TRASHFUTURE - Manifesto Madness Pt 1: Jo Swinson's Ideology Wallet feat. Mollie Goodfellow

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

Welcome to Part 1 of TF Presents: Manifesto Madness. This week, we're looking at the absolutely realistic promises the Lib Dems are making, should they come into office. We're joined in studio by special guest and returning friend of the show Mollie Goodfellow (@hansmollman) on the topic of the Lib Dems' manifesto. Mollie joins Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani),  Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) to discuss Jo Swinson's plan to build an exciting liberal world with the power of markets and STEM education, so she can nuke it. Join us for our bonus episode about the Tory manifesto on Thursday! TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN THE UK! You can do this here — it’s fast! https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote - the deadline is 11:59 pm, so [Question Time voice] get on with it! *Do some canvassing* Momentum (@peoplesmomentum) has a great resource that lets you sign up to canvassing events in marginal seats close to you. Access it here: https://www.mycampaignmap.com The only way we can win is by meeting voters face-to-face, so let's make it happen. *LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see us live on December 3 at Vauxhall Comedy with special guest Rob Delaney! The address is: 6 South Lambeth Place, London, SW8 1SP, and the show starts at 8:30 pm, doors at 7:00 PM. Tickets are available here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-pre-election-christmas-spectacular-tickets-82622465017?fbclid=IwAR0qE8wwGZAYXWLRiQ_f2yO9urbKS1d-0dUuyE-mWAq6DoGQwAGuNRa_IYw If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31753429  

So they're doing that thing, they do every election, where they try and find out what drugs the respective leaders have done. And they were speaking to Joe Swinson on Newsnight about cannabis. And she gave this bravado of like, I'm not going to be one of those people who says, I tried it once and I didn't really inhale. She's like, yeah, I enjoyed it. And it's like, no one believes you. No, she has never.

It's not. It's not true. No one believes the Joe Swinson chum gang. No. Joe. A little old Weedaroonie. Joe, Joe Swinson may have like purchased some oregano and then giggled after smoking it, but there's no way she's ever been in possession

of a controlled substance. She still thinks of it as a jazz style cigarette. Do you think she is like, has anyone got any wacky tobacco and thinks that she's been really jazzy? Yeah. She walks up to just, if you're walking, if you're walking down the street in the evening in a trench coat, she'll walk up to you and say, Hey, I'm looking for a gateway drug. I still love the idea.

What would, what would blaze Joe Swinson be like though? I can't do the accent at all. So I'm not even going to try, but imagine the real cannabis psychosis, maybe, maybe that's the thing. She thinks she spoke to him. She actually was smoking spice and she had a horrible vision with her squirrels. Yeah. Thus, thus was born her obsession with ridding us of that menace.

I mean, kill squirrels, nuke the world is absolutely a K2 vibe. Yo, I'm just excited that we might be the first, the first podcast to be sued for saying someone didn't take drugs. Incredible. Look, I think we should consider that question. Well, welcoming everyone to trash future. The lib dem election manifesto super special episode. It's Riley, Nate on the boards, hello, Alice in Glasgow and Hussein calling all the way

in from New York, New York. I, little, little Italy where everyone, regardless where you come from is Italian. Yes. I mean, you can use as many slurs as you want. It's okay. You just walking down the street wearing an overcoat with the sleeves off and just like inspecting produce. I mean, it is kind of amazing because little Italy now has kind of, it's really obviously

all of Manhattan is super gentrified. And also Chinatown has kind of expanded outwards. So a lot of what used to be little Italy is now way more Chinatown, but there are a couple of blocks where there are a lot of people just who are like, Hey, whoa, like that does actually exist. Oh, great. It's just rarefied. And we're also joined by Molly Goodfellow, returning champion.

Molly is excellent at spotting the ideology and she's going to help us point out where somebody, a little bit of ideology may have crept into the Lib Dems supposedly ideology less manifesto. Sucking out the ideology amongst the facts. Molly also has an unbroken record of making one member at least of trash, use her cry on each episode. And so there will be tears. It's just the way that it works.

All right. Indeed. Indeed. Well, she has a record of one. Yeah. So unbroken record. Unbroken record. You are pedantic.

If correct. Yes. The bar chart with like one of us crying. Winning here. I'm a born Lib Dem. Come on. So also before we carry on, I want to say to everyone, if you don't know already, we are doing our pre-election live show with Rob Delaney and Vauxhall on December 3rd.

So do come along to that. The ticket link will be in the description of the episode. I would like to see each and every one of your smiling faces there. Yes. Climb into the trash can of ideology with us. But without further ado, because I have, I know I say this a lot, but I have so many notes in front of me. There's like a proliferation of notes, the notes have been getting longer.

I'd like to talk about Joe Swinson's plan for Britain's future. But first, I'd like to give a few caveats. Number one, I've peppered in comparator statements from the labor manifesto here, which is an extremely strong document with lots of great detail that's worth voting for. But let it be known that like, that doesn't mean there's nothing to criticize the labor manifesto for. Like they've watered down some truly progressive conference pledges, such as net zero by 2030 and closing all the immigration detention centers.

It's still, they're still the best on those subjects and it's the best manifesto by far, make no mistake, but you shouldn't look at it uncritically. And also it's a document that a lot of people are scared of, like the conservatives made a website called labormanifesto.co.uk that just lies to people about how much tax they'll pay. And some of these stems are claiming that labor will only enact a second Brexit referendum if it wins by a supermajority, or it'll only remain if remain wins in the second referendum by a supermajority.

Lies, lies told by people who don't want you to have a good life because the best ideas they can come up with are the ones we're about to talk about. Last caveat. I was going to say, we're also threatened by labor's cool graphic design front. So I just want to give a shout out to all the labor graphic designers. Shouts out to the labor graphic designers. You scared Robert Peston with your washed out colors. Yeah, two millennial pink.

The last caveat before we crack on is that every single thing the Lib Dems are promising here is premised on them getting a majority, which they won't get. At best they'll go into coalition with the Tories, so anything which they've already said they'll do. I was going to say, Philipp Lee basically said that's their plan. Yes, their plan is to go into coalition with the Tories. So let's see how many of their terrible shitty won't work promises actually hold up when Boris Johnson and like Jacob Rees-Mogg and like, I don't know, whatever, like boys from

Brazil, they dig up to run throughout the country actually like get through. Yeah, well, what the sequel to the plastic bag tax in exchange for benefit cuts is? Yeah. Oh, and we have so many of those. So without further, further ado, voters are being told that the only choice is between conservatives and labor, mostly because it's true. That's why they weren't in the debates, isn't it? Because everyone knows that. Yeah, because they're sued and lost.

Oh, but when I look at Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, I know that I could do a better job as Prime Minister than either of them. Because of, you know, just strong, strong head girl energy, you know, because I'll nuke the world and all squirrels will die. And that's really what matters. Yeah, because our country deserves better than what is on offer from the two tired old parties, each led by men who want to reuse ideas from the past. No offense.

But like before Joe Swinson, it was Vince Cable. So if we're going to be talking about tired old things, not tired, or the liberal party, which like, I don't know, is up there with the wigs. Yeah, I mean, if you want to draw an unbroken line from the Lib Dems through the Liberal Party, which I think you probably should, then they are like, yeah, 200 year old party that's based on opinions on the corn laws. And also the history of the modern Liberal Democrat Party is basically what have changed UK had actually won some seats.

Like what if that had actually become a thing? Because they basically formed in, if I'm not mistaken, in the 80s, in the 80s, in the leadership challenge after Jim Callahan lost the 1979 general election. And when basically, even though they, the labor picked Michael Foote, that was just too damn left for a certain segment of the Labour Party. And so a bunch of their MPs split off and joined a breakaway party that basically was a spoiler party all the way until 1997, all the way until now. And now, again, of course, but that weird situation where the policies are great.

We love the policies, but we absolutely can't endorse this one guy as Labour leader. The whole thing really familiar because they picked, they, they, they, they refused to accept Tony Ben. They said they needed a compromise, basically, because he was too far left. So they went with Michael, Labour went with Michael Foote. Michael Foote was just too damn left. Then Neil Kinnick went, went on a tear, basically purging the left from the Labour Party and the SDPLP were just like, nope, sorry, we can't, it was too damn left.

Gordon Brown, too damn left. How many times will the Labour Party try to kick this football? And here's the thing that really blows my mind. Like people failing to recognize this and I'll let Riley get into his thing. But it's just like, I'm not even fucking from here. How the fuck do I know this shit? How, if I know this shit, then what the fuck are all these people like, oh, no, the Lib Dems are different this time.

