Are Reform UK Good for Business? Zia Yusuf's Plan for Fixing Broken Britain

Reform chairman quits, then he's reinstated, then he quits again, and now there's a new chairman at Reform. So very recently, before this all happened, I sat down with Reform Chairman Zia Yousef. So this was clearly all bubbling. In fact, Rupert Lowe had left that day and I wasn't allowed to ask about that. In this exclusive episode now ex Reform Chairman Zia Youssef opens up about the state of the uk, Britain's struggling economy, reforms, plans and policies, and an insider glimpse into a potential collab with Elon Musk.

How are you going to fix broken Britain?

There has to be a clearing of the decks of. We have to be a first principles approach here where, you know, like, almost like, you know, businesses talk about a zero budget, where if there's a business that's wasting loads of money, you basically have to look again and go, okay, every pound has to be justified again.

Yeah.

So rather than reducing you and then you're starting again, we've got to do that again for regulations. And we had an opportunity when we had Brexit. There was, there were thousands of EU laws that were on our statute books that had been pledged to be removed because now we didn't need to have them anymore and it was vetoed. And do you know who vetoed it? A lady called Cami Badenok. It's true, she stopped thousands of those laws and the justification, she stopped them from being removed from our statute books and the justification she gave, and I'm quoting her here, was I am a Conservative and not an arsonist. But look, we need to stop wasting taxpayer money. We just did procurement in this country in a way that was competent and not corrupt.

That is how we invest the tax money.

Exactly how your taxpayer money is spent. The reality is people would be happy to pay more tax. I'm sure you'd be happy to pay more. I'd be able to pay more. If you could tell me we were going to reduce NHS waiting list by 90% and you could go into a hospital, your parents would be able to go into a hospital having paid tax their whole lives in this country and be seen by world class doctors and nurses at once, I'd gladly pay more tax. And so most people, the problem is we get the opposite of that. If we treated that with the reverence that you would spend your own money or your own business's money, it would be the country's already infinitely better.

Why do they not understand this? So like, I'm a landlord, I have 345 rental properties and I have one source of income, it is my tenants. So every time they punish me and make the law really hard, the only choice I have, other than selling the properties or going bust, is to put my rents up. It's the only choice I have because it's the only source of income. I run a business. They put national insurance up, so they make me pay more per staff and they put the minimum wage up.

The only choice I have is either.

To put my prices up, which means the consumers pay more, which is essentially a tax, or I have to hire less people, which means there's less jobs. This is the most fundamental, obvious, simple supply and demand. But you don't even have to have done economics to know this. Anyone would know this. What do they not understand?

They've never been in that situation. They can't think of any form of second or third order effect. And also remember, most of these policies they come up with come from a focus group or a poll. So let's take the increase in national insurance contributions for employers that Rachel Reeves announced right now. What has that done? It has. I'm sure you've spoken. I speak to people who are shutting down their pubs because they increase the minimum wage. So you talk about. Okay, you know, let's go back to this fundamental point, okay? Let's assume you are even. You're well intended with these rules, right? Maybe you are, maybe you aren't, but let's say it's well intentioned. So you want to increase minimum wage because you want the bar staff to have a better life. Cool. What's actually resulted, in many, many cases, entire hospitality businesses are shutting down. And all of those people, many of whom are like 16, 17, 18, are losing their jobs. The national insurance contribution is adding huge amounts of cost to businesses, way for thin margins. They're already suffering from insane energy prices, insane business rate tax gone back up, all sorts of ridiculous costs. Yet legal fees, accounting fees, your audit, all of this stuff. And it only ever gets worse. It never gets easier. As you grow, you start as you.

Know, we have to hire more people just to give out returns. Half our finance department essentially work. That's another one for hmrc.

Yeah, we have to raise the threshold at which point you start paying vat, all of these things. You got to let businesses build what I call the, the, the immune system a bit. You got to let them get beyond that embryonic stage where it doesn't feel like you're fighting a fire every hour. And that is how most business owners feel.

Disproportionately hard at the start, isn't it? So if you made it much easier at the start, why didn't you have a sliding scale whereby the, the more they've been going, the more they charge and you work your way up to paying more to.

