TRASHFUTURE - Brexit Won’t Let Me See the Kids feat. Tom Kibasi

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Last time we had @IPPR’s Tom Kibasi (@TomKibasi) on the show, he correctly predicted a bunch of things regarding the politics behind Brexit. We needed to consult the oracle once more, and as such we reached out to Tom to come back on and reassure us about the future. Well, sort of. This week, hear Tom discuss the stat we’re in with Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Nate (@inthesedeserts). If you want to hear more Trashfuture episodes, you can sign up to our premium feed and get a bonus episode each week for just $5. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *COMEDY KLAXON* On October 9, come see Smoke Comedy, Milo's new-material night at the Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA) in London! This next one features TF favourite Olga Koch as well as Radu Isac. The show starts at 8.00 pm and entry is £5 -- get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-radu-isac-and-olga-koch-tickets-74708544267 If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

So I'm pretty sure that Boris Johnson has been listening to TrashFuture because that speech he just did at the UN in which he said the following quote, in the future, voice connectivity will be in every room and almost every object. Your mattress will monitor your nightmares and your fridge will beep for more cheese. Oh, he's heard about the MIT media laugh and the recording. You may keep secrets from your friends, from your parents, your children, your doctor, even your personal trainer, but it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from Google. AI, what will that mean? Helpful robots washing and caring for an aging population

or pink-eye terminators sent back from the future to call the human race? Hang on. Pink-eye terminators. Didn't they have red eyes? Pink-eye terminators got a shit in its eye. The terminators did a bear-ass fart on a pillow and now they're all sick. This seems like the slow process towards Boris Johnson admitting he's being blackmailed over how much hentai he's been downloading. And finally, of the final quotes I'm going to read from this bizarre and rambling speech.

What will synthetic biology stand for? Restoring our livers and our eyes with the miracle regeneration of tissues? Like some fantastic hangover cure? Or will it bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables? Terrifying limbless chickens. Oh, he's talking about Jeremy Corbyn again. That's what he's going for. Usually I prefer chickens with two arms and two legs on my table.

Exactly. And exactly one penis. Thanks, Paul Embry. Chicken dick is actually a delicacy. Hello and welcome back to this week's free edition of Trash Future. I'm Riley, that guy from that podcast you're listening to. I'm joined here in studio with Milo Edwards. Hello, it's me.

I, too, am worried about my fridge beeping for more cheese and finding out how much hentai I download. Good morning. Nate Bethay, Mr. Boards. Yep, it's me. It does seem as though Boris Johnson is just like this is one extended bet he had with a fellow columnist. Like you have no idea how far I can take this shtick and it's starting to unravel, but he refuses to lose the bet.

Well, I suspect it's like from, you know how at like White's Gentleman's Club, they would have... I don't know anything about White's Gentleman's Club, Riley. Riley once again showing too much of his hands too early on. I'm from Carmel, Indiana, Riley. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Well, you can bet on anything. So in the betting book, there used to be, you know, large wagers made on which raindrop would reach the bottom of a pane of glass first

and so on and so on. It could be that this is just a multi-year... Shut up, I really know in my own head. White's Gentleman's Club seems like a very on-the-nose name for what is already a Gentleman's Club. And we're joined by Hussain by phone. Hey, I think all of you are wrong because I think what this actually is is like precedent for Boris Johnson to actually replace the statue of Winston Churchill with an Evangelion. This is the first of three speeches where that will then happen.

And returning champion, I would say four Pete now. Tom Kabassi. Tom, how are you doing? I'm doing very well and I think really you should get Dominic Cummings on the show. Look, I won. He's too smart. We can't do it. It would break the record of your government, right?

Yeah, exactly. Our mixer would... We would need at least 64 channels in our mixer to handle his many strings of thought that he would bring together. I hear he has to be kept suspended in a sort of magnetic field to prevent his intelligence from melting his surrounding. He's zordon from the Power Rangers. He just exists in a screen to tell you when to be racist.

Well, I mean, look, what he knows is that the secrets to establishing a permanent mining presence on Mars were all contained in Thucydides if you know how to read it. Anyway, so before much, much further ado, we have done what we... We're doing what we usually do whenever UK politics gets just a little bit too confusing. And we've brought Tom to explain it to us and by extension everyone else. So... We pretend to be dumb so you don't have to pretend. So, just to catch everyone up on Brexit, I'm going to try to summarize it.

You tell me where I've gone wrong. Go for it. The deadline for leaving the European Union was moved to about October 31st, which I believe we predicted in the last episode. No deal brinksmanship has just basically been moved back to October 31st, which I believe we also predicted in our last episode. The Conservative Party realizing that there can be no more false spring extensions because this extension only happened because Theresa May said she was going to have talks with

Jeremy Corbyn, which she said she wouldn't before. Therefore, the EU said, okay, this is enough of material change that we can give an extension. There's no more of that. So they have to do something, which I think is what we said before as well. And now a bunch of all the Eurofile Conservatives or many of them have either decided that they have to go with no deal or leave the Conservative Party, which has happened. That has absolutely happened. And now we're in a position where Boris Johnson wants to take us out of the European

Union with no deal on October 31st, or does he? I think that's the mistake. I think it's a mistake to think that Boris Johnson's objectives revolve around Brexit. Brexit is a tool, it's an instrument for him, a tactic, if you will, to gain and retain power. And that's been consistently true. So in 2016, he picked what he thought would be the side that would give him the greatest chance of getting the leadership of the Conservative Party.

I don't think he particularly thought he was picking the winning side. He just thought he was picking the side that would be popular with the Tory Party membership. And I think every single action that he's taken since then has been all about getting to the position of Prime Minister. And now that he's there, it's about retaining that position. And that's the best way to understand it. In fact, I would go as far as to say he doesn't want no deal, not because he actually cares about the consequences for the country, but because he knows that the consequences are

so substantial that he couldn't win a general election in the aftermath of a no-deal exit. Okay. So I think then, and then also finally, he tried to prerogue Parliament so he could try and limit the amount of time that the opposition could inflict defeat after humiliating defeat on him in Parliament, and that prerogation was ruled unconstitutional. Well, so I think if you look at the prerogation, I think the real purpose of it was to force the pace on Parliament. So what he wanted was a people versus Parliament election.

He didn't want no deal because it caused lots of problems for him. So actually quite helpful to have a prerogation that forced Parliament to act in the time frame that he wanted them to act in, in order to try and precipitate general election. So the purpose of it was to get them to legislate against no deal so that that could be the base on which he went to the country, effectively saying Parliament's trapping us inside the EU. If you want us to get out, then, yeah, and for Brexit to be over, then you have to vote to give me Boris Johnson a majority. So that was the objective.

