Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave, is out for preorder now.

I've been working on this for 25 years. It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior. Please check be your welcome for the next hour. You guys are in for a treat. We have my dear friend, Francis Foster. He's half of Trigger Nometry, the podcast you all love and love to hate and hate to love and hate and all the good things in between. Francis, you have a new book out which I'm excited to talk about because it's about you having been a teacher and why no one should ever do it and it's Uneducated, which is kind of funny because my next book is called Unwanted. But before we get into that, because I think the educational system is something that is crucial for everybody, and also it's crucial in a political sense because it makes basically the generation and the leaders of tomorrow, I wanna talk to you a bit about what what's going on in British politics because I think you are very much kind of a modern minded approach. You speak to people of all areas of the political spectrum on your show from far left to far right. You guys get criticized for having this person or that person. It's like we have a lot of people on the show that we don't agree with. But I think Americans should appreciate how deranged British politics are at the moment. And I don't just mean people getting arrested for Facebook. So let me see if I can. Let's hear the teacher. I'm doing my five minute story. Let's see what kind of a grade I get, okay? To bring people to speed. Oh, for the pen is out. Yes, sir. Green pen is for crazy. Red pen is for grammar, one second. So for close to a century or over around a century, since the days of Lloyd George, someone do I get points for knowing who that is. You did? British political system was basically a binary. You had the labor party, which was the left wing party or left of center party. You had the Tories, the Conservator, who was the right wing party. The two of them went back and forth for decades. And in third, and a consistent and persistent third place,

was the Liberals.

Later, we came to Lib Dems.

The high point of which was in the election

with David Cameron, what was that 2010?

Where they met.

2010, duh, yep.

Yeah, when Nick Clegg, they started having debates

between the party leaders.

Nick Clegg, who was the head of Lib Dem Lib Dem, was a guard, was a superb job. The Lib Dems had the balance of power. They got enough seats and they had a coalition government with the Tories, which hadn't been a thing, I think, for a century beforehand. From 2010 to 2024, the Tories ran the UK. They went through several prime ministers in order, David Cameron, who was, I think clearly a moderate, kind of internet globalist, kind of figure. He certainly, no, Trump, to put him mildly, Theresa May after him, who was very much of the moderating of the party, after she called an election and did much worse than she was expected. She was forced to go by her own party. Then you had, was Boris Johnson next? Boris Johnson, he was regarded as from the right wing of the party. He had an election where he ran with the head of the left, was Jeremy

Corbin, a figure which is not really analogous to anyone in the States. It's like Bernie Sanders, if Bernie had no sense of humor and was much more of a trotsky eye than someone who liked civil liberties, which I think Bernie I think people would agree is fairly solid on that issue. The Tories had their biggest electoral victory in I think a century.

