TRASHFUTURE - American Magic feat. Christopher Caldwell-Kelly and Pope Lonergan

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

In the first half, Your Gorgeous Hosts take the time for a little check-in to the core assumptions of TF Season Three. How has the ongoing implosion of global markets due to coronavirus proceeded? How competently are given authorities handling this implosion? How many people are going to be thrown into a volcano for the sake of the Olive Garden? Why is it that when you reach terminal velocity after falling off a building, it feels like you aren't moving? In the second half, we are joined by social worker/sci-fi writer Christopher Caldwell-Kelly and social worker/comedian Pope Lonergan to discuss the ongoing crisis in social care in the UK that has been exacerbated by the Coronavirus. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

Nothing can basically stop America and and We've faced Great problems in the past and face this exact problem. In fact, we haven't really faced anything quite resembles this problem But we faced tougher problems and The American Miracles American magic has always Provelled and it will do so again, and I would I would like to take you through a little history America magic America magic

I Welcome to this American magic inflected episode of trash future the podcast you're listening to right now It's me Riley recording from sunny London Wait, you disclosed your location for the first time. I have disclosed. I have disclosed my location I also gave myself a pause because I was like, well, I've introduced this person now time to give him a pause to say How they're doing I forgot that it was me How are you doing Riley? Thank you for fucking asking Everyone's always asking where is Riley and no one ever asks how is Riley? I'm just like poochie lover again

It's Alice Milo and Hussein have joined me from TF Hakers. What's up? America magic get away from me. Yeah, that's right. And we also have a brace of guests joined joining us today our Is comedian Pope Lauderdale comedian comedian Pope Lauderdale. How's it going? Hello. Hello. Hello gentlemen. How is everyone? Never has the word gentlemen been worse used. Yeah Like all of us that are men aren't gentle and then the one that is gentle is not a man. Awesome

You're the least gentle. I don't even try to come out. Oh No You want to like maybe introduce our other guests or should I do that since I married them? No, I'm doing we're doing some nepotism here I got my husband on because for reasons that will become apparent so Say hello to Chris called what Kelly Christopher and hi Whatever Damn, well, this is my marriage is on the rocks, huh? My Wi-Fi switched to a different Wi-Fi

So I hope you just Alice you finished off all of the various introductions as well Shut up doing that Yeah, I was I was wondering I thought I thought you were just like I thought you were just like owning me by making me Introduce my own spouse just to punish me for nepotism. We are going to talk a little bit about Social care today and the crisis in social care with Chris and Pope as we get on to the second half of the episode But the first half of the episode we are going to do something of a check-in We are going to do a check-in with the season three

overarching big bad the big theme the overarching plot device Which is that the light motif if you will yes Just that we speak so often of the elements of our our different cry of the crises in the overlapping crises we're experiencing We're looking at what's happening here or there with this or that social function And sometimes we lose sight of the overall trajectory of we stepped off the ledge a while ago And it's very difficult to see an entire catastrophe and get your arms around it when it's unfolding in front of you like this So it's worthwhile to try to sit back Unhook our eyes and get the measure of this whole thing

Unhook our eyes right allow our eyes to talk to Charlie Stross once and you just Immediately go back to like eldritch body. That's right And we're gonna sort of get a bit of a measure of what's going on a little bit of a vibe check So we're gonna we're gonna start in the UK the UK is facing the greatest recession since 1709 according to the Bank of England now 1709 was a frost based recession It was the coldest winter ever an agricultural activity was decimated But at that point the economy was largely based on people growing stuff and selling what they grew rather than

Ceaseless constant activity of sending sort of the same email back and forth and back and forth and back and forth And now for an interview with Charles Moore who remembers that recession And of course the internet was in black and white then Very kind of Nosferatu Charles more than I have to say And so what's happened is we have to remember the activity has all stopped So the line the line hasn't kept going And there are still some partisans of the line Who think that it is going to keep going so the Bank of England has predicts what's called a v-shaped recovery

which is It's an Australian t-shirt of rebound. It's it's a it's a real thing. It's a real thing It's where there is a massive decline and then that's followed by an almost immediate recovery. So it looks like a V Yeah, sure So we we're all gonna get not scared of coronavirus anymore And then we're all gonna go out and buy shoes and we're gonna buy so many shoes that we undo all of the harm to the economy That's been caused by us pausing for a couple of weeks to not buy shoes So what what then you'd see a v-shaped recovery after say a flash crash

Where there was some outside force caused some Bit of panic in the market that changed equity prices such that they went down and it went back up again Or changed GDP such that it paused and went back up again, but there was the fundamentals weren't funded weren't well changed However, one more phenomenon the the the Bank of England prediction of this rosy recovery is Which is a recovery of 200 billion in GDP over like a one-year period is based on their their key assumptions being that like high street banks are Gonna continue their ordinary lending activities, which from our free episode last week with Antonia Jennings We just know they haven't they just haven't done it. Hmm. Yeah And of course people are still gonna buy shoes with the money that they have

They're still gonna want to and they're still gonna be able to and so it's gonna be fine Don't don't worry about it gonna buy shoes because they need to buy shoes to improve the economy So that they can get a job again to pay back the debt that they owe to their landlord. It makes perfect What's actually happening is that they're looking at like a completely different economy like post-corona And I actually think they have a good point Because even if like stocks and shoes and stuff like don't the value of those don't go up There is one market, but it's not only stayed resilient, but it's more likely to grow Post-corona and that is the magic the gathering secondary market

