Already and this is the Daily OS.
This is the Daily OS.
Oh now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Monday, the eighth of July.
I'm zara, i'm emma.
Fourteen years of Conservative government in the UK has come to an end.
And as Big Band strikes tenth, the exit poll is protecting a Labor landslide. Labor will form government in the UK after an election result that's been described as a landslide victory.
It comes after one of the most tumultuous periods in recent British history.
We're talking about an era that saw five Conservative prime ministers, Britain's departure from the European Union, a global pandemic and the death of Queen Elizabeth, among other things. We will take you through the results and tell you everything you need to know about Britain's new Prime Minister, Kirs Starmer in today's deep dive at First Zara.
What's making headlines.
Three children have died in a house fire in Sydney's West that is now being treated as a domestic related multiple homicide. A twenty eight year old man has been arrested after police say quote direct actions were taken that were intentional of keeping police, other first responders and neighbors out of the property while it was on fire. The three children were aged between ten months and four years old. Four other children were taken to hospital in a stable condition.
Always remember help is available on one eight hundred seven three seven seven three to two.
Community based preschool staff in New South Wales have launched fair Work action amid calls for a twenty five percent pay rise. The Independent Education Union says experienced preschool teachers in the state earn around ninety thousand dollars a year, compared to experienced teachers in public schools, who earn around one hundred and twenty two thousand dollars. The union filed an application for an early educator pay rise with the
Fair Work Commission last week. Its New South Wales branch secretary is urging the state government to quote step up and address the staff shortages caused by inadequate pay.
Mustard Possession has been elected as Iran's next president. It comes after the country's previous president was killed in a helicopter crash earlier this year. After winning, Possession, who is described as a centrist politician in the country and was previously a heart surgeon, said and I quote, I am the servant of the people of Iran. We will serve you, dear people of our country.
And today's good news.
A clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda has proven to be one hundred percent effective in preventing HIV in women. A new pre exposure drug was administered twice in one year to a group of five thousand women. Women are disproportionately affected by HIV in Sub Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations. Researchers say they hope the treatment will address the stigma and discrimination that's prevented the uptake of
preventative medication in some communities. The injection was also shown to be more effective than daily HIV prevention pills.
So m. The US election and the showdown between Trump and Biden has absolutely dominated headlines, not just this week but for the entire year. But as we know, twenty twenty four is shaping up to be a huge year of elections, not just in the US but all around the globe. As we talk this morning, polls in France are still being counted after a snap election there.
Right, that's right, it's a very crowded field this year.
It is fighting for attention here.
Fighting for attention, but the UK is center of attention today in the spotlight. We saw some pretty significant results come out of their general election last week, and the biggest headline is, of course, that Britain has a new prime minister, Keirs Starmer, the Labor leader now the Prime Minister. And the other massive headline is that the Conservatives, who had been in government for fourteen years, suffered a massive defeat. And when I say massive, I mean their worst ever.
Okay, so pretty dramatic scenes there, an ominous sounding voice, and I want to take why don't we start with that second part with what has happened here with the Conservatives, because I think that that's necessary context to then understand Labour's win. So tell me a bit about the Conservative government that had ruled for so long in the UK.
So, in short, the Conservatives, who were better known as the Tories, have been in power since twenty ten. That's when David Cameron became Prime Minister and he went on to be re elected for a second term. He was seen at the time as this fresh face for the Tory party, younger, more dynamic than their previous leaders, so he was well liked for a time.
Yeah, he was quite a popular leader. So what happened from there?
So the cracks for the Conservative government now the outgoing Conservative government really began to show. At the same time that calls for Britain to leave the European Union really began gaining momentum. So those calls of course came to a head with the Brexit referendum. But David Cameron was really strongly against leaving the EU, so when the UK voted in favor of Brexit, he ended up standing down as PM.
The British people have made a very clear decision to take a different path and as such, I think the country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction. Then we had to raise a May.
What's the naughtiest thing you ever did?
I have to confess when me and my friends sort of used to run through the fields of wheat.
The farmers weren't too pleased about that.
So May's biggest challenge as leader was actually implementing Brexit. So the UK said we want to leave, the government had to figure out how that would be achieved. Theresa May then spent a fairly chaotic three years trying to negotiate a deal to leave the EU, and ultimately it was the resistance that she faced within her own party across the board in Parliament trying to get Brexit over the line that saw her resign as leader in twenty nineteen.
So Brexit was twenty sixteen. That takes us to twenty nineteen, and then after Theresa May, we get Boris Johnson right.
That is right, we sure do. Bojo the man.
Himself yesterday I went to Pepper Pig World, Pards, He's been to Pepper big World.