Also, haven't you seen the general, the, the European election results? That means everything's changed. It's like, yeah, it does. Your brain is a thin slurry. Yeah, because everyone knows who their MEP is. Yeah, your MEP is like Constance Q. Racism from the fucking Brexit party, most likely. I was kind of getting was that everything that Joseph Winston is saying is basically

exactly what Nick Clegg said, right? Like all the lines are basically the same, but the only difference is that like Nick Clegg's lines kind of worked in the sense that like, there was some truth to the idea that, yeah, both parties kind of are more aligned than not aligned. So it doesn't make any sense why, why could she, I mean, the only thing that it makes sense is that like she's basically trying to make it 2010 again. Yeah, and hoping to kind of get this victory and then argue that, oh, we didn't actually want to go in coalition with the conservatives, but our presence there

will mean that we can be like a moderating force. The thing with Nick Clegg as well is, I guess he didn't have that context of, oh, we did completely betray everyone last time. Well, no, I feel like the, you know, the, what's going to end up happening is after like Joseph Winston does her five years as deputy PM, she'll just become like the head of press at TikTok, which by which at that point is going to like be involved in some kind of like international war. So good luck.

Oh yeah, it's new, new rumors that President FaZe banks as a scandal on I just love the idea that Joe Swinson is finally going to get to start her nuclear war, but not in government, but in TikTok. So here's, here's what she says, our country deserves better than what is on offer from the two tired old parties, each led by men who want to reuse ideas from the past, whether the 1870s or the 1970s and gamble our children's futures. I mean, that's awesome that she recognizes that Corbyn is the intellectual heir of the Paris commune.

I'm not sure what Boris Johnson has to do with the 1970s. Yeah, so the 1870s or the 1970s or the Lib Dems ideas, which are all new, they're new ideas, the new ideas. Basically the Lib Dems, their politics is that it's 2006 forever, 2006, probably the worst year ever will be our eternity. And that's all you can define your politics. I'm telling you what we're doing. We're doing frosted tips.

We're doing skinny ties. We're doing early EDM. We're into the cooks again. Oh, my God, I was going to say the cooks, but I didn't know if it would be relevant. Yeah, we are all going to be having a crush on the saxophone player from the Zootons again forever. We're going to be, we're all wearing skate shoes like Etnees. Yes.

It's first beer forever. They want all millennials to go back to when we were like mid to late teens and just figuring stuff out. So let's get into policies, shall we? Shall we delve? I was 22 for the record. So shall we delve? I'm going to delve.

I was like 13. Yeah, I'm old. Yeah, I mean, I was I was still into block party. I still am. So I'm the natural constituency for this policy. Number one, stop Brexit headline. Stop Brexit and invest the 50 billion pound remain bonus in public services and tackling inequality.

What do we think the remain bonuses? I don't know, but we're going to have to have a separate wallet to put it in. Is the remain bonus, the money that they think they're going to save when they make Brexit not happen? Yep, it's just normal in coalition with the Tories. It's just if we continue as normal, we'll be able to spend the bonus of normal on public services and tackling inequality. That's such a meaningful bonus.

Yeah, you know, more money. It's money we wouldn't have lost. Like that's literally just a fallacy. That's like a folk economics fallacy about like allocating money in pots and have being loss of ours. It literally is a cognitive bias. It's folk and bad economics. It's also the money that the EU are going to steal from us

when they beat us up every single month for trying to leave. Yes. Yeah, of course. I mean, I was just the idea that's like, oh, because everything's going to continue like Britain's massive economic growth, which was like 0.1 percent last quarter, like surely that'll pay 50 billion pounds over the next five years. I mean, with this kind of the kind of innovation stuff that they've gotten in this manifesto, there's so much innovation stuff and I love each and every

bit of it. So anyway, the remain bonus. Yeah, it's what we get. We save, we don't do Brexit and Brexit or not. The labor manifesto will be paid for by Jeremy Corbyn's fuck the billionaires bonus and boy, can I tell you what, I'm very excited to see what he's capable of. Yeah, I mean, this is the only time that I move into the kind of armed John McDonnell kind of memes is when it gets into like extreme wealth taxes. Yeah. So the election of a Liberal Democrat majority government.

Yeah, OK, sure. Oh, for sure, man. Yeah. The election of a Liberal Democrat majority government, you know, because the European elections will then decide that's how they're going to stop Brexit so hard. The European elections will retrospectively decide who gets to be an MP in the UK. Riley Reid DMing Riley, our Riley, to tell him how much she loves the podcast

and wants him to make a podcast just for her. We'll decide how we're going to stop Brexit because that's as likely. But like, she's already kind of what's the word? She's already conceding on herself by being like, yeah, we'll definitely stop Brexit unless we don't get a majority and then we'll like do a second referendum. And that's the only way to get a second referendum as far as I've heard. Yeah, I mean, no one else is offering that shit. They it just operates on this idea that this is a thing that's possible

when it's like Labour has had a complete majority before. The stories have had a complete majority recently. The Lib Dems have never. I don't the Liberal Party might have. I don't know. I don't like what in like the like 19 teams. I think David Lloyd George might have been the last Liberal PM. Like, but fuck's sake. Like, yeah, this is this is this is absolutely a work of speculative fiction.

Yes, yes, David Lloyd George was the last Liberal Prime Minister. So they want to go back to like. We want to get past all of these old men with their policies from the past. Yeah, we're going to David. David Lloyd George is now is now cool again. Yeah, we're going to do the thing that happened on Twitter today where they tried to make Pete Buttigieg a POC. I just love the idea.

It's like, yes, we're going to harken back to the glory days of the Liberal Party with we're going to bring back the coal dividend. Everyone gets an extra pot of coal for their fucking collier. No, it's new ideas. We're focusing on new ideas here, people. I mean, the coal dividend of today is a software dividend where the government like dumps a big spoil pit of software on your house. The Lib Dems have a plan for that.

Um, hold on. I'm just going to I'm going to scroll down to that because it's I just want to want to do this right now. I was I was setting you up for that. It was a second gets privatized, but everyone gets to have one of their videos go viral on TikTok. You just got to pick which one the child care thing, because they're promising like free childcare to everyone.

What if instead of nursery schools, it's like coding universities but for babies? Yeah, instead of basically your your children get sent to state run childcare, but they have to make baby shark competitor videos the whole time they're there. I found it. Yes. So here's your kid gets a social credit score based on how well they do the high hopes dance. So here's here's the here's an incredible Lib Dem policy. This is this is the one that Alice was alluding to.

They and this was actually shared with us by listener TK IS Peter. So follow him on Twitter. But develop a mechanism to allow the public to share in the profits made by tech companies in the use of their data. What do you think they've invented here? It sounds like they have invented something called stock options, which I remember being sort of a thing that were freely given out at the height of the dot com boom

and then nothing bad happened. No, Alice, you're almost right. Molly, I think you had the idea. It's just like taxes, isn't it? Yeah, it's tax. They're going to develop a mechanism for the public to share in the profits made by tech companies, you know, they're just going to tax the big tech companies like we should have been doing for years.

Well, they probably won't. Well, if she's going to get a job at one of them after she stops being deputy prime minister, then she can't tax them because they won't like her. No, exactly. So we say develop a mechanism. What they clearly mean is something other than tax. Maybe they can like give like maybe like an apprenticeship for every disadvantaged community that's below like 30 percent below the poverty line

or whatever at Facebook, the cleaning floors. It may just be as stupid as asking nicely. OK, so let's let's also talk about what else they're going to do. So here's the what they're going to do on brexit, the election of a liberal Democrat majority government on a clear stop Brexit platform will provide a democratic mandate to stop this mass revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. And then we'll dust our hands off theatrically.

And that will be the end of it because we've just created a precedent for cancelling and uncanceling Article 50 based on general elections. Looking forward to this going back and forth for the next 50 years. Yeah, we are the joke about about ceremonially leaving the extending the brexit deadline long after everyone's forgotten what it's about. They're going to make it real, folks. In other circumstances, we will continue to fight for a people's vote with the option to stay in the EU.

And in that vote, we would passionately campaign to keep the UK in the EU. So that's their fallback, right? There's a second referendum run exactly like the first one. There was some precedent for the Lib Dems going into coalition with the Tories on the promise of a referendum that they then lost. So they're like they I don't really get it because they're like, oh, we're going to stop Brexit. We're going to stop Brexit.

Brexit is a really horrible idea. We're going to stop it. But also we are going to give people the choice to vote again in which they may also vote for Brexit again. Well, then they're going to double stop Brexit. That's facts. But then if people, if they do do the second referendum, which we know that no one else is offering, obviously,

and they vote for Brexit, did they done Brexit or do they not Brexit? I think what they've done is assume that they'll win and haven't planned for losing, which we know is a good idea. Famously, a very good approach. Well, they have actually planned for losing. But to kind of reckon with the idea that they have to admit that, yeah, like we are going to have to go in coalition.

