TRASHFUTURE - Starving Refugees to Teach Them a Lesson feat. Vicki Spratt

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

This week, it’s a star-studded cast of Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Alice @AliceAvizandum discussing the recent story of asylum seeker Mercy Baguma being found dead from malnutrition in her flat in Glasgow. Why was she starving? Because asylum seekers in the UK aren’t allowed to work and are only allowed £40 a week to live on. This is of course by design -- because Baz logic runs that people won’t seek refuge in the UK if we’re just as cruel as possible to them. We also have an interview with Riley, Hussein, and I Newspaper’s housing correspondent Vicky Spratt (@Victoria_Spratt) on the topic of the looming eviction crisis, Britain’s housing shortage, and why it doesn’t have to be this way (but has only gotten worse in the last 40 years). If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

Hello, and welcome back to Trashfuture, the podcast about how the future is bad. The comedy podcast that we do, the comedy podcast where we make fun jokes and we have a nice time and we don't think about anything distressing that once again has been forced to do the fucking thing that we do where we instead think about things that are very distressing. I think we might have to think about renaming the podcast because I think when we started Trashfuture seemed like a reasonable like, you know, the podcast about how the future is trash like, you know, things are things are going to get worse. But actually, I think now we should really rename it Trashpresent because yeah, I think we I think we're nearing

a kind of rock bottom scenario. So I mean, it's it's it's Riley Hussein, Milo and Alice today. And I want to usually we do as a startup up front, but I didn't we didn't want it. We want to sort of do it a bit differently today. I want to jump right into this where we are beginning to see the extremely human consequences of not just austerity, but a much a much broader trend of gleeful cruelty and sadism in UK and US governance. When we see the death, the forced death by starvation of asylum seeker from Uganda, Mercy Baguma, she was located in a flat in Glasgow beside her infant son, having literally starved to death, because she was not allowed to work

and was not allowed to claim benefits as a refugee. Well, in the same week, eight refugees all attempted suicide and protested their conditions in asylum seeker centers. And I, I have I myself, I don't I don't know, I don't fucking want to make this about me, but I've been hit with a wave just a wave of fucking despair, just looking at not just the cruelty, but the gleefulness with which it has been indulged. Yeah, no, I agree completely. There's something very sick about our society. And I think the thing we'll talk about this in more detail. I think this is sort of the thrust of why we're talking about this. But like, we're sort of seeing the crocodile tears about this, right?

Like, everyone who is involved in making this happen, everyone who is responsible for this woman's death is going to say, Oh, of course, we regret it. And, you know, we obviously this isn't what we wanted to happen. But it is. And it is, it's the chosen policy outcome of the hostile environment is to leave the country possibly back to your death or to die here. It is to be inhospitable. It's just the hoomps could have predicted thing, isn't it? We didn't think that by turning on racism, Robocop, any racism will happen. No, you know what it is? It's don't cry because you got what you wanted, right? This is that's

everything that has been done in order to make this country a more hostile, a more cynical, more unpleasant, more venal and more cruel place has been in service of this. Yeah. And the thing is, the thing is, right? If you, if you are, if you are, if you are unwilling to say, if you're like, yeah, if you're, if you torpedo like the Department of International Development as much as it did as best, it did the best it could, but it didn't do enough. But even then you torpedo that, right? Your whole thing, if you don't want immigration into Britain, with people legally making asylum claims, not that that matters, I guess, then the only way that you can stop that is to say, okay, we have to make Britain as inhospitable to these people, as a

place where they are literally, where someone is trying to kill them. So we have to try to kill them effectively. Yeah. And one of the, one of the most recent architects of that now gets to go on a podcast with her daughter to talk about cum, which specifically big comes. It's also worth like noting that on the day that this news came out, the Home Office, the Home Office, the Home Office Twitter video to back all happened. Fucking hell.

That was the same video where they made like a, one of those like pastel wellness infographics about how they were taking active measures to stop more rubber dinghies from coming to Dover or coming to, coming to any sort of like British island border. I was about to say they may as well have had a load of border force officers on it in black shirts. And then I realized that actually they do wear black shirts already. Right. They were fucking prepared for this change in tone of border policy. They do. And the Home Office left this on for, I think, 15 hours before they deleted it, but it got like a million views. And it was a price they did. I'm surprised they deleted it at all.

Yeah. Because if you remember the whole, remember when we talked about this, I think even last week or a couple of weeks ago, that when interviewed about Britain's upcoming refugee policies where Pretty Patel was trying to like get a four star general to look into, you know, carpet bombing the English Channel, they said specifically, oh, this is really going to piss off those labor loving lawyers, essentially. Right. Yeah. Activist lawyers. Yes. The whole point is like this is we're in that, in that, in the, there's the idea that of this small well, I mean, I in service of pissing off people, you killings, basically committing social murder, partly to piss off people that you don't like.

And I mean, the thing is, right, any leftist, a Keith Stammer. I certainly am a leftist and an activist. I didn't make it to be a lawyer. But yeah, I am pissed off. So, you know, consider that to be a victory for the conservative party that I am, in fact, annoyed. I am angry that a woman has been murdered and has left a young child behind in extremely traumatic circumstances as a consequence of this this this idea that we have to like, we have to be tough on immigration. Yeah. And the thing is, and the thing is, like Alice, you being angry is actually at the whole point of this. I don't know if you guys remember, but like a few weeks ago, when Pretty Patel came

on record, or at least kind of came on second, when she was kind of said saying that like the Home Office was going to introduce these new hostile environment measures, which were designed to make which were like the kind of good effect of it would be that it would make left wing people lose their minds or something along those lines, right? It was like, these are policies that are designed to like agitate, you know, so-called like left. We've already lost our minds, Pretty. We've been on Twitter for years. Fucking catch up, you crazy bitch. But what's really kind of obsessing and also just really kind of like enraging about all of this

is that when she's talking like, you know, the way in which they kind of talk about the hostile environment policies and racking up the racism machine as a way of like placating their unhinged, like basically unhinged, ready to go volunteer border force, but at the same time also like racking up so-called credibility among a particular like element of the columnist class is that like what they're really talking about is people like Mercy being the human kind of effects of these types of political games, right? And to them, you know, they will kind of, they will kind of shed those crocodile tears and they'll kind of claim that, you know, they'll try to like absolve themselves basically by saying like blaming the bureaucracy or blaming

the civil servants or even blaming like, you know, lawyers who make this whole process complicated, etc. When in reality, what it is, is like, this is the desired intention of all this, but this is being dies attention of like more Mercy's and more kind of basically nameless refugees and nameless homeless people who are killed and made kind of irreparably sick because of the policies which are designed to prevent more people from coming around. And I mean, also, one of the things that struck me was if you remember the first round of like Black Lives Matter UK protests, it was very much a talking point on the right that like, oh, this is this is like American imported culture war nonsense. You don't need to say

that Black Lives Matter in this country. And well, here we have a horrific example of why we need to, along with, you know, God knows how many other people are, Belly Majenka comes to mind who was like, effectively murdered and just was never investigated and no consequences for anyone involved. And yeah, no, this is... Well, look, if I can, if I can say this, right, this is once again, anybody, anybody who looks at people talking about Black Lives Matter in the UK or whatever, and says, oh, this isn't the US, we don't have, it's not nearly as bad. It's not like a cop shoot people, yeah, you can tell you, you can safely ignore them forever. Yeah, you can never pay attention

to anything they ever have to say for the fullness of time, because they appear to have drawn a distinction that if you are starved to death by the state or shot, if you are starved to death by the state's neglect, you are somehow more dead, right? That the idea that we can absolve ourselves because that we commit social murder of like 120, 130,000 people over the last 10 years, more recently... Well, that's what's so depressing about it to me is that... You're as dead. Yeah, but like, I don't, that's why I have the kind of despair that I have is that I don't detect the same kind of public anger that has been in the US. I don't know if there ever will be, I don't know how bad things have to get. There's been a sort of slow shift that I think

has happened under this guy. I mean, like obviously, like border violence has been a part of like the UK government's policy for a long time, but I think it's gotten a lot worse. And there's been a drive to sort of make the idea of being legally allowed to be in Britain entirely contingent on the government's whims from week to week. I think kind of a good turning point in this whole like scenario was probably the Shamima Begum case where the government basically used it, like they had no legal right to strip of our citizenship. And I'm pretty sure that actually in the high court, it'll end up getting reinstated eventually. But that simple principle that like we can just like decide whether or not we like people and determine it on that basis.

