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Reform UK is getting into the lottery business – inviting people to sign up for a chance to have their energy bills paid for a year. But is the real prize a massive database of voters ahead of the next General Election?

Plus – party leader Nigel Farage has been caught saying some pretty questionable stuff for money on Cameo. Is that really the kind of thing we should expect from someone who plans to be our next Prime Minister?

Nish and Coco are joined by authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. Their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed looks at the billionaire manbaby in a whole new way. If you want to understand what’s driving Musk and what it could mean for all of us – this is the chat for you.

And POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy is on hand as the former Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner pops up to point out all the ways Labour is getting it wrong at the moment – subtext: without her they’re lost.

Reminder to send in your burning questions for Nish and Coco to psuk@reducedlistening.co.uk

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GUESTS 

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Authors. Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
Out on March 24th

Anne McElvoy, Executive Editor, POLITICO and co-host Politics at Sam and Anne’s

USEFUL LINKS

The Podcast Show – https://www.thepodcastshowlondon.com/explore-passes

Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/477340/muskism-by-tarnoff-quinn-slobodian-and-ben/9780241805114

CREDITS

The Guardian – YouTube
The Independent – YouTube
Reform UK – YouTube
Today in Focus – The Guardian

Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.
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TRANSCRIPTS

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I’m Nish Kumar.

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan.

Nish Kumar Reform is on the money this week, and not in a good way, whether it’s energy bills lotteries, Richard Tice avoiding a big tax bill, or Nigel Farage pretty much saying anything for cash on Cameo.

Coco Khan Plus, we’re joined by the authors of a new book which looks at the billionaire man-baby Elon Musk in a whole new way.

Nish Kumar And what with wars in Iran and Ukraine, Keir Starmer was already having a busy week. And then Angela Rayner popped up at a soft Labour event.

Coco Khan That’s right. She’s back and she’s got opinions. Anne McElvoy from Politico will be with us to work out what Angela’s got planned.

Nish Kumar Are you worried that your energy bills are about to soar because of the war in the Middle East? Don’t worry, Nigel Farage has got you. Just head over to www.NigelCutMyBills.com

Clip And if you give us your details on that website, in the next week or two, we’re gonna draw one of those names and Nigel is gonna come to your house and he’s gonna pay your energy bills and those of everyone who live on your street for an entire year.

Coco Khan Sorry, I’m just having visions of Nigel Farage knocking at my door. What?

Nish Kumar It’s a nightmare. I’d rather paint my streets energy bus.

Coco Khan So, as Robert Jenrick explained there, one lucky winner will get Nigel Farage knocking at their door. Their energy bills and the energy bills of the whole street will be paid for one year. It’s the most squid game, stroke Troy McClure thing I’ve seen.

Nish Kumar At this point, Adam Curtis documentaries are almost making themselves. I mean, this is a collapsing economic system writ large. The stunt is being used to promote Reform’s announcement that the party will be getting rid of VAT and green levies on energy bills. But at the same time, Reform UK is cheering on an illegal war on Iran, which is raising energy bills, but at the time saying they want to cut your energy bill. Like nothing about, as always with Reform, very little about what they’re saying makes any sense whatsoever. I’m not a lawyer, but certainly something about it feels eggy.

Coco Khan Sorry to keep Labouring on my Simpsons references, but you know, like Dr. Nick on the back of a, it’s got real Dr. Nick vibes about it. The party insists that the giveaway is allowed because it’s open to anyone and the winner does not have to commit to voting for reform.

Nish Kumar It’s also really worth pointing out that without doing anything systemic to reduce people’s energy bills and instead just paying off a street’s energy bills, you know, it’s really revealing of the way Reform UK sees the country and it’s an attempt to return to almost like a Victorian system of patronage, where just every so often wealthy people hand the pavos a stack of cash and then do nothing to actually help improve the lives of most of the people living in this country.

Coco Khan I think it’s quite Trumpy, isn’t it? It’s that winners and losers thing. And it’s writ large here. It’s quite literally a game. You know, what if you don’t enter that competition or you do and you don t win? Oh, well, wha wha, like, you know, energy poverty for you, I guess. What is this? How is this being spun as being, you know, warm or for the people? I find it quite grotesque.

Nish Kumar It also shows you where we are as a country. I mean, a couple of years ago in 2022, during the height of the cost of living crisis or that phase of the costs of living crisis, there was a thing on this morning where Phil Schofield and Holly Willoughby were hosting a segment where they, it was called spin to win. And one of the prizes was paying four months of your energy bills. It is deeply, deeply worrying. The party is, to be absolutely fair to reform, totally flush with cash after a recent 12 million pound donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourn.

Coco Khan And also in many ways, this is quite cheap because everyone entering the competition will give over their contact details and I’m sure that data will be very useful for a form for campaigning purposes.

Nish Kumar Yeah, it’s a data mining exercise. It’s a worthwhile financial investment for them in terms of the access to information that it allows. At the heart of the policy is cutting that on energy bills, which ultimately means less money going into the government’s coffers. Nigel Farage is also committing to extra money for defense. Now, the only way you can square any of this is by his own admission imposing very, very tough benefit cuts.

Coco Khan Call me an old fashioned progressive, but clearly the best way to raise money for the country is through a fair tax system. However, some are questioning how fair it even is that reform deputy leader Richard Tice could take advantage of a rare legal status known as a real estate investment for us.

Nish Kumar According to the Sunday Times, that meant his property company could avoid paying almost £600,000 worth of tax between 2018 and 2021. Farage was quick to come to Tice’s defense, speaking at a reform press conference on Tuesday.

Clip Richard Tice has obeyed the law. He’s filed his accounts on time, he’s obeyed the law in every way and no one pays more tax than they have to. You don’t, I don’t. No one does.

