UK Elections: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns the UK the number one study abroad destination for Americans who refuse to learn a new language it's also fun fact where I'm from and even if I never opened my mouth I feel like you could still tell the UK is in the middle of an election right now which is prime minister rishy sunak called back in May for some reason in the middle of a torrential downpour at a damp Downing Street with few moves left to play it was time to roll the dice earlier today I spoke with his majesty the king to request the dissolution of parliament the King has granted this request and we will have a general election on the 4th of July what are you doing rishie it is pouring rain and you're literally standing in front of the house where you live just pop in and grab an umbrella it frankly says something that a British person trying to reclaim the 4th of July as a day of potential Victory is the second weirdest thing about that announcement this election was something of a surprise though and if you're confused how that can be in Britain the Prime Minister can call an election whenever they want as long as there is one every five years like many things the way Britain operates is kind of like the us but whimsically worse the last election was back in 2019 so sunak had to call one before the end of this year but he chose to do so right now something that even members of his own party were blindsided by as these reporters pointed out later that same day I mean in this morning amid all the speculation nobody could really believe it how has it gone down with his MPS badly yeah look first I don't want to read too much into this but the fact that both of them were ostentatiously holding large umbrellas there feels like a pretty clear dig to me but second I get why sunak colleagues were mad it must suck to have to suddenly go home and tell your spouse sorry love I know we were supposed to go to Italy next month but my wet boss gave a speech and I have to spend the next six weeks running around fighting for my job sunak party the conservatives or Tories are currently wildly unpopular in Britain they got trounced earlier this year in local elections and they're currently pulling around 20 points behind their main rival the labor party with one projection model suggesting labor could win around 450 of the 650 parliamentary seats some have even said that this election could be an extinction level event for the Tories and it's not that they're projecting confidence or competence right now nearly 80 conservative MPS have stepped down ahead of the election a post-war record and that is on top of the resignation that have taken place over the last couple of years including this MP who admitted to using cocaine but claimed that he was set up saying it was very late and he'd been drinking tons of incredibly potent Japanese whiskey another who admitted to groping two men at a private members club and this guy who resigned after he was found to have watched pornography on his phone in the House of Commons and his excuse for that was genuinely amazing the U situation was that that um I funly enough it was tractors I was looking at and um so I did get into another website um that had a sort of very similar name um and I watched it for a bit which I shouldn't have done but my my crime biggest crime um is that on another occasion I went in a second time and that was deliberately that was deliberate that is incredible yes I looked at porn twice but the first time I was just trying to look at tractors on the internet that is very much the Japanese whiskey tricks me into doing cocaine of internet porn lies but what makes it even more unbelievable is why would anyone need to seek out porn if they're already looking at tractors you've got everything you need right there and you don't even have to flip off safe search why go to the bakery when we've got cake at home I'm not saying I'd a tractor I'm saying I would let this tractor me so hard I Sprout corn and on top of all this suac himself seems to be almost trying to lose the election given one of his new bold campaign ideas is to bring back mandatory national service for 18year olds a plan that Drew almost immediate blowback to the point that he felt the need to talk to teens in a way that he hoped they'd understand hi Tik Tok sorry to be breaking into your usual politics free feed but I'm making a big announcement today and I've been told that a lot of you already have some views on it so first thing no I'm not sending everyone off to join the Army what I am doing is proposing a bold new model of national service for 18year olds they'll be able to choose to spend 12 months in a full-time military commission or one weekend per month volunteering and roles within your local community like delivering prescriptions and food to elderly people or in search and rescue oh okay so it's not bringing back the draft it's bringing back the draft or forcing teens to do GrubHub for grandmas or search for bodies in the temps just classic things 18year olds love to do to put it mildly the Tories are in trouble which is a remarkable downfall for a party that's been in power for the last 14 straight years this could be a massive couple of weeks for the UK so given that tonight let's look at the UK election we're going to focus on a few things some of the choices on offer why people are so mad at the conservatives and why they are absolutely right to be and let's start with some of the contenders there's the liberal Democrats the traditionally Centrist party they are unlikely to win overall and because of that seem to mainly be focusing on having fun one Liv Dev official has said said as a smaller party we have to find a way to break into the new cycle and that has meant pushing their leader Ed