It Could Happen Here - The UK’s Cost of Living Crisis

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

The gang talk about Liz Truss, the Conservative party, and how the British government has consistently made life worse for most of its citizensSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit.

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Out of the park. You absolutely, just stunning work introducing this podcast. Yeah, I've bought the level of commitment that British people have bought to governing half of the world for centuries. I have my coffee cup that says, fuck it. And that's where we're at with this one. That's exactly what we wanted from you. Yeah, I'm incredibly sad

about the plight of my home country and continue to be so. But I'm going to explain the reason for my sadness to garrison and chris and robert today one of hell yeah one of the reasons for my sadness uh okay so what i want to talk about today is elizabeth truss liz truss i want to talk about the british cost of living crisis and i think more broadly i want to talk about the British cost of living crisis. And I think more broadly, I want to talk about like how we consent to be governed by people who do not give a single fuck about our well-being. Well, now, James, that's an experience that only the British have. So that's correct.

Yeah, it's notably not something that much of the colonial periphery experience for centuries. We fought the monarchy away, now we're free. Beat the monarchy, Garrison. That's a bold we, Garrison, from a Canadian. Yeah, that's right. Your people tried to stop it. All we did was invade you a couple of times. Don't think you can sneak in there in the ambiguity of accents.

My U.S. passport is on the way. On the way. On the way. Yeah so was the Queen of England's. Mm-hmm yep Liz Truss is gonna come take that away. King Charles is gonna make it not allowed. I do have to get a new Canadian passport with the King on it now which sucks. That was the most I guess we all learned a lot because it's been so long since you had a change of monarch but the fact that everyone has to stop using the money and everyone has to get new passports is fucking absurd this is the worst political system i've ever heard of just wait because it's gonna to get even more cursed.

I mean, okay, Chris, you live in Chicago. Yeah, but here's the thing, right? In Chicago, right, everyone, like, in the core of their being, they know that the people who rule them are robbing them. Everyone in Britain actually genuinely, like, wants to be like this. Nobody in Chicago wants any of the people in Chicagoago who rule us to be ruling us right everyone in britain is like pro like they they want to have to throw all their money away because some fucking 90 year old in a hat died it's it's an incomprehensible level of just oh yeah outstanding yeah it's a marvelous

country. There's nothing wrong with it. It will continue to be marvelous. The lowest 10% of income people in Britain now enjoy a quality of life which is substantially lower than that same income bracket in Slovenia. Which Yeah, the economic

powerhouse of Slovenia. I just want to say we do not deserve a better quality of living than the people of Slovenia. No, because Slovenia actually fucking rules. Yeah, it does. Great place. Yeah, it's a really nice place. Takes about two hours to cross, but it's a great country. Yeah, right.

You can ride your bike across it, but that's great. That's what you want to do. What's happening here is that Maoist Liz Trust is very slowly returning all the grits to the countryside she yes she's there you go she's doing a cultural revolution let's talk about maoist liz trust so uh her parents were actually a long way to her left there was a thing a little while ago where her dad refused to campaign for her when she ran for a seat as a conservative which is based i have critical support for liz trust's dad her mom also ran for a seat as a conservative, which is based, we have critical support for Liz Truss's dad. Her mum also ran as a Lib Dem, which is not exactly,

like the Liberal Democrats are not exactly like the party that are going to liberate the working class through a glorious revolution. But it's still pretty funny to have your mum running for a different party than you and like objectively amusing. She was born in Oxford. Her parents, her mother's a teacher.

Her dad is an academic. I think at Leeds, her dad, he's a mathematician. What a nerd. God damn it. Her dad is not the nerd here. Her dad is the best trust, as far as I can tell. It's Liz who we're worried about. She described her parents as being to the left of

labor which is not hard right labor just exists to kind of these days really to have the pretence of opposition right they've deliberately purged the left from labor uh after 2019 and they exist for kia starmer to say i broadly support this terrible neoliberal policy but and and then say something completely ineffectual. And I'm sure he will be prime minister soon and nothing will change. Nothing that Liz Truss has done and is doing will be walked back because Britain doesn't have an effective left opposition in parliament. It does in society and in the streets. And we'll see there are lots of movements. Our parliament is a farce and continues to be a farce. And it's lots of dudes who went to the

same educational institutions, making this funny kind of noise. There are more diverse people in Parliament, but I'm sure people have seen videos of the British Parliament, right? And everyone is like, when someone makes a point. Yeah, it sounds just like that. Yeah, that was a soundbite. Thanks, Daniel.

