You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker every morning to hear the latest episode. Just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian, Here's what's on the Front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, July eighth. The Federal Court has convened a special panel of judges to tackle a wave of constitutional challenges engulfing the legal system in the wake of a landmark High Court decision that freed asylum seekers from indefinite detention, including some convicted
of serious violent offending. That exclusive Byrienne and Down is live now at the Australian dot com dot au. A pro Palestine organization called the Muslim Vote, which helped five independent candidates win seats in the UK, will this week announce its candidates here in Australia. It's one of the many reasons Australia's politicians are anxiously analyzing Britain's stunning election results, which swept Labored to power and threw up a whole
new set of challenges for the major parties. That's today's episode. American presidents get months to move into the White House. That means they also get months to move out when their term is over. Things move much faster in Britain, Your majesty. As the UK's newly elected Prime Minister, Labour's Keir Starmer shook hands with the King and engaged in
a few moments of awkward chit chat. Ready the new tenant at ten Downing Street and Rishi Sunak, with his wife and daughters, was out As Labor absorbed it's stunning majority, more than four hundred and ten seats out of the six hundred and fifty seat House of Commons. There was a party, we did it, and then a somber first speech.
If I asked you now whether you believe that Britain will be better for your children, I know too many of you would say no.
Keir Stormer has entered the Host of Commons with a staggering majority, the second biggest since the Second World War.
Richard Ferguson is the Australian's National Chief of Staff.
He could be Prime Minister for a decade. He's already thinking about the next election. But this is a majority that's on shiki grown. This is a majority that relied very heavily on people hating the Tories rather than loving Labor. The calling this the loveless Lanslade.
Starmer has spent four years rebuilding Labour's lost soul after it was thrashed by the Tories in twenty nineteen. Surrounded by a cloud of distaste about the anti Semitism former leader Jeremy Corbyn had allowed to flourish within the party, Starmer sacked Corbyn from Labor altogether, the first step in a reset where Starmer proved himself politically ruthless.
My government will fight every day until you believe again. From now on you have a government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by the determination to serve your interest, to defy quietly those who have written our country off.
Starmer and his wife have two teenagers, a boy and a girl, but until now their names have been kept secret at the request of the Starmers, respected by the UK press. Victorias Starmer has Jewish heritage, and Starmer has previously revealed their children have been raised in the traditions of that faith. It was reported in the days after the election that the kids didn't want to leave their
home in London's inner suburbs. However, it's expected they will move into Downing Street the row of seventeenth century townhouses with offices on the ground floor and the living quarters above. Margaret Thatcher called it living over the shop. The Starmers are still unpacking, but they'll move into the interconnected living quarters above number eleven Downing Street, where there are four bedrooms, rather than the much smaller two bedroom flat above number ten.
Starmer is already indicating he'll be different. He said. Throughout his career he has finished work at six on Fridays while working as a chief prosecutor and as a human rights barrister, and he says he has no intention of changing that habit.
In many ways, Kers Starmer is the opposite of now a few prime ministers ago Boris Johnson, and that we don't know anything about him really at all. With Boris Johnson, we obviously knew every affair, every illicit detail. Even if he wouldn't tell us how many kids he had, we knew there were at least a couple that he wasn't admitting about. But with Kers Starmer, you know, we know his wife, Victoria works in the NHS, the National Health Service. We know that they've got a number of children, but
we don't know their names. We don't know what they look like. He's also different than say Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, whose children were very much a part of their lives and of their Prime ministerships. And we're out there and used kind of his political props sometimes with the Starmer family. It's all very very private. It's all very much business up front.
Says The children have asked to get a dog, and there's already a cat in residence at Downing Street, a rescue named Larry who's lived there for thirteen years. Kirstarma will be Larry's sixth Prime minister. Even though Labor only got thirty four percent of the vote, it's getting more than sixty four percent of the seats. That's because of Britain's voting system, First past the post means the person in each constituency who wins the greatest number of votes
gets the seat. That's a stark difference from Australia, where the major parties often have to rely on preferences flowing from smaller parties.
What Libra did and what the Liberal Democrats who came number three and the elections did very well as they plead the first past the poorest game. So instead of focusing on national vote share, they poured all of their resources into the seats they knew that they could win a plurality of votsen, particularly for Libra. It was in Scotland, so there were really boosted by a huge sweep against the Scottish Nationalists who have been very dominant in Scotland
for the past decade. But Labor has swept all those seats in Glasgow and Edinburgh back and the Liberal Democrats only had a very tiny national vote share increase too, but they had massive increases in the seats that they targeted in kind of affluent Tory areas a little bit like the Tales here, that they knew they would get
the votes in. They didn't have a formal deal Labor and the Liberal Democrats, but Labor basically ran dead in seats where the Liberal Democrats would do well against the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats ran dead in the seats where they knew that Labor were the best challenges of the Tories.
Downing Street's previous tenant, Rishi Sunac, couldn't hide the pain as he fronted up for the Conservatives blunders in front of that famous black door.
I would like to say, first and foremost, I am sorry. It was the biggest collapse in the Tory of war whatever. And I think Rishie Sonac's position was irretrievable the minute he walked into Number ten Downing Street, Claire. Because of Les Truss. So Les Truss obviously was the Prime minister for only seven weeks. She was the Queen's last prime minister. But she only lasted seven weeks because of a disastrous mini budget which sought, you know, a kind of a
radical lazzi fair agenda. But what she did in that instance was she spooked the markets. But then she tied the Conservatives to a massive rise in interest rates. And the minute any political party is tied to the rising of interest rates, Claire, no matter where you are in the world, that is very bad news.
