TRASHFUTURE - Exiting the Warwick Cathedral

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

UK newspapers are desperate to convince you that the future of politics in the country is a weird 19-year-old Reform council leader in Warwick. It doesn't matter that Warwick doesn't have a cathedral (it's just a big church! it's not the same thing!) and none of the upstart right-wing politicians want to address the actual quality of life issues. The issue is, as always, wokeness. Also, we talk about recent (bad; transphobic) developments at Stonewall and the weird freak wizard lady who always shows up for some reason.   Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! MAYOR ALERT Get tickets to the three performance dates for No God No Mayors in London on 25-26 April! The link is here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Lions Led By Donkeys will be performing live in London on 29th May and you can get tickets here! Nate's band Second Homes is about to release their debut album, and you can stream / preview / preorder it on Bandcamp here!

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of TF. It is Hussein Nova. It's Riley. And I'm very happy to announce that the paper clipping has begun. That's right. Operation Paperclip 2, which is use the technology brought over by the Nazis to turn everything into paper clips in a long enough time scale. Yes, that's right. It's happening. I've wanted to talk about this for a second, but I've not gotten a chance. It's pushing every, it's pushing Mandelson. It's pushing. It's pushing. It's pushing. the Palantir Seferoth announcement. Allbirds, the ultimate shoe of the venture capitalist. Oh, the shoe for like guys who need orthopedic shoes but are embarrassed that they do need orthopedic shoes. Yes. The wool shoes. It's very popular among like certain kinds of fashionable dad at the playground as well. They're no longer, the design is no longer owned by Allbirds.

It's now owned by the American Exchange Group. Allbirds has sold its all of its design and all of its shoe assets for $39 million. It was worth $4 billion a couple of years ago, by the way. They could never get the shoes off the ground, I suppose. That is the point of shoes. I'm supposed to stay. But the shoes are supposed to stay on the ground. My Nike grounds, my ground force ones.

The Allbirds basketball shoe. My ground pounders, come on. Very, very tacky soul, you know. I mean, this is a good point in the sense of like, you know, they hate the business for doing what it should be doing. Yeah. So Allbirds has sold all of its shoe assets to American Exchange Group, a brand management company,

and has announced that has now received $50 million dollars of investments So not that much in today's like investing world, but quite a bit still, to rebrand as something called New Bird, which is expected to pivot to AI compute infrastructure. Oh, yes. We're not a shoe company anymore. We're an AI compute supplier. Genuinely. I'm often saying, and Riley, you can vouch for this. I'm saying unprompted that the production lines for shoes and compute look so similar.

Indistinguishable, basically. Anytime we meet up and have like a meal together, you say it like a version of grace. And I thought it was really weird and not applicable to anything until today. Yeah. My plans are measured in months. Our plans are measured in, I don't know, a little bit. My plans are measured in, let's say the medium term. My plans are measured in quarters.

So the facility is expected to close during the second quarter of 2026 will enable the company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service, AI native cloud solutions provider. So they're going to buy a bunch of like GPUs from Nvidia and then rent those to AI startups is the goal here. The shoe company does. Yes, the shoe company will be doing this. Remember how Kodak stopped being Kodak and started being a blockchain company for quite a while? Fucking ever, yes. As a film photographer, yes, I do. You can't buy Kodak film anymore, but you certainly can invest in blockchain opportunities. Yeah. And now they're taking my shoes as well.

They're slow. That's the thing. It's the paper clipping. Everything is slowly going to be turned into an AI data. It happened to Neum, one of the most useful, a great loss. All birds now. And what's next? Yeah, you're not going to have shoes.

You're going to be walking around with GPUs duct tape to your feet. Yeah, the slightly old ones. And the other thing is, I also remember during the height of this sort of cryptomania, Starbucks, it's a chain that has reached a saturation point of its market. It is very difficult for Starbucks to grow. Yeah, they have, they have employed every pronouns having American. Like, there's nowhere to go. Going to Starbucks, you will hear neo pronouns, the likes of which you could never imagine.

And it's against you, conservative American families. Of course. Yeah, but the other thing is the Starbucks loves to jump on to technological bandwagon hype. They did this with blockchain. They did it with like Web 3 stuff, like different kinds of blockchain things. There was the Starbucks NFT. Your loyalty card was supposed to be an NFT. and now, at the same time as like

Allbirds is doing the Kodak style pivot, Starbucks is once again hopping on board, having rolled out a chat GPT app that lets customers order coffee using chat GPT. Oh, cool. Okay. What if I want my coffee slightly wrong in a hallucinatory way? You know, just dump like an entire container of matcha into it.

Yeah. Put some rivets in there. My order is for the entire bottle of vanilla monine syrup. Thank you. Hold everything else. So it says, if this catch is on, customers can open chat GBT tags at Starbucks, describe what they're in the mood for, or upload a photo of their outfit. And the AI will suggest a few drinks they think they might like. And then they can check out in the Starbucks app in chat GPT.

Having chat GPT match my coffee to my outfit is a level of irritation. I never thought I would reach with coffee. I've become this sort of coffee-flavored coffee boomer now. Yeah. In a long enough timeline, we all become Lewis Black. Yeah, I wasn't expecting to become a traditionalist when my tradition was I want to order like a cappuccino made by a non-binary person, right? I would have thought that was a relatively progressive position to hold. But now it turns out that's actually like yesterday's news.

And what I should be doing is fucking grocifying my macho. All right, you piece of shit, we're going to make a machet. We're going to fuck that macho into the glass together. Let's go. vibe coding a Lewis Black AI to like order a coffee flavored coffee. Maybe that's how we take on OpenAI is we vibe code a Lewis Black AI and then inform it that this is what's happened and then release it into chat TPT. Remember when Trash Chutja used to release podcast episodes instead of selling you Lewis Black AI agents? Check out our new TF.

Okay, all right. Oil Warehouse, Tax Lost Farming Enterprise. Competing Liz Trust Social Club. now finally we're a hyper scaler and our in-house AI, our chat bot's going to be called Lewis and it's going to reliably be able to give you whatever Lewis Black

would think of any given situation, even ones that he wouldn't have the context of reference for. Lewis Black will tell you what kind of coffee to buy. Well, a coffee flavor coffee is what he would say. It's so cool that like everyone with even like a medium successful business is now looking for the angle to sell out

to AI. Yeah, right. Because AI isn't getting better, right? Like, as much as it sort of purports to be, and as much as they might jerk themselves off about mythos or whatever, you know, new thing this week, it's like, all of these people are looking around for someone to surrender to. And nobody's coming.

I do think it's, like, quite funny how, like, a lot of these guys just sort of, you know, because in order to sort of make a pivot like this, you would at least have to justify on the surface, like, why you're doing it, right? No one wants to sort of be open about what they're cynically doing, which is we're like running a scam or a scheme or something along those lines because we want to jump on the hype. Yeah, we're cashing out. We're cashing out.

And we want to jump on the hype and sort of just make as much money as we can before the whole thing collapses, which is basically what's going to happen. And so then you end up just having like very weird justifications like, oh, yeah, the AI is good because it will tell you what kind of coffee that you'll, you know, to buy, despite the fact that like the whole point of coffee is really that you just kind of order the same thing all the time. Or conversely, we're really passionate about compute here at the shoes company. Let me tell you what they say about the Starbucks AI.

