TRASHFUTURE - Teabagging the Landscape feat. Phil Burton-Cartledge

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

We speak with Phil Burton-Cartledge (@philbc) about his book, Falling Down, about the sociology of the U.K. Conservative party. How is it to be understood? What are its weaknesses? But first, we look into a number of chickens that appear to have come home to roost in the Labour Party. Riley Quinn: And also, of course, we talk about a ludicrous Web3 Project. Buy Phil’s book here! https://www.versobooks.com/books/3851-fal If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hi, everyone. It's TF. It's the free one. I had such a good thing going where I just wouldn't say what it was. Then you told me that you were doing that. And so now I'm going to think about whether it's the free one or not. On you not knowing whether it's a Thursday or Monday, he was relying on me not knowing what day of the week it was, which is Thursday. It's that Thursday feeling. We're recording the free one. It's a pretty good bet to rely on you to not know what day of the week it is. Unless unless you give Milo an incentive to like, okay, incentivize me. I'm motivated by spite. You know this. You're doing nudge theory on

Milo to learn what day of the week it is. I know the names of three. If you knew what day of the week it was. Oh God, I would hate it if you looked at the calendar. He's so owned. The thing is, I actually, I live my life almost entirely by my calendar, but I never actually look at what day it is. Yeah, I do. You live by the calendar. You die by the calendar. That's the thing. I die by calendar, man.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's TF. It's myself, Riley. I'm here with Milo. So now Alice. I smate PCFWords. PCFWords, PCCore, Vocali, PCQuad. That's right. I'm a with a gentleman and a lady. In view commencing, 1928 hours. Yeah, that's right. God, they really know when this is being recorded, huh?

Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. So, you know, cast your minds back to then and you'll have the context for this. No, and we are going to be talking about some stuff in the front half of the episode. Again, in the back half, we're going to be talking to academic Phil Burton Cartledge about trying to understand what the Tory party is as like a sociological phenomenon. And so that I'm looking forward to doing that after this.

Boy, I wonder what that conversation is going to be like for you a little bit by saying simply that when Riley was doing the notes, he had a beautiful perfect plan to sound smart and he told me this by going, so what is the Conservative Party? And now that we've already recorded that, I know that he doesn't get to say it and it's driving him crazy. Please not reveal my interviewing techniques on the podcast. So what is that? What is trashy? So you yourself are a sociologist. Is that correct?

So you was right in a book about the party. We're going to talk. We're going to talk about some stuff. So I have some some planned notes and so on. But today, a sort of perfect storm of events were announced that essentially has meant that Britain has now officially recorded the single most significant decrease in living standards since record keeping began with a number one, baby. Oh, yeah, that's right, champs. We have done it once again.

Yeah, everything has been everything is now much worse. Yeah. Energy costs, of course, have gone up by a record amount with. Why is that, by the way? Does anyone have any clues as to why that might be? Well, I'll tell you something. Energy costs to consumers in France have gone up only 4 percent because if they went up any higher, they would overturn the country.

They would flip. They would all gather in our bond and flip the country like a car. The firemen would have to fight the police again and they can't afford that. Well, that's what's interesting, though, in that basically there's this kind of tendency where prices only ever go up regardless of the market conditions. I've noticed this with like when there was that petrol shortage, petrol went up by like 25 percent and it's just never come down again, even though there's no longer a petrol shortage. It's like a ratchet.

Yeah, it only goes in one direction. And the same things happen with the energy crisis. Like all that Russian supply crisis shit I think is basically over. But the energy companies are like, well, we've put the prices up now. So you know, Shell's 19 billion pound profits this year. Yeah, eight and a half billion paid out in dividends. And yet energy costs like going up by an average of 700 pounds, I believe. I think that's right.

Yeah. More in subsequent years and then also inflation spiraling because the Monetary Policy Committee is like, well, I wonder where all these price rises are coming from. I suppose it's people doing too much business. So we have to put the rates up to encourage saving. Yeah, the Bank of England has projected that inflation is going to go up 7 percent. And which is so funny to me because I this is the thing as a leftist, I'm cursed with having a memory.

One of the like only groups of people in this country that does. And so I remember when a certain magical jam man was going to like maybe get some nice things, some nice social programs going. But we couldn't do that because if we did, we would get uncontrolled inflation and that could not be allowed to happen. No, it can. Whereas now, now that uncontrolled inflation is just fucking happening anyway. And you know, walk it off.

Yeah, you love it, actually. I kiss it on the mouth. Yeah, it's it's and also rents up 8.3 percent as well. Oh, great. All of it's a bit and this is all, you know, all up and and at the end, sorry, I mean, it's all up. It's going to take that again. It's all up and all that anyone seems to have to answer for it

is the you're on your own version of like the Victorian vision of the welfare state where I don't know, maybe like the fucking Salvation Army is going to come and give you a lump of coal to bring work houses back. Yeah. Yeah. And if you raise the minimum wage, it will make the economy sad. So yeah. So this isn't that raising energy prices to pay for massive share buybacks and dividends to like other countries, energy companies that own the other ones.

That's that's that's different from a minimum wage increase. That's a price increase. And that's different. French energy companies aren't putting up the fucking energy prices in France because they own all of the British energy companies. Put up the prices like that's different. That's real. That's real franchising.

It's not as tiny as that. The one thing aside from like a bunch of people in high vis jackets, like turning the entire country over like a car that's that would explain why France's energy bills are not going up that much is because they invested heavily in nuclear power, a thing which we were too bitch made to do seriously. Well, yeah. And we can't do that because it would make like a heron sad. So so right.

This is right. What we have is we have the it's focusing purely on energy prices, not the other huge spikes that are happening all over the rest of the economy, mainly being made worse by the people who are supposed to keep quote unquote credibility, whether the fuck that means the Monetary Policy Committee is just focusing purely on energy prices. Right. The conservative vision is well, I'm sorry, it's not sustainable to keep an energy price cap.

Some of you are going to have to freeze. That's just the way it is. Yeah, we have to stick to sustainable things like oil and coal. And also people freezing to death. And secondly, right, the and the and what is, of course, the opposition doing is they're saying we believe that we should not break the record for an energy price increase year on year by night as much. That's not what the opposition is doing.

What the opposition is doing is getting is busy getting Keir Starmer's name in as many places as possible in connection with Jimmy Savitt rules. No, but this is just focusing purely on the we're going to get to that in a sec. But focusing purely on the energy price price energy price crisis. They've said they've said what they're going to do is they know the bills should increase by 200 pounds less, which is still record breaking. Cool. Yeah. To a mere 500 pounds extra a year, a thing which everybody has on hand.

We are going to break the record, but not by as much. Please let us have the Xbox controller. Well, because now come out because like again, something that we'll get into in the in the serious segment, but like the Tories hate governing. And one of the reasons why they hate governing is because they have to actually make policy and sometimes that policy is catastrophically unpopular because all they know how to do is piss down your back and tell you it's raining. And so what they've done in this instance is given you at like this party.

Someone has pissed down my back and I'm informed that it is raining more than 11 weather. They're giving it a redraining. Thank you for the thank you for recapping all of what we were saying to one another before we started recording. Yeah. Our room joke of a Midwestern news reporter who's insanely horny. All the time, a sex policy. That's right. That's right.

But like no, instead, what they've done is they've given you alone. Yeah. They've given you a loan. So your energy price, your your your bill is going to go up by a huge amount this this year, less 200 pounds. And then it's going to go up by the same huge amount in subsequent years, plus the 40 pounds that you owe from this time, because we need to make sure that Shell can continue paying. It's it's it's never.

