TRASHFUTURE - (700) Days of Starmer

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

I can’t believe he’s gone… he had so many relaunches left in him. We reflect on the premiership of Keir Starmer and ponder what awaits this country under Burnham, before reading the poem that proves AI generated art is just as worthwhile as anything done by a human. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Guys, guys, guys, guys, guys, guys. I fucked up so bad. Like, I had a cold open. I had a whole cold open planned for this episode for months. Because I knew it was going to happen. We all knew it was going to happen that Andy Bonham was going to be playing out. Yeah, we knew it was going to happen. And so secretly, I have my own little initiative, and I went out and I secured that each of us,

Manchester doubles. So, and it takes some time, right? It's not easy to find those. And so I spent some time scouring the streets, doing some like real shoe leather podcasting. But I succeeded. I found exact, like the exact same, like our doppelgangers,

except that they had the accents. So, like, obviously we didn't know when the by-election was going to be. So I was just keeping them in this storage locker. In the meantime, the trash future northern campus while we wasted. But the thing is, years. Andy, he took so long and it took longer than any of us expected and I, I mean, I had art done for this. It was going to be beautiful. It was going to be called Mank Future and we were going to have them be us and it was going to be so, so funny and everyone would have laughed and

like respected us. But then the longer I waited, every time I would go in to check on them, they started getting ideas, right? They started thinking they could do what I assume is the plot of the movie, The Prestige to Us, right? They started thinking, well, what if, what if it was Manc Future forever? And we could just replace them. And they had the temeracy to think that you could be on a podcast in this country without coming from the Southeast or one region of Canada for some reason. And so we fought.

And, you know, we both, I think it's fair to say we said some things that we regretted. But I left them in there to cool down. And I guess I forgot how many small plates you need. for three people and they fucking died so I'm so sorry Mank future is cancelled for the foreseeable future

it can't happen now and I just we have to treat this moment with the kind of intercultural sensitivity between south and north that I think this moment demands and really sort of understand that in their culture it's very important to say that you will

never walk alone and that's so true at this moment. So please, all flowers are gratefully received to the Trashchuture Northern Campus Storage Locker. Thank you. 1, 2, 3, Hasea, Enda Street, Madchester, United Kingdom. This is what happens when I try to do things a little bit different. Like, they said three per person, I just heard three.

They told me they got bigger as they went further down the menu, but I didn't know they started that small. They were in there for a week on the peanuts. We forgot to poke holes in the student housing. glass window fucking terrible. It's fucking awful. Okay, well,

put it in the exit surveys. Put it in the exit surveys. Look, as long as Keir Starmer is still in power, we should be okay. Let me just quickly. Yeah. Check. It's Trash Future, by the way.

Hello. Hi, it's TF. You know what's up? Would you wait for something for a long time? And then it just fucking happens. Yeah, edging. Yeah. Well, and it's kind of disappointing.

Like, you do all the retweets that you've saved, like fucking K. Burley's inexplicable, like one line, Starmer, comma, gone. I feel like he's going to go on holiday somewhere hot. Newsflash bitch, that's here now. Yeah, yeah.

So, so, here's Starmer. I cannot believe it. After, I went and counted this up. I look back at all my old notes. I looked at old news articles. And this is the definitive list. There's been 10 pledges, six first steps, five missions, two phases, three, three foundations, six milestones,

11 KPI's, and an eight-point industrial strategy, all of which were delivered to a grateful British public over the course of eight distinct governmental relaunches. He was... He's done, folks. He's had more relaunches than I've had name changers. He's sadly folding up the Kandan board and taking it home. I...

Just brutal, brutal scenes. Y'all, you have drafted your last minute there, partner. And it has been a coronation. right? Like West Streising, our last hope for southeastern English representation in government, has clearly been promised a job. I mean, he claims not. He claims he talked to Andy and they talked about their ideas. So presumably that question was, what ideas do you want in my government? So we look forward to that, I guess. But now unless they can find 81 MPs willing to write in, I want Al Khan's from Army to be my dad, it's just going to be a, I can't be a, I can't,

completely unopposed, like a walk for Burnham. Yeah. If you're a smart Labor MP right now, you're going to want to like lose to him graciously. Yeah, I mean, very, very, very, very funny to do the Al-Karns thing to be like, yeah, day one of the new government, I want to get on the new prime minister's shit list by pledging my undying loyalty to progeria action man. Well, maybe this is what we need to do because like, you know,

there's obviously no guarantee, but like this is the solution, if anything, You know, I'm sort of interested to see, like, when the dial starts shifting for Andy. So we can be the number one Alkan's podcast in the sense of endorsing Alkan's. Do you think we can get him on? I mean, I did just say he was in the army a couple of times. So he's going to twist my head off like a fucking thing of string cheese. But, yeah, but we get in early. We get in his good books.

And then we eventually become the official sort of podcast for the government, right? Interesting. After the coup. Yeah, okay. You're listening, you're not listening to Manc Future. trash future. You're listening to regime future. Oh, yeah. We could, instead of like engaging with and criticizing the sort of ongoing Madchester countrywide decade under Prime Minister for Lifeburnum, instead, what we're going to do

is we're going to be the voice of the dozens of people who are the Carnes bros, who are crying for Carnes. Yeah, everyone who deeply in their heart of hearts believes that they could have been a Royal Marines Commando but like you know just ah the facts the facts got in the way but I could have done it we can be those people's weedy nasal

adenoidal voice I'm ready for everyone listening instead of have a pariscial relationship with me to think of me as a kind of adjutant I think that's pretty good yeah absolutely so Akir Starmer is gone this is because if you're not in Britain Andy Burnham

who we mentioned before a man who is not the guy won the Makerfield by-election last week with 54.8% of the vote. Handly. It turns out time and again that people will vote tactically to keep reform out because they're obvious weirdos. Which reforms share of the vote was lower because also like they ran a Facebook commenter what do you expect. Yes, 30% of our society are irredeemably fucked. These are living tweet replies to Elon Musk. These are living cry laugh emojis. You can't get to, I don't know how to get to them. I don't know how to de-radicalize them, but they are really off-putting.