And there's been a kind of a shift as well from in government messaging, from the kind of like vaguely neutral tone that government departments used to take to what strikes me as just full on propaganda. I started noticing this with because I drive a lot the radio adverts about Brexit where they say shit like now that Britain has left the European Union, it's time to make a start on our bright new future. It's like we haven't left the fucking European Union. No, we literally haven't because you guys haven't been able to fucking do it. Don't don't use government money to lie to me in a fucking advert and call it information. There's been a turn in the BBC to this effect too. Like maybe it's just me, right? Maybe it's confirmation bias. But around the time of

the independence referendum up here, I remember seeing Scottish nationalists go full on like, every word on BBC News is dictated by MI5 beforehand and thinking, no, it's not. It seems relatively even-handed to me. And maybe I was wrong. Like maybe I was wrong in hindsight and maybe it was in fact extremely biased, right? But it feels appreciably more obvious now. Yeah, well, it's everything from the BBC where the first boats out on the water trying to vox-pop people desperately bailing out a dinghy. But I'm really focusing on this, right? Like there has been this change in tone. And while sort of starving people via neglect isn't new, right? Like there have been hundreds and hundreds of cases of people who are sanctioned

fit for work after being dead and so on. This seems especially cruel because it could so simply have been solved. You know, Chrisy Vitero went to the Common Select Committee and said that she didn't think she hadn't heard any reports of any problems that asylum seekers were struggling to get their basic needs met on, what is it, 45 pounds a week? 40 pounds a week. So I've got a little more details here. And by the way, Mercy Begumma is not... This is not an isolated case even in Glasgow, even this month. So according to Rabina Koreshi, the director of a charity called Positive Action in Housing, who basically like Mercy was living on charity donations, but those charity donations were

essentially... The support network of the charities was stretched by COVID. So what you're seeing is not that COVID... This is not a casualty of COVID. What we have is that the Tories in government have created... The Tories and the Lib Dems too, you know, have created a scenario where someone's lifeline is so tenuous that one shock to the system throws it off. And if you make a lifeline that is so tenuous that one shock destroys it, then you have effectively not made a lifeline at all. Well, yeah, because if it relies on charity, how... Also, just aside from just like the kind of out-of-the-box evil that all of this encapsulates, because it's a frank unwillingness to do the most

basic kind of like civic duty towards these people, right? But the fact that the British government has asylum seekers who are nominally in its care, who are relying on handouts from charities just to eat is fucking embarrassing. It's so embarrassing that Britain is such a pathetic country that we can't even afford to give asylum seekers who are an absolute piss in the ocean in terms of the number of people in this country enough so that they can afford to eat, drink and not die. Yeah. Well, it's not that we can't, obviously. Well, no, I mean it can't and inverted commas.

And the other thing, right, is I think just by the fact that there are charities who are supporting these people as much as they can, the fact that it was like infrastructural issues, not as much funding issues that were keeping these charities from like going and doing as much as they could, and the fact that her funeral costs have been raised dozens and dozens and dozens of times over shows that a lot of people in the country actually do want to help. Yeah. And we are being just like basically stopped.

There are opportunities for doing that in like the political sphere. Who exactly are you going to vote for to make that happen? I will point out, we talked about the Tories, we talked about the Lib Dems. Corbinism as a project, right, in the vaunted manifesto that had all of these great things and at the most left-wing policy proposal in our lifetimes, they were going to close one immigration detention center. No one is taking this seriously. No one wants to take it seriously because there is, and again, I'm trying not to be

one of these rainy fascism island, I hate Britain, blah, blah, blah, people. It's hard. But I think there is a desire to be something more. There is a desire to not just to help people who come here looking for shelter, but to not create a world where people need to come here to seek shelter at all. Not because we want to keep them away, but just because the idea of seeking shelter is something that we should be trying to remove these push factors. Well, bad news.

What is it? The tipping point of ice shelves in Greenland now where it's now totally unrecoverable? Yeah, that's been, that was reached a little while ago, so. Yeah, we fucking love to see that. I mean, that for me, because I think there's an extent to which, I mean, there definitely are a lot of people in Britain who like fucking love this children of men's shit, and it's absolutely what they voted for, but it's also absolutely not the majority of people. It is a minority of people in this country, and I feel like it's being pushed on us with

this very aggressive, I mean, I think the most chilling part of that fucking home office video for me was that part where it said, yeah, we're running so many deportation flights today to remove these people who've come to our country like quote unquote, like however it was they described it, and then they said that and we'll be able to run much more once we're out of the European Union and their laws aren't allowing these people to come here, which was such a, I thought, a revealing kind of shell game that they played there where they made this about like, oh, those fucking liberal Europeans. It's like, no, this is like a basic principle of international refugee law that these people

like, they're just as much legally required to accept them in fucking Russia as they are here, like it's not the European Union. Mason You can't tell me that the European Union, which is currently like making its peace with Andrzej Duda in Poland or with Viktor Orban in Hungary, like, if you've been to Brussels, if you've been in the office where EU bureaucrats talk to each other, they sound like the people who wrote the camp of the fucking saints. They would make Steve Bannon blush and like, all of the EU's external like foreign policy has been doing this but worse in the Mediterranean.

Mason Yeah, they did basically like screaming. Mason You're not going to be able to how do the people who decided, oh, yeah, let's just do some slave markets. Mason Yeah, they're never, you're never going to be, it's the idea, yeah, that this is somehow the problem of the people who want to turn like, Malilla and Ceuta into like, giant gun emplacements pointed at Africa, but that's laughable. But also like, there are a couple more things that I want to address, right? Number one is we brought up this point about bureaucracy, why that is so powerful,

why there has not been as much public anger. One of the functions of bureaucracy is to make things seem natural. One of the functions of bureaucracy is to make things seem like, well, these are just the processes that happen and if you follow the processes, you get the outcomes. Mason Yeah, it puts stuff into the passive voice for you. Like, your application for asylum has been refused. Well, been refused by fucking whom? Mason And so, while there was no police officer pointing a gun at Mercy Baguma, she was still murdered and she was still murdered by the state. It was done politely and passively and following the rules and all this. And also the other thing that I was going to say earlier

about the charity is that three other refugees have died in Glasgow in the last three months from starvation. It's not the first person. This is not the first time this has happened. Mason I shouldn't be the fucking last. Mason It's going to get worse when winter hits because you just have people freezing to death. Mason Who's saying, I want to bring you back in before I go into a little bit of, you might call, a little bit more evidence-based anger. I mean, I feel like everything that's been said, I honestly don't know what else to say to this other than that. I feel like this is just a very deliberate way of things to go.

I feel like we've seen, like, crocodile tears. I feel like this is a story that kind of is, yeah. I mean, one thing I sort of was thinking about was just how, in many, the way in which we interact with these stories, see the image of someone starving to death. They didn't have to be when it was all down to, like, when this was really an issue of not just bureaucracy, but also just kind of a very brutal system where you have a home secretary that has openly said they want to make it more brutal. Remember when we were talking about deportation bands and how meek that sounds compared to now?

Mason That's basically just, it's threatening, but it's just shaking the stick. It's not hitting you with it. And you now have a home secretary who's very kind of not just really well aware of the brutality of the system, but is very willing to weaponize that even further as a way of stoking anger. We spoke about the volunteer border guards just now. Again, one of the things that did, I feel like I don't know whether we laid that into existence, whether that was just inevitability of what you do with boomers who live in the Southeast and all have white fans for some reason.

Mason But it happened. It's real now. People got on Twitter and there were like three Asian males spotted at like 5.50 in the morning outside Dover. Mason I mean, my dudes were just hanging out. We were doing some fishing. Right. No, but like also another bit of news that came up today just before we went to record was like the Britain first video that's been going around where they went to a hotel where which was our finest labs, which was supposedly which was supposedly housing refugees. I mean, you know, this whole like there's been this whole thing about like, you know, in this country about, oh, you know, all the refugees are staying in all the hotel

Marriots around the country, which is so which are so nice that one of them that one of them was driven to commit a mass stabbing in Glasgow. That's right. These people are enjoying a free continental breakfast and one of them little boxes of cereal on a taxpayer. It's disgusting. Mason I mean, I mean, basically that was what the Britain first woman said, right? And like, I don't know, it just kind of makes me think that like, this is a home secretary that knows how to weaponize this. And it wouldn't surprise me if like, you know, a lot of the kind of monitoring and surveillance and kind of, you know, the actual act, you know, the actions of the

brutal actions of that's embedded within the system is sort of being carried out by civilians as a way of, you know, when meanwhile, the government can kind of keep launching this kind of pastel colored like infographic videos and visually absolve itself, right? Mason I want to talk about very quickly the consequences of this, right? Because if you consider like former home secretary who like ramped up the hostile environment, even like to the point where it made Theresa May have second thoughts, Amber Rudd, what's she doing now? Well, she has a podcast, right? Saja Javid was the one who like, revoked Shamima Begum's citizenship illegally. What's he doing now? He's posing in The Times magazine.

And he's got job at J.P. Morgan. He's got a very good job at J.P. Morgan. Yeah. So I look forward to whatever Prissy Patel chooses to do next. She's going to work for SpaceX. She's sending migrants into space. Yeah, that's going to be her. So here's the thing, right? A couple things here, right? That Britain first video, the state uses far-right civilians as auxiliary troops. You see it in last in Northern Ireland. You saw it in Northern Ireland. You're seeing it again now. It's just the nature of Britain is this ossified sort of passive voice bureaucracy. And so basically, you're getting people being like, go home CCTV vans, but on a volunteer basis in the South Coast.

