TRASHFUTURE - Investigative Reports

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

The Forde Report is out and has landed with all the impact of a feather in the febrile British media space. We discuss being right, what’s wrong, and what else. But first, we look at a new podcast that is teaching England’s prisoners about how to hustle a brand. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Welcome to this episode of TF Milo is the free one you can see here Milo is back you can see listeners but I can fucking not my eyes are so bad today oh my god the conjunctivitis is back what I don't think the listeners even knew it was there now they know I went on holiday and my conjunctivitis came back while I was still on the conjunctivitis medication folks you love to see it or not see it in my case well let's everybody get our prayers up for Milo and his fabulous eyes fresh future the podcast that on average cannot see good yeah that's right it is also of course Riley Alice and Hussein who have been here the whole time not swanning about on holiday at what I can only assume is butlands blackpool that's right yeah um I was I was at

butlands newcastle on the line um yeah seeing a little pop show never should have smoked that shit now I'm at the butlands in Ulaanbaatar that's right the butlands in Ulaanbaatar is actually a great place to go out yeah absolutely well it's it's it's well Heidi High means something very rude in Mogulia it became quite disconnected from the broader butlands chain and now it's sort of quite it's quite adult I would say well now it's now it's a pontons the only center parks I can afford to go to is the one in Oost Kaminagorsk Kazakhstan um so hi hi everyone look we had a lot of stuff to talk about last week uh and we know what we didn't get to talk about we didn't get to talk about what we did to beat the heat oh beat the heat for years for years I've done that

while I was on hold I was actually had to explain this to a friend who was like what because they said something about beating the heat and I went oh beat the heat and they were like yeah that's what I said exactly you may be wondering are we going to talk about the release of the Ford report yes we are but we're going to talk about some other stuff first yeah most notably the fact that all of our brains have been baked broiled uh under under the new the climate the climate is happening yeah that's right what I think like look it's it's very easy to say uh that this is another example of um Alice at least something you said which is that the future is just cell phone videos of uh extreme weather events and eventually you're the one taking the video yeah but the most

recent one of those I saw was in Dagenham and Dagenham's miles away so I'm fine I'm not worried about it um yeah and I think it's it's easy also to note that uh and especially in the context of the Tory leadership election uh obviously none of them are going to do anything about this obviously it's going to get worse before it gets better well wish you wish you'd like sending everyone little bottles of SPF 30 that's right that was so fun and and the extent okay for American listeners it's common for like you know how if you're a real nerd you'd get your teacher like a little like a little snack or whatever to like on teacher's day or what have you um well this yeah exactly well this happens in the lobby journalists where people running for

party leader are supposed to like give a little box of treats to lobby journalists we are a nation of treat boys and treat girls that's the thing um yeah so rooms also that treat also that but so the first the first day of the heat wave even though it didn't get as hot up here uh I I had uh quite a bad panic attack because I was like oh it's not gonna get better which is the one thing that I want the only question is like how well we cope with it getting worse and the answer probably is not well um but then but then sort of after a while you know you can't stay anxious forever eventually one or another of your brain's defense mechanisms kicks in and so what it was for me was I just chose to adopt the way of the boomer I became a big cry laugh emoji I was like yeah

it's a beautiful day it's summer summer supposed to be like this it was hotter in 1976 probably haven't checked uh and everything's gonna be fine stop worrying wokes no flakes what what I did was I just made the minecraft fall damage noise uh every couple seconds if I was outside like hey you were you taking damage just by being outside you're losing hp because I I specced into Canadian uh and it's really it's really it's very expensive to respect I've been trying yeah you put all your points into like civility which is actually pretty much useless now and then you're going to the nationality reassignment clearly what I found most what I think of yourself as a Canadian when you masturbate what what I when I um what I found most I mean look so I don't

want to just sort of rehash all the table stakes about like the increasing stream weather our inability to our the inability of our infrastructure to cope with it and the unwillingness of anyone to recognize that this is going to take a huge effort of adaptation at least because yeah I want to be an hour of screaming which we want to talk about and and yeah maybe a new patreon tier hour of screaming but what I want to do is I just want to talk about the completely insane way I saw the news covering it which is as though the heat wave was being was perpetrated by OJ Simpson in the 1990s there would be like there was I have a screen cap in front of me of a woman holding a giant thermometer and then picture in picture there is a camera pointed

directly at the sun like this is the culprit here he's he's orbiting around the earth somehow what's funnier about that is the woman holding the giant thermometer like that to me is more comedy british tv of just being like you may be unfamiliar with the concept of heat I've brought this primitive device with me which demonstrates how it works of course I meant I meant that we are rotating around the culprit of course is what I meant ahead of it happening the the tone of the news was it's going to be a scorcher this is going to be great and then the second it actually hit everyone was too hot to buy a newspaper that said that anymore it's it was so like the image itself was very funny because to me it reminded me of like these very funny flat earth or images

where they used to take like levels on planes to prove that the world was yeah and that was very funny and then the second part I would I would kind of say that it wasn't the case that like it was hot and people were like oh shit like it's actually hot you know we can't necessarily just like bake and have an ice cream because actually it's too hot to function as a human being in this temperature it started off with like lots of news people sort of being in denial about the whole thing they were like oh yeah you know it's like really hot but it's not quite 40 yet and then as the day kind of went on and you had like trains not working and just like everything sort of like falling apart which sort of culminated with like a record number of fires including a

fire that was like near like my house um like I think towards the end it was like that sort of tone then dissipated for the most part so it was very much like this case of like denying that this was a problem until literally everything was on fire we found the thing we found the threshold that allows us to treat this as an emergency and it is you are currently on fire well I mean the thing is and this is this is just a little bit just a little bit of again I'm asking you to do the thing that we sometimes do and we will do later on in the show where I'm asking you to remember even the recent past when any climate activists that went on any kind of public forum was uh sort of the main thing that they would they would receive isn't even the like

