TRASHFUTURE - The Immortal Science of Marxist Leninist Cakes-and-Aleism feat. Kimberly McIntosh

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Since the election result, you’ve heard all sorts of cries for Labour to get more racist. To discuss her recent article about why this is a terrible idea, writer and researcher Kimberly McIntosh (@mcintosh_kim) joins Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum. What are ‘Labour heartlands’? Why is class in Britain apparently tied to what you or your parents were doing in the 1970s? And why does London not count as working-class (unless you’re a whippet in a flat cap)? You can read Kimberly’s recent article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/traditional-working-class-labour-minorities-heartlands-white-voters If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *COME SEE MILO* If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  

Hello and welcome to this week's free episode of trash future season two. It's me Riley. I'm in studio with Milo. Hello, it's me, your boy, Nate on the boards. Hello here again, Alice in rainy Glasgow. Hello. Yes. Keeping up with the weather. I see. Yes, it's out. And this has been weather corner. And we're also joined by friend of the show and returning guest, Kim McIntosh. Kim, how's it going? Yeah, it's good. Thank you for having me back. Fantastic. Very welcome. Yeah. So we've got an enormous amount to get through today as we always do all the time. And so just off the top, I want to say that we are going to talk about Iran in more detail next week. But our initial reaction should get on the

Patreon and go on to the like death to America tier, to hear all of our uncensored, highly illegal thoughts, tune into next week's episodes, Iran, a land of contrast. But if I've learned anything from the experience of just watching politics for my entire lifetime, it's that I'm certain the country that fabricated a bunch of flimsy evidence in order to wage a bloody imperial war in the Middle East with no end wouldn't do it again. Of course not. They would have learned their lesson. Well, I mean, as we all know, everybody who supported the war in Iraq suffered incredible professional consequences and people who opposed the war are now in positions of extreme influence. Yeah, exactly. That's how things worked, right?

I for one look forward to like the same monsters in 20 years saying, just because I supported the war and war's in Iraq and Iran, you say my political opinions don't matter. Damn. I hate this PC culture. Yeah, I mean, except they're saying under a gigantic picture of the eye at all. Stay tuned for Iran talk. However, we are going to focus mostly today on that classic canard. The left just has to get more racist as we talk about what we think what blue labor is in the second half of the show. However, in the first, I have to do to bring this up. I have a startup. And my goodness, is it one hell of a startup?

Delay for a little amuse-bouche before we get into the serious bit. Yes. It is called O Y O looks just like Bobby Holly. Very nice. Yes. O Y O, which stands for, I'm just going to give this to you on your own. Kim, what do you think they do on your own masturbating? You can use this service to masturbate if you want to. Well, you can use a lot of services to masturbate if you're determined. Is it a private jet?

It is private. O Y O stands for on your own. It is one of SoftBank's better performing companies in their vision fund, and it's actually been seen at counteracting WeWork, Uber, and others. It's valued at $10 billion. It's counteracting them. It's supposed to be successful. It's like a prestige thing. It's like the crown jewel in the SoftBank vision fund, and it is like ameliorating the losses. Sorry. I thought you meant it was like somehow deliberately undermining what Uber does.

Oh, that means no. It's somehow doing the opposite of Uber. No. In fact, quite something quite similar. But what do we think it is? One more round of guesses. What do we think it is? If you get fired from a salary job, it helps you find a freelance job that pays less. It will help you get fired from a salary job, but it will not help you find a new one. Is it some sort of entertainment portal or something? I'll pause what they do for a minute. I'm going to have you do one more guess, and then

we're going to go right into details. How much do you think this mysterious company, the crown jewel of the SoftBank vision fund made for its $10 billion valuation last year? Was it a loss? Yes. When we were doing the notes for this, we were like, yeah, they're just going to say it's a loss immediately. And yes, thank you for vindicating us. Yeah. It was immediately obvious. Give me a guess. Give me a magnitude guess. How much do you think it was? Let's call it a round bill.

Okay. No, they lost a third of a billion on revenue of $900 million, but things are getting markedly worse after each round of expansion. Amazing. That's great. It's almost as though if you have a business that's losing money and then you make it even bigger, it'll lose even more money. Okay. I sold all of these kettles and I lost 10%. What if I sell even more? No, but it's economy of scale, right? You just have one gigantic kettle and then it's constantly boiling because people all want a cup of tea and it's, yeah, it's much cheaper. Yeah. I mean, that's what global warming is. It's turning the world into one gigantic

kettle so everyone can have tea all the time. We're going to save tons of money on kettles. Looks the Middle East. It's like a big kettle. They love tea over there. They're always drinking tea. I've been there. I've seen them big, boiling, boiling, always boiling. They love the boil. Here's what they actually do. I've taken this from a testimonial about using their services. For five years, Sunil Solanki, a retired captain in the Indian army, had run the 20 room foresight hotel in a New Delhi suburb. Business was steady, but he longed to make the establishment a destination for lucrative business travelers. This is just Basil 40. You've introduced us to Indian Basil 40 here. Last year, a hospitality

startup called OYO told Solanki that it would turn the foresight into a flagship hotel for corporate customers. It guaranteed him monthly payments, whether the rooms were booked or not, as long as he rebranded the property with OYO's name and sold the rooms exclusively through the site. At OYO's request, Solanki sank $8,400 of his own money into reupholstering the hotel's furniture and adding new linens that were themed with the red and black colorway of OYO. But the corporate guests did not materialize and OYO stopped making the payments, and now he's on the verge of eviction. They just tricked him into buying a bunch of expensive ugly upholstery. This is normally they do this and then like, you know, there were hidden

cameras the entire time and then people like emerge on screen at the last minute with like a band playing or something like when they're doing this for a fact. It's it's yes. So corporate guests are just pressed and lacy chasing we not make it through the hotel. I mean, honestly, you would make more money having the jackass guys come and do the reading a letter from an attractive female fan taped to the wall. And it turns out it's just we man behind it with a boxing glove. Yeah, I mean, it has scaled up by promising hotelier's monthly payments, which have been made possible by soft banks money. The payments, which were in advance on the hotel owner's share of room revenue, were supposed to be paid no

matter how many rooms are booked. And in exchange, the hotel had to add all of these improvements, like free breakfast and upgraded linens and so on, and then agreed to book every single room under any circumstances, even walk in guests through OYO and let it control how the rooms were sold in other sites. But the subsidy payments from OYO don't last forever. And OYO controls the price. So it discounts the rooms online so much that Solankey couldn't even afford to offer them to anyone at any reasonable price. This is a machine for driving hotels out of business. Yeah, it's just like we work for bankrupting your hotel. That's all it does. Is it just bankrupts your hotel?

Who came up with this idea? Someone who was wronged as a child by a hotel and then decided to commit some kind of like blood feud? It is literally, the thing is, they have like millions of hotel rooms now under their control. They have tons of hotels in America. This is like the Phantom Menace shit. This is like really like banal evil. Like, yes, we're expending our controlled hotel rooms all over the world. All the, yes, as Alice said, all it seems to be is a multi-billion dollar operation to close down hotels at no benefit to anybody. They're doing private equity. The thing where you just like do a leveraged buyout and then like

strip all of the assets and fire everybody and make off with your ill-gotten gains. But without doing the money parts, you're just driving the business into the grounds. It's a 10 billion dollar company that basically exists to like go buy up in like a vacant house, rip up all the copper and then just leave it in a pile. I'm reminded of the joke about the Austrian economics meme. You've seen that before where it's the circle where you steal the manhole cover, sell it for drugs, wait for the city to replace the manhole cover, then give it, steal it again. Just keep doing that in the circle. I never expected somebody to make that into like a 10 billion dollar valuation.

