TRASHFUTURE - The Great Brexit Escape...Room feat. Tom Kibasi

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

We’re long overdue for something smart about Brexit on this show, or something smart in general. To that effect, this week, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) speak with Brexit seer and director of IPPR, Tom Kibasi (@TomKibasi). You may remember Tom from our infamous November ‘Yu-Gi-Oh Dragon Dick” episode in which he correctly predicted the entire sequence of events leading up to now re: Brexit. Well, Tom has more predictions, so this one will be a treat. Stick it to the stuffed shirts at the BBC and vote for us to win a British Podcasting Award. They’ll be forced to listen to our terrible acceptance speech if we win. https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be performing once again at the Star of Kings in Kings Cross (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) on Thursday, May 30 at 7:30 pm. Get your tickets here and return to the podcasting basement! https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-30052019/ *COMEDY KLAXON*: On April 18 at The Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA), Milo will perform a preview of his Edinburgh show. The show starts at 8 pm. Get your (free) tickets here and come out! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-presents-milo-edwards-pindos-wip-tickets-60015467880 And if you can’t make that show, come to Milo’s regular comedy night on April 24, also at the Sekforde. This show also starts at 8 pm and features Mickey Overman among many others, to include TF’s own Charlie Palmer. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-micky-overman-tickets-59543070928?aff=ebdssbdestsearch Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

So Robo Tez has extended article 50 without an act of parliament. Surprise, ruddy, surprise! How is this legal? Is it legal? Is she even legal? How on earth is this bi-dictat primordial legal? Hello again and welcome back to Trash Future, the podcast that you're listening to right now. It's me, Riley. You may remember me from every other episode of this podcast. I'm joined, of course, by the full clip of everyone, including Milo Edwards. Locked and loaded. Who's saying Kaspani? Hey, I'm back. It's been a minute. Nate Bethay. Hello. Thanks for having me. And returning three-peat champion Tom Kabasey. Thank you. Good to be here.

It is lovely to have you back for one of our occasional episodes of sober analysis. No dragon dicks today, folks. Yeah, anyway, you never know when it comes up. We can't promise that. Yeah. But what we do have is something very exciting. Live on air, I'm going to declare my personal independence from the European Union. We're actually replacing you out. We voted you out personally. It was very personal. This sounds like something that, like, just the idea of, like, declaring my personal independence from my wife. It has very divorce energy. The EU is love Ireland now. Someone gets voted out every week. He decided it's easier for the

UK to leave the EU that way, just like one by one, and it will take 60 million weeks. I, Riley Quinn, do hereby solemnly swear that I do personally declare it reads like a pattern song that I am a British citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and not and not Northern Ireland crucially and not a European citizen and in so doing do not recognize the European Union. It's authority laws or legislation that on the 29th day of the month of March and the year 2019, the United Kingdom of Great Britain did leave in whole and renounce any and all membership of the European Union in all forms legal or otherwise spiritual and that we reclaim all fishery rights, agricultural rights, all rights to sovereignty, self-control of borders,

but spelled like people sleeping over, belonging to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and control all the leagal systems of the United Kingdom of Great Britain that we regain control of all trade, moving across all borders and all forms of immigration in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Name, date, postcode. I'm really glad that we get the defunct bookstore back. Who don't know what's going on in the room right now. Riley has a bowl of chlorine washed chicken in front of him, but he's eating raw. It's pretty gross. It is leagal. It is leagal now. This is just one example of many Facebook memes that have been circulating ever since the United Kingdom voted to first do a short extension from its Brexit deadline of

May, March 29th to April 11th, and then again from April 11th to Halloween where we will spookily leave. Just as last time we talked to Tom, we spoke about the way in which remainers engage in bizarre fantasism and very literal protests of taking a flamethrower to a Brexit deal. We're smashing a button that says remain with a sledgehammer. Eating their own shit or something. More or less, just these very embarrassing public protests. I mean, that is basically the Woofer Endham, isn't it? Shit was eaten at the Woofer Endham, certainly. It's now levers that are doing it, but yet again, Brexit has broken everyone's brains. Now, Tom, I did some cruel and unusual

punishment. I forced you to watch the video of the three MPs doing a Brexit escape room. What's your reaction to that? It was as you could imagine horrifying, really. I think what was the worst feature of all was that they were dressed up in sort of gear from the 1940s and it was this great escape from the Brexit escape room. This idea that sort of underpins the whole Brexit debate, that somehow we're victims or plucky Englishmen who are going to escape from some sort of foreign tyranny, it's just pathetic. Unlike the foreign tyranny of just letting the US run all of our healthcare systems,

which would definitely be good and would not in any way be bad globalization. That's just freedom, man. Absolutely. It's the, for some reason, anyone who talks, anyone who tries to talk about this whole process metaphorically just engages in the weirdest literalism. It was a very, very weird thing to see, to see three MPs sort of humiliate themselves once again in fancy dress form. It's just horrifying. Look, it could have been worse. It could have been like an adult ball pit.

There's one ball in there labeled Brexit and they have to find it. But it's really sad. It's really sad that like so much like public space in London is now, so even our MPs have no choice but to go to escape rooms. Now this is like really cursed my brain because I'm thinking of like a version of the film, The Great Escape, but starring all of the Brexiteers and like Mark Francois is the Steve McQueen character. And he just like keeps trying to escape, but he keeps like crashing the motorbike into a wall because he's only ever ridden a motorbike in an arcade before. And then he's like, you know, John-Cord Lunker goes cooler, marches off there with his little

cricket ball and throws it against the wall. Well, that's the, this, that's not, again, that is the metaphor I would use as opposed to any of this weird, like, you know, literal Papi and Mache shit that they've been doing. That's the metaphor I would use, which is these are all most of the columnists and MPs who are sort of the gnashing, frothing, no-deal Brexite people are just, they hate that they were too young for any of the major wars or too old for the major wars in the 90s. And also they were born at the wrong time to play shooter games. They've never had a battle. I mean, isn't this why they kind of set that like, why these kind of meme, these personal

independence memes are kind of circling around? Yeah. Like the only logical extension between now to October is that at some point a bunch of these old us Brexiteers are going to try to form like their inversion of the Lord's Resistance Army. So it's like Dad's Resistance Army? Dad's Resistance Army. And they'll go around like more friends wars. They'll go around various Itaboni 2012, various English town centres with like airsoft rifles demanding that like, if Britain doesn't leave the European Union now, with no deal, they're going to terrorize the, they're going to terrorize the local town, which the only stores on the high street are vape stores and escape rooms.

