TRASHFUTURE - The Taking of Britain 123 ft. Gareth Dennis

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Rail Natter's Gareth Dennis joins the gang to discuss the RMT's strike action. We look at what made striking necessary, what striking does for everyone (not just the strikers!), and - of course - we run down the Mick Lynch daytime TV hit list. Gareth mentions a strike fund in the episode, which you can access here: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Enough poppycock. I just want some coiloads here to talk about trains. Sort of coiloads a cast to do phrase from phone. I mean, it's silly enough mood that we can start me coiloads a cast. That's you, you, hey. I think we could record a podcast. I don't think many people even remember do phrase from phone. Jack has a very laser targeted bit there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do this.

Let's have after the ending theme song, let's just have the last like 45 seconds. Just so just so people can hear this madness. All right. For the real heads who listen to the whole theme song every time and end credits scene. Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of TF. It's the free one. It sure is.

I remembered what day of the week it is. Congratulations, Milo. Yet again, you are proving yourself to be the most together man in Britain. That's fucking right. 28 days later, but yeah, 28 days later, but you're the only one who knows what day of the week it is. Everyone else. And look, it's it's the episode that is all about the the man

who broke British daytime TV. That's right. Any costa from blue. We're talking about Anthony. She knows the camper. We're talking about Anthony Costa from blue who is. Why do we know? Yeah, of course, who is leading the rail strikes that are going on up and down the country that are going to, of course,

be potentially spreading out into more sectors. And to speak about this subject, we have once again, TF rail correspondent to to it is rail matters, Gareth Dennis. Gareth, how's it going? I'm very well. Thanks. I'm in the lounge and I can tell that you were the one who last stocked the cupboards because rather than a little bottle of water, they're like six bottles of malvasia just in a little pile.

Thanks for that, buddy. Oh, no, you know what? Look, for our repeat guests, nothing but the best sort of like high end Italian whites that are food friendly, crucially. Yeah, because guys, you're now allowed in the trash huge executive lounge. You're getting access to free orange juice. Well, we actually we have our snacks in the executive lounge. We actually had a Ferran Adria of El Bully consult on on on on making them.

I mean, look, they're made by normal chefs like people in the kitchen. We employ, but like his creative juices are in there. And you can tell. Yeah, that's what he calls it. Yeah, that's what that was, so that makes sense. I'm sure he could probably sell that. Anyway, it's it's Milo Riley and Alice. We are joined by by Gareth and we are going to talk all about the strikes.

And we're going to do it in sort of three ways. We're going to do one one concept served three ways, like like an egg. At El Bully, we're going to do it three ways. Yeah, absolutely. First, the emulsion, second, the reduction and third, the start-up round. That's right. The three way egg. Can you guess what this egg is and what it does?

This is an egg that reminds me of going to the mountains with my uncle when I was a boy. How much was this egg valued on the stock market? I hate when I go to a fancy restaurant and they make me guess the purpose of an egg. Yeah, it's like, guess how many sweets in the jar? Guess the weight of the guy? You know, guess the purpose of the egg. What do you think this does?

Just holding an egg and then and then Wittgenstein's there. Like, what can be the purpose of it? All right, all right, all right. Look, look, we could talk about purposes of eggs when there's not something. Politics are happening in a very real way in a way that they haven't in quite a while. Holding the politics out in front of you and being like, what do you think? The egg, much like the economy is now real. Yes.

There is a once I feel like all the kind of restaurants rather goes to is. There's a once again, there is a what appears to be a struggle to recognize as a real class struggle. I think it's it's it is that. But I think it can also be interpreted as the at least on the airwaves, let's say, because we're going to start with talking about the media portrayal of the strikes and how and specifically how the general secretary of the RMT, Mick Lynch, just basically humiliated every single British TV broadcaster over the course of a morning. The top rope with the folding chair with the stair ladder,

like any number of these things. Using this one weird trick, which is refusing to engage when they say something obviously stupid. Yeah, just going, what the fuck are you talking about? No. And then we're going to talk a little bit about what actually is going on, what all of the different parties want. And then we're going to end on what on the sort of all of the inflation scaremongering, what that really means and why train workers or postal workers.

Or in the case of people who just voted to go on strike today, BA workers at Heathrow is actually more money in your pocket as well. And we're going to sort of why it's why it's good. Not only because it's based, but also it's like a good thing for the economy. Exactly. So let's start out with just a little bit of a refresher of what's going on. If you're in Britain, you'll know, of course, know all about this. But if you're in Britain, you or someone you know, will be furious about this.

Absolutely. But Gareth, can you just give us a quick praisey of what's going on before we go into the looking at the kind of media psychodrama that's played out around it in the last few days and weeks? Yeah. So so like a couple of weeks back, 25,000 people voted within the RMT to go on strike in the railways, which that's a pretty hefty mandate for bearing them on the UK has like just been had its unions totally obliterated

over a succession of decades. For that kind of mandate, that's a lot of people who are pretty pissed off. And that meant that this week we've had three days. That's like 87 percent, right? That's like a huge in an absolutely enormous. Yeah, it was like, yeah, exactly like the vast majority, a bigger mandate than any politician has seen for a very, very long time. Huge. And as a result of that, we've had and it's crucial to sort of say

who the people who have gone on strike are because a lot of the bullshit that we're about to talk about is as a result of deliberate misdirection as to who's striking. But the people are striking for three days this week. So it was Tuesday today and day of recording. And then again, on Saturday is about 50,000 frontline railway workers. So we're talking we're not talking train drivers. There are a couple of train drivers, but they are a tiny minority.

It's mostly people like signers. So the people who make trains not crash into each other. It's like, well, who needs them? Unimportant. Yeah. Where's the thing? The euro crats in Brussels have been trying to tell us not to crash trains each other for too long. I think put the jackass boys in charge of the railways and let's fucking.

Well, that's the great British tradition of like gas lamp, wooden carriages, smashing into dust. One of the things that the government wants to do is that. But Gareth, please go on. So so so yeah, it's signers. It's track workers who like Milo just so much. All of the people are clearly extraneous. So the track workers who maintain the track and stop the train track.

Yeah, you don't need it. Cleaners, so sort of station attending staff, just a huge 50,000 people bearing in mind like for scale. NERC rail, which is the government body that actually owns and manages the infrastructure and the rail infrastructure in the UK only employs about 42,000 people. So 50,000 people, it gives you an idea of scale. It's depending on who you read as to the size of the rail industry.

That's as it's almost half the rail industry. So it's a huge number of people striking over these three kind of 24 hour periods. And and they're doing this because and I'm checking my notes to make sure I've got this right. They hate Britain and the armed forces love Putin. And also want to stop nurses going to work and children setting exams. Is that? Yeah, yeah. And also random which local news channel you're talking to some random guy

who's got a heart operation and has had to pay 200 pounds for a taxi to get from, I don't know, little fathering him to to Maitley or some some random place that no one cares about. Of course, it's worth saying. Yeah, ever since they closed the general hospital, a big. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's worth saying as well. Right in the pocket of big fathering.

It's worth it's worth saying as well. Right, that you say you wonder, ah, well, they should they shouldn't go on strike because this one person needed to pay 200 pounds to get to a hospital. But surely it's important to have a rail industry. So 98 percent of the time they don't need to pay 200 pounds to get to the hospital. It's it's amazing how many people and I I had a chance on BBC Radio York. Milo, this is going to screw you or not.

You'll love this and a chance on BBC Radio York to quote Lenin. I didn't tell them that I was going to do it anyway, which was to just say because there are a lot of people saying, oh, you know, I so I understand the plight of the workers. I understand the workforce is sad, but they shouldn't strike. And I was like, well, no, so you don't support the unions because saying that you support the unions, but you don't support striking is like the is like the hangman is supported by the hangman's rope.