I mean, this seems very like fucking just so fucking like a try to say. But like the idea that oh, it's not it is not sustainable to fill the funnel extra money to the people that, you know, need the heating and stuff. But it is only sustainable to funnel all that extra money to like, I don't know, like BlackRock so that they can get the the dividends from their Shell shares. The thing that really, really bothers me. And I know hypocrisy is table stakes at this point. And I know we shouldn't care about it and we shouldn't let it get to us.

But this does get to me is that like we've been told for years and years and years by this same like business wing, the same treasury wing of the Conservative Party, that like first of all, national budgets are the same as household budgets. And second of all, if you are experiencing like problems in your like personal debt, that's down to your own fiscal responsibility. So for them to for them to now interfere with quite literal household budgets in order to force personal debt

on you is just. Well, it's the it's also that you let the other end, right, which is well, we need all this privatization so that we can get efficiencies and innovation and everything. And where there's less privatization, there's less price increases. Yeah, where are the efficiencies? Whereas there was never. I mean, obviously we know there was never any innovation or any none of that

was ever coming down the pipe, but to see it so nakedly. Well, hang on a minute, I'm not sure about your reasoning here because we didn't have these efficiencies, right? And then we privatized everything and that we still don't have the efficiencies, right? So presumably that means we need to privatize it more. We've not done enough. Imagine if we did elect Corbin, maybe inflation would be at, you know, eleven billion percent.

Exactly. Maybe we did the thing of like letting a thousand flowers bloom of letting like dozens and dozens of energy companies get started. They were entitled to that privatization for cleavities. And then and then the second that like things got bad, all of those energy companies just died on their ass instantly. Yeah, again, not without like, again, making some making some like, you know, guys looking to make a fast buck. Basically, what they want to be honest, like, oh, yeah, I'm I'm like calm energy

and I'm going to be your electricity provider now. They all got gonged off. Yeah, basically has been told by his friends too many times that he's funny. No guy who's been told too many times by his friends that he's really good at allocating electricity. Yeah, a piss plasterer held up the fucking audience card and they got gonged off. It was sad to see. All right. Bye, bulb.

I want to talk a little bit about something you alluded to earlier, Alice. And something I'd like to add, actually, that we talked about a year ago and said it was going to happen. Once again, history has vindicated us. We have never been wrong about anything except that we thought Jeremy Corbyn could be prime minister. We were wrong about Stalin. One big thing.

But then every other thing. Everything else, we've we've only been owned once in history. Yeah, with we are we are basically like the Lakers on a very good season. Yeah, that's right. So basically, if you don't if you if you haven't been sort of following what's going on, is that Boris Johnson akin to again, a sort of wounded badger at this point, starting lashing out and has got TB. That's right.

Wounded badgers often call people pedophiles. It's very it's very difficult. I'll sort of lay out what's going on. And especially this for American listeners, probably some good context, which is again, as like Boris Johnson feels more sort of pressure from various elements of his own party, for American viewers, pedophile is the way we pronounce pedophile because we're a stupid country. That's right. So note that down.

So Boris Johnson has an in the commons where you can't be in the commons. You have parliamentary privilege. You can kind of say what you want. Basically, repeated something that is very frequent comes up on like telegraph comment section, various like right wing blogs, all this stuff, which is that Keir Starmer basically was personally involved in the decision made by the Crown Prosecution Service to not prosecute Jimmy Savile because they had insufficient evidence in the late 2000s,

but they almost certainly probably could have. Now, just again, this is in the way that they're saying this, this isn't true. Like he was in charge of it. He was not personally involved in the case and the way that this particular attack line goes, it says basically, oh, Starmer bit soft on Savile. Wasn't he? He's kind of a wrong and etc. Please do not mention any of the photos of Savile with, you know, Margaret Thatcher. Yeah, obviously.

So basically, in this statement, like I said, it is partly true. He was in charge of the institution at the time, but like he wasn't in charge of this. Like it's so, so insulting to like of all like you barely ever hear about Starmer when he as like former director of public prosecutions, right? Like he mentions it occasionally because he thinks it makes him sound forensic, but you never get any criticism of him or his record when he was doing this shit, when he was the like chief prosecutor for England and Wales.

And the first time it's ever really taken off has been like a really tenuous sort of like crank fringe thing about not prosecuting Jimmy Savile. When they, you know, for all I know, they didn't have the evidence to convict him. So, but anyway, right, this is just sort of the said way more terms of table sitting, right? If you want to really live by the principle that I think a lot of people who are currently pretending to be shocked and horrified about this have eagerly lived by for a few years, then anyone at the top of an organization has to take responsibility for everything that happens within that organization, such as,

for example, the social media posts of, for example, labor members, right? A lot of people who are very, very aghast that Boris Johnson would bring this up. Also, we're saying, well, Jeremy Corbyn clearly can't be in charge of the labor party. Look what, you know, like Brenda, 43, 72, whatever, posted about Massad, you know, right? That's this. In fairness, Brenda, 1473 is a fucking, like, crank. She's a lot better than Brenda, 1488, though. I'll give her that. So this, this is, you don't want to hear her opinions about Massad. Jesus. Absolutely. Right. So this is, and at this point now, full fact has come to bat for

Starmer, which is how you know that these people do not know how to manage this. Martin Prince is going to bail me out of this one. He's being defended by the more assertive nerds. It's actually, it's the bit and never been kissed where the fucking the math club are like, we can offer you some protection from the police. So that's a strangely specific reference. I've watched Never Been Kissed for Massad about Domain recently. Hey, listen to Massad about Domain, he's talking about Never Been Kissed.

So I guess what we're coming back round to now is there is this, we have this, there's this association that's been drawn between Starmer and Savile. And a lot of, and it's, you know, again, it's spurious, but I don't know. I seem to, and people are saying, oh, this is uniquely toxic for our democracy. But like, is it more toxic than the Trojan horse Muslim allegations, right? Is it more toxic than when Simon Heffer got on the radio and said Corbyn had reopened Auschwitz? Is it more? It's hypocrisy. Fine. Like, we know that. And like, of course, we know that like living

in this country, like remembering anything that anyone has ever said previously is incredibly powerful and incredibly annoying, right? The idea of Jeremy Corbyn, like, going to Poland, a country has no control over, and walking into what is now a museum and being like, fire this thing up. Yeah. Right. But, and so what we get, right, is, is, is there, there's this, this attitude of, ah, this is uniquely damaging. This is uniquely bad. This is a new low. And it's like, well, no, this is more, more continuity, I would say, than change. It's just a lot of people who've been very happy to dish out this kind of thing are now very, very, again, aghast, or you might say,

hurt, that these chickens that they have fed and raised and then let out into the world have now come home to roost. And you'll forgive me. You're not roosting again. Most fucking winged cunts. Every year, I feed them, I look after them, and how do they repay me by roosting in me fucking ass? And I think beyond, beyond, I think like what, what, like whether or not who should say what, I think those are particularly interesting questions. What I can say is that what you can see now is everyone who thinks Starmer is great, who's decided that their main offer to the electorate is that the Prime Minister is a scallywag and that, you know, he's, he's a little scammed. Yeah. And that his unique badness makes the, you know, supporting Starmer the necessary thing that

everyone has to do, kind of like the Biden pitch, which, you know, worked for them, right? But that, but that in so doing, they're saying, look at this terrible thing that Boris Johnson said, which means that they're going on TV and saying these words next to one another dozens of times, here's Starmer, Jimmy Savile, here's Starmer, Jimmy Savile, here's Starmer, Jimmy Savile. And if you just get your news from Facebook, then you're just going to be like, here's Starmer is involved with Jimmy Savile. Yeah. Yeah, weird that these two are like linked together. Anyway, like, do you know that Kier Starmer was in shawty-wody?

