TRASHFUTURE - Beer Baron Beats Boris

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

This is the day Boris Johnson finally became Prime Minister. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ 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 *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *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)

Hello, welcome to this free TF, which we are going to free one, unlike what my fine colleague has just done here. I want to start on a more somber note. Fine colleague. My colleague. My 10 out of 10 dime piece baddie colleague. That's right. My caked up colleague.

My twink colleague. That'd be true. That's to be fair. With that recent picture of you in the car, yes, my twinkie colleague. I'm so much twinkier there, a 23-year-old twink Milo, RIP. No, no. This is, I want to strike a somber note because there's been a person who I think has been with us for a lot of the life of this podcast, and while we may not have always agreed with

what he did, I think we have to accept that he provided us with a real sense of purpose in giving us something to understand the world in relation to and to work against. And I think without him. He gave us permission to be with him. I don't think we'd be where we are today. And so I just want to take this moment to commemorate... But Charlie Palmer died. To commemorate that Rajiv Misra, the architect of the Softbank Vision Fund, has left his

job at Softbank. Pouring some out. Pouring some out. This is the worst and only resignation to happen this month. Look, man. The summer of Morbius takes more victims, RIP to a real one, but maybe I didn't. He went out like Stashara. Finally.

Maybe, yeah. Well, it's like part of the great resignation, right? So maybe he's decided that he wants to spend some time, take some stock, maybe start a podcast. He really got into baking during the lockdown, and he's decided that that's what his calling in life is, and not giving billions of dollars of funding to an app that makes a Wi-Fi connected toilet. So, you know what?

I appreciate this positive cottage core turn in his life, and like you said, this is the only resignation that matters right now. So I feel like this episode's done. Time to riff. Yeah. Bye. So if by cottage core, of course, you mean move to the Emirates and just open up another fund there, but not at Softbank, that is, of course, what he's done.

I assume they have cottages in the Emirates. When you've got as much money as Rajiv Misra, and you're used to living in like fucking Bel Gravia or whatever, why the fuck would you agree to move to the Emirates? Because you don't need the money. And as a country, it's hell on earth. Like what is the, I mean, just really, I don't know, just really enjoying the prospect of living somewhere that's entirely dependent on desalinization to get the water in and giant fleets of trucks to get the shit out.

If you have money and you're in the Emirates, like it's a very different life to kind of just like, you know, being there normally, even if you're sort of like somewhat rich in like the West, like going there normally, it's like hell on earth and you shouldn't do it. But if you're like in, if you have like insane amounts of money, you can basically just sort of live a life that is tailored towards you. And like the emerald of the government will like give you, literally give you anything you want in order to ensure that.

So yeah. Sort of like the metaverse, you know, you can just have any experience that you can just go up to something, you'd be like, Hey, can I kill a guy? He's got you can meet Nick Clegg. Yeah. Yeah. The Emirates to a lot of these guys are basically is basically just like a safe space for them to be told that like, you know, they're really good and special and their innovations are

really worth it. And like, if you want to go to a place with loads of stupid startups, like go there, like there's tons of them. That's a brutal idea to go up to like the fixer, the guy who can get you anything and be like, could you just tell me I'm like a good person? I think for the next Dubai expo, they should build a giant Nick Clegg. Yeah, perfect. We've built the robotic Nick Clegg that's a stampeding throughout town.

Now, before I sort of move off this soft bank thing, I think there might have been some more resignations and some other stuff happening. I'd like to add that I don't pay attention to that. I'd like to add that this is like good news for us, because the only person who's more insane than Rajiv Misra is taking over management of the soft bank vision fund. And that is Masayoshi son himself. So he's back. Masayoshi, very excited to see him, I don't know, create some kind of, you know, moon

rock mining startup, but then forget to give anyone a space suit. Very excited. If you ever wondered if we were going to run out of startups, Masayoshi son, like single handedly guaranteed our future doing the startups like. So look, here's the thing. I have just enjoyed doing a small, what they call the industry, a fake out, because of course, what we have to talk about is all our Boris's gone. They found out you could use three slurp juices on a single Boris Johnson.

Yeah. And that he could not be allowed to stay in office. Just at the perfect time to own me about it too, because he had been holding on by his fingernails for so long that it seemed like the whole constitutional order of like convention and custom. And we're asking you really nicely. We don't, you know, we're going to miss you, but we think you ought to go sort of thing. I thought he was just going to hold on for long enough to make all of that moot.

And instead, mere moments after I posted a is just going to hold on forever. He fucking resigned. Cunt. I hate being owned because also my assumption was post vote of no confidence. He would just say, fuck you, you can't remove me. And would the 1922 committee actually change the rules? Maybe, but until they actually did that, there was no mechanism by which they could get him to go except shame.

And as we know, shame does not work. So I don't know what they did. I don't know what they did. The way what they did is that everyone resigned and he couldn't fill the jobs in his government. So he would have been like, he would have been like having with hundreds of MPs, of Tory MPs in parliament. It would have been like splitting the jobs among like a Lib Dem number of front benchers, just being like, OK, you like Nadine Doris, you have four different

ministerial posts and so on and so on. I think she could have held all of the great offices of state at once. Yeah, I would have liked to have seen it. Look, if there's one thing I think that I there's one thing that I believe it is that at this point, the British Constitution, such as it is or isn't, and does not exist, there's not I spent so long studying like in law school, right, two things that I studied the most constitutional law and EU law. One of them is now useless to me.

The other one is now proven to have never existed because like the study of the British Constitution has depended entirely on constitutional lawyers and constitutional academics, sucking themselves off about how good it is, how flexible it is, because it's based on custom and it's unwritten and it's, you know, it infers a sort of a social consequence rather than a legal consequence. And then it turned out, if you just ignore that, nothing. It doesn't confer a legal consequence. That sort of makes it not the law, doesn't it?

That's one of the big one of the big issues with it as a legal. Well, that's the thing. I did I did an LLB, which stands for like a Bachelor of Law and also Vibes. So both laws, my take was, of course, that it's good that this is happening. This is clearly dead weight. And the more that this bumbling clown can just fuck up and be weird and discredit it, the better and the better. Oh, sure.

This is discredits and damages the institutions that we all, you know, hate, which is great. I thought the funniest tweet about this was Andy Burnham, who managed to be incredibly cringy and go like, oh, like it's something like classic sense of eat and entitlement or something. And it's like, no, he's so much of a weirder guy than that. You don't understand types of eaten guys love resigning and being like, my honor has forced me to like, it's the least eaten thing.

It was him against a couple of dozen, like a battalion of eaten guys, and they were locked in there with him. Exactly. Yeah. He just he just wouldn't go because he had even less shame than any of them. All politicians should have to do a mandatory course in podcasting so that they understand types of guy. I will not have people keep just lazily bleeding the word eaten as though

it means anything anymore. Come up with a better taxonomy. So we were there for a lot of Boris Johnson. Like we can remember, you know, we're running the little slide show now. I mean, this show predates Boris Johnson being Prime Minister, obviously. And we sort of, I believe we predicted that in the sort of morass of 2019, there was one reason and one reason only why Boris Johnson was going to be made Prime Minister.

And we didn't ever believe that anyone else was going to be Prime Minister when the Tories were picking a replacement for Theresa May. Yeah. I think we got his right. And our take was basically Boris Johnson is the cry laugh emoji Prime Ministerial candidate. And that's who they want because they have to go against a guy call it a non-traditional, non-standard politician who has that sort of like anti-establishment edge.

So what do you do? You get just William and you make him the Prime Minister, which is what they did. And now we've lived in the consequences of that. He ran an election and basically they just did every lie, cheat and steal, fucking bullshit thing, pull all the strings. They possibly could just absolutely. Which is the kind of thing that the British constitution has developed to enable, right? That's why I'm not sad about it withering.

But I think that ultimately they published a manifesto that basically said, nothing but do Brexit, make it illegal to be a traveler. And nothing else. He drove a JCB through a bunch of foam bricks that said Brexit. And yeah, that was what the hogs wanted. And we... Predict where he's due. That was good.

And now we live in the consequence of it. And so I feel like watching Boris Johnson finally run out of usefulness, if you will. That's the most interesting part because to me it felt like once the, call it the sort of like actual brain power in the Tory party and the Murdoch papers and all that shit, like they had a guy who was pretty useful to them. You know what I mean? Like he was scandal-proof. He could do anything.

And he didn't want to do anything. He certainly didn't want to work. But you know, like he was scandal-proof. And they think is when you've had this many scandals, he built up a sort of immunity. It's like Mr. Artie isn't poisoned. And nobody's interested. I don't know, man.