That's like the best way of doing it. Like the best of best outcome. They're kind of just like trying to pad themselves off as much as they can. Basically, there are so few liberal Democrat MPs. Every single one of them is just planning on getting a job at Facebook when Brexit wins again. That's totally, that's totally possible. Labour want to reopen the withdrawal agreement

all over again and negotiate a new deal. But they will not say whether they want Britain to remain in the EU or leave. Jeremy Corbyn, why won't you sign my picture that says remain? Why, why don't, why can't I know what's in your heart, Jeremy? It's not enough for you simply to offer the democratic and legislative mechanism to stop it. I need to know you want it. That's not ideology. That's facts.

I don't want it if Corbyn doesn't want it. I, yeah, personally, Corbyn's votes count for 20 million. So it's really important what he personally wants and campaigns for. Also, we campaigned for Remain in the last referendum and it didn't win. If you don't like him so much, why do you want him on your side? You know, he's a secret Brexiteer. That's why he campaigned so hard for Remain because in his heart, he knew that everyone would be like, wow, this guy is very unconvincing.

I should vote for leave instead or something. Yeah, I'm not able to make a good joke because I just don't understand. They're so fixated on the idea that he's a secret Brexiteer. It's like, OK, maybe he is every single fucking thing he's done has been until the referendum was in support of Remain. Like, how hard is that to grasp? But I don't know, I guess it's all. He loved Remain so much that why didn't he build a special bus?

Like, Boris built a bus and I don't think Corbyn built a bus. So. No, he painted that bus himself. It was actually cardboard. It was a wine box. Corbyn's too busy worrying about the activities of the Build a Bus group. So here's what they say they're going to do about the climate emergency. We will tackle the climate emergency by by the way, I'm picking and choosing stuff here. I'm trying to pick the most representative, but I'm having to edit.

Tackle the climate emergency by generating 80% of our electricity from renewables by 2030 and insulating all low income homes by 2025. Ah, pissing in the wind. I love to extract like a single drop from this bucket. Also, like it also like the process of insulation in like tower blocks is really difficult to do, right? Because occasionally catches fire. Yes. And notoriously, nothing has happened with tower blocks filled

with poor people in the past kind of couple of years. Like it's not like the Lib Dems would shaft people. So actually, I just I went back to the manifesto because they have a helpful search function. I've searched for the word Grenfell and they haven't said they're going to do more Grenfells because there are no results for Grenfell in their manifesto. That's good.

Yeah, you have to show them who let's see to be reassured. Yeah, I mean, they're going to generate more electricity from renewables and that's all going to come from like the tiny propellers on the top of the hats. We will also set a new legally binding target to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by. 2045 after we'll all be dead. Legally binding to just like Paris, which we're just blazing straight through. Amazing.

Also, you know, you will have net zero greenhouse gas emissions if you try to target that by 2045 because no one will be alive to make you more greenhouse gases. You know what this is, the legally binding thing. It is literally just that you're being murdered. Some people can't do that. That's illegal. So here's actually also where labor made a compromise in the manifesto. I'm not on their manifesto like me, like mea or they a culpa.

The specter of Ian Lavery haunts the manifesto and it's yeah, it's not great. Yeah, so this is where they made a compromise where they're saying they're not willing to commit to net zero as quickly as the science allows, which apparently is the compromise position between the activists and the scientists. Because if you go net zero by 2030, you'll have to base it everywhere. There's a lithium mine. You'll need to do a coup because you have to build that many batteries that fast. So it's like just literally scientifically not possible,

unless you want to like do lots more emissions by building that many like electric cars and stuff. So that's the compromise position was as quickly as the science allows and like without making it worse. Great. Fine. That was the compromise between the activists and the scientists. But then basically they came in and said, no, we can't do that. We have to roll back this this target, which I think is pretty disappointing. So instead, labor is saying they're going to get 90 percent of our energy

production renewable by 2030, which I'll admit is a 10 percent better than the Lib Dems and B their manifesto includes so much more shit that will reduce other that will reduce carbon carbon deposits tied in together. And like while we definitely should be shooting for better than 10 percent better than the Lib Dems, it's it's it is obviously a significant improvement. So stuff like free everything from like free child care to properly funding hospitals to properly funding public transport is going to also have a huge impact. But I got to say it's not my favorite, but damn,

it is better than just dying waiting for like three percent. It's it's like a Kamala Harris policy. Like the three percent of like Pell Grant receiving historically black neighborhoods to be insulated. Just if you look at the power dynamics of this, the best way to make sure that a labor government isn't able to be pushed around to quite the same extent by the GMB is to elect it. But also my point out, too, is just the fact that this from what you've read

Riley in the Lib Dem manifesto, this seems to indicate that they think that you have to better insulate homes and have renewable electricity. And then climate change is just over because basically then by 2045, oh, they have other ideas. Something will happen. But that doesn't take into account just how much like, for example, I mean, people like to celebrate the fact that the UK basically, like they go very long stretches where they burn no coal,

but the largest generating source of electricity is natural gas, which is not fucking good. And they're still building new natural gas plants all over the country. Like that's a thing they've had budgeted in for the next couple of decades. So basically, like if you're not addressing that fact, then it's 2045 is going to be a deadline that's going to keep rolling outward as the seas rise. And then eventually the only city left in England that won't be under water is Birmingham. And who wants that?

She's saying 2025 or 2045. 45. 45. What if she's just like, look, whatever happens by 2045, I'm going to fucking nuke the place anyway. Zero carbon. She's absolutely. She's a pesadist. She's just going to whistle.

We're going to solve climate change by just like welcoming the nuclear fire. So look, here's I guess I've been I've like added down to some of the funnier ones on these, but like I'll give you more of a deep example on this because I think it's useful. So she's saying like all this is like pure war and shit, where she's saying like, oh, I'll require all companies registered on the UK stock exchanges to set targets on climate change. I'll regulate financial services firms to encourage green investments.

I'll establish a department for climate change and natural resources, which we used to have, but that it won't have any power. And then I'll establish a UK local citizens climate assembly to engage the public in tackling the climate emergency. And then the first time she talked about actually expending resources, it's creating a statutory duty on all local authorities to produce and follow a zero carbon strategy, but without giving them the resources to do it.

So basically business, if they don't meet their targets, then it's like, whoops, guess we didn't miss our target or we didn't make our targets. And that's it. Whoopsie doodle. Damn. I hate it when that happens, but I promise I'll do better, chief. But then if councils don't make it with the resources they aren't given, then it's like, now you're paying 15p on plastic bags, you fuckers. The prices on plastic bags will go up. Also, we're killing everybody who's in a wheelchair.

Also, so here's their big promise. Support investment and innovation in zero carbon and resource efficient infrastructure and technology by creating a green investment bank and increasing funding for in the UK and our new catapult innovation and technology centers on farming and land use and on carbon dioxide removal. So this is a green wallet. Yeah, it's green wallet.

So we've got skills wallet, green wallet, new wallet, squirrel wallet, cannabis wallet, cannabis wallet. It's it's it's the entire suite of wallets. We, you know, given that our audience is primarily American, they may not know about the squirrel thing. Like this may all just seem like complete non sequiturs. I think we should not explain. No, we're not going to explain it.

She hates squirrels. That's all you need to know. The sole concession we made to accessibility was not keeping up our running joke of calling Joe Swinson, Lenny and Carl. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. OK, here's but here's there. They're my favorite of the Lib Dem green policies. Ban non recyclable single use plastics

and replace them with affordable alternatives. Like what? Isn't everyone already doing that off the road back in a non political way? Anyway, yeah, but now it's going to be politics. So now I'm going to not want to use reusable stuff because the Lib Dems want me to. It's like, you know, I didn't want to I didn't want a plastic bag. But now that I know Joe Swinson is going to make me have one.

Yeah, you get the shessy paper straw from McDonald's and then Joe Swinson just gives you a big thumbs up. That's politics, baby. Pour the whole drink on my head. OK, so I want to move on to education. Giving every child the best start in life. We're going to give every child the best start in life by recruiting 20,000 more teachers

as part of an extra 10 billion pounds a year for schools, which sounds good until you realize that they're like they're tweaking the rules on how schools become privatized academies but not getting rid of them. So basically all that money is going to go to private hands. All of it. It's so great that there's always a sting in the tail of more teachers. Like the Tories version of this is just, yeah, sure, 20,000 more teachers.

They're just the entire household guards. Like they're all troops police. Yeah, they're all also police in troops. They come in on a parachute. We're spending so much money on schools now, but it's all going to dropping them from like having a fast rope in from a Huey. I don't know if that's possible.