I'm so excited for the concept of like a guerrilla insurgency for Brexite, because they would suddenly realize that like, there's nothing for them to fight against because everything they hate is imaginary because like the EU army doesn't exist and there are no troops for them to ambush. They're just having to like break into people's offices and like make them slightly more unsafe. They'll be fighting against the Euro star. Right. Oh yeah. You know, they'll be like, damn, damn, the Taliban was a lot better fought out than I previously expected. Mark Francois, who like loves to tell that he was what, was he,

he was a territorial army officer, right? Or something like that. Yeah. He didn't teach him to lose. So like those types of people who like really like the idea of war, but have never actually like, they're the type of people who like imagine that they could just. He should be running a baseball place. Right. Like that is Mark Francois natural job. So many, so many, so many TA guys are like this, right? They're the types of guys who are like, oh yeah, if I was like going down to Afghan right now, I just like go to the front line and like

fuck them up. They wouldn't know what I'm talking about. And it's like, when you actually go, it's like, oh, actually the Taliban are a lot smarter than I expected. Why does this keep happening? Why do I keep running into like, Oh wait, they have guns. Why do I keep running into a brick wall with like a, with a, with a shout out with a door painstot. So there are two other examples of no dealers being now driven insane by the Brexit extension. One of which is after Downing Street stood down, it's no deal contingency planning and

businesses started to stand down there. No, no deal contingency planning. Brexiteer conservative MP Steve Baker branded this decision as one of quote, sheer spite as the civil servants had worked very hard. He's had a lot of concern for those civil servants, but I think no deal has played a really important role in the Brexit debate. So arguably the only way you could get to a majority vote to leave was by having leave as an undefined option, right? Just being imaginary. You could imagine whatever country you wanted at the other side of leave and keeping no deal in play and in discussion

for the last couple of years has been one of those sort of seismic strategic mistakes that the prime minister is prone towards whereby she's ended up leaving something on the table that enabled everyone's fantasy to exist. So you could just dream up what did no deal look like? It looked like anything you felt like, because it was by definition the sort of presence of absence. The arrangement is nothing can therefore you can fill that empty vessel with any kind of perverse fantasy you like. And that's what I think has driven a lot of the sort of the psychosis of like people mobilizing into the dad's resistance army, which is that as the wave form has collapsed

and it's become clear what Brexit will look like, whether it's May's deal, some kind of customs union or whatever, as it has gotten more set down, the disjunct between their fantasies just sort of crashing headfirst into reality, I think has genuinely broken a lot of them. Yeah, I think it has broken a lot of them. And I think that's because for a lot of this, the right lens is psychoanalysis, not political analysis. And that this is a sort of search for an account of heroism in these rather sad old men's lives. And it's, you know, it's worst it's or it's best, perhaps it's pathetic, and it's worst, it's incredibly destructive for everyone else. So what you're saying is Slavojicek was right all along.

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, this is a very divorced dad thing, isn't it? Because it's like, the whole thing is like shroding his cat. It's like, well, until I get divorced from my wife, we can't definitely say that I won't be dating Claudia Schiffer. But as soon as I do, we have to find out. It's not looking good, lads. And it's the same thing where there's now the desperate bid to retain the fantasy by suggesting that actually, all of the extensions never happened, that no deal was struck, and that we're living in the reality of no deal, which is another meme circulating on Boomer Facebook, which is that the extension was also known Facebook, which is that the extension was illegal. So this guy, Robin Tilbrook, the head of the

England Democrats, this is one thing boomers get frustrated about. It's when their extension is illegal. I paid good money for that conservatory. So they hit very close to home. It's like, that's just another Dartford anecdote for you. So yeah, so that they're saying it was illegal because it was carried out through a statutory instrument rather than an active parliament. And again, this is just the mirror image of attempting to save your political project with appeal to like some arcane technical rule, because everyone's watched too many inspirational sports movies where actually like the basketball tips in at the last moment. In March, I started to debate some Brexiteers on Facebook on Twitter saying, well, you know,

it's actually very easy to change the date of exit day, you just change it through a statutory instrument. And they kept saying, no, it's written down on the law, there's an active parliament, it's the law. And it was extraordinary, the number of these people who had never bothered to check. It's very clear, it says very clearly, you can, you know, a minister of the Crown can vary the date and this is how you do it. So this, it's interesting how it was built up and Theresa May has this sort of habit of building up an expectation and then not delivering it. And this was just another one, though, is right? And this was just another example of that. We all know that the only thing that is, it can only be enshrined in law once it's like

engraved in a sword, right? Exactly. That's why there's a sword in the Tower of London that says you like, no, like no race, no racist words are allowed to be said, otherwise you'll get arrested. And it has to be the sword of the guy who's like, a dear Isis, if you can kill me, I'll give you 50k, but I have a sword. Good luck. So I think you're right. This is basically psychological. And it's why I think like that, you know, no matter how much people on the left like to paint Brexit is something good through, you know, their lexidiness, it's that really this is, this is, it's a flashy project because fascism always is about appealing to the sort of sadistic psychology, the sadomasochistic psychology of sort of old men who have a sort of schlocky

dream of this, of a paradise world in which everyone is rosy cheeked and this shopkeeper says hello and we just have to like obliterate society as it currently is in order to achieve that. Yeah, it's perfection, a vision of their version of perfection. So I think, but if you want to understand Brexit, fuck David Goodheart, you got to read Eric from. Yeah. And lexid is this funny thing in the sense that there's all these people who are like, oh, I don't like the European Union for these reasons. And although Brexit is a project being controlled largely by fascism for fascist purposes, I'm confident that when it actually happens, I will decide how it ends up. And even though I'm in a concentration camp now,

I'm confident that everyone will come around to my point of view in just a few short moments as I'm inscribing all of my socialist policies on the wall of this windowless cell. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like it's, it's a Tory psychodrama specifically because it's concentrated in this weird nostalgia for a vision of England that has never really existed. And it's like, for them, like you said, sunny uplands, whereas like in real life, it was just smog and non-sing, like non-stop. Like even there's like some sort of distance, right? Because I mean, from what I've noticed anyway, you have these types of people seem to be dwindling, the people who like genuinely believe

in kind of like a sort of positive vision of what Brexit could be. Like this guy, like, as obviously, you know, the guy in the video is like living in this kind of fantasy world in the literal sense of like, he will do, he'll just, he refuses to believe that anything has happened after the 29th of March, other than the thing that he has been conjuring up for the past two years. But there's other people, but others, the other people who exist on the right, who talk about Brexit purely in like these kind of absolutist terms, it's very much like, we just want to leave. I don't give a shit what happens if you're like eating chlorinated chicken and like, you can't get heat in your house and

just live with it, you'll survive. But I just want this done, right? It's kind of, and that's like, I feel like that's another dimension. It's not one that's rooted in like naivety. It's one that's rooted in this very obvious and very knowing idea that yeah, things are going to get really bad for people, including maybe myself and my wife, who I'm currently trying to divorce my divorce from. But who gives a shit? Let's just do it anyway. So yeah, it's like a weird like hair shirt thing for these people where like for some reason, they just have to do it no matter what the consequences will be. Even if it's like, we'll guillotine you all. They're like, it has to happen. Had a destructive allure all along. And that's partly because so much the establishment said,