Like he just, it's amazing to me. But you'd think they would have wanted to get more mileage out of him. But it seems as though actually he finally, they picked an arbitrary thing, but he finally just pissed them off too much. It's like a mob movie. No loyalty. No honor. But it's like a mob movie where like fully, it's well past the walking down the street

in your bathrobe phase. It's like the walking down the street in your bathrobe phase after you've shit in literally everyone's mailbox. And at a certain point, I think, yeah, they just got tired of him. But I don't know, like I'm not a Tory Kremlinology person. It just seemed as though they had the advantage of a guy who was shame-proof. And now they're throwing it away? Throwing it all away. For what?

For whom? For which of these band of freaks and psychos shall lead our country next? There's trust. Absent the possibility that Boris either like tries to cling on or tries to affect some sort of comeback down the line of which, you know, never count out touchdown Tom. Don't don't rule it out. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump back in the same term.

What a vibe that would be. Come on, don't threaten me with a good time. It becomes like breathing, right? You have like four or five years of these guys, and then you have four or five years of the same people, but normal. And then you go, but it just, you know, repeats in that cycle. This fits into my understanding of the sort of cycle that British politics has basically been in since Thatcher,

which is a massive sort of program of sort of Tory vandalism, of ripping and tearing things up to basically wind down the state as a going concern to drive down prices, to drive down wages rather. Yeah, the finest though, sure. And then what happens, of course, is labor and the technocrats come in to fix it all up and make it work and try to fund it just enough to make it all take over. Till which point? That's a great act.

What do you call it? The technocrats. Until which point? As all of the sort of impulse, this impulse to demolish the country in which they live, to rip the copper wire to the walls, just builds up so much that everyone gets so bored with and mad at the technocrats that they hate, that they bring in a bunch more vandals who then do a bunch more vandalism.

And at this point, I think realistically, in terms of the long structural cycles of British politics, we're just, we are back at the stage where the technocrats are going to default in because everyone's tired of the vandalism. And then what they're going to do is they're just going to take all of the vandalism, like for example, the Rwanda flights or like the sort of like the sort of insane new trade relationship that we have with our close neighbors. We're going to carbon offset the Rwanda flights. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, they're going to come in and carbon offset the Rwanda flights by essentially making all of this policy, all of these new policy space that have been opened up, assuming, well, that's just sort of, that's just what it is. That's now settled. It would be divisive for us to go back on it. People got that stuff because they voted for it because they liked it. And if we don't keep what they liked, they won't vote for us again. And so you just sort of make it work and you institutionalize it and

you make it very official and yeah. What if the same policy but administered semi-comps? And then, and then four years later, five years later, however many years later, once again, the boring technocrats are going to like, people are going to get stirred up again. There's going to be another inexcusable thing that is happening that's been happening under the watch of the boring technocrats and another round of vandalism. Am I the inexcusable thing?

I think I'm the inexcusable thing. I hate being the inexcusable thing. So I would say also, when I think about what caused this, let's not forget, because a lot of people listening to this show aren't British, that the notional reason why there was this rebellion in Johnson's cabinet was because one of the conservative deputy whips was apparently known to be a sex pest. Petrocious nuts. Yeah, it was abusing men, again, touching them and harassing them again without consent.

And not only did Johnson apparently know this, he then lied to the cabinet about the fact that he knew and then also... Yeah, he laughed it off at the time. Yeah, and basically... The guy's name is Chris Pinscher and Boris liked Pinscher by name, Pinscher by nature. And basically, there was apparently another quote that he said that like, it's actually like, I only want sex pests or something like that. I say, all the sex pests love me.

Yeah, exactly, because basically, it's sort of a black male control kind of thing. That's kind of a Trump line. Oh, the sex pests, they love me, they say I'm very good, they're very fine people. The thing is, everyone knew about this. Everyone knew that everyone knew about this. A lot of the lobby journalists knew about this. Everyone knew that every single other scandal of Boris is what... They all knew about it the whole time.

And yet, if you pointed this out in 2019, then you would have been called a conspiracy theorist. Also, the last point I want to make, though, is to me, the real reason is, right now, for the first time, Johnson is actually seeming like an albatross around their neck because they just had two by-elections in Wakefield and, what is it? In Tiverton and Honiton, where in one case, they lost a seat to labor. In another seat, they lost a seat to the liberal Democrats. And in the case of Tiverton and Honiton, it was like a 25, 24,000 vote majority got overturned.

So, no, granted, that was a loss to the Lib Dems. But there is, I think, some anxiety about the fact that their polling has, in fact, been quite bad. But that, I think, so much of that also is what's been going on in this country with cost of living and then just general stupidity of nothing working. And it does feel like you said, Riley, like, finally, after all the vandalism, the guys chasing the warriors, which in this case is the conservative party, are the guys in the fucking Cadillac hearse. They have clanked the bottles together and said,

warriors come out and play so many times. The wheels have finally fallen off the fucked up car they drive. And so now you're stuck with this hulk of a car. And so labor's got to come in and say, actually, this is the best car that could ever exist. Labor being the role of skating. Yeah, the baseball furies. They're definitely the baseball furies. They love America and they love getting killed by trains.

I have no idea what the fuck I'm going with that. Two things, right? First thing, Johnson was finally knifed. He was finally brought down by the coordinated resignations of Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, right? Sajid Javid has like since explained himself. The Sajid. Yeah, he's claimed two things.

First thing, that the resignation with Rishi was not coordinated, right? Which is a flat lie. Second thing, he was inspired to resign after hearing a House of Commons sermon about integrity. Amazing. And he had he had a sort of like, you know, a damocene conversion, right? Where he was like, wait a second, this guy I've been a senior minister for. It's actually been a piece of shit the whole time.

I am more willing to believe in the fucking Cheech and Chong nice dream strain of weed that turns you into an iguana than the idea that a Tory MP has a fucking damocene conversion because of a sermon given in parliament. Like, I'm sorry, but it's just I, you know what? I will just pass the microphone because the level of just you shut the fuck, what the fuck is wrong? We like just losing my mind at these people, like the credulousness

and just like the fact that anything they say is treated with any seriousness. Sajid Javed, he heard a great speech by Keir Starmer in which Keir was advocating for the adherence to the Nolan principles of conduct in public office, a return to the Nolan principles to which we all agreed when we were elected. If we want to talk about resignation letters as well, I mean, Rishi's resignation letter was essentially didn't mention any of the of the conduct stuff at all.

I mean, again, I have a huge picture of his own head on it. That's right. But what you have, I mean, again, like, assume all of these people are, you know, completely cynical backstabbers who've done nothing basically, but in sort of different forms of student politics for most of their life. All of these, all of these people have been in a knife, Boris knife emoji group chat for the past like seven years minimum.

And so essentially, right? You know, you, but if you look at what that the resignation letters is, how they're pitching, right? So Saji Javid said, yes, Boris, you were so important in stopping the specter of Corbinism because, you know, absolutely, that was going to be worse than this. And of course, you know, and with Rishi, he said, Boris, I'm afraid you put taxes up too high.

We're not doing austerity like we should have done. All of us have the memory of goldfish. And now, now Rishi is being sweared as a socialist, a socialist chancellor by Jacob Rees Mogg, which is fucking great. I, I love, I love politics. I can believe that Jacob Rees Mogg earnestly believes that Rishi Sunak is a socialist, but of course, Jacob Rees Mogg is insane. Jacob Rees Mogg is out of his mind.

I want to make a prediction, which is that if Jacob Rees Mogg managed to become the Tory party leader, I actually think unlike what the smart guy, Sam, after whatever, who can't cook a chicken and posts his food gore picks thinks, I don't think it would lead to electoral annihilation. I actually think nothing after what we have experienced in the last four years can convince me that the British public is somehow going to come to their sentences and not elect haunted Victorian children's doll, Jacob Rees Mogg prime minister. Genuinely, genuinely, like, like you cannot tell me they wouldn't vote for him.

I just, we have hit rock bottom, I think. I think we have, and we found that there is no, you know, there is no one who the British public would not elect, apart from a quite nice man who wanted to make their lives a little bit better. Jimbly, crumbly. Jiminy, crumbly, crumbly, crumbly. And I think that the other thing to sort of, I mean, I don't really care about his resignation speech, which was essentially, again, self-congratulatory and self-pitying. Ends the breaks. In the, yeah, exactly, in the same.