There is a good news. The other good news there is that there is a slight, although less than was sometimes made of it split, between the people in that group who vote for reform and the people in that group who are so cooked, they vote for restore. So that, you know, shaved off another 7%. But it wouldn't have made a difference in the end. Now, I think it helps a lot that reforms guy love to say things like, I hate women. because...

There are so many women out there. Yeah, it's true. And unfortunately, a thing of women is a lot of us quite like the sort of reform terrible policies, but like delivered in a nice way, you know? Yeah. And instead, all these people really seem to enjoy

the sort of performative cruelty that alienates a lot of, like, would-be racists. Which, by the way, is largely when we do... This episode, I guess, wasn't originally intended to be, but has sort of turned into a bit of a retrospective on the Starmer Yeah, let's see your best bits. Yeah, this is the Starmer clip show

just starts with him gendering Israel as a woman. This is his number one single. Yeah, gendering Israel as a woman, not gendering me as a woman. Like, it's basic stuff. Yeah, it's one in one out. But, like that strategy you described

Nova, that's the one that he has been from day one of his premiership using, which is well, we're all going to go for that 30% of the country who are, you know, largely who are the biggest addled by the computer. And we are going to go after them by promising by sort of join in almost all major parties, some exceptions, chorus of promising to campaign against the lives and well-being of the 70% of us who are comparatively regular. It is, it has been the political tendency of pandering to freaks that

has it has gone on now for like seven prime ministers. And it is, is Andy Burnham's projection of I'm a normal guy and won't pander to the freaks going to survive 10 minutes of contact with the corrosive surface of the British establishment? It already hasn't. He's already, he's already folded like a like,

like, like, he's already folded like Kyr-Sarmus Kanban board on like trans people, the most obvious kind of culture war third rail. exactly he's folding on that he's folding on like defense and welfare spending so he appears to have convictions that are kind of no stronger uh let's see how they survive office uh what they won't i presume they won't but let me want to talk about starmer yeah sure by all means as you said nova this is something that you said that stuck with me is that starmer's basically been in a room with a service revolter in a belt of whiskey pretty much for a year like he's not like this crisis

forced him out he's been a dead man walking for more time than he hasn't been a dead man walking. There is no way he could have relaunched his way out of this one, except by actually fundamentally changing what he was doing, which he wasn't going to do. No, no. And the whole, I think the main story of Star-Marism is going to be one of intransigence, right? I think that's particularly the sort of like kicking his, you know, his feet and like dragging his heels in on resigning. I thought it was sort of weird that this is already being misremembered, sort of deliberately as like, oh, he was very sort of like collegial and very dignified in the way he stepped down. He came out looking like he had been weeping and then I think like read the entire

lyrics of death grips fucker bitch off of a printout from genius.com he had brought and then like went back in and started audibly crying again. So I don't know what's collegial about that. God, I think he should do like film and music reviews like post. But that would require him to walk because I was going to say my favorite memory of Kirstarmer is when he told the Guardian that he didn't have dreams. I think that was the thing that's really stuck with me.

This is a man who had basically said in one of his first interviews as he was about to become prime minister that he had no interiority. And I didn't know whether that's actually whether he told us the thing and we just chose to sort of ignore it, right? And so as a result, you had like,

you know, nearly two years of like, oh, why does this man not stand for anything? Why does this man not believe anything? He's told you because he doesn't have any interiority. Like, he just, he is, he is in transient, right? Yeah. And if he did, he burned all of it away for this. It was for this that every, if he ever believed anything,

every compromise he made, every promise that he's never going to watch a film or read a book or have any kind of humanity beyond the kind of fake humanity that's performed in claiming your father was a toolmaker. Any of that spirit has been utterly scorched out of him. I mean, some of it is just like believing that he should be prime minister because he should be the one to have the access and the status, right, and seriousness, even when everyone else is laughing at him, even when he's picking up Donald Trump's papers,

even when Donald Trump is announcing his resignation before he does in a final cuck-holding. And it's just, now I guess he has sort of like very, very good money for life and, you know, presumably some... Yeah, I think so. Think about this, though. Starmer's out of government, right?

You know, finally he's free of his bad boy, ours. Yeah, it's why he did the death grips thing. Couldn't have done that if he was staying. Yeah, so he could finally be that sort of, you know, liberal statesman that sort of the press imagined him and still imagines him to be. So I have, Rachel Sylvester, from the observer,

has written him a particularly odious political eulogy that I intend to sort of, this, for it to form the back half of this episode. But look at what the previous, like, seven prime ministers of the UK actually did. Cameron tried to get to the country involved in a pyramid scheme with his green sill involvement. Theresa May is a campaigner against modern slavery,

which is a condition that she facilitated with her hostile environment policy. Liz Trust seems to be speaking to empty rooms at sea, P-PAC and trying to franchise CPAC London. I love her. She's so fucking cool. Yeah. Boris Johnson's just a columnist again. Sunak is just working doing what he would have done already.

He's working in tech. Yeah, but you don't see them like begging for change, do you? Like, he's going to get like some kind of like board position of Mishkonda Rio or something. Maybe, but I don't know. Do you think he's like fucked himself so badly that he's actively unemployable even in the higher an ex-prime minister stakes? No, no. I feel like he'll stay on as an. for like a little bit.

But I think you're right. He'll take on like some sort of like honorary position at like a law firm. Because he's like, you know, he's like a KC, right? So actually like he has more kind of avenues, I suppose, to sort of like move on. And I think also just this idea, like the fact that like the commentary I have been willing to sort of give him these kind of nice sendoffs, right? This sort of sends, you know, the summary I've kind of gotten is, oh, this is a man who tried his best. and, you know, lots of different forces kind of like prevented him from like, you know,

achieving kind of moderate change or whatever. I kind of think where Rachel Reeves is fucked, more than anything else. Well, she's staying, supposedly. It'll be interesting to sort of see where she goes, but like... Not to her sister's birthday party. That's right. Well, in terms of like someone who I imagine probably had political ambitions, and that was very much dependent on care,

I imagine she is probably more pissed than anyone else. She has defunded her last hospital, Pat, perhaps. Unless she wants to start doing it like recreationally. What? Just like, do what you love. You never work a day in your life? Yeah. But like you're thinking, I just want to think about like everyone since Cameron, right? Well, yeah, they're all victims of Steve Bray.