don't do it. Here's a button really don't press it. And it's like the kid who's told not to do something and therefore it becomes irresistible to do it. And it's a kind of understandable sentiment in some respects, right? When you're told definitely don't do this thing. A lot of people react by going, I'm really now really want to do that thing. I really want to fuck the black hole. Yeah. And the Brexit button is on the other side of the wall. And when they pushed it through, it extended the stop Brexit button in Jeremy Corbyn's office, which he's been refusing to press. So speaking of Corbyn and the famous stop Brexit button, let's just do a quick review

of how we got to where we are, which is no, nothing really decided. No deal sort of off the table, but still the default if nothing is decided or at least seem to be and Brexit extended to October 31st. Amazing. What a day. What is, what do we think, what is, we talked last time about what Labour's strategy was and it involved holding the Tories to account based on what they've said. But Labour's, has Labour's strategy changed at all? Well, I think it's somewhat starting to shift over time. I think where Labour started out, which was to say, okay, well, here are the tests. Just does your deal meet them? No, it doesn't. Okay. And then people said, right, what's your alternative? Labour set out its alternative

and wrote to the Prime Minister in early February saying, well, this is the sort of Brexit deal the Labour Party could support. The Prime Minister basically sort of brushed it off and said, I'm not very interested. Thank you very much. Then we had this plava, what, 10 days ago, where the Prime Minister said that she was suddenly going to sit down and negotiate with Jeremy Corbyn. And that to me was pretty obviously a bad faith offer. And the way that you know it was a bad faith offer was the fact that if it had been sincere, that Prime Minister Theresa May was saying that she was going to negotiate a soft Brexit with, you know, terrorist loving Marxist Jeremy Corbyn as they like to describe him, the idea that then the hard line Brexiteers who wanted

to leave with no deal instantaneously would just put up with that without resigning was clearly just not true. We would have known if it was a good faith offer, because a bunch of people would have resigned the next morning. The fact they didn't shows it was a sham. And essentially, it had a short-term purpose of trying to signal to the Europeans, look, I've got a different approach. We're going to take this forward through the process of consultation and consensus building and to give that kind of fiction. And so that carried into the European Council meeting. And then it's continued since then, because everyone wants a holiday. So now we're in the mode. Seriously, everyone is now, everyone's like, actually, this has been exhausting. Let's just

pretend the negotiations are ongoing so we can have recess. And then it will blow up after recess, because by that point, there's no need to kind of keep the fiction going. There was that piece in that Financial Times about, I think it was the FT where it might have been wanted the telegraph or something, about MPs needing to have mental health breaks because because Brexit was getting too much. Was it MPs? It could have been civil servants. I think it was MPs. I remember seeing this. Well, I think everyone actually genuinely needs a break from it. And it has been stressful for people. But that's because I was thinking a lot about this. A lot of people feel very upset with

the way things are at the moment and all the ranker and division and arguments and failure to resolve the question. In my view, actually, this is really healthy. This is what democracy actually looks like. When you've got a big and important question that needs to be decided, people hold very different views and they argue for them. They try and forge a compromise and they go back and forth. And there's a real struggle. It tells you that something matters. And I think the lesson from all of this should be that we need more democracy, not less. And this is the first time in a long time that we've seen what that looks like. What this actually exposes to me is that we do have a system of elected dictatorships where basically

the government of the day largely gets its own way. There's a bit of a tussle between leading personalities within it, you know, Gordon Brown versus Tony Blair and, you know, what does Nick Clegg really think about what David Cameron wants to do and all that kind of stuff. That's not real politics. That's just gossip. And actually, for change, we've been an arena of real politics, real democracy. And why are people so upset by it? It's because actually, we've learned helplessness. There is this learned helplessness that has existed, such that when there's a real argument going on, people suddenly say, well, I don't want to hear anything about it. I just want this to be over. It's so awful. It's so

important. I think that's also connected back to like a lot of the ways in which people have tried to be politically active about this and in the ways it just hasn't really worked. So I think like last time we talked about this, we talked about the just endless protest marches that essentially amounted to please make it stop, more or less. So I'm not sure I completely agree with that. I do think the fact that a million people cared enough to go and protest for a people's vote or whatever, had important symbolic value both to Westminster for saying, actually, that's not awful, a lot of people who care enough to give up a Saturday to do it. And in continental capitals, where it starts to generate this narrative of,

well, actually, there's this, the biggest pro-European movement in all of Europe appears to now be in the United Kingdom, you know, what the fuck is going on? And if you take the revoke... Take us back, Sandra. Yeah, but it's kind of fresh things, right? And then I think this revoke petition, right, I think really did have an impact in Westminster, because the idea that there were 6 million voters who were pissed enough about Brexit to sign a petition told you something really quite significant, because most of the time, most British people are like, can you just get on with it? I don't want to hear about it. I don't like it. I'm not interested.

And the fact there's a block of people that care that much is electrically very significant. And I'm not saying that somehow that means that we're going to get a revocation, but what it signals to politicians is 6 million really pissed people need to think very carefully about how to respond to all that. It also creates some really weird and bizarre moments. I was thinking about what's the very... I don't remember a lot about the moments that defined Brexit other than Matthew Goodwin eating his book, which like... I mean, it's so fibrous, you're for the battle. If more democracy produces more of that, then yes, absolutely more democracy.

A recipe book that you can cook, page by page. I'm really excited for the very principled leave Brexit protests where it really elucidates what is that they feel passionately about. Over the years, the EU environmental safety regulations may have taken their smoke, but they will never take their noncing. I feel like we could get to a point. I wonder what the point will be where everyone just loses their minds so much that someone from the leave campaign just does the dumbest thing. And none of us would expect it. Eating the book was one of the golden moments, but I wonder whether... I also like... What was it, those pro-EU people who got nude in parliament?

Oh, yeah. No, that was Extinction Rebellion. Oh, was that okay? Oh, yeah. That was actually about the environment, wasn't it? Well, then there was the keys economics professor who got naked and wrote something about Brexit on her boots. Someone got nude. I'm just waiting for someone from leave to get nude as well. I was just wondering if you think that there's going to be a moment of absolute make or break. I'm thinking of previous crises in the United Kingdom, things like the flash crash or a currency devaluation or things like that. Do you feel like there's going to be a moment where

there's literally going to be like, we're at a cliff edge, we have to do something? Well, I think that's what the Prime Minister's been trying to create. That's been a core part of her strategy for the last couple of years, and she's manifestly failed to do it. And the reason for that was that actually no deal was quite clearly a hoax. I started calling it a hoax last summer. It started to get some traction in and around the vote in November. And the reason that you could confidently say that was that the consequence of no deal was so serious in terms of the future of the Union. So losing Northern Ireland would be a pretty likely outcome of a no deal Brexit.

