TRASHFUTURE - (Reverently) Gone Girl

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Riley, Hussein, and Alice ring in the reboot of the Carolingian Era in true TF style. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

In many ways, you know, she was my load star and growing up in suburban Southeast London in the 90s, I, you know, her music really gave me permission to be weird. And she was, you know, she was a woman of the people. She was the people's queen, like the people's princess, but one better than that. And now, you know, I'm struggling, boys. I am. So, well, we're gonna, we're gonna get each other through it as we've all lost the magic blood grandma.

Yeah. And her special blood, yeah, it's, it's pushed the, um, it's pushed the like human instrumentality madness button for everyone over a certain age in this country, which is fun. Uh, hello, it is, it's TF, uh, coming to you live from, uh, the situation room. We're all wearing black. Life from Balmoral. Uh, yeah. We're all wearing black.

We're all wearing black. Like in the, on the BBC, they wear like black ties, whereas Riley's made us all wear like Burkine black stuff. So like, we're all like towel necks and like, I'm wearing a black tie, but it is made of PVC. Uh, I've, I've been weeping openly for the last 12 to 14 hours. Um, and the funniest thing about this, and you will be, I'm going to let you look behind the curtain here.

Normally Riley pulls back the curtain, but I'm going to pull back the curtain. Um, you, you'll find this out later on there, but we, we record, it's called the prestige. We recorded, uh, an episode, uh, a prerecorded an episode that was originally going to come out in two weeks time, where we were like, well, we were like, oh, the, the first two weeks of Liz Truss's, uh, Prime Minister ship, nothing, nothing's happened. You know, interesting. All of the news. And then the fucking queen dies specifically to spite, I imagine us and maybe also Liz

Truss. Yes. Yeah. Well, Liz Truss, Liz Truss did kill her is the thing. Um, oh yeah. Life, lifelong, uh, uh, Republican, uh, she did what Guy Fox could not. Yeah. She was lucky once, uh, you know, she, she just, just incredible, incredible

patience to wait until you assume like the, the great office of state. And then at that moment to, to seize your chance and strike and kill a 96 year old woman, stone dead. Yeah. It's, it's, it could only, I mean, look, 96 year olds don't just die, you know. No, no, no, no, she looked so youthful. Um, I mean, there is, there is another possibility here, which is that the queen was like sticking it out long enough consciously to meet Liz Truss and then

died to embarrass her, which is also very funny. Uh, yes. It's, it's, you imagine being Boris Johnson right now, right? You have, what you have done is you have missed by two days for like having to deal with an energy crisis that you kind of helped foment and then also dealing with the queen dying where it, and you missed it by a whisper. And now you're, you, now, you know what he has already arranged is two million pounds and speaking fees with JP Morgan.

He's like the luckiest guy, like in, in like this country, he is the luckiest. That's true. That's true. He's, and the thing is though, um, we have, we have lost out here because we so nearly, by a matter of years, nearly had a case where we had a state funeral of the longest living monarch in anyone's memory, uh, presided over by Boris Johnson and with guest of honor, Donald Trump, we need that. In fact, in fact, if she had died a week earlier, we would have had the royal

train leaving, carrying her body from Edinburgh down to London through the fringe and a bin strike. I mean, it would have been great to see like, you know, like, I don't know. I think the people doing on the front of the royal train to move all of the like fringe leaflets and handouts and like, uh, takeaway boxes and stuff out of the way. Yeah. Just, just on the front of the cowcatcher, just a big portrait, Milo Edwards, voicemail.

No, I'm so glad she lived long enough to see voicemail. Yeah. I mean, I can't believe she gave it a three star review in the Scotts. It's a bit, a bit harsh, but you know what, you know, so yes, it's true. Uh, it's Riley Hussain and Alice coming at you live for the, uh, for the, the, the, the first, uh, episode of, uh, the reign of King Charles the third. I, I really don't like that. We're just saying the King, well, that we have a King now.

I have, I have views about this. Not only does it sound very weird, but like that really gets the fucking Republicanism going like a queen. That's a, you know, that's an affectation. That's fine. No harm in that. Great band, for example. Yeah, exactly.

But a King, a King, this motherfucker thinks he's better than me because of his special blood. No, no, we're not having that. So he's not grandmotherly at all. No, no, not at all. He didn't, he hasn't given me permission to be weird even once. So we're going to go through some of the, uh, successions of normalities that have sort of cropped up during the day.

I think like, you know, I, so this, I want to put this out there though first, right? Like Alice, we feel, we see how, how you feel Hussain, give us, give us a window into your soul at this, the moment of crisis for Britain's dads and uncles. I want to talk about my day, first of all, because I did a very funny tweet, but I had to delete it in which I made me feel so much better because I was like, there is nothing I can post that will not get people as bad as me is initially. So when it was very clear, when, when Kirstama was passed for no, and we all saw this established that it wasn't like the cool ass or like pregnant Garfield.

And that's some dad, some shit had gone down. I did a tweet, which was just like, it's so sad that the queen won't be here with us to watch, uh, to see Avatar the way of the water, uh, which is the sequel to our avatar, not just a film, but an immersive experience. And I thought, okay, this is just like a dumb thing, but it's fine. So many people got mad at me, including like loads of kind of like people from football Twitter. So like a bunch of new castle fans got mad at me, a bunch of like Man City fans got mad at me.

Yeah. Like it was actually very interesting because I was like, I was going to say, I was, I was sort of expecting that like columnists and, you know, like the journalists and stuff would be the ones who would really be like, you know, doing the whole, uh, what you call it, like, you know, it's problematic to be mean about like the monarchy at this time and everything. And they're getting granted, like some of them are doing that. But I think for like football, Twitter really is like the most, like one of the most sensitive areas of like Twitter.com. So that was like my insight. I guess, like,

now I don't know, like if it feels kind of weird, uh, uh, we expected an announcement at six o'clock and like I was on the train, like on the way home and I like everyone was sort of glued to their phones. I guess like waiting for this announcement. We all thought that the guy in the crossrail, like this sort of like had put the tannoy on and was going to announce it. But the, the only thing he said was like, uh, there's a problem at Woolwich. So that was a bit of a, so that was a bit of a dead, dead queen on the line. The queen's coming through Woolwich. It was just like, yeah.