Yeah, they're all being deafened by Steve Bray. Starmer was in office for 100 days more than Sunak, who is in office for 570 days more than trust. who was in office, and then Johnson was in office for about a thousand days, May about a thousand days. Like,

it's the amount of time that our political system can stomach someone being in charge of it is getting shorter. It's getting, it's because, May and Johnson is about a thousand days. Trust,

don't worry about it. Soon, I can Starmer, both around like six, seven hundred days. If these trends continue, we will within the next several years, we could see a double event.

Eventually, eventually everyone gets to be prime minister for 15 minutes. At the same, but it's the same 15 minutes, crucially. Yeah, and it's like, I know this is a Tory attack line, there's also straightforwardly factual. He was forced into like 13 separate policy U-turns because the agenda he was trying to advance was incredibly unpopular. I mean, I think you can safely say he was elected by a very narrow, loose coalition and he governed without one entirely. There was no, there's nobody this was actually for.

It was for some people's benefit, but they didn't like it. It could say it was to try to maintain the sort of social structure of Britain where our living standards are intimately connected to like the global financial markets and the bond markets in particular and are based on pleasing them. Yeah. And a sort of certain sort of establishment residue, I guess, that prioritizes things like sort of like forms of democracy and stuff, I guess. It's residue. That's what it is. It is the whole premiership. I think probably the premiership of Burnham as well, unless he, like, takes off his mask and reveals a different flat-capped man. As much as he is trying to come in being like Mr. Mussel, just like, I'm going to sort of get rid of the loss of this residue, right? No, absolutely not. It's going to be the same in that sense. It's because, look, Starmer's premiers premiership, I think, is a natural experiment in what it means to run any country without any actual constituency, really at all.

already without any mass constituency, certainly. And I think that all of these prime ministers from fucking Theresa May on, Cameron on, even, they've been symptoms of this institutional lag that these institutions and institutions broadly here, whether that's first past the post, whether that's the various great offices of state, whether that's the idea that Britain should be a globally important country, whatever the fuck that means, whether or like the idea of controlling our borders, these cliches that just swim around, they are hangovers.

They are decaying. They're not being updated. They are producing leaders who are trying to govern them while they're falling apart. You pull a lever on the British state and there's a pretty 5% chance it breaks off and you have to find another lever

and you have to keep pulling that until it breaks off. And at this point, there have been seven prime ministers recently who've just been pulling fucking levers until they pull them off and the whole thing is just falling apart.

Of all of them, you have to say he's the least charismatic. at least trust was fun at least she had some chaos yeah well trust trust was a sort of like more interesting experiment because it's like what if we give these sort of like howling like economic

rightsists everything they want and watch them fuck it up everybody else has been kind of like much of a muchness obviously Johnson has had his sort of like had his chaos and everything but no I mean Starma has just tried he tried to do the Mr. Rules thing

and it became in the minds of like your sort of brain-fried grandparents some kind of like anti-white jihadist who was determined not only to take their winter fuel allowance away but also to give it to immigrants. And, you know, hey, should have done it. I mean, yeah, this is one of the problems. As much as we talk about, you know, jerk off motion about Britain being ungovernable,

like a huge amount of this is just having to, intent with an aging population that authentically needs a lot of social care. Some of them need winter fuel allowance, but also has a breathtaking entitlement and hypocrisy about what they think the government should be doing to them. Witness the whole

waspy women thing, right? So, yeah, you have to sort of make up that somehow, right? And if you don't, then they're going to decide that actually maybe Tommy Robinson was right all along. Yeah. It's going to be this thing where we have

wave election after wave election after wave election until someone who is either someone who will sweep away the sort of falling apart institutions of this country will arrive and that person will either be Hitlerite or a moderate social democrat or consider this

think of the illustration of Napoleon at Sansia with the shadow cast behind him of the great man that's Al-Karns right now I was going to say what you've basically described as sort of like British Shiism in the sense We're waiting for the hidden prime minister,

and the hidden prime minister is either going to be Hitlerite or it's going to be Al-Kan's, or it's going to be like the most average guy that you know, and he's just like, maybe we should just make the trains a bit cheaper. I wasn't expecting the hidden imam to have been a Marine, but sure, I guess. I mean, it's truly, the reason we keep changing leaders

is because this machinery, it's not that the country is ungovernable, It's that the machinery to govern it is broken. Yeah, it's because we keep trying things that we know don't work because we refuse to imagine anything different, either because something different would be so horrifying that it's like automatically the big genocide switch, or it's too nice for us,

and we don't think that we actually deserve free bus travel, and that type of shit is the way Hamas is going or whatever. Well, this is it. Like, what we're sort of dealing with is just kind of, once you're sort of in the job, confronting all the sort of, like, conflicts and contradictions, of British politics at a much harder scale, because I think to a certain extent, like, you know, obviously they've always been there. But, you know, we had, like, things to sort of paper over those contradictions for a long time.

So we had, like, low interest rates and we had access to the European Union. And we had this sort of, like, services economy where you could sort of perform a lot of tricks in order to make it appear to be, like, a lot more successful than it actually was. And also, like, so much of, like, the British economy in terms of its relative success has been in sort of, like the increasing value of property, right, but has been able to sort of like, you know, not only been the bedrock of a lot of like the riches of the, you know,

older generations who are now going to sort of become the British jihadists, but also like, you know, it's been, you know, any sort of time like during the early austerity debates where it became very apparent that, oh,

like, there is a lot of inequality in this country and there is a lot of poverty that basically kind of like gets hidden. How easily that was dismissed by everything else, right? But now we've reached the state, where you can't really mask over that. The idea of like saying, you know,

trying to celebrate like a 1% and growth for the British economy is laughable, right? It is completely, you know, the fact that like... Oh, 1%. Oh, we'd kill for 1%. And we'd kill for 1%. And we'd kill for 1%. And we've sort of been like, you know,

averaging at sort of like 0.3, 0.4 for quite a long time. And, you know, the question is, it's like, well, can a political leader be able, like can be sort of resolve those contradictions? And like, they can, but they can either do it in a good way. or they can do it in a bad way.

