TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Woke Reform Rides Again

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

Due to illness and absence we have convened an unusual cast configuration of Riley, Hussein, and Nate, in which we discuss recent allegations that the Reform UK party is "woke" because they're not transphobic enough somehow. We also discuss a Bloomberg article about the right-wing sealed biosphere that produced one of the DOGE tweens. Sorry this is late: we've gone woke! Also November was sick and a lot of stuff has been up in the air. We love you all. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

The whole point of reform is, you know, we could go back to this, right, which is we've spent 40 years, really, in the depths of this increasingly radicalized, manufactured culture war about anything that people who live in cities and are below the age of skeleton tend to believe is just, you know, reactively gainsade. And that reform exists as the, and so even going back one step further, that the way that politics has worked, especially in this country, in the States as well, to a lesser extent in Canada, to a greater extent to Australia even, is this march of people on the right saying, I can do just a little more. I can do just a little more, but I'm still going to have to run the state. I can do just a little more, but I'm still going to

have to run the state. And at every turn, the moment they come up against, okay, I can't do any more than this, because like, if we do, you know, set up militarized checkpoints at every, at every bathroom, it will cost quite a bit of money, right? Like, they stop there. But the problem is, is that the right wing parties have always used this culture war stuff to be like, I will be the avatar of your anger that is getting whipped up by all the usual sources. I will work out your anger on people the state deems worthy of targeting with it. And so the point really is just, is to be able to say to, you know, again, these like pensioners in Kent, right? The point is to be able to say, to reform is to say, oh, the Tories failed. They didn't deport everybody with a tan. They didn't

like, you know, make trans people wear a special chime. You know, they didn't do any of that stuff. Guess what? We will. And unfortunately, again, as reform starts being like, okay, well, we actually do want the kind of govern. We don't just, we have to like balance the needs of governing with our electoral mandate of basically do a sort of scorched earth victory in the culture war, is that as soon as they come up against the real problem of actually having to do something, immediately, Rupert Lowe is like, they're woke, they're woke. They're woke. They're the same as the Tories. Everyone, everyone's woke because they're not going to, they won't burn and salt the land in the victory of the culture, of the culture war. It's like to me, I was thinking about stuff in America where there's

an eventual point at which things, when they actually get put into action, wind up being revealed to be terrible ideas, which does not mean that the, the people porting these or arguing for them are going to acknowledge that. But like, it just becomes obvious that it's not working and that it's a huge boondoggle. And in this case, all I can think of is like, JK Rowling is basically demanding that Britain build the toilet hyperloop. It's like, there will be sexual Xandadu. There will be sexual Xanadu. There will. will be a fucking gender. There will be a gender palace that everyone has to report to. Like, it's so weird. And I just, I feel like the thing that's so weird about it in the case of these

sorts of things is that like America is doing it in its own way about some, some similar topics and some different ones. But it feels as though like there's never a sort of like, oh, well, you know, no one is ever willing to go take a roll again be like Steiner's attack didn't happen. You know what I mean? Like, it's, I mean, I just bring her up as kind of the, she's kind of the, I don't know, synecta key for all of the rest of them. because like she's the loudest and the most cashed up. So it's so weird, man. Yeah, well, it's also like sometimes reform will do this and they'll be like, yeah,

but that's ballics, we should just nationalize the rails or something like that. Will they? I don't know. But like, you realize that sometimes not being beholden to like the stupid, just the weird, everything's got to be shit and privatized and run by G4S mentality. That's been the kind of like default affect of British politics for so long. Like sometimes they just swing and it's actually a thing that's popular with their constituents, which labor is never allowed to do something that actually is.

Um, it's just, but in this case like, man, even at some point there's some Americans in red states were like, y'all talk about gay people a lot, man, that's kind of weird. Like, y'all, y'all talk about bathrooms so much. I even ever seen a trans person. You all talking constantly about these bathrooms.

You know what I mean? Like, it actually worked against them at some point. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, in every case, it's always a, it's inevitably, it's a vote loser because if you're obsessed with it, you come off as a fucking freak. But in this case, right, this is a group of freaks

talking to one another and enforcing the most baffling, not just cruel, but relentlessly. impractical standard for a series of personally held convenient illusions about sex and gender that allow them to continue being angry. And all of this is to appease, and though the person who's coming out, because who's now the Nigel Farage of this situation, right, is of course Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe is the MP for Great Yarmouth, and he was elected as a reform MP, but then he left a few months ago because the party went woke. Specifically, he left because

the chairman is a, the chairperson is a Muslim. Can I just say the great Yarmouth sounds like something that someone would cat call in Britain in the 1950s. Cracking Yarmouths is this guy Rupert Lowe, right? He leaves Reform U.K., because there's this big split in reform. It's crazy between the central organization of the party itself, like the party machinery, the thing that was headed by Zia Yusuf, and the MPs, like, Lee Anderson. Because the MPs were like, we want to Burke a ban immediately. Let's like, let's immediately push the Islamophobia meter to 11. And Reform Central was like, that's not our policy.