Americans who don't understand entirely how British educational culture works. The fancy schools that they go to, they're like Hogwarts if you replaced the magic with kids beating each other in the shower. Yeah, with repressed sexuality and violence, bullying, and being picked on because you're the poorest kid in a school full of rich kids. So actually, it is a lot like Harry Potter. It is a lot like Harry Potter. It's actually quite a bit like Harry Potter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are still TERFs.

It's very disappointing. So talking of educational institutions, Truss went to Oxford, right? She went to Merton. I went to Oxford too. I didn't go to Merton. That's a better off college. I went to a college which is renowned for being poor,

for what that's worth, within Oxford colleges, which were all full of rich people doing rich people stuff she read ppe politics philosophy and economics which i don't think you can really do as a degree in the u.s right no what is that politics philosophy and economic what that yeah yeah it's called ppe three made up things well what are you saying? Other degrees, on the other hand, are real and tangible and exist in the physical space where you

can touch them. Everyone knows that. Yep, it's true. Apart from PPE. PPE is, so like I went to Oxford too. I took modern history and politics, which is way cooler and better in every way. But the PPE kids, so that people understand a vast number of british prime ministers have taken ppe as their undergraduate degree it's

like the king maker of degrees and you take it because you're an insufferable fucking dork who wants to be prime minister or like work for the british government in some way right like it is this like king maker who wouldn't want to be prime minister it looks like such a good job yeah they they last a long time they have universally great approval ratings and to be fair they do just go on to grift a shit ton of money like it's not and they don't have to do it for like a fixed period of time like american presidents do so that's nice they can just have a bunch of parties for their friends in the lockdown and then leave which is more or less what boris johnson did and i don't i don't expect liz to be prime minister for long but it's what she's doing

and what she has already sort of done that i think is of interest here i turned out she was also president before we get off her university time at the Oxford University Liberal Democrats um so oh no yeah yeah great stuff um the so like she's gradually drifted to the right which uh you know what are we what we uh she's drifted to the right you know the Lib Dems were a little bit more left then but Labour was very neoliberal in the 90s right when she was in um when she was in parliament so sometimes the lib dems provided something of a left opposition uh if you remember like tony blair new labor it was just kind of uh bold neoliberal like shameless neoliberalism right now tony blair is the one who was played by Hugh Grant, right? Is he the one? Is he the inspiration for Love Actually? I was assuming because Tony Blair was the only British politician I could name as a child.

Okay. So he must have been, right? Because Tony Blair is completely devoid of charisma. And the one thing that that Hugh Grant character has is charisma. So maybe, maybe he does kind of, I mean, they're all white men. They are all white men that is a very white movie he looks like him uh but then that's not exactly a remarkable thing is it in this sort of homogenous british ruling class that we have so uh trust has gone through

like being secretary of state for justice through being lord chancellor uh through being foreign secretary god okay lord chancellor is a pretty cool sounding title i gotta give it to him first that's like star wars shit wait do they have a shadow lord chancellor too yes the thing that your people do get right is they pick the terms to make it all sound cool like whenever one of like your parliamentary coalitions collapse they're like the government has fallen it just makes it all sound like it's so much cooler than it is it does lend an air of shakespearean epic where it's what it is is these 17 people who all went to the same schools and read the same telegraph newspaper columnists have disagreed with each other from minor point and

will shortly be reconstituting their alliance in a slightly different way yeah but it sounds like people are fighting each other with machetes in the center of london yeah it has a game of thrones beheading vibe yeah maybe that's where this is heading who knows uh she i think if people had heard of liz trust until she became prime minister it was probably from her really wonderful pork market speech which uh if you haven't watched the pork market speech is a study in which you should and shouldn't pause for applause. Robert have you seen this pork market?

