TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Norwood Team Six ft. Eleanor Penny

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Eleanor Penny rejoins us to talk about the government and media class’s ongoing cynicism in suppressing and criminalising any expression of Palestinian solidarity. We also read an article that - let’s say - got everyone in something of a Tilly. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

both MAGA and reform don't have any interest in history whatsoever. They use the iconography of it and they use like certain kind of like aesthetic markers to like appeal to a kind of like, you know, again, like a very sort of like misplaced nostalgia. But they actually have no history of it. And like the more I think about it, the more I'm just like, well, the reform types are really just trying to get to like for them anyway, but just trying to get to like a period in the 90s when they were like relatively young and they were kind of having fun, right? I think it's the point that it's like they sort of imagine the country as like a stock you know a stock trading room floor

but like it's also just like yeah you are imagining what the country was like when you were young and you had disposable income and you probably had a good time with it and like now like every older person who just like yeah things were better when I was younger like yeah no fucking shit things were doing vapor wave edits

of John Major but this is also probably why they fetishized like the UAE quite a lot because like if there's any place that like I don't know if it resembles the 90s in London but like if there's any place that sort of like imagined itself entirely as like a society built around like a stock model or like a commodities market and one where it's just like, you know, very like emphasizes the opulence in order to sort of like paper over a structural like

and inevitable structural problems like probably Britain in the 90s. And it is that. So it makes sense why they would sort of look towards that as like a model that they would like to sort of see in Britain rather than one that is actually like anchored in any sort of sense of historical responsibility, even if it is. like a fascistic one. I mean, you know, that's where they made all their money in the 80s and 90s was just making deals with the sort of with the Saudis and the Emirates. That's why fake shake stings were so effective because that's literally what was happening at that time. So of course

they fetishize it. The Doge is cutting a program to make council homes more energy efficient and scrapping a new fleet of cars, despite the fact that the current fleet of cars costs a huge amount to maintain and is not fit for service. So congratulations to you guys. You really, you really nailed it. Driving around in Kent's County Council's anti-woke Robin Reliant. It's the budget sheet, the budget line imaginary of doing politics of like, yeah, it might look all right for the next few months, but like state abandonment is an extremely expensive thing, not even long term, just like next year. Because when people get rickets, that tends to cost the economy. And this is a horrible way of putting it as well, because obviously,

people having Ricketts inherently bad news flash, but nonetheless. But also it's like, okay, you sort of the assumption that you guys are making, where reform guys are making is like, oh, like, you know, they'll be like private sector kind of, you know, people coming in to sort of like make up for like the services that we're cutting, which presumably are mostly in transport and in like house maintenance and stuff, right? But it's just like, I don't know, again, going back to like my time living in Kent. It's like nothing ever replaced the bus routes that ever got cancelled, right? Like, nothing replaced the buses that sort of got taken out of, like, out of commission and

we never saw them again. Well, hey, guess what? It's a shop window into what a reform government would look like. Much more of the same cutting capital projects. That's it. Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah, and that's what I'm going to say.

And I'm just going to say, it's really great, like, you know, especially in a county where there's like a lot of people who are very, very elderly to be like, fuck them old people, you know, fuck your house. You know, you go burn in your house. And yeah, you're not going to be able to get to the hospital because there's no transport together. Yeah, well, this is the thing. Like, those self-same old people love that shit.

They're perfectly willing to be like, yeah, you know what? Maybe kill me, because maybe I am woke. I didn't think I was, but you never know. They're doing relentless self-criticism of, like, accidentally being woke. Yeah, bombard the headquarters, right? These are kind of like, we're doing some, like, far right nowism things here.

Oh, okay, all right. I do want to move on, jarring shift in tone now, of course. I want to talk about the events of the last couple of weeks. First, an attack on a synagogue by what appears to have been an internet radicalized ISIS. Just the most usual piece of shit you can imagine in the sense of like, was already on bail for sexual assault and just kind of self-radicalized, it seems like, on the internet at some point during COVID. And it's just like taking off all of the boxes of someone who has been like alienated from society for. for very good reasons and just deciding, okay, yeah, sure.