And what the interesting thing, sort of about reform is that they actually have a solution to the problem. It's just that their solution is, fuck them kids and fuck like anyone under 40. Our constituency are kind of like all these sort of like property types who will let us do the British jihad against immigrants and leftists and people that we just don't like. What is the sort of, you know, what is the kind of left answer to this? There are certain kind of propositions from the Green Party and like, you know, within the various sort of conversations and groups on the left side of politics.

But I think the question that Andy Burn and Ben has to answer and whether he will be able to do this is very much like the question that will, you know, shadow his like a thousand days until he's booted out as well is like, okay, well, can you do the thing to sort of like resolve the contradictions and that might have, that might mean kind of giving the pensioners a bad time or giving like the, you know, the Gen X's and the boomers and stuff like a bad time by sort of telling them that, hey, like, your entire life has sort of been built on these sort of, on like false accounting. You might have to, you might have to give the bond markets a hard time even.

And that's the thing that did for Liz Truss. So scary, scary times. Kirstama, on the other hand, does not have to worry about any of this because he is beachside and mystique with Julia Fox. That's right. I thought about that. And it's not as though this machine is just stopping, breaking down. Oh, yeah.

That's the title of that song. Yeah. Because right now, at the time of recording, Britain is now, London and Southeast especially, are enduring four days of like dangerous heat, like wet bulb kill you temperature. And are you going to be able, is anybody, is any of these people, are they going to be able to confront these problems? Yeah, we laugh at Manchester and their small plates restaurants now, but when the columns of refugees come up the most away and they turn the machine guns on us, you know,

then they'll have to revenge. Right, Ben, and we know that Burnham is kind of an empty tweet suit. He's not even a suit guy. Like, part of me sort of wonders, given that he's established this as a mayor, and I sort of hope that he does, if he doesn't do like a kind of John Fettom

and Vladimir Zelensky thing, of like, oppositionally refusing to wear a suit to make some kind of a point the whole time, like, do you think he's going to wear the fucking Harrington jacket to meet Trump? God, he's going to have to.

to meet Trump, he's going to have to hang out with him. Do you think Trump's going to make of a guy who's going to talk to him about the Hasseander? Yeah, he's going to show up in a bucket hat. Cool. Yeah, you know what? I'll take it over what we had. I mean, Trump comprehends a club guy at the least, right?

That's true. Yeah, like you have a common language. But what we've seen, right, around Burnham is you've seen these policies swirling around him of people saying, well, he's going to continue the sensible. Starmer crackdowns on the people. You know, wanking trannies, all the cool stuff that we love to hate. Yeah, sure. Young people

existing in public, migrants, yeah. He'll continue to fund our, let's say, allies in the Middle East. Oh, those scamps. Yeah, those rascals. What are they up to? We'll talk about that maybe a little on Thursday. Certainly, they've never been up to anything in Manchester because that would be a particularly

galling piece of hypocrisy. Yeah, but the nationalization of utilities, right, is, well, he's going to use. say, oh, public control over utilities, whatever that means, right? Is someone who is willing to make that many compromises going to be materially different from Kier-Starmer? Is he going to confront that the actual state is fucked? Here's the thing.

Of course not, but for the moment, we have so many people whose job sometimes is to know better lining up to get wallet inspected because the vibes are different now, right? It's the same thing that Americans saw with Biden as well. Starmer was a vibes project. It was all, he was continuity Sunak. It's all vibes projects because there is no way to steer this car. Or rather, you have to get a different car. I'm turning the big vibes dial left and right.

And I think it's worth also, just going back to our Starmer reminiscences, right, is to remember also that everybody who's saying, oh, Starmer was a liberal who was defeated by interest groups. He was never able to be himself authentically, which we'll get to. He said that. He kicked the shit out of my interest group. I got to be honest, I got to hand him the W on that one. Like, my interest group absolutely got our asses handed to us.

And before we got, I go to the Rachel Sylvester Eulogy, which I think is really what this whole thing hangs on. I do want to briefly talk about, like, the, I would say a collapse of civil liberties under his government. Well, it collapses something that happens on its own. This is, this is sort of like a collapsing. You know, he's been at the Jenga block with an axe. Yeah, there are four of the protesters at the Elbit factory. They have been convicted of property damage by a jury. And due to a series of changes in counterterrorism legislation and sentencing legislation,

a judge was able to decide that property damage is terroristic property damage. And this predates Starmor, but it's a role that he played gleefully. And it is a agenda he advanced quite effectively. All the stuff about prescribing Palestine action in the first place or, you know, David Lammy trying to abolish jury trials. The key thing with the terrorism motivation thing is that the jury didn't know ahead of time that if they convicted them, they could be like sentenced on the basis of like terrorist motivation. No normal person would do that because the Starmer project is a pro, is an anti-normal project. This is why it was so uncanny. It was projected these normal or vibes that they felt were normal, right?

We are, we are regular humans. I'm a pebble dash semi. My house was a toolmaker. I grew up in a toolmaker. It was actually all about stripping as much representation away from the non-freak part of the world as they could possibly imagine. And getting rid of jury trials so that you could sentence four people who committed property damage as terrorists is a perfect example of a utter like freak coalition. elite freak coalition. It's the last lever that like any kind of

establishment has to have left is the repressed one. It's the one that has to work, right? And so if you're pulling all of them, that's one of the ones that's going to feel most natural to you. You know, so these four people, Samuel Corner, Charlotte Head, Leona, Camio

and Fatima Rajwani are now going to be jailed for many years for property damage. They are going to have to have huge restrictions on their travel, opening a bank account, getting a job. They're basically going to have to, they have to more or less walk around the rest of their lives wearing a big sign that says, ask me about my terrorism conviction.