No. What is a fucking pork market? God it's so funny. In December I'll be in Beijing opening up new pork markets. What the fuck is this shit? She's not a real person. It's

reminiscent of when you take a fish out of water and it moves its lips but makes no coherent noise. It's like an alien trying to pretend to be human. Yeah, it's wrong. This is a great leader of our people. it's like the uncanny valley of politics it is a little bit like it is almost lovecraftian and it's

and it's unsettlingness yeah right what's what's happening here what we're seeing is this is this is the this is the final result of affirmative action for white people yes we're gonna get into that this is what This is why she has this job. She benefited from affirmative action from white people. Other examples of this include Destiny. And yeah, you get the same kind of person every single time. Same, same, right? Like Destiny and the Prime Minister of the UK. Yeah, so like she becomes Prime Minister.

And it's worth noting that like the way you become Prime Minister in the UK is different to the way you become President in the US us right you you are the leader of the majority party in parliament or of the coalition that controls the majority of the votes in parliament so she becomes prime minister not through a vote of the people but through a vote of the members of the conservative party um you can understand as like people whose dogs have girls names and whose daughters have dogs names uh that is i think that's a trash future bit i don't know where it came from but it explains them perfectly uh so these people got together and they she ran against rishi sunak right and who is eminently

more capable of doing the fashy neoliberal shit that they want to do as are many other people of color within their party but above all things they are racist right above even doing this kind of speed run extraction from the british economy they are still racist uh they're they're fine with having people of color in in positions in the hierarchy right that's something that britain established through hundreds of years of empire. But the idea of having someone in a leadership position is fundamentally anathema to the Conservative Party. So instead, they picked Liz Truss to just flap her lips around

and talk about pork markets, right? So that's how we get Liz Truss as prime minister. So no one per se votes for Liz Truss. No one even per se votes we get Liz Truss as prime minister. So no one per se votes for Liz Truss. No one even per se votes for the Liz Truss agenda that we're seeing now, right? And I think that's really important. In her acceptance speech, she talks to Boris Johnson. She said, you're admired from Kiev to Carlyle.

What? Yeah. What? Yeah. Okay. First of all, bizarre. The one thing I know about

Boris Johnson is that he looks like Donald Trump if Trump didn't have his shit quite so together. Yes. Yeah. He looks like Donald Trump whose mom didn't tell him to comb his hair and tuck his shirt in before he went to school. Yeah. If Donald Trump couldn't have paid to have people like check him before he walks out the door, that's he would look yeah yes exactly if he fell over in a wind tunnel

he would look like boris johnson boris johnson a guy so fucking rich he's never had to comb his hair stop being prime minister because of these scandals right these sleaze scandals about them having parties during lockdown more or less that was what destroyed him not any of his terrible policies his bigoted bullshit him writing op-ed saying that the problem with us was not that we were in charge of africa but that we're not anymore uh good god yeah yeah this is a type of guy who exists and can become prime minister like people don't understand i think um british the the British right is very different from the American right. And I think we're going to get into that.

Also, a guy who famously just, like, pulverized a small child on a trip to Japan playing rugby. Okay, you don't need to say the things that he did that are rad. He did finally discover the actual third rule of British politics, which is that if if you have fun in a way that someone else can't have fun they will destroy you yes like yeah the mere british the mere act of a british person seeing another person having any joy whatsoever like just like the the the so a switch flips in their brain and they just turn into like brits, but worse. This is, yeah. So this is like, there are basically two ways that a British political party can be, right? One is that they enjoy themselves

while they're plundering the institutions that still remain in the United Kingdom. And the other one is that they are like monastically abstemious while they're doing it, right? And Labour tend to be the abstemious ones. And the Tories tend to be the ones who drink the port and have the lockdown parties and have like literal karaoke events when they're asking people not to go to their grandparents funerals uh and labor tend to be the ones who wring their hands to go oh no