Yeah, so, so we're going to do a lot of work on all of these specific points. Right. In terms of the specifics because we, we take that very seriously. By the time we. One of the reasons we haven't announced loads of policies into the General is partly because the next general unfortunately is years away. As much I'd love for it to not be true, it is. The Tories got through how many Prime Ministers without calling a. Didn't even one of several of them weren't even voted by their members, let alone the people. So yeah, unfortunately because of our unwritten constitution, the chance of a general election before early very low. So we've got to use that time Rob, to understand how this is going to work. Cost it properly. But you know, again here's the thing. Whenever you look at all of these bodies like the OBR and all these independent bodies that mark the homework of the politicians, the politicians introduce these bodies because what it does is allow them to wash their hands of making important decisions. That's fundamentally what it's about. And if you go and look at the OBR's predictions, you would struggle to find in fact a really good money making strategy was just betting on the opposite of what the OBR says. Seriously, they're going to bout to cut their GDP forecasts again for this country. All of the forecast that these taxes were going to raise how much money was supposed to come in from the inheritance tax raid and all of these things. And what's going to happen now is those changes in inheritance tax, aside from being appalling and just attacking farmers who do so much for this country, they're going to result in a net negative impact on the Exchequer. Why? Because people change their behavior. You know, so we need to, we know we need to do things like reduce capital gains tax, we need to reduce income tax. We've got to do it in a way that ensures that revenues actually grow for the exchange. See that's the fundamental point that most particularly far left operators don't understand which is that look, if you massively increase, if you increase capital gain stacks, what happens? People are less inclined to sell assets. They'll just hold assets on longer and be more inclined to disappear from the country at the point that they have a major liquidity. Yeah. And Capital gain tax is one of those taxes that is classic sort of 8020 rule. Right. It's a small number. You go, and look, if somebody sells a business for billions of pounds, if you're getting a capital gains tax event as. As the chance, you'd be very pleased about that and it'd be a large amount of money. If you crank the tax up beyond a certain point, what happens? That individual goes, oh, you know what does. What Eduardo Savon does. You know where he went for a marriage? He went to Singapore. Yeah, right. So you've got to think about how. How do we make this attractive place for people to come create jobs, They've got to pay taxes. That is important. We do need to pay for public services. We can't waste money, but we do need to do that. But there's so much to be done by, as you said, making it easy for people, making this a place that people go. Now, actually, the uk, he's incredibly supportive. Now, I will say there are some things in this country that are advantageous. EIs, SEIs, you know, these are interesting programs the likes of which the Americans don't have. We don't market those very effectively or make it particularly easy. You look at things like entrepreneurs relief. Taken away. It was taken away.

It's nothing.

Saja Javid, Tory Chancellor, just rug pulled. People who, you know. So look, and that's another problem when you have so much instability. I mean, I think we had three chancellors in a week at one point. Right. So if you have that much instability, Rob, then it's very difficult for anyone to plan, whether you're a multinational corporation or an individual entrepreneur. So look, yeah, we've got to get the government out of the way for the most part. Right. Of course, some regulations are upon. But listen, if you're starting a. An estate agent or, you know, you want to start a plumbing business, broadly speaking, you should be given. Let the person go and build some business, hire some employees. You know this workers rights bill again, of course, workers should have rights, but by giving people the ability to claim for unfair dismissal from day one.

That's ridiculous.

What that does is what that does for anyone who has ever made a decision to hire somebody. What does that do? It increases the jeopardy for a small business owner. It's not going to affect GlaxoSmithKline or Goldman Sachs. They don't care about that. Yeah, the rounding error for them. But if you're a small business owner who could one day own a massive business or just someone who's working really hard on their business and takes pride in it and they need extra help. They have to now risk adjust. What if that person maybe isn't what I thought? Could they turn out to be a huge cost to me straight away when by the way, there's no shortage of costs already. So what happens? The behavior changes. They just won't make that hire. And so that's my point. They call it the Workers Rights Bill in this Orwellian way, sort of animal farm way. Yeah, but it does, it does the opposite. It harms, it harms working people. And that's the point about the national insurance thing because they tied themselves up in knots around this manifesto claim, yeah, we won't raise taxes on working people. As if people were that dumb that they wouldn't understand. Well, yeah, fine, I can't see it directly on my paycheck. At least you can't see that number. But if your cost to your employer has just increased, what happens when you go in asking for a pay rise? Or of course there's going to be less. And by the way, when inflation's still running at 3, 4%, people tell you people, people still struggling to, to afford basic groceries and then you have government.

