TRASHFUTURE - Barrattly Legal feat. Owen Hatherley

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

This week, Riley, Milo, and Alice join special guest Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) of Tribune Magazine to discuss Barratt Homes: what is the deal with new-build housing in the UK? Why is it of such uniformly bad quality? And why has this become pretty much the only real new construction of homes in this country? Also in this episode: another re-discovered song from Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads. Owen’s new collection Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism is available from Verso Books here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3789-clean-living-under-difficult-circumstances If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Well, the thing is Pete, you know, at the end of the day, if you don't lay down boundaries, you know, they're going to take liberties, and that's just the way it is. Yes, thank you to Colin and Cheshire there calling on our debate about whether all magpies in Great Britain should be hunted down and killed by the state. We're now going to be taking in your song request. I believe I have got Pete on the line in Basingstoke. Pete, are you there? Hi, Pete. It's great to be here. I've been in the big Spanish show for a long time,

and let me tell you, when I was back in South Africa, we didn't have any problems with magpies. We didn't take any shit from birds, OK? Hi, Pete. Great to have you. Do just watch the language for me, though. Now, you've got a song request. Is that right? Yeah, of course. I know that a lot of your listeners like me, they're big fans of Johannes Bonk and the clockheads, and I've often been surprised that the biggest Johannes Bonk and the clockheads hit in South Africa,

my home country. It's not really known here in the UK, even though the band are huge, so I really want to request this one song that they made. When they made, they came to South Africa in the 1980s, and they met a guy, a South African guy, a military guy, and they were impressed by him that they wrote a song all about his life and about the code that he lived by, and that guy's name was Jerk van der Kleef, and the song is called Warrior's Heart, so I'd like you to put that on for me, please, Keith, and I hope your listeners are really going to enjoy it.

Pete, that's a great request. I do actually know the track. I've been looking this up, and apparently it was number one in South Africa for eight weeks. In 1987, if you believe that, but it did not chart in the UK, so this is one for real clockheads in the UK. As Pete said, the song is called Warrior's Heart, and it contains a very touching dedication at the end. We'll get that on for you now, Pete. Thanks very much. See you, Keith. I'll catch you later.

I've got a warrior's heart I'm living life on the edge When it comes to an African nation The high spirit has got my pledge I've got a warrior's heart I put my life on the line What they want to do with Equatorial gave me That's no business of mine

That's no business of mine Ain't no business of mine I'll never face the ICC They'll never put the chains on me Chains on me There's no Dutch caught in Harlem That could cancel me That could cancel me though

I've got a warrior's heart I'm paid for risking my life Middle eastern oil fields are my children And blood diamonds are my wife I've got a warrior's heart I live my life by the plane I don't care if you're a fashion dictator As long as I'm still getting paid

I'm still getting paid I'm still getting paid I'll never face the ICC They'll never put the chains on me There's no caught in Harlem That could cancel me I'll never face the ICC I'm living my life wild and free

There's not a judge in Harlem That could sentence me De sala si sung And that was the new Johannes Ivonek in the cloghead's track Uh hahaha, warrior's heart Yeah I hope you all enjoyed, I mean, I can tell you this I sure hope it was

At the time of recording it's not done yet At the time of release it hopefully is Or maybe Johannes Ivonek in the cloghead's have become a very experimental band who like to play with the silence Yeah, it's like actually they're doing a cover of 433 by John Cage I think the song is very long, so I think probably the better part of the song is probably going to be at the end You in the future will have heard an excerpt of the song And if you wish to listen to the whole song you're going to have to wait for the end of the episode Or fast forward to about six minutes before the end of the episode

Yeah, but then be sure to rewind back To hear Yeah, to hear the episode that we're going to do Look, it's a good show and that means you should work for it Because if you didn't have to work for it, why would you care? If you want to listen to the show all out of order like it's memento, that's your decision But you have to listen to the whole thing That's right

It's going to be some kind of like podcast colombo Yeah, um, yeah Joining us Membo Good gracious Joining us in our efforts to baffle, confuse and frustrate you Yeah, it is Owen Happily

Owen, how's it going? It's been better It's been Yeah True We are going to be talking about a number of... A number of different things today that are sort of in your purview and bailiwick Namely

Not the purview and the bailiwick Yeah, both of them Fucking hell Namely, we are going to be discussing A subject that has been interesting me for the last, I think probably I'd say year and a bit Which is the growth of sort of Barrett Holmes taking over of the 2% of Britain that's used for building homes on An increasing percentage of that percent is Barrett Holmes And as an urbanist and sort of critic of sort of architecture, urban design, housing and so on

I was hoping you could help us understand just what Barrett Holmes is Sure You want me to answer this question? Yes, please So they are a property developer and builder who've been around for a good few decades but probably became best known in the 1980s For churning out large quantities of houses which were kind of like... They looked a bit like if you sort of shrunk a Victorian house So a sort of similar thing with kind of like little kind of porches and brick and pitch roofs and so on

But you kind of reduce the size by about a quarter And rather than being in a kind of street or a grid like Victorian terraces or semi-susually where they are in cul-de-sacs Designed to be kind of easily reached by car And they kind of spread across suburban areas particularly in the southeast In the 80s to the point where one of the larger ones was moved into by Margaret Thatcher And they now I suppose are a kind of developer like any other They do modern blocks of flats sometimes even which at one point was exactly the thing that they were supposed to be the alternative to So they just kind of churn out kind of crap housing really

And they're kind of... I mean they're one of several companies that do things like this like Persim and Taylor Woodrow They also do similar sort of stuff But Barrett just did so many in the 80s and 90s and they advertised them very aggressively So they kind of become a sort of synonym for a particular kind of British crap housing If you say Barrett Home, Barrett House, do you think of one of those sort of like reddish brick boxes, right? Yeah, a house that just sucks They were running an ad campaign, I'm pretty sure it was Barrett If it wasn't Barrett, it was one of their imitators

Being like why buy an old house that you renovate when you could buy into a new house that you don't need to renovate by Barrett Homes And it's like because it's shit, that's why And I think this will sort of puzzle American listeners a little bit Like why are you talking about just like a suburban house developer Like the guys who do the British McMansions that just became popular in the 80s And one of the reasons that you talk about this I think on a politics show is that Barrett has been much more very close Barrett in particular and the house builders in general have been very, very, very closely tied in to I'd say the political development of the UK Well since as you say Owen, like the 80s, the late 70s, they have created, they have been driving the suburbanization of the country