This is the new kind of technology that sparks creativity and helps customers discover something new. For our baristas, it means customers arrive feeling ready, inspired, and more excited about the drink they're about to enjoy, which creates richer moments of connection across the counter. This is so funny because anyone, if you talk to anyone who has worked at Starbucks. But if you talk to anyone who has worked at Starbucks before, what they will say is that it is the most fucking annoying job. Yeah. Because they were like one of the first big brands to sort of really introduce a type of customization of your drink. but like no other coffee chain will let you do.

Yeah, you see these TikToks of people who like, here's how I make my special drink, right? Which is like 27 pumps of this and six pumps of that and add four things of this. All the other big coffee brands are like, no, fuck off. You're not doing that. You're not ordering like 26 pump macho with like seven pump vanilla. Starbucks is the only place I did. Because it was like the first to do it.

And it was like a big, you know, and also just like the name on the cup and everything. Like yeah, they sort of really, they really kind of like influenced coffee culture for a very short period of time. But they did so in the worst way. And if you talk to anyone who has ever worked at Starbucks before,

they will tell you that like these kind of cutesy things that the company CEOs want people to do, all the sort of like fucking customized like match a milkshake with like, you know, insane kind of combos in there. It is a barista's like worst nightmare to have to do that. Yeah. Well, I mean, what you're actually making most of the time at Starbucks is like big sugary morning breakfast milkshake for people.

And people will still get mad at you. You remember all the videos that came out back when Twitter was kind of good. And you have people like, oh, the Starbucks barista didn't listen to my order. I ordered like six pumps of blueberry and seven pumps of like, you know, and they're sort of like post their order of like what kind of drink they have. And like you would just see it. And it's like you have kind of gone insane. Yeah, you're giving yourself diabetes. But the other thing, of course, is you could go into the Starbucks chat GPT app, open it up and say,

Hi, Starbucks. Today I intend to get into a knock down, drag out argument with one of your woke baristas who I hate. What's the best order that I can write Merry Christmas on, but in a cruel way? Chad, GPT, what drink can you come up with that best honors the legacy and memory of Charlie Kirk? I've got to say, I think my coffee order would actually be, well, how about gang violence? Yeah, the name on the cup is counting or not counting gang violence and you're really not going to like the way I collect the coffee either. Anyway, look, this is now paperclip watch. Do you think Charlie Kirk?

is embarrassed in hell that he, that his assassination is now a kind of like warm up joke for sort of like 10th minute of a podcast. I think that he probably just likes the attention. But I do wonder like, you know, because I, you know, my thinking is still very much about like, you know, what's happening with Eric and

JD. Yeah, what is going on that? You could commemorate that in a coffee, right? You could process all of your kind of emotional responses to media through chat GPT and then the sort of Starbucks, you know, like hook in would be like, Hey, do you want a coffee right now?

Would that help you feel better about this? It's more and more effective states that are trying to be commercialized. Yeah. Do you want to match it in the middle to commemorate Malcolm in the middle being back? Because Frankie Mniz needed money. Yeah, couldn't do car racing anymore. So there's one other techie thing I want to address before moving on to Britpole, which is, as you all know, I'm an avid reader of Andresenhorowitz's newsletter.

Of course. And I saw something very strange in there that I actually think relates pretty tidily to Palantier Sephroth posting about like why they think their company is important where basically they wrote a series of 21 Theses that map pretty much exactly onto Umberto Eco's 14 tenets of our fascism. Yeah, it's crazy how they were just like, yeah, you know, point point 20, racism is good and it's like this is supposed to be groundbreaking to me. Some cultures are bad. People need to stop scrutinizing elected officials. I wonder what kind of cultures they mean. Or also like, hey, accountability in the public's field.

sort of forces good people out of the job and so on and so on. Yeah, crazy. Groundbreaking. But what I find unusual about it is, well, I'll go into this Andresen Horowitz thing, and then I'll sort of tell you why I think that they have something in common. So this is from A16, Z. New York City's socialist mayor is making good in his campaign promise to bring government-run grocery stores to the Big Apple.

His honor recently made the first location reveal, the 9,000 square foot East Harlem La Marquette, expected to open in 20-29 at a $30 million cost to taxpayers. Groceries are well-solved problem with plenty of data on when it typical cost to open a new grocery store. 30 million is a bit rich. For 30 million, you could get five Aldis and 10 times the grocery store footage. One Kroger, which is 12 times larger than Mamdani's collective adventure, or either a Whole Foods or a Publix, which are both four times larger, but 10 million take-home money to spare. Yeah, but all of those have the

logistical chain of Kroger or Wholefields or Publix or whatever. They're also not in New York. Those are national average prices. Ah, yes. Okay. This is, but Andreessen Horowitz was like, Well, let's just look at the average cost of opening a fucking Aldi in South Tucson and compare that. I assume two publics, which there are a lot of in New York, I guess. You know, everywhere is a kind of like, you know, GM constructs type situation where there's, you know, no sort of valence to where you put in the thing. Yeah, it sure seems like affordable high-quality groceries is an area where we've made a lot of progress. But if not, it's hard to see how an already cash-strap city, building the most expensive affordable grocery store ever approves that solution all that much. Now, Andreson Horowitz is a company that invest in software companies.

And what I notice between this and Palantir Sefraud posting is that in both cases, it is a different kind of political activism by companies. Because I sort of, I split this into the lib version and the Chud version. The lib version is, you know, Uber makes $100 million in tax deductible, charitable contributions to a political action committee that says they should be able to use their drivers as biofuel when they get tired, right? That is liberal corporate political activism. But this is, I think, quite different because they're getting involved in things that are not directly related to them. It's getting sucked into the cultural stuff, right? Like, Andresen Horowitz, it isn't strictly speaking relevant to their business model to be like taking shots at Mandani for the grocery store stuff.

And Polymarket did it too. Polymarket opened a satirical grocery store. See, this is the thing. What it is, is we're closing in on one of the two reasons why you could own a sort of publicly traded business, right? One is to sell out immediately and try to become a sort of an AI company. And the other is to indulge in your boss's sort of like culture war grievances, which are always to the right, of course. And because you view everything through that negative polarization of the culture war,

to then just have these quite sweeping views of what society should be. They're no longer just implicit. Like Uber has a sweeping view of what society should be, but that view is always implicit. Nothing chud is alien to me. it is, I think they're, they're too excited about the, about their beliefs to make them implicit. The Uber people, right, or Facebook even sort of before it Mark Zuckerberg has became like a real China hawk. You can even, we can even remember about like their campaigns, as we talked about

when we read Careless People, their campaigns throughout the global South to try to get like Facebook basics to quote unquote free internet. They were around things like internet access that had a real implication for like what society should be like, but they didn't say, and here's what we think governments are for, right? I think it's because they take a fundamental view that a lot of the really insincere transactional sort of DEI that companies used to do can only have been the sort of left mirror of this, right? That, you know, you could only have had lean in because you genuinely insisted on a kind of totalizing feminism. Not that it would be a bad thing to insist on a totalizing feminism, but I don't think

Cheryl Sandberg ever did, right? At least not in the way that mattered. And so I think there's this idea that turnabout is kind of fair play, right? And so now, now that Trump is in office, you know, before his brain melts, we have to kind of try and do everything, do all the chud things. And, you know, it's the sort of now we can say slurs banker all over again. It's genuinely, it's like a societal level, how come there isn't an international men's day. Yeah, that's a Umberto Eco's 15th point.

It's just that question. The other element of this as well is that the more success right wing projects get, the more ambitious they get. And the success that they've had, like the success Palantier has had a company that had a DEI office until 2022. Like they had affinity groups. They had Palinqueers, of which I'm sure Peter Thiel was a member. And yet, and yet they didn't learn from their own experience. They all thought, oh, we were the only ones doing it in sincerely. Yeah, we are being sort of lauded over by the tyrants in, I guess, the Biden administration who really believe this stuff.