Nish Kumar I don’t know how many more times we can say this, but reform are the champions of capital. They’re the champions at the wealthy. They are an instrument of deregulated capitalism and unchecked corporate power. And anyone pretending otherwise is a liar or a moron.

Coco Khan A lot of these populist leaders, they ride to power, or certainly close to power through this message of, you know, drain the swamp, we’re not like the other guys. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but actually this tax avoidance story in reform is the least of Farage’s concerns this week because a Guardian investigation into videos He’s posted on Cameo, I mean, it’s nothing short of skin crawling.

Nish Kumar I’m sure you’re all aware of Cameo, but it’s a platform which you can pay celebrities to send you a personalized message. The Guardian has analyzed over 4,000 clips that Farage has produced since joining the platform in 2021. It is a miracle. He has time. And I’m, sure he is doing this. Do his job as a member of parliament, given the amount of external interest he seems to have.

Coco Khan So a lot of the messages are pretty innocuous, really. It’s like birthday messages, Christmas messages, thanking people for voting reform. But some of it is really quite concerning. So Farage charged £155 for one video he made in 2025 for a man named Ben Tavener. He’d received a 16 month sentence for his involvement in a far right riot.

Clip Ben, it’s Nigel Farage here. Lossy and your mum have been in touch. They told me all about the summer riots of 2024 and you doing your bit to try and break the whole thing up. Yeah, it all turned very, very nasty. Now you clearly got the most incredible prison sentence in Ben. What for the first time we saw and understood to be two tiered Britain. Absolutely outrageous in.

Nish Kumar In another video for which he was paid £141, he promoted an event by Canadian Neo-Nazi Group which used the clip in propaganda alongside fascist salutes and antisemitic imagery.

Clip They’d have to go back. Now, hello, Andrea Hallworth. It’s Nigel Farage here. And we’re told you don’t like comedy, but your friends are trying to get you to attend Roe Rage Terror Tour comedy show. But you’re hesitant. Now look, it’s hosted by Jeremy McKenzie, Derek Harrison, and Alex Rend. And it’s currently the most talked about show in Canada. So do you know what, Andrea? Just sometimes in life we’re a bit reluctant, a bit hesitant to go and do things we don’t really fancy doing But for the sake of a couple of hours of an evening, why not give it a go? You never know, you might walk out saying road rage terror tour is the best thing that ever happened

Nish Kumar Premise of that video is that he’s inviting the mayor of Ontario to this road rage terror tour, which is hosted by the names that he mentions, Jeremy McKenzie, Derek Harrison and Alex Brent. Now, those men are the leaders of Diagilon, a group identified as a Canadian far-right extremist group by the US State Department in 2022. Their website advertised a book alluding to Adolf Hitler called Meme Camp, and group’s extremist slogan, they have to go back. Is a nod to the forced repatriation of migrants. That slogan is what you hear Farage repeat at the top of the clip.

Coco Khan So Farage’s spokesperson said he used the platform in good faith and without knowledge of the individuals involved beyond what is written for him in the prompt. They added, if individuals or groups subsequently choose to misuse or repurpose a cameo recording that is clearly outside Mr. Farage knowledge or control.

Nish Kumar While Farage claims to have been duped into repeating Diagon’s far-right slogan, in cameo videos reviewed by The Guardian as part of the same investigation, he uses, or more often alludes to, the hardline anti-immigration phrase, if in doubt, kick them out more than 20 times. So I guess the question is, does any of this matter? As in, will any of this stick to the sort of slipperiest man in British politics?

Coco Khan Probably not. I am haunted by the interview we did with Liam Thorpe from the Liverpool Echo few episodes ago. Do check it out, go back and listen to it. It’s really, really interesting where he talks about how fundamentally when he went out and he interviewed people on the street, people said they believed that he did racist things, but it wouldn’t stop them wanting for reform. And so fundamentally, we know who’s going to dislike this story. It is people I can’t This is going to make our skin crawl. This is gonna just put more fear in us about him possibly being prime minister. This is a man who at the very best in this scenario, just doesn’t bother to read things, doesn’t bothered bother to Google names, doesn’ bother to do basic fact-checking, which is what you would expect for someone who is meant to be leading this country. So that’s the very bad. The very worst is he knew what he was doing and he didn’t care.

Nish Kumar Yeah, he’s got an astonishing amount of outside interests, given that he is a serving MP. If we just look at America at the moment, in the lead up to the 2024 election, we saw a lot of the podcast buffoons line up behind Donald Trump. Many of them are comedians, they all lined up behind Trump. Now, everything that Trump has done in the ensuing year and a half. None of it’s- hugely been a surprise if you pay any attention and have basic critical faculties. You know, if you had any sense of Donald Trump, nothing about the ICE raids, nothing about the regime change war in Iran should really have surprised you. But what we’ve had to see is a bunch of nauseating clips from these men saying things like, this isn’t what Trump promised he would do. You fucking morons. This is exactly what he was going to do. Now, what it would say for us in the United Kingdom. It’s that old saying, when people tell you who they are, believe them, okay? If reform do form the next government in this country at the next election, whatever that is, nothing about what they will do should be a surprise, okay. Just follow the things that Farage has said. Follow the things Farage’s done and extrapolate outwards from there. And if there is a reform government and we do see them enact some of the terrible things there. They’re saying or they do behave in a policy manner that’s consistent with the rhetoric coming out of Farage in these videos. What I don’t want to hear is any of you fucking people going on your podcast saying things like, oh my god, this isn’t what we voted for. It’s exactly what you voted for. Own it. If you’re going to express contrition and remorse, express contritional remorse. Don’t pretend that you didn’t know that this was going to happen. I don’t want to see any of that. And I will admittedly watching it from a gulag in Kent. Where I have been immediately transported once Nigel Farage is Prime Minister. I don’t know what the television facilities are gonna be like. I might have to hear about it when my girlfriend comes to visit me. But don’t, when Amy comes to me in the Gulag in Orpington. Please, please do not have her have to tell me. That all of you people that are lining up behind Farage are now expressing surprise at the things that he has done. I don’t want to hear about it. I’ve got enough problems. I’m in a gulag in Kent. Still to come, the man, the myth, the musk. We dig into what makes Elon tick and why his rise is about so much more than him being a tech bro with a lot of money.

