TRASHFUTURE - The Life Aquatic with Edward Colston

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Why did they throw that statue into the water in Bristol? Why does the state want to find as many ways as possible to make owning the libs its official policy? Why does burning down a police precinct poll better than Joe Biden? This episode features (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) and seeks to answer these questions. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

Hello, and welcome back to this episode of Trash Future, the podcast you're listening to right now. Do you say welcome back as if they've just started listening and then paused like three seconds in? Yeah. There's an ad break by a Casper mattress that helps us out. They started listening about a week ago, and then they stopped listening, and now they're listening again.

Yeah, it's all one continuous episode. Yeah, exactly. So it's me, Riley. I'm in studio back in the TF Studio looking at a drawing of dignity I did from The Simpsons as part of a joke from a stream from months ago. Is that hauntology? Yes. It's hauntology for when we used to be able to hang out in the studio.

Mark down your shirt and shoot your bingo cards. Yeah, I am joined, of course, by my good friends and colleagues. Alice from an undisclosed Northern location. What's up? Yes. Hussein from an undisclosed Southeastern location. What's up? We're only doing cards in all directions now.

And Milo from I Don't Actually Know, an undisclosed location outside of London. Not facing Mecca. We're in a Lion and Scott polo shirt. Simple as. That's right. You can't make certain turnings because you're too basic. You will not take that chance. We are recording while there is a very large protest of guys.

There's a bit of cheeky fascism going on, isn't it? Yeah. We're recording while there's a very large protest of guys who can only be described as will never turn in a 360 degree circle because they don't want to risk facing Mecca. Oh, you're you're a cheeky cunt for a statue defender. Great episode of Fake Cenotaph this week. That's right. So here's what's going on.

We are going to be talking about about the police, about about the police in the UK, about the technology and the police and about just generally what's going on with with all this stuff, with all the current events. So I'm just going to crack on. There is this common myth, I think, that racism and police brutality is not as big of an issue in the UK as it is in the US. And I think that this statement is frequently used as a cover to prevent us acknowledging our own fundamental structural problems

with with racism and the justice system. And also with our relationship with American police brutality because this should make I mean, maybe this will come as a surprise to some listeners and not with others, but American police brutality is an extremely profitable industry in the United Kingdom. I don't know if that comes as a surprise to anyone I'm currently talking to right now. Yeah, no, someone has to make all of the like rubber bullets and the tear gas grenades and the helmets and the riot shields.

And it's, you know, we love we love free enterprise. We love our burgeoning defence sector and we love export. Yeah, that's right. I've got a tear gas factory down in Surrey. And the reason for that is I know a lot about tears since Sandra took the kids. Every single one of those guys currently like putting body pillows of Winston Churchill up on that statue opens a tear gas factory in Reigate. Oh, I'm not joking, by the way, Reigate is one of the addresses.

I looked up like places with export licenses to the U.S. and one of the they all they're all in industrial states in Reigate. Well, this is like there's this proud British tradition that we've discussed and well, there's your problem of just mucking about in your shed for a while and kind of seeing if you can turn that into a business or a piece of civil engineering. And this is like this was the entire plot of like that movie War Dogs where I don't know if you guys did you guys ever see War Dogs?

And it was like this this movie about how these two guys Joe Hill was an arms dealer. They ended up like procuring like loads of like Iraq war contracts just by like putting together all these licenses from guys in America who like ran mis like just made like they had like defence just like these like dumb startups in their sheds like just making kind of gas canisters like you know, you know, this reminds me of though, is do you remember the fake bomb detectors that like a couple of detectives?

My favorite. He fasted for an IED on you know, literally, literally one of these guys operating like out of an industrial estate in Essex sold the Iraqi police and army millions and millions of dollars worth of basically like dowsing rods that they claimed were able to detect explosives. And they made millions off of this. Yeah, this is we call this one the Giard sensor. It goes off whenever there's Giard in the vicinity.

So I actually use the campaign against the arms trade site, which tracks who's getting licenses for what where. And so I then filled I basically then looked into this. I looked at all the licenses to do with keywords like riot, crowd control, irritant, non-lethal, etc., etc. Which I mean, non-lethal, we know to be a massive misnomer. But basically, there are 58 arms export licenses of which about 20 are unlimited or open licenses.

We'll talk about what that means later. Granted to UK companies to export specifically those items, specifically to the US. And we only have data on licenses since 2008. But I think it's important to know that the vast majority of these licenses were granted in the last five years with a huge spike in 2016. Yes, there's Baz's stun baton shop. And most of the licenses that were granted were for shields and shield components, which by the way, we also know can be used as offensive weapons

that have injured quite a few people. But there are also multiple entries for tear gas, crowd control, ammunition and one license for acoustic devices for riot control. So if you want to know where American police forces are getting their LRAD cannons, like supposed to liquefy the brains of people. Which is selling them unsold cassettes of D-Reams' lost album. Yeah, but if you want to know where they're getting those, they're getting them from here. And so anyone and even without looking at the UK's own quite problematic history

of police violence against black people in this country, even without looking at that, anyone who tells you that the UK is is better than the US because we don't have as much of a police violence problem and completely ignores the fact that we are contributing to theirs materially is either a charlatan or an idiot. That's it. I've had enough of these protesters. Officer Bologna, turn on Simply Red's greatest hits. Look at Bernie Sanders there.

I know he's against police, but we've done hard against him that we're just making. Yeah, officer Sanders. 99% of the tear gas in this country is manufactured by people called Baz in Rogate. My theory is that if you like my theory is, I mean, again, I think that the idea that British police are less abusive or less violent or less institutionally racist than American ones is largely down to like an aesthetic that's rooted in pop culture. So in America, we have like there was like a very good article about this.

And I can't remember where it was from. But the case was basically that loads of American pop culture is sort of like the goal is always to whitewash the police, but they do it in different ways. So in American pop culture, it's about the police kind of being an abusive son of a bitch, but like goes through a redemption arc when he's paired up with like a black police officer who becomes like a body cop. And this guy just like gives the white cop like lots of advice throughout the movie until the white guy sort of realizes that like cops

are cops and guys are guys, right? And usually that guy is like Eddie Murphy or something like that. But in in the UK, it's the BBC and ITV and their British cop dramas. But I think it's sort of given this aesthetic to what British police are, which are like, you know, stoic and very sensible. And they call everyone Sarge, including their wife. You know, just like they just like Bobby's on the beat, who are tormented by their work, even in their personal life,

because they believe so much in the institution. So these are perfect figures to begin with. And all they're doing is navigating an imperfect architecture. The vampire castle that we're trying to escape from is Sunhill Police Station from the Bell. My wife was I'll call her the death sergeant, super incendent. That will come up later. But before we move on to the UK, like so domestic policing matters in the UK, I want to talk a little more about arms export licenses,

because it's another one of these very boring things. It's very important to understand. I'm just hopeful that, like, it follows the the Jihad detector model and a lot of the shit that we're selling. UK US cops just doesn't work. You're just trying to shoot a guy with like a rubber bullet and then just like flops out of the end of the barrel. Oh, yeah.

