TRASHFUTURE - Harry Jazz feat. Rebecca Wilks

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Becca joins the gang to discuss her recent investigation into the use of prison as a “place of safety” for mental health crises. Also, we discuss the brewing war, Farage in Wales, and the takeover of Wales’ premier news site and its conversion to an AI slop factory by gumshoe reporter and assumed identity, Harry Jazz. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* You can get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everyone, welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the befree one. It's the befree one. Yeah. And we had our desserts. We just did the live show. The last one we recorded won't come out for a little while. It was all fun and games.

And now we're back to some of the news. Yeah, it was lovely. Thank you to everyone for coming out to the hottest venue we could possibly have gotten. Oh, yeah. I hope all of you survived. Combination trash-shoots,, future live show and sauna experience. Thank you everybody for coming to that Soviet sauna from the copy pasta.

It was really fun to like go mad with all of you. Welcome to the show. We are all here today and joining us for the umpteenth time, sipping on a Mai Tai that was given to her complimentary with premium spirits. It is Becca Wilkes. Becca, how's it going? It's going. Hello. It sure is going. Yes, that's right. We've had our bartender ship you a canned TF branded Mai Tai, which is a great business idea. And I'm going to just remember for a while.

So Becca's on, which means, you know, we are going to talk about some Welsh stuff. However, you've also done quite a bit of investigative reporting recently on the standard of mental health care, not just in Wales, but also the rest of England and Wales as well. And you've written a long piece about it, which I have a few questions about. And it is, of course, harrowing. Love to be harrowed. That's right. And of course we have some news, we have some dessert harrowing. Hmm, good. Love to be harrowed. That's right. And of course, we have some news.

We have some dessert at the end. Don't worry, I didn't forget about you. But before we talk about the big news, I actually want to start with Wales because it seems like once again, British politicians are just looking over to America and doing whatever they're doing. Because whether it is supporting a catastrophic war in the Middle East or coming to the decision that everybody really wants to mine coal

or screw in faceplates onto iPhones, that seems to be what's going on. Because Farage recently went to Wales, where reform is leading, and I have a couple other things about reform, and said, we want to get everybody here mining coal again. Every single one. Yep. Every, every, every. The Welsh yearn for the mines. Yeah. Becca, how do you feel about your new job in the coal mine? It's good. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is fucking with my enjoyment of the Mai Tai, but if I wipe it off enough, minimal coal dust gets on my god.

The top third of the Mai Tai is mostly like, you know what that's flavor That's free flavor. You can't buy that Margarita That's why a traditional my Cornish my tie can comes with a sort of a crust around the edge that you used to hold it It's got my tie one end and gravy in the other sort of main and dessert Hey a minute and we invent the Cornish my tie. Can I get a cart of margarita, please? It is just a margarita, but with coal. Yeah. The Cornish Mai Tai sounds like a Schueningen handshake.

Let me pitch this to you. The new t-shirt is, you know, come and come and relax on the English Riviera and have yourself a Cornish Mai Tai. Oh, man. OK. All right. Do some real like Ingsoc style arts. Yeah. Okay. We still don't have a place where we record banger shirt ideas. I'm going to find one because... The minds of our audience.

Okay. So everybody, if you're listening to this, it's incumbent upon you to remember the Card of Margarita Cornish Mai Tai, come hang out of the English Riviera shirt and remind us to make it. Because I think it's really fun. Dozens of replies to the post on Patreon, one after another. That's right. Trash future all-inclusive resort. Oh my God. An ad for the all-inclusive resort would be an amazing design. Trash lens.

We might even put it on the front. No, just kidding. We'll never do that. You just do Nigel Farage's holiday and or migrant camp. Oh, okay. Perfect. It was depressing item of clothing you could possibly wear. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. So this is what Farage is doing in Wales right now. I have a little bit of this, but obviously, Rebecca, you're closer to it is that Farage says he wants to re-industrialize whales so it prospers and grows and allow coal to be mined in the country so that they can reopen the blast furnaces in Port Talbot that have

now been cold for a year and have been rendered unusable. Yeah. Yeah. You can't just reopen them because they just have a lot of solidified metal in them. So that is not the type of thing that's going to happen unless they're able to sell it as a very, very, very good deal. Because they basically have to build. He came out afterwards and said, oh, we'll have to naturally build another blast furnace. We obviously can't open the unopenable blast furnaces that are already cold. But obviously that wouldn't happen unless they found the world's most predatory finance capital company to come in and pray on our innards. But yeah.

Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Given the kind of, the history of the last time Wales got industrialized, was that something Wales like, you know, profited from and prospered from just across the board or? Yeah, we're doing fantastically. Yeah, we love to be industrialized. We love being deindustrialized. We're really- There are folks going out and coming in, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The thing about it is that they, I think this is the second time that he's made a big visit to Wales. And it's not to, you know to do down my own country or whatever, but it's because he can smell the desperation on the air. For years, people, the line from the Senate, obviously, Labour has been in control of most layers of government in Wales since devolution. And the line has always been, obviously after Blair went, it's always been we need a Labour government in Westminster once we have that symmetry. You know, things like public sector pay where they were offering sort of well below inflation pay rises for nurses and co. It was always, we agree with you. We do think what we're offering isn't

enough and we would love to do more, but we can't. Our budget gets largely set by Westminster. We rely on the consequentials we get from there. And once we have a Labour government, we'll be able to do all of the ambitious progressive things that we've sort of sold ourselves as kind of standing for. I know we do have that and there's been kind of a shift. Now the messaging has sort of quietly changed to, well doing better just isn't possible. Yeah, a better world is not possible. But it's a similar story with rail funding. We hate just to, obviously that has also been sort of kicked to death now by cuts and stuff. But that was classified as an England and Wales project. Whether you agree or disagree with that, the outcome is that we don't... Wales usually, when there's

an England-only project, will get Barnett consequentials, which means we can then use money that's proportionate. It's a very flawed way of doling out money, but we would get our own sum of money for our government to do what it wants with our rail system. They classed it as an England and Wales project and therefore we didn't get a chunk of cash. There's a similar thing that's happening now with the, I can't remember, it's the east to west rail lines and then to do with Oxford and yeah, I'm not going to say anymore because I can't remember which line there is. But the underlying thing is that the UK government has told Welsh opposition MPs to be more grateful for the cuts that they're receiving.