Yeah, it's like shit that, you know, it has become sort of like a famous example of like the Soviet Union's human rights abuses, right? That is something that we're just kind of casually doing just in the open. Are we allowed to say even that we think that this is bad? Are we allowed to say that they're good people? Are we allowed to admire them? Are we allowed to say that we think the convictions and sentences are wrong? I don't actually legally know the answer to any of those.

And that's part of the thing is this is a real exploitation of ambiguity, right? Because most people are not human rights lawyers, right? Most people do not know where the line is because there's a kind of, there's been a kind of comfortable liberal assumption that you shouldn't have to know exactly where the line is, that you should be able to broadly express these things. and it should be sort of like, you know, fair game within a sort of civil society to not have to be looking over your shoulder for the police kicking your door in over it. And in this case, not only do we not know, but it suddenly matters that you don't know because that could happen.

And this is also, just before we get on onto the eulogy here, this is a colossal inversion of UK's like ordinary habits around sentencing. Right. There's this longstanding principle that you treat conscientious, direct action. I think this is sort of like, people remembering the suffragettes basically is, uh, they did a lot of shit, but it turns out they were quite correct.

It took a long while for them, for people to get that way, but nevertheless, uh, the conscientious direct action gets treated more leniently than like ordinary criminality, whatever that means. Yeah.

But the conscientiousness of this activity is now being treated as an aggravating factor. And that's, again, this is like a legacy of what, of what Starmer's government has done. It has pushed this over the line. It has flipped. It has made that change.

It has made the UK in just that one example in terms of like free speech, a profoundly less liberal country, a liberal in a small L, for the sake of those, that 30% of people who still think that he's going to put Hamas in their garden shed. Also, crucially, all of this stuff interacts, right, systemically in sort of like predictable ways. How to phrase this delicately. It's now so illegal to express support for Palestine action that I don't even know if I'm allowed to say whether or not I feel bad for not having said that I do and getting arrested, right? And these things tie in together

because one good reason not to say that, for instance, might be because you are transgender and you will get sent to a male prison because you said that. Or another one might be because there exists this far-right international that will like docks you and destroy your entire life because of it, or there exists this sort of, like, radicalized network of freaks who will just take a machete into the streets and start attacking Muslims at random because of these same

sorts of narratives. So all of these things tie together, and when people say the country is ungovernable, or people, even before this were talking about, like, UK aesthetics or things like that, they're picking up on a kind of air of misery because they don't want to like actually be specific about all of the things that are making this so frightening and miserable a time. And the whole Starmer project, it's just thinking in terms of a retrospective, is looking at that tendency and saying, well, that's natural and I suppose we have to accommodate it. Let's accommodate that as much as we possibly can. Yeah, let's help it, if anything. Like we should be sort of like this sort of like far right grouping that hates us and fantasizes often about our assassination is our ally in terrifying the absolute shit out of not just the left wing but like even your kind of squishy lib who thinks that prescribing a campaign group is a bad thing to do and would like to sort of protest that on its own merits. Yeah, no, no, no, definitely.

That's 30% They're going to multiply, I assume. They're not just going to die. They're not just going to die at a higher rate than everybody else because they're all fucking ancient. But with all this in mind, I want to look at Rachel Sylvester's eulogy to the man, the myth, the relaunch. The headline. Starmer was neither corrupt, compromise nor crazy M-Dash, but his failure to cut through was profound. The deep public hostility to the BM is still hard to explain.

I don't think it's that hard to explain. No, no. A lot of people got their brain. brains cooked and like started at like the winter fuel allowance thing comes up time and time and again but I think you've seen a lot of voxpops people who were affected by that taking the extra step that they've been sort of like invited to by a very well oil machine and going I knew when he did that you turn on the winter fuel allowance that he was a secret Muslim who hated white people and I think there's like there's look we talk about the yeah the original sin being the winter fuel

allowance, but I think you could say more broadly, it's, it's even then, the winter fuel allowance is almost much of a muchness. It's, the original sin is coming back into office thinking that there are things that the British government does for the people who live here that you can just get rid of because the state is too large in some respect. Yeah, it's also interesting as well, because the stuff that these people profess to want the British government to do, they don't care whether or not it does. like net migration this is something that like Starma acolytes

will tout as being like a sort of like yeah the people are so irrational right because because they don't care about this but they will say that because they're proud that he did this is an evil thing to have done uh starma successfully made this place on his own through a bunch of factors

so hostile and so shit that net migration is down basically to zero and all of the people who are most exercised about net migration being like too high of a number that do not give a fuck because it was never about numbers to them. It was always about race. It was always about racism. And they want the opportunity to do more racism.

So you can't sort of wonk your way out of this with these people. And there was this kind of determination that maybe, maybe if we sort of accept the premises and we do the kind of like homework enough, if we do our racism homework hard enough, then these people will see the light. And it just never came through. And it never will. And it won't for Andy Burnham either.

it's like getting rolled by a pool hustler and then feeling then feeling smug that you beat him the first time what's quite interesting to me though is also like a lot of this is anecdotal but at the same time it's like i don't think there's like an insubstantial number of people who would probably like remember kirstarmus sort of going on to lbc and basically saying yeah like the israelis can absolutely starve and basically kill like palestinians right he said that very directly and i understand that you know there was a whole sort of attempt to kind of like to get him to walk back from that without really walking back from it, attempt to sort of like play multiple sides. But like the fact of that also isn't recognized,

I think is so telling in terms of like this kind of being less about Kier Stama and his legacy and much more to do with like how the sort of people who are paid to cover politics, but increasingly also kind of like dictate its terms and like sort of paint the, you know, at least like present the parameters in which, like APM is allowed to kind of govern, like what they are willing to pay attention to and what they are simply not willing to pay attention to. And the fact that like, in lots of cases,