Yeah, they never want to work with Deloitte because they're like, well, they just care about their pride float. They don't care about training of consultants. But also the increasing ambitions, I think it also ties a little bit into what we talked about with Quinn and Ben on the bonus episode about like the ambitions of guys. The ambitions of guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to grow state capacity but also keep it for themselves is if you want at some point, just like in Nazi Germany, if you want to grow state capacity but keep it for yourself, you're going to have to utterly subvert like whatever is left of democracy. You're going to have to completely kill accountability. You're going to have to demand complete bellicosity because what you're selling is bullets and the software that

controls bullets and grenades and drones and explosions and so on. I read both of the Umberto Eco 14 Theses of 14 characteristics of erfascism. Not a perfect document, but like if you're going to have a list of little points, good to compare to like things, they're basically fully all represented from like the others who are are weak and must be simultaneously weak and strong are like, oh, the DEI officials who will allow us to be crushed by China, but who have dominated America and the West generally for however long. So to me, these things, the Andresen Horowitz anti-GroStrecht's greed and the Palantir,

Sephiroth posting, it's kind of the same thing. It's getting involved in what you think things should be for at this very overt level. Anyway, the main thing I want to talk about today is sometimes you see an article, sometimes you see an article, and then you have a lot of fun with it, and we're getting there, but before we do, I have two more bits of Brit Paul I want to discuss. Number one, did we all see that Keir Starmer finally showed us angry Keir today? Yeah, the quiet man is finally turning up the volume. It's so funny as we're like, heading towards what, the fourth or fifth incarnation of the same scandal. We're probably at like the tenth scandal that could have brought down a government.

Had anyone else been ready and willing to do it? And instead, everyone who could knife Stama in the back or indeed the front is sort of like hesitating outside the door. Reza Palavi is like completely bottling it again. We're going to get it. Listen, maybe we just need a shot. I'm just saying we've never tried it here. And he's looking for some, he's in the market for being shaw somewhere on a part-time basis. Maybe he could do it here.

I feel like, yeah. I mean, you can't really be the sun king somewhere like here, right? Being the kind of drizzle king. We could get you what we could do. We could give him like a sort of six-month probationary period as the Shah of England. Put him on like work experience, you know. He doesn't really get to do much share stuff. Yeah.

He gets to, like, make copies and, like, get the tea in. Well, he gets to do a big presentation on the last day. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be really, like, indulgent. Well, I mean, like, he does, like, it does sort of feel, all quite often that what he just wants is the sort of, like, palatial experience. Sorry, are we talking about the Shah of Iran or Stama? Or Kistama.

I mean, yeah, that this, adds to this stage, I don't know. I would probably say the Shah of Iran in this instance, but. Yeah, yeah, they are quite similar in some ways, aren't they? Oh, now that I, now that I think about it. My dad was Shah of Iran. My father, my father was a fingernail puller. My father was a pilot, weirdly enough. Just to just to sort of catch American listeners up, it turns out that every two months now, we have a tradition in British politics.

Yeah, it's that time again. Yeah. Where we identify someone who is so, I mean, you got to feel bad if you're Peter Vandelson that every two months someone associating with youth friends to bring down their organization. Pushing another civil servant down the big flight of sort of pyramid sted. into the path of the bus. No, the problem here is Peter Mandelson, long-time sort of Labor Party, sort of like, Grandi,

had dirt on everyone, famously friends with Jeffrey Epstein, pictured with Jeffrey Epstein on a number of occasions. And while that was public knowledge, Starmor tried to make him ambassador to the US on the basis that at least he would have something in common with Trump

that he could talk to him about. And this was transparently a bad idea. Everyone said so at the time. But the scandal that is now unveiling is Peter Mandelso, was vetted for that role, failed the vetting on the basis that he kept hanging out with the notorious international pedophile. And then Stama gave him the job apparently seemingly because everyone involved decided to lie to him that Peter Mandelson had passed the vetting

when he hadn't. And this sort of put Stammer on a sort of fork here because on the one hand, it's like Stama did know and he's lying. Or Stammer didn't know and nobody told him because he exercises a kind of Stalinist web of oppression over the civil service and no one was like everyone was too scared to tell him. Or just that maybe Keir Starrmer has never been meaningfully in control of any organization that he's ever been in charge of. That would be a crazy thing to suggest, I would say. There are multiple possibilities here.

None of them look particularly good for the government where yet one is, well, Starmer announced Mandelson's ambassorship before the DV came through, which kind of gives the lie to any stereotype of him as a sort of. of cautious rule follower and more like a sort of reckless idiot who happens to just sound like a dork. And he either knew and just figured it would be fine because he expected to be able to govern with impunity or he just delegated the whole thing to Morgan McSweeney who just ran the government again, apparently not very well because all he really knows how to do is say, what if we agreed with the right wing press enough at a time when like our opponents are

historically unpopular and just sort of win by default. Yeah, getting asked some questions about why you employed this guy who was so friendly with Jeffrey Epstein and being like, guys, come on, racism? Racism you love when we do racism together. Do you want to do some racism? Come on. It'll be like old times. Exactly. And the thing is, journalists aren't really supposed to ask these sorts of questions. And none of them have really wanted to. It's just that this came out because the American political establishment had no incentive to protect Peter Mandelson. And the sort of fallout of that is we're just left with this exposure. It embarrasses a lot of people, not just Starmer.

And we're just going to keep going up and up the chain, finding people who aren't him to be left holding the bag for it. Eventually, in a long enough timeline, every single person in Britain will hold the bag for Starmor, I guess. Yeah, well, because the thing is, there are a couple of people who could genuinely unseat him, but they won't do it. Like, Andy Burnham isn't even in Parliament.

He fumbled that one. And then, you know, Angela Rainer's still waiting for HMRC, to be like, yeah, you didn't do anything wrong when you underpaid tax catastrophically. And so what's happening is it's just like the engine isn't sort of getting into gear. Like Swan Lake keeps playing on all the TV channels, but nothing's happening.

And if I read from some of the analysis in The Guardian here, I mean, it's pretty fucking dire by Andrew Sparrow saying it wasn't much of a win, but as Keir Stomber heads back to Downing Street, he will probably count that as sort of a success. Labor MPs did not turn in him. No one called for his resignation. And those who did speak out against him

were mostly from the left, whose views are discounted by number 10 anyway. It's so funny to be like, yeah, my brilliant political instinct to keeping me in the job, when you're just there because there can be no one else. For a while, it was the idea that you were going to be this sort of like ablative, like, heat shield between, you know, the sort of elections on the 7th of May. And obviously that's still a factor. But at this point, it's just like, no one else is ready to do it.

No one is ready to get rid of him yet. Well, yeah, because, as you mentioned earlier, someone would have to take over the job. Yeah. Please go ahead. Take my chalice. It is full of poison, though. Yeah, it's because if there's one thing we've learned, and unless, God knows how long, is that British prime ministers can't do anything, apparently. Seemingly, yeah. Evidently, they can't do anything. No one tells them anything, apparently.

They're the least powerful people in the country to hear them say it. The reason no one in Parliament particularly wants this job is that as the years go on, the impossible trinity that you have to satisfy to be the British prime minister. I need to make a rue with that. is like that you have to get growth without investment. You have to cut spending without hurting anybody that matters. You have to project power and be serious on the world stage, but also you have a budget of 10 pounds to do it, right?

