Douglas Murray: The Iranian Regime Means What It Says

Conversations with Coleman - The Free Press

Douglas Murray discusses UK political stagnation under Keir Starmer, Iran's aggressive global behavior, and the dangers of misreading authoritarian regimes. He critiques Western liberal blindness to ideological extremism.

Key takeaways

• Starmer's UK premiership lacked mandate and failed to address public anger.
• Iran's regime means its threats of destruction and assassination seriously.
• Western institutions often misread authoritarian intent due to ideological bias.

Transcript preview

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Douglas Murray. Douglas is a British writer, author of many books including The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, and he is now a columnist at the Free Press. In this episode, we discuss Kie Starmer's recent resignation as Prime Minister of the UK. We talk about what's gone wrong in British politics over the past decade, in particular on immigration. We talk about the emerging Iran deal and whether the whole Iran war should be viewed as a success or a failure. We talk about the nature of the Iranian regime. And finally, I ask Douglas whether he loves the UK or America more. So without further ado, Douglas Murray. You had a for what two years you had a column things worth remembering on right on Sunday and I was there from the start Yeah Fantastic so we're really glad to have you back I know our listeners to this show will be happy to be reading your columns There's a lot to talk about we could start with the UK or start with Iran which would you prefer I want to hear your thoughts on both It's bad news all around let's start with the at least slightly funny bad news which is the UK. Yeah, so the news just broke yesterday I'm not sure when this episode will come out that Kirstarma will be resigning as prime minister I guess I can let's just start out with what do you feel his legacy will be? Not existent really there's nothing much you know the oddity of the British system is we have this we obviously my country of birth we have the system in the UK first past of the post which is meant to, it has certain downsides, but it's meant to deliver clear mandates from the people in each electoral seat and therefore with governments. The argument against a portion of representation has always been that first past the post means we don't have unstable coalition governments like say Italy. Now for the last 15, 16 years, Britain's been this very strange position. of having our usual system, the first past the post, and a sort of coalition politics. The 2010 was a coalition between the Conservatives and the noble Democrats. Theresa May ran a minority government in 2017, supported by the Ulster Unionists. Kia Starma got a mandate from the country of a kind in 2024, but really the mandate, although it was a very large majority, was incredibly thin in terms of popularity. It was simply an election in which the British public said they wanted the Conservatives out of office. After 14 years of Conservative Party rule, in which, particularly in the last few years, Conservatives seemed to think that there was an endless appetite in the country for Conservative leadership elections. That is where the tiny number of people who are members of a political party vote for their party leader who then need to their party leader who then need to their party. if you're in power becomes Prime Minister and that's how we got in a short number of years David Cameron Theresa May Boris Johnson Liz Truss for a month Rishizi Sunac and the public had just had enough the Conservative Party obviously needed the time on the opposition benches so Starma came in with no there was no love for him in the country it wasn't like 1997 when Tony Blair really did come in with an enormous a wave of enthusiasm as well as a desire to kick the Conservatives out after a similar sort of period of stagnation and conservative rule. So unlike Blair, Starma came in with no particular popularity and with no particular program. I mean he studiously in the election campaign avoided saying anything much that he was going to do. And then he succeeded in the election campaign avoided saying anything much that he was going to do. And then he succeeded in... not doing very much. I don't think history will really remember him. There's a few things, I mean continued British support for Ukraine. That's sort of been a happy place in a way, strangely to say, for British Prime Minister since the war began. It gives them a feeling of grandstanding on the world stage. But other than that, you know, he's tinkered with some social media laws and so on. If he's remembered at all, it'll all, it'll probably be for badly misjudging the public mood from the moment of the Southport stabings onwards, which was really only a few weeks after he entered office, and deciding that instead of dealing with any problems that existed in the country, he should clamp down on and prosecute and suppress the opinions of people who didn't like the bad things that were happening. Can you remind people the details of that stabbing? That was when a young man called Axel Rudebicano who was a child of Rwandan immigrants to the UK, went into a Taylor Swift themed dance party of young girls in a place called Southport which would ordinarily be a sort of Labor heartland. I sort of started stabbing all these young girls and killed three of them in really brutal circumstances. happening you know what you sort of can't blame a politician for the actions of a lone madman but you can judge a lot by their response and the response of the stama government was to try to cover up and you know they they knew within 24 hours who the guy was that he'd been downloading Al-Qaeda manuals, they knew within 24 hours the who the guy was that he'd been downloading Al-Qaeda manuals, tried to make rice in all sorts of things which the public deserve to know. And the police and the government put out this thing that this sort of Welsh choir boy had gone crazy in Southport. It was just incredibly dishonest. Now there was rioting and terrible unrest for a period after that and that's obviously terrible. You know, in those situations you do have to be careful about what