I could believe that like Kier Starmer could like win an election off of this, but equally, he could just lose it because he doesn't know how to crisis manage. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I will fix it for you to have a functioning infrastructure. Okay. The band grows the air out for juicery management that's conducive to the future of Britain getting moving. He's got a pair of like round, like rose-tinted sunglasses. They're finished in a shell suit. Really leans into it.

I mean, you do sort of see the opposite of this, right? Which is that like, I've seen a couple of people on the left have been like, you know, I know that this like smear isn't true, but I'm going to pretend that I think it is because of like the hypocrisy of like smear and Corbin or whatever, to which my response is just like, this is weak shit, right? Like if you're going to get on their level, you have to get on their level, not just be coy about it and be like, oh, I, you know, serve you right. No, call Boris Johnson a pedophile. I think Kier Starmer should come into the House of Commons with one of those like hard laptop cases, lay that shit on the dispatch

box and say, I've invented a new non-detector. Pop the fucking lid on that shit, slide it across the table to Boris and make that shit start beeping. It's pointing at you, Boris, and it's going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Now, why would a non-detector do that? We're back to hardball, Starmer, one of our favorite characters again, doing the seagull voice. I'd like to invite you to a little party, a party with my fist. That's right. Oh boy. Not a kid's party. He'd probably like that, wouldn't you? No, it's seagull would be something like, yeah, you went to the kid's birthday party, but you didn't expect me to be the clown. I'm not a clown, but I am disguised

as a clown. I want to write that down. I'm going to juggle with your ass. Sorry, I've been watching a lot of seagull movies recently. Going to juggle with your ass. I mean, it's saying that to Jay from the app. I think the best Steven seagull line is in the movie Exit Wounds, which I watched for The Bottleman with Dan Wilmeniker, which was... You used to be watching movies for our podcast. That's right. Well, I have the main one that I do a lot of research for, and then I have the other one that I also do a lot of research for.

So I like to watch a movie occasionally. But he's going up to a group of guys that are trying to steal his truck, and then he's like... He says some shit. You see these gentlemen saving your truck. How do you open it? Well, and then the guy, the guy's like, what, are you a magician or something? And he's just like, yeah, I'm going to pull a rabbit out of your ass. This man says he's going to pull a rabbit out of my ass. One of the most perfect line reads ever.

I want to talk a little more about this. It's that the standard response from not just the Starmer camp, but his allies in the press, and also some people in the Tory party, which this makes this different from anything they tried to pin on Corbin during the Corbin years, because during the Corbin years, there was a pretty robust elite consensus, that if the Sun publishes something by Arian Unity, or that was informed by a group called Arian Unity, which they did, then no one's really going to talk about it, or everyone's going to support this idea that

he's uniquely bad and so on. He was supported in the Labour Party, basically the whole press, and also the Conservative Party. In this case, in this thing, there's a lot more division as to people who are think that or aghast that this is bad, and the people who are going on TV and gleefully repeating it or writing it in columns. The thing is, it's not just everyone condemning it. There is a split here. You get to see, well, to what extent is something like this driven by institutional support, whereas the institutional support for it going to be actually pushing the lever of change, but crucially, the people who are against it, who are saying,

no, this is wrong to say, the Prime Minister is scurrilous. In fact, Munir Amirza quit Downing Street as an advisor, citing the PM as quote-unquote scurrilous and was called... Absolutely swashbuckling. He really doesn't have any scurrels. And was then hailed, of course, for her moral courage by Dominic Cummings. So again, you can realise, like, all of this is purely just spectacle, none of it actually. I mean, table stakes, all of this is purely spectacle, because this is where these people all want politics to be. It's nothing but the realm of spectacle, and then you can either boo the spectacle or cheer the spectacle. And the way, though, that Starmer's allies

are booing this bit of the spectacle is, again, to talk about how wrong and despicable it is, but while repeating it constantly. And I just like, have you learned nothing? Have you observed nothing? No, no, no. They refuse to do that. We're the only people that remember things. It's us three, and maybe like two other guys. Those are the only people that remember anything. Yeah, as boring as it is to do, like, the Trump comparison. Like, it does remind me of all the people who would, like, quit the Trump administration in disgust periodically and be like, I can't believe that Donald Trump has done this. He's gone too far. Like, oh, you went and worked for Donald

Trump, and you were, like, surprised he was rude to you. Like, what, like, how, how dumb are you? Yeah, it's like, this is basically just like a game of Red Rover where everyone's friends, right? And, like, the sole guardians of truth in this country are us and a guy on twist with a Simpsons avatar. And it's like, yeah, okay. Like, the fact that this is, like, now it's politically convenient to attack Johnson on this, if you're a Tory, doesn't do anything to, you know, about the actual pipeline. And that's the thing that interests me is that, like, you can start these smears in fully QAnon or fully fascist groups, and then they'll just sort of, like, launder their way into respectability. And that's just one of the things that the

Conservative Party and its elected officials are there to do is to provide that laundry service. Yeah. And God help us. There's going, there is a group of Washington generals who are gonna be there to be a kind of, not a controlled opposition, but a self-controlled opposition who want to make sure those smears get through. Damn it. Yes, smear us. The evil smear move. Would to be like to do some kind of Sigma move and start insisting that Jimmy Savile wasn't a nonce, actually. It's a conspiracy that Boris Johnson is at the top of to smear a good man's name. Here's to our, here are advice. Yeah. We're giving you good advice. Go for it and start,

start dressing like him too, like earlier. Yeah. When other people zig, I like to zag. So I am a nonce, but it's good actually. Why aren't you a nonce? Is it because you're gay? We're lexed with 100% of the vote. He makes a good point. I don't normally like him, but maybe he is gay. I'm not for that. Four slides. The thing is, the other funny thing is, right? This isn't the first time that a Conservative Party has a Conservative Party politician, a leading one, has said this exact thing about Kier Starmer. It's just the last time they did it. It was in 2019 and no one was outraged back

then because it was very, very important that every single thing you can say about the Labour Party that's bad lands and lands unquestioningly. Anyway, so I mean, look, it's just that this is not a monster of the Tory Party's making. This is a monster of British establishment politics is making because they chose to do these kinds of things and allow these kinds of things when it was politically expedient for them to do so. And now, whoopsie daisy, it's being deployed. A weapon I have formed has been turned against me. Oh, no. I hear that it sucks to suck. Yeah. I mean, there are two things that are going on here, which is one,

they've very much been hoisted by their own Patard, which is funny. Unfortunately, the Patard is also very bad and is going to further destroy what remains of British politics. I mean, honestly, I mean, I think that ship sailed a long time ago. At this point, I'm just, yeah, like Alice, like you say, you know, sucks to suck. Good luck. It is like a useful barometer of how much worse our politics are getting. And curiously, I think how much more American our politics are getting. Yeah. So I'm excited for this to continue. So, you know, would you trust Kirsten Arba to answer the phone in the middle of the night if the Chinese were invading? He'd probably be shagging a child.

