The Bugle - Fish Cakes with a Hint of Lead

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

We're back! This week on issue 4388 of The Bugle, Andy is joined by Alice Fraser and Nato Green, as they discuss El Niño, Australia takes a stand on AI and Canada-USA squabblery. PLUS a Bugle update on Burham's tenure as PM and find out how this episode got its title! Subscribe to the Bugle now through our voluntary donation scheme at the bugle podcast dot com. 🇦🇺 Australia takes a stand on AI: The Bugle report as Australia takes a stand on AI in the music industry🇬🇧 Burnham Bounce: The trio delve into he latest on Andy Burnham's tenure as UK PM🗺️ Google Gives In: Andy, Alice and Nato discuss as Google give in and rename Lake America for US usersAndy's Links: https://www.andyzaltzman.co.uk/Alice Fraser's Links: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraserNato Green's Links: https://natogreen.bandcamp.com/album/the-darkest-hour🎧 Support The Bugle! Become a Team Bugle subscriber for bonus episodes, exclusive video editions, and the righteous satisfaction of funding satire:http://thebuglepodcast.com📺 Watch Realms Unknown on YouTubeProduced by Chris Skinner, Laura Turner and Harry Gordon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world. Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4,388 of the bugle audio newspaper for a visual world. I am Andy Zaltman, and we're back after our summer hiatus. Let August be what August will be, as a wise old puffin month, so. I'm joined today for our first post-hiatus bugle by Alice Fraser and NATO Green. Happy September to both of you. Welcome to September, one and all. What a treat it is.

The beginning of the year for comedians who've just finished Edinburgh. How was Edinburgh, Alice? I had a really lovely time, as I said to a number of people. I do not have time to be having a bad time. I have two children and a book to write and a show. And actually it was all almost entirely sold out and very positive reviews. So I feel like I didn't have to stress out, as it were. I didn't actually have to fend off, stress that hard.

But now I'm so tired. Well, that's what Edinburgh was all about. We don't want to be jogging for a bus at the end of a marathon, you know. Do your children go to the gigs? They came to one or two gigs with me. But for the most part, no, I don't bring them. I did a panel show run by, uh, Little-aged lady is called Agony Ants. You always know it's a high-quality show when they begin it

with three A's close up to the top of the guide. And that was just a very lovely show. And I said, they called me in at the last minute, said, oh, we've had a dropout. Would you mind jumping in? And I said, sorry, I can't. I have the children. And they said, bring the children. So I brought, the children. And through, I'm not going to claim any good parenting on my, this was just a coincidence of sort of weather and glory, but they were incredibly well behaved in a way that made me look extremely competent. I remember when my elder child, who is nearly 20,

was a baby. We brought the baby to, my wife brought the baby to my show at the stand, and I thought it would be fun. The show that year, so it would have been 2007, had an award ceremony in the second half and in which I gave myself various awards. I can't remember the premise. It seemed funny at the time.

Anyway, so my wife brought the baby in. I thought, I'll be funny to get the baby up on stage, like Alex Higgins in the snooker in 1982 and various other sports people since. And so I did that. And the baby, until that point, had just been, you know, quite quiet. and behaving,

burst into uncontrollable tears. So what I thought would be quite an amusing moment of parental devotion became child cruelty. But, I mean, that's, you know, I guess those are the risk you take in showbies. Naita, you didn't do Edinburgh this year. But had you done it, how do you think it would have gone? I think if I had done Edinburgh,

I think it would have been bad because I would have taken up probably two-thirds of my set checking with the audience that they could follow my references. And then I don't know if I told you the story. Once I did have a gig at that I did a spot at the stand. And I had a joke where the reference was the American actress Julianne Moore. And the audience sort of had a tepid response.

And so then I put to them, okay, here. here's the parameters of this reference, what reference would work for you? And the audience like broke into discussion groups and quickly reached a consensus and reported back to me that the right reference for them would have been to substitute Julianne Moore with Nigella Lawson. All right. Okay. So that doesn't seem like a like for like swap for me. So yeah, that's that's that's that's what what my my Edinburgh show would have been. It's just consensus

reaching. Teaching people the value of democratic deliberation. Well, we are recording on the 1st of September 26. September, one of the top 12 months of the year for me. The best ever year for British September haters, though.

