The dust has settled from the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections, and Russell Brand is more disenchanted than ever.
Thursday night saw a sweeping victory for the Conservative Party, whose leader, David Cameron, won a second term as British prime minister—the first Conservative prime minister to do so since Margaret Thatcher. Conservatives also won a majority in Parliament, while major opposition parties—Labour, led by Ed Miliband, and the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg—saw crushing defeats.
The Scottish National Party, or SNP, enjoyed major victories in Scotland—which last year lost a bid to leave the United Kingdom—winning 56 of its 59 seats in Parliament and pushing out most of the Labour MPs.
Brand’s response to all this: “Bloody hell, what’s happened?”
Brand, who famously believes voting is “pointless,” found himself at the center of the election debates after he interviewed Labour’s Miliband at his home for his YouTube channel, The Trews.
Miliband’s appearance with Brand became a major election talking point and a bludgeon with which Miliband’s opponents bashed him. It was seen as evidence that the establishment, big-business Conservative-backing media in Britain had lost some of its infamous influence to more liberal, new media figures like Brand.
In the wake of the Miliband interview, Brand even went so far as to call on his fellow disenfranchised citizens to vote, putting his celebrity backing behind Miliband’s left-leaning Labour after initially supporting the more liberal Green Party. Today, all that political vigor looks to Brand like a foolish, drunken mistake.
“What I feel like from a personal perspective,” says Brand in Friday’s video, “is when we interviewed Miliband, we thought: ‘Oh my God, we can probably influence the outcome of an election.’ And now I think: ‘You can’t influence the outcome of an election.’”
Going forward, says Brand, Brits can expect to see the passage of a major Conservative agenda that cuts resources for the poor, ignores the environment, and puts an emphasis on the benefits of big business at the expense of everyone else. He also predicts a foul wind will overtake the British population between now and the next election as a result of the Conservative majority.
“We’re going to have no shortage of meanness over the next five years,” says Brand. “There’s going to be meanness to the disabled. There’s going to be meanness to immigrants. There’s going to be meanness to the poor. So all we’ve got left is to be compassionate to one another.”
Screenshot via Russell Brand/YouTube
