TRASHFUTURE - Khan Starmer ft. Danny Dorling

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

We met with esteemed social and economic geographer Danny Dorling to talk about the forces causing Britain to be a failed state, and the inadequate response to those forces presented in the Labour party conference.  More importantly, how phoney Khan Starmer will not form a new golden horde and take Uzbekistan and therefore the world. 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  *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Yeah, I went on the trash sheet to Reddit the other day because I was looking for something I can't remember what now. And I remembered about the existence of the Reddit and I was like, oh, maybe someone on there that's posted about it or or I can't remember what it was. Anyway, and I'd found someone who'd posted on there and was like, oh, maybe a controversial opinion, but I think like whenever they start speaking German or like jokingly, pretend to speak German, they all just seem like precocious little Lord Fauntler always. And I was like, yeah, that's the voice we're doing. That's the point. Is it in that little German boy?

Andy Flaar. Yeah. Oh, does his mega-goated, mid-dense swag, I'll... The thing is, right, I get this because it always pissed me off when, like, fucking chopper, whatever would do, shissi British accent, or British jokes. But on the other hand, have you considered

that if you're German and you're offended by this, you'd lost the fucking walls. Two world wars, one world cup, and what you... Don't ask about the other world cups. Don't ask. And do you really think... Marcus Nickd. Yes, do you tour? Do you really think that Jan Blowjob was a salt of the earth guy who just started... who just ran Twonkall Capital because he was good at maths?

Yeah. No, he's got family money because his father invented the hand gel. The Twoncole Capital like history and values section on their website has a kind of gap chronologically. My, my, my Vata had a, a, a man, ausk of ink. So, so hello everybody, it's time for TF. It is all four of us today. We got a serious guest on this one. Oh, I was going to say all vote. Uh, but it's serious enough by our, our standards. Uh, it is Danny already downgrading that. It is Danny Doryling, uh, the Halford Mackender, a professor of geography at the University of Oxford, who has written a book called Shattered Nation in Equality and the Geography of a Failing State. Failing State, of course, being Britain. And we are going to be, oh no, crazy. And we're going

to be evaluating the labor conference. Reading this was like growing horror as I realize, but that's the country that I am in. Yeah, we're going to be evaluating the labor conference program at a high level based on that metric. Speaking of labor, however, I wanted to start with a few things about labor conference. One that is quite serious and depressing and one that is quite humorous and depressing. Which one do we want to start with first?

Oh, give me the bad news first. Right, so it's going to be a little bit of a continuation of our bonus episode of the Shamist as the situation in the Middle East has continued to deteriorate. And Israel has continued to talk about gods with openly genocidal language, such as cutting off food,

water, medicine, power, etc. Starmer has said Israel has every right to defend itself in the way that it chooses essentially saying yes, this includes collective punishment of everybody who lives in Gaza by doing things like cutting off medicine, leveling apartment blocks. He also sent Emily Thornbury out onto TV to do the same line. And the thing about Kirstaama and Emily Thornbury is that I know that both of them are by training human rights lawyers. And I know it's not a surprise and I know it's an obvious point to make to be like, yeah, you know perfectly well that this is a series of war crimes.

And you're choosing to sort of like, like, elide that in service of getting elected. But fuck me, it's grim to watch. Well, it's the, yeah, the Emily Thornberry interview was like quite comical because she was just insisting that she had answered a question that she hadn't answered. But I'd like saying, what basis were we saying, is that not a war crime?

Is that not forbidden? And she was going, I think Israel has a right to defend itself. And then she's like, you haven't answered the question. She's like, yes, I have. I said this very anodine sound bite. That doesn't mean anything. I think it's also useful to say that, you know, what is the official labor position?

The official labor position has been pretty much dead in the water since, I don't know, 2003, which is they say, we believe in the two state solution. A Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel. No, no one still believes in the two states. The only people who still believe in the two state solution are the parties in Western countries where the main thing about them is they have to feel bad about shooting the gut. That's who believes in the two-state solution. Yeah, the only people who believe in a two-state solution are Flemish set protest nationalist in Belgrade.

Yeah, I mean, Belgium, a great example of a one-state solution working, I guess. Exactly. Yeah. You've got the people who like the chocolates come together with the people who like Little Boy. And it was, if we can weld such disparate policies together into one nation state, then to be honest, like, you know, Israelis and Palestinians easy bang that out in an afternoon. Like, yeah. So they like similar cuisine.

Whereas the French and the Dutch, they despise what each other. No, but the other thing I was going to say though, right, is that we are, it is alarming how quickly we have progressed into September 12, 2001 territory in terms of the denunciations calls for revenge, calls for essentially the total jingoistic loyalty from everyone for the prospect of a enormous set of either human rights abuses or for an enormous expansion of that conflict throughout the region, which would be incredibly destabilizing and and curious to everyone in the service of nothing we or our allies do is ever wrong. The laws of it's essentially what Starmer is it was Starmer and Thorne Brewer saying is as far as when one of our allies and friends

wants to do something outside the laws of war, then the laws of war change to some kind of Thucydides logic. It's become whatever, it's the laws of war, what is written in the Geneva conventions, or anything our friends really, really, really, really, really want to do. Well, I think more specifically in Starmer and Thornberry's case, it's if one of our allies wants to do something that's outside the Geneva Convention and Rupert Murdoch thinks they should be allowed to do it, then I can't say that they shouldn't be allowed to do it because then I'll get accused of being Jeremy Corbyn.

Jeremy Corbyn who, you know, is like, by this point, supposedly a card carrying member of the Al-Kasim Brigades, as like now, like, there have been a couple of journalists who have had to delete tweets and do that, like, I apologize to Mr. Corbyn thing. Well, it's just, they forget. They forget that the world outside their little conversation, outside of the necrotic scourge of British political insiderism is happening. Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, like, it just became so established and so concrete that like, it kind of doesn't matter anymore, there may as well be photos of him like wearing the like Hamas headband. I think, I think this is like a really interesting, because I've

been looking at like some media stuff recently. And I think there's also some extra phenomenon sort of going on in the sense that like, and this is more of like a fall in progress. So like apologies for, you know, if it's confusing. So we all know that like the British kind of mainstream media has kind of lost a lot of prestige overseas. And one thing that like British newspapers used to be very good at, or used to be kind of like, well known for, was their coverage of kind of global affairs. And as that procedure sort of gone down, one of the interesting things looking at what is effectively like the sort of monumental global crisis

has sort of become one that in which like, even foreign dispatches kind of feel like going over the sort of Corbin referendum all over again, which I mean, but it is all fixated around the sort of, yeah, it is all basically fixated around Jeremy Corbin. It used to be the case that you could be like, oh man, fucking Robert Fisk is showing up, or whatever, there's going to be some insightful reporting about this, I don't know how insightful it was, but like he wasn't fucking going on about like Jeremy Corbin, you know? Yeah, and well, because like the reason I started to bring this up is because like, so I mean to summarize it, like basically if you go to,

if you went to a protest this week or if you go to the protest on Saturday, which is like a solid, Palestine solidarity process, you are automatically like a card carrying member of the mass. And these columnists are also, well, they do give out those cards at the protest, which I think is the wrong. Some of them are quite shiny, like they're rare collectibles. But their argument is like, well, you know, if you sort of factor them in as being Hamas supporters, and that can be vague and nebulous and completely obfuscated, then basically advancing anti-migration sentiment, anti-immigrant sentiment, in one of these columns they kind of say that, well, these

people are clearly like terrorist sympathizers and so you should like, you know, you should penalize them, you should, you know, they should be thrown in prison or deported or whatever. And again, this, it strikes, it strikes me as like both a recognition that this country is a deeply, deeply unserious country and it has so little to say about what is happening in the world that it's only kind of retreat is one that is incredibly insular. And like the other example I was sort of thinking about, and this was from like people I know who went to Labour Conference, was that like, you know, any politician, any Labour politician that kind of interacted with the Palestine Solidarity campaign, which

has a stall at Labor Conference every year and is not a prescribed group. But like, politicians were basically told, do not go anywhere near, like, near them. You will be punished if you do so. There were some MPs who had to like issue out formal apologies for being, were being pictured talking to members who are running the store. The store that has been at Labour Conference, you know, for many, many years and is not prescribed, I just want to like emphasise that. And in the meantime, like any sort of, it's not the Hamas store, which you can also go to, but it's a bit spicy. Any, any, like, interaction that is considered to be sympathetic to