And you're getting, and the same thing is like the way the Britain first guys go through, they're almost like a benefits inspector where they're trying to make sure that the migrants don't have, the refugees rather, don't have too nice of a room. Yeah. Well, that's where we get the volunteer border force thing from. And it's why I bring up Northern Ireland is that like the state in general has one trick and it's collusion with far-right radicals who can do all of the headbanging stuff that the government wants to do. And they can be directed and controlled and reigned in as necessary. Right. Or until they can't be. So there's that. But yeah, so Britain and the idea that again,

the other thing to note here, right, is that the Home Office said this is a tragic situation and our condolences go out to Mrs. Begouma's family, which is as far as we know, is a son who we have made an orphan. The Home Office takes the well-being of all those in the asylum system extremely seriously. It doesn't. Well, it does. It does. Just it takes the well-being, takes making it back. What's the opposite of welfare? Oh, yeah. It seriously is not necessarily a positive descriptor. Extremely seriously. And we will be conducting a full investigation into Ms. Begouma's case. But I don't know why there needs to be an investigation because in 2018,

when the UN sent a special rapporteur on extreme poverty to one of the richest countries in the world, there was a country was that there was a sub clause called asylum seekers and migrants. And I'm going to read to you what the UN special rapporteur found with regard to asylum seekers and migrants in the UK on his report on extreme poverty, which, by the way, just seems to have been forgotten. He says, Destitution is built into the asylum system. Asylum seekers are banned from working and limited to a derisory level of support that guarantees they will live in poverty. The government promotes work as the solution to poverty, yet refuses to allow this particular

group to work. While asylum seekers receive some basic support such as housing, they are left to make do with an inadequate poverty level income of five pounds a day. For those who have no recourse to public funds as a result of their immigration status, the situation can be, ready for the understatement of the century, particularly difficult. Such individuals face an increased risk of exploitation and restricted access to educational opportunities. So we knew... Yeah, but he's a fucking like soft leftie. You can tell because he's gotten a U in reporter. Yeah, so he thinks, right, that you should be able to not die because he's been raised soft.

You grew up where I died four times in my own childhood. My father died before he was born. He never did any harm. The Home Office has been... No, the Home Office has been warned time and again for several months that 40 pounds a week is not enough. This is not something that they were told in 2018 several Home Secretaries ago. So Home Secretary Preeti Patel... This is fucking several Home Secretaries ago. Claimed during a parliamentary hearing last week, though this was some months ago. Yeah, we talked about this.

Home Office policies and measures on asylum support were working, and that the department was absolutely making sure people were supported. When asked by the select committee whether she would raise asylum support rates by 20 pounds a week, considering how many asylum seekers are in Britain, that is the cost of the two-way radios for like one devolved administration police department. Yeah, it is the cost of about three Thames Ferry donuts. Yeah, those are delicious donuts, by the way. It's the cost of... I would imagine it would be less than a million pounds, dramatically less.

What am I talking about? It would be less than 10,000 pounds a week. Doing the accounting on this is futile, right? Because they print the fucking money, right? It doesn't... It's a cost that they have chosen not to absorb. The actual number on it does not matter. The prestige of like the hit to our national prestige, if such thing there be of us not... Of us choosing to starve people is less than building a big fuck-off aircraft carrier that we can drive around the North Atlantic, smashing F-35s off of it.

Yeah, with no planes on it. Yeah. So basically, just remember this, right? This is system working as intended. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Yeah, and also the only way that you can get out of this is systematic, right? Like, paying for Mercy Vagoon's funeral five times over is a very nice individual action that a lot of individuals have taken. I'm not sure how much it benefits her. It's almost as if you need some kind of government to do this shit, right?

There are people... There is a system that's in place that could benefit these people, that could treat these people fairly, that could preserve their lives and their welfare, and instead, it has dedicated itself to doing the exact opposite in order to appease like a handful of dickheads in the home counties. Yeah, so also the last point, I want to bring up that America comparison, because I think it's actually a profitable one to make. We have the far-right exiliaries working as an arm of the state informally. We have the systematic disregard for and murder of Black and brown people driven by xenophobia.

We have the incredible overweaning authority. It's where the US is this brutal explosion of violence. We are just a managed, ossifying, deadening decline. Yeah, that's why I'm so depressed about Britain, right? Because the US, like, things are very bad, obviously. Everyone has guns, which are the contradictions, heighteners, and also the management of the American federal government is so sclerotic and so insane that I feel like one of the things that Britain has been very effective at is keeping the people who want this, the people who like doing children of men, they're fine, right? Their heads are thoroughly above water, they're thriving. In the US, that's not the case,

because it's so incompetently managed that even those people are getting their absolute shit kicked in. But hey, you know, I think there are only so many America comparisons we can do. I mean, I don't know what else to say about this. It's something that's... We are raising the question, what is to be done? Yeah, it's something that should never be far from anyone's mind, I think. And it's something that, you know, again, it just means that anyone who talks about how we're better than the States, because we're more liberal, or how we're this or that, or how we're the most compassionate, whatever, you can just ignore them forever. Go on about your day, play a fucking video game,

don't just ignore those people, pretend they're not there, make a fart noise, just never dignify them with an answer. And can we for a moment, through gritted teeth, just address a comment to Centrist Hacks everywhere of, imagine what this would be like if Jeremy Corbyn were in charge. Still probably weirdly not that much better. I mean, better, but like... Yeah, but what I mean is, it's like that constant refrain of them trying to reassure themselves that the way they undermined the only option for making this even slightly better during the entire election process was like in service of something good rather than in service of directly this. Yeah, fair enough. This is the result, like, Centrist Hacks, you got what you

fucking wanted. Yeah, welcome to this. And if you say you don't want it, you're fucking lying, because otherwise you wouldn't have done it. Now they just continue to moan because they're like, oh, well, both options are really bad, and everything's really fucked. And I guess even very even kind of disappointed with Keir Starman not saying anything at all about any of this. Time to go, big man. Yeah. Hey, yeah, I'm about to grab the clutch on this podcast, because it's time for a jarring change in tone. Is this the moment where we remember... Driving metaphor from Riley. Yeah, grab the clutch, pull out the choke and turn on the windscreen wipers. Oh, it's time for a jay turn, baby. Are we going to remember now that we do

a comedy podcast and that occasionally we don't want all of our listeners to kill themselves at once, Heaven's Gate style? Yeah, so we do a comedy because we have, and also we have like a really interesting, an interesting but not a comedy segment with Vicky Spratt later, who you'll know as the housing reporter for the i newspaper. Two servings of vegetables and one of comedy. That's the i newspaper is in the independent, not the i newspaper is in all your Epstein news in one place. It's not the true in our newspaper. No. That'd be fun though. That would be good. We should start that. Brace building to buy independent newspaper. Gettingyourisucks.com. I mean, it's kind of a joke, but I feel like we could actually buy a

local newspaper. So we do, we had a website which was designed to save local news. Oh, we still have because we got bored. We're just like, well, this bits come to its logical conclusion. Time to never think about it again. Yeah, this is no longer funny time to do something else. But hey, everybody, I between just to give ourselves a little, just to give ourselves something that we can laugh at. Yeah. Back to the morning zoo. Yeah. All right. All right. I have a startup that's called the flu. You're listening to Riley and the flu. I'm trying to pronounce this. The startup is called the flu. The flu. Is it Swedish? How many Omelows does this have? None. It's called F-L-O-O-W. So it looks Dutch.

What? Flu. The flu. The flu. You mean the big face? The fly. Yeah. So it's called the fly. I want to get quick, quick fire guesses as to what we think it does. Who's saying the fly? I don't even know. I feel like based on the lessering, it might have some thing to do with food. But again, that's me replacing this W as to D. The fluid. I am obliged to guess that it is a tap in your house that shoe polish comes out. It is a low flow smart toilet. No, none of you are even close to correct. I'm going to give you there. Okay. I'm going to give you the first line of copy.

By the way, this is thanks to friend of the show, Jathan Sadoski, whose podcast This Machine Kills is also worth listening to. This Machine Flues. When we first conceived of the flu eight years ago, we had little in the way of resources. How is the one accent you can do, Swedish? I'm trying to sound Dutch. It's the Enigma Machine at work again. But closer this time, at least geographically quite close. When we first conceived of the flu eight years ago, we had little in the way of resources, but we were foolish, hungry and laser focused to deliver solutions that would transform

the blank market and make blank safer and smarter in the process. Fish market. I'm entirely focusing on water this time. No, nothing to do with water. Why is it called flu then? Because it's named, and I can actually tell you this without revealing what it does. The flow state is when you're really absorbed in a task and doing it well, and they wanted to name themselves after how they felt when they were writing it. So it doesn't describe the product at all. It's a description of how they felt when they were making the product. Yes. So really, depending on what happened on that day,

this product could have been called anything like the horny yet confused. Yes. The horny. The horny and confused. Trying to do touch. It's horny and confused. It's horny. It's the flu. The flooding sucks off. A twink. That's what they want these days. That's what they want these days. We're going to transform the twink market. Alice, Milo, Hussein, have you all done guesses? Yeah, yeah. It's a fucking twink hypnosis video that we watched on the stream. Hussein, I want one for you.