Wendy's B side rate to Jihad detector. I'm sorry, we've sold you. We've sold you a rubber bullet that actually just makes a little flag. No, it's a butt block. Why does this tear gas shelf smell like Link's Africa? It just cuts to Baz and his mate, just spraying a can of Link's Africa into this thing and then screwing the end on and tossing the can of deodorant into a giant pile of deodorant cans. So let's let's talk about arms export licenses.

What they are granted by the their their responsibility for granting them goes to the Secretary of State for International Trade. So it is a sitting MP for whatever party is in power that decides who gets exported, what, when and under what conditions. So you can have a couple of different kinds of licenses. You have limited value licenses and you have open licenses. You I think you get the kind where it's like you can ship two hundred grand's worth of Link's Africa shells or just the one where it's like, yeah,

you can just do whatever you want. We don't give a shit. Oh, yeah, the fuck around and find out license. And so effectively, what it means is that you can track is that you can track where this is going. But also it means that the decision to export arms and and so on is entirely a political one, fully political. There is no not even a veneer of technocracy. There is not even a nod towards this being some kind of neutral or external body. It's literally just ministers who decide this.

And what and you can all what's always very interesting is that they're usually decided in conjunction between the Department for National Trade and the FCO. And since and essentially of all twenty nine of the thirty countries on the FCO's list of, you know, problematic human rights, cancellation lists. Yeah, on the FCO's mega mix call out post. Yeah, exactly. Being to Kim Jong-un's tweets with not sure about this one. In fact, North Korea is the only is the only country on this list

that is not being sold arms. So the only other of all other thirty countries on this list, twenty nine of there are being sold arms. The only one that isn't is North Korea. Really, the only thing you can you can criticize the ideology of Juche as much as you want. But at least they're not being taken for a ride buying like Baz's bean backgrounds. So basically at the only country that we've ever stopped selling arms to that's on this list is Saudi Arabia.

And that's only because the a charity has taken the British government to court and got a court injunction to take take down the license. Right. So given the current patterns, the political nature of the arms export licensing scenario, no matter how many times Boris Johnson says that, oh, I I feel the pain and stand in solidarity with the protesters in America, etc, etc, etc, which, you know, he's been trying to make those right noises. So long as those arms export licenses to the US continue,

you'll you will know that like there can be as many gestures from people in power as you want. And you will know that they are basically lying to you as long as those arms export licenses stay in place because the power to grant or revoke them is literally within is within the remit of one of the Department for International Trade. They could just stop. It's also like totally obscure. Like they won't actually itemize anything.

They won't tell you which companies have been granted licenses. So you can't go and protest against like this exact industrial estate in Riga. You have to actually do the like shoe leather reporting to track down where all of this shit is coming from. Yeah, I mean, and by all means, criticise Boris Johnson for not having done enough. But I know that certainly big tail of big tails beheading sword imporium

has been very upset by this anyway. So I think it's probably worth us doing an episode at some point down the line on precisely how Britain's role as the armory of some of the worst pieces of shit in the world works. Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, but I digress. So basically, that's not the first thing, right? Anyone who says to you that this is not as bad of a problem in the in the UK,

we're better, we're more enlightened, et cetera, and doesn't acknowledge that we are literally making money not just from this, but from like different versions of this of ever increasing severity and complexity around the world. Again, they're either a charlatan or they're a moron. So let's also, I think, talk a little more about about this. But this issue domestically, I should have dropped with the bill theme song. Yeah, so and right. So one of the one of the reasons a lot of people say at the UK,

what happens is here's that this conversation usually goes, especially goes like this in the media and talk radio and so on. I think it's worth exploring, exploring what it means. So a lot of people in the UK, right, they'll respond to accusations of systemic brutality and racism by by police by bringing up that our police are less brutal and militarized. And what that means is that because they don't have guns and because they don't have some kind of like Warrior Cop

Killology training program that they all have to take that by simple numbers, fewer unarmed black men are killed by UK police and US police. Yeah, but like like an order of magnitude. Yeah. But by bringing up this fact, whenever challenged about British police brutality, you're basically tacitly admitting that there is a number of black people killed or arrested or held or hurt with impunity by the police that you're basically OK with and you'd rather not allow and you'd rather allow this to continue than confront the reality of what of police brutality

in this country. Also, I will point out that like the fact that we shoot fewer black people does not mean none. I mean, we're not just talking about brutality in the sense of deaths and custody. The fact that we don't have routinely armed police doesn't stop our extremely warrior cop armed police from just shooting people dead all the time. Yeah, like if the thing is like, yes, it's good to have disarmed police or it's not it's not good to have police in general, but it's better to have disarmed police than armed police.

But like we have disarmed police. Ask Mark Duggan how he's doing. Ask Shikubayo how they're doing like how did that go for them? They're exactly as dead. And so and they are dead because of this culture of of impunity. They're dead because because they will because the police know that they can get away with it and so on and so on. And so by trying to say by responding to the by responding to legitimate and justified accusations that racism is a real problem in this country

and a real problem in the justice system by saying, well, it's not as bad as the US. You're you're basically saying as far as I'm concerned, it's as bad as I want it to be. Yes. And I mean, the thing is like we're doing racism in a measured and moderate way. Yeah. And the thing is like the fact that the U.S. is so monstrously disproportionate in this does not like absolve us at all. It's like it's not even the case that like our cops have to be a bit cleverer or a bit more subtle about how to do their murders. Because like if you look at like this has been going on since

as long as we've had police, but particularly since like the eighties and nineties deaths in custody, you know, you can pull the CCTV from like custody suites and it's exactly the same cops are exactly the same everywhere. They'll kill you and they'll laugh about it. And there's very little that anyone can can do to hold them accountable. Guys being dudes. So basically, right? That I think there are also you have to talk about police reform

and police abolition and what these mean. So the big police reform agenda in the US, I mean, there are tons of them right now. So I think it's premature to say what the agenda is. But there are a few examples. There are there is the Minneapolis, as we know, is to chosen to essentially disband its police department. And that could be good. It could be bad. It could be replaced with something worse.

I don't think anyone really, really knows how that's going to go yet. It's probably a good start. But yeah, it's a good it's a good start that only exists because people burned down a police precinct vote. It's because everyone voted. Did you did you see that the burning police precinct had a higher approval rating than Joe Biden? Don't blame me. I voted for the burning police precinct.