I think what he didn't want was a people versus Parliament, a people versus Parliament. What he didn't want was if Parliament was able to sit, they could have postponed that decision to a point where there wasn't sufficient time to have a general election before the 31st of October and him to be in office and then compelled to ask for an extension. I don't think they expected the opposition parties to resist an election in the way that they have, but I think he's simply adjusted. I'm personally very skeptical about polling that says, if this happens, what will you think? And I think in truth, if he is compelled to ask for an extension, which I don't think he'll do,

I think there'll be a way around that and I can come back to that. But even if he was, I don't think it would be as catastrophic as everyone else seems to think. I think he'd just say, see, these bastards forced me to do it and that's the issue. I think on the prorogation and the legality of it, it was in a sense of relatively technical thing, which was what was the purpose of seeking a bit and where you tell the truth. And the purpose was clearly nakedly political and therefore unacceptable, but that just shows that if you're going to do something like that, you need to not tell anyone that that's what you're doing it for. So if you tell everyone that you've got this nefarious plan, it doesn't work out.

It's like, you know, in the Bond movies where they're like, Mr. Bond, I'm going to kill you really, really slowly, tell you all of my plans to destroy the world and give you a massive time window for you to escape and stop me. Is that approach to being kind of nefarious and evil? And of course, what happened just like the Bond movie, right? Parliament escaped. They managed to stop the wicked plan and it kind of failed. If they just shut the fuck up about it, then it would probably have worked. I actually have a huge, a huge boner for the Supreme Court judgment because my girlfriend, who's a barrister, explained it to me and basically is what Tom was saying, but they worked out that because a parliamentary

convention, they've never tried to contravene a parliamentary convention by the executive before and so they basically said, well, if they tried to contravene a statute, which the Supreme Court decided to rate the same as a convention, then they would have to have a reasonable justification. So they were like, so does the government have reasonable justification? And the government had given them the internal memos, which were written by Dominic Cummings and were like, yeah, we're going to do this because then the opposition won't be able to do anything. And then there was a secondary piece of evidence, which was just the same memo, but Boris Johnson had written on it. And it was just in his handwriting, he's only like,

top hole, poppycock. This is not seem to constitute reasonable justification. No, exactly, right? So if you were going to do this, they need to just sit in a room, write nothing down, and then hold the line in internal correspondence and publicly, but they basically were too full of themselves to pull off their nefarious plan. They just love showing their ass. Yeah, no, that's it. It's the problem. The problem when you hire someone who's so in love with his own intellect is Dominic Cummings, he lives to be the bond villain explaining to bond on the laser table precisely the code to stop the satellite, because the code to stop the satellite is like a reference to Sun Tzu.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly. It's art of war one, two, three, Mr. Bond, a book I have memorized. Except this is Britain. So the laser table would be a table with like a huge, like ornate mace hanging above it, like a sword of Damocles. And so now we're at the point where I want to talk a little bit more about extension as well, and then get into some of the psychology here, because I think something we've discussed before, well, before turning on the mics is that like really very little has effectively changed on the ground. Like many things were just tendencies that already existed playing themselves out. But one of the things that is, I think, relatively new is the idea that Boris Johnson is being

encouraged to go to jail in order to, because he's otherwise legally compelled to seek an extension. Is there any truth to that? That if Boris Johnson does not seek an extension, as Parliament has instructed him to do, that he would be at risk of imprisonment? Well, so the way it would work would be if he broke the law and didn't seek the extension. This is all this talk of having a secret plan up their sleeve. I don't really buy that. They've got some clever work around for the law. I don't know that really works, because I think the courts would rule that Parliament's intentions were clear, because they laid them out a few weeks ago. It's blindly obvious what the intention is.

If you commit an act that is to break the intention and the purpose of a law, the fact that you technically don't break it doesn't really count. The legal system is smart enough to have allowed for that possibility. And so the way that it would work would be if he broke the law, there would then be a Supreme Court judgment. They would then pass a order, basically compelling compliance with the law. If he failed to fulfill that order, then he could be done for contempt. And the ultimate sanction for contempt of court is to be thrown into prison. I think what's more likely in that scenario is that Johnson would lay down the gauntlet and basically get to the date, say, I'm not sending the letter

and I quit, and then force the opposition parties to find another prime minister to fulfill those terms, or force in that moment for some other means for the letter to be sent, whether it's a court order for the cabinet secretary to send it on behalf of the government or whatever it would be. But for him, he's clearly put too much stock into not sending the letter. So I don't think that he will, but I think his primary meetings will be to get to that date, say, I told you so, and I stick to my word, and I'm so principled that I'd even resign this office, resign it and get someone else to ask for the extension. Would that just to clarify, would that be somebody else in the Tory party that they would appoint another prime minister, or are you saying that they would have

to form a caretaker government or something along those lines? Or it would be someone who could command the majority of the in the House of Commons, and it would force the opposition parties to work together in order to alight on a particular candidate. There's a lot of chatter at the moment about forming this sort of government of national unity to take over from Boris Johnson, because everything that's been going on these last few days, I'm a little skeptical whether that will come to pass. I think you're seeing the Lib Dems, all their top marginal seats are held by Tories, so they're not going to be prepared to back Corbyn into the office. For the SNP, they've said they're happy to support Corbyn into the office because they're

chasing Labour votes, so different parties are positioning based on their own electoral interest. I think one thing that is definitely clear, though, is that if those opposition parties are going to be prepared to support a Labour-led temporary government, that they will want to install someone whose career is behind them, because they're not going to want to, whether it's Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Keir Starmer, Emily Thornbury, any of those figures who could be a potential future Serious Prime Minister and serve a full term, they're not going to want to give them the dignity of the office, so they'll pick someone like Margaret Beckett, who I think is older than mum rather than ever living, or Hillary Ben, or someone like that, that they know has no

front story if they do go for it, so I think it's quite unlikely to come to pass, in part because the natural response from the Labour leadership will be to tell them to get stuffed, so I think it's quite unlikely, but in that 11th hour thing, if Boris Johnson refuses to send the letter, then there is a possibility that just out of sheer desperation, people have to coalesce around a particular figure just in order to send the request for the extension. I'd love to see that. That would be the ultimate conclusion of the three years of just Brexit insanity, just a government led by Ban Margera, because he's the only figure neutral enough to coalesce the SMP, Labour, the Lib Dems, the fucking Plaid Cymru, and whoever the fuck else.