I think it might be like a Brewster's Millions type vibe where like someone has been told they have to lose like so many billion dollars, but through a completely legitimate business. My hello. Earlier, you asked who started this up and Kim, you suggested Airbnb. It was actually started by a 19-year-old Indian university student called Ritesh Agrawal. Well, he sounds like he should have 10 billion dollars. He's now 26, so like he's no longer able to game effectively. He's sort of too slow for Fortnite. So now he has to do what the other 26-year-olds are doing and control a multi-billion dollar hotel empire that is just fraudulent. That's what I'm doing.

A spin off of Real Road Tycoon called Hotel Tycoon, except in real life. Yeah, he's playing with cheat codes somehow. I hate it when that happens. There's like a roller coaster that has to be installed in the lobby or whatever. Oh, Milo, there is a little bit of that. They're not roller coasters because that's the thing. Don't forget this business that seems to exist to churn hotels into bankruptcy at an industrial raid around the world. It is the something awful thread about the machine that kills children. It's the zipline that has a 45 degree angle. There might be a point here that who are the companies supplying all of the new library for these hotels? Is this a huge scheme

for re-upholstery businesses? Because they have to re-upholster everyone around the world with the same fucking red and black. It's a shadow university news parents zone of failing upholstery business that has way too much red and black fabric. Oh my god. It's just a case of the front business getting way too big accidentally. It's doing a producer's on the entire hotel industry. They just put one extra zero when they were ordering pallets of cloth off Alibaba and then they show like, what am I going to do with 10,000 pallets of red and black cloth? So I'm going to throw to Kim here. What do you think makes this hotel franchising website

a tech company? Because it's a tech company somehow. Is there a website? There is a website. Oh, no, it's a tech company in the sense that it's notionally worth billions of dollars despite being a loss making enterprise. Oh, sorry, Milo, you're giving the real definition. I'm looking for the ostensible definition. Did they put some dumb tech in the hotels? Because you mentioned like some escalators

and some treats and things of that nature. No, they don't put any dumb tech in the hotels. Why if I connected Corby Shrouser Press? Fucking, at this point, why not? Do they apply dumb tech to the hotels? Yes, Alice, they do. This is a selection from an article in which they were interviewed. Before we design interiors, we predict what kind of design for the lowest capital expenditure

will give us the best returns. For instance, we found that portraits of Marilyn Monroe increased revenue per available room of a property by 10 to 11% on average. What? Milo, you heard what I said. Was this written by Markov chain? It was designed by a Markov chain. I love to go into my hotel room and every surface is covered in like tiled pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Every room is a different kind of hell. I did once genuinely state there's a chain of hotels in Britain called Britannia.

And I once stayed in one of their hotels in Wigan, delicious, you should go. And it's like an ugly plate glass hotel from like the late 70s or early 80s. And inside the hotel in the lobby, they have pictures of all of the other Britannia hotels on the thing, which are just as ugly as the one there. And I don't know whether someone was playing to a tour of every Britannia hotel, but it's like Britannia, Manchester airport. So I was like, well, I've always wanted to see Manchester airport. You know, I went into the breakfast room and above the like,

they have one of those like conveyor belt toasters. And above the toaster, they had a huge oil painting of Henry VIII. Just for no reason. Yeah, they could have used some data and replaced all of them with different pictures of Marilyn Monroe. They would have made more money. This is of course because the theory of change here is that consumers classify hotels like this.

So with several pictures of Marilyn Monroe as quote boutique, it began when one of our hotels in Wichita Falls, Texas saw Rev PAR. These companies always invent ridiculous metrics to like try to show that they're profitable. They saw the KD ratio go up. The ping went down. Well, remember, we work had community adjusted EBITDA, which was like, how much money are we making net of vibes? So literally that was what it was.

That was one of the financial ratios that they released. And so this company just also invented its own financial ratio as well, revenue per available room. And it improved by 25% after we put Marilyn Monroe portraits on the walls. Then we started copy pasting this around. I've never seen the whole idea of like one of these startups like described. So simply we found a thing that kind of worked in that we made a graph go up. So we just applied it everywhere.

Yeah, wait. And so they just did this in like every room has pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Or it's like they put different celebrities. Which is our Falls, Texas. I mean, this is basically the, remember those stupid Johnny videos, like the children's theme, the children's lullaby song, that like they made all the counterfeit ones on YouTube because they were making ad revenue.

It's basically that concept applied to a hotel room. Yeah, what if kids YouTube was a hotel? Basically, we could we could game this so badly. I'm sure if we put our minds to it for a week, we could like get this hotel to start putting up pictures of like the Diana car crash. It's like if every trash future listener decided to get together and demand that we only stay in hotels where like this every set you can't look without seeing Goatsy,

we could ruin this business. Steye a teller above the taste. When a guest checks it, here's the real impressive technology that OYO uses. When a guest checks into a full service hotel, the lobby staff knows what the guest that the guest ordered pizza to the room on the previous visit. Mr. Epstein. And we'll proactively ask if the guest wants a pizza on this visit.

I'm showing up to the travel lodge with my wife and them saying, will you be having the prostitute again, sir? If a receptionist sells additional services, they earn an incentive. Our OYO training institutes are OYO training institutes. Groom. Mr. Epstein. Groom employees.

Okay. Hey, we've created 300,000 jobs in housekeeping, front desk, maintenance, and so on. We must clarify. By Groom, we presume they mean they like pick the nits out of each other's hair and eat them. What good is it if they create 300,000 jobs if they're making a third of a billion dollars a year losses? Well, no, obviously what's happening.

That's a lot of lessons to be fair. That's true. Yes, they're creating 300,000 jobs. They're also creating and destroying 300,000 new hotels all the time. So it's very exciting. You never know where you're going to work tomorrow and what you're going to be doing. You just know that you're going to be doing something,

and somewhere there's going to be a computer optimized image of something that's going to drive up some kind of imaginary ratio. I love the hustle economy where I go to sleep in a different pod every night and then go to work in a different hotel that shuts down immediately. Look, maybe the hotel ceases existing in the middle of your stay. Maybe this hotel will be open long enough for me to have lunch. Are we sure that this is capitalism and not just the matrix finally breaking down? I don't know.

I'm starting to feel like reality is fraying around the edges from this. It really, I don't understand it. Why does it exist? It doesn't do anything. It doesn't even make a handful of people very wealthy like we worked it. It makes no one wealthy at all. It makes the owner's wealthy. Kind of, but like...

Sorry, it doesn't even make the owner's wealthy. It's going to lose... It basically exists to spend billions and billions of Saudi oil dollars because that's the entire Vision Fund is Saudi oil money. It exists to use that to wage war on the hotel industry in general, a worthy cause. I love going down to reception to complain that my pizza hasn't been delivered and them saying, sir, this is now a Wendy's.

Oh, good. That's the other thing, right? They also appear to be engaged in what appears to be outright criminality. And this is from an article today. OYO, once the star of the SoftBanks portfolio. And like, when I say once, I mean last week. Yeah. Massa's favorite, like large sum. Yeah.

How is it their best performing company when it's made a $300 million loss? Yeah, the others are much worse. The others are much... The others are WeWork, which made a multi-billion dollar write down in valuation. Yeah. Okay, that is true. It's definitely the chief culture officer

of WeWork put his house up for sale online, which is always a good sign of a business. And featuring a piece of art that just said, I want to come in your heart. What? It was spelled C-U-M. No ambiguity there. Yeah, absolutely.

On a rainbow background as well. Yes. Love is love, guys. That's just a new kind of medicine. That's a book. That's universal healthcare under Bernie Sanders. Yeah. It really says a lot that this is the best performing company

because like the other companies in their portfolio, whilst they are like doing worse financially than this, they're arguably not as dumb. Like Uber at least like provides a service, which people like, it makes sense. Like the way in which they do it is bad. But like they don't kill you in the car. No, they don't crash my Prius.