I mean, I would I would vote I would campaign for the burning police precinct. And the some of the other examples of police reform in the US are eight can't wait, which is yeah, at the eight that can't wait are number one, a ban on chokeholds and strangleholds, which has already been in place. Yeah, it's already there. There's they banned them already. Hasn't stopped. He hasn't stopped anyone from being killed by them.

Far from my favorite Tarantino movie for a kickoff. Secondly, they must require de-escalation of of these differences of of confrontations with you know, with suspects, which again, it's already required to literally require already cops. Cops do not follow the rules. They will lie to prevent themselves from having to follow the rules. All of these things. Oh, you have. Yeah. Yeah, you have to wear your body cam. Oh, oh, shit.

Sorry. The body cam. I forgot to turn it on again. Am I going to be punished? I keep I keep thinking about the like multiple occasions where police officers have gotten caught planting drugs or planting guns because the one smart thing they did with body cameras was like making them record the like 30 seconds after you turn them off. And so all of these guys, you can just see footage of cops

just planting stuff because they're too stupid to operate the body camera properly. So so what we have, right, is we have like these the reforms that are being mooted in in the U.S. I mean, the ones that are being mooted by the Democratic Party essentially are just what the police should shoot you but try to hit you in the leg and hope it doesn't hit a major artery. Literally, he said that literally Joe Biden said that.

Why don't they shoot them in the leg? Yeah, just a group of people, the people who are most empowered to do anything in terms of police reform. People who are most of the congressional Democrats and stuff at a national level are some of the people who are least willing to do anything about it. And I think and I think you'll see if you look at the Labor Party in the UK, much the same thing.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing the thing about eight can't wait is right. San Jose police in California did a tweet pointing out quite correctly that like every single one of those is already policy for them. The day before they put that tweet out, the guy, the black man who does their implicit bias training went to a Black Lives Matter protest and San Jose police shot him at point blank range in the nuts

with like a less lethal round and fully destroyed his dick and balls. If you want to know how well that's going. This is this is completely this is nothing. It is there is there is no it's there is no series. There is no seriousness about about in about the attempt to reform. So gradually, you know what it is. It's it's the you're being murdered, but that's illegal. So the human right.

This is what we can see, right, is that the abolition of the police, whatever that means in terms of an armed group that is allowed to do violence to enforce the will of capital is a good is a good and worthwhile strategic aim of the left. And it's certainly better than let's ask the police nicely. But looking simply to undo them with a stroke of a pen is also putting the cart before the horse because, quote, social workers empowered to do the jobs of police

that police aren't aren't aren't doing or shouldn't be doing. In my opinion, we'll start to look like the police pretty soon. I mean, I think a lot about the time when Russia changed the militia to the police and then like repainted all of the cars and stuff because the militia were too tainted with like shoving people's hands and desk drawers and stuff and didn't change anything. And shoving their own hands in other drawers, which they're object. So and that right, the thing is here's when one of the one of the things

you can see in in the US, right, as you can see it, you can see shades of it in Minneapolis, you can see shades of it in in this sort of medium term objectives of the eight can't wait campaign because those eight are just their short term objectives. It's just their short term objectives. They've already achieved them if they've done nothing. But some of the that they are they are looking to say disarm the police, make them more like the UK.

And we can kind of like we can say, look, if some of these centrist police reform efforts succeed, then the UK, the US may look a little bit more or certain parts of the US may look a little bit more like UK policing with like disarm police and and so on and so on. Just the worst American accented cop having to wrap his lips around the phrase, a low, a low, a low, what's all this then as a matter of policy? But the you can actually look at the UK as a good counterfactual because unlike in the US, where austerity never really touched police budgets,

austerity really touched police budgets. We defunded the shit out of the police. Yeah, the public sector pay cap, like it applied to UK police in a way that it didn't apply to the US police. So it's not like we've been hiring lots more of them. And it's and it's not like they're being paid tons more. I like I like to think about the police federation, which is the closest equivalent that we have to like the US police unions

that get all weepy on Twitter, right? They tried to get a Tory minister fired because he had called a police officer a pleb at one point and the government just told them to go fuck themselves. So, you know, that that that kind of power for police officers does not exist culturally here and they're still killing people. We don't have the really cursed thing, which is the millionaire cop. No, just like totally a thing in America. Yeah, we don't have the guy who's like screaming and hooting and hollering

about how the badge still has a shine on it or whatever. So here's the other thing, right? We we all also know that UK police, by and large, but not entirely are not carrying guns. And that's certainly made the made made this a safe or if not safe. Although big, big asterisk here that they did just like widely roll out tasers. And so you end up with a lot of videos of like

rich 30s that getting tasered or like that black guy in Manchester, getting tasers while he was holding his kid. Um, not dead. And that's probably better. I don't feel great about it. Yeah. And the also you have functions of the functions that were parts of the police being delegated and moved elsewhere, but to the private sector. And that's the thing that worries me a little bit about the

about the about the disbanding of the of the Minnesota Police Department, a Minneapolis Police Department. What if, you know, you just get G4S that comes in and bids for those contracts and then you no longer even have the shadow of democratic accountability because, right, private security guards, they killed Jimmy Mubenga on a deportation flight here. Yeah. Or even the kind of. Yeah. And that that happened here.

And that was that was basically privatized police brutality. Or you have the kind of racism that goes into medical professionals deciding who to section under the Mental Health Act, which surprisingly or unsurprisingly, rather, is is BAME people. Yeah, because of being more combative or whatever. Like, you can't offshore all of these like coercive functions of a police department to other things and then, you know, not expect the same results. Exactly. And so if you're just going to.

And so you can you can see there are some things that are unambiguously good that that ought to happen. The police are it's good that they don't carry guns. It's bad they carry tasers. They should be carrying neither. You know, if should they should they need to exist at all? And the and the the the the private the privatization or the shunting off of police functions of enforcement functions on to like social workers or private contractors or whatever, it just reproduces the same problem.

Well, like ultimately, ultimately, the police are a symptom. Policing is a symptom of a larger problem of inequality. Yeah. Well, like I'll point out that capitalism predates universal police departments. You can absolutely just we can just go back to the Pinkerton's or like coal and iron police if we want to. The capital is fine with that. Yeah, it's it's not it's not sort of antithetical to

a coercive capitalist mode of production, not to have a centralized police. And the question is whether in removing this this cancer of policing, whether we also managed to excise the the capitalism part that that like is the motive force behind all of this coercion and all of this brutality in the first place. Indeed. Yeah, I don't really want to return to a hue and cry system. No. Who's who's saying I haven't heard from you.

Yeah, I mean, what's you to think? I mean, this is like it's a good this is a good way for me to come in because this is the thing that I've sort of been most worried about when we talk about like the police abolition thing where again, I can't remember who posted this. I feel like it was someone from Vox who did it in bad faith. It might have been like our friend, Matthew, like Iglesias Iglesias. Yes, friend of the show.