Coco Khan [AD]

Coco Khan To many, he’s an emotionally charged narcissist. He’s supporting dangerous far-right characters across the globe. But to others, he is a free speech warrior, crusading against the woke mind virus. One thing is for sure though, there’s been a lot written about Elon Musk.

Nish Kumar But do all these accounts miss something? Should we see Musk not as another socially maladjusted tech billionaire, but rather as a symptom of today’s world? Musk’s not just an individual, but a propagator of a worldview.

Coco Khan That’s the argument historian Quinn Slobodian and tech writer Ben Tarnoff make in their new book, Muskism, a guide for the perplexed. They join us now. Quinn and Ben, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Ben Tarnoff Happy to be here. Thanks so much for having us.

Nish Kumar Do you have the worst job in the Western Hemisphere currently writing a book about Elon Musk?

Quinn Slobodian Well, now that it’s done, we’ve cleansed ourselves and sort of bleached and then rinsed ourselves several times and now we can look back at it with a little bit of distance, thank God.

Nish Kumar Would you be able to make a conservative estimate on how many of his tweets you’ve had to read?

Ben Tarnoff Oh, thousands, thousands. Definitely thousands. It’s more fun to do with a friend. I mean, there were many reasons to undertake this collaboration, but one of them was just like preserving sanity is easier to do. Harm reduction, yeah. Together, harm reduction. Because he’s prolific.

Coco Khan It’s prolific, isn’t it?

Ben Tarnoff Extremely.

Coco Khan I mean, what are we talking? A tweet an hour?

Ben Tarnoff Oh, I think more, I mean, I think Bloomberg did an analysis of this.

Quinn Slobodian At its peak, it was something like 60 an hour, I think, or more. Yeah, yeah. You can see they graphed it out and it’s just like a kind of slow sine wave that just turns into like solid black by the end of it. Oh, God.

Nish Kumar We talk a lot about Elon Musk at various points for various reasons, none of which are ever very good. Can you explain what Muskism is as a kind of thesis for the book?

Ben Tarnoff Yeah. So we’re interested in trying to think about Musk less as an individual. There’s obviously been a lot of commentary on his personal psychology, his personal biography. We’re curious about what happens when you zoom out a little bit and look at his life and work as a whole. And when you do, you find certain recurring themes that we extrapolate into a kind of broader political economic system that we call Muskism and the kind of one line capsule summary of what we mean by Muskism. Is that it’s the promise of sovereignty through technology that both individuals and nation states can fortify their self-reliance in an unstable world by plugging into his infrastructures.

Quinn Slobodian The rough analog that we’re using is to Fordism.

Nish Kumar Just for a British audience who are aware of Ford motorcars, but maybe we’re not as culturally au fait with the figure of Henry Ford, just briefly kind of give us a kind of primer on Ford.

Ben Tarnoff Yeah, so Henry Ford, arguably the most successful American industrialist of the 20th century, known for founding the Ford Motor Company. And usually kind of two main things are attributed to Ford. One is that he introduces the moving assembly line in the 19-teens in Michigan, which makes it possible to make the production of automobiles vastly more efficient. He achieves this incredible rationalization of production. On the other hand, he’s also known for introducing the $5 day, which at the time was a much higher wage than most industrial workers were getting. And this is how commentators of the last century talked about Fordism. Ford did not see himself as a Fordist. That wasn’t like a category that would have made sense to him. But when commentators were looking at what he did and trying to think about what is the system that’s implied here, they came up with mass production plus mass consumption. And this was a system where you could achieve this advance in productivity, but also stabilize the system, right? By giving people something, a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage. And that was kind of the social settlement that stabilized capitalism in the middle of the 20th century and in many industrial countries. Our question for Muskism is, what is he offering? What is the social contract of Muskism? What is promise of muskism.

Coco Khan And did you get to the bottom of that?

Nish Kumar Not really. I mean, it has different… You mean what’s the, there’s a lot of sticks, but what’s carat of musk? Yeah, exactly.

Quinn Slobodian Well, the thing is, you know, his public persona is so grotesque and overblown and, um, off-putting and repellent that I think it can be easy to, to be distracted from the structural basis of his power. I mean, among other things, he’s the wealthiest man in history. He will oversee an IPO later this year that will be the largest IPO in history when SpaceX goes public, probably evaluation at $1.75 trillion. So if you look at SpaceX, for example, you start to see what is the thing that he’s giving to people in return? Well, SpaceX has a complete choke hold on getting mass into orbit right now in the United States. So if want to put a satellite into space, you have to go to Elon Musk. That’s true even if you’re Spain or Austria wanting to put communication satellite in space, you have go to go Elon Musk, so he’s now controlled this ever more important layer that is above the Earth through which battlefield operations are organized through which soon satellite to handset cellular will be transmittable. Already Starlink has become indispensable in the battlefield in a place like Ukraine. So a lot of the things you usually think about the basic functioning of a sovereign state, right, the ability to send their troops into battle, the ability to monitor communications. Musk is offering that anyway to his government clients and increasingly to consumer clients too. So that’s the beginning of, I think, what could be a long. Story about Musk’s, um, you know, services that he offers in return for tolerating what his outrageousness.

