TRASHFUTURE - Murder on the Barking and Dagenham Express feat. Gareth Dennis

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Gareth Dennis (@GarethDennis) of Rail Natter returns to our hallowed halls to talk about, among other things, the decision to put the capital’s transport network into “managed decline,” so we can enjoy the standards of infrastructure currently only available to exotic places like “Italy” or “Quebec.” Also, a Foxtons for the Metaverse. Check out Rail Natter here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzA-8fUrw2C5cRcP9gO5BwA 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 *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We will be doing a live show in London on Wednesday, March 2. Get your tickets here! https://www.designmynight.com/london/whats-on/comedy/trashfuture-live-pre-election-christmas-spectacular *MILO ALERT* Milo has a bunch of live shows this month in both London and Prague. Check them out here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-show *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to TF. I've been handed a bulletin. It'll be fresh off the presses, yeah. This is a very recent bulletin. It's from four hours ago. Cressida Dick, the beleaguered officer in charge of the Metropolitan Police in London, has said, I will not be forced out as Met Chief. However, the comic timing division of our news organization, our Stringer, our Stringer who's wearing a clown makeup and tumbling towards me, has handed me another bulletin and honked his nose seven minutes ago. Sorry, this is an updated bulletin. Met Police Chief, Cressida Dick, to step down. Bye bye.

Bye bye. I got to change my fucking Twitter name now. Yeah. You are now Cressida Girl Dick looking for work. That's right. I mean, that's genuinely like huge news because she knew where the bodies were buried for like years and years and years and years. She's like consumer insider, like to the point where when she like stepped away from the Met for a couple of years to go to like a direct level position at MI6, everybody in like UK media just kind of collectively closed their eyes and pretended not to notice us. So now we've now we've had a little like palace coup. That's that's very, very interesting news.

And look, like every British palace coup, where someone in charge of a police coup, of course, thank you. As you're waggling your eyebrows theatrically, absolutely. I have a spinning bow tie on. Yeah, that's right. Spinning like the police bow tie thing. It's a little spinning siren bow type. Every time one of these like deeply corrupt, flawed, sort of irreparable UK institutions just like throws its leader to the wolves. Like every single time that happens, just remember, this is the institution sacrificing the Yellow King to ensure that it keeps getting a harvest next year. I mean, this is the thing, right? Cressida Dick has like thrown so many people to the

wolves over the course of her career, not even as like a personal judgment. That's how you become commissioner of the Met police and stay commissioner of the Met police. But now she herself has been like, become sort of an ablative heat shield for the institution, which is very funny. That's right. So it's so fucked that like this was the thing, right? Like Wayne Cousins, not the thing, the fucking policing of the vigil for Sarah Everard, not the thing. Any of the like Charing Cross leaked WhatsApps, not the thing. No, it's this sort of last bit of intrigue on

behalf of her, on behalf of fucking Boris Johnson that does for her. It's so fucking ignominious. And she deserves it. You know, I'm very glad. It's the scene in Casino. It's like, you went to bat for fucking that guy, do me a favor, like this prick. That's not what it is. What it is is fucking layer cake, getting shot in the last minute of the fucking movie, because disrespecting a guy you half remember, who is like a gigantic fucking moron.

Chris at a dick has been ousted because of the Duke from layer cake. All right. All right. I want to I want to introduce the episode. It's Alice Riley and Hussain and we are joined by TF returning champion and the host of Rail Natter. It's Gareth Dennis. Gareth, how's it going? I'm very well. Thank you. Yeah. I am. I realized I listened to the show last time as I do. I left a lot of open brackets of like kind of interrupting myself over and over again. So I've come back to close those brackets in a true ADHD way.

Absolutely. Finishing all of your details. Yeah. Look, before we get to a little bit of Rail Natter of our own, because my goodness, are we talking about trains today? There's a little more news. This comes not from our news desk. The first of which, of course, is once again, history has proven us right twice in as many weeks. Trash Future undefeated, vindicated by history every time the immortal science of podcasting.

Because what did we say? What did we say about Captain Sir Tom? Oh, I thought this was about the bin men and the switch blades. But yeah, sure. We're right about that. Yeah, we were right about so many things. You know, how can we hold all of these dubs that we've been accruing? So this is from an interview with Captain Tom's family that was recently published. Shout out to his family. That's right. We're shouting out his family. What was the best year of your financial life?

The interviewer asks, it was 2020, they say, surprisingly. That's such a like, we didn't burn him on some, you know? My husband and I sat outside worried about our financial future. The entire pipeline for our business over the next 18 months have been white clean overnight. It was then that my father, who had been rehabilitating after breaking his hips, started to walk again. We had to cancel his 100th birthday party from COVID. So my husband suggested that instead of a party, my father should walk around the garden 100 times and we'd give him a pound of lap.

Oh, my goodness me just fully like, listen, fuck off down the garden for a bit and I'll give you a shiny pound coin. That's a lot to you, right? Oh my God. Yeah, because well, number one, he remembers when like, when you could buy a house with a pound. So, you know, back in the good old days, but I think it's also just like this really good indicator of like, how much British people like have genuine contempt for like old people.

You're trying to watch fucking like Game of Thrones and Granddad won't shut the fuck up about Burma or the Ardennes or whatever. Right. So yeah. And you kind of resent that like he sees sort of there all the time as you were like, why don't you just go outside for a bit? Yeah, why don't you just fuck off? And I'll give you this shiny pound. Remember how much you could buy? Remember how much you could buy with this one pound when you were like, when you were like 10 years old? You could go, I don't fucking know like how many six pence as it is, but you know.

I mean, you could buy a big like racism chocolate bar at that point. You could buy a hundred penny sweets for a pound back in the old days. And you'd have enough change for a golly walk to absolutely. You could buy a golly walk, Fredo. You could do any number of things. Now you can't even buy a golly walk, Fredo, because of the because of the woke laugh. So basically, yeah, they did the trailer park boys thing. But they were like, I'll give you a hundred dollars to fuck off. Yeah. But for one pound, they were like, Captain Tom bears the door and he went through that door.