Been a long day without you, my friend, but I will tell you all about it when I see you again. Yeah, it's, you should have gone off to that. Yeah, absolutely. That would have been cool, number one. But I think that there is, and of course, you know, again, the lobby journalist sort of said, what a dignified speech, as he came out, and was like, it's everyone's fault for uniting against me, you're all bad friends. The lobby journalist all said, what a dignified speech, and then got 15 texts at once from various conservatives who were like, that was fucking disgraceful, and immediately changed

their minds, which was a great moment in our sort of political stenography. It's a really, it really is just a wonderful view into a functional state, isn't it? Well, also, also just to bear in mind that he resigned on the day of the spectator garden party as well, which is like a very small thing, but also incredibly funny. That's a huge thing, because they all had to go and like get drunk and pretend to be like friends with one another. Well, sort of all actively running around, again, half cut while trying to make alliances. That's the perfect sort of Amanda Yanucci moment, right? Because everyone is plotting, everyone is running around,

everyone is making phone calls to fuck each other over. It was also a very good example, because I saw some of the photos that came, because they post the photos afterwards, and this one was obviously quite interesting, because you're sort of trying to spot who's in and who isn't. Within that, you sort of have people who have, at the time, hadn't announced that they were going to run for the leadership, but definitely are now. You can definitely imagine that they used that time to sort of talk to lobby people about support and all that stuff. But a lot of it was always incredibly theatrical in the way that the spectator garden party is

by nature, not least because you have Allegra Strassen, who like, but God, is he the godmother of Rishi's kids? Or like, you know, this has like a very close relation. Yeah, they all kind of like, are God parents in each other's thing. And then you have like Allegra Strassen the day afterwards, just being like, oh, we don't know when Rishi Sunak's like, very slick video came out to announce his leadership. And it's just like, you can text him on your private number and ask like, you don't have to post or you don't have to post any of this. Like, what do you expect is going to happen when you post this stuff where you're pretending that you

don't have like this incredibly personal relationship with all of it? Like, yeah, because everyone, everyone can see it, everyone knows, and they've made the judgment correctly that it doesn't matter. Ready for Rishi. The thing I kind of wanted to say, which is like about Boris, but also is just kind of like, you know, something to bear in mind as we sort of watch like this play out. This like, this kind of like very bad theater show play out over the next few months is that like one of the reasons why like Boris was able to stick for so long is because

like he kind of like, we know, we, he, he kind of knew everyone, but crucially, like this was the one of the Johnson kind of administration was also the first, really one of the first formal administrations where like media and politics really sort of intertwined, right? Because he was like the spectator editor, but he was also just like someone who knew people in media in such a kind of like, in-depth and innate way that their interactions with him would just be fundamentally different because ultimately they just saw him as like one of them, right? And like where those lines kind of blurred, then, you know, you end up in a situation where like, you know, they are like the media generally

like a lot easier on him than they would necessarily be to other like people. I don't know whether that will like apply to others in the Tory party, but I do imagine that like the kind of relationship that, depending on who gets elected anyway, the type of relationship that they will have with like the new Tory leader will be very, very different to him. Clearly, just because those lines like blurred a lot over like the kind of period of time that Boris was around. You think now it's possible to get, I don't think really it's possible for, if you are committed to governing within the bounds of what is acceptable to do, I don't think it's possible to do anything other than what he did, which is basically governed by

press release. And what happened to him is the negative press releases just began to outnumber the positive press releases, but that's really all he ever did. And let's not pretend the press wasn't trying. I mean, I can just think of, if we were, we could literally play around the table game for the rest of the episode, if we wanted to, we're not going to, but we could, where we just, it's like keeping the ball aloft of just one after another, remembering stupid anecdotes or dumb fucking things people said, like in support of Johnson, or like as a part of sort of the Johnson electioneering, like, of course, would you nationalize Saucer just comes to mind. But I was thinking when Hussein, when you said about him, the sort of media intertwined stuff,

like, I also think that the extent to which so much of it was just like the idea that Boris Johnson just embodied, you know, Britain being important again, and Britain, Britain mattering again, when like, you know, the sun granites tabloids, the sun running, you know, the photo of Boris Johnson's face superimposed on the sun saying it'd be like a bright morning for Britain, or like when he, you know, failed to pull out for the 19th time. And the fucking, I want to say it was the Telegraph. I want to say it was, God, I can't remember her name, but it's one of these insane columnists who, Allison Pearson, who referred to his either six or seventh child as a bouncing baby Brexit boy. It's like, what the fuck does that mean?

What the fuck does that mean? Like, who gives a shit? But like, that's the level of what you would get in coverage, just constantly, constantly, just like hyping it up in a way that had no, like, it wasn't just that it was style over substance, it was there was no pretense, there was any substance whatsoever. Boris Johnson just gave you, like, naughty Churchill vibes, apparently. And that was all that mattered. Remember the time he had a domestic with his then girlfriend, and like, the people, their neighbors who called the cops got monstered by the press in response. Yeah. And also, the labor activists who, yeah. And also, like, it was kind of, you know, it was that sort of guido sun nexus where it's crucially just like, well, you've got Harry

Cole, who like, was the ex-boyfriend or husband or whatever. The most fucked man in British political history. Right. And then, I don't know what his name was, but like, the Godfather, right? So it's like, are you still got the same problem of okay, you've got, you've got, you've got, well, I don't fucking know, but like, you know, you've got like, these people who are so sort of, like, personally connected, just pretending that like, they had this distance when, like, everyone who sort of reads it, who is aware of it is just like, this is truly insane, how you're just pretending, but like, you don't know what's going on. And whenever you sort of, like, bring this up to any of these people, they'll either, like, ignore you or they'll kind of say,

if they do ever address it, but oh, you know, you know, we take our jobs very professionally and seriously. So like, when it comes to work, matters like, I can keep that separation, but it's like, no, because like the way that the lobby has worked and crucially over the past, like, five years at least, like the way that the conservative party have, like, used the lobby to kind of like, you know, do, you know, to like avoid accountability and basically play access with them in such a way that like, they have no choice but to like, send to it. Like, that is so obvious to anyone who like, even has any remote, like, understanding of how media works. And the fact that like, this theater has played for so long is just like, truly, truly

exhausting. Because again, like, you know, they'll either just ignore you or they'll sort of just like, make asinine comments, which are like, objectively untrue. I don't know whether this will necessarily apply to like, whoever comes next, only because I was going to say, and I'll like, I'll like, end this there. Because like, again, I could talk about this for like, an entire episode too. I don't think that Johnson necessarily like, represented like, this sort of like, churchillian character, or in like, in as sincere a way as like, you know, some sun headlines would have us. What he kind of represented was like, a validation among lots of journalists who don't really have any idea of like, what this country looks like, or how it works, like what the people here think

would like it to think. And like, that sort of level of insularity that really only comes when you spend so much time in Westminster, or like, within Westminster circles, that you just like, have no idea how real people work beyond those soundbites or like, how they sort of interactive politics on a day by day basis. Like, I think what he did and what his administration did was just really validate that worldview to the point where like, now that's sort of how they function. And the way that the reason that this works, right, is that we have to remember what I think 2019 fundamentally represented. And that only is becoming more and more clear in retrospect, or specifically the election of Keir Starmer as Labour Leader, the total severing of British

politics from any kind of material concern, where this, and we're in the place of the politics, in the place of shifting our politics, or the boundaries of what is acceptable to beyond what will work has meant that what in what fills it in is lurid personal stories, ludicrous shenanigans. And then as you say, Hussein, like, these people just pretending not to know one another, but essentially just having a little friend group squabble, where we did where we just determine who gets to have a go on the social murder machine for the next several years. Yeah, the social murder civilian. Yeah, the only interaction that politics can have with the real world is to make it worse. But I mean, maybe maybe I should ask Milo this,

because you are of course, the resident Anglo vibes expert, although Alice, you know, Hussein, you all I'm consulting you all you all you basically it's like the star chamber of the three of you in terms of figuring out the type of guy, the type of brain. But like, part of me just wonders it when my less generous moments when I've sort of been, you know, feeling like just throwing in the towel about this stuff that like, I mean, America fucking sucks. And we elected a senile racist game show host as our president. And I feel like nothing could be more American than a senile racist TV show host being president. Now we've gotten rid of the game show host part. Yeah, exactly. Right. We've

heard you and we have gotten rid of the one part of that you find objection. But I was going to say like, is there's just a thing in the water here that people basically like are just willing to accept anything if it lets them think that they're being governed by like a naughty school boy who fucks because that's Boris Johnson is just like like a 50 year old man in short trousers and like a fucking like basically a primary school uniform one of those with the propeller on the top. Exactly. Half of the propeller, but he cannot stop fucking and he's got like he's just just shagging left and right, like endless, endless numbers of kids. No one knows how many kids he's got. Like, there's something about that that just seems like it wouldn't work in America.