1752, when Britain jumped straight from the 2nd of September to the 14th, when it belatedly got on board the Gregorian calendar train. So that was a very short September that I'm not a huge fan of September myself because I found that statistically, cricket seasons are much more likely to end than begin in September,

and for me that is never a good thing. And also around 50% of all world wars have started on the 1st of September. So that's not a great recommendation either. Oh, for me, I don't love a September because my ticket sales go off a cliff. I don't love a September because, I live in San Francisco and September is the kickoff of something that we have come to call wildfire season.

Oh, right. When periodically the skies are just choked with ash for days at a time. Right. So it kind of bumps out the vibes. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I guess if you're an oxygen fan, that's, I don't know, you are a huge, huge oxygen fan. That's not great, is it? Yeah, it's my third favorite of on the periodic table.

What are the top two? magnesium and malibdenum. Oh, right. But the thing to remember, NATO, of course, is that if you are the CEO of a large polluting contributing company, you can afford better air, so it's all right.

Or you can just afford to declare a different month and not have to go through September, I guess. To do two August or maybe. Good point. Yeah, nip back to April. As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin. This week, Bayer Tapestry section.

Very exciting news here that the more than 900-year-old bit of needlework has made its way to London, and an exhibition is opening next week. This is, for those who are unfamiliar with it, the Bayer Tapestry, is very much the saving Private Ryan of the late 11th century.

The smash hit, not actually a tapestry, tells the story of the EU invasion of Saxon Britain, which paved the way for a staff to pay for parking and eat straight carrots and stop at traffic lights and health and safety gone mad. But we ask on our bugle, Bayer Tapestry section, is the Bayer Tapestry actually that good? Compared with modern-day war photography and news reports, it took fucking ages to come out, and it wasn't even that accurate when it did come out 20 years later. We also have some

Bayer Tapestry facts for you. The tapestry, which is like a watermelon on a motorbike, in the sense that it's not actually a tapestry, is 68.3 meters long, meaning that a peak Usain Bolt could run all the way along the Bayer Tapestry in under seven seconds, assuming he'd already got up to speed. And also you could use the Bayer Tapestry as a blanket for 34 randomly chosen NBA players lying down head to toe should the opportunity arise. Your second Bayer tapestry fact is the Credence Clearwater Revival song, Born on the Bayer, highlights the importance of the tapestry to late 1960s American rock, although Credence did famously mistake the Halle's comet that appears in the tapestry for a poor quality moon. The Bayer Tapestry famously contains more than one

penis per meter of cloth, which is one of the highest PPMs ever recorded on a news-based historical artefact. And people are starting to ask, are there too many plonkers on the Bayer tapestry? 93, in total. Some claim 94, which seems like quite a lot for a tapestry. Although historians do, of course, now except that the Willie was in existence in the 11th century, so it's not like those hieroglyphs of UFOs or whatever people think they can see if they squint hard enough. 88 of the penises are horsey dongles and five are human penileada. And I guess you have to ask why there are so many plonkers on this tapestry.

I guess just like with modern films, they obviously thought they had to put in some gratuitous sex to keep people's attention for the whole 68.3 metres of the tapestry. And also, why not? Michelangelo door 57 prongs on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And no one fucking complains about that. Not to whang on about Edinburgh, but the best review that I'm. got for this entire festival gave me the pull quote 10 minutes of quote breathtakingly original dick jokes end quote I argued with my PR people about whether that should just be at the

pool quote breathtakingly original um can I um so was that was it the the jokes that were breathtakingly original or um was it jokes about unoriginal jokes about original dicks original dicks original Dix, yeah, just completely revelatory shapes of penis. I have to say, as I reflect on my time with the bugle, I believe that the bugle is possibly the number one podcast for tapestry-based jokes. Oh, that's good. I'm not aware of any other podcasts that is returned to the bountiful well of comedy that is tapestry-based humor. particularly when it's not about something that's not actually a tapestry. But I mean, is that better or worse?