Imagine Ban Margera having to pronounce Plaid Cymru having only read it. I would be so ready for that. That would be ace. I'm Steve-o, and this is Shend-a-letter requesting an Article 50 extension, and it just explodes with green paint as soon as they open it. So also, I'd like to, because like I've said before, a lot of what's happening now are just the tendencies that we talked about in the last episode, naturally playing themselves out, brinksmanship and decisions made under duress, and in effect, much of those decisions being borne out in the sense of who can command votes in parliament,

and no deal clearly can't, and the question being just who will the, probably who will the government of national unity coalesce around once Boris Johnson pushes us to the brink, but blinks before no deal actually hits. I kind of want to go a little bit back, because much of this will probably have to be resolved by general election at some point, and the question of Europe isn't going to go away on November 1st. It's not going anywhere. There are still going to be Euro skeptics, there are still going to be Euro files, and depending on what gets promised at that general election, the unilateral cancelling of Article 50, further extensions into the infinite period of time until the extension

of Article 50 is just a religious ritual that we have no memory of what it actually means, and so on, and so on. Actually working out what you're- That would be amazing, wouldn't it? Like in a hundred years from now, someone starts a Brexit religion. I mean, it's not quite that bad, but I think about the Iran deal. I can't remember the acronym. I think it was like the joint plan course of actions, one like that, had to be ratified in perpetuity every two years, and so it's one of those things where it's like, here's the deal, but if anyone, like the idea is that it would be such a time bomb, no one would actually do it, no one would actually fail to ratify. It's like, oh no,

clearly this is just a logical thing, but it can't be permanent, it has to be ratified every two years, and then of course Donald Trump has to pull out of it, but the idea, like it's weird how that seems like such an insane precedent, but it has been done in the past. Iran, it's run by the hamburger. You can't trust that guy. He steals hamburgers. It's the liberal, this is the problem, I think, is a liberal approach to politics by Fiat from the top, that you say, well, we put the virtuous people in, we've got our Obama, we've got our whoever, and we're just going to give them the, we're going to assume that they'll just keep ratifying this good thing, because they assume that there will never be someone in the far right who just

comes in, takes over, and then just doesn't do the obvious correct liberal answer. I don't think in that case it's particularly true. I think in that case, it's how do you build a majority for a controversial decision, and part of the way that you build a majority for it is by allowing for the possibility for it to change in the future. So by saying it has to be renewed every two years, you can expand the number of people, because you can say to people, people are then permitted to say, well, we've given them two years, and if it doesn't work, there's a cutoff point. And I think that's the fundamental reason for it was to be able to do that. I don't necessarily think it's a liberal belief that there'll always be virtuous people

at the top, because they think they're so, and it's so sort of blessed with virtue, but they also believe the other side isn't. So I think it is, it's just a more straightforward political calculation. I see, because I was going to relate that to the Lib Dem strategy for the stopping of Brexit, which is note, we're just going to unilaterally cancel Article 50. The people's vote second referendum hashtag crowd have sort of continued moving more your file sort of ahead of wherever the Labour Party moves. They were saying, but you want second referendum with remain on the ballot, Labour Party moves there. They say, now we want to unilaterally cancel Article 50.

But I think if you take that example, it's neither liberal nor democratic. So it's motivation, I think, is quite clearly just to outflank the Labour Party on remain. And as I've been saying for a while, you can't out remain the Lib Dems, because there's nothing else that they really stand for. I mean, I think there is a strategic problem they're going to face. Apart from the tax on plastic bags, they love that shit. They would die on that hill. They would die on that hill, and they let other people die on that hill with more sanctions for benefit claimants. Bring back hanging, but it's a £20 charge for plastic bags. Yeah, exactly. They sign up. They sign up. They'd be like, absolutely.

That's the synthesis. Right. So I think in that particular case, it's just political strategy. I mean, I think it's irresponsible, but it seems to be relatively effective. Do you think it's possible that Labour will eventually move to a cancel Article 50 position, and then the Lib Dems are forced to go even harder, remain than that, and they get to a point where they're actually hard Brexit, because they believe that the EU itself does not want to remain in the EU to the extent that they do, and by extension, want the Labour Party to. So I've been saying this for a while, right? They went completely nuts when Labour was like,

the referendum should be between remain and a credible leave option. So what did you want? Did you want it as between remain and remain harder? Remain with a vengeance? Like, what the fuck? I'll live free or remain in the EU. They would want to change England to England, but with one of those little dashes on top of the E. England. England hashtag F.P. I think what they want to do is they is hashtag England. We remain, but we also build a new public research institution that's just Hogwarts. And it has the sorting hat that the MIT Media Lab made,

and it's just a bunch of adults getting childish encouragement. I have a question, and I just really quickly, because Tom, this is sort of a follow-up to your previous appearance on the show. You mentioned on the last episode we did with you that one of your concerns was that there was a tactical reason for being neutral on the possibility of remaining at all on the Labour Party's part, but you were worried that they might hold on to that 2017 consensus so long that they might get... Things might move under their feet, and they did, it seems, move to the point where... That's basically what's happened, yeah. And I'm wondering, yeah, if you could comment on that, do you think that this

move to remain has happened too late, or the possibility of remain is too late, or do you think that it's salvageable in any capacity? Well, so look, I think the position of having a commitment to a second referendum being in the heart of the policy is a sensible position, in part because you can't out-remain the Lib Dem I think the issue for Labour was that it needed to do three things really at this party conference, and I think it sort of managed one, but failed on two. The first thing was to put the idea that the public would decide front and centre in its policy, and I think it did that very effectively. It's a clear, strong, unequivocal commitment

to a second referendum, and making that a legitimate choice and saying this is a real choice. There's an option that's actually workable for leaving, which is possible, and there is the option of staying in the EU, and I think that bit worked relatively well. I then think the second task was then to sort of lean in to remain and say, well, Labour's not a remain party, but it back remain in 2016, would expect to do so again in the future, the kind of McDonald line of I'm a remainer in my heart, that kind of thing, partly because for remain voters, who are the vast majority of Labour's voters, Brexit has much higher salience with them, so they care a lot more.

