elite has diversified, it is, it has very much still been there throughout. I mean, in the 1960s, you had an Earl become Prime Minister Douglas Holm. And after him, the Tories finally experimented with, let's call them more ordinary leaders, most famously Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer. And that seemed like a moment when actually the Conservative Party could change forever, that we would never again see an Antonian as Prime Minister. How's that going? Yeah, two of the last three and not only the Antonians, but our distant relatives of the Queen. And that was true of Jeremy Hunt as well, who was Boris Johnson's opponent for the election. So, you know, that that continuity and that staying power is is very unique to Britain. Well, I mean, I think we should get into this matter of private schools, which are, you know, really quite uniquely British in terms of the longevity of these institutions and their dominance over public life. It's not really something you see in this quite the same way in the United States or France or Germany. 85% of our Prime Ministers to date have attended a fee paying school. And I think it's almost, you know, for half of our years as a democracy, we've been governed by an old Antonian. And so it's got a remarkable, remarkable stranglehold on our public life. Do you think that, you know, the changes of the intake of these private schools where they did open up beyond the aristocracy and towards the children of the new capitalist elite? Does that explain the changes in the Conservative Party and their relative diversification? Or is it the other way around? Yeah, I think that's a good question. I don't know the full answer on that. I know that, you know, it's very easy for the Conservative Party is also very good at appearances. And so, you know, in the latest Parliament, it was held as the most diverse Parliament ever. And yet within Cabinet, Johnson appointed the proportion of private schoolers there was the highest in 30 years. And of course, there are now a wider range of people going to private school. It's still, you know, as you say, such a minority of the population. And yet, again, you see the level of public support for banning private schools or abolishing them as there were whispers among the Corbyn government is huge. And that single announcement caused such an outcry. And so it is sometimes hard to know, you know, is it being, is it top down imposed? Is it bottom up? There is clearly within the British psyche some kind of tendency towards valuing a kind of aristocratic elite. I think the deification of Churchill is another really interesting example where he seems to exist simultaneously with this this old school tough and also a man of the man of the people kind of plodding along on his walking stick. And that clearly taps into something that, you know, British people associate with why especially English people associate with their identity. I mean, I really want to get into this question of England in just one second. But for those of you who've just joined us, you're watching downstream. I'm going to talk about why the Tories keep on winning. If you like this video, then like this video, there's a button you can press it and it will be a physical embodiment of your regard for us. And if you like this video and want to watch more, you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel. It means that you will also get little updates on when we're posting new content. Also, if you dislike this video, don't press the thumbs down, just donate and give us some money and then I promise we'll improve our content. But I want to, you know, sort of pick you up in this point about Churchill before we move on to the question of England, which is GK Chesterton very famously wrote about the relationship between the conservatives and tradition. He referred to tradition as a democracy of the dead. And in this kind of rye GK Chesterton way says the balance of power shouldn't lie with the noisy minority of people who happen to be walking around right now. Does the power of the Conservative Party lie in their ability to connect with history as it was an authentic existing tradition which they carry down the generations remarkably unchanged? Or is it in their ability to define the past and to remodel notions of tradition in line with contemporary political needs? Yeah, I mean, I would go for the second one of those. But on the note of, you know, the Conservative Party's power being placed slightly in its connection with the dead, that also of late is quite literal. And I think there was a study in 2017 that showed that the Conservative Party was receiving more money from the quest from the dead than from living members because its membership had become so small. And, you know, I do have this image of the Conservative Party of one foot always in the grave and another planted on the throne and yet somehow remaining forever in that position. But, you know, you've seen it so much at the moment with the way in which it protects a certain image of the past. You know, Johnson's statement about those who took down the statue of Bristol of trying to rewrite history rather than, you know, every statue being an attempt to write history. And they certainly want, they, the Conservative Party rely on overwhelmingly whitewashed and positive view of Britain's past. And they thrive on painting their opponents as people who want to attack Britain and they often point to, you know, them holding Britain to account on their past as an example of all the ways in which they want to do Britain down. And so that conflation in a way of Britain, the