And so basically, and then, of course, they started the Captain Tom GoFundMe, which raised like millions of pounds, which went to the NHS. And then they also set up a charity to carry on their confused father's legacy after they put him outside. After they put him outside and then a grateful nation murdered him by giving him the novel coronavirus. Like he was more or less killed by British Airways was flying him to the Caribbean during a pandemic where he got the novel coronavirus and then died. And now like now it's all now like there's some kind of like literally there is a kind of blasphemy law against speaking ill of

him. Yeah, which we have all violated and therefore we'll have to report immediately to prison. Yeah, absolutely. There's a blasphemy law against speaking ill of him. A guy literally like got convicted of speaking ill of him. He's like overtaken the poppy. I don't know. He's like it's like Captain Tom and then below that is the poppy. It was very easy to overtake the poppy because the poppy doesn't do any laps of its garden at all. Just sits there. Yeah. It just sits in the in Flanders fields. It's also I mean it's quite amusing that it's overtaken the poppy just like a confused old man

just like going to raise money for an institution that's been put into managed decline. So his kids can start a charity that they then have their own company's bill for hundreds of thousands of pounds. So so British that like the chain of dominoes starts with telling your like father-in-law to fuck off down the garden for a bit ends in having to like look at a fucking drone swarm light version force ghost of him. Oh my God. I mean just the entire so basically right. So Tom Moore's daughter and her husband Colin by the way who are like property developers, right? I thought she was like a PR consultant. I thought that was where they were. One's a property developer. One's a PR consultant. And then they had these companies called Club

Nook Limited and Matrix Group Limited. And they both build the Captain Tom Foundation like well north of like a hundred and a hundred thousand pounds on fundraising consultancy fees. Yeah. Didn't this foundation give out something like some insultingly low percentage like 40 grand out of like a huge amount of income. What it was is there is 32 million which was like a go fund me. They didn't touch that. They set up the foundation that's gotten like some millions. And then so far they've given out 160k and they've they've spent on like various like I don't know what you might call a related party transaction right like billing the charity with their own. Now again like that's pretty common in UK charities which

is less an indictment of them and more an indictment of the UK charity sector in general. A future episode the UK charity sector. Absolutely. Yeah. So like during a 12 month period a total of more than fifty four thousand pounds was paid to two companies controlled by Captain Tom Moore's daughter Sir Captain Tom Moore's daughter rather Hannah Ingram Mourner husband Colin Club Nook Limited and Matrix Group Limited and like they think you can't even fault them right like that's the only industry left in Britain now. I'm not mad at them for hustling right because like they're just doing what they've been what they've been trying to do and what society rewards them for doing. What I'm mad at them for is the PR like goosing it like every

time you stop thinking about Captain Tom one of these fuckers pops up in the pages of one newspaper and other and goes actually my dad who British Airways killed would want us to like not have pronouns or whatever. Absolutely. Oh yeah we've we've decided to yeah like put our the rest of our like working Air Force on an aircraft carrier to go sink in the Black Sea in honor of Captain Tom. Yeah yeah my my dead dad who was in World War II and who I told to like fuck off down the garden for a bit was very concerned late in his life. He told me in fact about the threat of like Russian sonic weapons and therefore we must immediately give all of the possible military aid to Ukraine. Yeah absolutely. Anyway I think the whole thing right it's just it's such a

perfectly British event because it just the whole because the whole thing was enabled by the extraordinary mockishness of our media class right that but when you actually look at the events that unfolded it's sort of it's somewhere between farcical and deeply upsetting. Yeah farcical upsetting deeply authoritarian to make it like illegal to like be rude about this guy or even by this point to ask hey wait a second why did this 100 year old war hero have to do fucking laps of his garden to fund the NHS a thing that should have been taking care of him you know gratis like I'm sitting his chair and watch last of the summer wine like surely that was what he wanted to do for his last years. Well we have no idea what he wanted to do because

like that every every single relative he's ever had in his life now has their hand firmly up his embalmed carzy just fucking using him like a mouth puppet. Okay speaking of speaking of things that are extraordinarily extraordinarily funny and also very upsetting there is sort of have been some developments in the last thing we were right about which is sorry do you want the game of horns again yes please of course you do which is that guess what that Kier Starmer going on TV and all of his like representatives going on TV and saying the Prime Minister is a scallywag for suggesting that I you know was too soft than Jimmy Savile. Milo's not here is he I welcome Jimmy Savile. We have the non-union Kier Starmer impression. We've gotten Milo's non-union equivalent to come

in and do the Kier Starmer impression. Garrett that's going to be you for the rest of this segment. Oh damn. So basically right what happened is they keep he keeps going on TV right and all of his representatives going on TV. And saying Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile. Nick Kier Starmer Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile yeah and if the thing about Britain is we as a country are probably have one of the highest rates of undiagnosed pre-owned diseases in the world and as such we are a nation of people who half listen to the news so this has worked out for him about as well as you would expect. So what's happened right is what happens and I've sort of noticed this at any time there is like a split in the Tories it works like a

ratchet right where and it's a right word ratchet where a split will happen right and there will be Tories that who say ah this far and no further I was fine with everything that we did up until now but this Savile thing is a bridge too far but then that's the red meat that like the most active part of the like conspiratorial bircher insane you know right loves right and then the other part of the party will appeal to that group and guess where the fucking energy is in right wing politics it's not the people who are being favorably compared to John fucking major for some reason it's the frothy people the frothy people have all the power yeah and I think I think the ratchet's a good analogy right because like okay we can talk about the people the Tories who like have either

an attack of conscience or a political convenience and who go oh well actually I don't like this latest manifestation of what we're doing and I don't think we should do it right to say that they're hypocrites is like table stakes as we've been over right what's more interesting to me is the sort of structural thing of like this is analogous to setting up a big ratchet strap around like a tree or something and then putting like a little tiny posted on it that says don't fucking crank this ratchet whatever you do do not crank it are we very unhappy about the ratchet but I would encourage you to go further yeah we work we I mean as you mentioned we were right about this but it also just kind of everyone