They tend to be higher up the income scale, so they are a bit more fickle about their choice of political party, and because for them, Brexit has become an identity issue, and I think it's that idea of needing to show that you understood what it meant to them and lean into that position, whilst not going as far as saying Labour is a remain party and will always campaign for remain, it could have said, look, it will be a real choice, but to sort of talk about the values and the internationalism and the importance of cooperation and all those kind of things. Instead, that basically failed, and it made it sound like Labour was leaning leave rather than leaning remain. That was the tone that came out of conference,

and that caused a kind of shitstorm, and then the third thing that Labour needs to do in the conference was then to reassure Labour leave voters, for whom the number one issue is austerity, wages, those kind of ordinary issues of daily life, to show that Labour had a serious response for how to make their lives better, create good jobs, sort out broken public services, all those kind of issues. Partly that policy agenda was eclipsed by the row about Brexit because of the inability to lean into remain and kind of accidentally ending up sounding like you're leaning leave, and partly because of the way that things turned out on the conference floor, that meant that the policies that might have really resonated with those Labour leave voters,

like free social care, for example, or changes to universal credit, which we're expecting will be announced tomorrow, that instead those were all drowned out in the noise of abolishing private schools, Green New Deal by 2030, abolition of all immigration control, those kind of things, which are very motivating for the Labour's members, which is important for getting the base excited, but weren't part of the political strategy to reach out to the Labour leave vote who were disproportionately impacted by austerity and have really suffered from stagnant wages and declining living standards. So I think that was where the problem for Labour was at this conference. I don't think it's actually that Labour necessarily needs to go

all the way and be turbo-remain, but it needed to say the choice is yours, but we know the kind of people we are and the kind of party that we are and how we would approach it. Got you. So just to clarify to people who might not be familiar with policy, with how Labour Party sort of processes, what happened was there were two motions in front of the Labour Party of how to pitch the second referendum and what to campaign for, and now I'm sure I'll get some details of this wrong, but effectively there were composite 13 and 14 were the two motions. One compelled Labour to come out for remain, and that one was defeated on the floor. One said that Labour would remain neutral and would decide what to campaign for

after the new deal. The credible leave option was negotiated with the European Union, and that's what passed on the campaign floor, the conference floor. Yeah, that's basically right. So I'd like to go a little bit back in time. Well, so just on the implication of that would be that Labour would go into a general election promising a referendum, but not necessarily committing to which way it would campaign in that referendum. So it would then say Labour will have a three-month period where it will seek to renegotiate with the EU, then after that it will have a special conference where it will meet and decide whether the deal they've been able to negotiate is better than staying in the EU

and make a decision then, and then have a referendum and decide it. And the thing is they would be able to negotiate more effectively than the Conservatives because they don't have the Conservatives red lines that have created such problems as the Northern Irish Backstop. Well, so I think the thing is we already know what a Labour deal looks like. It's pretty straightforward. It's the withdrawal agreement, which the EU has said is closed, and it remains closed for all this noise that the Tories is sort of making about how they've got the EU to agree to reopen it. That hasn't really happened. The EU has said, well, if you can show us a better alternative legal text, you know, knock yourselves out, but that's no change in position. The

withdrawal agreement is all intents and purposes closed. So we know that. So that a Labour deal, one pillar of it, would be the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Theresa May, but the deal also has another pillar, which is the political declaration, which is the statement of intent for what they will be negotiated for the future partnership. Labour already knows what would go into that. It was set out in Jeremy Corbyn's 6th of February letter to Theresa May saying, you know, permanent customs union, close alignment to the single market, protection of workers' rights and environmental protections, security cooperation and so on. So it's very clear what would be in there. So it's just a matter of updating that 10-12 page political declaration. So my argument is

that could be done in an afternoon, partly because Labour as a responsible opposition party would has engaged with the Article 50 Task Force in Brussels over the last couple of years, and they know that that is already negotiable because it is actually the logical and sensible position that you would come to in response to the referendum. So the natural response to a close vote to leave would be to say, OK, well, this has to be honoured. So we will leave. But that doesn't mean that we end our economic cooperation. It just means that we put it onto a new and different political basis. That would have been the rational response to a close vote to leave. So Labour already knows what the deal looks like. And I don't think they need three months.

I think they know what it looks like now. And that enables the process to be much faster than the six months that the motion envisaged. I think that's quite unnecessary. I think you could offer to have a referendum much faster than that, because Labour already knows what it wants and knows that that is negotiable because it's the logical position for everyone. It's only Tory crazy, Eurosceptic ideology and dogma that has caused this chaos, because they cannot accept what a rational and reasonable person who looked objectively at the facts would come up with, which is basically what Labour's proposal is. This is why I think that Theresa May might have to take the can from David Cameron for

the worst Prime Minister of all time. On the basis that she comes into office, she's presented with the leave vote and she's presented with a leave campaign who've campaigned the entire thing on the basis of we would stay in the single market and customs union. And she decides to out leave the leave campaign and thereby creates this impossible situation where you have to pretend that Northern Ireland exists on the internet or some fucking shit in order to try and make this impossible Brexit thing work when she could have just come up with a very simple and sensible Brexit that she could have actually gotten through and fucking retired with her knighthood or whatever the shit. That is exactly right and I think what people miss

is that Theresa May misunderstood her political task. Her real political task was to take a general mandate to leave and translate it into a specific mandate as to how. And if you were going to do that, you'd have a much more collaborative consensual process where you'd build on the areas of overlap on the common ground, you essentially would very early on define Brexit as soft Brexit and be done with it. And then there'd be some fruit loops off to the side who'd be saying, no, no, unless we, you know, shell Brussels with gumboats, it's not real Brexit. You know, unless we unleash a plague of locusts on Madrid, it's just not Brexit. Mark Francois frantically tugging at people's ankles.

Right. Exactly. Exactly, right? Please, sir. And instead she went, she marched off down this way and then she also created, out of nowhere, she generated the demand for no deal. So this rhetoric of no deal is better than a bad deal. Well, any deal that you get, obviously, everyone's going to slag it off and say it's a bad deal. That's the nature of politics. But by framing it as saying, well, actually, there's a better option than that and that's no deal. She created the political demand for no deal. It's just so politically inept as to be untrue. And she never intended to have no deal as we

knew along. I, as you know, I started saying this, you know, in summer of last year, no deal is a political hoax. It's never going to happen. Eventually, people were like, oh, I think we're going to leave with no deal. You know, Stephen Bush had a new statement, where article after article after article saying the most likely outcome is that we leave the EU with no deal on 29th March. And it was obvious from the beginning that this was a political hoax once you understood the implications of it. And yet she's now generated a desire in about a third of the public for a no deal Brexit. She's like, Don Draper has been cursed by a witch and he can only generate catchy marketing slogans

for things he desperately doesn't want to happen. Oh, my wife should leave me. It's toasted. Draper, you've done it again. Generating a marketing slogan to make your wife divorce you. So that's actually a feat. Like as like I said, I feel like this is us playing out the implications of stuff we've discussed before. I kind of want to talk about some of the roots of this. Now you've written about like why there are these people in the UK that just want, that think that no Brexit is real Brexit, unless the SAS goes in and perforates all of the European commission. Why that is. And there is an excellent article in the London Review of Books by James Meek called The Two Jacobs, referring to Jacob Rees Mogg. One tells truths and one tells lies.