history that's told of Britain with Britain as it is today is a very kind of powerful foundation for the for the Conservatives to campaign on that if you attack one, you're attacking the other. And therefore, why would we want you in government? But is there some truth in that? I mean, we're talking about the kind of remarkable electoral successes of the Conservative Party in the 20th and the 21st century. But of course, it has its origins as a party in its formation when Britain is establishing itself as an empire and a preeminent global power. So isn't there some truth in the sense of any time you do try and attack the Conservative Party? You are questioning and quite a deep way the very foundations this country was built on. Yes and no. But I mean, as you know, especially a few recent historians have shown is there's always been opposition to empire within Britain. It's always been a matter of debate. And that's one of the reasons why it's no excuse to justify someone's actions by saying that they were of their time, because you'll always be able to find other people of that time who oppose them. And I think what you see is not an honest account of British history. I don't think anyone, especially not our listeners today will think that that's the case. But it's a version of the past that flatters Britain and flatters especially the Conservative Party. I mean, the way in which Churchill has gone from being someone who couldn't win an election in 1945 to now being someone who cannot be criticised at all. The way in which we now think that Britain was the primary force in defeating the Nazis in the Second World War when when you look at polls, it was clear that even in Britain, people thought that America and Russia were more responsible as they were. It's not when we see the past less and less clearly the further away we go for it. And as the ruling party that has been in power for so long that grants the Conservative Party an incredible power to rewrite that past. I mean, nobody likes to hear that Stalin won World War Two. They don't. That is the thing which is going to get me geared out for real for real. No, I mean, I have written a piece slightly to that effect. But from a personal point of view, because my mum is her mum took refuge as a Polish Jew in in Soviet Russia during the Second World War and then escaped to Australia. And my grandma had had much more positive a much more positive view of the Soviet Union that was incomplete, you know, through in the face of everything I was taught in school, which a lot of it was justified. You know, Stalin was a wild tyrant. And yet history is complicated. And, you know, in the end of the day, I think Russia lost more lives fighting the Second World War than any other country. And painting Stalin as a villain doesn't doesn't address that. Well, I think that this is an interesting question for me, which is to what extent has the modern day Conservative Party been shaped by the Cold War? And to what extent does the result of the Cold War inhibit Labour's ability to tell an alternative vision of this country's history and socialist history and make the case for national nationalization, collective forms of political mobilization and so on? Yeah, I mean, you know, the thatch is famous. There is no alternative slogan has also proved remarkably durable and, you know, Labour's only victory since then is testament to that slogan rather than an argument against it. Blair was famously, you know, thatches. What would she say thatches? I just said Blair was her best achievement. And, you know, even when you read, I was reading op-eds that were written in The Guardian by Nick Cohen during the Blair years. And he was saying that the economic order was out of out of the question. No one, you don't speak about it. Even welfare was given out, he said, like change to a beggar. There was no real attempt by Blair to change the argument. And the New Left Review, they called it a weightless hegemony in the end. Yes, he won three elections. But the speed with which any of his achievements could be wiped away were testament to the fact that there had been no attempt to really change the way in which we talk about things and we see the state. It was still something that had to be done quietly. And, you know, from that, you do see that this, you know, neoliberal consensus that really kind of came to power under Thatcher has continued, you know, throughout. Well, I think I'm so glad you mentioned the H word because this is my little hot take, which I've been nurturing like an egg, like, you know, a hen that's been eating an egg. So it's now, it's now going to hatch and be introduced to the world. I'm just like, you know, prepare yourself. But I sometimes wonder if the British Conservative Party take Gramsci more seriously than the British Left do. Because when it comes to thinking about how institutions produce voters, how civil society and the institutions of civil society shape people's world views and their habits and their values, the Conservative Party have always had quite a canny view of what kind of institutions produce Labour voters or voters for opposition parties. And what are the kind of circumstances you need to produce Conservative voters. So on the one hand, and I think that Thatcher is the best example of this. On the one hand, she went to war with the National Union of Mineworkers, not specifically because, you know, coal mines were presenting a huge problem to her, but because that unionized workforce, which was well organized, which was militant and which also was really core to a kind of collective working class cultural