Another 10 interest rates have gone up recently.

Council tax, people's council taxes being raised by hundreds of pounds every year as a result of all of this waste. So people are really struggling, Rob. And again, there are some problems in this country that are really difficult to solve from an intellectual standpoint and there are some that are easy to solve. Again, I keep saying this. If the right leader backed by the right MPs around them, right.

Will Elon Musk help reform be the next party in power?

I think so. On the basis that at a minimum he has been a hero with regards to protecting free speech in this country without which it would have been very difficult for reform to even got to where we are today because a lot of the common sense things that we say and Nigel and RMP say would have been censored, full on censored under the old regime of Twitter. Right. Saying that boys can't become girls or our culture is better than many other cultures in the world, all of these sorts of things would have been full on censored. You wouldn't have been able to say them now. So yes, in that regard he is obviously shone a very bright light on the grooming gangs in, in this country and the appalling cover ups and the horrific things that have happened. No one did more actually to shine a bright light on that and forced the debate which needed to be had and continues and clearly much more needing to be done in terms of a donation. I don't know, to be honest. I will say this, that, you know, we have 220 odd thousand members now, Rob. 90% of our costs as a party are met by our grassroots supporters. I'll tell you as chairman, I actually love that.

So you haven't had the 100 million yet. That was no. Banded around.

No, but although I, I don't know where that came from, that, that figure. Neither do we need it. So look at last year, calendar year 20, you don't need it.

So if he offered you 100 million, would you take it?

It's a really good question. It wouldn't just be solely my decision, but I would say that as a party that is incredibly passionate about one of the biggest problems being the interests of British citizens is not being put first and foremost in decision making. Could you make the case that $100 million from a foreign citizen is unhelpful to that? Probably, yeah. I think, look, if you wanted to give us some money, we take 100 million was never going to happen anyway. But I will say this, I like the idea of this being a party which is fundamentally supported by our members, by our supporters, by ordinary British people and we also don't need it. And when I say don't need it. So last year the Tories and Labour party raised 11 and 14 times more than us respectively. Right. In a general election year. And who's leading in national opinion polls right now? Yeah, look, I'd actually be pretty uncomfortable and not that in favor of anyone giving us 100 million. Any one individual giving us 100 million.

They'D have some demands that money.

Yeah, because I think that. Yeah, look, I think again, we live in the real world. Political parties need money. Right. And you know, but I'd say particularly given he is basically part of the Trump administration and look, I'm a huge Elon fan. I, as a tech entrepreneur, I've read almost every book, every bit of material I could to try to digest as much as I can his genius to the degree that I could. He's an amazing entrepreneur, I'd argue is greatest entrepreneur of all time, given his. They'll think about the challenges he's taken.

And the breadth of what he's done.

Like making electric cars a thing when nobody thought they could. Basically taking on the entire oil lobby and doing so, building out the charging network and then autonomous driving the humanoid robots he's building With Optimus Neuralink the human machine brain connection SpaceX replaceable rockets landing back the starship heavy. So it's not just about the money he's made, it's the which is obviously extraordinary and unprecedented but it's about the challenges he's taken on and how much those things we just talked about are going to benefit our species across time. So I mean this is the irony, right? You know, no one has actually done more to get us to quote net zero than Elon Musk right through through electric cars. So, you know, we're in a situation where we've got to reform is about looking out for the interests of citizens of the United Kingdom. So I have enormous respect for for Elon it wouldn't just be my decision but again I would say I really love the fact that this is a party that is funded by Grassland by them.

Is it funded by your.

The membership fees that people north of 90% over 90% of our costs are met by our members and our supporters, small donors and the membership. Yeah.

So sorry to change the subject for a bit of doom, but in light of what's happened recently, it feels to me like it's the closest I can feel we've been to World War 3.

This recent budget should warn you that your pension is not safe and secure and they're coming for your inheritance. Do you even know how much is in your pension or where your pension is invested? Add to this the recent inheritance tax grab on your pensions and and the risk of a market crash.

You probably didn't know this and I.