The Sock. which I think Bernie I think people would agree is fairly solid on that issue. The Tories had their biggest electoral victory in I think a century. The so-called blue wall, sorry red wall, the opposite there, which are areas where have been voting labor for decades voted for the conservatives. In part because the labor party had turned its back on the labor and the working class and became a party of you know shit lives and elites and what was very odd then after Boris Johnson's dream from office rich list trust was PM for like a month she before a barely you know libertarian budget with a like the mildest of austerity. She was driven from office. Rishi Sunak then took over. He's like Mitt Romney without the, he's like Mitt Romney, but all the bad qualities of Mitt Romney magnified. I think it's fair to say. And then in 2024, there was an election. And here's where things got very bizarre, because the labor vote only increased by one or two points. The Tory vote got split in half. So they went from like 40 to like 22 or something, something crazy. Nigel Farage's party reform got a huge percentage of the popular vote, very few seats, because in the UK, whoever is first passed the post, meaning whoever has the most votes in a certain constituency get the seat. So if it goes 40, 30, 2010, that 40 will get it or if it goes 30, 2020, 2020, you know whatever. So you had laborer, despite having their smallest share of the vote, you know, historically had 400, I think 11 out of 650 seats. In 2025, you had local elections. Labor came in 3rd or 4th. It was Farage first, then the Lib Dems, then labor and conservatives, 3rd or 4th. Something unimaginable American politics, where the Republicans, Democrats, in any election, let all nationally would be in Third and Fourth place. Just a couple of weeks ago, it happened again at local elections, labor lost a majority of the seats that were up, the Conservatives, I think, came in fourth. And now the Greens have started picking up the slack. And for, you know, it's funny because Americans always, or in politics, general, it can't get any worse. You think Kierstharmer who's the PM, you can't get any worse. The Greens are a coalition between like Antifa and Ilhan Omar. Like it's just the worst people in politics come in together. And now things are a precipice. West Streeting has quit Kierstarmher's cabinet and he is trying to become the first gay PM. We don't talk about Ted Heath in this context. And there's a big question for the Labor Party. Do we go left to where the Greens are? Do we try to attack to the center? But all polls now have British politics where you have, oh, and in those local elections, they lost the labor party lost whales for the first time in a century. Well, whales had been strongly labor for a century. Now the Welsh nationalists, Pledkumri came in first, kicked them out of the Welsh parliament. So now all polls in the UK have forages reform in a clear first, and then you have a second tier of conservatives, labor, greens, and Lib Dems, all like a pointer to a part, which is something that has never happened before in the UK. Certainly, it's never happened here in the US. And no one knows what the future of the UK holds. How do you grade me? I think that's an A. There's no A and A plus. You missed out a key element. But it's not. No, the key element is, so we're treating the health minister left the cabinet and said he was leaving the cabinet because he had no faith in Keir's Thomas ability to win the next election, which is accurate. Nobody has any faith in Keir's Thomas ability to win the next election. And that even K. Starma has the faith in his own ability.

That's part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle.

There is also a man called Andy Burnham. Andy Burnham is the mayor of Manchester. Andy Burnham has had designs on the Labour Party leadership for a long, long time. He has already had two failed bids to become Labour leader. Now, Andy Burnham is seen as the, so we just say the King in waiting. Now it would be to run for Prime Minister in the UK. You need to be a member of Parliament. So you need to represent what is known in the UK as a constituency, an area of basically a portion of the electorate who vote for you in a certain area. For instance Kensington, Kensington has an all Kensington West, whatever it is, that group of people vote during a general election and they vote conservative, labor whoever it is, and then that person is their representative in Parliament, it's called their member of Parliament, their MP. Now there's a slight problem because Andy Burnham wants to be the leader of the Labour Party and their full prime minister. Andy Burnham is not an MP, he's the mayor of Manchester, so he can't be mayor of parliament. There is an area of north west, the north west, which is called Ashton and Makerfield. Ironically It's actually where my dad is from. It's a very white, very worse area. It's more widely known as a part of Wigan. People might know Wigan because when George Orwell wrote about the positive poverty and misery of the British working classes, and he could go to any town in the UK, he went to Wiggen. So that's what we're talking about here. Yeah, the Bren was called the Road to Wiggenpier. This is before Orwell was Orwell. Yes, absolutely. And it's a seminal text in British modern British literature. So, what's happened now is the MP for Maker field has stood down. This gives Trigger in what is called a bi-election. And a bi-election is when an MP leaves for whether it's illness or death of for any other reason or they stand down as in this case, it triggers a bi-election and what that means is there is an election to see, to elect a new MP. And that is what is happening now. So Andy Burnham is going to be the Labour representative. And he wants to win in order so that then he will go on and he will trigger a challenge to the car'suman. Now this is where it gets complicated. We're really getting into the weeds. Wait, we started to get to that. There's one point I wanted to make which I learned about yesterday, which is fascinating about the idiosyncrasies of British politics. He's correct me if I'm wrong. Teach. You can't legally resign as an mp So technically what happens is I think you you are assigned in some ministry or something like that, which means you can't be in two things at once. So tech and that declares the vacancy. That I don't know. Well, that's, so I just learned about this.