Davey to do multiple stupid stunts like going down a water slide falling off a paddle board and doing look M no feet on a bike he even tried to conduct a policy interview in the weirdest imaginable place what about the economy what are you doing with the economy yeah we got to get it growing again and that that will that'll be helped by cutting the NHS waiting list also by getting a much better trade deal with Europe and by investing in the skills of our our young people so you know we've got great policies for the economy including the cost of living look look I'm glad Ed dve is having fun but the fact is his party is still going to lose the election then there is the much less endearing far-right reform UK party the punchable face of which is Nigel farage he's been out on the campaign trail running on a hard anti-immigration platform and getting the exact reception that he deserves reform UK's attracted attention with bold promises on reducing legal immigration levels and stopping small booat Crossings for all the support it seems not everyone's a fan of their approach Nigel farage was covered in milkshake on the campaign Trail spectacular also just a bonker's use of the passive voice there was covered in milkshake who threw it exactly I'll tell you who the Dairy Queen who made this perfect Fibonacci spiral just look at her you can't erase this icon look at those lashes you don't need to force the youth into serving their country this Legend is doing it for free and you have any idea just how unlikable you have to be to get milkshaked no one just casually has a milkshake on their personal thinks I better grab one in case I encounter any today no they think you know what I haven't had in a while but deserve a milkshake a treat yet despite that Nel farage is clearly so much of an that this hero was willing to get rid of her possible birthday milkshake having decided this is a better use off it and frankly she was right especially as this wasn't even the first time that farage got milkshaked it happened to him back in 2019 to and just look at that look how sad he is wearing his stupid little ribbon he looks like he threw up on himself after winning a spelling be and if for even a moment you have the tiniest flicker of sympathy for him please know that he followed his recent milkshaking by releasing this video My milkshake brings all the people to the rally I hate that man so much there is and I'm not exaggerating no one on earth more deserving of being milk shook than Nigel farage so clearly neither of these two wet boys are likely to be the next prime minister but why isn't this one going to win as prime minister he should have the advantage of incumbency but the truth isak's never been popular and for multiple reasons including the fact that after marrying the heir to a multi-billion dollar Fortune he's now got more money than the king in fact it says something that the very day it was announced that sunak would become Prime Minister One news report featured this fun graphic well how would you describe rishy sunak in one word Savant comres a polling research company came up with a word cloud and people sent in their thoughts and this is the conclusion rich is the overwhelming word alongside capable okay good and clever wow do you know how much of an outof touch Wang you have to be for people to think that your whole vibe can be summed up by the word rich Elon Musk is the richest man on earth and it's not even the first word that comes to mind when I think of him that would be aparte it's also not the first word that comes to mind when I think of Bill Gates that would be how many times was he on Epstein's plane which counts as one word if you say it really fast but perhaps the most notable thing there isn't how big the word rich is is it that that word cloud also includes the words and they put that on the news enough people called the Prime Minister a that it made the news it almost makes me feel patriotic and just for the record count in the UK isn't as harsh a word as I know it is here I know that here in the US it's usually used by redpilled basement boys toward powerful women but in the UK it's a non-gendered multi-purpose insult like dodgy tosser numpty wanker dick spash fuckle toes pillock and wble only one of those is made up and it's not the one you think but but perhaps the clearest sign of how unpopular the Tories are is that they're about to be defeated by the labor party currently led by Kier starmer and fun fact about Kia there aren't any in fact when pollsters ask voters to describe what starma stands for the responses included nothing not sure and don't know his most notable attribute may be having no real notable attribute at all as this pollster delicately points out for care stammer still over half of the population don't really perceive that they know what he stands for and only one in five people say that he's good in a crisis or indeed has a personality and so there are some areas where he needs to see further development okay set aside the brutal personality slam there you know how hard it is to have less than half the population know what you stand for in the Modern Age thanks to social media I know what my high school chemistry teacher thinks about vegans who eat honey I know my brother's roommate's ex-girlfriend thinks Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't have acted alone and I know that Shaq doesn't fit in the seats at notb Farm because he tweeted in I quote I'm at knots bery farms and my butt's too big to fit in the seats on the ride Ah that's me yelling that was 15 years ago and it'll be the last thing I think about before I die the point is we know too much about everyone on Earth making it incredible the British people don't seem to know much about the man on the verge of running the sixth largest