the thing and don't look up where they were like oh yeah well you know that's a bit that's a bit harsh instead they would receive um accusations of hypocrisy yeah especially on like you get a call-in show and someone who would like glued themselves to a train or whatever would be subjected to an hour of phone calls from people who you know didn't use that train but might have wanted to and were very concerned about this yeah or even just people advocating for like more I remember people advocating for more insulated homes this sticks in my brain like well is your home insulated and he was like well I'm a renter and they were like well have you asked your landlord to do it because until you get your landlord to do it I'm gonna think that you're a hypocrite and that you're

just one attention so just remember remember how dismissive everybody has been up until the very moment that all of a sudden it felt dangerous to them nobody told me it was gonna get off well well for me like it was almost like there was like almost some poetry in it in the sense that like the Range Rover mum I didn't know if any of you guys remember her of course Range Rover mum all of our wife who like that whole incident happened just out just just outside like the Dartford tunnel and about like a mile away from where that happened was where like the Heath fighters like took place where I think you had like at least two homes at least according to the Kent Messenger but just completely just got destroyed like without you know just like they're all is

kind of just like crumbling ashes now you had like those those viral videos of the Heath on fire on like VM 25 like leading to that road so like basically around that around about in the in the same place where like the Range Rover mum stuff happened was also the site of like one of the worst fires of this week not whether that's been picked up anywhere like I went back on the Kent Messenger website this morning to see whether there had been any like follow-up and the leading story was really just pictures of people like enjoying the hot weather yesterday and a story about a guy who sold a record number of ice creams from his van so amazing not even an ice cream man just a guy I like to imagine that the Kent Messenger is also just a really overworked guy who's just every

every day several times a day bursting breathless into the same house going it's on fire you go you go and tell him on a podcast this is fucked because you used to have to get your Kent news door to door and also I mean this is this is another little bit as well in the legitimate politics part of the show as well which is that if we think about this well they're the massive sort of issues with like you know as we say train cancellations infrastructural and safety the people whose job it is to try to make all these things work right these are the people whose jobs are supposed to be cut casualized devalued de skilled etc etc and and what I'm of course talking about like not just rail workers but you know ferry workers things of that nature

ferries have got to keep doing donuts otherwise then the doctors can't do their job and then we're really fucked oh yeah this is an old lady who swallowed a fly situation basically but that all of these people right in in this very moment where there is a let's say step change in the need for infrastructural resilience the government has now just repealed like the last big law defending trade unions which is that it's a criminal offense to like higher agency workers well they've repealed that in order to keep our great infrastructure going yeah scabbing scabbing with like unqualified agency temps is now legal which is great I look forward to all of the trains running directly into each other and somehow sinking a ferry also so at

so at a time when if anything keeping the infrastructure you might say steady functional where maintenance is going to be much much more important much much more high stakes in terms of do I make it off this train for example the government has decided that what they're going to do is they're going to allow someone yeah to allow someone who like read a power point about train track maintenance to just have a go this guy are you saying that this man isn't qualified to fix a train he sold the most ice creams he's ever sold last week he's got 10 years of experience is the kent messenger okay now if that guy paired up with an ice cream delivery business he'd probably make more money he's got to visit a lot of homes anyway to tell everyone in kent what's going on

in kent all day exactly and then people would like the new they'd be less likely to shoot that's for sure we're getting dangerously close to reinventing the movie the postman no one has ever needed to come up with the phrase don't shoot the ice cream man because no one would shoot the ice cream man he's just brought you an ice cream now the messenger however people are rightly suspicious of yeah I see your truck yeah the messenger never brings treats so yeah what's your brand name wing sandals for is he nonce that's right um the oh the other other thing um I wanted to sort of ask you to say please in that voice Milo is to ask the question uh do you have a license for that heat dome do you have a license

for the heat dome ah thank you yes uh yeah yeah put up a heat dome over europe didn't get planning for it council's going to make you take it down oh you've had some right cowboys in here the work on this don't what is that is that is that pebble dash now you never get that off no they would like they would never bring up the heat dome because the heat dome implies the existence of a hot boy and uh can't have that click on the heat dome and going that's going to need re-screeding uh look I'm going to move we're moving on from the um from the goings on of the week but uh I do think that the two sort of most important things in terms of like the future of is this going to be a decent place to live uh seems to be uh are we able to it's a decent

place to live is this going to be a habitable place to live yeah oh okay yeah wait Britain's a habitable place is this going to be a doesn't immediately melt you into the concrete place to live oh I see I keep I keep I keep like selling it slightly low right and eventually I'll get to I'll get something yeah that's what I mean decent what's good for the ice cream man is good for the country yeah so look yeah Britain 2050 it's one ice cream man wandering around in like a climate controlled spacesuit above and like in the blasted wastes um and look the the the real to the no more ice creams to sell yeah because he was everyone's already bought an ice cream I've sold an ice cream to everyone in the country the ice cream men weeping because

there were no more ice creams to sell you're just describing a man who has sold all the ice cream that he has it's pretty common no no because you can resupply on ice cream it's much funnier to be like there's no more demand for ice cream everyone is sated with ice cream yeah yeah of course um yeah we we've genetically engineered the perfect ice cream man and that's how we're responding to the climate crisis we can rebuild him we have the technology yeah we we can make mr whippy the real guy dollar ice cream hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on okay oh by the way what i'm about to say is copyright you can't patent make it patent pending patent pending uh dark mr whippy movie about just called whippy yeah just called whippy and it's about his origin