who was sort of covering conspiracies and like looking seriously at like not just like QAnon but also just like the way in which conspiratorial material travels through like the internet and stuff like it was always going to be at this point in fact like it you know the whole kind of like Pete like the Pito scandal is very much like ingrained into every British conspiracy movement anyway right like we saw that quite a lot when you know you think about like the trade not the Trojan horse stuff the other kind of like stuff that happened in Rochdale and Rotherham Grewing gang stuff right which was like in the 2010s you know it was kind of like the thing that not only like were politicians like using to win elections like I remember it like in places

where there weren't like big Muslim communities and like you have these like you have these prospective Labour and Conservative candidates who are using grooming gangs as a way of like shoring up their kind of you know shoring up their voting base like it was this type of this type of stuff has been around in British politics for a very very long time and it's amazing but it's also incredibly depressing but also incredibly predictable that the line is drawn when like when when Kirsten and you know the respectable kind of like elected politicians are like involved right but it also sort of represents to me and you know people kind of got mad at me when when I would when I tried to say it but like again I'm yeah they were mad at me online but

crucially I am right and that and that when it matters sorry do you want the Gamerhorns well what I was going to say is hold the Gamerhorns for when I when it's proven because I really want to like enjoy it too it's like just just let me know when you want those Gamerhorns it's okay thank you it that type of stuff like that type of like the pedophilia scandal never like in you know scandals is going is like it is an inevitable endpoint for this country especially like right now I think at a time when um you know the whole kind of you know because this type of energy was being harnessed by like Brexit people in the past but now that like now that sort of like dissipated the energy is still there but it's kind of like manifesting in these or it's kind of like

moving in these really unpredictable ways right and this is why I'm also kind of thinking about like you know but when when the whole like Brexit drama was happening there were lots of people on the right and not like on the left as well but mostly on the right who were like um you know the error of like right and left-wing politics is like over and like now you know you know people be like you know that whole thing that you hear on like unheard like yeah yeah yeah like which is kind of a third way if you will yeah and it's kind of like well what do you and but there were no questions as to okay well if right and left don't exist and I and I and I have like some sympathy over that or I agree to it to the extent without positions like well what happens

next right like what what what what happens and like no one seemed to really have an answer for it so now we end up in this place where like we see Kirstama and we see like and this and it won't just be Kirstama involved in this we will see like establishment politicians like have to kind of answer on tv or on radio or like on podcasts or whatever like you know they will have to like address these conspiracies very very directly right and like this is the thing right and if they dismiss it as a conspiracy theory sorry like I was just gonna say but if they dismiss it as a conspiracy theory like they will kind of then be accused of like ignoring working people's concerns and everything yeah well like I would say the one lesson from like uh any kind of this like

failure of left and right or like brexit or whatever is that you can't once you once you've made these people once you've activated these people you can't put them back in their box this isn't going away this is like the the the new trend in politics there's always going to be that now this like irreducible like hardcore of absolute fucking psychos right and in America you sort of see like candidates or like republican candidates who like have the full support of the party because I think the party's like very aware that like there is no way that these guys can be stopped so it'd be much better to absorb them than to sort of like let them go wild and like you can see that happening in the UK as well like in like a very short period of time and it's so so

dangerous too like I genuinely think the risk of like political violence on in a serious way is is like higher than it's ever been and it's only going to trend upwards like I think there's going to be a time in this country and I don't say this like um you know in anything like a positive sort of way just in case that was in doubt that like we look back on you know labor canvases getting beaten up it's something like quite quaint uh because yeah I think we've really sort of opened Pandora's box yeah absolutely and yet it's something that all of you have pointed out in like its successive episodes you come back to the point where it's like oh but okay for example I I'm nothing if not a dumb Twitter guy and who do I see posting I see David Aronovich tweeting

saying well we've never seen anything like this this level of conspiratorialism it's very dangerous like wait I don't I didn't see that coming from like when when another leading politician in fact a leader of the opposition was pulled into right-wing conspiratorial things and I didn't see the same level of outrage and then also some other stuff like well we have you know the level of violence this is new we've inherited it from America it's like uh Joe Cox was murdered like not that many years ago we seem to like so much has just been uh what Alice what do you say we're the left a curse to remember I don't know yeah yes yeah and I mean I you mentioned Joe Cox and that reminds me of like possibly the bleakest thing I can think of which is like the the worst thing I

can imagine and I want to be very careful with the lathe here because I don't want to suggest this as an outcome I don't think it's a likely outcome but I think it is possibly the bleakest one which is uh you know Keir Starmer gets elected prime minister off of the back of Boris being unserious or whatever and as he's talking about how to like forensically forensic things a fucking combat 18 Baz murders him and he becomes a sort of secular martyr yeah and then if that happens or if something like that happens and I mean that that's like an obvious bet that like some kind of heinous political violence will happen at some point in the future right there will be like a bipartisan like cross political spectrum responsibility for it and it's not it's as you

say there's not rationalism behind it you as you say they can't be put in the box the people who are really like like angry angry like red like purple face angry about Corbin they don't think that those are the people they don't they see Keir in the same they see if Starmer in exactly the same way right it doesn't it doesn't benefit you to be to be moderate at all like these are the same people who think that Biden is a communist they think that Keir Starmer is a communist uh it like by that point you may as well be a fucking communist well the way I sort of I always sort of see it and I sort of noticing our time is ticking along but the way I tend to see it right is that there is there has there has been this right wing movement that sees anything that sort of is required

for social reproduction right things just manage the man the day to day management of things right as fundamentally uh uh uh alien as uh as as moving the world away from the utopia that they want and so this manifests and stuff like anti-vax this manifests and stuff like it's it's it's like I guess it hits differently right when you've gotten everything you've ever wanted all your life and then you get one thing that like you you know you can't get what you want like you have to wear a mask in the cinema or whatever and you you put enough media around that telling you that you're being oppressed for that and like people really do believe it and you create this sort of like insurgent population of people who think ah I am the most oppressed person in human history