I approve this message. I know it's like unsurprising, right? But I do think it is worth briefly noticing just how personally like malign and fucking nasty Boris gets when he's cornered at all. I just, I find that very sort of compelling. Like, you know, when he's on the ropes, all of the bluster just drops for a second and he just goes to, ah, you are a nonce. And I really, I really like, you know, that there's some depth to his character. He activated my trap card. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, like, it certainly makes him more interesting. It's like, oh, you found my secret deep down personality where I'm a different kind

of cunt than the one everyone thought I was. I prefer to imagine that Boris Johnson actually just does get his news off Facebook and doesn't read the things in the dispatch boxes and just show it up and they're like, I finally got something on Starmer. They apparently advised him, like his spats and stuff, advised him in strong terms, not to fucking use the line. And he just did it anyway. So the thing is, right, like that it's the things are far from certain as in British politics. It's a febrile time. So, you know, could it be that this, could it be that this provokes more people to send in letters so he gets replaced by someone with his exact same ideology?

Could this be the thing that, like, sticks to Starmer and, like, he's actually has a hard time shedding? Could this be the thing that opens up new pork markets at long last? Finally. This is like, this is the small domino to the big domino of new pork markets, long closed, yearning to be open. Nothing's going to stick to me. I'm perfectly smooth and oiled. I want that on the record. All right. All right. Look, that's enough. We're going to do a little, like, politics sandwich. We did some politics up front. We got some politics out back, but I want to talk. And then we briefly remember we're a tech podcast.

We're whatever we feel like talking about podcast. We're a fun times podcast. We're a fun times podcast. We're not a regular podcast. We're a fun podcast. We're a podcast hanging out with the fellas bracket sometimes female. So long as you smoke weed in the house where I can know you're safe. Yeah. We all, we actually have special chairs around the table that we podcast from that are supposed to be backwards. No. So there's been a few like different web three projects sort of skipping around the internet a little bit galavanting out the place.

A couple. And there have been a couple. I want to talk about both of them. One today, probably one on Monday with our guest on Monday. And Monday's guest is full of grace. Monday's guest grace. So let's talk about the color dot museum. I hate this already. Yeah. You can own the building blocks of the future. Okay. Behold. Ricks.

Nope. I don't like anything that starts with a behold. I'm sorry. Behold the color NFT. Oh, fuck. So you can buy a color. What if you could own the fucking pantone color of the year? Yeah. Well, you can. Now, so sort of in as much as you can claim to own anything on a blockchain

other than a link to somewhere on a server and you own whatever's there. Yeah. So what is a color NFT? Before I go into this any further as well, I want to note that as time goes on, things that the podcast talks about shifts, right? We started talking about dumb, silly products back in the very beginning. Who can remember that? And now we talk about really fucking stupid products. And then we started looking at sort of like large, well-funded startups that like softback

was pouring lots of money into. But now we're trying to find where the stupid energy is. And a lot of the stupid energy is in these Web3 projects that aren't companies that you don't need to like fill in a form or anything to set up. And so the barriers to entry are basically nothing. You just invent a gift for us. Yeah. I love that like filling out a form is now like beyond most of the like the level of people

in business has become so stupid that like, oh, I have to like fill out a form. Nah, I'm just going to invent my own money. How about create an Instagram account? I can do that. Not that stupid because they do seem to make some money out of it. So and so basically what happens, right, is these projects just spring up and then if enough rubes put enough money into them, then the project is heralded as a success. If not, then it just goes and collapses and it took zero capital to sort of create.

Sorry, sir, your apes weren't bored enough. No one's interested. These quiescent apes are not very interesting to anybody. So this is just sort of a preamble, right? To a lot of these Web3 projects, it's just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks because it requires no investment. You just invent your own money. The answer, of course, is always shit.

Yeah, of course. So with that in mind, let's just think of this project in that way. So what is they ask a color NFT? And I know that they're smart because they've asked a very large, general question out front and put the emphasis on the word is. What is a color NFT? What is a color NFT? Now, before you answer the question, I'd like you to note that we're talking about colors here,

not shapes. Now, the one thing about shapes is they can't be pyramids. Wait, sorry. No, wait. The one thing about colors is they can't. I'm sorry. I'm very stupid. The one thing about colors is...

That's why you don't get to ask the quick, broad questions. One thing about colors is that the pyramid is the shape of a... They can't be. I had a well-constructed joke in my head that I just failed to say. The joke in my head makes sense. The thing about colors is they aren't shapes and they can't be pyramids, which this project is not. You're totally safe.

That was so good. I'm glad you took the time to get that one out. It would have been funny if I'd have got it out. I'm so listening. That is fun. Please remember this in the way Milo wants you to remember it. That's right. Dude, gaslight yourselves.

That's right. And then gate keep yourself and you'll be a girl boss. Gas leak, girl keep, gate boss. What is a color NFT? A color NFT represents a new category of NFT, which is a meta NFT. Great. Looking forward to it. So, a meta NFT is usable as a building block to spawn new NFTs. Oh, so you're buying an NFT of the colors in someone else's NFT.

Correct. So you can charge rents on someone using... So this is the thing that I've been talking about constantly now, right? It's like, Riley, since you tell me on theater of capital needing and expanding frontier forever and it running out of physical frontiers, we're just having to displace them into fake bullshit. NFTs are a frontier, right? What's the first thing a frontier needs after it's been settled? Rentiers.

Yeah, that's right. And so, we have this now. Yeah, you could rent the components of your ape. No, that's true. That's what it is. It's saying if you... I actually own the copyright to the pussy eating gesture. So how am I renting it out? How this intends to work, right?

Is it supposed to be something like OpenSea, which is one of these NFT marketplaces, and everyone hates OpenSea because it's one of the biggest ones, which means that it's had the most problems, which means it's had to institutionalize itself. So everyone's like, hey, wait a minute, I need... Someone stole all my apes. I have to call a complaint department. And OpenSea is like, well, I guess we need a complaint department now. And so it's just because it's gone from a block change.

Becoming a central bank. Yeah, because all of these guys have found out the hard way why every banking regulation exists. Yeah. In this case, like at our auction house, but it's the same thing, right? Where these things that are supposed to be completely uninstitutionalized, just all the rules just in lines of codes, you don't have valuable humans dealing with them, is like, ah, fuck, we forgot about all the things. Libertarians love finding out the hard way why like rules exist,

but are they ever going to find out the hard way why the age of consent exists? Oh, some of them do every year. Yeah, they say. Well, they find out that it does. I don't necessarily find out why. Well, they got a lot of time to read. So they say, the meta NFT is usable as a building block to spawn new NFTs and other products and experiences limited only by the imagination of the creators.

And also, of course, if they can afford the rent that you're charging for cyan. So the imagination of the creator in this case has to be pretty fucking limited. That's right. You can have an ape. You can have an ape. You can have another different kind. If any NFT, you haven't done any color you want, so long as it's ape. Yeah, the ape color is going to be so, so lucrative.

So the, but the thing is what they want to do is they want to say, look, we want to create a new thing, a new method, a new kind of open sea, which is like a market for NFTs, right? And then what will happen is anytime someone mints or buys and sells an NFT, whoever owns the color for, so they just get a rent payment. Every time. Does that mean your NFTs can only be like one color? Well, no, it's that.

Well, here's the thing. They are 10,000 NFTs that they're selling colors of and they have something called a win by color distance model where they have like a big color wheel. And so for every pixel in the NFT up under over a certain threshold, whoever's color that they own is closest, they get the rent for it. So basically, you'll be unable to portray anything. Well, you're incentivized to use as few colors as possible in a digital space where using many colors is or wasn't recently completely cost free.