Which I think actually in turn has been driving the Americanization of the country as well Well the thing about these house builders is they have a lot of pull at the new market jockeys enclosure And how are British cabinet ministers to resist the kind of treats they're on offer And I mean there's also, there also is the Barrett man as well Right that this that's I think exists as a kind of people who like to define demographics Love to define, have been sort of trying to define the Barrett man Sort of England's sort of like classic suburban dweller Where I think in America this has been sort of so entrenched for so long

In America you call that guy the middle class, right? Because that already implies white It already kind of implies male, it kind of implies like suburban Here we've tried to do like, we've tried doing that through the guy's car like Mondeo man And now we're taking another crack at it with his house I think there has been, and what's weird right is whether this person drives a Mondeo Or lives in a Barrett home, they're always sort of seen as like the lynchpin political demographic Of Brit, I mean like, oh and what's your, do you have a sort of understanding of like What the Barrett home's demographic man is when people say Barrett man?

I mean to be honest, I think it's quite a different thing now than it was in the 1980s And that's sort of the kind of changes in political geography since then So in the 80s you know it was very very obvious who it referred to, referred to people in Essex and Ken And generally maybe West Midlands, South Hampshire, basically places where like People had moved out of industrial areas, moved out of council estates and you know Got themselves out of the working class into the middle class So it sort of defined a particular kind of, you know, bourgeoisification of people Particularly in the more affluent bits of the UK

And you know, obviously New Labour made enormous efforts to kind of, you know, appeal to those people And Mondeo man comes from one of their things to kind of I do How do we, how do we connect these people? They defined Mondeo man and Worcester woman And the two kind of centres of this there, I think Mondeo man was seen to be Women who love sports So well, I mean it's specifically more about the West Midlands, I think You know, the West Midlands, like London was sort of full of people sort of drifting out into these kind of Somewhat characterless places

And whereas, obviously I assume you're going to start talking about Dino quite soon I'll leave you to discuss Dino But on Dino, I will say Pretty much anyone that can, particularly in places which have little scattering of Barrett estates Will tell you that actually Mondeo man was with us Mondeo man is now a comrade, you know, the Barrett home man was actually fairly Barrett home man might have grudgingly voted Labour Barrett woman will usually have enthusiastically voted Labour

Whereas the people that actually hate us and wanted us killed Were generally elderly voters in kind of right to buy suburban housing estates In kind of like 1930s council estates on the outskirts of industrial cities Those are the people that basically, you know, that drove that political shift Because there's way more of them Whereas people in their 20s and 30s who have a couple of kids They moved into those places who were the people that Labour desperately wanted in 1997 and then got Jeremy Corbyn mainly got those people

What he didn't get is the people that voted for him in the 1980s So it has shifted a bit and I think there is a kind of like People living in crap new houses with young families are actually not the drivers of conservatism anymore So there's an element there that The drivers of Audi A3 I don't even know what that is So the... That's the yin and yang of the show

I list the car, you don't know what it is I think it's very funny though that we've... This is a sort of critique of like political analysis is While we were trying to pin down a type of guy He aged 20 years beneath us As we were like, guys who live in Barrett homes Meanwhile, we go through from the 1980s to the 2000s Or from the 2000s to the 2020s

And the type of guy that we're trying to look for has completely gotten away from us Because the guy is a different guy Stay in your box, stay the same guy forever Don't age, don't move Someone who sort of pay bourgeois and 32 with a couple of kids Was doing pretty fucking well in the late 1980s They're doing pretty badly now And I think that that's...

And the kind of interesting thing about that for me is that Basically this is shit housing This is very... It's a poor quality housing And in the 1980s, people were living in poor quality housing And thinking it was wonderful And now people are living in poor quality housing And thinking it's poor quality And generally being dissatisfied with their lot

So I think that's progress But I said, what kind of guy they are I saw the Dino thing and I don't know Maybe I'm just not doomed enough I've not met him Maybe I've just not kept him enough touch for the people I'm in school with I left Facebook, I don't know But definitely canvassing

A lot of people would go to those new built estates And you're kind of like, oh, they don't hate us And then go to the place where they were supposed to be getting out of labor vote And it was then that they were kind of like You know, you're going to bring in Sharia law, fuck off Yeah, that's right, we are You know what they were right But I think this is worth talking about as well, I think

And Owen, this point you make as well These are people in crappy housing that are Where it's not They don't necessarily like that They're in crappy housing I think this actually brings us quite neatly Into what Engels wrote about this In his pamphlet, the housing question

It's interesting Yeah, don't get it Barret houses, drafty as hell Stay away from them said Engels One of the weird things I won't tell you Engels, Hitler and Freud They all lived in Barrett homes in Vienna In 1913

Read Vienna when the communist government Built a load of Barrett homes That's right We'll have to come to that That's exactly what militant did in the 1980s When they controlled Liverpool We'll have to come to this point Barrett homes

So the basics of what Engels says about housing As shouldn't surprise anyone Suggest that housing As it is experienced by most people Is defined by two forces that are intentioned with one another Shocking Kind of a dialectic There might be some kind of a dialectic at play here folks

I hate it when two forces are intentioned With each other Capital, he writes The housing question is actually Written as a response Much as so many of these guys' writings Were basically written as an angry Response to someone else

It was posting He said he said basically look To house workers usefully to capital And to derive maximum value from those houses as a commodity Those two Forces are Intentioned with one another That is to say you want to house workers

So that they can be close to where you need them to be To work and they can live healthily And so on Like the iso cube in the corner of the factory That you can stack on top of one another But having a Iso cube that won't make them ill Is more expensive than having an iso cube

That will make them ill to live in So there is attention as to how do you House workers well similar You have to stop extracting From them at some point and capital never wants to do that And so the other thing Right that Engels talks about In this 19th century paper is again

Should strike people As a quite modern question Which is A modern answer to this question Which is he talks about The solution to a housing crisis Created by these conflicting needs of capital Is working class home ownership

Where you see Engels sees this as a problem Because he's focusing mainly on Like labor as traveling factory labor So he's like yeah but if you own your home Then you're rooted to one spot And then you're not going to be able to like Go to other jobs so your