And you've talked about Euroscepticism as an Atlantis project for closer integration with the US, which I think is generally more friendly to capital than the EU. I don't buy how much. And the Euroscepticism has this internal function being used as the sticking plaster over what Meek refers to as the Thatcher bug, which is the contradiction right wing politics of reconciling these two strands that are incommensurable. You're incredibly patriotic, worshipful of cops, the military, and Britain is the greatest place in the world. But equally, you also want to subject this country that you claim to love to the whims of global capital and then sort of decimate its living standards. And something like Brexit manages to resolve this contradiction. And also I'll

read from this article now as to why. This article about Jacob Rees Mogg. Since his rise to prominence as the informal leader of the hard line conservative Eurosceptics and as a cult figure among pharagists in the country as a whole, many have tried to scratch away at the boundary between the two Jacob Rees Mogg identities, between the globetrotting emerging markets player who runs SCM, the hedge fund, and the British nationalist who treasures the portrait of Charles I made of hair taken from his chopped off head. He actually has that. What? That seems like something like a weird stalker would make as a masturbatory aid.

I mean, if anyone's going to be a weird masturbating stalker of Charles I, who else would it be? Fair enough. He can't sue you for that because who else would it be? We're not saying he is that person, but if there was one, all the signs are in place. This is sort of unrelated, but also like no one has ever seen Jacob Rees Mogg in Slenderman in the same room. So how how how meek plays this out. It is possible to interpret Rees Mogg's personal resolution of the Thatcherite contradiction in a way that lays out this different course.

An ultra low tax, starvelling state, zero tariffs and zero subsidies is ideal, but he's prepared to depart from his ideal for the sake of political expediency, provided the model is one of quickie-patridge for a chosen client group. So rather than open-ended community funded universal provision as a principle, we combine we combine relentless friendliness to capital with patriotic cultural gestures and spectacles like the launching of aircraft carriers or the birth of royal children that serve as compensation for the mean lives people are forced to live. The launching of royal children, the birth of aircraft carriers.

Commemorative plate after commemorative plate after commemorative plate. Smashing royal babies on the head with huge magnums of champagne. No, that's not even right. So what does this that why does this play to you that your skepticism was this glorious war that both sides of the conservative movement needed, the capital, the ultra capitalist and the ultra nationalist conservatives need to resolve the thatcherite bug, the glory of Brexit in an independent Britain as a sort of trade-off for lives withered under the collapse of the welfare state.

So look, I think there's some truth in that analysis, but I think the starting point is to realize that the Brexit vote and Euro skepticism has never been a homogenous movement. It's never been that. So when I said that it's best understood, as an Atlantis project, not a unilateralist one, it was referring to that specific group of people who are currently leading the conservative party. So I think if you go back to the 2016 poll, it was precisely because Brexit was undefined and you could imagine any country that you wanted on the other side of it that it was able to scrape a majority of 52%.

So if you imagine a referendum on the electoral system that said, do you want to keep the electoral system or do you want to change the electoral system? People would say that's a ridiculous question. You need to know what you're going to change it to. But in the referendum on European Union membership, you were just told, well, do you want to stay in this thing or leave it? But leave was entirely undefined. And so I think for some people, it was a kind of little England vision of going back to England's green and pleasant land and not engaging in the world and a sort of isolationist unilateralist project. And that was a lot of that's driven by this sort of

nationalist idea or a much more social conservatism at the heart of it that says, well, how do we restrain who's in the national community, restrict immigration and try and keep things back to a sort of 1950s vision of Britain, but also contained within it was a kind of imperialist vision of Britain, this whole empire 2.0. So some people have this idea of great global trading nation. A friend of mine recently described it. It's a bit like a kind of corpulent, red faced, gammon 55 year old man deciding that he's going to leave his wife and kids walk out the house because he thinks if he goes to the local nightclub, he'll pick up a 21 year old, right? That kind of vision that somehow that kind of buccaneering thing and then it gets

upset when his wife has shut the front door and said, no, you can't see the kids and doesn't really understand why that is. So that's another part of it. But I think this Atlanticist thing, which is the dominant project of the people at the top of the Tory party right now, is because they have a fundamentally different vision for society. So I don't find Rhys Mogg's politics irreconcilable. His politics, he just has a different moral basis for what he thinks a good society looks like. So in his view, the basic moral structuring is Spartan, you know, the strong will do as they will and the weak will suffer what they must. And it's that kind of giant pit into which we will kick.

But I think for him, he would see that as a single swim society is essentially moral because, you know, there's a fantastic Nietzsche aphorism, which he says, you know, equal to the equal and unequal to the unequal, that is the true slogan of justice. And I think for those people, that is their conception of justice that people aren't equal, aren't all inherently worthwhile. They aren't all precious. Not everyone gets a nanny. Right. And that some people deserve a lot more than others because they are either smarter or more hardworking or all these other things. But that's the moral basis for the society in

which they want to create. Now, I find that abhorrent. And I think a lot of us, well, I hope everybody who would consider themselves on the left would find that vision of society absolutely abhorrent. But it doesn't mean that's not their vision. And I think that's what it is, or that they don't consider that moral. I think they do consider that moral. And they look across the Atlantic and they say, see, it's better for everyone because it creates a more dynamic economy and society. And that actually the current European model holds the best back and it inappropriately props the worst of us up and that that result is bad for everyone would be their analysis. I think that's a total nonsense. I don't think that's the way the

world works. I don't know what this way this world should work. And so for them, the route out of that sort of soggy European social democracy and into this more Spartan world is through leaving the European Union, striking a trade deal with the US and creating a society with much lower levels of social protection. And the fact that, you know, he likes our dog society, right? But the fact that they want sort of wave the flag and all that, it's the Hannah Rent thing of, you know, it's an alliance of the elite and the mob. And the elite is trying to create a Spartan society and how do they work up the mob in order to support that? Well, you know, they go around singing rule, rule Britannia and waving the Union Jack and all of this sort of