Yeah, it's one of three industries left It's patreon It's only fans and then it's magic the gathering resales I mean like it might like think of how many podcasts have started in the past two months, right? Think of like how much patreon money has been exchanged think of like how many kind of like red booster magic the gathering secondary market cards Have like the value is just like massively increased like we're not looking at v-shaped economy here We're looking at like a swoosh shaped economy. Yeah, I mean that we haven't seen peak gamer girl bathwater yet Like the phases of the British economy it's gone through like a feudal industrial

Manufacturing services and now we're at podcasting Podcasting and e-girls. Yeah But you know just just in case you were worried we are reopening the garden centers Yeah, and of course we've also had the extremely fucked vibes of VE day where like we've had people dress up as planes we've had people like like Costume up their mobility scooters as tanks socially distanced Konga. Yeah, the socially distanced Konga line It's it's been it's been a tremendously normal time in our

Extremely here for elderly killdozer like assisted suicide dozer What we're really seeing here is just morbid symptom after morbid symptom after morbid symptom as You know the the things that are the things that are keeping people say bound together is as a Society is supposed to even while it collapses are also the things that are actively killing them So this is basically it says though we have a Band-Aid but instead of an adhesive it is covered in sulfuric acid Which is Fantastic listen if you can't have VE day Konga line while dressed as Lancaster bomber in middle of pandemic Then what is even the point of living in free country?

Yeah, this is it is it is the spreading of the logic of the ship doing doughnuts in the Thames To more and more corners of the national psyche as I think there is a widespread bit of denial That we actually are living in something of an end time But not the end time we are coming back into a World that's going to be fundamentally changed with people who are fundamentally incapable of reacting to that change steering it and people who are fundamentally incapable of Understanding where we need to go Acting in opposition a lot of people have been absolutely terrified for good reason and traumatized and also

Everyone in Britain over the age of 35 has an undiagnosed latent pre-on disease So all of that's just because of coming home to roost at once And so you get these perverse kind of displays of of nationalism where we all like get together shoulders to shoulders sing We'll meet again and all infect each other It's great. No, we love it because it's back to the thing we talked about with Patrick Wyman It's our death cults are less interesting than the Roman ones. Yeah, there's much less vlogging Yeah, we'll meet again on the ICU ward. So we are we are also the we have the Laborer in the UK not labor party, but the labor force has been described as addicted to the furlough scheme or the government repaid

Replaces 80% of the wages that your good employer would pay you so long as your employer doesn't fire you and Matt Hancock has said that workers Will need to be quote weaned off of government money lest they essentially become dependent on it Yeah, stop being motivated to go to work where they will probably die Yeah, I need some real help with my paying rent addiction. Oh, yeah Yeah, I'll face that you're addicted to wage It's just like an upset like imagine, I don't know like being addicted to having less money Hmm. It's such an absurd notion that like I can't even come up with a bit for it But it's basically just like it's basically masquerading and doing the whole

I mean the only thing that I kind of think about now is like does this make Rishi Sunak more or less Yeah, does it make Matt Hancock more or less adorable to use as a like a fictionalized character on our podcast That I'm still dealing. I'm still dealing with but there is there's a little bit of economics to talk about here, right? Which is that both which is that the furlough scheme and the small business lending scheme Basically exists to do the same thing They exist to take muddy front that is created by the Bank of England and put it into the hands of people who make purchases the the work the the workers essentially and Because one of the most important things that businesses purchase with that borrowed money is

Labor as well as you know premises and parts and stuff So that that money is it designed in both cases to go to the people who need to spend it but there is this I guess there is a Ideological opposition to actually distributing that money to people who need it properly and Entrant which through the furlough scheme, which is just hits more or less everyone who needs it And instead electing to do the same thing to take the same action Which is to distribute government money to people but allowing it to proceed through the intermediary of banks and employers Who get to like take what they want first as their profit they get as we know from what Antonia was saying last week

They're not lending it and they're not paying it So not only is it causing massive human suffering, but from a demand management view It's shifting shutting off a channel of money in people's pockets when we're dealing with an acute demand crisis anyway Like this is where the world of automation was leading us. It's already existing Accelerating existing tendencies. Do you remember the McDonald's automatic ordering terminals when a recession happens? companies replace employer employees with capital so in the form of machines and Then those jobs never come back so all all we're essentially doing is

Accelerating this tendency to just nobody has a job in general the fully emissor aided rationed Impoverished Exterminism if you want a vision of the future just imagine two McDonald's terminals Serving each other McFlurry's forever. I love this shit drives me absolutely insane like the whole yeah The whole like you're addicted to the furlough scheme thing is like well What the fuck else are people supposed to do they say they're gonna reduce it to encourage people back to work What fucking job Rishi? Have you noticed what the fuck is going on you stupid cunt? Like you can't exactly like say oh well just go and get a job like while staying in your house a job that doesn't exist

Because everyone else is staying in the house Only fans you've got to get an only fans Rishi Sunak is a huge Supporter of sex workers I guess by default maybe there is like an only fans lobby that is like That is lobbying the British government and that we're not gonna find this out Yeah, it's even that or Rishi Sunak is kind of like way ahead of the rest of us and is basically saying but like Not only do you need to get jobs, but we all need to prop up the magic secondary market So you better go out and go buy some booster packs right now You just really want everyone in Britain to have a twitch stream. The only fans lobby is where you verbally abuse the other people watching the

Having a he's one of the reasons that the UK has not had like quite so many Dismolish charts is is the government furlough scheme that people are being are being kept on and kept like from you know Starving because they're we understood. We at least have some level of understanding that that we society Might need fewer people in order to like operate the machines because many of the machines have been automated But we still need people with money buying stuff even not even from a Not even from a Humanitarian perspective, but simply from a people need money to buy things so capital can continue accruing returns perspective And by the way, here's a worker quoted in the Guardian who Hancock wants to quote wean off the package