Right. So like, you know, one of those, you know, you know that kind of guys is like the worst person, the worst person, you know, made a good point. His good point was that there is actually like there is a wealth of anti police literature or police abolition literature from libertarians who basically make the argument not that police like as an institution are or like not that police are bad, but the institution of centralized policing is bad. So therefore, am I being detained? Am I being detained? Am I being detained?

Yeah, having so having this having like privatised or semi privatised security forces where you have quote, like more community involved, like all these kind of buzzwords, like more community involvement, more democratic elections, having kind of people in suburban communities on board as if like that doesn't have any like made like that doesn't cause you just actually existing problems. You just end up with the Danziger Bridge thing in New Orleans after Katrina, where you just have like armed like neighborhood watch suburban guys

just going out in the like dad shirts. Does it volunteer border force, baby? Yes. And this is where I think I worry about just the kind of not the surprising amount of support for these protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, because what lots of brands and even like politicians and institutions are basically doing is sort of like distracting from the actual issue, as Alice mentioned, which is capitalism and how capitalist structures like necessitate these sorts of things.

And they're basically kind of re they're basically making the argument that we should redirect resources into areas where communities quote have more say, which conveniently happen to be private, less accountable enterprises like G4S, but also like, you know, Serco. And there's like a few ring, right? Right. Yeah. Like that's a good one, too. I completely forgot about that, actually. So I think the volunteer border force thing is absolutely central

because that that is what it is. And I mean, look at look at the process today, right? And just like the volunteer like the volunteer three quarter length. I'm starting to think about like the guy in Vegas, who just like showed up to like assist the police with like a fake homeland security patch on his plate carrier and was just like, yeah, I'm a fed now. That guy, I don't think he was wrong. I think he was just like slightly too early.

I think he was a little bit ahead of time. But like that kind of fry core shit is absolutely in in the offing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, when you talk about abolishing the police, you have to think about like something is going to fill that void. And it can be something or it can be filled by something bad. This was something that I was I was talking about on Twitter a while back was that like part of the like the language of like police against abolition is, oh, well, if you don't if you don't like if you abolish the police,

there's just going to be nothing and like it will just be the war of all against all. And like, I think it's important to say that that would still be better. Like that would if you abolish the police and just did nothing that would still be an improvement. But that isn't what's going to happen. If you abolish the police, something is going to fill that vacuum. And we have to make sure that it's not going to be a bunch of three percenters with Balfeng radios on just fucking doing the same shit but dumber.

Well, actually, it seems like a pretty cursed thought. Glinner and J.K. Rowling team up with Mumsnet to form the gender critical police. The bathroom inspector. I'm just seeing myself at the bottom of the Landwehr canal. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, if we can envision like a general like a like what would be an organized voluntary police force, it would be the voluntary police force of bathroom organizers that is completely funded via Glinner.

Yeah, it's it's either the Mumsnet bathroom inspector or it's the volunteer border force. And that's that's the future if we don't. Same. The last and it's worth it's worth bringing this back in, right? Because I mean, I have some of this stuff written down, but I'll bring it up, which is like we can't for if we're looking looking at the ways in which these institutions are going to be transformed, reformed, abolished,

changed, whatever, you could also look at which institutions have the flexibility to adapt to the current conditions on the ground. And those institutions, as I'm sure will surprise nobody, it's not the labor or democratic parties, it's not local city councils. It's Amazon, it's Google, it's Microsoft and so on. And what what's happened, firstly, is that, yeah, Amazon has said on Twitter, you know, that they call for an end to the inequitable brutal treatment of black people in the US.

Do we remember the union organizer who they just deliberately smeared as being like a troublemaker? And they were and they were like, oh, we're going to say he's not well spoken. Yeah, all that shit. Just just all of that, of course, is being completely forgotten by one month later, Amazon sees you, it hears you. One thing I will say, though, and one thing I will say in praise of the protests and and the movement as a whole is that for a moment,

it really did seem to put these these corporate institutions on the back foot. There was like that first wave of tweets that was like Starbucks is committed to like black lives or like also zone is also zone is listening and is an ally and fruit by the foot is listening. All of that struck me as absolutely the kind of like Jimmy Stewart. You wouldn't hit a guy with a commitment to racial justice, would you? Kind of thing.

I have marked that down as the two minute preview for the episode that I'm going to suggest we use. But also, right, like the other thing is Amazon has and Microsoft have seen where the wind is blowing here and they have very publicly paused their partnership between their facial recognition program called recognition with the works through just the one, not the three. Yeah. And and law enforcement for a year. And again, much like disarming the police, this is no bad thing.

This is harm reduction, like reduce the harm as much as you can. Try to deal with the cause of the harm as a long term. Yeah. But it's so transparently a bet that renewing it in a year will not be controversial or or here's the other thing, right? These institutions do have the flexibility to change and adapt, and they are the institutions with the flexibility to change and adapt. And they're not democratically accountable. Yeah, the real the real terror is not that like

the police are protecting the inequality of Amazon. It's that Amazon no longer needs the police to do that. Or it's that Amazon may may, yeah, it says we're no longer going to do recognition for what for the police police forces. But we are going to sell recognition to like local community safety groups that organize on ring. And you can tell because they all have these punisher skulls on their cars.

I'd love to be in a militia organized on next door. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's one of these things where, yes, this is good because it's harm reduction. But I do not trust any of the people who are doing the harm reduction. Fundamentally, no. And besides clear companies like Clearview were created by Peter Teal specifically and his, you know, coterie of helpers. You know, they were created specifically, I think, as a countermeasure

to Amazon and Microsoft, taking a marketing decision to dial down their relationships with the police because they already have facial recognition software that is provided to them by someone who's ideologically committed to the police having facial recognition software, you know. And the other thing is right there, the Microsoft and Amazon have also said in IBM as well, what their condition is first. IBM being like, no, this is too unethical for us. Fuck me.

What they've said, what they've said, right, is that they're going to wait until there is national regulation of what facial recognition technology can be used for. And so it's not racially. It's impossible. Never going to happen. Cannot be done. They're going to give up. Or it can be done in a rubber stamp way that says much like, you know, banning chokeholds, like we ban you from being racist.

You can't use the facial recognition software unless you want to. Yeah, you're not allowed to be racist using it. And then the police will just be like, OK, we promised not to be racist. Do not operate facial recognition software while under the influence of racism. Yeah. Right. So so it is all of these moves. They they look good on the surface, but they are worth thinking about critically. You know, so it's worth asking the question. Is the Minneapolis police force going to be replaced by like a citizen police

force that's organized by a bunch of like paranoid suburban dads on ring? Or is it going to be privatized? Or or or or is it going to be a bunch of social workers who now also have the power to put people in jail? You know, what is it going to be? Or the same thing with the tech companies? Yes, they're saying, oh, we're going to dial back our massive participation with law enforcement in some ways.