and as such I should go out and I should fucking like you know shoot my senator or whatever and so to bring it right I think right back around to the events of the last several days right there are a lot of people you know it's like um there are a lot of people who were sort of fine with this who encouraged it who built their political careers on it who were fine to engage in its tactics who are now essentially finding out oh no this thing this these chickens are coming home to roost this thing I built I can't control this thing that was politically convenient at the time yeah kind of I think I disagree in the sense of like this would be like a bit they might like know it deep down but like it's way too introspective for like a lot of these kind of columnists to

really like admit or at least confront some of them believe like absolutely sincerely where did these guys come from yeah they all they all believe that I think I think they're like yeah all more likely they're kind of like um you know this is what this is like a legacy of like the Corbyn years and like all the people kind of calling me like bald in a gammon online like this is kind of like the end result um you know and again it's it's it's more proof that like for a lot of like the people who kind of pretend to support Kirsten because I'm not kind of convinced that like most people actively like support him um for them it's very much just like kind of continuing 2019 and and crucially like justifying why the decision that they made to like vote Tory or like

to not vote Labour in 2019 was not only like a good decision but like a morally correct one do not own me because I voted Lib Dem. Yeah exactly so much call columns are now dedicated to people like self-justifying that their opposition to Corbyn and bringing Boris in was like oh it's fine because you know look the other way yeah because and do not remember anything that I said or did and like I feel like this is like an episode in itself right this kind of like the the psychos right the like the various freaks and morons who who populate this kind of like reactionary insurgent movement I think that's that's something to talk about like on its own and really dig into because they fascinate me in a terrifying way so look I think that's let's let's let's leave that

there for now I think right like just this is what what's with the word right that this thing that could have just that could have been made to go away right this one thing right this or at least they could have been minimized everyone has decided to deal with it in the way that feeds it most and no one wants to take responsibility no columnist no one who engaged in sort of similar kinds of convenient smears no one no one who has been sort of happily enabling the right facing ratchet Tory insanity machine that's been going basically since like bircherism came over here right no one wants to acknowledge their role in that or the fact that the only way to avoid that is to do the kind of thing that they've spent the last five years essentially trying to stop so

like we said last time we talked about this sucks to suck bye bye I want to talk about enter dow it's a it's a not a startup it's a web three organization pizza dowels cover of enter sandman yeah that's right uh it's so it's a dao um it's called enter dao and it makes three products oh wow that's that's three that's three more than most of our startups usually do yeah I think it's about the same number okay sure so I'm gonna actually send you the first product I'm gonna send it to all of you on twitter uh and all of you listening as well check your dms I've said that to you Riley is sliding into your dms with this it is called uh sharded minds or as I call it sharded minds oh my god wow yeah okay what are we seeing here do you want to take a crack at

describing this I'll go into describing uh podcast describing mode what I'm seeing here is fucking mental no I'm seeing um I'm seeing like weird splodgy I'm seeing it I see no I'm seeing galaxy brain there's a galaxy brain ghost in the shell type character looking right at me and there's a button above it that's pink and it says my nfts which doesn't that does not bode well and behind all that is weird psychedelic like gif action that seems to be pulled out of a website from like 1999 quite something roll down a little bit please oh here we go to the image beside the word story that oh there we go the galaxy brain has turned into uh um waka waka waka waka is shall I shall I shall I read you the story section please oh it can't even work just before you

read this Alice the the image this is next to is the same woman but wearing 3d glasses with face tattoos and a necklace that says gm and there's a pac-man coming out of the uh interest color black hole in her head Alice go ahead and read the story for me so under story the failure of legacy institutions systems and media has led to the emergence of the web3 metaverse a parallel digital reality built around technology decentralization public goods doesn't exist yet it doesn't exist i'm still my lord at this point why is it here it doesn't exist yet why do people keep saying it exists and most importantly vibes leaning on the foundations of decentralized finance digital art and gaming the web3 metaverse is a

magical space full of adventure and yield but the web3 metaverse is also a fragile space protected by gm from the constant threats of the non-gm sayers on the verge of oblivion wait what's gm again it just stands for good morning oh good morning cool a magical space yet a space still inaccessible to many the legend has it that only a sharded mind can enter the metaverse that's right so this is mindshad enter the metaverse this is one of their three their three projects which is a number of nfts that are just like pictures of women that like look like they were from a sort of like a sexy computer magazine in the 80s they look like how grimes think she looks yeah there we are yeah yeah that's probably the best are they good they're like they're

scrolling along the bottom there's a joiner forage one there's the there's the the blue one avatar one oh yeah there they are so they are they're essentially right this is organization makes these these nfts which cost like 0.09 ethereum they're not that expensive by like nft standards and it's just like they say only only only with a sharded mind can you enter the metaverse which i agree but they have two sort of more substantive projects one is called land works and the other is called portal which is very funny because facebook also tried to build something called portal but it was just a tablet that spies on you which feels almost quaint at this point oh yeah i mean that's like a season one tf startup yeah that's right oh it helps your boss spy on you how

novel yeah crazy damn never never seen that before if what does it do it sells your personal data that's a man-made horror that's so within my comprehension so land works what do we think land works does uh once again gareth what do you think what do i think so does land works uh do that thing where you can buy a piece of land and become a lord for some reason but an nft no no no you can't buy it oh yeah that's right reality yeah yeah vibes vibes i'm just distracted by the fact that i've just realized the galaxy brain like weird galaxy sweep on the head of all these nfts looks a little bit like a cat's anus but blue well that's it's it's because you shard out of it you shard out of it yeah uh who's saying you can't buy land through land works but what can you do you sit on it but

you can't take it with you can you rent for land yes but like but like isn't it one person renting a plot of land you have a group of people who rent the plot of land and whoever has the most value or like who is kind of like who has bought the most nfts and the dowel whatever guests decide what uh is kind of put on that patch or you can be like an ape plantador yeah yeah but thing is again like that's kind of what it does do actually which is it lets it lets you be it's like it's like so this is like real land this is metaverse land that isn't real yes this is not even real land so it's did it's digital land that you can so if someone wants so if someone's like we should build like a nice digital house on this piece of land but like the person who has the more ape pictures