uh and then fundamentally do the same shit right that that is a difference chris is entirely correct that that is uh the thing that irritates british people most right and maybe we'll just talk about this right now it's increasingly like it's not the material conditions that bring down british governments because material conditions are getting worse and have been getting worse since we started this this austerity stuff in 2010 it's these stupid scandals right these these personal scandals which just normally involve them having too much fun when they're supposed to be pretending to be serious while they steal all the all the things that still remain in britain and i want to talk about a little later so yeah she said boris johnson was a boy from kiev to carlisle

he's not that's why he's not prime minister anymore everyone fucking hates him uh and also i don't think she's been to carlis because I've got family who live there. Not everyone loves Boris Johnson there. I'm sure not in Kiev either. So the UK has been having this cost of living crisis since the economy reopened in 2021, right? Since the end of lockdown. What this cost of living crisis is, what a cost of living crisis is generally,

is that the goods that you need to buy to exist are rising more quickly than the wages you get paid for working. Now, some of these causes are global, right? We have this inflation issue in the US too, but the UK has compounded this by leaving the European Union, that creating massive labor shortages and these repeated bumps in the energy price cap, right?

Which is the limit that an average family should pay for their energy consumption it's not it's not a hard stop it's not a limit on like how much you definitely will pay but it's a limit on how much the average family should pay right um so trust comes to power in the context of skyrocketing energy rates for British consumers. Gas is used for heating most homes in the UK, and it's increased 926% in price since before the coronavirus times. Despite the fact that most British people don't pay spot prices for gas, they don't pay the going market rate for gas. There's a serious crisis in affordability. Now, it was looking like the average gas bill for the average British person was going to go up more than it now is because trust has announced some capping of spot rates. We're going to get into why that isn't as great as it sounds. The big issue here is that Britain

doesn't have a nationalized provider, right? It's privatized its energy grid, it's privatized its energy generation. And it ends up with this bizarre situation where one of the people you can buy energy off, and often you don't have a choice, right? Depending on where you are, is the French National Energy Company.

That makes sense, sure. Yeah, it makes perfect sense, right? It's great. depending on where you are, is the French National Energy Company. That makes sense. Sure. It makes perfect sense, right? It's great. And one of the notable consequences of this is that gas prices have gone up, France caps the prices that consumers can pay, Britain allows them to charge a lot more.

So British people, and this is, as a rule, one thing that British people dislike. So you're telling me that France finally won that long war. Yes. I'm saying that we have been owned by the French. And if that doesn't bring down the conservative government,

I don't know what will, because there's one thing British people dislike, it's French people. And so, yeah, Britain is now subsidizing energy rates for French consumers, which is great, having just left the European Union, because we are incredibly xenophobic as a nation, as it turns out.

And people may have seen this UK TV show called This Morning, where they did a Wheel of Fortune type thing where you could win a thousand pound. Oh God, that was brutal. Or they will pay your energy bills. Yeah, but for like three or four months, right? Four months, four months of energy bills.

The bloke they're doing it in is just like, it's this sigh of relief when he or four months, right? Four months, four months of energy bills. The bloke that they're doing it in is just like, it's this sigh of relief when he gets energy bills, right? And he's like, oh, massive. Like I'm going to have my energy bills pay for four months. It's such a relief. And this guy is one of 4 million people in the UK who uses what's called a prepayment meter, which I'm reliably informed that Americans don't have.

So do you all uh are you familiar with the concept of pre-payment meters uh no okay uh so maybe people are familiar with like pay-as-you-go phones right where you go to the shop yes yes yeah if you if you're like selling drugs or you're you're you're engaged in anti-government extremism, yeah, you want a phone like that, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you're doing journalism, you might want one for legitimate journalism reasons. Same as one of the others, yeah.

Yeah. Yes, true. Selling drugs. Yeah, here at Cool Zone Media. You know who won't use a prepaid cell phone to sell you drugs? Because they're not... Wait. Yeah, they would.