It's the political system in this country is run itself down. You are trying to drive a broken car. And so, you know, Kirstrober keeps on getting DUIs effectively. And the cops are just like, oh, we're not pulling you over. No way. We know what happens if we get you out of that car. I mean, like, the job in the sense that, like, to actually seriously take the job is one way you have to sort of accept that, like, you get like a brief honeymoon period, but your main role is to basically get, have people get mad at you all the time until, like, it becomes intolerable. And he's sort of at the stage where I kind of feel like, people are getting mad at him, but he's sort of, he isn't quite rattled just yet. But that's not to sort of say it's not coming soon.

I'm surprised we're not getting like some of the sort of wistful Trump stuff from him. Like, wouldn't it be great if I just drove off? I don't know if he has the capacity for whist You know, I don't think he has any whist in it No, he claimed not to, you know? We were told that we would, I guess, like, see him try to go Super-Sayan getting angry at everyone who's ever failed him in Parliament today.

This is the other thing too. He sat very early into, even before he became PM, but when it was very clear, but like he was likely to sort of succeed and then you have like the papers doing lifestyle interviews of him. In every one of those interviews,

he did a lot of work to basically tell everyone I have no interior life. I have no interior thoughts. I do not have a favorite novel. I don't have a favorite film. I don't like have a favorite meal, really. Or even very generic answers to horror. In some cases, he would literally just say, yeah, I have no interest or like,

no even I have no interest. I have no opinion on any of this stuff. And in order to sort of like do the Trump thing of like presenting yourself as a victim in an exaggerated ways in order to sort of like deflect criticism or to, you know, tactfully like move the subject. like move attention away from you, kind of have to have a personality. So much of the Starma story and how it will end

will very much be that this kind of attempt to curate himself as this neutral, a political figure that as you guys have mentioned, like, you know, has never had any meaningful control over any sort of agency or political institution really kind of came to bite him in the ass. Ultimately, his political trajectory is one that necessarily ends in failure

because he was allowed, elected to office in the hopes that things would fix themselves and he could take credit for it. Like all of his pledges. Remember the pledges like six resets ago? Oh, were those the pledges or the goals? Well, it was the, oh, sorry, the 10 pledges were unit zero. The goals were unit one. And then unit two through the production line was the pillars, the benchmarks, and I think the key performance measurements. Guess we're making key performance measurements now. We're going to get another reset. He's already signaled that there's a reset coming. Maybe it could be like, I've heard a rumor in that they're going to, that the new bond is going to be set in the 60s. Like they're going to reboot it all the way back. Like we could do a reboot back to like the pledges.

We could have 10 different pledges. Getting, getting my shit mixed up and Keir Stama comes out as Harold McMillan. I mean, anything but this. You've never had it so good. One more thing I want to talk about before we get to this article, which is finally, there is a leader of Stonewall in the UK. Riley. Riley. You choose this. You choose this to wound me with.

I think one of the best sort of translations of, let's say, a political sentiment I've seen in a very long time, comes from the mutual of most of ours, Croza Luxembourg, who translated the Stonewall welcoming the cast report as we surrender unconditionally. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so if you're not familiar, Stonewall is a, I suppose, was now nominally LGBT advocacy group and charity in the UK, named after the Stonewalker Fuffle where the New York queer community peacefully debated the NYPD about their right to continue occupying a gay bar. Yeah, they often say that a trans woman went into the first neutral third party bathroom at Stonewall.

Yeah, she made the first cogent point at Stonewall, I think. This is, so Keziah Dugdale was the former Scottish Labor leader. who is a... Yes, yes she is. Who is an out lesbian who says she's quite scared as a lesbian in Britain, starting to feel nervous

holding her wife's hand in public. Fucking Vidkin Quisling being like, I'm starting to feel nervous as a Norwegian. I'm speaking it to the Guardian in Edinburgh on the announcement of her appointment as the chair of Stonewall. She said it was completely possible gay rights in the UK

could be eroded with the rise of whitewing populism. Note gay rights specifically because the trans rights rollback has already happened, right? That's unarguable, but it's like, no, no. This could affect people who like matter.

So, you know. Oh, so the trans rights rollback. That invited the right wing populism that's now threatening gay rights. I'm, guys, I'm so sorry. Because like, it's all been me. It's been my fault, right? Because like, obviously, as we know, Trump was elected because I didn't do my OCD rituals, right? Like, I fucked up there.

But then also because I was transgender in public and that's kind of gross and like cringe, right? Now because of that, the fascism is happening. So I'm really sorry. to have done this to everyone. Most of all myself, but also you. Yeah, it's the Dominion voting machine company. It was just like they had someone planted outside on your neighbor's

roof being like, okay, she's turned the light off and on two times. All right, rigged the machines, go. I kind of loki believe that's what happened, yeah. But of course, this is in the fucking guardian. Dougdale deployment would appear to mark a pivot for the organization. Oh, would it? I think that pivot happened a little while ago. Yeah, the pivot happened sort of at the elbows

and shoulders as you raise both hands up. Well, they have a flag, a white flag, and then they pivot it on a pole sort of back and forth. The thing is, the thing is, right, because like, you know, pride flags obviously about of bright colors. And obviously some people in our society don't feel very positively disposed to seeing those. So we thought that a nice compromise would be something we could all agree. It would be a nice white flag. Kind of goes with everything, you know? It's a nod to the most important political tendency in history.

We can say it together. One, two, three. The Confederacy. Of course. As well as acknowledging the charity's missteps, she also had warm words for J.K. Rowling. Shut the fuck up. Fuck you.

No, honestly, fuck you. Please, please tell me the warm words for J.K. Rowling because I'm thrilled to learn. I am the type of bitch to ask, like, as I'm being pushed in front of the bus, like what number bus is that? Because I'm just curious about this as a detail. Like, noticing, like, it's one of the London buses

that has, like, D in it, And you're like, oh, that actually is because a lot of them were called like Dockland's buses. So this is Doug Dale who just said moments ago in the interview. Yes, I'm really worried about this, um, revanchist right wing populism that's threatening sort of sexual minorities generally as one of them said then, I understand that. And I've also heard that J.K. Rowling and other people who hold a different position on these issues to me to describe with a similar rawness how they've experienced being opposed for their views. That's so terrible. I'm so sorry J.K. Rowling was, I'm so sorry she was opposed. We should have known better. I know. I know. I feel badly now, you know. I mean, she should have said that she was being opposed. And I think everyone would have stopped. How on earth? How on earth? I mean, again, I say how on earth. I know, you know, everyone listening fucking knows. But you take this position and then say, well, yes, I actually, we were in a conflict. And then she told me, you know, my counterparty in this conflict who believes something different than I do. And, wants to impose that belief on society.

Just as like, like's the thing, like progressive changes in society aren't popular at the time. People wanted to fucking kill Martin Luther King when he was around. They only remember him positively now that he's dead.

And like, and the point of like civil rights is to take an unpopular position, which is these types of people who we used to think that were like, society at large has treated poorly into sort of campaign

to impose on the people treating them poorly. They can't do that anymore. That's the point of civil rights. That's what it is. And so, for Dougdale to say, well, I didn't know we were opposing her, you see, in our campaign for civil rights. What's funny is

like there's a bit that you didn't put in the notes that I pulled out when I read this article for the first time, where she talks about how she admires J.K. Rowling. She says, I have a huge respect for J.K. Rolling. I've had the pleasure of meeting her before. And I think her story and how she came

to be this prolific, incredible children's writer in this city as a single mom writing in a cafe is phenomenal and an inspiration to so many women across the world. I think she's been a really powerful political advocate for improving the lot of single mums, making a case for tackling poverty and inequality in all its forms, and there is absolutely a place for her in public life to share her experiences and tell her story and make a difference. Fucking when! Yeah, this was also going to be my question is when had she been a really

powerful political advocate for making a case for tackling poverty from her super yachts, inequality in all its forms? I mean, evidently not. all its games. Inequality in some of its forms. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really just the most sort of craven, like, oh, please stop hitting me type thing.

