TRASHFUTURE - The Guys Trying to Poison Me Have a Point feat. Dr Lucy Burke

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

This week, Riley interviews disability activist and Manchester Metropolitan University professor Dr Lucy Burke about upcoming Labour policy changes to enact even more cruelty against the disabled under the guise of ‘combatting benefits culture.’ The combined gang of Riley, Hussein, and November also discuss the non-America news, particularly regarding countries actually defending themselves against right-wing takeovers? It is, somehow, possible. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *NATE ALERT* Lions Led By Donkeys is performing live in London on Friday, 11th April! Get tickets here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hey, isn't it weird how, you know, certain historical figures like overlap in time in a way that is counterintuitive. So like that 30 year window where Abraham Lincoln, the fax machine, and samurai were all around at the same time. Yeah, I think that is cool. Imagine the faxes that Abe Lincoln would have sent to the samurai. Yeah, and they're like, what the hell is this? I don't speak Japanese. Like, excuse me, I don't speak English, but it's still a closed country.

That's right. Yeah, Commodore Perry hadn't yet opened it up with the black chips. Usual routine, three, two, one, clap. Please clap after I say clap. Three, two, one, clap. Ow. I'm a very fragile woman in so many ways, really. Like mentally, emotionally, also physically, and one of these days, it'll get to like, kind of late Biden, uh, sort of presidency things,

where like, you'll do the clap to synchronize the thing, and I would just be killed by that instantly. Yeah, we do the synchronization clap and then you immediately have like a heart attack and one of your eyes explodes. Yeah. And then you say, now now now now listen, you know that the the fax machine and the samurai were able to coexist, so for 30, those 30 great years, those were the tronch Glorias of France, when the Frax machine and the Samurai both existed at the same time. What I'll do is I'll say something like, America as a nation can be defined in a single word, really hype it up, do the clap, and then just kind of like, one of my eyes is gonna fall

out and roll away, and I'll just kind of like mumble some nonsense. Yeah, that's right. I miss that guy. Apart from all the stuff, like, you know, because now we got now We got this other guy and he's kind of worse. So yeah, it's it's two different kinds of senescence Yeah, yeah, I mean listen, they were all gonna kill like infinity people But one of them was personally somewhat sillier Hi everybody. Welcome to the free episode of TF This Week. In the second half, I will

be talking to disability activist and academic at Manchester Metropolitan University, Dr. Lucy Burke, about the upcoming changes to, well, changes... Yeah, positive changes, I assume. Reforms. Yeah, the unambiguously good reforms that will make disabled people's lives in this country so much better, I assume. Yeah.

The gentle encouragement that the cheerleading that the Labour Party is deciding to do, as we said, we would speak with someone who is a disability activist, so that is coming in the second half. However, in the first half, we have a little bit of news and a little company to talk about. Mmm. Okay. We have a little bit of news and a little company to talk about. OK, there's actually what I wanted to talk about was not America, because we're going to be going a little bit deeper on the sort of global and economic impacts of the tariffs with previous guest Alex Skaggs in a couple of weeks. So I want to sort of leave off a little bit of that for now.

Instead, I wanted to talk about two things that have happened recently in the last few weeks, which is we have seen two states actively defend themselves from right wing takeovers. Which as you know, I love. Yeah. I mean, we can all agree that there are some marked differences between the way that for example, Brazil most admirably and somewhat, are handling their insurgent right wings versus the way English speaking countries have done so. ALICE Yes. It's the thing I always say, and I say this as often as I can, I love it when the liberal state defends itself from the far right, I hate it when the liberal state defends itself

from the far left, and so when the liberal state is defending itself from the far right, I go, uh, that's very, that's very cool and based of you, Mr. Liberal, and then Mr. Liberal shoots me in the back of the head and dumps my body into the landfork canal. So it's not, it's not reciprocal, right? They don't appreciate that kind of united front work, but I do. ALICE Yeah, they double tap right through the back of the pussy hat that you've put on in honour. ALICE It's always nice to sort of see what happens when you put in a little bit of effort. And it's like, yeah, you can get some results. But the problem is that those results, yeah, when the motive is like, but all of my enemies are just as bad as each other.

Yeah, there's not really a way to sort of get around that. But nevertheless, it's like, I suppose, like, if you're sort of on the left, your question is, would you be willing to die if it meant that that your rabid enemies would also die at the same time? And that's a question that's up to you, really. I mean, for the liberal, it's not as if all their enemies are equal, right? It's like, to temporarily put the Nazi in prison or something is like an inconvenience on the way to your real passion of shooting me in the back of the head and dumping me in the landfill canal.

So just for some little context as to what we're talking about here in the last couple of weeks, November, as you alluded to, uh, Jared Bolsonaro will, I guess if he's announced medically fit, if he hasn't contracted like some kind of new, a new type of COVID that evolves specifically in his body, if he isn't getting like a fifth stent put into his heart or like a second colostomy bag added to his first, if he's not wearing a full body cast, then he will be standing trial according to Brazil's Supreme Court. Yeah, for the coup he tried to do. And I mean, this raises some interesting legal questions,

right? I'm not an expert in Brazilian constitutional law, or really any kind of Brazilian law, but I will say that it raises an interesting, like, judicial question of how do you, like, charge, try and convict Jair Bolsonaro separately from the, like, just colonies of, like, microbes and worms and viruses and stuff that are, that really are kind of operating him at this point. Yeah, and it is very much like a trial case because when the Trump administration are also taken to court for like whatever they do, you are going to have to figure out, well, like how do you separate RFK from like the worm in his brain? Yeah, because the worm hasn't done anything wrong.

Well, no, this is the thing, like, you know, do they both stand trial? Is the worm to blame? And like the only precedent I really remember, like I can sort of really draw on- Using the worm defense. Does the worm, well, no, this is a bit remember like I can sort of really draw on the worm defense. There's the worm. Well, no, this is bit and I realized I was like thinking to myself like where have I sort of heard the story about like a worm that takes over like a brain and you know, you have to sort of and you've got to figure out like whose fault it was and the storyline was actually in the children's the children's novel series at Animorphs. No shit.

Yeah, because like the big plot of that was like the fucking alien worms came down and like infected a bunch of people's brains. So if you see Bolsonaro's lawyers reading animorphs, then you know that they're going to try and plead worm sanity. Or it's like, you know, my lawyer's reading animorphs, I'm going to jail for her. It's just like my lawyers, my lawyers taking the day off to go to the scholastic book fair. I know that my lawyer is amazing because he has the transparent phone that you only get if you read 30 books in a two month period.

Just like a hurriedly closing horrible histories book. Your honor, motion. Your honor, uh, motion to have a break because this is a chapter book and it's long. There are various pictures. Dull and kinderly illustrated courtroom. It's got a cross section of a judge. It's pretty cool. Mostly the judge is like a normal guy.

It's just, he also has a leg. Yeah, but he's cross sectional, you know? Like cross section defendant with a little label going to the worm in his brain. So Bolsonaro and all of his various ailments are gonna stand trial. And like two generals as well. He was genuinely really gonna make a push to try and kill Demeret, the guy who was now charging him, which is cool, and Lula, and just institute a military dictatorship. Again.

Yeah, well,institute, yes. And I mean, some of the names of the people are involved are pretty fun. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Do we wanna hear some comical Brazilian names? Well, I just picked what I think is the best one. Like a lot of them are called, you know, like Hercules dos Santos or whatever.