So Johnson campaigned on a promise to quote, get Brexit done. You probably would have heard lots of news grabs around that time. Let's get Brexit done. And within months of his prime ministership he followed through.
The UK did leave the EU.
But it wasn't smooth sailing for the Tories from there because of course we ran into COVID nineteen and consequently another Conservative prime ministership was claimed thanks to a scandal known as party Gate.
Now what is party gate?
Party Gate was not as fun as it sounds. Boris Johnson as Prime Minister was found to have held parties with senior ministers at his residence Number ten, Downing Street during lockdowns, so the party was in breach of lockdown restrictions. It also came at a really high pressure time for the British people. It was around Christmas. The UK health system was at breaking point. They were in the thick of these really high numbers of deaths from COVID nineteen. It was not a good look at the time.
It wasn't And there's very stark, you know, news grabs and imagery of Boris Johnson, you know, looking sternly down the camera telling people they cannot leave their homes. And yet he was hosting these parties, as we now know. So just to recap, because we've met a few characters so far on this little journey. So we've had David Cameron, we've had Theresa May, we've had Boris Johnson, all prime ministers from the same party from the Tories. But Rishi
Sunak wasn't the next one. There was one more prime minister in between, another one another one.
Almost at Sunak on this narrative, but not quite because while you'd be forgiven for forgetting there was a Prime minister named Liz Truss.
I am a fighter and not a.
The shortest serving prime minister in UK history. So Liz Truss tried to pass this ambitious plan to cut taxes. She didn't provide specifics about how the government would pay for those tax cuts, which led to an economic crisis in the UK shortly followed by Liz Truss's resignation.
It was an extremely short time someone had a let us there to symbolize her prime ministership, to see which.
Would wilt quit the live countdown.
The live countdown, she only lasted forty five days.
Forty five days YEAP, during which time the Queen died and actually Zara Liz Trust ended up losing her seat in this election, so that kind of spells an end for her political career, at least for now. She lost that seat very narrowly by about six hundred votes to a labor candidate, so it'll be interesting to see what she does next.
So a fairly consequential time yeh UK history. But yet she resigned, she stepped aside and then came Rishi Sooner.
Then came Rishi Sunac. So Rishi Sunac forty four year old former investment banker. He became the first non white British PM, the fifth Conservative PM in that government since twenty.
Ten, and what was the vibe when he assumed that Prime ministership.
So clearly he inherited a government that, to put it lightly, had a fair bit going on. The Twries were hit really hard by that party gate scandal. As I mentioned, it came at that time when Britain was struggling and voters really turned against the government from that point, obviously other frustrations in the lead up, a lot of frustration around how Brexit was handled. The Tories from that point lost almost every opinion poll to Labor from December twenty
twenty one. So when Johnson was found to have held those COVID nineteen lockdown parties, that's the point at which Conservative opinion polls really really suffered. The leadership of Liz Trust marked another slump in the Tory's popularity. So opinion polls showed that Labor was roughly thirty points ahead of the Conservative government in the days before she stepped down.
And so it's against that backdrop that Rishi Sunac called an election earlier this year. What kind of campaign did he run given he was operating in this very kind of low trust environment. What did that campaign look like.
Yeah, So it was always going to be an uphill battle for Rishi Sunac this election.
Of the century.
Yeah, But then came another scandal for the Tories, if you can believe it, right in the thick of when Sunak would have been hoping to kind of garner a bit of goodwill and positive pr for the party, but this betting scandal emerged and the fallout from that is still ongoing. But the BBC has reported up to fifteen Tory candidates are being investigated, along with one Labor candidate, and this is all about some unlawful bets that were made about the date and the outcome of the election.
So essentially people who were not meant to be placing bets on this kind of information allegedly putting money on when they thought the election was going to be called. London Police have also confirmed that one of Rishi Sunak's bodyguards is also under investigation for being involved in this
alleged unlawful betting ring. But in terms of what Sunac had been spooking if the Tories were re elected his campaign promises, he'd promised to cut taxes, boost defence spending, cut migration levels, and he also wanted to introduce mandatory national service for eighteen year olds finishing school, which garnered a few headlines as well, But he ended up spending a lot of his campaign just trying to appeal to conservative voters by warning them against giving labor too much power.
He really platformed his campaign on better the devil. You know, I suppose or telling voters you can be mad at us, but if you give all of the power to labor, they'll end up with a supermajority.
They can pass whatever they want. Don't do that.
If you hand labor a blank check, you will not be able to get it back.
It's a really interesting position to be in when all the signs are pointing to a huge electoral defeat, Like how do you campaign in that sort of environment? And even Rishie Sunac's announcement of the election, like even that he couldn't escape headlines because he did it in the pouring rain around us. It really wrote itself. How did voters respond to this sort of campaign?