But we are still going to keep processing all their data in the cloud. We're going to dial back your in a fee at five hundred with a 50. I don't mean your house because you've painted your front. You mean, I feel like Karen's are absolutely going to like leap at the opportunity to kill people more directly. Like genuinely, though, capitalism, capitalism requires brutality. It requires white supremacy. It requires exploitation.

It does not necessarily require a police department. And this this is potentially the cool zone. It's potentially also the weird zone. Yeah. And so right. So that's the so the question is, you know, is what replaces these institutions going to be good? And then you wait in order to answer that question, you have to ask yourself what institutions have the flex because the police departments have proven

that they don't have the necessary flexibility to respond to the pressures that they're facing as institutions, right? They are Darth Vader shit and being like, you have failed me for the last time. But and so the question you have to ask is, who has the flexibility to step in? And, you know, it's and the while the the left, especially since 2015, certainly has the ideas like we talked the other week about the ideas that are lying around and how powerful it is to just have the ideas that are lying around on the table, be your ideas.

And one of the strengths of the left, because I think if we were always going to be pessimistic, that would be pretty reactionary. One of the strengths of the left is that a lot of the ideas that are sitting around on the table are our ideas. I mean, I should say we're not like this is all critical support. We do support the protests, of course. We're not saying that it's oh, you're naive to want to abolish the police. No, it's a good idea.

It's just that we're trying to articulate what we perceive as a danger in doing that with us. Yeah, think of this as a yes and yeah, you know, and so and and exactly like it's the the the institutions like Amazon and Microsoft that can appear to be against against, you know, police brutality and racism and all this stuff, they can appear to be that. But then you look at what they're actually saying, which is that until we nationally approve the until we approve national

regulation of the technology and ask yourself, well, who's going to regulate it? What's that regulation mean? Who's going to be able to just not obey those regulations? So what signs the end racism act in which you have to say that you're not racist? Then we will be supplying the racism. I hate it when I'm trying to do my job as an officer of the law and then Clippy pops up and says, it looks like you're trying to use the facial recognition software for racism.

So look, I think what we can what we can say, you know, this is especially for Americans, which is having a disarmed police is good. If you can take away their ability to hurt people, that's good. And honestly, having a disarmed police has probably saved a lot of black lives in the UK, but we can't let that number occlude that fact that the police make it dangerous to be black in the UK in other ways. Right. And and and furthermore, we can't let it occlude that fact that many of the, you know, brands and companies that are that are coming

to coming up to support this this this move for reform or whatever. You know, we can't let it occlude that fact that they're still here to make money and they're going to make money in the best of the way they can. And that in many cases, this is just a marketing decision. So I fundamentally would say if you look at Amazon saying, we're we're pulling this back and so on, again, that's good. It will probably save some lives. And that is an unalloyed good.

I want to put that out there right now. Controversial. Yeah. But the fact, but we again, we cannot let that brand move occlude the fact that they are they that it's that software exists and that they're willing to let it be used again. Well, like, I know, I know you're trying to put a button on this, but like just one more one more point is that, like, one of the reasons why police abolition is necessary as as a minimum.

And I think it's a prerequisite to doing anything significantly cooler is that, like, OK, the police may not kill you, but like their whole existence is a continuum of force that is used to instill terror and humiliation. And like being killed is the worst thing that can happen to you as a consequence of it. But like just everyday stuff is bad enough that they should not exist. I mean, look, the way I tend to look at this is that dealing with the police is sort of one strand among many for the left. As long as there's a property ruling class,

there will be a segment of the population that is armed to protect that property. And it is armed or enabled to enable armed by law, say, to, you know, it's call you mentally to call you mentally ill and have you locked up or whatever. But we're seeing more and more than that matters less. Both of these both of these things are different kinds of arming and empowerment to sort of maintain order. And, you know, if you can make that segment less powerful and less and less armed, that's urgent and necessary.

But until the inequality that makes that armed group necessary for capital to protect itself as a result, capital will continue finding new ways to occupy the grounds it needs to with as much coercion as it as is necessary. Right. Yeah, that's it. Basically, we want to abolish the police, but not in a monkey's paw kind of way. And this is also why we should be worried, I think, as a whole about like tech companies, but also companies in particular being very, you know, starting to kind of putting out these public statements

of being with the pro like being with protesters and stuff. Because we also, I mean, we kind of have to take it with a pinch of salt, which is, as you've mentioned, like so long as they have like as long as they have like capital interests and as long as they like have interests that they need to protect, they will find ways in which to protect that, which involves like coercion and it involves, you know, it involves imprisonment and classification. And, you know, you know, so we are kind of post-policing future,

maybe one where we don't even kind of have, you know, the fish, bobbies on the beat or whatever. But what we'll have is like a very, a much more integrated surveillance like system, right? One that can like one that can have very like long-term consequences. So the idea, for example, that, you know, with kind of enhanced surveillance, someone who's caught in a particular time or a particular place may not kind of be the victim of like a brutal police arrest.

But that will affect the, you know, bank accounts. It will affect their kind of way of living. It will affect their citizenship. You know, and these things can be classified. These things can covertly be classified as like anti-police stuff. Just like, you know, do you know what I mean? Just like. This is already the case with prevent, right?

Which is what part of what I think you're getting at, is that like you can absolutely be be categorized as an extremist in a way that can absolutely like be used to like take your liberty or your citizenship away from you in a very unaccountable way without anybody ever having to put handcuffs on you. Right. And because, and again, the prevent is a really good example of this because the prevent, like the finding out about how prevent works is one of the most difficult things that you can do because there's so much, there's so many contractors and private sector organizations that are involved like throughout the process.

So it's not even, you know, and actually very few of those resources are directed towards policing. It's much more again to do with surveillance and it's much more to do with deradicalization and it has a lot more to do with like, you know, finding networks and working, you know, and prevent works very tightly with places like Google and they work, I'm pretty sure, very tightly with places like Amazon. There was like a story that came out recently about how prevent is still using PR companies to like make dubious Instagram pages where they're basically trying to rope in influencers.

Yeah, they used Angela Davis. They used the photo of Angela Davis to like. Right. And they're using like legit influences and telling them that, look, we're trying to do this for a good cause. We're trying to kind of like raise, you know, awareness about the process. Of course, we stand for Black Lives Matter. We care about Black Lives and we understand, like, we understand like the problems that people are kind of articulating with policing and then using like for likes and the

follows of this account to kind of, again, collect data, right? And if you're trying to find out where all this information is going, well, good luck because if you try FOI at the Home Office, they'll reject it on the basis that it's kind of a threat to national security. So they will find ways around that. My new thing is just typing into Google how to do Jihad, do Jihad in Syria, how to join ISIS, not because I want to do that, but because I want to make some new friends and I want to like talk to a prevent guy.