Sorry, Alice. You're talking about, are you talking about Uber for F-35? Yeah. Yeah, or Uber aren't operating a model where you get in the taxi and it just goes somewhere. And they hope that in our coincidences will occur, they will take you where you're going. Yeah, move fast and break things, but the thing is a hotel.

It's just so beautifully insipid and pointless. So wait, I notice we've been talking a lot about the OYO thing. I would like to throw back to Kim, what do you think of this all out total war on the hotel industry being undertaken by the Saudis through SoftBank? To be honest, I feel quite overwhelmed. I don't even know what to say about it. It's a lot to take in.

It's a lot to handle. I've got nothing against hotels. They're all right. Someone does. It just doesn't feel very fair. What have hotels done? I don't think they deserve this. This is the Saudis remember that they got mad

about some sort of diplomatic misunderstanding and responded by making a Twitter meme that seemed to indicate they were threatened to do 9-11 on Canada. It can happen to you. But again, the great thing about this is, I can't point to anybody here who's anti-hotel because the Saudis just had to put their oil money somewhere. Massa from SoftBank is, I don't know,

clearly just kind of a dumbass. And then Ritesh Agrawal probably thought this would really work. It just seems like a bunch of people were far too stupid who are far too stupid to be left in charge of a pencil accidentally have taken control of a large portion of the world's hotel industry. It's so dumb. It's not even a scam.

Saudi Liam Neeson just ringing up the Premier Inn and havin' and going, listen, I don't know what you want. I don't know who you are, but I have a very particular set of skills, skills which make me a nightmare for any kind of ballot sheet or company that I come into contact with. From the county Kerry region of Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I was just doing my normal, Liam Neeson.

I have one more thing about OYO that we're going to move on. This is now like 2000 of their staff have just quit, which is always a good sign for the star of the Softbank Vision Fund. Because the office disappeared, they didn't know where to go. The office was three different kinds of hotel and now it's a gaming arena. The whole company's based in a giant peach.

They all got into different oevers which just disappeared. The entire company just like lost ping, lagged out. So OYO has been imposing extra fees on hotels and declining to pay any hotels the full amount they claim they were owed. According to interviews with hotel owner as employees, emails and legal complaints in other documents viewed by the New York Times. It's a bubble that will burst,

said a former OYO operations manager in Northern India who left the company in September. What was the name of that operations manager? They began working at OYO in August 2018 and said employees were under so much pressure to add new rooms that they brought hotels online that lacked air conditioning, water heaters or electricity. He and eight others said their managers

had asked them to engage in a month. Just a bin laden compound. I just love the idea that they don't have heat or water but they do have a bunch of pictures of Marilyn Monroe just stacked up in a corner. And a long drop toilet that you have to squat over and there's a picture of Marilyn Monroe's skirt being blown up opposite. Well, here's the thing.

This is that's not even the prestige. That's not even the worst bit. At least those hotels exist. Because he and eight others said their managers had asked them to engage in a monthly shell game of briefly inserting unavailable properties into OYO's listings complete with fake photographs to help impress investors. Incredible.

So someone is making money off of this. It's just the people who are smart enough to defraud this company. Yeah. Just be like, yeah, I have a hotel. The stock image in. It's called the Getty Suites. Look at our satisfied customers. And it's all just pictures of the awkward old guy from the memes

like doing the thumbs up next to the cereal. Yeah, good breakfast. Oh my goodness. And again, before we move on also, I just want to note that like it seems like every major story about some unicorn startup has been just a story of a slowly unraveling fraud. And like when Dominic Cummings posted his want ad for like the people who are going to like rebuild the British government with him,

he basically says he wants someone who has extreme curiosity and capacity for hard work and isn't a confident public school bluffer. But his worship of startup culture means he's just replacing like the confident public school Jacob Reese Mogg bluffers with the Ritesh Agrawal style bluffers. And it's all just more bluffers. And most of them still went to fucking public school. Oh, yes.

Everyone, like honestly, the vast majority of public school people I know now work for startups, like the ones who don't work for investment banks. Yeah, that. Yep. Yep. Yeah. That tracks.

Like, yeah, no, it's actually a really cool app. Yeah, me and some guys that I was in JPJ house with, yeah, we came up with this app that like helps you connect with people to play frisbee with. Yeah, we've got an office insurance. It's really cool. We've been valued at $4 billion for some reason. Fine.

So yeah, that's OYO. And it's going to just another big fucking stone around the neck of the global economy when we need at least. Awesome. So when's that recession, Juerga? Oh, I don't know. There's going to be at least like, in fact, instead of measuring time in hours or measuring time

in like the total lifetime of a hotel. And I think maybe in like. It's like shakes of a lamb's tail in nuclear physics. Yeah. Like four to seven hotels from now. We're going to have a recession. They've never now invested in Habbo Hotel because it's getting so meta.

They probably would just put a screenshot from Habbo Hotel on their website. To be honest now, I think that the economy is so dumb that we probably can't have a recession because like as soon as the stock market starts plunging, the soft bank will be like, oh my God, these stocks are worthless. We should buy millions of them.

What if soft bank are just accelerationists? I just firmly believe that. However. Chairman Mao. Let's see who that's like who she thought really is. All right. So leaving soft bank and the very amusing elements of that firmly behind us,

I would now like to move on to talking a little bit about blue labor and Kim a little bit more about what you've been writing. So you recently wrote an article in that we all read, which was based on the comments of Matthew Goodwin, who will always be remembered as the man who ate his book on live TV in 2017, where he claimed that labor has, quote,

prioritized an awkward coalition of students in ethnic minorities over the real working class. And how did every ethnic minority become a wealthy property owner? Yeah. So I think it's really important to explain to everyone why that is. My grand came here in like 1960

and then just got given a million pounds. Then we all got given houses. Yeah. And then that was it really. And now we're all just millionaires. And then that's it. Yeah. And so there are no non-white people who are working class.

Yeah. It's just to the blacks. They like no one else got that. Oh, right. Of course. Oh, and it was due to Marxist in the universities, right? Oh, yeah. They've been backing us for a long time.

Yeah. For some reason, the Chinese all got little woods vouchers, like hundreds of thousands of pounds worth, but only little woods vouchers. So, joking aside, this is sort of based on... It's joking. Is Little Woods still going, by the way? What is Little Woods?

I think it's gone online now. Okay. We're helping the non-British people out. What is Little Woods? What is Little Woods? Little Woods is like a shop where your nan shops. That doesn't... What is it?

Like a department store that sells shitty things. It had like a catalog that you got? Yeah. It's hauntology, because I don't know what that means and I refuse to learn. It's the shop where you just... You have the existence of being Dismore and British. That's not hauntology.

That is what hauntology is. I'm pretty sure. No, it is not hauntology. That is what hauntology is. No. I have opinions about Mark Fisher and I'm going to talk over women about them. I'm every man on the left.

I'm going to talk about Burghide now. No, no. Amazing. No. So, basically, when Goodwin talks about an awkward coalition of students and ethnic minorities over the real working class... Well, for one thing, it's hard to hear him over the book chewing. He's basically saying...

He is actually saying that there is an authentic traditional English working class and it doesn't live in cities and it's white. That's the strong implication of what he's saying. I'm reading from your article here. You've said, whether you say labor heartlands or left behind or the traditional working class, the meaning is the same. These are white voters and the unspoken implication

is that labor has lost the white working class specifically because it has pandered to the multi-ethnic metropolitan elite in London and other cities. Yeah, and that is what he's saying. He got a bit mad on... To be fair, it wasn't him. It was his like... There's a kind of whole gang.

Actually, last time I was here, I'd just been to the Battle of Ideas. Oh, yeah. And I didn't know what it was. It's been a year. I now know what that is and so there's like... For our listeners, what is it? So the Battle of Ideas is organised by someone called Claire Fox who is now a Brexit party MEP.