identity, had to be attacked and defeated head on and was still living in the echoes and the ashes of that defeat in so many ways. And on the other hand, she understood how to create a sense of buy-in from an upper echelon of the working class who had enough capital available to do things like buy out their council house and then subsequently to, you know, rent it out, purchase second property. You know, she understood that lots of people did want to become a homeowner and a buy-to-let landlord. She created economic circumstances which were which were favorable to her political project and which ended up being also quite favorable to Tony Blair's political project. Whereas subsequent Labour leaders, and I think perhaps, you know, even Jeremy Corbyn, you never got a sense of how are they going to produce Labour voters? What are the kind of institutions which are going to be necessary for doing that? So I guess that's my question. Do you think that that British Conservative Party best raises the question? I mean, we've only got one politician at the moment who will happily invoke Gramsci and that is Michael Gove, who I think has done it at least twice, said that Gramsci is his favourite thinker. And yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. I think the other thing you notice about conservatism is how frequently it invokes common sense. Without any explanation of what it is, common sense always favours the Conservatives. You know, you saw a particularly egregious example during the pandemic when Johnson seems to suggest that good old British common sense would save Britain from the pandemic and that hasn't worked out very well. But on the whole, this thing of essentially claiming the common sense of Britain for itself is a cultural act and is something that the Conservative Party has done very successfully. Stuart Hall, who I think is probably one of the most relevant left-wing thinkers that we can read today because he was writing. I want like a dub siren to go off every time there's a Stuart Hall reference on this show. If someone can edit that in afterwards. I want a notification on my phone as well. She's like someone's message to Stuart Hall. Yeah. And he wrote a really good article on common sense conservatism in, I think, the late Nordies. And he said that, you know, and so there's always talk of hardworking families, you know, Labour stands for shirkers, like we stand for hardworking families, etc. Stuart Hall said that the way forward for Labour was to find some kind of common sense that exists that is progressive. And that's why I think it's important to stress that the British public isn't only instinctively conservative. There is a desire, there is this love of the NHS. Admittedly, the Tories have been very good at co-opting that so that now the NHS is no longer as clearly home turf for Labour. And that was, again, I guess, an example of what you're saying, an attempt to rewrite, you know, common sense around the NHS. It's not a straightforwardly Labour issue because they've been so proactive in claiming it as something that they've always supported, even though that's a lie. But you've got support for public services, you've got this desire for higher taxes. And given how much of society is against those two things, you know, the weight of the Tory press, this conservative party that's been in power for the better part of the last 100 years, it is quite uplifting and promising that public support for those issues is still so high. And if Labour wanted to, in a way, create its own cultural hegemony, Stuart Hall suggests that you need to start with those little openings, kind of get elected on the back of those and then seek broader transformation. And so let's talk a little bit about the kind of cultural soil, which produces, you know, British election results. Because one of the things that you've sort of, you know, hinted at is that the country's cultural tastes have this conservative tilt, but that's not all there is to it. It seems to me that at the moment, when you look at the focus of Johnson, Gove, formerly Cummings and definitely Minera Merza, is that they're obsessed with spaces of knowledge production. That's why Nish Kumar can become public enemy number one and the symbol of a defund the BBC movement. That's why they're obsessed with what's going on in universities. On the one hand, it's a replaying of this kind of reds under the beds paranoia, which justifies a kind of muscular government intervention to reshape these institutions in ways which are favourable to them. But do you think that it also speaks to a real fear that they look at the kind of generational polling and division that if you're under 45, you know, you're more likely to cut off your own hand than you are to vote conservative. And if you're older than 45, then, you know, you'll be driving there and any one of your two Jags like, you know, but they're essentially, you know, based based on a voter cohort, which is and will be dying out. So do you think that's a real fear or simply a moral panic which they're conjuring into existence because it's useful? I think, I mean, at the moment with this government, I would lean more towards the second of those, which is that they are conjuring panic, partly to just distract from the pandemic. It is it plays into their hands again, as we were just talking about with, you know, the kind of preciousness of Britain's past. When there's a perception that it's under attack that that plays into their hands. And so they love summoning up these specters that are, you know, about to do Britain down and, you know, commies sort of kind