TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Keir Starmer Just Needs To Apologise

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

We return to U.K. shores to look at the state of national party politics in advance of local elections, and think of who would win in a capitulating contest between Starmer and Trump. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So look, we've been talking a lot about various things, let's say, recently, but local elections are coming up, and my goodness. Oh boy, is it my favorite day of the year? Talk about Local Elections Day? You there, boy, what day is it? Ah! Who stands for election in my local parish? It's me at three different ages.

Go and get the biggest bin they've got. No, so, while I'm not going to talk about local elections necessarily, it is a good time to check in on the state of British party politics. Where things are fine, presumably. Yeah. Well, more specifically, more specifically, we're going to start with, we're going to start zoomed in and then we're going to zoom out, which means because it's now an election season that the current marching orders from Labor

Central Command appear to be telling MPs born in 1977 to reminisce fondly about the blitz spirit to appeal to voters born in 1957. Fantastic. Yeah. It's quite sort of goodbye Lenin vibes, isn't it? I'm of course talking about John Pierce, the MP for High Peak, who has written in an article in his local newspaper that he thinks that police officers should be able to punch children that they see.

Yeah, great. Why not? Yeah. Specifically because he, of his supposed fond memories of the police, like, hating his dad? Yeah, it's not even his memories. It's like his dad's, like, he's using his dad's trauma for his own electoral, and I feel like that's the most disgusting thing of all. Use your own fucking trauma, right?

You can't use someone else's to like, you know, like to try like, launder your reputation. It's just making more explicit the stuff that they've all already been doing of like, oh, I remember the kind of like, blitz spirit or whatever, that's no longer plausible, so you have to do it vicariously. Well I remember my dad's blitz spirit, I guess, or now my granddad's. So now I remember my dad's post-war getting the shit kicked out of him by like, Dixon of Doc Green. All the parliamentary candidates are sitting in the Assassin's Creed chair reliving their memories of like, you know, drinking cabbage water and getting beat.

FF genetic memory of getting a clip around the ear from a cop who was drunk on juicy. Yeah. Why not, why not go further? Well, of course in my day you'd go to the gym palace, wouldn't you? And you'd come out and in a bow street run there's a club you over the head. Of course the police would now have a top hat then so they could see over a wall if they stood on top of it. But it was better, wasn't it?

It was. Everyone had cholera. No one died. It was alright. Yeah, never did me any harm. Yeah, people are too afraid of cholera now because of woke. So he says, I'm a bit old fashioned in my view of the importance of the bobby on the beat. This is, I would love it if those four words were just obliterated from the British mind. A bit old fashioned here, referring to what, like 70 years ago?

Yeah. When was the last time we were doing this? Yeah, it comes from my dad telling me stories about how the local police officer, who everyone knew by name, used to give him and his brother a clip around the ear hole and threatened to tell my mother they'd been up to no good. He threatened to empty a clip into the ear hole and threatened to tell my mother they'd been up to no good. He threatened to empty a clip into their ear hole. He didn't want to be harmed. ALICE My dad grew up in the TV series Life on Mars,

and I always admired DCI Gene Hunt's determination. GARETH We all knew our local copper DCI Gene Hunt. GARETH And he'd call you a ride, bloody toerag. ALICE They may not believe this, but they do believe that voters are this stupid, right, and will vote for the guy who is willing to indulge their kind of hazy, false memories of DCI Gene Hunt, like, kicking the shit out of them. The thing is, the British public would vote for Gene Hunt if he was real, but they won't vote for, like, a nerd pretending to have, like, a false vote for Gene Hunt if he was real, but they won't vote for like a nerd pretending to have like a false memory of Gene Hunt. That's too far of an abstraction.

If Philip Gelenister ran as Gene Hunt, then yeah, we'd be in big trouble. Stomach coming out of a camel coat. Listen, you're nicked. Okay. Don't the ladies of the Labour Party look lovely today? This is hard labour. Beautiful. Why don't you pop off down the shops and get me a pie? I'm rebranding. He's got to replace all the ministerial cars with Reliant Robins so people can fondly remember only fools and horses. It is purely just remember when. It's dying brain.

It's dying brain syndrome, right? Like when the entire country is like on life support and it's getting the kind of like the like big endorphin rush that you get, you know? We're going to be talking mostly about just like the rush of DMT that appears to be illuminating all of the things that is officially possible to leave. Every British politician is Joe Rogan now. They're all gonna start doing BJJ. That's right.

So, this story always stuck with me for two reasons. First, I always found it funny that he was more worried about his mum finding out than getting in trouble with the police. And second, his total respect for the police because they were so embedded in the community, presumably beating random children. Yeah. It was a better time, I imagine. Yeah.

Probably. Oh, and the police certainly didn't do anything bad. No. Yeah, remember when you respected the bully? Yeah. Who definitely isn't still bullying you right now. The sell that Labour have to do is to just be like, everything's shit and it's gonna get worse, right?