I don't think you can do that. You can, but a Huey is like a 45, 50 year old helicopter. So I don't know. There's the saving right there. That's the. We're going to have the fast rope in from a sea king, but they crash all the time. So we need to keep hiring more teachers.

Also a really old helicopter, but it's OK. This is Keynesianism. We're getting everyone around by sea king. So there's always lots of jobs going. I think what you're thinking of is an osprey. Yeah, there we go. The dual rotor thing that always crashes. Oh, yes. But you know what?

Who knows? I could be wrong. Maybe see Kings also crash. They do. The crashes all the time is a broad field. True. Yeah. But the osprey, the tilt rotor one was famous for like, it's like, oh, time to test it again. Oh, we killed 20 Marines somehow.

I can't. Back to drawing for. So we will provide free childcare for all children with parents in work. Cool. So do you have a zero as contract, which they're not banning, by the way? Sorry, your your hours were too low. You don't count as in work.

And if you're looking for a job, which I presumably encourage that's looking for a job is time off. Right. Yeah. But then so you're looking, so you're like, you're a parent looking for a job. You can't get childcare to go to interviews. Bring them to the interviews.

Show them you're committed. Your child's a project. Feminism. Yeah, it's feminism to do that. I mean, Cheryl Sandberg came up with that idea. She works at Facebook. So does Nick Clegg. There it is. Yeah. I love I mean, I love I love

referring to my my child as my colleague. Look, maybe you and your kids can all pitch in and you can split the job between you and they can gain valuable workplace experience. Lib Dems. If your child is working, then it won't need childcare. So so it basically seems like

to make a mistake. It's progress. It's feminist to give every child a job. Yeah. It basically seems like they found a list of things that they've pulled well as social issues in Britain. And they were like, let's make policies that change nothing. But we can at least say we address them in the manifesto.

Yeah, it's a it's a childcare themed policy. Yeah, it's a it is the ball pit bar. It's just yes. It's in the childcare extended universe. The Conservatives. Not canonical, but you know. Maybe that's actually what it is. Maybe their version of childcare is just a giant ball pit.

Yes. Well, like in The Simpsons. Where Maggie just gets lost. Everyone drops their kids off at one massive ball pit. So here's the thing. And this is going to be really funny when they go into coalition with the Conservatives because they keep saying throughout this manifesto

that Conservatives are failing our children, which is why we're going to vote for them. They have cut school and college budgets to the bone. Labour want to waste time and money on a massive top down reorganization, which will do nothing to improve standards. Wasting time and wasting money also known as increasing budgets.

Yeah, that's a waste of money because they also want to do a massive top down reorganization. Two things you can do to a budget. You can cut it to the bone or you can do a wasteful top down reorganization. Unless you're a Lib Dem, in which case you can do a smart evidence-based policy,

which is neither, by the way, because it does neither to be fair, except cut to the bone. It does that though. So anyone want to guess what the Lib Dems have promised university students burdened with debt? A ball pit. They're going to triple it.

Alice is closest. Fuck, am I? Free iPad for every student. No, nothing that nice. OK, I'm going to say the first few words out of it, raise standards and universities by strengthening... Campus freedom of speech. Yes, they cut it right.

A milo in every university. By strengthening the office for students to make sure all students receive a high quality education. The office for students is the market regulator that Toby Young was in charge of that he used to do his free speech on campus vanity project for two weeks for getting shit can.

They're going to allow students to say slurs. Yes, incredible. I love to have like the chancellor of my university is now every single person on Twitter who replied to the University Trans Day of Remembrance post to like harass it. Look, if students didn't have access to that office, what would they do?

They would have to stay at home and make weird depressing alts and harass... You're going to talk. ...and harass hosts on podcasts with very strange and overt slurs. So in many ways, we're saving them. We're saving them from a life where they have to be like a sad columnist who was only prevented from being a pedophile

because of his wife. Well, we can't keep that in. No, he said that. He literally said that. What? Did he? Toby Young published this thing. He absolutely can keep all of this in, including the discussion about not sleeping this in.

That marrying a strong woman like his wife is what kept him from going the route of Jeffrey Epstein. Imagine being his wife and knowing you're the only reason that he's not. Not the route of Jeffrey Epstein, but the route of Prince Andrew. But then someone in the replies asked him, does that mean that if you hadn't married your wife,

you would have done... I think the phrasing was something unsavory, and he said yes. There's a really good... We need to strengthen the institution. This guy was in charge of to bring the universities better. He did an episode of Celebrity Comes Down With Me, and I think his wife did a lot of the heavy lifting.

Okay, I'm going to file that for watch for a bonus episode. Yeah. Okay. I just remember him saying that... Yeah, never mind. I don't want to go derail on the youngster, but man. Toby Young's advice is marry your mom. Yes.

So here's some more advice from Jo Swinson. She actually is going to reinstate some funding for students. She's going to reinstate maintenance grants for who do we think? STEM students, coding students. Students who work in deprived communities for a period of no more than three years,

but no less than two years and six months within a certain income bracket, within a defined list of postcodes. Yeah, Alice has it. But she said only for the poorest students, ensuring that living costs are not a barrier to disadvantaged young people studying at universities. So making it very clear that this is going to be

something that you get if you're literally a Victorian match girl. Otherwise, fuck you. Do we know... Skills wallet, that's what you have. Do we know if previously the Lib Dems have done anything? No, I don't remember anything. Students would like?

Like that. Actually, Molly, I think you're referring to that tuition fee misunderstanding. Was that the Lib Dems? Yeah. That was the Lib Dems, wasn't it? Well, they said they wouldn't do anything and then they did the thing.

What if the Lib Dems weren't in there? The Tories could have raised it by more. That's true. They could have made it a billion pounds That was the argument that Nick Clegg was saying. He was just like, well, we were the moderating force. So even though it went up, it didn't go up as much as they wanted it to.

What was the trade off? A testable statement. Was there a trade off? Because there was the plastic bag welfare trade off. Do you think there was a student fees? I'm sure there was. Magic beans? Magic beans.

He was a magic beans thing. Wasn't it something to do with the alternative vote referendum? Like it was part of a package of... I think that might have been or possibly something like House of Lords reform. Right. Yeah, something like that. Something completely inconsequential.

So here's what they're gonna... Here's their new policy on tuition fees because they have one. They are going to establish a review of higher education finance in the next parliamentary session to consider any necessary reforms in light of the latest evidence of the impact of the existing financing system

and access participation and quality and make sure that there are no more retrospective raising of rates or selling off loans to private companies. So they're gonna establish a committee to prepare to review the establishment of a committee of inquiry into the project to research the committee of... Is it so that presumably by the time the Lib Dems have been in gone

in whatever coalition they may or may not end up in, there's no reference back to the fact that they did the thing? Well, yeah, because they just said they were gonna ask about the thing. So basically, there have been rumors that I might have shit myself. I am gonna get to the bottom of this and I will make sure it never happens again.

So that's what they're gonna do for students who have burdened with lifetimes of debt that they'll never be able to pay off from tuition fees is they're gonna look into it. Hey, that's me. Health and social care. The conservatives have failed people who rely on health and care services.

Cuts have left hospitals and community facilities crumbling and struggling with overwhelming debts and they've damaged the services that keep us healthy. Who did they work with for five years to do all of that, I wonder. It's specifically Joe Swinson. Specifically Joe Swinson worked with the conservatives to do this.

Oh shit, yeah, she was the minister, wasn't she? Yeah, it was her. At least she's experienced. She knows, so if anything, she knows not to cut. Yeah, you just like retrace your steps backwards. Uncut the things. Yeah, she's like the political version of the sort of, of the uptight minister from the small town in America

who watches all the porn, so he knows what's in there. She did all the cuts so she would know what not to do. I was gonna say thesius and the labyrinth, but okay, go off, King. Oh, sorry, I couldn't hear you. I was at the bank. Labor's approach is no better. Their plan for the NHS is a backward-looking,

here's that word again, top-down reorganization which would leave it in chaos. Yeah, let live-in reorganizations that only ever switches or bottoms. No, they're, lived-in reorganizations are looking upward, never backward, forward, never downward, and always twirling, twirling,

twirling towards a balanced budget. Live-in reorganizations are just swapping it for something that the conservatives want. Yeah, lived-in, they're reorganizing all the conservative party platform into their platform. Damn, I for one feel that when I have a state-owned healthcare provider that literally owns hospitals, it's a bad thing when it's top-down.