I'm just trying to like read some news. Jihad Detector Shop is fucking going off like a Christmas tree right now. I think like the one last point I would do want to make about prevent is like the most, one of the most interesting things about it, especially like in its first iterations and stuff, was that it basically did create like a civilian, like it did create civilian offices. Like the original iterations of prevent brought in like so-called community leaders and they were like, well, look, we'll give you this money. It's like run these like really good projects, like things like, you know,

youth groups and boxing clubs and stuff like that. But if you see anything suspicious or you see anything weird, just like, you know, just let one of the prevent offices know. Just like, you know, let one of these kind of coppers know. And by the way, like, you know, we're on your side because we're trying to, you know, tackle terrorism and we're trying to tackle extremism. Now, like I spoke about prevent on hell of a way like a long time ago. So I think the innate like spoke about this, but it didn't take that long for these police

institutions to basically turn on the people that they had like coerced into being civilian. And they left them without like any sort of resources or any, you know, lots of these people are like now out of jobs. Lots of these people like aren't trusted anymore because they were involved with prevent, you know, and prevent had like a decent amount of support when it was first rolled out, like post seven, seven. Now, like if, you know, you go like even five, 10 years on, you know, no one even wants to talk about it, even the people who were involved.

And like, there's a reason why, which is that even with these types of like civilian, not really policing operations, we're trying not to arrest people. We try to, we're just trying to like help them out. What you end up doing is sowing a lot of community distrust. Now, people do not like being spied upon. Apparently, apparently weird. Yeah. Hey, being reported to prevent because I was part of a group of more than five dudes

at the boxing gym, which was considered sus. And also, you know, if we, if we want to talk about, about reforms, I mean, you know, we've seen what the Democratic party's response has been to, I don't know what, like show, say that every cop should watch the movie Bad Boys 2 so they can learn that, you know, out of somebody, Will Smith, that, that, that kneeling in kente cloths, like labor. So that's, that was, you know, like ludicrous. So Kier Starmer also was a photograph taking a knee in his house of commons office alongside Angela Rainer and said he supported officers who felt the need to do the same.

I love, I love Kier because he's like, he's going to try and triangulate on this and nobody, nobody is going to be into it. It's just, it's so perfect to like watch this like weird ham colored man take a knee in like a carpeted office with two people in it, just staring into the camera, like a fucking weirdo. Yeah. I, I supports, I supports, it's like everything. Who's he support?

He supports the police that are kneeling. And he, and like with the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, which we're not going to talk about too much. You can listen to our unlocked episode from Bristol transform from last year. Right. He was like, look, it's good that it happened, but it should have been done the right way. I mean, again, you know, who is this? Who is, who is this for?

Who is that for? The people who wanted it to stay up are going to be livid at him for saying that it should have come down. The people who think that it should have come down are going to be livid at him for saying that it was wrong to take it down. It's, it only exists for the benefit of a handful of labor pricks. Yeah. And the other thing, right?

Is that if we're, if we're wondering who's going to be, who is going to be the politician that is going to try to lead the opposition? Could it, could it be Sir Keir Starmer, director of public prosecutions during the 2011 riots who had like night long courts to send people to prison for like 10 years at a time for like shoplifting a bottle of water? Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice. Oh, poor sweet Alice. You're doing, you're doing the vampire castle to Keir Starmer.

Yeah. Come on. You're doing cancel culture against Keir Starmer. You're not allowing them. I'm just, I'm lifting like an image of him as, as DPP. And I'm just like this year. Some of those, some of those people during the riots were dangerous basmati rice thieves. Yeah.

As Massey Rice was never going to be safe until they were put in jail. Yeah. So there, there we go. You know, that's just late. I, I, I would be surprised if Labor does much about this at this point. I mean, they are just. The Javert of the like 2011 riots is not going to fucking find a, find a like a happy medium on this one. Right.

If there's also, I was going to say this as a quick point, like there's also, and you know, I don't necessarily like blame Keir Starmer in the same way that I don't know if like you guys remember, but like Jeremy Corbyn, obviously got a load of shit from people who basically like called him anti-police. Right. Like, you know, various kind of a decent amount of leftists, like all support among like particular elements of the left who are pro-policing, like they are, and you know, they are pro-police union.

And for them, like reform is a much more preferable option than to just completely overhaul it. Yeah. I am, I am shouting thank you for your service at the copper who is bludgeoning my head in. So, you know, I don't necessarily like blame Keir Starmer for like being in a very like tricky position because I think that every Labor leader would. I guess with him, it's just very much like, because he is like the procedure guy, like his kind of advocacy for procedure is a lot more blatant than maybe Jeremy Corbyn's was. As far as I'm, as far as I can tell, right?

This is sort of something I think we're also going to explore on the bonus episode this coming week with friend of the show, Patrick Wyman. We are facing, and this has been true since 2008, unprecedented sets of challenges as a society, whether that is from like a police racism, whether that's from sort of like a very tumultuous, let's say, general contradiction heightening is happening. Now is the time of monsters, et cetera, et cetera. And the institutions that are supposed to be able to deal with these things have proven to be so rigidly unable to become flexible enough to deal with them

that you, and they have resisted in case of the Democratic and Labor Party, they have resisted every effort to try to make them be able to deal with the problems that we're facing because they prefer the style of the past. They like their, you know, six-figure signing cures, designing apps that, you know, are going to be downloaded exclusively by lobby journalists or whatever. You know, they are, the commitment to proceduralism, once again, is about trying to bring back a constitutional order that was shredded a while ago. It is try, it is commitment to the solutions of yesterday for problems that are quite simply

beyond them. And so Labor is saying that is making specific practical demands and race inequality. He's saying, what Starmer has said is he wants the findings of the Windrush review to be enacted. And David Lemme's report into the experience of BAME people in the justice system to be enacted as well. It's like, well, yes, these are, these are good. These are good.

