TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Smoke Em If You Got Em

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Riley, Nova, Milo, and Nate talk about the new civil rights struggle of our time: the plan to ban smoking in pub gardens. Then, a broader discussion of the miserablism of a PM whose approval rating is already at 23% only a couple short months into his government. Finally, we discuss an excellent article on the type of guy who becomes a middle manager in a private security guard company. It’s by Jasper Craven and is linked here: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/09/the-thin-purple-line-jasper-craven-private-security-guard/ Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Get the full episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/111098273 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

We need to talk about the latest depredation of civil rights that is sweeping the UK as sort of Obergruppenführer Starmer. ALICE Yeah, Keir Starmer has come out and said, everything is shit now, no fun is allowed, no smoking, but, just to make it worse, Oasis are back. RILEY Oasis is back and you can't smoke. DARREN Yeah, that's right. ALICE It's really kind of like, impossible to tell whether it offsets the harm being

done to the like, Ben Sherman jacket, Fred Perry shirt. Yeah, you should be able to smoke indoors at an Oasis concert, to increase the chances of as many of them reaching an early grave as possible. Um, I, like, the funniest bit about this was this morning I was reading about it and listening to a report on the radio. Let me guess, on Jeremy Vine. Yep, they were talking about it on Jeremy Vine.

And they were also talking about XL Bullies. It was, it was a bumper day. Should XL Bullies be allowed to smoke cigarettes? Yeah. XL Bully loose in Oasis gig. What's more dangerous when you're listening to Oasis? Is it an XL Bully or is it actually the slow silent killer passive smoking? Uh, Dave and Charlton. Yeah. They were talking about this and they said smoking will also be banned from nightclub smoking areas. I was really going to do a dent to the nightclub smoking area. It's just going to become the nightclub area.

It's sort of a metaphysical quandary there. Yeah. It also just like banning it from outside, because they were saying they're going to ban it from pub gardens. They're also going to ban it from nightclub smoking areas and from the spaces immediately outside pubs and nightclubs. And it's like, that's the place, that's the one place where you can smoke. That's the only place where you don't get looked at for smoking. The fiscal is the only, only Britain could invent the non-smoking nightclub smoking area.

That was the thing in the Onion years ago about the only smoking area left in America is this one room in Quad Cities, Iowa, and everyone has to drive across the entire country for their cigarette break and then drive all the way back. And it's like, that was probably in 1998 when they made that joke. It's like America more or less just has its rare smoking areas and stopped there, but Britain is like, no, no, we're gonna find ways

to make it even less convenient. If everyone's gonna be aware that life isn't good and isn't gonna to get better, and the prime minister comes out every three weeks and says, imagine, remember how we told you it was worse than we thought? It's even worse than that. It's going to be even worse than that. You should expect even less of your society.

The only thing that they can do, and again, this is what we said that they would do, is they're just going to keep cracking down on stuff. All they can do is ban thing. They can just be like, well, we can't fund more cancer treatment, but we can take away smoking. Well, so, you know, as you understand, Keir Starmer is just trying to revisit the inspirational message of John F. Kennedy in saying, ask not what your country can do for you. Fuck off. Exactly.

He puts such venomous, it's beautiful. Ask not what your country can do for you ever. Exactly. He puts such venomous, it's beautiful. Ask not what your country can do for you ever. Goodbye. I think the problem we're experiencing here is it's going to take a really long time to improve life in the United Kingdom. And a lot of people aren't going to live long enough to experience that unless we ban smoking. We need to get everyone in this country leading a tech billionaire lifestyle to live to 250 to reach the point where they will witness a pothole being filled in. And that

is what I'm promising to you. Everyone's going to be on fuel. No one will be smoking. Everyone's running 20 kilometers a day and I will supervise it. Brian Johnson has been, has been made the new cabinet secretary. Yes. I remember years ago there was like a world happiness survey and Britain was next to last. And the only country apparently less happy than Britain was Uzbekistan, which... And then they remembered they have delicious blob and they overtook us. But then also like that list was the 2024 happiness list or whatever. And like the number four country was Israel. So I don't necessarily put fucking credence in the happiness survey or whether or not people are giving

honest answers. But I am going to say that Britain seems to rank very low. And so Keir Starmer, maybe he's onto something. Maybe what people want is to be more miserable because they're like for too long, the Uzbeks have held the pole position. Yeah, that's right. I mean, hardly eating any plov these days. Yeah. When we're not happy, you know what that'd be just sitting in for pole position. Yeah. That's right. I mean, hardly eating any plov these days. Yeah. When we're not happy, you know, Abby's just sitting in for guy. Yeah. Think about it. This used to be a proper country. We used to be the crossing point of the silk road. We used to build huge domed mosques with teal tiles. This never would have happened in fucking game. A fucking camel, an entire camel. Now you go down to Greg's, they're out of sausage rolls.