Factory worker boss will be able to reduce your wage That's kind of less important now But what he does talk about That I think is still important now is Heavy and rising mortgage debts In order to purchase a home Which will basically become a financialized asset Which makes them more indebted and therefore

Vulnerable to exploitation by capital And he seems sort of quite Sort of prescient there And the other thing He notes is that home ownership would ideologically Incorporate workers by inculcating Basically an individualist attitude As they're sort of separated

Owning a house makes you a Tory We've kind of been over because That's you know that was Thatcher's base Was people who were able to like Buy their council housing Like knock down rates and then Became infected with Tory brain Yeah so the

I think the And also mad cow disease No it's called Tory brain The simpler conclusion here is that You is that by putting someone Into a suburb and then working them That by indebting someone an enormous amount And putting them into a suburb

That means they have to work flat out To barely service their debt, spend a long time Very isolated from one another in cars Driving to and from work with talk radio and so on The thesis basically is that That's a force that makes someone More sort of paranoid reactionary in America Right I'm not saying that's necessarily

What's happening but I think that's That's the thesis that's being advanced If you wanted to sort of take angles And sort of pull him into Modernity a little bit more Of his time and deposit him In a barren housing estate outside of Burnley and then

Told him about radio and so on Angles would lose his fucking mind If he saw a bar at home That sort of I think is the theory But oh and you're talking about how that Wasn't necessarily born out at least not In your experience There is that basic criteria

And it goes back a long way There's the guy That basically could have pioneered A mass produced Tiny suburban house The Levitt company Built the various Levitt towns Had that whole thing about

Someone who owns their own home and lock Can never be a communist And that being the plan And I just don't know I mean it doesn't entirely tally Where people went for Bernie Sanders

Or went for Ben Obviously Sanders had Enormous popularity in places like Southern California That just sprawl on forever In endless suburban houses So I'm not really sure I suppose what I'm trying to get at

Is I have a sort of aesthetic And town planning revulsion against this stuff Because I think it's a waste of space It looks horrible, it's a bad way of building cities They produce places with very little character I grew up in South England so I know These places quite well and they're miserable But whether or not they actually do

Make people into Tories I think they can But I don't know if that so means that they do And the militant example of this Is kind of fun Because basically in the mid 80s When militant ran Liverpool They demolished huge

Swades of kind of red Vienna style Kind of big courtyard Tenement blocks And replaced them with houses Where they got in people like Barrett And all these people to build The same thing that they would build For the private market

And that was seen as an aspirational thing Of like you are building council houses Do the standard of the private house of the day Unfortunately the private house of the day was terrible And the other thing And so you know a lot of that stuff is very bleak And if you walk around the inner suburbs of Liverpool There's this very strange sensation that you have

Where you're kind of on the one hand At one of the most interesting and urban cities in the country And then suddenly you're in Basin State And it's a bit weird But it's not people in Liverpool Any more right wing So I think there's more A sort of specific thing that happens

Which is about kind of Debt and fear And I think that's probably more More intuitive Than the simple question of the ownership So And also just the value of the asset To clarify, when we say debt

Do you mean the fact that many of these houses Will be sold at like a 5% down Exorbitantly high mortgage and so on The creating sort of stress People are paying off their mortgages for a long time And so on and so forth Sorry Yeah so

It's pretty It's quite hard to kind of Zero what makes them subjectionable I think it's mainly just the fact that they look Dreadful Yeah so I think like What we can say is whether or not it did Sort of have that effect of sort of

Creating those generations of More right wing voters One thing I think is probably pretty undeniable Is that Thatcher Because if this was this Caleb under Thatcher Laurie Barrett, the guy who started Barrett Homes Was a close personal friend of Thatcher for much of his life

No That's crazy That's fucking nuts And the intention I think was To if not it was to Americanize the country Right and I think you don't

You don't make a country But not by building spacious houses on Spacious lots Not by doing any of the things that are good about American house It still has to be miserable They kind of have mansions without the mansion That's the interesting thing about them Mansions might be horrible

At least they're big These things are tiny And I think it's worth thinking That the suburban neighborhood is The creation of a suburb As would it would be understood in America A large residential only neighborhood of cul-de-sacs Of identical or nearly identical houses

That is accessible primarily Or if not only by car It is Whether or not you go with the sort of Relatively more simplistic view Of suburbs equals conservatives It is still deeply political It's political in its creation

For example this is actually a quote from A piece on Levittown in the U.S. Which is the first suburb built on Long Island Or the first suburb as we would know it In this style built in Long Island Which is that at its peak They were completing one house every 16 minutes Using systems well known

To American automobile manufacturing But new to home building Employing only non-union Subcontractors and unskilled workers Who would go from house to house Each performing only one of 26 Highly specialized steps in the overall assembly process Using thoroughly standardized materials

Purchased directly from the manufacturers That's one of the most important things This is something that's very important But also very overlooked Is that the creation of a suburb In this way is also like The theory is that You don't become a communist if you live

And own a house in a lot But you also have a building Trade that is more easily Freed from union Influence If you are building Identicate suburbs Or at least that was again the theory

That the Leavitt brothers Put forward when they built Leavitt town The thing with Barrett homes Is that they're not mechanized Compared to something like Leavitt town They're pretty laborious If you look at these things going up It's sort of wood frames and brick

And it's basically building houses More or less as they were built in the 19th century And it's fairly wasteful That's one of the reasons why things are expensive Is that and the enormous price of land Is that these things that are shit Being quite expensive But there's something I want to talk about

The politics of it that we've not really touched on Which is about the way they're laid out And that comes from That they're always in these kind of cul-de-sacs They never have a kind of like They're never in squares, never in streets There's never a kind of There's always the most minimal

Or non-existent public space And that comes from Again, the U.S. Is the culprit for it Comes from the idea of defensible space Which was very popular among the American Liberal sociologists in the 70s And then the right took it and ran with it

And it basically, it's based on one of those You know, those sorts of things where you You have lots of pseudo-science Where you go, we put rats in a towel block And they hated it, therefore people will hate them too And there's a kind of thing where Decided that if you have public space People don't know what it is, they don't understand it

It's like, if it doesn't belong to anybody It belongs to nobody, so therefore you get crime Misery and blah, blah, blah, blah And so you completely Break that sort of structure Which unifies both 19th century housing of the grid Or post-war housing where you have blocks