is like no we should build a giant penis uh skyscraper then you're building a giant penis skyscraper is this like is it like the equivalent the metaverse equivalent of like uh minecraft multiplayer mods that stop you from like uh trolling other people is that is that what it is uh somewhat but effectively generally like this is in something like decentralized right which is like a game and so you can rent land in the game using cryptocurrency you buy with real money and then land works has put it has put itself in as a kind of um middleman just like what is the other it's an estate agent yes cyber fox tons a fucking flying car with the estate agent add on the side shows up yeah um yeah oh sorry it's just here you you you have your

metaverse land very very spacious views out of the cyber dome no your metaverse land has has a bug and every time you walk on it your computer turns off and like sorry can't fix it so the other project is called project meta portal and they say what they're doing is they're helping further advance this immersive gaming movement immersive of course meaning you have a normal job with a wage that is paid by someone else in a game for some reason that we are currently seeing it play out within the wider crypto ecosystem so they say the examples are axi infinity which we've talked about or or nifty island which we've talked about they say we have a quite a large number of games available and ready to play but we need to navigate to a completely different interface each and every

time we wish to play one yeah this is the last three numbers on the back of your credit card to help so they say this is this is unsustainable the idea that there are different games that you can play at a given time as opposed to being able to like bring your buster sword from one game into another one and into a meeting again this impossible stupid thing that absolutely won't work this is meta working from home versus meta commuting okay we're in realms i can live with it again okay right yeah i'm here i'm there just kind of frantically clawing your way back to like how is this like a train yeah i'm trying i'm trying so that's how my brain works to be fair so basically they're saying look we need to we need to create a single point of access for the blockchain gaming

ecosystem so that you can like buy nfts of stuff and carry them between games or like you can buy all the nfts for all your games on one platform let me just ask a question here yeah um why because that's where the world is going alice so the previous one was so the previous one was a metaverse estate agent this one is a metaverse ikea big blue bag correct yes oh great yes where the world yes where the world's going don't like it bears the portal perfect no no that we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna end the dow segment on that one we do a lot more like web three projects now i'm i'm yeah because that's where the world is going so much stupid energy like look i want to talk i want to change gears i want to talk about

something that's happening uh not in the metaverse but here in the verse um and garret you've been wondering why have we brought you on to you know chatter on about the news and captain tom and the metaverse and everything and not ask you about trains where are my trains we're so many minutes in and you haven't mentioned trains other than just now in that sense and i'm very upset that's right so look uh this is i want to talk today a little bit about uh tfl and tfl's relationship with the government and what that says about like the wider relationships with the regions and also i think building a little bit on what we talked about in our last free episode with filbert and cartledge about how the tori ideology and in many respects the new labor ideology just

coming at it from a different angle is all about the crushing of everything that's not central government control yeah i i feel like our episode with fellow is going to be like one of those really important ones where you're like if you haven't listened to go back and do that because we're going to be talking about stuff we talked about and a lot from now on absolutely so uh i'm just going to sort of say to give the scene setting opportunity to garret which is that tfl having lost money in the uh lost an enormous amount of money in the pandemic and being the only public transport system the only major public transport system in the world that is required to be fully self-financing um is going to be put into or is likely to be put into a state of quote managed

decline so garret can you take it away and just give us some context of how we got here what that entails all all the good stuff yeah for sure before i start i'd want to say hello listeners and as a scottish guy living in the north it's kind of worth pointing out that this might look like a london story but it is very much a uk thing like and not because of like stupid like ethereal uk economy reasons but because it says a kind of israeli intimates it says a huge amount about what this government thinks about anywhere where there's devolved power whether that's organizations or or kind of regions or cities or whatever it is so it's worth addressing that the largest devolved government by population in the uk yeah for sure and and and given that lots of other places are

aspiring towards that and and we you know we've seen you know we've seen off the back of the integrated rail plan we saw what happened with um you know transport for the north getting his power strip but we'll we'll get back to that anyway so what the hell is happening so you have transport for london which is a large kind of devolved subnational transport body that is in charge of the majority of transport stuff kind of mostly within the m25 right the big organization largely and it's the main thing that sedate can can could do actually pre-pandemic is the main thing he could do but um there was this thing called uh the coronavirus pandemic that happened and um it made everything go a bit weird and so we had to pay for systems to continue public services

to continue to basically function and exist that infrastructure doesn't just you can't just switch it off and leave it in in stasis you have to maintain it you have to pay the staff that are still there you know all these things and so obviously it was ramping up a lot of money while people weren't traveling around because there was a massive pandemic going on everyone but for some reason uh and exactly the same reason that government is doing the same thing to the national railways um government saw this as a perfect opportunity to asset strip um what was basically like our only really well functioning urban transit system just tfl you know buses they're not perfect but actually buses within kind of the tfl region are pretty good you know you've

got the only proper well established sorry Glasgow the only proper well established underground system in uh in London and then you have all the other trains and stuff that tfl is in charge of but um contrary to the fact these are useful public services the government decides to just strip them back and create this kind of really contrived or rather hammer down on this really contrived situation where it holds London to ransom over funding a public service that is to the betterment of the whole country like really very very strange situation it's also worth saying we're not talking about like tens or 20s of billions here we're talking about just single digit billions of pounds which is just not that much money in the grand scheme of things if you

look back at how much one ppe contract for one of my handcocks friends yeah yeah yeah for sure so so this is this is entirely about uh ideology um and um yeah uh good grief it's just yeah so that's the situation that essentially tfl and city can because people don't like him in government at the moment tfl and london is being held to ransom by westminster the treasury here adopting the guise of the riddler yeah riddle me this sadeek how can you run a sustainable public transport system with no money well that's more or less kind of what they've asked him yeah because this is the the fifth the fourth or fifth i think of several short term bailouts that have come with increasing the owner as strings attached as the as the treasury attempt essentially

attempts to take over and micromanage tfl it's things like it's things like uh strip back pension provisions it's things like strip back all the kind of don't pay your your drivers anymore don't pay you know all the all the stuff that a fun union smashing stuff union smashy stuff and and i spoke and and riley maybe maybe you want to get into this a bit later on but it also includes my favorite of these which i've actually written about is the idea that um as part of this funding settlement um tfl needs to start rolling out driverless tubes like there's no tomorrow um and uh yeah so we'll maybe get to that in a bit but that's that's one of the kind of the key sort of underlying requirements put in by um by not your special boy but railnatter special