So conservative or would be conservative voters didn't really buy it. Looking at the election results, you know, Labor is expected to win around four hundred and five seats out of six hundred and fifty.
So just give us a sense. That's a huge win.
That is the biggest majority held by any party since World War II in the UK.
Yeah.
So meanwhile, the Conservative Party, the Tories are set to win around one hundred and forty seats, contrasting Labour's victory. That is the Toy's worst ever result like in its two hundred year history.
Okay, so records on both sides there. What about the minor parties They've played quite a big role during this campaign.
Yeah, this has been an interesting one. So the Tories weren't just hit hard by that historic swing to Labor. There's a minor party on the right that really disrupted Rishi Sunac's campaign. It's led by well known Brexit supporter Nigel Farage. It's a party called Reform UK. Now, this is a populist, anti immigration party and Farage announced plans
during Sunak's campaign to make a political comeback. He'd gone away for a while, but now he's back and Farage ultimately has this goal of making Reform UK the real opposition in UK politics. I mean he's made a good crack of it. It's on track to pick up its first ever UK Parliament seats with wins in more than a dozen seats, so we're projecting thirteen reform UK seats in Parliament, and.
So when that's splitting the right wing vote, that's another challenge for the Tories to try and overcome. So I'm not sure Rishi Sunak and his party would have been too stoked about that. But I want to move on now to the new government and the new prime minister. I think most people in Australia would struggle to pick Sirkistarma even out of a liner. Yeah, he's a fairly unknown name outside of the UK, So tell me what we need to know about him and his new government.
Yeah, it's it's interesting. Kirs Starmer is not the eccentric kind of leader that we've seen from some of the conservative pms of recent times, like you're Boris Johnson's. He's not a particularly stand out character, you could argue, but that actually might be the key to his success. And I think, you know, after so many turbulent years in UK politics, that may have appealed to a lot of voters. So Starmer is a lawyer and a former chief Public
prosecutor and yes, a sir. He was knighted for services to Law in twenty fourteen. He's been a Labor MP since twenty fifteen, so quite a decent chunk. But he's fresh enough to kind of be seen as someone young enough or interesting enough to bring something different to the party.
Possibly.
He took over leadership of the Labor Party in twenty nineteen. That was when there was the last UK election when Labour suffered one of its worst ever defeats.
Under Jeremy Corbyn. So former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.
And what do we know about his policies? What did he do to the election?
So in the lead up to this election, Starma really lent on his record of change within Labor. So since taking over from Corbyn, he really lent on that. He has turned Labor into a more centrist political party compared to Corbyn's more left wing policies. Starma has pledged to do things like cut hospital waiting times, create new border security, hire six five hundred more teachers, and he wants to set up a nationally owned UK energy company. This has
all been under the banner of change. The word change has featured prominently throughout his campaign and I think that messaging goes to the heart of the fact that he wanted voters to feel that he was the right man for the job, whether or not they are traditionally labor voters. I think that he saw an opportunity to kind of present himself as the positive change that the UK needed.
And here's a little bit of his victory speech.
The change begins right here because this is your democracy, your community and your future. You have voted. It is now time for us to deliver. And obviously Rishi Sunac had to concede defeat. What did we hear from him on election night?
Yeah, so in a short speech on Friday morning. This was I think about five am local time, the day after the election, so a huge day for everyone involved. He confirmed Labour's victory. He said he had offered his congratulations to Starmer over the phone. He took responsibility for the loss, but I do want to mention that he retained his seat. So Richie Sunac no longer Prime Minister,
but he's not disappearing from Parliament altogether. He will continue on as a Conservative MP for at least another term. He said he was looking forward to working with his community, spending more time with family. He is a little bit more of that speech.
Today, power will change hands in a peaceful and orderly manner, with goodwill on all sides.
That is something that should give us all confidence in our country's stability and future.
He soon I ended up submitting his resignation in person to King Charles the Third on Friday, and just a few hours later, Keir Starmer was officially sworn in as Prime Minister. Now for the other members of the House of Commons, the lower house, they will be sworn in on the ninth of July, before the first official session of Parliament begins with a speech by the King on the seventeenth of July.
And thank you so much for explaining all that is the UK politics circus to all of us here today, and thank you for listening to the Daily Os for another day. If you like what you heard, we would love it if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts or rate us on Spotify. It's the way we know that you're listening and that we know that you're liking what we are putting out. So thanks in advance
and we'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Cargottin woman from Gadigal country. The Daily os acknowledges that this podcast recorded on the lands of the Gadigal people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.