It's extremely bad to have national organization when there's literally a national health service. What we have to do- You just do anarchism. You just have like an autonomous hospital commune that self-organizes. I love the idea, it's like I go to the hospital in Brighton but they're just applying snakes

that are gonna heal me somehow because hey, you know what, fucking, it's locally organized. I mean, that does sound like something Caroline Lucas would do. So there, and this is gonna be one where I actually go into more detail on what they promised because I think it's worthwhile. They're going to raise $7 billion a year

of additional revenue, which will be ring-fenced to be spent only on NHS and social care services. But because they're not doing a top-down reorganization, all of that's just gonna go to private contractors and like Richard Branson. And so what, so they're gonna raise it to ring-fenced it? Yeah, they're gonna raise it and ring-fenced it, the two Rs. So that nothing happens to it.

And then in years to come, they can be like, oh, we're gonna give an extra this money billion pounds but they won't. No. I foresee a lot of NHS contracts going up by a defined amount at the time this goes in. Well, actually what they're gonna do is use this cash to relieve the crisis in social care,

tackle urgent workforce shortages, and invest in mental health and prevention services. But the mental health services in like lots of areas that aren't London are just owned by Richard Branson. It's just gonna give it to him. Also it's gonna be ring-fenced, they're not gonna give it to anyone. Well, they're gonna spend,

they're not gonna spend it on things outside. Ring-fenced means they're not gonna reduce it or spend it on anything outside that area. So think of it like this. It's like they've got a bucket of seven billion pounds and then they're not gonna take any water out of the bucket but they have kept a hole in the bottom of the bucket. So it can all go to this one thing.

For the bucket. Yes. And if you're Richard Branson. The bucket is the hole. It's a kills wallet. Richard Branson is the person who's sitting under the hole with a personal bucket and then he gets to keep that for how good he invented about the bucket.

Yeah. And if he wants to replace that with a slightly larger bucket, if it just becomes more expensive to give someone therapy in that time, he's the market. He knows best. Yeah.

Also, they'll use 10 billion pounds of their capital funds to make necessary investments in equipment, hospitals, community, ambulance, mental health services buildings to bring them in 21st century. But they won't own them. They're just gonna spend money on them and they're not gonna ask who owns them. Love to have like a privatized, yeah.

A privatized ambulance. It's just gonna be ambulance again, isn't it? Instead of reversing the PFI, which has been a bit of a disaster, they're just going to dump more money into the open wound. Hey, it's a plan. And you know what? It's forward looking

because they know what they're going to do. It's just gonna suck. Not like we have any background on things when the Lib Dems raise limits and say, don't worry, it's not gonna go up by all that much. Don't worry about it. No background of that at all. They also are going to commission the development

of a dedicated progressive health and care tax offset by other tax reductions on the basis of wide consultation and extensive engagement with the public. So, you know, they're gonna be like, okay, we have to fund health and social care, but we can't raise taxes overall just because, you know, we have that Brexit benefit,

you know, that we get if just nothing changes, that bonus that we have. So how do you want us to spend it? But we do have to earmark it. And also they're going to, and here's what I love, establish a cross-party health and social care convention that builds on the existing body of work from the previous conventions,

select committees and citizens assemblies to reach agreement on the long-term sustainable funding of a joined up system of health and social care. We will invite patients, groups, professionals, the public and the governments of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland to be a part of this work, introducing a cap on the cost of care as provided for in the CARE Act,

but promised by but not delivered by the conservatives, which would be a key starting point for the Liberal Democrat participants. They just want a weekend in Birmingham, don't they, in a shit hotel. Yeah, I'm so glad that they don't believe this and don't believe this could happen, because if they did, it would be the most brain-cut thing

I could possibly imagine, where you just, after years in the wilderness of coalition, you start to mistake things like consensus-based, like citizens assemblies and stuff for actual politics. And then when someone asks you what politics are you going to do, you default back to this may as well be magical rituals kind of thing of being like,

oh, we're going to have like a consensus-based politics of consultative assemblies. That's not going to fucking happen. No, I'm pretty sure that worked pretty well in Afghanistan when that's when we decided counter-insurgency was going to be. You'll go to your NHS, your Shura, or your Majlis. Yeah, a guy, it will work very much like Afghanistan

in that the oldest guy there will complain for three and a half hours about how the NHS sent him an air conditioner, which is broken, and an air conditioner repair kit, which is also broken, and then it doesn't get repaired. What operation are you in for, hip replacement? What operation are you in for? Mostarac.

Building a fairer society. The conservatives have intentionally designed the welfare system for a traditional family with a main breadwinner and two children, which is entirely out of step with the modern world. Labor have a nostalgic attachment to a nine to five working life that does not suit modern lives either. There's a four day work week at the manifesto.

As increasingly households have two earners and people want to be able to work flexibly. We just love working this much. I love to work seven days a week. And also have everyone in your house work all the time as well. And totally unpredictably. I also like to work seven days a week

and if I'm sick one day, I don't get paid. Yeah, I love to have my boss text me that morning and be like, you have to come in in 25 minutes. I love that flexibility, that responsiveness. I feel free. Yeah. People love to look at their laptops

in both office environments and in their homes. Like honestly, I would not be surprised if there's gonna be a new addendum to the manifesto published where the Lib Dems are promising a British backed government rescue of WeWork so that it can be put in every town up and down the country. Isn't this where the whole, what do you call it? It wasn't, I guess we joke that it was like the green skills

like the environment wallet or whatever, but the whole kind of government bank for environmental technological products that is effectively just a giant WeWork anyway, right? Oh yeah, they're gonna fund so many startups. A funding startups is like where all the money's going. I mean, this defines our royalties because we want a Lib Dem majority government now

so that they fund us in keeping shitty startups coming. Oh yeah, we need so many, but we need people to be desperate enough that they'll make the first idea that they think of. It's a jobs program for podcasters. It's a content program for podcasters, Alice. So here's the next thing. Investing, by the way, Molly,

I appreciated your childcare as a baby WeWork thing. Thank you so much. There we go. Investing six billion pounds per year to make the benefit system work for the people who need it and reducing the weight from the first benefits payment from five weeks to five days. Yeah, that's good.

I love to like- You still die if you don't eat in five days. Also, if it's still universal credit, then you can still be sanctioned for whatever they want to sanction you for. Oh, they're gonna reform universal credit. Okay, great. Yeah.

I know, I should trust them because they've delivered on so many great things. They said they'll do it. They said they're gonna do it. They're always trustworthy. Actually, the highlight of reforming universal credit is to make it more supportive of the self-employed. It is the WeWork thing.

And yeah, amazing. So for people who need it in this case, just becomes like for people who- Live for five days, live for five days without food. Yeah. You know, camels. Not squirrels. Yeah.

I mean, I think there's a tie in here because what fits very well with the Lib Dems values is to span that five days thing. You should just get a giant thing of fuel. Just a giant thing of fuel by the town WeWork and the town ball pit. And it's like the water bottle in a hamster cage. Troughs of fuel.

Troughs of- Absolutely. Government sanctioned troughs of fuel. God, it's so plausible. Here's another one I've decided I'm gonna go into because it's worth it. So make the welfare system work by reducing the weight for the first payment from five weeks to five days.

Removing the two-child limit and benefits cap. Fine, don't make it better, but take it back to what it was, I guess. Make work pay by increasing work allowances and introducing a second earner work allowance. Establish a legal right to food to enshrine in law the government's responsibility to ensure that existing and new policy is audited

for its impact on food security. So not a right to food. No. But a right to have your right to food audited. It's just more just like, oh, we'll look into it. Yeah. It feels weird that like when Labour were like, yeah, we're gonna have free Wi-Fi for everyone.

People were like, oh, what's next? Free Netflix, blah, blah, blah. But then the Lib Dems are like, yeah, right to food. And everyone's like, yeah, that seems fine. Seems well-defined. That feels normal. Because Labour has also said they wanna declare a right to food,

but they're putting actually a lot of money in plans behind it. So they're putting like millions of pounds to different local authorities who will then like be able to spend it on community food programs. So like replacing food banks with something that's like more democratic and for everyone.

Is it kind of like preempting the fact that when the Lib Dems go into coalition with the Tories, like a lot more people will be on food banks. So then the Lib Dems will be like, yeah, we said in our manifesto that there's a right to food. So these food banks are what we were planning for. It's a right to food. It's whatever you can pick up.

Exactly. I mean, in prior to- For fuel. It's a supermarket sweep policy. What? Islands on board. I think this also kind of really exemplifies kind of the situation we're in at the moment

where a lot of these policies are very much like, you know, because when we were talking about this, I kind of, I had my first skim through the Lib Dem manifesto and it was like, okay, it's like, it's fairly dull. Like it's not really, there's not really anything like radical in here and like a lot of it is just very much, we're gonna look into this and we're gonna look into that. And like the reactions I've seen with like the Labour manifesto

have all kind of been the same thing, which is that like, oh, they're just massively like ramping up spending as if like the way that you change, like, I guess like the Lib Dems have taken this position and one of the ways in which they're trying to appeal to people is by saying, but oh, look, we're like the rational party. We're the quote unquote non-populous party.