Didn'T until recently, but physical gold can be added to your pension pot. Gold is inheritance tax free and has grown 700% in the last 20 years. You probably know from my content I'm investing heavily in silver and gold and that's why I've partnered with Direct Bullion. Myself and Nigel Farage are brand ambassadors and direct bullion can help you with gold to protect and grow your pension. I buy my gold and silver from direct bullion and I don't earn any money on any purchases of gold or silver if you buy direct from direct bullion. So if you go to robmore.directbullion.com you can get a great price on your silver and gold and you can get the pension gold investing guide completely for free. As you know, I don't do many strategic partnerships and when I do I do them with people who are credible, who've been doing it a long time, who invest in things that I invest in too. And gold and silver's going wild. I'm investing heavily in gold and silver and I recommend you check out robmore.directbullion.com.

Does it not feel like we're right on the edge at the moment, globally, with everything that's going on? America, Russia, Ukraine, Europe, the uk what are your thoughts? Because world wars happen and if you go back through history, it's been a long time since we've had one.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Are you scared?

I'm not scared because I don't think that's a particularly constructive perspective to have on anything. And again, I'm fundamentally an optimistic person and I think we will get through this. But that doesn't mean we're not clear eyed about the gravity of the situation.

I mean, public arguments with global leaders.

Yeah, yeah. And look, we came, you know, I wasn't alive during the Cuban missiles crisis, but I know people who were. And, and obviously that was a very dangerous time with retrospect, even more dangerous than people realized at the time. Kennedy, President Kennedy didn't know half of how serious some of this stuff was. We are in a situation where obviously Vladimir Putin is a murderous, abominable dictator. He does have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world and it's very difficult always, you know, to assess risk around you because you talk to some people and they go, oh, there's no chance it ever get used. It's like, well, I don't know, how do you price that probability? We did under the Biden administration. If you remember, they were talking about, you know, when they start talking about the Storm Shadow missiles and firing those deep into, deep into Russian territory, into built up areas with the help potentially. So you're getting into obviously a very dangerous place. Now we, I believe, and the party believes, and Nigel believes that peace is best found through strength. This country has catastrophically underinvested in its defense for decades. That is true. And actually most of that happened under the Tories. Right.

And the world knows about that.

The world knows and that's scary. If you talk to people in our military, the people I speak to, they say look outside of our SAS and sbs, obviously formidable world class troops, there's not that many of them outside of that. It's going to take north of six months to put a British boot on the ground anywhere anyway in anywhere of the relevant regions around Russia. So that's an unacceptable situation for this country to be in. You look at our Trident program, you look at any important military program, it's deeply underinvested, it's Ill prepared. And this is, I mean, this is despite the incredible people, you know, the servicemen and women who staff our military. But look, we have to invest more in it. But we go back to this original point. If you're, if you're saying, oh, we're going to increase the percentage, well, fine. But if your economy isn't growing, Rob, you're going to find yourself in a severe problem very, very, very quickly. We need to be growing our economy 3, 4, 5% a year. I think we can grow at 5% a year if we get this right. And then suddenly, yes, we can take military. Now we want to take to 3 and then to 3 and a half percent of an economy growing at 4 or 5%. Now that's now then we will have a military. And by the way, we then need to meet, do procurement properly. Yeah. So we don't change the requirements 5,000 times during a program which allows defense companies to balloon the price. Not dissimilar. You know, if you're building a house right the way the constructor, you will know this. You need to be very precise about what you want from the beginning, if you want the best value. Very similar on, on defense projects. We also need to make sure that our military is purchasing equipment and preparing for the world that we live in today. So people, you can go and look at companies like Anduril. I mean, look at what the Houthis were doing where they managed to initiate a naval blockade, you know, up against these extraordinary military machines, basically using in some cases consumer drones. So the world is changing very, very quickly. We need to make sure we are spending money again. Procurement is done by super smart people, Rob, who understand the way these things are going. Look, that's the only path that we have, which is to invest in our defense. Yes, we need a great relationship with the United States of America. But President Trump has been very clear. It's America first. He is going to run America on the basis that there are no sacred cows and what's in the interests of American people. And so we need to start thinking about what's in our interests. We need to start investing in our military. Of course, we need close partnerships with our friends in Europe and European, but they've also catastrophically under invest. Remember it was the Germans for all of the saber rattling they're doing now. Remember they were the ones who laughed at President Trump in his first term as president when he said, what are you all doing? You know, being reliant on Russian gas. Do you remember that? He called them out for being totally reliant on Putin for their energy. And they laughed at him and mocked him. They shut down vast amounts of their nuclear power. They've debilitated their. I mean, actually our economy in the UK, sadly, is in a bad way. The German economy is in a much, much worse state. So a lot of these countries are now on a collision course with reality where it's all well and good, Keir Starmer standing in front of a Union Jack and do fine. And again, you know, Putin is a murderous dictator and you know, the Ukrainians deserve support and have made huge sacrifices to defend the sovereign territory that was invaded. But fundamentally, if you want to be a major player in statecraft as we sit here in 2025, Rob, you need a formidable military. And living in some delusional world where you think that you're a super powerful country, when you have a military that is ill prepared and underfunded and ill equipped, that's not going to work anymore.