boy which is grant shafts that's right driverless train can't fucking join aslef or the rmt uh oh no we we put the class consciousness module in it we put the we put the brain of a shop steward from the 1970s into this driverless train and now it's going on strike every day we've up we we have uploaded arthur scargill's into a driverless train you wouldn't have thought of it he was a really good train driver they didn't push the night tube button they pressed the open all hours button yeah so so uh the other thing that they're doing right is this is as i understand it this isn't just stuff like trains that's getting affected it's also things like roads bridges cycling infrastructure i'm just i'm just

still on the train thing i really need to see a tube train in like a 1970s shop coat so our more creative fans uh please go ahead and do that please gareth continue absolutely do that um yeah now so so so for example you've got um you know london is leading the charge on um taking our streets back to being about people and not about two tonne metal boxes and so there's there's quite a lot of initiatives to for example um build out decent cycle infrastructure you know where it's not just a lightly painted baseline on the side of the road with dashes in it where you still get run over the same but you apparently it was your fault because you weren't in the little gutter um they're actually building proper infrastructure and also stuff like um uh sort

of street i can't remember the name there's a program called like streets it's about streets and about driving streets for the public it's not just about cycling but actually about having more uh street space isn't it we're having more um like uh businesses kind of being able to be out on the street and okay there are some challenges with disability about that but generally i still see it as a broadly a positive thing to kind of push cars back to the periphery again not design our entire urban space for for cars so so there's lots of that the trouble with that is it does require some funding and also even though weirdly it complies precisely with government some of government's own kind of big ticket items that you know the the Andrew Gilligan as kind of

transport advisory um uh doomster has been actually pushing the only thing that he is right about is about cycling and about pedestrians and it's like his policy nonetheless that doesn't that's not going to stop Westminster from stripping that away as well as part of the settlement because if you strip away for for an organization like tfl if you're stripping away marginal funding that tips them quite dramatically when everything's being run to the extent where you're not talking about big sun just quite quite um uh you know the tipping point of something being breaking even you can pay everyone you can pay for the you know the advertising you can pay for the all the things that make that service run the tipping point isn't much it doesn't take much of a nudge to push that

into not being able to pay for itself and with a year and a huge city that those numbers do climb quite quickly so government is able to cover that very easily of course this comes back to the fact that London isn't able to borrow its own cash it has to rely on government to borrow the cash you know as part you know via the Bank of England and if we had better devolution like they do in mainland europe we might be able to allow the regions to borrow their own cash but obviously that would take power away from treasury and that's never gonna happen so so yeah so this resulting in not just the trains being a problem but also buses which frankly a lot more people lower down the the the income desks rely on and also all the infrastructure for cycling and walking

is going to get hit by this so so isn't this roads too like bridges yeah i was yeah like bridges is it aren't the Tories basically saying welcome to well there's your problem a podcast about disasters with science we want to like how like roads and bridges of like Quebec and Italy on purpose there are stories that it always reminds me of a thing about like i have to remember that we're now in this moment there are stories about people in in north queensfree right which is a fine little village um on the other side of the first of fourth from kind of where Edinburgh is underneath the fourth bridge this magnificent my favorite structure in the world this magnificent steel structure and there are stories of like someone's car got destroyed by a

piece like a ton and a half piece of rust that fell off the fourth bridge in like the mid 90s and that was like for me that like defines a decade two decades of massive decline in in Britain we're in that now everything is falling to bits this is not a good time to pull away transport funding and i was having discussions today about exactly the same thing happened for network rail the the the the infrastructure manager for the railways kind of across the rest of uh england wales and scotland like it's the same thing it's like this isn't that we've had managed to come for a long time this isn't the time to then turn off the taps for that funding altogether because um bridge is going to collapse the growth yeah yeah it's actually a leftist project

i guess it was who you're also saying that like so things are getting worse but they're also getting more expensive huh that's that's that's interesting yeah funnily enough if you if you if you de-skill an industry say so i'm pulling it away from tfl sorry tfl but more broadly when it comes to engineers um and this is very much uh uh well as a problem podcast territory uh friend of the show uh the extended universe and if you de if you're reducing funding and generally de-skilling an industry that involves lots of skilled people like engineers and like uh you know train even drivers operators all the skilled people that work at how to plan trains it's not just about the engineering i have no idea how you plan trains it's really complicated and i've seen

the graphs it's crazy uh those people are skilled if you wind down an industry then those people go away they leave yeah they become yeah they become code they become coders instead and they make apps they go and develop nfts they go and learn to do digital and and and they're gone and they don't come back because they're like i'm not putting myself through that again you know i'm not doing that again i i want an industry where i want to work somewhere where i'm not likely to be sapped imminently and i'm not like doing loads of overtime and i'm going to take sick leave for stress so they go and do something else and that means that your ability to do the original thing the public service diminishes and so you have to pay loads more people over time you have to pay loads

of more lot more like vampires like me who work for major consultancies you know we that that's expensive it's not good so everything gets perpetually more expensive than treasury gets to go it's very expensive we have to reduce how much we fund this and and so i what we have right is this current impasse is basically about whether tfl collapses because it no longer meets its legal obligation to balance its books when again like if it is sort of it is this thing that enormous amounts of people depend on that again is one of the things that like people like about living here it reminds me a lot of like something we talk about about the tories a lot is there's sort of like a foot shooting aspect to public to public service cuts where like we've

talked about this before in relation to like stuff like the police or the army where it's like no you need those to keep yourself like in power and to do the big foreign policy stuff that you want to do but you're cutting them anyway well in the same thing like london for better and for worse mostly for worse is the economy of the uk like everything else is just sort of miscellaneous section yeah because they've not invested in transport anywhere else of course yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly but like london being a place where a lot of people work and a lot of people live and a lot of the economic activity of the country happens uh like defunding that because uh the people there mostly like vote labor and have blue hair and pronouns and you don't like them being

