The Radicalisation of the Conservative Party
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
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Summary
The News Agents at the Conservative Party Conference: Day 2
What does Conservatism look like in 2023? At their party conference in Manchester this year, the right of the party are being very vocal about redefining how their party looks. We hear from the politican whose drawn the biggest crowds at the event this year... not a government monster but former UKIP leader, Nigel Farage.
And the PM still hasn't announced his decision on the northern leg of HS2 - we talk to West Midlands Mayor Andy Street about his campaign to keep the train line going north of Birmingham.
Editor: Tom Hughes
Senior Producer: Gabriel Radus
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Planning Producer: Alex Barnett
Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell
Video Producer: Will Gibson-Smith
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:13.1 | What does conservatism look like in 2023? Well, I've just emerged from a fringe event |
| 0:19.7 | where the speakers were Jacob Rees-Mogg, Miriam |
| 0:22.3 | Cates, David Frost, very much the right of the party talking about refinding, restoring true |
| 0:30.6 | conservatism to this party of theirs. It is a massive swing to the right, and it's taking this party in a very different direction |
| 0:39.9 | to the one you might have seen here a decade ago. Welcome to the Newsagents. |
| 0:48.4 | The Newsagents. It's John. It's Emily. And it's Lewis. And it's really interesting. |
| 1:00.1 | You go to the conference hall itself and there are people anemically clapping and it all seems sort of fine if a little low key. |
| 1:02.6 | You go off the centre of the floor into the parties and Rishi Sunak, who has been seen as a technocratic, decent, honourable, slightly bland Prime Minister, |
| 1:16.3 | he attracts visceral hatred that I could not believe from a certain section of this party |
| 1:22.5 | who feel disaffected, disillusioned and dispossessed at the moment. |
| 1:28.2 | And that is despite the fact, as we've discussed on the show before, |
| 1:31.9 | Sunak is giving them virtually everything that they want. |
| 1:35.8 | It would be a misunderstanding to think of this conference in a sense as two conferences |
| 1:40.3 | split ideologically, like between a group of kind of pragmatists on the one side |
| 1:45.2 | led by Sunek and a group of more ideological kind of zealots on the other side. There have been |
| 1:49.6 | conferences where it's been like that under Theresa May it was a bit like that, for example. But it's |
| 1:53.7 | not really like that. Like we were saying on the show yesterday, you know, you go into the conference |
| 1:56.5 | hall and it's not as if you're hearing from all of the different cabinet ministers who go up there and make their speeches. |
| 2:01.4 | You know, very composed, dull, technocratic speeches. |
| 2:04.6 | They're all up there using so many of the tropes and kind of language that we associate more with the kind of radical right and with the kind of culture wars right. |
... |
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