Mehdi Hasan first rose to prominence as the New Statesman’s pugnacious political editor, a job he held from 2009 to 2012, and he hasn’t stopped picking fights since: his 2023 book was titled Win Every Argument. He moved from magazines to television, presenting shows on Al Jazeera and MSNBC, where he became a furious critic of the Israeli war in Gaza. In 2024, he founded his own media company, Zeteo, which is now establishing itself in Britain as Zeteo UK. He came on the New Statesman’s The Exchange podcast to discuss media start-ups, how the US views Britain, and taking on Donald Trump.
Oli Dugmore: You have this position, in the States, where you can give us a sense of how America is seeing what’s happening here. And when I say what’s happening, I’m referring to Keir Starmer’s resignation and his very likely replacement by Andy Burnham as the leader of the Labour Party. How does it look from America? Does America care?
Mehdi Hasan: “No,” is the answer to your question. About 15 years ago when I lived in the UK and I worked at the New Statesman, I remember having a coffee with a friend of mine who’d moved to the US to work on foreign policy issues. He said, “When you live in the US, you realise no one cares about the UK.”
I thought that was a very arrogant thing to say, and I was very dismissive of him. And now here I am, saying the same thing to you! No one cares. If you walk towards Capitol Hill and flag down a passing member of Congress, they would not be able to tell you Andy Burnham’s name. Many of them would struggle to tell you Keir Starmer’s name. These are members of Congress. I’m not talking about vox pops of people on the street. I’m talking about the people in power. I know in the UK there’s this obsession with the United States, but it’s not returned. I just want to be very clear about that.
I’ve lived here for 12 years now. People love Brits. They love the accent, they love the royal family, they love all of that. But British politics, no. The United States has a special relationship with Israel. That is what most members of Congress regard as the special relationship. That is who most people, especially on the right, would say, “Oh, the 51st state.”
That is Israel, not the United Kingdom. Of course, we can talk about intelligence sharing and defence sharing and all sorts of military ties going back years and Nato, but I’m just telling you the reality of politics and media in this country. I’m looking at the US media, and I’ve seen little to no coverage of Andy Burnham in the mainstream media.
It’s interesting to hear you say that about the special relationship because, you know, different countries have different terms to describe it. It seems to me that so much was made of Starmer, with people looking for things to score him on, and one of the things they would say is, “Oh, he’s the Trump whisperer.”
In terms of his own personal reputation, he ended his premiership being publicly attacked and mocked by Donald Trump, so I’m not sure how he would ever retain the title of Trump whisperer.
There is no such thing as a Trump whisperer. Trump throws everyone under the bus. The closest to a Trump whisperer in international politics is either Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. It’s not Keir Starmer. It’s not even Benjamin Netanyahu, who we’ve seen have his ups and downs with Trump.
Obviously, he laid into Burnham in his own very particular way. “Mayor of a small town”, “very liberal”, I think he called him. Donald Trump couldn’t find Manchester on a map if his life depended on it. He wouldn’t know who Andy Burnham was if he walked in the street and slapped him in the face. I think when we talk about special relationships with the United States, we also have to bear in mind that Donald Trump is president, which changes everything.
Even if Kamala Harris was president right now, I’d be saying the same thing to you, that no one cares about Britain in the United States. Yes, at a military level, people are going to wonder, “Is Britain going to spend what it needs to spend on Nato?” and all of those things. People at the high levels of “the deep state” will care very much about the relationship with the UK.
But in terms of politics on the Hill, national media, no one is paying attention to the Labour leadership race in the United States. But let me add in: Donald Trump makes everything even crazier, because with Donald Trump, you never quite know what he’s thinking about a foreign nation or a foreign alliance.
There is a tendency as well, running through British politics and perhaps even European politics, to consider this American moment as an aberration rather than the new norm. Do you think it is a temporary change in the way that America orients itself towards Europe, or are we seeing something more permanent here?
I think the long-term damage has been done. If this was Trump term one, we could have that relationship where he’s an aberration, and then we’ll get Joe Biden or whoever comes in, and they’ll reset relations. That’s what Joe Biden did try and do, of course.