because they know that, yeah, they have the 25% of Britain who's like, you know, addled lunatics. And that's a very important constituency. It's so, if you're going to win from the right, it's like when victory and Britain from the right runs through the sort of cesspool timelines of our most addled and sort of mold infested lunatic minds. And so like the MPs who are all in that are like, yeah, let's fucking, you know, pedal to the metal. And the party machinery is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

we need more than just that and they don't have a Morgan McSweeney who's going to give them a one person majority in every single seat and so weirdly they are trying to confront the reality of what it will mean to run, win and govern and not just be a gadfly and that is causing them to go woke

well this is also like the other thing too like it's a very good example of like sort of the broader trends that are happening on the right but also some of the stuff we're talking about regarding like the turfs and the toilet stuff and like I make this joke a lot where it's just like they like talking about toilets but they don't really talk about like

how all the toilets in the UK are all like really bad and gross and how like a much better way of like doing turfism in my part would be like, well, we're just going to like make nicer toilets. If you're going to do like the single gender thing, you're going to be like, look, we're going to like make the toilets nice, but only biological women or biological men can go there. But their argument is like, no, we're going to keep everything the same. We're going to keep, we're going to, and until it's sort of becomes this like

almost hypothetical argument, where you're not really talking about like who gets to use these quote unquote single gendered spaces because none of them really exist. It's more just like who gets to sort of occupy my mind. And the reason why I bring this up is because like, I think that point about like fantasy and reality and like how it's all like well and good to sort of build up a lot of like political capital on the basis of being able to project your fantasies, arguably one of the reasons why J.K. Rowling was like so good at it, right? Or at least like seem to be more adaptive than like other, like some of her other contemporaries. You know, it's one thing to sort of be able to project your fantasies and to sort of do so in a way where

the bar keeps on sort of moving and moving. Because the whole, whenever I sort of see the stuff how like J.K. Rawlings couldn't have involved in it. The thing that sort of like appears to me is like very much, you know, there is no sort of, I don't know whether you remember like a few years ago when she started doing like turf posting properly. And she sort of backtracked a bit by saying that, oh yeah, like I have trans friends. And actually I talk to them about this all the time. And like a couple of her post reference this trans friend that never comes up ever again after like 2021 or something. So number one, where is that transfer? What did she do? What did she do with her trans friend? The second aspect of it though is just like, yeah, it's all well and good to sort of play, like, to sort of like project your fantasies.

But at a certain point, once you've built up enough political capital as a result of like taking up so much space and, you know, there is a political party that is like, okay, we will do what you want. The thing is you actually have to sort of say what you want, right? You have to actually like tell people, this is what I want to like, to solve like this kind of quote unquote trans problem, but I've identified. And none of them have really done that. It's just for every sort of effort to like malign and malign is never enough.

And so you end up with this result where like, you know, clearly what is happening with reform and what has happened recently has been like a prison's officer or a former prisons officer who's just like, look, you can't actually enact this in real life. It doesn't work. It's going to put more people at risk. It's going to put more people at harm. Like it doesn't actually solve any of the problems. We've already like done enough. We've already done so in a way that kind of like makes things sort of work to their bare minimum. And then what you get in return is like, nope, it's not enough. It's not enough. But we're not going to tell you what's enough. Right. I would interject it. I mean, I do think. that when you get to the really extreme side in terms of the kind of like the ones who posit themselves as as intellectuals on the topic there's a lot of scare quotes involved there people like helen joyce you will see you know quotes where she's outright said like every subsequent person allowed to transition is a problem that later has to be solved and so to me that seems indicate that the the sort of if there is a kind of like brain cell in the organism that is weird fucking anglophone world turfism it's that transition has to be criminalized outright and thus gender norms have to be rigorously enforced.

But like Riley was saying, it's like, we're going to, we're going to have like the full might of the state to make sure that the toilet at, you know, totterage and wetstone tube station is sex segregated, but we will not fix that fucked up, like one long rotating hand towel in the bathroom. And it's never going to get cleaned either. Like, so there isn't really a constituency of any significant size for this, even if the ones who are into it are very loud. But I think the thing with labor, at least, is that.

Labor doesn't care. Like, if anything, if the majority of its constituents, voters, certainly voters and party members support something, then they have to do the, they have to ban it or do the exact opposite. The Tories never really had a big membership to speak of and their membership didn't care so long. It was like, you know, golly walks back on the jam and taxes go down. But it's a different kind of engagement with party membership. With reform, I genuinely have no idea. Because I can't quite put my finger on whether or not reform is actually going to stick around as a party or if it's going to be like the UKIP or the Brexit party or any of these other things that have been created as sort of like, you know, I don't know, Murdoch thumb scale kind of shit,

if that makes sense. If they actually had to govern and got elected, like, I don't know, but like obviously there's not a requirement that their, their policies, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, you know, whatever their actual kind of manifest or what they put into action has any correspondence with what their voters or constituents or party members want. I don't know. But it's interesting to see that this actually produced this disagreement, because quite frankly, like the labor equivalent of this is to say some mealy-mouthed horse shit that doesn't disagree with it, but also doesn't answer the question.