Basically, uh, except that tannoy sound at least was like sort of coherent. We couldn't really understand what was going on. Um, so yeah, we found out the about official, like the official announcement that the queen died, uh, while we were in Sainsbury's, uh, today. So, um, yeah, that, that was my day. So that's it. Where were you on British 9 11? I, yeah, I, I, I was on Twitter as is my want. I saw Kirsten on the behind of the note and I'm like, well, that's the rest of my day done. This is a full day commitment. I, I, I had shit to do. Now I don't, I'm going to be watching this. And that's exactly what I did. I popped

out right before the actual announcement to get two bottles of non-alcoholic prosecco. And, uh, you know, that, then I came back and I listened to it and I felt profoundly fucking weird that we have a king now. I don't like it at all. Uh, although we can also say, right? With, um, with, uh, uh, some certainty, right? Is that, uh, you know, Lyndon LaRouche won. Uh, he died. She, she died on his birthday. Yeah. Exactly. Well, that means he never went in. It was Lyndon Jr. And, uh, you know, the global war on drugs has finally been won. It's over. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Her trafficking activities

will now have to cease until they can appoint a new sort of cartel boss. Charles, Charles doesn't have the stones to control the world drug trade. You kidding? Is that the brogue wearing like tree gardener? No way. He doesn't have the, he doesn't have it in the British law family. He's a spent force in terms of the global drug trade. In any drug cartel, you need the guy who looks after the plants. You need the botanist. And that was kind of his role for a long time. Uh, you know, he, he was going around adjusting all the heat lamps and stuff. And now, you know, now he's going to have to really kind of sit at the top table. And I don't, I don't know how he's going to, how well he's going to like measure up

to it. Yeah. And so, I mean, let's, let's just, let's look at some of the sort of successions of normalities. Uh, one of the most like bizarre motherfuckers in this country, of course, is royal are, royal watchers in general are the feature like the, the phenomenon of the royal correspondent. Um, the only people that the royals themselves have ever been justified in hating. I genuinely disgusting sort of reprehensible toad-like people, uh, whose only deal is to hang around outside palaces and do pieces to camera about what various drunken ladies in waiting have like gossips to them about. And so we have the, the, the, the sort of the chief amongst the Nicholas Wichelt, the BBC's royal correspondent, um, who just sort of, he had to fill time, essentially,

it was him and Hugh Edwards in this long, long gap between, uh, everyone knowing that the Queen was on the way out and the actual announcement, um, which in itself was sort of uncharacteristic. Like, uh, we're going to talk a lot about, I suspect the, that Guardian long read about Operation London Bridge, um, which is like in large part about how exquisitely planned the ceremonial of the whole thing is. But instead of exquisitely planned, what we got was Hugh Edwards being sort of like laced into being like knotted into a black tie shoved in front of the camera and having the voice in his ear go, just fucking fill time for, for however long it takes. Save a line, Hugh, save a line. They must have pulled him out of that room,

like barely conscious after fucking five, six hours of, well, she is an institution and saying four sentences and Wichel, Nicholas Wichel was there with him the whole time, just cheerily speculating like, oh, well, she, she does probably have like diseases that haven't existed since the 18th century. She does have gout. She does have like, uh, blacksmith's elbow, certainly, uh, bad case of Fletcher's lobe, all of these things. Um, and of course we've always known this, but we haven't, you know, mentioned it to, to you because our role is sort of legitimized gossip. Yeah. Well, it's the, I mean, the British, the royal correspondents, it's the same sort of like omerta that governs the rest of the British media, which is where the keepers of knowledge

that we kind of know when we're allowed to release, but about like just moronic trivia. Yeah. But the thing is, in, in any other thing, in any other facet of public life, there is some mutual affection. Like I tell you, for example, your, your defense policy, right? Like people in the, in the ministry of defense, people in the intelligence services, right? They, they like defense correspondence. They like Gordon Carrera. They like, um, I forget the other one, uh, Frank Gardner, royal correspondents, the royals, fucking hate them and they're right to, and yet they still end up with all of these, uh, all of these sort of like insider pieces of knowledge, because the royal family is surrounded

by snitches and sharks. Um, and the other thing that I think that, that Wichelt said, which is very funny, and I'm aware this is not the first time he said something like this. Oh, he's been, he's, he, because the royal family changes so little, he has to reuse lines. He's been saying this one since 2016. He says, he says, uh, regarding the corgis, and of course they know nothing of her status. These dogs have no idea. These dogs are so fucking stupid. I'm grateful, mother fuckers. Um, yeah, it just like, it's, the, I guess what the, the British public is expected to be like, oh, poor dogs. They don't even know that they're next to her match.

But also, you know, I mean, this is, there's a lot of sort of amount of, you might say, sort of extremely performative, uh, sorrow that from like a lot of brands and, and columnists and, and so on and so on. Yeah, because some people, admittedly psychos, but some people will feel real emotional distress at this. And the fact that those people are insane and wrong, that's neither here nor there, but the brands have to capitalize on that. And so, uh, don't you get the crazy frog going like? Funko pops. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, wrestling promotions I've seen. Yeah. Boohoo. Uh, and pretty little, and pretty little thing as well. Uh-huh. Yeah, of course. But like, there, there's this, there's this sense, I think, of, um, of, of Britain as, and I mean,

we'll sort of get into this when we talk about that, that old article, I mean, to see how it stacked up on the day, uh, is the kind of last country where, where we seem to be making a lot of, um, incredibly stupid ceremony. Yes. And I feel like she was kind of the guardian of people tolerating that. Yeah. That, that, that's true. And also sort of the last run at Britishness. Like you, you see sort of like various attempts historically to mark the end of, of Britain as a sort of a first rate world power. Uh, you see Churchill State funeral and that, and that sort of context a lot, but no, this is where it really gets unambiguous. Once, once they put her in the ground, the party is over in terms of the British Empire. And you know, good, stay down there rot,