Cool. Now more expensive to use more colors on MS paint. What if we make the apes blander? I mean, I mean, I'm kind of in favor of this now. Yeah. This might make them less visually offensive. We're, we're, we're boring for normal people. Yeah.

We're finally making the board apes. Again, this is probably not going to go anywhere because it's moronic. But I know a bunch of other moronic stuff goes places. Let's, let's see what happens. That's true. Yeah. So what you do is you choose a color. It says no algorithm involved for machines.

K dot C. So you just pick a color from this like, you know, palette. And then the guy says, and you and I have never met each other. That's right. And then you name your color. You can call it like, I don't know, Riley's favorite orange horse semen. Yeah. Of course.

Oh, horse semen. Yeah. And then you give your color name. And then you can give it a little like biography. You know, like you tell the universe what your color means. And then basically that token ID associated with you, anyone who wants to mint an NFT from this like open sea competitor, then has to pay you for if they use Riley's favorite orange.

Well, why would you use that instead of open seed then? Because you hate open sea because open sea has made all sorts of, because open sea has gestured at trying to become a company. Well, yeah, but okay. But at least it doesn't charge you rent. Well, no, but they like that because they're an institute. They'd rather have a complicated series of interlocking rents. Yes, they're moron.

Exactly. Exactly. Because they want to have... Really excited to pay rent. By the way, here's an interesting thing. You know what? There's a recent statistic has been released about open sea. I love one of recent statistics.

Like 80% of NFTs that have been minted on open sea are either plagiarized, fake or spam. Yeah, it's so cool that there's this whole... That they've invented. They've invented the worst parts of email and made that the whole thing. Yeah. And this is like done astroturf by like 12 guys has gotten into the brains of maybe, I don't know, like 12,000 of the dumbest guys on earth.

And now every sort of like credulous fucking moron, like from journalists to politicians, including our special boy, has gone, this must be the future. Yeah. Well, look, because it's got computers involved. And I mean, also some of those first 12 or so guys were also probably Nazis. So, you know. So this, I mean, this goes back to the idea that basically like a lot of really,

a lot of what explains what's going on with like Web3, crypto, etc., etc. is that for all of this stuff, like a lot of this stuff takes place on the Ethereum blockchain, which means not a lot of people have to buy certain cryptocurrencies to get into it. And that really what is happening is that the big whales are just slowly selling to small retail bag holders who are trying to get in on this stuff. Meanwhile, the big whales, because like 10 guys own the vast majority of it, they can't sell because the market has no depth. They can't, there's no one to buy that much of what they can sell.

You're the fucking like Anish Kapoor of this shit. You own the like hex code for black or whatever. But nobody can fucking like pay you rent because nobody's buying your fucking NFTs. Yeah. Well, it's it's it's bigger NFTs on your platform, rather. It's bigger than that, right? Number one, yes, you could get you could get fleeced in a small way because you pay some guy. So that now that guy will say this guy owns the Anish Kapoor black, actually, and you have the authority of that one guy.

So that's one level. And then on the higher level, right, it's across the sort of crypto space, a very small amount of people own almost all the cryptocurrency, which means they can't get their money into fiat with the normal money, because if they sell everything, then the value craters and no one will buy it, and then they're no longer rich. They can't get their money into Fiat 500. So this is what they want deep down.

And so what they have to do, and you can't use it to buy anything, it's just sitting there and the number is very big. And so what they have to do is they have to entice a lot of retail people to come in like like normal normal people just being like, Oh, I want to get in this cryptocurrency thing. They have to entice them to come in and then say, hey, why don't you buy this, get in on this project, buy this, it's going to go up, et cetera, et cetera.

And then just slowly, slowly, slowly, there's a huge transfer of stranded shitty assets from the very wealthy, you've now secured it in fiat currency to retail, who has now owns a database entry that they paid a thousand pounds for for some reason. This is this idea, like there's a long video on crypto recently, that was released on the folding ideas YouTube channel, and he explains this very well. So I recommend that video if you're interested in hearing more about this. But yeah, you're right to compare this to Anish Kapoor, right, Alice?

Like this is back to the focus of this one particular project. It's basically looking at that thing that Anish Kapoor did, that every artist fucking hated, and was like, what if we made that easier and applied it to the ape economy? The ape economy. I mean, no great loss if this is only happening to apes, right? The danger is if this takes off and they start applying it to other things. Well, of course, I mean, the more and the thing is, right?

There's a real consent manufacturing process going on of trying to hustle people into web three and the metaverse and all this. And you kind of have this thing, I think at the back of your mind, where you're like, at some point, either a Tory government or my boss is going to compel me to do something in the metaverse, and I may have to pay a rent to some jackass that bought a color in 2022 off of some other random guy. And now some institution is forcing me to recognize that and suffer for it, basically.

That's the worry I have. But fortunately, all of this stuff seems to be so beyond credibility that I don't think that worry is particularly well founded. You don't think that we're going to be paying rent to our various ape lords any time soon? I've noticed you're in the office today, and what day is it again? It's Friday. Yeah, it's Friday, but what Friday? It's Ape Friday.

That's right. Now, where is your ape? Where's your ape? And if you want to work at this company, you participate in Ape Friday. What you've done there, Milo, is you've given me a horrifying idea, right, which is simply to ask, where's your fucking poppy ape? Oh, God, the Remembrance Ape. Patriotic Apes.

The Respectful Ape Club. Where's your Captain Tom Ape on this Captain Tom day? Oh, fuck, Captain Tom Ape is so going to happen, isn't it? It's so going to happen. How much trouble would we get in if we did a shirt that was a Captain Tom Ape? Captain Tom NFT collection exists on OpenSea now. There are multiple different... Yeah, but if we just stole it, if we simply right-clicked and saved,

and we did a shirt that you could buy that was Captain Tom as an ape. Well, it's right now, on OpenSea, you can buy for $1,500, a picture of Captain Tom superimposed over a Union Jack. Bargain at any price, but where's the ape content that I crave? And if we applied the Color Dot Museum logic to this, then whoever owns the colors of the British flag would just make tons of money out of the Captain Tom NFT collection. Awesome.

Yeah, awesome. I love looking at Web 3 projects and just peering into the psychology that they depend on. But I think it's time for us to talk to Phil Burton-Cartledge about his book about the Conservative Party in the future. And if that's right, I don't know how that conversation is going to go. I hope it's insightful and entertaining. Yeah, can you lead us in with what is the Conservative Party? What is the second segment of the Trash Future podcast?

Hello again, everyone. Welcome to the second half of the show. What a first off it was. We really had that Thursday feeling going. We did, yeah. That's absolutely right. Not that Thursday feeling. And joining us for the second half is Phil Burton-Cartledge, lecturer and sociology at the University of Derby,

an author of Falling Down, a book about, I assume, the movie starring Michael Douglas. Yeah. Phil, how's it going? Going to meet a star. Sadly, there might be some dead bodies in this, but in the pages of the book, but not in such glorious, satisfying fashion as the movie is. The economy is supposed to look like the picture. I actually got throat cancer from reading Phil's book.

Yeah. You will not get throat cancer from reading Falling Down that you published by Mircelle. The TS blurb. This book is healthy. Yeah, this book is as good to eat as it is to read. No, no, Phil. If you're a regular person, read the book. If you're an oaf, maybe just eat it.

If you're that guy. If you're the way by the book. If you're- We're definitely open. We're definitely open. We're open on TV. We're open on TV. We're open on TV.