Yeah, Hercules dos Santos is like the head of the army. He's paid hundreds of thousands a year and was fully on board with the plot to poison Demeris. Yeah. So basically, a huge number of machinations they have decided, they've found, were put in place to stop Lula from taking power entirely. Police claim one subplot, which was, you know, by these conspirators, was called green and yellow dagger, involved simply assassinate Lula with poison and shoot Morais dead.

I mean, Lula, Lula, an easy man to poison because you just find every barbecue in like a five mile radius and like sprinkle some cyanide over it. He will come to that barbecue and he will take a little bit of meat off of it and then die. Yeah. So the best name is the lawyer representing one of the co-conspirators, who's called Demosthenes Torres. I think Brazil might be like the fourth Rome. I think it might have the mantle of Rome. I think this is cool.

Um, I mean, yeah, sure, why not. I feel like the thing is, we don't really know the whole story with this Bolsonaro coup yet But it really seems like at the moment from what I've read of it the reason why it didn't come off is that it didn't get the like the people who weren't willing to go along with it with the Brazilian Air Force and the CIA basically because like You know Biden was still in, and so Biden wasn't gonna just hand it back to Bolsonaro, and there was like one general in the, like, Brazilian Joint Chiefs who was like, no, I don't want to do that. But everybody else was just fine

with it, I guess. And the kind of expectation, internationally it seems, if you're kind of following the playbook that is only just now seeming to change, is that, okay seems, if you're kind of following the playbook that is only just now seeming to change, is that, okay, well, you win the election and then you just do nothing about this, and you have to go to work with all the guys who are trying to poison you. Yeah, and this is, you know, this is like what is so striking about the flailing incompetence with which sort of anglophone, primarily, states are handling their insurgent rights, which is like, well,

the guys who are trying to poison me have a point, we can... Yeah. And they all want this. They're all, like, whether they speak about it in the same terms or act openly about it in the same terms, like, you know, the far right in this country, the far right in France or Germany or anywhere, what they want is dead liberals and them in power, right? You can tell they kind of have slightly blue balls over it with Trump because they won

the election, you know? And I want to move over as well to France, because this is the one where the UK is, UK columnists especially, are reacting to it. So what happened in France is Marine Le Pen was found to be basically running a very large campaign finance grift for the European Parliament. It's a relatively common phenomenon in Europol, generally. Yeah, you employ a bunch of assistants to your MEPs.

Your MEPs don't do anything. And those assistants are getting paid by the European Parliament. But actually they're just like members of your party who are doing stuff for your party. Yeah, yeah, what you basically are, it's basically like a kind of mafia no-show job for the European Parliament. Employee of the week at European Parliament sanitation. And France made it illegal with one of the penalties being disqualification from participation in politics if you were found guilty of this particular crime to dissuade people from doing

it. Yeah, I believe in fact Le Pen's Parsi were one of the ones pushing for the penalties to be tightened while they were doing it, which is really funny. I mean, this is the classic sort of far right winger protagonist of reality syndrome because it's just like, well, it won't happen to me. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no.

It's this is like we need that extra European Parliament money to try to convince voters in Marseille that like Muslims have an extra bone in their brain. And that's important for France to do. Right. We have to say that, look, under every niqab might be a gun. And that's what we have to make sure no one can wear them. And we need that money to promote those views. I assumed all of the other parties,

all of the liberal and sort of left-wing parties who are doing this, but everyone was doing it. They're the ones who are, you know, like shiftless and indolent, you know, we're actually using it. So we're actually gonna go after them. But what happened is Marine Le Pen is now banned from running, and what's become very clear is that without a Le Pen, there is no RN party.

ALICE Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but people, like, cause either they'll try and appeal really quickly and get her to run anyway, or they'll just run Jordan Bardella again. What's interesting is that there's been a kind of, even really across the political spectrum, I think Melanchon was in on this as well, along with obviously Zimone stuff, this idea that like, no, this is wrong, we have to fight the iron at the ballot box, we can't just kind of, because this seems like a deep state fix and whatever, and it's like, okay, sure, whatever.

And how has fighting them at the ballot box been working? You know? Yeah. And what I want to bring up here is this opinion is echoed in the right-wing British press as well. Oh, of course, yeah. Yeah, where they say, at a stroke, the judges have displaced one of the most popular politicians in the country, a presidential favorite, no less, and dismayed the 12 million voters who

supported her. The apparent muscling of an anti-establishment figure will feed into the culture of grievance that propels the hard right across the world. Oh, thank God that's only a one-way street. I mean, the thing is, right, like, France is in many ways not a democracy, right? And I say that as, you know, a citizen of the United Kingdom, which is also in many ways not a democracy, right, and I say that as a citizen of the United Kingdom, which is also in many ways not a democracy, right, but we're familiar with those.

I think that Macron getting properly Apollonian with his presidency, or these kind of charges or whatever, it's entirely justifiable this one, in terms of, you know, just the Republic defending itself, but also, crucially, it's not that much of a stitch up because she did do the thing, right? Like, that's one key point of difference, is that she absolutely did do what she was accused of. This is the sort of insane thing, like, if you're sort of making the liberal argument, which is like, she broke the rules of the institutions that you care about so much, right? And if you want to, like, preserve the institution, if you want to, if you, if you like want to protect norms and stuff, then like, yeah,

you should absolutely like punish them, right? This isn't really like a punitive measure. It's a sort of, no, you kind of, yeah, you broke the rules. Um, and so how the way that it's sort of being framed is like, cause we always knew that the right would kind of try to capitalize off it on the basis of like, oh, they're trying to like, you know, silence, suppose silence our opponents and so on. But like, the fact that you kind of like see the idea that you're sort of even entertaining the kind of concept of, oh, she should be allowed to run seeds, that argument,

regardless of the fact that we have so much evidence now to show like how stupid that is. But also, like if there's that America is showing, it's like, oh, okay, this is what happens when an unhinged right just decides it can do whatever it wants. It's going to be punitive. It's going to punish you. It's going to make sure that you eat shit every day. And they will say it directly. It's not even a subtle thing where the attempt that South would see by hiding behind institutions, every single day the Trump administration is like, we're going to make our opponents eat shit and it's going to be really funny for everyone. And like those first kind of a few weeks, like the first month of the Trump administration

coming in, all the sort of other right-wing parties being like, yes, this is actually very good and we should like copy the Trump model. We should copy the Trump model. We should invent our own dojos and so on. Like it's so obvious at this point, like what they, what like the right want to do and the fact that like we're sort of entertaining this whole thing about, oh well, we might upset their followers. Their followers who are all fucking unhinged and like, you know.

And already like maximally polarised and radicalised. At a certain point, I don't know, I've sort of noticed some kind of liberal commentators in the US sort of waking up to what's going on. And I say in the sense of, their argument is still very much about, oh, we have to preserve the norms and we have to preserve the institutions. And what the Trump administration is doing is really undermining their integrity, rather than the reality of, no, they're fucking dismantling them with their teeth and they're enjoying the blood that comes out of it.

Yeah, but it's still tone. The American liberal that gets it at this point is like, well, Americans like it when Democrats say fuck. What I wanted to get back to as well, and I think there is this intentional misreading on the part of many, you know, ostensibly well-meaning liberals. Yeah, the people who aren't like, knowingly sympathizers. I mean, the thing I was going to say, right, is that my least favourite part of this dance that the Libs and the Right do is all of the fascists who a second ago were like, once we're in power we will force feed you the shit that we have.