There's no opposition from the Welsh government. And so, yeah, it's just, it's no longer possible to do anything, unfortunately. People feel very cheated. They also feel the general sort of ennui that we're all feeling. And that's where Farage swoops in, unfortunately. Because if you've been told that it's impossible to fix anything, then the idea that Faraj and the guy you used to host Most Haunted come in and by the way, that's the new reform chairman is Dr. David Bull, the host of Most Haunted.

I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know that, but I'm gratified to know that. Yeah, yeah. So the Most Haunted guy comes in and is like, we'll do something equally impossible. And it's like, look, you're never gonna get funding for nurses, why can't we just reopen the steel plants? And then everybody gets those, like, you know, they never say heavily unionized,

but everyone gets those manufacturing jobs and you can imagine that they would be heavily unionized. And then you can imagine that also Britain would just be a manufacturing economy again. I mean, it is the, like so many times we see, especially reform politicians up and down the country, imagine that also Britain would just be a manufacturing economy again. So many times we see, especially reform politicians up and down the country, labor politicians as well, the ones who are just like, yeah, fuck universities actually, even though they're like in the current model, the economic underpinning of whatever town they're in, that's the industry.

A lot of those ex-industrial towns, ex-mill ex mill towns, ex mining towns just support a university. Like a university is their industry now. And they're like, yeah, but that's, you know, that's a bit like, that is a bit fruity. So we don't like it. Like we're going to go back to mining and blast furnaces. Who cares that all of it is completely fucking impossible because you know what? All the stuff that you, that you could have wanted before, that's also impossible. So nothing is possible. So why not have some fun with it? And plus everyone gets to mine coal, which is, as I remember, an awesome job. Maybe we'll get a piece of coal and you can put that on your shelf and it can be like a fun little memento. Yeah, it can be a bit of a fidget tie. You can roll it around in your hand.

I'd love to vape in a coal mine. I think that'd be really fun. It's actually better for you in a coal mine to continuously vape rather than breathing the air. It's a loophole in the tobacco marketing law that you're allowed to sell vapes to children so long as they're doing a coal mining job. That's right. Down the mines. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because the Welsh government sort of attack line back to Farage on this was like, oh, that's what he would do. You would have us down the mines. You know, we famously loved being down the mines.

It was famously very pleasant. And his sort of response to that was, well, if you offer people well-paid jobs, many will take them, even though we all accept mining is dangerous. And that to me was such a telling statement, such a tone setting statement. It's like, well, yeah, they're desperate. And if you dangle the prospect of a well-paid, in quotes, like in brackets, whispered, heavily unionized job, then they will go down the mines. And it's like, yeah. Yeah. Another thing I was just thinking about was this also sort of reflects a sort of bigger national problem, which is that like basically everyone's run out of ideas of things to do. And so all you've got are some politicians who are saying, yeah, we can just do everything

with AI and that's it. That's the thing. AI has to work. It's going to create millions and millions of new jobs. Everyone's going to have AI integrated in everything. But if it doesn't work, and it won't work, but when it hits that this will not work or it will make things worse, the issue then is that no one else has any idea of what to do afterwards. And it strikes me about the whole, let's just

reopen the minds thing. Does this speak to that sense of, well, no one else has got any better ideas, so why don't we just do this thing and see what's there? Yeah. And also just complete contempt for the people that live in these places and the prospective voters. Oh yeah. It's very much to say, oh, well, what are they going to do? Like, they're basically little pigs. Yeah. And you'll see that in like lots of very poor communities, especially like poor de-industrialized communities as well, where the idea will just be like, well, you know, they like doing the old thing. So why don't we just sort of create like a simulation of the old thing? We're going to use the AI to create a pit that everyone gets to go down. And then instead of mining coal, they can mine Bitcoin or Wales coin or anything

else. I mean, it's the thing is, right, is also, I, I, I now just, I'm going to keep going back to M, son of the century in the story of like early 20th century. Yes. Not, not to sort of like do more marketing, but this is why Left on Red is important because it allows me to snipe your psyche. And then, uh, like the theme of the next bit of TF is just like, that's my design. That's right.

You're pulling the strings behind me. But next month, I'm going to be all age of sail again. Don't worry. It's a little preview. In many ways, this kind of idea of forcibly re-industrializing Wales is like a sailing ship. I didn't say it was like a sloop. I said it was like a brig rigged like a sloop, you fool.

No, but the word reminds me of it is, you know, including like the God, David Bull, the T this like, you know, TV clown from the show where he goes around being like, oh, I wonder if there's a ghost in here. Maybe there's a ghost in here. Maybe there's not the guy who professionally goes and wonders if places are haunted. And this is, oh, maybe, you know, him being the reform chair,

Nigel Farage, the guy who described himself as well as the inheritor to Thatcher saying, oh yeah, well, fuck it, reopen the mines, re-industrialize Wales, maybe she got that one wrong. Or she got it right then, but it's right, but it was wrong now, so we're gonna fix it. It is exactly the way that Il Popolo d'Italia, like Mussolini's newspaper, would handle any issue

where it looked like they were being ideologically flexible between the left and the right. It's no, it was just an anti-politics. It was just the politics of no, right? We're going to reopen the blasphemy. So you can't do that. Who cares? It's fun. People like talking about it. People like thinking about it. It's big and it's dramatic and we're going to do it and it's going to be a great time. I have this TV host here beside me who's going to, you know, do a little jig on stage and everyone's gonna love it because guess what? The fucking FACTA government, they are the sort of equivalent of the Italian liberals, is also doing fucking nothing. It's just they're doing nothing while leaning on the controls, preventing anyone else from doing anything.

And the only person who gets to do anything is someone who's promising something ridiculous. Speaking of ridiculous, I want to talk about the actual other news. I mentioned this at the beginning, which is that, of course, the United States has decided to finally do that thing that John McCain sang in the late 2000s. Greatly pleasing Senesah Holden blood feast. Yes, they have, in fact, bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, joining the Israeli attack. However, most commentary about that now, from like, you know, Western aligned papers even, right, is saying, oh yeah, it didn't do anything. Oh cool, okay. They kind of must up the

library in these various sites. Knocked over the water cooler at a sort of like 60 meter deep, like deep facility. And in exchange, maybe started World War III. We don't know yet. Like the problem with the news lately is that there's this long latency, right? Like by the time you hear this, okay, it's just going to be tomorrow. But like, who knows what's going to have happened by then. And then if you come back to it in three weeks, then you'll be like,

damn, it was crazy that they still had electricity back then. I had to hand crank a thing to listen to this. Where will Ayatollah Khamenei get his Goosebumps books now? He won't. Well, reading is fundamentalist. He's laughing on the other side of his face. Khamenei has as many Goosebumps as he wants. Khamenei needs to still get them from the store to win the Scholastic Reading Championship.