I don't know. I've devoted my career to being, you know, number one in a subset of one, speaking as the world's leading cricket statistician stroke stand-up comedian. If it's a shmata on the wall, it's a tapestry. Also in the bin, we mark the retirement of footballer Lionel Messi from International football with a chance to build your own Lionel Messi commentary. So just collect the messy commentary clips and put them together to make the perfect Lionel Messi match. Here is your first Lionel Messi commentary clip.

And the ball is deflected out for a throw-in. Messi picks it up. Is he going to take the throw-in? No, he's handed the ball to a teammate. Next week, Lionel Messi plays a simple pass to his right back. That section in the bin. Top story this week. El Nino is back and better than ever, or bigger than ever, probably not better, depending on if you want a Nino to be big or not.

Look, I'm not a huge fan of El Nino. It seems to call it's a really annoying weather system for me that seems to enjoy nothing more than threaten to bring devastation to the planet. And it's gearing itself up for another tilted its own record for biggest recorded El Nino, the Mondo DuPlanis of Weather System. in many ways. Alice, I know you are the Bugles' El Nino correspondent and I've been tracking it for many

hundreds of years. Just bring us up to date with its latest threat to our well-being. Yes, Andy, it's getting hot in here. So take off all of your assumptions about the future of capitalism. It's very difficult to talk about weather events, particularly pending weather events. So the scientists have been talking about how there is this massive bolus of warm water coming up in the place that is the predictive of El Nino, but that is already warmer than any previously recorded El Nino, which means that the cascading El Nino effects, which are pretty predictable at this point, are going to be unpredictably bad. It's very difficult to talk about them without feeling helpless in the face of decisions that have already been made or are being made by people over whom you have zero influence. It can feel as though your own recycling of a yogurt pot pales in comparison to new data centers being built or the environmental cost of shipping or plastic toys or fast fashion or AI and streaming video. But actually, I think it's sort of super depressing.

But I think the solution is to bring back the old pantheons. Just bring back some weather gods so that we have, so can we like we can sacrifice a goat and feel like. like we're having an effect. Like I feel like the core problem here is disenfranchisement leading to climate panic. So what we need is like a Captain Planet-style god of recycling. You can sacrifice your plastic milk bottles to recycle. You can have a giant flossing octopus made of bin bags

who hovers behind you reminding you to rinse your cans. You could dedicate one vegan meal where you let a chicken live in the name of Benevolo, the god of virtue signaling. I feel like if we had a pantheon, this would feel less stressful when our houses are being flooded. I mean, there was one quite obvious other solution that you suggested that your yoghurt pot doesn't seem to be much in the face of major pollution. All I could hear there is eat a fuck of a lot more yogurt and you would balance that out more effectively. Am I misinterpreting the data?

I mean, you are misinterpreting the reality that the solution is cultural, but not the culture that you're finding yogurt parts. Look, NATO, I mean, it's been a fantastic summer to not take any interest whatsoever in the physical state of the planet. I think it's been one of these summers in which that approach has been most beneficial. It's a great time to pretend that everything's fine, because if you don't take the option of pretending that everything's fine, then you're probably going to find yourself watching a film like, say,

the day after tomorrow and thinking, let's not give up hope that we can still achieve that utopian dream. That seems to be where we are right now. That's, I don't know, disaster films just seem like optimistic comedies now. Is this the point we've reached? Yeah, I do, I find that there's something quaint and comforting about films where there's like a grand conspiracy of people where everyone's in on it and they're all, it's all meticulously planned and they're getting rich.

because at least they have offered the hope that someone is in charge. So this El Nino story genuinely makes me angrier than anything we've ever talked about on the bugle. Wow, that's a high bar, NATO. Explain why that bar is so high. Even than you answer it incandescent, NATO. Yeah, and like angrier, angrier than COVID, angrier than Brexit, angrier than Trump. Angrier than all of the wanted slaughter and suffering on the level of butchery of the Spanish language and science journalism, both. Okay.

So Spanish, I speak Spanish. El Niño means little boy in Spanish. Apparently, I looked it up. The name goes back to Peruvian fishermen in the 1600s who noticed that sometimes around Christmas the weather would get. And this is a technical term, Pudo Chingado. And there would be no fish. And it was El Nino de la Navidad, the little boy of Christmas, a dark joke for Christmas about how your Christmas present is no fish because the little boy ate it or something. Now, reading articles about it, these scientists and journalists don't care about the Peruvian fishermen who just want to catch some fish like Peruvians do to combine with aahi chilis and choklo corn for a delicious saviche.

