TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Dry Canal Station feat. Gareth Dennis

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

For this week's bonus episode, we're joined by friend of the show Gareth Dennis to discuss the upcoming 'infrastructure reforms' that could obviously make a huge difference, if done intelligently, but... don't seem to be shaping up that way. Which comes as an enormous surprise to all of us. Get the whole episode on Patreon here!   *TF LIVE ALERT* You can get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

The task before us is simple, right, and easy. We have to take, this should be really straightforward, we have to maintain, we have to take the Green Party of England and Wales to a really rhetorically combative institution. If you think about where the Green Party's been before that, it's a walk, but I think it could be done, is the thing. This is like one of those movies from back in the day, we're like a crotchety old coach. Like, it'll never work. We're gonna... The Green Party want to go to the Olympics.

It's never gonna fucking work, kid. Genuinely though, because it pays to have a theory of... A stupid theory of this, right? Which is that people, when they are a few, if you're taking not Pat McFadden's line of rolling the dice, they want something that's like aggressive and libidinal, right? And you can use those in the service of good things, like, I think it's perfectly... That's why, you know, all the most effective Corbinism was the kind with teeth, the kind that was like, why are billionaires like, owning vacant housing stock in central London?

And it could have, he could have done more on that even, but he was kind of, you know, the triangulatory sort of guy. And so, ultimately, like, that's one of the things we need. We need, like, a crank green party, you know? Yeah, this goes back to a long in the toothed Milo theory. If you just want someone to stand up and say, yeah, ages ago, you used to say that you just need someone who's gonna say, you're speaking fucking shit, you're a c you. You're a cunt. Yeah. Get a knife out at the...

Danny Dyer. Genuinely, that's the most politically engaged most of Britain has ever been was the time Danny Dyer went on Good Morning Britain and called David Cameron a twat and they cut to an ad break. Ultimately, the long term goal is step one, Greens, step two, Vote Zac, step three, Danny Dyer. Question mark, question mark, question mark. Danny Dyer, leader of the Green Party. Step five, Danny Dyer, climate Stalin. Yes, listen, me and these fucking sandal-wear-a-wearers are going to fucking swat the fuck out of

you if you don't sort this out, alright. It's a program I like to call Green Street. So look, we didn't mean to talk about this for this long, of course, but like this right now is a moment also of unprecedented weakness for the Labour Party where the minister is saying, oh, is this a confidence vote? Is it not? But if they lose it, like what the fuck is, how is Starmer going to carry on? Is he just going to U-turn again? He's going to have no authority. It's going to be a zombie government for the next three, more of a zombie government for

the next three years. My favorite instance of this was a text that got leaked from the WIPs office. Not for anything important per se. Starmer was giving a statement about the G7 and the NATO summit, right? And you get a text from the WIPs office that's like, the prime minister's going to be giving a statement about this, colleagues are encouraged to come to the house to support the prime minister. Text, 10 minutes later, colleagues must come to the house to support the prime minister. And it's just like, there was going to be nobody standing behind him for that shit. He was going to be on his own being like, yeah, it was cool when I went to the G7

summit and, you know, hung out with Mark Carney. It was cool when I kind of like, yeah, it was cool when I went to the G7 summit and, you know, hung out with Mark Carney. It was cool when I kind of, like, picked up all of Trump's papers that you can't hold onto because he's like 90 years old. So, look, like, ultimately, the Labour Party is in a position of unprecedented weakness right now. They are unable to, like, to manage, like, their MPs who, by the way, they brought on all of the quote, like, the, the, as they were called in the media, the storm troopers. And then they were surprised when they were unwilling to stick their necks out to defend unpopular policy. Crazy. That's insane. I never would have thought that would have happened. That these like lobbyists and careerists that you brought in who have like never set foot in

their constituencies are all of a sudden panicking that they're about to lose their do nothing job. I've decanted the most venal third of the like intelligence corps officers who needed a job into the houses of power. If you're a politician whose whole identity is that would be good for my CV, you're not going to go and get, you're not going to stand behind an extremely unpopular policy. At this moment of weakness, fuck it. We ball. We do. we do.

It is time for you to get really into big dangly earrings and cork sandals, big skirts... I'm sure there's other green fashion signifiers, but just do all of those and see what happens. You can wear Birkenstocks at the Winter Olympics, it's never been done before! Yeah, look, look. We are here, mostly, allegedly, talking to Gareth about the infrastructure review. Now, I actually have pre-recorded a half-hour discussion on housing in the infrastructure review with Gareth Fern, a different planning Gareth that we talked to infrastructure about. Oh, it's the gaggle of gas again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're going to be

talking about the transport infrastructure review today with this infrastructure, Gareth. So you mentioned earlier, right, let's build on this a little bit, that this is a document that has basically nothing in it except largely the status quo. Well there's actually three, so there's three dots. So we have the spending review a couple of weeks ago, right? Comprehensive spending review, which, within which, with all the departmental budgets, and there was 83 billion for transport, of which about 40% of that was for rail, and only 0% of that, 300 million, was new money that had