You know, it's not it's which is which is me garbling up a Lenin quote, which I was very pleased to do on local local radio like Gareth. Why are you speaking Russian? What's happened? But so what we essentially have, right? And one of the reasons that this is all happened, of course, is I mean, there are immediate causes and sort of more ultimate causes, right? I would just quickly go into these causes before we go into the framing

and then into the detail. Yeah. So hating Britain, hating nurses. Sorry, Alice already said, yeah. But I guess in the troops, the causes that they will lie to you about, of course, and say they actually believe are that they have they've been having real terms pay cuts every year for ages. And that the they are they're working conditions are constantly under threat from a broad umbrella of things that we've actually talked about on the show before, dubbed modernization, that actually just involve

trying to replace skilled labor with like an AI drone. Yeah, and it ties in and I know we'll get into this a little bit more to it, but it ties into the fact that as we said on the previous, I think we talked about this more on the bonus episode that I was on to start with, which was the fact the guest does it. I don't know if I hate when the guest is like weirded out by it or if the guest I don't know what I hate more. Embrace it. Yeah, we talked about the fact that the real industry is currently

going through like a protracted reorganization. And it's it's as as ever, it's an excuse to just it's supposed to be defragmenting it, but actually what it's doing is just doing more than I'm seeing of like sort of skills and people who actually are desperately needed within the industry. But yeah, we'll we'll get we'll open that hood when we get to it, which nicely segues us into the media section hood. So I get there. Yes, yes, this is perfect. Thank you to zoom out for a moment to the broader British show.

I think, Gareth, what you were saying, they're taps into a broader thing about any any sort of public project in Britain, which is it's always an excuse to make things worse, no matter how notionally good the thing is. It's always an excuse to make things worse. It's like whenever they do any kind of like transport reform in central London, more or less, all they ever do is make it harder to drive. They never make it easier to do anything else. Like in quite and quite often at the same time as they make it harder to drive,

they're like removing bus routes and stuff. And then just going, you could cycle. It's like some people are old. Do they exist? Anyway, but what got my broader point here is that what I've noticed a lot about the I think the analysis about the strikes and how people are reacting to the strikes is that the strikes are good, as we've previously discussed. But what they're missing is that Britain is a deeply fucked country

where everything is fucked. And it's sort of weird because sort of like they're kind of like there are two layers going on, which is like all of train drivers grievances are valid. And they're perfectly within their rights to strike to try and address those things. They're just also grievances that almost everyone else in the country has in their job and they don't have a trade union, which is why they hate the train jobs. Because they're like, no, it's shit for us as well.

It should be shit for you. That's the it's the crabs dragging you back into the bucket. Well, and that's it goes to show, right? And it's moments like this where I suppose I'll sort of betray a little bit of my optimism from later in the show that these these big demonstrations that like you can you can you can make the world better. You don't have to wait for someone to do it for you. You can do it yourself by working together with others.

Yeah, the demonstration that this actually can and might work if you just actually do it and you actually believe it will work and actually follow through suggests that Ted Kacinski said, that's what I mean. The crabs can learn to leave the bucket and then they can pinch the man that put them in the bucket while you were exiting the crab bucket. You're talking about this recently. I think it was a current formal. Was it Nate who was talking about that you just ended up with him?

He just ended up at a stopping at someone trying to get evicted. They're like trying to drag him and shove on a plane to Rwanda. Yeah, the immigration and he was saying there was just this sort of sweat. And it wasn't just a bunch of activists turning up. It's just people coming out of their houses going off. Why? Why are you bollocks and up this guy's life? Like stop it. And there is a smell of bacon out here.

A little bit of optimism, that little bit of optimism. We can't let it happen. We can't let it happen. So so so the strikes must be crushed. Well, and of course, a key component of this, of course, is our beloved independent finder of fact, the media. So let's let's talk. I mean, I've got a few of these.

We've all all watched the Supercut. I want to go around and ask what everyone's favorite Mick Lynch bodying was, starting with our guest. For me, it has to be it has to be when there was the like 2019 intake. Tori, he was like, oh, yeah, obviously, there's an app and you can you can get an app that, you know, automates things. And you're just getting in the way of that and, you know, veterans. And then maybe it was like getting in the way of the app.

Maybe it was like, yeah, the app that all the veterans were on. Nonsense, mate, you're just speaking absolute nonsense. I'm not going to discuss this with with some bench MP that's got no you just got his notes handed to him from conservative HQ. You're a nonce. He said he was reading off a script. He was absolutely kneecapping. Honestly, I was like, he can't say nonsense.

I was like, is he just does he know that he's just calling this guy a nonce? It was great. It was a bold stunt for Mick Lynch to go on TV and be like, you're a pedophile if you oppose these strikes, but it does seem to be working. So well, that's that's the one way you can flip British public. A Peter, well, I was against the strikes until I found out that that was what the paedophiles would do. And then I was like, well, I've got no choice but to join the picket line

as an amateur paedophile hunter myself. Yeah, putting a paedophile in a headlock and walking him to the picket line and making him stand on it for a show. A bit of respect, man. My purpose, the one about Gullis that I love was just that like this twenty nineteen intake Tory MP who never fully like closes his mouth when he's waiting to talk, which is really funny to watch. Oh, yeah. Nice.

Just being like, yeah, just say and and another thing, the veterans. Oh, my God. How dare you? It's our forces day. The most sacred day of the day. Yeah, I love I love armed forces day because it's such a new labor confection. It was like invented in something like twenty thirteen. They had like a whole branding exercise for it with a flag and so on. The word veterans in the UK, like that's not it's just.

No, no one gives a shit. Truly, I don't think like I don't think the military even give a shit. It's just but it exists to be like it's on our sort of our secular calendar now that you would dare strike on armed forces day. It's it's like it's like it's like New Year in China. It's the biggest single movement of people. Yes, a bunch of like ex forces guys all swimming upstream to London. That's it. We should we should have like we should have like the end of the verb

but for the British army, like they should the parents get stripped down and they should get in the fountain in Chicago Square and just like soap each other down a bit. And then the British people would respect armed forces day. This is a horrifying thing that you've laid because I know Paris would love it. So I would I think my my favorite one was probably K. Burley. Who like that's mine to that was powerful interview because the thing that really struck me about the K. Burley thing was that it was a good example of how Mick Lynch is successful on TV, not just because he is like a normal

person who knows what he's talking about, but also because he's like actually very good at media work and has had some professional training in doing this because what K. Burley was trying to do is to lead him to like deny something in a way that would have made him look bad. She had him in front of a picket line and she said, what will what will you do to stop people who want to go to work on the railways from going to work with the heavy implication being of, are you going to hit them? Right. And and instead of like, yeah.

And tenderly down the neck. And instead of engaging with that, because if you had said, right, well, certainly we wouldn't hit them or anything. It would have looked fatal. It would have looked so, so like evasive. He just quite correctly acted as if she was asking a very stupid question and just went, what do you think we're going to do? We're going to stand there and ask them not to go to work.

That's how I love that space. He like stepped back and they're just like a few picket, like a few picketing RMT people in the background. And it's like, what? What do you look like they're doing? It's just like, OK, I have nothing. Statutory maximum of six people doing the most British thing imaginable. Standing about where our hands in the pockets.

It's the same thing. On forces that we had, we had the the IEA is worst freak dipshit Matthew Lesh, not notably a railway employee. Not to be confused with Matthew Moore. Went went through a picket line and took a photo of himself sort of. Oh, that guy, that soy face guy. Yeah, because he was like, no one tried to stop me and no one called me a scab.