The Tories lost more than two hundred and fifty seats to see it, one hundred and twenty one seats out of six fifty, the Conservative Party's worst result in its entire one hundred and ninety year history. Kis Down says it's down to business. He's promising to put the VAT, Britain's equivalent of a GST on private school fees and to fix the creaking National Health Service, as well as
a prisons crisis. Britain's jails are full and defenders are being released after serving half their terms to make room for more. And then there's unauthorized migration. So far this year, more than thirteen thousand migrants have arrived in the UK via small boats across the English Channel. The Tories wanted to send them to Rwanda in a fix inspired by John Howard's Pacific solution, but Keir Starmer says that's off.
Look, the ride scheme was dead and barer before it started. It's never been a deterrent. Look at the numbers that have come over in the first six and a bit months of this year. They are record numbers and I'm not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don't act as are deterrent.
One of the things about labor that they're going to really struggle with. They really didn't reveal what they were going to do at all in any area of policy Claire because they didn't want to spook the electorate. But he doesn't have a particularly strong plan to deal with a small boats crisis, and he's going to have to come up with one, and even Tony Blair is in the Times this weekend saying if you don't control your borders, that's when prejudice flows. So he's having the minutes walked in.
He's having Tony Blair, who it must be said, still holds the record for the biggest labor majority, saying you must stop these small boats or it will be your undoing.
One of the biggest factors kiz Dama has to face now is the Gaza effect. Five independents, including Jeremy Corbyn, who campaigned hard on recognition of Palestine, took seats that Labor would otherwise have expected to win.
It's a big problem and it's a problem around the world. Look at the primaries for the Democrats, where Joe Biden basically ran unopposed, but he suffered huge protest votes in
places like Michigan with huge Muslim populations. Labor kind of saw this coming in Britain because they had huge protest votes in the council elections and a lot of this has been directed by a group called the Muslim Vote, and as we know, they are looking to replicate that here in Australia, targeting some ministers such as the Education Minister, Jason Clair, the Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke, and we know that through Dennis Shanahan and Sarah Eisen's reporting in
The Australian last week that Anthony Albinizi is concerned about this group. So we may yet see that replicated here, but it is definitely a problem for cair Starmer.
Coming up the firebrand conservative everyone's talking about and how he could reshape British politics. Australian's deep in coverage of the other two Orcist elections happening in coming months in the US and possibly here in Australia. You can be the smartest person in every room by joining our subscribers now at the Australian dot com dot a U and
we'll be back after this break. One of the wild carts in the UK election is Nigel Farage, a politician who's been around UK politics for decades, initially as an anti Europe campaigner and now offering himself as an alternative voice to the Tories with a strident line on migrants. His party was the second most popular in more than one hundred seats and took a whopping fourteen percent of the national vote. It also won five seats of its own, putting Farrage into Parliament for the first time.
There was one political analyst and Breton who said, Nigel Farage will be happy he's finally entered Parliament. He'll just be sad that there's four other MP's going with him. He has a reputation for falling out with people that have joined his group. For example, when he was in UKIP and a couple of Tories defected to UKIP his original party where she was pushing the bricks of vote from he fell out with them. He's very much the star of his own show, but also he actually has
to be an MP. And the thing about being an MP clayer, especially in Britain even more than so in Australia, it's very restrictive. He can't dominate question time. He only gets one question maybe a couple of months, and then there's so much work in MP has to do, especially in Britain where people write in about their council bins and the bus stop nearby making too much noise and oh you know there's a problem with my toilet m sewerage, like it is not going to be as glamorous as
he thinks. And he may be wishing that he decided to go and do what he was originally going to do, which is and Stumper own the country for Donald Trump and go to all these gletsy events for the Republicans in America, rather than he's sucking in the cisode tain of Clacton.
Nigel Farage was criticized during the campaign for being allegedly pro Russia. He's fired back about that, speaking here to our colleagues at times Radio.
I've never said anything nice about Pootsin. I think what he's done in Ukraine is absolutely reprehensible at every level. Of course, all wars end in one of two ways, either annihilation or negotiation. I would have thought negotiation was rather important. I would have thought the West could satan Putin. You've got to give up the territory that you know
thus far, and if you don't, then I'm afraid. You know, we are going to lay down some very very tough conditions and maybe NATO will have to expand.
But Richard, he's now a force in the Parliament who, I think it's fair to say, is not likely to support huge amounts of weaponry being sent to Ukraine to prolong the war. Is that your rating of base and what does it mean for Ukramee and the rest of the world.
I think ultimately it won't matter because Labor has five years, it's a much longer term than we have in Australia and they have such a huge majority. But what it will mean is if say there are other events in NATO in the next coming years, how will the Tory Party react to how Nigel Farag thinks This will be
the problem for the British Right. Do they welcome Nigel Farage back into the fold and try and get him into the Conservatives or do they try and push him out or hope that he blows himself up or gets bored. Labor has won the first past the post game, but it's on a very very shaky ground this majority. The Conservative Party is in a very very bad place, but it's not impossible to imagine them even getting back to a kind of a hung parliament standing maybe not in
the next term, but definitely in the term after. So that is how it will affect is how will the Conservators react to Nigel Farage and what role will he play in the reorganization of the British Right.
Whichard focus on is the Australian's National Chief of Staff. Thanks for joining us on the front and don't forget to subscribe at the Australian dot com dot au