This 26 year old sales rep and his partner have already begun to sell their belongings from PS4 games to the MacBook that he uses for work I'm absolutely not addicted to having crippling anxiety about having been paid enough to pay rent or bills I've not been paid enough to pay rent or bills or waking up in the middle of the night panicking There's nothing addictive about being frightened of having your things taken away when you've worked for everything Yeah, but I mean what if you made a bunch of like Lancaster bomber parts out of foam and then like stuck them together and like through them over your shoulders and paraded through the town center Yeah, it's it's wouldn't have anxiety then would you it's it's the Reconceptualization of the entire economy as a soft play area that's slowly killing everyone in it

And like this is this is what it feels like when you've stepped off the ledge and you're getting to terminal velocity You feel like you've stopped moving. Hmm. Yeah We haven't all we have just we now are we are off the ledge. We're at terminal velocity things are going faster and faster and faster and The blood from your brain is beginning to drain out and you're having hallucinations of spinning boats guys dressed as bombers and conga lines all kinds of and fun little celebrations and As your as the your sheer force of gravity and inertia and the g-forces just pull all the blood from your brain to your feet

Now in the US the stock market will not stop rallying the unemployment rate sits at around 20% worse than the great worse than the Great Depression and businesses are going bust and taking a wild debt And there's going to be a default wave in the next two months and the NASDAQ and S&P have added 250 points following the report of the worst unemployment is the Great Depression What if you invested in unemployment then it's a good week for you I mean that that guy with the like a dow 30,000 hat who then brought out the dow 20,000 hat when it went down He's gonna keep switching hats back and forth

He's just gonna he's gonna like catch the wave each time up and down He's just gonna be taking on and putting off that for ever He's getting value out of those hats if you want a vision of a full vision of the economy the the real economy of traded goods and services is essentially a McDonald's automatic ordering machines and smart bins passing the same McFlurry back and forth for you know eternity and then the stock market is Just a guy changing out hats based on the random sort of insane bullish and bearishness Looking good about this in 1709 just putting on a different

Tri-corn with a different number of guineas running on it And the thing is right that the this is not just some some random uptick This is a 29% rally in the S&P 500 since March 23rd And there has been literally nothing in the real economy to say that it's because the line is Divorced from reality now because the line has stopped But like obviously no one has come and like shut down the stock exchange and smashed all of the Bloomberg terminals with hammers So the line still has to do something the line the line is literally divorced. It's going through that period It's a it's bought like a house it can't afford and like a jet ski and stuff and like all the kids are like

Wow, dad's having a really cool time, but it's like just teetering on the edge of destruction He has a new girlfriend called like Crystal who's like 40 years younger than him. Yeah, this is our synthesis is line go divorced Well, in fact, it has been remarked that the equity values are no longer Reflective of the society that there that underlies them. So like well, they never were but the especially not now The the break is now made and it's complete and it's not coming back Yeah, the number doesn't go to anything anymore It's just the num the number is now just a reflection of the vibe of the like small number of people that own any guys

Yes, it's how are those 50 guys feeling? And previously it was like the vibe of maybe like I don't know 5,000 guys Now it's just the 50 guys and 5,000 guys was what five guys was called before it's a mation Look, I don't think the stock market is gonna stop right? I think it's gonna continue until it's reflecting a game of P knuckle in a corner of a bunker on the New Zealand It's going to continue going on It's going to just going to become more of a religious right

Then then much of anything else and the Pope hat is it says Dow hundred thousand But the the thing is based on part of this is based on investor assumptions that well Actually, the economy can kind of work without anyone really going to many of the jobs Yeah paging a mr. Graber Most of the needs of people with or most of the needs of people kind of thus far on like riding on the fumes of the Savings people had the credit they were able to get and just quite simply the belief that many of them are expendable That society is able to continue coasting on that When in reality even if you can continue for providing over all those needs at that residualized level with maybe what?

50% of your workforce 20% of them unemployed the other 30% doing jobs that you're just like at spreadsheet factories But who's going to buy the stuff? Who's gonna have money to buy the stuff? No one's going to buy the stuff How does this keep going? I don't see it It doesn't it just shrinks it just shrinks until the Dow or the Nasdaq reflect You know what two guys think about which raindrop is gonna hit the window sale first All end up happening is like what happens with phones, right? Which is like you don't just buy the stuff you like rent it So like the provisions of like being able to like rent very basic things just

Extents and then like economic activity comes from like this process of cyclical renting of like basic necessities Yeah I mean who said I think you've kind of got it You're just reaching for a pistol right now. We I'm sorry man. It's been nice podcasting with you But we can't trust you with this power It's so like the consumer economy Like the Bank of England and and Wall Street the reason that they have these this bullish outlook is because they assume It's going to come back. It's

Hmm, it's gone and it's not it's just it Alice play the rig. There are two. There are two visions. Oh Fuck hold on. Yeah Still have American magic queued up. Here's the rake. It's time for the rake job There you go. Yeah, that's that is the Bank of England and Wall Street is right there They're just jumping on a rake because they assume they'll keep going up and won't land on the rake Yeah, well, there's two there's two competing visions here There's mine, which is that as Americans and British people become more unemployed and as the line continues to get weirder We enter what I saw one tweet call when to capital letters of the cool zone