It's pathetic, really. And it's like, does he work at the railway? No, he was going to drive a train, he was going to give it a go. I think what is the thing that I think unites a lot of these different sort of media vignettes? I want to talk about one or two more. But I think that what's it's really interesting is it shows a few things. It shows number one. Placency, absolute complacency.

The fact that the fact that like you think that you trade unions have been decimated enough by Thatcher that you don't need to know anything about how they work, that you don't need to know that there can only be six people officially on a picket, that you don't need to know that you like can't do secondary action so you can't just open all of the ticket gates and let people throw onto trains that are running anyway, like either not knowing those things or pretending not to know those things is a function of like winning too much.

It's suffering from success. Also, the other thing that I think it really shows is number one, the role of these people as like the British states immune system that they are there to try to demolish and discredit. T cells, they're there to try to demolish and discredit anything that is improper or out of the ordinary or that is simply unthinkable in the based on what our current our current political imagination is as like a society and to see like to see them just using that again.

I think very proddy, confrontational interview technique. But against a guy who refuses, who just refuses to be anything but normal, baffles them. It goes back to what we've said about Kierstahmer. It's like, for Christ's sake, just call them a cunt. Like you will go up 10 points in the polls. You immediately just be like, that's fucking stupid. It's why Bernie Sanders was so successful,

because he'd just go on Fox News and they'd ask him a bunch of stupid questions. He'd be like, I think that's a very stupid question. I don't understand what you're talking about. No, of course, of course, I wouldn't do that. Who would do that? That's what I was saying. We dropped on the head as a child. I think the other thing, the other thing, though,

is what it made me think of is the film Solaris, right? That the the British media, the Punditocracy, the sphere of the great and the good that generate opinions and TV and in columns. Interacting with them is like interacting with the planet Solaris, which you imagine your dead wife, which, as you know, is the planet that from the sci-fi film Solaris that if you look at begins to enter your mind and change you and warp you and turn you into something other than entirely human. And I genuinely believe that prolonged exposure on its own terms

and taking seriously the fantasy world of either sort of breathless fear or snide like snide condescension that someone like Piers Morgan or Kay Burley or Richard Maitley or Jenny Chapman or any of these or any of these fucking mutants that like that he has gone up to talk to who are again trying to perform an immune function, but for an insane society. OK, to be fair, Maitley is not that smart. Maitley is simply off the top of the dome, saying the most uncool shit you can think of.

I want to talk about one's organ, though, because I think Piers Morgan is one of the greatest freaks this country has ever produced. Like that's true. I was discussing it with Phoebe the other night about how like Piers Morgan is the closest thing you can get to like what the British public mostly think you have said this. I know, I know, I have. This is sort of a, you know, it's an ongoing theory that we're developing.

But here's was the most fascinating because it was advanced. Piers Morgan, that's right. It was pure day to day like his like the Kay Burley one was really like cringe and car crashy. But the Piers Morgan one, I think, was the funniest because he was just the tack he took was so bizarre. He was going on about how Mick Lynch has his Facebook profile picture, the villain from the Thunderbirds, which first of all, Piers Morgan has got

to remind everyone who that is, because no one under like 70 is going to know. And then he's like, why have you got that as your profile picture? And this and Mick Lynch looks like this guy. It's obvious, right? It's a joke. And that's why. And he's like, it's basically going like, is it because you're an evil mastermind? And it's like, no, but he was acting like he had a picture of Hitler.

I think it's a plastic puppet. It's a plastic puppet from the 60s. And Piers was not anything he wanted to. Oh, man. Yeah. He's like, can you, can you not see the resemblance? And he's like, I don't know, can you? What do you mean by that? Well, that's just why I go with the Solaris comparison, right?

Because and that's so funny, by the way, to be like the reason why Mick Lynch is is effective on TV is because he seems normal. By the way, have you seen this Tarkov scheme? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. I got a PhD in between the like the last recording and this one. Now he's going to be doing PhD guys shit. But this is why I was thinking of this on my bike, right?

Which is just why because the world that they want you to inhabit is one where things of everything utterly inconsequential must be whether that is totally unfounded fears based on wild speculation, whether that is the vast overinterpretation of some shit on Facebook or just outright suggesting that someone is a liar because they are out from outside the political norm. All of that is is this coagulation of the the suggestion that anything that is unreasonable,

that is a sort of an irrelevance or a frippery is kind of the only thing that must ever be discussed and must be taken incredibly seriously. Whereas the actual material things, the world in which you live, the world of cars and trains and houses and humans and lives and stuff, that is an irrelevance. That is that's that mustn't really ever be taken seriously. And someone like West Streeting, for example, who was platonic. It's pure like cave in the forms.

He has grown up from the age of fetus to be molded into the perfect participant in this performed unreality. That's why he's so uncanny. So, yeah, it's so I was thinking about this on the drive up, actually. And I was thinking, like, why would I think? I was just trying to think of pinpointing things a bit like Alice. You're saying like normal guy also knows what he's talking about. And I was thinking like, so I do dangerous combination.

So I do news bits every now and then. And I do local radio stuff because, you know, low level Twitter weirdo. But I was thinking, but I don't the people who successfully really crack going on the TV a lot are either kind of generalists or economists who kind of do know stuff, but only on a general level and are generally pretty extreme. You know, whatever it happens to be, they're punchy kind of characters. Let's say that I'm not just talking about psychopaths.

But like, you know, people like Ash, Ash Sarkar, she's really punchy. She's really punchy. She's a generalist. She's fantastic. I got bumped from GMB for Ash. I was like, I'm up. I'm at peace with that. It's fine.

But like the other end of the spectrum, you have the West Streetings who are just like, they're like, they're like, oh, they're like just a slime ball that's been shaped and sort of molded by that to fit in that ecosystem, as you say rightly. And there's no space for it. And I think when people who actually know what they're talking about do occasionally get to appear on the news, it does it lands in a way with the general public like, oh, that's someone who knows what they're talking about.

And they seem normal. And it's just it's so rare that the door is allowed to open enough, just a little tiny crack for them to be able to talk through it. This is one of my favorite things when sometimes you get a radio debate and you know, they have to have like balance. But then it's like, it's really off kilter because it's just not a matter of opinion. Like they just get on someone who knows about the thing. And then for balance, they get on someone who just doesn't know about it.

Like I remember once listening to, I think it was on radio too, a debate about having a four day working week. And they had like a professor of economics from Oxford, who was just like very patiently explaining like why four day working would be a good idea and like places where it's worked and like the economic rationale behind it and so on. And then they just had like a back bench tour MP who was just going, well, I think that's bollocks. And then like the guy's going, but why is it bollocks? And he's going, well, it just is like, this isn't a debate.

This is just a guy explaining it, another guy saying bollocks. Your man, that's the thing. He was not, he's not also willing to go on the attack. And that's the thing. I don't want to make this the Mick Lynch fancast, right? Oh, but it is already. It's really that ship itself. Yeah.

I think what I would just, we're just not going to be one of the people who's like, Mick Lynch should be in charge of the labor party, a job which would like make the labor party and come inside me. Actually, that's why this is something. Wait, wait, wait, wait. This was so tight already. That is about Mick Lynch. It's going to happen.

I've never had my hand on the lathe, but I'm removing it for the bloody lathe. Slash fiction about Mick Lynch. It's actually a pass through in the executive lounge onto the lathe. I want to, I want to sort of come to the end of this bit and sort of move on. So I'll start here. This is why I think, yeah, as you say, I was people calling, people like see one normal person who is able to resist the kind of mind bending power of the, I'd say like, again, defense mechanism that is the intentional vapidity.