And they're having to try sell that, and I feel like the strategy that's being in place is like- It's a tough job. Well, in one way it's not, because? And like, they're having to try sell that. And I feel like the strategy that's being in place is like, well, in one way it's not because like, you know, if you're like good and charismatic, you can probably sell misery, right? Like there is enough evidence to be, you know, the sort of like stuff around like breakfast clubs and stuff, like, you know, like feeding kids like while their parents go to work and stuff. And the amount of like shit that, you know, from, from like the usual places in terms of like, oh yeah, like it's fine for children to starve.

I kind of just ate a Snickers bar before I came into school and I was fine. And now I like have a commentator job on LBC or whatever. The police punched a cereal bar down my throat and then sent me off to school. You had a fucking Snickers bar, son. We dreamed of a Snickers bar. We'd eat a bit of old shoe. We turned out alright. Yeah, I tried to take a bite of the truncheon he was hitting me with, the big liquorice truncheon that the cops used to carry in the few days. The thing is, you can sell misery, but you have to be good at selling stuff, and the problem with this labour cohort is that they're bad at everything. They are bad at

everything. And so, no one's even asking them to improve any of the material conditions, like, this is like the easiest time for them, but the fact that they sort of lack so much charisma, and they lack so much, like, they lack the basic ability to speak to other people, and as a result you just end up with really weird shit, like, I remember my dad's memories of being, like, molested by a police officer, and that was fun actually, and we should bring that back. ALICE It's from the top down as well, because Starmer invented this trying to relate to people via his dad thing, and now we're just kind of

seeing this spread. So I'm excited to hear about what every Labour MP's dad likes. STARMER My dad was more relatable than your dad. We have a three wheeled Ferrari, but you can't see it. It's in the garage. My uncle was a Bobby on the beat at Nintendo. We are though, we've not been back on our side of the world for a little while. If only because our side of the world is part of the planet that's having its economic rules largely redrawn by what appears to be a three-stuages situation in the White House I want to address very briefly before we move on.

ALICE For a minute we thought the trade war had ended, because Peter Navarro was out of the White House, and- SEAN For like 20 minutes! ALICE Yes, like literally, I mean, physically. SEAN He went out to get a sandwich? ALICE Yeah, physically, he went out to get a sandwich. Someone spotted him in the metro and tweeted about it, and the other two guys, Bessent and Lutten, just piled into Trump's office

instantaneously while he was gone to be like, the economy's fucked, it's over. Yeah. Yeah, they just were like, hey, look at the dollar, look at what's happening with the dollar, look what's happening with the S&P 500. Remember your favorite game, United States dollar? You have so many of them. Your high score on dollar is gonna be like, permanently compromised by this shit. And so, I mean, look, imagine you're in a three-way capitulating contest and your opponents

are Trump and Starmer. You would give up. You would give up right away. I mean, look, I've been thinking about this for a while, but Starmer has, he has put in years of incredible capitulating. Right. He is, he shows up every day. He shows up every day and he capitulates.

Yeah. Right. He's like a stretch Armstrong. He's so flexible. He is just, he is getting his numbers up there. He's dependable. Right. Whereas Trump, Trump comes in and he does one of the greatest years of capitulating

in the entire history of the sport and it's been three months. So I don't even know who to put ahead in terms of the goat capitulator. It's kind of jujitsu where like it's a move that like you end up hurting yourself more, but it looks kind of cool. You think it looks kind of cool. I think with Trump it's kind of more impressive because Trump goes in, he plays the hard man. He plays, whereas Starmer, you know he's going to capitulate.

He starts off capitulating. The thing about Starmer is he's not even got anything to capitulate from because he never said he was gonna... he's constantly moving backwards. He's never moved forward. Whereas Trump, he makes like a big swing and then he's like, actually it turns out everything's fucked, sorry I didn't realize that. Turning the US economy off it's a bad idea apparently so we're not gonna do that. I didn't realize that we used dollars. I forgot about that. I thought it was a New Zealand dollar. So yeah, basically, yeah, Lutnick and Besant locked Navarro in a supply closet or something.

Or like, y'know, calling fake meetings for one another, dressing up as Bugs Bunny when he's a girl to distract one. Hilarious. If we, if like, humanity survives this Trump administration, the book that gets written about all of this, by Bob Woodward, or whoever, after the fact about how all of this went down is gonna be incredible. I mean, when Besant's out in eight months, I'm very excited to read his tell-all book that will be denounced as, you know, the anti-Trump drag on truth

social. But it is endlessly amusing to me though, yeah, like as you say, Nova, Lutnik and Besant corner Trump while Navarro was hitchhiking back from being dumped in a cornfield somewhere. When he was last seen drifting towards a pie on a window. Peter Navarro kicking over the suitcase from Old Boy. Peter Navarro waking up on an ice floe that's been detached from the main glacier.