You're twink now. I still have no idea. So I'm just going to go with my default, which is it's a machine that somehow sucks you off. We had that. That exists. The Chinese dick sucking machine. It's called a sex teleporter. The world of blank. They want these days. The world of blank is changing fast. At the flow, we're helping to accelerate that change with award-winning blank solutions that address the costs and efficiencies and dangers faced by blank solutions. Wait, dangers?

By combining data science and social science with cutting edge technology, we're... What dangers does this protect against? We're making mobility safer and smarter for everyone. Mobility. I've added one word that's actually a signifier. Everything else. It's pure marketing pablum. Is it like a high-vis thing for riding a bicycle? No, this is a very highly valued startup. It's multi-multi-millions.

That doesn't tell me anything. Yeah, that doesn't mean anything. Okay, so it's to do with mobility and that combines data science and social science with cutting edge technology in order to make it... In order to make something good. I've got nothing for this. Because it's just lorem ipsum. It's just innovation ipsum. Yeah, corporate responsibility, Black Lives Matter flu.

So I'm going to do another. Because this is one of the worst, one of the best I've discovered for just having so much copy that just doesn't say what it does. That just is just innovation pablum. I've got another one that I think you're definitely going to guess. Reasons to work with the flu. Okay. Quality people. We are proud to have some of the best minds in the business,

always on hand to deliver first-class work for our clients. So that tells you they're a B2B company. Okay. Advanced capabilities. Our solutions are developed not only to a high technical standard for robustness and reliability, but also to delight their users. Wait, wait, wait. Is this like an interior design thing?

Like they feng shui your office? No. Not even close. How am I getting your office a nice flu? Leading R&D. Playing a key role in a number of industry leading initiatives. We aim to lead our clients confidently into the future. Does anyone have any ideas what this does yet?

Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. You've, I think you've stumped all three of us here. Yeah, this thing is fucked. No, that's the thing. You will never guess what it is, but I would be very interested in your question. But you're torturing us nonetheless. Is this some sort of communications thing? Yes.

Milo has gotten into the ballpark. Yeah. Okay. So because the thing, what I would like, when I ask for guesses, I would like real guesses based on what you've heard here. I've been doing those. What do you actually think this is? I haven't been.

Communications. It helps all your staff speak Swedish to each other. So you're convinced those guys understand your emails. So this is the last chance. I want, what do you actually think this is? Genuinely. It's going to be an app, isn't it? Yes.

Sort of. Yeah. It's like some kind of Apple platform that facilitates some sort of communication either between your employees or like, it's something like that. Not employees, but it does facilitate communication and it does want to make mobility safer. Mobility safe, is it? This just sounds like a glorified like hands-free phone thing.

It's so much more evil than that. There's something to it. Make some mobility safer. There's something to it. I'll give you, I'll give you one more thing, one more thing. It's supposed to make travel by car safer specifically. I was going to say, is this something to do with like scooters? No, it's supposed to make travel by car safer specifically.

It's a heads up display that your boss can yell at you at, causing you to veer into a truck. It tells you where like all your fleet vehicles are or something. No. Because it's for an individual. No, because there would be fleet. It's an individual, individual drivers will use it, but it will be let's say foisted upon them by a third party.

Oh my God. Okay. Okay. I've got an idea. I've got an idea. Okay. Is it like, is it designed to like track how you drive? So things like to do with cognition and like how quick you break and that's a big part of it.

Hussain. Okay. Now who gets that information? Insurance company. Insurance company. Yep. There it is. Oh, but this has been around for a while.

They'd like the black box insurance thing. Yeah. But welcome that what basically the flu has done is they've turned your smartphone into the black box. Oh, so I can't get away from the fucking thing. So we thought that this was just going to be standard hardware and all new cars, but they've short circuited that and this is why it's worth 11 trillion dollars or whatever, is because they figured out, oh, what does everyone have and keeps in their car? Their phones.

So what if your phones was spying on your driving? So the idea and vision for the flu was conceived by... I wish it wasn't called that. Milo, you're going to like this. Mm-hmm. Aldo Monteforte. Amazing. Oh, you came out with a flow over here.

I mean, we've got all these Swedish guys working on an app to tell your insurance company how you're driving. I got one. I mean, when do you always go to Italian American when this is clearly Italian, Italian? Like, my startup, Operazione Gladio. I think he's British, actually. But I also do love... Guido British Italian, which also exists. The Italian flow state, where you get so into just making spaghetti that you're just saying

14 kilos, but you don't even know what they are. Yeah, you're speaking in rude terms. Okay, if he's Guido British Italian, his parents almost certainly own a fish and ship shop and are millionaires. So the idea and vision for the flow was first conceived by Aldo Monteforte, who wanted to make vehicles safer, smarter, and cheaper for all. And again... How is it going to make them any safer? Because the idea is, if you can only pull on the cost lever,

if you're purely dedicated to supply side everything, then what you have to do is you have to say, okay, we're going to invent a little widget that imposes costs on doing things that are increasingly risky or outside the acceptable boundaries. But there are already costs attached to those things. But they want to do it smarter and more importantly, they want to make money while doing it. Yeah, I think they're not misunderstanding anything,

because they don't care about all the things they claim to care about. All they care about is extracting a rent from the market, basically. But as someone who drives a car a lot, I see a lot of people who clearly don't have that much money, but are invested in spending every fucking penny they have in extending their penis as much as possible, by driving a cheap old car, but with a big engine, as fast as humanly possible around streets that are not appropriate for it, because they want to be a fucking legend.

Yeah, this is your most middle-aged opinion. No, this is... It's not my most... No, middle-aged people love doing this. It's my most... How the fuck do you afford that much petrol, just for going A to B? Like, people who are doing like 130 on the fucking North Circular

in their fucking Audi A3 S line from 2003. Like, if you had money, you wouldn't own that old of a car. So, you just love being a legend so fucking much that you can't not drive it as big. This is a very particular culture in the Southeast and Northwest Kent, where you get like a shittiness, and you give it like really low-riding wheels and an engine, where it's so big that if you go above 40, it'll just kind of keep popping and crackling, but people still do it anyway. Oh, yeah, nice.

And then they get their insurance through the flu. Also, the one thing I've learned in the course of looking this up in order to find out whether their CEO was, in fact, Italian, he's just Italian, Italian, by the way. Thank you. Oh, it's the... ...is that they capitalise... They capitalise the thee in the flu every time. Yeah, it's the name.

That's the most upsetting thing about it, is that it's not just... Also, that's still a North Jersey slang term. Yeah, I'm not going to say that. The North Jersey guys pronounce that as a G. Flu drive is the main product, and they use a policy holder smartphone as a powerful mobility sensor. Once the user has registered and downloaded the app from their insurance company, it will start recording all journeys completed by the car. That means if I'm in my car just sitting still and I have my phone in my hand and I drop it,

it suddenly thinks my car has gone 12 feet in the air. I'm sure that they do. I'm sure that they probably worked that out somehow in a way that they don't tell you and can probably fuck you around. Yeah, I fucking think so. Oh, but also, it's that thing where insurance gets so specific that it just ceases to be insurance. On a journey where you crash your car, it senses that you've crashed your car and raises your premium for that day to 5,000 pounds. If you reduce this to its natural

conclusion, it's just like, well, this just isn't insurance anymore. This is just paying to repair your car. This is just Google Maps for where you've gone that an insurance company gets to see. Our technology is able to automatically differentiate between a car journey and other modes of transport like a bus or train. They are tracking you all the time. Explain how it can tell that you're on a bus. I told, I already said it said it does. What is the bus sensor? I don't know.

The bussie sensor. It detects if you're driving an e-busy. Yeah, so basically, yeah, and you can also manually adjust the app after a journey to allow for a trip so they've been a passenger, not a driver. So if you have the flu... Wait, so if I crash my car, all I have to do is immediately get on my phone and do the, yeah, actually, I was in the passenger seat thing and my premiums are fine. Also, if you ever ride in a car with anyone else... If you're just streamlined insurance fraud.

Also, if you ever ride in a car with anyone else, you have to like, send a text message or your insurance premium goes up slightly. Awesome. Yeah. Wait, what if my friend is a better driver than me? All of this should have been thought about by the flu, but it wasn't. Yeah. You could actually, if you're a good driver, you could sell your services to people just driving them around and then claiming to have been the passenger.