Who controls the world's money?

Fundamentally, my assessment of it is the central banks, right? They are the ones who, however, independently get to decide. They're the ones who can print more money. And if you are able to print more money, you can look at the M2 money supply. That is largely going to give you a lead indicator of any major financial index that you might choose. On the flip side, huge amounts of money, you know, £1.2 trillion in this country to bring it back to the UK is spent by the government. Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband. I mean, could you think of the worst people? I defy you. You spend a decade scouring the country to find two worse individuals to entrust.

Any budget to spend other people's money, because if it was theirs, that is the important thing.

Yeah, probably. So in terms of controlling money, we've got to shrink the size of public spending for, for that philosophical reason, in part, which is that, you know, people, it's much better to allow private individuals to spend their money generally than the government. Now, where the government does need to spend money clearly are in areas that are necessary, whether that's defense or health service or benefits for people who need them. But obviously we've got to eliminate all of the waste and then we've got to, as we talked about through our tax policy, through reducing taxes, but also massively cutting red tape, getting rid of all of these nonsense regulations that exist, allow people to go and build companies and create jobs for people and build cool products and make the genuinely the brightest and best people want to come here to start businesses or to engage in hard science and move not just British people forward, but humanity forward. I mean, that's what Britain has done, by the way. You know, look at, we talk about building stuff. This country has lost the thread as to how we can build anything these days. Right. I made the point of question time a few weeks ago that we heard this big announcement about a third Runway. It's going to take according, it's going to take 10 years. 10 years to build a piece of tarmac. Right. Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the Royal Albert Bridge. It's thousands of feet long and it is, it carries trains 200ft above the water. He built it in five years and he did it 175 years ago and it still works today. The Chinese build a Runway in a year. The UAE, similar. The Chinese build an international, whole International Airport in five years. We're going to take 10 years to build a piece of tarmac, Rob. So we have lost the thread to the incredible pedigree. I mean, go and look at our architecture. It's not just building stuff, the beauty of it. Go and look at King's Chapel at Cambridge. I mean it's awe inspiring. I mean how many kings of England did it take to dedicate their, their entire will inheritance to help build that thing? And it's all inspiring. Or go and look at the Natural History Museum as an unbelievably beautiful piece of architecture. And again, we've lost the thread. Look at all these modern buildings that come up there. What's the word? Not pretty.

Pseudo modern.

Pseudomon. And so we don't, we build far too slowly with far too much red tape, far too much bureaucracy. But yet I will tell you the there still remains this pedigree inside this country and they, and, and so, so long as that remains, I remain very optimistic. We need to cut taxes, we need to reduce the size of the state and we need to get all of this red tape out of the way and tell people we're on your side. And by the way, the way we're going to demonstrate, demonstrate we're on your side, Rob, is getting the hell out of your way and letting you do your thing. And generally when you do that for British people, you end up with extraordinary successes. One of the reasons I've come into politics is because thankfully I didn't come from money, but thankfully, as a result of selling my business, I no longer need to work for money. Yeah, it's a very privileged position to be in. I'm still relatively young Just under 40, are you? I'm 38. 38. And I feel like this country has given me so much opportunity. You know, people talk. You know what's really interesting, Rob, when I first came into politics, invariably sort of white liberal journalists would ask me because obviously I come about reform and we were talking about freezing migration. They gave. Yeah, but see, aren't you just trying to pull the ladder up from behind you? Yeah, as if. And I, and, and so, you know, I, I, I, in hindsight what I probably should have said was, look, I was born here and raised here, so I didn't climb clamber here up a ladder, but was, you know, it's an insight into their psychology. Right. But what I will say is there is a ladder I do care deeply about and that's making sure it is never pulled up, which is the ladder of social mobility. You know, this is a country where someone who did, came from a family, didn't really have means, who worked unbelievably hard, gave me every possible advantage that they could within the means that they had that was able to create jobs, pay millions of pounds in taxes and contribute. Right. Economically and in other ways. And so that's a big part of what motivates me is that I really feel that that aspect of social mobility is being severely curtailed and is disappearing fast.