Is now a second later they're like, I am being oppressed, I am the worst victim of communism of all time, the state has driven a big bulldozer over my entire family, and I am just the smallest, humblest, most, sort of, like, pathetic person who has just been ground under by this, sort of, like, out of control liberal authoritarianism. right? And it's bullshit. And like, bit it doesn't matter, that's always gonna be enough to force some liberals, and it's always, always gonna be enough for people who convince themselves they are liberals, or pretend to be liberals, to get in the newspaper and say, well gosh, obviously we all love norms, but is how much are the norms worth if we are driving the big bulldozer over that fascist's family?

Don't we have to be different than them? Yeah, we have whatever they say is driving the bulldozer over them. We have to not do, and we have to take them at their word as to what is the bulldozer. Even when functionally, as in as in Le Pen's case, what that means is, we think that if you're popular enough a politician, you should just get a pass on crimes. Yeah, that's what I wanted to address as well, right? Where there is this, again, whether this is sort of stated mendaciously by columnists, which I think in some ways it is, but also in some ways, I think columnists are just genuinely very stupid people, is the premise of, oh, well, you know,

the 12 million voters who support her are going to be pretty upset with this and they're just going to channel their anger somewhere else. That assumes that charismatic fascist leaders only emerge in response to a kind of neutral demand for them that arises spontaneously in a large slice of the electorate. Right? It also, it legitimizes the kind of idea of a paternalistic liberal state that has to look at these nutcases and go, well, your concerns are very reasonable, pat you on the head. And we have to manage all of those things, you know? We have to think a lot about your feelings here. I mean, we talk about it over and over on the show, because I think it is one of the

sort of repeating patterns of the 21 of like, you know, 21st century global north, which is that the triangulation of the third way in the 1990s led us to this place where we believe that every preference just arises naturally, and it has to be met at least to some extent, right? Marine Le Pen doesn't go around creating demand for herself, right? But she doesn't go around stoking the kinds of panic about immigration that then get reported on by the papers as factual and so on and so on. There's no ecosystem. Everybody just wakes up in the morning, a perfectly rational consumer,

and the first thing that they see that day decides how they're going to vote, or what they're going to think. It's like for that to make sense as a belief system, you would have to assume that preferences arise in a semi, in a normal distribution across the population and that change semi-randomly and that the job of politics is to best identify what those preferences are and then manage their satisfaction. It doesn't understand that politics creates as well as satisfies preferences. That's the point of it. That's the point of like mass mobilization is to get people to care about something. So those 12 million voters, are there 12 million Le Pen voters without a national front constantly firing people up? Because it's charismatic

fascist leaders arise in response to grievances that are going unaddressed by a feckless and sclerotic ruling establishment. But that means that the demand as always is a change from the feckless and sclerotic ruling establishment. It's just that the fascist leader is the one whose ideas get the first and best and most prominent showing because they are just much more appealing to the liberals who think they can manage them. And they never fucking do. They also don't just create new...

Well, they don't just kind of create demand, they create new demands and new grievances that are practically impossible to respond to, and to which liberals can only ever concede, most notably immigration, right? Like, this framework, this discourse of an immigration crisis is a long-term creation of the far right, to be absolutely clear. And it's something that has then been fueled by, you know, everybody through to, you know, like, the center-left at times, and bits of the left. And it's, you know, the only way around that is to actually reject that as a framework in the first place. But that, that takes a belief that when you kind of, when you do politics, when you speak politically, you are doing something to an

electorate rather than just responding to them. You're not a, you're not necessarily a service provider, but you're exercising some kind of leadership, which is not something that liberals believe in. Matthew 18.11 This, this broadly reflects a kind of change in the way that the right has marketed itself in the last sort of 10 to 15 years, which is that they have been very good at realizing that the kind of PR market research focus group politics of the 90s, that those are now, you know, the Maginot line. Don't tell me that the Maginot line actually worked for some good stuff. You know, I'm using it as a general historical metaphor.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Because what those are doing is you're identifying voters' revealed preferences. The unprotected Ardennes, the open door that you're pushing on of be racist. Yeah. Well, you're identifying revealed preferences, but you don't ask where those come from. And that's because what The Right has managed to retool itself into, primarily via social media, I wonder if a certain podcast out there is going to read the book Careless People about how Facebook basically did this on purpose.

I wouldn't be able to guess. I wonder if that might be the bonus episode this week. Again, wouldn't be able to guess. But the right has very, very effectively remade itself as a network of influencers. Right? That's Nigel Farage. He's started as like, he has like gold newsletters, like those are some of the original influencers that these guys copy, right? Trump is at the center of a huge network of influencers to the point that now like Laura Loomer gets to decide who's on the National Security Council. They have made themselves active participants in influencing rather than detached and sort of academic managers. And that's why, that's why I think there is again and again, this drive to say, well, 12 million people are voting for Marine Le Pen. That means it's important that she runs because 12 million people have a revealed preference to vote for Marine Le Pen. And if we thwart that preference, then they're just going to get madder and vote for Marine or Le Penner,

essentially. Do we need a leftist Joe Rogan? Penner, essentially. Do we need a leftist Joe Rogan? Anyway, before we switch to the interview, I want to do a quick, a quick little company, quick, just a Swifty, a Swift company. Okay. Here's the thing. The name of the company, it's very, it's going to be very obvious what it does. It's called FaceTech, but with an AI in the face. So F-A-I-C-E.

ALICE FACE-TECH. ZACH FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ZACH FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH.

ZACH FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ZACH FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH.

ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. ALICE FACE-TECH. Are they generating fictional faces? Are they scanning real faces? What direction is the FaceTech going in? So what if I told you that Aldi was getting its own version of the plot device from Batman 3? Our vision at FaceTech is to create a world where facial recognition and machine learning technologies coexist harmoniously with human values and aspirations. Uh huh.

So human values, like shoplifting is punishable by, you know, extreme death. Yes. Like hyper death. Yeah. Shoplifting is punishable by demnatio memoriae. Yeah, yeahlifting is punishable by demnatio memoriae. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of shuffle a couple of like, eye shadow palettes into your bag and you're like next, you're like nailed up on the outside of the city walls.

Yeah, sure. And then all mentions of you and sculptures of you and images in frescoes are all removed. No, you get like, gibbited, you know, they like put you in a cage and hang you off the cathedral tower. Yeah. It's, again, all of the discourse about shoplifting, right, and resale theft, it's like, no, of course it's not nice to be stolen from or whatever, but everybody's fucking broke, and of course some of the people stealing will not be nice people, but like, it's not the point, how did it get this way?

And like, do you hope to get out of it with punishment, which will not work? Even beyond the sort of like, because the poverty thing obviously plays the biggest role, but I feel like there is something, you know, because there's lots of examples of people who like, sort of just shot, you know, the thing that people point to is like, oh, if they were so poor, why are they just like shoplifting alcohol? Or why are they like shoplifting things that are considered to be like luxury goods, right? And I feel like the missing point here is like, actually shoplifting's kind of fun. Yeah, yeah. And no fun is allowed in this country.

And that's the point. It's sort of like, well, you've kind of got rid of most of the fun stuff, right? And like, you know, and I guess like, the more serious point is that like, you know, you've got a society that's sort of breaking down in lots of different ways, and like, it's very, very evident, you know, even if like you are someone who can still afford to like eat and, you know, have drinking water and, you know, heat in your like home and stuff. You know, there are ways in which like you can very evidently see that, oh, the things that are sort of not necessarily even promised to me, but like the sort of bargain that was sort of given in terms of like, you know, you do certain things and you get certain basic services

back. Well, that's declining. And every time you bring this up, people just yell at you. Yeah. My social contract said, treat. That's, well, it's not even like, when we say treats, we sort of just mean like, hey, like, I don't know, a bus service that works. Or, um, like these are very, very basic things. I saw, I saw like somewhere today, like a sort of political journalist, like who just sort of made a comment about how Five Guys was a luxury good. And he was just like, we've really lost on my butt.