stuff. And I think the other bit is, I do think that there is an inherited this is the final part is that I think contained within Brexit is an inherited understanding of the way that the world is that believes that the world is fundamentally organised into hierarchies. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily realise this, but I think most people and most people tend to think that the world exists in hierarchical structures. So you see that quite often if you talk to people who aren't that engaged in politics, they will think things like councillors reporting to MPs, that London MPs report to the mayor of London, that the mayor of London reports to that there is a hierarchical sort of reporting structure, the way that people

understand the world is hierarchical structuring of it. I'm not saying that that is universal, but there are a large number of people who think of the world in hierarchical terms. And I think in that analysis of the world, you know, in the inheritance is this idea that the UK belongs in the top tier of nations, that the natural order of things is that the UK rules the world. The Second World War came along because the Americans were just much bigger. We shared the top spot with them. And that was kind of fine because, hey, they speak English and they like us anyway. That the next tier down is other English speaking nations, so Canada, Australia, New Zealand, that's tier two. Tier three is other

white European countries. You know, tier four, it just sort of works its way around the world. And then tier five are, you know, brown people from all over the world that they don't have very much respect for at all. And I think the inherited reasoning for a segment of that Brexit vote was the idea that somehow the European Union was a trap that puts the UK into tier three, when the natural order of things is for the UK to be in tier one. And that drives that sense of an inherited hierarchy in the world also drives that Atlantis project because it's seen as restoring the natural order of things, which is why English speaking men rule the world, which I do think is part of the story in all of this. I just had a quick question. It seems that times that every time a solution

is positive, there's an agreement or something put forth, there's always this contingent that demands to be heard or indulged that says, no, this thing that might exist is better, that we could, we could get a great trade deal tomorrow with the United States. We could do X or Y. And it just, I wonder if, do you feel like we're going to run out of that? Like, there's going to come a point where they're going to say, stop, or is it going to be this continual indulgence of this idea that just like the guy who you're describing who thinks he could take home a model, but hasn't yet had to move into a bed-sit, they haven't been confronted with reality. What I'm saying is that Brussels is going to make us a bed-sit and we're going to have to

move there. Well, no, I think, look, I think there are some people who are just, where the dominant factor is sort of a bellicose idiocy, right? Mark Francois represents that strand. And we love him for it. Exactly. Where he genuinely, I think, believes that no deal is an optimal outcome because he's too stupid to understand what it is. And he sort of... He went paintballing once and it changed his life. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Right. But for the most part, don't... This is not the question of letting best get in the way of good enough, right? So why did the ERG oppose maze withdrawal agreement so strongly and object so strongly to the backstop? It wasn't technical. It was because it would have

been a strategic defeat. And the reason for that is the backstop as a term is very, very misleading. The backstop was not a fallback. It's the default because it's contingent on... So leaving the backstop is contingent on a known question, which is the Irish border question, to which there is no known answer, right? It may as well in the agreement said, you can leave the backstop once the prime minister presents the president of the European Council with a jar of magic beans. So actually the backstop was the destination and should have been assessed as the destination. And the political declaration that may produced said that the future partnership will build on the arrangements in the withdrawal

agreement. So really, the deal that may negotiate was contained within the backstop. And that was high degree of regulatory alignment, customs union with the European Union, which was their number one negotiating priority, in return for which the UK could decide its own immigration system and didn't have to pay very much money. So that was the core of the deal, which was keeping the UK in the regulatory and trade orbit of the European Union. But precisely because the people now running the Conservative Party's objective is Atlantisist, that is why they were prepared to fight to the death on May's withdrawal agreement, because they would have got a formal victory, because Britain would be out the EU, but had a strategic defeat because of their fundamental

objective was a realignment to Britain away from the European bloc and towards the US. So in a sense, strategically, it was logical for them to fight to the death, right? But it's only people who think who look at it at a very high level and say, well, you know, at least May's thing was Brexit. Well, it's Brexit in a very formal sense. But the real underlying objective was this realignment in world politics towards the US and May's agreement would have prevented that by keeping the UK and the European sphere. I find like really posh English people who have this fascination with like an American way of doing things really interesting, because they invariably have like utter contempt for Americans and the American way of life. Like they've seen like

what it produces, which is like huge amounts of cheap, mass-produced products and like poverty and kind of like this weird kind of society where like class is entirely defined by money and there's nothing more important than where you fit into the hierarchy of like the kind of pseudo American class system, right? But then they also like weirdly aspire to it. But wait, so look at, so it's people like Soames, right? The really posh ones want to stay in the EU for exactly that reason. And Jacob Rees-Mogg is in a sense a new money guy, right? Yes, his father was editor of the Times and part of that kind of the establishment, but his wealth comes from his hedge fund. It's a kind of new money city finance construct. So it's not the

old established posh, you know, who kind of did that. And in the referendum, the kind of red trouser brigade, you know, votes to leave, but it was in that kind of petty little Englander type way. But Rees-Mogg is not in that, he's neither a petty little Englander, but nor is he that kind of aristocratic posh. It's that somewhere in between of having all the pettiness of the little Englander and the kind of social conservatism aligned with the kind of grubby money grabbing city boy kind of dynamic that's going on there, right? Farage was a trader, Rees-Mogg, a hedge fund manager, Aron Banks financial services and insurance and so on. There is quite striking that all these people's money comes from finance.

Aron Banks is played by the Duke from Leia Cake. But it's important actually that all the leading proponents, their background is in finance, and that's because you can do that globally and it doesn't really matter what your relationship with the EU is and you can make a lot of money out of it. What I'm saying is I'd love to see a Jacob Rees-Mogg speech where it has to be like, no, we're going to have a trade deal with the United States and it's going to be fantastic. We're going to be able to import lots of, then he just casts his gaze down at a keyboard and has to say, Mr. Pib. There's lots and lots of plastic cheese.