in margaret thatcher's lab yeah exactly and yeah and then and then uh okay whippy origin in margaret thatcher's lab uh he hates but then comes to respect his mother and then check this out it's like a version of the postman but for delivering ice cream timothy shallowe as the flight they call it they call it soft serve but why is it so hard perfect all right okay copyright section over you can copy the rest of any not that bit uh anything else from the show you see timothy shallowe as margaret thatcher okay copyright that as well we're keeping all of that um no no no so it's called whippy boy and you'll learn to sell it uh yeah interestingly mylo is now of actually somehow leading the conservative uh leadership race having done that perfect margaret

thatcher i'm so annoyed and depressed that pennie morden has been has lost the conservative leadership election that's that was a real blow to me on top of alice alice it's made your life a lot easier yeah that's true that's true it hasn't like imperiled my politics no because it pet because if she had become if she had gotten to become the conservative leader in p.m um alice could start every section if i can fix her that's true that's true yeah now there's nothing to fix no we've gone from pennie morden to being a hipney more daunted by the prospect of liz truss's prime minister six months ago we had hope jobs and pennie morden and now in 2022 got no hope no jobs and no milf p.m terrible yeah and no more dint of the effort by which i will support pennie morden uh no i was

doing a little bit of a summing up before going to the next section which is that the only things that really matter are the extent to which this is going to be a place you are able to live and uh the the forces sort of work working on that are um uh the climate via human caused climate change and the inability to even adapt to it as opposed to uh to prevent it uh and then the the question of are are are you as a worker or you as a consumer of a service provided by a worker going to be able to say live get around feed yourself be healed be represented in court for example uh by uh anyone who's trying to make things work in this increasingly difficult environment and the direct political answer that the tories have given to the second question as well as the first

one is uh no how about a guy who uh did a zoom session um so that is just fantastic and again we're going to talk especially the stuff we're talking about later is a little bit of history uh media studies and us uh saying we were right the whole time uh but is not strictly speaking politics at this point but before we get to that I do have a couple of things I want to talk about this is like just a this is like a kind of an easing milo back into an episode getting back into the flow um I've got a couple of paragraphs move me up Riley I've got a couple of paragraphs here this one is from the center for social justice Ian Duncan Smith's ironically named think tank is it better or worse than his book uh I I'm still waiting on his book to be honest

we'll get there we'll get there our fearless correspondent has obtained a copy and is now reading it first before sending it to I need him to send it to me quickly because I need I need I need to be done reading it it is weighs on me like uh a sort of a sort of damocles the anticipation is the worst part and you know it is it's a horrible book of damocles that's sort of let's like the book is like suspended above you yeah but it's suspended open with the pages being turned in front of your eyes so you have to read it yeah yeah just uh like water torture but with a bad book um and then uh everyone says oh Riley dude the tf loves to torture Nishkumar with the bat he only has to deal with it for an hour it takes me a few hours

to get to summarize the thing no uh look Steve uh Steven um uh uh Ian Duncan Smith's center for social justice has written the following paragraph I'm going to read this and then another paragraph and then I'm going to talk about what we're really talking about this the the center for social justice goes by denying prisoners the opportunity to gain the benefits made possible by education we are fostering a ticking time bomb of reoffending sure many prisoners have never many prisoners have neither used nor held a digital device ever which is a chilling sentence use nor held just that that the idea that so much of your life has been stolen from you that like you that it's like you have never even held these things that have become very basic for like

how we live now yeah it's naive isn't it that they think that prison isn't absolutely full of mobile phones it's like it's equally dystopian and funny yeah sort of prisoner holding two tiny mobile phones and like going no never never seen a phone in my life them like presenting a prisoner with a sony ericsson walkman phone being like you've probably never seen one of these and he like puts down his iphone 13 that he's currently on a call with he's like what I like the idea more that he's just not a grass and so that like do you know what this is like no never see before in I have no idea what that is digitally excluded without qualifications and unready for the workplace prisoners are more likely to slide back into a life of crime

a phased introduction of online learning using in-cell technology would transform prisoner rehabilitation that's incel not incel thank you yeah okay so there's a very there's a very sharp turn at the last sentence right because it goes uh education and prison is important and necessary true a lot of prisoners like don't have a lot of technological experience aren't very technologically literate which is a hindrance to getting jobs and stuff true therefore and I think this is the unspoken bit we should replace out of cell education which is very expensive with just going your fucking little like a knockoff ipad in your cell which is much cheaper and also much worse for you yeah like like it's definitely like the uh the sinko like the fake

company uh from tim and eric that makes all of the like awful tablets or whatever it's a cost seven thousand pounds each and has barely any functionality is this the same initiative by which we'll be getting some very special podcasts beamed into prison yes it is i'll be getting to that but also i'd like to add of course i think i want to clarify at least what i what i believe which is that it's uh important is that education in prisons is important and necessary as a thing to humanize which is why i shouldn't be fucking fobbed off onto like a an ipad or whatever yeah exactly it's it if this dehumanizing and horrible thing is going to be happening this is a a thing that makes the awful unnecessary thing better see that's that's the reasons are bad but if you want

to have prisons then you've got to stand behind your thing of actually making them places where you can rehabilitate people and not just make people worse yeah absolutely but that's the thing that's we've talked about this before in like other contexts but it's part of the tories relentless commitment to austerity that even the place that makes you miserable and immiserated is so cut in terms of funding and stuff that it can't even do that efficiently it has to make you miserable in a different slightly more humiliating way and and this is from a magazine called inside time which as far as i can tell is a magazine for prisoners it literally a lifestyle magazine yeah ten ten tips for giving yourself that summer look it's the the weekly online monthly