Where where some things might happen or there's Hussein's answer, which is that we just end up having to like rent our clothes You can actually rent your clothes now There is a service where like you basically get like a month's worth of clothes via subscription and then you send it back and they send You like a new box and like the idea is that you're supposed to you know They you'll kind of keep up with like the hype beast trends, which again is probably going to be like the back of Like the new Rishi Sunak hot guy economy Listener if you if you if you have to do parody redacted because I will not be wrong about this one. I won't accept Cut smash cut to six months time that Alice sitting in a gigantic rented supreme hoodie like oh fuck

Yeah, I here is an artist's impression of me right now. It's time for the rake job And the thing is right the the assumption all all Warren Buffett had was well, I Assume some magic will happen and then that will solve it Don't worry American magic American magic American magic is coming to the rescue magic Miracle magic, right? Are you got increasingly Trump? That's right. American magic folks Have magic

Magic they don't folks they don't ask you this Milo What's the difference between the sort of the statement that Donald Trump statements of you American exceptionalism confidence the virus will resolve itself without a vaccine and then Warren Buffett the sort of liberal darling of the quote-unquote good billionaire this founder of the Good giving pledge looking at the collapse of the consumer economy at a conceptual level and hand-waving away and saying well I assume American magic is coming What's the difference the difference is that is that you know they go to parties or Warren Buffett's house The difference guys that Warren Buffett went to some like Warren Buffett didn't like go to didn't go to like like it was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein like I don't know

What's I don't know what the difference is? Yeah, the difference is one of them makes you feel better If you're like a normal person and the other is that one makes you feel better if you're like a jet ski dealership psychopath Hmm, it's vibes entirely vibes based economy. We work with the head of its time with GDP at this point is what we should be looking at because that's all there is left fuck Fuck Yeah, that's that's also episode title community adjusted hell. Yeah adjusting the GDP based on how many Union Jacks There are on each street. I mean at this point. What what else is the I'm not saying that like anyone has come has There's no government conspiracy. There's no Dom Cummings saying yes

We're going to distract people from the fact that the the economy general is imploding Oh, that only exists within the BBC. They organize they organize that one autonomously, which is the Honestly, this country was beyond repair the the minute we accepted that there's a guy in public life called Dom Cummings I mean like that was that was really when the matrix broke, right? Yeah, so, you know, we are our I'm gonna take it background our review of Season three is we were right We are continue to be right Because we said that the model up at the consumer capitalist model is dying doesn't mean that

Capitalism labor exploitation and so on are going away as Nate. I think Nate had a Nate had a very still could Just hint hint you could do that if you wanted summary of it, which is that things are going to get more residualized more feudal More limited the idea of unlimited growth is I think gone Where we have to deal with mass scarcity without the sort of fig leaf of Mass potential abundance one month in the future except it was sicker than he imagined because we still have the growth It's just it's just on the line We have taken the map and replaced the territory with it

So like there will still be boundless growth in the stock market You just want to be able to get food Fuck it. DOW a million who gives a shit. Yeah, DOW 300 trillion These these lines are no longer meaningful. No, we they are still effectively Youth you they have effectively stopped not because they've stopped moving but because they've stopped reflecting anything They've stopped being useful to anyone who wants to take a critical view of what's going on They are essentially superfluous. You might as well look it up. You might as well look at a fucking spirograph Hmm, I mean we basically managed to like collapse the US dollar enough to make it the ruble and then the Dow does become Dow

So Yes, in in this so in the spirit of being you know, very pleased at being right Well, no, not pleased at being right. I'm fucking miserable that we're right. I'm pleased at being right. No, I'm pleased I'm pleased. I want to be right about the next thing. Also. I Will be miserable if it's saying this right about the next let's Let's let's shift from the hopelessness of the macro picture. Let's talk about some particularities Because and again, it almost feels strange to be talking about about social care in the context of total total hopelessness of of season three

but it is one of these it is one of these professions that is mitigating the hopelessness and we are very pleased to be We are very pleased by by Chris and Pope who are in fact social workers Chris with the Young and Pope with the old who can tell us a little bit about it So I'm to you too. I'm going to read a headline from the Guardian Social care crisis risks two-tier blow to the poor minister is warned Now this is a headline from like January. So

The social care crisis is not the COVID crisis instead they are part of the same thing So can you tell us a little bit? This is to Pope and Chris about what these what we mean by social care crisis Okay, so I'll stop with the children family and young person sector, which is the one I work in In Scotland in particular, there's been a real kind of weird move from old models which didn't particularly work very well for homeless youth to new models where they haven't set up anything to implement them yet housing first, which is I think is fantastic but they don't have the housing stock and There's been a big move towards closing larger homeless facilities the problem with that is is

Closing saying Jimmy Really done a great job of identifying new solutions. I was in a large facility which downsized by probably two-thirds And this was right before the crisis hit and there's no beds for anyone because they've been closing all of the hotels Which the council has been using as a kind of temporary stopgap measure while they're waiting for housing So one of the crises is that they're just really isn't the resources for whatever they want to do and that's really been exacerbated by well A current pandemic where all of the kind of stopgap measures they put in just won't work anymore

and I know there's tons of crisis with Elderly people, but I think Pope would probably be better to speak on that Yeah, no, I worked in elderly care for eight and a half years and The the social care crisis is something that preceded Coronavirus for a long I mean in them eight and a half years. I was there everything was going to shit anyway all the time constantly and What you have is that there was becoming so I work for a company I don't know if I can name can I name and shame the company or yeah Okay, I work for a company called runward homes and they in 2017 apparently I made a pre-tapped profit of

16.9 million The directors were paid 4.4 million and the highest paid Gordon the head of the company received in 2.2 million and now they've got a dividends of a 5.1 million and that was in 2017 and that was the same year That he then Gordon was sending out memos to each of the care homes pleading poverty Tried to cut back on little trivial things like peanut butter It seems trivial, but for these people in these residents are in these care homes It's something that makes a day a bit the bit right and saying they look forward to a lot as I'm like a rabble rouser

