TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Hannibal l'Equity feat. Ethan Shone

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

For this week’s bonus, we speak with friend of the show and openDemocracy journalist Ethan Shone (@EJShone93) about the… corporate proximity to Starmer’s Labour and its recent investment conference. With all the documented malfeasance, fines, violations, and general contempt of the public, it comes across like new marketing on old (but dumber) Blairism. It is 2005 forever. You are always listening to “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee. Things can only get greyer. Check out Ethan’s work on openDemocracy here! https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/ethan-shone/ Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/114295330 *T-SHIRT ALERT* Two new t-shirt designs—Avignon Popes and Banished to the Lagoon—are available for pre-order on our website. Get them here! https://trashfuture.co.uk/collections/all *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour Here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

The government announces Macquarie is investing £1.3 billion into new green infrastructure, including a green power farm, as a result of planning being pushed forward by the government. And its road chef portfolio will be installing electric car fast charging points along its sites in the UK motor network. It's a road chef portfolio. Macquarie owns all of road chef. Oh man, road chef. That makes me hate Macquarie even more. Who goes to a road chef? Well. What kind of sick fuck would go to a road chef?

The little chef was one thing, but a road chef? I would sooner eat from a Burger King at a moto. And I don't say that lightly. I like the like, really deep well of knowledge about like motorway services there, you know? Yeah yeah yeah, yeah. There's an opinion that you come by honestly. I would sooner stop at Lee Delamere than go to a road chef! We have another, right?

Which is, uh, not just data center after data center after data center, or like, saying hey, Macquarie, you invented the way that Thames Water is currently run and financed. You're behind, ultimately, you are the great and powerful Oz behind the curtain of why there's so much shit in the river. Why don't you do it again, but with wind farms? Dorothy discovers that the river is full of shit and therefore imagines that she's no longer in Kansas. Follow the Bobbing Brown Road. I think it's worth considering though, that you're actually underestimating the government

here and there's something else, there's a different plan afoot. Because I think one way to look at it is that, yeah, they're just laying out the red carpet and they want these firms to come in and just extract rents and it's all going to be about profit for them. But when you look at the specific companies that they have chosen for these investments, if you were trying to choose companies who were more likely to face huge regulatory fines for things like filling rivers with shit. Like you would struggle to pick better companies than the likes of Macquarie and Abydos. I actually think what they're doing here is bringing them in and letting them commit to these projects knowing that they're gonna fuck it up so badly that they'll be fined billions and billions

of pounds for breaching all these regulations. So when you think of it like that it's kind of 4D chess and you're missing the fourth D as it were. Are you saying that we're in the middle of a kind of infrastructural version of the producers? Yeah, essentially, yeah. Great. But it is like, it's kind of just worth highlighting that like they're kind of trumpeting these investments

from these companies as though they are, as though they're not terrible at what they do. Of the firms that you've read out there, since about 2010, those companies alone have paid like 300 million in fines. That doesn't include DP World's fire and rehithing, because that was actually within the rule. They didn't get fined for that. That wasn't a technical breach by this kind of metric.

DP World owns P&O fairies for people who might be wondering who that is. Oh, okay. I thought DP World was a very different kind of website. So it doesn't include that. And I think if we look at Eli Lilly, for instance, they haven't actually fallen afoul of regulators in the UK yet. But all we need to do is let them operate here for a while. And they're short of, because they've been fined like $2 billion by US regulators in the

last 20 years or so. So if you think of it about investment in those terms, I actually see this paying off. I think there could be a big starma W incoming on this. The country's doing a slip and fall scam. Springtime for Hackloy, Tanmokwary. The only the fact that the only way to spin this process properly is like the country is preparing to get out of phony neck brace. a phony neck brace. We're going we're going to a mall that we know like hates bad publicity and like

running across a patch of black ice. A couple of more that are worth talking about as well, which is like, oh, we're also announcing like half a billion pounds of investment to build homes on quote unquote Brownfield to tackle the ongoing housing crisis. Five thousand homes aren't going to be enough, but it's not nothing. But again, the homes that are being built are being built by like Schroeders or like, you know, man group or residents and stuff. And they're once again going to be like, oh, these are these aren't socially owned houses. They're affordable houses to address social inequality, which is like all it's

the it's normal housing development dressed up in sort of social language. Regular houses for dudes built by the man group. No chicks allowed. They also announced, like the Eli Lilly collaboration was announced at this festival, right? Like, you know, what Starmer has to say about this, let's go back to this, right, is, you know, after all of his, you know, sort of cavorting and capering, ultimately says, and by the way, here's an example. And I feel like I have a feeling, I have one of those sort of spidey senses here that his citing of it takes 4,000 documents

to build some new power station somewhere, right? Not, there are 4,000 pages, 4,000 documents of multiple pages each. That's going to become one of those numbers that's quite sticky. And it's gonna become one of those numbers that's quite sticky. And it's going to be one of those moments where when the next major preventable building safety crisis happens, the history of that crisis will point to Starmer waving that 4,000 number around promising we're going to cut building and planning regulations so that