Imposing sanctions on your own economy by ripping up trade deals with 67 nations overnight. It was actually fairly obvious that no even vaguely responsible politician would ever permit that to happen. And equally, it was always pretty clear that the Europeans would be prepared to use extensions as a way of avoiding no deal. The question is, when does that reach its limits? And is there a risk of a misjudgment whereby actually on the European side, they say, no, no, enough is enough. This one really is real. This one really is the last extension. And MPs in parliament saying, oh, I'm sure they'll just extend again,

and therefore we can postpone making a decision. That's the really big risk. I don't think we've got that much further to run in this extension game. So my sort of central view on this now is that the talks will come to nothing, because they were never a good faith offer in the first place. I think people are very much mistaken if they think a compromise can be found. I think at this point, people are far too dug in. So Brexit, the vote to leave was a general mandate. And the government and the prime minister could have generated a specific mandate out of that

by having a very consultative open process from 2016 onwards to say, okay, well, we've got this general instruction to leave. Now, how do we bring people together and look at how we actually do that? Once you have the general election in 2017, it should have been blindingly obvious that without a majority, she would need to build a broader consensus for what leaving the EU looked like, and she chose not to do that. So you've got to this situation now, with that passage of time,

that having failed to generate that specific mandate, everyone has dug into their particular positions, and therefore I think Brexit has essentially dissolved. And I think the conservatives have broken Brexit as a political project, which is kind of a fascinating thing to see. So when it goes from here, the talks will definitely break down. Even if they were to reach an agreement between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, the Tories would vote.

If it didn't have a second referendum attached to it, the Tories would vote against it on substance, because they'd say, well, we don't like a soft Brexit, customs union, single market regulation, and so on. And if it didn't have a second referendum attached to it, Labour MPs would vote against it on process. So you could have a situation where Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May agree a deal, and the only people that vote for him, Parliament,

to the opposition government front benches, and it fails again. So at this point, I think there is no majority in this Parliament for any outcome whatsoever. And that leaves you with processes as the only way forward. And that means either a general election to change the Parliament, something you can achieve a majority, or it means a second referendum to delegate the decision back to the people, rather than for Parliament itself to make it.

And you said yesterday, I think, on Twitter, that because of the current polling, you don't think a GE is likely? I go back and forth on this. I mean, I think if you were thinking about this rationally from the Tory side, you would say to yourself, well, we can't get a majority for any outcome, even by trying to negotiate with Jeremy Corbyn, it's not possible to get to an outcome that's agreed across Parliament. The DUP are dug in, the ERG are dug in, Labour's pretty much dug in.

So there isn't an option there, in which case you can either have a general election where the Labour Party will almost certainly promise renegotiating second referendum, or you can have a second referendum. And if you have a choice as a Tory member of Parliament between having a second referendum under a Labour government or a second referendum under a Tory government, I suspect that you will end up concluding eventually. Under duress.

Under duress, that you prefer it under a Tory government than a Labour government. Now, I've usually got the timing, I've usually got the kind of where it's going to go right, but the timing's wrong. I usually think it will move at a bit of a faster pace. Like when I was last on the show, I was saying, you know, I don't think the soft Brexit thing is going to get a majority, and we eventually found that with the indicative votes.

I just thought that would have occurred, you know, four or five months ago. You also said the point about them basically using no deal, trying to like threaten no deals and means of getting the deal through. Like they're like, we're going to create the scenario of an economic destruction because that's what's going to be your punishment if you don't vote for my deal. Yeah, and it just totally failed. So my guess now is, how does this play out? I don't think you get anywhere this side of the summer.

I think basically everyone just finds various different ways to waste time. I then think the party conferences then lock people into a more hard line position. I think Labour will explicitly come out of the party conferences saying, you know, Labour is a party that believes in remaining in the European Union, and it exclusively supports a second referendum as the means to achieve it. And then I suspect that there's a decent chance that you get legislation in October that says there shall be a second referendum organised will be my guess. And then we go back to the Europeans at the end of October and say, okay,

well, we're not going to have it all sorted out by 31st October, but this is the referendum. This is the process. It's passed into an act of parliament. There's a specific date that the referendum will take place on. Can we extend to, you know, the other side of that date? And after that referendum, that referendum will make the decision and either will be in and will revoke Article 50, or we will definitely be out.

And the consequence of the vote will be that we will leave. Yeah. I've greatly enjoyed personally Theresa May's strategy of being like a sort of feckless supply teacher screaming at a class, I'm going to count to 10, but only getting to three before she is hitting the head with a ball of rolled up blue tack. I think that's possibly the best description I've heard so far. But the stunning lack of political skill, I think at this stage, people get very distracted by it.

So they sort of say, well, this person has no political ability whatsoever. She's completely lacking in any empathy or ability to persuade people. And they think that that's the problem. But actually, the problem is much further back in a catastrophic failure of strategy to not understand after a close vote that probably you needed to bring people together. And then in 2017 to have a Lancaster House speech, which if we were using the kind of modern parlance, that was basically a proposal for a managed no deal.

That's actually what she really proposed in Lancaster House. And then to go through this journey, still not seeing what was obvious, which was that she wasn't going to get a deal through purely with votes from her own side. Yeah. Well, because she spent so much time trying to bring her own side together, forgetting that 30% of them are completely insane fuckos. Like, like fucking, you know, Jacob, Rhys, Morgan, Mark, Francois, the dick dastardly and muttly of the Tory party.

Like you can't rely on them to say anything that makes any sense at any given point. It was never going to be a good idea to rely on the Tory Taliban. Driving around Westminster on their Toyota Hiluxes with paintball guns on the back. I will not tolerate bespurching this Taliban on the show. They put a lot of planning into what they do. Who's saying defend the Taliban? Who's saying defends the Taliban? It's just because it's a group of guys that hang out together.

There's no way not to go back to psychology on this, I think, right? The Taliban is a star. So there's no way not to go back to psychology, where Theresa May has taken this and has since we last spoke as behaved as though there is a natural kind of Britain that wants no deal. And that is, that it basically has all the characteristics of a David Goodheart somewhere. You know what I mean? Isn't that it? This is like, okay, so I haven't really, as I've said before,

I haven't really paid much attention to like Brexit and everything. But like, it sort of feels like this conversation has always been a very strange mix of like, cultural, it has, I don't know whether it would have been better. Interesting in your opinion, but whether it would have been a better strategy to like, advocate for a no deal solution purely like on economic terms. I think because so much of this conversation has also been wedged with like cultural issues around as David Goodheart thing about like, everywhere's and nowhere's, Theresa May's being like, if you're a citizen of, you know, you have to be a citizen of somewhere.