Palestine solidarity was considered like beyond the pale, and like no politician or representative that is considered to be sympathetic to Palestine's solidarity was considered like beyond the pale. And like no politician or representative was really like unofficially allowed to be part of it. And so it does feel like even though this was a trajectory that I feel like we knew that the Labour Party was heading towards, it is one that really does show both its insularity, its fear of right wing media.

But I think more over just like, you know, okay, this is just the way that things are now and human rights are woke and so punitive collective punishment is actually completely fine. And if you don't support that, then you should also be collectively punished. Well, I think to build on that, right, you just have to think about the, and this is the thing, right? I don't think, I don't really care about gotchas, right? I think they're just pointing out hypocrisy, which as we know, doesn't matter. But like to build on that, like there is the, they're the photo of Starmer speaking out of Palestine, solidarity conference, like within recent memory as sort of where he's younger and less puffy. And, you know, it's the way he's got puffy from all that puddle. He's puffing up with puddle water.

But I filled him with air bubbles so that he can understand what it's like to be rack complex. But what happened is someone has put on the one ring of British insiderism. It's just the difference between the one ring and the mythos of the Lord of the Rings is that it just gives you access to power in a small failing and fading place essentially. It gives you access to power that looks only inward and that inward looking power just agrees on which which indignities and punishments are to be meted out to prescribed or marginalizer outside the wire groups. And it is what is that what the ring from Lord of the Rings does. I thought I just made you invisible and run around really fast.

Yeah. Which case, Tom, or is also do it. He's in here right now. I want to I want to do one more one more quick item about labor conference before we go on. I was just going to say on top of that, I think this plays into two classic tropes of British politics, which is one being able to remember things that have happened is cheating in any British political debate. Like how dare you point out something that happened before that is relevant to this situation? That's not fair. I am a goldfish. And if you remember saying that happened more than seven seconds ago, that's violence against me. And second of all, if

you say anything that everyone knows is true, but isn't saying, that is you should be banned from politics for life. But if you've observed a true fact about a situation that doesn't accord with the overall narrative, then fuck you. You're not welcome in this discussion. Like, this is why I talk about British Insiderism as essentially being a kind of touch of death. It's a touch of contacts death. To become a British Insider is to willingly make yourself stupid. And I don't mean like incapable of A, B reasoning.

I just mean you, for the purposes of power, decide to put on, you know, the blinders and I can't see it, I don't care, blah, blah, blah. Right, you become a sort of political horse. Yeah, you essentially, you sort of charge in one direction and you're, that's your life. Yeah. Stalmer's guy's little coconut hobs.

He's going round labor conference. He's licking a big salt lick. He's eating an apple. And it's not sort of stupid as like, oh, that'll never work. It's stupid in as much as you become unable to perceive the things around you. Or even if you can't perceive the things around you,

you become numb. You become numb to the consequences for other people. You become unable to process what the consequence of what you're going to do, because what you're going to do, what you're going to allow, what you're going to endorse, what you're going to move forward, whether that is giving the green light to the IDF, the tarot, the Geneva Protocol, Geneva invention, we're going into Gaza, or whether that is deciding that the NHS can't be saved except by AI, you have to make yourself kind of stupid to not feel what you're doing. You have to thicken your

own brain, or it will keep you up at the nighttime. Nice thick, well insulated brain, the keep you warm over winter. And so when I talk about stupid, I don't mean, oh, what a goof, what an object of fun, but rather what an object of enough microplastics in that you can create a kind of like a fleece lining around the inside of the skull. I think what an object of pity at that point, to numb yourself to other people so much that you who were once standing at that, you know, save Gaza Stahl are able to now do this. I mean, it was never, it was never particularly sincere as I think the main conclusion to draw is, uh, or even if it's not, even if it's not sincere to know, you have to, you have to armor yourself against what you do, whether that's through ambition, whether that

is through, uh, cruelty or whether that is through just deciding that the story you're telling yourself is right. Anyway. And like, yeah, there's so many bad takes. Like the idea that you're supposed to care about Israeli civilians, but then you can also just carpet bomb every woman and child in Gaza and that's fine.

It's such a bizarre kind of cognitive dissonance that you, and if you refuse to enter that cognitive dissonance You're excluded from British both but because it's like it's racist to not engage in this huge lie that we're all It's the it's that we this is what I mean about you have to make yourself stupid in order to yeah in order to To think this I don't think that's necessarily necessarily true because I think there's two choices here. You have two, two genders available to you. You can make yourself very stupid or you can make yourself very spiteful. And I think it's perfectly possible to go into this absolutely openly and be like,

yeah, the genocide is good and we should do it. And, you know, you go back to your sort of 2001 to 2003 kind of thing. I'm talking about Islam or fascism or whatever. And there have been a few people who have just who have been willing to do that. And to be honest, it's refreshing that they're actually saying it instead of just being like, oh, it's right to defend itself.

Yeah. As you have said, it is the great increasing in honesty. Yeah, mosques coming off for long last. So here's the awkward thing, of course, I planned for us to do a quick start up before we talk to Danny Doryling. And this is, boy, is it stupid? Okay, so it's another jarring shit.

Is it as stupid as you need to be to be leader of the live party? Yes. Okay, it's just a horse. Yeah. We invented a horse. The stratifist horse. No, it's a revolution in personal rapid transit runs on sustainable biofuels. No, it's called bass actually.

We've invented cocaine. This is so close. You get some free bass. No, no. You don't know Alice, you don't understand how close you are. Wow, okay. So, so, so farmers, are we doing like CVD for cocaine? Are we invented a form of cocaine that doesn't really work, but is legal? How come capitalism is the best economic system in the history of all of humanity if the CBD version of cocaine doesn't exist? of all of humanity if the CBD version of cocaine doesn't exist.

Diet Coke. Diet Coke. Very good. Very good. Come on up. Fuck yeah. Yeah, and then men won't, men won't snort us. They have to come out with Coke zero.

Who's saying it's called base? What do you think? I've said that they're close with cocaine. We didn't not close to the cocaine. I think it's, is it like some kind of new trope? I'll say, base brings together the most interesting people in cities around the world through unique experiences. Oh, okay. So it is cocaine.