In green space or blocks around squares And instead you have These kind of endless looping cul-de-sacs And kind of long looping roads And you get a lot of kind of You know, they're places where When you walk into them When you're not from there

You immediately have that feeling that everyone is watching you And there's frequently, you know Then the sign next to that Usually a neighborhood watch sign to remind you That you are in fact being watched by the neighborhood And that's all very, very deliberate And it all comes from This kind of idea of defensible space

That was then codified into law In the UK in the 90s And the program was executed by design Where basically the layout of any housing estate Had to have the okay of the police force And they loved stuff like this Because it was incredibly easy to police And you know, it's very difficult

For criminals to escape And this is Pretty much one of the worst things about them I think is that That not only kind of creates A certain level of kind of paranoia and insularity Also, this makes them reasonable to walk around Because any

You know, any kind of connection Of a surrounding area, of a high street Or what have you, is deliberately made difficult Because those would be through roads Which criminals might escape through So, you know, this Can't have that. Yeah, who goes on a through road? Someone who needs to go through

No, why aren't they driving? Yeah The milkman is absconding with my wife On this through road You've been called a sack Yeah, that's true Also, you know, they very rarely have pavements As well

Obviously, as you know They very rarely have pavements But yeah, I think there's a big part of this Idea of I want to sort of focus on this idea of public space As well, right? Where the public space really is You cannot hang around your home

You can go into your garden But you can't go to a park You go from your space to your space To I don't know the The center of town, you maybe go to a restaurant But what this reminds me of Is this reminds me of Georgetown

In the US, Georgetown, just near Washington DC Has The sort of multi-decade sustained campaign To prevent the establishment Of A bus line That would go from inside To go from DC to Georgetown

To a bus bridge Based on the idea that once you get a bus Might bring in an undesirable element As though essentially, you know, like Vandals and criminals are going to all pile On to the bus And then it trundles across the bridge They will then sort of, you know

I can't wait to vandalize something I cannot wait to knock down this Georgetown mailbox Essentially It's sticking your baseball bow out the window of the bus And just knocking the mailbox as well It's the same idea The future comes from without And

Anything that is not Defended by someone Will immediately become overtaken And defended by teenagers and hoodies Right, that seems to be the attitude Behind defensible space Yeah, David Cameron can't hug them all No, he can't

So he is but one man He's a lot of cabinet ministers to text He, you know, give him a break Yeah I'm doing well in the heart of the through road All best DC But it's the, but through roads bring in The unfamiliar and cul-de-sacs are

Supposed to, it's, it is the, yeah You can bring in the familiar They atomize, because if you're not atomized You're being threatened And so whether or not I think this works As a, as a A method for sort of, you know Creating conservative voters, you certainly see

The logic to it It's the same underlying principles Like ownership, exclusion, and then security Through defense, because I mean you could also Look at like the, the alternative The main alternative anti-suburban Sort of theory of the city Is, you know, your, your standard

Jane Jacobs, who says, well no Actually what creates a safe place Is More through roads, and more mixed use And more people, and eyes on the street That are not sort of suspiciously watching You, because they want to judge Whether or not you should be there

On the street that are sort of almost there As a, as a friendly You're greeting almost, like Jake Jacobs Imagines like a, the shopkeeper Leaning out the window, or what have you, right? I mean, it seems sort of An antithetical, it is The logic is antithetical to that, it seems

Yeah, that's basically true, although One of the critiques of Jane Jacobs Is that she overlooked one of the reasons For the low crime in her bit of Manhattan In the early sixties being the presence Of the mafia, so I guess neighborhood Watch kind of reproduces some of the The presence of the mafia

The Barrett estates We got to get fairly atardom On to the Barrett estates To clean these things up It's a nice Audi A3 you got there That's the sport line edition The shame is something what to Happen to

If the tip-tronic shifting solution were to I'd say stop functioning At such speed That's right We were to pass a magnet over the car's internal Computer You wouldn't like to see that, it could get very nasty Yeah, I do like

The idea of all of a sudden The garbage collection in the Barrett estate Being taken over by a couple of fat guys in Hawaii Listen pal, if you don't start kicking up To the bin man, you're going to be eating Nando's Through a fucking straw, please But I think that's excellent To sort of

Excellent point to raise, regardless It's not just the houses, it's not just the people It's the system of houses It's the idea of making an estate With one entrance in many cul-de-sacs That is defensible that the police like Also, I feel like you can Defend our original idea here

Of this place Makes you a reactionary How much Can you say that a person isn't a reactionary Just because they offer support For Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn It's not necessarily Like, particularly if you're on some

Hugely expensive mortgage Yeah, but like No, but if you genuinely If you would quite like free broadband And you're not too fussed about like You know, a lot of other stuff But you are in favor of like A bit more, you know

A tiny bit extra Ratcheting back on the whole You know, massive Inequality thing I don't think that necessarily makes you Not Suggesting that electoral politics Might not be the only measure

Of people's opinions and views Shot to the core I'm suggesting it might be a weakness Of the candidates that the left has been Next we'll have a sort of Electro-politics might not map Entirely onto class, but then we're in Really difficult territory

Alison Owen, these are heresies Definitely Definitely true is the very, very close Link with the Tory party And the Big Before Barrett became like the synonym For this kind of crap development

The synonym was Blovis And Blovis was of course run by The top neoliberal ideologue In support of eugenics, Sir Keith Joseph Who was Such as probably closest political Allied advisor So you know it's the link is

Definitely strong Thatcher just loved building She's just hanging out Thatcher had a no-show job on the site She's just there, sat in a lawn chair Talking to all the guys Oh sure, she had a tool belt As we mentioned earlier

Thatcher moved into one Not too far from where I went to And also she commissioned The architect Quinlan Terry A man that believes the classical orders Were sent by God To Remodel 10 Downing Street

So she was very into Crap traditional housing To the point where she made 10 Downing Street Into a crap traditional house Amazing Just kind of look a bit like The thing that amuses me about her Barrett house Is that, hey it's not a regular Barrett house

It's a stretch Barrett house It is a Barrett mansion That one It's like when you see Like a lada where they've taken each End off and then put an extra bit in the middle Instead of the kind of like Square Barrett house