And I mean, it's a lead poisoned media. It's intentionally stupid, vapid and aggressive. And, but I think the people who can resist that, it's so rare to see someone who's not just part of that awful infernal machine go on and just refuse to be taken in by it that, yeah, people will go from saying, this is good. It's good for the union. It's good for public opinion of the strikes. It is also communicating clearly why things like union membership are good and necessary

and why arguments against them tend to be kind of either stupid or fatuous. But in addition, I think it also leads people to over conclude. And because it's not as though you need Mick Lynch to be the leader of the Labor Party, because what you need is him to be the lead, like in charge of the RMT, and then a thousand other versions of him in charge of other. You need to clone a Mick Lynch. People have made good points about this, actually, on the Twitters. Not that I'm going to make this Twitter review.

Basically, if people are pointing out, like, no, it's not because he's utterly and totally brilliant. He's great and everything, but he's just a normal guy. He is the result of a truly democratic process. And we don't have many of those functioning in this country. So actually, if we just had lots of functioning democratic processes, you don't need lots of Mick Lynch. You don't need it to be a leadership complex, as in, like,

we have to have great heroic leaders. No, you just have a democratic process. And that will generally work to provide a functioning system for people to kind of be represented and to get shit done. Believing in democracy in Britain in 2022, it's almost quaint. I mean, we talk about, we talk about sort of, or it is often talked about that stuff like the free press is kind of a core element of democracy. But we're here seeing, I mean, we all know this, everyone listening to it knows this,

but this is an, in fact, a fantastic object lesson in seeing the free press come up against democracy and, well, and be too soon to say, like, beaten, but at least humiliated. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when we talk about, they contrast this to, like, how they're talking about the Labour Party, which is trying to live in that media world of unreality, right? They've sort of adduced, they've sort of decided we are going, that the shadows on the cave wall are good. And we are going to make the noise, we're going to make all the right noises when we

see certain shadows come on the cave wall. And we're going to make sure that we all stay in that cave. People say that being in the cave with the shadows is bad. But some of those shadows are of good things, like of children going to school, or of opportunities, or of the concept of dignity in public office. And not that it's done the Labour Party any good, either, because now they, like, in the framing of both the Conservative Party and the media, refuse to condemn the strikes. They actually love the strikes.

I saw Keir Starmer and Mick Lynch and I'm kissing one time. There's one shadow I'd really like to talk about. And it's the shadow being cast across Boris Johnson's reputation by his conduct at the power of the parties and his refusal to resign in accordance with the Nolan principles of ministerial conduct. I mean, already, you know, the Express is sort of writing breathless revelations of, oh, Labour has been taking money from the unions. Again, that's how the Labour Party is constituted.

Again, the thing is, and it's not not not the RMT, not the RMT. The RMT isn't affiliated with Labour. Mick Lynch himself isn't a member of the Labour Party. It's got fuck all to do with them. And the question is, like, why the Labour Party are going so hard to, like, try to distance themselves. So there are a few people who I know who are like, Labour Party, no matter what, Keir is great because we need to unify behind wonderful

Keir. And they continue to say, no, they know what they're doing. They're brilliant. They're navigating their way through. Safe pair of hands. Safe pair of hands. I love how successfully they've navigated their way through this in the sense that they have managed to successfully be tarnished by an association with unions

and are disciplining MPs or disciplining ministers who have appeared at picket lines, thereby alienating absolutely everyone they possibly could in one go. It's fantastic. Never knowingly on the winning side. That's the Labour Party promise. We will distance ourselves from whoever seems to be winning. That's what we'll do. This is, I think, the air war, let's say.

Right? This is the war over public opinion. Again, public opinion just to... Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of the movie Roadside Picnic, which... Shut up. That's my favourite part of when Mick Lynch was talking to Richard Maitley. It was when he said, well, of course, this comes up a lot when

Tarkovsky is dealing with that idea of stuff. He had to go to the Alnist. I think it was fucked up for Mick Lynch to push that pram down the long five steps. You know, they held one of the RMT picket lines, a disused chemical plant, and then all of them actually got cancer in late life. If you're all done roasting me, I'd like to talk a little bit about public opinion, then go on into what actually happened. So, public is currently, again, broadly supportive of the strikes.

Again, this breaks down mostly by age. If you're above 65, you're like, fuck them. It should be shit. They should be happy to get paid in mud and sludge. That's right. And then if you're sort of under the age of 49... The age of people who take trains the least as well. Like they've been the least inconvenienced by this.

Yeah. Just the idea that someone is doing something to make their life better, that isn't becoming an entrepreneur is anathema to these people. Pensioners love all the stuff that they will never have to do, like commuting national service, like any shit like that. Pensioners are always like, fuck yeah, dude. There's a public is broadly supportive of the strikes. And also, you know, this is that generally speaking,

there's a pattern that support for strikes as they drag on, support for strikers tends to rise among the public. Because the opinion tends to be, and this is sort of historical, that the lowest the public opinion of strikes will be, not all the time, not universally, but usually, is at the beginning when the disruption starts. And then the blame very sort of gradually over the coming weeks, then shifts to government or for not solving it.

Right? Yeah. Because it becomes like irrefutable that people don't like it when they're on strike. They don't like not working. They want their conditions to be better. They don't want to not work. Yeah, because eventually, like eventually at some point,

the news has to interview someone who's actually on strike. And I think, you know, when they do eventually do that, other than the leader, when they eventually do that, you just see someone who's just a normal person who is just fighting their corner because they actually aren't going to be able to pay their mortgage. And again, the, and then the, and that's why the attacks on, no, they're not fighting their corner, they're fighting you

because you want to get around for Armed Forces Day or whatever. You know, you want to go every Armed Forces Day, I celebrate it by getting a bunch of trains back and forth. The traditional way. It's the different times. So it happens. It's weird that every Armed Forces Day is celebrated by doing the thing that whatever industry on strike is doing.

It was weird that one Armed Forces Day when everyone had to go to primary school. Next Armed Forces Day, I'm going to go to Heathrow and check into a bunch of different BA flights. I'm not going on. I visit all of the service academies on Armed Forces Day. As I presume all of you do, I do sandhurst first and then I go off down to the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth.

Yep. And then I go to wherever the RAF one is. Yeah. Cranwell, yep, yep. And that this, this will only increase because it's essentially the only thing they can do. But no, so let's, let's talk about sort of the specifics of what's going on and how we got here

because these are themes that we've talked about, which is that every time we've talked to Gareth, we've discussed different plans where the term modernization or technological development, whatever these things, is always cloaked in a very thin veneer of sort of an idea of making the trains more efficient, more pleasant to be on as a rider. But in every case, involve the stripping away of skilled workers

who are essential to the actual running of the trains safely. And there are a few I've seen that I want to discuss a little bit here as well, which is it seems as though they want to automate a lot of safety checking on trains and tracks, using stuff like drones. I have something for this really quickly. So, yeah, there's a mixed picture and I did want to touch on this

because it's actually, it is a complicated picture on rail. And the challenge you have is that railers always had some level of need to, maybe it's not different to other industries, but certainly the way that the rail industry works is that since the Second World War, we've actually always been short of skilled people. So we've always been short of having enough. We've always been overstretched.