I for one have no desire to have a range rover when I could have a jeep tcherokee. I do so think that Britain could be built for tough, but I want to go back to Ireland a little bit as well because we've touched on this that the thing preventing any workable Brexit from being a properly Atlanticist project is essentially the UK's relationship with the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Ironically, 40 years of the American's funding Irish terrorism. That's an irony twist for you. Look, I think that if you look at the December 2017 initial draft of the withdrawal agreement

produced by the EU negotiators because we were too shit to draft our own text so they wrote it for us. David Davis was busy. He was scanning everyone's vulnerability to attack. We hate you, but you do it. Exactly. The backstop then was only for Northern Ireland. It was because the DUP for whom Theresa May was dependent for a majority said, well, that's basically dividing our sovereign territory between Northern Ireland and the rest of the mainland UK that the backstop scope was extended from being Northern Ireland only to covering the whole of the UK on a customs union. So that was the motive. I think that if let's say there is a scenario where Boris Johnson wins an

election, he's not going to go for no deal because the chaos is too costly and the constituency of the Conservative Party contained in the business community would be too outraged if he actually did it. I think that instead they'll just set out the unionists and what we'll end up with is a border in the Irish Sea and basically the price for Brexit would have been a united Ireland, which for a lot of us I think would just say great, but for the so-called Conservative and Unionist Party, that's a bit more of a problem, but they don't seem to really give a fuck. I mean, you've seen the polling where Conservative Party members basically say they don't care if they lose Northern Ireland. I think that's probably true, but I think that if he wins a majority,

we'll basically return to Theresa May's withdrawal agreement, but the backstop will be Northern Ireland only, which means that the UK won't be within the customs union, which means that he can go off and negotiate his trade deal with the Americans and kind of basically let everyone forget about what's going on Northern Ireland. I sort of privately think that's like Southern Ireland's worst nightmare position, but of course they can never say that as being given back Northern Ireland, because Northern Ireland is such a like, have this huge basket of problems. It's yours now, a country with much fewer resources. But there is a strong strain of that within Irish politics, saying, well, this is a very difficult

thing. And the way the border poll works is that for Northern Ireland's position to change, it needs both the Republic of Ireland and the North to be in favour of it. And so it's not entirely clear how that vote goes. Now, I think emotionally in the end, when presented the choice of a United Ireland or not, even if it carries high economic costs, I think that they will probably vote in a border poll to go for a United Ireland. But there is a very substantial body of opinion within the Irish Republic that says they don't want that poorer part of the Ireland of Ireland and all the attendant problems. I think, but more than that, de facto, if there is a Northern Ireland only backstop,

then de facto, there has been unification, because the UK no longer has a role in deciding the trade nor regulatory policies for a part of its territory, which are now being decided by Brussels. Damn, Northern Ireland is still separate, but it's just being run by Brussels now. Just direct rule. There's a compromise position for you. And that's basically what I think is likely to happen if Boris Johnson gets a deal, that it will become a Northern, the backstop, become Northern Ireland. So in effect, there is basically nothing Boris Johnson can do that will not that will not split the conservative vote in some considerable way.

I know, I don't think any... I don't think most of the conservative party really, I mean, they bluster and say they care about the DUP and all that kind of stuff. But I think that was a device to oppose May's deal. And I think in truth, it becomes a Northern Ireland only backstop. They would be pretty comfortable with it. In the same way that if May had not gone for the general election and had not required the DUP to be in order to form a government, I think that we probably would have been out of the EU by now with the withdrawal agreement as per the December 2017 draft and Northern Ireland would be in a different regulatory and customs territory to the rest of the UK.

Now, so this is by way of sort of moving us on with this basis in place to looking back towards the near future. Because it seems like the Tories will have to run an election on a concrete Brexit outcome for the first time. Whether that, right? Because they have to say what they're going to do at this point if we continue kicking the can of no deal down the road. No, because I think they'll go back to essentially saying, if you vote conservative, they'll leave the EU either with a great deal or with no deal. They'll just carry on the fiction. And I think then that also, we have to ask some of the same questions about Labour.

What are we going to promise in an election? Because we can't just keep promising processes. We have to promise some outcomes. But also, you've written a Guardian article recently and this text occurs in the following paragraph comparing the upcoming 2019 or 2020 election to that of 1945, which for American listeners was a victory for Labour under Clement Attlee, which led to the creation of the NHS. You've written, it is possible to detect a pattern, a moment of crisis, a decade of collapse, and a period of rebuilding. More than 10 years on from the global financial crisis, there is a real possibility that the 2020s will define our political and economic settlement

for an entire generation. So in effect, what we need to do is understand that the Brexit crisis has more or less been resolved with the exception of the last couple of moves. Well, so I think, so the crisis that I'm referring to there is the financial crisis of 2008 that then sort of reverberates around. And we've had 10 years of crisis of wages. Is it crisis twice a year? A wrecking of the public realm by the Conservatives through their austerity policies. And we're nowhere near out of it. And the recovery from the 2008 recession was the slowest recovery since the Second World War. So it has been a very painful decade. It's what Gramsci referred to as the interregnum

when the old is dead, but the new cannot yet be born. And that's what we're living through, I think, right now, which is why I think this election could be so consequential, because the choice is, do you continue that going or accelerate it? This sort of, and I think that US trade deal thing is an acceleration of that, right? This sort of ultra flexible labour market. So if you think precarious work is bad, then imagine putting the whole of the UK's employed population onto a fire at will contracts, right? I mean, that's where it ends. In the US, most states, it's employment at will. So if you just decide you don't like someone's face the next day, you can just... I've never had a job in the US that

wasn't at will. I've never had a job that you had like a guaranteed contract and they couldn't terminate it at any time. And that's what's normal to me. So I don't know if people know what they stand to lose in that regard. So exactly, right? So at the moment, you've got a million people on zero hours contracts, but actually you could move the entire workforce onto that precarious basis. So the idea that this is as flexible as UK labour markets could be, I think flexibility is such a dreadful description. It's basically forcing all of the risk onto individuals rather than being taken by companies. It's just exploitation as a better, let's call it an exploitative labour market. But I think there's a much,

much further to go in that exploitative labour market in the 2020s if we make a choice to go in that direction. The other choice is to have the deep and fundamental reforms to the economy to make it fairer and more successful because the other thing is that the research now shows that more equal economies have stronger and more stable growth paths. So actually, this is not a question of, do you have to be unfair in order to be successful? Actually countries like Denmark or Sweden or Germany tend to show that the fairer your economy is, the stronger its growth and the more stable that growth path is. So there's a choice facing us about which way we go, which why I think this election is so hugely consequential. Do we continue to run down public services or do

we invest in them? If you take, for instance, what's happened with social care, in the last 10 years, there's been a 27% reduction in the number of people receiving state-funded social care in a period when demand is rising, right? So if you look, the total quantum of social care has not reduced. What's happened is there has been an explosion in informal care. So instead of that burden being shared by the community, it's been pushed on to individual families. Care is often the elderly people caring for a spouse or it's their children or neighbors and so on, and essentially rather than having the community shoulder that responsibility fairly, it's been forced on to individual families. So you could see a world in which we go into the