And it's really bleak for Kejia Dogdales to be like, I'm afraid to hold my wife's hand in public, right? Because it's like, oh, this sort of tide that I have watched drown everybody else who is more vulnerable than me. It's now kind of lapping at my ankles as well. And my response isn't. you know, the sort of like, the bus has already come by and hit us, right? That's fine. It's just to try and like sort of reach for some people who aren't even really there to push them in front of the bus, you know?

I'd like to connect things. We want to connect these two things. We want to connect Doug Dale and Starmor. These are people whose plan seems to be to perform utter impotence. It's sort of, it reminds me a little bit of the new kind of settlement in international relations that we're deciding in Hormuz, which is you can kind of just say whatever and just keep saying. different things until you sort of like either get the result you want or don't and just live in the kind of incoherence. So yeah, the straight-of-form moves is open. There is no war in Barsing, say,

and J.K. Rowling is a powerful advocate for, against all types of inequality. And if you time all those free things correct on Polymarket, you can make a pretty tiny profit. It's like, hey, why does that Polymarket uses avatar look like Toff Bayfong? I scrolled to the bit of the article, you were talking about and the I have huge respect for J.K. Rowling. I've had the pleasure

meeting here for blah, blah, blah. That's... Surprisingly down to earth and very funny. Well, that's asked about J.K. Rowling's opposition to trans rights. Dougdale said that. Yeah. I'm just going to deflect. Oh, sorry, that's question is inconvenient. I don't want to answer it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Guardian, come on. Can we work together here? Ask me the question in a way I can plausibly deniably not answer because we all know what we're doing. Dudddale also called for quote A bit of kindness, a bit of generosity of spirit

And a willingness to get into the gray area To talk about things calmly What do you think? What gray area do you think J.K. Rowling Is really willing to permit? What in her campaign, her anti-civil rights campaign That is now being replicated around the world.

What gray area? I would like to sort of turn the temperature down On this debate as your neighbor's house is being burned down. As your neighbor's house is already ashes. You're like, who's temperature's getting a little high. Maybe she really wants a cameo on the age of

like Harry Pazirio Rebo. Go, quote Kezi and Doug Dale's name in Harry Potter the Harry Potter TV show be probably something horrifying. I mean something, something like horrifically anti-Scottish so I don't even ask, you know.

Oh yeah. Oh, Jockeena gay woman came in her one. On self-ID, Dougdale said, I believed in it and I still do. It's so funny that J.K. Rowling is straight and is like always on about sort of like how she's sort of a protector of cis lesbians. That's really funny to me.

I cherish that. Great job. How come there's this anti-LGB campaign? That's why, where did that come from? Yeah. Here is a cis lesbian being like, I feel unsafe now because of this debate that started happening out of nowhere. Hey, I'm as a cis lesbian, how come there's this tendril of like black mold that's reached on to the back of my neck and dug into my spinal nerves and seems to be emanating from a very beautiful house in South Edinburgh. That's weird that that happened. No, it's fine, it's fine. Listen, we can all find a compromise on this.

National Sisterhood week. Yeah, well, everyone submits to the mold. Pretty good. Done. I believe in it and I still do about self-ID, but pushing for self-ID is not top of our list. We're an LGBT organization. Of course we're going to be there for trans people.

Thanks. We're going to be there as they are hit by a bus. Saying that in the same cadence as the Costco dads. that is that is three big booms we're gonna we're gonna be there like a residence of Brooklyn were there for kitty Genovese so it's integral to who we are and what we do but our priorities now are very much focused on things like

securing justice for military veterans yes gay chugs let's fucking go trying to thread the needle so so hard of like do you like these gays do you like this kind of of gay, some of them did war crimes, you love war crimes.

Wouldn't you like to see them get some compensation for the fact that they were sort of like hounded out of the military and like sort of interrogated for their sexuality? Because, because they did, they did war and we love war. Come on, please. Guys, these guys, they're like almost normal, basically. You know, they're not gross. You don't have to like film them on your phones or whatever. It's fine.

Yeah. Please. It's totally like, Cassia Dougdale being like, Have you all heard of the Theban Sacred Band? It's actually really, really cool. It's like making a bid for like the kind of dignity of Ernst Rome in 1942, you know? Just even aside from the kind of ethics of it, the political instincts behind this of like, guys, I think I'm onto a real winner here.

We found a kind of queer they can't get mad at. This guy shot an unarmed kid in the back in Northern Ireland. But he is gay. So compensation. I kind of cancels each other out. Yeah, I think so. Then he went back and he kissed his boyfriend. Okay?

Yeah, it's about inclusivity. So, any case, it is these nominally liberal political institutions just utterly colonized by people whose fecklessness is so great that they are actively harmful. Yeah, and I mean, these are sort of unprecedented times in one way. And I'm not sure what I sort of make of this, right? Because on the one hand, within any kind of like LGBT community, right, even within an LGBT community, Stonewall is going to make itself less relevant materially by taking this tack. And, you know, they are going to lose out on support and funding and attention that way.

But equally, I don't know. I sort of, for a while I was kidding myself, right, that what we really needed was, you know, besides the actual sincere stuff, you still needed the insincere performative advocacy. because that's the kind of thing that, you know, people in labor could really get to grips with. Like, one of the reasons why the kind of EHRC guidance keeps getting delayed is because, like, these people are basically liberals and it makes them feel bad to be doing the sort of fascist thing. So they're kind of reluctant to do it some of them. In the end, of course, that's not going to stop them. But some of that delay is maybe attributable to that kind of instinctual bad feeling.

And maybe it's worthwhile to inculcate that. But I think even if you wanted to do that, the best way to do it does not involve going. I have read every Harry Potter book cover to cover. Does J.K. Rowling need her like big hedge mode for free? Does she like any stuff doing around the house? She could spit on me and kick my dog if she wanted to. I respect her so much. Yeah.

I will whitewash any fence. You know the tack that you want to take, even if you, even if for some fucking reason, and you shouldn't do this, but even if you want to. to take some kind of like, we accept that we're living in a more right-wing culture now and we can't change it, tack, on J.K. Rowling, you know what you do? You go, she doesn't even fucking live here half the time. She's in the fucking Bahamas, you know? Who cares what this, like, 1% or like 0.1% multi-billionaire thinks about anything because she has no relation to the way any normal person lives, or even, to be honest, the way any abominious. The way any abominious. normal person lives. But no, apparently we can't do that. Do you know if you want to remain relevant, I think what we've learned is you have to fight for something because people hate losers. And this is losers. It is. It is absolutely 100% loser shit. And I mean, what's interesting is, I tend to see a bit more sort of fight in this in the Greens, which is actually a good sign given,

you know, Labor's polling versus theirs. Yeah. So I don't want to sort of concede defeat. even within the lens of sort of electoral politics, which is a very small part of like how things actually change. So I don't, I don't feel particularly sort of duma about this, but it is very weird to see Stonewall just sort of like as an organization write itself out of history in this way, you know? And it was always, it was always teppered. You remember that like some people are gay, get over it, T-shirts?