They're saying stuff like no two El Ninoos are the same. We've had many El Ninoos in a row that got worse. The El Ninoes are getting bigger. It makes me fucking furious. If you're going to choose to use a Spanish name for a scientific phenomenon, at least get the Spanish right. You don't need to say the El Nino. That's the the Nino. Right.

You don't need to say the El Ninos, say Los Ninos. And if you're going to say El Nino is getting bigger, say El Mbray. And then at the level of science, I read like, eight articles about the El Nino's, and I understand less after having read eight articles about studies that were published in the journal science than before I read them, because here's what I got. It's going to be the worst El Nino in a thousand years, which they know from poking Galapagos coral, and no one knows how El Nino will be affected by climate change.

Is climate change accelerating El Nino, or is L.NU accepting climate change? or is it both? Also, what is El Nino? Well, it starts with water warming in the Pacific and that somehow makes some places wetter and other places drier, and it comes every two or three years, and they're not consistently the same and have unpredictable effect. So it's not one thing. So it's not clear what it means to even call it El Nino. It's just fucking weather. And they wanted to give it a Spanish name to pander to racist when the weather is bad because Exxon rain ran into trademark issues. You say it's possibly the strongest for a thousand years. I mean, the problem is most of the tapestries from those early Elmina are sadly lost. They either got very wet or they just blew away in the wind or both. But it seems to me that one of the problems we've got here, just in terms of global climate generally, is that humans evolutionarily are a curious species.

And so we have figureheads in politics and business, think there's nothing that can be done, or at least there's nothing that can be done without denting short-term profits or political popularity, and also nothing that can be done easily and by other people. And they are curious because they're humans. They've shown the level of curiosity to become, for example, presidents or CEOs of multinational billion-dollar corporations. And they want to see what happens when Armageddon comes. And it's that sense of intrigue that you get, of wanting to see what happens. The same thing you get when you're at the top of a 120 meter water slide

and a small hippo stops right by the top of the water slide and it is human instinct to want to see what happens if you grease that hippo up and shove it down. That's just basic human nature. I guess one positive and

look, I mean we do have to look hard for positives now and to a degree I feel a bit sorry for the climate deniers because I think it's been a tough few months for them. I think they've been put to the test like never before and they've really had to dig deep and find some real determination to stick to the script. Others, of course, have jumped straight from it's not happening to it's already happened,

so there's no point trying to stop it. So, which is quite a, you know, a convenient leap, meaning that you can still carry on doing nothing but for a slightly different reason. But there was a report that the water temperatures, in fact, off the, of the Californian coast, NATO, are already, quote, cooking the animals in the sea, which, ironically could actually help the environment because we can then save on the fuel needed to cook them on land once we've taken them out of the sea. So that's, you know, I mean, this is a silver lining, is it not? Ocean-boiled prawns, sea-poached lobster. It helps restaurants on their fuel bills and it reduces emissions.

And I think we can clutch with that. Straw-clutching is perhaps the fastest growing hobby in the world right now. And I'm all in on it. Canada, US war news now. And, well, NATO, I mean, it's, I don't know if we can describe the current squabblery between Canada and the USA yet as a war. It's quite hard to tell the difference, really. I mean, the average modern war is now up to 187% more childish than the average war in history. And I feel that the USA-Canada squabble is so.

childish that I think we can define it as a war by 2020's standards. And I guess we should just be grateful that these two nations are just log-aheading each other. Can you use log-ahead as a verb? Yes, of course you can. It's 20-26. I'm going to third millennium it until it's been thoroughly verbed. Anyway, we should be grateful that this squabble has remained non-military for now. How is America dealing with it? How are you prepping for the inevitable conflict yourself? You know, I'm stocking up on syrup. Look, it's a trade war. And so Trump has sought to negotiate a more favorable trade arrangement with Canada and has imposed tariffs and Canada's imposed tariffs because the negotiations broke down.