And so straight after the Second World War, we introduced machines to maintain track because we just didn't have a load of track workers that we had had before the Second World War, partly because we got a load of them shot and partly because they just didn't want to come back to railways. Railways was shit work. We thank them for their service on Armed Forces Day

by riding the trains. Exactly. So we've always had instructors of new technology as part of sort of dealing with a shortage of staff. So there's a bit of a weird dichotomy. So you've got this skills challenge and also the safety thing, which is actually that it is good to reduce the number of track workers on the railway that aren't getting turned into chunky marinara by trains.

So there is this, so I want to, as I always like to, make the picture more complicated by reality. However, so yeah, things like using drones to survey track is actually fine, right? Fine, but what is what is problematic is when that is used as an excuse to not then redeploy those skilled people to do the other things to keep the railway running.

If it's used as an excuse to strip those, to just basically get rid of their grades, kick them off the railway, then it's like a double whammy hit to the railway when we're already continuing to be short of skilled staff, which I know is a strange thing to say when government is actively telling the industry to cut more people. Yeah.

So yeah, it's a complicated, it's, I just want to, like, automation is not necessarily always a dreadful thing in the railways, but it's, it's what that, you've got to look at where it's coming from, what the kind of the desire for that automation is doing, and then what the outcome is. What's happening to those skilled people?

Are they actually just basically getting sacked, or are they genuinely being redeployed and being made a better use of? Because it's, for me, right. I mean, having done this podcast for several years now, whenever I see a very important, let's say, important to my continued existence, process, getting, being told,

oh, we're going to do this with a drone, it's going to be analyzed with AI and so on, what I tend to, and we're getting rid of the guy that used to do it. Yeah. Yeah, what you, what you tend to hear is. Shake hands. Yeah, and it's, and it's stuff like,

or also it's things like trying to replace station attendants with a sign, for example, because the sign can't control, say, an overcrowded platform, for example. Maybe it could be that one call sign in the underground that has like an, like an inspirational message of the day, and that just writes itself. Yeah, exactly.

Well, take accessibility as an example, right? We are railways are hopelessly inaccessible to anyone other than, well, basically, they're really inaccessible to basically everyone for various reasons. But if you're in a wheelchair, or like you can't lift your knee much, because for whatever reason,

it's really difficult to get on trains. And invariably, you end up stuck on or off a train, and you need someone to come and help you. And those people, if they're not around, if there's not a ticket off, for example, there's no ticket office, you've got rid of ticket office, it can be quite hard to know where someone is

to actually go and find them in the first place to get help. So that's one microcosm of, like, how staffing is really important. So Britain in general, knifey, spoony-ass country, where, like, there are staff there, and they do have to help you, but can you find them?

Can you say the magic word which will summon them? It's all of my riddles three. Yeah, yeah. So the picture is complicated, and in a weird way, so there is lots of technology that we use that is, that works, that this week has sort of been a week, my airshow thing,

the railway airshow thing that I've been at all week, has lots of this technology, and plenty of it is good and does work, right? And so it does fall into the potential, like, you'd expect to hear it one of your startups, rightly, but actually, it's some of it is real. Whenever it mentions AI or autonomous, that's when my little flag goes up,

it's like, that's not a thing. But it's about the context. It's about, right, why is that technology being used? Is it just being used as an excuse to just get rid of people out of the industry, and what are the outcomes? And it has to be assessed in that light of skills and safety. The other thing I want to talk about,

especially to do with skills and safety, is this idea that they want the... And again, this is, as I understand it, there is a drive being supported by the government right now for Network Rail to bring in lots of agency staff to fill these holes, but also to be able to use more agency staff for these skilled roles in general.

So this happened before. So before we had Network Rail, which is basically, and like it was basically a government body, and then it is very much legally a government body, I think it changed in like 2013 or something, but Network Rail was always basically a government body, a part of government.

Railtrack before it was not. Railtrack, lovely, delicious Railtrack, which was basically a contract management organization that hated anyone mentioning the word engineering, and what they did was entirely outsource everything. And if you remember what happened, that is that we killed a bunch of people. Yes, well, you mentioned Potters Bar, didn't you earlier?

So really not great. And so that was as a result of this outsourcing, as a result of not just... And some of those people were skilled people, plenty of them were, there's all those interfaces, contract management, but the reality is that agency staff, and it happened through Network Rail,

they actually reversed a lot of this, they brought it all in-house, and safety has got better. Actually, efficiently, fundamentally, the thing that government seems to be obsessed with, which is money, was better when it was in-house, because you didn't have to pay a load of lawyers

to manage those interfaces. And so they're now looking at reversing that. But then, when you have to pay those lawyers, you don't have to think about it ahead of time. Exactly. So it's less. And you just have an entirely contingent workforce, with absolutely no prospects.

Ideally, and this comes back to big themes, right? You lock them into that little thing that they do. There's no chance that... This comes back to even something like cleaners, right? Cleaners, in days when there was a less fragmented industry, cleaners would be like, you know what, I actually want some life aspirations. What I might do is, okay, cleaning is fine,

but actually I want to maybe do something different. I'm going to be a guard, and they might try being a guard, and then eventually they're the guard. And they might, you know, maybe I want to drive trains, and then eventually they get a chance to drive trains, because it's one organization. They can do that.

Not when you've split it into train-cleaning, subsidiary-incorporated, 2011, there's a thing, and they are trapped in that little tiny fragment. Final.doc.exe. It's the same with agency staff for maintenance. If you're creating a company to put all people of one type of thing in,

there is no chance of that. And also, it just ends up with better engineering outcomes, worse engineering outcomes, because no one's talking to them. It's just going backwards. The government's excited to announce. And the agency thing is... They got extra staff off of LimeWire,

and they're excited to open them on the big government computer. Oh my God, that's such a... That's such a narrow reference. Is that the idea that they're going to break the strike by just having a bunch of people from town have a go at doing track safety inspections

is a very fun idea. Oh my God. But it's like signals as well. Signals require a minimum 10-week course to be able to say that they are a trainee signaler, let alone actually do it. How are you... That's no longer is that person

high and mighty agency. They're becoming an employee. And government even had to roll back on this. They admitted that it was a bit of a dead cat so they could try and... They were even admitting it. It's like, oh my God, just yeah. The agency thing is really bad.

And I really... It's one of the things I get most angry about in the industry is this reliance on agency staff, because it's deliberately trying to keep everyone exactly where they are so that their grades are easily manageable. So you never have any pay escalation. This is...

And it's difficult to unionize. This is a lot of also... Why a lot of the history of unionization as well is the more you are treated as part of a machine, the more you are boxed into just... Yeah, an individual component. Yeah, precisely. The heart of the machine.

Exactly. This is something that people fucking hate. And if the thing is, if I'm on a train, I do not want the person who decides if my train smashes into another train to fucking hate their life. I want them to have a very good life. I want them to be happy. I want them to have a good life.

Be trained, have some sort of professional framework that they sit within. And also, frankly, the way... So to get briefly kind of rose tinted, kind of misty-eyed and happy, events like this week reminds me that the railway at its best, as probably lots of industries, is one when it feels like one thing,

when there's a bit of camaraderie and it's like, actually, we're all doing this thing. We actually care about making trains work. And this is good. We feel good about it. That's how you have a better running system, good kind of happy people. And you also don't kill people

by crashing trains into each other. So yeah, it's side benefit. It also shows, right, how just with a very sort of... The only downside is you have to have people talk about the railway family, a phrase I've always had. They're big rivals, the lighthouse family. But the thing is...

You should see those British Bulldogs with those two. It's another way in which, just by thinking about it a little bit, you can very easily see that this is not a strike of railway workers against nurses or teachers. It's a strike of railway... That's next week. Yeah, exactly.