Like, it's always been like this. But like, it's so much worse now. They've never been more consumed by mold than they all. are now. I would say so. I think this is stonewall is an organization. Pieces of it are falling off. Like they're a looper that tried to get away from their own death and like they are just they're consumed by the mold. So you know what? This is the official official TF recommendation. Stay away from Stonewall because they're covered in black mold now. Yeah, I would say so. All right. Look, I've, I've been excited to read this for a while ever since I read it. One of the people who I've been very interested in.

And I know this is like, this is just at flirting up against no gods, no mayor's territory. But this is somewhat. This is George Finch, the leader of Warwickshire Borough Council at 19, due to reform not expecting to win quite so many seats as they won last time the council were elected. Yeah, sort of like bank error in your favor council leader. Correct. And the guy who was going to be the reform leader getting sick and resigning. So he is in dead man's shoes. It's so, so funny that the divide in reform is between like extremely sort of ruddy, sort of like heavy drinking. at lunch 60 and 70 year olds and the most racist zuma you've ever mess in your life. Oh yeah, like someone who's loop back around to 19th century racism and has like epithets for polls.

And I'm not even sort of indicing this kid specifically, but it is really funny that this sort of youth wing of reform is like, I got radicalized playing paradox games and now my ideology is something that was last shared by like three guys in like the northern part. of like Russian emigray Manchuria in 1912. Well, everybody involved. Castoroyal is a big part of their lives. It's just, it depends why.

So George Finch, reforms teenage council leader. Interviewed by Charlotte Ivers, having been selected for like the Times white, I mean, sorry, young power list. Included on that list,

of course, was also like the 24 year old lady from Clarkson's farm. So it's just like, we need to find the only right wing of sub 30 year olds left. We're going to call them. It's going to be on our young power list.

So this is an interview with Charlotte Ivers and George Finch. George Finch's Shih Tzu, Winston, Grown. Uh-huh. Pads happily around the 19-year-old's office. He's named after the John Wick movies. Yeah. Who else to be named after? In Warwickshire Hall.

Fust over by council officials twice Finch's age. So yeah, he's already petting dogs. The big age of, what, 40. Yeah, he's already petting dogs at a 40-year-old level. This is crazy. In the corner of the room is a large, Tax dermied brown bear holding a union jack. I would like us to put this photo in the, like, in the episode notes if we can.

I think this is the episode art. This is, this is just a beautiful image. It's, I'm not sure if it's consciously in the same genre of, like, not staying friends with the photographer that, like, the really harsh flash, sort of contempt lighting photos you get of like CPAC or like the Trump White House, but it's close. Yeah, you can see that the bear is on a wheeled, platform with a cord behind it.

Magical. Yeah, it is, I don't know why he has it, but says Finch required the bear soon after he took over the role of leader of Warwick Council in June last year. Settling into his office, he decided it could do with a bear, similar to one he'd seen in the local museum. It's the fastest I've ever seen the council work, he says,

with a grin. So they talk about how he's managing a half a billion pound budget and how right now there's an effort being made by Lib Dems and Greens to table a vote of no confidence in him, which this article expressly appears to be trying to portray as unreasonable, mostly because George Finch, as we will find out from this interview, which I think is one of the most detailed interviews he's ever done, is a Chinese room with a copy

of the telegraph as his codebook. Amazing. Also, I suspect it's because a bearer is on the sort of heraldry of Warwickshire. Because he's the kind of guy who cares about that, I guess. The key is not to be the kind of guy that cares about that. It's be the kind of girl that knows about it and use it to insult the guy. Thank you. Yes.

I think I'm much happier than he is. So much of their discomfort rests on disparaging comments he's made about council staff. In January, for example, he told Matt Ford's The Political Party podcast that sometimes when dealing with officials, one needs to, quote, lay down a little bit of the boot on neck type thing. Again, referring back to the photo, this guy could have both boots on my neck and I'm not sure if I'd feel anything. Yeah, where you say, actually, thanks for your advice, but now I'm instructing you to go off and do what I say. But also, that's not how English councils work. No, I mean, it's really funny to be trying to like blaze a trail of like, no, but I could be the kind of wartime leader that Warwickshire needs. That is just not how they work.

A lot of council functions, like the day-to-day stuff is carried out by professionals hired by the councils. It's also like alarmingly sort of statutorily prescribed, right? Which I'm sure would also be one of reforms arguments, right? So there's too much red tape. But like a lot of council offices are fulfilling like functions that are pretty narrowly drawn. the sort of like national level and you know there's arguments both ways on that but it's very funny to go in and be like

my personalist regime has actually seen to it that you know the sort of health and safety offices are going to be like inspecting restaurant hygiene in sort of like a reform inflected way now yeah they're going to be seeing if you have the stay woke shirts that they found at Twitter

they're chud hygiene expectors yes searching warwickshire for the cathedral which it shouldn't be that hard to find it's got a bloody big spire they also note that Finch could literally be out of a job before the article sees the light of day and this could be a waste of time. I can't pretend the thought hasn't crossed my mind. So is this going to be a waste of time? Finch

sighs ruefully, seeming in that moment twice his age. Twice his age comes up twice in a few paragraphs. Seeming in his age, same thing into size, 40 years old. Also, I discover from Guppel at Warwickshire actually does not have a cathedral, which one, wash, and two,

that's what the cathedral wants you to think. So keep looking, guys. It's going to be in there somewhere. So the confidence vote is what it is It probably won't work out in their favor But we'll have to wait and see To survive he'll need local conservatives to back him His hope is that they'll realize

The only alternative to him Is an alliance of Greens and Lib Dems He said oh it would be a mess Completely pedestrian Ordinary form of local government You just get the more Lib Dem end of the Greens In that case Because like weirdly the Greens

Are sort of in this position Where they span sort of like The Lib Dems to left of Labor So yeah you just get like Plastic Bag Tax effectively. Sure. That's normal. Also, you say pedestrian. Finch says it would be a mess.

Cycle lane lovers, we'd all be crying. But again, like, it would be a mess. What do you be? Can you not a mat? Have you reset it to year zero? Every day of my life, I see a bicycle lane and I weep that I'm not hanging out with my cool stuffed bear. I weep, I gnash my teeth, and I pray that a real rain would come and put a car there. We go into Finch's personal background.

His family has significant amounts of disability with his. father getting sick, both of his sisters being disabled, and his mother supporting the whole family by retraining as a special needs teacher. Finch said of this, it's the hard work and dedication that families these days and young people don't have. Yeah, it's hard work and dedication when you do it and it's benefits scrounging when everyone else does, you know? Well, the grit, the priority to want and achieve a strong family. But like I say, it's really what this guy has to say, this person who the times is desperately trying to make seem smarter. Serious. Serious. Like political and what's not really that big of a political role.

Yeah. You can see it's, all he's doing is just repeating stuff he remembers from GB News. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the reasons why councils, like local councils are like this sort of like repository for like, you know, little bits of like local corruption, but also like training grounds for sort of national politicians is because at all the time, there isn't like a huge amount to actually like do politically that you can kind of really put your stamp on stuff.

I guess he's trying with the bear. Yeah. Fuck, someone wants my counsel to perform local services and now I have to actually do them. Shit. Oh, no. Quickly, find a bear. Like from the bear? From the bear from the bear.

Well, maybe, like, he talks to the bear to sort of figure out what his virus is a green goblin. Get on this on a sort of like Reagan sort of like fortune teller beef and be like, you know, what kind of advice is this bear getting him? What's Winston's agenda, you know? Both of Finch's sisters are disabled. He says, Our family life has been in and out of hospitals fighting doctors, fighting the system just to get what we pay for in our tax.