printed national newspaper for prisoners and detainees but it seems to mostly be for guards i can't really tell like i've been trying to figure it out i like the addition of and detainees this is that someone wrote in and was like what about detainees are we allowed to read this um yeah so anyway anyway look it's if you want to like those peak into a very specific corner of the internet inside time does have a forum uh so you can look at that but no so this is what they wrote an inside time in its new strategy hmpps the prison service pledged to make prisons quote fit for the internet era commitments include developing a plan for digital education in prisons and starting to deliver it providing new desktop and laptop computers for prison staff with 14

jails to receive the devices by christmas and replacing outdated software by 2024 all of this has come together of course to lead to one place which hussein shared with me this is from uh it was someone we talked about years ago but haven't talked about very recently one of like the og one of the og tf like opponents uh from back in the day when we like recorded from basements and stuff when we had ops he very he very briefly made it into the discourse in the last few months because he was the author of the viral molly may interview in which she said everyone has the same 24 hours and i also think he kind of responded to us when we had like put an episode where he was kind of featured in it like he didn't listen to the episode but he did respond to like

either the tf account or riley or me or one of well like some he responded to someone because we felt because i found it very very funny but it was just like this guy who is like quite like he's more famous now than he was back then but like he's like clearly a lot more famous than us is like it's very easy to get under his skin so one of our haters basically what one of one of our haters who gives us all energy uh steven Bartlett uh former i believe ceo of social chain like uh sort of a uh fucking like one of these one of these places that would make a facebook group that's like oh new castle freshers week and then be like get oakleys this is this is sort of important like i won't like go too much into the origin story but like social chain is important

as like a piece of history as to like how the internet is the way it is because his company or the company that he was running with his friends was one of the first to sort of realize that you could kind of make loads of like viral content by just continually pumping shit out and by gaming like facebook's like algorithms to to uh so that it would then like increase your kind of the uh the frequency at which like it was like shown something yeah i like so basically like if you're thinking about how shit just gets on the internet and how it proliferates into people's timelines whether they want to see or whether they search for it or not social chain is very much like one of the reasons why that happens so with all that being said all

that background together i bring you probably one of the most deranged linkedin posts i've ever read he's such a perfect idiot steven Bartlett he's fascinating i have some wonderful news to share heart emoji the diary of a ceo podcast which by the way has featured matt handcock on it yes is now streaming to thousands of young people and adults in prisons up and down the country fantastic right the hustle podcast about rise and grind we can't let you out of this cell for like more than an hour a day but what we can do is teach you how to be a girl bus yeah we can this this idiot in like a fedora and a turtle neck is going to like teach you about how to you know instead of like going back to a life of reoffending how to make money off of like i don't

know um referral links to your blog basically you know like a ceo would would you like to listen to this computer idiot yeah you can game the forums on inside time with your amazon affiliate link and you use it to make money while you sleep he says i have some wonderful news to share the diary of a ceo podcast is now streaming to thousands of young people and adults to prison cells up and down the country today i can announce uh that that is be that this show is being provided the thousands of young people and adults with inspirational content via in cell technology i've had the and also like inspirations not so i think the idea that you need inspirational like you know work 25 hours a day to you know make contacts with a referral network or whatever

or do advertising on a facebook page uh is i mean the thing is like not not not to say too much just even barless credit that is kind of one of the only industries that's left right is just this kind of funny the idea that you can be hustling from prison like just a very like a guy which again you can yeah you really can i mean i'm very hard in prison if anything prisons have fascinating internal economies where a lot of people are really coming up with innovative ways to make money or cigarettes or whatever it may be but um the idea that like from prison you could be like sending marketing emails i'm being like i am currently in prison however hear me out on this pitch look i may be in prison i may be a spanish prisoner however i do have an offer you can't

refuse i think this is something that like tory mps were trying to do when they go to prison like whenever a tory mp gets done for any of the many many things that they do and they get they go to prison for a few years i think they're always like they either write a book or they try to become an entrepreneur inside so you know this is good this is sort of a little bit of like a little bit of politics happening here white power dave gave me a fascinating idea about arbitrage of the prices of cigarettes and different wings of the prison at which point i put my oxford mind to work going back to like what you said earlier who's saying right that the the actual economic activity represented by steven Bartlett is at best a kind of um spam advertising um and then

also of course the lifestyle of being a boss generally well this is the thing about social chain as well because like one of the controversies around them and it's like documented quite well in a piece that uh luke bailey like poster did like a long time ago is that like they don't the way in which they sort of arrive at their numbers and like the way in which like they sort of ascertain their value like is still very is so very much like shrouded in like mystery like no one really knows even in the industry like how they are like why they valued themselves so highly like how they kind of like said that they were a lot more effective than other social media organizations when they weren't um but at the time when they were sort of at their peak around about 2013 to

15 um because you have like so much money being thrown around these like digital media economies and spaces like no one's really asking any questions so he does very well out of that he comes out like fairly early he then follows the whole like angel investor out um and he's kind of been able to basically develop his own personal brand uh in the uk which is now sort of culminated in one of these kind of like and you see them on youtube all the time and like tiktok and stuff as well these types of channels that are for like lack of a better term like grind set channels like they don't really kind of give you anything of value they don't really sort of teach you anything i've listened to a few episodes of this podcast after the molly may thing and like

what's remarkable about it is that like for the amount of time that you spend listening to it it really doesn't kind of give you very much as a listener that's i had a thought about that which is everyone kind of knows that i feel but i love the idea of like someone who doesn't someone who thinks that this grind set stuff will teach you to be a successful businessman and it's like you can't beam that into prisons because you'll make them too good at crime also but if you go in there for dealing drugs and you learn about secrets of a ceo eventually you're going to be so much better at dealing drugs when you come out it's irresponsible i wake up at four a.m i call my business associates we discuss what gear we've got coming in at felix stoveport this week at that