it deserves to. But, uh, you know, a lot of people will be very sad about this and we'll get a lot of sort of nostalgic things about, fuck, I don't know, railways or something. Yeah. Well, there's the, I mean, there's this sense, right? That's our, like, that's our most unproblematic legacy of that is like the time we defeated fascism because it was German. Yeah. Um, and, and the, um, I think there's also a sense, right? There seems to be this unspoken, unspoken, very often spoken, often too spoken, I think, um, uh, sort of almost like repeated, like a Zen cone that, oh, the queen is necessary because she is respected by all and apolitical, uh, right? That there was, which were true. Um, but when sort of necessary sustaining

myths that shielded an institution that I fear now will begin to look very silly. Yeah. I mean, so I'll turn to Hussein, right? What's, uh, how do you respond to that? Yeah. I mean, I agree with, I agree with everything that like Alice said, um, I think like it was very evident for a while. I mean, we've, we've spoken about this before, like when we sort of speculate a bit, well, when it, when it comes to the queen, when they, when it comes to confirming that the queen is dead because, you know, we all know that she's been dead for like a while. Um, my little pet theory was that like they, you know, they couldn't be, you know, the electric bills were so high that they even, they couldn't afford to project the hologram anymore.

Yeah. But we kind of knew that, like the country is not going to handle this well. A country that has like been stuck in nostalgia loops for, you know, decades now, but especially in the past few years where it's really sort of like doubled down on it. Um, and yeah, like, I also think it's sort of evident that like print like Charles, the good King Charles now just doesn't have anywhere sort of near the stature as, you know, the queen. And I don't know, like, I think it's going to get really, like the monarchy is going to get really, really weird. Um, in part because like Charles is much more of a kind of, well, he, at least like as a prince, he wanted to sort of be like a much

more active public figure. The spider letters. Uh, yeah, that too. I, I mean, I, I would have, when I sort of think about King Charles, I just sort of think that like, uh, what ha, you know, isn't it sort of weird that his like paedophile brother is still like around and like wants a job and like, how is that going to get addressed now? Because like before, um, Andrew was just sort of considered to be like, you know, the Ophish son who just happened to sort of like, uh, at least like that's how they were trying to like spin it. I think it's a very different situation now. Like, it's a very different situation where like, you're the brother compared to when you're just like the Ophish son. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The King's brother is like, uh, allegedly announced is like, right.

That's the kind of, that's the inciting incident of from hell. I kind of, yeah. And, and it's also like the sort of the worst time for it to happen because like all the sort of like, Q and non adjacent conspiracy theories are all heading basically towards like everything is paedophilia. Um, so you've basically just like, you know, you've got this like sort of ticking time bomb. So to speak of like, you know, when they sort of, uh, when they bring in like the conspiracies around Prince Charles and his connections to like whatever fucking like, uh, you know, uh, global food program or whatever is, you know, part of like the globalist couple. Um, and then they just kind of make that tenuous connection of like, oh, the W E F connected like

Prince Charles, you know, his brother also happened to be friends with Jeffrey Epstein. So like, whether it's Charles or whether it's one of his sons, we are going to hear the phrase woke King in our lifetime. When we do, I am going to fucking kill myself. I think there will be no other choice for me. I guess like what I was just trying to say was like, I think like at this point, like once the sort of like King Charles thing sort of, you know, we have to kind of engage with it. I don't think that I think that like the palace is going to find it very difficult to sort of contain, um, or like, or at least to kind of protect him in the same way that they kind of did with the Queen. And I definitely don't think that like the press, including the royal press,

will be anywhere near as kind of like supportive or sympathetic as they were to the Queen. So I think like it's a very dangerous sort of position to be in. Thinking about this, right? What I, what I was saying earlier is that the Queen's role basically just seemed to be to anchor many of the institutions of the British state, which are, you know, decrepit and failing and falling apart. Yeah. Well, I mean, she was, she was the fount of all honour and the fount is after all, and she was inanimate object. She was the people's gaffer tape. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But and, and the idea was that just there is enough goodwill that she just sort of had residually from, well, from like a British, many British people, maybe not many others around the world will get into that

in a little bit to just kind of keep a lot of faith of people. I think it's the dividing line, right? Between whether you really care about the, whether the Queen puts a shine on stuff she's associated with you or not is, you know, whether or not you remember your experience of the British state as being sort of one where it's more interested in you than just whether it can recruit you to the army or put you in jail. And there is this idea, I think that, you know, that her, she keeps the shine on these institutions that have long since rotted away, you know. Yeah. There was this sort of like air of expectation, which is, you know, not something that was solely patrolled by, you know, the Daily Mail journalists that are currently searching your tweets to see

if they can put them on the front page. But like, just this sort of like general sort of ambient sense of decorum as much as popularity that like, you're supposed to at least like her, you know, you're a spoil sport if you don't like her. You can be anti-moniker, you can be a republic but like you have to admit that she's done well, that kind of thing. And if you don't, then that's that's weird. Absent that now, you know, it's going to be much stranger as you say Hussain. And it's the main kind of advertisement, I think, for the these very sort of old August institutions of the British Empire abroad of the state is sort of gone, right? She was the last the last line, the last thing connecting connecting the imaginations of, you know,

the people who are sort of, you know, addled enough to like think it really matters, which means, you know, mostly sort of people over 40 with sort of a positive view of the country, the state and you can even see it, you can see it in some of the great and the good of the column world, right? Their outpourings of grief are outpourings of grief at the Queen that appear to be largely directed at people who are insufficiently grieving. Yeah, Megan, Markle, us. James Cameron. Yeah. The like the or the the Oreo company that still haven't put out a tweet just like I wish their condolences. One thing I was just yeah, I was going to add to just like that in a little bit to sort of say that the Queen has also been very good at like, I guess,

facilitating one of the things that the British media is very good at, which is kind of being in denial about everything, right? You know, so as the state of sort of crumbling like the Queen, the Queen in particular, not the like the royal family. In fact, like I think a better example of this is also just during the Prince Andrew stuff as well, where like there was this real desperation to kind of like separate like the Queen and like the royals and stuff from, you know, the actual kind of royal family. So they were kind, you know, all that stuff, you know, you remember about two where it's like, oh, the Queen was so distressed about like Andrew and like so stressed out about her and like, you know, the same stuff that happens with like