We aren't gonna like overspend and crash the economy, et cetera, et cetera. But we're also gonna bring radical change. This idea that you can marry like radical change with like incessant amounts of auditing and looking into stuff. But not too radical change. Right.

Because if you vote Labour, if you vote Labour, then their food program is John McDonnell going to every Tesco in the country and smacking the like theft sensors with a big baseball bat. Well, that's also because it would cost too much money and that's the problem. Like Labour just wanna spend too much money, you know.

And top-down reorganizations. Exactly. That looked to the 1970s. They just made us, yeah, like spending money is something in the 1970s. Now we all use contactless, you know. It's weird that we're a place where we all accept that like austerity didn't work,

but we're still not, yeah, a place where spending money. Oh, the Lib Dems haven't accepted that. Yeah, but Lib Dems have an exception. They've said they want to run a permanent budget surplus. Oh. They, like they, like they don't want any wallets. No, no, they want lots of wallets, no money in them. The skills wallets inspector.

But that's the thing. The skills wallet is just coupons because it's not money you can spend freely. None of these wallets are actually have any money in them. They're just basically coupons the Lib Dems are giving you for like weirdly marketized services. It's a lot more similar to the privatization of the Russian public sector in 1990

than it is to anything else. So they are wallets inspectors. So I'm gonna do some more. Reform universal credit to be more supportive of the self-employed, increase local housing alliance in line with average rents in the area, but we're not gonna cap the rents or anything. No, the rents going up is like mysterious and unknowable.

That's their beef with universal credit. It's all good, except it's just not as in support the self-employed enough. I have searched universal credit in their manifesto and it is mentioned there and one other place. That's called a safety net that works by the way is that. Here we go. Nope, that's the only place it's mentioned.

Wait, it's mentioned in one other place is, oh, extend free school meals to all children in primary education and to all secondary school children whose families receive universal credit. So those are the two mentions of universal credit in manifesto. So right now, let's do the counter. Universal credit gets two mentions,

one of which is about free meals for people who are on it and the other of which is that they're gonna reform it to make a nicer to the self-employed. Meanwhile, it's like one of the main things that's claimed 130,000 lives. Oh, and let's see, the counter mentions of Grenfell was fucking zero, but they are gonna increase the renting allowance to go up with the rents

as they skyrocket. I love the idea that they've determined that there's a cutoff point between primary school and secondary school where you don't need to eat anymore. No quote, you have five days. Exactly, what they're really doing is they want to time this for life expectancy based on what's gonna happen in this country.

They just like watch some YouTube videos on like intimate and fasting and they just want to get people yoked. And as you know, that's the best way to do it. Here's the next one. Ensure that everyone gets the help they need by separating employment support from benefits administration and increased spending on training and education.

Doesn't say what they'll do with it though. Introduce an incentive based scheme to replace the current sanctions system. Oh, that's the most year 11 head girl policy I've ever heard of. That's just a new way to repackage sanctions. Yeah, but if you don't get sanctions, you get a little gold star.

Yeah. You have an incentive to help not starve them. The incentive is the universal credit. Yeah. And they'll give it to you if you do the stuff. It's an incentive, it's not a sanction. That seems fair. I don't see the problem.

They're calling it something else, don't you get it? Basically, if you don't get sanctioned, you get put into a lottery and you might win an Amazon gift card, all right? The Amazon gift card. You win an absolute coupon for your skills wallet. If you do get sanctioned, do you get put into a lottery,

but it's the short story, the lottery? If you get an Amazon gift card, but it can only be spent on a JavaScript course. You get to be there when Joe Swinson presses the big red button. Reverse cuts to the employment support allowance for those in a work related activity group. I didn't even want to say anything because I knew there was going to be another clause there.

Of course you do. You know my style too well now. End work capability assessments and replace them with a new system that has run by local authorities and based on real world tests. So nothing. So if you live on like the Isle of Skye

or something like that, they're just going to make you pick up a huge rock and it's like that's what you have to be good at. You have to toss a job. You can't do it. You're a skiver. Yeah, so, you know, they're going to totally end work capability assessments,

but they're going to replace them with a different thing that does the same thing, but it's going to be based on real world tests. You know, a real world test. Yes, it'll be run by your local authority. Famously not tyrannical at all. Yeah, you know, so the people who like yell at you, the people who yell at you for not cleaning your driveway

or mowing your lawn or whatever local authorities do, they're going to be in charge of whether or not you die. I love the idea that like the person who runs my neighborhood watch is telling me whether or not like my bed has been made correctly. We're also going to reinstate the Independent Living Fund. It's radically overhauled the bereavement allowance so that widows and widowers receive more support

and extend the payments to unmarried couples and a parent dies. Death wallet. And that's my black metal band. And aim to end fuel poverty. Death coupons, yes. Aim to end fuel poverty by 2025 by providing free energy retrofits for low income houses

as part of our emergency program to reduce energy consumption from all the UK's buildings. And that's their plan to remake the social safety net. That's 100% of their plan. That's their real world test, is do you have to install the solar panel on someone's house? Yeah, but you could fall off the roof. I'm just laughing, I know that, okay,

obviously we have an incentive to make things sarcastic and cynical, but from the way you read that, it made it sound like she thinks that Britain is producing too much heat that's escaping through the windows. And so once they can capture more of it with more energy efficiency,

they can give that heat to people in the winter. Yeah, just remember though, I did not edit that section of the manifesto. I read it in full. That is 100% of the plan. And that's not even the plan they're gonna enact. They're just gonna do whatever the Tories say. This is their greatest demand.

Build a greenhouse around your regular house. But also something you said Molly made me laugh because... Is it death wallet? Well, death wallet's amazing, but also... If it's death wallet. If Joe Swinson, if the prize for not getting sanctioned is you get to be there when she pushes the big red button, it makes sense why they're trying to court

the FBPE people this much because they've realized that an enormous red button is such a powerful metaphor for the button that Jeremy Corbyn won't push. And so they're like, wait a minute, we wanna leave her, we'll push the button to end all of it. Just buttons, push buttons. So we could also...

Yeah, firing a nuclear weapon is the only way to stop Brexit. How can you leave the European Union if it doesn't exist anymore? So, housing, at least build at least a hundred... Wait, what? Just kill them, nuke them. Can we quickly look up how many times it says nuclear

in the manifesto? But Joe Swinson's gonna kill us all with a nuclear bomb. It says it twice. Once in a... So that's more than what was the other thing that was only mentioned once. Oh, Grenfell, which was mentioned no times. And Universal Credit, which was mentioned twice.

So they're gonna revive the Iran nuclear deal. That's one mention of the word nuclear. They're gonna what? Yeah, you know, revive the Iran nuclear deal, you know. That thing that America has said that... Yeah, why not fucking revive coal marks while you're acid? They're both dead. Oh, they're gonna maintain a nuclear deterrent

while pursuing multilateral nuclear disarmament, continuing with the Dreadnought program, the submarine replacement for Vanguard, but procuring three boats and moving to a medium readiness response posture and maintaining deterrent deterrent through measures such as unpredictable and irregular patrolling patterns. It's another manifesto, guys.

It's another manifesto. I love to have a medium threat posture. Incredible. What's more Lib Dem than that? Which is, we're going to nuke the world a bit. Just a tiny bit. We're gonna... Three times more than we said we would.

We're gonna... Joe Swinson is basically a Tory from Scotland. I imagine that deep down what she really wants is just to nuke everybody until there's only two genders left. But then what if the mutations caused there to be infinite genders? Wait, is that transphobic? This was the one thing we didn't want to happen. Wait, hang on.

Is that transphobic? No, it's not. Okay, cool. Just making sure. Just leave that in. For the record, for every one of these we leave in, there is 10. There are 10 where Riley is like,

is that transphobic? And I'm like, no, fuck off. Shut up. So, housing. Build at least 100,000 homes for social rent each year and ensure that total house building increases to 300,000 each year. But crucially, they're not changing the definition of an affordable home. What is a house if not a person wallet?

Okay, so they've said they're going to build 100,000 homes for social rent each year and ensure that total house building increases to 300,000. Fine. But, when I looked around this, I've said, oh, they're not going to change the definition of an affordable home, which is 80% of the median rent of an area. So, rents are still going to be high. So, an affordable home in Liverpool.

And go out by 20% immediately. So, an affordable home in Liverpool is 80% of like 600 pounds and an affordable home in London is like 80% of 2,000 pounds. Correct. Money means different things in different places. Same, normal. Just like, you know, how you can go five days without eating or you can go your entire secondary school without eating.