So as a result of this I tried to a initiate a coup d'etat With people with dementia to to reinstate peanut butter because I couldn't stand this kind of deprivation But then also he was he was saying about turning off Electricity turning off heating even in the winter months to to to save money and When these private companies are profiteering from Social care They're always prioritizing the bottom line over the welfare of the residents. I said and another problem that you've got is

That CQC the regulatory body who comes in they They don't do unannounced visit. So they always announce when they're coming in so So when when they announce that they're coming in There'll be a lot of cosmetic maintenance on the residents The private and them of their personal agency because some of these residents might not want to shave that day or they You know, they might not want to wear this item of clothing or they might not want to dress up They just want to kind of relax and chill out, but into the latex granite But yeah, yeah, and then the elders because of these put like this cosmetic maintenance

They just become an advertisement for the quality of service within the care homes Just so that the the the company can sort of save face that they can maintain there Excellent grading and that they can continue generating revenue for themselves and I think one of the things that I spoke about was the national idea of a national care service and for it to be taken out of private Private companies and a sort of like a national health service by a national care service Formed so it's got like a public entity that that that supports the elders and elderly care and

Any kind of care of people or stuff from dementia neurodegenerative diseases and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean up I'm all for that. I'm all for it because I I saw what Worrying about, you know revenue streams and stuff. I saw what it did to these care homes and another thing That I'm not I don't really understand how the care home providers themselves as kind of escaped scrutiny in this moment and it's all been that sort of It's all been focused on on the government. Obviously the government's been terribly incompetent and Loads of stuff have been mismanaged on their behalf, but these care providers So professor Martin Green of Care England who represents his care home providers

He made a statement where he was taught. I see if I've got a statement here. He said Yeah Care England's green said the recommendations for expanding capacity and staff levels were not discussed with providers following the 2017 report That's the is it operation sign it or whatever is called Nobody has ever had that conversation with us. He said care England has been talking about Providing extra capacity for years. We have been telling them that we have it and we have capacity and people don't need to be in hospital But we have got nowhere now He focuses on

Extra capacity which will make more money for the care providers without mentioning the need for extra staff to accommodate the expansion which will be less money for the care providers and a lot of these places have been severely understaffed for years and And yeah, like I said because DCQC doesn't operate under a mystery shopper approach The dangerous Staffing deficit is whitewashed in in anticipation of their arrival But for the rest of the year, we're just told to make do and so I wanted to actually I want to talk a little bit about making do You know how people in caring professions are frequently asked to make up shortfalls in The provision of the actual resources or staff or whatever to accomplish what their job is so the example here, of course is

Teachers buying school supplies for their students and so on and the rationale behind this seems to be that well you get the emotional and moral fulfillment of You get the emotional and moral fulfillment of Caring for someone of not having to do a soul-deadening finance job So of course, you shouldn't be well paid for it a but B You should also like cover a few of the costs yourself because what is a care job if not a kind of vacation? I mean I know exactly the kind of mindset you're talking about. I mean I look I've I've been on shifts where you know

You're you're you're a meshed in these people's life. You've become an extension of the family. I love it It's very rewarding, but there are certain points where you have to clean them and you're basically wearing them They're hemorrhoids as a cufflink and that doesn't sound Vacation to me They take advantage of our compassionate nature and so much of my income from these jobs I would would then go back out just buying stuff and providing stuff to the residents whether it's Like sweets or or like a coloring pencils or even clothing if they're residents who have come in With with social workers and haven't got family. I would buy them new clothing. I'd buy them

Better quality razors. I would you know all this kind stuff and so many carers were doing this We're filling the holes in resources from their own paycheck, which was meager the pay You know, we were getting 7 pound 20 an hour now I For a long time it was even under the the minimum the national minimum wage and then they had to rectify that because we Sort of collect me put pressure on them Sounds like you're addicted to earning a wage

These are what you're saying right I want to I want to because I love bringing things together I love I love summings up even in progress where we can see another Another sort of conceptual Decoupling happening here right where we go back to our marks We talk we look at the the composition of capital of organic capital which is people doing stuff and and Inorganic capital which is machines and so forth the deal of capitalism has always been that you're provide that you're the capitalist provides the the inorganic capital and then the labor the the labor force provides the organic capital and And what were you don't have to bring your steam loom from except in the case of the caring professions

There has been a decoupling of the work that goes on in Schools and care homes and so on from that particular Deal that the private sector is supposed to be good at making you're providing your own inorganic capital as well Because the people running the show have realized they can just make you do that It's so true and that is so so true and I would always I was a proper rabble rabble rouser in there And I wouldn't blindly follow the the directives passed down from the sort of the upper tiers of management and stuff like that I would always question it and I said like one detail I I've got asked by a bit of big publishing house to write a proposal a book proposal of a funny book about elderly care

And one of the little details Well, that they said was like really evocative was this idea of carers horse trading Incontinence pads and because there's a severe shortage of incontinence pads that that would become commodified within the home Well, I'll trade you like free of the the lower absorbent pads for a big absorbent pad because we've got a big shitter over here And these are all the things that the companies are supposed to be providing that they are just not they Absolutely totally failing in that regard. So you're not providing these resources And that's why we're we're constantly running around trying to try new, you know forage Incontinence pads. I mean, and that's madness and these poor people shouldn't have to

be sitting in, you know in their own in their own Fluvia I'm gonna use that word because I've used it before by low enjoyed it You said you weren't gonna talk about that They shouldn't be sitting in their own shit Just because there isn't enough incontinence pads to go around and they are that they take an advantage of that because they are just relying on The carers natural compassion To to fill those those gaps and also the severe Dangerous lack of staffing is such a major problem