He came into office with America at its lowest position in its international standing. Trump was super unpopular. The United States was unpopular. The world had just watched an insurrection, was stunned by what had just gone on in Washington DC. And Biden did the slow, hard, arduous task of turning around the super tanker. And polling did go up for America around the world. America did get more popular again, under Joe Biden. But of course, Donald Trump is back again and much worse than ever before, especially compared with the first term on the international scene. In his first term, he had not launched what is starting to look like a forever war in the Middle East against Iran.
He had not taken out the sovereign leader of a sovereign nation while in his pyjamas. He had not threatened European territory, as Trump continues to do with Greenland. So we’re in a very different place in terms of who Trump is and his relationship with Europe. And as you say, the changes he’s doing can’t just be undone, certainly not on the Republican side, and even on the Democratic Party side.
Let’s say a Democratic president comes in and says, “You know, I want to be friends again with all the people Trump pissed off.” Yeah, good luck with that. I mean, we’ve reached a point where the Danes had blood banks on standby, had troops ready to mine airports and runways because they were worried about an actual American invasion of Greenland. That’s very hard to just undo overnight or even over four years. So I don’t think we should consider this an aberration. I don’t think we should think Trump’s just going to disappear. I think the world needs to understand that this is America now.
I invite your thoughts on Burnham, because he’s someone who’s been a part of the Labour Party for a long period of time, particularly during the Blair-Brown years, and at one point in time voted for the Iraq War. Do you think he’ll be haunted by that vote as he comes into No 10?
I think it may rear its head. Iraq is the war that lots of people who supported it want to go away, and it’s never really gone away. And obviously I covered the Labour leadership election of 2010 when I was at the New Statesman. I co-chaired with the then-editor Jason Cowley the Labour leaders’ debate in Westminster, which was Andy Burnham, Diane Abbott, Ed Miliband, David Miliband and Ed Balls. And at the time, in a couple of things, Andy Burnham was the most “right wing” candidate on stage. He had launched his candidacy in 2010 as the guy saying, “We need to be tougher on immigration. We got it all wrong. We abandoned white working-class voters.”
Actually, I think the Gaza issue is the one that’s really going to hit Burnham first, because he’s kind of dodged it. I saw him during the [Makerfield] by-election campaign get asked about it, and he talked in very vague terms about how it’s all very upsetting and distressing. He’s spoken about it, but he’s focused on the by-election. That excuse won’t work once he’s prime minister and we look at Gaza and Lebanon and Iran, all of which are live conflicts. Let’s not buy any bullshit that there is some ceasefire or end to the war in any of those places – and the British prime minister will have to take a very clear position. We know that Keir Starmer got heavily damaged by his LBC interview where he talked about no food, fuel, water.
What I would say about Andy Burnham is, you’re right, he did vote for the Iraq War. He’s just appointed James Purnell as his chief of staff. Perceptually not the greatest of issues, given Purnell was a Blairite and a hawk and a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, though that was [more than] 15 years ago. People change. Let’s see. But in Burnham’s defence, I would say, at a very controversial moment – October/November 2023 – when Keir Starmer is doing these ludicrous interviews on LBC saying Israel has the right to blockade Gaza, Andy Burnham came out for a ceasefire. I don’t think we should completely discount that.
By the way, I should say quickly on Burnham, to go back to your original question: in the US, my understanding is that where the Trump administration cares about Andy Burnham is what he does about oilfields. That’s what Trump cares about. He doesn’t care about Middle East policy really. He doesn’t care about foreign policy. He cares about business and investment and getting deals done, and obviously these two oilfields have caused controversy in the UK. What Burnham does there, what Ed Miliband does there as energy secretary or future chancellor of the Exchequer, I think that will be something that people in Washington DC pay attention to. I think that’s certainly something that’s on the agenda here in terms of what happens with oil and drilling, because that’s what Maga is obsessed with.
There are a few characters who do make a habit of talking about the UK and British politics – Elon Musk being one of them.
Ugh.
If I could talk to you about that sort of communicative regime, because Musk is a very powerful, very rich man, and the apocalyptic vision he paints of Britain presumably serves some kind of purpose. Though maybe you think it’s just sort of his pet plaything, and he likes projecting these ideas of civilisational collapse? But there is this perception about Britain as a country, and is that because of its kind of symbolism as a part of Western civilisation?