Oh, fact-tracks. You fact-tracked something. That's right. door to win this galactic reading championship. Oh, fact checks. You fact check something. So what the US do is they joined the Israeli bombardment of Iran and they attacked a bunch of nuclear bases. We talked about the Israeli bombardment of Iran on the last, I believe, free episode. And they did this for reasons as well. Like again, judging them on their own merits were insane. I mean, it would have been insane to do it regardless. Right? It was based on no new Intel had come to the fore. You know, there's a really good

coverage rolling stone about this. It's just, oh yeah, it seemed like it would have been good TV, essentially. Well, the thing is, it's good TV and Trump was also impressed by Israel because he only watches Fox News and that's why he makes most of his decisions. And so he was like, oh this is playing well, right? I guess why not just sort of like join in even further, why not commit even further to the kind of omni-war, you know? And I think it's cool that if you try and express any kind of negative opinion about that war and the kind of genocide that precipitated it, then it'll be illegal to do that soon as well in this country. We're gonna get to that in just a moment. But also, just before we go further, this is an open question to all of you.

I'm not crazy in that two weeks ago, op-ed pages were full of right-thinking liberals hand-wringing about how Israel had gone too far, right? I'm not crazy to... We all remember that. No, that happened. I mean, they seemed kind of embarrassed about it, but they were saying it. Yeah. And then it turns out that the Iranian nuclear program, which was exactly as close to making a weapon as it had been for years, which is to say, not very, was two weeks away from nuking Paris.

Well, there's still a fatwa, right? Like, how many looked up from his Goosebumps book and was like, it is un-Islamic to have a nuclear weapon so you can't do that. They still haven't rescinded that, right? And like, the idea is, the Israelis had some super-secret intelligence that proved otherwise, but you can't see it and you can't ask about it. Yeah, it was in the end credits of that October 7th film that only Gal Gadot has seen. The American intelligence community, to use the kind term, also didn't believe this, right? And that's not because those aren't people who don't want to bomb Iran, right?

Those are guys who love the idea of bombing Iran, they're just also capable of one step more deductive reasoning than anyone else in the federal government right now. Look, the Israelis met the Iranian nuclear bomb on holiday, it goes to a different school, it totally happened, you have to believe. Yeah, I mean, it's just luck, really. The second it seemed like everybody was deciding, oh, you know, maybe, maybe the like, you know, 300,000th dead civilian, and that's being sort of like conservative, maybe that one was too many, and maybe, maybe, you know, this is kind of unacceptable, and we're

gonna say some kind of like toothless things about it. Just at that exact moment, setting down the Goosebumps book and going, build the nuke. It's time. All that dual use stuff I've been winning through the Scholastic Book Fair, put it together. If you collected enough vouchers, like people don't know this, right? But if you bought enough horrible histories, then you could, in fact, get some highly enriched uranium. They give you a little piece of enriched uranium each time, and as you collect it, you just

pull them together. It's a bit of a scam really. They don't give you very much, but this copy of the dangerous book for boys has surprisingly fulsome instructions about building a nuclear weapon. I like the idea of like, you know, those magazines where like every week you'd get like a little piece of like, I remember I collected one, which was like a robot and every week he sort of got a piece of like this, like this robot that you built. But then at some point midway through, like the price would just like jack up. And so it was like at that point where my parents were just like, no, this is, this costs too much. I'm

not spending like 15 quid on a magazine. Are you joking? And so, and I feel like that's sort of where the Iranian nuclear program sort of at, like at a certain point it was just like, yeah, it's too expensive to like actually build the weapons. So we've got this nuclear program that's sort of half built and Harmony is too busy reading Goosebumps books to really figure out where to... Hedvig What I love about that is that's the exact little joke that I made, but Hussein's got dad brain. Jason That's right. That's correct.

Hedvig God bless him. That's right. That's correct. The really dangerous book for boys. So look, basically, basically, right, there is that this all sort of came out at once. Also, just before you do, just to take the deductive reasoning one step further, a thing that's even more unfashionable now, this is the single thing most likely to lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon, right? Because why would you not, at this point, if you've proven that, like, maybe doing one isn't deterrence, and negotiating doesn't work, and that's an elaborate trick, and sort of like having this patience to be like, well, no, we don't think it's right, we just want the right to enrich the uranium, but we're not gonna do anything with it.

That doesn't work, you get bombed anyway. Why wouldn't you use the sort of, like, you pick the water cooler back up and you go, okay, well now we build the thing. And whether that's, you know, in like two weeks time or three months or ten years, like, it's just this gamble it seems, that you kind of, like, kill enough people now that you kind of reduce Iran to the status of like Iraq after the first Gulf War, this kind of like shambling on state instead of like, no, these people are resourceful enough that they will learn like the lesson from this, surely. Yeah, it's been said a million times, but nobody's fucking invading North Korea. Nobody's

shelling North Korea. Well, exactly. You could not send a clear message. Well, also another good example of this is Pakistan, right? Like, you know, the site, the fact that they've got like, you've had like, Israeli like former, fuck, I don't know who, like, was it maybe like, he was like an academic and former like cabinet person. You spent like one of the most recent weekends being like, yo, we got a bomb Pakistan, dude, we got a bomb Pakistan. Like, I know, I know what's going on there, but we got to bomb Pakistan. And like people just sort of responding

to him being in all of this, like you, you can only find out if you hit the translate Hebrew button, by the way. So it really depends on how much time you've got. And like there are guys like responding to him just being like, no, are you stupid? Of course we're not going to like bomb Pakistan. Are you kidding me? That's India's job. Our friends in India. Yeah. But also like the other point being that well, Pakistan has a nuclear weapon and like, I've been reading like a little bit about the development of the nuclear, of the Pakistan nuclear program and how so much of it was just done like, like, like a lot of it just through like backroom deals and like,

you know, chat, like sort of clandestine channels and everything. And it was very much a sort of awareness. It came out of this awareness of like, well, like diplomacy and these institutions and stuff are not going to protect us. And that they're very, they are farcical and that, you know, the only thing that is going to sort of be any type of, like, is it going to offer any form of protection is like a nuclear weapon, right? And it's like, I think they sort of clocked onto it very much earlier, which is like, well, you know, once we know, once we hit the cool zone and once we hit the vibe, the sort of like everything is vibes now, the only thing that is going to protect you is like a nuclear weapon. And it fucking sucks to say that obviously, but I think it is the conclusion that like

people who are sort of like the critics of comedy are sort of like now even more vocal about, but I think it is also like the lesson from this, which is, well, once these institutions that are supposed to promote diplomacy and to good diplomatic relations, all the things that Keir Starmer is saying, oh, we now have to keep doing this, even though he does not believe it at all. But I think it is just becoming more evident now that none of this meant anything. And so like build the bomb because why not? Like you've got nothing else you can, there's not really much else you can do at this point. So actually Keir Starmer's support of Trident is vindicated so that Israel doesn't bomb

us. If you want to hear a farcical statement, Starmer said, quote, Iran's nuclear program is a grave threat to international security. Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and the U S has taken action to alleviate that threat. The situation in the Middle East remains volatile, and stability in the region's a priority. We call on Iran to return to the table and reach a diplomatic solution to this crisis.