I mean, Riley, you can go five days without eating. It's probably not wise. Okay, fine. Five days without drinking water, you'll die. You can go months without eating. It's just not advisable. There's no money in the water wallet, so... And also, they're going to help people

who cannot afford to rent a deposit by introducing a new rent-to-own model for social housing where rent payments give tenants an increasing stake in the property, owning it outright after 30 years. So, what they've done is they've taken right to buy, you know, the thing that demolished the social housing sector and they've made it long. Also, that's how it works in Animal Crossing.

That's true. This is Tom Nook. This is a subsidy to Tom Nook. It's a rip-off. That's what it is. It's bloody sick of it. So, basically, this is Animal Crossing with Nuclear Weapons. It's just one since the idea of the world.

Animal Crossing with Nuclear Weapons, but a Zelda amount of wallets. Also, here's another housing policy that landlords certainly won't take advantage of. Help young people into the rental market by establishing a new help-to-rent scheme. Oh, no. Would you not be like, maybe we need less like...

If we've got this many help schemes, maybe there's a problem. No more schemes. Like, you shouldn't need this many help schemes just so people can live in a place. It's a help wallet. No, they're like Wiley Coyote. He's constantly coming up with insane backfiring schemes that never accomplish anything but embarrass them.

It's like all the moors in England are on fire. People are breathing accurate smoke, but they have a help-to-breathe scheme. It's like, don't put the fire out. That's socialism. It's not canned air that you can breathe. It's an air wallet. Student fees are a help-to-lend scheme,

if you think about it. Is he crying? Have I done it? I've thought a lot. Riley's laughed till he cried, and now Molly has made two members of Trash We Should Cry. Two for two, baby. A help-to-rent scheme to provide government-backed tenancy deposit loans

for all first-time renters under 30. Nothing can go wrong if the government own it. It means it's a landlord subsidy. That's all it is. Landlords can charge whatever they want, basically for deposits or whatever the law is, but I'm sure it's impossibly generous and it'll go up each year.

And the government lends you money for a deposit, which means they invent fake money that then becomes real when it goes into your landlord's wallet. But not yours now. But not your wallet. No, the landlord gets the money. And it's a loan, and you don't get the money back. Correct.

They love a loan. Unless it's to a landlord or a PFI beneficiary, then they're all about gifts. They're Santa. Yeah, this is basically landlord kinsiasm. I don't fucking get it, man, but they love this stuff. Oh, also they have a really cool plan to end homelessness. Is it houses?

The roof wallet. Oh, Molly. No, that'd be too simple. It's not houses. No. It's not even like means tested houses. No, not even that. They will insure.

Free cardboard. No, it's not even a good. No, it's less generous. The cardboard would not be free. It is literally less generous than that. They will insure sufficient financial resources for local authorities to deliver on a homelessness reduction act, which sounds like it might be arming local authorities,

armed the neighborhood watch. You won't need to cure homelessness once you've nuked the place. I mean, once everyone's homeless, what is a home? I mean, really, when you get down to it, what is a home but a memory? Homes are pretty. More localism and just have every Tory council

just independently decide that it is the best way to reduce homelessness is to hunt homeless people from a helicopter. But then, of course, the helicopter is an osprey. It does crash immediately. No, that's just Glasgow City Council. We're going to buy a new helicopter and crash it onto every homeless person in the city.

Hang on. This is another good one that I'm going to just do all of, but I'm going to do it fast. Urgently publish across Whitehall plan to end all forms of homelessness. So their plan is to make a plan. They'll exempt groups of homeless people from the shared accommodation rate.

So that's fine. So if you and your homeless friends can get enough of a deposit together, you can live in a house of six people without having to pay a house of multiple occupancy tax. And just learn to code there. Basically, we're going to end homelessness by making homelessness illegal.

Well, no, they're actually going to, they're going to do a help to not be homeless, but through a bunch of loans and incentives. Homelessness, we work. We live. We have that. It's real. We get an episode. Make providers of asylum support accommodation

subject to a statutory duty to refer people leaving asylum support accommodation to who are at risk of homelessness, the local housing authority. You know, when you refer asylum seekers to the government. That's the idea. Like that's the problem is that they just don't know. Like they're like, oh, damn,

we didn't know these people were homeless. We're going to solve it now. That's the problem. It's this whole thing of you can't murder me. It's you can't be murdering me. It's illegal, which is like, well, if they knew about all the homeless people, certainly they would do something about it.

We need to raise awareness. That's the Lib Dem plan. Raise awareness of homelessness through like a live aid concert. And there's definitely no risk of the government, like trying to get more favorable, favorable numbers when it comes to homelessness by like deporting people. No, of course.

There also hasn't been any data problems for the last 20 years that I can think of. Oh, sorry. All of that stuff you guys are saying, you forgot. They're going to, they're publishing a plan. A plan's part of it. So I'm sure that'll all be in the plan. Why don't they publish the names

of all the homeless people too? So then we just know who's in trouble and we can help. I mean, basically, you know, we just need to recruit more billionaires to live in Britain and build more phone boxes where they can transform into Superman and solve problems for us. I've thought this through. It's very cogent.

It's going to work. Didn't even mix your comic books. Just building an extremely epic London to try and like induce Elon Musk to show up. Super Batman. I was going to say you could see, I said Superman though, you could see my brain turning

that I wanted to say Batman. But so here's some more. So that homelessness reduction act thing, which sounds very foreboding, legislate for longer term vacancies and limits on annual rent increases. They don't say what that limit is and scrap the vagrancy act

so that rough sleeping is no longer criminalized. So they're going to do the minimum possible and in a way that probably won't do anything. Labor is just going to build homes. They're going to build 8000 additional homes for people with a history of rough sleeping and then earmark a billion pounds a year for council's homelessness service.

The thing is we know that's not going to work because there's only like one sentence. Yeah, there has to be a second thing that makes it good. Yeah, a good plan would have had lots more facets. It wouldn't just be to do the thing. You'd have to like create a wallet, do a consultation, maybe a plan, find some like weird taxes that no one knows about

and exempt people from them, but like only in certain circumstances. That's how you do politics. Give tax breaks to Amazon distribution centers so they give away free cardboard boxes. Yeah, we could distribute the homes. No, it wouldn't be, again, you would get a loan on a cardboard box.

No, you're right. It would just be a loan on a cardboard box. Tom next cardboard boxes. But and labor will pay for this by bringing in a national levy on second homes used as holiday homes to deal with the homelessness crisis. But I thought John McDonnell had one of those and therefore he might have to pay more tax

and that doesn't make any sense. John McDonnell sacrificed his own money for tax. Exactly. John McDonnell, who has three boats, I might add, one of which is a robot. Three boats, McDonnell. One of which is just an old leaky robot. Somebody was trying to own a bunch of labor figures today

by posting pictures of their houses implying that they're all millionaires. Because apparently John McDonnell's home is worth two million pounds, but it literally looks like a spooky haunted house from like an M&M video about Detroit being fucked up. Like it literally looks... It looks haunted and for warrants.

Except for Emily Thorbury's, which is very nice. It is, but also Jeremy Corbyn's is by far the worst. It just looks terrible. His big house in Islington. It's just amazing. A million pounds in Islington buys you this piece of shit. He tries to fight out of his front garden. What they're really saying is that London is for rich people

and only rich people should get to live in London. And the fact that these MPs are living in London shows that they're hypocrites. They should just go like live in a cave on the Isle of Skye. Yeah. They can do real world tests by like lifting boulders. I'm going to do a few more

and then we're going to close down. Transport. Start a revolution in rail franchising. By opening up the bidding process to public sector companies, local authorities not for profits and mutuals which have the potential to deliver better services than private operators. You get a preschool railway.

Southern Rail is now a fucking academy. Correct. Yes. I feel like Richard Branson must have some offshoot of Virgin that is non-for-profit. Therefore, he can loophole it. Virgin Galactic. Yeah. This train technically goes to space. Or are we train?

You could say maybe it's train wallet. Train wallet. Travel card wallet. I also love that. It's like, no, we're not going to bring these things into public ownership. We're not going to democratize ownership. What we're going to do is do more competition. The answer must be more.

It has to be more. Because as we figured out with rail franchises in the UK, the profits there aren't enough of them. Yeah. If a not-for-profit let's let them bid. Maybe save the children could run a railway. If you're not going for profit, just fucking nationalize it. No, that's too simple.

No, it has to be like two different competing non-profits. That's the 1970s solution. What we want is a 1980s solution. The train is going to be run by Live Aid. Come on. 1870s solution. 1870s solution. All trains are run by people who are earning extra money while

their children are in care by pumping on those hand cards. The entire original lineup of Duran Duran get pressed gang into driving trains somehow. Don't know how it's going to work, but it's going to work. Build into new rail franchise agreements, the new ones that they're going to sign,

a stronger focus on customers. So be nice, including investment in new stations, lines and modern trains. We're going to... Only by 2045 after we've all died. That seems like a pretty easy thing for them to do. I'm pretty sure they're going to be electric and I really don't like to get them.