We're open on TV. We're open on TV. What about on TV? Matthew, what? Remind me, who's the guy that ate his book about- Oh, one guy, one guy. Matthew Goodwin. Matthew Goodwin.

Yeah, if you're a bibliophage, like Matthew Goodwin. No. One of the poll profs. Yeah. No, we are talking one of the good poll profs. Phil, you're a sociologist and what you have written, essentially, if I could summarize it, is a sociology of the conservative party

and how it adapts and fails to adapt to changing conditions around it. Would you say that's about correct? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Sort of biological field notes on Tories. That's one way of putting it. I was going to say, somehow, Phil,

you're not emaciated or dead at the end of this. You haven't succumbed to dark magic. Well, he's been eating books. Oh, right. That's right. That's the only way to protect yourself from studying the Tory party. Ah, yeah, the serious half,

getting off to a good serious start. No, no. So, look, I want to start, Phil, with your statement of purpose, because I really, really agree with what you say about not assuming that the Tory party is this unassailable behemoth that stands astride British electoral politics and culture of the media and so on.

It's a monolith with them, but it is beatable and you have to understand its weaknesses. So, here's what you write. The Conservatives are not only a model case study for the longevity of parties and competitive party systems, but are also fundamental to our understanding of Britain's politics, class structure, and the character of its state.

These alone are reasons enough for a serious attempt, a serious attempt, excuse me, to understand the state of the Conservative Party in the 21st century. Studying and analyzing the Tories can, but should not be a purely academic exercise, which brings into sharp relief contemporary writing about the party.

Most political commentary appearing in the British press reads embarrassingly like fandom, full of praise for the visionary qualities and overdone patriotism of this party's leading lights, instead of seeking to explain what's happening in the party and providing snippets of information to help their readers piece together the wise and wherefor is a policy, decision making,

and blunders in office, the voluminous press coverage of the party attracts instead, excuse me, the voluminous press coverage of the party in tracks instead obscures its workings, rendering the Tory party a mysterious and charmed entity that happens to win elections a lot. Structural relationships are merely hinted at

with the occasional exposure of a tie between a certain politician and a certain business. Good or bad policy is a mark of personal qualities or right or wrong ideas. Well, that's how columnist listenership gone. So I know this is a very long excerpt, but it was one that I think suggests that say, suggests that a serious and academic look

at the Conservatives is a worthwhile activity. So can you tell me a little bit more about what the Conservative Party is and how to look at it from a sociological point of view? Step one, what is a Tory? What are they? Opsies, dictionary, et cetera. So, sadly, Tories are all too human.

They're not reptilian. Sorry to go there. I've lost David Ike as well now. Fuck's sake, please, Phil. Yeah, I guess the best way to think about the Tory party is a kind of as a movement of the ruling class. You know, we typically, in sociology, when we think about social movements

and if people take courses on social movements or read about social movements, they have the idea of people getting together in the street or kind of engaging in some kind of protest activity or facing off against the police and so on. But the ruling class has its own movements as well. Conservatism is one such movement. Liberalism is another such movement.

So the way to think about the Conservative Party is not just as a kind of a discrete entity that has a membership and a bureaucracy and a set of members of parliament, but as a kind of a network that exists, that reaches across, obviously, politics, but also the state, the personnel of the state, particularly the Treasury Bank of England,

into the armed forces, into the upper echelons of the police, obviously into the editorial officers of the press. And it's... Wait, what? It's a... I know, it's shocking. Crazy. I know, crazy talk indeed. Get me tinfoil hat out. And so that's probably the best way

to approach the Conservative Party. It's less a party and more a movement. And this is obviously the problem that a lot of the poll proffs have got because they just do treat it as some sort of entity that can test elections and runs governments and nothing else. Whereas a sociological take would actually see the Conservative Party,

not just in its political context, but in its sociological context as a kind of a political wing of the ruling class and therefore a politicized network of ruling elites more or less moving in the same direction. And it doesn't really care... As you want to think about it from a long-term perspective, if you want to sort of cast back to the 19th century,

it doesn't really care who the ruling class is, whether that's a gentry, whether that's a factory owner or whatever. It's just always going to be on their side. Yeah, it's proven quite adaptable. It's like different forms of the same economic thing, right? It's always fine if it's okay if you're white, black or purple. We'll get to that. So yeah, I feel like this is something

that you've talked about, right, about how... And I think Alice, this is what you're driving at as well, which is that looking at the British parties this way says, well, no, Britain actually is a one-party state. It just changes the party every third of 15 to 40 years. Yeah, pretty much. Because if you think about it, we've just gone from one period of... Well, we're in a kind of a period of one-party states at the moment,

if you like. So we had a period 1979 to 1977 under one party, then 1997 to 2010 under another party. There, of course, there was significant policy continuity between those two parties. And then from 2010 until today. And of course, again, there are significant policy continuities. So the period of the 1970s, from, say, the mid-1960s,

all the way through to 1979, where we had that kind of that switching around of parties in government, that is actually an aberration. Because before then, that was preceded by a long period of conservative government, short period of labor government, and then before that, another long period of conservative government. So effectively, we are living in Tory Britain.

There is not one party that has done more to shape this country, it's policy, the policies, it's political culture, more than the Tories. And that's why Britain is such a great country to live in today. That's in the name, Phil. Thanks for joining us. That's also the thing that bothers me so much about starmarism, is that it's such a creature of this one-party state thing, where it's like, well, you let us have a turn with Blairism,

now it's our decade again. It's like a politics of, mom said it's my turn on the Xbox. Keir Washington General's Starmar. Just really thinking about the Washington generals a lot lately. Well, it's because I was talking about them earlier when we were on the phone. So I think like, when I get weirdly, we haven't spoken about them, so I brought them up entirely separately. That's right.

That's right. I've never met this man, audience. Yeah, you can just confirm that. We have never met him. This is your watch. So what I want to ask is, in this period of time though, the Conservative Party has changed so, so, so much. It's opponents, what's starting is the Liberal Party,

now the Labour Party have sort of risen and fallen. Whereas the Conservative Party, what it does is it's very protean. It transforms sort of very readily. And you might say, well, rather than what transforms, I think it's more interesting to ask is, what is the core that everything else shifts around to protect? And so what's the Tory secret source, if you like? I suppose, in one respect, you can kind of think about it in terms of class relations

and capitalism more generally. Because as we know, capitalism is an incredibly dynamic system that has a proven track record of incorporating all kinds of counter-cultural objects, social movements, people's desires, and so on. So unsurprisingly, the favourite party of British capital is able to do that as well. But if there is a particular core that the Tories are concerned with defending, a particular set of class relations, I'd say there are two broad things really. So one is broad, one is quite specific.

The broad thing is the defence of class relations themselves, particularly the wage relation, making sure the working class do not develop any kind of collective consciousness, making sure that any opportunity that the Tories have to put the phone screws on to keep people individuated and divided amongst themselves, that is what the Tories do. And they've done that expertly throughout the coronavirus pandemic, for example. The second thing, the kind of the economic entity,

if you like, that they've been particularly interested in defending, is the city of London. Every Tory government, since there have been Tory governments in the kind of the modern sense, since the 1830s, their concern has been primarily around the defence of that particular institution. Why the city of London? Well, because it's the linchpin of the British bourgeoisie for want of a better phrase. The British bourgeoisie have made more money and owe their power to making London the kind

of the world centre of brokerage, of exchange in stocks, of raising finance, building money markets and so on. It's the goose that lays the golden egg as far as the British ruling class are concerned. If the status of the city of London can be maintained, if competitors can be seen off, then it's still catching time as far as they're concerned. The money keeps rolling in all the time. So people like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rishi Sunak, who have very strong ties to the city of London, they don't care about levelling up in Bradford or in Manchester,

or the fate of Scotland or what happens in the south-west, because as long as the city of London is able to attract the best and the brightest, and it's able to compete with New York, with Frankfurt, with Tokyo, with Hong Kong, then they're quite happy. And that is, if you like, the core concern of the Tories. So let's talk about, I think, two different splits, two different sort of political clefts that the Tories have to manoeuvre. One is capital versus capital.