But they were there! They were at the table! You flipped it! You flipped the table! Listen, I'm sorry that my friend punched you in the face and broke your nose. However, I am calling on you to engage in a dialogue with him. And allow him to punch you in the nose several times.

Now I'm also punching you, but only to make sure that you don't punch him. Yeah. By the way, I'm going to be like, I'm putting fist oil on him. Eugh. Excuse me? That could be. No, no, no, no. Don't put fist oil on him. No, no, that's not what I mean. You know, that's not

what I mean. I just, I just, I just thought it was weird that Stama had that like a red handkerchief hanging out of a suit pocket. I'm trying to connect with members of the LGBTQ community. That's why I'm wearing this really long glove. Holborn and St. Pancras include some of Hampstead. So, but like what he's saying, you know, it's, it's, of course it's ludicrous, right? Anyone with eyes, not just, you know, and not just Iranians, not just his diplomatic interlocutors, so to speak, but also just anyone here sort of who is going to be in some way paying for this for God, for another sort of possible quagmire in the Middle East, whether that's through beyond the moral stain that this leaves on those who are responsible for it,

but the cost of high energy prices if Iran fully closes the Strait of Hormuz. By the way, very funny, as soon as Keir Starmer was like, we support what the US has done in Iran, he announced his plan to reduce energy prices for businesses. I am so... These things are not at odds at all. Never, never have anything, two things been less at odds. How about your pledge to like have the fastest growth in the G7 and to have inflation? What's going to happen if there's an energy price spike because Iran closes the trade

of hormones? Not all gas goes through there, but it's not about direct access. If there is enough gas that is restricted from enough of the market, more people are just bidding for less gas. And that drives the price up anyway. It doesn't matter if you don't get your gas or oil from the straight of foremost. Okay. But counterpoint, what if you send a bunch of children into a mine in Wales?

Open the mines. I just see what they find. You know, that could be oil down there. That could be one big vape. I don't know what there is, but I'm excited to see. And so like Marco Rubio, sort of away from the UK, back to the US for a moment, is saying, oh yeah, I called China to ask Iran to not close the Strait of Hormuz, which is what you do when you did something with a plan.

But like, I go back to also something Zahra Sultana said, right? She said a million... It's a rare disagreement actually I have with Zara Sultana. She said a million people marched against the illegal war in Iraq and they were right. Now the same script is playing out again. The same lies, the same institutions, the same push for war. There's only one thing I disagree with about that statement, which is that the same script isn't playing out again because they're not even bothering to do a script.

There is no script. Yeah, they don't think they need to. Yeah, this is like the real shame because I feel like if you're going to do a fucking war like this, at least give us, at least allow us some dignity. Where's the sexed up dossier? Try and gaslight us in a way that's entertaining. You could sort of say- Can't afford the gas, straight at home it was closed.

That's right. You can't gaslight anymore because it's too expensive. But look, you could sort of say something like, I don't know, the Iranians are planning to turn Ohio into one big mega mosque, right? And we have to stop that. Like, you could just go wild with it. Why not? Everything is like fucking vibes now and they don't, they're not even trying anymore. Yeah. Remember when we had yellow cake uranium in the UN and it was just like a piece of yellow cake? Yeah. Some of it's the same thing. Do you remember the Iranian sleeper cells? Oh, of course.

Do you remember those? Like, they're back. They're back now, apparently. They've woken up after hitting the snooze button for like, 20 years. And now, apparently, like, cause I saw this in a really perfunctory way, they're like, oh, you know, everybody's so worried in the US about these Iranian sleeper cells. And it's like... The Iranians have got these very sleepy boys. Okay. They could be anywhere.

They're asleep. No one knows where they are, but they might wake up and then they're coming to America. And in the time that they've been sleeping, they have been moving, making pensive dialogue driven movies. I've spoken to China. I say, please wake up. So ultimately right. You've learned what we've known all along, which is that there's no reason for any state to ever negotiate with the West or its allies. Iran's negotiated again and again, then negotiated every time the person negotiating with walks away. I think if you wanted to talk about the USA and developing country terms, you would say

something like weak governance institutions. This is the same for us, by the way, we're a province of this sort of large collapsing empire. You would say it's weak governance institutions. This is the same for us, by the way, we're a province of this sort of large collapsing empire. You would say it's weak governance institutions empower a radicalized rural minority that threatens global security. Because even if you make a deal with a member of the beleaguered opposition party, who's concerned with responsible management of imperial decline, whether that means, right, because it's a failure to whatever, then it doesn't matter, because this current regime's son is just going to come in and make a meme coin of him burning the paper it was written on. So it is basically irresponsible to engage with anybody in charge of that country

or its vassals in good faith. And that's if you're an ally, if you're an adversary, you just have to understand that this country is a rabid dog, because that's how it behaves. Yeah. Which is, I mean, that's how the North Koreans talk about it, and they're not wrong in this case. And you know, from a UK politics perspective, it's now my view that the only one thing that matters in the near term, in terms of, if you ever have to think, just even in terms of distributing a vote somewhere, right? You just have to, there's one question, and I think only one question that matters, which

is who is going to be the political voice in this country who will speak out against any further involvement in Iran, and along with any for speaking out against any further involvement with Israel and Gaza. That's all that matters. That's illegal now. That's illegal now. Because by doing that, you're you're lending material support to Palestine action. And so therefore, all of us are now terrorists. I hate to tell you. So just a quick segue there. This is going to be a short segment because I'm trying to find... I'm currently in the process of booking someone who's much more expert on this than any of us. But just to note, especially for American listeners, I think British listeners

are probably au fait with this already, that Palestine Action, a direct action group that has been disrupting Elbit arms Manufacturing. We now have to be quite careful talking about them. And then has... Yeah, I guess so. And has also disrupted some RAF flights to refuel planes flying over Gaza. Yeah. They put some paint on some planes that were implicated in the refueling missions that have been going on for some time. I believe

documented them actually helping to refuel Israeli planes while they were bombing Iran. So this has led to this group likely being prescribed as a terrorist organization, which in this country, you remember we talked about this similarly with the rap group kneecap, where expression of support for a prescribed group carries a 15 year jail term, right? So I guess Palestine Action won't be playing in Glastonbury. This is of course, by the way, Kirsten. Is the intended idea, yes. And I mean, to be clear, if we're looking at prescribed groups and if we're looking at enforcement of laws around which groups are prescribed, Britain first, not a prescribed group, despite a guy screaming their name while he murdered an