economy in the world to the extent we do know anything about star that he's a pretty bland Centrist perhaps the perfect symbol of that is the fact that he unveiled his party's middle of the road platform earlier this month standing next to the word change in the smallest font imaginable he's also done things like tell his cabinet members they should not be on picket lines showing support for striking rail workers which is a little hard to take given his party's name is literally labor and on a personal level he's been repeatedly challenged to come up with interesting facts about himself and so far has only managed to come up with one tell us one interesting or surprising thing about yourself that we don't already know by the way oh well look I did violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim back in the day and I'm sure some think that's absolutely true absolutely true okay I will admit that is definitely notable though it's not great when the most interesting thing about you is I was once in school next to someone more interesting yeah Kia we assumed that so how are the conservatives at the point where they're about to have their asses handed to them by Fatboy Slim's violin partner well the answer is everything they've done over the last 40 years in which time they've had five different Prime Ministers and it's worth briefly revisiting all of them let's start with David Cameron three-time winner of Britain's least lips he took over in 2010 at a time when Britain was running record deficits and chose to tackle that through what's been called one of the biggest deficit reduction programs seen in any advanced economy since World War II and while much of Europe focused on raising taxes to close budget gaps Cameron relied heavily on a program of austerity essentially making brutal cuts to government services and attributing Britain struggles not to the 2008 financial crisis but to years of frivolous spending under labor and he explained his Cuts Like This reducing spending will be difficult there are programs that will be cut there are jobs that will be lost there are things the government does today that it will have to stop doing many government departments will have their budgets cut on average by 25% over four years now we will get into the impact those cuts had but before we do let's address what might have been the most Savage cut of all there and that is the camera cut from David Cameron to this guy it is strange to suddenly show this haunted business thumb at all but especially right after David Cameron said there are things the government needs to stop doing but maybe it was strategic maybe they thought look we're cutting programs people lose their jobs so when I say the government is going to stop doing stuff make sure you cut to weird Dave he's so oddl looking people might think oh is that the government I definitely want him to stop doing everything he's doing immediately turn off the lights and put him somewhere damp he looks like a fan of the damp but those cuts were brutal in their first 10 years central government funding for local authorities fell by as much as 40% and the way they were structured meant that the most deprived areas had to cut their spending the most and poor families and kids were hit hardest as cameras measures included reducing housing benefits cutting grants to pregnant women and freezing benefits for working age families even as inflation was Rising but the move that ultimately doomed Cameron wasn't any of that it was the decision to appease Euros skeptic members of his party by calling the brexit vote a decision one of his own cabinet ministers has called the greatest blunder ever made by a British prime minister and that is including this look and by the way buzz buzz the B movie called it's 2007 and you have six years left to live the idea was the brexit referendum would later rest the question of whether Britain should leave the EU and the infuriating thing is Cameron himself didn't support Britain leaving and only called the vote because he thought it would fail but of course it didn't and he immediately resigned in disgrace leaving a successor Theresa May who had also opposed brexit to deal with the mess she spent three years trying to hammer out a brexit deal while also overseeing yet more austerity measures like the so-called two child cap which restricted the child tax credit and other benefits to the first two children in most households so even if you had five kids you only get benefits for two of them which does make sense everyone knows that after the third kid they don't really have to eat and may wasn't exactly a charismatic leader Beyond Westminster despite her attempts to laugh at herself Theresa may never really connected with the public public sector work she was also weakened by episodes like the Party Conference speech where everything that could go wrong did go wrong well before her decision to step down critics said the wheels were coming off her leadership I got to say it's a pretty bad sign when you're literally standing in front of a pretty bad sign ultimately May couldn't hammer out a brexit deal that her party would support so she gave way to this guy whose time in office was a total shambles because while Boris Johnson did finally get a brexit deal done and Britain left the EU on January 31st 2020 that was the exact same day Britain's first cases of the Corona virus were announced and boris's handling of covid was an unmitigated disaster at first he reportedly dismissed it as the new swine flu and just a scare story with one of his advisers saying that he seemed to think covid is just Nature's way of dealing with old people and one of boris's top AIDS Dominic Cummings later testified about just how badly the government handled covid in a hearing featuring readings