The Belgians want to straighten out bananas. I mean, all that as well. Like because so much of this conversation has been very much like a cultural one of like, what kind of country are we? Which is like, to me, it's kind of one of these big existential questions that you're never going to answer anyway, but to kind of put like a big constitutional question in framing in this way. Like, regardless of what way you approach it, it's always going to fail. Does that make sense? I don't know if it does.

Well, to frame it as a no deal as a constitutional point. No, just like have this whole kind of conversation around like no deals and managed deals, like trying to kind of on the one hand advocate for a like a managerial logic based solution to kind of, you know, but we should leave the European Union in this very kind of processed and calm way. Meanwhile, like the conversations around Brexit aren't really about economics and not really about kind of like economic prosperity, but they're more about what kind of people exist in this country and what kind of people should we listen to. I think that's partly true, but I do think at some level it was just a really boneheaded

strategy that said somehow in a negotiation, if you're going to get a good deal, you need to the other side need to sincerely believe that you'll walk away, which was just childish. And it was one of those things that you have to have no real understanding of how the actual world worked or how the European Union worked in order to think that it ever could be a plausible strategy and saying, look, if you don't give me what I want, I will shoot myself in the head. And by the way, you'll get splattered with the blood. And so you won't want that. It's such an obviously stupid thing to do. Especially if it's someone to kink.

Right. So it just at the end of the day, I think it was that kind of flawed thinking and thinking that you they thought that it would have a benefit with the Europeans of getting a better deal. And they thought that it would have a benefit with Parliament in scaring particularly Labour MPs into voting for her deal on the basis that the alternative was crashing out. And I think it just proved to be a total nonsense. I keep thinking back because the Brexit vote happened and then Donald Trump got elected. And there were some I was living in the United States at the time and there was obviously like this chatter about, well, Donald Trump will be the Brexit president. And I realized that the

similarity there is that after Brexit, which is a close vote after the referendum and after Trump winning, which is also a close vote, which was really a squeaker and it was only because of the incredibly undemocratic system the United States has, this then got interpreted as this massive cultural moment as though the mandate was much larger than it actually is. And everyone wants to say no, the reason why Donald Trump won or the reason why the Brexit referendum voted to leave was not because of a small vote and the way that was decided in some tactical missteps, but rather because there's too many damn genders or something like that. They always want to ascribe it to this larger cultural phenomenon.

And for me, I think what's interesting is watching this happen and watching the fantasy Brexit, the like can never reach it because it's on your fantasy Brexit team. It's like this concept like Brexit, it's like we're going to leave the European Union and enter a different state of mind or something. It feels as though the more that has to come into contact with the reality, the less agreement there can be. It's like it's as if... Well, that's exactly right. That's exactly the dynamic that's in play. And it's once you make Brexit specific in any form, it probably could never achieve a majority. So you've got this paradox that by being undefined, that's how Brexit could get a majority for people to leave,

voting to leave. And then as soon as that had occurred, you could only leave in a specific and defined and concrete way, at which point you've immediately lost the majority that you got by having it as an open-ended option. I signed a roundtable with David Davis back in December 2017. And he said, look, a lot of people are paying lots of attention to all the detail. It's like, yes, we know that you're a lazy fucker and you don't read your briefs. That's well established. He's just assessing our vulnerability to attack. It was truly extraordinary. And he said, look, I'm not really up there with the detail of regulation or trading arrangements. You're like, well, that's the job, but you carry on. And then he said, but I really think that what

Brexit is about is a revolution and expectations. And that it's about opening our eyes to the rest of the world and realizing how much more opportunity there is outside of Europe and in other continents around the world. And so if you think that this man was the Brexit secretary, he'd been in the job for over a year at this stage, he'd been in the job for just about 18 months. He hadn't got a grasp of the details. And he thought that the real value of Brexit was this amorphous revolution and expectations. That tells you a bit about how we were heading towards this. You think she's Captain Kirk? He's like, we all forged to relate with the new world. That's just it though, that the entire thing has been the fantasy. That's why you go back to

psychology. It's the fantasy of swashbuckling, exploring, fighting, glory, etc. It's just the ways in which it's cashed out or different from person to person. Mark Francois has a different fantasy to David Davis, who has different fantasy to one of James O'Brien's many callers in. Like they all have various different fantasies. But they're all going to get eaten by the Hawaiians. They want to jump off the cliff so that they can feel the rush of the wind through their hair on the way down, right? And they don't care what happens when you get to the bottom. I'd like to move on slightly from no dealism though and go to a little bit more, because we talked about what process labor wants. Were labor to be elected tomorrow

versus were labor to be elected, say, after the conference? I know that's entirely hypothetical because they won't be. Is there some kind of positive? That is to say, just simply not negating Theresa May. Is there some kind of positive vision of what, how labor could then take a Brexit forward? Or do you think that it's so parliamentary, so parliamentarily impossible as that it doesn't, it doesn't bear having? Well, I think, I think labor would clearly put together a coherent proposal for, for a soft Brexit. I think that's what they would do. And I think people sometimes think, oh, well, you know, all kinds of Brexit are the same. And what the hell is the difference between soft

Brexit and hard Brexit? And I think the terminology is not helpful. But essentially it's showing, it's showing dick going in pussy, isn't it? That's the dick. It's whether you can show it on mainstream TV after a certain time or whether there's never going to be an episode where Tom's going to be on and we don't talk about dicks. What's happened is we've, we've actually, there's been a collapse of the various fantasies about what the dicks are. It started as a dragon. Now it's just a normal one that's after the watershed. Because before, if you wanted a hard Brexit, you'd have to go to Amsterdam and go to the bit in the back of the shop. And it's actually legal to bring it back into the UK.

You know, I swear to God, you guys are so on brand, but sometimes I'm just like, what is fucking happening? Holding us back onto course. So holding us back onto course, we would basically be looking any kind of positive vision that labor might have, like positive meaning forward and active, would basically be one of more or less what customers union, single market, this kind of thing. So what is the difference between the two in the non-pornographic sense? We're just like the Rockets of Freddie Brecks. I make Nate in the same laugh and then them laughing makes me laugh. And then yeah.

Right. He's like the captain cook of the show. Always like steering us on course. Someone end my suffering, please. So, well, so the distinction is that one is a strategy that says the best position for the United Kingdom is to diverge as much as possible, as quickly as possible from the European Union and its economic institutions. So that's what hard Brexit is about, a strategy of divergence. The difference with a soft Brexit is it says, well, actually it's in our economic interest to continue our economic partnership, but we've had a vote to leave.