I don’t know why specifically Britain, but your guess is as good as any. I mean, it is a European thing. This is not just Britain, right? He spent a lot of time in Italy with Giorgia Meloni. He’s openly and fully backing Alternative for Germany [AfD]. He was one of the earliest American supporters of the AfD. He spoke via video conference, not just to Tommy Robinson’s rally recently, but years ago to the AfD, long before they were leading nationally in the polls – which they are right now, depressingly.
So, he does see this as a joined-up thing. He does see this as a kind of transatlantic Western movement that he thinks is trying to save the West. That very much is driven by white nationalism. I’ve said it before: you can take the boy out of apartheid South Africa. Can you take apartheid South Africa out of the boy? His father is still an open, unabashed racist. I think his grandparents were accused [by Musk’s father] of being Nazis.
I mean, Elon Musk is exhibit A in what happens if you spend too much time on Twitter. I mean, the guy bought the platform, and it red-pilled him. He wasn’t this radical ten years ago. He wasn’t this bad five years ago. We’ve seen him get progressively worse and worse, amplify the worst people, take the most extreme positions.
Sunday was his birthday, 55 years old, and he spent it online promoting a film called Citizen Justice, which is a film from Uwe Boll starring Armie Hammer, the controversial actor from the US. It’s a kind of B-rate, low-budget revenge thriller, but it’s basically also far-right political propaganda.
It’s all about the idea that you deal with migrant criminals by killing them all. It’s about an American vigilante in Europe who murders not just migrants, but their entire families. And Musk has been posting this as the “moderate response”. This is a film that the Germans won’t even classify, because they see it as incitement to violence. And Elon Musk has been promoting this film. So you’ve got to ask these questions. What is he up to here? How extreme is he? Is he now inciting violence? The Tommy Robinson rally where he says, “Fight back or die.” Just insane rhetoric from Musk.
And yes, he is the driver behind why right-wingers in America now think Britain is some dystopian Mad Max hellscape, why they say things like, “London has fallen.” That is because of Elon Musk. That’s not just because he has helped fund some of the worst people in the UK – Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, etc – but because in the US, if you want to see Britain, you see it through his social media prism.
Elon Musk does have some kind of weird vendetta against the UK. I don’t know why the UK, but I think it is a part of a Europe-wide context. The “rape gangs” controversy gives him easy fuel, and it helps him on social media spread disinformation and racism.
Yeah, complicit in the rape of Britain, and I think he accused Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist”.
But then he says the left call people bad words and incite violence and put a target on his head by calling him a fascist!
Well, Mehdi, you were here recently. I’m surprised you managed to make it out alive and back to the States.
Why would I not? It’s Londonistan. My people control it. What are you talking about?
Yeah, sorry, sorry. That’s why you were OK. Yeah, obviously.
Wait till that’s clipped, that three seconds completely out of context on social media.
Can we talk about Musk’s wealth? How do you feel about the fact that one individual could, for a period of time, be worth more than a $1trn?
I’m delighted it was only 12 days, but I’m sure he’ll be back there. I think it’s insane. I’ve said this many times and I’ll say it again. This isn’t just about wealth inequality. This isn’t just about the rich vs the rest. We can make all the economic points, but fundamentally this is a political argument.
This is a democratic argument. You cannot have a functioning democracy if one person in that democracy is worth so much money, has so much financial power. I mean, he gave $300m nearly at the last election to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. He then said, “I’m done with politics,” but of course he was lying, he’s Elon Musk.
He’s now again one of the top donors heading into the 2026 midterms. When you have oligarchs who can buy elections, it makes it very difficult to say you have free and fair elections, a liberal democracy and one person one vote. You can’t have one person, one vote where one person’s wealth is worth so much more than thousands, millions of people’s votes. That is the fundamental issue, and I think all Americans get that.
They don’t like the rich. No one likes the rich in the United States, in terms of the rich’s control over our politics. Yeah, everyone wants to be rich – the American dream – but no one likes the idea of billionaires controlling politics, and I think that is the fundamental question mark here when you have someone as rich as Elon Musk.
Let’s talk about Zeteo UK. Why did you launch it? What made you want to do it?
Well, many things made me want to do it. We launched Zeteo in 2024 here in the United States after I left MSNBC. We have over two million subscribers on YouTube. We have 700,000 subscribers on Substack. We’ve done pretty well. We’ve made a bit of an impact here in the US. We’ve done what I wanted to do, which is have the establishment taken seriously while also having some anti-establishment politics and media coverage.