not been announced already by the previous government. So already, we're off to a bad start. But then it kind of pushed, it said, right, yeah, but wait for, there are two more things coming that will be very important. One is the industrial strategy, and the other is the the 10 year infrastructure strategy. Now the industrial strategy, I'm sure you'll pick into that in detail. It focuses lots on things like AI, data centers. You've touched on a lot of this before, so I'm not going to retread this classic TF ground. But essentially within it, my main problem with that is that it's talking a lot about downstream without fixing the foundations of why our economy is fucked. Things like high energy prices. They're going, well, energy prices are high, but not actually going, so we need to build more power

stations so that we reduce energy prices. They're also not saying, by the way, we need to end the experiment of pricing all electricity on the basis of gas prices. No, they briefly talk about making it regional. But as you say, they don't talk about like actually just, well, I mean, for starters, they talk very lightly about reform, but again, get nowhere near going, maybe we should actually nationalise electricity. Anyway, so, so energy, one thing, mobility is severely lacking. They just have no vision for what, how critical mobility is as part of an industrial strategy. And then thirdly, when it comes to the other major factor in the industry, in industry

and our economy, which is the university sector, which is basically about to completely disintegrate. Again, as you've talked about ad infinitum, there is the only thing they talk about universities is we need to be even more selective about which STEM subjects we fund and defund absolutely everything else about universities, which is going to work great. How is this different materially from deciding that, you know, like insect biology or whatever is woke and defunding it. Yeah, tisn't.

Okay. So then the next, so that's, so that's the industrial strategy sorely lacking, but we're not going to focus on that now because I'm sure you've picked up loads of it already. The 10 year infrastructure plan you've talked to, you've addressed the housing side of it, which I'm sure the other Gareth will say is hopeless. The bit that I want to talk about is transport. No, the other Gareth is really upbeat about that. Oh really? He's your Garry-o. say is hopeless. The bit that I want to talk about is transport. The other garroth is really upbeat about that.

Oh really? He's your gario. Yeah, no, the transport. So when I talk about what a strategy should do, what an infrastructure strategy should do, what any strategy should do is have objectives. What are you expecting the strategy to deliver so that you can say we have successfully delivered this strategy? Oh, I can answer that one. Nothing. That's correct. Yeah. There are no objectives.

When I talk about strategic objectives for transport, I am talking about things like modal shift targets. You know, targets for we have this much mobility, this much of it should be served by sustainable means, this much of it should be served by rail, this much should be served by road, by, you know, we want to localize active travel and all these things, and then maybe a discussion about what

that looks like regionally. But there is nothing. There are no objectives whatsoever. So there is, it's, all it is is a list of projects that have been funded by the Comprehensive Spending Review, which as I've already said, are all Sunak or before projects. So there is nothing in this, and I'll stress again, 10-year infrastructure strategy. Ten years takes us to 2035, which gives us 15 years to our net zero target. If we're just going to look at one element of it, 15 years to our net zero target, and

we will have 15 years to then deliver probably about 40 years of infrastructure to actually get us to net zero. So it says nothing. And it's extreme. The problem with that is that our industry, whether it's the railways or whether it's the broader transport industry, whether it's civil engineering or the construction sector, has no idea what it needs to be doing. It has no idea what direction it needs to be facing. Let's drill into what this... Oh, let's do a meanwhile. Meanwhile, we have a situation where the funding for the railways right now is so much less

this year even compared to last year that in one particular key area, which is railway electrification, that is making our trains run more reliably, more cleanly, faster, so on and so on, putting wires above the railway. Seven and a half thousand people made redundant over the last year from a lack of funding of that particular element, which I would say is- I presume that's because it's done? Because we're finished? Yeah. Let's go with that rather than the fact that we've just not done any of it for like a genuinely now almost a decade of having not done electrification again.

It's so funny that in a country as small as Britain and in a country which has famously had the railways the longest, some of them still aren't electric. Yeah, it's absolutely baffling. And in extreme efforts to go into how do we not do that? How do we not electrify the railways with Europe looking onto us like we are bonkers? Because it's like, no, railways, we are building, as we speak, we are building a 125 mile an hour mainline called East West Rail, again, funded in the Comprehensive Spending Review, but it's not a new project, it's been around for ages. We're not electrifying it. It's a new mainline, brand new, using bits of old railway line and some bits that are brand new. It will not be electrified off

the bat. This is mostly a freight spine that connects across from like, kind of Oxford across towards Cambridge, but a lot of it will be freight and it's not being electrified off the bat. This is mostly a freight spine that connects across from Oxford across towards Cambridge, but a lot of it will be freight and it's not being electrified. It's just baffling, which means that everything will run slower, blah blah blah blah blah. So 7,500 people mean redundant. That is the tip of the iceberg. The redundancies, the reduction in skills that actually need to deliver, say, an industrial strategy are being shed because of the lack of vision of what we need. And it comes back to storytelling, a bit like we were talking about earlier. There is no story. This is an infrastructure strategy that has no maps in it saying what things need to look like, what are the receptors. You know, infrastructure transports one thing,

but even like hospitals. I would expect an infrastructure strategy to go, well, here are areas where we have enough hospitals, here are areas where we don't have enough hospitals, here are the hospitals made of the aero concrete, and therefore here is a list of infrastructure, i.e. hospitals, we need to build for that sector. But nothing,