Like the kind of an aberration though, in terms of actual prime ministers, I think he's he's much more like a kind of like a back bench or maybe a front bench MP at a push like that's that's definitely like a type of guy you get what I'm trying to say though, is that like Trump Trump is an aberration as president in terms of that actually being the president of the United States, but he's not an aberration in terms of type of fucking American guy. There's just like it would have to be the most like vulgar Marxist critique of America basically that derives a situation in which you get, you know, you basically get like racist $64,000 question host is your president now. And I feel like Boris Johnson, I see what you're saying, but Boris, Boris isn't like the

aid of Britain in the same way that Trump is the aid of the United States or much of it, because he fucks too much. And it's it is weird. And I think I agree with Milo, it is like, I can only attribute it to, you know, him having, you know, the heart of the Turk or whatever that he had. He has that like Ottoman spirit in him that makes him want to genuinely it was it was that he was it's that it was time for the vandalism and he was he was a he was a basically famous and didn't have any shame. And that's all that you needed. Well, he was a famous posh guy. And like, he's the kind of posh guy that like British people are like lots of British people seem to really like,

but for reasons that sort of go beyond me, but the type of posh guy that like dresses like shit has a house that like is breaking into smells of damp all the time. Just like owns lots of like crap like shit. Yeah, like not like, I guess I don't know whether that's like old money. I don't even know like what type how he would sort of separate it or anything. But yeah, he's he's a certain kind of British rich guy that like, I'm sure maybe one of the listeners has more of an insight into. But like, it's definitely familiar if you've like sort of grown up in areas at least, you know, I can only speak about the South, but like in the South, there are like,

or in the Southeast in Ken and stuff, like, it's definitely an old money thing. Yeah, it's an old money thing because of his like carelessness, I would say. I'd like to move on from Johnson in particular, right, to sort of a lot of what is what it toasts to the so what? Which of these freaks show latest? Not just which of these freaks show latest, but like what I that I think the roots of this, I mean, the roots of this particular thing are very much, you know, in deeply inside Johnson and his own characteristics because of the way that he rose and fell was essentially that he's a creature of the papers and that Britain is a nation that is weirdly differential

to papers. And we needed to have our vandal be the person who'd be, you know, differential to the papers. What is very shocking, not very shocking, in fact, not completely unshucking, totally unsurprising, is the extent to which there is this campaign now that the aberration is gone, the unusually rude man who has just enough shame to have left after being an embarrassment for a while is gone, that somehow normal, we can get back to normal now and normal is doing all of the same shit. And that realistically, right, that there has been a slow rolled constitution, I mean, constitutional quote unquote, because there isn't really one, there has been this crisis of British government that has now been happening for decades, decades and decades.

I mean, you could, it depends when you want to start, I mean, I tend to start the clock at thatcherism largely because we can see the long term effect of thatcherism was that the British state has no longer able to sustain productivity, because if we have factories, we'll have unions and unions are bad. Instead, what we're going to do is be the world capital of financialization, and we're going to start by doing it to ourselves, which means that basically, like, we think we've been eating well, but we've just been eating our own arms and legs and torso, and we're sort of now just running out of rib meat, right? That's where I put the constitutional crisis starting, because we've been trying to run a marathon while sustaining ourselves only on

eating our own legs. Let's just establish some baseline things here. This is probably not new information to you if you are in the United Kingdom. It might be if you're outside of this country. Wage growth in this country is not just stagnant since the 2008 crisis. If you adjust for inflation, wage growth is negative. This country has the worst income inequality in Western Europe. When it was a member of the EU, it had the worst regional inequality of any country in the EU. When you think about the regional inequality that must exist in a country like fucking Romania, no, Britain is far, far worse. We spend more of our income on our rent than any other country in Europe.

Yes, we have the worst quality housing stock in Europe in terms of age, serviceability, insulation. If you don't like your house, move to Britain and pay more for us. We also have, as Alice said, some of the most expensive... I'm not sure if we have the most expensive real estate. Southern England absolutely has the most expensive real estate in Europe. I would also say a couple other points. At present, I believe we are presently paying more for energy than any other country in Europe. And we're going to pay even more soon. We are going to pay even more soon. In October, it's going to go up again. It's estimated between

33 and 50% of children in this country live in poverty. The overwhelming majority of people in this country who are in poverty are in work. I don't care if you're in work or not because a government allowing poverty to happen is a choice that government is making. And in the UK's case, it's incredibly egregious. But even if you were a fucking guy who thinks Singapore is the best country on the planet, people in this country do work. It's just that the cost of living is so high and wages are so low. So we are now... It's not even sick man of Europe. You're in a situation where things have not gotten better for so long that the only thing really holding this country together is that they

keep inflating the housing market. I really genuinely believe that. You've had huge supply chain crises and labor crisis this year because they've depended so long on the ability to import the cheapest of cheap labor from the EU and they can't anymore because they cut off their nose despite their face and own the libs. And no country in the EU benefited from the fucking... The labor arbitrage more than the UK did. So it's obscene what they got away with and they still said, no, we'd rather be even more racist and we hate Poles and Romanians so much that we're going to force a huge labor shortage on ourselves. It's a nightmare. The point I'm trying to make here is that this country, it's very, very difficult to find any positive direction,

good news about this country. Genuinely, to find good news about the overall outlook of the UK's economic and political situation, you have to go for one of those insane macro-listicles that'll be like, well, death rates have reduced 99.9% since 1381. And that's been every piece of lobby journalism about the economy. And so the situation is so dire and I feel like that doesn't get communicated because so often the way that it's represented in this country is basically like, if you present a case of how dire things actually are, it's either I remember the milkman boomer memes or will you nationalize sausages? The media in this country and politics in this country just pretends it didn't hear you. I'll give you an example of how that is happening in real life,

which is I've recently seen a Victoria Spratt, former guest on this show and housing journalist described as a campaigner and activist because she describes what housing is really like. Amazing. If you're able to identify what a house is in this country, if you can do the sort of like year one drawing of like a house with windows and a door and a little roof, maybe with your family outside and stick figure, that's active. Because we talked about this a lot, right, that fundamentally in Britain, we have a swine mentality. We have a filthy hog mentality, which is that no matter how terrible and shit our lives

are, no matter how much swill we consume, no matter how much modern piss and shit we bathe in, that it is what we deserve and that better than this cannot be imagined. Again, so this is, I want to emphasize, right, that this mentality is core to the cycle of people. This mentality is core to the cycle of you read the news, you get agitated by the news, then you pick the person who's going to beat you with, who's going to beat you senseless, right? That's core to that mentality. And I think this is why there are other mentalities, which we'll talk about in a little bit, mostly to do with labour organizing, which is not a swine mentality, the opposite. But what I think we're talking about is that

where we, this big black hole, right, there's a big empty void at the centre of Britain, of British society, of all of this. We have to band together to fill Britain's politics hole. Indeed. And then this is why, you know, as the politics hole tends to be filled with ludicrous shenanigans, spectacle personality and so on, because we are completely, we decided it was the right thing to do to eat our legs before running the marathon in order to get some energy for the marathon, and that we are unwilling to recognise that that was a bad choice politically because, well, just if only because everyone, everyone's cozy little, genius. Everyone's cozy little life depends on no one ever recognising that fact. And this is why,

like when I see the Johnson going, and you remember, well, wait a minute, has the government served a full term since 2015? Because Britain's politics hole used to be filled with Johnson. But now, without that, our politics hole is left to Gape. And that's very... My Gape's is coming back. And our politics hole used to be filled with Brexit as well, but everyone's kind of agrees on that now. There's no more... It's like settled law, which is in itself like that's another example of the ratchet, right? It only titans and ever loosens. So, you know, Rwanda, deportations to Rwanda, those are

baked in now. That's settled because we've almost done it once and therefore we have to keep doing it forever. And in fact, maybe we have to do more of it. The thing is, it's either this constant invented fake crises, ludicrous shenanigans, it's just going to keep coming because all of the people who guard all of the official levers of power are all committed to making sure that nothing gets fixed in them and that we're driving this car. And now, it works, we're going to go into is the people who are trying to get into the driver's seat of the car that is going along the road and slowly shedding parts. They say, well, I can drive the car in such a way that will cause all of the parts to fly back on.

They've already eaten their own legs. Yeah, of course. And I mean, I think that realistically, right, this is what I say, why I go back to sort of thinking about this in terms of sort of Starmer taking over the labor party and disconnecting it from people's real concerns, is largely just that, you know, this is the alternative. It is just an increasingly ludicrous display in the news to fill the large and growing hole where politics is sort of being demanded, even if it's not actually happening. I demand politics in my large and growing hole.

Because the thing, and this is what I'll say, right? The political economy of Britain cries out to have its holes filled. That's right. Which is that all of these, I don't, that all of these institutions of the British state, which many of which exist, I mean, to further the interests of British capital and so on, are at a point of almost terminal weakening, reaching a being governed by a Tory party that is manifestly out of fake crises for now, at least, to fill the big politics hole at a time of unprecedented worker mobilization.

Yeah. And it's good. It's what they deserve. These institutions deserve to fall apart. They deserve to be brought to ruin because they've already been brought to ruin by their own nature. And we've already tried to use those institutions to better people's lives, and it was met with nothing but hostility by them. And so I think with the other thing that this whole sort of, what this reveals, the sort of reasons for removing Johnson, his removal itself. I've got some reasons for removing Johnson.