We wanted to take that sensibility, that approach to politics and media to the UK. Number one, because I’m from the UK – at some point that was an obvious place to expand to. Number two, we are doing well and we do want to go more global. The UK seemed like the obvious place to go next. After the US, it’s where we have our second-highest number of subscribers. Number three, what really annoyed me this year were a few things. I saw the UK media coverage of Iran. I went on some radio shows. I did some interviews in the UK media, and I just reminded myself how bad the UK media is. I’d kind of forgotten.
I did a bunch of rounds of interviews. It was all just kind of clichéd questions, the worst groupthink, the worst conventional wisdom, the laziest wannabe right-wing questions from supposedly centrist hosts.
And it really, really reminded me of just how bad the media is in the UK, and I’ll throw in here the Gorton by-election. That’s when I kind of said to my team, “We really need to launch Zeteo UK as quickly as possible,” because I saw the coverage of the family-voting bullshit. It was across the media landscape – everyone, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times – everyone weighed in on this completely Islamophobic story, completely evidence-free story, and it just reminded me of just how bad the “liberal media” can be in the UK.
I thought we needed Zeteo in the UK to shake things up, to have some pushback. But I think, in general, media in the Western world has its pros and cons. The cons are there’s a lot of groupthink. There’s a lot of corporate influence. There’s a lot of hawkishness when it comes to foreign wars. And I think Zeteo can play a role in the independent space there.
It can play a role in the progressive space with the New Statesman and others, trying to make a case against insane wealth inequality, against trillionaire rule at a political and economic level. And I think people want to hear that. I think people are fed up. I don’t know why we think people are just fed up with the political establishment in the UK and not just the media establishment. There is a correlation.
I’ve got some quotes here. I think Zeteo UK has been called a potential “media arm of the Green Party”.
No, we’re not the media arm of any political party. I think we’ve made that very clear here in the United States, where, in the 2024 election, I was tough on the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Greens, and on Jill Stein. So we were pretty tough on all of the parties here in the US. I’m tough on politicians across the board. Obviously, my own politics are on the left, as you know. Obviously, I am a sympathiser with the AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]-Mamdani view of the world. I was delighted when Mamdani won the mayoralty [in New York]. I’ll be delighted if AOC turns up as president, but we don’t endorse candidates. We don’t campaign for political parties. There’s a reason we call ourselves independent media. We’re not just independent from corporate control, from party influence as well.
You mentioned AOC. Do you think she’s going to run in this cycle?
No one knows. I don’t think AOC knows if she’s going to run. If you put a gun to my head right now, I would say yes, but it’s 51-49. I think it’s very, very tight. There is a very good case for her not running, for keeping her powder dry, for running for the Senate.
She’s very young. She’s 35 years old. She just made the criteria last time round for president. There’s a good case for saying Chuck Schumer has no future in the Senate. He stands down in the next cycle, and she takes his seat and becomes Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has a much stronger springboard for the presidency another time.
Look, I grew up in the William Hague era, right? The most boring general election in British history. I did cover the 2001 general election, and William Hague, people said to him, too, “Just wait your time. Now’s not the moment. Tony Blair’s in his dominance.” Hague could have been a much more effective leader many years later. He actually impressed people years later, as an older politician.
But you know what? Politics doesn’t work that way. People see a chance, they say, “Now’s the moment. Who knows what will be tomorrow? Gotta go for it right now.” And there is an argument for her running right now. You mentioned earlier, we don’t know who the Republican candidate’s going to be. We assume it’ll be the end of the Trump era. It’ll be a moment for the Democrats when the Republican Party’s probably very, very unpopular. There will be about 30 Democrats running. Everyone and their dog is going to run this time. I don’t know if AOC is guaranteed to run, but I would assume she will.
[Further reading: It’s not the phones]
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Subscribe here to commentInteresting…..Why does Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refuse to debate her far left politics with Bill Maher on his show Real Time on HBO? Does she think far left politics is a help or a hindrance to the Democrats winning the next US Presidential election in 2028? We need the middle ground!
*Citizen Justice
I think it’s actually called Citizen Vigilante, director Uwe Boll, 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Vigilante