Nish Kumar I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but doesn’t that render the phrase sovereignty through technology a total nonsense? Because not sovereignty, it’s actually, he’s essentially a kind of baron or an oligarch. The state is sort of subservient to his whims, right?

Ben Tarnoff Well, so the concept we use to try to understand this dynamic is state symbiosis, where it’s very important for us to make the case that Musk is not a libertarian, that he doesn’t seek to shrink the state. He really seeks a fusion of public and private power. And the US government typically finds it of great value to purchase these services. For instance, in the case of Musk, through SpaceX, he’s achieved a more than 90% reduction in the cost of getting mass into orbit. If you’re the Pentagon, that’s a very appealing value for you. So it’s not precisely that he’s completely parasitized the state. That would actually be a kind of different interaction. It’s this more nuanced dynamic where governments increasingly feel that they need to exercise core sovereign functions through the use of high technology, satellites, artificial intelligence, and so forth. But in order to do so, they have to purchase those services from. A private provider, a dynamic we describe as sovereignty as a service.

Quinn Slobodian But I think at a larger level, what we’re trying to get it in the book is something even stranger, which is Musk’s often quite fabulous depictions of a coming future are actually also the load bearing infrastructure for the global financial system. So one of the top 10 investors and shareholders in Tesla is the sovereign oil fund of Norway, for example. And they need to hold on to Tesla stock and they need believe Musk’s rantings and ravings about 100 billion. Humanoid robots coming in the next decade, because it keeps the stock up and then it keeps dividends coming out to pensioners in Norway. Same thing goes for people who hold pension funds that are wrapped up in the stock market. So to keep the growth story going, to keep S&P 500 rising, the NASDAQ rising, people like Musk, who seem like maniacs, need to be implicitly or explicitly believed by the institutional investor class. And that’s the real kind of dependency that we see, that we kind of need him to keep this growth engine.

Coco Khan I’m going to ask you a question about what’s happening in the UK. So Britain’s energy regulator has approved Tesla to provide electricity to the UK, the government has also sought closer ties with Palantir, NHS has contracted Palanty to deliver a data platform and the Ministry of Defense has awarded Palantyr a three year contract. You know, there’s been a lot of controversy about that here and there’s a hope, I think, like, you know, people who are interested in social democracy, that we have in place checks and balances to stop muskism. From running rampant. Do you believe that there is any social structure that can? This unholy alliance that you’ve described where, you know, we have to, we have to believe his mythologizing in order to continue to keep things kind of the same really, because otherwise at best, right, exactly. Do you think there’s any way of running a country that could kind of liberate us from this ridiculousness?

Ben Tarnoff Yeah, absolutely. And I think, actually, efforts are underway. If you look, in the case of Europe, there are a number of governments who, really, because of the actions of the current Trump administration and what we’ve been thinking of as the educational shock value of someone like Musk, are actually making real investments towards things like space sovereignty. So for instance, there’s a Spanish startup that is attempting to follow. The example of SpaceX in developing low cost reusable rockets to put more satellites into low earth orbit. There’s a French provider, UTELSAT, that has about 600 low earth orbit satellites in comparison to about 10,000 by Starlink. But again, those are gaps that can be closed through.

Nish Kumar In the 1980s, the Thatcher government handed over so much of our public sector to the private sector on that same basis and now, I don’t wish to be crass, but our rivers are full of shit and none of our water system works at all and our train system is overblown and expensive. It’s a complicated case to make, I think right now, to the British public at this point in history that the private sector is more agile and innovative when it comes to delivering public services. Why is there such a lack of political will to actually… Engage with that idea.

Quinn Slobodian I mean, I think this gets to something Ben said a minute ago about the kind of pedagogical utility of Musk, like his monstrous qualities are helpful because they sort of snap us out of something that has been a kind of slumber or complicity. I think it’s been a while now that we’ve understood that finance is political. So you mentioned, you know, if you think about the sell-off of rail and telecoms in the United Kingdom, we know now that there’s something nefarious about the way asset managers and private equity. Milk out those infrastructures for value and leave very little for users. The useful thing about Musk is that he himself has been forthright and clear that technology is political too, right? For a long time, critics and communication scholars had to make the case like, no, no, the algorithms are political. No, no there are biases built into even things like search engines or whatever, facial recognition software, these things don’t treat all humans equally. Um, and you know, the response of the center was sort of shrug and say, well, no, technology in the end is just neutral. There is nothing wrong with taking Silicon Valley tech because, you know we’re using it within our own regulatory environment. Now you have someone like Musk who comes along and said like, no, it’s all infected with the woke mind virus and you need to buy my tech because I have the antibodies and the anti woke mind, this is the richest man in the world, the man convincing institutional investors. It’s sort of like, oh, okay. So now, I guess we can. Confess like finance, the tech is political, and there are stakes in doing a contract with Palantir, and you can’t assume that they’re just going to be acting in the best interest of the customer or the client. That they’re bringing along with them a set of social relations and power relations, let alone higher loyalties to their boss back home that need to be thought twice about.

Coco Khan But there is still, I know that, you know, you guys have made a very compelling case for not just focusing on the man Elon Musk, but it is very difficult to not. I mean, aside from his terrible personality, but, you know, so Reuters reported that in 2025 Musk ordered the shutdown of the Starlink satellite service whilst Ukraine was attempting to retake territory from Russia. That’s him. That is him as an individual taking action that has geopolitical consequences, probably even like death. It’s hard to not think of the word you used, which was barren. We’re talking about techno feudalism and so on and so forth. If Musk was to die tomorrow, would his legacy continue?