MP. That could have been any group. As far as I remember, the EDL are not a prescribed group, but conversely in Northern Ireland, there are a lot of like, like, loyalist paramilitary organizations, which are prescribed organizations, but which regularly hold like, parades and stuff, and are more or less kind of an open secret. And, you know, nobody's getting like like, holed into court over those. So... Well, no terrorist would have a parade.

Yeah. Have you ever seen a terrorist play a brass instrument? Come on. Yeah. I would have loved a fucking Al-Qaeda parade. Like, you know, like, tin whistle going down the streets of New York, little bit of drum, maybe a black sash. That's so fun! That could be fun. But yeah, so, all of this is to say that this is incredibly selective, obviously, but also that this is a dramatic curtailing of free speech, along lines that were already drawn

and have been drawn for a long time, right? It's your thing, Riley, of the wire getting smaller. To put this in a little bit more of current context as well is that it hasn't been talked about much because of fucking everything else that's happening. But the Labour government does currently have a crime and policing bill, which I do find funny because it's just kind of swapping the words of the Tory bill that we've already dealt with around. But they've got the crime and policing bill currently going through parliament, which among a raft of just really deeply unpleasant draconian stuff that they've put in there, you know,

beefing up policing around shoplifting and things. It also bans the deliberate use of face coverings during a protest, bans what they call pyrotechnics at protests, which I'm guessing is targeting the kind of the powder red flares that get let off at Palestine protests. You can't put a flare up your arse anymore because of what? Bloody Anne British? Criminalises, claiming of specified war and other memorials of national significance. So this is stuff I've looked up and it also comes in the context of the prosecutions against pro-Palestine activists already in South Wales. We've got a case ongoing with a 26-year-old young woman

called Koubina Devanish. She was prosecuted for making a speech that invited support for Hamas. I believe it was something to do with her saying that the current conflict to scare quotes predated October 7th. And that was enough for her to be held to court on terrorist charges. That court case is ongoing now. So this is, yeah, it's part of a wider avalanche. Yeah, and not a huge amount of daylight between the British government here and the Trump

administration, you know, whether they're arresting Mahmood Khalil. Yeah, again, 26 year old anti-racism company. She's well known in the city. She's just a very beloved young woman who's been active in sort of anti-racism protests and feminist campaigning and yeah, just raided her house. Anyway, carry on. And I think the other thing to remember, right, is that this is a group that is, this group is the first one to be prescribed, as far as I know, for purely property damage. Yeah. And I mean, you had the usual kind of run of columnists being like, well, I think if

you trespass on an RAF base, you should be shot. And how this is reflective of this kind of woke infection of our armed forces. It's like, two things happening here. One is that the armed forces are broke, right? Even irrespective of getting like billions more in the strategic defense review, even still, not a lot of money to go around because of previous cuts and austerity. But also, the security at Bries Norton is outsourced to Serco. Um...

Korseres. Arm Serco. Well, so this is the thing, in order to cut through the fence and get on a little UberEats delivery scooter and go and destroy a Jess engine, right, you don't have to get past some imagined woke RAF regiment guy or whatever, you have to get past this same underpaid Circo guy who's guarding everything else important in this country. And yeah, so I guess, I don't know what you do about that if you don't want to invest in a thing, I guess you maybe ruin the lives of some actionists and then also maybe publicly execute the Serco

guy with an anti-aircraft gun, like in North Korea. We need Robocop. So look, this is something I'd like to come back to. I'm currently bombarding the Liberty Press Office with emails so we can talk to an actual lawyer about this. On the episode, not consulting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I will say technically is there's been a lot of an attempt to muddy the waters here and say that it is now illegal, as of 23rd of June 2025, to express support or gather

in support, and it isn't, right? Nothing has legally happened yet. What has happened is that the Home Secretary has said, I am going to introduce legislation to prescribe Palestine action, which then has to go through Parliament. That'll probably go to Parliament on the 30th, and then, you know, we'll see what happens there. Whether Parliament has any interest in civil rights, it doesn't, but like, whether it theoretically does. But until that point, there is no legal force to any of this. What there is is a lot of practical force, as you saw with Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Met Police, because there was a demonstration, today in fact,

I believe, against this, and the announcement came out, like, through the Met police, because there was a demonstration, today in fact, I believe, against this, and the announcement came out, like, through the Met, but from him, saying essentially like, I'm shocked and appalled because this is a group that is in the process of being prescribed, and while we don't have any kind of legal basis to ban this demonstration, we are going to ban it from any kind of relevant areas of central London, and we're going to heavily imply we're going to kick the shit out of everyone, right? And that's not a kind of, like, legal rationale, right? If the Home Secretary has said she's thinking about prescribing it is enough to ban a demonstration, then you don't really have even a formality of rule of law, right? And so

you end up with this kind of gray zone shit, like the concept, not like the website. Where it's just like, okay, so we can essentially say whatever Yvette Cooper doesn't like enough to just sort of like point the finger of suspicion at, now becomes practically kind of illegal to support, if not directly yet. Remember when she tried to propose prescribing the Iranian military last year? This is the thing about the Labour party, right? The Labour right love using the levers of power more than Tories do. There's still some kind of, like not that Tories aren't authoritarian, they're extremely authoritarian, but there's some kind of like vestigial, like insect hindbrain thing going

on there where they're like It's the same as the ID cards, it's that blatant nostalgia, they're just addicted to the terrorist act The real problem is that the Labour right loves governing that's the issue, they're no good ass but they do love it, they're crazy about it The Tories hate governing they just want to like drink port and knock off their secret. Yeah. The Labour right, they fucking love governing and it's to all of our detriment. I am working on getting a more full discussion of UK terrorism legislation in the near future.