This is like one of the... To be fair to this company, which I don't want to be, this is only slightly more fucked than the way insurance companies already operate because what they do is they just implement these grand statistical models that have absolutely zero relevance in individual cases. My car insurance is still really expensive because I work in the entertainment industry, which according to insurance companies means I'm going to crash my car nine times a day, just because James Dean did it. I have had like literally, I have had a car for like over seven years and I've never

crashed it fucking once, but apparently because I'm in the entertainment industry, I'm definitely going to crash it every day. And if I walked out and got a different job tomorrow, I would stop crashing my car. So the insurance industry is just the architect from the matrix, but each of the little screens in his room has a different kind of like Nissan micro. So basically what we're saying is that this is doing mostly what the insurance industry did. It's basically doing something stupid and harmful, faster and more efficiently, with a lot of unnecessary surveillance in and around your...

A trash feature classic. Yeah, this is totally in a wheelhouse. So they basically score you on every journey. Smoothness of your driving, whether or not you're distracted. So if you like look at your phone or change your music too much. There's to be a fucking chauffeur for my phone now. Yeah, you're a chauffeur for your phone. You also, if you're fatigued, so if you drive for too long at a stretch,

so if you don't take breaks every two hours, your speed and the time of day that you choose to drive in each journey is assigned to score and each score dynamically changes your premium. Damn. No driving during the siesta. So this would really suck if you're a gig economy worker whose main job is involving driving long stretches in a car and then being penalized for taking breaks. Yeah, it's almost as though you're getting penalized for either taking breaks or not taking breaks and your choice that's left to you is, who's going to penalize me less? It's all very good and cool, actually.

We like it. Actually, we think it's good. But here's the thing, right? You're saying, I don't like the flu. I don't want to be spied on. I think this is a very exploitable thing, blah, blah, blah. I'm a lefty lawyer and I don't like being spied on by my phone while I'm driving. Yeah. So basically, you don't see your score, by the way. Only your insurance company sees your score.

Of course. So however, here's the thing. If you score well enough, there is a rewards module that can be integrated into flu drive. Oh, I love the rewards module. Allowing insurers to offer a range of food and drink vouchers and discounts at online stores. Oh, fucking hell. They give you a little treat. You don't crash your car enough so you get to go to Hollywood Bowl and have a wimpy.

You get to go to Harvester and film it for your influencer channel. Oh, God. Oh, the influencer family should get one of these. I for one, I'm looking forward to my insurance going up. The next time I decide to go to the Dover crossing at 5am with my homies, because there's only a few hours where you're allowed to hang out with other guys before you get arrested. Before your car insurance starts going up. Yeah.

Because you know, also, it's like if you have to do, it's this weird thing where it's going to, if you have to do anything outside of normal, you're speeding because you're driving to the hospital or if you're driving overnight to go see a family member or just doing something that isn't in the normal realm of like a short, smooth drive where you don't look at your phone, then you have to all of a sudden, now you have to bear the mental load of being like, well, I have to be making cost benefit decisions hundreds of times more per day. Yeah. The app just doesn't understand that my wife really wanted me to take it to see her boyfriend at 3 o'clock in the morning.

But who wants to make that many cost benefit decisions? That sucks. The rational consumer. I want to think about something else. But anyway, if you really want to tear your hair out, Milo, this is really going to infuriate you. I present you a blog post from TheFlu. Amazing. TheBluug. UK.

There's an O God and a line through it. You know, it's just F-L-O-O-W. No, I know. I meant TheBluug. TheBluug. TheBluug. TheBluug. TheFlu. TheBluug.

TheBluug. Because you're having a dynamic moment. So UK CarShare and Company. Prince of Sweden. CarShare has recently launched a new app, CarMate, powered by a global telematics provider, TheFlu. You're not like CarMate. You're fucking spying on me.

You're not my mates. So the company launched CarShare in response to the COVID-19 crisis, loaning out cars from members of the local community to be used by frontline NHS workers, charity workers and food bank workers free of charge. The scheme is currently operating successfully, with 300 cars donated in Bristol, Brighton in the London-Daklands area, and so on and so forth. So how does TheFlu play into this?

The CarMate app, which is built using TheFlu drive solution, is a vital element in the sharing process. The app allows CarShare to monitor the journeys of volunteer drivers and driving behavior when on the road, providing peace of mind for all those who are donating their cars to others. So basically what they're doing is they're saying, hey, doctors and nurses, it costs a lot to park in hospitals. Maybe some of you don't have cars, especially nurses,

because we don't pay you anything. Here, you can drive to work, but we're going to spy on you. Yeah, that's very cool. It's very good, actually. How do you feel about that, Milo? It's extremely normal and definitely the solution to the problems that we experience. I think this is like... More surveillance.

I was having a conversation with a friend about this the other day, that there is scarcely a dumb guy who went to boarding school in the UK who hasn't left a mediocre, red-brick university and been like, I've got a great idea for a startup. And that is exactly what this strategy is. It's this idea of just like, oh, there's this huge problem to do with the way in which we pay and value NHS staff. I'm going to solve it by making sure that each one of them gets loaned a Citroen Saxo

for up to six weeks, and they'll get spied on, but in a way that's actually really woke because it's about road safety. And that's important because the Citroen Saxo has a really bad euro and cap safety rating. Like, honestly, the things are fucking death trap. That's right. That's this, except an Italian guy. Oh, and he went to Stanford, too. Yeah, so yeah, that's the great thing.

They say a key worker with six points has been approved to use a donated car by the insurer, despite the normal restriction being three points, because the app will be actively monitoring her driving behavior. So she's a legend. She's got six points on a license. She doesn't fuck about it. Yeah, essentially, yeah, we are providing surveillance solutions for the dirty pores who are doing all the jobs that we're clapping for them for,

so that when they use their car, you know, they won't do a Ferris Bueller's day off. How much is this value that again? Oh, a whole bunch. The app will tell if you crash a parade and begin singing a song. Well, it'll tell if you, if you joyride the Ferrari around at least that nature. Let's see. Well, it's on the global, it's on FinTech and ShureTech 100 list. Their annual revenue is about five million pounds, but...

Just assume a lot. Like, more than it needs to be for something that essentially the vibe is, it cannot tell if you're on a bus or not, but... Yeah, well, they had to program. That's the other thing, right? This is something I always like to think about with these companies, where because the problem it's solving is so idiotic and they have to solve it in such a convoluted way, it always creates new other problems like, well, wait a minute,

how is our app for spying on people going to tell if they're on a bus? Where then they have to solve like nine other problems created by the ludicrousness of this solution because it's a technical solution to, again, problems that aren't technical. So you just have to keep pinning on little more solutions until you've got a Rube Goldberg device that just tries to snitch on you to whoever will listen. Yeah, it actually has a patented Orton Towers sensor, so it knows whenever you're on a roller coaster because we had some problems with people going on roller coasters and then getting banned from driving because if you drove like a roller coaster, that'd be pretty intense.

See, I don't know exactly how much it's worth, but I presumably probably quite a bit. Considering it's because it's raised $16.6 million, but like that could have been for 5% of the company, we don't know. Honestly, it's worth more than my dad's sapphire mine, I'll tell you that much. Anyway, I think I'm about ready to hand it off to myself and Hussein while we talk to Vicki Spratt about housing. Thank you, Raleigh. Hey, and welcome to the second portion of our show where Hussein and I will be speaking with the housing reporter at the iNews paper and also writer at Refinery29. Vicki Spratt,

Vicki, how's it going? Hey, thanks for having me. I'm good. How are you guys? You know, still housed, fortunately. Just about, yeah, just about. That's all any of us can hope for at the moment. Indeed, but certainly not what the government appears to be working towards, he says with the excellent segue. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking, I'm looking at ways in which I can register as a office

so that I too can get a press among J near where I live. It is, we must sacrifice ourselves to save Pretz business model. If they have to adopt a new business model in order to maintain competitiveness with consumers, then we have failed. Well, yeah, or the other option is that all of the Pretz are going to be turned into housing through permitted development rights. So let's talk about it. Let's get into it. Before we get into permitted development, I just want to do a little bit of a table setting, right? So at the beginning of the pandemic, the government's move to help

renters was largely an unenforceable bit of advice to landlords to be compassionate and then a moratorium on evictions through courts for some months that was about to expire last week. So can you give us a little more detail around how we got to where we are, how we got there and what's going on? Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, I'll start at the beginning because that's always a good place to start. When the scale of this pandemic became clear, perhaps not the public health aspect, but the economic and financial aspect, the government realized that they were going to have to do something to make sure we didn't have a homelessness crisis. And they talked about

mortgage holidays for landlords and for homeowners. But for renters, the best they could do was a stay on evictions. A stay obviously is not a ban, it's just a suspension, which initially was three months and then was extended at the 11th hour, but I'll come back to that. And they did also increase the local housing allowance to what we call the 30th percentile, which roughly translates into like normal terminology as the lowest third of market rent in a given area. This sounds good, right? That's accessible through universal credit, which is good. But the wider context of that is that housing benefit actually used to cover the lower half of market rent in any given area, so the 50th percentile.

