Episode description

Nick Cohen chats to Peter Oborne, Conservative commentator, reporter and author extraordinaire about the growing threat posed to the UK by the radical right in politics, press and from the other side of the Atlantic.

Something died inside Peter Oborne @OborneTweets when he saw Sir Keir Starmer recently bound across the floor of the House of Commons to talk to Nigel Farage. Neither Labour nor the Tories seem prepared to take on Farage - not on the failed shitshow of Brexit nor on his negative message on immigration. "What an extraordinary state of affairs!" says Peter. adding, "It's shattering. I mean, Farage is, is a bigot.  His finances and the way he runs his sort of, his party, astonishing, full of dreadful people who shouldn't be seen in public, and yet somehow, it's very like Trump, that is, and they cannot find a way of tackling him or seem not even to want to."

Peter had high hopes before the election of Sir Keir Starmer, believing his working class background and record of solid achievement before entering politics helped made him an attractive political force But he now says of the PM, "he comes over as a nothing somebody's blown around by the wind". Peter believes the Labour government's current timidity is driven by an addiction to focus groups - something it shares with the Tories." He adds, " it's one of the sicknesses of our time."

Peter says Tory party is now "a vehicle for thoroughly unpleasant people and who don't understand what Britain is about" and that he same can be said of the press that used to identify as Conservative. He says, "They [right wing press] flourish by going after vulnerable minorities they're wrong about almost everything."

Peter is disturbed by Trump toady Elon Musk's threat to fund Reform, saying "what is happening here is indeed a takeover of Britain, culturally, socially, politically, and there's a massive attempt to do it economically by the United States. And it's only just started." The UK should tell these extremist far right forces to "get lost", Peter adding, "we're now moving into a world, an authoritarian world, which wants to destroy liberal democracy."

Peter Oborne is an associate editor for the Middle East Eye . His latest book published by Simon & Schuster is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is wrong about Islam

Nick Cohen's @ latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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