So watch out for that. Yeah. If you want to take the kind of maximally safe thing to say now, I think the answer is that like on a kind of legal level, this is fucking terrifying and you should be terrified by this, right? It's just another in a long list of examples that you don't really have a lot of rights in this country, and free speech among the least of them. Good stuff.

That's it. Keep doing stuff. If we wanna talk about rights, you, uh, and don't worry. A jarring shift in tone the other way is coming after this. Uh, but I'm afraid the tone is staying this way for one more, uh, then jarring shift in tone, but jarring cause it's going to be like more, uh, odd and unpleasant. There's suddenly jarring shifts in tone around here. So Becca, I want to, I want to move on. Uh, but you recently, um,

performed some investigative journalism for the lead. A piece we'll link in the show notes. You were writing about this thing I think not a lot of people know about, which is that under the Mental Health Act, people experiencing severe mental illness in England and Wales can be imprisoned as a quote, place of safety for them, which I feel what happened is someone drafting that law looked at Foucault as kind of an instruction manual. Everything resembles the prison. Yeah. So the long and short of this, would it surprise you to know we are in a mental health crisis at the moment?

I hadn't noticed. We certainly are on this podcast. I'm going to start with a really cheery thing and I really do apologize. I am also still thinking about you performed some investigative journalism as kind of a sentence construction. That's really good to me. Well, it's like Judith Butler says, you aren't an investigative journalist. You just perform investigative journalism. Yeah. Yeah. When is not born, one becomes an investigative journalist. That's right. But to talk about John Chifton, I'm about to tell you that the suicide rate in talk about giant shift and all I'm about to tell you that the suicide rate in the UK is presently it is highest since 1999 for women that's the highest since 1994. Police detentions under the

Mental Health Act have sharply increased since austerity came in a rise of 44-45 percent between 2016 and 2022 and obviously neither England or Wales' health systems are equipped to cope with it. At the same time as this, we've got two provisions in law that allow people to be imprisoned on mental health grounds alone. We've got the Mental Health Act, which is as you said Riley, when people are experiencing severe mental illness and there is no available beds at their local mental health unit, they can be sent to prison or police station as a place of safety. Alongside this is schedule one of the bail act and in some ways a little bit more insidious this one. It allows people who are arrested during a mental health crisis to be

denied bail and imprisoned for their own protection even if the crime they're accused of wouldn't normally result in a prison sentence. Children can be imprisoned for their own welfare under this same law. An example of, of where this, this can, can come up is someone attempting suicide trespasses on railway lines to make that attempt. They're arrested for the trespass and then they get denied bail and kept in prison because it's reasoned that not imprisoning them would cause concerns for their well-being. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

I have no special expertise in this, but I do have this feeling, and perhaps you could sort of advise me on this, that if any of this shit happened to me, it would make my mental health infinity times worse. Yeah! Just a little bit. You might lose where you live in, you might lose any income you have, you might go through the harrowing process of going before court during a mental health crisis and then finding yourself in prison without really understanding any of what got you there in the first place.

Pretty bad, pretty bad. So yeah, the UK government, so this issue has kind of been going around a little while. It's kind of since 2018, there was a review of these laws and it's kind of been batted around various governments. All of the various prime ministers we've had, all of the various justice ministers have kind of taken it up and then delayed it and delayed it. And then finally, our previous government under Johnson and Sunak and whoever else had drafted a bill to repeal these parts of the law that allow prison and police stations to be used as a place of safety. And Labour has kind of picked it up largely without altering it.

That bill is currently at committee stage in the House of Commons. It's already gone through the Lord and the committee stage is expected to conclude and report by the 26th of June. Oh, so no rush then? No rush, no rush. It's only taken the better part of a decade to even think about this. Genuinely forgot that Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister for a minute there. I had to take a second. You notice I started with Boris Johnson and that's not because I remembered any of the

others. Yeah. Ending up in prison because I failed to correctly answer her who's the prime minister question in hospital. And people always forget Liz Trust, you know, the Lady Jane Grey of British politics. Look, maybe if she'd had 45 days, she could have gotten this done sooner. Yeah. Imprisoning Liz Trust for her own good. She was one day away, one day away from passing the don't

imprison people for having mental health crisis. Getting kicked out of HMP Wandsworth after two nights for soiling all the bathrooms. Sorry, all the other prisoners mistrust say they are trapped in here with you and have requested that you be released. So this has been something that's been happening forever. And like so many things, it is a grinding problem that has gotten worse because services that people don't consider to be important to fund get less and less and less funding. They go on to councils that can't possibly fund them, devolved administrations that can't possibly fund them. They're overlapping crises with other things, right? Like for example, let's say you had

mental health issues that qualified you for PIP as of now, but then when the rules change, you would unqualify that would make you more possibly more likely to have a like break. And by the way, you don't have a council house, you don't live anywhere. So like you're more likely to accidentally commit some minor crime while having a mental health issue. You can see how all of this would just basically is a giant funnel leading to jail. Yeah, yeah. That's the really important thing that I'm really glad that you have kind of zeroed in on because none of this is happening in a vacuum. The bill itself, there's a lot of weaknesses in it. The repeal of prisoners and places of safety is, I guess, a positive

in itself. However, nothing about the context in which it's arising makes anyone, and that's people that I've spoken to in the kind of service provision side, you know, mental health charities, people who've been through the system themselves, nobody feels like any of this is a serious effort to improve the lives of people experiencing severe mental illness. And on the contrary, the government appears to be not just deprioritizing mental health care but also kind of just setting a target on people who do experience mental ill health and that's with the cuts and the the cuts that they're planning will kind of have a very pointed

effect on people with severe mental ill health. Specifically the Green Paper proposes requiring people to score at least four points in a single category and in the PIP assessment for people who aren't familiar PIP when you're applying for it you've got to kind of list off all of these things all of these ways in which your disability impacts on your everyday life and it's separated into different categories. People with mental ill health are not likely to score four points in a single category because their conditions and their needs fall across multiple categories. It varies from day to day. And all of the stuff that they've put up before making these cuts, before proposing these cuts, very much talk about, you know, they use rhetoric like our

sick society, the bulging benefits bill, talking about economic inactivity, all of it is centered on this idea that there are too many people saying that they have mental ill health and we need to make it harder for people to get support if that's what it is that they're experiencing. It also comes in the context of, again, the crime and police and bail, which alongside all the protest stuff I mentioned, further criminalizes shotlifting. They've sort of... They've stopped... The exploding bombs that have been strapped to every single, like, shot...