So it's so, so it's so house, but for people who are on cocaine. Oh, no, that's so house. Oh, yeah, that's good. Oh, who say and got it. What? Oh, but that's so her house. Oh yeah, that's girl who say and got it. What? Oh, but that's just so her house. No, it doesn't explicitly say it's Rebellion cocaine. Let's talk about it. Very funny if that was the thing that like actually got us sued for the first time

as so her house being like, we do not condone the consumption of illegal drugs in the show house. So how smirking off of them face, like them how actually leaving their head, as they go, we don't know the taking of illegal drugs. You know, on the territory of surf. There is, there is in, in Soho House, there is a little sign on the toilet that just says,

we have a zero dollar its policy for taking drugs. That's the most a zero tolerance policy for taking drugs. That's the most tolerance, zero tolerance policy. This is completely unrelated to what base was, but I did think of the idea of what is cocaine, but not cocaine. And I was thinking about vapes and how, or less like flavoured, basically flavoured cocaine is the thing that's going on right now.

Yeah, the bubble gum flavoured coke. Oh yeah. Well, you know, so it has to be cocaine that Yeah, the bubble gum flavored coke. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, so it has to be cocaine that smells good. It's like mixed with like an ooo. I always assumed that cocaine smells good. Otherwise, why else would people be like sniffing it? That's right. You stick with that, Alex.

So basically, the only podcaster in the world who's never done coke. What do you want from me? These brings together the most interesting people in cities around the world. You need experiences. Innovators, the artists, the eccentric from all never done Coke. What do you want from me? Please brings together the most interesting people in cities around the world to unique experiences. The innovators, the artists, the eccentric, some all backgrounds and industries. Please matches the right people at the right time. It's part conversations, generate collaborations, and start life-changing friendships.

Now, going on a cocaine retreats to like network. Well, it's like I, O'Asuka, but you're just in Belivia instead of Peru. And you're there. And it's like, andaska, but you're just in Belivia instead of Peru. And you're there. And it's like, and now you will invent the ancestral concept of the small place restaurant. So basically, it is a Miami based startup. They say great minds. Of course, it is.

Very strong. As soon as you say Miami based or Vegas based, I'm like, this is going to be really out there. Yeah, Mr. Worldwide. That's right. Bully Axel himself. After attending a a basic experience, you're able to indicate which members you connected with the best. I've certainly had some basic experience. This information helps base AI get smarter in matching you to other people in your city in the future. Wait, so this is like AI assisted speed networking. Correct.

Like e-harmonie, but for like business. Well, you know about, you know the whole thing about like you need to upgrade your circle. Right. Yeah. So this is the AI that helps you up your network. It's your network. This is the AI that helps you upgrade your circle with other like-minded cocaine takers. Um, legally speaking, we cannot say that do come in. I want to I want an app like this, but it's for people on care. And it just links you up with

other people who can't walk. Yeah. Yeah. And and a horse. Yeah. It's yeah, you can all ride the horse. It's like one horse per full people on cat. Perfect. It was a whole sex out because we had sex people. You know, so you got a rape tool. So you can do the base dinner. There's a match dinner experience at one of our special venues. Of course, this startup, which has now received half a million dollars in financing, um, they don't have like a building or anything. What they have is an AI that matches you based on a profile with

someone else based on the idea that too many tech people talk to only other tech people. Right. Yes, which is probably true. But is it going to be solved with an exclusive very expensive AI-based members club? If they can corral some people who want tech people into that. If they can corral some people who aren't tech people into that so yeah amazing. He was what it's so like a horse Yeah, just check this out. See you. Oh, Cabin, Clousin. Oh hold on God and like the second reel of the great escape as Steve McQueen sort of golf z-tports the wire. That's... Claven Claus. So, Cavin Clausen,

Cavin Clausen, and a hawk for thenstay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah then just, Gaven Klausen, ow! Yeah, anti-German content tonight. Gaven Klausen told Refresh Miami that he originally moved to Miami to co-found the Y-combinator-backed pigeon. However, he says, base is making it very easy to be invented.

The base is making it very easy to facilitate a high-end conversation with incredible people. Base pulls information from their so-called base index, a matching algorithm that aims to determine which members will get a long pass. They get this information in the following. Potential members are interviewed before being accepted to join the community. The questions include things like, quote, if you were to write the story of your life,

what would the current chapter be? Base also asks people about their dream dinner guests, the most common answers being Michelle Obama, Elon Musk, and Oprah Winfrey. This is like reverse Oxbridge. It's like you guys an interview where they check that you're stupid enough to get in. That's the idea that is they're trying to disrupt friendship by realizing that most people have friends from their experiences of their lives as opposed to most people having friends based on whether they'd rather have dinner with Michelle Obama or Eli. It's not very efficient.

Like none of us agree on who a perfect ideal denigast would be at all. Well, I don't know. I want a friendship group but it's entirely Phoebe some friends. If you did one of those Buzzfeed quizzes, but all from different occupations. I was thinking they need to find people whose ideal dinner guests are one another. It seems like it would make sense. Isn't that just dicing again? Yeah, we've got it. We've got to put together Nelson Mandela, William Shakespeare, the big bopper. I was excited, this is from someone writing an article

in Miami Times when I showed up to my first based in a red a cozy Italian restaurant in downtown. The experience brought together eight of us from a wide variety of industries. Pays curate some questions to stimulate the discussion. It's an icebreaker, it's a $500,000 icebreaker for like adults who are desperate for freshers week. Cool. That's so cool. Adults who are desperate for freshers week also describes like Middling Night Club DJ. Well, I love it when the freshers

come back. At this dinner, the diversity of backgrounds was great, including a therapist, a DJ and a spa owner. That's not a huge amount of it. Like, you're just counting on a terrible pub. Yeah, it sounds like a beginning of a pub joke. Yeah. You have to have some real surprises in there. Like, DJ isn't that, that urchraider, that's not that weird. It should be like, you know, something, you know, professional fucking.

A DJ therapist in a hall. I see. DJ is wide along the fence. Can DJs, why the long face? Can I say something about the DJ thing? This is like completely unrelated. I feel like too many people are becoming DJs now. That's true. That should be lawy.

Back in the day, back in the day to be a DJ, you had to have like scratching ability, you had to have a whole case of vinyl that you carried around. And now you had to have a white wrapper. You had to have a white wrapper. And these days, these days, you can carry a DJ controller in your bag and connect it to your laptop.

I saw someone at a coffee shop today with one of these controllers, not a DJ. I'm sorry, you are a management consultant. Go away. So people were telling us they were feeling a sense of isolation and that base has given them a consistent sense of community, said, Klauson. Wow.

Wow. Sad little life. You can just go out. You can do stuff. Like, if you have shared interests and you don't share them with anyone, you can just like go and pursue them. You can go join a fucking, I don't know, DJ Circus. Is that a model train club?

I don't know. You can go and meet friends without it being institutional. Like I agree, there is a, there are lots of people are very, very lonely. But the idea that you're going to like get people together based on a Myers-Briggs test is kind of ludicrous. I don't know. If this app has changed your life, then bowling would change your life. That's the level you're operating on.

You're a little more than an amiibo. I think the premise of it is necessarily a bad thing on the basis of it. Yeah, obviously I can only really speak for myself and my limits of experiences of things, but I think it is much more difficult to meet people. And maybe that's an age-related thing, maybe it's a post-pandemic thing like as well.

But especially if you don't live in like a city for example, but I think it can become quite difficult and that is sort of accelerated by the fact that unless you live in a big city, it is quite likely but the place is where you would meet people, be it in pubs or be it in like, arts and crafts clubs or whatever, like I'll just even being shut down, cut back and so on. So I like I can understand like why this would stuff would exist. My issue with this is that it kind of clearly cases towards a particular kind of person for whom like this is not really a problem. You know they cater towards people who like do live in most cities and so this feels less over kind oh, I want to meet friends like who have similar interests and taste to me. And it does feel much more like, oh, I want to optimize my social circle, but rather than sort of my, all my friends being management

consultants, I sort of want an eclectic mix of friends for who, for including a DJ who is not actually a DJ, because all he does is press buttons for me to talk about management consulting where. So I'll finish here. Tech innovation has played a major role in developing base, both in terms of creating the index and facilitating the operations behind every dinner experience. I love a dinner experience. I love the operations of it.