point i read five books about stabbing the thing is his podcast doesn't even do that like you listen to it about like you listen to i've listened to the ones where like because they're apparently like business secrets and everything and there are like no business secrets in there except for like it sort of just goes be like the the furthest it ever really goes is like oh you also need to build like a really good brand so that people trust you in this like you know this very sort of like like overcrowded market but the thing about prisons is that like it's not an overcrowded market in fact if anything is pretty overcrowded well yeah okay fine but it's like but you know in terms of like the problems that he supposedly identifies none of them really kind of even

like in a prison economy they don't really apply unless like some guy who's selling spice decides that he wants to like overtake another person selling spice by adding like very cute tweed british copy to like his sales i mean the great british spice company i i would listen to the reverse of this i would listen to management secrets of like hmp pentonville or whatever like it was broadcast outwards i'd love that but the thing the thing to see this as is a couple right it's i think number one this is a case of a guy hooking himself up to the big government money hose right of just and number two i think it's the case of the of the government find this hose the government itself well apparently he did the government itself or in this sense

at least like the um the way that we're sort of set up to think about crime and punishment and rehabilitation and stuff sort of also betrays like yeah if you would think that you'd think this would work if you thought that crime was just a choice made by lazy people and they need to learn how to hustle but also i think it really is an indication that yet this was kind he did the main thing that you could do in the economy in 2013 i mean having people hear business secrets from him you might as well have them doing like a fidget spinner building class um and um even then that's more current uh but also these now he's just doing the thing that you do now which is building a personal brand talking about how great you are and then he's teaching everyone else to

build a personal brand and talk about how great they are so he's training a generation of people who's main basically main thing is just going to be like well okay i guess i'm going to go on instagram my brand if you like it's mostly stealing car exhaust i think that's really that's the space i operate in if you know i've branched out into some other things but my core brand identity is catalytic converter basically but british prison's external valley mostly is a marketing aid for people who are not in prison i find like yeah we use a bit of prison labor but i feel like most of what they're there for and like sort of labor terms is to allow you to you know open a restaurant or like send them in podcasts and no one really thinks to ask you know

is this helping anyone do the people in prison like it instead you just sort of that that's a very quick way to become a saint in this country which is very very weird considering a prevailing atmosphere for criminals and for prison well the other thing to bear in mind also is that it's not just prisons that are kind of getting like basic basically licensing content out as like substitutes to actual education um schools are doing it as well right like colleges are doing it and and i think like with with steven Bartlett's stuff like it's really representative of like you know for lack of like a better term like the kind of the government approach to any kind of public education um over like the past decade right which is fundamentally to kind of like

well number one to strip it down to like it's kind of cheapest possible iteration um well yeah basically that and like on the content creators end it's very much the idea that like you know the thing about the grindset podcast is that they're extremely easy to do these types of interview formats are extremely extremely easy to do the people who go on them know that the purpose of it is just to sort of like amplify their brands the guys who like host it are doing the same thing and in turn you just end up having this sort of very weird product where you're watching two people basically tell each other how great and how smart they are and how no one really understands them um and then you're sort of sending it into like prisons where instead of sort of like getting

education or even access to stuff like libraries because bear in mind that like libraries across prisons have basically been decimated as well um so the only things that they really have left to kind of like watch two people talk about how great they are and how misunderstood they are um and that sort of classifies as education because it's like you know it's not cartoons and it's not like classic entertainment like it's not films and stuff so they can like justify you know it can be justified for it to be there it's just I don't know is it it's it's incredibly soapy and it's also just like the kind of natural conclusion of what this type of content is supposed to do and serve well I want to move on a little bit to our labor party section or as I call it the

Christmas of bitter recriminations my stockings are full they are hung by the fire with care yeah we were right we've been right about everything we've ever said except for that one time you should always listen to us you should always trust us we've never said anything that's ever been incorrect uh yeah where uh well do shall we go right into the Ford report or shall we talk about uh Neil coils a little bit so this is this is sorry we we had a lot of sort of us full length interview subjects last week so we're sort of catching up a bit um this is a a a note set post made by I don't know it's a but some post made by Neil coil I think you made a rent of the RUD yeah that's right in in labor list one of these things

where and if you may recall Neil coil was sort of publicly shamed for racially abusing lobby journalist and former guest of the show Henry Dyer yeah he's a labor MP or was a labor MP and and was like publicly very racist yeah uh so it this is what he said this is this is what he said he said he said he said I was I was drinking up to you know 12 drinks a day I couldn't get up without a drink and it's like oh surprise um and he says by the time I stopped I was routinely drinking a dozen or more pints an evening uh so giving patty losty a run for his money oh he's trying to get good drafted into the royal family he's trying to drink his way in it's one of the few it's one of the only ways a commoner can get elevated to print status is by day drinking that

hard yeah you got you've got to get drank in uh that's right you gotta be drinking eight drinks before 11 a.m or you can't become a royal uh the volume meant I could not stop cold turkey but had to reduce gradually drinking undoubtedly affected my demeanor and attitude and contribute to my own suspension from the labor party earlier this year for aforementioned racial abuse this investigation linked to the expulsion suspension means I'm prohibited from speaking publicly uh drinking in no way excuses my bad behavior but it should not take a public scandal before someone is able to access help to stop drinking when first elected in 2015 I'd have occasional drinks at work uh but the constant battles within labor and attacks on me from the former leaders cronies as well as