Ben Tarnoff I think the answer is yes. I mean, I think you’re pointing to something important, which is that when you think about the kind of power that Musk possesses, it really exceeds any kind of comparable example that we could draw. I mean Henry Ford would be a good example. Like Henry Ford couldn’t just wake up in the middle of the night and turn off, you know, an integral piece of modern warfare halfway around the world. He also couldn’t wake up in the middle of night and post a meme and have that inflate the value of a cryptocurrency. You know, the way we think about what would happen if Musk disappeared from the historical stage tomorrow is that the ensemble of historical forces that we’re trying to map as Muskism would likely persist in some form, perhaps in a different political direction. But when we’re thinking about de-globalization, which is kind of one of the main threads we follow in the book, or digitization, specifically now under the banner of AI, you know, these are likely to continue.

Coco Khan You know, you always want to know the chicken and the egg, right? What came first, Musk or Muskism? But it sounds like you’re saying that, you know, obviously he’s been on the rise for some time, but the infrastructure, the environment for a character like him to rise has been there for some of time.

Quinn Slobodian Yeah, I mean, that’s really how we’re trying to use him is to help explain what the big trends have been in the 21st century so far to make someone like him, you know, snowball to the level of wealth and influence he has. So a couple of those things already alluded to, the overwhelming importance of digital capitalism to drive the global financial system. There’s other things too, right? The attempt to do a green energy transition under the banner of something like green capitalism has also been a source of great power for him. The war on terror. Actually was something that was essential for Musk’s seizure of market share. And up to now, right, the ongoing war in Iran makes clear that the United States effort to police the globe is also creating business opportunities for new actors to come along and say, you know, we are the insurgent new corporate players in a very Muskist fashion. We will be nimble, we will be more cost cutting. We’re not like the old giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. So turn to us, the AI. Uh, warriors, uh, for the present moment, while Musk stands in then as someone who’s managed either through his own contingent luck, his own intuition as a business person or guidance from people around him has managed to, you know, surf the wave of the zeitgeist in a way that our book tries to help kind of give a narrative for.

Nish Kumar The clearest expression we’ve had of sort of political philosophy is Doge so far, essentially, because he’s brought into the government, heads up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He promised to cut up to $2 trillion from the U.S. Budget, mainly by rolling back DEI grants. The cuts were made, but the savings didn’t stack up. And this video of a former Doge employee during a lawsuit deposition might actually help explain why.

Clip How do you interpret DEI? The EO explicitly laid out the details. I don’t remember it off the top of my head. It’s OK. I’m asking for your understanding of it. Yeah. My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO. So can you? I don’t remember what was in the EO.

Nish Kumar It’s exactly what you’re saying in terms of it’s mimetic warfare. It’s just the surface level phrases and the whole aim is to sort of provoke. But there isn’t necessarily a huge amount of thinking behind it beyond that. So last year, the BBC, a BBC analysis of DOGE could only trace $32 billion in actual savings, which for context is less than half a percent of the total US federal budget. What’s your read on what he set out to achieve and did achieve through DOGE?

Quinn Slobodian Yeah, I mean, I think you can really look at it in two ways. So in one way of looking at it is that it was an abject failure in the way you describe, but a failure partially because of the limits of understanding politics in this mimetic, thin cybernetic way. Why does that perspective matter to make sense of what he thought he was doing? Because he saw the government as just another bunch of computers, right? There was nothing particularly unique about the state or the government. It’s just a one network among many. And because it’s one network among many, it has the same problem that Twitter had. It’s got a bunch of ghost employees, it’s got bunch of bots, and you need to use technology to locate them and purge them from the system. This was the big story of DOGE day-to-day was that there are vampires collecting social security, there are all kinds of fake and illegal immigrants who are collecting pension payouts and Medicare payments. So the project was then to begin with the bugs in the system, But if you’re talking about immigrants in particular, and he almost always was, then you need to find those bugs outside of the system. And the clearing of the database is actually just the precondition for the clearing of the actual body politic through mass roundups and deportation. So DOGE could be seen as being, yes, a cost-cutting measure, but not in the old fashioned kind of management consultant come in and figure out how to trim the fat. But it was really an attempt to clean the code base of the state as a precursor for cleaning. The code base of the population. It turns out, in fact, there weren’t as many bots and vampires and ghouls and shadow people in the database as he presumed through his distorted worldview. But what there was, was a lot of people who’d paid into social security for their whole lives. There’s a lot people who were either elderly or low income and required the thin gruel of the welfare state that the United States offers. And that’s actually the big chunk of what the federal budget. And the moment he started to get into that, huge backlash, huge response, town halls filled with people screaming and shouting, and that’s basically when he gets ushered out the back door. So you look at it that way, failure, Doe showed that we’re not just memes, we’re not just bots, like we’re fleshly people with all kinds of material needs and we can get angry if we get provoked. Looked at as a success, however, you can see the way that he went in and smashed up silos that had previously existed between different agencies and departments. He made different pools of data interoperable and legible to one another. And in the meantime, plugged in new forms of often AI driven software, including his own Grok chat bot, but especially the UK’s favorite Palantir as a way to then carry out future missions within the federal mandates. So the deportations that we’re seeing in the roundups at a place like Minneapolis earlier this year are in some ways, you know, directly downstream. From the successes of DOGE, because it has actually been able to better automate and mechanize certain forms of population management. So one shouldn’t, I think, be too distracted by the figures and kind of look at more the way that the institutions are being transformed.

Coco Khan But also he’s embedded his own technology even deeper, therefore lining his own pockets in a more guaranteed way.

Quinn Slobodian And we know from at least one whistleblower who incredibly reported having a thumb drive with all of the social security data of Americans living with something else called the death master file and all living, all Americans dead, which he reportedly was, um, you know, instructed to take with him to his new private employer. So that possibility of world historical data grab is definitely still on the table as well.

Coco Khan I mean, this is particularly relevant to us because as we’ve described, you know, Palantir is in so many departments now, but also our biggest threat as, you know, progressives is Nigel Farage. He’s kind of our, let’s call him hard right to figure here in the UK. He has said he wants to copy DOGE.