from messages that he'd sent at the time you called ministers useless morons in emails and whatsapps to your professional colleagues do you feel that you expressed your views too trenchant that your opinion of ministers and of the cabinet overstated the position no I would say if anything it understated the position as events showed in 2020 just to be clear what was bleeped there was Cummings calling his colleagues useless pigs and and that is completely unfair not the part that does apply I'm talking about the term pigs because For the record there's only been one actual Pig in Downing Street and that is David Cameron whose unauthorized biography L we forget told us that as a student at Oxford he apparently once put his dick in a dead Pig's mouth and the thing is he probably would have gotten away with that too if someone hadn't squealed not the pig of course the pig couldn't squeal it was dead plus its mouth was full David Cameron put his dick in a dead Pig's mouth now ultimately Johnson was undone by a series of scandals including his efforts to cover up parties his government repeatedly held during the pandemic in violation of his own lockdown rules so he then gave way to Liz truss who had the shortest tenure of any British prime minister in history we've talked before about her disastrous proposed budget full of tax cuts for the rich which caused a mini economic crisis and we talked about her weird speaking style so there's really not much point in even showing you a clip of her but given how weird she was I'm just going to go ahead and do it anyway my mother took me on protests I went on marches I made banners I stayed at peace camps what is happening there she speaks like a kindergarten teacher during story time but with no book no page turning and crucially no kindergarteners it's like if hold for applause was a person anyway truss was gone in less than 2 months which finally brings us back to sunak the wet a man who literally doesn't have the sense to come in from the rain and look it's objectively fun to look back at what a collection of weirdos ran Britain four years but it gets considerably less fun when you look at what they did to the country and let's start with the most obvious Calamity and that's brexit the pitch for it was that it would free British businesses of Europe's onerous restrictions but instead what what ended up happening was for UK companies looking to trade with Europe especially small businesses the red tape was actually multiplied exponentially remember when we were part of the single Market you could throw a box of tea or a packet of bangers into the back of a Van in Birmingham and just drive it to Barcelona or Bon or Brussels without let or hindrance now you can't do that we were told that we would have the most amazing deal we're going to get our sovereignty and we were going to keep all the advantages of being the EU as a business we were dumb enough to believe that come January last year we got an order from Italy we shipped it as normal thinking there'll be a little bit of paperwork and we'll figure it out and it's sat for 12 weeks in different Customs houses so the reality was very different yeah that sounds like a total mess but I just want to go back to that guy naming cities there cuz I really did not want him to ever stop you can throw a box of tea or a packet of bangers into the back of a Van in Birmingham and drive it to Barcelona or Bon or Brussels or Bratislava or burn or Bucharest or Budapest or Belfast or Berlin or maybe as far away as Bergen or Bill baau or breast or bologna or even Circle back through bad Hoover Dorp you could just drive the point is trading Goods with the EU is now so onerous lots of UK businesses like that woman's have opted to relocate into Mainland Europe which is not good news for the UK and helps explain why brexit is estimated to be costing the UK economy about 100 billion pounds per year but while brexit's the story that made international news austerity might be the more Insidious Legacy of Cameron and his successors because it has in so many ways obliterated the social safety debt take the NHS the UK's healthc care system years of underinvestment have left it gutted and understaffed just watch as the father of one sick child tried unsuccessfully to convey this to Boris Johnson back when he was PM there are not enough people on this war there are not enough doctors they not enough nurses it's not well organized enough right the nhf has been destroyed it's been destroyed it's been destroyed and now you come here for a press opportunity actually here what do you mean there's no press here who are these people what an amazing line to even try to get away with the thing about denying the presses there is the Press tends to catch you doing that because the Press is there but that man's anger was fully Justified weight lists for NHS treatment have exploded more than 7 and a half Mill million people are waiting for non-emergency treatment that is up from 2 million when conservatives first took office it's gone to the point where significant numbers of British people and now going to Europe and paying out of pocket to get treatment this surgeon in Lithuania apparently has a booming business treating British patients last year we did about 400 something 500 maybe sges and about 80% they from UK people from the UK comes because of the waiting time and also excellent quality here of course okay first I I really don't know what's more surprising there the cheerful hammering or the fact he's doing it in the middle of an interview but the fact 80% of his patients and now from the UK is staggering the only foreigners I expect to be flocking to Lithuania on mass are people from New Jersey wanting to see this actual Tony Soprano statue this is real it's in a train station in their