They're not going to show those nurses and teachers. It's always odd. But this is that when their conditions improve, a little bit of everyone who uses the trains' lives also improves. Your safety on the train improves. Your experience of being on it improves. Your life gets a bit better because ultimately,

the private equity funds that go ahead in first group don't get quite as much state subsidy. Again, I do not want to use an asset-stripped service. Do you know where has asset-stripped services? Is Quebecois and Italian bridges and roadways? And those are dangerous. What's the difference between a private equity fund owning a train operator

and the mafia using half the concrete to build their own houses or sell or whatever for a bridge project? We feel... The mafia have nicer suits and probably take a smaller cost. There are some guys filling those gaps in the concrete. Don't worry about it. And the thing is, right?

In there. And so let's go further, right? What specifically does network rail want? We talked about the broad themes. You've said, Gareth... Cut a bunch of jobs in order to save two billion quid a year. You've said this is about staff services and station. Yeah, this is my three S's.

So when people have been... When I've been appearing and people have been going, why are they striking? And I go, well, okay. Well, because... It's a beautiful impression. I'm doing a play with a caster. Why are they striking?

Can you tell me why they're striking? I might not be able to understand what you're saying. I've taken quite a lot of quailudes, mate. So I like... Maybe I'm becoming the media person who we all hate, but I like to kind of keep it something memorable. So for me, it's three S's, which is like staff services and eventually stations.

So it's like three things to think about. So first staff, which is the obvious one, right? Because the union represents people. And so what is happening is that government, under the guise of, oh, there's doom and gloom now in the rail is because of the COVID reduction in services, are forcing their own organization, Network Rail,

to reduce its headcount by about 20%. So that's about 8,000 staff that have needed to go. Quite a few have gone already through voluntary redundancies, right? It's worth pointing out this is absolutely insane, given that we have a chronic shortage of people on the rail. But anyway, so these cuts, the first kind of pass was like attempt to have voluntary redundancies that kind of, and I'm using rabbit ears here,

management level, but it's not really management level. It includes like engineers like me, and it's kind of like, if you like white collar type roles. But around, so a bunch of people are like, oh yeah, fuck it, I'll take voluntary redundancy, fine. I'm close to retirement age, I'll do it. And 50% of the people who applied for voluntary redundancy were rejected.

Why were they rejected? Because literally the railway could not run without them. So that was at like white collar level, of like testers and commissioners, and people who, there are about 18 of them in the country, and if four of them go on voluntary redundancy, the railway will just not work ever again. So they rejected that.

So much of the modern economy is down to like, a handful of guys in various industries. Yeah, the bus factor. Oh my God. The bus factor, the maximum number of people that have to get hit by a bus before the thing just is irreparably fast. The government constantly like trying to project like, okay, so we've removed five of the Jenga blocks,

and it's still, it's still working. So I reckon if we take out another 10, it's probably, it'll probably be, based on the trajectory of the five where it was fine, it'll continue to be fine infinitely, no matter how many blocks we take out. I can tell you one pub in Derby, that if you fire bombed it on a particular evening, the railways would cease to function.

Yeah, it's Mike, it's Mike. Dominic Raab stalking towards the pub with a Molotov. So it's worth saying that voluntary offering, that voluntary sevens package, none of that was offered to blue collar workers, none of that was offered to kind of non-management rates. And then the other thing is that grades themselves are being shifted. So like the lower level grades,

in fact, the lowest level grade is basically being binned, which you think sounds, oh, that great, that means people's salary increases. No, it basically just reduces the, it reduces the load of conditions for people on that new lowest grade, which also includes new apprentices. So new people with their bright-eyed,

bushy tail coming into the industry now having their grade, their kind of, their conditions kind of fucked with as well. So that's the staff thing. So there's a load of mess related to staffing, right? And that includes, by the way, about 2,500 front-line staff, like key critical maintenance staff who are being asked to basically go. So that's the sort of staff. Next is services.

So kind of tied into this, and this is absolutely within the union's own kind of literature, is this idea of the government rhetoric, that's continuing to kind of play up this reduction in passenger numbers, to kind of make out as if the railways are in decline and they desperately need to swing in as the heroes to save it. And they're saying, oh, you know, passenger numbers are dropping, you know, they're only at 70%.

The reality is last week, ridership was at 93% of pre-COVID levels and continuing to climb, right? And so it's kind of this idea that the railways are in decline again. It will be familiar to anyone who lived in Britain in the 1960s. So it's kind of being used to force through an agenda of contracting the railways right at a time when they are desperately needed to expand, you know, like climb to change.

Well, if I can say like one of the things that has been one of the themes about the moving on from the pandemic and the sort of the pandemic state, right, has been the British government saying all of the things, these things that are now been set permanently in motion, but these things that were either temporary changes in the pandemic that we like are permanent. So rail ridership is going to be down forever,

or things that are basically ratcheted up quite permanently, like high energy prices, at least for the foreseeable future, those are temporary and can be dealt with with a one-off payment. You can see again the sort of sorting of things into unreal and real of permanent and temporary that is sort of totally impervious to any kind of learning, I guess you could say. Yeah, or the reality of the evidence.

So I'm genuinely not going to be surprised when treasury or DFT switch off the feed that provides me the numbers to tell you that it's now at 93%. At some point, that feeds getting switched off when it gets used too much by journalists. And it's also worth saying, so at 93%, but we're still running an 80% timetable. They're 80%, like they're 20% of services pre-COVID are still not running.

And that number is actually, government has been cutting more services. So the government is cutting services whilst ridership is still increasing. So if all the timetables were reinstated, I would be very surprised if we didn't jump well above 100% pretty rapidly. But that doesn't fit the agenda, you know.

So, and it's also worth saying, for all the real rail nerds out there, this is the train zone. For the real rail freight, for anyone who cares about that sort of thing, is way above pre-COVID levels now. So all that side of things, forget passengers, that is all back to normal.

So to give you an idea, given that they haven't had services cut, the reason I said it gives you an idea of the fact that that is back to normal again. So if the timetable for passengers was back to normal, it's likely that you'd see, okay, there's been a change maybe in the time to travel, but we would be way back above 100% again.

So that's the third thing. Sorry, the second thing which is service is gone, right? It's also telling, right, that at the same time, that the same people who sort of generated, I would say, like an entire sort of swath of the Amazon rainforest worth of headlines about needing to get back into the office, they are unwilling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Death notch to the office. But now we don't want them to travel. It's Schrodinger's office worker, right? So yeah, the third thing. Sorry, this won't be long. So the third thing is about stations. And it's about the longer term.

And this is kind of more of a reading between the lines of the unions. And kind of me chatting to people, I know kind of within the unions, not just the RMT, actually, but the TUC, the TSSA, my union, and others. The TSSA, by the way, are balloting for strikes as well. So this is going to escalate, it really is.

So it's the fact that the workforce is in daft. The cancellations, and we've talked about this, the fact that they're desperately murdering, look what they've done to my beautiful boy with HS2, but desperately destroying that. And other major projects, stuff that's outside of London, the major regional projects,

they're just getting cut left, right, and centre. And London projects as well. We talked about the obliteration of TFL. So all these things, all these cuts. They're like Scotland as well. Yeah, Scotland. Yeah, Scotland. Yeah, quite.

So all these cuts and changes to the actual long-term shape of the railway, proposals in their sort of wonderful integrated rail plan, which is anything but, will fundamentally involve the contraction of the rail network, and it will involve local stations closing. So the unions know this. So the government's talking expansion.