Where do you get a picture of my car? It's just been like extruded That little bit Further, which I appreciate a lot But the other thing that I like about Margaret Thatcher's Barrett house Is that she couldn't stand Living in it

Absolutely despised Trying to live in it for any longer She's dead Margaret Thatcher killed by a large Barrett house She moved out To like She moved out To a mansion in Bel Gravia

That was given to her for like A sort as like a favour From like some war criminal She did favours for or whatever Awesome I would take the mansion in Bel Gravia Over the McMansion in Dulwich And so would she because despite having like

Configured the entire country to be More like Have to hand it to Thatcher on this One specific issue She was right about that Which of the two houses was better She didn't want to do it I respect that

I don't think we know who Owned the Bel Gravia mansion she lived in Until her death in 2013 A guy It was only a nice guy Not sure what the surname was But let me tell you this It was owned by a company based in the British Virgin Islands

So probably someone Who owed her a debt of gratitude For Some kind of Of denationalization of something Anyway So the history of Barrett and the Tory party

Just a history of Barrett generally Is it started in 58 It now builds sort of some tens Of thousands of houses yearly But again this is the story That they tell about themselves anyway Is that Laurie Barrett one day

Just decided to build a house out of some bricks He found That's how it works Then he built two more and sold them Then he did the things where you keep just like Something about houses is that they reproduced through meiosis That's right You don't have to learn things to become a builder

There's no skills involved you just find some bricks And then you find some land and you just build on it And then you're a builder You put the bricks in a little pile And then you make the pile bigger You get together with some other pigs And you build and he gets a straw And this is a clever bot

So basically the idea Of the company that he had Through the 50s and 60s Was as sort of Britain He sort of slowly begins building these houses Not in these giant Communities yet But the idea is that he wants to build a house

As a kind of one-stop shop or home over From building, conveyancing, maintenance You just bring the linen And then you've got the house that Barrett decides you should have Nothing else though Don't like bring any sort of like Individual lifestyle thing No certainly not

Well that would be counter-revolutionary Alice To bring an individual lifestyle Look you have been given That's what everyone hates about communist countries Right? Even these crappy identical places to live That's the same as everyone else And everywhere you live

Has to be approved by the security services Of the country as well They have to agree on the layout of where you're going to live And then you don't get to like make your thing Look different from anyone else's And like it's always falling apart And worst of all, you just know that it's crap Because the guy who was behind it got a huge kickback

From the government to do it Yeah you hate to see that, you really do More insulting The only way you're allowed to sort of express Identity on it Is like patriotically So you can put your country's flag on it Or maybe some like sort of related

Slogans particularly at certain times of the year But like You know nothing too subversive Yeah I still have it Well I love about this because we've discussed them Kind of being primarily accessible By car and it being a sort of like Americanized concept of suburbia

Which is that most of these Barrett type developments are also Really shit places to have a car Like most of the houses don't have parking Spaces and the ones that do the parking Spaces are kind of too small to really Fit like an actual car in And so most of them are like

They have parked cars like on the pavement On both sides of the street which means They're a fucking nightmare to drive down And a nightmare to park your car on if you do own one Even though they're kind of This is your development if you're the car guy Also like they can't even afford to have One of the things right

Is that I mean I think Britain especially Sort of in its neoliberal era Sort of as we get into Thatcher And then oh and I'm interested to hear sort of how You react to this idea is much more Of like a state capitalist economy Than the US

It's a little bit more You do have like Your house builder it's just like There's like two of them And so even by the logic Of that competition produces better outcomes result There actually is very little competition Between these guys

They've mostly either carved up the country Into like their areas or They're just sort of they know they have like The benefit of these sort of government Blessings to carry on about their business Also they're building shit that's identical To the other guy so it's not really competition It's more like price fixing

I want to know sort of how you sort of How you react to the idea that this is Especially house building since sort of Really state capital I mean it's true and so far as probably the You know a lot of the land will have been Public land that's sold off You know we never had

Land nationalization tragically But we did A huge amount of land Was taken into public ownership between Late 19th century and the 80s And a lot of these kind of weird little Pockets with shitty estates on They are on usually

The kind of publicly owned land that got sold off Or they're often on You know land that would have been part of Kind of railways or state run industries And so there is that sense of You know there being Okay we'll parcel this out And give it to our

Our guy who just happens to be One of our donors And it's the kind of just mundane corruption That we know And love in this country Yeah and if you want to ask yourself Like if you are in one Of those houses, if you want to ask yourself

How come I have this ruinous mortgage How come I can't park my car anywhere That I need to get To like pay for this ruinous mortgage How as well do I like Why are there so many Drafts in my house Why has it been put up so crappily

A lot of it goes back to Well I'm sorry but the housing minister In whatever decade Ode either Laurie Barrett Or the Taylor Wimpy or whatever A favor so sorry I guess that's the house you get now

Fuck you And again in America it's a bit different It's usually in America would have been farms It's a big Big privately owned farms, this is in the case of Levitown Levitown was built on an onion farm But it would then be It would be farms that get converted into these things

But in Britain it's sort of a little more A little more sort of involved with the state That's not entirely uncommon here either is it But a lot of like housing estates Are named after farms that they were built on And like that's only like I grew up in Harlow in Essex Which is a new town where a lot of housing Was built by the local authority at the time

And also sucks in a different pebble dashing Kind of way But yeah lots of it is like old old farms And has the names of those farms As the names of the estates And also we talk about a symbiotic Relationship with the Tory party that goes on today For example yes we were

Laurie Barrett and Margaret Thatcher They were friends But also like if you just google Tory party Barrett Homes you'll see sort of announcements In different publications Of oh yeah this person leaves CCHQ To join Barrett Homes and so on and so on

Some kind of door not sure what Specific type of door we're talking about Yeah if you're going to google something like that Though be sure as a pallet cleanser Afterwards just to quickly google Venice way though Yeah oh yeah you don't want us for balance Make sure you google it Anyway

He was knighted in 82 And stepped back from the running of Barrett Sort of some years later Lived in Corbridge in Northumberland And had a 5000 Acre estate for shooting And

I want one fence To shoot bottles and cans off of That's like Alarming the public But this guy I'm imagining a 5000 Acre housing Estate on which but he's only populated It with wildlife which he hunts