And this is the point I'm making, I'm trying to make anyway, in terms of whenever you point these out, that life is difficult across the board, but also things are degrading at a rapid pace. And if you point this out in any form, you just get yelled at, right? And told like, you know, fuck off, just deal with it. Yeah. Or you get called, you say, oh, actually you're just supporting crime because you're virtue signaling. Right. And I think to a certain degree it's just like, well, you know, like acts like shoplifting are just kind of like a fuck you, right? They are just sort of like a ref, they're

also just a reflection of, you know, societies where you just don't feel like you sort of... What's the point of contributing to the idea of a civic society when you're local politicians and you're elected to Westminster politics? And when anyone who you elect or anyone who has a degree of actual authority also doesn't believe in this either. It's like James Baldwin on looting. If you even miss Eva. Right? It's like James Baldwin on looting, right? Like if you steal the TV in a riot out of a store, you don't want the TV, right? And that's, you know, an accurate judgement of the value of the TV. You're trying to send a message about your own kind of like, place in society, right? And your kind of demand from it to be recognised as a human being

with needs. So, yeah, of course. I'll go on. I also like that they say that they're going to have these co-exist harmoniously with human values. You know, the values that humans have. Ordinary, regular, human values. Yeah, this feels like a company that is buy-in-for aliens. It says, We envision a future where our innovations enhance security, convenience, and efficiency, while maintaining the utmost respect for personal privacy and individual dignity. You can envision anything you like.

You can't just like say stuff now. Anyone can just say things. But I'd like to see them do facial recognition through the thick cloud of smoke grenade that's been released by the other anti-shoplifting sister that has detected that I've picked up a packet of Rebels off the shelf and it hasn't scanned properly and now everybody is getting like gas with smoke. I like the idea of so many shoplifting countermeasures. Like it's different departments that aren't talking to each other. Like store security and loss prevention were like split up in

a cost saving measure a few years ago. So one bought the smoke machine, one bought the facial recognition cameras. Somebody tries to leave without paying, and a bunch of flares go off and set fire to a punch. Someone tries to leave without paying, and then several perfectly placed C4 chargers go off at crucial structural points in the building, collapsing on everyone inside.

Wait, so just to sort of go back to like, you haven't, this is a, this is a, this is like an anti shoplifting technology, right? You haven't explained how it works just yet. Yeah. So it's a, it's a, it's a facial recognition company and they say, oh, we have all of these uses, but all of their case studies and all of their consumer testimonials are all from like retail loss prevention. Of course. They're like, Oh no, you could use this also for access control to like your college library. And it's like, again, I don't know if I want my college to be, if I'm in university to

be able to place me wherever they want to, to draw whatever conclusion they may wish to at the expense of me using a card to get into the library. It says, at FaceTech, we are guided by our principles as we strive to shape the trajectory of facial recognition and machine learning towards a more ethical, inclusive and beneficial direction for all humanity. I guess all humanity here includes store loss prevention officers and nobody else. That's a real highfalutin claim there. It's like sending the Voyager golden record into space, but the last track of the golden record is asking to see the aliens' receipt. Yeah.

Sending the Voyager golden record into space, but you didn't pay for it, and then so we launch another probe. Yeah, but Voyager 2 is space loss prevention, it's just chasing after it. Yeah. It legally can't touch Voyager 1, but it is able to call a third probe that is able to arrest Voyager 1. PC Voyager 3, which is currently on a rest break. Yeah. It's the same as the other two probes. It just has a little stab vest.

Oh. Yeah. It's pretty cute. So as they say, we are, we deploy facial identity technology as part of the computer vision safety solutions that we offer to private companies and public organizations. Most commonly, these are used to accurately highlight individuals that are identified of known interest to those clients. That's where I wanted to highlight with this one, right? There are a few things here. Number

one, if you're one of those clients, you just make that list. That's your list. That's a private list. That is Aldi's list, right? That is not, that is, so that is like basically saying we at the Aldi family of stores reserve the right to, you know, basically like develop a national security agency. Yeah. This is the other thing, right? Like you're saying about like different departments of the store doing different countermeasures and stuff. This is basically the US during the war on terror, right? Every different organ of it was doing a different thing that was often pulling against

each other, and involved a lot of insane brutality that happened for no reason. So what we're saying here is, every supermarket needs to become more like the Obama administration in Afghanistan. Yeah, exactly. Aldi has started sponsoring like local death squads. It's Aldi is sponsoring local death squads, but is also doing like a skateboarding class because that's Aldi aid is sponsoring a soft power skateboarding class. Aldi spent like six months building a skate park in the car park only to have a bunch

of Aldi security drop in and kill everyone using it and blow it up on the way out. Aldi Aid built the skate park in the car park and then a bunch of local mafiosos who were actually paid primarily by Aldi security came in and blew it up. It's like actually a warlord controlled skate park for a while, yeah. So the other thing I wanted to highlight as well is they keep saying, oh, our thing is great because it corresponds with privacy legislation, right? And they say, okay, well, by using our well tested and trained facial matrix technology, we generate a unique irreversible identity for every individual in a field of

vision in line with GDPR legislation." ALICE Oh, this is one of the stupidest fucking lies I've ever heard. Apple went in on this, right? Because I remember when they started advertising Face ID for your iPhone, one of the things that they put in their ads was, well, it doesn't store a photo of your face, it stores like a digital, like, numeric representation. It's like, that is what an image is.

That is... It's one layer of obfuscation away, and just because the idea that you're not saving it as a JPEG onto like a hard drive doesn't mean that it's not protected data. Yeah, cause also you could easily say, well wait a minute, couldn't you just unobfuscate that by one, and then you might not get an exact picture of the person's face, but you would be able to see what they're seeing? It isn't as important for, you know, your own testing that you yourself are able to do that, for instance.

It just, and this is why it's so important that it's also an AI thing as well, beyond just kind of buzzwordy hype as well, is because again, it's the disattribution machine, right? It's the black box. If you involve AI at any point in this process you can be like, well, it's still a really kind of like bleeding edge part of computer science to be able to say, you know, to even investigate what an AI is, you know, air quotes, thinking. So we don't know. It's impossible to say, sorry, we can just keep this purely numeric representation of your face, that by the way works exactly the same way as an image would in terms of setting off the fucking flares and smoke machines

and chaff every time you go on the fucking Aldi. That's fine, right? Because it has gone into the black box, and a process has occurred, and now it's not our problem. It's regular story evasion in the most facile way. And the thing is, the way GDPR is drafted, they're right. It does comply. They can make an argument that it does comply.

Yeah. And you're not going to sue Aldi, especially you're not going to sue FaceTech in the fucking in the European courts because you got a piece of magnesium from an Aldi flare lodged in your eye or something. Because if you're in the business of shoplifting, you're not fucking suing anybody. You have been positioned and constructed as a victim in all of this. I think really one of the things that this highlights is the weakness of privacy legislation

for preventing surveillance. Because privacy is all about not disclosing your identity, but you can be so surveilled in ways that someone can say, I have a legitimate interest to collect this person's identity. It's so fucking stupid because I can be like, I have this file of movements, right? That go from like, like, you know, from London to Berlin to Burgheim to a woman respecting spa to a studio back in North London, but that's not identifying because all I'm saying is that this all correlates to one hue. I don't know who that is.

That's an alphanumeric designator that has been assigned to this through a process that I don't understand. And so therefore... I've been some poor guy called Roger Quimby who... Yeah, it could be anybody whose initials are RQ. I'm not making that inference. You're making that inference. The drone's just circling and they're like, yeah, he's still in there.