the trade union leader for daring to speak out against anti-semitism all contributed to me all contributed um and and and he's like yeah Corbyn made me an alcoholic Jeremy Corbyn put shit in my pants look I mean look there's no shame in being an alcoholic you know he's right about a lot of the stuff he says however being an alcoholic doesn't make you racist automatically Jeremy Corbyn did not make you be racist to that guy um it's just it's it's so self-exculpatory just just Jeremy Corbyn is like the grim reaper in that meme where it's just like knocking on doors with like blood coming out of them and then it's like it's like Raphael bear the door is open you see like a dead foot poking through there and there's like Neil Coyle

is the next door uh so it's the the idea here basically is that yeah it's he just got so mad that Corbyn was there that he was uh in the party uh that people weren't really listening to him or excited about him that uh it drove him to drink uh which is I don't I don't think that alcoholism is just like directly causative as that I think it's I don't know it feels grotesquely irresponsible and factional to try and use even this even your own sort of like humiliation as a weapon to kick against a guy who's been out of power for years to be like no no no it wasn't me it was him it was his fault well I'm concluding from this is I think Neil Coyle in blaming uh sort of in no small part blaming like stress caused by like the Corbyn cronies the momentum thugs and having him turn to

drink I think he may be the first gangstocked member of parliament he's finally targeted individuals have representation at the highest levels of politics Jeremy Corbyn has been like following him around uh you know whispering you should you should be racist to that journalist to him yeah yeah absolutely him and his momentum thugs uh no no I want to get to the real the real meat and potatoes of the of the labor discussion um I do have momentum thugs it's just such a funny concept yeah it's just like huge bouncer built guys with no neck who like don't see your pronouns on your badge mate yeah momentum was a sort of a very vegan traybakes sort of organization so you know their commitment to relentless psychological

terror and thuggery was quite a shock to me yeah listen sunshine if this isn't fucking decolonized by next week I'm gonna come back and you're not gonna like what I'm gonna do I'm gonna bring some of my friends respected BIPOC academics and they're gonna give a blistering critique of a lot of the artifacts you've got in here um yeah I mean one thing I do always note right is that the um we talked about this yesterday but it's worth not yesterday last last week in the free episode but it's worth remembering is that the what this what this period in British politics what the left was like is remembered as worse and worse and worse the worst things get because the choice retroactively retrospectively always has to have been the right one yeah for these sensible liberals

right sure we had to I had to have voted for Boris because the alternative was Jeremy Corbyn and the worst Boris gets the worst Corbyn has to get for that to make sense yeah the alternative was free board banned and so we can't we can't have allowed that yeah so it has to have presumably been free broadband and also like everyone would be murdered of course so this is this is this is all I say this is the forward report on the leaked the forward report on the veracity and circumstances of the leaked report that came out in 2020 after many long delays has finally been released which we knew was true because it was made by the labor party and the people trying to deny we're all people involved in the life so it has dropped yeah the the the inquiry into the report

into the report of the inquiry as to whether or not there is shit in that guy's pants and whether or not Jeremy Corbyn put it there is finally out now this is soviet we're about to get our own comrade Dyatlov here so to the Americans listening I'm sorry that we've been so British politics recently but the British need to be reminded that that they weren't the British listeners I mean we need to be reminded that they weren't crazy but the experience in 2018 from sort of 2015 to 2019 was real that they should should believe their lying eyes even though a lot of people are sort of looking at the forward report and saying ah yes this makes them very sort of tortured efforts at even handedness yeah briefly summarized the the deal of the

forward report the forward report is like one side said that anti-semitism was being used as a factional weapon against the leader of the labor party which was bad and the other side was using anti-semitism as a factional weapon to attack the leader of the labor party which was also bad therefore both sides equally bad and that is I'd say probably one of the more major conclusions of the report right it says that essentially it says both sides were guilty of weaponizing anti-semitism pretty much as as you say Alice that the right did definitely see it as a a weak point in a way to attack the leadership and then the leadership said hey those guys are weaponizing it and then the report says by failing to take the problem seriously they both the thing

is if you just do something so atrocious that even accusing someone of it is in itself a terrible thing to do then you know it's perfect as bulletproof because then the second you go wait a second you're you you just shitting your own pants you're like by accusing by accusing that guy of shitting in his pants you have like it disclaimed all of your authority and all of your moral leadership however of course it by one thing I think it's important that that this report does though even though again like I say it makes this very strange tortured effort at even handedness where it's not I don't think warranted is that it does recognize in out in the media in a document that is very difficult to be ignored I mean look all these people are ignoring it anyway or

sort of interpreting it in let's say very partial way yeah but the thing is you can you can read whatever you want into it but then we'll get a report on the reports of the findings of the report that will say well one side said that they were just you know reading whatever they wanted into it and the other side were reading whatever they wanted into it so they were equally bad but but in this case right what it does say is something that really couldn't have been said in mainstream British publications it said until Corbyn was gone that was the thing that's that's the only that's the only thing yeah but they couldn't be said which is yes the labor right were weaponizing this thing and that before if you said that earlier you'd get called a you know crank or

conspiracy theorist or whatever but here it is in an undeniable plain written English they had a bell that's that's my favorite example of the like fucked new like national union of students sort of like culture in the labor right is they had a big bell in the compliance department and whenever they got someone who they considered to be a trot expelled or suspended from the party on whatever grounds however tendentious one of them would ring the bell it's like it's like the fucking kids cancer ward where one of them goes into remission they get to ring the bell centers it's just a bunch of nuts phenomenal absolutely incredible and they must given the numbers of expulsions they must have done this around a thousand times which is just