Amazing. Yeah. Always very normal people. To totally chill, totally normal. They do a lot of very serious debates such as is increasing diversity a threat to the West? Oh, I remember that. That was the one with...

Yeah, I remember that kind of getting circulated, holding an event that basically framed it all in oppositional terms basically that like... Yeah. This house believes I should get to say the word sort of corpus. And then everyone applauds in the audience and is like, so that's so right. Yeah, totally agree.

Speak the truth. That kind of vibe. And so it seems to me that this is based on the idea that multi-ethnic people have different basic interests that can't be reconciled with white people who don't live in cities and that what Labour has to start doing is pandering to the interests of the former at the expense of the latter.

And especially again that like Labour included a lot of policies that would do that like say reparations for imperialism, specifically creating... Specific making sort of much harsher penalties for hate crimes, etc. Of course, being sarcastic, there was precisely nothing in the manifesto

that was specifically for the interests of the white people. How many immigration removal centres were we going to close again? Not all of them. That's just like one or two, I remember them saying. Yeah. So what I'm trying to get at here is the immigrants can have one or two removal centres.

That's a treat. So what I'm trying to get at here is the whole Blue Labour premise, that sort of goodwin is articulating here, the socially conservative economically radical one, seems to be based on a kind of imaginary version of the Labour platform that might have had stuff like this in it, but it's not.

I think we should lean into that though. I have this idea going around for red Labour where we just do the exact same thing but from the opposite direction and say, well, the reason why Corbanism failed is because we didn't... We actually compromised too much on social issues. And we should just be like fiscally kind of socialists

and socially incredibly hyper-communist. Page one of the manifesto, white genocide. Everyone issued with identical overalls. Yes. Right, but it feels like this at base, there is an assumption that any party, that is any political movement, that doesn't explicitly coddle the feelings

of non-urban white people with the idea that, oh, the empire was fine, you don't have to feel bad about saying slurs or whatever, is too woke and is going to be alienating to them. Yeah, and I see there's like a couple of things about the Goodwin's Newsnight appearance and his subsequent tweets, which also aren't based in analysis. So even separating now...

You're telling me the guy who ate his book on television might not be the smartest commentator? He may. He's doing facts over feelings or rather the reverse, right? To be fair, it was my favorite episode of Ready, Steady, Cook. Sorry, Kim, let's go. Yeah, so it isn't based in... We're still waiting to have the full kind of excavation

of why people voted the way they did, why Labour lost in its, quote unquote, former heartlands. But what's been really dispiriting, but also unsurprising, is that whilst we wait for that analysis to come in, we've had this... Like the vacuum's been filled by Blue Labour, so I feel like they were waiting for the election result. And when it came through, they're actually quite pleased

because they felt it vindicated, what they've been arguing since about 2011, which is that, as you were saying, we're talking about essentially fights for rights, for gender and racial equality, and we need to move away from that. And what we actually need to be talking about is some things which I think Labour should think about,

like anchoring things in local communities, what matters to people, what's happening on your local high street, what's local services have closed, and what does that mean to you, and what's changed in your area? What is based in why I can see no data is one, this belief that Labour spent loads of time

talking about the rights of ethnic minorities, which, as you said, I missed it in the election, I feel like I'm pretty active, I didn't see that happen, that there are no ethnic minorities in the North or Midlands, which is also untrue. Famously not, none. Yeah, none. Oh, I go to Leicester, it's just white as you are, your elbow.

Yeah, just white people everywhere. Depending on how white your elbow is. Birmingham actually is just one large country club. But what's actually really scary is that a lot of Labour MPs that are now vying for leadership have taken this rhetoric on, even though it doesn't appear to be based on any evidence yet, and are all fighting to say that we didn't listen to the working class, they don't say white working class,

but we know that that is what they're referring to, because they're saying things like the more working class an area was, you know, the more likely it was that we're going to lose it. Again, not based on research. Yeah, not based on inner city areas at all. Not at all. Because they're not a single working class person in Kensington or Putney. Well, because those aren't communities.

Communities are like local communities that have like flat caps and whippets and stuff. The dog and flat cap pub. I think that was the point in your article that I appreciated, was the fact that this is constantly being referred to as the Labour Heartlands. And it's like, yes, but cities are also Labour Heartlands. Like, why can they not be Labour Heartlands? Is it just because the only voter base that matters to commentators,

are they just suggesting that it has to be rural or not urban areas full of white people that have massively aging populations, because their young population has declined significantly? Like, because, go out and say that, but don't act as though this is some like, oh, this is getting, we've gotten away from Labour's roots. It's like, working people are working people regardless of where they live. And people are on shit zero hours contracts, whether they're in the city here,

or whether they're in the middle of nowhere, I don't know, in Bassett law. But invariably, it's just, it's like the Claire Fox, Melanie Phillips, Wink, Nudge, shit, where it winds up just being, oh, well, they've gotten too woke. And it's basically saying is, you need to be cruel to people and you need to victimize people who aren't white. Otherwise, people won't vote for you. And it's like, yeah, maybe that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know, but like, it's such a bad faith argument.

And to see it being treated so seriously across the board by everyone, whether it's, you know, right-wing news or slightly right-wing news, like the BBC, yeah, it doesn't matter if it's true. Well, it doesn't matter if it's true or not, because it's the morally wrong thing to do. And I know that like, the failure of Corbyn and Corbynism has maybe sort of taken the shine off of the left as a moralizing project. But if you can't say, no, we're not going to be more racist, even if it works,

because what is the point of us if we do, then, you know, what good are you? Yeah, well, the trouble is the government was subsidizing the racism mines for years and they simply weren't viable anymore. It worked out down racism pairs, yes. Yeah. Well, the other thing, right, is I think like at some point, someone in blue labor must have read like Chantel Mouff or something, because it seems to be, there seems to be the, this seems to be based on this idea that in order to have a community,

like a working class community or whatever, there needs to be some other that they're opposed to. And it seems like blue labor has decided that, well, they're going to be opposed. The real working class community is going to be opposed to the sort of coalition of ethnic minorities and students in the towns. And so labor basically has to performatively shit on everyone in the cities on the basis that they're going to vote for them anyway. It's so ironic because it is the most metropolitan elite thing

of having a bunch of people in Westminster sit around a whiteboard and go, what are people in talkie like? Racism probably. Let's do more of that. Okay. So I want to go back to Kim's- Okay. Compromise solution. You can get your gender confirmation surgery, but your dick has to be bitten off by a ferret. Okay. That's as good as we can do. I want to go back to Kim's article here.

She writes, the rhetoric purposefully places ethnic minorities outside of the nation as rumors circulated that David Lambie and Peefer Tottenham might run for the labor leadership. Goodwin tweeted that he wasn't sure Lambie was the right person to quote, reconnect with labor's left behind socially conservative and patriotic heartlands. In the blue labor imagination, Lambie, the capital city, and even blackness itself for American listeners,

Lambie is a black MP. Lambie, the capital city, and even blackness itself are implicitly placed in opposition to some authentic or real Britain out there. Hey, some kind of folk. As far as I understand it, Lambie is pretty conservative as far as being a labor apikos, and he was even more so earlier in the previous decades. So that's such a weird thing for him to say. It's so revealing. So for one, Lambie, earlier on in blue labor,

in blue labor is, I can't believe I'm saying broad church, considering that they're just being overused right now. It's a broad church, absolutely no mask though. It's a broad church, church underlined. It's an incredibly wide kingdom whole. There's a lot of spectrum of views within blue labor, but earlier on, Lambie actually wrote a chapter for a blue labor pamphlet, and it's not a secret that he is socially small sea conservative.