I love the operations of it facilitated. That's one of my favorite things to do with those operations. Making a reservation, for example, building a skyscraper on top of a mountain in the Saudi Arabian desert, whether dinner will be hosted. Base is also currently working on an app to give members a chance to connect outside their experiences. Wait, so it isn't even an app yet? It's just like, it's just a guy.

It's just a hundred dollars a month for a chance to have some ice break or coffee. So much money. for a chance to have some ice break or coffee. So much money. Like... What happens if you join this app and it just hooks you up with a bunch of guys in her mask? These are the guys you're most comfortable with. I almost made this joke earlier when I was like,

they should give you some really unexpected people to match with and it's like, yeah, it's like, Islamic jihad fighter. Yeah. The 20th hijacker was just a guy from this out. Yeah, shit, shit interests with the 20th hijacker, you know, crochet. Connected by the jack, not turning up to work. Yeah, both connected by their love of toplorons. I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring bass back down to bass camp now.

And I'm going to, you could not launch the app base in any Arabic speaking country That's right Well, you could it would just probably have some baggage. Yeah, yeah, the Islamic jihad guys would show up I mean easy icebreakers, but We're going to I just I just got that joke. We're going to welcome our guest for our second half. So please join us in a few seconds in the future. Well, we talk about labor conference, Starmer's plans for new towns and so on and so on with economic

geography for Danny Dorelig. See you in a second half of the episode. And we are being joined by Danny Doreling, the Halford Maccorder Professor of Geography at Oxford, author of numerous books on inequality, the economic geography of inequality. Now most recently, the author of Shatter Nation, inequality, the geography of the failing state, Professor Doerling, I just have to ask, as the Halford Mackender, Professor of Geography, who as we all know wrote the geographical pivot of history, can you please comment on Kira

Starmer's failure or unwillingness in his conference speech to mention the importance of Britain taking and holding it back a stand so that we may once again rule the world island. He just isn't ambitious enough, is he? You know, he should be going for Empire 3.0. I mean, you know, this man's supposed to have guts and patriotism. He puts flags behind him. But he just isn't properly British, is he?

I know it's disappointing. There's so many small rocks around the world, we can start with some little islands at least, but no, no, he's got no ambition out here. I love that Riley opened this with like a very, very esoteric, sort of IR geography beef from like, from like undergraduate days. It's like having read this guy's voice like as Becca Starwood. It's a center of the world islands. He's a every dog for those. That's where the power begins. That's right. You've got your plove. You've got your doughnut-shaped bread. You go everything you need. Yeah. Look, Halford Macunder knew it and then Britain

and Russia competed over it for decades. Many sort of ambitious Russian aristocrats in British army subalterns were sent, blacked up to die in Kiva and now Kierstharmer spits on their grave by refusing to conquer Uzbekistan. I want to see Kierstharma conquer Uzbekistan. I want to see him at the head of a kind of Mongol Horde. That would be great. I would love to see him be like, look, I think that's a broad church, the Mongol Horde, that are sub-proport, that want to take things in one direction and another. And that's the way we can use that as a strength because if you take one of my enemies and you tie him to one of the horses going one way, but also to one of the horses going the other way, I think we can use the Satajada product. So if we're not going to be recapitulating the sort of frankly quite

odd thought about Alfred Mackender, what I propose to do is to talk a little bit about the economic geography of what Starmer seems to be promising, Starmer and Associated Acts, seem to be promising via labor conference. But before we do that, your book talks about written as being essentially shattered in a geographic sense and kind of a failing state. Given that most of our listeners kind of are, indeed, are familiar with reading this with like mounting horror, like that's the country that I'm living in. Turning to the images page and there's like a Google Earth

image of the top of your head. Oh, no. No. Given that most of our listeners kind of already know that, you just want to talk about why shattering as your main theoretical pivot for what you're talking about. And then we'll go into the conference speech and see, does it solve that? Okay, why? You begin to run out of words. We had an Atlas called Banquet Britain, almost a decade

ago. And it's not a fail state. There is some way to go. We could keep trying to go. And it's not a fail state. You know, there is there is some way to go. We could, you know, we could keep trying to go for the Sunlit Uplands and see just how far we can go. Can we take the UK into the second and the third world? It could get worse. It becomes harder and harder to actually muck it up even more. But it's kind of it's the opposite of McKinther. You know, McKinther was all about how can we regain the empire? How can we be at the top again? How can we be bigger than the United States? This is where we really don't want to cut be like the United States. We are becoming more like them. We have the biggest prison population in Europe. We have more people sleeping on the streets than anywhere else in Europe. So we're like the USA, we have fractured our health service. We're not quite at the level of the USA in terms of life expectancy, but we're heading that way. We've privatized our housing to private

land laws so that we can have an eviction rate. If you imagine a kind of anti-McKinder going, you know, let's really try and can we become the most unequal country in Europe and have the highest rate of poverty anywhere west of the poorest parts of Eastern Europe? We've succeeded. You got to be fair. That is George Osborne and Boris Johnson and so on. Mainly, you can take the credit, but Tony Blair helped and Gordon Brown gave it a

little shove in that direction. Well I think it's very... You're filming the first 10 minutes of Borat now they do it in the north of England. Well no no no do it in the southeast the southeast of England which does need to be called London. No no no no no where are you serving? So we would have gone bankrupt. So we would have gone bankrupt but they we would have gone bankrupt, but they couldn't let it go. Bankrupts of Birmingham can slow has gone bankrupt. The South East doing that as a higher child poverty rate than Scotland. It's not Hastings, it's not Newcastle.

It is actually their home counties. And I think this goes to show right of the, we talk about trying to become more like the US, is when we talk about projects that fail, not just morally, but on their own terms, trying to become like the US without being the kind of global consumer of last resort at the head of a blood soaked empire doesn't really work. You don't have the level of prosperity to support that much inequality and have it

take over, really. Yeah, you cannot give giant plasmus screens to all your poor and like the US, we can't simply print sterling endlessly and go, oh, I've got this amazing modern monetary theory, don't worry, we could just print the bound. Does that stop sending food? Because we're not in the same position as the USA, we don't have ten fleets. I think Starmer might disagree with you there with his speech of, let's get within one golden horde, which is going to secure the borders of his back of town. No, and we're sharing an aircraft carrier with the French.

We are sharing an aircraft carrier, didn't the planes fall off it then? Yeah, we still got some American nuclear missiles from those submarines if we think they really work, but We are very funny if they gave us non-functioning missiles So they're like oh, it'd be quite good if they were non-functioning. Yeah, I want to move on to to Starmer's speech because he poses the question That's weak Let's get on Future back saying and this is from later on in the speech, but I want to bring it up at the top because it's also a little bit of a theme. That this is an appeal to conservative voters who despair at their party and that this is a changed labor party that is no longer in

Thrall to gesture politics. He then makes claims to solve another problem without major investment. For example, the Green Pros green prosperity plan being now cut by 8 billion pounds a year, having a move back for two years. Finally, gesture politics is at an end. We will be doing announcement politics instead, which is different. It's a sort of semifull politics, you know? I mean, sort of same amount of flags involved at this point. Yeah, yeah. Starmer says, I believe in this country, I believe in its spirit, its people,

its businesses and its communities. I don't just see the sewage in our streams and our seas. I see the volunteers, people who love their community, standing up to fight for clean water. That's really funny to begin an inspirational thing with the sewage acknowledge it, to be like, to do the like, look for the helpers, Mr. Rogers thing about like, yeah, every waterway is choked with

filth. Yeah, he could do. And of course, he won't turn to the one part of the UK, which has the least sewage, which is Scotland. You know, we love, we have a place that's as sorted out some of these things, but we can't talk about Scotland. It's not allowed. They waffer thin elements of social democracy. It's all that we needed to hold back this reservoir of turds.