Nish Kumar Called DOGE, right? DOGE, yeah, yeah. That’s such a good term. We’ve been hearing about that. Yeah, yeah that’s the- Department of local government officials.

Coco Khan Oh wow, I didn’t know that, so that’s great to know.

Nish Kumar Also, there’s no reason for you guys to know this, but finding more efficiency in our local governments may only be possible if you scrap them all together. Like, we’ve had 15 years of efficiencies in local governments, so the idea that you could cut any more from that is fucking insane. So if we’re looking at the, you know, forages like the sort of DOGE slash DOGE emissary in the UK, and we’re look at muskism, you now, as this kind of global force that still has the kind of. Its footprints all over the kind of American state. Is there actually constructively a way to push back against this?

Ben Tarnoff Yeah, I think you could think about it in a couple of different ways. I mean, one is kind of the realm of high politics of like, how do you actually increase independent state capacity to reduce your reliance on monopoly private providers? But another is the space of social movements and popular mobilization. I mean Quinn mentioned the case of Minneapolis. Minneapolis is, you know, on the one hand an example of muskism in action because you had, as Quinn alluded to, these data integration efforts within the federal government that made it possible to use high technology to target more people for detention and deportation. When you actually see videos from the streets of Minneapolis, you see heavily armed agents of the state using things like facial recognition software and Palantir analytics to go door to door and conduct operations. But you also saw an extraordinary popular response. Where you have community members who are also using technology, using things like signal groups to build networks of solidarity and resistance and successfully turned back that incursion and has in turn, you know, not just had an effect for the people of Minneapolis but has managed to shift public opinion nationally. So we now have a majority of Americans in favor of abolishing ICE. We may in fact have an opening now for a new kind of. Program a new kind of rhetoric around immigration, which in the United States both parties have been moving to the right for decades on. So I think sometimes when we talk about this book, it can feel a bit overwhelming or kind of inevitable. You mentioned this, we talked about like muskism, will it persist without Musk? But I think we really wanna emphasize that there’s quite a lot of room for maneuver here for progressives. There’s quite of weaknesses and fragilities in the system. Partly because muskism, as we talked about before, is quite weak on the question of the social contract of what it’s offering. It doesn’t think about consent or legitimacy in the same way because of this cyborg model of reality. And that’s a real opening for people to organize.

Quinn Slobodian And the case of Farage is actually an important case in point, right? Cause they broke up, right. They’re actually not buddies anymore. And why aren’t they buddies? Because again, Musk’s sort of cybernetic narrow understanding of politics actually doesn’t even have space for sovereigntyism in the sense of the European far, right, right in case after case from the AFD in Germany through Holland, Italy, and now here in the UK as well. Musk has tried to reach out to European far-right parties, boost their signal, give them mimetic energy from him. And often they’ve had to kind of treat him at arm’s length because it’s actually not clear that taking support, let alone cash from an American centibillionaire is actually helping your bona fides as the party of the true people in the land, right? So he broke up with Farage. Now he’s thrown his weight behind Restore UK. Which he sees, I think, as the new kind of Tesla of politics that’s gonna churn through and make all the old legacy parties defunct. But it seems like more often than not, he’s unable to actually understand the grievances that drive these things, and therefore he ends up kind of contaminating and staining the very movements he’s trying to support.

Coco Khan Quinn and Ben, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Muskism, a guide for the perplexed is out next week in all good bookstores. After the break, we’re joined by Politico’s Anne McElvoy to discuss what Angela Rayner is up to.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Nish Kumar Angela Reyna has been keeping things pretty low key since her resignation last year. Even during Keir Starmer’s recent leadership troubles, she kept her head down. But are things changing, given her appearance at an event last night for the campaign group Mainstream?

Coco Khan Don’t forget, we’re still waiting for the result of an HMRC investigation into the amount of stamp duty she paid on a flat. Everyone assumed that she wouldn’t make a return to the spotlight until that was done. Apparently though, she actually approached HMRCs to offer to help their investigation to speed it along.

Nish Kumar Part of the reason her comments last night have, I think, got so much traction today as we record on Wednesday, is that they went to the heart of what many people feel is dragging Labour down right now. So we’re joined by Anne McElvoy, she’s the executive editor at Politico and the co-host of politics at Sam and Anne’s. And first of all, thank you so much for joining us at Pod Save the UK.

Anne McElvoy Great to have a debut with you.

Nish Kumar It is a lot to get through here and so let’s just jump straight in before we get into what was actually said I guess our first question should be why now what what? Why at this moment essential range chose to make a kind of intervention in public?

Anne McElvoy I think a couple of things, as you suggested, Coco, when you described her situation, waiting for her tax affairs to be concluded and money that she owes on having not paid enough stamp duty on a quite complex set of transactions, which ultimately cost her her job as a deputy leader. And she, I think, really wants to get into a situation where she feels she can speak, she can speak openly, she can put out an alternative vision of where she feels the Labour Party ought to be going. Why now? Well, to be honest, I think she’s just got bored waiting, as anybody who’s had any dealings with tax authorities probably knows the feeling. It is interesting that she has chosen a kind of narrative that builds on the defeat in Gordon and Denton. We could get into that in a moment, whether she’s right or not. But that gives her some talking points, say, look, we’ve gone too hard. Shabana Mahmood is clearly her target as Home Secretary. We’re going too hard on asylum, on immigration. If we get this wrong, and she’s suggesting Labour is getting it wrong, the party will bleed support, the idea being it would go towards the left and the Greens. And that was the setting in which she spoke last night was kind of left-wing enclave of MPs in a pub in Westminster. So all very cozy, kind of Lefty vibes.