able to get a tube is like very very funny i was gonna say funny is exactly what it is is like have you you haven't thought about this plan you know you you they've not thought it through in any way whatsoever i think i think they have i think it's just that the animating forces spite oh yeah that's true the the other animating force of course i think is this idea that these things these these things that make life good and bearable that are sort of emerged in this wave of consolidation and institutionalization that started in the 19th like mid 19th century and carried on through the 20th century culminating in things like tfl being stitched together from multiple different private railway operators the nhs being created and having dental care like these

this wave of institutionalization this modern project um has been thrown into reverse because precisely because the neoliberal world doesn't need big edifice institutions it's just that those big edifice institutions are some of the things that make life bearable under these conditions they enable you to get around to stay healthy they enable you to have your consumption pattern smoothed all these things and so i would hate to have my consumption pattern smoothed and so there is this there i think the the way to understand it is like the whole state has kind of been in managed decline it's just going faster in certain areas and sometimes right the and these processes are frequently hidden they're hidden behind it used to be called a hollowing out of

the states in political science so there's very reason well it's that these processes are hidden until they're not right and in liverpool it was very obvious very quickly because again i think spite drove them to want to crush this place that especially the tories to crush this place that had seen fit to resist them and in whereas in other places it's slightly slower maybe new labor puts in a requirement that the transport system has to be self-funding maybe they really really believe that by doing that they're going to cause them to innovate and of course by innovate they really meant union bust and put in driverless trains and then for some some fucking how tfl manages to clear the oggy and stables it manages to do the impossible task and be self-funding with tubes

cross subsidizing buses with like like ultra low emission zones and so on really is like a miracle of like uh fucking totally it's incredibly impressive yeah yeah and then but then when being when confronted with again a once in a generation or probably not once anymore generation catastrophe they say well we were running you like a business and when a business fails a little bit it fails forever which means i don't know unless it's a business yeah unless it's actually a business in which case they'll prop it up no problem yeah and then and then the question right is okay well what the fuck comes after this are we going to go back to like the norther like norther in in cambridge sure rail company running the fucking northern line we're bringing back the

fucking metropolitan underground railroad railway lozenges what if you had a northern line but the trains came once every hour and a half what if you had the bay kalu line with the trains that are still from the ah oh yeah i mean like one question that i have and this is a very kind of selfish question because you know i live in one of the areas that is getting cross rail um and i guess there are still questions as it's like supposed to be both nearing completion and its opening date that there are like some stations that are like begging for like tfl money um because they're like not quite at completion there's also like talk about like lots of the testing being done very fast because they're trying to like meet like an impossible deadline bearing in mind but like so

much money was hemorrhage before but also the fact that the project made like never be completed outside of like the london zones um and i sort of wondered whether you had like any kind of insight into that as someone who yeah has sort of been in and out on that discourse for a bit yeah i mean i've worked on bits of the project um in fact some of the outer london bits of the project the bits that i worked on it's um yeah i mean that i have to everyone has to remember that was a central that was a tfl that was like a london and central government project so it's like it's funny that london is like oh the goings getting tough they're now like somehow london rather than westminster this gets confusing geographically um tfl and the mayor have to pay for the problems rather than it

continuing to be a collective challenge you know a lot of the reasons for um for the overruns are actually there to do the trains being procured but also there to do with skills problems shortages and skills because we don't do capital projects enough in the country we do we do very small so in case you do a big hit but we just generally don't invest in skills in this country and when i say invest in skills i mean invest in infrastructure that makes people skilled when you invest in skills without doing the infrastructure bit no one does that you that's not a way to build a workforce so yeah a lot of the cost overruns are as a result of some of these longer term problems of not investing and and and and yeah and and there are risks with the funding across rail

having an impact cascading an impact through the rest of tfl's finances absolutely i would just find it very funny that they would open the open like crossrail and then like a year later be like oh yeah this high speed rail service uh is now going to run uh like trains like every half an hour because we don't have because we don't have to stop all the people instead of instead of crossrail you get a high speed bus replacement that's right yeah basically that's richard wellings he wants that oh that's let's not talk about the institute of economic affairs let's move on quick i was setting up for a speed joke but now that i know that this is a real thing i'm i'm not touching it so i want to sort of i want to rewind this back to something we were talking about earlier right

which is that tfl has been set this impossible task and i think this goes back as well to like central government taking these popular institutions setting them impossible tasks and then when they meet their goals sending them a more impossible task or like nhs waiting list for example right yeah because it's a test you're not supposed to pass it's why every winter is the nhs's worst winter ever yeah so let's and we know where that sort of led with the nhs which is like the closed not just the closing of like a and e and different and local hospitals sort of over the course of many years that's now culminated in like emergency rooms don't have to come unless you're in that work yeah hold on so let's let's talk about like what does what does tfl kind of have

ahead of it if you live here right or if you even come here occasionally for work like most people a lot of people fucking have to well the challenge is that a lot of the cost cutting they're asking for and it's very difficult to achieve without fit like this this as i talked about kind of the the flip that you go from like viable to like not viable well in order to actually make savings it's not a case of like running train like maybe one fewer train an hour or something that doesn't make much difference because all this all the fixed costs are still there and actually you still have to pay the staff so actually that doesn't make much difference so there's a risk that the changes that these some of these funding pressures will result in are going to be massive and severely

impactful on on the city and and frankly it won't be the the well-off people it won't even be necessarily us who will be suffering the most from it it's going to be the people who rely on buses at the fringes of the and kind of all the kind of the pretty deprived areas of london trying to make their way across to work because they don't have a car because car ownership in london is thankfully quite low so it's going to be those people who are going to be hit really hard and it worries me a lot and and a lot of it is in is in the direction of really it's a lot of it is really stupid ideology so if you put aside the treasury ideology you know that let's go back to the driverless thing shall we if if if that's where i was leading yeah so driverless trains oh my goodness

so to talk about this i'm going to within the next 10 minutes no not that three minutes try and explain grades of operation because it is kind of relevant and so so if you like you've got these driverless trains kind of fall into different categories of grades of operation so like grade operation one is where you have the driver who makes the train go and stop and opens the doors and grade operation two is where the driver is kind of not doing so much of the go and stop and is just basically operating the doors and then go grade operation three is where the driver kind of doesn't need to be involved but kind of looks at the doors being opened and doesn't have to sit in the front grade operation four is where the thing is totally on its own you