Harry and Meghan and everything. There was like a real concerted effort to basically like insulate her because I think she was so useful in that like project to just sort of be in denial about like basically, you know, the decline of the nation, right? That was her strength was like no interviews, right? And statement, speeches, no interviews, no gossip. You could kind of project anything you wanted on her because you know, she was like the nation's grandma, right? And now like, you know, no, not my words, but kind of like the words that have been used like in some of the obits. I don't think that can happen with Charles. And I when I wonder what will happen when you have like, when you're

sort of dealing with like the head of the royal family and stuff who just, you know, who you can't like project your, you know, you can't just project Nylon, right? And just simply because like he won't work in that way. In terms of just like maintaining the legitimacy of a state that is very, very quickly deciding it's not interested in maintaining its legitimacy in the realm of keeping you alive. Not even that, but it itself is a unitary state. I mean, if you want to talk about this, this is like, you know, we can talk about the Commonwealth. We can also talk about the various constituent nations of the United Kingdom, most notably Scotland. I'm imagining how

King Charles is going to go down up here. Probably not that well. And, you know, if Scotland does at some point become independent, I think the odds of it becoming a republic that's independent are now considerably higher. Australia has already gone, Canada probably will be at some point too. Like the Commonwealth was like a sort of a personal project of hers. And, you know, perhaps not a very sustainable one. No. And like we say, right, it's so much of what Britain has been in the last, I think especially 14, but, you know, increasingly like 40, whatever you want to call it, years, has relied largely on people remembering it as a pretty important place from the past.

Yeah. Well, both domestically and abroad, like domestically, we were perfectly happy to slap a big sort of Great British thing on everything from like M&S sausage rolls all the way up to railways. And at a certain point, that just doesn't work anymore. And I think that points now. Yeah, absolutely. And without, and I think without this, without this reminder, this physical, reified reminder of exactly what, of that importance, of that general air of goodwill, again, not from many people in the world, but from the world's powerful and the most privileged, right? That's gone. It's gone in terms of, it's gone as a tool of domestic politics that you can use to rally people around the essential sort of coziness of the British state

to sort of remind them that, oh, it's all sort of T and lovely and sort of jubbly and, oh, remember Hugh Grant, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, this sort of like Tweet picnic table stuff, that's gone. Yeah, that's gone. But also abroad, right? This idea of Britain as a, as this, the idea of Britain as what it was before, like whatever you want to chart its decline, Second World War, the 70s, the financial crisis, whatever you want to call it, right? That connection's also gone. They tried a different thing with Blairism, but that's still with Cool Britannia, right? But that's still certainly relied on that same kind of imagery, that same kind of, almost like a very strange gestalt about this little island.

Yeah, and it's born of a sort of, I think, cowardice and a kind of decline and a kind of malaise that makes us too afraid to develop any kind of mythology of a country that might be better. And that was one of Corbyn's like real crimes was like, hey, imagine a country that doesn't look backwards all the time. And that is slightly different. What if instead of a bunch of sort of very quickly losing its sticking power gaffer tape in the form of this one extremely old woman, we sort of made people feel as though the state had legitimacy. And even still, our best shot at that vitality was also an old man. There are some sort of material facts here.

I mean, this is from that London Bridge article from 2017 in The Guardian, which I've pulled some passages from, right? It says, they interview Andrew Roberts, a historian who's sort of of these types of things. He says, I think there will be a huge and very genuine outpouring of deep emotion. And I think that is right. You know, I mean, the question is what is the emotion for? I think that there's a lot of it is anger, the idea that you need to search for, search for traders that the idea of Britain that a lot of people had that was always fake anyway, they're now willing to admit that it's gone because it's so pinned to this one person. The sense of like history happening to you,

a moment of historical import, there's another line on that Guardian thing was like, you know, people who aren't expecting to cry will cry. And, you know, I, as you may be able to tell, have been sort of an ardent Republican all my life. And I still wasn't 100% sure, like I didn't think I would, but I was like aware of the possibility of there being sort of a little paradoxical reaction there. And yeah, no, certainly, I don't think I'll be the only one. And he goes on, right? He says, there will be an urge to stand in the street to see it with your own eyes, referring to the Queen's, you know, funeral procession.

Yeah, referring to the, you know, division, the guards division doing coffin flop on the Royal Mount. The cumulative effect will be conservative. I suspect the Queen's death will intensify patriotic feelings. But again, we will say will intensify patriotic feelings because I think there's going to be a desperation to reach out and find something, right? Well, we're all, we've been sliding down for a while. And the route we were grabbing onto has just come off. Yeah. What is it that we actually do internationally? Like, are we going to get up there and say that, like, you know, Her Majesty the Queen, she would have been very

proud of these deportation flights. She'd have been very proud of this year's Reading Festival. Like, what exactly are we going to say is we have to be patriotic about, as we fucking starve all of our children and freeze all of our pensioners to death. What are we going to say is, like, good about living here? Yeah, I don't, and I think that's, that comes down to a point that you sort of raised what we were talking earlier, again, and sort of saying I'd be interested in what you have to say about this as well, right? Which is that a lot of people under 40 are, don't have a lot of a reason to sort of buy into, buy into this, right?