You think so? I think they just got enough money. They would just use a regular phone bill and have a lawyer just deal with it. No, I think they're deep into Boost Mobile. It's the only thing keeping John Law off their fucking back. You know who has to go to Walmart to buy more credit to their phone so they can sell you some weed? It's the advertisers who support this show. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. killing brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. ground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home

and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Feast, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack

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and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. And we are talking about prepaid energy meters, a scintillating topic. So the prepaid energy meter, you have to go out, you have to pay for your energy. So if your rates go... The reason for these overwhelmingly is that there's an agreement

by which most energy suppliers won't just cut you off in the UK. If you have old people in your house, you have children in your house, they have to do this. The appearance of caring is this thing that we're going to see is really important in lots of these policies, right? So they can't cut you off but if they have if you have a meter and you can't prepay for the electricity then you're de facto cut off right and the best statistics i could find about this was in 2017 where roughly 140 000 households 16 of the of those that had prepayment meters self-disconnected self-disconnected. Self-disconnected is the euphemism

for they couldn't pay, right? For gas or electricity in 2017. They couldn't afford to add credit to their meter, right? And they didn't have the credit, so they couldn't get the electricity. So they end up disconnecting. And if you add to this, British houses are made out of cheese.

Our houses are very poorly insulated for the most part right they're often single brick so it's expensive to heat them and they get cold in the winter and they get hot in the summer we're not we have like houses that are designed to deal with the extremes in temperature which we are now experiencing because we have ruined the climate so people are spending more and more using more and more electricity and gas to heat their homes it's costing more and more and increasingly they can't afford to pay it right and and this will lead to people dying uh so if we look at like what the average pensioner in the uk right i looked up

some uh statistics for the office of national here. The average pensioner in the UK on a fixed income is making £17,000 a year. Nice. I guess they're guessing. £17,000 of what, though? Oh, they're gold, Robert, gold. You take your pound to the Bank of England and they give you gold in return.

Oh, okay. Not anymore. That actually, interestingly, was, if we go on a side note for a minute one of the ways britain achieved greater democratization when the middle class were excluded but landowners were included was that the middle class had cash money and the landowners had wealth in the form of property right so the middle class threatened to tank the entire bank of england by taking all their pound notes and asking to have them converted to the gold that they were supposedly pegged to.

And there was not enough gold to actually, to do that for the entire money supply so they could attain the Bank of England. So yeah, bit of 1868 Reform Act history. They're no longer, they're decoupled now from that. So you can't do that, sadly. But 17,000 pound is not a lot of money, right? Trust has just announced that the energy bill

for an average family is going to be capped at £2,500 a year, which is a decent chunk of your income, right? If you're making £17,000. Before that, the previous plan limit had been £3,5 pounds for an average family based on average consumption which is a very significant chunk of your 17,000 pound a year right especially if if you're renting on top of that right the cost of housing the cost of rental housing has

gone up in the UK um so and this is a rise again the cap had already been risen in April, right? It's not a price cap, right? This doesn't mean that you as a family are guaranteed that you will not pay more than this £2,500 number. What is it's a unit cost limit. So not all families are typical, not all homes are typical. But the cost is for those who are interested, 10 pence per kilowatt hour for are interested 10 pence per kilowatt hour for gas 34 pence per kilowatt hour for electricity so what this means is that like we've capped a little bit

of the cost uh and in response like and this is pretty uh this is pretty typical for what the conservatives do right they'll do this thing where they give the appearance of caring. And then at the same time, they bundle it in with a bunch of incredibly, like, just like, the best way to understand these people is that they view the free market as a religion, right? So, and they believe that like, the only way out of anything is to cut taxes. Whether they actually believe that

because they think it will genuinely make the situation better, or they're just trying to get as much as they can for them and theirs i think it probably i'm leaning towards uh the second one right but uh so she bundles this with uh the uk is gonna gonna lift its ban on fracking right um the uk banned fracking in 2019 after a series of earth tremors near blackpool which there's a lot of cursed tremors near Blackpool. There's a lot of cursed things about Britain, but until recently, we hadn't added earthquakes to that list.

So thank you, Liz. It's very funny. Warwick Business School published a study in 2020 pointing out, it is widely recognized that the open and liberal nature of the UK's gas market means that the market price, the national balancing point, is unlikely to be influenced by shale gas development.