He also had grew up with a single mother and got a scholarship, I believe, to Harvard, and also to grammar school was the first in his family to go to university. He's from a working class background. He worked his local KFC in Tottenham growing up. So this isn't someone who is quote unquote from a wealthy background middle class. So he should be able, in theory, to represent an area that has patriotic, socially conservative, traditional working class voters. So I just kind of feel like Goodwin played himself,

and he might as well have just said he's too black. Like he's too black, so he can't represent them. And like that sentence is so convoluted. But if you know anything about Lambie, then he fits the description that Goodwin's describing. The only thing he doesn't fit is he's not white and that he grew up in London. I feel like they're normally so subtle with the language that they use. And I think I don't know if it was on purpose because they feel empowered by the election result or if it was just a mistake.

And he kind of tripped up with the ethnic minorities and students awkward alliance thing and with the Lambie thing. But they're normally a lot better at disguising their issues around calls for equal rights, whether that's gender or race, so that it's hard to call them out. And I was actually surprised that he was so blatant because it was just a lot, it was so obvious to me and to a lot of other people too. All of the dogs just started barking. That hoity-toity David Lambie with his metropolitan KFC job.

Why couldn't he work on hot, bubble, stand like normal working-class lads? I mean, the most charitable possible reading of what Goodwin said is that, oh, well, Lambie's from a city, so he couldn't possibly understand what's going on in the towns. But again, that makes a nandy for Labour Leader. But that makes, again, I think- Towns future. Again, I don't fully buy that because he always says, okay, well, Nigel Farage understands what's going on in Labour's heartland.

He drinks a pint in front of a very small TV. He's a banker who went to Dulwich College. Yeah, some very source of the Earth's gold there. Yeah, so it's like if you really run out of places to go except, well, he's Black, he couldn't possibly connect with Labour's traditional voters. That's kind of the Trump thing too, though, isn't it? That somehow Trump has his finger on the pulse of working-class Americans, which we do the same stupid problem here where it's always like, wait a minute,

why are you saying, why can only white people who work in fucking coal mines be working-class and nobody else is? Yeah. But Trump is born into incredible wealth, went to private schools, went to Dartmouth, like has been nothing but a rich failure who can never face consequences his entire life. But somehow he's authentic, and anybody who isn't a racist and isn't white can't be authentic. Yeah. And you see that play out over and over again, and I just feel like

there's a certain degree of, they sort of demand credulousness when it's, to me at least, it seems pretty obvious what they're trying to say, which is that they don't think that Black Labour voters or minority ethnic Labour voters or anyone who isn't white deserves to be treated equally, even considered equally when it comes to how a party develops its platform. Yeah. And it's just, I guess it's because Trump got elected in 2016, and every major newspaper decided, oh wow, we're too much in a bubble.

We need to go out and explore what's actually happening in real America. And invariably, they always go to just like diners in Pennsylvania where people like retirees and ball caps are basically like, we love racism. And I read this thing on Facebook that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and stuff. And it's just basically, there's no challenge to it whatsoever. There's no pushback. It's just basically, you need to connect to these people. You have to win these people back somehow.

And it's like, these people don't believe in reality. And the thing that animates their every waking moment is racism. They're never coming back. Yeah. In most cases, I don't even think they ever were in the first place. And in Labour's case, I think a lot of these people stayed home from what I can tell, probably because of Brexit and the Brexit policy. But it's a lot more complicated of a picture than that.

But the idea that somehow it was this one, that they got mad that Labour was somehow not speaking for them or not representing them. And they decided that this was the moment that they needed to challenge that, as opposed to what appears to be a decade and a half of vote share decline. And just general apathy. And total neglect. And neglect and mismanagement by both their Labour councils and the Westminster government. Because they were too busy doing new genders.

Making up genders left and right, exactly. But also, I think, before I move on, I also want to highlight this as well. I think, Nate, it's something that you brush on. I think it's worth going into more. It's because people like Matthew Goodwin and movements like Blue Labour have a completely fucked up but very British view of what class is. Which basically, class is whatever you or your parents were doing in 1970. It doesn't matter if you own your house.

It doesn't matter if you're now, if you're living comfortably on a pension in a town and don't really have to struggle to get by or anything. None of that matters. You were all working class signifiers. Yes, even remember from the... From which the left is not immune. And so they're able to see this coalescence of voter power as people who might have voted Labour in the 70s because they might have been in a union in the 70s.

And the intervening 40 years, nothing happened. Because nothing ever changes. Because you have these cultural markers, you have a flat cap on. Or you worked in the factory 20 years ago. So, Kim, you conclude the article this way. I paraphrase the first bit just so it starts as a sentence. But not capitulating to a political project that diminishes the rights and minorities in exchange for some uncertain promise of community to a white working class

is essential for ethnic minority survival and also for Labour's. Demographic change will bring more minorities into the electorate and they do not owe Labour their vote. The question is, what Labour does with this new reality? Is it willing to abandon its values and our communities in a futile attempt to recapture the past? Yeah, so we have only one in 20 ethnic minorities vote for the Conservatives. That was the last election 2017. Too early to say about this one, but probably relatively similar.

So even taking morality out of it, I think it's immoral for Labour to abandon this ethnic minority voters in an attempt to recapture this imagined white working class, which is mostly identity-based and own their own houses and aren't even working in quote unquote working class. Wouldn't have voted for us anyway. Yeah, they weren't going to vote for me. It's so cynical too, is the thing. I don't think that blue Labour is a, let's say, ideologically racist project in the sense that

they're idealistic about this. I think it's a very cynical way of being like, oh, people like racism. Well, we can just do some racism and then we get the thing that we actually want, which is power. And yes, of course, that is still racist, but there's a hollowness to it. And I think if you want to vote for a racist, you just vote for a racist. Yeah, you vote Tory or you vote the Brexit Party because it's not like people who's animating impulse for voting as racism, they aren't going to be impressed by racism or low calorie racism.

They want the full thing. They want the orange soda that's just massively bad for you. So basically, we see that blue Labour as a movement, which has been around for a couple decades now, I believe, has turned to social conservatism, which tends to imply opposition to minority rights in favour of quote, community, cohesion and integration. Transactionally, as Alice said, because of cynicism about the non-metropolitan working class and what is fundamentally a middle class movement. We're just doing David Cameron's Munich speech about integration at 160 decibels on a loop.

But what they always forget, and this is something that I feel like we are going to be bringing up over and over and over on this show for the foreseeable future. This is a big theme of Trash Future Season 2, is that Dennis Skinner was one of the main champ as an MP, was one of the huge champion of LGBT rights in the UK in the 80s at the head of a trade union movement. There is nothing socially conservative about the working class. There is nothing inherently socially conservative about it. But rightly, LGBT people all live in that London, and we don't have town's issues. Let's say you want to go to a gender clinic because you want to do something about that

gender that's been bothering you. If you live in London, there is an 18-month waiting list, which obviously unacceptable, extremely bad. If you live in Leeds, or anywhere where say Leeds is the closest one for hundreds of miles, it's a five-year waiting list. That is a local issue and also a quote unquote woke issue. It's a cooling off period in case gender goes away. In case they invent a new gender in the meantime and you realize that's the one that you want. Exactly. It's like buying a Ferrari. You get a place in the queue and then you see maybe a new model comes out in the meantime. You're just like, wait a minute. Maybe within like two years

before you're going to buy it, you're like, actually, I identify as a Maserati instead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I'm Andrew Dale now. I have one joke. On to millions. But this whole idea is why it should come to no surprise to us that in 2011, blue labor founder Maurice Glassman said, labor should try to quote, build a party that brokers the common good with everyone. That means going around the table to guess, Milo, what do we think that means? Okay, I've got an idea. What if we just do it? Say the word. Say the word. I'm just thinking of like a compromised position with blue labor where we don't let them do any racist policies, but we just let them say old timey slurs. We just let them get into

like a soundproof chamber, like a phone booth and just like rage in there for a bit. Here where you say no detention for immigrants. Can we just change immigrants for whops and dagos and then we're fine. Just like whatever. Kim, any guesses? So I'm pretty sure what it is. So I don't want to ruin it. Why don't you just open the box? Tell us what we've won. So it's the EDL or the English Defense League for people that don't know just like the ultimate racist. The Football Alliance. Actual neo-fascists. The Berry, the Berry Gents Coalition. That labor should involve people who support the EDL within our party.