They're talking about reopening railway lines, but their actions are the literal opposite. And the unions know that this is a long-term risk for all their roles. So they know that long-term, if a contracting railway means fewer, like fewer workers, fewer jobs, and yet another sort of tightening noose on conditions,

an excuse to, oh, your conditions are going to get worse, your pay is going to get worse, but at least you've got a job. Yeah, it really does. I mean, and we've touched on this on the show before, feel like a Tory government is basically, they are like a sort of,

like an auditor or an administrator brought in to wind Britain up as a going concern. Constant drive is to like sell everything off and to like get everything running on a skeleton crew are possible, as though that's like the desirable way. And they can't see like, oh, well this service, you lose his money.

It's like, yeah, but people need it. All government services lose money. That's how it works. You spend money on them because you need the thing. This reminds me of the biggest, the like sort of the worst attempt to own the strikers from the right that I saw was a Navy account going, well, train drivers, again, not who's striking,

but train drivers get paid, you know, 50 grand a year or whatever, average pay in the Navy is 32 grand a year, to which there were several hundred replies going, yeah, but you guys don't drive me to work on the battle ship. And they should. You don't, you don't fucking, yeah. Exactly. Hold on for a second.

Yeah, I don't want to take the HMS Glasgow to fucking work. I want it. That's how Alice is going to commute down. I genuinely do. That's right. That's right. I think this actually is a good segue into the next thing I want to talk about,

which is what's the Tory government want out of this, right? And I think quite a bit of chaos, destruction, the ruin of their enemies sown upon the mountain side. They want Britain to look like those scenes in sci-fi movies when there's not, and everything's white and there's just a guy walking around. That's what they want Britain to look like. Just like everything is just totally, just nothing exists.

I think what we're seeing is that without the motive power of a project like Brexit, is that they are returning very, very strongly to the natural state of a post, of a post 1990, post 90, post 2008 British political party, which is a cargo cult to the last time they had an idea. And so this is why I think they are, what they are, what they are essentially doing

is they are trying to fight the same fight that Margaret Thatcher would have done, but in a very, very, very different economy, starting from a very, very different place, where they are trying to... Starting from a Thatcherite victory, no less, which in some ways has hindered them, as we've seen. And so to see like, and so they are essential,

I think they're, the mission is essentially to, and again, this is what the RMT has said, that the mission is to stop an agreement from happening, because the concern is that more unions, like the, like the NEU, like the CWU, just to name a couple that have come up, like the, like the... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so on. I think CWU just balloted something like 95% in favor of industrial action on principle. So, yeah, it's going to be an interesting summer. Long, hot summer. Yeah, the fighting scene. Right, what we're seeing is this terror of wages rising, sort of to keep pace with inflation, of course.

And again, this is, I think, because their plan is just to hit the same button, which is brutalize the people that we've been brutalizing since Thatcher and before. And I think that's sort of, again, no, that's why they're there, their primary purpose is to do that. But it's also interesting to see how at odds that is with all of the other things that they're trying to do.

How, like, that's so at odds with, for example, having a high wage economy, because they believe that there is one way to get a high wage economy, which is the way implied by Thatcherism and promulgated by like the IEA, which is to have taxes be nothing so that someone comes and invents a new type

of blockchain in Britain. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, if the rich... So, like, I grew up in probably the city in Britain, if not Europe that represents better than any other that trickle down economics does not work. That is Aberdeen,

which is where, like, all of the oil and gas money came through there. And I can tell you with great confidence that not even a penny of it landed on Union Street for anyone in the city to spend. So, yeah, if you go to Aberdeen, particularly now that the oil, the arse has fallen out of oil and gas big time,

that's what it looked like when I was growing up and just not a penny of it stayed there. What I sort of see, right, is that all the people with actual power in this, or with actual institutional power in this country, because there are lots of people with power in this country that's not institutional power, such as unions, but that all of the people with institutional power

in the country are essentially retreating to cargo cults of the last time their thing had a kind of verb and a kind of idea, right? Yeah, and Labour are doing it, right? Labour are going back to, like, their sort of niceies, sort of, oh, we want group, kind of people to... We have no thoughts of our own, we have no policies, we just want to be nice and we want to make prosperity

through people having security, and some other words that we've focused on. Crucially, we have to forget all of how they got any security, prosperity, the weekend, all this stuff. You have to forget all of how that came about, because history, we're no longer there. We're now just negotiating a set. Of course, they're going to be weak shit.

Again, they were put there to be weak. And again, it is, I note with some amusement that columnists such as Gabby Hinsliffe are now writing columns titled, the summer of discontent should be a big gift to Labour. So where are Starmer's ideas? I don't know, Guardian opinion columnist, where the fuck are they? Oh, my God.

If only there had been someone in that job who had been able to make some productive use of this for the Labour Party. Ah, well, I guess we'll never know. And so this is why I say that both the factions in control of the Institute, of the ship of state, of the institutional levers, have shown themselves time and again

to be manifestly unfit to actually do that job. And manifestly... Oh, yeah, it's great, because we have technocrats now who can't run a technocracy and in fact seem actively hostile to the idea. I'll tell you what we fucking have. We have the Adeptus Mechanicus. Is it going to be another Tarkovsky?

Yeah, we have... They don't understand how the technology works. They just pray over it because they know the... It's like, you know, it's the Adeptus Mechanicus priest trying to repair a tank. Which ones of the religious oils he's putting on it are actually oil and which ones are just like nice smells to please the emperor?

They don't know. They don't want to know. And if you try to know, then you're going to get killed for being a heretic. And that's what we have in charge of the country is just competing factions of tech priests. Yeah. Check out Warhammer 40,000, everyone. Do not do that.

I'm just thinking about it. I'll just stop Boris saying those words in a speech in my head now. I mean, I don't want to run them, drip them on if it works. No, I love it. We could not approve of the emperor's desire for space marines. 10,000 psychers a day to keep the queen alive.

I don't want to recommend Warhammer 40K to anyone. It's just that if you're already cursed to get any of these jokes, then... You're already into it, it's fine. But yeah, they understand what technocracy looks like, and they will make all of the noises that look technocracy-ish. But there is a manifest... And again, this...

But it's on the blockchain now. But I think this goes back to them living in the same world. In fact, the British media world being a kind of outgrowth and a member of the same monolith as our sort of high political firmament, which is that it is a world of unreality. And a technocrat that is technically incapable of reaching their goals,

but is very, very capable of seeming like they're reaching their goals, is a homeostatic and ultimately parasitic organism. But... And it's funny that it should be the rail industry that that is currently bumping up against, given how much of a real thing the rail industry unavoidably is when you've got 450 tons of train kind of barreling towards a signal that's being controlled by an agency worker

that works for some company that had its name invented in the mind of some prep boy like a year ago. Can't put that on the blockchain. Yeah, like the train gets there or a dozen. And you can't be like, well, I think in a very real sense, the train not being here reflects our commitment to the train being. And they're sort of at the base of all of this, right? One of the main reasons why it's happening,

and one of the main reasons why sort of most of the people in charge of figuring out whether it should or shouldn't happen are trying to, you know, are liking that it's happening, is inflation, of course, right? And there was this, and if you remember, right, fucking the Bank of England, I think it was Andrew Bailey, came out and said, all everyone across the economy should not ask for pay increases,

so we don't have a wage price spiral. Now, again, this is now something that's coming out of number 10, saying it would be irresponsible. Be responsible when you... But the thing is, do you know what creates... If you think about what makes something a crisis, it's not that the numbers get higher, because if the prices...

There's two kinds of inflation crisis, right? There's the kind that we are experiencing right now, which is essentially an affordability crisis, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a cost of living. That's when inflation outpaces wages. That creates a crisis. That in itself is a crisis,

because I think it's worth talking about this. A price has three, broadly speaking, components to it. A price has a labor cost, it has a non-labor cost, and then it has margin. And if you want to look at what's been growing, it's been non-labor costs and margins have been growing, have been... And the thing is, all of it...