It's been like 14 hours. What the hell? Yeah, the drones just circling and they're like, yeah, he's still in there It's been like 14 hours what the hell was he working in there? I'm pretty certain we saw him take a think pad in Opening think pad in burkeye and darkroom. Yeah, it's like no everyone has the place where they work best. That's just what I make That's just where I write good show notes. They get- Are you asking them for their wifi password? Yeah. So, they say, right, they say, you can experience a revolution in security with live facial recognition by seamlessly integrating your existing CCTV with a database of known offenders.

Right? And they say known offenders, as though Aldi is a law enforcement agency. Yeah, and so this is then sharing between whoever adopts this. So Aldi, like Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose or whatever. And what you've created is an intelligence sharing apparatus. You've created an intelligence sharing apparatus that is shops. Yes. Also, also, if you look at stuff like, I don't know, ATM cameras or private CCTV,

this is then something that the police can get into with a warrant, it is something that almost certainly the intelligence services can get into without a warrant. So that's cool. If you ever plan on doing anything that's going to attract either of their attention for whatever reason, I hope you've never been caught shoplifting in your life, because that's all going into the file as well. Yeah. And like, if you look at how quickly the ground can shift, right? Like in America, for example, right? There are people who are getting like deported because they like, you know, had a reckless driving charge. We mentioned this thing in the episode with Joseph, they

had a reckless driving charge like eight years ago. And it's like, all right, well, you're getting deported now. So in this case, it's like, again, it's a little bit like a miniature version of what Tony Blair did with the sort of extreme interference to optimize everybody's life state, which is saying, okay, well, we're just going to create the Tesco Panopticon. And then I assume that having a database of people we think are dangerous, that's compiled by store loss prevention officers, again, not saying that the people compiling the state versions of these were more dependable or have people's better interests in mind, it's just more accountable. More accountable. You know what it is? It's that the answer is less of that,

not just distributing more of it to even more irresponsible actors. Yeah, and putting it directly in the hands of capital rather than through the layer of the state as well. ZAC And you know, any time there is a huge database compiled of suspicious people that, where you can land on it for any reason, that always is worrying to me. ALICE Mmhm. Particularly when it's so, like, this is so nakedly economic as well, because what you're building there is largely going to be a database of poor people as well. ZACH Yeah, 100%. ALICE And if you're creating an underclass, right, in this country, which you're going

to try and keep permanently surveilled, then has-ever-been-caught shoplifting is not a bad basis in which to kind of like, build one of the fences of it. ZACH And you know, some of the case study quotes from this company include like a loss prevention manager who's like, yeah we've reduced known loss, it complies with all relevant regulations and it alerts stores to known offenders enabling proactive theft prevention. Yeah, I mean if you think about how you would try and maintain a kind of like an uh, an economic and social

underclass absent funding any policing. One of the things you would do would be this. One of the things you would do would be very, very like closely surveilling benefits. One of them would be a very, very closely surveilling disability, uh, and, and health. So you, you, you see some, some kind of like some structural things starting to take shape here maybe. So I'll just finish with this. This is from Big Brother Watch. About this company in particular. They say facial recognition results frequently in innocent people being falsely accused of shoplifting. In one case, a teenage girl in Manchester was wrongly flagged as a suspected shoplifter by automatic facial recognition cameras, searched, publicly

thrown out of the store, told by staff she was a thief, and banned from shops and supermarkets up and down the country with no recourse." ALICE Yeah, and are we naive enough to imagine that this data will ever go away? ZOE Yeah, this data will never go away, and it will definitely make its way into whichever hands politically think it's useful to obtain. ALICE And like, you're're gonna end up with a situation of very much like the no fly list, right? Where you end up on the no shop list because you were falsely accused of shoplifting something.

The no treats list. The no treats list! Yes, genuinely. And that data just follows you for the rest of your life, which, great. Fantastic. Love the society that's being built. I, yeah, I mean, it's very much like going into any supermarket right now is like very dystopian in the sense of, I think I went into a Sainsbury's like just before we went on recording and there was something like in one of those like plastic containers where I was just like, why the fuck is that in a plastic container?

Just going to the, the till and being like, excuse me, can I get the, the thing to unlock the laser grid protecting the cheese? This is the thing was actually the most annoying about stuff not that like I mean like the stuff that's in the plastic containers Yeah, it's really fucking annoying dystopian But actually the thing that's really annoying is the fact that because there are like so few staff you have to wait for a really Long time for them to then unlock the plastic container so you can get you or and in this instance It was like those like pots like those pots of oatmeal. So they were like ready pots of oatmeal.

So that was... What the fuck? How much oatmeal can they possibly be losing? It was the flavored one as well. So I imagine it's very much like, oh, you know, if you're buying that like ready-made blueberry oatmeal that you just have to put in the microwave, well, like, you're just like, you're a posher or like, you know, that's a treat that you're not allowed to have. So it's already like really fucking weird to like go shopping in this country anyway. And now what seems to happen is like, okay, like even

like looking, even browsing at stuff is going to be like suspicious. And so the result of it is what like, you know, you go into a shop, if you know exactly what you want to buy and you like know exactly how to sort of navigate the aisles and you do so in like a non-suspicious way and even then there's like a 20% chance for like, you know, if you look at something that's not on your shopping list, you're fucked. I'm, I'm, I'm lingering slightly in the crisp zone. I can hear the stores surface to surface, battery traversing. Being taken for interrogation because you look, you lingered a bit too long looking at like a pack of Kit Kats. You can just feel sentry guns training on you as you're like hesitating before you decide

to continue buying Pepsi instead of Coke. Anyway, look, we've run a little long for the first half, so I'm going to throw to myself in the past for me, but future for you, talking with Dr. Lucy. Like Tenet. Yeah, that's right. It's going to be just like Tenet. See you in a moment. Hello, everybody from the first half.

Welcome to half number two. It is once again, it is me, it's Riley. I have exiled the hooting cretins that I make this show with who love to interrupt me with their little jokes and bits to talk about the subject more in depth for about 30 minutes. Today, we are talking to Dr. Lucy Burke, who's an academic at Manchester Metropolitan University in cultural disability studies and Medical Humanities, a disability campaigner, trade unionist, and one of the hosts of the Green New Deal podcast, all about what the, let's say, labour and like almost every government before them for quite a long time has been doing to people with disabilities. So Dr. Lucy Burke, thank you very much for coming and joining us today.

Thank you very much for inviting me. Yeah, it's great to be here and talk to you. I want to open on something that we've talked about on the podcast before, and that is this myth that persists among, it seems like the elite of the country, the sort of media elite, political elite, that there is a huge portion of the working age population that is essentially malingering while being paid tens of thousand pounds more than the average wage. The concept here being that ordinary hardworking Britons are getting mud splashed on them by people's Motability Rolls Royces. And I just want to say as someone who does cultural disability studies, can we talk a

little bit about this pernicious idea and how it's useful where it comes from just as our kickoff? I mean, it is a pernicious idea. It's one of those ideas that through repetition sticks. Just like the idea that the country has a door that is open and people kind of flip through it. I think none of us have ever seen that door. Also that idea that there are all these people who are living a luxurious life on benefits is one of those notions that gets repeated until it gains a kind of traction and people start to believe it and it is kind of buttressed by these anecdotes.