Huh. We're not racist. Yeah. It's so cynical, right? Because like I mentioned the whiteboard thing, but it's even worse than that. It's literally it's like looking at a Facebook group and being like, that's a lot of members. Maybe we should do something. There's racism, you know. Well, you know, I think- What are we doing for the football people? I think that's my-

Yeah, it's a big graphic. I think we can't oversimplify this, right? Like both fascism and socialism are both attempt to organize the working class at a time of like crisis and capitalism. Like that's just the case. And I think like we have to understand that socialism has to woo people who are in danger of being wooed by things like fascism by preventing them from going over there. But the idea- Yes, but not by doing fascism. Yeah. The idea that we have to outflank them to the right is bizarre.

Also, I mean, I think that from an outsider's perspective here, I mean, I haven't lived here that long. I don't think people realize how incredibly draconian, like for example, immigration for non-EU citizens is in this country. It's insane. It's, I mean, my wife and I were talking about this the other day because she lives in Switzerland, which is a famously racist country, an extremely racist country, like so unbelievably racist that some of their election posters- Google some SVP posters sometimes. Yeah. It gets shared online. Like one of the, for being like almost like jokes,

like because they're so over the top. Zekeheit Schaffen. Yeah. One of them was literally, it's a big outline of the nation's borders of Switzerland, and there's a bunch of sheep with Swiss flags, and they're kicking the black sheep out of Switzerland. And it's like, that's the level of discourse in Switzerland. But in nursery rhyme books, it's dark. But in Switzerland, if you come there on a work visa, if you lose your job and you've worked for at least 12 months, you have access to public funds for unemployment. Because in their mind,

well, you paid in the unemployment for at least 12 months. Why would you? Imagine that in Britain, where like there's zero, until you're a fucking citizen, there's no recourse to public funds. Or for example, in Switzerland, renewing your visa is apparently like you have to do it every year, but it's like 100 Swiss francs. My wife's visa, it has to get renewed of every two and a half years. It's like 3,000 pounds to renew it. And like for people who are on what they consider, they have a 10-year track for a settlement here if they think you're at risk in any way. And let's just say, it's not explicitly said if you're from certain countries, you're on that track, but somehow people who are from majority non-white countries

wind up on that track a lot. You have to renew that every couple of years. That adds up to like anywhere between when you can't count the cost of applying for ILR and for citizenship, like anywhere between like 15 and 20,000 pounds. And those have to be paid in cash. People in Bolsover love that. Yeah, it's like, so I don't think people realize when they're like, oh, we're just too soft on immigration. We got to win people back with like being harder. We're already fucking insane on immigration. It's just, it's never good enough. And that should be the lesson, I think. But it... Well, you've got to be careful because it's a slippery slope there. You know, first of all,

they bring over the wife, then suddenly it's the wife's boyfriend. You know, where does it start? You know, it's that to me, like the disconnect between the rhetoric around immigration in this country and then being a citizen by descent, but going through the process of helping, you know, my wife get her visa when she's not from an EU country, how bananas insane it is. And it's like, that never gets mentioned because it's never, it's never hard enough. It's got to be, it's got to be stricter and meaner and crueler to deport more people and raise the fees more, even though they're literally running a massive profit on fees because it doesn't cost that much to process visas. Yeah, and we have to make every person in Bolsover a border guard. We have to

give them a hat. Remember the volunteer border guards, but that's why I think ultimately, like you cannot see blue labor as part of the left, but rather as a project fundamentally hostile to the left that prioritizes the aesthetics of working class politics over any kind of substance. It's basically we'll do socialism for the people that we choose worthy of it, who just happen to be white all the time. Well, no, it's not even that. It's that we're going to look at what they, we're going to look at what people that we've decided to the working class seem to want and just do that because neither blue labor, nor to be honest, you know, moralizing liberals actually want to engage seriously with how working class social conservative views come

to be formed and why. And there's this idea that by saying that it comes to be formed, say in the media by the Rupert Murdoch's empire or whatever, that you're denying people's agency to say that they that they might come up with these things by yourself, but it's not denying your NAN's agency to note the power difference between one, your NAN and the Daily Mail. But because we're coming up to time here, I'd like to talk about blue labor and how they view their own political goal. So we have this perplexing article from their website by a guy called Jonathan Rutherford that's entitled, let's bring back cakes and ale socialism. Few people would immediately associate the modern left with a spirit of delight and celebration. No fun zone,

only genders. Only the swim zone. The popular image is a per-slip puritanical preaching interspersed to the good dollop of hypocritical Bollinger Bolshevism. What? That's just us. That's literally just our podcast. That's not a popular image. I mean, like if there's any takeaway mental image I have of all the various left things that we've attended as part of this show, it's like the joke in a tropic thunder where they're at like the one week of shooting rap party. It's like the biggest party and they're like, wait, the movie's not done yet. Why are you guys celebrating? It's just been one week of shooting already. It's like, it's that same thing. The left has a lot of fun, maybe too much fun. Maybe we need to be puritanical.

Quaffing a nice glass of something cold and sparkling with one finger. Sorry. Quaffing a nice glass of something cold and sparkling with one hand while finger jabbing at the plebs pleasure in bacon sandwiches, fags and booze with the other. Doing what to the plebs? Well, fingering the plebs. Are they talking about how the left hates bacon sandwiches ever since one got Ed Miliband diselected and booze and fags? Yeah, we hate it. Have you ever met a London socialist who isn't constantly smoking and drinking? Cause I fucking haven't. Although the perception is not like Marlboro Reds for some reason. Although this perception is not altogether fair. It does

sometimes seem the left can't win as whatever we say, we are doomed to be denounced as either grim face kill joys or champagne socialists. There is some truth in it though. It is rare to hear voices on the left raise even a mild hint of skepticism towards whatever the latest pronouncement of public health experts happens to be, whether it's plain packaging for crisps, attacks on unhealthy food or regulating vaping out of existence. So if you go back in the archives, there's a bit where I call Jamie Oliver a thick-tongued cunt for doing the sugar tax. I don't know about that one. Yeah. Yeah. It's also just weird just, oh yeah, that's what the working class really care about.

When you really get down to it, it's the plain packaging on crisps. That is what's driving all of this. Brexit really was a proxy vote about the plain packaging on crisps. It's because they weren't holding those votes on like special flavors that time. So you had to vote in this instead. Look, what is plain packaging on crisps but a kind of niqab? Damn. Sniper. God damn it. It is not a coincidence that even Shriller calls for more state regulation of life's little pleasures, plain packaging for this, more taxes on that, ever more unrealistic quote-unquote advice to eat. Boring clerks and fucking shithacks. Age of consignalness. I just like drive my car and drink booze. But also like who the fuck does this besides liberals?