I think in like recent British politics, whether it's sort of like by elections or council elections or this, the complete refusal to sort of acknowledge that there is a fairly high percentage of people in this country who look at what happens in the Middle East and look, has looked and seen what's happened in Gaza. And it has like impacted their politics. has impacted the way that they see the world. And these people just completely refuse to even acknowledge for those people exist. I guess it also relates back to like,

you know, the people who have been sort of arrested and have been sort of like declared to be terrorists for their direct action. You know, this also being like, even the lack of interest or the complete dismissal of it, also being like a complete dismissal of like the like British involvement in Gaza and our sort of responsibility in regards to like what has happened

and what continues to happen. basically what we're saying is the reason that Keir Starmer was unpopular is the stuff he did and the stuff he didn't do Yeah maybe it was the sort of like video and audio of him saying yeah I think Israel has the right to do a genocide well Rachel Sylvester

is going to give an alternative answer. Okay. A different answer to the question why does Starmer fail? That is well his failure why did he cut through? Cut through him was fucking talking about cut through. Kier Starmer did not accept 5 million pounds from a foreign based crypto billionaire like Farage or hold parties in

downing street like Boris Johnson or crash the economy like Liz Truss. Skill issue. Yeah, I'm sorry he didn't have friends, apart from one guy who kept giving him clothes. The outgoing Prime Minister is neither corrupt compromise nor crazy. The deep public hostility to him is actually hard to explain, and in many ways it's unfair. He's, I mean, this is the thing. He's not corrupt in the sense that, like, no, he's not doing any of that shit, but he is corrupt in the sense that he's doing all of the stuff that we've normalized, and which he clearly

loves, right? All of the stuff that we've decided is okay for a prime minister to do, like taking the fucking box seat at the Emirates. He loves that shit. He can't get enough of it. And also, it's a compromise. Okay, well, he might not be compromised by, in the same way, like, he took

a bribe and now he owes someone, although, you know, God knows it. That's the way to get close to him is just to buy influence because his whole fucking, like, the whole of the PLP is former lobbyists, right? He's not compromised in that way, but like you say, Nova, he's compromised in a way that we think is perfectly fine because the whole point of starmerism is not like

steady uh ming vah's strategy of of cautious change no it is a huge removal of what happens in this country from the people who are living in it it is an absolute dictatorship of freaks uh but i'll move on some point to the winter fuel allowance cut is the original sin others highlight the botched welfare reform or the decision to accept free glasses fuck off that's not what it was No. Also as well. MPs criticize Starmer's failure to, quote, tell a story or highlight his lack of charisma, or say he's been a terrible judge of character in making appointments.

God, with friends like these, huh? What are you? Hey, there were a couple of anonymous labor sources texting in the runoff of the resignation being like, I can't stop crying. You know, so there were a few people left in the Starma bunker with him. Steiner's counterattack, I'm sure we'll be around any moment to head off Burnham's journey down in the Avanti West Coast. Mine fewer,

the rules-based international order has failed to stop the 1309 Avanti from Manchester Piccantilly. I think the real problem was more profound. Starmer could never properly explain why he wanted to be prime minister. In fact, it was always unclear whether he really knew himself. There was no

irreducible core to his premiership or governing project around which everyone could unite. Again, that's where you're wrong. There was a governing project. There was also the motive was also very clear he had this sort of boundless entitlement to it of like I worked very hard and now

sort of like in the aftermath of this we saw him sort of like a leak about how betrayed he felt by Andy Burnham and the Labour Party to which he had given so much of his life and he had missed seeing like years of his kids growing up and shit like that it's like no

you chose to do that you just can't sort of admit to yourself that you wanted it he's gonna be on the beach Mystique with Julia Fox and he's going to finally have the sort of Walter White realization that it was for him. Yeah, it's like, and the idea that oh, it was unclear whether he really knew himself. No, he wanted to govern Britain in such a way that it would be removed from the people who he considered to be dangerous to it, which happened to be the vast majority of the people who live here. Yeah. Crush the left. Like, that's, that was what he was there to do. And it's kind of what he was

relatively successful at doing. And so, despite, a belated radicalism that saw the government announcing a ban on social media for under 16s. I forgot we even did that. Yeah, no wanking, no trannies, no young people anywhere, no posting. Yeah, like this is, to me, this is the Starm Reich equivalent of Hitler going, maybe we can find the lance of launderingist and that'll turn this thing around. And promising to get closer to Europe. Again, promising any real sense? No, absolutely not. That's going to continue as well. Yeah.

Which not to get to woof a random, but like a, you know, vast majority of voters would be, like, 60 something percent would take free movement again in exchange for closer ties to the EU. Which is the funniest fucking I told you so any liberal could possibly wish for is to be like you guys are so racist that you started getting immigration from outside of Europe instead of immigration in between Europe. and now you want back it again. Yeah, I mean, again, Rachel Sylvester cannot see it. No eulogy would be able to print it because they would have to tell the truth, which is the Starmer Project, in addition to being an absolute, like, freak political project, was the brainchild of political extremists like Morgan McSweeney, who is a political extremist, right?

It is of like a kind of anti-liberal from the right political extremist that likes to pretend that not only we on this podcast and to varying degrees and like the people who listen to us don't exist or are dangerous to need to be pushed out of public life, but that even people who might appreciate a led by donkey's projection on like parliament or whatever, those people are also dangerous extremists and need to be pushed out of public life. I mean, I also think that of them, but from the other side. No projecting on parliament at all. No images. You cannot depict Al-Karns. You know, you have to depict him somehow as just a human salute. But Starmer too often seem to have his foot on the break when the electorate wanted the country to accelerate towards change.

But again, the country did change. It did change. You can't protest anymore, really. You can't really be trans. You can't go on the internet if you're under 16. That shirtless guy with a machete hacking up Uvery's drivers in Edinburgh. Like, that's a change. Yeah.