They say that. They don't fuck that up too. Everywhere will get paces for some reason and no. Let's see. I'm just going to check because we're going to try to be fair with them. Why? Stop doing that. Accelerating the transition to ultra-low emission transport, cars, buses and trains

through taxation, subsidy and regulation. It does not say exactly what they're going to do. They're just going to invest. Just do the least charitable possible reading of this. Look, it wouldn't be funny if I wasn't giving it a charitable reading because people wouldn't understand the true

depths of mania that this Anifesto goes to. That's fine. You can give it a charitable reading. I can say that every train under the Lib Dems is going to be rolling coal. That'd be fucking cool though. Better business. Do we want to know how they're going to do

what they're going to do with employment rights because this is fun? Is it a wallet? It's a rights wallet. Encourage employers to promote employee ownership by giving staff enlisted companies with more than 250 employees a right to request shares to be held in trust for the benefit of themselves.

You can ask nicely. You have the right to remain compensated by asking politely. You can ask for some stock options if there's more than 250 employees. Yes.

It's another coupon. Molly, you're right. It's another coupon. It's a coupon that lets you ask a question. I'm holding the conch. I get to ask a question. Extend the scope of existing public interest test when considering approvals for takeovers

of large strategically significant companies by overseas based owners to recognize the benefits of the UK economy. They promise to change the test. That's just going to be like we would also make it illegal for Huawei to buy any telecom stuff here.

That's just the good kind of protectionism. Of course. The strategic protectionism. You've got to get through this. What if the Constitution was written by a Buzzfeed quiz? This is fucking killing me. I have a couple more

and then I'm going to finish. I'm going to speed run the rest of this. Modernized employment rights to make them fit for the age of the gig economy, including by establishing a new dependent contractor employment status between employment and self-employment setting a new 20% higher minimum wage

for people on zero hours contracts at times in normal demand to compensate them for the uncertainty of fluctuating hours of work. Giving a right to request a fixed hours contract for zero hours and agency workers not to be unreasonably refused. You have a right to ask. Ask nicely. Maybe your company will give you stuff.

Not to be unreasonably refused. A reason to refuse it would be I don't want to. There's a reason. Labor is just going to eliminate zero hours contracts and increase wages to 10 pounds an hour. Again, too simple. It doesn't target people.

Actually 10 pounds an hour or 10 pounds an hour coupon. For whatever you want. For only specific places you can spend it. So basically, your wage will be 10 pounds an hour if you ask and they say yes. Correct. And they can say no for any reason.

Yeah, for any reason whatsoever. UK 2050, our vision for an innovation-led economy. Build on the industrial strategy developed by Liberal Democrat ministers in the previous government. So hard. Because that's been working out so well. Working with sectors which are critical

to the UK's ability to trade, creating more catapult innovation in technology centers. What the fuck is that? She's going to have a chat with Nick, see what they can do together. No, it's a new way of launching nukes at Squirrels.

I mean, it might literally be because one of the only things that is strategically critical to our ability to trade internationally that we have in industry is making weapons and exporting them. We have carbon and environmental innovation. So they are actually funding startups.

They're guaranteeing venture capital funding to startups. So they're giving us content and everybody else like green nuclear weapons. Oh, you said green new deal. I thought you said green nuke deal. Reform building standards to ensure

that all homes built from 2022 have full connectivity to ultra-fast broadband. So still private broadband, but you can ask for it. Fuck me. It's actually help to post scheme. Continue to support investment in UK's digital startups

by reforming the British business bank support for venture capital funds. So yeah, don't worry. Nobody knows what that is. Nobody cares what that is. It's UBI, but for like guys who used to wear pukka shell necklaces who now just drink huel, but not from the trough. They drink private huel.

Privateized huel. Privateized huel. Also, they're going to allow companies to claim tax credits against the cost of purchasing data sets and cloud computing. That's interesting. You said tax credits when I think you meant to say tax coupons.

And also, cloud they're just going to give tons and tons and tons of money to what like subsidize the services of Cap Gemini. Oh, yes. I'm Adobe. I'm going to get a new cloud-based service. Good thing the UK government is just going to pay for it for me. This is just like playing mad libs with companies listed

on the British Stock Exchange. Like literally it's like BAE Systems is going to build one big ball pit in hall with broadband connectivity. And it's on the cloud. It's on the cloud. It's got a data set. Also, I love the idea that it's like all houses are going to have broadband connectivity, but what are you just going to have

the fucking like the plug jacks, but there won't be any trunk lines. That is literally the plan. You know, to not do anything useful. Just to do stuff that is usefulness themed. There are two more sections. I must get through them because they're very important.

I'll do it in under five minutes. Fair world champion the liberal rules based international order which provides a strong basis for multilateral action to address the world's biggest problems including support for NATO. Yeah, NATO. We're bombing Libya again. No, on Syria, cooperate internationally

to stabilize the region and provide humanitarian assistance. Okay. Cooperate internationally with hoomst. You know, just whoever's going to let us nuke it. Increase overseas financial support for the ongoing refugee crisis. You know how we're just funding like slave traders

who have disguised themselves as the Libyan Coast Guard to like trade in slaves. We're going to fund them. We're going to fund those puckers. And it's a help to buy scheme for slaves. And here's the other one.

Officially recognize the independent state of Palestine but condemn violence on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and support Israel's right to security. We remain committed to a negotiated peace settlement and two-state solution. Motherfucker, the U.S. has already recognized illegal sediments in Palestine as legitimate.

How are you going back to a two-state solution? This is just more dreaming of the 1990s. The same way they're going back. They're going back. They're going back. They're going back to the 1990s. The same way they're going back to the Iran deal. They're just going to like ask nicely to move the pieces

back on the board to the way they were. So, the Liberal Democrats believe that despite efforts to prevent violent conflicts, sometimes military intervention abroad is necessary. Nuke, nuke, nuke. Nuke it. The UK should only intervene

militarily when there is a clear legal or humanitarian case. Of course, you know, like how they've always done and how those always go well. Are you thinking of a rock? Yes. Not even that. They're thinking of the responsibility to protect doctrine, the most

expansive thing in international relations. We're going to do the last section here. We're going to end on promoting a fair public debate. Oh, it should be illegal to at me. Yup.

A well-functioning democracy should have a high standard of public debate in which citizens are supported, educated, and empowered to distinguish between facts and lies. Stop sharing the square. Since they have to cancel their leaflet. Yeah, they're going to have to shred every single one of their leaflets and stop telling

people I murder squirrels. This is the heart of this, though. All of the other stuff, whatever. But this is the real psychodrama at the heart of this, is it should be illegal to reply to me on Twitter calling me Swo Jensen. If they cancel every single one

of these policies, they will immediately roll back on in anticipation of the conservatives in a coalition suggesting they do. That is the only one they will stand firm on. Be nice to me online. Don't say I murder squirrels and let me push the button when it's time to end all life on Earth. I'm Joe Swinson.

We found it. We found the ideology. This is the only ideology in here and it is don't at me. Oh, nuke the squirrels The Lib Dem promise, baby. Yeah. Anyway, we've been going for quite some time

and so I think it falls to me only to say, Molly, thank you so much for coming back in here again today. Nuke the squirrels. We're going to nuke the squirrels. And also, as a reminder, come see us on the 3rd of December in Vauxhall with special guest Rob Delaney.

We're going to be doing a very fun live show for you all. And, you know, we've got a Patreon. We're going to do it five bucks a month. It gets you a second episode every week. And finally, I cannot emphasize enough how if you don't want these people taking even a

single seat in Parliament, you have to immediately register to vote if there's still time to do that. There will be. This episode comes out. It was on the last day of voter registration. So this episode, when you're listening to this, if it's the first day, it's the last day to register to vote.

So register to vote immediately if you haven't had some people to as well. Then vote, Labour, donate to Labour, donate to Momentum. Go on my campaign map, the Momentum Organizing Tool. Go to Daenerys Marginal, knock on doors and talk to people. It actually works because the only thing our party has is people.

We don't have money like the Lib Dems and Tories do. We just have conversations. We don't have enough wallets. We have people wallet. That's what we have. By the way, when he says go and knock on doors and talk to people, do organize that through the constituency party. Don't just go

playing. What's it called? Yeah, that's the one. Don't go doing that. Organize it through a constituency Labour party. Okay, theme song. Yes, and our theme song is Here We Go by Jinsang. Find it on Spotify. Listen early and listen often. Otherwise,

we'll talk to you in a couple of days. See ya. Bye. Bye.