00:00This sort of scandal, if you like, the questions raised about Labor Party members and their links to certain figures, the continued rise of reform, it all feeds into this commentary around the future of the two-party system itself.
00:22It has been a battle between the two major parties for more than a century, and although this isn't the first time there's been a third contender, it certainly feels like the most serious challenge we've seen to the status quo in a long time.
00:39Reem, do you think that questions around Peter Mendelsohn and his links to Epstein, the defections from the Conservative Party, the rise of reform, is this all a signal that people are fed up with the two-party system?
00:57Is it going to die out in the UK?
01:00I think people are fed up of not feeling as though they're getting better off.
01:06They are not better off now than they were 10 years ago.
01:09We know this from the economics of Great Britain, you know, when we're looking at the fact that public spending as a proportion of GDP is now at about 45%, which means that almost half of the economy is the government, and we are spending enormous amounts of money, regulating enormously, and people, as a result, are not better off.
01:31Now, of course, part of this is the fallout from Brexit.
01:35Now, only last Saturday, it was six years since the UK actually left the European Union, and people, many people voted for Brexit so that the country could take back control, take back control of power, take back control of our sovereignty,
01:52ensure that the pathway towards prosperity was a pathway we could choose to take without being held back by the shackles of Brussels.
02:01Now, what we have discovered is that our own governments in Whitehall and Westminster were almost just as protectionist and just as pro-regulation and pro-government and pro-establishment thinking as Brussels.
02:14So what people voted for didn't occur. We've now been left with an enormous number of levers, and nobody has had the guts to pull a single one of them.
02:24So now people are looking at this and saying, OK, what we need is to shake up our own governance.
02:29We need to shake up our own power domestically.
02:30And I think that the rise of reform, the increasing support that reform are getting, is in part the backlash from people not feeling as though they are better off, but also this new rise in anti-establishment thinking.
02:47And it's, by the way, why I think accepting too many Tory defections will bode very, very badly for reform.
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