John Oliver looked homeward on his latest Last Week Tonight, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a surprise general election for next month. (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 kinda like the US but whimsically worse,” Oliver explained.)
Sunak’s party, the Conservatives, or Tories, are currently “wildly unpopular” in the UK after getting trounced in local elections this year. “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,” said Oliver. “This could be a massive couple of weeks for the UK.”
Oliver, born in Birmingham, took the opportunity to delve into the main players in this election, the hallmarks of Conservative rule in Britain, “why people are so mad at the conservatives, and why they are absolutely right to be”.
He started with the Tories, who will likely be defeated by the Labour party, currently led by Keir Starmer. “Fun fact about Keir: there aren’t any,” said Oliver. “His most notable attribute may be having no real notable attributes at all,” he said, citing a poll that half the country didn’t know what he stood for. “Do you know how hard it to have less than half the population know what you stand for in the modern age?” Oliver mused. “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 Shaq doesn’t fit in the seats at Knott’s Berry Farm.”
“We know too much about everyone on earth, making it incredible that British people don’t seem to know much about the man on the verge of running the sixth largest economy in the world,” he added.
Oliver also recapped the last five conservative prime ministers, starting with David Cameron, who took office in 2010 and instituted one of the biggest deficit reduction programs in any advanced economy since World War II. While many countries raised taxes to help with budget shortfalls, Cameron focused on austerity, “essentially making brutal cuts to government services and attributing Britain’s struggles not to the 2008 financial crisis, but to years of frivolous spending under Labour”, said Oliver.
Cameron’s measures drastically cut central government funding of local authorities and reduced housing benefits, grants to pregnant women and benefits for working-age families, among other programs.
Cameron also appeased Euro-skeptic members of his own party by calling a referendum on Brexit that he thought would fail. It did not, and he immediately resigned in disgrace, leaving his successor Teresa May to deal with the mess. Over three years, May could not hammer out a Brexit deal that her party would accept, so she ceded to Boris Johnson, “whose time in office was a total shambles”, said Oliver, calling Johnson’s handling of Covid “an unmitigated disaster”.
An advisor claimed that Johnson viewed the virus as “nature’s way of dealing with old people”, and he drew widespread outrage for hosting parties at 10 Downing Street while Britain was in lockdown. Johnson gave way to Liz Truss, who had the shortest tenure as prime minister in the country’s history and was “like if ‘hold for applause’ was a person”, Oliver joked.
“It’s objectively fun to look back on what a collection of weirdos ran for Britain for years,” said Oliver. “But it gets considerably less fun when you look at what they did to the country,” starting with Brexit. The pitch was that it would free British businesses of European restrictions, but instead, trading goods with the EU has become so onerous that many UK businesses have opted to move to mainland Europe.
But austerity “might be the most insidious legacy of Cameron and his successors”, Oliver argued, “because it has, in so many ways, obliterated the social safety net”. Years of underinvestment in the National Health Service have left it “gutted and understaffed”. More than 7.5 million people are waiting for non-emergency treatment, up from 2 million when conservatives first took office. “It’s gotten to the point where significant numbers of British people are now going to Europe and paying out of pocket to get treatment,” said Oliver.
Additionally, “the Tories have literally starved the country,” said Oliver, citing a massive increase in families referred to food banks and more hospitalizations for nutritional deficiencies; British five-year-olds are now, on average, a centimeter shorter than they were in 2010. “It is pretty hard for conservatives to say they are working toward the future growth of Britain when its future generations are quite literally shrinking,” Oliver quipped.
The host pointed to the case of a disabled person forced to sell their cutlery to pay for medications. “That is the natural endpoint of austerity right there: punishing people for circumstances completely beyond their control,” he said. And yet Sunak has promised more austerity measures, saying: “I worry very much about benefits becoming a lifestyle choice.”
“Which is a rich fucking statement from a rich fucking man, who would probably go into anaphylactic shock if he ever had to fly coach,” Oliver retorted.
Given all that, “it is no wonder Britons want a change,” said Oliver, “and personally I would want the changes to be a little more sweeping than some of what Starmer is proposing,” such as maintaining Conservative tax spending plans until growth returns and keeping the two-child benefit cap. But Oliver understood why people weren’t focused on Starmer: “If a wild badger broke into your home and fucked everything up for 14 years straight, tearing absolutely everything apart, you would think: ‘OK, you know what, we’ll worry about redecorating choices later. Right now, that badger needs to fucking go.’”
“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,” he said. “And I know that celebration is not something that comes naturally to Britons,” he added, noting that the “morale booster” Keep Calm and Carry On essentially amounted to “I know you’re about to die, but there’s no need to make a scene.”
“But if Britain can extricate itself from the party whose unremitting cruelty has stained the last decade and a half of British life,” he concluded, “that does deserve to be marked.”