So shale gas is fracking right in the UK. So the UK is going to start fracking, which is great. She also proposed removing the top tier of income tax, which is reducing the amount of tax paid by people who earn more than £150,000 a year. Right now they pay 45% tax above that. This announcement caused a pound to fall to a historic low against the dollar. And for trust to find herself in open beef with the woke scolds at the IMF. So the IMF said,

new economic measures laid out by the UK government will likely increase inequality. And they added that the IMF does not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture. So she also during this, like she she promised that she was going to cancel a planned rise on corporate tax and scrap a proposed cap on bankers bonuses. on corporate tax and scrap a proposed cap on bankers bonuses this has been one of her big uh policy things along with simon clark who who declared a new age of austerity uh at the time they announced this right but there's this constant like everything britain does there's only one way in which conservative governments to move can move and that is taxing the other people who went to the same schools and universities as them less and so i kind of want to take a step back here and talk about the ideology that underpins a lot of what trust is doing and and it's that she and chancellor dex jacob wasi kwating and

priti patel and dominic robb uh who are all in her cabinet i think a part of this free enterprise group within the Conservative Party. And much like you have caucuses in the American Senate, in Britain, we have these groups. And they wrote this book called Britannia Unchained, which I don't know if people are probably not familiar with, right? I've heard of it, but I know very little about it. Yeah, it's just like a, it's a series of short essays, just like doing a Milton Friedman, like an unreconstructed free market fundamentalism.

It's very different to what the, because the American right likes to talk about markets and libertarianism and stuff, right? But like in general, their entire politics is just kind of owning the libs, right? Like these sociocultural grievances. And then when they get in power they they're spending is largely just about one might argue staying in power right

and whereas the conservatives in britain are genuinely committed to slashing government including slashing services including slashing uh any kind of social safety net right it does have these amusing consequences sometimes like uh britain continually cuts the number of police it has which is great yeah it's genuinely really funny yeah it's it's very funny it's very funny that like our most right-wing party i guess not our most right-wing party if you've got some proper nutters but uh we've defunded the police just by not wanting to spend money on them yeah It is also, okay, and by funny, I mean incredibly depressing that, like, Corbyn was running on adding more cops, which is, like, the most cursed, like, the British left, like, always, like, they always find a way to destroy themselves. They've been doing this for, like, 200 years. It's really impressive stuff yeah yeah

it's incredibly uh it's incredibly depressing to watch like uh yes the british left just tear itself to pieces not that the american left doesn't tear itself to pieces right it seems to be a thing on the left but yeah when the british left had a serious run and making a serious difference in 2019 instead we decided to just absolutely like tear each other to shreds. And here we are, right? Here we are with the number of children in poverty going up by 600,000 since 2012. With the number of, from 2019 to 2012, the number of children who rely on food banks

for their food security has tripled by the end of this year the national health service national health care which is our nationalized socialized medicine system right uh the budget will have been cut by 24 compared to 2016 that's despite the fact that we just went through a pandemic uh the poorer socioeconomic groups in the uk are experiencing a fall in life expectancy for the first like we we have life expectancy is pretty much continually trucked up since the industrial revolution but we're now finally slashing that down again i wonder i wonder why yeah there's no way of explaining it there's it's just happening uh the only solution is a free market a

free uh market a freer market yeah to pump more things into the air yes yep meanwhile here i'm gonna take a puff from my inhaler because my lungs are dying yeah well that's because pollen is outrageous right now you're not getting fracked hard enough in in the pacific yeah more fracking will fix my pollution and air quality the fact that people are uh literally dying yeah younger than their parents did and the tories don't they have these like what's very important to them is the performance of patrician care right like we saw this with uh theresa may's burning injustices which of course remain burning injustices because you don't do anything about them uh boris johnson's leveling up agenda are people familiar with his

like god i i can't believe you have a minister you have a shadow minister of leveling up yes we do i just like at what point do you just go none of this is real and like if they start sending cops you just keep beating them up until everyone else is forced to concede that they're like no there is not in fact a shadow a shadow minister of leveling up yeah i don't know that is the uh the big the big question that i want to ask is at what point do we realize that there is not a shadow minister of leveling up and that we don't have to open new pork markets and that maybe that isn't the solution to us dying younger than our parents