Capital here it is from another angle the thing is huge and much like hundreds of British Orthopedic patients it doesn't make any sense that it's suddenly in Lithuania but it's not just the NHS the chys have literally starved the country in 2010 the largest network of food banks in Britain operated just 35 Nationwide today it runs more than 1,300 and 20% of people referred to their food banks are in working households meanwhile more than 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies last year with doctors even seen cases of scurvy and rickets and British 5-year-olds are now a full centimeter shorter than they were in 2010 and it is pretty hard for conservatives to say they're working toward the future growth of Britain when its future Generations are quite literally shrinking the unending parade of austerity Cuts has relentlessly harmed the most vulnerable in Britain take Alexander doodle who has multiple disabilities including a degenerative condition in their hands and feet a few years back they invited a camera crew to see the impact that cuts to things that the government used to provide like home health aids prescription drugs and accessible housing had had on them it just feels like every area has been infected by by cuts the government changed things on on some of your uh pres prescription stuff so one point I was having to pay for four or five medications and I'm just not buying them anymore and I can't afford it again because of funding Cuts there's these huge waiting lists for a wheelchair electric wheelchair which is kind of fundamental for disabled people to be able to get B and so then I I I sold my TV and I had a secondhand lock laptop that I sold and I had a little yard sale at the FR front trying to just sell items and Cutlery and plates and stuff and it were still nowhere near enough that is appalling they're having to sell their Forks to survive and now when you think back to David Cameron blly saying there are things the government does today that it will have to stop doing it makes me even mad at both him and MP Slender Man here but that is the natural endpoint of austerity right there punishing people for circumstances completely beyond their control and sunak is now promising to introduce what he calls the next generation of welfare reforms including yet more Cuts justifying it by saying I worry very much about benefits becoming a lifestyle Choice which is a rich statement from a rich man who' probably go into anaphylactic shock if he ever had to fly coach and the thing is none of this was inevitable the Tories will argue that they faced headwinds of financial crisis and a pandemic but other countries had that too but made different choices and as a result on a perers basis econom IC growth has been slower in the UK than in the US and the EU since the 2008 financial crisis so it is no wonder Britain's want to change and personally I would want the changes to be a bit more sweeping than some of what starma is currently proposing which includes maintaining conservative tax and spending plans until growth returns and keeping the two child benefit cap that just isn't the kind of bold political courage I would like to see from someone who remember took violin lessons with Fat Boy Slim and it does say something even our starma appears poised to sweep into office in a landslide Britain's don't seem that Fired Up by him so if you had to describe K's campaign in one word no no one really cares cuz we all know he's going to win so he kind of gets a free pass on most stuff there seems to be a lot of shrugs going on at the moment but maybe that's just where we are as a country yeah I mean maybe that is true but after everything you've seen tonight you can probably understand why people are much more concerned about who's leaving than then who is coming next if a wild Badger broke into your home and everything up for 14 years straight tearing absolutely everything apart you might think well you know what we'll argue about redecorating choices later right now that Badger's got to go and I will say if the UK can successfully rid itself of the Tories next month that is not a cause for a shrug that's a cause for a celebration and I know that celebration is not something that necessarily comes naturally to Britain is the country's most famous motivational slogan is Keep Calm and Carry On And even that morale booster basically amounted to I know you're about to die but there's no need to make a scene that was supposed to get us through World War II but if Britain can extricate itself from the party whose unremitting cruelty has Stained the last decade and a half of British life that does deserve to be marked and I know Dancing in the Street doesn't really fit with the British character so instead why not celebrate what's hopefully about to happen with the single most British symbol imaginable a rainstorm because on July 4th Britain has a chance to watch itself clean a 14 miserable years of conservative Rule and is a chance it simply must take if I may quote Bill pman yelling about aliens if we do this the 4th of July will no longer be known as just an American holiday but also as the day when Britain looked at the conservatives who've driven the entire country into a ditch and said in one voice loud and clear off into the sun you pigs and Weirdos you tossers wankers dick splashes and wbl if Britain stands together this July the 4th it will finally celebrate its independence day that is our show thank you so much for watching we're off for the next few weeks fact July 21st good night give us freedom wash these away watch the world [Applause]

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 4,111,944

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Id: tkAqwHiAR-g

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2024