Like riding a horse around a fucking A Barrett Homes estate that's just full of deer Just like An entire like Like Blenheim Palace with the exact same form But the texture that's been applied To it is Barrett House Brick Yeah so you got like 100

Audi A3s parked out Yeah I have a carriage drawn By a harness of Audi A3s Yeah that's right I have my My Land Rover Defender Which I have a mere 49% APR

Financing with which I Shall hunt these deer So he Is then actually dies After he and his An armed robbery in his home Where they may Have taken some of the deer

Potentially one of the swans Or maybe even One of his prized hatchbacks What if his prize does Sport crossovers They wouldn't have been able to get in if he hadn't been living in a Barrett home Because they simply knocked on the door And it fell in

Somehow I don't think Laurie Barrett's living in a Barrett home No I'm sticking with this idea because I find it amusing And I think we talk sort of about the There's a direct relationship between the house builders And the conservative party Remember we talked about this when it was happening

But Richard Desmond and Robert Jenrick The sort of donation after donation after donation From house builders to Tories And that's because Despite the fact that they may Wish it were otherwise People still do need to live in shelter in order to work And this is the only shelter that's being built

Precisely Because the whole strategy That happened in the 80s and 90s Is basically destroy public house building And concentrate instead It's just saying they destroyed public house building I'd say what they did was they privatized The creation of mass housing

And That essentially And every policy up Since then has been to make sure That that market keeps working And that the value of all these assets keeps going up forever And so every single Policy since

Right to buy To help to buy Those are the big ones And many others But has been basically the furtherance of We need to keep on Solving that contradiction That Engels poses up front

Which is workers need housing to work And capitalists need workers to work But housing capitalists If you like Those who own housing capital Don't want to provide anything like Anything good for people who Are able to afford it

And so the struggle Has consistently been How do we without changing Any kind of property relationship Make sure that this keeps working And every single time What it translates into is More money for Laurie Barrett

Or his equivalents basically Yes So I mean One of the things The sheer numbers Is that this particular system Builds far less

Than the previous system Of local authorities Building most of the mass housing And one of the reasons for that Is obviously the enormous price of land But also the kind of land banking they go into And there's a sort of myth That the kind of more simple minded

Kind of Adams Smith Institute type Tories The people that really believe in capitalism I think quite a small Very online category That they Tend to have this idea of what builders want to do Is build, of course They love doing it, you know

Every single bar at home brings them joy They just desperately want to kind of make these things And of course this is nonsense There's a thing about this It's nonsense what they want And you know it's difficult not to sound like You're selling socialist worker at this point But you know what they want is to make a profit

And so they have enormous land banks Of interest that the price of land keeps going up And up and up And so actually By the standards of like the 20th century They build bugger all They really don't build that much It's noticeable this stuff

Because outside the big cities Outside the kind of blocks of flats they're built In the centres of London and Manchester And Liverpool Leads, outside of there This is all there is This is all the new housing But

You know As the coverage from Harlem, Utah No, you know Seven years ago they just built entire towns And this does not happen now Yeah And I mean Would we say it doesn't happen simply because

The home builders realise the economics Have it changed because they could just Because they want to access government-guaranteed Loans and through things like Help to buy rather Like what caused this to change Or did they just realise, hey wait a minute We make sort of money hand over fist

More or less just by existing Because the Tory party needs us to keep existing Why don't we stop spending money on building stuff And continue just buying ourselves ivory back scratchers What if we were more of a vibe actually Yeah So I think the question is like What is it that changed or was it just

A realisation that they didn't really need To build homes anymore because they were so In grain I think I've already answered this question You know, what What changed was the housing system went from A kind of system which despite Various flaws was mainly about the provision

Of housing into a system That returned to what it was in the 19th century Which was a mechanism to make Large quantities of money for a small group of people And that's why it is as it is I hate that That's why I remember this feeling of like in the last kind of two years

Of just like Becoming more and more kind of folga Marxist Because just everything is just so obvious And in your face and this is very much one of those things It is just like No, no, no, no, like the guy selling the paper Outside of Aster is more right about this Than like you are with your like

You know, elaborate analysis of the mystery Of capital it's like no it's just about that And You know housing really is one of the places you can see That it's very It's very obvious the corruption goes off I feel like I look at a lot of things And I think this housing

Provision is like a good example But I think it applies to the economy Generally where I feel like all of the big companies Are effectively Engaging in the economics Of the game kaplunk Where The important thing

Is that they continue to make a profit Which is that the balls don't fall out Of the bottom of the kaplunk tower But what they need to do Is to not spend as much money On the kaplunk sticks That keep the balls up there And a lot of people

You know who live in the tower They're like well we quite like the sticks But the sticks are causing problems We're going to keep removing the sticks All that can remain Is the absolute minimum number of sticks That will be required to keep the balls From falling out of the tower

And then once that's done Then you start sort of filing those sticks down To the minimum possible Rigidity required To stop the entirety of society collapsing And so like You stop having discussions about like Okay we're going to build a house

What sort of house would people like to buy Or live in? It's like no fuck them Those cunts are going to buy it anyway Because it's the only house there is What is the cheapest fucking piece of Shit house we can make them buy I think that Sort of comes down as well to like

Because the whole premise Of the sort of Home ownership revolution America didn't really have the home ownership revolution If only because it's a country built On the idea of free real estate If you want your home ownership revolution Just walk 10 miles west

And no one's there as far as your concern As far as you're concerned It's the crucial clause there As far as you're concerned no one's there No one who we care about Precisely So they never had this home ownership revolution Whereas I think in Britain there was this idea

Because it's a It's a country that wasn't built on This idea of sort of manifest destiny Free real estate as far as we're concerned Important to note, not because we don't have enough Space It's only that that space is mostly Occupied by shooting

Estates Very various like shooting Estates Butter churns, sex woodlands Dangerous games Something like a third of the country is grouse more Or something like that I don't think I'm even a country

No We're a free real estate country for grouse If you are a grouse You can go wherever you want Yeah, that's true That's the trade-off I can live on this grouse more for free Let's just say you don't pay with money

Yeah, it's true In Britain it's not a space issue It's a land use issue Most of our land is used for The aristocratic pursuit of hunting The most dangerous game Just used for nothing Nothing

But the idea really was A 10-year revolution for us What we're going to do is we're going With the car we have opened up these great houses These great areas outside Outside the city We shall open up choice as well Rather than