The general, like the fact that we just have a summer campaigning season for far. right rioters. That's a change. Right? The country did change. A lot of people fucking hated it because they're people that you pretended and your whole political project was designed around pretending don't exist that will vote for you anyway that you don't need to court. And it's what led you to being the least popular prime minister as long as records have been kept because you actively trot. The whole point was to govern without a popular constituency. And that's what this looks like. So his government was defined by incrementalism. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. It just wasn't. It made things incrementally worse.

Yeah, because it did not dare press ahead with necessary transformation in so many ideas from welfare reform, social care, education, or digital ID. There was always plenty of analysis about the past. Oh, it's always the fucking ID cards with these people. They're going to try and make Burnham do them as well.

And when it founders in the same way that it always has, because everyone hates them, it's going to be like Andy Burnham has finally, you know, Godin has come up into the of, I don't know, someone even more northern, maybe even a woman this time, if we can imagine that, and it will be because he didn't take the digital ID card seriously. He was not able to extend a Mac card to the nation.

Yeah, because like all of this, this sort of like Blair-write sort of fixation on the sort of digital ID cards is, okay, making you sort of put in your whole passport details every time you go on the computer, that's a start, right? That's a good start because it means it's illegal to app them, right? and the police will be visiting you if you're at your MP enough times about Palestine and enough times is a very small number. But the real step from this is they want the power to demand

like, you know, name and CLP of people in public doing anything that they don't like or that they deem antisocial. And you need digital ID cards to do that and you need the Met to have facial recognition and we can only really do one of those, you know? Yeah, the idea is always right that the project isn't wrong,

it's just being delivered wrong. Digital ID could fix the whole thing. The right kinds of powers for police could fix the whole thing. If we just woo the right, then we can get on with delivering all of the improvements that we want, right? That's the, again, goes back to the fatal flaw, that's taken all of these prime ministers down,

which is that nobody likes the system that they're running. Everybody hates it. Nobody likes it. weirdly, it doesn't seem from, like, it seems to be idealized as having no human involved at any point. it's a very techy kind of trash future, right? Like the idea is, I think these people genuinely want a kind of Tweed minority report where, you know, you go somewhere and because you chanted something a bit too loudly at a process like 17 years ago, all of the cameras follow you around.

Or like the fucking changing rooms at M&S are like geo-fenced based on your immutable sex markers that the NHS assigned you at birth or some shit like that. And no one has to be involved in it. administering any of this. We all just live under it forever, all watched over by machines of loving grace or whatever. And she goes on.

He hated politics. Get a different job. Yeah. You could, well, I guess he's going to have to now. It's like what they say, do what you hate and you work every day of your life apart from weekends. He hated politics.

So he subcontracted all to strategists like Morgan McSweeney, who gave him a harder edge on immigration and environment in Europe, which again, people like. This is a rare sort of. Martin Bailey argument here of shit czar bad boyars. It's like, okay, Morgan McSweeney gave him a harder edge on these things that, again, they fetishize making unpopular decisions.

That's another reason that they're so hated. Shaking the fleas off. If you don't like the changes I've made, there's the door, you can leave. Okay, well, Udo reverse card, Starmer, you can leave. Doing the Assad finger point thing. That gets funnier, the longer Assad's been out of power, I think. As a result, Starmor found himself to be pretending to be something he was not. He read out his speech suggesting that Britain was turning into an island of strangers.

He never believed it, but he thought that is what he had to say to win. Oh, that's convenient. Okay, sure. That's, that's sure. But again, the issue that Sylvester describes, this is the nub of it. This is like the, this is her belief. This is just why he failed. It meant he came across as inauthentic and there's nothing voters hate more.

There it is. I think voters hate the fucking bills going up. Like, I think the voters hate it more when like Afredo costs 25 quid than the Prime Minister being inauthentic. Voters also, if you make a case for immigration

like it. Right? Yeah, it turns out. Voters like public services. Also, people like him. People move. You can never stop people moving. They will just move. And you can make that a crueler and more depressing system or you can make it something

else. But the idea that the problem is he was in on, it didn't matter what he did. It's that what he did and who he was didn't match, as opposed to, no, everyone hated everything that he did. What he did was shitty

and people hated it. Now, I will grant that Kirstama had a kind of world-class, like paradoxical inability to be authentic about the stuff he was being authentic about.

Like, I think about this very often. It's like a bit of an old saw at this point that, like, Kirstama likes football. He's liked football his whole life. He plays football recreationally. He enjoys going to see Arsenal.

anytime he talks about football, it's like he's getting lines through an earpiece, right? It's, or when he talks about like his dad being a toolmaker, right? His dad actually is a fucking toolmaker or was, right? But he felt he had to do that as a show of authenticity. And so this authentic thing became authentic with a capital A and people saw through it, right? So it's just this kind of curse.

But it doesn't matter. It wouldn't matter. You could have that kind of like weird, like, socially maladept shit if things were okay and I think the real story of all of this has been the most landlord brained country in the world

coming up against a kind of cockroach of a situation that's finally too big to paint over and painting over I think it's crucial is that this idea that authenticity is somehow important that voters must connect with you and then you

will get to like and then they will trust you and then your support will flow to you You can enact the policies that you want and change society how you see fit. The idea that somehow that is that authenticity means you should sound like them. You don't demonstrate your understanding of someone's situation by saying I too, my father too was a toolmaker. I'm going to hand the NHS another. I'm going to solve the NHS waiting list crisis by giving more money to private health care firms.

Right. Only Barack Obama and only like two times ever got to buy the ability to do the former by claiming something like the latter, right? That machine doesn't work because you sell your ability to pilot it well, well. If it's broken, it doesn't matter what you sell. It's always good to fail. And so this is why for, what, 10 years, we have had this uncanny performance of normality by politicians who represent the same uniparty. And that uniparty is all about just getting the, let's say, political outcomes further and further and further and further. from what anyone fucking normal wants for this place.