And therefore we must continue on a different political basis. So actually they are strategically distinct options. And I think what people think is that somehow there's a spectrum between the two and that you can kind of have a compromise somewhere between them, but since the block chain Irish border. Well, but get since the governing thought is so radically different under each of those scenarios, there is no compromise between them in my view. And part of the reason that Theresa May has done so badly is that she's tried to find that middle way between the two. She started out wanting a sort of ultra hard Brexit in facts and

experience taught her that this would in fact have calamitous consequences. She tried to move her proposal towards soft Brexit, but having set an expectation with the Tory right of this sort of fantasy ultra hard Brexit, she just couldn't move far enough into sort of soft Brexit territory for it to make any sense. And therefore she's going to end up with a sort of dog's breakfast of a deal. Labour I think would come in and not been constrained by a coalition that's quite the same way. It would then propose a soft Brexit, but its coalition would insist on a further referendum and vote on it because at the end of the day, Brexit is a project of the right for the right with a right wing leadership that proposed the right wing agenda. And I think

most of the Labour movement would very reasonably ask what the hell is a Labour government trying to do to deliver something that four years ago, a bunch of right wing people whipped up and for what reason. So I don't think it's possible for Labour to do it without saying renegotiate and referendum. I do have one question on that though because it feels like some, at least to me, that a lot of Labour strategy is governed by the idea that they have to not seem as though they're being Brexit wreckers because they are facing the moment that anything strays from that, then they have the entirety of the British media basically painting them as betraying the will of the people or at least the tabloid media. I'm wondering,

is there a point at which that mandate expires, at which that's no longer applicable? So I think things are on the turn and I think the fact that last weekend, Peter O'Born, the associate editor of The Daily Mail came out with a 2000 word essay saying actually the case for Brexit has basically dissolved, the economic case has collapsed, the rhetoric has got out of control, the EU is not a dictatorship, it's a group of sovereign states collaborating together, we didn't understand it properly until this period and so on. I think that's very significant and I think the other thing that happened this week was Nick Ferrari who's a sort of populist radio commentator has now said that he's given up on Brexit and wants to think and talk about other

things and we should just stay in. What those populists are very good at doing is understanding what is popular and they kind of have a nose for it and they pick it up and they start to articulate an opinion that they kind of know is already brewing in society. So I think we're at an interesting moment where labor has to be very careful that it doesn't get caught advocating for something that actually a lot of people no longer believe in out of some rigid belief that somehow the tabloid press will smack them around. Isn't there like this problem also about the people, that even though there are like on the wider scale there are people who don't care as much as maybe they used to,

but the ones who do really care like they're much, they are more kind of what you call it, they're more fired up than ever and some of those people are really unhinged and like, I don't know, whenever I think about this I'm like- But they're quite close to a stroke so you know. Well also at some level, I think at some level there is a kind of lunacy in saying, look the way that you tackle the far right and people with extreme opinions is to give them what they want and then they'll go away because it won't make them go away. So I think at some point you have to realise you're in a fight and when you're in a fight

you have to decide either you're going to lay there and take a beating and hope that it won't hurt or you're going to fight back and I think you know it's getting to that point where I don't think there's much tolerance left in the wider labour movement for indulging a right-wing project that seems to at very best leave us worse off than we were before and to have achieved nothing in particular. Or and bear with me on this Tom, you take the beating because you know that what the far right want is actually very good and they just want it for the wrong reasons and when they eventually get it they will realise that your vision of it is much better than theirs and let you decide how it happens. And that ladies and gentlemen is Lexi. Strapping on my dungarees.

Well I've always said you know Lexi is mirage, it looks good from a distance but up close there's nothing there. Oh it's like my car. The thing is as a Marxist, if I am to be a Marxist, if I am to understand institutions not just as the literal bodies of rules and people that comprise them but also as an expressions of class interest, like it's still, there is still a socialist vision of the European Union that is different from the currently existing European Union. So I sort of have two related points I want to raise. Number one, what does a socialist remain campaign look like and if there is to be some kind of confirmatory vote which we think is likely? And how does that get Boston rather than Manchester and Cambridge voting for you? Second, or sort of as a corollary,

which ones of those can we afford to lose? And secondly, what does a actually more socialist EU look like? So if we're going to make those kinds of promises about being protected from globalization but actually being protected from globalization from inside this institution, what do we then do to make good on them? Well I suppose for me the big lesson of all this is the EU is very important for many reasons but by far the biggest determinant of our economy in society is already within our own grasp and control and that actually we have more agency and more choice and control about our future destiny than we commonly imagine. And I suppose in my view, you know, at some level socialism is all about priorities and so I think the very clear

message that any left remain campaign would need to have would be stop Brexit, let's rebuild Britain instead because this is a colossal distraction from all the things that we could be spending our time doing and actually kind of detailed regulatory frameworks and trade agreements aren't going to be the things that are going to move the dial on, you know, the quality of people's lives in most of the country and actually having a focus on those things by not being distracted on Brexit is the way that I think we can solve a lot of the problems that we have. Yeah because I think there's a difference in saying that there were people had like legitimate concerns which they expressed by voting for Brexit which I think is a valid point but it's

different to say different to saying that they had legitimate concerns about the EU because by and large everything they were angry about like austerity and stuff actually had nothing to do with the EU they had just come to associate with the EU. But additionally I mean there are there are things that we if we are to be a good faith left remain campaign like that we have to address like the militarized European border, the sort of rank immiseration of Greece and the other southern states by Germany. I mean I know we're not in the Eurozone, I know we're not in the Eurozone. Well but there's two things to be clear about there right, one we're not in the Eurozone and most of that has come through the Eurozone and I think if we were in the Eurozone and in one of

the periphery states I think it would be a very very different debate and if they were having this discussion in Greece about should they stay or should they go I could really understand the kind of legs of arguments I think we have a very different salience. But I think you know you can't have it both ways and say well one the same time we've got this degree of sovereignty and control and we control our borders and all that kind of stuff and then say that you also want to police other people's borders so what if you're going to stay in the EU and you're outside a Schengen then and you control your own borders as a result. I don't really think it's that anyone is going to think the UK is a reasonable voice in determining border policy outside of outside of our own

borders. What I'm asking really is if we are if we are going to try to be a socialist government in Europe how can what are the things we can do to actually try to basically make Europe a better institution for more people. So I do think the treaties will need to be revised at some point and I think there is a a very significant opportunity because the UK has had such a shaping role and I think if you look at why has the has the EU been a neoliberal institution in many respects that's because of the success of British diplomacy that has tried to drive it in that direction and I think equally if British diplomacy decided that it wanted to try and drive it in a different direction that could be an attainable goal but it doesn't happen quickly

and it doesn't happen easily. So you know this has been going on since the mid 80s with the single European Act which creating the single market and so on and it will take years to steer it again in a different direction but that doesn't mean it's impossible right. So why wouldn't the socialist government for example propose a trade union directive saying that there has to be minimum trade union rights across all EU countries right. So there are all sorts of things that you could choose to do differently. I just have one question because I noticed from recent polling that for European parliamentary elections it looked like Labour had a significantly like almost 20 points ahead of the Conservatives. I'm wondering do you think that if that were if that were to play out