Yeah. I mean, again, this is like something where, like, there's not really much to add, like other than speculation, and just like going back to the point about, like, I wasn't ever kind of sure how convincing even the idea, like, when the argument that is usually advanced or like used to be advanced about the value of the monarchy, especially like, and you remember this like during kind of like the kind of Corbyn years and stuff, was the idea that like, you know, people around the world respect the Queen, not like necessarily the royal family or like the monarchy, they would always kind of say that they respect the Queen. And almost like you just sort of had this, like,

brand, which I guess is like the reason why they were so adamant about like protecting her all costs and stuff. And, you know, it's the brand is sort of gone. I guess, like, I don't know, don't really know of a good example, but it's like, what if you replace like chests of a cheetah with like a different kind of cheetah? Like, it's not the same thing. Bro, they cut chest or two? I've got it. I've got it. What if they replace chest or the cheetah with chest or Bennington? What then? Oh, that's horrible. No, it's horrible. Anyway, like, yeah. There is going to be such a stark generational divide, though, I think. Yeah. Well, I just like, I don't know if there's not really kind of you, again, like, there's no

real sort of like appealing qualities about like Prince or King Charles. And I just don't see, like, I don't, I don't see how any kind of like marketing or like PR could really sort of like elevate him to the standard where like, you are kind of willing to like kind of hone in on him and sort of ignore the rest of like this insane dysfunctional family, which then kind of brings me to the thing about, well, I wonder whether like this, you know, I would number one, I wonder whether like the royal family sort of recognize this as a problem. And if they do, like, you know, will they sort of have to just like really kind of like reform it in quite a significant way, which was like a conversation that was happening not that long ago, right? Where when they were

sort of talking about, well, when she eventually dies, like, we're going to have this problem, which is basically like we have this extremely unpopular family who demand like a lot of like taxpayer money and support for like them is not as high as support for the queen. So what the fuck are we going to do? And like one of the sort of like solutions that was posited was to basically have like a slimmed down royal family, we're going to do austerity on the royal family, like get rid of royal family by G4. We're gonna have to make Prince Charles cool. You might just learn all of these floss dances immediately. Like genuinely, one of the proposals was like, like, you know, you just got to get rid of a bunch of them, right? And I just like,

Princess Michael Kent, what have you done for me lately? The sort of the Bolshevik solution here, you know, guiding Princess Eugenie towards the fucking Ipatiev house, you know? And like in the sort of like classic British, like in the classic British way, you know, they just like kick the can down the road, right? Because they were like, well, you know, she's going to live for like, you know, another decade. So we don't have to like worry too much about it. Prince Charles having to go to his cool lessons and be like, one is a kung fu hippie from Gangster City. Doesn't barely look like an ass at all. It's more than eight. I imagine that like, probably what's going to happen is,

is that they're going to try like, do marketing for like William and Kate. And like, it might, yeah. Prince Charles getting up and being like, I'm going to now regale the British with my favorite joke. You see, there are two kinds of black people. Oh, no. Day one says the word. Yeah. Yeah. I think like, I don't know if that would be like, in some ways, that would sort of be like a good solution to doing like cool king shit, which is basically like, yeah, sort of like being, I don't know, being like a Trump kind of guy. But like, again, we've gone through this so many times, you sort of like, you can't,

you can't really be taught how to be a Trump kind of guy. It's either you either have or you don't. And by all sort of estimations, it's very clear that he doesn't. So I don't know. Like, I might, might kind of like, every time I sort of like think about this, I'm just like, well, sure of like, somehow doing a massive PR operation to make William and Kate really endearing, which like they have tried before and it hasn't really worked very well. I'm a really bold husband. Yeah. Just like, it just like real like, absolute fucking like, just cold blooded people. Yeah, like, not right. And I can just imagine that like, they are like, well, if they're not having one now, they'll definitely have one soon. Like this is a real

existential crisis because like so much as we've mentioned on this episode in like previous ones, so much of like the royal family soft power was really rooted in this one woman who I imagine lots of them just really did their best to kind of like, make sure that you just like, make sure that she didn't die up to up until she literally had to, which ironically was when she met Liz Truss. She just couldn't take it any longer after that. She saw her wearing her day collar to the fucking receptions. She was like, well, that's it for me. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. She was like, well, see you space cowboy. I finally got to meet Liz Truss. Well, that's the dream of any monarch. Yeah. And also like, yeah, think like, let's think back a little bit to Empire itself,

right? You know, when the Queen was sort of, when the Queen was ruling in the way that she's remembered for ruling well, right? Because she is supposed to be this connection of Britain to the past when it was important. And is this, this sort of by her aura provided this sort of psychic machine as some kind of gestalt, right? Where, you know, in 1952, she was, she would make a speech from the throne saying in Malaya, this is from Hansard, by the way, in Malaya, my forces in the civil administration are carrying out a difficult task with patience and determination. In spite of great loss and suffering, all communities are playing an ever more active part in the defense of freedom. And, you know, this is, this was, and of course,

political figurehead stuff, you know, don't, the fact that she's fucking, she was looped in on everything, you know, the fact that she almost certainly was aware of Operation Legacy, the foreign office, well, then the colonial officers plan to dump a bunch of incriminating files at sea, rather than hand them over when countries became independent, all of that stuff, you know, don't worry about that too much. Think about the nice old lady. Because it's like, yeah, you were a figurehead. What were you a figurehead for? Oh, the good things mostly. Yeah, you were all the figures, just like, oh, the figurehead of the boat that's laden down with cannon is harmless. Well, I guess that means the boat also is harmless by the transitive property. Yeah, and it's, because this

is also right. Like, what was the empire for a lot of people? Well, for the wealthy, it was a way to dispose of capital profitably for, or for a lot of ordinary people, it was sold to them, right? Sold to them by the press, sold to them by stories, all this kind of stuff through ideology as a source of great pride. This woman, like, as much as she claimed to live her life in service, this actual service she provided was mostly reproducing that ideology. Oh, come on. I read that she lived her life in service. I don't see any reason to doubt it. I'm just talking about some of the services she provided, but I think it's when people have this very... She did a bunch of stuff, you know? She did the very first den of everything, you know?