But that was cut during austerity. So during this global pandemic, yes, it did get increased, but it was not restored to its pre-austerity levels. And given that the recession we are now in, as our economy constricts is the biggest we've experienced in living memory, that's just not good enough. And lots of renters have been falling behind on their rent, obviously because they've been furloughed or they've lost their income. And where landlords and homeowners have had mortgage holidays, which obviously they do have to pay back in on their mortgage, like it's not just free money, but you have more security and a longer time to pay it back. Renters have had no help with what we're calling rent debt. And this is the thing you mentioned,

the government just advised landlords to be compassionate. Now, as we know, landlords tend to only think about themselves and their investment in housing. They don't always think of themselves as providing someone with a home. So that's got us all into hot water. And I'm hearing from lots and lots and lots of private renters who are not experiencing compassion and being threatened with eviction. Now, the evictions ban was supposed to end last week. Up until the last minute, we were like, is it going to happen? Is it going to happen throughout lockdown? All of the housing announcements, make of this what you will, by the way, have been being rolled out at like five PM on a Friday, which is really dodgy because like, no one's watching the news or reading the news

at five PM on a Friday. It's fine for me to have to work a bit late, but the people who need the information about whether they're going to be evicted or not might miss it. So that's been happening consistently with pretty much every announcement about housing. But on the evictions extension specifically at the end, well, it was kind of mid afternoon last Friday, after months and months of being told to sort this out, they announced that they were extending the eviction ban for another month. We don't even know how bad this recession is going to be, how many people are going to lose their jobs, like another month is like a drop in the ocean. And then today, just before I came onto this chat with you guys, they've done another

last minute Friday announcement, which is that, but this is actually a good one. But again, I question why I couldn't have just been decided like months ago and given people peace of mind. The notice on an eviction, which up until this point was always three months, right? So you get served with an evictions notice and you've got three months notice, but obviously your landlord can't evict you until it goes to court unless you agree to leave. That's now going to be six months. So even if when or if the evictions, I'm not going to call it an evictions ban. So I keep doing that. That's actually the government's language. It's a stay on evictions. It's a suspension ban that has like seeped into all of our consciousness. They've been very, very

clever with that branding. So what was I saying? Six months. Even when the suspension does lift, you'll have six months notice, which is something. But it's just not really addressing the issue, which is as a private renter, if you fall behind on your rent and your landlord wants to get rid of you, you're still going to owe them the money unless you've been able to pay it through benefits or savings. So it's just inadequate really. Yeah. And so it seems like what we're doing is we have all of these, and you've compared this to the A-levels crisis, where the government just sort of has this problem that it is temperamentally unwilling to solve, which is quite simply that the rent is higher than most people's incomes right now collectively. Those numbers just don't

match up basically. And there is something they can do to solve the problem that would create an evictions crisis and mass homelessness, but that would require them forcing the landlords to compromise, which they're temperamentally unable to do in any significant way. That's why I would imagine you have rent being looked at as something that goes into arrears rather than something that gets forgiven, even though we're also forgiving mortgage payments at this time, right? Well, that's really interesting. So I guess to pick up on your initial point, why is it similar to the exam results crisis? It's similar. There's a direct parallel in that experts in housing, like experts in education, were warning this would happen from the minute we

went into lockdown, from the minute we realized how bad the coronavirus crisis was going to be. They have had the very best information, the very best modelling, the very best minds talking about this, and they have not moved. I honestly don't really know why. I don't know if it's like an ideological aversion to being seen as weak or to be performing new turns or they just don't really understand in this case, the housing market, kind of like they put their faith in an algorithm, maybe without really understanding an algorithm with the exam's results. It does feel like a real, real clusterfuck because it could have been sorted out so, so much sooner. And this kind of ad hoc piecemeal way of approaching it. When we're not talking

about something small or easy to resolve, like in the same way that exam's results were about people's futures, right? Their life chances, what's going to happen to them for the whole of their adult life. Here we're talking about people's homes where they live, the roof over their head, like it's wild to me that they haven't given private ventures any peace of mind throughout this crisis and have kept things changing. What does that do to a person? In housing we talk about this thing called ontological security and that's basically the human need for security and stability. One of the things that undermines it the most according to psychologists is housing stress. So we shouldn't underestimate what all this dithering and changing their mind and saying

one thing and doing another has had to people who has had on people who are facing homelessness or being threatened by their landlord or their letting agent. And I think it's just not been taken seriously enough. Like Labour presented a draft bill and really good solutions I thought that they worked on with an expert housing lawyer called Giles Pica back in May. I don't know why it wasn't, it wasn't discussed at that point. And then I suppose to your point about rent debt or rent arrears and where the money goes and how easy this would be to solve, it depends how you frame it but what I keep coming back to is you just need to give private renters money, right? Like whether that's through, like clearly through benefits, if a rent if a renter is behind on

their rent because of coronavirus, give them money, like find a way to do it through the benefit system. But then, right, that's really interesting because the reason we've seen so many people rely on the private rented sector which has expanded exponentially over the last 30 years is because A, we allowed house prices to rise beyond earnings across most of the country and B, we sold off all our social housing, not all of it but loads of it and didn't replace it. So loads of people who would have traditionally been in social housing now are in the PRS. And what we're looking at, right, and maybe this is why the government's reluctant, is essentially a massive public bailout of landlords.

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly popular. Hussein, what's your thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, I feel like Vicky's kind of explained a lot of kind of how much I know about this anyway. I think one of the interesting things that you brought, Vicky, was the idea of like, is this an ideological aversion or is this kind of like them just not understanding the grip of reality? And I feel like it is kind of an ideological block. Like as you kind of said, that solutions have been posited. And even like the most basic solution of like, give private renters like more support and more money, at least for kind of like the period where this virus is still like active and it's still like the economy still isn't kind of functioning in the way that

it did like last year. That kind of poses a real ideological bias of, you know, a country that has largely been dependent on landlords, where you have like small towns and commuter towns which have like best survival is largely rooted in the overvaluation of property and like the continued overvaluation of that property. So in many ways, like a solution that would benefit and help people is also one that would change the fabric of this country, right? Well, what would the solution be? Also by the question whether the economy was working last year? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm being very, I'm very charitable. I guess like what I mean is that when you have an economy that's sort of like, I mean, this is also one of those things as well,

where this problem was the problem of like earning like rental costs and like house prices, vastly outstripping earnings. This is a problem that existed long before coronavirus and has sort of maybe been accelerated by this moment in the same way that lots of problems, structural problems have been accelerated by this moment. And you have a government that like is largely ideologically unwilling to like, you know, enact solutions that don't benefit the people who like own property. I mean, this government, they have done, they have done some stuff, right, to be, to be fair to them. They did promise the Renters' Rights Bill and the Queen's Speech at the end of last year, which is a really good piece of legislation that should absolutely go through.

And it actually was put forward in the Lords by a Lib Dempere, Corbarianist Olly Grenda, then adopted by the government. That's often how legislation works. That, in my view, like, could have been fast-tracked when the pandemic hit, right? Like, take the domestic abuse bill, for example, that was fast-tracked because it was seen as urgent and it had been delayed and delayed and delayed. Why not fast-track the Renters' Rights Bill? We were promised an end to Section 21 evictions for anyone who's been fortunate enough never to encounter one that is also known as a no-fault eviction. It's basically a clause in the 1988 Housing Act whereby Eleanor doesn't have to give you a reason to evict you. That, we were promised under Theresa May, would be abolished,

we're still waiting on it. Why was that not fast-tracked? Getting rid of Section 21, during this pandemic, would have made so much sense. Then there's another way of evicting people, which is Section 8. But at least you're like getting rid of no-fault evictions and under Section 8, it would be more rigorous, right? The way that a landlord would evict their tenant. And then I suppose the broader context here, like the macro picture that you're referring to of house prices outstripping earnings and increasing reliance on the private rented sector to the extent that it's now the second largest housing tenure in the country. Yeah, like, people have been talking about this for a long time and coronavirus didn't

cause the housing crisis. Our addiction to the idea that you could make more from owning property than you can from working did that. That's like the crux of it. And the kind of the increasing stigma that has surrounded social housing in recent years politically, the lack of political will to replace stocks sold off through help, through right to buy, that did that. And obviously, it's always important to caveat, like, we have a national housing crisis, but it is also very much a local one. So, like, it's very different in Cornwall and Sheffield. It's very different in London and, where's a good example, the Cotswolds. Like, every region in this country has a housing crisis, but it's slightly different. There are

some places where it is actually affordable to buy at home for some people. But there are lots of places where private rents are unaffordable for people who can't afford to buy. This is, like, based on average, average wages. So, we've completely failed to tackle it and successive governments on the left and the right have avoided doing anything about it for years. And I think what we're seeing right now, and we're only just beginning to see it, and I genuinely, like, incredibly concerned about how it's going to play out for the people who are on the sharp end of it, i.e. renters on low and middle incomes who live hand to mouth because they're rents so expensive, in a really precarious way. And, like, we knew about this. We have,

like, a crisis. It's not a housing crisis. It's like a crisis of identity in this country about who we are and what we've allowed to happen to home, right? The one thing in your life that should be constant, the one place that you should be safe, the one thing that you shouldn't have to worry about, like your basic need, which is shelter, we have just completely financialized housing and allowed that thing that should be so sacred to become completely corrupted. And now we're in a massive crisis, and we do have a huge problem. And I think that the government are really, really scared of it. Well, and that's why I think you see them, that they know that they have to do something.