I love the idea of a sewage acknowledgement in the sense of it. Before we were doing wild swimming, you're like, you know, this is the river that was traditionally inhabited by a bunch of turds. Yeah, that he finds it really difficult because he can't talk about the parts of the UK which are succeeding, the parts which are actually stopping children going cold and hungry in winter because they're not his parts. He's trying to ape something which is a failed model. George Osborne said in 2015, if you follow my economic plan then by the year 2030 we'll

be the richest medium sized large country per capita in the world. Oh, it's Johnson in his resignation speech. Six more years to go. Six more years to go. We can do this. What was that? Just going to tough it out. God, tough out Johnson, resignation speech. The Sunlit uplands are just around the corner. And Starmer carries on the same one. We'll have the highest growth rate, outside of the

G7. If you just leave it to me, don't look at the things. Collapse your economy enough. It's quite easy to have a high growth rate. He's doing like one more poll kind of laborism but for the opposite political tendency. That's beautiful. So it additionally, you know, it's the, to be clear number one, I'm sort of starting, I'm not starting from when he starts,

which is just like some arsenal jokes and starting from when it picks up. And all the kind of like weak conference shit was like the pattern. Yeah, here's what my parents did and stuff. We're skipping the pattern. And I also want to say, you know, story about the Don Quay sanctuary.

I've sold it off, but I've used it to keep horses from my hold. It's stormer recognizes that every turn in the river creates an opportunity for someone to contribute to their community by removing that turd from the river. It's the character for human feces and the character for opportunity. One third at a time, this is the reality of big society.

You know, we fight. It's small nets. More nets to cope with the small boats. I don't just see the crumbling concrete in our schools. I see the teachers in the temporary classrooms still giving that our children the education they deserve. I say the teachers crushed to death. But they... I salute them.

And they were coming a little heeding jack at the time so it's all okay, isn't it? Yeah. The plan, but what if we could build the schools out of turds like Waterloo Dorb? We could solve two problems out of turds like water and doob. We could solve two problems at a stroke. Genius. The player again, the player of the Labour Party who's explicitly did not fix the schools, all he's saying is he will bear witness to the crumbling schools and be sad about it. Well, we're going for the teachers unless they, you know, strike or anything like that. Because we haven't got any spare schools in this country. We haven't got great, big, enormous ones that are half empty, which if you needed some

schools, could you add a 200 moves going? You might get, oh look, look, there's some schools there and there aren't many children in them. They've got quite an expensive uniform and loads of teachers. Teachers, this has been, no, no, no, no, leave those ones alone. Tiny increase in their tax rate but nothing nothing that radical nothing to scare the horses because we need those horses we can't scare the horses anymore.

No that's up there for the whole that's the that's the GMB and the ARMS industry union say love him wasn't that that was the wasn't storming like quite heavily into taking away private schools charitable status and then like immediately abandoned that after like a couple of weeks. Oh no, no, no, no, that was one of the later ones here, banded. They abandoned a whole load of stuff before then. But no, no, that's gone as well. And then before you know it, those schools we full of little Starmer clones, all saying how much they care, while elevating themselves separately for the rest of society.

So, I will carry on. I don't just see the boards going up in our high streets. I see the businesses, the pubs, the cafes, and the retail is still trading, finding a way to the chaos and serving their community. That's the real Britain conference. I fucking hate that.

Millions of people who look at the toys. They're dressing the conference in the second person, yeah. Lane. Millions of people who've looked at the dressing the conference in the second person, yeah. Lane. Millions of people who've looked at the Tori circus and said, fine, we'll get on with it ourselves. I say, let's stand with them and give them the government they deserve. Turn her back, so never ending Tori decline

with a decade of national renewal. Do not fail. I think if you vote for Keir Starmer, you will get the government you deserve. But it's sort of like a monkey's paw, kind of way. I'd go to the Tori circus, I to see my handcock do trapeze. It's no matter of months away. He says, do not doubt that the fire of change still burns in Britain. The question is whether it lives on inside labor. And today we turn to the

plane. Yeah, that's a fucking question, isn't it? So it's a brief turn into Zora's Trinism, that too. Then you feel sorry for him. How many must? No. You don't feel sorry for him at all. No. Where do you think he's going to stop the fire? And we're going to fight her dead. You think he manages to avoid ever seeing a clip of himself? Or walking? Maybe. Maybe sheltered from it.

Let me say this. Do not doubt the fire of change still burns in Britain. Today we turn the page to answer the question, why labor it with a plan for Britain built to last. So just to reveal, that sort of like enhanced interrogation on that metaphor, we're going to turn a page on the fire. Correct. How come the fire is burned through the time? I've already turned the one.

It's just a Mario book. It's printed on us pastos pages, which, if used correctly, with a mask, is impervious to the hate of the fire. Obviously, it's very important not to abrade the book around anyone who's not wearing a appropriate re-breathing protection. No, a huge fan of Fahrenheit 451, you know?

No. Well, we have this sort of like table setting here. The fire of change burns in Britain, which is going to allow us to turn the page and get the NHS off its knees. So those are the three things. Okay. Right. Well, because the NHS is trapped

under a very heavy page of a book. Yeah. And they're like on their hands and knees going, oh, I wish they could stand up, but there's very heavy his bestos book. So there are five missions, which is... It's so fucked that they call the missions too. I know this is his thing, is mission politics.

And it's just like, why this kind of language, why the turn to the tactical? Well, Bruce Davidson showing up in her fucking cadets uniform was already, I think, the sort of British public tolerance limit for this kind of stuff. It's kind of like it's a juke of Edinburgh war to post a politics, isn't it? It's, you know, he's going to get some badges. So I have to hear the missions. Higher growth, safer streets, cheap British power in your home, more opportunities in

your community in the NHS off of its knees. Opportunity in the community, less guy. Well, it's going to require mission government, rather than sticking plaster politics. Because no one's ever had missions before. No one's ever got into government to try to do something. It's also sticking plaster politics the same as gesture politics. No, gesture politics is what Corbin did and sticking plaster politics is what the Tories do and real mission driven government is what Starmer will be doing. He's a grown up in the room. He's a grown up in the room. When you've got a crack in your rat concrete school, some people would suggest

sticking a kind of plaster over that crack to retard the degree at which it cracks open, but we're not even gonna do that. So we're not doing sticking parts of all six. We will give the school a pep talk, however. So is this, he says, this is actually something I'm interested in the economic geography of, there are a couple of elements here.