And then what people want to do once he's gone and they get in, is it just shows what happens when consensus ossifies and becomes wrought. Johnson's departure from the politics hole may mark the first time in his life he's ever pulled out. You have to ask, what is political, which is personal conduct, personal background, personal values, and what is not political, such as tens or hundreds of thousands, did mismanagement or social murder? How have multiple women let Boris Johnson raw docket? Is the real unanswered question.

He clearly has a vibe. This is all we can say. I mean, that man, he must surely fuck. That's all we can. You can watch him work his fucking shagger magic on Laura Coonsburg in that video, where they're sort of shot like in a closed pub, and they're sort of sitting and talking, and she's interviewing him, and there's just, it gives off such profound either we fucked or we're gonna fuck vibes, like, clearly it's just a magnetism thing. Now, I do think that there's an extent to which Johnson just kind of represented, I feel like this is such a cliche to say it, but like, basically just throwing the, like, throwing coffee in the face of your

enemy, cold coffee, of course, you don't scold them, you just basically throw a tantrum and say, fuck you, I'm gonna dump this drink on your head. Basically. I've never wanted to own the libs that badly, to like, look up and see that face. But like, that's, I think Johnson, not just, we're not talking about specifically sexual magnetism here, I just mean in general. I feel as though Johnson was always the comedy option, Johnson was the cry laugh emoji. He basically represented like, you know, making a well-timed stupid joke, throwing some Latin in when like, the question is, how are we going to govern the seventh largest economy or ninth largest economy in the world or where the fuck it is?

How are we gonna keep people from dying? And he just is like, he's gonna quote Ovid and then make some joke about Bussy, which like, is great on a podcast, but tremendous on a podcast, please don't do that on a podcast, because we already do it and we want to keep this niche that we've built. I mean, Tifa, if you're quoting Ovid, you don't need to add the joke about Bussy. But yeah, but that's what you see what I mean though, Riley, like, I don't, I feel like, I feel like there's an extent to which if we're going to issue a sort of final judgment on this period, before we talk about the freaks that are waiting in the wings to do Johnsonism, but even worse, I feel like we have to acknowledge the extent to which he was foisted upon us and

the British public, because he basically represented this sort of notion of like, this Ruffian who's gonna throw up two fingers and tell you to go fuck yourself, you know, like piss off Ramoners, haha, we won, etc. He was just that the novelty parody candidate, you know, place to own the libs and tell people to fuck off, then had to govern the country through like a once in a fucking century crisis. And we by all accounts failed miserably. And now we're living in, you know, in the slop trough as a result of it. So I feel like the funny thing about it is, I do not feel as though there has been any reckoning and there has been any acknowledgement of how bad they fucked it. I certainly don't think you'd get that from British media. And

I genuinely think that the lesson the Tory party is deriving, maybe as a segue into what you're going to talk about next, Riley, is just do more of this, but be even crueler and also do more austerity. And the thing is, a couple of things. Number one is that, is that the reckoning that they have with it is to remember Jeremy Corbyn as even worse in retrospect, because that's the only way that any one of these people can justify it. Everything that's happening now would definitely have happened under Jeremy Corbyn, they say, you're like, wait, but that's what's happening. And they're like, yeah, but it would have been worse under Corbyn. It's just sort of like, how could it possibly be worse than what's already happened? And also, right, that it would have been

socialist is to remember, right, that it's all that anyone who was shocked by this before we move on. This is who they chose and this is their guy. And yeah, it didn't work out for them. Never ever let them forget it. And I think though, I think that I don't think there is much of a lesson that they can take from this, though, because I think Boris Trump comparisons are stupid and often are made on the basis of like, you know, quite two men I don't like. Yeah, two men I don't like that are there. Yeah. And with sort of similarly stupid hair. The one thing I think it is worth saying though, is that in both cases, both of them were creatures of the media who were able to basically get by on being kind of famous and being from TV. And yeah, and run roughshot

over their own sort of like parties institutions by virtue of sort of popular support or claimed popular support. But popular support that they were able to generate by being the kind of charismatic TV person who's epic. Yeah. And I don't end at this. And the thing is like the American Republican Party and now in the British Tory Party now can't really generate another epic TV guy. You know, you can't just like try and turn and they spend all of their great person points. What are they going to do fucking like like Rishi Sunak is trying to be a TV guy. But he's the kind of like he is also the kind of like fucking like psycho who has just been in all of these go great and prestigious positions for his entire life. And so of course is going to be

fucking weird. Yeah. It's sort of like like an LA Sheriff's deputy. If Rishi Sunak ever takes off a shirt, you'll see the like full back tattoo of Ludwig von Mises. And so, you know, it's just like I don't know what I think I assume a lot of LA Sheriff. Of course. I honestly think like that if I think that most of these people, I mean, I've actually read all of their pitches, it's remarkable how much consensus there is. And how much transphobia. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Apart from from Grant Shaps weirdly. Yeah, that was that was bizarre. Grant Shaps, the man who's in favour of, I don't know, all this stuff seems a bit of a weird thing to be obsessed about. Yeah. So critical support to Grant Shaps on that one. The thing is, the thing is, you can't be ministered

with responsibility for trains without interacting with a lot of trans people. And it just it forms a positive impression. So I thought you were saying trains phobia. Yeah. So I think like this is a long list of people, all of whom have just been career politicians, as opposed to like Johnson, who was again, incidentally a career politician who was mostly a columnist in TV personality. Oscar's death list 2021 is very long. This is all a bunch of career politicians who all have said that they are going to bring about a low tax, high growth, high wage state, unleash the potential of Brexit. And also there's like everyone wants to expand the Rwanda program. So the difference between them is just a question of which themes you like.

Which one do you think is hot? And the answer is always penny more. I think the only answer of which potential leadership candidate could actually change the countries, not necessarily for the better, but what's the only who is the only one that could actually plot a different course? Well, Steve Baker would have gotten us all killed. Liz Truss still might get us all killed. No, it's I think Matt Hancock is the only option for real change, not necessarily for the better. He's as stupid and evil as the rest of them. But I'd like the rest of them. He's a very gullible true believer in lots of different things as opposed to and it's very easy to convince. That's why he's not as evil as the rest of them

because he's stupid. He doesn't have the same moral weight attached to his evilness. He knows not what he does. I think like, look, some of what Matt Hancock does might kill your nan, but some of it might like, I don't know, legalize weed. He doesn't believe it now, but I think he'd be easy to convince. It might legalize weed for your nan. Honestly, if you if you played Matt Hancock, an entire Sean Paul album might change his life. He was he would have been so easily influenced by anyone. It would have been total unpredictability. But instead, we just have all of these deeply predictable Matt Hancock legalizes ketamine by mistake, but also reinstates the death penalty for Salvia. No one understands why it just happened.

Salvia sort of is the death penalty. I think I think he could like come up with a scheme to get every boiler in the UK like doing cryptocurrency calculations, and that's how it like produces heat and all to enrich a guy you met at the Jockey Club. Or you could also accidentally implement UBI while doing his own taxes. I think it could be any of that. So here's what we have. Look, we have Steve Baker who deranged when I seize power sort of far right Brexit. Who's who in this sort of four hours as candidate says, I will be relaunching conservative way forward to redefine the territory in which the Conservative Party operates. Yeah, tactical guys. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Already quit. Yeah, if you want to talk about tactical guy,

there's of course, Tom Tugendot, of course, when asked. Yes, former intelligence officer of at least one kind where TA guy as well. He said when asking answering the question, what's the naughtiest thing you've ever done? Because again, our it's our media is of course, as we talked about fields of wheat fields of wheat deeply unserious. He again gave that an answer. He gave an unserious answer as well, which is I invaded Iraq. Well, you're in the intelligence core. Don't hide yourself. You were kind of many, many miles behind the front line till following. But again, like the I think that's that is quite telling, right? None of this is serious. This is all little fun game between friends. What's a million dead Iraqis? And you

know, because this is again, someone who like, definitely was happy about it and would do it again. Tom Tugendot's campaign has been he's just been using his first name because no one can pronounce his surname. So he's just been Tom and his thing is a clean start. Oh, he said it so many times. I think, well, he really missed the trick in like not trying to brand himself as like a Captain Tom like, you know, I think he literally is a Captain Tom, too. He says, oh, no, I think it nice. Well, he was anyway. So this is speaking to someone who he flew a mission with in Iraq. He talks in an anime villain. This person said, oh, I was in the second helicopter in that thing. Tugendot replied, well, your mini gunner nearly killed us. Killed us. Luckily, he's a crap shot.

He recalls now later that night we went to the bar and he bought the first round. I was standing next to the bar and he said, you're around next. And I said, no, mate, it's your round forever because you tried to kill me and failed. That's just like epic army guy. You said he was he was an intelligence officer. So like, were they ferrying him around to like pick up a special tube of toothpaste at the PX? Like, what the fuck was he doing in a helicopter? Like his job is to sit in the nerd box and analyze nerd shit. That's what they do all day. You're not going to fucking impress me with that shit, Major Tom. Actually, Major Tom, if he is a major in the TA, would be a funnier thing to go by. At least he would it would ply off that boomer nostalgia for David Bowie.