And I've been on shifts where there was free carers to 40 residents with complex needs Where most of them need help with mobility Where a lot of them need help and assistance with feeding where they all need help with food service Where they about 90% of them need help of getting taken to the toilet if you imagine just one person who requires a hoist It taking about 20 minutes half an hour to take to the toilet and then there's 40 of them with free staff How is that possible? Well, if that possible on on the subject of staffing actually

I would like to I'd like to I'd like to focus on that of how we are able to get people to come in To this job that require that requires you to that takes advantage of your compassion essentially And pays you very poorly it makes you buy quite a few of your own bits of equipment But I want to I want to ask Chris now. What has happened to recruitment in the not just the Prevailing social care crisis, but this acute coronavirus crisis as well. It's always been a particular problem for us The group of people that I work with in particular is challenging I can't tell you how many times I've been bitten threatened yelled at it's just part of the job

They're young people who don't trust anybody That's just living with Alice She only bites on Tuesday So On top of the normal recruitment things of course there has to be all sorts of checks There's got to be background checks. There's got to be police checks You don't want to get in anybody in with a history of abusing people to work with people who've already been abused So recruitment is normally slow. The wages are absolutely dreadful. Like they're a joke

They boast about being a living wage employer, which they are but it isn't really a living wage And so before you would say interview I don't know 15 desperate people who haven't been able to find a job anywhere because the economy in Glasgow is dreadful and still Six seven of them would walk away from it because they could find something that wasn't quite as terribly paying um Yeah, you don't get bitten as often in a call center

Oh, you get threatened about the same though We'd be so sure about that so but And so one of the things that I was I was hearing about was they were looking in order to fill this staffing gap They were instead of instead of doing something where where they could say well, look, let's improve the pay Let's improve the conditions. Let's improve the prestige, which by the way, that's what Finland did with teachers Like that's they they made it a well-paid um

Therefore prestigious and highly respected career and now Finland's doing amazingly in education Um, but I they have not to have taken a different road If that's the high road of filling a Uh, let's say a publicly required caring occupation. We have taken the low road We've got a we've got a couple of regulatory bodies. Um, they're different than the ones in england We've got the care inspectorate which acts like the care quality commission And we've also got uh, the triple sc which covers all social care Uh, which is the scottish social care

Commission or something. Um, I should probably know this But what the triple sc has done at the start of the crisis was basically sending out an email saying that all of the Normal checks that we have to do to make sure that you're not getting an abusers and jimmy savel types um, could be suspended and then uh, so to get people in earlier that rather than doing the normal checks You can just go ahead with your recruitment thing hire them do the recruitment checks once they're in the job And then if we find out let's say you've hired a child molester to work with seven year olds Well, then they would be fired. So that's absolutely terrifying and

I love to play pedo roulette or as we call it in britain british roulette I mean, just absolute nonsense is absolutely stayed and boring and like Um, completely difficult to work with and this has actually worked in our favor because they have just ignored the triple sc's guidance about getting people in and have taken even longer than normal. So What while our recruitment levels are even worse than they were before at least I'm not having to like watch The new guy like a hawk to make sure that he's not going to take little jimmy into the bathroom

We don't do personal care. So there's no reason for that It's it's everyone everyone is everyone is cops and border guards now If you're if you're your landlord and redding age letting agent are your are your border guard uh, social care workers now have to Be on the lookout for like child safeguarding which is I guess good because most of the people who would be wanting to Hurt children seem to have an incentive to join a version of social care that has no background checks Just just dreadful shit But that's what you just you just know there's a startup genius watching this now being like well

We can save the government 100% of the money if we just get volunteer pedos for the social care and then we get volunteer cop I mean one thing britain does still have an abundance his pedophiles, right? So it makes sense as a stopgap. You just Risking their lives I'm looking forward to the Epstein home for wayward girls It is it is essentially the choice right where when you are in crisis and two and two irreconcilable an irreconcilably different forces come together which is the force of We need to make a profit by paying care workers less because we accept that this industry must be privatized and the incredibly high requirements that

Of social care in an aging population that's facing a fucking pandemic That that's that something has to give and either it has to the job has to be made better Or the quality or the threshold for applicant quality has to go so low that we're no longer saying If you want to work with children, we're going to make sure you're not a pedophile There's also the redeployment which uh, I don't know chris. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit Well, that hasn't actually happened but another thing that our regulatory body came up with was the idea of In some services are running low In staffs the level where it's unsafe, which in my opinion is the normal state of things

That they could just redeploy you to another service where You don't know anybody and don't know any of the rules and probably are going to be exposed to a deadly infection Because well, we're not getting a sufficient PPE to deal with things like personal care and Ventilation things that some of the elderly care social services have been doing on a regular basis Um, so that was also a kind of terrifying announcement and it's really weird to expect that somebody who for instance works with Uh, young people who slam the door in your face would necessarily be suited to work with Um, a woman with dementia without any additional training a real kick in the teeth for the pedos who signed up as well

Yeah, you sign up for some easy pedophilia and instead you just find yourself on the wards This is the last thing I wanted to have This is the complete opposite of what I was hoping for This is I take it back. I take back every criticism we've made of the government and the social care sector This is ingenious. We've used a massive resource British pedophiles and trapped them Like flypaper into making them bypass essentially essentially what we've done is Through a kind of gigantic reimagining of the entire Caring labor force of the united kingdom as a kind of liquid that can slosh around the country wherever it's needed