Every single supermarket outdoor wasn't enough. The IEDs weren't enough. The flash bangs weren't enough. The drones weren't enough. It's like, no, no, no, we need more. Yeah. I just, the idea of further criminalizing shoplifting is very funny to me. Is it something which has always been a crime? But also is the crime that like, it varies purely on the basis of

how much money people have. And there's not really any other factor that like affects the rate of shoplifting, but they're just like, well, maybe if we brought in the bloody code back. It's finally time to prescribe shoplifters. What if they could be like, okay, we have not been able to remove like professional shoplifting groups. So instead what we're going to do is prescribe, as you say, November, prescribe all of them as terrorist organizations so that if you, if you wear a shirt that says like meat stealela, then you're going to go to prison.

I'd love that shirt. Meet Stela. Money is scar band. The thing that they're really upset about supermarkets and the government alike are that I think about a decade ago, it was decided that shoplifting offenses, if they concerned thefts that amounted to a value less than 200 quid, they would be devoted away from court. And while this legislation is like, actually no, we're sending people who steal stuff worth less than that straight to court. And again, it's horrendous. They're also, they're saying they're getting rid of the Vagrancy Act, which is a very old law in the books that criminalizes begging and sleeping rough.

It's like 1879 or something like that. It's like the oldest statute that police are most likely to still arrest people under. Yeah, it dates back to the Napoleonic Wars. And they're saying they're getting rid of it, but they're just replacing it with this new bill, with just another set that they call it, they're targeting nuisance begging and nuisance sort of rough sleeping. So you take all of this, the cuts, this bill and sort of set it again and also just the woeful spending commitments for mental health care. Again, the most that they've pledged is they've said talked about making talking therapies more available. They've talked about putting

sort of mental health counselors in schools and that they're going to hire eight and a half thousand new NHS staff for mental health. They've never detailed like what roles they'll be recruiting for, how this stuff will be kind of distributed. So it's just... It probably won't even be the NHS. What you'll get is you shoplift something and what happens is the street that you're on experiences like a double tap drone strike where the first missile kills you and everyone around you

and the second one just showers a bunch of better help leaflets. Yeah, basically. What comes back around with this with the mental health act as well, right, is that even if prison's not a place of safety, if you, you know, shoplift and then the cops are like, are you feeling anxious right now? You're like, yes, yes, fine. Then, you know, you think, okay, we have reason to believe that you have anxiety, which is a mental health issue and can act accordingly. Yeah. Is criminalization a kind of like anxiety, like an anxiety causing experience? I think so. I mean, there are so many more ways in which the carceral state of sleep seeping

into mental health care. It's like, there are so many more ways in which the carceral state is seeping into mental health care. It's like, there's so many more ways in which the Marianas trench is full of ocean. But you know, what I learned about from your article that was I found jaw dropping was serenity integrated monitoring, which is not what it sounds like. It's just like, Hey, we have a cost saving innovation where the NHS works with police who identify people who overuse medical services. And then basically the police go and are like, it's illegal for you to call 999 and get it. It doesn't matter if you think you're about to hurt yourself. And perfectly, this was a private scheme sold to the NHS and to public authorities by a private consultancy run by a former police

officer. So it really is kind of Britain in a nutshell. But yeah, as you say, they would work with police to identify what they called high intensity users, you know, people who would, you know, call 999, you know, talking about how they felt that their life was in danger from the mental health and things. And they were staff at mental health facilities, A&E staff and things like that, were told to do things like withhold care. They were instructed to take a cold manner with people because they reasoned that it would incentivize people not to want to return there. Correctly identifying that someone in a great deal of stress might want to talk to someone, turning that into a point at which you can beat that person with a stick. It's really heroin.

And NHS England has kind of advised against using it now. They say that they've dropped this but again, I've talked to a lot of people who work in the mental health sector and there's just no real way to know that it is actually gone because all of these like private schemes with these private consultancies come in, they can give themselves any kind of name, but they can kind of work in the same way. It's yeah, it's really grim. It is a, it's like anytime someone says, if you're talking to someone, I don't know who you might be talking to and they say, oh yeah, well like, look, labor is solving these problems the mental health act with their reforms. You'd be like, look, labor is solving these problems, the mental health act

with their reforms. You'd be like, no, they're not. No, they're fucking not. They're making one important change that the Tories were going to do anyway. And everything else is being kept largely the same or worse. And also, as I'm sure you might have noticed in the piece, it is also that no, nobody suffering with mental health should be going to prison. It's not an appropriate place for people. But also, if you are not then, if you're taking that off the books, you're saying you're not going to send people to prison for this anymore, but you're also not doing anything to fund and repay mental health services, then what does that look like? It sounds progressive, but are you just actually just kind of cutting someone loose and just kind of

washing your hands of them altogether? And I think that was very much the case with one of the main families I spoke to for the piece, Lucy, a young trans woman and she ended up repeatedly being put in a men's prison. But her dad, again, very supportive of her transition, considered himself a very left-wing progressive guy. He's politically active and abolitionist and stuff. But he was relieved that she was in prison, because so often, they would just turn her away, and just

he wouldn't know where she was. She was, yeah, it's a very, very bleak state of affairs. And, you know, Scout, one of the other main people I spoke to, she told me that in some way she preferred prison because at least with prison you couldn't be discharged out of nowhere because you didn't seem unwell enough, which is something that happens routinely with people is that these services are so stretched that the moment that they can find an excuse to get rid of you, they will. And you just end up in this thing where you're on the street, you get in sections, you're taken to the hospital, you're turned away and it goes on and on and on

and on and you get worse and worse and worse. And there's no outcome except crisis. I'm very sorry. This is very depressing. Well, look, remember the name of the show. Ultimately, right, this is a large part of a don't worry, jarring change in tone coming in seconds. But this is a part of a larger pattern of just, you know, the every successive government for the last several decades just being like, let's go back to Victorian. Let's make it more Victorian. But look, I want to do a jarring shift in tone. I'm aware we've run a little long, but I think we all deserve a jarring shift in tone, which is a little bit more journalism. This is journalism about journalism. You shared this with me, Beckett. I thought it was very odd.

Yes. Now, The National, the Welsh news outlet was launched after COVID. It closed in 2022 because it struggled to gain traction, partly because of the low commitment, low funding model of journalism. It only been the brainchild of a big consortium like NewsQuest. That's fine. However, towards the end of 2023, a man named Harry Jazz appeared to have resuscitated the national. Excuse me?