don't need anyone in the vehicle at all it can run on its own now mecha are the scar girl yeah yeah exactly so um the thing with that is that in order to lots of the benefits that you get from opera like automatic running you get quite low down in that scale basically once the driver's not doing this stop and the go stuff that you can i quite a lot of good sort of uh thanks to clever signaling you can squeeze a lot of trains together and actually that the difference going from like the driver making the stop go happen to the driver just controlling the doors that's basically where you get all the benefits that's where you get all the capacity benefits of some level of useful automation right and above that it becomes vanity by and large so in order to get to this high high

levels of like the grade of operation three and four where the driver is not controlling even opening the doors you start needing major infrastructure investment on things like platform edge doors so so you see those in the new bits of the jubilee line where there's like the screen doors all of crossrail have that in the central section and that's actually a good thing i think we should be investing in that it's a good thing but it's not going to gain you capacity it's just a massive extra cost so it's not going to gain and indeed tfl did loads of analysis on this because because this is not a new thing um the department for transport and grant shafts and his predecessor been asking tfl to do this for ages and so tfl have done loads of analysis

and indeed um i can quote tfl where they said that they basically came up the fact that um their kind of line on the back of their analysis was um that none of the grade of operation four conversions would cover their costs over the stated asset life and overall network-wide grade of operation four conversion represents poor value for money its implementation will present a considerable affordability challenge which will further exacerbate tfl's current financial and longer-term funding position yeah but on the other hand it's future yeah if it's if it's the future then that means that it's good right also the other dimension here presumably is well this won't solve the uh we won't we won't solve that problem with efficiency but we will

solve that problem by say for example drastically weakening the collective bargaining power of workers and and and it solves the problem of grant shafts not being able to get photographed with yeah exactly i mean this is a lot of this is a bit in a way and i kind of said it tritely kind of uh trivially but actually shafts is the it's sort of the rail network special boy because he actually is like lots of this sort of stupid tech stuff in the way that matt a special matt handcock comes up with he's all about this for the railways in a way that is based in evidence in no way whatsoever like he has no real understanding of railways and i'm not saying that ministers should have an understanding of railways but he like is in the dangerous position where he really

thinks he does understand railways it's almost like the second kind of tori which is there's the tori that is that is put into power and wants power but hates governing and then the tori that's put into power and is incredibly deliriously excited about scammy horse shit yeah he gets to play with a train set yeah there's two toddlers there's the toddler sitting there kind of drooling and chewing their own foot at matt handcock and then there's the toddler sat there punching that other one and grant shafts is the one punching and that for me is like that kind of defines the sort of nasty but basically incompetent men who are screwing up our country and and and the point is right and we go back to like let's think about like loan conditionality right because like if you

can't directly take control of something yet like for example say you are uh germany and you need to like punish greece for you know having a state or whatever right uh then you can do that through loan conditionality which is what we're doing here and i think that we have seen the ideology and it is again comes back to something we've said before as well which is we all we can do is the impossible which you must do we know what will work which you can't do and so we are all go because of this intellectual lacuna this thing that cannot be spoken in public that cannot be understood that certainly cannot filter to the way that we run the country because of all of these all of these things these these things that we imagine are unchangeable

then you have to continue you have to do magic in order to continue this process of social reproduction that we've become quite used to because it's no longer useful for capital and and i can and to widen it back out from from london back to the the rest of the rest of the uk again or at least or at least the kind of the continuous britain bit that england wills scotland and this is exactly what grant shafts has done with the integrated rail plan that he that he pumped out after we recorded the last episode right um like again it is a load of nonsense fakery in it a load of stuff that's just not achievable but the whole of the rail industry is being held to ransom with it like oh we're going to hold you to ransom with this and we'll give it and you should you should

be glad for what you're being given and a good example is where a devolved body that had that theoretically has the power to do a lot of good stuff and is ostensibly a good thing they spoke out about it and said this is actually not good this is going to cause a lot of problems this isn't going to achieve what you said it is and also it's missing a load of now in fact there's no analysis what have you can you provide any evidence to justify this stuff and um central government stripped transport of the north uh of its powers transport for the north was stripped of its of a substantial amount of its powers for speaking out courage the others and indeed the other one midlands connect another uh subnational transport body they did the other thing which

is where they didn't say anything bad about this integrated rail plan which comes out to the same consequence which is that if they now they can't say anything bad in the future because they'll also get their funding stripped so it's the same uh consequent result and it's it's loan conditionality is exactly to say and the idea of this public service being used as a bargaining chip in the bigger ideological plan is painful because it just as with all these things that every episode you go through shows it just hits people it hits the worst off people even harder and I think sort of I think that's that's a good place to leave it right a very tidy spot I mean not a good place but an appropriate place to leave it um so I want to say uh Gareth as always it is such a massive

delight having you on it's absolute pleasure yeah oh thanks all right it's always fun to join I uh yeah I I have to say I've binged a lot of trash feature episodes after the after the last um and uh yeah it's it's dangerous I'd say don't look don't listen to like three trash feature episodes a day it's actually harmful to your health absolutely do do that it's recommended that you do do that and subscribe to patreon although legally you have to do that can we just can we can we make that seem edited in really poorly by the way yeah Gareth can you talk in a much in a lower bit rate cut that into like the middle of a sentence uh no uh so I want to say Gareth thank you so much for coming on and encourage everybody to check out rail natter

which a link of course will be there for that in the description um and to thank you all for listening and to remind you that there is going to be a paid episode coming out in several days there's also gonna be a live show all right there is March on the second of March I love details and on this this isn't the first I've heard of it but definitely the first I've heard of it was when it was like announced on the patreon the thing the thing is right we we run a very shambolic podcast but also somehow uh we are right about everything we ever talk about yeah that's right anyway uh so thank you to Gareth check out rail natter thank you for listening patreon's five bucks a month you know what it is and we'll see you in a few days bye everyone bye