We've applied the principles of crossfit. I guess Um, yeah, we're doing muscle confusion to the entire social care workforce confusion You you are someone who who works with the elderly you wake up the next day congratulations It's time to teach school. Uh, you're a school teacher. I hope you like wiping asses It's just it is because we've just assumed that these jobs are completely interchangeable because someone who did not understand Any of this work at all came in and reimagined it in such a way And again, we could keep relying we could just shift people around And we could rely on their caring instincts to just stretch thinner and thinner and thinner and paper over an

increasingly What cracks in the system that are becoming canyons? well I think I think there's also a real strain of misogyny in this and that a lot of The social care workers particular in my sector are overwhelmingly women and the skills that they utilize are soft skills They're getting people to agree with you when they don't want to they're getting people to Kind of learn personal hygiene. They're getting To talk to a shut in an elderly people who

may be confused and Because that's not, you know Engineering or making a box they're really devalued and it's something that has been done in the home for free So it's also devalued so they just don't put in the stock into it that like these are difficult skills These jobs are challenging, but they don't treat them like that They think anybody off the street can do them and they think they're all interchangeable and they're not Yeah, that's and so many People have the misconception that when they come into the job that it's all tea and sympathy

And just like sitting down and having a little chat and do it and they don't realize the the the heavy Labor that goes into it, but because is I think it's because it's like an invisible labor because It's the type of productivity Where there's no sort of raw materials and then there's no Transformation into a useful object like there would be with mechanics or stuff like that It's just the the maintenance and the preservation of a human life and it's madness. I have to say it's only that It's only that it's only the

Like I'll give you for instance. So I work as a comedian and in In edin bra's part of a comedical Phil Ellis's show And I had to come out dressed as a shit clown Pretend to suck off a trombone get shot dead I got shot dead and then Phil would call me a podgy slut Now I got paid 10 pound an hour To to do that job and that was like 2 pound 80 or 2 pound 60 more than I got

for Helping to continue an elderly person's life and helping to provide the process was very similar Hey, but yeah, like hell yeah and helping to provide like holistic benefits to them as well because that's another thing that That that people don't need because it's not immediate medical Media medical provisions that you'll provide. I mean you do a bit of that as well in In conjunction with the visiting district nurses

But because it's like a holistic benefit and it seems a bit nebulous like I'll making an elderly person feel safe and happy Now I don't really know how to you know, I don't really know how to Put a value on that and that's yeah that that yeah that just yeah pisses me off It's interesting that you raise that actually because I think that's one of those things that like permeates the entirety of our society now As part of this kind of like logic of austerity thing like how there are all these just like yadda type people Getting really annoyed about people buying easter eggs at the supermarket because it's not essential And it's like why do people have to be miserable just because it's a lockdown? Why are you so desperate for everyone to be miserable? Yeah

yeah They didn't wait for the lockdown to do that Easter eggs Yeah The growth of like spite as like the dominant Vibe in british public life is like, I don't know probably the most important story Of the last 10 years especially in the commentary it is that that the birth of spite as the main driver of british politics Emerge when gordon brown called jillian duffy a bigoted woman

You know, um, I think that's probably not right. I think it's actually the logic of it's it's austerity That's well, I think there's it's like the kind of the The the the aggrieved nature of a lot of these people It can be like I don't think we had anything as dramatic as a psychic wound as the election of barack obama For the british boomer, but like it's something like that was when sandra collectively took all of our kids Yeah, yeah, it was when it was it was sometime when sandra took all of our kids And you were reading a thing in the mail about the eu and you just thought well

Fuck everything and you just let that animate you for the next 15 years I sort of feel like the point of chaos came when the like bin cat lady happened. Oh, yeah I feel like everyone's brains and any sort of sense of like Notion of like a good collective society and stuff that just all went out of the window because it just Physically broke the country in a way that like I feel deserves much more anthropology Then it has kind of warranted chaotic evil There is you have to understand spite if you want to understand why

The social care industry at the whole social care market if you like has been turned into a market and then Basically been forced to fail. It is because There is there is resentment on the part of people. There is resentment for people who are doing care By people who feel guilty because they don't And then there is resentment that there is a public service that someone else is getting cared for The idea that I might be paying for it But I expect of course that I will be I'll be taken care of by society anyway Either because I'm rich or because I deserve it

And I just I don't like this cannot continue. I have like a serious point Which was that like I think for like the most part like Riley is right. I think that like this is a mixture of um Just like the kind of bizarre cultural like years of the like the beginning of austerity in the coalition government But I also think that like this is also the kind of like notion of spite and this weird Like this weird kind of I don't even know if dialectic is the right word But this sort of resentment over people who work low paid like caring roles, but also this kind of sense of Help with this kind of like identity crisis that comes with working

What you know is like a bullshit job and then having this crisis about like am I actually providing something useful to society? And when you sort of realize that you don't like all that all that kind of conjures up is like this bizarre rage and like Where else do you kind of put that right? So it comes as like this weird self-defeating cycle Well, like self-defeating might not be the right word But it becomes just like weird cynical cycle where you resent the people that you sort of want to be but in order to kind of like justify Your relatively comfortable existence you basically have to convince yourself that your bullshit job is actually Worth a lot more than like the job of a carer or a cleaner or someone who works in a like a supermarket or something like that

Yeah, or you just veer in the opposite direction and you do the other thing that like You you valorize the troops and you put on a big Lancaster bomber outfit because that's another thing you didn't do But you what you want to identify with that as opposed to like just be spiteful again It's like this blanket thing of like well, whatever you do in your life, you're never going to be you're never going to have like the same amount of Your job is never going to be a soldier's job. So it's basically useless anyway regardless of what you do They should draft the troops into Y passes and the old folks Tactically interdicting some shit out of an old person I want to do a little bit by way by way of summing up here, right?