But yeah, weird how she took apart that gas storage. You know, what we ask, what happens to the British psyche? What's really being severed? What's being severed is, in many ways, it's connection to the psychic pleasure of violence done on your behalf, you know, from the empire, from the seriousness, from the importance of empire. You knew it was important because we constantly had to send guys with increasingly automatic weapons, you know, from muskets to, you know, early automatic rifles around the world to make sure that everyone stayed under our boot. And you got the thrill of being in the metropole and being feeling like the boot was kind of on your foot, you know? And I think there is this feeling of loss, really. You know, this was the

last connection. This was the last serving politician who would have been involved in saying, yes, the Malayan emergency, go ahead and do what is necessary. And the rest of her career and the rest of her life, because those things were inseparable, going, yeah, we did this for you, not for us. The fact that I live in a fancy house and you don't, that's neither here nor there. It was for all of us in the person of me. And it's about, I think, as well, like, you know, that this is, as much as we like to retcon, you know, this harmless, harmless, apolitical figurehead, you know, it's your apolitical, okay, well, what's apolitical? What's apolitical is that, you know, both labor and conservative prime ministers

thought that, you know, the Mao Mao, we're getting a bit uppity, that the Malay need to be classified. But also, like, that's, even if you're adhering to the conventions of myth, you might choose not to, you might choose to believe that, you know, all sorts of rare interventions and sort of murmurs to various prime ministers weren't perhaps as rare as the palace liked to pretend they were, and that there were occasionally sort of expectations of governance in defiance of the constitutional system that we currently have, which is only going to get worse, because now we have the fucking spider memos cunt. It's great. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's, I think people like to...

It's intolerable. It's literally intolerable for anything that purports to call itself a state in the 21st century to go, oh, yeah, this guy, he actually gets to be in the meeting for this, because, because the blood thing, really, like, it really is on account of the blood. Look, the other thing is the blood has kind of like special properties. So like, if you, if you like hold him down and transfuse a bunch of that blood into you, you still don't get to be in the meeting because it like really kind of like, it's, I don't know, it's like... If the blood's more of a meta, it's the genes. You, you could go to like Prospera and get gene therapy, then we could talk. Right?

You know, the Roe family is like steadfastly refused to ever have any kind of DNA testing. I'm not, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they're all lizard people from outer space. I'm not saying that. I'm just heavily implying it. Right. So then, you know, we have this, so what does this do to, if this was the last thing that we sort of had to hang onto, right, for the great cognitive dissonance, really, that is British politics, these spectacles that, these spectacles that happen at the same time as initially gradual and now quite sudden and sharp declines in the standard of living of everyone for whom this place is responsible, right? Like, what does that do to the British, does that do something,

do you think, to the, to the British psyche or does it mostly do something to the columnist psyche and then have an impact on the British psyche indirectly via them? It's a two-way street, really, isn't it? We sort of, the Queen effect to us, we affect the Queen also as a social construction, I would say. Oh, indeed. Yeah, social construction in it. Getting my CSCS card for social construction, you know. That's right. So, like, what do you think Hussain? You know, we've spoken about how columnists tend to sort of like overstate and exaggerate things, but I don't know, like, I think with the death of the Queen, it's sort of different, right?

Like, there's definitely like a sense of like unease, well, at least when I was out, like, during, when everyone sort of knew today that it was going to happen, you know, you can obviously like sense this sort of like unease, but like, more of this unease of like, well, what, like, how are we sort of supposed to react? And I kind of wonder whether like media types are your columnist, your royal reports and stuff, like people sort of look to them as, you know, what, how you are sort of like allowed to sort of like, you know, yeah, how you, how you are supposed to like react to this, right? And I'm looking at like some videos right now and like, there have been, you know,

vigils outside of like Buckingham Palace and you've got like a bunch of like, weird freakos who like are sort of, you know, all like, you know, alarmingly young, but balding and, you know, in tears and like holding candles and like, we'll send their phones and stuff like that. It's kind of like this very sort of weird experience. I don't know, like, because I, when we, we've sort of been waiting for this moment for a while, and I think we all knew that it was going to get really weird. And I guess like your columnists and stuff are sort of really the kind of barometers of like how weird it can get, right? So, you know, you have like BBC commentators today who are, so, you know, one of them kind of,

I was like, allegedly to kind of said was like, you know, energy bills and stuff are kind of insignificant now because of the death of Her Majesty. And it's just kind of like, I don't, not, not quite sure about that one chief. Also, because like we can only pay to pay attention to one story at a time, right? So like everything else is kind of irrelevant for like the next kind of month. And obviously that means like everything is suspended and like, you know, everyone's keeping their jobs, no one's getting fired, prices are staying the same, inflation's like staying the same. No, like, you know, we all the vickers are getting back on the bikes. We hit the big pause button and Glasgow has been fucking weird, to be honest. Like,

I would say having been out a bit today, seven tenths of the people on the street do not seem to give a shit. And then the remaining three sort of split variably between honking their horns a bunch of times and like shouting and jubilation, or in the rangers bar a couple of streets over from me looking like the fucking last scene of Event Horizon. And I mean, I think it's also worth it to bring up to bring up the fact that, you know, because we have flattened politics into a kind of entertainment media, right? Yeah, into a big cube. Because most, yeah, the big guy, the big ideology cube, most people's engagement

is primarily by consuming entertainment and choosing which entertainment they consume. And, you know, at the moment, right, the entertainment supplies to you, the listener also. Legally speaking, no, it doesn't. Listening to the show is actually politics. Yeah, it's value neutral. What's going to happen, right, is that we are going to have a very large, like, state funeral involving multiple trains, you know? People supposedly are expected to throw flowers onto the tracks ahead of the train carrying the Queen's body. I am in two minds about this because...