When the news of these changes to the benefit system were announced, there were all these box pops on the radio and on the sort of BBC of people who knew somebody or a friend of a friend or a distant relative who was doing this and it was an outrage and it's never direct sort of information. Its history really gets embedded, I think, in the first austerity period when George Osborne was chancellor and he talked about strivers versus skivers and people who never opened their curtains. I think, obviously, it's a kind of ideological tactic to make people feel that anybody who requires additional support from the state is either lying essentially or is not to be trusted or should be greeted with

suspicion. It's really effective because perceptions of, for instance, the levels of fraud in the system are way, way higher than the data indicates. So for instance, with personal independence payments, very, very small levels of overpayment, sort of 0.4%, whereas people think it's significantly higher, partly because these ideas are just kind of repeated and taken up and not sort of challenged in any of the places you might expect them to be challenged, for instance, in a lot of the newspaper reporting and in the media. We talk about repetition. It reminds me of the British press especially is so, so good at knowing what the line is and then just hitting you with it over and over and over

again. I remember in 2019, there was a survey done where people were saying, okay, what percentage of the Labour Party membership do you think is under investigation for anti-Semitism? People were like, I don't know, 40%. And it was like 0.002 or something like this. And you just see, oh yeah, it's that the message gets repeated and repeated and not just in the news as well. It's been repeated in British TV entertainment as well for years. I'm of course thinking about the little Britain characters who are the lovable scamps who fake being in a wheelchair so that they can have their disability benefits or whatever. And it's like, people really, really, really believe this and it is so hard because you can't just

go up to them and then repeat it a thousand times. Right? And I almost don't know what to say to the people who are absolutely convinced that this is happening. I speak with some older family members about it. The refrain that I always get from them is, well, yeah, no, we definitely need to take care of the people who really need help. And we want an I, Riley's older family member, really think that we should be helping them. But at the moment, the benefits are too generous and so easily gotten that a lot of people who don't need them are skiving off those who do. And we owe it to the people who do need them to kick the people who don't need them off. Right? That's, you know, I don't, I don't know how to talk to that. I don't know how to respond

to it. I mean, it's, it's the deserving and undeserving poor from the 19th century, isn't it? It's, it's a really familiar ideological tactic, which is about a kind of division of people and also based on this kind of real sense that the only legitimate thing you can do is kind of pity a group of people as well. You know, oh, we want to help the very, you know, those poor disabled people over there who were really desperate, but not this other group of people over here who have decided don't need any, any support.

Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like they haven't performed enough to make like the, this type of person they haven't done. They haven't done what this type of person I think considers their duty, which is no, you must tug on my heartstrings more. You must perform emotively for me so that I will feel okay with you being able to get around." And very, very narrow, sort of limited idea of what disability encompasses as a kind of term. So under the Equality Act of 2010, and I mean, you need to bear in mind here as well that disabled people in the UK

only gained anything like civil rights in 1995, basically, with the Disability Discrimination Act. And then you get a whole bunch of equality legislation swallowed up by the Equality Act 2010. But in that act, disability is any condition that impacts upon your daily life for longer than a year. And things like cancer automatically included HIV statuses for obvious reasons. So there are a lot of things which count as disability, but people's perception of what disability means tends to be a wheelchair user, you know, or a very particular idea of what it means. And I think that that's

part of the problem as well. And in terms of there being a reluctance or a difficulty in recognizing the impact of conditions that might not be sort of visible to people, chronic variable conditions, and conditions causing sort of significant pain or sensory impairments and so on. So that's part of the mix here as well, I think. But of course, it's also just not true that the welfare system in this country is kind of full of malingers. An awful lot of people who have to claim additional support from the state are people who are in work but are not earning enough money to be able to survive really without additional support. And again, this kind of rhetoric that people use is about concealing the reality as well that wages have been eroded. As the

inequalities and wealth have increased, you get this real reduction in the value of the money that people end up being able to take home from work. So that's quite a significant part of the universal credit. You talk about people having these payments in work. And I think that one of the sort of universal credit. You talk about people being, you know, having these payments in work. And I think that one of the sort of critical things that the, what the labor government is doing is they're trying to do almost like a hand wave trick where they're trying to say, okay, you're only going to get disability, you're going to get most of your disability benefits if you are unable to work at all. And someone who might have to like, I don't know, get extra help to say,

for example, get to work, right? Or who might need a guide dog or whatever. They're like, okay, well, we're just we're pretending you don't exist or that your wages are just going to rise enough naturally because we're like encouraging you. We're being the encouraging government that these costs will just be covered. And again, this just seems like willful ignorance bordering on sociopathic. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, youopathic. Yeah. I mean, when they published the Green Paper, they didn't publish the impact assessment alongside it, which some people speculated was deliberate and hoping that that would get lost. But one of the really awful things about the proposed changes to personal independence

payment is that benefit. And again, I don't like calling it a benefit. I think if you're in a kind of society that is geared towards supporting everybody, to realise their kind of, and to have the best life that they can have, you wouldn't probably use that language, but I'll use it. But PIP is what enables a lot of disabled people to go to work. It is in some measure, but doesn't wholly address the additional costs that are associated with being disabled. So it costs more money for disabled people to live for all sorts of reasons. They might need to use heating, they might not be able to use public transport. And given the powerless state of our public transport system in terms of accessibility, it's often the case that using public transport is difficult.

If you have PIP, it can help with all of that. And it's not means tested. It's not an out of work benefit. It can help people access work. So taking it away is an incomprehensible thing to do. That's the word I think I was reaching for earlier is incomprehensible, unless you're imagining sort of just the most horrible sort of cruelty. But I want to talk about this,

this is the actual different benefits that are in play here. So we alluded to them on the show when we talked about this last week. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the carer's allowance, both components of PIP, the UC Health top up, these things that are all getting stripped back in the belief that the local labor market, wherever someone happens to be, will just step up and fill the gap. Yeah. What is actually changing and to make way for the local labor market, wherever someone may be to step up and fill the gap? Well, I mean, yes, that's part of the question. But if you take, for instance, carers allowance.

So one of the requirements that enables people to claim carers allowance is that the person that they support is eligible for PIP, right? So if you're not eligible for PIP, you cannot claim carers allowance. Carers allowance is £81.90 a week, right? So, I mean, can you imagine how much money that is? That's so much money, right, for care. You know, so if you're doing that and if you have a disabled dependent and you're sort of offering that care, you know, potentially 24-7, it's minuscule. It's barely enough to survive,

right? At all, on any level. But the person that you're supporting, for instance, now doesn't meet the eligibility criteria for PIP because they don't score the requisite number of points in, you know, you have to score, you know, the green papers talk about needing to score four points in one category at least, which is quite a lot. That means then you don't get that. But the person who you're supporting still needs the support. They still, for instance, might not be able to be by themselves. You will be pressurized to look for work. There is no way that the current social care system can step up and

step in because social care provision is totally broken. And there's no indication that a local job market will be able to step up and step in. And you potentially are not able to do that anyway because of the care needs of your disabled dependent who now doesn't get PIP. So you're in this absolutely impossible situation. I mean, people aren't joking when they say this will, you know, the harms that this will cause are massive. It will push people even further into poverty and disabled people are far more likely to

live in poverty than any other group of people already. So yeah, it's a disaster. And you know, obviously people who live in poverty are much more likely to become more disabled and to become disabled as a result of impoverishment and ill health linked to poverty, both physical and mental. So yeah, it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Well, I think let's also put some numbers on it. If there is a disabled person and a carer and the disabled person, let's say they receive personal independence payment from having scored, I know, three in two categories. That would mean as far as I can tell that would someone scores three in two categories,

they're unlikely to really be able to work regular job meaningfully. They will need a considerable amount of help, like let's say showering or getting around or whatever. And their carer is maybe taking that extra money for their carers allowance to get taxis back and forth to hospitals and stuff, things like this. How much money do those people stand to lose, which I think we need to go back to really emphasizing that the local labor market will not step in and fill? Oh, I mean, we're talking about thousands of pounds. The loss of pit might be, I don't, you know, I mean, thousands a year, I think people are talking about between sort of four and 8,000 pounds a year, perhaps more for some people. But if you're already on

a essentially kind of a poverty sort of level existence, then you're absolutely stuck. And of course, the local economy is not necessarily going to step up and make up for that, a job won't make up for that, particularly not if you can't take that job. Yeah, because is the job going to be flexible enough that you're going to be able to go to a hospital appointment that you're going to be able to take half the day off that you might be able to say, I'm having a pain flare up today, I can't come in? Because a zero hours contract tends to work the opposite of that, right? Where you don't know when you're going to come in.