Having to We shall give The working people of the country The freedom of the grouse So you have the chute You don't have to live in this tiny Box room with an apartment You now have choice

To live in a tiny box house By the way If you don't keep up with your crippling Payments Back to the box room The bar at home's mafia will come and cripple you That's right It's another thing of the illusion of choice

On the big important stuff There is no consumer choice It's fuck you, you get what we give you In this case One of rage against the machine's Less popular singles You can choose to live in You can choose to live in the

Denverd Free-flowing space You can choose to live in a Flexible terrace time You can live in the Elerton Ideal for modern family living The Morsby Which is double front

Which sounds like a 1970s beat-a-file The Maidstone The Palmerston The Norbury The Denby The Ennerdale The Hulten The Hemsworth

Fantastic housing that's available The funny thing about this stuff I suppose is that You don't get it In big cities anymore And you're used to it The idea that you would build this stuff in Dulwich It's not a thing anymore

You don't build cul-de-sacs in Dulwich anymore You build stunning developments Of six-story blocks of flats And they've been doing that for quite a while And I remember being quite shocked Being in The Royal Docks At Barrier Park

About 15 years ago And seeing like a huge, great big White-walled modernist block With Barrett signs all over it So you have Barrett will both kind of do For you the typical Barrett home And will do the supposed alternatives

To the Barrett home But both equally bleak and badly built They're very much capable of doing both It's very much The VAT The two different labels of VAT All coming out of one pipe

It's all the same thing Extruded through different molds Yeah I think The things to do And I wonder if you've got some of this already Just look at those 80s adverts And those 80s TV adverts

Oh, the one with the helicopter There's so many of them What's your favorite one Of the 80s TV adverts? Actually, my favorite one Is actually not a Barrett home advert At all, but it's the advert for Milton Keynes With the small child

So he's Taken around Milton Keynes He's taken around A city which we presume is London Or Birmingham or Manchester And he sees like traffic And road works

And tower blocks And all sorts of things He just shouldn't see the poor boy And then He reappears In Milton Keynes And it's just like I wish I could live in Milton Keynes

And there's that kind of like You know, one of the really Crucial things about when the stuff emerges In the 80s is it's predicated on like Absolute fear Like racialized fear And that's the thing that again We borrowed from the US

To a very large degree Is that kind of idea that you know That cities are deeply, deeply threatening And what we're offering you is an alternative To them Which makes it kind of curious how They then start to build After 1997

They then start to build a lot of very urban housing So they start to build the very thing that they are Supposed to be So it's Yeah, it's a difficult one There's a kind of like It's very easy to kind of like Look at the bar at home and go

Our Dino lives here But there is, I presume that at some point Elsewhere in the recording you have gloss on Dino But the The thing that I see Day in, day out having lived in London For my entire adult life Is

The Kind of riverside block of flats Between like Six or 20 stories With a stay Asian on the ground floor And a coffee shop And Who lives there

Who are these people? Who is buying this? What is it? And I find it a mystery in many ways I've very seldom Ever been invited into one of these I suppose I kind of Have this picture of it being kind of Eyes wide shut

I don't You don't move in the right circles are you? And you're not getting invited to these high class parties Are you suggesting that the But these I sort of see a lot of the buildings That sort of bear would be involved in As kind of somewhat similar

In theory To their To their sort of Suburban development We've worked out a way to isolate you in the city also Which are also Like basically existing on the On the basis of a government

Credit guarantee Right in terms of help to buy Let's sort of hark back a bit more to the episode we did with India Block ages ago about the Help to buy flats that were all built by Jeff Fairburn and all magically cost Like 499,999 Pounds

Regardless of what the flat was worth I guess in my To my mind it's that the Builders fall and why I sort of Mentioned the state capitalism thing earlier That what the home builders do is they sort of They look at what the government's going To subsidize

Through either And then they do that Whether that's through making mortgages tax Deductible Whether that is Guaranteeing Loans of new builds In otherwise expensive areas

But again of sort of Loans in such a way that often leaves the buyer Saddled with sort of a lot of Debt for a difficult sell house This has always been truest of earlier Going back to the kind of Adam Smith Kids and their deep Belief and the reality of the free market

Like if you look at how Kind of things like Levittown and the Civilization of the US happened It is a gigantic state investment Not just in The kind of mortgages And loans to enable people to buy that stuff For the GI bill

Also just in terms of The freeway network And the interstate highway network These things were Without which the whole thing would have been Totally impossible There was enormous state subsidy For suburbia

And there's this kind of idea that people Like again the kind of simple mind did have Of like there is a state Thing which is public housing Which all kind of looks like Gigantic kind of concrete Panel blocks In Minsk

And then there is the free market Which is you know the wonderful Sperven house which everyone loves And those probably have a fairly Comfortable level of public subsidy And always have I have moved To a beautiful bar at home

On outskirts of Minsk It is bent from potato Isn't that basically just Okay, screephole So maybe I think this is If we want to ask What are our differences then

If Governments are always Involved in the large scale provision of housing I guess what's different in Britain Is that the developers are Much more hateable In as much as they tend to be Much more they tend to be

A lot of these things tend to be sort of Happening through sort of direct Very direct, insultingly direct Political connections There's no point covering any of this stuff up And also If you want to wonder what Barrett's doing right now, they're not building homes

What they are doing is They are working on de-cladding The homes that they built with flammable Cladding at a profit Nice How could they have known that the cladding would be flammable Other than the ratings And you could go out to the free market

To find someone who's going to remove the cladding On the Barrett home May I introduce you to Laurie Barrett Wearing a fake mustache He's not even wearing the mustache Just the free market includes Laurie Barrett Who else knows how to de-clad a Barrett home Better than the man who clad it in the first place

When you think about it Poacher turned gamekeeper All on the same 5000 acres of state And So there's an example The cityscape development in Croydon Barrett is set to make a 56

Loves the idea of Croydon having a cityscape Incidentally What else would you call it? It's the Manhattan of Surrey, I'll tell you It's 56 million pounds That they're charging To be

Doing that They're now basically being forced To Buy back some of the flats at least That's the thing, you can get them To Stop being directly Sadistic to the people who are unlucky

And have to be in contact with them If the courts will force them to I was mentioning this to you earlier Is the leasehold scandal Where a lot of suburban homes would be sold On a leasehold basis Companies like Barrett or Taylor Wimpy Continue to collect a ground rent