and that we don't have to do what these people say when they are just very blatantly like trust is very obviously doing like an extractive speed run on the british economy right there and i tell you what you know who else uh will do an expected street run on the british economy right there um i tell you what you know who else uh will do an expected speed run on the british economy is it the products and services that's yeah the show it is sadly yeah welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every

week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them

black lit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life listen to black lit on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast all right we're talking about extractive speed runs we're back uh so with johnson and even with theresa may right who was the prime minister before him there was this important performance of of caring right being like oh we're gonna make life better for the poorer socio-economic groups the poorer people in the uk i think what's changed is that like the nature of of consent from the governed is this thing that maybe we need to elucidate more right like in britain there was this kind of consensus that like the governing party would pretend to care and would pretend to

do things and sometimes they would let you have nice things right little treats and trinkets and that in return you would largely not kick them out, either physically or electorally, although it's very hard to kick them out electorally because of Britain's ass-backwards electoral system, which is another relic of a previous era. Now they don't seem to be bothering to pretend to care. When you're looking at a system in which, when trust came to power, old people were going to die. you're looking at a system in which like when trust came to power old people were going to die when we we were looking at a system in which people are dying younger than their parents and old people were going to die in the cold this winter like i've got friends

i remember this was years ago uh but it was when utility prices maybe started going up when my grandfather passed my grandmother lived on her own and her being really afraid to heat the house because of how much it cost right and i've got friends who i've spoken to this time who are like well we're preparing to have our grand come and live with us so that we can we can heat the house or like if we just move into the downstairs parts of the house then we can keep those warm right or like you know we're going to go back to having fires and we'll just go we'll warm our house with a wood fire right lots of houses in uk still have fireplaces that are functional yeah my my

house growing up was heat with a wood fire it's great it's good for the lungs it's it gives them a good coating that they can then use in the rest of your life to repel other pollutants coal fires are great inside the home highly encouraged so like people were really making these like i don't know it's it's uh it's the sort of stuff you you associate maybe with like uh like the hard times in the soviet union right like like sort of being like oh we're gonna go to the food bank and we'll line up and get food and then we'll we'll all huddle in one room to stay warm but these are the plans that people were making like this this summer looking to this winter and liz trust responded to that with like okay well the way to fix this is lower taxes for

high earners and no cap but removing the cap on bankers bonuses so that the financial services industry will relocate to the uk which it won't because the UK has left the European Union, right? And it's now kind of a pariah in that sense. So like, I don't really understand how the UK, how the British government obtains consent from the governed anymore. And I'm partially interested to see how this goes and partially obviously like appalled to see the costs of this. They're not even trying to care. They're not even pretending anymore.

They're just going to take what they can and then presumably bounce to some tax island where they can survive and thrive while the rest of us freeze our asses off over the winter. So what I want to, I guess, finish up with is this idea that like... in america you have fixed terms of elections right so every we're having uh midterms next month and then we'll have the presidential in britain we don't right in britain the the government has to lose a vote for no

confidence which is when the majority of mps vote they no longer have confidence in the government or uh the prime minister have to what in, the monarch has to call an election, right? So I guess King Charles could just, because they didn't let King Charles go to the climate summit recently, which is another amazing thing that Liz Truss has managed to do within like a month of being in office.

She's already like openly in beef with the monarchy, which is the one thing that conservative people might like more than uh white people who tax rich people less she wouldn't let king charles go to a a climate summit uh because conservatives are more or less climate change deniers or at least sort of climate change don't give a fuck because we need to extract more money and so like at some point like i don't know what the withdrawal of consent looks like anymore right it's the people who uh british politicians see themselves like see themselves as governing for like their constituents are seemingly like columnists in the telegraph and people who are