of invaded every university and all they teach is Foucault, et cetera, et cetera. And you again, you've got tabloids, the Tory press that have an infinite appetite for these for these stories. I think it really with that it just touches on what has always been the kind of two sides of the Conservative Party. One is Little England and the other is Global Britain. You've got Little England, which is all about patriotism, nationalism, authoritarianism and xenophobia is always looking for any enemies within and without to kind of drum up patriotic feeling. And then the Conservative Party positions itself as the defender of the country. And then you've got Global Britain, which is much more the business side of the Conservative Party, which is about lowering taxation, free markets, et cetera. And the culture war that we're seeing today is that Brexit essentially unleashed a kind of new wave of little England feeling and Boris Johnson is all too happy to play into that. Well, to what extent are we using the terms Britain and England interchangeably, because of course the idea of the Union at all is imperiled by the popularity of the SNP, which conversely is good for the Conservative Party in an electoral sense, because it blocks off a route for Labour to number 10. You've got the impact of Brexit in terms of weakening the bonds between Northern Ireland and the mainland. You've got Plaid picking up some of that disaffected progressive vote in Wales. Has the Conservative Party always been a projection of England's ruling class and its colonial ambitions, and we're now seeing a kind of spasm and contraction in that very phenomenon? Yeah, I think exactly. We are. We're seeing the intensification of that contradiction between these two forces governing the Conservative Party. I remember that it was kind of noteworthy that when Theresa May became Prime Minister in 2017 with the coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party, she emphasised what the Conservative Party's full name is, which is the Conservative and Unionist Party. As you see now, for those reasons you stated, that the Union is very much falling apart at the same time at which the Conservatives are ostensibly under the name of the Conservative and Unionist Party. And I think there, yeah, you just see all the tensions that have always been simmering away within the Conservative Party and now are just coming to the fore. And it is very typical that what is really an inadvertent consequence of the Conservative Party's actions in Scotland is only strengthening their position in Westminster. You saw that with Brexit as well, which, you know, it wasn't some master plan to put Labour into a funk. It was really an accident. And as you said, we all thought it was going to riddle the Conservative Party more than Labour. And yet they have ended up the ultimate beneficiary of that. And, of course, no one more than that than Boris Johnson. We often talk about what is it Labour should do to sort of exploit these crises within the Conservative Party and to, you know, turn the crises that Britain finds itself in into an opportunity. But instead of having that conversation, I want to ask you something different, which is imagine for a second that you are the kind of person who took a briefcase to six form and you wear red trousers and chinos and you are often to be found on the King's Road in Chelsea. You are one of those young weirdos who works as a Conservative adviser. All right, that's who you are. If you need to go a bit down your daily list. You don't know about my past. Well, I mean, fuck me. I don't know my due diligence. But go for Daniel Day-Lewis with this, all right? I invite you to go for Daniel Day-Lewis. You are looking at a generation of tenants and renters who refuse to go near the Conservative Party. While you do have some fragmentation amongst BAME voters, most notably within the British Indian population, kind of soft vote amongst, you know, some African voters as well. Generally, BAME people don't really like voting Conservative and that's a growing demographic. While you have a grip on the Shires and there's these inroads in terms of some Northern and Midland seats, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, London are increasingly closed off to you. You, young weirdo, Conservative adviser, how would you advise them to adapt? And do you think that's what they're going to do? Okay, there's lots of digests in that thought experiment. The short of it is, you know, if I was a young Conservative Party researcher, how would I try and cement the party's future knowing that all these demographic shifts are working against it? Yeah? Well, I think one is what the Conservative Party always do, which is do everything they can to discredit the alternative. I mean, with Corbyn, you really saw the Tory press flex their muscle and turn someone who had a huge amount of youth support and had also been a Labour politician for, you know, half a century. They managed to turn him in a few years into someone whose mere presence in the Labour Party was beyond the pale. That was even just to watch that was quite frightening to see that shift because whatever else you want to think of Corbyn, the truth is that he had been a politician for a long time and it was only once he became close to power that that campaign began. And now, you know, you had the surreal sight of him being suspended from the Labour Party and the Daily Mail front page being RIP Corbyn's legacy of hate. That level of, you know, of course, for us on the left, it's the Daily Mail's the most reliable wellspring of hate and for them to be able to