That feels a bit dangerous. It feels dangerous, but it feels so weird. I can't imagine anyone doing it. And yet, I know in my heart of hearts, there are millions, literally millions, of people in this country who will do that. And I can't sort of process... I do, yeah. Just as like a caveat to that, this is kind of like the reason, like, where I'm kind of... I wasn't sure about, like, whether people sort of look towards columnists or, like, you know, whether they sort of set the boundaries or the bromance and stuff. Because I do think that, like, you know, there's a lot of just, like, pent-up anxiety,

like, generally. And you sort of need big moments like this to kind of see that kind of come into fruition. So I think we're just going to see a lot of weird stuff. Like, things that kind of just feel very strange and odd and, like, they'll kind of be, you know, they'll be done because of, you know, the death of the Queen and everything. And, like, you know, just the way that... I think, you know, you can... You sort of see that online in people's behavior in terms of, like, trying to police how, you know, Americans, like, sort of talk about this or how, like, people other than British people are, like, you know, and just, like, you know, just, like, some British people being like, oh, Americans should really stay out of, like, all

this because, you know, it's a really sad time for British people and everything. I just think we're just going to see a lot of really weird behavior and, like, a lot of, kind of, like, you know, weird, kind of, like, policing and snitching. And it's all kind of, like, just rusted in these types of feelings that are very somewhat, like, difficult to articulate. And this is much more of, like, a channel in which, like, that can kind of be expressed. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm going to try, like, keep a tally or, like, keep tabs on, like, the weirdest stuff. And maybe we can, like, you know, turn it into content, because that's what we're doing to respect the Queen. The normal thing of the week. I really, not to get too, like,

Alexis de Tocqueville here, but I really like the Americans for one thing only. And that is that they do have, in general, unless they get really into the mon Netflix or, like, Instagram or whatever, an honest sort of bafflement at the concept of monarchy, that's, that's, like, the only good thing that their revolution gave them. And, you know, I applaud them for it. I mean, like, we can see, right? It's the other thing I want to highlight is that the spectacle of the big state funeral is happening at the time of two cost of living crisis that have overlapped into one another, and have essentially pushed the, to be perfectly honest, quite insane Liz trust plan to massively invest in what appears to be paying a late fee

for British energy without, you know, actually buying anything much for ourselves with it, have sort of just pushed that, I think, out of political consciousness. I mean, it would be reprehensible to talk about that now. Yeah, of course. And we have to set up for the big sort of spectacle of this awesome of, you know, the biggest state funeral, the one that gets everything while people can't pay for anything. Yeah. And of it reminding everybody of how entrenched the aristocracy actually is, because there are so many, like, people who are like, you know, 19th dukes or whatever,

who have various ceremonial roles, you know, it's, it's, it's coming through the Duke of Norfolk. And it's like, yeah, like, I don't know, like what, what, the fact that this has to come through sort of, you know, like modern aristocrats, all of whom are, you know, private bankers or, you know, dead of hedonism seems to be, this is going to remind a lot of people of the, or that I think that that the state has the power to do a lot, but it won't not for you anyway. But I think this is also right, the spectacle of the big state funeral at the same time as to cost of living crises. You know, it's, it's part of why the, this consent manufacturing machine has to work overtime. It's why people are so obsessed with the hierarchies. Again,

not naturally, of course, or were made to be obsessed with them, but that where, where we imagine that there is something good bestowed upon us by participating in them, that if we don't participate in these hierarchies, that we will be worse off, that we, that in, in doffing our cap, we serve not only who we serve, but we serve ourself by making ourselves servants, right? That is essentially how the British, British hierarchy is ideologically justified. And, you know, I think it's going to just massively turn up at this, at this display of an outpouring of love for the British nation as represented by a woman who lives in a gold house that you or your ancestors paid for, you know? So I would like, you know, briefly to transition to talking

about the, the trust energy plan, to be honest, because like it's, it's so, I think, relevant to think about what's happening at the same time as, as this is national. The plan is great, because what it is, is a sort of contortion act to avoid anything that smacks of nationalization, or even a windfall tax, because Liz has, of course, ruled that out. So what we're doing instead is we're going to, we're going to do some more borrowing, which I know is like a knife in the heart to these sort of like fond meses freaks, but they're going to do it. They're going to borrow another 100 billion, I think. 140, I imagine.

Yeah, drive, drive the energy bills down and then like very slowly sort of repay that is the idea. It is, it is the finest example. It's like a, I don't know, it's like a very like a professional footballer doing a cross, but for kicking the can down the road. If you want to know exactly what happened, right, is we, when money was free, we were very, very fiscally disciplined. We never bore anything and we tried to pay down our deficit when it was free, when you couldn't, when the yields went negative, you know, and then now that money is no longer free, it's actually pretty expensive. Instead of, because we didn't invest when the money was free, we now have to borrow to, for essentially funding a credit card,

borrow to consume entirely, no investment, now that money is very expensive, right? And, you know, for, and for all people saying, oh, this won't work, that's stupid economics, it's like, well, no, it will work for what it's doing, which is, you know, keeping, keeping things ticking over for the shortest amount of possible amount of time between the next crisis. And also, it is, it is just exactly what the current sort of motive accumulation we're in is about facilitating. It's about the state creating opportunities for capital to just hook itself up to the central bank or to, to like, to basically take money it can borrow as a state. You know, so, I mean, this is why I say like, the, this is what like fucking Lex Greensill was

trying to do, right? Lex Greensill was trying to do what trust has now done for the energy companies, for the generators, or more specifically, for the private equity firms that, and investors that own the generators. Because that's the most efficient sort of organizational structure for those. Yeah. And per, because what permanent crisis does, right, and the reason you don't invest is because you need permanent crisis, because in permanent crisis, you have to turn to capital to hook it up to a section of the central bank. This is what you do with like voucher privatization of schools in America as well. It's the same thing. If this is in crisis, we need something to fix it. We can't do it because we won't invest in it. Someone else will have to invest in it,

and we will pay them to do it. It means you hook yourself up to the big money printing machine, and you get what is essentially conservative MMT, right, where you can print, borrow, or, or, or QE yourself out of any crisis. And you just have to assume that like, you know, the intervening animal spirits of the market will make up for it in future growth that you're encouraging by not borrowing to invest, which as we all know, would discourage future growth. Because, but it's working because that's what we, that Western governments have been essentially doing since they finished selling all the copper piping from the walls. You know, we don't have a lot left to privatize. There aren't a lot of council houses. We got rid of British, British rail already.