Again, these are good and necessary, but you appear to have failed to have grasped the enormity of the challenge. That's why police abolition, right, is that we are increasingly unironically in the land of the meme society has evolved beyond the need for police, right? Like it's, it's not something that you can like, if you just try to like resuscitate this enough, then we will have like a, a, a, a form of policing that works and is not, is not just because it's, it's irredeemable. And like we have to give thanks to the police on this one for like just going on a sustained

campaign of agitprop to prove that they themselves were irredeemable. And just like, for instance, I'm struck by the NYPD Lieutenant who like, he kneeled with the protesters as like an op and then like took it back the week later and was like, man, I kind of wanted to beat my own ass as a cop. And it's just like, yeah, cool. Fully mask off. So yeah, thank you to the police for making the argument that we do not need or want police. And so also I just moving, moving on sort of a little bit as, as part of this, right,

as part of the sort of global or global wave of protests about police violence, many of the, of the statues in Britain are, or statues throughout the US and UK are coming down. Splish splash, bitch. Yeah, we can Boris Johnson. Here's the thing. He said, we cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations with different

perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. Those statues teach us about our past. Sounds like previous generations fucking sucked. Yeah. And here's the thing, right? I, I am going to absolutely not give this particular line of reasoning anymore. It's boring. It's pedantic.

You know what it is. It's just a shell game about where it puts critical engagement with history under a little shell. Does the, does the moves, does the, the mixing them up and opens it up. And hey, look, it is honorary and commemoration. These, it is a, it is a trick to get you to believe that what, that these things are the same. They are very stupid and it is not a good debate to engage with. Alice, you have some notes here about how it's mostly a part of imperial nostalgia. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's true of, that's true of statues, like on both sides of the Atlantic, like all of the Confederate statues that are coming down were put up in like the early years of the 20th century to try to like reestablish a nostalgic racial dominance. A lot of the like Edward, like the, the statues of slave traders, same thing, but for empire here, it's the same thing. It's the same impulse that leads you to a nostalgic view of like the village policeman who isn't going to brutalize anybody or Winston Churchill. And I mean, talking about statues or the other thing, which is TV shows, like we've gotten

into talking about like old episodes of 40s howlers and shit, just as like a transparent kind of distraction. It's extremely, extremely funny to me that the horizons of imperial nostalgia have shrunk from like Cecil Rhodes as a giant, bestriding Africa to, no, it's important to my culture that I get to see David Walliams wear blackface. Or like, and Andrew Lillico having a meltdown and adopting Edward Colston as his first sonar on Twitter. Oh, that was wild. But to be honest, my favorite thing has still been like all the Tories having to pretend that they liked little Britain, which is so funny. I have to, like I have to hand it to them because like, to be honest, if anyone is prepared to even pretend that they

liked little Britain, that rules. That is such commitment to a bit because it was just such a bad show. I think my favorite part of this whole week was like every like Tory ministers having to defend the non statue in pool. Like, yes. Yeah. Baden Powell. The tomb of the unknown nonce. The guy was like a very well documented pedo among other things. And yet, like, it was fine. And it was just like, I was just thinking to myself, there's no better representation of like the decline and fall of Great Britain than a bunch of like guys who are all wearing three quarter length like pants, which I, I very much support and I support the comeback from defending defending a statue of a nonce while also saying they ate nonces simple as

yeah, that is like the king and the land of one, right? Britain, Britain and the British Empire now are like an untrepossessing statue of this sclerotic pedophile. Just like, and it's a dismal statue that's like sitting on a bench being like in in shorts looking thoroughly non-sworthy, overlooking a dismal pedophile island and just the worst people on that island and now riding to the defense of the pedophile statue. I did love all of the fucking scout leaders standing guard around it as though to be like, well, if you're calling him a pedophile, you're calling us pedophiles too. Maybe that's not a threat you want to talk about. I was going to say, and I'll make this like very quick, I think this is like indicative of just

like to some degree, like a level of powerlessness and what people do to sort of like assert themselves and assert their kind of own existences. And I think it's also like a product of, and in the same kind of vein, I think it's like a product of like where the media culture for the past few years has been, where in order to kind of get the attention, you sort of have to like be a reactionary and do stupid things. Like, you know, the people, it starts off like just repeating stupid talking points on Twitter, getting you a regular pundit slot on Sky News. But it also comes with like people doing these quite like stupid, like saying these quite stupid things and not really thinking about what they're protecting and what they're kind of saying is representative of the national

identity just because they sort of know it gets attention. I feel like it is a real kind of taking the attention economy from like bizarre online culture and it's like seeping out into the real world, which makes it even more absurd. Like the one son editorial by Katie Hopkins, rescue boats, I'd use gunships to stop migrants. Yeah. And that's like a very normal thing. If it was published today, I think you'd have a lot of people who were like, well, actually, she makes some very good points. Sorry. Oh, you're just afraid to debate. Always. Speaking of debate. I want to do, I want to do what if we're transferring into the thing it's going to end the episode, I want to talk about one other thing before we do that. Yeah.

Which is that, you know, the people who are defending the Baden Powell statues and all the stat, the people who are defending every statue except a PC pulver, I guess. They're Dan Sabba, a Guardian defense journalist, says that outside the Churchill box earlier today, because it was put into a box. Yeah, they put them in the shame cube. Yeah. A couple hundred or a couple hundred or so people were chanting Ingerland, all of them carrying lager and then giving Nazi salutes to because they were there to defend the statues from Black Lives Matter protesters, Black Lives Matter protesters didn't go. And so essentially they're I think I think the only thing that can explain this is that all of them did like

a kilogram of pub cocaine on the train here, whatever home counties they live in. And now they're based, they just caught here, they took off all, they all took off their shirts. Every single one. And they're all, they all jump cocaine does make you hot to be fair. Shut, shut off. Fucked parachute regiment berate on. Simple as. And like the thing is right, like one of the things that we talk about in preparation for doing the show, in preparation for doing season three is reliably fuck hypocrisy. We don't care about it. It's, it's, it's, it's hacked to point out that someone is being a hypocrite. And so like one of the things that I expect you'll see the more kind of like lib end of the left doing is being like, oh, well, don't,

don't you think that it's bad to like do Nazi salutes when it's the center self and they fought against the Nazis and the parachute regiment for the Nazis to it's missing that it's an entirely congruent, uh, worldview that form of fascism that like the fighting the Germans in World War Two has now shifted entirely out of its historical context. And like the points of reference for say the parachute regiment have more to do with, um, bloody Sunday, no apology, no surrender than they do, then they have to do with Pegasus bridge. So it wasn't a fascism. What was bad? It was what they did it in a sort of German way. Literally, literally, that was a thing that Candice Owens, another intellectual leader of the thought brains bright said was that like Hitler was a nationalist

and that was fine. It was only when he started getting ambitions outside of Germany. And so like that was, that was honestly, again, entirely concurrent with Churchill's view of Hitler. This is not that weird. It's, it's, it's a historical, it's a historical viewpoint that is, is quite cohesive and is quite dangerous. And it one of the most hack things to do is to be like, oh, that's just what we fought against the Nazis. So that kind of, that kind of patriotism actually should be anti-Nazi because it's patriotic because the, the troops in World War Two were the first Antifa. And then you post a picture of like Omaha Beach and you're like Antifa is like, well, not, not really. No, it's, it's more complicated than