He's made it all the way to Lieutenant Colonel. This is ground control to Major Tom. This is from his pitch. He says, my view is clear. The conservative party must be a broad church that anyone can find their home in, whether young or old, northern or southern, renter or owner, how they're going to do make a renter feel more at home in the conservative party, presumably by again, by being racist, creating some crisis that they're then going to promise us to solve. Hey, am I the crisis? I don't want to be the crisis. I'm putting together a broad coalition of colleagues that will bring new energy and ideas to government and finally to bring new ideas about what the crisis could be. And finally to bridge the Brexit divide that's dominated a recent history,

but is done. It's bridged. There is no party accepting maybe the fucking Lib Dems who want to revisit it. Yeah, absolutely. Even Starmer is just like, yeah, we're going to have hard Brexit, but I'm going to manage it well, basically. The guy to have a responsible hard Brexit that's managed appropriately. He says, of course, the full advantages of Brexit are yet to be unleashed. These are not listed. Citation needed. Taxes are unleashed. The full advantages. Taxes are too high. There's an emerging consensus across the party that they must come down. Just put them up. Yeah. Well, you know what? That was socialism. Well, that was there was the socialist Rishi Sinek. Yeah. Yeah. He says, more than ever, we need a military style

grip on issues of crime and illegal immigration. A military style grip. It's functional and filled with suicides. Like a foregrip maybe. Yeah. A deep cut style grip. Yeah. We're going to get a hold on the country, like Pete Bujaj holding that gun in that picture. Maybe some kind of... This is the great thing, right? We can't even do like a war on drugs or a war on crime because those things have been so obviously discredited that now we have to do a military style grip on crime. Tom Tugendat fucking holding Britain at the low ready, bringing things into martial law the next time someone makes untoward comments about

Johnny Mercer's wife on the Plymouth airhold comment section. Yeah. The war on drugs has failed. We must begin the special operation. It's like one of the things that sort of really struck me about reading all these people is just that it feels like they're coming into the job, a job that they're going to manifestly fail out immediately. And then the question is just at what point are they going to be embarrassed into calling an election that they're just going to kind of, I don't, in my opinion, lose... Lose to forensic... Lose by default, essentially, because they've just fucked up too much for the last several years.

But again, like it just because of the manifest failure to come to terms with any of these issues, any of the things that Nate, that you listed, the long laundry list of like where politics is needed in order to make people's lives better, or at least stop. There's a manifest inability to even recognize that they're there. And this guy is one of the people that the press are calling more reasonable. I'm just going to say it though. One thing I know we've just gone through an enormous crisis and they fucked it really bad. But just bear this in mind, given the nature of the British electoral system and the politics of this country in general, we are in year 13 of the

conservative's reign of shit, if you will. But bear in mind, Thatcher ruled for eight... The Tories once elected with Thatcher in 79 ruled until 1997. They still managed to limp on. And I would just say this with all of my heart, if there were ever a labor leader who could lose fucking Neil Kinnick style, 1992 Neil Kinnick style, after all the shit the Tories have fucked up, it is your star. We need to keep Caste Armor away from the sea all costs. I mean, he cannot be allowed to fall in the sea. I think that's absolutely true. I think it's his to fuck up and I fully believe in his ability to fuck it up. Yeah, but if nothing else changes by default, if there were an election tomorrow, he would win

probably. Yeah, probably. But then again, I mean, Ed Miliband was pulling ahead the entire time in 2015. And again, never count them out, their ability to lose and lose badly. But also the fact that even should they win that... Sort of the opposite of never count them out. Always count them out. But even should they win? I mean, Starmer now is saying that is basically saying, well, we still need to reduce the size of the state. We still need to get taxes down and so on. He agrees with all these motherfuckers too. So yeah, he is also a Tory leadership. It's just, it's a man. It's a man. It's who is going to replace Boris Johnson to essentially say a repeat a bunch of platitudes into the legislation machine while continuing

the long progress of outsourcing. What flavor of it do you want? Do you want this tactical guy? Yeah. Do you want a tactical girl maybe? That's who I want. Do you want like one of the culture warriors? Do you want... I mean, because we've got, we've got what? Liz Truss, Zuella, Braverman, Pretty Patel, like... Yeah, let's just blast through these real quick. Let's hear the list. Nadim Zahawi is a man whose chancellor, his role as chancellor coincided with when my internet at home got fixed. Oh, yeah. It's a joke candidate. Very funny. I mean, can we just, can we just first of all, can we just congratulate Nadim Zahawi on some of the most like messy bitch who loves drama behavior I've ever seen in British politics where he

insisted that if Boris made Liz Truss chancellor and not him, he would resign and call for Boris to go. So Boris made him chancellor and he immediately put out a statement on the chancellor of the Exchequer letterhead about how Boris should go. You know that when you resign, you get 16,000 pounds? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's like a game show. Would you like to gamble or would you like the 16,000 pounds now? And then Nadim Zahawi has said today that he plans to fund tax cuts by cutting every government department by 20%. You heard that correctly. That's every government department by 20%. Leasing out arms and legs. There's no legs left, Nadim. Where are you going to find the 20%? Because it's the...

This is what we talk about in Solarity is the same thing we mean when we talk about total separation of the actual experience of living here is because all your understanding of the world around you is just you talking to your little friends who you either like to get into a little club with or like to kick out of the other little club. Is he going to do sell whales? There's nothing left. There's no services left. Getting a little text from Nicola Sturgeon there like, hey, got my dear. I was thinking about Hussein's experience. Correct me if I'm wrong, Hussein, but didn't you have to go on your honeymoon on your Canadian passport because this just takes six months to get a British passport now?

That's just one example of it takes six plus months to get an appointment to take a road test for driving. The worst part is, right, we don't even have a sort of a Mediterranean culture where we know the government doesn't work. We accept it and therefore we pay someone a bribe to get it to work for us. You can't even do that. You try and bribe a passport officer. You get arrested and you still don't get your passport. I think this was also why when the pandemic started, I was doing like mutual aid in my area, like, you know, lots of other people and the mutual aid system like collapsed really fast and I got very disillusioned with it. Not because like I didn't want to do it or like I didn't find it rewarding, but the fact for like

even working within that type of like, even trying to build this type of mutual aid system in like a Tory constituency that overseas like, is it, you know, one of the poorest boroughs and like, you know, in grace London, they just like, hate each other and they like, actively distrustful of the people who really needed like, you know, mutual aid and like, you know, there were lots of, there was lots of talk about like, you know, all these people like scamming benefits. So like, we shouldn't send a food parcel to them. And it's like, means test the mutual aid. Yeah, we, yeah, we have to basically, yeah, it was like, we have to like mean test the mutual aid. But when you're like, okay, well,

how do you want to do it? They don't really have any answers of how to do it in any way other than like, I don't like this person. And I would like their life to be miserable, if possible. And the police won't like, because the police are so underfunded, they won't come and like, knock on their house to like, arrest them for going on a second walk. So I'm just going to deny them like a couple of tins and chicks and stuff. It's, we are so alienated that we need a functional society to keep us from having to interact with one another. And yet here we go needing to talk to people. I'm going to keep running down the list, of course. Yeah, next, next, next.

Tsunak, I mean, a putative front runner widely hated by everyone else because he's a putative front runner. I love him stealing AOC's campaign logo for ready for Rishi. I love him going everywhere in his shirt sleeves. I love all of the videos that are emerging of him when he still had his accent from Winchester. Everything about him is hysterical to me. He's probably going to fucking win. There are some, there are some photos that have come out which have shown his true height. And I just think that's very funny too, because for so long, like as I've spoken about many times on many different shows, he has a team of photographers that are obscuring how tall he is. And it all got ruined when Reuters took an image of him standing next to a very tall

army officer. And finally, we realized that actually this is a very short man with the proportions of a tall man. So it's, it's like an optical illusion. Lanky, yeah. Is the Conservative Party ready for a five-foot-four leader? And so of course, he said he's going to restore trust, rebuild the economy and reunite the country. Again, by like not immediately reversing his own tax rises, but promising essentially the same thing, right? A return to fiscal credibility so that a wizard will invest money in various towns and so on. Things that, things that have been promised to be for 12 years that have not failed, they've only been failed. I just got to say this though. I did see some polling and granted,