you can all grow faster as you alluded to earlier, Ethan, right? Yeah, no, I think I'm just gonna say, you know, I think I would put good money on that specific claim, the 4,000 pages thing. I put good money on that coming from a briefing note sent by one of the kind of favored lobbying companies with lines to take on this. And I would imagine that it's just been kind of like taken wholesale. And like that's how this government does seem to operate. They don't have any sense that companies operate on the premise of trying to serve their own interests and that those interests don't necessarily

align with those of society at large. And so why would they lie? Why would they lie about the fact that there may be 4,000 documents and that being a bad thing? There's no reason for them to make that up. It must be true and it must be good for everyone if we get rid of those documents.

Yeah, because the documents are stopping growth. What are the documents? The documents are things like, to make that up. It must be true and it must be good for everyone if we get rid of those documents. Yeah, because the documents are stopping growth. What are the documents? The documents are things like, don't have your power plant burned down. Don't have your dam burst. This building shouldn't explode. Useful reminders. Yeah, essentially. And I'm just reminded again of David Cameron's two in one out rule on new regulations. It's just him setting himself up to do the same thing. And then once again, the rule was, and we remember this from the Grenfell inquiry,

it was, no, we only cut the bad regulation. So again, what Keir Starmer seems to be setting himself up to say is, no, we're not going to get rid of the necessary documents. We're just going to get rid of the unnecessary ones. And quite simply, I think it's, even then, I've talked in this show before about the planning process, how it's like, you don't need to streamline it. You need to actually beef it up. You need to get people involved in planning. You need to actually like hire people or just like getting, trying to drive down the number of documents that businesses are supposed to

produce without like hiring professional planners. All you're going to do is say, Hey, why don't you make more dangerous building? Why don't you build things that are going to pollute more? Why don't you build things that are going to fall apart? Hey, remember that rack? That thing that means schools are collapsing up and down the country? Why don't we have that in more essential infrastructure? Because it's cheap to do and that's what you'd rather have. We took out the document that said you can't have rack. To me, it is just identical. The identical thinking that, you know, quite horrifyingly is, you know, never gone anywhere. And it's just it's it's just in where it's got a little more polish

and appears to be delivered almost directly by the people who seem to benefit from it. I think we can all agree that one thing Britain definitely needs is lower quality buildings. I think we all know that the buildings that are being built, they're too good. OK, They're too good. That's why no one can afford them. Cause they're making them too good. They need to build shittier buildings that people can afford to live in. Because I presume that's what's causing the prices to be high. Because the buildings are so good. Well, anyway, growth at all costs. I cannot wait personally for my heart to be torn out and to be thrown down the temple steps as we attempt to once again ensure that the sun of the economy shines upon us. Unless the temple collapses because we made the sun temple of the rest.

I've bet a huge amount of the Mayan Riviera pension fund on the outcome of this particular iteration of the ball game. We're hoping for the best. Anyway, anyway, I think that's probably all we have time for today. But number one, Ethan, I want to thank you very much for coming and talking to us again. No, I mean, my time's covered by my handlers anyway, so it's not probably torso. Also, do you have a torso is a question I find myself asking many people. If you're asking the River Thames, almost certainly. Yeah, if you're asking adversarial reporters against the intelligence community, perhaps

not. Or maybe only a torso. Yeah. Do you have a torso or are you a torso? Would you like your torso to be covered? We can help. We do great reviews from Jamal Khashoggi. Would you like help with covering your torso?

We are back selling shirts and both of these are labors of love from our very own producer Nate Bethay. They are two new t-shirts that these are labors of love from our very own producer Nate Bethay. They are two new t-shirts that we are doing pre-orders for now. There is one that I can only describe as about the lagoon. Yeah. Yeah. If you love the lagoon, you know, you know what, if you don't know what we're talking about, you don't want the shirt.

Okay. If you know what we're talking about, then you may want the shirt. Yeah. You just, I'm not going to explain it to you. Just look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lagoon related. It's a want the shirt. I'm not going to explain it to you, just look at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's lagoon related. It's a lagoon shirt. It's about the lagoon. You can yourself be finished. If you're a lagooner, if you enjoy lagooning.

Yeah, if you want to wear it to your lagoon cave. Yeah, that's right. And also we have a shirt for our new favorite non-Meso-American ball game sports team, the Avignon Popes. Our bootlegger finally got back to us. I really, really, really like that one. I think it's pretty funny. And if you liked anti Pope Clement the fifth, then you're going to be able to support him in style. And our new Avignon Popes American football t-shirt. I see November's head is in her hands. Anyway, so do there will be a link for those. Do check them out. And otherwise, check out Ethan's newsletter, Dark Arts or his vertical and open democracy for reporting on all of

the stuff that's actually going to make the government do things the next four years.