Nish Kumar Do you think this is, she’s actually skipped the process by which she would have to oust Keir Starmer. It’s sort of operating on the assumption that she’s already fighting a leadership contest against Japan of a moon like that. Hearing you describe it in that way did really make me feel like she’s gone. Well, obviously he’s done. Let’s talk to my real opponent here.

Anne McElvoy Kea-hoo.

Nish Kumar I really had the feeling of that.

Anne McElvoy It did slightly have that vibe. I think it’s a very good point that effectively she was tilting Shabana’s image. There is another way to read her comments. You could read it as her saying, you need people like me back in when I get my first small matter. She sees it as small. Some people, according to what polling or people in the public see as more serious about her tax affairs. I need to come back in and I’m going to bring this Labour Values Plainsong. As someone called it with me, which is that we need to change, otherwise we face an existential threat. And this is where your point is really quite trenchant. You’re saying Keir Starmer led the party from a large majority into an existential threat in two years. That’s quite a record. Do you think she’s kind of called it correctly? No, I don’t think so. I think she is living in a bit of a Labour soft left bubblehead. Whether, in the end, you’re going to win. Or win back electability for Labour by going so hard against the Home Secretary and into an internal argument about how you’re handling leave to remain and the conditions for leave to remain, I very much doubt. You’re making an assumption that the public is in a very different place on this, or a decisive group in the electorate, let’s say, to where a lot of people are, which is why Shabana Mahmood is moving this way to start with. And you can certainly make… The argument for what she’s saying in the insecurity that it brings and how it makes a group of people feel and whether that’s fair or not, but by using the word un-British, which as we all know, it’s a blunderbuss when you roll that one out. It means I don’t have to say anything that is clear about what I think the real issue is. Someone who’s not of Angela Rayner’s persuasion, who’s trying hard to revitalize welfare reforms, for instance, because if you imagine, if that’s your position on this, what’s your positioning going to be on the other difficult stuff? They were just saying is she lives in a bit of a world of Angela Rayner and people who are attracted to her politically and think she’s wonderful and fun, which she is.

Coco Khan Right answer. That’s so interesting because I, my assumption when I read this story was that all the comments, forget who was in the pub. It wasn’t about who was the pub, it was about all the voters that were thinking of defecting to the Greens or maybe other places. That’s who I thought she was talking to. And fundamentally those are the people, I don’t know how many of them are still Labour members, but if she was to make a leadership challenge, she would need to win them over. So that’s what I thought in terms of this question And Lorena’s assessment, was it right? For that aim, it probably was right though, right? If she is mounting a leadership challenge. Well, she doesn’t need the public for a leadership challenge. She needs the members, right?

Anne McElvoy She needs the members. She need the members and the MPs. I felt it was, I am the queen of the soft left, although it was moving into a much more, there’s nothing soft about me. Here I’m prepared to take on, she didn’t name it, but she very clearly was tilting at Shabana Mood and her whole vision of politics, that sort of blue Labour strand, which says we understand that particularly in stressed communities, or what Labour wants to call working class communities, that there is dissatisfaction. About aspects of asylum and immigration, yet Angela Rayner is saying you’ve overdone this, you’ve got it wrong, you’re alienating people who’ve come into the country who are left feeling insecure about their leave to remain. The question is, is that really going to be the motivating subject which is going to animate a leadership competition?

Nish Kumar You’ve been talking on your podcast about some of her recent speaking engagements in the city and the amount of money that she’s making. Is that a complication for her if what she’s trying to do is make an appeal to the soft left of the Labour Party and the left of British politics in general?

Anne McElvoy You do then have taking money in large amounts of money, for speaking in the manner of a Boris Johnson, and then the next day showing up, going, you know, our Labour values and we’ve got to get back to the core. For some people, I think it could peel them off towards other candidates who might also see themselves as being a challenger, whether it’s an Andy Burnham, if he ever manages to get a seat, or Lucy Powell. There are others who… Fancy themselves as the leader of the modern Labour left, but it is also true that a few of them would come out speaking fees like Angela Reyna because they’re just…

Coco Khan She’s not as good at speaking. If she did return to the front bench, she seemed to have, in one way or another, put down everyone. How feasible is that? I imagine she wouldn’t be very popular right now.

Anne McElvoy Not with this front bench as it is. I suppose the scenario that you’re looking into there, Coco, is that it’s not like it is, there will be a disastrous result in May. So you could see a situation in which you have to have a reshuffle. And I think she’s making it irresistible to ask her back. I mean, Kirstam has also said he wants to have her back, actually said it in an aside placater a little while ago. The difficulty is in what role? Because you couldn’t put her in any role now where we can put her into, say, Justice, for instance, where David Lammy is at the moment, because that abuts the Home Office and Shabana Mahmood, who would be setting up one of those Saturday afternoon wrestling brawls, throw each other across the ring. And that’s not, even in this cabinet, that is I think something that they couldn’t do.

Nish Kumar Look, we must just pick up on Trump and Iran before we wrap with you, Anne. Trump has been full of his usual bluster this week, chucking out threats to the international community who, let’s face it, have not kind of been falling over each other in their rush to support his war with Iran. Even Kirstam got to say no for a second time to request for help.

Clip While taking the necessary action to defend ourselves and our allies. We will not be drawn into the wide

Nish Kumar Is this really shown that Trump is kind of out on a limb here? Trump and Netanyahu, how isolated are they on the international stage? And then I guess the follow-up question is, does that matter?