Like this isn't a thing that the left does. Like the people who are like, oh, we love soda taxes and shit and making poor people's lives even more miserable. That's like Mike Bloomberg's thing. Yeah. Famous communist. How much of this is a fucking really desperate working class thing? You know how fucking expensive booze and fags are? It's like, this is. Yeah, it's the. It is all like Jeremy Clarkson being squeezed into those jeans that are too tight and cut off the blood flow to his brain and think that, oh, actually I'm, you know, speaking out for the motorist or whatever. You've all missed the best bit of this, which is even more unrealistic advice, quote-unquote, to eat half a ration of bacon every

fortnight or nine pieces of fruit and veg a day. This is just a child. It's a child who's being as angry at being made to eat vegetables. This sounds a bit like one of those like diets for people who are trying to have like a genius baby or something. Exactly half a ration of bacon every fortnight, nine bananas a day. Plain packaging on the crisps. You're listening to Mozart backwards. The ethic of modern, of modern consensus, economic and social liberalism tells us anything goes. No one has the right to tell you how to life your life. Spelling errors in original. Individual autonomy is all. At the same time, free market liberalism is hollow out our civic institutions and the rich cultural life and

the set of standards and values that they sustain creating an analog, sorry, excuse me, creating an anomic isolating an empty society. That's just the thing where they say the true thing, but what is their like answer to that? Oh, well, it's that if you combine these two things, Alice, what actually results is a society of curious, soulless and distinctly unjoyful hedonism, unhappy, disconnected people buying cheap booze and drinking it on their own. I mean, sure. Yeah, excuse me. People are lonely and people are atomized and yeah, but that is bad and people do like, for instance, maybe want to drink because their lives are shit. What do you want to do about this? Here's the thing. This rubs up against the other

tendency of establishment liberal politics, which is technocratic utilitarianism, the public health consequences of the kind of society they've created are predictably disastrous, but their only response is top down state intervention or totally unrealistic and condescending pieces of lifestyle advice. So he's doing the thing where liberals in the left are the same. Yes, correct. Yeah, famously the hallmark of a smart person. Indeed. And also, state intervention is only ever conceived as punishing the poor. It's never conceived of as, for example, creating a state-run grocery shop that you can just go to and buy healthy food at. Nationalized Greggs when?

Or, remember, nationalized pubs that were ways to get out and drink subsidized alcohol with lots of people that existed all over the north of the country for a long time. No, no, no. That's state intervention. That's inappropriate. I think I've worked out what kind of article it is. So we've had the first half, which we might describe as the problems are bad, and now I feel like we're getting to but their causes. No, this is blue labor. The problems are bad, but our solutions are ridiculous. So I'm going to throw to Kim for this next paragraph, which is her favorite one. I just, it speaks to me, although clarification, what is that word? What does that mean?

Bacchanalianism. Love to be accessible to the working class. We're going to see, listeners, wait until you find out how this moron uses the word Bacchanalianism in this paragraph. Champagne socialists who use words like Bacchanalianism. Kim, please take us away. The reality is that a real politics of enjoyment is not the empty Bacchanalianism, totally normal, accessible word of lonely liberal subjects crying into their Sainsbury's basic vodka. I feel personally attacked by that. You get a glens anyway. Yeah, glens is fast, and not much more expensive. You see how to be crying into the vodka makes it salty. How are you crying into the vodka? Are you pouring it into a glass then crying in

there or are you crying into the neck of the bottle? Yeah, just crying, just putting my eye directly on the neck, yeah. It is communal, and it is about relationships as much as a necking neat gin. It is rooted in intermediate institutions and our common life, practices and civic habits that are collective, but not necessarily official or directly provided by the state. Pubs, social and working men's clubs, the informal chats between smokers on their break, tea and biscuits at church days, sharing a few drinks after the cricket match, or watching the football. We live in a fucking society. That's the solution. A highly intelligent race of aliens came to earth, and they're trying to

describe British life, and this is the article they've produced. This guy has never had a cigarette break or gone to a church due, or what else do you say, gone to a pub, had a chat, watched the cricket or the football. I feel more confident in my ability to use terms like the football than this guy should, and I'm not from here. But that's like, Milo, you said earlier that an ordinary classical liberal or work-free market article or whatever would say that the problems are bad, but the causes are good. A blue labor article, so economically radical, allegedly, even though they hate state intervention for some reason, and socially conservative, says the problems are bad, but our solution is for people to hang out.

Yeah, damn, it's fine. It's we work. This is hell to me. The solution seems to be, what if we just wished all of those things that have been demolished by neoliberalization back into existence, but never took... Yeah. Nobody goes to church anymore. The attendance figures just drop off instantly. How many people do you seriously know who go to the fucking cricket, who aren't like Tories? Everyone has podcasts. This is what we do now. Can I just bring it back to the Sainsbury's Vodka quickly? I don't think it's fair or true that Sainsbury's basic vodka can't bring about communal enjoyment.

I've had lots of communal enjoyment in a group bonding with other people based around Sainsbury's basis vodka. But Kim, the problem is you weren't in an institution that was core to the social lives of people in the 1970s. If you were in a house... You were in a park. There wasn't a wedding or a flat cap around. How many of those people were consuming live ails at the time? Exactly. None. You were probably in a house and probably in a city. I was actually in a town. Oh my God. There it is. Interesting. Well, blue labor. Yeah, we must respect this experience now.

So he goes on, these social contexts tend to allow earthy enjoyment. Hard-handed sons of toil. Just having a cigarette down tip pub on a break from my job as a call center operator. None of that ethereal Olympian enjoyment. And the letting off of steam while providing ways to regulate behavior and ensure nothing gets quote unquote out of hand. Yeah, I've never been in a pub or anything's got out of hand. Yeah, but it's got out of hand in a sort of fun, earthy, rugged English way. Yeah. I'd be like that guy getting carried naked on the fucking crowd when England scored

against Sweden. Because that to me defines the English pub experience. I want to avoid it at all costs, but the most town experience I can think of is like kicking out time at a shitty nightclub that's called something like rumors with a Z and something like tackled face down onto a pavement by four bouncers and six police officers. Yeah. But Alice, what if it was like that? But in the 70s, basically it seems like what if instead of like women walking home carrying their shoes and like trying to avoid the big puddles was sick everywhere. We just had like a bunch of miners smoking and doing racism. Cool. I think this is just like they kind of they kind of want the labor manifesto to be like the lyrics to like a street's album.

This manifesto specifically for you. Yeah, we know he's a you didn't even fucking touch him. That's right. Yeah, I'm going to get I'm going to get through the rest of this paragraph. 17 year olds should be allowed to have a pint in their local in full view of people who know their parents might get a bit squiffy, but they're not going to end up in hospital. Nobody even has a local anymore. It's it's a weather spoons or nails. Yeah, they're basically like we should make sure that 17 year olds are allowed to drink and pubs so long as they're with their parents and surrounded by local people who will watch out for them. And we should somehow make that a political party platform. Yeah. And we're going to fight capitalism by doing that.

Yeah. Step one, rebuild any kind of sense of community in a totally atomized neoliberal hellscape. Step two, 17 year olds drinking pints. Yeah. It's simple. Yeah. I didn't realize blue labor was a libertarian organization in the womb. That's that is why that is why they think that Nigel Farage is this kind of like working class hero, though, isn't it? It's because like there's this weird thing I've been trying to get my head around it in the British psychology where there's a certain kind of like posh show who like certain kinds of people from these like kind of quote unquote working class in the most British sense of the word rather than any materialist analysis see as being like them when those people would never see themselves as being like the

quote unquote working class. Yeah, you know what it is. It's the same thing that the American quote unquote working class see in Donald Trump. It's this is what I would do if I was rich. I would drink the same shitty beer I would smoke wherever I wanted and I would tell anyone who didn't like it to go fuck themselves. I divorce my wife and I spend Christmas day alone watching the Queen's speech of like three feet away from a ridiculously small television. Yes. Most normal people are just going to ignore weekly alcohol unit limits and eat bacon sandwiches and actually it's only human to enjoy a beer or a packet of crisps. So why not embrace it? But what does that mean politically? Was this was was this article just written by someone who's

been given like a diabetes diagnosis and is like trying to like subtweet their own doctor? You know what? You know what Muslims famously love is bacon sandwiches and weekly alcohol. So yeah, nothing no sort of undertones there. No, not at all. No. So what do you think is going on here, Kierakam? Do you think that the way to reconnect with labor sort of former heartlands is to like let 17 year olds drink sometimes and also to remove weekly alcohol recommendations? I mean, if they want to get the youth fate, but we've already got that locked down to be honest. But as a manifesto, you know, if someone when I was 17 had said, do you want to be able to drink in a pub and eat bacon whenever you want? I probably would have

been quite up for it. That was peak epic bacon years. That's true. But I think they would fuck this though, because I think it would become whatever the kids say nowadays, it would become simp. You would like you would be allowed to drink in a pub, but the pub would have to have a thatched roof and you'd have to have like a half of like really warm London pride. There would have to be a guy who warned you not to go to certain bits of the moors. You have to drink Bombardier. This is just the in-betweeners. We literally have this law in Britain already. You can drink alcoholic drinks in a pub and provided you're accompanied by an adult and that you're having a meal. That's already a law. If you're a fucking nerd.