in the election would you start to see any kind of change or are we still too locked in to the Brexit kind of mindset. Well just just very practically if the UK were to return a very large contingent of Labour MEPs at this election then the overall balance of power within the European Parliament would shift towards the party of European socialists. If that happened that would have a big impact on who forms the commission who the set of commissioners would be in the next term and so that really could shape and affect the future of Europe. So actually the stakes are pretty high if you believe in solidarity and you think that there's an opportunity to help people in other countries and the stakes are really high in these European elections and could make a real

difference. I think this actually this can be taken taken back to then make a point make almost make the point against lexit which is that these very large institutions that span sort of think the constructions like national borders that have the ability to even discipline international capital in some ways it's best to take control of them and in effect by making everyone care about the European Parliament or by making many more people care about the European Parliament what we're saying is in fact the project of Steve Baker might be a more socialist Europe that we're still in. Yeah well this is why I was saying this is why I was saying wouldn't that be pretty sweet right? No imagine imagine a completely different outcome seriously but you've got a situation

where you've ended up with the UK having had a massive row about being in the EU or not and having concluded that it should stay in right and having resolved that once and for all and stopping this kind of euristic skeptic bollocks and every time that you had one of these imbeciles come up and say well we just need to get out everyone would be able to say well we tried that and have that and last time shut the fuck up right at which point you can then start to have a conversation about how do we have a seriously constructive role in Europe how do we shape it in the direction that we want it to go how do we stop saying you know in Europe not run by Europe and turn it into in Europe you know leading Europe and I think that that takes things in a completely

different direction and I think too much of the left lacks any kind of ambition when it comes to these oh it's unreformable it can't be changed it's in the treaties yeah and it just seems to me that that fundamental lack of ambition is a mistake the left is at its best when it is when it is ambitious and it is utopian and just the fact that reforming the european union will be difficult doesn't mean shouldn't be done especially because it is such a big institution that can allow us to control so much yeah I was I was just going to say also that like my brief experience with dealing with business things in the united kingdom makes me think that as an american if lexate happened and britain was opened up to rapacious american capitalism even more than it

already is the i don't think people are prepared for how much worse it can get like oh yeah coming from a place where like hussain got seriously ill eating food because he's not used to how bad the american meat quality is if you buy from like not whole foods like the level of that kind of problem like you're going to see so much worse and it's like the idea that wouldn't happen because somehow as an individual we can control it better than as a member of like the reason why you have higher food standards in this country as i understand is because of the regulations passed through the eu like if that were to go away like do you really think that it would be sweetness and light to use a british expression as opposed to getting much much worse and be like oh well that's okay we've

we've we've we've we've put scented oil on this rotten food you know that kind of a thing well i was greatly enjoying tom's take on this because it really confirmed my suspicions because the first time the first time i was ever asked what i made of what i made of lexate was on a boom to vista the australian podcast um where i was effectively on authority on brexit just by virtue of living here and not in any other way and i could literally only give an instinctive take on it which was well i think it's a bit rich to leave an institution on the grounds that is not left-wing enough when it's largely apart from you run by a bunch of countries that are significantly more left-wing than your country and your country has spent the last 30 years trying to make it more right-wing

it's like going to a house party taking a massive shit on the floor and being like it smells bad in here i'm leaving now i think i actually happened once to a house party i went to in kent so uh just uh just to take us out i have a very brief um reading a little palette cleanser a little palette cleanser um by by arch remaniac nit cohen in uh the spectator just a man who understands what's going on and he knows what audience exactly um so this is this is nit cohen writing therese may and jeremy corbin have been undone by brexit now i'm not reading it from the therese may this slash fiction those those are basically like yeah therese may's ability to

govern is more or less gone i would argue it was never really there um but here's starting the corbin section maybe the real ability to govern was the friends we made along the way the friends we made along the way about bill cash yeah exactly now cash a man who's both of his names mean money um corbin cohen writes has failed miserably to oppose therese may's deal that's how he opens this section so the fact you can tell that corbin failed miserably to oppose therese may's deal is for example the fact that the deal went through it went through four times it is astonishing i have to say most people would think would reasonably say that labor has done an astonishing job at holding its coalition together i mean what an idiotic thing for him to say but this is not a

surprise carry on what are the next joys for surely they're beached without mike gape's i mean how they ever oppose brexit without the milk guy in fact actually just a brief a brief digression from the article that was one thing i wanted to i wanted to bring up there are some columnists who say ah yes well therese may's deal failed because you know because tig sort of showed that the creation of the independent group showed that mp's had to take this new politics seriously do you think there's any credence to that well i think the poll came out yesterday this new party of the one percent was polling one percent damn this this pro this pro bret this anti brexit party being undone by the polls how ironic the one percent of course being the mike gape's

contingent so i felt quite embarrassed because i had been forecasting that they would get three to five and it turned out that they were even less popular than i thought they were getting one percent is what mike grates would describe as semi-skimmed so wait hang on so one one percent would be what about the population of britain would be what like 60 000 650 000 650 000 they're about i think there are about that many newspaper columnists in this country so that many people have attended dinner parties in zone two in the last year so oh yeah it's the party for them so like well kuk i think is a really important contribution like this i've said it before and i'll say it again everyone who's been saying that brexit is like the thick of it because there's so

much backstabbing in political maneuvering has misunderstood the thick of it because it's just it's a show about just image and nonsense the only thick of it conversation to come out of brexit was the one between the members of a party that had just accidentally named itself kuk that's the only thick of it moment it's beautiful i mean the fact that also after two hours and 15 minutes after being launched they had their first racism scandal but they're doing it they're doing a speed run um well it was the uh by the way if you want to know what uh tv show brexit's actually like it's not the thick of it it's game of thrones and again not because of the high politics maneuvering because the incest

baby uh no it's because no soft it's because one thing that we realize is very little has actually substantively changed since we last spoke it's just a ton of activity but sort of just setting stuff up mark france wire is the dwarf i so i think i think very little has changed in some respects but in others i think things have changed so i think now opinions are much more locked in and are and are hardening and so i think i think the sort of new lay of the land is is becoming clear which is there is no majority for any outcome and that is the thing that i think we've discovered through um four or five months of painful parliamentary maneuvers and vote watching and all that kind of stuff that actually there isn't a way through this with this parliament

but if you think about this many episodes of a show for it to only have gotten to from months and months of constant watching of opinions are starting to harden yeah of realizing what was probably quite obvious four or five months ago like the torii nostalgics labor too believes great britain's greatness is unquestionable except in the case of the nationalist far left they think brexit will lead to socialism in one country rather than empire 2.0 cohen therefore says conflating i think the labor position with lexit which is patently incorrect well there are some idiot lexateers around and they do take exactly that kind of point of view but they're obviously wrong yeah the labor brexit policies as we know who but also something too that i think is that