twist reality like that and for it to then have real life consequences was quite humbling in a way and that will be for sure a Conservative Party strategy going forward. It's just to eliminate the alternative and we also go back to what you said in the opening about, you know, are we a one party state with two of them? The second thing that I think the Conservatives will look to do and again, which they're already doing is fiddling a bit with the electoral system, introducing ID cards like you've turned out was already very low and the more you can disillusion people with politics on the whole, the more the Conservative Party benefit. I don't think really that there's anything substantive that right now the Conservative Party can offer. It's just it's not within their imagination. You've got a generation of people who have no capital, who can't afford a house, who, you know, all the traditional markers of adulthood are becoming inaccessible and to shift that you really do need to reform the status quo at a very deep level. You will need to redistribute redistribute wealth in a way that the Conservative Party has never wanted to do. And I don't see how they can ideologically reconcile themselves with that reality. I think hopefully that will be maybe when the Labour Party's time does come and then while in opposition, the Conservative Party does what it does very well and that is then adapt. But the idea that the Conservative Party is the one who's going to drive through those necessary changes, I can't see. Rather than talking about the Labour Party that I'm sure you and I would both like to have, thinking about the Labour Party that we've got, which is led by a quickie lawyer with a voice like Alan Partridge, how do they position themselves in relation to a Conservative Party which has done some really extraordinary things in recent years. It's resolved so in contradictions with regards to Europe. We want a landslide majority and it's completely discredited the one viable youth-led socialist alternative. What does Stammer's Labour Party and leadership do in relation to that? Rather than just going, oh, there he picks himself up in 2.0. Realistically, what's the strategy that's available to him? I think the strategy that he's pursuing is pretty doomed. I think over the last 50 years, pretty much, you've seen one example of Labour's success, that's Tony Blair, one of only four Labour leaders to ever win an election. 1997 does offer some important lessons to the left. It's worth looking at what allowed Labour to win such a landslide. I think it's very telling that even after having spent so long in opposition, the Labour Party still needed to call itself new Labour to be elected. I think that itself paints a pretty depressing picture. But then the other things you need to remember about Blair is that after that landslide, enthusiasm across the country completely evaporated and the 2001 and 2005 elections that Blair did win had record low turnouts and so unless Stammer wants to kind of dull the electorate into a deep disillusionment and hope that he can coast along on a really low turnout to a majority, then I don't think Blair, apart from 997, offers any kind of example for what Labour should seek to emulate. The only other example of Labour's success is Corbyn's election in 2017 that brought about a hung parliament. It obviously wasn't the result that Labour wanted, but Corbyn received over 40% of the vote and it was the first time Labour's share of the vote had increased since 997 and he did that in the completely opposite way to Blair. Whereas Blair tried to become the Tories 2.0, Corbyn made no attempts to get the Tory press onside and did receive a remarkably high amount of the vote. What lessons Stammer can draw from that? At the moment he seems to be going down more the Blair strategy of trying to just show that Labour will carry on where the Tories left off and are a safe pair of hands. I don't really see how that's going to cut it now in the post-Brexit context where there is such low levels of trust in establishment politicians and where Keir Starmer at the moment is pitching himself in that way and against a populist like Johnson, at the moment it looks like we're heading for another Tory win. So what you're saying is that Blair without the charisma isn't necessarily going to cut it in 2024. I think I can hear the roar of adoring crowds at a football stadium nearby. That means that I've got to let you go. All of my mates messaging being where the hell are you? Where the hell are you? The ref is looking absolutely like pissed as fuck. I mean, it's a shame to be cutting off this conversation for something as silly as football. As serious as football, there's nothing more important. Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to politics and not that tribal, when it comes to football, I'll do murders. But Sam, thank you so much for joining us. This was such an illuminating and interesting and nuanced conversation and it was the one that I wanted to have with this much Labour in this much Tory chat. It was like having Ian Dalon. It was wonderful. But thank you so much for joining us. And thank you to our audience for tuning in. Downstream is every Tuesday at 5pm. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel and that means that you will always know when it's coming. If you like this content, you can also go to navara.media.com forward slash support and ship us a few quid. If you didn't like this content, you should do that anyway and it will help us improve. So a big thanks to Sam for joining us and a big thanks to all of you for tuning in. Bye.