that. It's, it's the thing is right. Again, the people who are like, like I said earlier about there are a lot of people who are monopolizing like these are people, you know, in like the Labor Party and the Democratic Party and so on, the people who successfully fought off all these left wing challenges and stuff, monopolizing the levers that actually like can do anything about this, just failing to understand the time they live in. I'm going to put the levers into the fucked configuration of progressive nationalism where like we talk about Polish, like Battle of Britain pilots and shit. And we could like, we call out UKIP for hypocrisy because they used a spitfire on this brochure that says send all the immigrants back and it was actually

piloted by a Polish man. Doesn't that make you think? And then all of these guys are just like, no, no, it doesn't actually make them think. The thing is, right. The thing is that like having done all of this like labor right, British no shit, all of this like Gordon Brown shit, having stitched together this Frankenstein, they're now watching it shambles down the hill to terrorize the villagers and they're going, no, wait, come back, we can actually, we can stitch more bits on this and we can make it good again. Yeah, it is the same thing of just not having understood how these symbols have changed and how they have become used by different people to mean different things. And so the, to the, to the liberal sensible brigade

who are holding on to the same policies from 1995, who are holding on to pointing out hypocrisy being sort of committed by, you know, again, like a North FC guy. It's a comfort blanket. Right. And the thing that I would say to them is that you own a share in this. If you talked about Britishness, you own a share in this. If you talked about reasonable concerns about immigration, you own a share in this. This is partly a product of your political consensus. And if you're in the US, you supported the crime bill, you own a share of this. This is welcome to the world that was that this is their world. This is the consequences of their world. We are living in it. Anyway, look, I, I, one thing I promised is I promised we would not

take the, the statue debate seriously and we would not talk about it too much, except as something very silly. So I think to give the official TF position on the statues and to play us out for this week, I would like to hand over to a certain a forehead of a man, the TF rationality correspondent, a certain Mr. Brendan O'Neill, Alice. My favorite part about that drop is how early it cuts off. So like, you don't even get the riff, you just get the, well, you need to do it again so that Brendan has his proper introduction. So all right. Over these last few weeks, the chattering classes of this once great nation have been all of a flutter marching in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Thousands of

them broke their precious lockdown and congregated in the streets to protest against so-called racism. But where were they when this government closed down the pubs, a form of racism against bloke? Protests initially erupted in the USA after a video emerged of a police officer in Minneapolis kneeling on the neck of African-American George Floyd resulting in his death. This was a tragedy for sure. But now that the protests have made it to the UK, the paella posadists of Stoke Newington would have you believe that the UK government is racist too. But how can that be so? Our own Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is non-white. So how could she go about being racist? She would have to be racist against white people, something which those very couscous communists claim is

impossible. They say it was racist when the government deported the Windrush generation because all those people were black, but this is failing to see the big picture. They actually deported a group of people who immigrated from the Caribbean in a certain period, all of whom happened to be black. There was nothing stopping white people from immigrating from the Caribbean in the 1960s and then they could have been deported too. I presume, however, that they simply chose to stay and build up their local communities. I'm sure that in America, and even here in the UK, there are a minority in the police who give black people a harder time than their white counterparts. But let's not jump to conclusions. If I were beaten senseless by a

black policeman, I wouldn't cry racism, I would simply assume that he was arresting me for saying that I am English, something which is sadly now illegal. And though I may not agree with it, we live in a society of laws. People often neglect the expertise of the police in these situations. Perhaps supposedly innocent people harassed or arrested by the police should ask themselves whether they may have been about to commit a crime of which they are currently unaware and it was only the eagle-eyed intervention of the police which prevented it. Should they not be thanking the police for keeping them safe from themselves? Indeed, if it were not for the brave sacrifices of our boys in blue keeping us safe and tackling extremist traffic lights,

we would be living in a very different world. But the quinoa Khmer Rouge of Kentish Town don't want to hear about that. They would like to abolish the police and make murder legal. And they are in league with the Sanseir Sandinistas of Bristol who tore down a statue of local dignitary Edward Colston and threw it into the River Avon, opening up yet another front in the war on Christmas. If a man cannot make a fortune from the slave trade and have his statue stand until the collapse of civilization like Ozymandias, then what is the point of a free democratic society? Like most people, I detest the slave trade. But we cannot simply vilify people for meeting the demands of the free market. Indeed, if the people of Bristol dislike the slave trade so

much, they should have gone back in time and encouraged people to vote with their feet by not buying the slaves that Colston sold. That would have been far more democratic than murdering this statue, which being a large piece of non-sentient solid metal cannot have done anything wrong. But that doesn't count for anything in the kangaroo courts of the Kanoloni KGB. How do you keep coming up with new ones of those? They will not stop until there are no more statues and no physical police left, replaced instead with a thought police who will arrest you and throw you in jail just for thinking that you were English. I don't know how many statues of guys will yet be thrown into rivers

for the historical crime of being dudes. But I suspect the number may reach 1,984. Thank you, Brendan. And you know what? That segment copped off with that Brendan article. That's the last we're going to talk about the statue stuff because it is basically, it's a culture for the train of the right and it's boring as hell. It's also revealing of how weak and how rotten this nostalgic establishment is where the only thing they can do is to like publish a list of more fucked statues, put Winston Churchill in the shame cube and then just have the lads come out and fight the cops. I'm assuming that the shame cube is the thing that Ice Cube keeps posting online.

But hey, look, it's thank you, Brendan, for that intervention, that important and timely intervention. And thank you, our listeners, for hanging out with us today, for exploring this issue with us and for always being there by our side. So I think that's good for us for this week. Don't forget, we have a Patreon, subscribe to it, five bucks a month. This week we'll be talking to friend of the show, Patrick Wyman. We're going to be putting, we're going to be trying to look at some historical context of what it means when regimes, countries, empires, whatever turn against their own, turn against their own people, especially the military. The shooting into the crowds episode, looking forward to that. The one thing I have to plug

is continue to donate to bail funds. It's still a thing. The thing is still happening. Yes, absolutely. We're going to put the same link that we've been plugging the whole time in the description of the episode as per. If you've already done that, then check out the Patreon, check out the t-shirts, but do that first. And let's see. You've already done both of those things. Maybe come and join us in a special place where there are no statues left, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Swin Zone. That's right. Swin Zone is hauntology still. None of these clashes between protesters and police and the far right and stuff. None of this would have happened in the Swin Zone.

Everyone would be too busy taking selfies. Love a selfie. Love Joe Swinson. Simple as. That's middle FC. What's a lovely Lyle and Scott polo shirt? Is that turquoise? I think that's good for us for today. We'll see you on the Patreon or we'll see you on the next week's free feed or we'll catch you later. Bye, everybody.