And I've said it many times, Trump's whole brand is the art of the deal. but for me as a professional negotiator who trains other negotiators I can say definitively that Trump is bad at negotiating why is he bad at negotiations well first of all he's 80 and his brain is made of rancid hamburger pudding what is one of the early indicators

of cognitive decline in seniors loss of short term memory that's a key quality that you need in a negotiation to be successful the negotiations have stages we propose that you counter this we counter that and so on. You can't negotiate if you can't remember what stage you're at and keep rehashing the details of a deal that let you evict black renters in Brooklyn in the 80s,

aka your happy place. Second, he doesn't track details because he's very stupid and negotiations are all about the details. For example, he insists that Canada is ripping off the United States and the U.S. subsidizes Canada, except that's actually not what is happening. The trade with Canada is based on us buying from them stuff that we want that they have. We buy 20% of our oil from Canada, 80% of something called potash, which is fertilizer for soy and corn, and 85% of our electricity. If having to pay to buy stuff that you want from someone who has it is a rip-off, then so is all of capitalism, which I accept. The first reason he's bad at negotiations because he can't keep track of details.

that would allow him to evaluate the deal on its own merits, his measure of a successful deal is just being told that he won in the form of renaming stuff. Trump resorted to self-soothing by renaming stuff. So he renamed Lake Ontario, Lake America. But why the lake? Why not just rename Canada, northern Minnesota? Matter of time.

That's all he wants. Gulf of America, Trump Tower, Department of War, Trump Kennedy Center, Trump accounts. his politics are motivated by one thing and one thing only, which is printing news stationary. You could probably get him to agree to allow trans players in women's sports by telling him they just have something called Trump balls. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was asked if we were in a tit-for-tat trade war with Canada, and this is what he said. Well, I don't think you could be in a tit-for-tat with someone who's 13 times larger than you are. What are they going to do?

Take their two submarines from the eminent ball and sick them on us. that is the kind of thing the bully says in the TV script right before he gets laid out and then the producer says that's two on the nose. Can we get some more pitches in? The only way Bessent could be more of a cartoon villain while saying this is if he said these words to a henchman while sitting at his command console

stroking a cat and then raised a toast to Evil. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said things must be called by their name and this lake is called Lake Ontario today and forever. And that is such a quaint Canadian sentiment. In America, things absolutely must not be called by their name. We have no mechanism whatsoever to require that. If we did, a lot more things would be called lies, crimes, fraud, corruption, racism, racism, illegal, unconstitutional, stupid, bullshit, weak, failed, dangerous,

clownish, narcissistic, and weird. And that's just the Odyssey. And HBO, HBO would still be called HBO, wouldn't it? For sure. There is only one thing that I am personally upset. about the U.S. Canada relationship, which is that Canada is to the north of the United States, and Michigan is one of the U.S. states that borders Canada, which is, let me repeat myself, to the north. However, Detroit is a city, which is across a river from Windsor, Canada, which is to the south of Detroit. And that is fucked up. Always been upset about it. And I think someone should do something about it.

In fact, the people of Detroit are upset about it. Two, if you go there right on the river, they have a giant metal sculpture. of a fist as if to fist Canada for doing something so stupid as to put a city to their south. I mean, obviously, it's Trump's, you know, when he's struggling for popularity,

his go-to gambit to distract people from the lack of food on their plates or fuel in their cars is to rename a large bit of water. You know, what more nourishment do the people of America need? But, I mean, I'm disappointed that Canada rejected the opportunity

to fight infantile peave with infantile peeve, sign into law an order renaming the post of the President of the United States of America as Percy the Wanking Pelican. They did goad the Gossamer Skin president by installing a big sign by the lake saying Lake Ontario now and always. And it's been known as Lake Ontario since the early 17th century. It's thought by a prominent online encyclopedia in which I did upwards of 10 seconds of

research on this. Thoughts we derive from an Iroquoian word meaning go fuck yourself, you sat sumer face, piece of pig shit. But Google has kind of sniveled out and grovelingly renamed Lake Ontario for its American users as Lake America. Well, surely, it could have just done that only on Trump's phone. That must be possible. There must be the technology just to do it on one person's phone. Obviously, it's simpler for us here in the UK.