Number one is he always talks about this concept of unlocking and it's something that I think since 2017, 18, it's something we've seen in the more like liberal bent of, of Britain, whether that is the idea that leveling up frequently responds to our thinks about this contribution, unlocking. And he says, the possibility in working people in the parts of our country is ignored, passed over, and disregarded as sources of, sources of growth and dynamism, but with potential ready to be

unlocked. So, and he also says, if we want to challenge the hoarding of potential in our economy, then we must win the power of the hoarders in Westminster, give power back and put communities as opposed to the potential holds. Yeah, the potential hold. Let's talk about this idea of unlocking and why unlocking has to happen geographically. As an economic geographer, how does that strike you? Well, this is this old idea that you've simply got to unlock this hidden potential that's

just waiting to burst out. And it requires a son of a tall maker who knows all about locks and the tools to do it. To free people. Donkeys. I don't have that. Remember that he sold the donkeys? We're not going to mention the donkeys. He's got horses now. Yeah, the donkeys are gone. It just requires a few switches to the levers, a tiny switch on interest rates, something else, a bit more caring on some more devolution, which is brilliant code word for. we've run out of money entirely. So now it's over to you, Manchester, and this is what you've got left. It's wishful thinking, really, it's kind of well things are so bad they probably turn around and run themselves,

but you know I'll be in power and I'll be able to take the credit for it, but I don't think I really don't think there's much of a plan there at all. Because it says that the state, the hypothesis here, right, is that through bungling, the Tories have locked lots of this ingrained potential that could be unleashed to make us into a country that makes precision machinery, that makes other precision machinery. Yeah, they've locked the fire. Right. And when your fire is locked, you can't turn the page on it.

In the NHS, the staff of this country has a little German boy locked up inside the, like he's trapped in a shredding like hunger from the tablet of the dentist and he's waiting to come out and build a diesel engine which manufactures other smaller diesel engines. But it is unlocked potential time. It is. Unlocked potential says essentially that the responsibility to, let's say, reinvigorate the economy lies in everyone individually and that if only everyone can reach their highest attainment as a producer, as a producer in sort of an alienated economy,

then we can get there. But unfortunately, the Tories have bungled it, which means that things aren't being managed efficiently and potential is locked away. But ultimately, it's innate within us. This is back to Macinda. This is back to Cecil Rhodes. We are born fortunate to be the best race on earth. And if only we're unshackled, we will take over and rule everything. And so you've only got

to a lump, you've only got to release the potential. The British are not really sure. And that's why the teacher is still kicking around to this day. Yeah. It's the same old thinking. It's the same old thinking. We are we're old thinking. We're destined to be up there. If we're not up there, it must be a small thing holding us back from our rightful place in history. Well, also the talk of unlocking, as you say about tinkering, it's like, well, we can't or won't undo anything

we've already done, right? We're not going to bring social housing back. We're not going to take infrastructure into public ownership. We're not going to bring social housing back. We're not going to like take infrastructure into public ownership. We're not going to spend any money. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, students, they're student loans are forever. And you know, your grandchildren can have them as well. No, no, no, we're not going to you turn on anything. Yeah. And so for me, what unlocking means is attempting to, in fact, lock in everything we have already, and just to say we can keep all of this, and all of this will keep working.

If everyone just works a little harder, and we're gonna give you the tools to work a little harder, but we're not gonna give you anything like a better life. Well, obviously, the Tories are useless, and they've fucked everything up. So when we get into power, well, we're not gonna change anything

from what they've done actually, because that would also be bad. That would be responsible. In fact, not changing Tory policy would be the sort of thing, changing Tory policy rather would be the sort of thing the Tories would do. Have you seen how often they change Tory policy? So, in fact, when we get in, what we're going to do is we're going to keep the policy exactly the same in the precise thing that the Tories won't expect us to do and then

everything will be fine. Yeah, because business likes to be able to see it in those where it is. Exactly. You know, general meltchert sort of vibe, you know? just to do and then everything will be fine. Yeah, because business likes to build it in those where it is. Exactly. The general meltch it sort of by, you know. So yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the key missions as well is to start building lots of houses. Of course, not nearly as many as are required,

but the idea, let's get Britain building again. So the plans involve a number of new towns, so new new towns built on brown field, which they intend to make more easy to develop on, or the gray belt areas of disused land within the green belt, which consists of wasteland, car parks, and so on. Oh cool. I'll come to New Stevenage.

Welcome to wasteland, Sissy. I can't wait for Neo-Milton, Kane. They expect that the majority of upfront investment in new towns will come from the private sector with local areas bidding for new towns required to seek up cyberpunk. It is like neo-Milton Keens, a project of I don't know fucking San Rico or Carillion. Yeah, I live in the circus I bat suit. However, however, the key is that that Starmer is this is not from a speech. This is from commentary on the speech is expected to pledge George and style townhouses in these new areas. So merit townhouse. Yes.

What? What in the King Charles fuck is why? Because that's what we need. Because back, back then, we were number one on the planet. So clearly it is, it is the lack of enough columns that as hell does back. It's a thing is right. There is actually a problem in this country

with whenever we build anything housing wise be it social housing, be it private housing, it's always shit. And so he sort of he's vaguely lacking on to a point here which is that people like Georgian houses because that was the last time we built anything that wasn't shit. And so like, it's better, but then if you're going to let Barrett Holmes build them, they'll just find a way to build a shit Georgian townhouse, and it won't be better. They have to fundamentally change the Barrett house.

They have these special bricks, which are much smaller than normal bricks. So from a distance, it looks like an okay house. It's just when you open the door and go in, you discover it's much smaller than a Mon your mom and dad at. It's like a model village. Yes. But like, it's fully the like pound-free stuff. Like, it's a weird little culture war thing

to get invested in because like, there are perfectly nice like Victorian and guardian houses. I mean, not to do this, like, modern architecture society thing, but there's perfectly nice Victorian and guardian houses, not to do this modern architecture society thing, but there's perfectly nice brutalism that people who live in it actually like. It's just a question of doing it with some degree of care which we on the whole just refuse to do.

And which we won't do for this because we're asking Barrett Holmes to do it. Well, I was just going to say because a lot of it is about maintenance as well, right? And it's just kind of, you know, even with like the sort of like the new builds, like, no, the problem isn't the fact that they look a certain way, at least to like most normal people. It is the fact that like we are made when you see a new build, like you aren't sort of, if you're a normal person, you're not sort of thinking that, oh, this looks aesthetically displeasing. What you're what you're actually thinking is like, well,

that looks like it's made of shit materials and it's designed to sort of be like sheet, that's the main- It could be made of actual shit. It could actually be made of actual shit. And so the distrust comes from this idea that like, okay, these were made very, very quickly and you can see that it was made of very cheap materials and everything I know about them

sort of suggests that within like five years, if not sooner, everything is gonna collapse. And I want like with the Georgian House thing, like it's, so you know, the idea sort of seems to be, but oh, if you, because what it feels like is, it feels like a very lacklustre policy attempt to like return to tradition, right? You know, the idea that like if you would ape

the aesthetics of tradition, then you can like invoke the sort of sense of, you know, imperial nostalgia for lack of a better term. But that time when things were better and they weren't, you know, and when things were made like fairly decently. And yeah, there is a contradiction in practice and it does, like this policy does sort of feel like one more. And there's another big thing about the policy.

I mean, essentially, this is the build us telling labor what to do. That they are the advisors on housing now. Oh, good. Well, we can trust them, right? Trust them. And they would like to build some more for it to be easy. Not too many. They have to build slowly to keep the prices as high as possible.

But they want the promise of building because they don't want the labor party. They look at people who've got second and third homes in cities and look at the holiday homes and look at all the Airbnb's that are empty for half the time and start to say maybe we could do something about all those houses in London and Birmingham and Sheffield where the lights are out because they're not actually being used because they're an investment. Right, the builders go, no, no, no, don't look at that. Don't think of actually using all your spare capacity. Just let us build another quaint, rather small place

just off the M4 that a few executives might just be about to buy a house when they get sick in their 40s of living in London anymore. And we tell everybody else, don't worry. Just next year, next decade, there'll be a house for you or a home for your children. Trust us. Yeah, and you don't have to do a sort of like popular imagination of Corbin kind of like expropriation of this.