I have one last theory for why why Kier failed. Do you remember the Alpaca? Geronimo the Alpaca. I do, yes. And Kirstarmer executing, demanding the execution of Vala. That was the first 100 days thing, too. That was really early on. Yeah, I wonder whether if he had pardoned Vala,

things would have been different. That's the sliding doors moment. Yeah. Rachel Sevester, none of the political commentary at really entertained that. But I genuinely think, but had he saved Geronimo, things could have been very, very different for him.

A couple last things here. As he stood behind the podium outside the door of number 10, Starmer listed his achievements. He had turned around a Labour Party that was, quote, politically, financially, and morally bankrupt, referring, of course, to his, let's say, rooting out of the cancer

of anti-Semitism root branch, which I'm sure he fucking did. Then, when a landslide general election victory, he ushered in a stronger economy and improvements on NHS waiting lists, infrastructure, workers' rights, and immigration. He accepted with good grace that his time was up. He did not do that.

And that he insisted his successor will inherit a Britain that is far stronger and fairer than the one I inherited two years ago. But again, improvements in NHS waiting list? No, that's just private capacity pushed into the system. What you did is just brought in more private capacity. You rented state capacity. You didn't build any. The stronger economy thing is largely global, right?

Nothing he did at all had any bearing on that. Workers' rights were largely symbolic. and infrastructure is just about, that's mostly just been building data centers. That's just been data centers. So what is Starmer's legacy? It is a country that is much like what Rishi Sudak would have governed, but about 700 days worse. Yeah, it's doing, it's doing the like robot girl haycrime from the Animatrix to me. So that's cool.

Thank you. Thank you, Kier. Enjoy Mystique. It's going to be lovely. All the best. Stay in touch. You know, I'm signing the back of Kirstar. shirt and just it's putting like best friends forever you know so look this is this is rachel

sylvester's eulogy and hussein had to run but nova and i are going to finish this up because look i very rarely i was never read posts on this show almost never in the starmer bunker a final a final radio transmission escaped the starma bunker pro starmer influencers were uh using AI to i would say um make one rhetorical pitch. This sucks. I mean, I thought it was bad enough when I got banned from the Ukraine live war tracker

for adding a separate front descending from Manchester to London in real time. So I want to read now a poem that was written by someone who could be only described as one of at most four or five Kirstarber deadenders who is not

directly related to or working for him. Yes. This is a poem called A Decent Man. your Starmer. In a subtitle, let him get on with the job we elected

him to do. So each of these stanzas has a title. Riley, Riley, I have a question before we start. How many stanzas?

About eightish. Oh, God. Can you, can you pull this up on the notes for us? Scroll down to the bottom? Uh-huh.

Scroll down to the bottom, please. Oh, there's so much, okay. Fine, fine. Yeah.

Thank you. Yes. Okay. A decent man by, I assume, mid-journey. This is clearly rendered as an AI. A decent man. There are louder men in politics with easy slogans, sharp applause. But Kirstarmer is a decent man by work-defined, not the noise.

By work-defined, not the noise. Yeah, by work-defined. Not the noise. AI-generated fiction is winning list for air prizes now. So, like, it's great. Also, this has the same layout as those loyalist paramilitary, close your businesses, WhatsApps. That's why I knew it was like a fucking AI.

I was like, this looks exactly the same. So, well, the poem. Those snaps. At home, if you feel the need to applause, please just stick to snaps, if that's all right. So, hardworking and dedicated. He labors long behind the scenes, pragmatic, cautious, common wise, a man who's known that governing requires more than grand disguise. Oh, the scumption.

Okay. I like how he never came out in a disguise. Cares for his country. He cares about his country's course. future dignity and name. He understands that human rights are not a pawn in party games. It's true. Look, I'm going to skip a couple to the one that I really, the one that I really care about. Are you going to skip over methodical and cautious and pragmatic and sensible? Well, I think, look, an editor might have said, pick one. Methodical, cautious, pragmatic, sensible. Okay. For leadership is

not a smile or promises that drift like smoke. It is the burden carried daily for ordinary working folk. steady but ruthless if required yet should the moment call for strength he'll be ruthless when there's war he has steel to do what's right when duty knocks upon the door there was war and he decided that we were going to support it

to the point of abetting a genocide and then there was another war and he decided that we didn't want to get involved so but neither of those seemed particularly ruthless to me a large mandate to govern the people gave a mandate clear a large man date to government

date to govern. The people gave a mandate clear, a trust earned fairly at the pole to bring some order back again and help repair a fractured hole. And finally my... Kirstarmer is going to repair our prolapsed country. Finally, finally, the colorectal

surgeon our country is demanded. This is, I think, might be my favorite so this is my favorite line ever written. I can't stop thinking about and I've been annoying everybody I know with these three words. Many support him. Oh, dozens.

Many stand firm and watch with dismay, the backstabbing antics of some in his own party who want to remove him. This should not be allowed. They just forget to make that a poem. I've never seen a robot get so mad. It forgets how to like do the structure of the poem it was doing before. That's wild. We invented the centrist piss boiler bot.

So don't force him out. If they oust this decent man from the work he still has left to do, countless supporters will simply leave the party they once all knew. Let him govern, let him work, without the knives behind the grin, judge him by the quiet strength he shows, and trying hard to get things done. Okay, that's not quite a rhyme scheme anymore, but that's fine. We're just jettisoning parts off the thing.

You know, they always break down, you know, after a few prompts. But, Keir Starver, we hardly, well, I'd say we knew ye all together too well. Maybe you can join Liz Truss's social club. Yeah, I hope so. I hope they let him hang out in there. That's going to be so cool. And listen, you know what? It's not really about the policies that you did or, you know, anything else.

It's about the friends that you made along the way. And like the shirt signing, you know that he has a friend for life in Donald Trump, a guy who will definitely remember his number and name. And crucially, above everything, the fact that he exists. Who is it, West Streeting? So look, I think this is the official TF sendoff to Kier Starmer. See you at the Leckin Field, I guess. Absolutely.

I think we just ended there. That was beautiful, yeah.