the ceos of these big companies in london which have grown and grown and grown and grown based on this endless supply of free money that is now drying up right so instead of dealing with the root cause of that they're going to try and look at other ways for those people to continue to to grow and extract finance and i don't know what that means for the rest of british people like i don't know what the withdrawal of consent from a system which so obviously doesn't care about the material conditions you live in looks like but if we want to talk about collapse and collapse is a thing that gradually happens rather than a thing that kind of we click our fingers and it's there i think some of this is what it looks like like people refusing to pay their power bills is becoming a thing in uk right

i should mention the energy companies are recording record profits throughout this time period maybe it looks like protests in the street the britain has had these like they had big tuition fees protests and we had the quote-unquote london riots right which were incredibly harshly put down and people went to jail for a long time for like stealing a bottle of water from a tesco so like i think it's worth watching for people who are not in the uk like what does it look like when your governing elite stop pretending to care about you and what is the withdrawal of legitimacy or the withdrawal of consent look like and like i say i don't know it's looked different every time it's happened right it looked different in the soviet union to uh the way it looked in like i'm trying to think of other like regime collapses in south america um but like we say that a we say that a regime is consolidated when the rules of

the game are more important than the outcome of the game and i think we're getting to a point in britain where maybe the outcome of the game is going to be more important than the rules of the game so that might mean some serious change it might might not. It might just mean, you know, we put a new dude on our coins and everyone puts bunting up industry and we do nothing fundamentally different and just acquiesce in living conditions getting worse and worse and worse and more and more people are dying because they're poor. I don't know. But yeah, Garrison's just nodding. Yeah, I think i think that last one's gonna be the one that happens yeah maybe we'll do it olympics and we'll spend the next what was london 2012 the next decade just reminiscing over how great that was um and and then we'll just not notice that you know our

grandparents are dying unnecessarily because this trust his friends have to make more money i i have i have an enormous amount of faith in the british people to just do nothing like they they they they have they have an unbelievable ability to just be like eh things are getting worse like i don't know who cares like we're still british like they like they they can't even really effectively do imperialism anymore, but it's like everyone's so wedded to the like imperialism machine that everyone, that like, you know,

everyone, every, everyone will constantly vote against their class interest. Everyone will constantly act against their class interest. Everyone will constantly just sort of like literally let hundreds of thousands of people die around them. Yeah. Yeah.

Because flags and sports i think corbin has an energized a lot of people into realizing their class interest perhaps more than they were before because there was briefly a parliamentary alternative but right now there isn't like kia starmer is not jeremy corbin but then you know but it's also the british right like it's like well okay so they sort of reconsolidated the left it did nothing got, and then imploded, and now it's being split between just complete, pure, people arguing that Starmer's doing socialism, pure Labour Party hacks,

and then a bunch of people just doing nothing because it's the UK and it fundamentally never gets any better. Yeah, yeah. I take a little bit of hope from like have you seen the uh the um where people are to be deported from the uk and then there are like mass mobilizations to prevent that happening yeah that gives me some hope right that's a lot of people willing to give up their saturday or their sunday to shout immigration officers and like that's something that didn't happen by and large in the US, right? Even with the gross abuses of the immigration system under Donald Trump. People didn't stop that happening.

So some of that stuff- It did happen in places. There were a lot of flights that got blocked and stuff. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, it happened in a different way. Some people here did, like in 2020, I think there was an icing in Barry O'Logan and it got run out of town. So I shouldn't say that.

But that gives me hope. It gives me hope that maybe some people will realize that the solution is not to vote harder, right? And the solution is to organize and to do things in an extra-parliamentary fashion and not trust the people who are participating in your exploitation to live you from your exploitation, which has

maybe been our mistake for too long. Yeah. Everyone in England needs to take a page from the Harry Potter books and arm the children to murder government officials. If I'm remembering how those books ended properly. Form a guerrilla army of you

and your friends and attempt to overthrow the government. Is that what happens in Harry Potter? Probably. Yeah, let's say yes. That's the plot of The Order of the Phoenix. Okay, yeah, I remember it now. When they do a car bomb. That's it.

That's our message for you today. Read Harry Potter, do a car bomb. Yeah, that's it. That's our message for you today. Read Harry Potter, do a car bomb. There we go. There we go. That's our legally binding message for you today. Non-actionable threat. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.