So what we've talked about before on the show, right, is the different needs and characteristics of provincial, extractive, heavy, dirty capital and urban, financial, service-based capital that prefers high regulation so that there are huge barriers to entry and so on that goes for monopolies. The differences between these two kinds of capital, they've been defining these swings, not just economically, but also culturally, that we've seen from the 90s, 2008, 2016, all these things, these different kinds of capital vying with one another. And I think you can see that in the Tory party, the party of swingists.

For example, yeah, that's right. Number one, they have lots of, there are lots of people associated with the sex party scene in the Tories. And number two, the fact that you can see, like, you know, the sort of liberal, remainder Tories that tended to be more, again, associated with those urbanized industries and then the sort of more conservative, culture-worry, lever Tories that tended to be associated with guys like Aaron Banks, Dyson, Crispin O'Day, who's hedge fund manager, but who is always exclusively in oil, right?

Paintballing activities like that, yeah. That's right, and so there's... And so you see, like, the occasional tension within this spillover is when, you know, various like finance conservatives, or I suppose I should say like city conservatives, say things like, oh, we're just handcuffed to, you know, a nation of idiots who, like, want to, you know, fucking deport everybody. But then the other tension is the fact that they are still a mass political party that does still need to get elected, and so they need to calculate the exact right amount of

patronage to throw out, basically, to keep people bought in. Well, that's the thing. I feel like less and less, that's important. I mean, like we've mentioned this before on the show very recently, but I feel like there's this sort of like broad sort of transition towards managed democracies where political parties realise they can like take and hold power without really that much engagement from most people. I was thinking about this a bit today because of all the stuff about TFL being bankrupt again, and how the government's just like, yeah, we're just not going to do anything about that.

Like, we're just, you know, like the entire... Freight off emoji, yeah. The entire transport system to include roads of like our country's capital, which is like where most of the money comes from that we need. We're just going to be like, nah. Well, and again, so that goes back to what you were saying, Phil, right? There's this, there are these tensions, right, of the need to preserve the city of London as this thing, but also a desire to say not fund transport.

And that these things are problems that they have to confront as a social movement, right? Yeah, absolutely. They always need to do just enough in order to stay in power. And this is where the Tories are kind of in... In many ways, you know, my book argues they're in a kind of a tight spot. But in another way, they're also in a bit of a sweet spot as well, because their present coalition of voters means they don't actually have to do a great deal of anything, you know, as I'm sure you've discussed many times before.

They hate governing. Yeah, governing is like, is lying, you know, reclining on the front bench and closing your eyes, like Jacob Rees-Mogg and listening to proceedings in the House of Commons. Because what is it that their base wants? Well, we know that their base is overwhelmingly elderly. And also disproportionately turns out to vote. And it's very, you know, it's very hard to kind of think about ways of dislodging that vote, because...

Tipping towards should be on earlier. It's too late. I need to go to bed. But as far as the Tories are concerned, as long as they run a system where asset prices keep on increasing, you know, and let an infrastructure, you know, fall apart, that's not going to affect asset prices too much, you know, their base is happy. You know, the landlords still get collecting their rent, the property commercial interests are still getting their rents as well.

And the old-day pensioners are still seeing their house prices increase over time. And so the Tories don't need to do anything in order to stay in power. I suppose they're kind of their levelling up agenda is a belated recognition that, well, actually, they do need to do something. They do need to sort out the infrastructure eventually because otherwise... It's a low effort. Yeah. Because they're all like, not only do they not want to do it, but they're also like out of practice

because they're like temperamentally unsuited to it. Exactly. They're all completely short-termists. And that is the Tories' statecraft. It's always, you know, particularly since Cameron and Osborne, you know, incredibly short-termists just chasing the next headline. And Theresa May was less like that, but Boris Johnson is certainly a lot like that. And so that's a big structural problem that they've got.

I think the word recognition that you used to describe levelling up is, I think the exact word I would use because it really isn't anything more than recognition. It's just them saying to someone who previous government said, no, we're putting you in managed decline and you love it and you can become a computer programmer. Don't worry about it. They're actually saying... You little bitch. Yeah, they're actually saying, actually saying, no, your life sucks.

But then that's basically it. They're just recognizing that you have it bad, other people have it better, and you should be resentful of them. Yo, I'm reading all that. I'm sorry. That's essentially what the levelling up agenda is, is all this stuff, like no new money, all this. But, and again, this goes background to how, why you have to be understood as a whole social movement,

because as a purely as a political party, you can't explain that unless you understand that there is a whole social movement of saying people lying about what's going on to all the other people who are trying to make sense of what these parties are doing. Yeah, that's it. This is quite interesting, the lying of itself, you know, the Tories rely on lying, because fundamentally, the Conservative Party is a dishonest political enterprise. It's all about presenting the interests of the tiny minority as the general interest. What is also quite interesting as well is you see the Conservative home is usually

the good place to go if you really want to know what Tories are thinking, because that's where they go to think aloud. And early in January 2020, not long after that, after their famous election victory. Those blog posts just say kill. The Tories were kind of fretting about what do they do with these new seats that they've just won. And James Frayn from Public First argued in a post saying, we don't need to do anything. Don't bother doing anything.

Don't bother addressing their concerns. Don't bother kind of spending money. Just leave them be. They'll still vote for us. And I mean, I think this now that's the fucking handshake meme with Keir Starmer. It's like, oh, don't worry, I've stopped us addressing anyone's concerns. Give me the Xbox controller. I promise not to ruin your game.

Yeah, I think we can sort of also connect this to like Stuart Hall's discussion about like thatcherism, how economics has a project to change the soul and all this. I mean, if they have a project to change the soul, what is that project? Well, the Conservative project is always basically the preservation of class relationships, preservation of their class interests. That's always the project and everything else kind of flows from that. And so Thatcher had a particular kind of project. I mean, we can debate about, you know, there's a lot of debate out there about how coherent

her project was, but it was very clear that when she was elected that, you know, she had a plan in place to take on the trade unions for smashing the miners and for restructuring the British state. And as I talk about in the book, as you go through the 1980s, of course, she's took on different aspects of the labour movement, you know, bringing them all to heel and subordinating them directly to the authority of the executive, i.e. the government. And so for that, it's all about destroying pockets of autonomy and pockets of authority

and pockets of expertise that existed in the state in order to bring everything to to heal in order to reassert the primacy of capital and of their class interests. And all throughout the Cameron years through Theresa May and even through Boris Johnson, that project, even though it's slightly shifted in emphasis, is still the case, you know, subordinate everything to to government. And so you can think about the the attacks or Tory attacks on the right to protest, for example, you know, the idea that extinction rebellion kind of, they're going to go all Maoist and collectifies the Tory landowners is just utterly absurd.