We got rid of the, the Royal Mail already. Yeah. We got rid of more than stripped everything. Yeah. Vibes. Yeah. All, all we have left is the ability to create currency. And so what we are going, and so by creating crises. It's a money printer with an army attached. And, you know, essentially, like this is, we can't avert the crisis because we need the crisis for the accumulation. And it's not even that they go into work saying, well, time to cause a crisis. No, it's because all of these things, right? It is a totally coherent ideological picture of the world to think that you cannot invest in anything because it will deter growth. And that when the inevitable crisis of underinvestment comes, because that's essentially what this was,

a crisis of underinvestment, you can then do the one last thing the state can do to fix the crisis. And you will believe, and you can do that believing the whole way through that what you are doing is essentially efficient, right? This does not require anyone to be a sort of secret bad actor. And it's, if you want to think of like one of the best examples of this mode of accumulation is Iraq, right? Iraq, we weren't really there for, we weren't really there like to do, to like take over their land or anything. They had, they had resources, sure. They had oil, but like America very shortly after became like a mega net oil exporter for a while. Really, what we were doing in Iraq was we were creating opportunities

for government contractors to go get money out of the central bank. We were helping out, yeah, we were helping our homies doing business. And, you know, it's rare that you like find loyal homies these days. So I don't know, I support that. It's true. And, you know, you might ask in this, in this moment, you know, beyond sort of doing sort of exaggerated, please daily telegraph, let us govern cap doffing about the Royal Funeral, you know, where the fuck is labor? Because, you know, they were essentially... Apparently, Stelman was in tears. So we're just going to be doing that. That's definitely going to convince the Daily Mail not to call him like a Britain hating trader.

He wanted to do the speech where he would say she was the people's gulf. I'm not very good at doing the accent. I'm sorry. I was at the holiday. Sorry, everyone. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, Kier Stalmer, it's been literally hours and he has yet to change his Twitter profile name from QC to KC, which means he is a traitor and a Republican and a degenerate. You know, QC now refers to, he's a QC, but for Ramona Didilo, the Q and on Queen of Canada, he's now a counsel of her. So it's... But yeah, we were like, where was labor? They were saying, yeah, bills have to be frozen at this level. And it's like, yeah, well, of course,

they were going to be fucking frozen. The whole point of the Tory government is to do just enough to avoid total social collapse, right, so that you can still get everyone profiting from it. You know, that's basically... That's like one nation Toryism of like, well, let's see how many of the Kerplunk sticks we can take out. But of course, they were going to do something and to say, great, yeah, it's good that they are capping bills that's going to stop a lot of people from fucking dying. Like pulling teeth, another thing that you also cannot get done in this country on the NHS. But also the fact that it was done... And again, don't even get stuff like financing through borrowing. Sure, finance shit through borrowing,

but the fact that there is... That that borrowing is for pure consumption and not any kind of investment. And you say, oh, well, the UK can't get to net gas importer, can't control the energy price. We can control some of the fucking energy. We can certainly control some of it. No, no, no, no, no, Riley. A state can control those things. A money printer cannot control those things. Well, I guess we're not a state anymore because we've lost like the main thing that sort of held it all together. We're not even a kingdom for the moment. We're just a united something. Yeah. You want to hear this, right? This is from an analyst note from Deutsche Bank on Guilts just now. Guilts. Guilts, the British government debt. And then according from the note

here, a balance of payments fund in crisis may sound extreme, but is not unprecedented or unexpected. A combination of aggressive fiscal spending, a severe energy shock, and a slide in sterling ultimately resulted in the UK having to recourse to an IMF loan in the mid-1970s. So, and they may make us even less of a money printer, but they're going to take off like one of the colors from the money printer. Yeah. Instead of money prints that go, bro, we got money prints that go, you know. And so, I see really like what I see is, I see that it's a short-term fix. And once again, labor has allowed itself to be outflanked on the basis of how it's funded, which I think feels to a lot of people like a technical detail.

It's certainly not, right? Like labor's plan here was much better because it didn't involve, because it involved basically saying to the oil and gas producers, we're not going to just concentrate all of society's wealth on you. We're going to undo some of that, but which is better than just saying, no, no, it's right and good that you have the wealth concentrated on you. And we're just going to facilitate it in a way that doesn't kill half the country. That's an important distinction. But the fact that labor has basically shied away from, again, putting so much distinction between itself and the Tories, again, it's depressingly predictable. But once again, none of this matters because everyone's going to be mad

at Elizabeth Truss for killing the Queen. No, no, everyone's going to be, everyone's going to look like Jack Nicholson at the end of the shine. Yeah, absolutely. The entire, everyone in Britain is, you know, all work in no play makes Britain a dull country. No, I was doing the freezing joke. Well, I mean, look, there's a lot of, I think, all of Britain will be doing the Kubrick stare as sort of our connection to the thing that we thought made us us is now severed. And Kent is going to do the human instrumentality project. Yeah, I'm like waiting for it. I've heard like a few cars like honking, you know, just for no reason. I think, yeah, I think like we're going to see the human instrumentality

project in Kent and that's going to look like a bunch of Range Rovers on the Dartford crossing, like all honking simultaneously. Maybe we can get the ferries to do donuts again. Oh, yeah. Well, well, because the Dartford crossing is right by like, you know, the Thames, right? So during the honk, all the ferries will be doing donuts. Truly, we will stand on the honk at that moment. Yeah. And it will sort of be like a weird inverse of like the 2012 ceremony, I think. I don't know. I think something like the 2012 ceremony will kind of occur only because even in those instances of commemoration, we still can't get out of like nostalgically. So anyway, I think that's probably about about time for us to call it.

Nailing down my prediction, God's division coffin flop. Watch for it. It's going to happen. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much for being a part of the old TF family. And also don't forget, there's a Patreon you can subscribe to it. It is for five American dollars a month, five cash American dollars. If the people have disgusted letters because they're disgusted by us, where should they write to? It's probably right to... So it's keer.starmer.gov.uk. Yeah, he tells us what to write. People say nobody tells us what to write. He tells us what to say. Everything we say,

he is told us specifically. He writes all of them. It may sound sort of, you know, loosely improvised around notes. He writes every episode. Oh, he's a real stickler for it. Yeah. Including the Julia Fox stuff from a few months ago. He puts the like Julie Birchill voice directions in like square brackets too. He's like very, very precise about this stuff. Absolutely. Anyway, we will see you on the free, on the bonus episode and a few days. Bye everyone. Bye.