imagine working in the same office constant bell there was but yeah there was one month where they got rid of the bell so that when you went to go and hit the bell it wouldn't be there and you'd have to talk to your fellow labor HQ colleagues about mental health by saying no it's better than a big box yeah they said no bell no bell it's it's no bell when it comes to mental health they were given a prize for that so the no bell prize god damn it my love is that none of you picked up no i thought i thought that was implicit already yeah he's back i was looking at my notes here anyway so like i say right the other thing i think is important about the report not as a bit of sort of relitigating its contents although you

know i think if you read its contents and consider the context of for example what the meat how the media sort of kept interpreting these you might say fact the factional disputes inside the party that the report considers essentially sort of comes down to among that that that that was a completely dysfunctional organization true that it was that a lot of the complaints processes were also dysfunctional that and that sort of certain accusations that the leader was interfering in the process to like get ken livingston back in the party or whatever were sort of were kind of not really either not true or not done um maliciously like things of that it is a very detailed legal document about an organization that clearly doesn't function very well because

a bunch of people who weren't elected by it disagreed with the fact that everyone who joined elected someone they didn't like and again it is unable to see beyond the you should have played nicer together bit of it rather than the um you might say profound anti-democratic implications of everything that went on the labor right as much as they like to think of themselves as the establishment of the labor party a best understood as an entryist phenomenon and that's the best way of understanding the forward report is to like look at this as a group of entryists who are inside an organization whose aims they are explicitly like trying to sabotage it's important to remember as well in back to the sort of pox on both your houses thing about weaponizing anti-semitism

is that like uh is that if you remember right there it's there was anti-semitism in the party the uh but but less than one percent of people were under it less than point one percent of people i believe were under investigation for it but the leaked report said yes it's being taken seriously uh and then the uh but then you know by saying ah the pox on both your houses is because yes uh elements of the right were weaponizing it but elements of the left were totally in denial instead it wasn't a problem at all which again if you're kind of looking at the formal logic of balancing two extreme viewpoints yep does make sense but if you take a look at the fact that for example i believe uh studies were done at the time that showed that ordinary members of the public

when asked how many what percentage of labor members they thought were under investigation for anti-semitism said give an average answer about 30 versus point zero i believe point zero six percent what was the actual number right and so and so i think that by looking at the report and by look though in the forward report looking entirely just at matters internal to the party which of course it would have written by a lawyer with a very lawyerly way that that was its remit sure yeah exactly it's sort of it and by it it's sort of even handedness kind of obscures the actual effect of this stuff especially right when we say oh yeah the disciplinary process wasn't really being improperly interfered with by the leader's office um when that was the subject of

like a huge number of these sort of uh of complaints right when that was the subject of a lot of the panic that was created around the whole the whole scenario right was oh yes the leader is interfering in all the in all all this stuff and so on and so on and that was used to create a common sense idea that it was going to be dangerous for minorities especially jews and britain to elect a labor government led by Jeremy Corbyn right and that and that taking this in terms in by looking probably at its formal definition of well some did this some did that no one treat no one took the problem seriously you sort of miss the political effects you miss the forest for the trees right and not least because you can't look at a whole bunch of trees that are in national newspapers

exactly so you're left to look at what this like handful of weird nerds were able to achieve within the party which was a lot it transpires so essentially right the umbrella of weaponizing this thing uh is sort of what what do we mean by weaponizing i think that's not exactly clear so it looks like you know cynically using sort of claims that you know are false or exaggerating the extent of anti-Semitism and the labor party in order to remove Jeremy Corbyn in particular on the left more broadly from positions of power which is we now know what was done right that would that happened yeah and again it's not to say that there was that there was none but you can't you can't you have to square that circle

between 0.06 percent of members were under investigation versus 30 percent consider it this way uh the sort of the weaponization of of this rhetoric of anti-Semitism was such that it was more of a hindrance to removing anti-Semites from the labor party than it was a help right because every single possible accusation is now tainted by that cynicism and it becomes very easy for someone who is anti-Semitic and isn't the labor party to say this is a factional thing even if that person is a minority of a minority of a tiny minority statistically uh that then you know it provides more cover than it provides exposure and i think the what you have to also remember right is that the is that is that we are said well it for the whole time this was an

institutional problem right and you know you want well how do you define what an institutional problem is and i think again that the the report itself importantly tells you it shows tells you your lying eyes uh were telling you the truth right which is yes this was happening but it was unable to it is unable to i think take into account its full political implications i want to talk about a few more of the things the report said which again is that racism in the party especially against like black and and south asian members and and staff racism in the party was not experienced by individuals solely through acts of microaggression towards them personally it was experienced through seeing colleagues being passed over promotion being the only person

from an ethnic minority background at a meeting table or being managed by a near exclusively white senior team and hearing the particular disdain which colleagues reserve for for example ethnic minority mps counselors and labor party members yeah which which again is one of those things that like even to someone who is not in the labor party it's someone who like pays only a cursory amount of politics is something that is obvious and that's that's one of the sort of abiding features of the forward report for me is that a lot of the a lot of the stuff about racism in the labor party a lot of the stuff about anti-semitism in the labor party what was happening was obvious to people who were paying like a little bit of attention and then there was a

massive campaign to try and obscure it from them absolutely and and and again if you said oh the labor party is institutionally racist towards diana abbot for example you get called a you would get called a fantasist or conspiracy theorist yeah absolutely yeah if you said that the labor party uh elements in the labor party were um so let's say if not if not necessarily i don't think that the forward report says it shows that they tried to throw the 2017 election on purpose well that's the strange thing yeah what it says is that they were they were trying to achieve the same the same goals by different means which is a hysterical sort of piece of equivocation yeah well i think what the picture it's painting is of a party unable to work together working across purposes