He doesn't blame the doctors. He says, They're overstretched, overworked, and the staff try their best. He recalls visits to the food bank as a child and filling out endless forms to secure his sisters the care they needed. As a family,

we've seen so much that it does give me that experience. I've lived bloody, many lives. I've done a temporal pincer attack. Yeah, sure. He said with the gravitas of a 39-year-old. It's like, yeah, sure, fine. Right. Like you've had like horrible stuff happen to you, right? I don't get how you do that and it makes you less empathetic politically, you know? Yeah. I mean, I suppose, because he says, well, the whole family is quite conservative, right? And so, you know, you have your, in the case of the finches, you have your narrative as to why it's happening, which is the doctors are trying their best, but the NHS is paying for a million pride flag inspectors and immigrant pamperers.

And they're just around. There's somewhere. They're just around the corner. Yeah. Got to find the cathedral. We got to be. Again, it's, yeah, he's railing against a cathedral. It's not there. And, you know, so he says, my family is very conservative in general. Not the party, but the thesis. Low tax, low spend, low government intervention, get the state out of the way. But it seems like, again, it's his, if what he says is true and given what we know about British politics, fucking God knows. So it's like, it's a state that, like, can care for people with, like, significant amounts of disability. but without having like a sort of a big state. Without intervening, I think.

Sure. Yeah. What's not intervention when it's good? I think you could very easily get George Finch to say that the state should get out of the way of the NHS, and he wouldn't mean it in the way that actually is kind of correct. You know? It would be, I sort of tend to imagine, like, I don't want to see like a pride flag at a hospital. Yeah.

There's a lot of that, which is, well, none of, we would not have suffered any kind of these sort of like structural systemic social deprivations if there wasn't this fucking pride flag up at the hospital. Yeah, why does this doctor have pronouns? Yeah, sure. They're spending all their time doing pronouns and not surgery. So in 2024, the Reform MP

Lee Anderson visited Nun Eaton. Funniest possible guy to get radicalized by, like, I'm sorry, that's less dignified than getting done by Anwar al-Lalaki. That's rough. So the Reform MP, Lee Anderson, visited Nun Eaton. He said, I went and listened to what he had to say, I asked a question, how will reform resist the wave of wokeism that is watching across our educational

establishments? And his answer was just what I wanted to hear. I thought, this is the party. This is us. And again, it's like, what I did is I got up and I asked him a question that he answers every day unprompted. And he gave me the answer that I wanted him to hear. It's like pro wrestling.

It's like someone, it's like you hold up a, it's like call and response. And he's like, I did the call and he did the response. It was so fun. Yeah. So Finch attended an Academy in Weddington Nunning. What was so woke about it? He laughs melodramatically. Oh, you know these uni's in sixth forms.

He laughs melodramatically is great, just hitting the Sephiroth, watched over by the bear. He laughs like the monarch, I suppose. Oh, these unies in sixth forms, they're conveyor belts for communism. That's what I call them. They're woke. It's terrible. But my sixth form was all right. Great.

Cool. It's just the cathedral's everywhere. somewhere, man. My school wasn't particularly woke, but I've imagined that other peoples might be. Yeah. I mean, I'm from Lee Anderson, you know, what he told me. The teachers were open to allowing

discussion, but some of the students, though, oh my God. So, popular guy, I think we can estimate. One kid in the class with pronouns and this kids at the other end getting like radicalized. I, okay, sure. Finch's A levels were in history,

politics, and law. There's a long pause when I ask Hearts of Iron 4, Hearts of Iron 4 player detected. There's a long pause when I asked for his results. Finch replies, I haven't been an education in ages. I don't know. I'll have to look for it.

You're 19. You're an education real recently. This is really funny to get evasive about because it's like, you shouldn't care about exam results, least of all in the politician, right? But like, when you're 19, you absolutely still feel that kind of embarrassment really keenly.

And the sort of worry here is not like, Like, you know, he didn't get like good A level, so he's stupid. It's like, no, you're your counselor's in the hands of someone who is young enough to, like, pretend not to remember but care deeply about what his A level results were. And he's being interviewed by someone who accepts that deflection and moves on. Oh, for fuck sake. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I wasn't an A plus student. A levels were tricky for me. I didn't like the way it was all processed. I did my history A level. And for like my sort of final paper I put in, you know, don't. don't siege Leningrad take it immediately, that whole green text. And for some reason, the woke exam board didn't like that. I didn't like the way it was all processed.

Essays, essays, essays. I don't run this council by writing essays. I mean, okay. I guess when you stack that up against the sort of Stama thing of like, he can take a minute, he can chair a meeting thing. Turns out you can't. Also true, yes. But like, clearly the credentialism also doesn't, you know, being very, you

educated doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. Hearts of Iron 4 and probably the new order last days of Europe. This is a cold shot here. I love history of the passion because we can learn so much from the past, but I couldn't go through the teaching degree

knowing what would be the outcome. Sitting in a classroom teaching about how we hate our history and our country and we should all just cry. It's so negative. Remember going to crying class instead of history? I used to love crying class. Yeah. You know, that movie dead poet society where they all just stand at their desks and weep.

Actually, no, maybe I'm seeing him wrong. He could be like a sort of Victoria or Europa Universalis guy who gets like really mad that he has to learn about slavery at any point because like he thought it was all Orbray Matur in novels. I think the Europa Universalist guy probably would be less baffled by the actual limits of the power that you have. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think the hearts of iron guy is probably much more likely to get a bear in the office and talk about like we have to surround the schools to create a pocket around high I'm high school. So what would you like to do instead? I'd like to be an MP.

I think it's a great honor. I mean, there's going to be fucking like 700 of them from reform at the next election. So yeah, why not? If they ask me to stand, I'll do it. If they ask me to stay back and lead the council,

I'll do that too. Could he be prime minister one day? Nigel Finns almost shouts. We want Nigel be prime minister. You're sort of compulsive like Twitch. Yeah. As though it's the eyes of the bear blinked red for a moment. And then he shouted, Nigel.

It's two fingers up the establishment. We've done it. That's what I'm excited about getting him in office. And he can say to everyone that shouted him down for 30 years, I've done it. Yeah, what's it going to do like the day after that is the problem? You know, like. Imagine at these last three words, Finch bangs the table. A beatific look comes across his face.

Imagine all the keyboard warriors. Everyone who said he's racist, which he isn't. And he finally gets there. And he says, watch this. I'd love that. That's the journey I'm on. That's the future. Again, not to sort of, not to whisper in Caesar's ear here, but like, as we have seen with Trump, if you go in being like, I'm going to own the libs, and then you owe the libs day one, and implicitly the libs are owned and sure, that can be kind of satisfying. And then day two, all of the stuff is still there. And you still have to do things, then sort of what then, you know, once, after a while, you run out of sort of like pride flags to tear down. It's like you jump in a lake, you get wet, they'll only get some.

wet. You can't get wetter. Libs can only get so owned. So what does George Finch do as part of, as he's like leader of the council is he's like requested permission to increase the statutory walking distance for pupils, which would have required children to like walk five miles to save council costs.

He tried to get rid of every pride flag. And also he has an public spat with the Warwickshire police accusing them of covering up the immigration status of suspects in a child sexual assault case. Just just doing the kind of culture war stuff where you get to be functional like a Twitter account and a suit with an office. Yeah, he's running it with things that could be Elon Musk replies, basically.