But they know that the one thing will work is also the one thing they can't do, right? So they keep coming up with these just bizarre plans to sort of try to square this circle of housing has been financialized and not enough people can have access to it. Rents are going high, wages are staying down, but, like, broadly speaking, people do need to be housed to some minimum standard. So how are we going to do that? And it seems to me that the main, their main weapon in that arsenal is to say, ah, what we have are a lot of empty office buildings. And this isn't even, again, just driven by coronavirus. This is driven by like the movement of companies outside city centers. This is driven by the fact that

homeworking has been on the rise, not for the last six months, but for the last, like, you know, several years. There are lots and lots of office blocks and bits of commercial property coming available. And so the solution has been for the government to say, okay, we're going to bring back this thing called permitted development, where we're going to knock the bottom out of housing standards if you're converting existing buildings, whether that's warehouses or office buildings or whatever, into housing, right? And so what you, what you then get is you get a way to flood the market with housing, but that doesn't or, and that doesn't require significant state investment. It doesn't require looking to say,

expropriate the wealth either through taxation or through, like, occupancy laws or whatever of landlords. It's a way to try to house people so they're not homeless, essentially, by deregulating, which basically means bringing back slums, right? Yeah. Although they, we're not bringing them back because I've been in a few of them. They're definitely here right now. So PDR, permitted development rights, has been around for quite, quite some time. David Cameron's government really liked it. And basically what it is, as you rightly said, is converting existing buildings, commercial buildings into residential property without having to go through normal planning, which is, if when you, when you put it,

that simply is kind of wild, like planning permission exists for a reason. It's to make sure that communities are built properly, you know, like where, where a building's gonna, gonna sit is really important, like what's around it is really important. And then there's another aspect of that, which is standards. Now the thing with PDR is it is supposed to still get building regulations signed off. And obviously that like speaks to the minimum size of a room, for instance. But what I have found in many of the permitted development conversions from office to residential that I've been into, in Croydon, for instance, and Bradford actually, there's loads of PDR and Bradford. They, they, I don't, I don't think they've ever had building reg sign off. And what I've not been able

to get to the bottom of in my investigation is like how the fuck that happened. Sorry, I just swore. Don't know if that's allowed. But like, how did that happen? Because legally they're supposed to have building reg sign off. So you have these tiny, tiny rooms that are way beneath the minimum standards that shouldn't exist, potentially, sometimes aren't safe. Like this is what experts I've interviewed have said, like, the safety is highly questionable. And also just really bad for people's mental health to be in a tiny, tiny box room in a converted office. That is now housing, like there's a block in Croydon, which is actually where I grew up. And I remember, I think it used to be the BT building. And it's a huge, huge, that massive block with mirrored glass windows

that barely even open. Some of them don't open at all. That's now been turned into flats. So this is a good illustration of the problem. And this is why we should be concerned that this government have been like, yeah, let's do more PDR in response to Coronavirus and use up all the empty prex or whatever. Because that building once for Croydon was jobs. There were people who were coming in and out of Croydon, maybe lived nearby using local businesses, like it was an important spot in the community. Now, of course, is residential fine, but there's less office space. Croydon was like a really busy place, like a really busy, busy commercial area. That's no longer the case. So now it's becoming kind of commute about people just coming and going.

That has an effect on the community. And I know that the Labour MP for Croydon is really concerned about that. But then there's another issue, which is the quality of the flats just isn't up to scratch. They're noisy, too warm. The windows don't open. The water pressure always goes off because it was never meant to be residential. So it wasn't built with proper plumbing. And then like down the road, above what where there used to be this incredible nightclub called the Black Sheet Bar where I spent like much of my youth is now was once office offices and like the club underneath and is now a supermarket and flats. They've got a similar problem, right? So A, the erosion of the community. But B, because it was never meant to be flat, it doesn't have the kind

of boilers that you'd have to put in if you were building flats from scratch. So it's just the old boilers that like heated the office block like poorly. Now that they've got however many, I think it's like 120 flats, however many people living there, showering at different times of day, needing their heating on, whatever, the boilers have just packed up. So last year, for months and months and months, the residents in the building didn't have any hot water. Just didn't have any hot water. And one thing when you remember as well, like these these permitted development buildings aren't just emerging out of whole cloth, right? Like, no, people are buying like businesses free. And as as you say, in some cases, like family offices, that means like a business,

a basically an asset management firm that exists to manage the wealth of one family based in a tax haven will own a company like you, you talk about inspired homes, which wins awards all the time and stuff. And then basically just converts office building into office buildings in zone sort of three or four or Croydon or whatever or Tower Hamlets into slums from a tax haven, all for the benefit of one family. Yeah, well, yeah, and that they most of their money is yet offshore money. And I think the person in question who is who is the freeholder of that particular building that I mentioned, which is the block above what used to be the black sheet bar, the freeholder is actually not inspired homes as a different company.

But inspired homes, I think, with the developer. That particular individual owns a huge percentage of housing in Britain. I think it's like 1% of all homes or something wild. One man who has all his funds offshore goes around buying up freeholds on these properties, charging people ground rent and just just makes money out for conversions. And I just, I think it's alarming that that that has been one of the things that this government has responded to COVID with, right? Like, Oh, I know what we'll do. We'll just lower standards even further when what we face currently is a crisis in housing standards, not just like in homes that are being rented out, not just in social housing, but also in the housing that

is being built and sold like that block in Croydon. I met people there who had bought flats there through help Dubai. So the government had effectively subsidized these shitty conversions. Man, when you when you lay it all out at once there, it's pretty depressing. Yeah. It seems to feel like a lot going on in terms of like when I was like looking, looking really up on this. You have like this dual problem of like a government that's like obsessed with like fudging the numbers and kind of like, you know, there's been lots of kind of critiques in like on trade publications for like builders and developers, which is just along the lines of what we've been saying before, which is this is really poor quality housing,

like, you know, also a situation where a family where you have like, you know, maybe four, six people are getting the same amount of space as like, maybe one or two people. Um, you know, so you end up having you end up like creating these like untenable and like, I think one build to put it in terms of being like, you're creating like human warehouses, which I thought was a very like quite horrific way of describing it, but also like probably the most accurate. I think I think that that particular quote is in reference to when permitted development buildings are used as temporary accommodation, which happens all the time. I've been into those blocks. There's one in Catford that's particularly bad. There's another in Harlow

that's particularly bad. And the one I saw in Bradford was particularly bad. And what they mean by human warehouses is literally like, yeah, there's no communal space, windows don't open, people are just stuck on each other. And that's emergency accommodation, because we don't have enough social housing. Yeah. It also distracts me like one of the other problems that I think might come up and maybe you probably know, you probably know more about this than I do, which is just about how this doesn't really solve the problem. This doesn't really solve a problem of like, um, like landlords and property owners, it's like making a killing out of these new developments. Um, without kind of giving assurance of like a quality or giving even the protections

are for renters that like this, this was trying to resolve, right? All it's doing is sort of, sort of like increasing a supply with very bad products. If you're without kind of addressing any of the structural kind of dynamics have caused this problem to begin with. I'm saying it's like the, the lever here only goes one way. You know, the lever only goes more, is only goes deregulate more market because there's very, there's not much else that you really want to do because quite simply because like to do something else would require a radical change away from what Britain from, from a, a neoliberalized Britain where most people's houses are also their bank accounts. And whether that is a family office or the perceived,

the perceived idea that if you devalue the property, if you, if you make a family office harder, uh, if you make it harder rather for a family office to, you know, convert, uh, like a dog kennel into houses for people, right? Like if you make that harder, then there's this perception on the part of, you know, corritory voters that their house price is going to be affected. And so I don't know how you square that circle by just continuing to do the same thing. It reminds me of this situation. So I feel like a proposal like this sort of came out by one of the think tanks. It might have been like policy exchange, but it might be one of these other places where they were trying to basically defend like making like, like micro houses or like micro