And then they just say, okay, come in for four hours today, tomorrow, and then four days from now. And you don't really have the freedom to say, well, no, actually, I have a hospital appointment that day, for example. I think the idea not just that the amount of jobs that will be provided by whatever local labor market someone is in, but that the job would be flexible enough to accommodate someone with disability is again, fantastical to the point of incredulity, I think. Yeah. I mean, it is, but also the other part of this is that access to work, which is another

mechanism for support for disabled people in the workplace has also been cut, been made more difficult, more labyrinthine to apply for. So the support that you and a lengthier sort of process, so the support you might seek to get to enable you to stay in work as a disabled person or to actually be in work as a disabled person has become harder and harder to get as well. And from a trade union perspective, you know, a lot of the sort of issues we deal with are tied to disabled workers not receiving the reasonable adjustments they require to stay in work. And it can be particularly difficult for people with, you know, who are living with complex

conditions to get those reasonable adjustments. So you know, I think the government has emphasised mental health a lot, but you know, if you're a worker living with bipolar or if you're somebody living with a chronic and variable condition or with an anxiety disorder, it's often very difficult to get the support and the understanding and the recognition of the impact of that and the kinds of support you might need in place and, you know, at work as well. So yeah, it's just a complete mess.

Just before we go on to what they are planning to put in place of this, also the universal credit health top-up is changing as well, right? Yeah. So that's going to become more difficult and I think particularly for new applicants, but they're going to not allow people under the age of 22 to access that either. Which is, which is, which is baffling. It's completely baffling. It's as though someone under the age of 22. What do you just not eat for two years?

Do you do intermittent fasting, but for your whole life all at once? Do you not live inside? What I keep coming back to when I look at these people trying to justify what they're doing, the most ironic of which of course is Torsten Bell, whose own former foundation was sounding the alarm on disability sort of support in this country years ago. Now he's out touting for it. But they talk about disabled people like they're a different fucking species. Yeah. But I mean, I mean, partly the point is, is anybody can become disabled at any point, you know, it takes one accident, one set of cell changes, you know, to, to, to

stock has been able to, it takes one, you know, you get COVID and then you have long COVID right. And, and your whole life is transformed. So don't, you know, make the error of, you know, acquiring an aggressive cancer when you're 21. If someone offers you to do that, say no. Just say no. Yes. Don't do that. Just say no to it. Make sure that you wait. Just say, no, I'd rather wait till I was 22, please, because at 21, I will have to live off 70 pounds a week. So alongside having, for instance, aggressive chemotherapy,

which will stop me you being able to work, you'll have nothing. You'll have 70 pounds a week to live on. There's a sort of arbitrariness to it, which is completely baffling, but it's cruel, again, incomprehensible really as an approach. Just seeming to assume that everybody under the age of 22 will have family who can support them as well. Will Barron You talked earlier, right, about the whole mission of the British really welfare system and sort of disability provision included is about separating the deserving from the undeserving poor. And this is something that has been around since the Victorian times. It used to be enforced at the workhouse as

you well know, and all this. And what I always keep coming back to is I remember I read a book about the five women who are alleged to be the Jack the Ripper victims. The book questions whether Jack the Ripper really was one person or whether people were just killing vulnerable women at the time. And the press whipped up a story about a guy, but nevermind. And what was sort of so in common with all five of those stories was that either these women or someone who was like their male partner would either sort of develop a substance use disorder or they would get hurt or their partner would get hurt or one thing that goes wrong

one time and that is enough to put you in an extraordinarily vulnerable position. That's enough to put you in the workhouse. This seems to be explicitly what the labor policy is promoting, except instead of saying we are going back to a Victorian treatment of disability where if you have an accident, we recommend that you die, which is essentially what the official policy was back then. But they're selling it with this pitch, is the Labor Party will not give up on all the disabled people out there. We believe in you. We think you can work. And what they seem to be taking away in 4 billion or 3.4, however many billions the Office of Budget Responsibility says it's going to save, whatever, whatever.

They're replacing with 1 billion pounds more of work coaching, which seems to me to be the final insult. Yeah. But also as if the role of work coaches is actually to provide mental health services as well, because they seem to have a particular focus on people who can't work due to poor mental health. There's all this kind of stuff about overdiagnosis of particular conditions as well, but as if this will resolve all of that. Yeah, a good job is all you need. You'll feel better when you're in a good job.

Of course, I think a lot of disabled people have, you know, have, have spent a long time sort of wanting to get the support that they need to be able to engage in work. So I think people, you know, a lot of people do want to work and if people can't engage in formal work, I think people want to have a life full of meaningful activities. You know, my son is learning disabled and autistic and needs somebody with him all the time. I want him to have a life full of good things to do. I think that's what we owe each other. But this kind of approach is not how you achieve that because this is about

one sort of approaching it as if a lot, if not the majority of people are somehow lying about what's going on and just need a push. Then pushing people and using the most aggressive, fear-inducing, stress-inducing tactics to try and push people to take employment, which I don't really think exists on the scale that the government is suggesting it exists, particularly not for people who are living with a whole range of impairments. So it's all the wrong way around, you know, and making people poorer and more desperate isn't going to solve any of these problems at all. And I think it says a lot that this government has invested a lot in assisted dying, but doesn't want to contribute or think about how you might enable people to live well or even suggest that we have shared obligations

to each other as people to make sure that no one in a society should be impoverished and despairing. Yeah, I mean, it's the whole ethos of the welfare state has kind of disappeared into nothing. I think a lot of people just didn't expect the Labour Party would be kind of cheerleading its kind of death throes really. Yeah, I mean, the other thing I wanted to talk about before we get into the last item is sort of moving into the economics of it a little bit.

One of the things that the Labour Party says this is doing is it is removing a perverse incentive in the benefit system that will cause people who are claiming multiple benefits for disability to lose out on those benefits if they ever even try work. And well, I admit that yes, that might be because the disability benefit system or compensation system is poorly designed. Also, surely the bigger problem in that is there still aren't the jobs that are going to enable people to, as you say, take the available to make those lives of meaningful activity.

Right? It seems to think that the cure for people not engaging in lives of meaningful activity, which also by the way, the government has no fucking idea if someone who isn't working is engaging in a life of meaningful activity or not. They're just assuming that they're not right. But it seems to me though that like, it is especially cruel to say the only way we're going to be able to get people to engage in lives of meaningful activity is to fix this incentive, which instead of forcing them not to, which will now force them to. I just wonder if you can speak to that idea of the poor incentive design, I guess.