We're threatened by crusties. These mums have got crystals and they're not fucking around. You know, that's that's one of the like, that's one of the central hypocrisy things, right, is to talk about small government and then to, you know, turn the police on you or whatever else. Of course, because what they what they're always talking about, right? I think this is they're talking about they're talking about, you know, freedom for well, who for to do what, you know, and I think then it given given all of that, right, understanding sort of the total focus of this entire social movement

on subordinating on on subordinating the vast majority of people to the government for the purposes of enabling a very small minority to enjoy, I don't know, ivory backs, creatures, yeah, treats, yeah, throwing. Yeah. Yeah. I'll go to the to go to the special X throwing bar that's also a swingers club, but also while playing kind of kaplunk with their own security, because like they sort of need the police to keep them there, but at the same time, they're like, but how many police can we fire and still maintain our very funny and just instinctually calling them plebs anytime they see them. Someone like Putin, like he knows he needs lots of cops and he keeps hiring them,

like he has a kind of consistent ideology in that way. Whereas I feel like the Tories are trying to do that thing. A friend of the show, Peter Valley once told me a story about Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa was trying to threaten Robert MacGarbie into signing a contract and apparently Robert MacGarbie was being super difficult about it. And he and Zuma said to him, I have 10,000 white South African soldiers out there who apparently were like feared throughout Africa. And of course, he had fucking none, like they hadn't had any for like 20 years. But like the idea of these white South African soldiers was enough to get Robert MacGarbie to sign this agreement. No, no, they are, they're all actually in jail at Equatorial Guinea.

Yeah, that was a story that was told to you by Jerk Van der Kleert. We've had a few problems. So what I want to ask is given all of that, given this social movement that sort of has spread across all of these institutions, this coterie of various government departments, high offices in the army, armed forces, the press, it basically is horizontally at the top of most things, right? Including the Labor Party. There is this movement, right? What are its structural weaknesses in terms purely of electoral politics, right? I mean, we're talking about this from a political party. You can't say what are its weaknesses. Ah, Molotovs. Yeah. So it purely because we're talking about, we're looking at this social

movement from the lens of the Tory party. You could look at it from any number of other lenses, which we often do, because we're looking at it from this lens. From the perspective of that lens, what are its weaknesses? How do you understand it as a fallible thing? I suppose its biggest weakness is the fact that even though it has a mass base in terms of the Conservative Party, so-called grassroots, that they're quite isolated from the rest of what's going on in Britain. So you remember that the Brexit referendum and also the election of Jeremy Corbyn plus, you know, the heart attack, the near heart attack, the assumption had in 2017. Their danger is insularity and just being able to talk amongst themselves,

so they don't realize what's really going on out there. And so they can't get a sense of the contradictions that are piling up out there, some of the problems that are piling up out there. Now, I'm not one to kind of ever soft-soak the Tories, but this is a disadvantage that they did not have in the post-war period, because after the Tory membership peaked at around 2.7 million people, it had roots in large numbers of communities. You can still go to bits and pieces, parts of Britain, where you can see Conservative Association bars, for example. And so the Pold Profs like to talk about parties having a linkage function. And this idea is that the membership are more broadly representative of the population as a whole. They feel the pressures of the population

as a whole. And therefore, those pressures get transferred to the parliamentary elites, and then they theoretically act on them. But if you just look at what the Labour Party says about its own members, it thinks they're all a bunch of weirdos and freaks. And the Tories... Yeah, they're right, but not for the right reasons. And the Tories, you know, they're so distrustful of their membership that their membership have absolutely no say over the policy direction of the party whatsoever. And so we have this situation where previously the Tories were able to at least have a bit of assemblage of a linkage function and no understand what was going on in wider society. But now they're kind of the elites only in

conversations with themselves. They have reflected back at them the media, which is only kind of really interesting what goes on in those elite circles. And so they don't know what's going on outside. I suppose, again, the levelling up agenda is a belated recognition that something needs to be done to keep the popular masses. I suppose we'll have to give the Northerners a train. Yeah, exactly. One train. What can it cost? $10? Waking up in a cold sweat to realise that for the past 15 years, you've been in government of a large country. This is why they're always rebelling against themselves, right? Because they come to some realisation five, seven years too late, declare its massive injustice, and then they will then be handily, of course, portrayed as

rebels, and everyone can understand them as change makers, and then they will come in and dutifully do what they always do. So like it's a private flight, some shit and sell it off. Yeah, exactly. So on the one hand, you know, it is build one train, get bored, sell it to a company, you'll asset strip it. That's right. And then sell it, of course, for the price of a tenth of a train. Yeah, that's right. That's good business, baby. I guess some of the Tories, I was just going to say, I guess some of the Tories is they're hoping if Starmer somehow wins an election, that he would be this kind of reforming, building Prime Minister who over the course of 10 years will build up all the institutions,

nationalise some shit, even though he says he's not going to. So then when the Tories, if the Tories get another turn, then they can relive all their Thatcher fantasies and privatise everything again. Yeah, well, basically, the Tories do kind of need some of the stuff to respawn a bit, so they can kill a game, right? That's basically, they basically like they've been like spawn camping like the British stick currently in like a zero player game. Like there's been a server error and everyone else is left. Yeah, there's just teabagging the landscape. Yeah, that's right. So I think that brings us round, I think, to a very, to a nice sort of tidy conclusion. So I want to say, I want to give Phil the sort of the last word on this discussion of what are the

Tories and how are they to be understood? Speed round, three, two, one, go. They're terrible. It's, you know, I've got plenty of criticism to the Labour Party. And I, you know, I'm completely on board with kind of this idea around around them, kind of the monolith as well, that you kind of explored in various and various episodes of your show. But there is something particularly special about the Conservative Party. You know, this is the chief instrument of our enemy. And I think that the left do need to take it a lot more seriously. Rather, you know, we know that the Tories are a bunch of bastards. We know that they're going to come in and going to privatise your granny. They're going to cut benefits. They're going to put up

energy prices and then offer you a loan in order to pay for it. You know, they're going to do these awful things, but the left needs to be a bit more serious. They need to go back to Stuart Hall, look at how he thought about the Tories in the 1980s. And we've got to really do a similar kind of job, but not just leave it because after Stuart Hall finished writing about the Tories in the 1980s, there was very little that was published seriously on the left about divisions within the Tory Party, what's all about, why they obsessed with Europe, their relationship to class, very, very poor stuff. So that's pretty much what we've got to do. And one of the reasons why I wrote the book was to try and fill that gap, to stimulate that kind of work.

Well, if you want to stimulate your work, then go ahead and get falling down from Verso by Phil Burk. If you're hungry. First, read it. Yeah. Read it first and then eat it. Buy two copies, eat one, then read two. Get more from it on the second eat. That's right, it'll fill your right up. Yeah.

Phil, thanks a lot for coming and hanging out with us today. Cheers. That was a real pleasure, thank you. Sorry, we accidentally told everyone to eat your book. As long as they buy it. As long as they buy it. On the read it first. All you out there in podcast land, thank you very much for being a listener, for tuning in.

And don't forget, for five simple American dollars, one, two, three, four, five, you can become a Patreon subscriber. Five stable coins a month. No, we will not accept stable coins. Legally, those are backed by nuts and gum. No, we will not accept stable coins. Five U.S. government-issued dollars. And you can get a second episode every week.

This week, we will be the bonus one. And for that second episode this week, we'll be talking to a historian of the internet and current writer about technology of Getty Morozov. So do tune in for that. In the meantime, thanks again, Phil, for coming on. Thanks to you for listening and see you in a few days. Bye. Bye.

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