you say as a politician. But really what the public got from Starma was you the public are the problem and and that sort of continued really for the remaining two years who was in office You know I'm afraid that Britain like a lot of countries is is not very good at dealing with its problems It has this habit of addressing secondary issues it has this habit of person has said in response to the issue things like that and that's and a total inability to address real societal problems I suppose that most recently came to a head as well with the trial of the killing of a young man called Henry Novak who was killed by a Sikh man who accused totally falsely accused Henry Novak who he'd stabbed on the streets of having said something racist to him and when the police are it turned out that they arrested the victim who had been stabbed. They immediately believed the Sikh man's lie. Yes and the Sikh man's family also involved themselves in the attempt to cover up the crime. The fact that the police had been trained and this is something happened under conservative as well as labor governments, the fact they'd been trained to regard the accusation of racism as being as it were even more. serious and the claim by a young man dying out on the streets he'd been stabbed. And the body cam footage showed that the police, one of the police officers said to him, you know, I don't think you have made somebody who's been stabbed to the chest and the face and so on, it's pretty obvious. And to handcuff a young man in that situation and for his dying moments to have him being read his rights. Strangely enough, you know, again, you know, these cases, they're not, you can't blame, you can't blame the case, you can't blame the case, on a single politician, individual people do individually terrible things sometimes. But the response to it again was clearly just of one of Starmer completely misreading the country. There's a lot of anger in Britain, a lot of anger as in most European countries and there's just, there was no attempt by Starmer or his government to really understand public anger about things like that. Yeah, so when I hear of... a policeman handcuffing a young man because he's been falsely accused after having been stabbed of saying something racist. When I hear about, you know, the endless stories of cops knocking on grandma's door because she made a Facebook post about Muslims or indeed arresting, you know, poor old woman. When I hear what you just said a few minutes ago, what the cops put out after the Southport stabbing. One of the questions that confuses me is, are the cops not conservative in UK? Because they skew conservative in America, which means that de facto, even if there's liberal policies, the average cop skews in the other direction and the culture of the police can only get so leftist, if that makes sense. Is that not the case? in the UK? No, I mean first of all I throw in Robert Conquest's third law of politics you know the fastest way to understand an institution of which you're not a member is to presume it's been overtaken by a cabal of its enemies that that rule holds pretty true you know you expect the police to be something and it turns out they're not what you expect you know people think that I don't know intelligence agencies are filled with sort of you know right wing patriots and they're usually suffused with you know quite the opposite anyway with the police it's been in the UK it's been a horrible journey for some 30 years now there was a there was an actually there was an actually there was an actually there was an actually racist murder in the early 1990s of a young black man called Stephen Lawrence and in the 1990s when that happened the police botched the investigation because they didn't think that it was a racist killing or at least they thought it was some kind of gang thing I can't remember the exact reason there was a sort of unforgivable set of failures by the Metropolitan Police looking into that stabbing there were subsequently many years later prosecutions for it but the investigation into that that was called the McPherson report came out in 997-998 accused the police of being institutionally racist and that was the first time that phrase had become commonplace and this accusation of institutional racism really caused the kind of breakdown I've seen in my own lifetime in the British police which is if an individual police officer were accused of racism that would be the end of their career many policemen just the accusation It's just that that's you can you can watch an investigation into something you can fail to follow up Leeds all sorts of things and you'll be covered for but they have strong unions protecting them in those situations No, they don't know Maybe that's one of the differences, but But that nothing has been powerful enough to override that fear and I mean I suppose you know the best way you could say it would be that maybe that. a correction or an attempt to make a correction that was then in the way that institutions do becomes embodied and overcorrects and you know and then there are there are sort of technical reasons of course why the police get obsessed with things like that I mean the social media sort of things that you point to the sort of things that you know Musk and others have highlighted on on X and on social media made kind of international stories those things I think in part come about because of laziness. There's a great problem in the UK, particularly in London, of the theft of mobile phones. Completely routine. Everybody knows somebody or has themselves had their mobile phone snatched from their hands by somebody on a moped or cycle. And you can turn on the trace thing and you can tell the police, you know, I actually know where my phone is. And the police are totally uninterested. Totally uninterested. And you can. You can. on the other hand, yes, prosecutions for social media posts or wrong thing online, some of which is ugly stuff and some of which is just what you should have to put up within a free society. There's a reason why the police are kind of more interested in that and it's obvious, which is it's quite a lot of work to catch a burglar, even if the homeowner is caught a burglar on their CCTV. It's a bit of a bother to