flats, um, where, and they kind of like, there were pictures showing what these microcars would look like. And one of these pictures, it was like a bunk bed and underneath the bunk bed is like where you would have like your little kitchenette, but also like a toilet next. It was like, it was like one of those things that I imagined like Joel Golby would do on the kind of like, this is how much, uh, what's it called? Like, you know, the whole like his old like renters column thing. They were like trying to defend it on the basis of like, oh, you know, this is just like how much space we get. And the most important thing is to kind of get people onto the housing ladder, like no matter what. So it's almost as if like, I feel like this is the argument that like the

conservative party, um, many of whom like have kind of like have histories with policy exchange and all these other places are like pretty much advancing, but like that kind of solution, which isn't really a solution for like a dignified living, but more, we're trying to get people to become homeowners or in this case, like own a small section of a cubicle. At any cost, right? Right. Yeah. Well, I think there's a few things, there's a few things here. Um, yes, the obsessive focus on homeownership, uh, in policy terms has completely, um, blinkered recent governments from dealing with the mess of the PRS private rented sector. Although I would caveat that by saying that whatever you think of Theresa May, um,

she did something that was a huge departure from David Cameron and George Osborne, which is that she hired loads of people from shelter, um, and had them sitting with her in number 10. Um, not, not people who agreed with her or with her party. Um, a guy called Toby Lloyd, he wrote an amazing book called Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, which I highly recommend. Um, and she listened to him, right? So like the letting fee ban that I was involved with that, that was a consequence of him being hired and her listening to him. Um, the decision to ban section 21, um, the social housing, green paper, white paper. Um, there was good stuff happening, right? The renters rights bill, which was promised before Boris Johnson took over.

There was a shift occurring. Um, she also said she wanted to end help to buy. Um, which was a good thing because that has basically poured petrol on the bonfire that is house prices. Um, so stuff, stuff was happening and there was a shift and I think the preoccupation with Brexit and then now COVID and Boris Johnson, maybe not getting housing as much as May did or being ideologically, um, unable to grapple with it and, and also perhaps not being able to get as many great people to work for him, um, has definitely shaped the direction that things have gone in. So I think there's a lot of behind the scenes, politicking that is informing what we're seeing. Um, and then I suppose like the other aspect of this, which is like, you know, house prices have

got so out of control in recent years, it's really important to note like they have slowed down. They are slowing down. Um, because you can only stretch it so far. You could only stretch how much property can cost beyond what people are earning before banks will say, no, we can't mortgage on it anymore. And we are seeing that happen now. So I think that those people, members of my own family, who I get into this with regularly, um, who are like, Vicki, you know, house prices always rise because that's just what they do. And I'm like, okay, sure. That's not what they, that's not just always what they do. They crash. Like the housing market is one of the most volatile parts of the economy. It always has been. Um, and what we're seeing now is, is prices

leveling out and banks, banks are starting to be like, no, I'm not, we're not going to lend. Um, so even with the stamp duty cut and like these reports of like an increase, I think we need to be very careful with that because I actually think that things are slowing down, but there's, there's a really important point here that I think we have to be really mindful of, which is wishing for a house price crash is not really the answer because a we've, we've foolishly, um, allowed our economy to revolve around, uh, mortgage debt and B, if, if loads of people end up in negative equity, which for anyone who doesn't know what it is, is where your house ends up being worth less than you paid for it. The people who are going to be hit the hardest by that,

right? The ones who weren't super wealthy and like scraped to get onto the housing ladder or did it through a scheme, like helped by assuming they weren't accessing the bank of mum and dad and then paying off the loan or shared ownership. And once again, it will, it will be people who, who really stretched themselves and brought into that dream who suffer. So it's not as straightforward as, as even I, you know, as I would like it to be. Um, and I think that's, that's why we're not really getting like clear solutions beyond, you know, immediate responses to the pandemic because it's really complicated. And there is a really, well, there are several answers to it, but just like build social housing, invest in social housing again,

destigmatize it, rehabilitate it into the political conversation, make it something that people like my grandparents were so proud when they got their council flat because it was like an aspirational thing to get. This is talked about really well in a book called Municipal Dreams that I recommend as well. Like, you know, it was, it was like an aspirational thing to be in social housing in the seventies. Um, make, make that happen again and, and just introduce rent control. Like, well, hey, if, if you're listening government, that's what we have to get done. I'm pretty sure that most of the people in the government do listen to this, but, uh, noticing

that we are going a little bit long on time. Uh, I think that's probably as good a place as any to, uh, to end it because we have a policy proposal. So, uh, with that in mind, uh, Vicky, I want to thank you very much for coming and talking to us today about, uh, housing and public housing and what the hell is going on, uh, with, with permitted development and this reaction to COVID. Um, oh, I know I've just said we've just been running out of time. The last, actually the last thing I want to talk about is that public health, good, good standards of housing is also a health issue. So if you don't want to keep having pandemics, you can't keep people crammed into little offices living in a meter square. Um, yeah. The last thing I'll say is like that is

born out in the data, right? So areas of really extreme overcrowding saw higher rates of infection. So, I mean, like case closed, right? Don't, don't cram people in to crappy housing. Um, also if you're living in poor quality housing, you're more likely to have health problems, so you're going to be more susceptible to illness. Um, it's just, it's so obvious. I think that's, that's the main thing with my beat as a journalist that like blows my mind week in week out. It's like, it's not actually that difficult. I just somehow, somehow politicians over the last like 20 years have managed to completely mess it up. Uh, well, I'm, I'm sure we'll get it right next time. Anyway, yes. So for real now, this time, uh, thank you so much, uh, Vicky for coming on

and talking to us today. Where can people find you online? Um, I am on Twitter at Victoria Spratt and confusingly on Instagram at vicky.spratt. And I've really messed up by not having the same name on. Nevertheless, uh, I guess I'll throw back to me in studio. Thanks for having me guys. Wow. What a fascinating interview. God, I picked up so much from that. My own house. You didn't have much to say. No, no, I just was content to kind of let you to, uh, really, you know, lead the way on that one. I'm a big listener. I've been quiet for the whole episodes. I knew that I just love to learn, you know, ever since I've made a lot of mistakes in my career, such as the planning of a coup in Ecuador, El Guinea. And since then I've really

learned the value of listening. I've been practicing a lot of mindfulness and yoga to help me get over the horrifying things I've seen in the bush. And ever since then, people have told me that they're much more pleasant to be around. I generally speaking, ask a better and more interested questions about other people. This makes me more rounded. Well, this jerk, doing a Ted talk. Well, this jerk. Well, this jerk. And here's the way our time shoelaces. Hey, thank you, everybody. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Everyone who listened to this podcast that has veered wildly in tone. It's been a mixed episode. I would like, I'd like, you know, I mean, some

of it has been, you know, very difficult talk about others of it has been the main thing that is my source of happiness. One of my main sources of happiness, which is continuing to do this show. Yes. Anyway, hey, I want to thank you all for listening and making this all possible. Fly is actually my sister's name. Fleur van de Klik. Fuck up. I take it back earlier about this being a major source of happiness in my life. It's a source of constant irritations.

A source of torment. This fucking rot, baby. So let's see. Yeah, I wanted to get thank you for the third time for listening. Buy a shirt. Yeah, there's shirts. There's Patreon. Send an email. Yeah, you know, you know how that goes. If you want to buy an email.

Buy an email to class, sir. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If you want a copy of Honkball Hufta class, so just like email the show and just say you've donated to the London Renters Union. Just buy an email, subscribe to the show. Yeah, if you would like to, if you'd like to make a donation, you can, you can PayPal us. You can also, you can also download the song on Kaza. Yeah, it's online. It's online. It's on email.

If you just download, if you download Honkball underscore Hufta-classa.exe. Yeah, that's right. Download, download our special Honkball buddy, which is a new, a search bar. It's Dirk Van Beere helps you search for stuff. Are you, are you clogpilled? Download our new, our new extension for the Opera browser. So also, like, I think one of the things you can, if you listen to the section of that Vicki and I talked about, which if you're listening to this, you did.

But if you're sort of half the people on this podcast, you haven't yet. What do you mean? I've been here the whole time. One of the most important things you can do is keep renters unions stocked. Yeah, I get the feeling we're kind of like things in the U.S. may be progressing past the point of bail funds, like the bail zone. Yeah, it's certainly, it seems to be entering a zone of some kind. Marcus Braun is still incarcerated. That is true.

Yeah, comrade Marcus Braun. So we will have a bail fund specifically for Marcus Braun. Marcus Braun is still incarcerated, much like the members of my family in my basement. This has been a running joke. I do not understand. I mean, I've asked you, you've explained it. I have never in my heart understood why. Because Austria is a very funny country. Yeah, we will be taking advice from American comrades on perhaps

what the best way is to, like, the best way forward to, like, possibly change the bail fund thing up. Yeah. What to do. In the meantime, London, it's the tenants, the tenants and renters unions are what we're going to be plugging. All proceeds from the Honkball donations are going to the London renters union, I believe. Yes, that's right. So, hey, with that in mind, see you later, everybody.

Bye.