If because all the things we were talking about Every single one of these tendencies making it impossible for care workers and to work And impossible for the cared for to live a life of dignity or increasingly impossible Those are all factors that were present before Coronavirus hit so I can only imagine that they've all gotten worse Uh Yeah, yeah, so what I want to think about right and I don't I don't have an answer for this I'm hoping uh chris and pope. You might know something

If there are people listening to this who want to help What can they do? um Well, I think yeah, I I think that uh people need to I am noticing a bit in this kind of post lapse area moment where people are exhibiting public-minded prudence and we're sort of witnessing the restoration of civic participation Uh, uh on uh on some scale. I'm hope I hope we are because the people are talking about Uh, it's slowing off a strata of society be it the elderly or the vulnerable as if it's just like a bureaucratic

management of budgets The people would usually clap along to that. I'm seeing a little bit more pushback. So that's good um and not assuming that life As someone with neurodegenerative disease or someone who has a form of dementia not assuming that they are half dead already and Realizing that they are in an altered state, but they still have a lot of vitality and they still have

a lot of Stuff to give and they're not Expendable, you know, they're they're they're not people who might as well be, you know, a better off dead um Because which is a you know a common thing even for family members who have relatives with dementia Uh, yeah, and that's what I mean. That's what I'm hoping to do in the if it was right in this book Is I really want to have a complete overhaul on the way

People think about dementia. So just go go in you can volunteer in anywhere in any care home People would be glad of the uh, glad of the help Just go in like maybe if you have a couple of spare hours and you know once once uh, Coronavirus has passed Maybe just try and do a bit of that every now and again Just go into a care home help out for a couple of hours and sit and and Yeah, as far as as far as I can tell right? This is a situation where going in and volunteering at least in the short term would not be scabbing

Because there is a staffing crisis that is causing the workers the workers themselves problems Yeah, yeah, I don't think any of us would consider a volunteer a scab. They have a kind of different remit anyway but also like Part of the way you keep these places Staffed is through a kind of an emotional manipulation where You know you take these people who are compassionate and they care and they care about their work and you get them to work Those extra shifts you get them to give up their family time you get them to Kind of put their own lives on hold so they can help other people

So yeah volunteering can do some relief for some of those people um for me though, there's such structural systemic problems that I hesitate to do any sort of solution that Doesn't involve Yes, that doesn't involve But I would say that just when you see vulnerable people like

Just treat them with the same kind of dignity that other people get A lot of times the young people I work with maybe they don't have the best clothes or maybe they kind of Have behavior that seems unusual and I've seen people just treat them like scum and it doesn't help them to You know learn how to be independent and learn how to move in a society that already hates them all it does is get them to double down on whatever survival mechanisms they've already learned and Those aren't always healthy, but you know, if you go someplace and people just treat you like shit you're not going to want to

behave in a way that Those people are going to pat you on the head and accept you you're going to be angry and indeed toby young is proof of that fact Yes, yes, despite works both ways, right? So So, uh, mindful mindful of time I think I'm going to say to both chris and pope a big thank you for coming on to the show today and for

I mean, this sounds cheesy as shit, but for continuing to do what it is that you do No I'll take a tenor instead, mate. If you'll just Actually got a saucepan here Instead of clapping, uh, just think about how you can, you know, do something do something material Um, and yeah, or I have I have the gamer air horns. I can give you a like a gamer fanfare That's who we have Air horn salute

Trash future presents a 21 air horn salute to the care to the to the middle management of the care industry We're having a monster truck derby to raise money for the care not to raise money for the care homes to raise money To replace the last dividends of investors in private care home companies Hmm. Yeah, it's like to get to give chris and pope's line managers nicer chairs I'm forcing the people with dementia to ride the monster truck. That's it. That's what we're doing So Thank you both every time they see the truck asaurus a new gasp just a surprise We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge. So, uh, thank you both again

Um, pope, I know you've got a book coming out. Does it have a name a release date? It's just I've just got commissioned to write the proposal. I hasn't been optioned yet It's just in the early sort of in co-eight stages. Uh, uh, yeah, I'm a comedian pope lonegan You can follow me on twitter at the daily bumbler and I'm doing at the moment I'm doing a lot of stuff with a next up and their streaming service And doing a lot of different bits online so you can keep abreast of that on my twitter page And chris, do you have do you have any anything to plug or would you just like to use this? This time to like tell alice to do the dishes of her own podcast or something

I do on the science fiction and fantasy writer You can read my work at uncanny magazine or strange horizons magazine for free online Or you can purchase one of my stories at fire magazine Um, and I will have more upcoming publications. Follow me on twitter. I'm at seraph 76 Yes, absolutely. Um, and so I think with that we just have to say, uh, number one We have a patreon five bucks a month. You get a second episode every thursday Um, we also have our twitch schedule. That is Wednesday thursday and sunday from 9 p.m. To 11 p.m. uh, british time

Uh, and we're going to be doing the inaugural saint brendan's day debate on may 18th Where seven brendan o'neils will square off against their hated enemy one another No, no It's a compound Anyway, uh, I think that is uh enough for today except for me to say our theme song is buy it buy it I never remember the shirts. Yeah, I never remember the shirts. So now that's enough for today. My shirt Yeah, but but I'll see our theme song is buy a shirt by ginseng Our theme song is buy a shirt by ginseng. We can listen to it on spotify. You can't find it there try here

We go its alternate title And other than that, I think it's time to say See you later