Thank you. Harry Jazz. The inventor of jazz? Yes, well, the guy who moved jazz on from its bald period. So, Becca, who is Harry Jazz? Well, when he got in touch with me, he had a different name. He had a different name and he was a very polite and earnest gentleman from Pakistan. His name was Emna D.A.K. He got in touch with me and asked me if I would, it was not too long after I was made redundant

and got in touch with me asking if I would like to start writing for a national Welsh news service again. I was very confused. He told me he'd bought the domain because my former employer, perfect summation of the entire enterprise, didn't bother to keep the domain or any of the work contained therein open.

So after a certain amount of time, the website completely disappeared off the internet, along So after a certain amount of time, the website completely disappeared off the internet, along with most of my body of work, which was really good for me to just be kind of applying for jobs and going, please God, trust me. I did do work. The better health leaflet floating down. It's just like, sometimes it's good to have a fresh start. Yeah. Becca, if you found that stressful, have you considered going to prison?

Mmm. Yeah. A retreat. Do a lot of reading in there Evelyn. Yeah, some of them have magazines. Yeah, I know what it is. Yeah, some of them have magazines. Maybe they heard that caller from LBC who was like, prisons are like holiday camps nowadays

and they were like, oh thank God, there's something we can use. Anyway, no. I'm going to get huge in prison. So basically, you got yet contacted by Harry Jazz, who's just like, hey, I'm getting the team back together from here in Pakistan. I'm very, very passionate about Wales, first of all. Very passionate. I'm going to rebuild the national.

The Pakistan of the UK. Many are saying. That's why it has nuclear weapons. We could get invaded again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're saying, we're going to rebuild the national as a truly independent Welsh-led community-focused news platform.

Becca, will you join me, Harry Jazz, in making this happen? Yeah, and I ask him, huh? Just like stifling fingers. What? I'm under what? Excuse me, Mr. Mr. Jazz, this is maybe more about the offers you don't make. Yeah. And I and I asked him what exactly it was he was asking,

because it wasn't entirely clear. I didn't know whether he was asking for my permission to sort of republish my existing work on on the domain or whatever. And he he gets back to me and he explains about his passion for Wales and about how he's, you know, resurrecting local good Welsh grassroots journalism, etc, etc, etc. I then click the little trash can on my email and I just kind of think, oh, well, that was strange and I forget about it. And then I get another email and then I get another email and then I get another email

and then I get another email and he is he's very determined. He desperately wants me on board. Eventually he gives up and I sort of I'm losing track of the time that the part since since like 2020 the years have all melded into me but a certain amount of time passed and then suddenly a Wales online journalist gets in touch and asks me if I know that the National Wales is back online and that some of my work has appeared the promotional images and kind of social media posts advertising itself the National Wales 2.0. Yeah, well, they announced it as it says here, the site has started a page on X the everything app where it announced itself with an AI generated video of a TV screen flickering the worlds.

We're back soundtrack by a sinister science fiction. I have enough kind of sinister local journalism. And my experience. Wales is back and this time it's evil. Yeah. Finally. Hashtag dark. They found something in the mine. Dark whales.

Pretty cool. Maybe there's like a greater demon of corn down there. So basically, basically what it appears is what happened here is that Harry Jazz bought the domain name for the old Welsh local newspaper, which was just allowed to lapse by the like shoddy asset manager that owned it. And then used a chat bot to just start churning out articles about whales but that aren't real saying for example that the Kadoxton River has quote secured a place in global consciousness. And it has! You tell me it hasn't. Well here's the thing.

That was any true thing. Yeah the great collective unconscious of all the humanity of the world centers on the Caddoxton River. This sewage-filled river. As you said, he does this, he buys the domain, he sort of begins to try to sort of create something that looks vaguely like a Welsh newspaper. It seems as though what he was actually trying to do was to make a convincing enough fake Welsh newspaper that he could sell ads and trick people into reading the wrong local Welsh news so that someone in like Glamorgan would be like, oh, apparently our river has got a place in the global consciousness. Let's click on this ad for Bluetooth. And the thing that I said to Wills Online where they didn't print it was to me, how different are the projects of Harry

Jazz and NewsQuest from each other? Honestly, truly. You know, someone sat in Pakistan or in the case of NewsQuest, someone sat in, I can't remember where they're headquartered, maybe New York, but someone sat the other side of the world being like, I think it might be a profitable venture to set up a national Welsh newspaper. We could probably sell a lot of ads off the back of that. Identical mission statements, I think. Yes, Harry Jazz did kind of do a mixture of sort of AI-generating really strange sort of explainer pieces and kind of just wholesale copy and paste and stuff that was, that used

to be on the national and current news articles that are going on. But from my experience working at the actual national, the priorities, not very different. Not very different. And, you know, wanting you to write up to seven stories a day because that seems like a good target and the more stories and the more pages you have on the site, the more ads they can sell. Yeah, yeah. Not, not, the more ads they can sell. Yeah. Yeah. Not a huge amount of difference to me, particularly because NewsQuest also is constantly advertising

for AI assisted journalists. Yeah. You'd think with Harry Jazz it would be about the anti-don't post. He's so, he's so bent on misleading the Welsh public. He's becoming Wales's answer to the riddler, the Rildler. I just, I wanted to include that largely because I like the name Harry Jazz, Becca. I think you're basically right that these two barely a cigarette paper between those two companies. Yeah, you can just kind of hijack a poorly secured sort of like rent into the newspaper

and be like, what if, what if I just filled this with slop? I think that's probably about all the time we have for today. So, Becca, once again, thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing, let's just say the articles both harrowing and fun. Thank you for having me. And I'm sorry. It is literally always a delight. As well, I want to thank you for listening to this show. Remind you that there's a Patreon, but also remind you that Becca's article is findable on the lead. As well, by the time this comes out, shirt orders will have ceased.

You will not be able to get more shirts. You just have to wait for the Cardiff Mai Tai shirt. Yeah, yeah. Yes, God, yes. Okay, well, I've forgotten it already, so it's so important that you keep reminding me about it. And if you're in London tonight, if you're listening to this day, it comes out. I'm doing a work in progress, so there's still a couple of tickets available.

I'm also doing work in progress in Berlin, 18th of July, Newcastle, 30th of July, and Edinburgh, 31st of July to the 4th of August. So get after those. Thank you. All right, all right. That's it, we've run long. Bye everyone. See you in the bonus.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. you