Why didn't you go and start a new business instead of getting into politics?

So, yeah, really good question. That was originally my plan and frankly, if Nigel hadn't come back, I probably would have done.

Yeah.

When Nigel said he was coming back, obviously before the general election, Reform had no MPs, I could see there was an opportunity. I've been reasonably good at sort of spotting inflection points and obviously in business and in tech you've got to think long term. Yeah, I could see that in Nigel. There was someone who was a generational talent. You know, you talk about a startup founder, who he is, which you know, you need to be very good in order to make massive impact. Nigel is someone who's a seminal generational talent politically. Him coming out of retirement and making, saying I'm willing to make all those sacrifices all over again at his stage of life.

Yeah, it's not nothing amazing energy hasn't, I mean people do not understand.

I, I, yeah, I mean, listen, people watching this, I will tell you, I consider myself and I take great pride in being a high energy person. Nigel makes me feel love energy. I don't know how he does it. Yeah, no, but now it's just like I'm starting, you know, so I'll speak to him at 6, 45, 7 in the morning, we'll talk about something. And obviously politics is non stop and as I said we're building the whole infrastructure of a party from scratch which may not be evident to everybody but that's what we're having to do do and is a core part. I mean if you fail to do that, it doesn't matter how good our policies are, we won't succeed. But then, you know, by the time we still get at 8, 9pm he's still buzzing with ideas. He's got this, he's doing his gb. He's the most productive, industrious, energetic and creative person I've ever worked with and it's truly inspiring, truly inspiring to work with someone like that. I honestly didn't think I'd have a boss again. Right. You know, once you've been an entrepreneur and all of that stuff.

But is he your boss?

Well he, he appoints me. But what I will say he is a very good delegator actually and he is putting people around him just like Trump did where you know, he had Elon and Vivek and RFK and Tulsi Gabbard. He put this team around him. Now we haven't, he put those in place in the last 18 months before the general, before the election in America. We've still got, we have still got time and work to do on that. I will tell you Rob, he is working really hard. He adds value to his viewers on GB news and the other business relationships. Yes. I will tell you how hard he works in Clacton and how hard he works for his constituents and obviously as leader of party you have obligations there and the results are there to see. If you look at when he became leader we had about 25, 30,000 members. Today we have 220,000 members. That's happened in about nine or 10 months. It's a blink of an eye.

It helped with Kemi sharing it all around the Internet for you, didn't it?

Well I mean that was extraordinary, wasn't it? I mean it was, it was just without relitigating the whole thing, it was just totally incorrect. Yeah. And but you are good thing. In the 24 hours after she did her tweet, over the festive period, we signed up more members in that 24 hour period than we had ever done. Even more than when Nigel announced he was coming back as leader. So yes, it was a very positive.

Who are their media team? I, I, I obviously Follow Conservatives, labor and the main leaders, their. Their media and social media is terrible. Yeah, it is terrible.

I actually have a view that no matter how good your social media team is or your advertising team is, or even how big your marketing budget is, if you're amplifying a symphony, that isn't a symphony, it's a cacophony of noise that doesn't make any sense and doesn't resonate with any people. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It just isn't there. Nobody knows what the Tories stand for anymore. I call them socialist double agents because I. Seriously, when you talk to our members or supports our voters, the word that comes up a lot. And this is someone who, you know, I never really had any involvement in politics before I got involved with reform, other than being a member of the Conservative Party. I just joined right. And it's a direct debit. But as somebody voted Tory, voted to leave, I felt hugely betrayed. I was so excited when Boris had this big majority. I thought, this is brilliant. I was building my business. I really feel like there's a bit of our moment of. There was a moment, a window here where we could use that to make the most of this opportunity of Brexit, because that's all Brexit is. Brexit was an opportunity. There's nothing guaranteed with it. And what it did was, was take, say, look, we don't want unelected bureaucrats in Brussels making our decisions. We want elected officials in Britain making decisions. Unfortunately, the elected officials in Britain making those decisions made catastrophic decisions, and I use that word advisedly. So the word betrayal comes up a lot, Rob, when you talk to our voters. And betrayals are very powerful emotion, a very powerful emotion. And that's why I think the Tory brand is toast. And the problem is that almost none of these people, Rob, have ever had serious jobs outside of politics. As Nigel says, this is the best paid job they're ever going to have. Most of them. Right. Whereas at reform, for most of us, actually, you're real costing us people. Yeah, it's costing us. Yeah, of course, in terms of opportunity. So not that I change it for the world, I consider a privilege, but that's the problem. Most of the people come into politics, Rob, are career politicians. Right? They are. And once you're a career politician, you are, you know, the mercy of the whip. You're reliant on the party for your. For your salary, because if the party decides, it's going to be very difficult for you to win your seat again as an mp.