You don't have to do like Chavismo, not to keep coming back to Scotland, but like Edinburgh Council eventually has forced through a sort of like a bylaw that is seriously going to impede Airbnb operators, which is always a good thing, early in favour of that, they're complaining a lot about it and well they might. It's not just Scotland, you can look at the west of Wales, they put double council tax on empty holiday properties, now making it more and more expensive than the house you only go to for a month because you just need it in the summer and

sod what the locals do. We can look at Northern Ireland with the lowest housing costs in the UK and one of the lowest rates of child poverty because housing is affordable in Northern Ireland. It's only in England that we managed to get it so it's so long and we don't even look at the rest of the UK. Well, I mean, well, of course, can't you? You might see another bloke and then, you know, that could be a bit suspicious. That's true. There's some climate stuff here too, which is, you know, as Justin from Malaysia problem is fond of saying, the greenest like lowest carbon building is one that's already been built. And instead, we're going to build a bunch more in places that don't have good transit links

except by car, which is great. We're just going to turn up the thermostat a bit more as well. I was going to say, let's remember, sorry, I was going to say, let's remember the new towns that we already have. So the construction of places like Harlow or Milton and space. How does this compare this new round of proposed new towns compared to what we already have in terms of like solving the problems of people not having places to live? Well that mean for start those were bought in when we had to clear slums in the middle of our cities. You couldn't have people living in that density. We were putting some of the planning of them together just after the Luftwaffe had

bombed out the large. Oh, and when we were having three or four children per family, right? We're not. We haven't had a two children per family since the 1960s. We've got enough immigration just to keep us going as a country, but that's all it does. It goes a little bit of growth, but not that steady. We have more houses in terms of rooms per person than we have ever had. We had the biggest increase between the 2011-2021 sentences, but the upper middle class have to have two or three bedrooms empty because they're

going to need them at Christmas. And that is essential. And you build these houses. Yeah, amazing. Imagine a miracle occurs. Somehow inflation comes right down. We can afford the concrete. We find some builders from somewhere.

We actually do build them. Who do you think is going to buy the houses? It's not going to be the people that actually need housing because there's no way. It's going to be people who need a family house in the countryside to complement the flat they already have in the city. That's who they're going to sell to. This is housing for people of a similar social strata to somebody who might own a donkey sanctuary. That's who it's for. This is the other thing that, and I know this isn't the biggest issue at play here because I mean, fundamentally the only way to solve a huge proportion of the issues with the British housing market is to build social housing rather than private housing.

But, if you're like a wealthy-ish person, right, and you can afford to buy a house for say like half a million pounds, right, outside of London somewhere on the M4, right, why the fuck would you want to spend your money on some piece of shit built by Barrett Holmes, which is on a street where you can't park your fucking car because they don't want to make space to park the car. You can only get there by car and every other prick on that street has a house which looks identical to yours

with fucking UPC wind up. There's a reason why you buy it. And you buy it because you can vent it out at twice what your mortgage will be and it's going to mean that you can spend your retirement fusing around the Caribbean. That's who's going to buy these houses, yeah. And then some poor souls will be spending 60 or 70% of their salary to live in a home and they never wish they could live in because the house builders got their way and got to build the kind of houses they wanted to build

rather than the flats and apartments near the cities that we actually need. Oh well. If they carry on, you know, you've got to think, is it a kind of suicide mission? Yeah. Do you just, do you think it's a kind of mission politics? It is a suicide mission. It's a kind of mission politics? It is a mission to see the same thing. Let's do the same thing.

I, my first job after getting my degrees in 1991 was a housing research failure for the Joseph Fraudview Foundation. When the government policy was 300 fucking thousand houses a year, that was 1991. I'm getting old now several decades of past, right? It hasn't worked and I'm a bit sick of hearing it again And again and again that was the end of market that you and John major They were the 300,000 houses a year. We've kind of right wrapped around

He's a new John major just not quite as credible Well in 1994 the British government received a report that said all of these schools that were made out of rack concrete were going to collapse in the next 30 years. And obviously they took a lot of action on that. So yeah. So one of the other policies as well as the creation of a national wealth fund, which sounds excellent. I mean, Norway created a sovereign wealth fund out of its oil, and that's gone very well for them, but the national wealth fund. Not going to be fucking well to put it up for money! The need to do that in the fucking 70s, you mad bastard! You can't start a wealth fund

when you're broke and be like, ah, if I now have to up a wealth fund, don't worry, don't worry, I'm not going any money. But I've just felt this wealth fund, so once that gets going, we'll be safe for Zous's mate mate. This time next year on, they will be fucking millionaires! Jesus Christ! So, I wouldn't say we're broke so much as just deciding to leave a lot of the wealthy, being very wealthy and deciding to deprive us of spending up in kind of... The impression I have is that it's kind of both. Right.

But we could soften the blow considerably by doing just a tiny bit of left when you're all so excited maybe. Yeah, like, like, we could be rich, but we're not rich now. And so the times out of the well fund would be once we are rich again, but honest to get rich again, we'd have to do like 15 things that the Labour party have put on their absolutely will never do list The well fund is sort of how you would get rich by investing in stuff, and then that's how you become rich Just you just put it all on fucking scratch cards Well, well, well might be the key word. I mean, it's worth you know at least he's told about a well fund

It's just if you haven't got any wealth and it's wealth you need, you have to look towards the clue is wealth. A guard to enter the Euro-Millions, every way as a country. Every one bars the ticket, our chances of winning are high. So the National Wealth Fund is slightly more, let's say, advanced than Euro-Millions tickets, but not that much more, which is essentially, it's a multi-billion pound fund to invest in critical infrastructure, but those critical infrastructure bits are things like gigafactories, steel, and ports that can handle large industrial

parts. Gigafactories, of course, we had one, it was called British Fold, it went out of business, because the government didn't support it enough. And, yeah, on the flip side, it says that for every one pound invested, there must be three pounds of private investment. So, essentially, it is another, it is a big, de-risking activity, but, again, it means to have this geographical impact, right? It says, the government will borrow to invest in things like gigafactories in places like, you know, in places that are sort of traditionally seen as deprived, even though huge amounts of deprivation as Danny pointed

out, is in places that are seen as quite wealthy, largely because of house prices. But we're just safe, but we're just safe seats and therefore we don't give a fuck. Yeah. So, so right, this is, this is, the season, we've learned nothing from the immediately previous election where a bunch of a bunch of seats, which we thought was safe seats, turned out not to be. So the, um, the argument here essentially is, yes, we are going to de-risk a bunch of private investment so that again, we, how much, uh, of a strategic stake, will the state have in things like, I don't know, the wind turbines that we're going to build, batteries, steel, etc. And how much is just going to end up being sort of huge

giveaways to the owners of these things, like for example, San Chief Gupta. Yeah. Oh, you could just, you could just look at BMW in Oxford, you know, 75 million bung to stop them leaving. That was just a month or two ago. You can sit there in the private sector and look at this government and basically play chicken with them. Because you know they're not going to do anything that radical and they're going to get embarrassed at losing their biggest jewels in the in the crown like the mini car plant because it's supposed to be going electric and it will be a bit embarrassing if it went to the check border. But these private investors,

they are not going to do this if they're not going to get their pound of flesh, though it really is the last of the asset stripping. So it's the way I see something like this, like a de-risking wealth fund is it is, as you say, it's like paying a company not to leave, it's the that from the other end, it's paying a company to set up, but then sort of abandoning much of your strategy to what the private sector will go along with. Like so much. It's so submissive is the main thing that strikes me about it.