This is a kind of effective method of suicide by cop. Like across like declared political affiliations for this form of stochastic violence, one of like the main commonalities is like, have I been an absolute fucking nightmare to every woman I've ever met? Because like being on bail for sexual assault is like a very high bar to clear. It's basically effectively decriminalized in this country. and yet he managed still to have been arrested

this is somewhat of a sidebar but I think I want to kind of lay this out not for the smallest part to kind of put some clear water between what this horrible motherfucker did and just normal people who have been watching a live stream genocide and will never forget

the vision of like parents holding the dismembered parts of their children in plastic bags and like it is The whole thing is disgusting, of course, and people just, people losing their lives on any day, let alone the holiest day of the year, right? Disgusting. What is also part of that disgust for me is that this guy seemingly supposedly, from what we know, at time recording, piggybacked off, you know, the pro-Palestine cause to give himself the vague veneer of

what he was doing was anything other than like fundamentally evil. sort of mass murder that might have happened in Christchurch, for example. Right. It's just, it's different fonts. Yeah. It's different fonts of the same thing. This, of course, has not prevented the government from immediately conflating this attack that happened in Manchester

with the broader Palestine Solidarity Movement and saying, well, now that this has happened, you mustn't. You absolutely mustn't under any circumstances. Show any public solidarity with Gaza because... Yeah, there was this strange appeal to decency, right? as if it was indecent to protest a genocide or indeed as if it were decent to arm one.

This idea that it was sort of like impolitic, it was it was inconsiderate to continue to protest to genocide in the wake of this attack, which I just was so napidly cynical. And to see Stama and Shabana Mahmood then go, okay, we're going to try and look at making protests even easier for the police to impose

kind of ridiculous conditions on so that if you want to protest anything the government is doing, you can have sort of a maximum allowed protest of three people, one dog, and it has to be 50 miles outside the center of London. Hey, look, Nova, Nova, come on. You have the freedom to protest,

but do you have to use it? Come on. Do you have to use it? Come on. Yeah, it's just this awkward sort of tight rope act of, well, of course you have the freedom to do this. And of course, I strongly disagree with you exercising that freedom. And that does mean that I'm going to be looking very strongly at how to curtail that, but you do have the freedom for the moment, but you shouldn't. To be, to be clear, Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, and this is for Americans who might not have seen this,

and I think most British people probably have, Shabana Mahmood, direct quote, I'm quoting her directly, just because you have a freedom doesn't mean you have to use it at every moment of every day. Which I guess is a quote from John Locke, I think. I guess, I guess that's like abstractly true. Just because you can pee, doesn't mean you should pee. If you're so into the freedom of speech, why aren't you speaking all the time? I noticed there are gaps between some of your words. Shabana Mahmood, anytime we're recording the podcast, she's sitting in one of the other chairs. And any time there's a little silence, she's mouthing dead air, dead air to us.

I was wondering who that was. We should actually hire someone to do that, like just to sit in the corner of our studio and just like shaking their head whenever like one of us goes too far. As though we don't have an editor. Dead air doesn't matter. We can edit it out. Anyway, anyway. Like, it's obviously they're incredibly cynical. It's incredibly hypocritical.

It's deeply insulting to be like, you know, just presume to speak on behalf of, you know, every Jewish person. Like, I realize I select the people I hang out with for this reason, right, expressly so. But, you know, no one I know who is Jewish is all right with people being slaughtered in their names. It's just crazy idea, I realize. But, like, I don't really necessarily want to center how fundamentally anti-Semitic it is, like, first off. I want to put this in the context that this is business as usual for the government. And I mean that as, like, an abstract gesture of the British government, conservative versus labor, both of them at the helm. Because the increasing criminalization of protest has been happening for many, many years now, because this is a government strategy in response to its preferred.

tactic of economic management, aka the state abandonment that we were just talking about, because if you're not going to spend on people, if you're not, if you're going to allow a managed decline, if you are going to let living standards collapse, if you are going to fan the flames of division and racism everywhere, you are going to get people kicking off about it. What are we going to do about this as a government? Well, of course, we're not going to solve any of the underlying causes, we're going to further empower the police and further expand definitions and strategies of policing further into civil life such that we can crack down on any form of dissent wherever it arises. And we're seeing this particularly in spy cops, proximate

strategies, surveilling just stop oil, surveilling any kind of pro-Palestine solidarity movements, even before like the genocide, most recent genocide, you say,