So defining this career politician thing, so I'm not sure people really understand it. Do you mean they stay in politics to earn as much money being in politics as opposed to wanting to change the country and the world and do good for the society?

That's exactly. That's exactly.

So that's a disincentive. That's where incentives are misaligned. Then, using what Charlie Munger said. Because if you believe in something strongly but you know it's going to upset the status quo of your political career, you speak out, you lose your job. Is that what you mean?

A thousand percent? That's exactly it. Very succinctly and very well.

Wow.

Are you here. What. What is your goal function? What are you actually trying to do when you wake up in the morning? Are you trying to make the country better for British people, or are you trying to optimize for your career over actually a very short period of time? One thing about politics. And then get a job on Facebook.

For many millions of pounds once you finish, or get a quarter of a million pounds, keynote speech fees at the end, or get a book written for you and sell millions of books.

Nick Clegg would go around. I mean, I've never met Nick, like, but he's worth tens of millions of pounds as a result of his engagement with Facebook. Yeah. During a period, by the way. I mean, I know Zuck's gone through this, you know, this transformation better than he has done, but let's not forget, they did deplatform President Trump some pretty awful things, by all accounts. Yeah. You know, the Hunter Biden, like, they. They censored and prevented the distribution of a true story that without a doubt had a meaningful impact on the presidential election. And he made tens of millions of pounds. And then when you look at his rhetoric, when he was a politician, totally misaligned with everything we just described. Anyone who has been brought up in the system, Tory, Labour, that whole Westminster ecosystem, will be unable to fundamentally change how the system works. And that is what we have.

They're indoctrinated, institutionalized.

That's exactly. So there's an indoctrination element.

You're an outside disruptor and.

Yeah, and you see it because sometimes you go to these establishment events occasionally. I mean, I don't really enjoy this. And you sort of see Nigel. He is so obviously not part of that, you know, in the best possible way, you know, because Nigel's obviously formidable, formidable politician, incredibly well read, deeply patriotic, actually quite predictable in terms of, you know, one thing we know, one of the reasons why we've gone up so much in the polls is because people feel like they already know where we stand on a lot of issues. They have a high degree of confidence that we'll stop the votes, for example, and this partly because Nigel has this brand built over decades where he hasn't flip flopped. If we carry on, you know, people talk about how do we maintain the lead in the polls. I always tell the team we're not here to maintain our lead. We need to build our lead. And the way that the way that's going to happen is through talking to people. The more people learn who we are, the more people learn who Nigel is. And Richard, you know, the other mps, the more they realize that. Yeah, but these people, they're not those things that some of these newspapers claim that we were. They're just sort of common sense people who say things that make total sense. And it's actually insane that the boats keep coming or it's insane that if you're on benefits and you start trying to go to work, you have less money at the end of the month, though. It's insane that then people. After my question time, I did question a few weeks ago that had no idea there was a cap on how many British born, how many homegrown medical students could graduate in this country. And nobody can give me a satisfactory answer as to why that should be. So we just got to keep getting our message out there. And I think if we do that, I'm optimistic that we can turn this ship around.

And where can we follow you? Where are you most active online?

Twitter mainly. Yeah. Yeah. So if you just go on X.

What'S your follow name?

It is at Zia Yousef uk, but if you. My name's reasonably unusual, so if you type Zia Yousef, you'll find it.

Yeah. I've really enjoyed this. Thanks for bringing us to your headquarters and giving us all this time. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Rob. My pleasure.

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