They also ask, are you differ from Farage? He portrays himself a slightly more pro-choice. I would also say, Finchad suddenly, that nobody should use the morning after pill as contraception. I don't think you should be able to go, ah, I've messed up. Maybe they should get a few chances, a few strikes and you're out type of thing. The state should... What the fuck? Like, yeah, 19-year-old's idea of like, you know, 19-year-olds of, like, you know, 19-year-olds of

like, fucking three unmarked A-levels idea of, like, sort of, like, cis women's reproductive systems to be like, I don't know, I feel like you should get like a couple of like chances, I guess, but after that, it's not going. I mean, to be fair to him, he can actually sort of say that, oh, this is just basic biology, right? Yeah, he was learning in a couple of years ago. It's like, it's sort of really taking a sort of hard term thinking about what would most, like, traumatized someone who had recently been in secondary education in this country and be like, draw the crab cycle for me.

Right now, let's go. Yeah. Once the powerhouse of the cell. Maybe a few chances. A few strikes in you're out type of thing. The state shouldn't be there every single time you slip up. Young people need to take responsibility for themselves. I love the phrase, a few strikes in you're out because it implies to me the idea of a tough

on crime, but really less a fair prison system. At some point, we're going to start counting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Look, do you have more than two strikes? For sure. Do you have more than seven? Probably not.

You have between three and seven strikes. So the best of my knowledge, this is kind of how points on your license work. Yeah, it's like a credit score. Maybe a few chances. A few strikes in your out type thing. The stage shouldn't be there every single time you slip up. Young people need to take responsibility. This sounds like he's a glitching robot.

What do you mean the state shouldn't be there every time you slip up the morning after Phil? What do you think the budget that we're spending? like state provided morning after pills, which they're not always paid for, by the way. What do you think the state's paying for in that? It's just, here's the thing, right? If you don't have the kind of media training, if you don't have the kind of access,

if you're at this level, you're kind of waiting for the like thought leaders, if I can call them that, of reform to give you your lines, right? And so left without that, and it's sort of why interviewing him like this is a bit of sort of like unkindness. He's just left to,

flail with his own sort of like culture war instincts, which are a war with the reality of being a 19 year old in Britain right now. This is also like quite an interesting point about like the way in which governance works, because I feel like if you are a talking head and even if you are a sort of an MP, like you can get away with saying all this shit, right? You can go to say, you can kind of get away with sort of like, especially if you're talking about, but even if you're an MP,

you can kind of get away with the culture war stuff because, you know, your kind of role within the sort of democratic system is more about being an advocate or at least sort of being a proponent rather than sort of being like someone who actually has to do stuff on a very micro way. But like the moment you become a counsellor, like, you know, you can't do that

because, you know, your whole job is to, you know, you can sort of say, oh yeah, the state should like be minimal and say, okay, fine, but the state does actually have to do something, right? Like, even if it's minimal. Even if it's minimal. You kind of, you kind of need to do the bins. You kind of need to sort of like deal with the minor issues of like life and like the complaints that people send to you

for basic services not working are not like instinctive of them sort of being socialists or communists or whatever. It's like they're just like old people or like, you know, elderly people in Warwickshire. Oh, I bet they love having a 19 year old around. Yeah, I bet they're thrilled. But like, but imagine then just like,

okay, so you're going to kind of give the major job of like having actual stuff needing to work and needing to work in like really high-pressured environment and at the sort of like real sort of tail end of all this which is, you know, council cuts, the effects of council cuts have kind of meant that, like, everywhere is underfunded. And so you need to sort of achieve this with as, like,

minimal amount of resources possible. And you give it to a guy who has mostly, like his political experience has, and I imagine this is the case, has largely sort of been concentrated on the internet, on Twitter, on Reddit, whatever.

Like, you've given, you've given, like, the job of actually doing stuff to a poster. And of course he's just going to kind of keep doing some, dumb, like dumber and dumber things. Because part of it is just like

the fantasy that he has been brought up with online, you know, the moment you sort of get into a setting like that, yeah, actually you realize that like it is not, you know, slogans will not work in this instance. You need to do the bins and doing the bins is like a pretty big logistical task, but no one really prepares you for. Like, no wonder

why he's sort of like dreaming of being an MP. Like he's probably like quite miserable in this job and he sort of wants to be in a setting where he can kind of indulge in the fantasies again. without having to really do anything in actuality, which is not the case just for him. Like that also seems to be the case for like, you know,

I guess like like reformed Doge and Kent County Council is another good example of this where they sort of swept into power on the basis of like, apparently like the communist Kent Council that, you know, is kind of corrupt and, you know, siphoning money everywhere. And I'm not sort of saying that like Ken County Council

are like, you know, really squeaky clean. But what they sort of found out was that like actually if you are going to go down this route of like their siphoning money or they're sort of, you know, corruptive of core. but corruption is pretty minimal. It's pretty like bare bones. It's not, you know, you're not sort of really looking at big kind of cultural stuff.

It basically is nothing. He is having to deal with something and he's trying to live nothing. And I think that's quite frustrating. But I'll finish up here. Six days later, I returned to Shire Hall for the debate calling for the vote of no confidence. Opposition counselors raise all the controversies. There's consternation about Finch's boots on next columns. Finch also won counselor solemnly in tones replied to someone on social media with a poop emoji.

Again, you're supposed to be like, ah, ridiculous. But forget, like, this person with actual political power is sort of acting like this. Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. Eventually, Adrian Warwick, leader of the conservative group, stands up. He's going to back Finch, but addresses the teenager directly. If you get through today's vote, I hope you take on board to a young man from an old man, the comments of today, you must learn. Finch clings on by one vote. These fucking boomers, they hate him so much.

Yeah, it's like, I think the Gen Xers on the council hate him. The boomers who are retired, love him because he's a nice young man. One of his older reform colleagues spotting him talking to a journalist, bustled over to warn him to watch what he says. I guess they didn't tell him this was a friendly softball interview. That he does fuck up a couple of times anyway. Finch waives him genially before turning back. Opposite and counselors have been there for 30 years,

have failed to do the change that we've done in nine months, and there's so much more to come. Who knows what other tax-driving animals will make their way into Warwicksters County Council? Fantastic. Incredible. Yeah. Good stuff. George Finch, thank you.

And listen, this is going to get replicated up and down the country and then some of these guys are going to start being MPs. Maybe a lot of them. Listen, we thought the last intake was the most embarrassing set of MPs that maybe the country has ever had. It's going to get so much fucking worse. It's, we will eat well. There's going to be so much taxidermy in the, in Westminster.

That will be like one scandal every couple of days. There's going to be MPs saying some shit, the likes of which you've never heard before in your life. Like, we will find whole new different kinds of different financial scams that MPs have like decades long histories of being. No parliament will have as many MPs who have phoenixed companies as the reform intake. They're going to, they are going to have to be like digging like people out of like trenches and ditches and stuff. Like unearthing ancient sellers trying to find people who can plausibly like be alive enough to stand for election and they're going to win. And it's going to be delightful, you know?

Everything's going to get so much worse, but... We went into the ancient seller of the guy that we found that we think, yeah, it's mine comps again. It's Iron Crosses and Mind Comps. Okay, is it a lot of Iron Crosses and Mine Comps? Or like a few. I think we can do a few. Anyway, anyway, look, that's all the time we have for today. Everything is trash.

Yeah. Someone should do a show about that. Thank you very much for listening to the pod. We are grateful for each and every one of you. And don't forget, there will be a bonus episode. coming later this week. Yeah. Subscribe for the Patreon

so that you can pay for us to get like a stuffed bear in our offices. Thank you all very much for listening and we will see you in a couple short days on the bonus. Bye everyone. Bye.

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