So it's very weird.

It's like you can't be a member of, let's suppose, this is not a analogy.

Like I can't be a member of the CIA and Congress, for example, right?

I don't think that's true, but let's pretend.

So what happens is since I can't quit Parliament, the CIA director just gives me technically

a secretary of the CIA, which automatically means I'm not a member of Congress anymore. So that's their way to work around the law. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. I mean, and I haven't heard anything more British than that. Right. Don't get me started on Black Rod. Yeah. It's so pointless. Black Rod is, Michael is not talking about his predilections. He's talking about something else. Yes I was. Anyway, so this is a plan for Andy Burnham. Andy Burnham wants to trigger a bilaction and his plan is to therefore win the bilaction. And then in the labor party in order to challenge the leader of the labor party, you have to get 20% of labor MPs to endorse your challenge sign a letter in a declaration to say that they no longer have faith in care, Stommer. 20%. There are, I think off the top of my head, 403 labor MPs in parliament at the moment that means they need 81 members of parliament. Yeah. Now we've skipped over the fact that he has to win the by-lection. Right. Now as you look into in your opening monologue which was very good, a tick with a red pen, as you have alluded to in your monologue, that ain't gonna be a full gone conclusion because what we saw in Wigan, that is the Red Wall. You do not get more Red Wall than Ashton and Makerfield. And as we've seen, the voters in Ashton and Maker feel belong to a community who have been sold down the river year after year by Labour, then by the Conservatives, they have been Brexitiers voting against immigration. They had a Conservative government who in the words of Kenny Badernaught, the current Conservative leader, talked right, governed left, which means they were gaslit. They said time after time after time, they wanted immigration to be lowered, time after time, government said, of course we will lower immigration, that hasn't happened. They now have a Labour Party, which isn't the Labour Party of old, it's very much what your Democrats are. They were the party of the, you know, the blue collar guy once upon a time, the factory worker. They ain't that. They are the party of the Liberal elite. Kirstalman literally went down on one knee during 2020 with BLM. There is a famous picture of him on one knee. This does not go down well in Ashton and Macafield. Now Andy Burnham, Paul, okay. Can I say something? Are you familiar with the term Reagan Democrats? Yes. So for people who don't know this, labor for in the same way that like DEI and the Democratic Party in America are pretty much interchangeable, that if you are someone who's for DEI, if you're not for the Democrats, maybe for the Greens, but you're certainly not going to be a Republican, right? For decades in America, unions and the Democratic Party were basically interchangeable, hand in hand. Like the Democratic Party was the powered by the unions. This still in many ways are especially teachers union. And what happened in 80 and in 84 was the rise of the so-called Reagan Democrats because these were union people who for the first time in years, decades, felt that there's some of the Republican Party who hears them, understands them. Reagan, people don't realize this, was the first union president to later become president of the US, use president's screen actors guild. So this was a sea change moment with the rise of the 60s in the Democratic Party, the old left, the laborer, many of them started voting Republican, and certainly many of them are Trump fans to this day.

So what Farage has done is he's taken a dump on the Tories and spoke into the equivalent of the Reagan Democrats, these blue collar historical labor voters and being like, guys, I see you, I hear you, and I'm here for you, and they're very much responding in kind. Absolutely. So this idea that this is going to be a full-gone conclusion for Andy Burnham, which the Labour Party seems to think will happen judging by their actions, to me is outstandingly arrogant and quite frankly completely lacking in any real type of understanding of what is actually happening on the ground. Now for Roger, for Roger, who is the leader of reform, has said they are, and I'm going to quote, throw everything at this by-lection. And by all accounts from the researcher I've done, the current person that they've got looks very talented. He's from the local area, he hasn't been parachuted in, he's a very smart guy, working class, a plumber. From the local area, born in bread has incredible cut through with the people there, Andy Burnham has a hell of a fight on his hands.

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