2020s becoming more exploitative in the economy and less and less solidarity in public services, and that is one direction, which I think if the conservatives led by Boris Johnson go for this US model of a sink or swim society, that's where we're heading, and the alternative is having the deep and fundamental reform, and that desire to do those reforms isn't solely located within the Labour Party. The Labour Party is more committed to it and it's a more expansive programme, but the S&P have set up a Scottish National Investment Bank, for example. The Lib Dems have written some pretty good stuff on corporate governance reform. It's not perfect, but there are a set of parties that are more committed to changing the political

economic system versus the regressive parties. Now I'm not saying they're all the same, they're not. Labour clearly goes much, much further, but there is a broader set of broadly speaking progressive forces that could succeed in this election. But Labour will never out plastic bag the Lib Dems. That's true. Just to quickly clarify what I mean is, how do we promise that without letting... How do we promise solving the real crisis without letting the fake crisis suck up all the air? Well, so it's not a fake crisis in a sense, right? It is a real crisis, it's just the

broader crisis refracting through that prism. And I don't think just telling people that this thing that you think is really important isn't important is going to be successful. And in a way, I think Labour having a clearer position about where it stands would enable it to pivot to more different issues. At the moment, I think because of the failure of strategy at conference, it is constantly going to be questioned about whether its plan for a second referendum is a secret plan to leave. And I don't think it needed to be that way. I think if Labour had emphasised the second referendum but shown that it shared a value set with remainers about being international and cooperative and all that kind of stuff, that might have enabled it to have pivoted

to more domestic policy issues. But I think it's going to be very hard. And I think the other problem is that Labour Party Conference also passed such a range of different things that it's quite hard to get a clear message, I think for most people, because it just sounds so broad ranging from abolishing private schools to abolishing immigration control to agreeing you deal by 2030 and so on. I think that stuff is sort of familiar territory for the politically engaged. I don't think it translates terribly easily into the public because it's not sufficiently specific. So, say you want net zero by 2030 is great, but it's not great if you can't explain how you're going to do it because then the voter says, okay, well, what does that mean?

And we don't have an answer right now of, well, what that means is this because we don't know. And so, I think there is going to be a real challenge to communicate those policies. Okay. So, we just have to make these things more real, make these things more concrete. What are we going to do next? Well, don't forget that Labour's Manifesto isn't decided by Party Conference. Labour's Manifesto is decided by something called the Clause 5 meeting. And that's one of the tensions within the Labour Party is that conference appears to be the sort of sovereign body, but it kind of isn't because there are all these other mechanisms that exist.

So, the Clause 5 meeting will decide what's in the manifesto. I think once they've made those decisions about what's in it, then it gets clearer as to where the campaign messaging goes. I suspect it will be things like free social care will be front and centre in that change to the benefit system. I'm sure will be absolutely a heart of what Labour does. I'm less convinced that some of the measures around immigration, change to the immigration rules will be in the, will make it through the Clause 5 meeting partly because what we've seen the last couple of days is that Shadow Cabinet members have, let's say, had a less than enthusiastic

response to the passing of that motion. Well, I feel like also it's one of those things where, of course, the Labour Party has strategies to then decide what actually goes into a manifesto because you can't devolve the strategising of winning an election in the UK, one of the most insane countries on earth, to a bunch of people who just happen to like good things at a party conference. Those people are not political strategists, that's not why they're there. They're there because they own too many pairs of sandals. As much as we like those people and we would like to take on board some of their values, every time I watch a Labour conference, I'm always like, everyone thinks that the Labour Party

governance is as weird as Labour Party members, which is not true. But I don't know, just always like a very frustrating of just like assuming the views of like some people who are like a bit too enthusiastic about going to conferences are like the views of the Labour Party itself. Yeah, I mean, I would take a lot of those positions at the Labour Party conference as being a statement of principle and intent. So the Labour Party is saying it is really passionate and committed to it with real urgency, confronting the climate crisis head on. Now, the precise details of how they're going to do that haven't been worked out, but there is an absolute statement of intent of that commitment. There is a statement of intent

to be open-minded and liberal about immigration policy and to value migrant workers and their rights. That's a statement of intent. I don't think in either case, is it a fully work through policy, but it's 250 word motion in the party conference, like inevitably it's not going to be a fully work through policy position. But I do think it is incumbent upon the parliamentary part of the Labour Party to take those commitments from the membership very seriously, because I think that in a democratic party, they should now they need to work out a plan and show how that they've how they've listened to those commitments. But you know, no policy is going to be restricted to 250 words in a motion because the world is more complicated than that.

I think one thing we know is that volatility is up, right? The range of possible outcomes is greater than ever before, partly because you've got this four-party politics, partly because Brexit is polluting the body politic, and that can just produce a series of very random results. I think right now, I think there's a chance that there's an anti-Tauri majority in the House of Commons and that Jeremy Corbyn is walking into Downing Street, but I couldn't tell you whether that chance is 30% or 60%. I simply couldn't give you a really good sense of the probability. I think the range of possible outcomes, I can't at the moment see a path to a Labour majority government. That's partly just one the consequence of the

strength of the SNP. Equally, I find it hard to see the path to a Tory majority government, but I think it's easier to see that path than to see a Labour majority government. But I think probably most likely is something in between a hung parliament. I could see quite convincingly both Labour and the Tories moving back a bit in terms of seats, seeing advances from the Lib Dems and the SNP, and just seeing where that shakes out in terms of who holds the overall balance of power. But I think volatility is very high and the range of possible outcomes is much greater than any election, I think, in living memory. So that's it, everybody. Invest in the VIX. Exactly.

All right. As ever, Tom, thank you for coming and making a muddled world a little bit clearer for us and our listeners. It's always a delight to have you on. Pleasure. Fun to be here. And as everyone also knows, there's a Patreon. You can subscribe to it. Five bucks a month gets you the second episode. And I don't think we have any plugs as a group, but Milo, do you? Yeah, 9th of October, there's going to be another smoke comedy. We had our first one of the autumn on Wednesday, and that was lots of fun. I can't remember right now who the headline

is going to be, but it's going to be a fun show. You should come down and see that on the 9th of October. Uniquely. There'll be a link in the description here. Excellent. And I think we still have a couple more t-shirts left. So if you're a size medium, only if you're medium. I said no, there are some large. There's some large left, too. I think there are some 2XL. If you're an extremely thick boy or girl. And you, or if you want to dress, or if you want to bring back early 90s baggy style.

Exactly. You have some. Yeah. All right. If you want to look like big smoke. All right, everybody. Talk to you later.