We just name everything after Elizabeth's. Canada is giving away lake names, but is stealing American scholars from top U.S. which I think is the baller move. Obviously, the brain drain has been reverse-oed by Trump's fairly anti-academic policies and anti-immigrant policies. So a fair few bright minds are going, looking for visas. And I think Canada's definitely scooping up spare academics. We are all academics spare access to requirements. This is the question. As a pro-academic, I think, of course, no, they are foundational to, you know, all of the, ivory tower building we need to do.

Exactly. And I have to completely say they're completely essential because my wife is an academic. My twin brother is also an academic, but he's an academic in the ethics of AI and AI regulation in Australia. On the last bugle before our summer hiatus, I maybe compared my wife to Helen of Troy. And she believed I didn't do it with the level of sincerity that was required. So we have to say that academic. of the absolute bedrock of all human society.

Australian news now and, well, huge news for fans of low-grade human-produced pop music. It's been given a big shot in the arm by the Australian music banning low-grade AI-generated music from its official charts. So Australia obviously has a great heritage in low-grade human-created pop music, and that tradition seems now set Alice to continue for the rest of time. Yes, this story puts the AI into Australia that we all pronounce but isn't actually in there. We are rejecting all of this AI slop that has been wedged into the charts, mainly by auto playlists on things like Spotify where they have been generating AI to put into playlists to boost their own numbers.

But it's been distorting the official charts, which record such streaming. as valid. So I think it's really good that we're cracking down on AI infiltration of charts because those charts deserve to be taken over by folk hits like Eastern Rosellas. If you haven't looked up Eastern Rossellas,

it's a banging track that was written by a child and it's actually just describing some birds in a really beautiful way. So, yeah, I think I think, first of all, it's very problematic for things like copyright because there's no copyright in AI-generated stuff, and we haven't yet determined in law what counts as meaningfully contributed by humans with AI synths and vocals.

But, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Is this a slippery slope that was begun with autotune? Yes, but are we willing to arrest its slide now seemingly? I mean it's a slippery slope that really began when I don't know, the violin was invented I think or you could go back even and people realise that by banging two stones together

you could make a louder noise and clapping your hands or whatever it was that began the history of percussion. You know, I think we need to get all music back to just people hollering in caves about how great that new picture of a bite. is. Well, I certainly don't think that you should be allowed on the Australian charts unless you're using something like a bush base or a banjo made with a biscuit tin or a bunch of beer bottle can lids nailed to a stick, the traditional Australian instruments.

I'm slightly surprised that charts still exist. They feel like something that should have been left somewhere in the early 21st century. And surely we now must be at a point where AI can create its own charts of music that AI could create if it wanted to and then would listen to if it had ears, but without it actually having to make the music. This seems to me the next and in fact there could be a blueprint for human music where music companies could just say Sabrina Carpenter has a new album out, wait for journalists to review it positively because they don't want to appear out of touch or elitist, without actually having to make the music and without Sabrina Carpenter having to, you know, take a couple of hours off from.

watching the snooker to get in the studio. I think that's progress for me. Well, I think it is a progress. I think it's also good to ban AI music because it preserves our vital capacity to judge music partly by the quality of the music and partly by whatever the person making the music is wearing to the music awards.

You know, we don't want to have our fine tradition of raising up and tearing down a series of mostly female celebrities stripped from us. It's part of being human. I could definitely do that bit, surely. I'm realizing how little I know about what musicians are from Australia because I am imagining that the Australian music charts, spared of AI contributors is just midnight oil and hilltop hoods in alternating sequence.

I used to do FBI radio, which was community radio in Sydney, and we had a remit. I think we had to do about 60% Australian music and 30% local music from the last 18 months. And I did have to be taken aside by the producers at one point and asked to stop saying the band names, quote, unquote, sarcastically. UK news now and Andy Burnham is still Prime Minister, which is lasted now, I think, 42 days. So that's pretty good.

He today spoke in Parliament for the first time because Parliament's been on holidays, it likes to be, and promised stronger... Were they with you, Andy? Sorry? Was Parliament with you on holiday? Yeah, I just went with 650 MPs to Northern Italy. It was lovely.