Exactly. But that's literally that scene in a classic British show, the in-betweeners, where they're 17 and the pub won't serve them. So they get some like alcoholic to sit with them while they have three carvery dinners in order to have exactly one pint of cider each. Yeah. But what should Labour have done if this is already a law? Just put a little section in its manifesto saying, hey, this is good. This is already a law. We're going to keep this law. Yeah. As long as it's bought and paid for by a whippet, you can drink exactly one pint of bitter. I'm going to sort of try and bomb the rest of the way through this article. It also allows us to make the argument that if you provide the right kind of society,

then people can enjoy themselves while we combat the deeper causes of genuinely damaging and self-destructive behaviour, stress, overwork, anxiety, depression, isolation. But again, don't forget, the court, the court, the problems are very bad, but the symptoms very good. Yeah. Just smearing on Joachim Acup so haphazardly that it's not even recognised by anyone. Alice, they are saying that the symptoms are bad. It's like the problems are bad and the symptoms are bad, but we're only going to use quackery to treat them. Yeah. But the symptoms are also self-care. Yeah. Not to be like, oh, a socialist should absolutely never drink or use drugs or whatever, but to be like, oh, our society is quite unfair.

Therefore, yeah, we should encourage people to get pissed in the meantime while we fix it, instead of like involving them at all. Yeah, because that's, and we'll sort of note this, right? I'm just going to finish up here. The left's attitude to things like drinking in public health really don't help our image. Again, this must be some kind of imaginary left. They make us look out of touch and sensorious and add to the perception that labour has become a party solely for highly educated metropolitan liberals who spend all their time eating mung beans and farting because they're too uptight to have a drink in a lab.

To be fair, he's right about the farting part, but I'm not sure what a mung bean is. I just, my rebuttal to this whole thing is just the picture of Jeremy Corbyn in his tracksuit with a bag of cans. Yeah. What? I mean, Gillian McKeith for labour leader, I guess, just like making every working class person shit in a Tupperware and then examining it and telling them that they're going to have to stop being finnish lasagna or whatever the fuck. That is the new workplace capacity assessment. But like if you look at all, so this is back to me again, right? If you look at all of the forms of community that they think are the things we need to bring back if we want to have a functional

society, these things like church groups or like our various kinds of ways to go to the pub with your old friends, your local pub, your local sports team. Extremely dead. Yeah, except for the stretum rovers. Go rovers. If you look at all these forms of communities that they that they venerate, the only ones that still exist are like the neighborhood watch and all the other things that like all the other things are these things that involve like camaraderie and fun, maybe for 1970s people, but not power. And when they do involve power, they're the EDL because none of these forms of working class solidarity challenge any class hierarchy. There is no in fact in Glassman's 2011 book, there was like no mention of trade unionism. Like there is nothing, there's

nothing, there seem to be very hostile to trade unionism and very hostile to any kind of state universalism, but they're very pro bad beer and strange dogs. Yeah, well, going down to church. Thing is, the trade unions is full of big Southern liberal pansies and so you can't Yeah, exactly. There's a trade unionist. You know, they're all not smoking and drinking and, you know, they've never eaten a bacon sandwich and they just refuse, you know, to pander to the working class. They won't do it. So it's like, look, it's basically blue labor. Like the way that I sort of describe it is that it's all of its solutions are like trying to do CPR and a skeleton. Like these things are gone and they're not gone because of immigrants or genders or like or

non white people. They're gone because they've been neoliberalized away and you can't just wish them back by saying that we've been too accepting of people who don't fit with the like cultural or ethnic or gender or national or whatever markers of the people who were in those community organizations that you really liked from the 70s. It just doesn't make any fucking sense. Love to have a sentimental romantic vision of a better past that has been taken from you by some other. This will never backfire. Every member of the cabinet is going to be a different kind of pie. Fuck it, fine. Yeah. It makes people feel at home. Every cabinet meeting will be a Sunday league match. So, Kim, any final thoughts on this political vision that is basically like the DMT

hallucination that happens when you die? Do you know if you want to go to a working men's club and have a pint? I really give a fuck. Do whatever you want. I think minorities aren't trying to take that away from me. But seriously, I'm actually quite worried about the influence of blue labor. I don't think that an imagined past where colonialism didn't happen. We don't have gender equality and everyone still hangs out with their church group is going to come back. It never existed. It was never real. In a very real sense, a lot of this stuff that they're imagining is just imagined. But if you are a Labour Party member, and I say this in an individual capacity as me and not any of my employers, vote for the next leader. I would watch this very

carefully because as much as we joke, I actually think blue labor has a lot of influence. If you care about the Labour Party and this isn't what you want to see the party turn into, then you need to be active in your local party and you need to analyse what each leader is proposing as well as their rhetoric. And if you see some of these arguments coming through, making sure you don't vote for them and also getting your friends and colleagues to not vote for these leaders either. Damn, get involved in the local Labour Party sounds a lot like creating some kind of community with social relationships and camaraderie. It does. Does it have pints though, is the thing? Does it have a warm pints?

Yes. Is there an old man who says, oh, don't go up past them all on the full moon? This was such a shit country and we're nostalgic for all the worst parts of it. A man who was created by putting an old man from the dog track and a kazoo into the machine from the fly. And every day is a living hell as he is an abomination that should never have been born. His entire body is just comprised of different coats. Please get into my life. I cannot do accent. I have a vision of what this is, right? And I think the best summary I can come up with of blue labor is that it is the shell game that you play to hustle people where you put

the ball under the thing and then you move the things around. But instead of shells, it's three different flat caps. Oh, wait, hang on. No, blue labor is just OYO, but for the Labour Party, right? It's just like... It's a machine that kills the Labour Party. Yes, they're just going to take over the Labour Party and run it into the ground. Why did Jess Phillips and her first actors leader buy all of this upholstery? All right, we've gone for like so long. So I'm going to say, Kim, thank you very much for coming

to the studio today. Thanks for having me back. Do you have anything going on currently you'd like to plug or just a Twitter account? I'm not reading anything at the moment. Just trying to get myself back to the new year. So if you want to hang out, contact Kim McIntyre. Yeah, I'm just chilling. If you're free, if you're available, let me know. If I go for a pint down to racism mine. Also, you can also subscribe to us on Patreon, five bucks a month.

You know what to do. I imagine some of our Iran invasion opinions are going to be on the next Patreon. Also plugs. I'm doing a show in Liverpool on the 17th of January at Hot Water Comedy Club. I've sold six tickets so far, which is more than I thought I'd sold, but still not enough. So if you're in Liverpool, if you know people in Liverpool, please come down to that. 18th of January, I'm doing one in London, same deal, but it's in London. So if you live in London, probably go to that one instead. No, fuck it. Go to both.

Use of the excellent privatised rail network. So yeah, please do get tickets to those. And if that's everything, I think we will see you in a couple of days. But our theme song is by Jin Sang. It's called Here We Go. You can find it on Spotify. I almost forgot to do it, but we'll talk to you soon. Trash Future Season 2. We're never forgetting the theme song. Never. Later, everybody. Bye.