But what's interesting about these Is that the very low ground rent Actually It just kept doubling Forever And it doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled Until you were having to pay 50,000 pounds a year ground rent

For the house that you thought you owned Incredible And Again, other house builders would be like We didn't know how this happened The thing about ground rents Is that they're entirely organic And

They just arise naturally You pay it to the ground, that's what it's called You have to dig a hole and you have to put some money in that hole In order to insure a Bountiful harvest This is what separates Britain from America Is that we love landlords They like landlords in America

But we love landlords Only the British can come up with something so perverse As you've bought a house And you still have a landlord That is so powerfully The fucking turf fringe Growing out of your forehead Levels of Britain

The huge drum growing out of your stomach For you to bang at the football match That is, if you want to assimilate Into this country That's what you need to do And so then a lot of the Essentially There was a huge problem with this

Where companies like Persimmon Means they must have known That this was going to happen But I guess if you're a Housing developer in Britain And the Tories are in power Or I guess Labour is also in power Mostly

You kind of know that you can just try this shit And you'll get away with it You can just build each house Don't bother finishing it, don't bother wiring it properly We'll get away with it Because what are we going to do? Not have houses And there's no other way to provide them As far as I can tell

There always has been So I want to just say Owen, do you have any Final judgments On Barrett, the history of Barrett Or the housing situation In Britain generally With reference to its suburbanization

I mean, I don't know if it really Is suburbanizing And again, this connects With why it's also small And all kind of miserable Is that the kind of The holy grail Of the British property developer and builder

Is a load of tiny little houses On some greenbelt land That you're not allowed to build on Because that's where everyone Wants to build, that's where the demand is The demand is essentially For housing between Like Oxford and London

On a kind of like You know, vaguely rural Site which you can build Some little kind of Pitchery boxes on And the same with that You have this kind of Contradiction of like, on the one hand

The Tories, you know, kind of Natural desire to Want to build a big profit out of things And on the other, they're kind of Obsessive hatred of All outsiders and all change So, you know You can see that currently

In the planning bill they're trying to force through And to make lots of Kind of greenbelt and You know, south-eastern countryside Land safe for barra All of these kind of Shire Tories are up in arms about it And that's why they have to have all of this

Create streets, building beautiful Kind of nonsense thrown into it To try and convince those people No, you're going to like it, it's going to be great And of course They're desperately trying to stop it And that's why they lost that sea Making him shit a few weeks ago

So that kind of It won't be shit, why would it be shit Just because the people who build the other shit are doing it And so, you know, that was cheap on that level So that Means that the actual future Is What's now in Voxel and Nine Elms and

Battersea, the actual future Is loads and loads of empty 30-story Blocks of flats in London And in Manchester And in Bristol and in Leeds And that's what's actually going to happen And I don't know, maybe after a certain point

Dino will live in them, I don't really know I'm really looking forward to that You know, the glass swimming pool On the 30th story between the two towers In Nine Elms I'm really looking forward to that being like Three stories above sea level At which point it will look like a really weird

Art installation So maybe then, in that case, it's not so much It's that the suburbanization happened for a while But we're doing something else now Effectively And I think also looking at The time I want to say That was a very, very interesting

Discussion. Thank you very much, Alan, for coming And participating in it If someone wants to say, read some words That may have been written associated With you, what on earth could they do to do that? There's various places, but they should Currently, the official answer Is they should read the book

Clean Living and a Difficult Circumstance An Anthology of My Work For the last 15 years, published by Versailles Books And they should subscribe to Trip Your Magazine Where I am the portrait editor That's right. We get it to the studio It's a good magazine. And if you have any money left over After that, don't forget there's a second episode

Of this podcast every week And also you can buy a Barrett Home You can buy a Barrett Home for 0.1% Down. Yeah, that's right Don't ask about the interest rate Don't ask about the lease That's right. It's fine. Look Don't ask about the plug sockets. There aren't any

It's fine. Well, do you rather Have a plug socket to get electrocuted in them? Exactly. It's safer. Alright, thanks everyone Don't forget to subscribe to the Patreon Once you finish buying Owen's Anthology And we'll see you For the bonus episode In a couple of days

That's right. Alright, bye everyone Music I've got a warrior's heart I'm living life on the edge When it comes to an African nation The highest bidder's got my pledge I've got a warrior's heart I put my life on the line

What they want to do is equatorial Get me that snow business of mine That snow business of mine No business of mine They'll never face the ICC They'll never put the chains on me There's no Dutch caught in Harlem That could cancel me

I've got a warrior's heart I'm paid for risking my life Made of leaves and oil fields are my children And blood diamonds are my wife I've got a warrior's heart I live my life by the plane I don't care if you're a fashion dictator As long as I'm still getting paid

I'll never face the ICC They'll never put the chains on me There's no court in Harlem That could cancel me I'll never face the ICC I'm living my life wild and free There's not a judge in Harlem That could sentence me

I've got a warrior's heart My only bond is my word I made a little plan to sell the man But then I flamed ship out of blue I've got a warrior's heart And I'm right out of time For even something happens in the heat of battle I don't see how that's a crime

See how that's a crime I'll never face the ICC They'll never put the chains on me There's no judge in Harlem That could cancel me Papa knew kidney They couldn't kill me You weren't there

None of you care You didn't see me You didn't hear me Legally speaking I wasn't there Papa knew kidney They couldn't kill me You weren't there

None of you care You didn't see me You didn't hear me You weren't there And neither was I You weren't there And neither was I I'll never face the ICC

I'll never face a hatery There's not a judge in Harlem That could sentence me I'll never face the ICC I'll never bother wallet and free There's no court in Harlem That could cancel me I'll never face the ICC

No, I'll never face a hatery There's not a court in Harlem That could cancel me And I won't apologize For what I've done and felt I was born with a gun in my hand And for a life on the vell And if the day should come

When I take a bullet and die Light a candle for me And come on a spark of the brown I've got a warrior's heart I've got a warrior's heart I've got a warrior's heart I've got a warrior's heart I've got a warrior's heart

I've got a warrior's heart In loving memory of Colonel Jerk van der Klik, killed by a white phosphorus while lighting a barbecue. Forever in our hearts, brother. We see on the other side.