Anne McElvoy They’re looking more isolated, I think, as the weeks go on, Nish, because when this started, I think there was an expectation that Trump would at least pay some kind of due respect to allies. Don’t forget, Keir Starmer, in a two-flag moment there I saw in the clip, was keen to say, you know, we’re not getting. Involved but we do defend our allies. The line between defense when you’re shooting down Iranian drones 300 sorties in the skies in the last days and the accusation in the Gulf states that we should have been better prepared and had a more deterrent presence. He’s very sensitive to that that’s why he says that bit but I think the problem with it now from Donald Trump’s point of view is having failed to acknowledge the UK effort which is considerable it just opens that field of play for Kiyosudama to say, well, actually, we’re doing what is necessary, know the word necessary, not like world enthusiasm, but we’re not being dragged in any further when we’re leaning further into anything that could look like we are part of the offense. In terms of targeting Iran, well, as you can see by the latest strikes and also the fact that they have killed some other leading members of the Iranian leadership, including the guy in charge of security, so a really big. Big player in terms of the war. Their targeting seems to be doing, broadly speaking, what America thinks it would do with Israeli support. That is working pretty well from Trump’s point of view. The hitch is that the Straits of Hormuz is pretty predictable, that Iran would use that choke point, and the president now seems to be going to allies saying, we didn’t expect this to happen. You’ve got to come and help us. And allies are saying, well, it was predictable it would happen. You could have reached out to us before if you thought it was going to happen. We could have maybe had another different quality of chat. But no, we’re not going to send our warships, our submarines, and our kit and caboodle into a narrow strait, which is absolutely drawing the fire of Iran and enraged Iran. Why would we do that for you? And you’re not particularly nice to us anyway. So I think it has widened that transatlantic rift.

Coco Khan Well, I think it’s worth mentioning that Trump said we do not need the help of anyone in all caps on a truth social post. So I think that means it’s all going well.

Nish Kumar Yeah, I mean, a couple of the clips that I’ve seen of him, you know, doing pool interviews on Air Force One, I don’t know what this is. It looks like he’s under way more pressure than he’s ever been at any point. He looks unsettled. He is, he’s famously very rarely been across his briefs as president. You know, there were very stories in his first term of people having to include his name in things to keep his interest. It also summarized things in one page, which obviously is not compatible with a very complex foreign policy operation like engaging in a regime change war. And does he look more under strain than we’ve seen him before, or is it possible that I’m just projecting how much pressure I feel he should be under, given how bad a job he’s doing?

Anne McElvoy I’m surprised, Nish, given that you’re a founding member of the Donald Trump fandom, to hear you speak like this. I think he is under more stress, and I think you’re right. You’re picking up something about that techiness, the coming back. I mean, I think the attacks on Keir Starmer now don’t really land as hard as the first one. You all know Winston Churchill, because he can still punch, right? You can still do Mike Tyson. But now he’s doing it two, three, four times. And even Kimmy Bader lot wrote in and said, this is childish. So I think, I think you’re right. I think there’s a reactiveness there. I think for the last few weeks, I’ve watched Donald Trump’s communications quite closely. I’m not sure I do agree with you that he can’t follow or understand briefs, you know. I think he has a kind of guileful way of getting through sometimes to what he wants to say and do. And he’s not a details man. And he sort of saying, I never said I was. But on this, I don’t think that’s the problem. I think. Feeling under pressure because it’s delivering in a bit more of what the Israelis want, which is just showing that they can push Iran back and push that threat that they receive from Iran to be existential. But it’s not doing that much for America because it is a mess and because the allies are obviously, if nobody is showing up, then you end up fighting everyone. And that is a bit of a problem for Donald Trump going into this midterms year. He wants this done and dusted. I would think by June, July, later. To turn to domestic matters. You know, what they need is to open the straights because without that, the oil price is gonna rise and everybody, including all of us, but certainly including Donald Trump’s photo base, is gonna be miserable and not in a good mood about it going into the midterms. So I think there is a touchiness and you’re right to pick it up.

Nish Kumar Thanks so much for joining us, Anne. It’s a slightly worrying note to end on, because I will say, this one person that you don’t want to be techy and under pressure, it’s the historically erratic President of America. Somebody get that guy scented candle, put him in a yoga class.

Coco Khan We could send him a link to the podcast. Oh, I’m sure that will do lots for his blood pressure. And if all of that has left you with even more questions, well, get in touch. We’ll try to answer them in our upcoming Mailbag episode. Drop us a line at psuk at reducelisting.co.uk. Also light and funny questions also welcome.

Nish Kumar That’s it for the show, but before we go, we’re going to be out in the wild very soon at the podcast show, which is happening on the 20th and the 21st of May. It’s the biggest festival of podcasting in the UK, and if you want to join us, there’s a link for tickets in the show notes. And this year I pledge to not get in the papers. Last year, I was asked a question, and I responded to it.

Coco Khan You shouldn’t keep fake promises you can’t keep. I’m not even giving you more details about what it is. You can’t, you shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t be allowed to do these events. I know that that’s a weird way to promote this event. In the spirit of accountability, because we’re always talking about politicians. Well, they say this and then they do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What you just did there? Yeah. I will hold you accountable for that. Yeah, I’m holding myself accountable. Okay. I

Nish Kumar I am aiming to call no one a [Unrecognized] at the podcast show. That’s my aim. That’s what I pledge to you, the listeners, and to you Coco Karr, is I will use the C word zero times at this year’s podcast. Also, it’s often in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, no one needs to hear that.

Coco Khan That’s it. Thank you for listening to Pod Save the UK.

Nish Kumar No one knows that I called George Osborne. No one actually knows that.

Coco Khan Okay. Yeah. If you liked what you heard, leave us a review. It helps to boost the show.

Nish Kumar You can follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky, and X.

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Nish Kumar Thanks to lead producer May Robson and digital producer Jacob Liebenberg.

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Nish Kumar Our engineer is Dana Ruka and our social media producer is Nada Smilinic.

Coco Khan The executive producers are Kate Fitzsimons and Katie Long with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

Nish Kumar And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify, or Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.