Andy Burnham has promised stronger public control of services, or as it's been reported in some newspapers, full-blown communism. So we'll wait to see how that pans out. Also, Kirstama, the former Prime Minister, has announced he'll be stepping down as a member of Parliament. He's leaving the House of Commons to spend more time in any other place that does not remind him of his own harrowing political downfall and the inbuilt confrontational idiocies of British parliamentary bickering. It's tragic. Immediately on contact with the reality of a job that can't be done.

Andy Burnham has lost the confidence of idiots who think the solution to systemic problems is charismatic leadership. And people are really crowing like he's actually had. time to do anything to lose the confidence of the voters. Yes, so it is, well, seven weeks he's been Prime Minister in which time, as we say, Parliament has been on its summer holiday. And he's not fixed everything instantaneously. So polling is now suggesting that the so-called burn and bounce is already over. Further evidence of quite how impatient we've become as a species.

Do you remember when the news cycle was a penny farthing, Andy? So far he seems not to have done anything completely fucking bananas. So instantly that's better than some recent incumbents and nor has he hastened the death of a monarch. So again, that's good. He seems to have some ability to communicate on a human level, which again puts him above some of the recent competition. So his personal popularity ratings are good,

but his Labour's poll ratings have not gone up a huge amount. So until he finds a way of magicing the shit out of the economy and fixing all public services by clicking his fingers, it is going to be hard to win the skeptics round. But we will have full exclusive coverage of the inevitable decline and failure of the Burnham government over the next one to ten years. Robert Peston, the political presenter and journalist,

wrote until today, Andy Burnham has been a lucky and deft Labour leader and Prime Minister, but is his luck running out or is reality catching up with him? And again, this is seven weeks in. You've gone early up. Surely the luck of an early primary. You've got to be given at least a year, haven't you?

What have we been? I mean, yeah, reality at that point, the only thing that reality is catching up with it's seven weeks is unprotected sex. That's when you really have to start checking the calendar. I have a question. Yes. So about your silly system, Andy.

So I saw the news that Kirstarmer was resigning his post as MP, which is the moment that I learned that Kirstarmer still had a job. And in the course of reading about that, I learned that Rishi Sunak is still an MP. So I just, I think it's, what do you make of it that in your system, you can go from being head of state to back to your old prior job as a member of parliament and just hang out. Do those people, do your former prime ministers who go back to parliament just spend the time

walking the halls of commons being like, well, what I would have done is whatever, you know. Well, generally they spend their time sitting on the backbenchers saying not a huge amount, but inevitably whenever their faces picked, people assume they're thinking, well, what I would have done. But they tend not to say it because we're British and we don't like to say what we really think most of the time. I mean, I guess the fact that it's different from America, there's an instinctive reaction to think,

well, obviously we must have a very good system then. But just because it's better than America, I don't think it means that it's right. But I think there is that element when you've got a former prime minister still sitting in Parliament that no good can possibly come of it and they they tend to hang on for a bit and say well i'm you know i'm still fascinated by the job of being a constituency MP before realizing that there's money to be made as a podcast these days right it's it's like an elegant version of the of the application of the peter's principle

the idea that in a bureaucracy individuals will rise to the level their incompetence so you do a job and you get promoted you do a job and you get promoted and then you do a job that you can't do it and you stay there. And what a great solution for the UK to demote people back to the job that they didn't publicly suck at to the scorn of the entire nation, rather than just firing them entirely. Like, that seems like a more humane system for everybody. Well, yeah, I mean, I think I have suggested on the bugle in the past that I believe that all political leaders, as soon as they leave office, should be fired into space to live out their days. In order to, sort of, of remove that sense of ego from politics, that sense of wanting, you know, wanting to

be able to see the impact of what you've done. I think really that's really the way we need to go. It worked for Napoleon. Just send them all to St. Elena. More UK news now. And, well, Alice, amongst your many roles in your extensive bugle portfolio. you are the Bugles' cryptocurrency taxation correspondent. And, well, it's getting a bit tricksy for crypto fans in the UK.

Yes, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have sent out 81,000 warning letters to crypto holders saying that they will have to pay tax on profits and that they will be fined or face prosecution if they fail to declare profits that they've made from selling cryptocurrency, even between cryptocurrencies or crypto's currency. I don't know what the plural is. One analyst has said that the new powers which will be given to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs will make it possible to actually observe these transactions and make investigations incredibly easy.