I think it was you gov, but it was very funny because it was Keir Starmer, like favorability versus all of these potential Tory leaders, like leadership candidates. And it was like Zahawi, it was like Starmer plus 12 trust. It was like Starmer plus eight, but I had to head with Sunak. It was Sunak plus two. And I was just like, it is possible. It is possible for us to have a short King Prime Minister who actually beats Starmer in a general election and a little guys, two little guys, exactly, poking over the dispatch boxes. We actually, we suspend the normal process to elect a Prime Minister and elect parliament. And instead, it just becomes a contest between you have like a final fight style bonus round of how many delivery drivers you can row

down with your SUV. And honestly, Keir Starmer is already seriously ahead in that contest. Well, the problem is, right, that Sunak is not liked by the Tory membership. So he's got it. I fully believe that the British public would vote for Sunak. He's going to like thread that needle of like being popular with MPs and like unpopular with like the foaming at the mouth Tory. You know, actually, one of the really big reasons why they don't like Sunak is because they think he's too left-wing. They think he spent too much money during the pandemic because he was sullied by the business of actually having to govern and do things. Whereas the perfect angel that we're about to discuss next has not been sullied by those

things. You can project whatever you want on her. What I think before we move on from Rishi, I think the one thing I want to say about his campaign video, which again, I've unfortunately watched, is purely about his personality, his background and how that confers on him and manifest fitness to govern. Because at this point, there is no longer really a credible case that can be made that you will do anything differently or anything that you do will work. Just that you sort of deserve to be given a chance, more or less, because you share an attitude that Britain is good. It's all Hamilton shit, right? Yeah, yeah. So, of course, the next person that we're going to talk about, of course, is

one Elizabeth Truss, Transphobic Bridget Jones herself. Opening up new pork market. Genuinely could get us all killed. Yeah, absolutely. If you think, she wouldn't just call Zelensky. She would like ask Zelensky where he wants us to fire Trident, first of all. Yeah, like genuinely catastrophically, irresponsibly thick. I've been one of the most, I think, called defiantly vacuous. But again, that's perfect.

That's perfect for this mode of politics, of course, because you just have to have nothing but a firm belief in everything you think and have the complete immunity to seeing anything rise up from below. If Liz Truss ever becomes leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, there should be a guy, like a slave at a Roman triumph, who has to follow her around saying, Prime Minister, if you fire Trident, where will you buy shoes? Yeah, if you doom all of us, then you will be doomed as well. You won't be able to get a cute little top from Liberty if you destroy all human life.

I was just thinking it was more on the lines of, like you said, a slave followed her around, just saying, remember, thou art girl boss, endlessly. No, I need one of those. That would make the missile more likely. She said, under my leadership, I would start cutting taxes from day one to take immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living. Again, why do you think the taxes are up? But what do you think the state was there to do?

Something awful the way we got all this low tax. And they're all talking about, again, downsizing the role of the state. What it seems as though the state was the only thing that got us through COVID, I mean, not unscathed, very scathed, but not worse scathed. It's like, well, that'll never happen again. Time to go back to the camera night business of making a small state where we encourage people to have close family relationships and other things that are free. As I say, rightly described as terrifyingly vacuous.

The other interesting one, I think, is former Equality's minister, Kemi Badnak, who's terrified, scares the shit out of me. Oh, yeah. I'll say that. Who's basically, again, looked at all of the problems Nate has described, plus energy bills about to triple, plus inflation running at 11%, and said, we need to deal with free speech on campus. And there's...

I feel like she's extremely transphobic, too. Oh, absolutely. Hugely, which is why she was a Equality's minister. I genuinely, like the purest culture warrior along with Braverman, and like fully going to import some more US style hysteria, which is going to have, this sort of top level governmental sanctions at the one end, and also the sort of stochastic violence at the other. Honestly, I'm amazed that none of these freaks have talked about changing the gun laws at this

point. Like it's the one thing left. What's a mass shooting between friends? We are determined to catch an American form of brain worms. I don't know why it is, but we have our own brain worms. It's fine. Transphobia used to be ours, but now all of these fuckers are going, we're not doing it American.

Yeah, the bins. You know, we've got our own thing. I think there is a certain kind of British person that does like, is this kind of innately fascinated by all the worst parts of America. I guess it's like the evolution of the guy that goes to Florida once, and is just amazed by how big everything is. Yeah. The wedge issues are so much wider.

But I want to, when I read sort of Cammie Badnoch's announcement piece in the telegraph, and what is, what really struck me was this, you'll remember the concept of luxury beliefs that get talked about and spiked and stuff. Oh, yeah. Those things I am. Yeah. Like a luxury belief for those of you who sort of aren't familiar is basically like, is their way of saying, oh, well, if you are,

you must be trans because you don't have anything else to worry about. Yeah, exactly. Any kind of sort of social progressive belief you have is, you have because you are rich enough to have it, also you're degenerate. And I mean, to be honest, if you want to talk about luxury beliefs, it's carrying on like transphobic culture war stuff and fucking like, or a free speech on campus stuff. Honestly, caring about like, you know, conservative points of view, getting bullied at you.

Yeah, exactly. Sort of caring about. And all of this amounts to, by the way, it should be, you should be shot by armed police for making fun of my like roller suitcase that I take to like. It's like, it's to focus on this at a time, to focus on like, on pushing these things, and rolling these things back to be, to be worried about these things from their perspective, right? Because worried about it from our perspective is worried about, well, fucking them.

But to be worried about this from their perspective at a time like this, that's the fucking definition of a luxury belief. To make fun of me, taking an attached case into a 9am lecture is to be met with lethal force. Very disappointed to discover when I took my briefcase into the 9am lecture, that there was no one actually else in the 9am lecture to laugh at me, if everyone else had been out having fun. She says in her article, change does not mean reheated versions of 70s, 80s or 90s policies.

It requires a smart and nimble center right vision that can achieve things. You know, things. Things. What is center about her vision? Is that she thinks she's reasonable. That's what's sent her right about it. Okay, good. But she says, this requires a smart and nimble center right vision that can achieve things,

despite entrenched opposition from a cultural establishment, that will not accept that the world has moved on from Blairism. Exemplified by... It's grim, isn't it? Exemplified by coercive control. Basically, it's like, yeah, we're going to like, shell the NHS in the BBC. We're not just going to sell off Channel 4. We're going to like, do our own...

We're going to get like, conservative comedians to like, do MST 3K over Channel 4 shows. I genuinely think that Kimmy Badnock might be slightly more likely than Ciavella Braveman to take us to a sort of a sorrows place in terms of culture wars. Exemplified, I think that's probably right. Exemplified by coercive... Because she's just a copy of Spiked Magazine, essentially, in human form. Listening to her talk sounds like three clones of Milo all doing different...

Brendan in the round, you know? Exemplified by coercive control, the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, and the end of due process. Identity politics is not about tolerance or individual rights, but the very opposite of our crucial, enduring British values. So she's basically going to... She's going to like, come in and just... She's the spiked candidate who is going to just...

Try and repeal a bunch of laws that don't exist. She's going to try to make it legal to say woman. Like, she's going to pass a law that it's legal to say woman. And it's like, you always could. You know, there's no law against it. But there should be. Yeah, that's right. And what are you talking about tasks for?

What? So you're going out of a bloke. And then the Suella Braveman, right? He says, my belief in an efficient... His bad knock, but dumber slightly. My belief in an efficient low tax state was set early, and I owe a lot of that to my mom. Yeah, that's a standard story about personal background, where like, your mother took you aside at the age of eight

and said that corporation tax should be 15%. Yeah, if any of these candidates tell us anything, it's that your own personal background or characteristics mass less than nothing to your policy. Did nobody else's mother do that? Is that just my mother? And again, like, she says, Napoleon derided Britain as a nation of shopkeepers.

An incredible start to a paragraph. Just phenomenal. And he was right to do it. Not the candidate that I expected to reference Napoleon. I expected Penny Mordon to be out there with a master and commander reference, but... Napoleon derided Britain as a nation of shopkeepers, but were in danger of becoming a nation of regulators.

Conservative parties are now battlefield. Let's make our own rules and grow the economy beyond the confines of London, rather than sacrificing our recovery on the altar of net zero. You don't want to do that. How are you going to do that with anything you have planned? Then the altar of net zero. Yeah, well, it's because anything but coal and oil

is a feat in liberal and culturally elite. Mm-hmm, yep, yep, yep. So she is one of the cry-laugh emoji candidates, and that's great because... But weirdly, right? Jeremy Hunt, who sort of is destined just to be in every Conservative leadership competition. Always the bridesmaid.

The thing about Jeremy Hunt is, the Parliamentary Conservative Party love him. Everyone else in the world, including the members, despise him. What is he doing in Parliament all day to get this kind of support there? I think Jeremy Hunt, the boring answer, is that he's one of the more reasonable Tories.