Where has that money been going, by the way? I was told many times that when it went to very rich people, what they would do is they would buy things from the economy. They would buy their yachts or their luxury watches or whatever. Yeah, and they do so from Tesco. And then that would enable me. And then therefore... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tesco would have more money, and yeah, I can open up a small business selling Rolexes and do very well for myself. You'd like to be a Rolex repair woman? I would choose a different brand of Rolex. But, but, but... I think actually Rolex is a fantastic example of artificial scarcity and of inflation,

because a Rolex was historically a tool watch. You could buy one for $100. And if you look at the... If you graph the price of a Rolex next to average earnings in the US, you can see that it just takes off worse than housing does. We have entered the watch zone. Genuinely, genuinely, the invention of watches as a luxury good is a phenomenon of the 70s onwards.

The thing I want to drive at though, right here, is we have these three components of price, labor costs, non-labor cost and margin. And all of them go up because that is the nature of having an economy where things grow all the time, right? That if you want to have growth, you need to have these prices go up. That's how it works.

However, the non-labor cost and margin have been growing at a faster rate than labor cost. And you want to talk about where inflation is coming from. It's not coming from increased wages. Inflation is coming from a combination of record profit taking, but also, more importantly, high non-labor costs such as energy, for example, is probably one of the biggest ones. Your demand for it is either constant or tends to expand.

Which is a problem of capital's own making, both by reckless use of energy, but also reckless energy policy, decommissioning a bunch of nuclear power plants, failing to build new ones. It goes back to the idea of there being nowhere really left to profitably invest, not just here, but anywhere really,

and just stripping out the copper wiring because that's all there really is. When we talk about inflation as well... Try that in British railways. There's barely any copper wiring to strip. Well, we talk about inflation as well, right? You cannot ignore that at the same time, at the same time as the British government, and sort of great in the good,

are calling for restraint on wages for people who work in the rails. Not only are many of the people who are in charge of it paid enormous amounts of money, but they're also trying to unrestrict what banks can pay bonuses to bankers to try and keep the city of London alive as a global financial center. Of course, what happens is those people's bonuses don't cause inflation, but bonuses to people who work in the non-financial sector, for example, do cause inflation because I imagine the money is somehow magically different. But there is one very, very, very, very important difference,

and this goes back to something I mentioned at the very, very beginning of the show, why the rail strike is good for you, the listener, if you're in Britain, sorry for not in Britain. Be glad. This often may not apply. This is not legal advice. What happens when a banker gets a large bonus is that tends to, some of it is spent on luxury goods, maybe invested in housing, but a lot of it- Less than you'd think. But most of it just gets-

The dark web, things like that. Most of it just gets saved. It gets stashed overseas, it gets put into investments, and so on, and so on. But investments just in a- They're very quickly gets to a point where there is, where you make more money than any reasonable person could spend. Then what you do is you hoard it. You don't actually use it. You invest. Yeah, you invest. A lot of, but what are you investing in? It might not be stuff here.

It could be- Could be absolute nonsense. It could be stuff that is like a reflection of an average of different investments that like, is it like six removed from any economic activity? What happens when a train driver, or a postal worker, or someone who works at Heathrow for BA gets more money, they spend it. Yeah, they donate it to the Russian military, y'all. Because they spend it, and what happens when they spend it? Maybe they go out to eat at a restaurant a little bit more.

Maybe that restaurant with its greater income can pay to have something refurbished, and then all of a sudden, builders are getting money. What happens is a union- All of a sudden, builders. It's the pound in your phone. What happens? What happens is- A very strange thing happens. Money doesn't trickle down. It just trickles across.

Exactly. This is, and it goes to, it's the message really is that the better economy for everyone, the better life for everyone, is a cooperative endeavor that's primarily horizontal. It is, I mean, the idea that it was vertical has been shown to be nonsense. The idea that you can get it through seizing power, through like, by like, say, taking over, leapfrogging your guy to the leadership of one of the political parties, for example, has been shown to regrettably not work. Just to pick a random example, yeah.

Going to get an extremely bow-time mode, and go, well, for a very long time, people thought of the economy as being vertical, but actually the economy has been shown to be horizontal. It's not a side-to-side motion, not an up-and-down one. But realistically, right? Like, if you can raise your wage, and if someone else or someone who lives in your town can raise their wage, then what happens is you're preventing money from being stolen and exfiltrated from out of where you can't get it. And you don't, it doesn't even require, what we're talking about here,

it doesn't require a seismic change in the way our society is structured. Much as I'm sure lots of us would like that to happen, it doesn't require it. We are within like an arm's grasp of people, of that horizontal improvement in people's lives. We're within an arm's reach of it. All it requires is for government not to continue stripping back the functions of the state, not to continue the fire sale. We're so close to it, but no, no, that's not all that. And I think it also requires us to re-approach the idea of managed decline, one that has been, I think, very sort of popular in Britain.

It's thought of as the main mode for understanding this country since the 1970s. I think managed decline is incorrect. It is a massive managed decline in the expectations and lives of most people, but the actual process that's going on is a managed transfer of wealth and services away from you. Yes, it is a managed theft. I have a more concise version of this, which is it is a robbery. It's what it's typically called. If a guy with a ski mask shows up and puts a knife in your ribs and goes, give me all your money, I am going, I object to this managed transfer of wealth that's happening here.

And that the way that that is stopped, the way that that is fought is by, for example, keeping railway stations open by maintaining jobs, by maintaining the skill levels of jobs, by reducing the amount that goes into margin and putting it into labor, because then they give it to you. The amount, the way that that's done is by worker power, is by organizing and by industrialization. So you want to be on the train, next thing you want to get off the train. Well, which is it? You know, I drive the train so much, just stay on it. Jonathan Gullis, when did you get here?

Gullis is such a good name for an Indian MP. Anyway, that's sort of all I've got, but if you listen to the last free episode, we also ended on a bit of an angry but optimistic note, and we're doing it again. Podcast is union. There's good reason to be optimistic on account of how there's going to be a bunch of strikes, which are good, because we love music. Exactly, that's why. So, Gareth, any final thoughts to leave our listeners with

before I recommend they check out Rail Matter? Yeah, I think go and support the RMT strike fund is the first thing. Just go and do that. Just chuck them a fiver. Like, honestly, just every little bit helps. Go honk your horn at the picket line, do that nicely, honk it in a nice way, musically. Yeah, generally, just support the strikeers. I don't know. Bin, Twitter polls. Jeremy Vine did a Twitter poll. Jeremy Vine on five. 35,000 people, and 90% of them were pro-strike. Oh yeah, that's another case of base to Vine.

Many such cases. Yeah, that's right. I think that's about six times the number of people who are in the YouGov poll that government has been citing, saying that people oppose the strikes. Yeah, no, sorry. Go support the RMT. That's all I can say, really. That's what we need to do. There will, of course, be a link in the description of this episode to go and do exactly as Gareth says.

And also to a picture of a train in case you were wondering what that is. I haven't been talking about this whole time. I can't picture it. So, with all that being said, once you've supported the RMT and not before, once you've done that, there also is a Patreon for five American dollars a month. You can get more of our delicious content. American dollars or Russian rubles? I don't want five Russian rubles a month. That's not that much.

I'm getting a carrier bag every month. Good to see of you, the listener. That's right. So, thanks, everybody. And don't forget, our theme song is Here We Go by Jin Sang. Find it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often.

Bye, everyone. That's right. Bye. Bye-bye.