So you're not going to get away with it anymore. Refuting the central promise of cryptocurrency, I feel, which is that it's only money when we want it to be. These penalties will be applied, noting that your magic internet money is taxable money, counts as money. And I feel this is very sad for cryptocurrency evangelists because the idea of cryptocurrency was always, what if money, but we had it and didn't have to do any of the kind of regulatory things that happen to money.

You know, the principle of Chesterton's gate, which is you don't see the point of any of the rules and regulations that apply to money until you hit every branch on the way down that led to the instigation of those regulations, all of the scams and cons and rip-offs. And pork future scratchings that have taken place throughout history are happening on the internet to cryptocurrency right now as it is being brought into the fold of actual money. So swapping one crypto coin for another counts as a taxable event. No longer is like, I never cashed out an excuse. But apparently they've been, you know, they've been posting their portfolios online under their own names for the most part.

So can you pay this tax in pretend money or do you have to use real money to pay the tax on the pretend? I think you do have to use real money or at the very, very least, a stable coin, which is seemingly the only long form version of crypto that has managed is the stable. stable coin, which is the coin that is basically a fiat currency, the thing that crypto is meant to not be, unfortunately, for everyone. I think it's horribly unfair that they're targeting crypto investors for capital gains taxes. If those crypto people had wanted to pay taxes, they would have invested in stocks and bonds and cobalt mines in the Congo like regular capitalists. Capital flows to invest in whatever is most advantageous.

Taxing capital gains on crypto will force them to move even further underground and invest in heroin. and the nerve of the British government to want to tax people for money they made that they didn't earn and didn't do anything or add any value or work by just by pretending when you have royals, it's as if the whole tax collection is King Charles enforcing his monopoly. If anyone's going to be rich for doing nothing and playing pretend, it's going to be me. I mean, there's a cryptocurrency evangelist said, how dare they tax us on money we made up? One analyst said that tax evasion among crypto investors will be like, quote, shooting fish in a barrel, which is a thing that is supposed to be easy to do because a barrel is not a fish's natural habitat. It's like saying we're harpooning Eric Trump in the library. And it's going to be easy because there's so many of them and they're so inexperienced a tax evasion. They'll be easy to catch.

But it's unfair to send a real tax bill and real tax collectors after people with pretend investments. the government should meet like with like and send larping tax collectors in rent fare outfits to tax collection via puppet show. I want to see it. I'm a big believer that the only things that should be tax-free are religious institutions and the bucket at the end of your Edinburgh show if you're in a free-frewish venue.

The one's shooting fish in a barrel, I guess, is that, I mean, it might be easy, but it's also pointless because you basically end up with water everywhere and mangled fish corpses that you can't really do anything with culinary. So it might be easy, but it also doesn't benefit anyone. Fish cakes, Andy. Fish cakes with a hint of lead. I think that's the episode title.

Well, that brings to the end of this week's bugle. Thank you very much for listening. It's great to be back. We'll be back next week with Bugle 4,389. Naito, anything to plug? Sure. I have a stand-up special out. The Darkest Hour, available for free on YouTube, and the audio version is out wherever you get audio.

But the best way to support me is this Friday, September 4th, to get it on Bandcamp. It's BandCamp Friday, so they waive their fees and I get more of the purchase price. So the darkest hour on BandCamp, follow me on Instagram, Mr. Nato Green. Alice? I run a podcast called Realms Unknown, which is science fiction and fantasy, the sibling to this podcast,

and also The Gargle, which is science and technology news. So if you like the bugle, but want it to be more science and technology-based, and without political news, then except insofar as science and technology, touch on politics, which it never does.

That's the gargle. Also, I am over at Patreon. Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. A lot of stuff is just basically my newsletter. You can sign up for free. Or if you want to pay, you can get things like my writers meetings, which I run weekly poetry Mondays and various other nonsense. Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

Also, the news quiz is back this week. So get that via BBC sounds or wherever else you get your BBC podcast or listen on the radio. If you want to get old school about it, be back this week and for the next eight weeks. Until next week, Bugler's. Thank you for listening and goodbye.