they they make it a point to constantly interpret what they think labor is saying as opposed to what labor has said and it's both in its manifesto and in its party or its conference platform like they've done what they said they were going to do and yet there's always you know dozens and dozens of more on columnists who are like that the mad marxist jezza is doing it again it's like but it doesn't have any bearing on what they're actually doing they invent something to get mad about for their column it's just it's just like when david brooks invents an intimidating sandwich shop it's just over here we do it in a slightly more overtly political way columnists are just pickup artists but who are trying to understand the labor brexit position like why do you like why

won't why won't women fuck us we could ask them no let's not do that let's come up with an insane strategy i'd love to see nick cohen in a giant cowboy hat asking jeremy corbin if his brexit strategy is real doing a magic trick for john mcdonnell i mean like yeah nice brexit strategy if you're into that sort of thing i guess so he continues corbin is not honest he has never made a principled speech as leader explaining his opposition to the e you any more than may has made an honest speech exposing the make believe world of the brexit right because she can't because she won't like i don't understand why they think that she's this this wise parliamentarian who somehow just like oh she's she's just her strategy is wrong it's like i don't think that

she's capable of comprehending it yeah sorry she had the opportunity day one to define what brexit was and she decided to define it as like we leave we get everything we ask for from the e you they don't negotiate against us at all and everything is great and then then surprise fucking surprise everything that falls short of that is called not brexit by like the fucking dick dastardly and muttley of her own party and she's going like oh i'm sorry dick dastardly and muttley i expected you to be so reasonable but also the thing is again the thing he says about corbin he has never made a principled speech explaining why he thinks this thing i've invented that he thinks why can't why won't jeremy corbin respond to my many letters why does he keep leaving me

on red well there's also a sort of like schrodinger's cat kind of phenomenon with their portrayal of jeremy corbin he's always bad at politics even when he's demonstrably good at politics every time that the labor achieves something they say they want to achieve or at least like in terms of shaping debate that happens it's always because of some ethereal thing and not because of deliberate policy because somehow jeremy corbin is always you know just just making jam and riding his bike in circles and not actually being the leader of the party i don't get it but they always come up with this stuff but i think i think to be fair i think um you know corbin corbin's position um hasn't been clear that clearly articulated and i think he would have benefited from being

a bit clearer at the beginning about what it was and essentially i think he's he is absolutely sincere when he says two things one he thinks the result should be respected and he does want britain to leave i think that's actually pretty clear to me the second thing is that i think he is sincerely opposed to this version of brexit this version of tori tori brexit as he would see it and i think it is possible for those things to be true at the same time and i think you know if he if he were to have his choice he would have britain leave with a labor deal a soft brexit as it would be described um and i don't think necessarily the labor position has been that well articulated in the sense that michael walker talks about this that it's a sort of series of

preferences so the first preference is labor's deal the second preference is uh it is is a second referendum the third preference is a revocation the fourth preference probably to raise maize deal the fifth preference is no deal or something some sort of sequence like that and people struggle to get their heads around this idea that there are multiple things in play at the same time but it's also been very clear that corbin doesn't back a second referendum and his preference is to leave rather than to remain in the eu and i think that's not true for the vast majority of people on the left and that's where the dissonance comes from which is that for the vast majority of people on the left they would like to stay in the eu they don't want to leave it

and germy corbin would like to leave it but then again also i mean he's when conference policy has come round he has come round to conference policy surely i mean also like the the vagueness is or the perceived vagueness is sort of like was sort of like a deliberate move as well right like well when they say vagueness what people really mean is that they don't like the fact that his position is for a soft brexit right and they want that his position to be for remaining in the eu yeah and so what they say is labor doesn't have a clear position whereas i think labor actually does have a pretty clear position yeah it's just that they don't want to hear that message they want to hear that there's nothing there and labor doesn't know what it's doing well labor very clearly has a

position for soft brexit my wife has a very unclear position on letting me back in the house equally the or you do what nick cohen's done here and you have invented a position that you say corbin corbin takes basically which is that corbin is a quote um my best guess is the leader labor leadership wants disaster socialism and not a compromised solution even childish i mean it's at some at some level and it but the the problem is not with people like nick cohen who very clearly are kind of openly campaigning um against uh against Jeremy Corbyn and there are plenty of columnists who are in the same position and do that and it's sort of understandable but that they say that i think the thing that i find more frustrating is journalists who present themselves

as reporters or presenters who then say but no one knows what labor's position is and just haven't bothered to try and find out or try and take it seriously or try and understand it and so is it surprising that the kind of gobby columnists you know rant and say all those things no not at all um i think it is a serious problem that many journalists simply haven't bothered to take labor's policy positions remotely seriously and try and understand them and i think they do a disservice to the public by not bothering to do that work and the reason they don't bother doing that work is that they have the same kind of contempt uh for corbin and the labor party as as do the columnists yeah i mean it feels like they have been upset with the fact that Jeremy Corbyn became

the labor leader and so they don't want to engage with it they don't want to engage with the idea that like this is a party functioning as a party and this is the positions it's taken they want to act as though this is some this is some tantrum they're having and that's going to all end when sensible governance comes back well we just de-legitimize it well if uh if those journalists are going to show contempt for the british public by not accurately reporting labor's brexit position what you the listener can do is vote for trash future for a british podcasting award do it it'll be so funny if we want everyone's head explodes it'll be so funny if we want oh my god we do not promise to respect the result though here's the you know why it's because we are unequivocably

the best podcast in this god damn cursed country the real point here is that is that every is that most of the british media establishment seems to think that the ramaniax is the furthest left podcast that exists um that's true i've seen i've seen the spectrum of politics podcast from ramaniax to the deling pod literally there was an event that held that so let's put let's put two fingers up the british podcasting establishment and vote trash future for british listener's choice because then we'll have to go on stage and hussain can explain his soup theories yeah that's exciting i will i will we if we win we will definitely go up on stage and like thank all the people that supported us from mark françois to the taliban absolutely shout out to our

listeners in um the hindu coach however it also remains for me to thank tom for coming on yet again to explain a smart thing to us so tom thank you my pleasure yeah and this thursday the 18th of april uh in the year of our lord 2019 i'm doing a preview of my edinburgh show uh pindos all about getting famous in russia because i've suddenly realized that i need to finish the show before i start touring it that would be a good idea wouldn't it um it's completely free as at eight o'clock on thursday at the sector there'll be a link in the description to sign up for a free ticket please come i'll be going i'll go i'm actually i'm going to and finally as you all know we have a patreon that you can you can support if you so choose you get a second episode every week um i strongly

recommend it otherwise you know the drill we got t-shirts we got mugs you can sip that soup you can wear your allegiance to our dumb show in any case uh thank you all and have a good rest of your commute or shit or whatever it is you're doing like you're listening to this you