You can't even make a doughnut shaped bread in a tandoor anymore. Cause it woke country scoundrels. If you just sort of agreed that you cannot take any positive, I don't mean positive, like good or happy positive, like active action that's going to like do something, build something, invest, invest in something even. Right. If all you have left and this, and like, this is, we know where, what kind of politics this is, right? This is the politics of like, austerity. It's the, it's austerity again. It's austerity again. And we're going to get into a little bit of more of that with his speech and some reactions to it. It's like, it was always going to be austerity again, and we're gonna get into a little bit of more of that with his speech and some reactions to it, it's like, it was always gonna be austerity again, of course,

but he's doing a very, like, Democrat, blue state, stronghold type of governing. It feels like this come over from America, in some ways. ALICE That's an insult to blue states, at least some of them will do shit like, you know, sanctuary cities, or like, you can get an abortion or like, be trans. Whereas all of this stuff it's like, like we said, like we predicted, all of the most like repressive authoritarian instincts and yeah, okay it's in service of like people not dying of lung cancer, which sure, but to pair it with the

by the way everything's gonna be shit forever really makes it clear what the priority is, which is the NHS is gonna fall over anyway, so, you know. That's what the rule is. We're gonna, we're gonna save the NHS by making it illegal to require it. This is also what's so funny about people not dying of lung cancer is then, you know what they're gonna need like, uh, social care and stuff that's gonna cost so much more. This is, he's actually creating problems for himself. Keir Starmer needs people dying of lung cancer. They're not gonna draw their pensions.

Yeah, exactly. We need deadlier things. We need Keir Starmer to be saying, you need to go out there and start hooning. Yeah. You need to start doing backyard wrestling. You need to start doing stuff that's on, like, low number American YouTube channels. Not enough people in the UK are into bass jumping. We've banned smoking areas from clubs.

Clubs will now be required to have crocodile areas. I like the idea of Keir Starmer going on a research junket to Indonesia to figure out how to make people smoke more. Like, they're getting the best tobacco scientists from all the Indonesian academies to come over to the United Kingdom. I don't even like crocodile, but it's the only way you can meet people in clubs these days. Well, I was going to say too, with blue state Democrat things, it's always sort of like

seeding the rhetoric of what Republicans say, but they try to be positive about it and be like, oh, we're not going to waste money on big government. It's always like, instead of wastefulness, we're going to use the ingenuity of the market, but they always kind of sell it in a positive way. Where I think what's about this is interesting is that it's just flat out dismal. But it's not like there's not like in order for us to achieve the thing. It's not like a, you know, Stalin or Khrushchev five year plan. It's just no, it's shit and it's going to be shit forever.

Fuck you. That's the thing they do have. And I think it's worth sort of going into a little more of like the economic program that's been being talked about in the last couple of days. They have one. It's just that like this was like a plan hatched by a few surprise, surprise lobbyists who are close to starmer like the Green Finance Institute, like one particular ex Barclays banker just like told Rachel Reeves, hey, we can just do private capital for all of you, the infrastructure of all the spending that you need to do. You

don't have to actually use any public capital. Just use us. You will never break a fiscal rule. And then what do we get out of it? Don't worry about it. Just don't worry what we get out of it. We're just going to do a PFI for everything. That's the plan. But they're not even willing to say that they're not even willing to lie that that's going to work. But also like Rachel Reeves has the demeanor and general political acumen of someone who like you could hand them a counterfeit bar of chocolate from fake Harry Potter world with her name on it and she'd be like, so bedazzled, so, so enraptured, she'd like give you anything. More so than your usual labor politician in terms of giving everything away for the price

of like a Toblerone and a bottle, and I don't know, like a bottle of Vimto. Like genuinely, she doesn't have to be won over or convinced. She's just sort of like, you just throw some glitter and she just gets really, really distracted by it. Well, it's the tre... I mean, the treasury's own way of forecasting its fiscal rules always cuts off after five years, right? So they will never count the returns for any kind of investment because they're not interested

in anything after five years. So they're only interested in blocking spending, right? And so Rachel Reeves, if you're like a sort of finance industry lobbyist who's like, Hey, we would like to be involved in like rent seeking out of the NHS for the next 400 years. Then the fiscal rules will say, great, according to us, this is free. This is politically costless. Who cares what it's going to do. And so that's fine. The treasury should be in favor of smoking because you get lots of delicious nicotine

now and then it doesn't do anything to your health over the course of five years, so don't worry about it So what Star Wars speech in particular the one that he made recently where he sort of said it's gonna be terrible by the way Oasis are getting back together, but you're not gonna be able to smoke at the Oasis gigs What he said there are a few lines that stand out He talked mostly about the Tories saying every time the Tories faced a difficult problem, they failed to be honest. They offered the snake oil of populism which led to more failure, stuck in the rot of the politics of performance. But again- They failed to get Oasis back together.

The problem wasn't like, dishonesty. I mean, it was, yeah, but it was also that they didn't want to do anything good. And neither did, neither does Keir Starman. Which is the politics of performance! That's just the politics of performance again. And neither does Keir Starmer. Which is the politics of performance! That's just the politics of performance again. And this is just the snake oil of austerity. It's the same snake oil! It's like George Osborne has been Chancellor the whole time. He's never not been Chancellor, effectively.

The snake oil is in a new package, so, you know. The Indonesian cigarette scientists are like, snake oil? I bet you could pull that on tobacco and smoke it.