You mean the poor incentive design that they're suggesting is already in the system? Correct. Yeah. Correct. There are kinds of... I think taken as a whole, this is a lot about what kinds of jobs are on offer. It's a lot about, you know, I'm going to do what people do, but that, you know, I do have a friend who took a job, which then because of the expensive nature of our public transport system, the necessity to take three buses to it ended up being far, far worse off taking that job, right? So there are elements in our system because we have a super expensive public transport system, right? And one that is not integrated and one that doesn't necessarily

help people, you know, and jobs can be quite a way away and so on. That means that in some cases it is hard and people don't benefit from that work. But that's to do with understanding the pressures as a whole, from a whole society standpoint. Why is public transport so expensive, so inaccessible, so difficult? Where are the jobs in a local economy? But I think, you know, so I suppose, you know, there might be elements where you say, yes, that's difficult. Or for a carer, for instance, if you're going to lose the entirety of your carer's allowance for going 36 pence over, do you know what I mean? Or get charged for that in a system that sort of makes no sense. And carers are often

locked into poverty because the cost of kind of going over just a tiny bit is so great that people become very frightened of those consequences and people have been kind of fined for unwittingly going over the number of hours. And there was a lot of reporting in the papers about that last year. So there are anomalies, but they're not addressed by this approach at all. The anomalies are a product of the cruelty of the system. They're not solved by further cruelty. They really are. That's the whole point. That's the whole point. And actually, the system

shouldn't... Do I think we should start again with the system shouldn't, you know, I do, I think we should kind of start again with the system. Yes, because you know, you'd want to have an approach which said no one should live in poverty, no one should be struggling to feed themselves, no one should be struggling to be warm enough in winter in a society which is, you know, has the means to ensure that nobody is in that situation. Instead what you do is you produce these elaborate complex, impenetrable, hostile, brutal, anxiety-provoking processes that cause people endless amounts of fear and anxiety just kind of filling out a form or being part of that process. And then you make it harder and harder and you kick people more and more

and more. And you say, the problem is you, not the system, making it ever more difficult to survive or find a way out. And on the basis of this kind of notion that there's all this employment for people who may not have been able to work for years to go into. Yeah. A friend of the show, Dan Davies has a good sort of little aphorism, which is that accounting systems are mental prisons. Like what you count and how and what you don't count and how. It seems like this is... They're very happy to be in this mental prison where what

they're counting is only... They're counting what they're spending, but they're not counting what could replace it. They're counting what they're spending now, but they're not counting costs down the line. For example, if someone like... And by the way, I don't want to say that you should oppose these changes on the basis that it's economically inefficient. The fact that it's causing human suffering as implication for the dignity of your fellow humans. That's enough in itself to oppose them. It really is. It's just also economically stupid. Where, for example, if you take these things away

from someone, you considerably reduce their ability to work, which is what you want. But you don't count. Because you've decided now to account someone who reaches a three in the PIP threshold, as someone who can work, they're just not incentivized to. You're now making a whole bunch of assumptions that might be convenient for you, Rachel Reeves, right now for you, Liz Kendall, right now, but are going to end up as someone gets sicker, for example, or as someone who tries to work as an able to ends up getting taken or someone who's carer now has to take a full-time job. They get put on to statutorily provided council services, which either won't be provided or will be provided at a lower quality by

a private provider, resulting in more council bankruptcies, which the central government will have to bail out in like three years. Oh, yeah. But also, the other thing to add to this is, whenever I see people talk about disabled people as a burden, which is what the DWP actually did kind of tally up the economic burden of disabled people as if we were sort of, you know, 1930s, you know, where the whole emphasis was on, you know, lives and worthy of life is, you know, a lot of public money in terms of social care is siphoned off to private equity companies who are making money by being big providers of social care, none of which is being experienced by those people

accessing it in terms of good social care. Often these places are associated with neglect and abuse and so on. But there's all this kind of money going out to, you know, and lining the pockets of shareholders somewhere else. Whilst, you know, the people who are suffering the consequences of all of that are held to be responsible for it. And that's the most, one of the most invidious things about all of this, that you take a group of people who are structurally incredibly vulnerable, often who have no access or limited access to the sort of means to express the

counter position and then they are made responsible for this terrible situation that they're in and described as cheats and frauds and liars and so on, and pushed further into desperation. It makes me really despair that this is happening because the system is already awful. It's an awful system to navigate. It makes you feel awful. It makes you feel precarious, unsafe, and it's about to become even worse. And even just going back then to like the people who are, I'm gonna say perpetrating, the people are perpetrating this. Ultimately, this is, it's part of a just an economic model that we don't need, that is actively harms everybody it touches except for like nine guys and I agree with you that it makes one despair. Yeah, yeah. It's completely unnecessary to approach and organize our obligations to each

other. Our recognition that, you know, as humans, you know, at some point and at all points in our lives, we need other people and some people need, you know, need much more additional sort of help. We should be thinking about it from a human point of view in recognition of the ways in which the economy is changing in any case. I don't see more jobs emerging out of an economy that is increasingly engaging with automation and AI. What are we so what are we doing? And by making life even harder for people who are going to struggle to engage in a market, a job market in any case, in the way that they're being prompted to by these sort of changes.

You say prompt. And I think Liz Kendall recently said that the real problem is the outdated technology in the job centers and as soon as they get the right AI program in there, this whole thing is just going to snap into place. Great. Wonderful. I love living at the base of the step pyramid in Tenochtitlan. I think that's great. Look, I think that's about all the time we have for today. But Dr. Lucy Burke, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It was, I feel like I'm saying this more often recently, it was delightful to talk to you. I wish the subject matter were different. Yeah, me too. Yeah, we really need there to be some space for something more hopeful,

don't we? And I think that's exactly what we've been denied. Well, yeah. Anyway, I want to want to thank you for coming on and remind people to check out the Green New Deal podcast. Is there anywhere else you'd like to direct people before we sign off? Support disabled people against the cuts, DPA, they're doing loads of really, really important work. And I really hope that people keep the pressure up to try and make a difference to this. So I hope there is time to put pressure on the government to change course when it comes to these cuts because they are devastating. So please, I

would just say, write to your MP. And Inclusion London has got some really good templates to enable people to do that. And when you're writing to your MP, remember all of these people are worried about losing their seats. This is like the most unpopular government that there has ever been this early into the term. They're on like 22% approval rating. You can just, you can tell them anything. They are terrified. Well, it took a bit of time for my MP to get back to me, but yeah. They ought to be because they're all going to fucking lose their seats. Anyway, look,

I want to thank you again for coming and talking to us today. Check out. We'll link all those things in the show notes. And I'll throw back to myself in the future past to take us out of the show. See you in a moment. What a wonderful interview that was, Riley. Yeah, well, I was enjoying it. I was nodding my head to say that I agreed with it. Yeah, absolutely. I was shaking my head to show that I disagreed with it, depending on your opinion of what that segment was.

I just want to thank you both for your respectful silence. Well, I mean, the thing is, I thought that we set up all the themes for it in the first bit and now we're closing them out on this, but so in many ways it's kind of like a temporal pincer attack. Yeah, I mean, I was making notes on like your facial movements and I will be sending them to uh... I recorded an alphanumeric, uh, like algorithmic version of my impressions of that conversation, which I'll be storing in my records in a GDPR compliant manner.

That's right. Anyway, thank you very much for listening to the show. There is going to be, as alluded to in the first half, a bonus episode this week, as there always is, and that's going to be all about the book Careless People. How Facebook basically did a lot of accelerate, not did a lot of what's happening now, but certainly accelerated it and didn't care. And they knew they were doing it and they were fine with it. Anyway, so that's coming up on the Patreon and we will see you in a few short

days. Bye everybody. Bye. Thanks for watching!