It is like coming to these companies and not just giving them the kind of like regular forning incentives, not just like paying for nice fact-finding missions and stuff, but like coming to them and being like, no, I am a dog, right? Anything you want. Like it's the, it looks like the end of fucking old boy in the cabinet office if they get their way on this one. Here's to arm a featuring Carillionaire with I'm so dirty. We're coming sort of towards the end.

So I want to say a few more things that he plans, one of which is of course get the NHS back on its feet. He says, if all we do is place the NHS in a pedestal that I'm afraid it will remain on life support, to which I have to say, what fucking pedestal? What pedestal is really like that? What kind of life support I like? In terms of the torturing of that metaphor, all I'm allowed to say is Israel has a right to defend itself.

Yeah, you go to A&E and a bunch of nurses like put you on a pedestal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then on life support, but then get you back on your feet because you were like sat on the pedestal before. I know, I know some people don't like the word reform. You're kneeling on the pedestal. You're on your knees.

I tell you there's no other option. And what he means, of course, what the new sort of resources for the NHS, it's going to be mostly reform. So do it yourself, use AI, whatever. With small amounts of extra cash for training and overtime. So they say we're going to cut NHS waiting lists

to increase overtime. So not more doctors and nurses, not paying them better. You are going to be people physically more tired than current NHS workers are. Like at some point you hit like a biological limit on that one. And we're one and the NHS will be issued, okay. Can you, can you forget we took back control?

So you know that you appear time-demective. Then we're working 56 hours a week, you in the good old days, the doctors would be awake all night. Yeah, so that's what I want to do in that journey. We're going to get the German meth chocolate for the nurse. They're going to be like, I'm a match-a-smit pilot, I'm a dreamer, I'm a Briton. Well, hold on. So this is all going to be paid for by scrapping the non-dom tax breaks to people who live half the time in the UK. But that's, if you want to talk about fucking gesture politics, then just say we're

going to, this thing that has been chronically underfunded in crisis, we're going to increase over time by closing a tax loophole, that to me feels like a fucking gesture. Well, that's quite nice because we've had that none dumb status since the French Revolution when we bought it in, you're going to go, come over here, I was to clap, not only will you not get your head chopped off, but we're going to attack you, especially lowly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hamilton should bring that in again. They're not getting a head chopped off. Yeah. We don't get a bunch of Saudi businessmen over here. Hey, are you worried about being crummed into a suitcase?

Well, I think we've kind of fumbled the bag on enough Russians that Britain is a like safe place to be an exile no longer really exists, you know. You don't have to fumble the bag at the Saudi embassy. Yeah. So, oh, what is it? Wet. This is.

Samsonite, I never take in that bag. This is very similar to the promise in Reeves' speech to fix the concrete in the schools by ending the private school that loophole, which is, yes, this is an unfair element of the economy that ought to be done away with, but it's only the most egregious one, and it's a very thin constituency. It's just not enough to fix the problem. You cannot rebuild every single school in Britain by taxing the private schools a bit more.

That's just a way to look like you're doing something. It isn't. And eventually, yes, somebody's going to have to actually fix the problem. But this is all the same. It makes me nostalgic for the press image of what Corbin was, which was going to be like expropriate everyone with more than 20 quid in their pocket, like Bayonet points. Yeah. 25 quid is now the ceiling. Yeah.

But listen, right, we're not going to fix all the schools, right? Listen, right, if kids are in schools, which at any moment mark collapse, it'll be a lot like the blitz. They'll learn to cooperate. They'll learn to work together. They'll learn to build themselves with a blitz spirit, which made our generation so great. So I think it'd be good. And they can play in the bubble. Yeah, exactly. And then Rallying comes in and they can build a new Georgian house that'll fall down right on top of the school that fell down. So just here's how he ends the speech. He says, we will face down the age of insecurity together, break the stranglehold of Tory decline together, walk toward the decade of national renewal together. Labor serves your interests, we will grow every corner of the country because we have a plan to take back our streets, switch on Great British energy, get the NHS back on its feet, tear down the barriers to opportunity and get Britain building

again. A plan for Britain built to last to heal the wounds, a plan to turn the page and say in a cry of defiance to all those who know right our country of, Britain must can and will get its future back. So I have to say, The important clauses, terrible script writing. It's a cry for help from the scriptwriter. They are sending us some liberal messages You know all those really bad metaphors. It's please, please get me out of here Yeah, it's like in a cross stick if you read the first letter of each line

It says I am currently tied to four horses on the Mongolia and step Hopefully is sent help I love the British energy thing, You know, we're going to have a different kind of electricity, not like anybody else is electricity. This is British electricity. Patriotic electricity. Or even then, right, it's the great British energy from what I've read of it, it's another one of these crowd in private financing commissioning organizations that still won't just own the actual stuff. British, so that's fine. It's still going to be mostly owned by it.

If we put a flag on it and we call it British, we could do the same with my firmestats. If we forget sales, these are British salesiers. The thing about the British government right is that with private investment, they're doing this project, which is obviously profitable, like green energy or whatever. It's basically a license to print money. That's just like an initial outlay that you have to do. And they're requesting all of this private investment,

which is money they could just invest themselves. They could just borrow it and invest it. For again, the money printing machine that is effectively green energy, right? And then they never ask themselves, why do all of these private companies, which have to make profit, want to invest this money in this project? Like, they're literally renting a house that they could buy for no other reason than they have an ideological commitment

to the rental market. It's the same as what it won't build council houses. Because that is the beginning of the terrible road to communism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where we talk about. That's a fucking terrible in this country as it is. That's where we talk about like in a cry of defiance to all those who now write the country off. It's like, well, this is, uh, this is a very, the very thin rule, I, in terms of the scale of the problems that we're facing. Quite, let's say, derisate gestures towards their enormity. But gesture missions, mission gestures, not any kind of British gestures. Hosting the log gestures with a flag on them.

Yeah, yeah. Just as to make you proud. Brackenpointing. Don't talk as just as down. No, eternal gestures. However, I want to say on the beaches, as they emerge covered in shit, we will fight them with gestures. We'll fight them with thoughts and with pages of books and pedestals and feet and concrete.

Kirsten has been really into the like heated, fermented, mes milk, you know, he's knocked a few glasses of that back. And we're gonna explain Polo with a dead goat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, from here to Coruscant, you know. Yeah. So I think that's all we have time for in our second half. But Danny, I want to say thank you very much for coming and hanging out with us today. And to remind everybody, of course, that shattered nation inequality and the geography of a failing state is available wherever you might find books. Yeah, turn a page, create a new Britain.

It's full of fun, fun, fun. That's right. So it's an upbeat read. That's what I'm hearing. Once again, thank you very much to Danny and a reminder to all you out there in podcast land. There is a second episode of this show every week. It is $5 per month to access on Patreon. There are $10 episodes as well if you want even more. And also there's the stream most Mondays and Thursdays from 9 to 11. Yeah, I think also tour comes see me in the UK. We're Bristol Birmingham Oxford

11th, 12th and 14th not necessarily in that order of November also Germany this way if you're listening to this in Berlin the day It comes out fucking tonight Come and see me 17th in Berlin and 22nd in Hamburg of October Would love to I'm not gonna lie, it's an expensive trip and the tickets are not selling as well as they may have done. Please come to that. So we will see the rest of you on the free episode in a few short days. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye bye.