not too side and not sort of just uh that that we literally these people do want to beat one another it's just one happened to be elected and then what one had a democratic mandate and the other had you know their phony baloney jobs um yeah and it's just the i think fundamentally right it shows uh the contempt for which the british political class uh treats basically everyone who lives here uh and whether that is whether that's if you want to have your democratic preferences expressed uh in the way that again you think that you probably ought to if you live in a liberal democracy uh or whether that is um if you are a um black or brown person and just want to get on with your day normally uh there is no shortage of contempt for you in the british higher echelons

or british politics uh again we tried for there not to be that uh and then the forces of wanting there to be that contempt proved to be extremely strong so where does that leave us then riley what is that what does that leave us with on the left what do you think about the labor party uh i mean i don't think i think um my i very rarely make my opinions on the loser party for nerds clear but uh i mean look where does that leave us i think that leaves us where we're talking about the beginning the political fight is not between uh labor in the tories or different factions of labor uh at least not for a while the political fight is between say uh the union workers and the companies who've now been um uh authorized to replace them with agency workers you know maybe um

is is there a chance that the parliamentary labor party of sort of starmer's swept into power by default reverses that they don't have a habit of reversing these kind of things but you know but is that something they could be pressured to do i mean they're still linked to the unions maybe you know so it's but political change is i think is we have to say is like not going to come from these organizations that are very resistant to change and when change almost broke through one they did their best to unbreak that change through so okay well they have to be forced and how do they how do they get forced is through collective power how does collective power get wielded largely through unions uh or volunteer organizations like tenants unions by making sure that liz truss is

elected to absolutely by making sure that liz truss is elected Tory leader and so all of us die in a nuclear firestorm 22 minutes after she takes office we are going to turn buckingham palace into a huge pork market and that is what we can promise you absolutely um all right i think that's probably about it for today for us uh so i'm quite depressed now remembering this time that we got owned and we got we got effortlessly played by some of the dumbest motherfuckers in the world we lost we lost a game of chess to somebody who would ask every move which way does the horsey go text six of their mates a racial slur and then leak that group fucking that group chat to a journalist how how did we do this actually like speaking of journalists like that's one thing

we haven't really spoken about very much um which is kind of like the role of like media people and uh like the positions that they sort of now hold uh in relation to this i think like the lesson that at least i took away from this like i was less you know this this could you could you could have like framed this and there are some people who are still trying to frame it media people in particular as like oh this is just like a is a factional issue and like the labour party is to do with like different bureaucracies fighting each other and like you know actually uh there's you know there's uh i don't know how like the way the horse goes in chess because i have no horse in this race uh but in reality like both like a lot of those journalists i don't know

whether i should name them but they definitely did kind of like at least uh kind of work in conjunction with forces that we're trying to undermine uh not only like you know left-wing people in the labour party but momentum and crucially just like younger people who like were for the first time like fairly enthusiastic about like left-wing politics um and like what's i guess like one of the things that is kind of depressing to me like reading all this stuff is just the fact that like for a lot of those journalists like they've sort of been left though they've sort of been like you know uh what's like they've been like let off the hook maybe um they can kind of like claim that they can kind of like feign ignorance um in a lot of cases when like it's

like it's been brought up to them by people on twitter they just like even ignore it like in the case of david iranovich which is kind of quite funny uh he has he's sort of like double down on uh actually like you know the ford report like vindicates everything that the labour right did and if you can't see that i've been like you're stupid but it's that very classic media thing of this like um choosing what they want to see regardless of like what the actual report shows deciding that like they're gonna learn nothing from it um and just kind of like getting on with it and just i mean ultimately just more proof that like they didn't really care like what they didn't really kind of care if like the conservative party or even if they didn't vote

for the conservative party they didn't really care but they didn't get into power right as long as like their kind of like factional war was kind of conceivably won um to the point where like now some of them like are you like have used like anti-semesis like actual like anti-semesis slurs um in one case uh being like accused or like uh i don't know whether you guys saw like the kist armor um the thing where like they used the holocaust like his kind of trip to the holocaust memorial as like uh campaign fodder and then like when there was like right like rightfully backlash towards that like some journalist being like oh like you know this is in such bad faith and like you know how can you read it like this kist has done so much to

kind of like you know uh you know heal the party and it's like yeah like you know in even if we sort of like take it by your even if we even if we like choose to believe that like like he's done it to kind of like heal the mess that you guys have made right and i didn't know like throughout like just watching this whole thing and i haven't like paid like much attention to the like the forward report like uh backlash this week just because i've had other stuff going on but like it just sort of seem being on fire that's right i've been in my house and been on fire um but like the ultimate the kind of thing that at least i've sort of taken away from it is like oh like british media personalities and institutions are kind of just choosing to just like not engage

with any of this despite the fact for like a few years ago we were told that this is the most important political issue and like the ugliness of you know uh yeah you know i'm sorry to sort of like go on for ages about this but you know it's but i just like remember like those headlines which were which which kind of suggested or where where where they were trying to make the argument that like oh this isn't actually about like you know party politics or like whether or not we like call bin actually we just want to like uh defeat this defeat the beast of like racism that um is taking over our society and this just happens to be really um really present in the labor party and like after they seemingly won that battle on their terms they just decided like that none of

it mattered anymore yeah it just goes back in the box right the campaign against anti-semitism is now firmly back in the box and having criticized kia starmer once uh you now get uh like sort of center left and liberal journalists asking on twitter hey who funds these guys which is hysterically like you know the it's all it's all fun and games uh but i think that's about time for us anymore and i want to remind you as well that we have a patreon there's a second episode every week you can listen to it if you want to uh you're wondering who funds these guys so with all that being said i want to thank my co-host for being here thank you for listening thank all our patrons and say we'll see you in a couple of uh sweet little days bye everyone