I think he's one of the ones who has, as misguided as his vision may be, he actually has some ideas and would like to implement them to achieve what he thinks of as a better way of doing things, whereas most of them are just insane. Well, the thing is, again, he's locked in... He actually has locked in all of the other things as well. If you think that Jeremy Hunt's going to be like,

okay, well, the Rwanda deportation thing is obviously insane, no, he says that they should expand it and include other countries. Well, it was Theresa May's right-hand man. He's got to do a bit of immigration racism, that's necessary. I think, to be fair, what I think what you're saying is not... He's a reasonable person who would be sort of materially better in government, more just like... No, he's reasonable on a sort of personal level to interact with,

which is why all these people like him. Whereas Soella Braverman is the same politics, but way stupider, and so you'd find yourself in a situation where she basically is trying to do his Lomaphobia, but winds up accidentally mandating circumcision and then also blaming George Soros without intending to. Like, Jeremy Hunt just strikes me as boilerplate Tory, but his beliefs, he's framed as being on the left of the candidates sort of slate, but his beliefs are...

Identical. Firmly identical, yeah, exactly. He says, most note, his first things he's going to do in addition to expanding the Rwanda deportation program is cut corporation tax to 15% to try to create a low tax, high growth, high wage economy, a plan I have never heard before, and I've never seen attempted before. Not said low tax, high wage economy. They have all said some version of that.

Some have said a nimble state that enables wage growth. Most of them have said a high growth, low tax economy. Some of them say all three, but all of them have said we are going to do the same thing, which is cut taxes, and then we're going to throw you the red meat of culture war stuff, and then that's going to enable us to have the kind of economy that we've been trying to cut our way to ever since between 2010 and 1979. How many more of these fuckers are there? Not many.

Well, in many ways, they are like in saying that they are going to... Well, in kind of putting all their chips on the culture war stuff, they are indeed delivering the type of a country that low tax, from something awful would have wanted. That's right. Sorry. Thank you for landing the low tax show. I was reaching for that.

I've had it in my notebook for like a while, so I've got to fit it in somewhere before we go down. Where are we landing? That's right. I've got just a couple more. Where is she? Just a couple more. All right.

Yeah. Where did she go? Yeah, it's like... Ronnie's like supply teacher. It's Friday afternoon, 3.59 p.m. He's desperately trying to hold control of the car. So warm. You know, it's honestly like, again, to sort of finally answer your question.

Yeah, they've all promised this thing that they're going to do by doing the same thing that everyone has done for the last 10 years and hasn't worked. That's why I genuinely do believe that we might be at the end of a vandalism cycle and onto a institutionalizing the vandalism cycle after this, because there's kind of no gas left in this tank. There's kind of nothing left to do. They all seem very lost, to be honest there. And they're the only sort of thing that they can really say,

well, I'd like power because, well, I'd like it. And as you can see, I very much deserve it. Who else are you going to give it to? Grant Shamps? Morala. He's not even going to do transphobia. Come on. To be honest, that is kind of implied in every one of these articles. Like, come on, who else are you going to pick?

Realistically. Let me be the one who gets to do the ritual. You have to pick one of us. Let me be the one who does the ritual. Don't blame me. I voted for Grant Shamps. Yeah. And of course, Asaji Javid, The Sajj, of course, is...

The Sajj, The Sajjmeister. Yeah, exactly. When will he become the walrus? He says basically, he said, I don't think we can have growth as a country until we have tax cuts. And so he's basically going to again. I'll simplify it a bit and go, I don't think we can have growth as a country.

You just put taxes up. You were in government. And you put them up. And also, it wasn't growing before that. What did you do? It's not going to work. It's never going to work. Of course it won't.

Because all of this is just rituals. It's just, it is incantations that you say before changing the person who's operating the machine that kills you and also is breaking. All right, who next? The really sharp Sibian. Of course, the Penny Morden, who I believe accidentally used a clip

for the day today in order to... I have a campaign video. She's, okay. She's the other troupe in this election because she's a Royal Navy Reserve Officer, which means she's imperious, kind of, I would say, handsome rather than pretty. 100% slightly domineering.

Will she do all of this evil politics stuff? Sure, of course she will. Do I want her to fuck me? Of course I do. HMS Morden. My vote. Exactly. Well, so, I mean, the funny thing was, I think,

her campaign video just starts with, Britain has a Prime Minister, who's a member of the Tory party, and the Tory party is undergoing a leadership election. She's really playing into the Navy stuff, too. Like, that leadership video had lots of photos of big, beautiful aircraft carriers. As well as big, beautiful Oscar Pistorius as well.

And then she had a beautiful line at the end, which I'm going to be thinking about all week, which was, nowadays, leadership has become more about the leader, not enough about the ship. That's it. We need a boat person to be in touch. Yeah, that's right. Person of boats.

Too long. Too long has it been called... Look, here's the thing. We've had lawyers come in and try to do the... We're going to put down taxes, and then create some kind of Singapore highway economy. Cameron was a PR guy. Yeah, a PR guy.

We've had a columnist. Yeah, he was a columnist. Maybe a boat person will finally do it right. Maybe that's the ingredient that was missing. Doing a naval style operation on crime, which involves drinking like 16 bottles of port and falling off your own boat. Yeah, we're going to fire on crime from nine miles away.

Welcome to Britain. Here's your rum. Here's your side of me. Here's your lash. Yeah, that's perfect. This is the candidate for me. It's the bit in Tomorrow Never Dies, where the naval like Commodore or whatever goes,

oh, we can't achieve a radar lock. We'll have to do this the old fashioned way. Yeah, we can achieve a high growth, low tax economy like this. We'll have to do this the old fashioned way, turning the big key in the computer from piece to wall. Yeah, exactly. Switching to guns.

And also, of course, Preeti Patel is, I believe, throwing her hat in, which is terrifying and needs no further explanation. Need a woman who's like a gender swapped Nigel Havers in the cruel sea. I'm sorry. No, no, no problem. Alice, you go deal with whatever this is.

I don't think there's whatever this is. We're going to go and we're going to sign off for our Boris Johnson slash Rajiv Mishra in Memoriam episode. And some Penny Mordant merch. Is she doing like t-shirts or something? Yeah, you have a big foam finger. Yeah, and I just want to say,

yeah, preemptive congratulations to whoever takes over the social murder machine and gets to do social murder themselves and see if their plans would work. Yeah. And commiserations to whoever will have dropped out of the race by the time this episode drops in like four hours. Commiserations to Keir Starmer,

who has failed to win the Tory leadership contest. Like even if you lose, you win because like even the job runners up are going to be. Yeah, exactly. Tom Tugendot doesn't think he's going to win. He's just like setting himself up to be like unimportant member of the minister of defense. Suella Braverman is not going to win the Tory leadership contest.

Let's not speak any of these things into... Allow me to confidently say with my hand on the lathe, Suella Braverman will not become... If people really want to live, they really want to have fake Singapore on, fake taxi Singapore on Thames, then do it. Not much I can do about it now. You know what I mean?

Shut up before I come back there and lower your corporation tax. We try our best. We will continue to try our best, even though it may not amount to much. We fake taxes. Penny Mordant has been branded a woke warrior for the trans lobby. Sure, why not? I didn't think I could like her more to go off queen.

Anyway, look, look, I think that the point here, right, is that this is very much, yeah, fighting to govern the ashes. But boy, do they want to govern the ashes. Also, you are the ashes and also all of we are the ashes. Unless you're in America, you're different ashes. So I want to say once again, thank you very much for listening to this show. There is a Patreon.

It is $5 a month. You can get a second episode every week. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah, the people are paying for it sometimes. Every week? Yeah, every week, every damn week. Sometimes more. You can tell that it's one of those episodes

because Milo makes a noise with his mouth. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've been doing that. But there's some other stuff coming up. We have an Edinburgh Friends show on the 26th. Yes, we do. Can you buy tickets for it yet? I do not know.

So maybe is the answer to that. You know what? But the whole gang is going to be there. They have coaxed me out of my apartment on a little trail of racist people. A little trail of Penny Mordo. If you want to buy a ticket to TF live at Edinburgh, Google is your friend.

Maybe you can. I'm sure you can figure it out. Go on the Edinburgh Friends website and type in Trash Future and see if it comes up or not. It will be available at some point. Absolutely. So keep refreshing that page, everybody. Otherwise.

Oh, I have shows. I'm doing the whole Edinburgh Fringe, forced to 28th August. My show, 435 at the Mash House, come to that. Also, on the 22nd of July, I will be in Worcester. Do we have any fans in Worcester? I'm not sure that we do. It's a small town.

On the 26th, and the ticket link is now up, I am doing a show in Manchester with Olga. Doubleheader. There's not many tickets for that. So do get those, because it will... In Manchester not being a small town. That will sell out immediately, I would think. So do get tickets for that.

Okay, cool. All right. Well, congratulations to... Our theme song is Here We Go by Penymor. That's right. That's right. That's right. Here we go by Penymor.

Yeah. Transphobia for some tiny British flags for others. Our theme song is Please DM me, Penymor. Our theme song is See Shanty, sung by Penymor. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye.