TRASHFUTURE - We’re Not Owned! We’re Not Owned!

Episode Date: December 19, 2019

So, we got owned. Labour got wiped out in the election, and now begins a sombre and introspective season 2 of Trashfuture in which we discuss where to go from here. Please listen to the solemn voices of Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts) and Alice @AliceAvizandum as we commiserate and try to laugh as much as humanly possible. Thank you all so much to those of you who helped campaign and fight it out. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31753429

I think a good friend of the show might stop in to give his two cents on what happened. Is it Christmas already? Santa Lennon! Dear reader, for once I bring you good news as last week the chattering classes of this once great nation lost an election making this nation once again great. Jeremy Corbyn, darling of liberal Islington castorite sympathisers, lost to Boris Johnson, a man of principle who will get Brexit done, and a man who, in all seriousness, I would let fuck my wife, assuming he hasn't already. But I'm afraid it isn't all good news. In this election,

cents has prevailed and finally we have a prime minister who can stop the SJWs and carry out the will of the people with Brexit. I should be overjoyed, but no, I am as miserable as ever. Some would say this is because my politics are driven by a cherished pedantic opposition to people having better lives, but they are mistaken. The reason I'm miserable is because even though we won and got what we wanted, the loony left won't shut up and accept that we won and that therefore it must have been what they wanted as well. Even though they lost this election because of their out of touch obsessions with the EU and not being racist, they refused to listen to the working class, and by working class I refer to the classical definition which is white people

holding a whip in a flat cap. The Corbyn needs to trade union Eurocrats, keep taking to their Twitter accounts to bully Boris Johnson even though he has been democratically elected, which means that the country is 100% fully behind him because that is called democracy. If the left proposed ending austerity, climate change and racist immigration policies and lost an election, that means those policies are morally wrong. That is just a fact. I don't make the rules. Online consensus barons like at Communism 69 and at Chairman Lamau mock the will of the people, while the champion of the common man, the salt of the earth, Boris Johnson relies upon only the flimsy protection of the entirety of the media. He avoided all scrutiny, they clamour.

He ducked the Andrew Neil interview, they all cry, when in fact the reason he avoided the interview is simple. He would have been asked about things he said and done and what he plans to do in office. These are the types of questions that are clearly biased towards lefties. Lefties love policies that give people things they want, but this is cheating. The only real politics is telling people they can't have what they want but hinting that they can have racism instead, but nobody on the liberal BBC would allow that. Indeed, perhaps the left's hatred of so-called dog whistles was their downfall. After all, how do you expect a whip it to vote for you if you don't whistle for me? Soon Jeremy Corbyn will step down as the

leader of the Labour Party and then I will have to start putting shit in my own pants. But until then, I'm occupying myself by reporting tweets that poke fun at our dear leader and his big beautiful son, Matt Hancock, and also ones which point out the bizarre competition vegetable size and shape of my head, which is violence against me, the most oppressed group of all, white male and free thinking. I soldier on unto dawn, click after click, post after post, until the number of tweets I've reported is 1,984. Hello and welcome to this week's Trash Future, the podcast where the title is relevant. Yeah, we love being relevant, don't we?

We were never wrong about anything, by the way. We certainly didn't predict anything that didn't come true or not predict some things that did come true. We were right about everything and you should absolutely not go back to the archives to check. To be fair, we were right about so many things that we didn't even know we were right about. We lathed of heaven into existence some real ass shit. Like some things we said as a joke ended up being true. One of the Boris Johnson's coterie of charlatans, disgraced party magicians and pyramid sellers that he's brought into parliament with him actually does run an expensive food bank app. So I feel like we did kind of lathe of heaven. There's also an MP, a Tory party MP who just

entered parliament who has shared stuff on social media indicating that it's a Muslim conspiracy that people are turning trans. Which is true. I mean, come on. I'm so excited to learn about all of these hundreds of interesting new Tories and all of their various personal foibles. What will they say next? Maybe they will talk about the frogs turning gay. We don't know. The Muslim frogs turning Pakistani. Who knows? Time was we used to have frogs in this country, but now you've got to make them wear a hijab. Yeah. All the little boy frogs are being bought tea sets and it's because of the Muslims. Exactly. The frogs are turning the squirrels trans and that's why the conservatives want. That's true. Yeah, that's why Joe Swinson's

euthanizing them. That's the thing. The birds and the bees just not enough to capture all of the genders and they're adding so many animals to the birds and the bees now and most new Tory MPs just can't keep up with that complicated of a story. It used to be the birds and the bees, now we've got the birds and the hadiths. Can I just say, by the way, that I'm going to miss Joe Swinson? Yeah, we never knew what we had until it was gone. We never appreciated her insane skills while in base politics. I got to say, Joe Swinson, if Boris Johnson prefigures a British, I don't know, Berlusconi, Joe Swinson is absolutely an incredibly weird British Pete Buttigieg. I was watching clips today as you do and because I was looking

into the Joe Swinson thing because I wanted to pinpoint the moment when she really lost it and I thought that for a long time it was skills wallet stuff, but actually I think what it was BBC Five interview that she did where someone called in and asked her, like, Joe Swinson, what do you think a woman is? And obviously, like, she, you know, right, and this is like the most I've been trying to ask my wife. An extremely normal question that happens like on BBC Radio Five, like these call-ins a lot, but you could kind of see how like excruciating an interview that was because obviously the person who called in like definitely had a very particular, like, answer. But I don't think she was really looking for, but she was just looking to kind of like trip her up

and Joe Swinson in the meantime is kind of like trying to make this very lukewarm case for, you know, so she says something along the lines of, I think women know who they are. And it just kind of you know who you are. Got this big data base. And I was a girl reading this and I was thinking about this because I was kind of just like, okay, you know, a lot of kind of pundits will kind of say that, oh, it's because she didn't really offer like a policy platform. But we just elected a government which had pretty much no policies and gave them like one of the most handsome majorities of like very, like very recent memory. But I genuinely think I genuinely think for that moment when Joe Swinson was like not bowing to the, to like trying like not capitulating to the

turfs, like that's what kind of made her lose it. They were doing protest ballots. They were spoiling their ballots when they were like voting Lib Dem because of it. It was wild stuff. I read about the Bungalinda. During a Y in the box instead in protest. I mean, that's the thing, right? Like, let's be perfectly honest. The sort of like weird upper middle class, upper middle class, white woman turf thing is 100% a Lib Dem vibe. The kind of people who would vote Lib Dem would absolutely be turfs. There is a couple in labor, but by and large, it's a Lib Dem vibe completely. Yeah. And I don't know if you saw, but in the postmortem for the election that the new statesman

did, you know, which was almost as fucking mealy-mouthed and shitty as their terrible editorial on endorsements, Helen Lewis literally basically did a thing where it was, she tried to say that labor loss because of gender. It's just like, it's just so weird because it's like hypothetical transcode. Imagine being the person that everyone brings on the show because you know somehow you're going to extraneously relate it to transgender issues. You're going to say you're going to get mad about trans people, whether it's like people talking about like the floods in Doncaster or like the fucking corn laws. Helen Lewis talks more about trans people than I do. Yeah. And it's so fucking backwards and insulting to be told, oh, labor can't win

because of this metropolitan obsession with trans people. When the obsession with trans people is from metropolitan upper middle class white guardian columnists. We would have been fine, right? I literally think the American right talks negatively about trans people less. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Upper middle class white women in Britain, I don't get it. And gremlin hand, to be fair to women, gremlin hand too. Yeah. Honorary woman. Yeah, honorary woman, honorary sister. Ironically, he is the most trans of all. So to be fair, trying to figure out information about NHS sexual health clinics via Google, I wound up on Mumsnet and it's weird because you can find old posts on Mumsnet, but like the people who have posts like years ago

still have like their stuff updated in their profile. Like some of them, you can see how like they've updated their signatures to be like really insanely turf stuff. But friend of the show, Abby Wilkinson, had a similar thing because she recently had a baby and she was looking something up and she'd actually asked, she posted and asked a question on Mumsnet and it turned into her getting banned from the forum because she's not allowed to say the word sis. You can't say it's gender. They're fucking shatanate to beak. It's amazing. They're stricter at enforcing the ban hammer on people who are saying forbidden words than Guido Fox's comments are about slurs. Like it's unbelievable. Fun fact, by the way, my gender clinic that I go

to is co-located with a sexual health clinic because there's no budget for two buildings. So it's co-located with Mumsnet. I mean, it's almost as awkward because the reception is half very nervous looking trans people and half dudes with like embarrassing itches. It's wild. So whether there's some overlap between the two. That's true. You're just going in the wrong door. I just wanted to get this dose for the clap and I've come out and they've cut my fucking dick off. Hey, you're curing your comedy. Did you just assume my STI is gender? Right. So pulling us back on track for a moment as we come to grips with the future of our country

where eventually every single service will be combined into the same building until the sexual like the gender clinic and Trident are all in the same building. Yeah, it's a virgin megastore for some reason. It's a shop. It's co-owned by Richard Branson and for some reason Apple. My dick is now a mini disc player. I'm not even really sure. Yeah, we're MP3s have been banned. We don't know why. No, no. So look, we've had this election. Boris Johnson was returned an enormous majority. The far right is emboldened and on the march and we as the left in Britain are left asking, what do we do now? And there are two answers that have been immediate, widely shared and praised in the media and are obviously wrong that I'd like to talk about and

get out of the way right now before we talk about the rest of this stuff. First, this was prefigured by some of the turf stuff we were talking about earlier, which is the resurrection of blue labor, which promises, quote, a socialism which is economically radical and culturally conservative. Yes, their motto is faith family flag and they're saying, look, we could do socialism. It just has to be all white people. Imagine getting excited for flag, by the way. It's not even a good flag. Yeah, it's weird. I got to say this as somebody who's from a country that really, really loves fucking the flag. I, in a way, always thought that other countries' flags were cooler,

but the British flag is quite frankly kind of gaudy. And people who have flags everywhere. It just looks really like, it's weird. As we've talked about on the show before, it's very confusing when you come here because you learn to associate, especially like national, like like constituent nation flags, like the English flag as being like racism symbols, but they're also football symbols. And so it's like, sometimes they're the same. There's a lot of overlap there. But right, there is this assumption. I think it's very, it's very appealing to people like Paul Ember, even to people like Helen Lewis, who want to say that labor was too, too inclusive, too quickly, too woke. We went woke and we went broke. Like,

that's the idea, right? Which is weird because like legitimately, the manifesto didn't address, like that, that wasn't a concern. There weren't any policies. Sentences about trans people and one of them was bad. It was a turf talking point. One of them was literally a turf talking point about women-only spaces. Like, it's just, it's mad. And so it's just so strange because it's like, what about the labor platform was too woke? Like, there isn't anything. There's nothing. You know what would be, Bet? You know what would please the blue labor people more? Is if Jeremy Corbyn had written 72 virgins in 2004. That's what's different about the conservative platform,

is that there's someone at the head of it who was able to say to people, hey, I have all the same things as you. You know, and that's one of the things I think, right? One of the things, one of the lessons I think I'd like to take from this election is that it's important, it's important to say, to highlight that, you know, Boris Johnson's ludicrous, ludicrous history of just cartoon racism. As evidenced by his dad as well as his own writings. The handshake meme, but it's him and Charlie Hebdo. But you always have to, you have to remember, right? Like, you know, that,

just be, that was a selling point for some people, but it by no way does that mean that that should ever be a selling point for us if we're ever going to consider ourselves concerned with any kind of justice at all. And it's so tedious, right? Because like, blue labor's idea seems to be that you could have the exact same manifesto, but page one and 72 point font was you're allowed to say the word and we would have won by 50 points. But it's strange. In the beginning, the word was with God. Because the, I guess the thing about it is, is that like when you, using the expression woke as in the inverted, you know, the scare quotes,

white people using it as a pejorative to make fun of literally anything that's meant to address social justice, like even when it's completely inappropriate in the usage, there's nothing in the labor manifesto that really, it literally all it does is it doesn't do racism. The manifesto, the manifesto, if you want to use it pejorative woke, like asshole columnists will, literally it's, it's, it's, it's the absence of any demonizing or any harassing, like they don't demonize migrants, they don't demonize trans people, they don't demonize the poor people on benefits, they literally just talk like affirmatively about like improving people's lives via the state. And so for them to turn around and say that it's just so weird because it doesn't even

meet the criteria of whatever like imaginary straw man, Daniel Hannon fucking like social justice warrior character they want to use, it literally isn't there. They've imagined it in the absence of any hateful rhetoric. Yeah, it's because they, it's because they want to like scupper the program, right? But I feel like if there's anything that we've really learned from this, it's that like policy was entirely irrelevant. Like, I mean, I think that, you know, Corbin as a leader had a lot of shortcomings in terms of like the way he was like sure to be perceived and all that kind of stuff. And I think like this election was basically one and lost on two things, A, personality and B, Brexit, right? Like those were the two defining factors. And our manifesto

could have been like literally fucking anything. It didn't matter. We would have achieved the same result. Like the manifesto was good. The Tory manifesto said literally nothing, but they won because all that matters people was Brexit and like, oh, I like the funny man with the silly hair and I don't like the jam grand part like that. Yeah, I have a third thing to add to that. And that's the media, right? Like if any one of those things had been knocked out from underneath it, then I think we'd be looking at a very different result if the Conservatives had managed to not avoid all possible scrutiny for weeks at a time. Even more than that. I mean, I think that's something that may not have come across to American fans or people who weren't paying attention to

the media covers the way that we were. Yeah, people don't Americans don't understand how trusted the BBC is or was and how completely to for lack of a better term, like black mirror levels of complete insanity. It went like I've never seen a like such obvious, just incredibly slanted, incredibly biased, like to the point where like they weren't even trying to hide it levels of just utter bad faith and total lack of scrutiny on one party. Like to the point where they were just endorsing the Conservatives and demonizing the Labour Party nonstop. Like Boris Johnson's just just one example of him showing up to put the wreath in the Santa Taff on Remembrance Sunday, putting it on upside down, apparently being like disheveled,

fucked up, drunk according to people who were there and then just deciding to use footage from three years prior because it made him look better. Like we're not talking about Vladimir Putin, we're talking about fucking Turkmenistan levels of insane. And that's the thing that really, I feel like if you weren't paying attention and you're not here in the United Kingdom, like that's I think a thing that really is going to be one of the defining features of this election for people on the left is that you realize that every aspect of capital in the state came down to be like, no, you will not get a fair hearing. And it was so it was it was like being nonstop gaslit the whole time. Right. And I was going to actually say that this is actually like even in

the aftermath of this election, it still still feels like there's like a ton of gaslighting going on. And I'm sure like we'll talk about this more. But like the whole idea like when, you know, just kind of like the number of like very emboldened people who on the one hand kind of say that, oh, like I feel really sorry for all the people who are going to have to like suffer under the Johnson government. But at the same time, this is all Jeremy Corbyn's fault for like, again, various reasons. So we have like the fucking like, you know, full revokers who are kind of saying, but oh, if Jeremy Corbyn just like press the big red, like Brexit button, like everything would have been fine. And, you know, or you have like, again, you have like the Paul

Embrys of the world who kind of take that position of well, we just had to like be more racist and less not like less good trans people. And what's kind of really scary is that like I was thinking about this the other day, like, I don't see Labour like not kind of going down the road where it will just end up being carved in the face of Paul Embry, right? I think like, I think I don't actually see like any other outcome except for that. I disagree. I will get into this later. The one other thing I wanted to say about the BBC was to a certain extent, I think it reflects that how much Labour and Corbyn and Corbynism had unsettled capital, because the BBC like being impartial is sort of a liberal article of faith. That's why you sound like a crank if you talk

about it being biased. And that BBC reporters were willing to put their thumbs on the scale that much is really revealing, I think. But I'd like to sort of respond to sort of two things that have been brought up. Number one, just going back to earlier what you said, Milo, about policies, like the manifesto this time didn't have the same story as 2017. 2017 was organized, streamlined, it told a single story, 2019. We told the same story, but we threw in a bunch of extra policies that just didn't seem so that weren't connected to that story, but they were still all individually good policies like free broadband. But I honestly, I don't think you can say that it was, that policy didn't matter, because the thing that got us, for example, 60% of the under 30 vote,

under 35 vote, it is that policy mix. And if we were just running a centrist campaign, I don't think we would have even got, we wouldn't have got near that. Oh, it's actually not with a turnout, no. No, I agree with that. Sorry, I would just add that I think, yeah, the policy platform definitely anodized our base, because it was a good platform, but it just like those voters that we needed to win over, like those middle ground voters, like they weren't going to be won over by policy. And they also just didn't believe it either. And I think a lot of it had to do with, in my opinion, a lot of it had to do with the fact that Jeremy Corbyn had record unpopularity. And so the idea,

like they basically were said, well, Jeremy Corbyn is saying this, but we don't trust him. So, but weirdly, we trust Boris Johnson. But secondly, right, like all of this stuff about the media, I hate to say it, for me, falls into the category of true, but not interesting, because it's true that it happened. And it's true that if you want to have a socialist program, you are going to upset capital and they will deploy everything four square against you. So what we have to, as part of the whole, like, let's not stop being socialists thing, we have to learn that, like, well, okay, the media is going to be, the media is going to be pretty against us.

So what we have to do, that's good for radicalizing people, though, at least, we have to, it means we have to do it differently. It means we have to find ways to get around the media or fight them in the air as well. That's why we've launched GettingYourDickSug.com. For kind of, I mean, to destroy the media, we have to become the media. But also I would say, too, that compared to 2017, the BBC wasn't necessarily great to us then, but this was so much worse. And so I think that there was an expectation that once you went into campaign mode and impartiality rules kicked in, that we were going to be able to win

the argument because we had policy and they didn't. But instead, the way that they nominally obeyed impartiality rules is that they only cover coverage. And so what they did was they just, they used the insane right-wing press, basically read the insane right-wing newspaper headlines, was like, wow, what a dumb policy. Labor's so dumb, they won't be able to do this. What a joke. Are you going to nationalize sausages? Like, they just mocked it nonstop. And that technically counts as coverage. But I think the disconnect between the 2017 elections coverage on the BBC particularly versus this year was so stark. And I do think that there's one of the lessons to be learned here is that

they were so rattled by the outcome in 2017. They decided this would never happen again. And they've basically spent the entire intervening period of two and a half years doing as much as they possibly can to make Corbin, Corbinism, Labor as toxic as possible. Let's be clear who we're talking about. We're talking about they as well. Like, what we're talking about is... Well, the BBC also... You have to put your hands up to the microphone when you say it. Yeah. No, so what we're specifically talking about is...

Like, 20 people at most in one group chat. We're not talking just about 20 people. We're talking about the networks of, like, think tanks and senior journalists. We said this on our, on the Thursday episode. It's the senior journalists, the think tanks, people who have a comfortable class position, people who are willing to indicate that their business will go on capital strike. We even said this in the episode about right-wing think tanks with James Midway. There's no necessity for the forces of conservatism and capitalism to organize, or at least not in the same way that we do, because in a capitalist system,

capital is self-organizing. So they don't... No point did the head of whatever think tank need to call up Laura Koonsberg and say, by the way, make sure to give Corbin bad coverage. She wouldn't be in the position she was in if she wouldn't give an insurgent socialist campaign bad coverage. And I think the more we have to understand that, that there is no conspiracy to expose, the conspiracy is right there. It's out in the open. It's all... And it's not even a conspiracy. It's just that these people have the same interests. It's just class interests. And also, there were a lot of useful idiots. Like, I think Andrew Neal kind of fell into that category where he was like, well, I've never before gone to interview someone in an election

campaign and they've not shown up. And it's like, yeah, but can you see what the fuck is going on? Then like go on TV and say like, yeah, he's cynically deliberately not showing up because he's dodging my questioning. Like make a point of it. Like they're just being like, oh, well, I'm sure it'll turn up. Like this kind of like... I don't think it's like... They're kind of not in league with the Tories, but they're just like failing to call it out for what it is. And a lot of people now are sort of being able to say, yes, well, if you remember who had the backing of the sun and who had the backing of the mainstream media and who had the backing of capital, it was Tony Blair. Yeah. Why can't every candidate be Tony Blair forever? Why can't we

just keep re-electing this smiling fucking like assassin? Yeah. Well, and this was the other thing that infuriated me about all the kind of like Lib Dem and mad centrist columnist things where they were going like, oh, yeah, good job on, good job on going, we won the argument, Corbin supporters, now that there's five more years of the Tories. And it's like, well, yeah, but first of all, A, we fucking did win the argument. Like it's not our fault. That's why they didn't make your counsel. No one listened to us. And second of all, like that is literally what all of those cunts have been saying about Brexit for three fucking years. They've just been crying their eyes out, going, but we were right. And the dumb

dumps of one and we were right. And no one's listening to us, even though we were right. And then suddenly, just because like someone they don't like is right about something unpopular for a change, they're like, oh, yeah, good job, dumb, dumb. Oh, you're right. Well, no one gives a fuck. It's like, yeah, you're a dick. Well, also, I think in the sort of pure electoral politics of 2019, I think that's about right. But also, I think the idea that the lightning in the bottle, like the very bad lightning in the bottle, but the lightning in the bottle that was Blair and New Labour can be bottled again is ludicrous. Because one of the reasons that we lost basically sort of so many constituencies between North Wales and the Midlands, the Red

Wall, whatever you want to call it, was that a lot of these people have a memory of voting for a Labour Party that continued the process of industrial decline that was set off by Thatcher. So, I mean, the rot wasn't new in 2015 or 16 or 17, 18 or 19. The rot had set in for a long time. And one of the reasons that New Labour was very successful was that there was still lots of state left to privatize or at least introduce internal markets into, if not outwardly privatized. And in fact, I know there are going to be some New Labour people listening to this because they said they would. So, hi, everyone. But honestly, I think it was at best a sticking plaster. And it was a victorious sticking plaster. And there are people who I've talked to who said,

you know what, just the fact that Blair reversed a decade and a half of funding cuts under Thatcher and Major and stuff, that did actually just help a lot of people materially. But it didn't change any of the structural problems that the rot that was input by Thatcher and that began to set in. So, the idea that you can go back to when we won elections by reviving the electoral logic of the 1990s is also patently ludicrous. It's just that tweet that the problems very bad, the causes of the problems, very good. But yeah, I mean, when you think about New Labour not really using its mandate to fix the material conditions or the economic issues in places like in North Wales and in the Midlands and places like that or in the North, and the loss of Scotland post referendum

in terms of there's not being the ability for Labour to win seats in Scotland anymore given the conditions there, it's becoming incredibly difficult for Labour to win. I mean, I don't foresee in our lifetimes there will be a time when Labour wins 418 seats like they did in 1997. I just don't see that happening again. Well, also the other thing, right, is that Tony Blair, when he was running, was in living memory. He was running against someone who in living memory basically technocratically and unnecessarily brought the UK to an enormous amount of humiliation to the European exchange rate mechanism scandal. Like, that's one of the reasons I believe the sun sort of fell in behind Tony Blair because the sun's a nationalist paper. Yeah, I mean, yeah,

if people should read into this, but basically the flash crash in 1992, I believe, caused a recession and it was literally just like it was their failure to attend to an issue that related to the currency exchange mechanisms within the EEC and the United Kingdom. And it's like it was completely avoidable. And in a way there's time for that. They forgot to hit the no-reception right next to the stop Brexit button. There's no one knew what it did back then. The president of Venezuela was missing and he brought the hyperinflation lever. But also the thing too, I think is that, I mean, there's a possibility that you might see a similar thing with some, you know, because I think it's a very British phenomenon to have a problem and no

one pretend to see the problem until the problem is literally like the houses on fire. And I think, I mean, I think it's possible within this parliament, you're going to see something similar with regard to Brexit because, you know, we lost the election and they can do hard Brexit now. So they have to do hard Brexit. They have to do, they're going to bring us out of the EU. They're going to have a transition period. They're going to have to negotiate a free trade agreement. And there are going to be things that are out of, there's no longer a question of like, stop Brexit, Jeremy, or like, you know, have a woofer end of or whatever the fuck. Like, when is the next recession to you again? Yeah, exactly. There's likely going to be a recession,

you know, in the coming years, given just A, historical patterns and B, some of the indicators with investment. I think there has been a lot of pent up investment that hasn't taken place in the UK because of the uncertainty. And so you are going to see some of that. But like, I don't think that like business capex, Keynesianism is going to make up for a recession, the kind of recession that's coming, especially in place with low wages, low wage growth and low productivity, like the UK, especially because most of the investment that's happening now is just different rideshare companies trying to out subsidize one another in a major, in various scams. At this point, it's not like someone's going to invest in some kind of, I don't know,

material condition. They're not going to invest in something material. They're not going to invest in something that gives anyone a steady job, because the only profitable investments are monopolies that you can try to build by undercutting either workers rights or regulations. That's not wholly true. There is one material thing we still produce. We still produce weapons. So we're going to export a lot of missiles. Here's the thing. Boris Johnson, one of the plans is to fold DFID into the foreign and Commonwealth office. So essentially, what we're going to start, what we're probably going to do is what like do like Sally May, but for buying like awful fighter jets.

Incredible. You'll have to see it. What I've heard is they're going to put all of the civil service into like a van that circuits the city. And what it actually does is it makes the policy as it's taken. So it's going to be implemented. Efficiency is going to be spearheaded by Matt Hancock. Oh, one last thing I want to talk about about the blue labor thing. Just to remind you all that it's complete and total horseshit that social justice and working class interests are not commensurable. This, Nate, you brought this up to me. Dennis Skinner is unfortunately lost his seat in Bolsover. After 49 years of parliament and he was a minor before he was a minor who stood fully and uncompromisingly for gay rights in the 80s.

And he is a working class hero and he's someone who was beloved by his constituents and he didn't have to resort to bigotry in order to get it. You always have to remember that bigotry is always the second prize when you're desperate and politicians are offering you something. But I think one of the things we learned, and we'll get to this later, is that it's hard to convince people to give up bigotry for uncertain prosperity when they already have bigotry. And aside from everything else, just on a practical level, the Tories are the racism experts. They are the absolute best racists. And given the choice, if you are a racist and you are offered the choice to vote for a racist or a light racist, you just vote for the racist and

you just vote Tory. You don't vote for the Labour MP who is aping the Tories because otherwise Ed Miliband would still fucking be Prime Minister. Yeah, I also remember this is now kind of a deep cut. But when Trump won the election, I remember a few months later, they had a guest on Chapa, I can't remember who it was now, who was talking about why it is that working class people in the South vote for Trump when it's just manifestly against their interests. And he was like, well, the Democrats aren't doing anything for those people either. But at least with Trump, they get to own the Libs. And that is like a consolation prize. Whereas with the Democrats, they just get nothing. They don't get to own the Libs and they don't get anything. So now that's

like a misconception, because Labour would do a lot for them, but the previous incarnation didn't. And that reputation has started. And also, even today, the local level, Labour Council's corporalism has not percolated down. And so you end up with a lot of these sort of northern heartlands where the Labour Council is, I don't know, some guy who murdered somebody in his club in the 70s and got away with it. Hello, my name is Paul Francis Ingridsman, but you can call me PFI. Yeah, it's literally like various spivs and gangsters. Gangsters. Labour Councils in the North are a source of the legitimate businessman's social club, right? But they're all buddies, see, Hansie. Yeah, like you were saying earlier,

Nate, yeah, they're just Labour Councils in the North, they're all just Mayor Quimby. Jamie Corbyn, he's working for the old firm. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's one of those issues also where, I mean, like in those places, Labour's been in power locally forever. And so, you know, that's what people associate with local government is the Labour Party. Here's the thing, you know, the two local authorities that were in pretty leave areas that stayed Labour, Preston and Plymouth. Now, I will say this much about Preston. Preston has a university, it's also got a significant non-white population, but that does, it's certainly a leave area, and like there are other places that didn't return their Labour MPs. But I think Preston, Preston's got, because of its university,

has a spike, if you look at its census, in people under 30, that's not normal for other constituencies in that area. And that population voted overwhelmingly for Labour, not just because they're students. Across the country, even people who aren't students, people in that age demographic voted like, I think 60% for Labour, 65% for Labour. Also, Plymouth has like heavily co-op, like Preston has the Preston model, and Plymouth also has heavily co-operatized industry. So these are two places with pretty good Labour councils that are actually concerned with like building the power and improving the living standards of workers as much as they can, where I think like, a manifesto of the kind that we put forward probably did cut through a bit more,

because you don't have to take the, you're not asking the voter to take the leap into socialism with you, they've already sort of been brought onto it a little bit locally. And I mean, this sort of goes the other way too, is that if you want to do electoralism in the wake of this, and you want to triage the worst of what's going to come down from Westminster, the best thing you can do is to become involved in local politics, because almost every councillor stands pretty much unopposed within their own party. You can like genuinely build something from the ground up that's quite powerful if you have the mind to. Also the money, because councillors don't get paid shit to be honest with you.

Corbynism was basically an attempt to try and engage in a socialist transformation of Britain from the top down. And right now, we have five years before we can try that again. What we have to do now is understand about building it from the ground up. Millicent again, which... Well, it's going to be councils doing stuff like Preston, but it's also going to be certain things that Alex Sobel is proposing, like turning... No, to be fair, John Duncan actually proposed this, and Alex Sobel jumped on it. But I'm going to say something too, though, that I think is really important to bear in mind is that you're going to see a lot of comparisons

to Millicent. And so for US listeners and people who aren't aware of this, and when Jim Callahan lost in 1979, again our election to Thatcher, at that time the left was, if not ascendant, was very powerful because of the trade union movement. And there had just been the winner of this content, which in the view of historians probably lost Callahan the election because he could have called an election in the autumn before. They called it for the May of the next year, and Thatcher won after an entire really, really long cold winter of intense strike action across the country. So the labor left, the unionized left was really active in those days. And there was a lot of what you would describe as Trotskyite or far left entryism into the

labor party in local councils, et cetera. Back in the days when the local council had a lot more authority than they do now. And after their labor lost in 83, they had more seats than we have now, but Thatcher had a larger majority than Johnson has now. But it was a complete blowout and basically the left, that was sort of the discrediting of the British left in 1983. But you've got to realize something. I think you're going to see a lot of comparisons to Millicent when people talk about what's going to happen next, because obviously there's going to be a desire to purge the left or like nominally they're going to make motions as though they can try to do that. And they're going to use the justification of,

you know, Michael Foote fucked it in 1983. And so, you know, Neil Kinnock had to purge the left. But if you look at the manifesto for the labor party in 1983, it is far, far more radical than anything Corbyn proposed. Corbyn proposed in 2017-2019 policies and a sort of view of the economics of the country more in line, probably directly in line with what was proposed by the SDP LP, which was the spoiler party, the centrist-ish spoiler party that wound up contributing to labor's loss in 83, 87, 92, the progenitors of the liberal Democrats. Like what labor was proposing in 83 was like unilateral nuclear disarmament and unilateral withdrawal from the European economic community. The SDP LP was just social democracy. And I

think the thing about it is the Overton window has shifted so much, British politics has shifted so much that like what Corbyn was proposing, yes, it's a transition towards socialism, but like if you're defining socialism as Finland, to be fair, we call it socialism because it's in a tradition of radicalism, but honestly, it wasn't that radical economically. Yeah, but that doesn't matter. No, but what I'm trying to say though. When tankies say that Corbyn is a liberal, they're not wrong. He's a social Democrat. Exactly. But the point I'm trying to make here is that people are going to say they're going to

be a lot of comparisons to 1983 and they're going to try to like use the sort of weight of history to discredit Corbynism. But like the fact of the matter is what the economic policies proposed were not that far left in the tradition of leftism in Britain, electoral leftism in Britain. And like there's no reason you should accept that framing that the same thing that happened after 1983 has to happen again. Anywhere in Northern Europe, it's completely banal convention. Like it's only Britain where we have the insane fucking like, oh no, any kind of redistribution is mad Stalinism. One thing I will say about Millicent is that like, yes, a lot of it was crank stuff.

But if you go back and look at newspapers, a lot of the scare stories about like Millicent councils were just things like, oh, they're teaching your children about gay rights. And that's exactly the sort of like, that's how it was pitched. Damn, Helen Lewis really has had a long career. So like, honestly, like don't accept the framing, but know it's coming and they're going to try to use the justification because they don't, a lot of these people, like there are some people like you'd call labor moderates, like who actually do seem to be reaching out right out to and trying to understand the left.

But then there's also people who on election night, the like agro-centrist pissed diamonds who were aggressively sharing Neokinux 1983 conference speech about like, let this never happen again, basically saying that we have to purge the left because that's what they want to do. Good luck with that. Did you see David from like posted a bunch of just like Tony Blair memorabilia? Oh yeah, like photos of him in front of number 10, like miss this guy. But so I also, before we carry on, I just, I do want to go back to that thing. Alex Sobel stroke, like John Duncan said that Alex Sobel also saying John Duncan, Alex Sobel

hive mind. Yeah, John Duncan, Alex Sobel hive mind. People be saying it, which is essentially that like, and I don't know how convinced I am by this, which is that look, we need to start reach it, the labor party needs to start reaching into people's lives and improving them, or at least offering people to improve people's lives. Now, like make every labor party, local labor party office, also a like versions of the Citizens Advice Bureau, help people organize tenants unions, like get all of this stuff done. And I think that on the one hand, that's a very good, it's a very good idea to like to do that and to show, and again, kind of like the Preston model, you have to show people that there is a

possibility of life outside of contractualized market relationships. But on the other hand, like that seems like it would take a completely enormous amount of organizing and resources on the part of a party where a lot of the people are in it, because they have neither time nor resources. Also something I point out too is from speaking with people, and I want to expand this conversation by interviewing some of these people on the show, people who are involved in labor's community organizing units and things along those lines, is that as I understand it from conversations I've had, one challenge you will face, and I don't think that this is a bad idea, but I do think that it's something to bear in mind, is that if it's the labor food bank, if it's the

labor childcare crash or something like that, if it's the labor whatever service, a lot of people will be scared away by that because they see there's there's reticence, not because labor is toxic, but because explicitly politically affiliated stuff is going to be toxic. And so you have to understand that like there's going to building community trust is going to take a really long time. You'll get a lot of like people in the Observer writing about how it's chavismo, more like her mass of distributes food, so you know, shit like that. Yeah, our friends in her mass. And I guess the best thing you can do in that regard is that I think that just understand, I'm not going to try to give like prescriptions here because I don't know

any more than the average person, but I would just say I think that like understand there's going to be a significant amount of weariness. Well, the thing is like British people don't like politics. They think it's icky like this is like this is like a classic thing like I've seen that like with my like talking to my own mom about this election like like if you if you now like elucidate her any of the issues that's being caused by the Tories like you know like people not having to go to food banks or like disabled people having to like go and do like ridiculous manual labor jobs because they're being found fit for work or whatever the fuck it is like she'll be like yeah that's really bad we should do something about that but you won't

elucidate her to the point of being like god we've got to do something about the Tories because that's politics which is icky whereas like helping people is good but like helping people isn't politics and I think that's that's a lot of people in Britain that really summarized a lot of people like they don't want these things but they're like they're unable to formulate it into like a political mindset to them that's just like a problem. What I was going to say was that so there was like quite an amazing tweet the other day when I think like someone from the Sunday Times she and the Sunday Times is a paper but obviously like back Brexit and it backed well I didn't know if it backed Brexit but it definitely backed Boris Johnson. It's a right wing paper. It's a

right wing paper and one of their kind of leader writers who was also I believe like I don't think that she was Tory but she was definitely like very like anti-Corbin for like you know for kind of the same the reasons that we've kind of gone over she puts out this tweet basically saying that like you know the Sunday Times appeal would be to kind of help homeless people to help homeless children and it was just like remarkable because it was just kind of like and I at the same time I just also remember that Ian Dale who is a commentator at the BBC also like anti-Corbin I think kind of more sympathetic to the Tories. He decided that like his LBC charity like Christmas charity bit would be to spend a week living or spend like a night living as a homeless person.

Oh yeah I saw this. And then when people were kind of donkey on him basically saying that like you know number one this is like fucking shit but also like if you really want to do something with homelessness like you have a government that is actually like has a credible plan to like well has like a party that has a credible plan of like actually reducing homelessness and actually like trying to reduce poverty by like building more houses something that he just wouldn't acknowledge like he actually just like block people who would say that because like God forbid you criticize him when like he does his kind of little bit because really what he wanted was just like

he really just wanted like gratification from his media friends like you could see that the only people he was engaging with were like fucking BBC Five commentators right? It's basically like they want they want a sort of Dickensian concept of like a single charitable person is going to solve this problem as opposed to like a problem that the state caused in the state. We just can't envision like oh you can actually have like a national program but like everyone can pay into and that we can like you know we don't we... This was always the goal. This was always the goal of privatization and balkanization of all of these services was to make people forget what a government program

looks like and what it can actually do. Great to serverization. The other thing is right like if you if you if if we solve that there's a fundamental belief I think at the core of a lot of British like middle-class people a lot of liberals as well which is that if we solve homelessness as a problem collectively through policy then I don't get to help the homeless. I have been robbed of my opportunity to spend one night outside to like raise you know 20 pounds. If you have a class analysis it is inimical to a kind of a vice and virtue one and these people love their virtue. So yeah also there's two things I'd say about this which is first of all fun fact about Ian

Dale at the Edinburgh Fringe this year he famously hosted a series of panel shows one of which was I mean they were all cursed but one of which was Alistair Campbell's daughter Grace Campbell and Fat Maud friend of the show. So I feel like we get exactly what we expect from Ian Dale and the second thing is I think this also just ties in perfectly to that whole thing that happened with Nish Kumar during the election where he was doing comedy at some charity thing for like the homeless or the poor some some sort of like relevant to austerity charity event and he made some political joke about the Tories being shit and people were like booing him and throwing bread at him because like oh we want to help the poor or the homeless or whatever it is with our like

big fancy charity dinner but we don't want to actually do anything that would actually help. If I were a political comedian I would simply not accept the invitation to perform at Gammons for Peace. Yeah it's also like having a dinner you can like have fun and hang out with your friends and maybe like get a little bit drunk whereas like if you just pay your taxes then that's sort of boring. I mean legitimately it is the tweet about I'm socially liberal, officially conservative, the problems are bad but the causes are very good. Yeah so like and then also this week one of the fucking idiot right when people I can't remember it was now tweeting about like how dare they mock the Tories on Have I Got News For You famously radical show Have I Got News For You because

they're elected how I've touched these people mocking the elected government like A that's their job and then fucking Alex Keely with an excellent tweet was like comedy is about agreeing with the government and the more you agree with the government the more comedy is. This is the whole shtick, this is why Brendan O'Neill, Brendan O'Neill's victim shtick still works in this government even though he politically has literally everything he wants because the one thing that you can't elect is being widely liked and respected by like and Sandra giving you the kids back like yeah. There are a couple of more things I'd like to get through here because I've got a few more thoughts. Columns for justice. Oh no! I think there are a couple of other other thoughts I've had

that I'd like to share as well. I think that first past the post definitely fucked us over but not in the way that most people are saying it did which is that the Tories get more seats for fewer votes. I actually think that first past the post fucked us in 2010 because we should have been Pesachified. We should like the Labor Party as it was full of the baggage that it had, full of the baggage of the continued austerity and institutional rot of new labor, but also full of the baggage of like you know like 60-year-old women knitting an Israel did 9-11 T-cozy like we need like that baggage on those two sides. George Galloway's official T-cozy. Like think about this right like we one of the reasons that Jeremy Corbyn had to be leader

despite like the fact that there were a lot of there were a lot of problems like with him that we did our best to solve and we did our best to combat yeah like one of the reasons that he was leader was because you know he's someone who was a he was a he was a socialist from a different era and we were trying to marry the the younger sort a younger kind of a more energetic say less and a socialism with a less checkered path sure this is the problem right with with with Corbynism as a political project now is that it's the pool of socialist labor MPs and especially what credible ones with like leadership aspirations is not that deep and now they're like almost all tainted by association and also like for viewers in Scotland this process is vastly accelerated

because now there is one Scottish labor MP who is Ian Murray who is a gigantic centrist dickhead and it's yeah no it's it's a spent force politically in Scotland yeah so like the only credible thing all the people who were popular media polished and like savvy who sort of who came up sort of in the 90s and 2000s and so on who had like professionalized operations and when I say operations I mean just like like like just able to like respond to press releases quickly you had to be a Blair right because that was the only game in town so they they were all they were all completely out of the question because like we want a socialist government and the only credible socialist MPs were like hopeless it turns out many of them were hopelessly naive not all of them

like I don't think I don't think Dennis Skinner was naive I don't think this is the thing that they weren't they weren't prime ministerial like when people said that they couldn't see Corbyn as prime minister it wasn't just the smears right he his his natural niche is as the backbench MP who is on the right side of history about everything who takes on every lost cause and always gets to say I told you so that doesn't marry up very well to a sort of broad base electoral politics and I think that's a really good point saying that like I think naive is a good way of putting it because I think people have tried to paint it as malicious and I think I'm very ready to acknowledge Corbyn's shortcomings but I mean I talked about this a bit in the run-up to the election where

like I was really really skeptical about Corbyn when he was elected leader of the Labour Party I was incredibly skeptical about it because yeah I didn't think he was electable and that's kind of ended up being borne out and like there were a lot of other things I was skeptical about but actually over the period of time of just being like so involved in constantly talking about politics like you kind of see this guy who like actually believes in the shit that he says and that's kind of his weakness in a way like so that's why people want to support him because like this guy like yeah he's not going to be like a fucking like lightning statesman like Obama or someone right he's not going to make great speeches or whatever but like you get that guy like on TV being interviewed

about fucking social justice and you can tell that he cares about that shit and he wants to make it happen and like that kind of should be enough and it isn't enough and fine we need to do something about that but like it's so ridiculous all these people like just kind of lauding over how could you support this guy and it's like he's demonstrably a nice guy he's been on the right side of these debates he believes in this stuff he like spends all of his free time trying to make his constituents lives better like how can you just like shit on him so much just because he isn't fucking a great orator like the thing right is that because he had that focus on foreign policy and because he was doing that for so many decades British people don't like to admit that

we're the bad guys internationally but we absolutely fucking are and the problem is that if you try to go into British foreign politics with a genuinely principled stance you will end up agreeing with a lot of people who we are killing and so you can yeah you can be like he's he's the Hamas guy he's the IRA guy and it sticks I think yeah and I said Alice is like definitely right and I was actually going to make that point but I also think that like because Jeremy Corbyn had like a very long history with like you know groups like stop the war and like the kind of hierarchical process and stuff and I think we underestimate just like how many kind of media people like were not on that's like we're still kind of like very sympathetic to the whole idea

that oh you know bureaucracy was like a disaster but it was just a mistake like anyone could have made that mistake um like John Rental kind of is like at the very extreme end of those things and like you know so we make fun of him because of that but you know I'm I'm always very surprised with like mainstream media colleagues who are kind of willing to sort of give those things things a pass almost as if they can't really explain it but then when they're kind of confronted with like Corbyn who has this like very different view of what foreign policy is and he also has like a very deep like understanding and knowledge of like the kind of like the kind of wars against socialism in the 20th century like these are things that a lot of kind of media class people

like just don't know what they have like a very simplistic kind of stance on and the thing about like Boris Johnson is that like Boris Johnson almost like represents the opposite about he wrote like this kind of forming but like massively inaccurate book about Winston Churchill probably like while he was doing his like fucking stupid novel um you know but like people like you know media people kind of see that and they're just like oh he has like such reverence for this country he has such reverence for you know the great statesman of this country um never mind the fact for like really what it is is this like big you know Churchill and like Johnson come from like are cut from the same type of class right this is very much still like about reckoning like

with you know Johnson is like a buffoon but he also for like lots of media people for lots of think tank people he also like is recognizable in like what class position he's in and he he genuflects to the right things like showing up drunk to the cenotaph is a less a less grievous offense right than than doing it while being a socialist or having said yeah anything nice about the IRA or anything like that and like and also showing up drunk to the cenotaph just makes you seem like a member of the royal family like when are they not drunk there was one quote unquote woke policy in the manifesto that i think really did threaten if not actual voters then i guess media people and that was in the education section talking about including some of the

not great things that the british empire did uh that and that was i i feel like that was just almost religiously unacceptable to a lot of commentators it's also funny because i remember with all the friends of the ira thing that people are always smearing him about and that i think it cut through really badly i remember watching an interview with him where he was questioned on that and his response was and i'm almost almost rebate him quoting it because i was struck by it he said i was a politician during the time when the troubles were still active the british government was trying to pursue a military solution in northern ireland and we knew that that was not going to work i wanted peace in northern ireland i knew that we needed to engage with the people who you

know were seeking political representation but at the time we're doing that by by combative means and i feel feel like in the long run that was borne out by the facts that we you know went those same people that we were speaking to and engaging with went on to be people who helped broker peace in northern ireland and that and it's like what's wrong with that show is one right basically there is one thing that's wrong with that and that's the saddest part of this is that uh the reason why he talks to the ira and he talks to her mass and that is because as as as you said he you have to give them an incentive to commit to dialogue and a peace process because do you have to give them some hope that that's going to work and the defeat that

we've just been handed and the election of someone like borris johnson would only seem to indicate that no in fact it doesn't because the good friday agreement is dead so why even have bothered and now northern ireland has more pro reunification or at least uh nationalist nationalist mps than ever before absolutely so and like i i hope i hope very deeply that the intervening decades has softened sectarianism in northern ireland to the point where if what i think is going to happen does happen it doesn't reignite the troubles you don't see loyalist activity turning into paramilitary activity well the thing is you're away with guarantee whether it does or not do you really have any faith that pretty patelle or whoever

takes her place is not going to redeploy troops in northern ireland none whatsoever i absolutely believe that pretty and that's i mean here's the thing right like ireland has advanced as a country and northern ireland has stayed quite stagnant and i don't know if there's going to be as much incentive for the the north to stay as part of the union and i think the really weird thing about it is is that just as you know young tories and people in borris johnson's team are the kind of folks who write fuck the nhs on their t-shirts at parties i think there are people who will say fuck the good friday agreement they don't care and i honestly don't believe the thing is pretty patelle is a fucking ghoul but i don't believe that they are committed to anything besides power

and if that means abandoning the loyalists in northern ireland they'll do they've already done it they did it to the d up they'll do it again and absolutely don't lost a seat so low yeah well it's because like that they're we talk about right like one of the reasons why sort of england and the us and england specifically in the us have consistently sort of been the villains of the last sort of century i mean it's because you know english nationalism in particular is just one of the most violent pernicious sort of forces in in the world today and in history absolutely well we generally like in terms of historical impact have made her mass look like a fucking crash there's no getting away from that um no and you have to like the the cognitive

dissonance between those two things between the we did this like the t-shirt on on that power protesting about war crimes investigations that said bloody sunday no apology no surrender uh which i may you summarized once as war crimes i did them and i was right to um you have this cognitive dissonance between yeah between yes we did it and it was good and we do it again and none of this ever happened when we're quite nice and progressive now actually and you can't as a bystep mix those two together well you can though you can because my my point is that it is in an inherent contradiction no you can't mix them together for long but like that's what cameranism was basically like that's what that's the whole point of like libertarianism was all of the

bad stuff really not to be too calm a book club but the thing i'm trying to articulate here is a dialectic and you know what that is and you don't have to yeah that's dialectics baby whereas the good t-shirt is of course bloody sunday perfectly encapsulates the frustration of a sunday um right so i there's uh look i want to get into another another point and this is one that was raised to me by a friend of the show phoebe roy and i think it's basically accurate with which was how we should think about this and she said to me it's a leftist impulse and tendency to look inwards and waste a lot of time on internecine squabbling and maybe it's more useful to see this as a victory for the right in a global context than a failure of the left in the local context

because focusing on failure of the left locally rather than success for the right globally only leads to triangulation on issues of social justice economic justice and so on because it locates the problem in the wrong place right so it says like oh the the left there is if there's a global resurgence of the right and you're just imagining that the left couldn't persuade voters because the voters are just to damn racist or whatever to damn racist some racist then what you've essentially done is you have committed to the idea that the wave of right wing of right wing populism sweeping the world is more or less like exogenous like there's not much you can do about it there's not much you can and it's also right naturally are yeah that it's right and it's the

way people are you don't have to accept that premise uh and the fact that we did get owned and everybody saw us got owned uh does does not necessarily mean that uh everybody in fucking uh lee or wherever else is just an incipient fascist waiting to happen yeah but we're actually laughing so it's fine that's true we are yeah we're we're not like it's the thing i mean today i did that fucking tweet where i was like oh i'm excited for the new leader of the labor labor party just to be like a big flat cap on a policy platform of like you know bring back smoking in pubs and dog racing and even then i still had just like people were applying to me being like what's wrong with dog racing and i'm like for fuck's sake nothing nothing just like i

mean maybe there is something wrong with dog racing i'm not okay yeah but like that's not already my point is it like my point is just how dumb that is an idea this this labor leadership thing has been a tonic to me though right because i i feel like we all had a couple of days where we were depressed and we were angry because we got owned and then thankfully along come our old antagonists the labor right to pull us up out of this gutter by being like who know well actually what if you did some market-based racism so that we can get the energy to say no fuck off that's a stupid idea and like it is a motivating factor to remain involved in the labor party if only if only to keep someone like fucking jess phillips out of the top table oh good god jess phillips like

what i will say about jess phillips is all of the worst people i know love jess phillips like all of the people i know who know nothing about politics and just have like completely venal interests of the kind that are like oh i don't care really about justice for anyone but like i just want politics to be nice again like those people all fucking love jess phillips and that motivates me so much to keep jess phillips out of office i'm so excited for her to launch her bid for the leadership and then get owned because even aside from the membership which i hope stays the way that it is and is comprised largely of people who are not carbon loyalists because there's there shouldn't really be such a thing but people who are at the very least are progressives

whether that whether that remains the case or not the fact is that almost all of progress and like uh the the the labor rights jess phillips is uh supposed colleagues fucking hate her she's insufferable personally so i'm looking forward to that um just yeah that's gonna be some shard and friday i would say like the the politics of this of the jess phillips school the jess phillips school of politics is basically just the jess phillips free school of politics jess phillips academy um is basically just it what it does is it tries to do a tiny little bit of social justice maybe mostly rhetorical while making compromises on everything so that things can stay basically easy right like but like um getting your like if you if you're going and getting your nails done

cheaply by a trafficked vietnamese woman or living with the confidence that you can say whatever slurs you want because you know blue they have blue labor types like think they're inherently working class or like centrists don't really want to be robust in issues of social justice you know that that that politics is sort of nice from a status quo perspective because no one has to do much change it's like people have to it's like michael bennett when he ran for president saying if i'm elected you'll never have to think about me again yeah it's it's the politics it's politics that's very that's true he did do that but it's politics it's a political outcome it's very pleasant but oh it's only ever the the bottom of the payoff matrix right because even if these

things are are are true people are doing them because they like them that's still silly because if people are doing these structurally harmful things to make themselves feel better or because it's easy in the short term have you considered that that doesn't matter because what if the prime minister was nice and she was your friend unless you're trans but but that's the thing like that's then we must never stop trying to solve these problems and forcing people to seek solace in these things that are causing the problems to be worse and this is because outside of its transparently moral dimensions socialism is about ultimately optimizing the long-term payoff matrix it's about making things better by actually posters yeah no but this is this is for the audience

i'm just saying to a very complex pill on the one hand our goal is the happiness of all mankind and on the other uh we're going to optimize the payoff matrix that's why i said alice that's why outside of its transparently moral dimensions it's about make it's about removing these short-term comforts that make the problem worse like the the ways that if i'm going to keep owning you with revolutionary slogans then like what about bread and land that's the same deal and roses yeah and roses but i think ultimately ultimately right there are going to be a lot of obscurationist charlatans that are going to be telling us for the next however many months that all of these problems are natural and not worth solving or in the case of blue labor

good yeah we've we've had all of these antagonists these new antagonists introduced by the writers of britain season 27 so now i have to know who fucking matthew goodwin is uh oh man you love to say i'm so excited for us to get to know the new crop of torey hampers yeah we this is trash future season two like i feel like if we put a season break anywhere it's here and we like slightly tweak the theme song something like that so basically what we were saying is like trash future is like going to be prison break because like isn't this like the thing a prison break like the first season like it was about them breaking out of the prison but like at some point like they had this plan that was fully in place and everything was good and then like one thing

fucked it up so then they kind of decided and then they decided okay well we're just gonna go like it's fully insane now it's it's it's dumber than prison break it's lost right like the plot twist to just spinning out and they're getting dumber and dumber and dumber you're both wrong you're both wrong it's season five of bones when they realize that they can't just keep doing the same procedural shit over and over again and so bones has to find a body that's wait is this a half chicken man made by the department of defense and that's like there's no bones in it that's a and that's serious possibility that's like entertaining for the characters for like for like 20 minutes of the show like that that's where we are now we're in season five of bone so we're just gonna try to do

the best we can with that I just I just I just I just wanted to add on the note because that that just that slogan of if I'm elected you'll never have to think of me again I think that is such a good yeah but then but then yeah like what are they doing why don't they want us to think of them but they also just made me think of this anecdote that a Russian friend of mine who's a comedian woman once told me that she was at a party and a guy was hitting on her and he was like hey do you want to have sex and she was like no and he was like hey listen like what if he's like if I just put it in halfway and then if you don't like it I'll take it straight back out again I feel like it's the political equivalent of that can I just slightly downer here on this

note can I just say so I think it bears mention on our parts that there were definitely some things that we got wrong or some things that like Riley and I had this conversation before we started the show that things that were like nagging doubts and suspicions about the election specifically but also some of like the the project itself with regards to like how things were going and decisions made and I I don't think that you know a team of more or less irony podcasters who cover British politics is responsible but I do think that there are some things where we need to consider like what it was what were our assumptions and what what did we like none of us thought it was going to be this bad right exactly I thought when the second MRP came out that a

worst-case scenario was they still had a Tory majority and that I never thought it would be this bad I thought Lib coalition for sure so it shows what I know but yeah I legitimately thought that too Alice I thought that we were either going to have a hung parliament and the Lib Dems would go into coalition or that they would have a small Tory majority and they'd be able to still push through their deal I think the thing about it is here is that because it's so bad because so many things went wrong there's a large question you know of like you know do we need to reassess our preconceived notions and I guess to me the thing that comes out is I was never wedded to the idea that Jeremy Corbyn was the savior I was wedded to the idea that the politics

he represented were the politics that aligned closest with my beliefs and that I wanted to see someone who as a politician that I trusted to not waffle or fucking hedge on things that mattered and I think the problem that we have is that there's now a question of okay but they got spooked and decided to fuck you and now you have to defend not just you can't really bring back Corbyn or Corbynism but what you need someone who is unfuckable but you can't you can't that's quite a lot of people and what they want to do is to use this defeat to discredit all of everything that it represented not just the man not just the politician not just the team not just the strategy but literally the entirety of questioning you know there's no alternative we have to go back

to the brains experts that brought us Ed Miliband with the 30% vote share and exactly and the thing about it is obviously the vote share was higher than Miliband it was higher than than Blair in certain elections but first past the post and the dynamics on the ground fucked us but I think the biggest thing I want to say here is that we have been told that people are trying to tell us that all we can go back to now is managed decline yeah and that's it there's no such things any kind of hopeful or transformative or even like regenerative politics all we can hope for is managed decline with a little racism but not too much racism because like just just on a personal level the labor right and center I guess their contempt is such that because they

believe that they are the the owners of this party right one of the things they will never ever ever forgive Corbyn and that whole project for is introducing 100,000 new members into the party that that's a bad thing more than that I think they introduced like 300,000 either way they want you out is the thing yeah and the thing about it is that I really want to point out is that I think you can have like something that bridges a little bit of the soft left to hard left gap that will work electorally but I want to put this out there just FYI because you will see this stuff circulated around there are two places where left ish or like pretty towards the left even for their respective society governments have done quite well electorally and

you know are being touted as these massive success stories or at least massive electoral success stories they are Denmark and New Zealand now I'm leaving out Portugal because I think Portugal is a great example of what I would like us to do but Denmark and New Zealand have left governments that are like left populist governments that are being Denmark New Zealand both are being incredibly cruel towards migrants and refugees and immigrants and that's the thing that like that electorally just into Arden is is it very warm and wonderful and welcoming politician but her party's platform is to reduce immigration to New Zealand and to not accept refugees and to generally be hostile to immigrants Denmark is even worse they're doing

they take your jewelry away from you up to a certain value if you try to seek asylum but also they make you sit through like a patronizing Carlsberg advert so I guess the thing I want to try to say is that one and Riley you brought this up earlier is that people are going to propose blue labor basically socialist policy with like nationalist chauvinism and I think we have to fight against that because that's there's gonna there already seem to be people who are conceding to it people that you know that we respect or at least are like you know commingled with and it politically and it sucks yeah we got through the forced failure boss fight and now we have a new objective gamers which is absolutely keep these people out

of any position of power in the labor party and like any any left-wing platform like fundamentally has to be based on principle and like there's no point being on the left if you're gonna like compromise on the things you fundamentally believe in like you can compromise a bit around the edge for electability I think that I don't I think there's many people who aren't tankies who would argue with that that like you know you can form a sort of like slightly soft or whatever the dsa candidate for congress in texas today who tweeted many people are getting mad at me for saying that I wish Barack Obama got cancer well here's why I'm right and I'm like okay that dude that is epic but also you're running for congress and we can all read this like yeah like the thing

we have to not do is is we have to not post cringe we have to not post like that not lose subscriber do not post cringe do not lose subscriber um and you'll only subscribe to your private snap yeah so you know yeah and and that means that we are going to have to think about what what practicality means without compromising those principles because Nate what you said earlier is you don't you don't want to bring up portugal because they're an example of what went well we don't know how that government is going to go and if the left in portugal gets rat fucked by its soft left coalition partner then obviously that's not going to be a viable choice for us but if they don't get rat fucked then we might need to find a way to work with the not the center or the right but just the

soft left yeah the squishers and see yeah this the soft left squishes the previagra left and just see it and see if like what we can do with them without compromising any core principles yeah absolutely and i mean one thing i will say is for the day after the election i was really i was on the fence about the labor party especially still being in scotland where it just got absolutely obliterated i was still thinking well you know maybe it's a spent force electoralism aside um and i again i'm so glad the labor right for giving me a reason not to believe that because now i just have this thing we know you have to you have to stay in fight because i absolutely have a like a congenital inability to let these fucking dickheads win anything ever

also i'm just going to say this too if your hate isn't pure just get on twitter there is a video where jess philips on election night didn't realize the camera was rolling in live and she's like prancing about and celebrating because labor lost and then as soon as they're like oh we're rolling we're live she goes to like you know stony face stella creasy stella creasy was in the pub and her her and her team were cheering every labor loss as it came on uh if there is one silver lining to this election it's that it has cleared out a lot of parliamentary labor party deadwood um i feel bad though because people like laura piccata denison lost their seats and this good thing fiza shaheen so and so on there's like plenty of good people who deserve to be

reelected and want but there are also plenty of people who are very happy to be put out of a job and you know i i i think one of the few uh benefits to us getting owned is that we have obliged them stella creasy declared fit for work i think i think it's also probably worth noticing like even though this feels really really shit and like being on twitter like you will kind of constantly be reminded if that like you you know that we lost and that like this was and you also have people who like oh we warned you right from the beginning that like corbin wasn't gonna like win it for you even though like in 2017 they were like eating their own words or like at least being very very quiet yeah and who else this is the thing about them not having a deep pool right

who else was gonna do it um it would it be better that we were still doing nine like if we if we were in government and we were doing 90 percent of the same things that boris is doing with owens smith as prime minister right so this so this was my point because i think that like when this all happened like the initial post morson from like the obvious people were kind of like oh this was like downs jeremy corbin and it kind of works on this premise that like if owens smith or like david milliband like had his like radical like as you know um uh radical like uh manifesto as we did then it'll be fine because what people actually didn't like was like corbin the man and like obviously that's bullshit because again we go back to just like well okay number one why didn't

because like if you think about what happened in the election like joe swinson was really the kind of like prime ministerial candidate right like she was like she was a technocrat she dressed well she kind of sounded the part like all the kind of stock lines were done she was the parliamentary candidate and lost and was like one of the you know possibly the only leaders that have lost her seat in recent times um they did abysmally boris like to kind of say that boris johnson is kind of prime ministerial is like really a joke and it's you know a more accurate way of putting it is that no he's like cut from a class that you're like somewhat familiar with because it reminds you of like you're kind of you know you're you're you're uh you're somewhat like racist

grandfather absolutely absolutely like personality aside from the broad strokes like that doesn't matter then what they what they kind of evolved to was the idea you know so when they were trying to talk about like where labor goes next what we're actually saying is that we you know there's a lot of kind of stuff that's going around saying I mean you're making fun of corbin and diana but for saying that you know the policies were really popular but like the fact is is that like it's true like the conversations that we are having the conversations that like say you know james bloodworth like wrote an entire book on but is now sort of saying the platform is uh like unpopular is you know without corbin we wouldn't be talking like a lot of you know so much about

the game economy we wouldn't be talking about like you know rental rental economies and like vulture landlords you wouldn't be talking about like the influence of like capsule so much of like the conservative agenda even kind of making the even making advances on you know we're going to invest more in stuff now whether that like manifests or not it's a different question but the fact that like you know corbin was the one who put him in that position so the idea is that even if like corbin is gone you know and even if like corbinism is kind of you know just kind of um you know in the background now but doesn't negate the fact that like you know we did with like the arguments are still there like the arguments don't go away we still have an economy where like

you know are you know the levels of employment are largely boosted by people on like shitty freelance contracts um or like that no one can like you know no one except the super rich can kind of like afford to live even in you know a like moderate city right those things are still there and i just don't see like how conservatives who have been so dependent on like if you're you know a crewing of wealth i don't know if any of you select the lord ashcroft poll but it basically showed that like the people who really want it for the tories were people who were over 65 and they were mostly men i.e. people who like had accrued wealth who had accrued property over time and that was like the premise of like factorism right the idea that if you created like a nation of

like homeowners if you created like created a nation of landowners then you would have this like solid base of tory support for a long time um that's fundamentally changed and now like the kind of tory strategy seems to be that they want to like retain working class votes and i sort of wonder this like how how that's going to happen like there's a part of me that kind of wonders that if this was a brexit election then a lot of these kind of red wall places that they won were really like one offs but whatever kind of form that labor now takes like you know we have this period of time in which to kind of set those roots again but also to kind of really take the fight to a party but like at its core is not going to help these people out right at its core

the one other thing that i wanted like that i would point out about personality is that a lot of the the drive from the center and the right it for someone elective or is backwards right like it as far as this this works uh it's it goes from the membership up we weren't following Jeremy Corbyn all of us were piloting him like an Eva right and we were hoping to pilot him to Downing Street that has obviously not worked so now we need a new thing but like it's it's not it's not like we were waiting for him to come along and teach us what socialism is right people didn't well people uh Jeremy Corbyn may have been able to open people's eyes to what a progressive government or progressive policies look like but a lot of

people got there on their own and got there first and then uh were attracted to what the Labour Party was offering under him and so he's trying me down and i'll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine we have to do the like the the fucking Ray Harry house in effect just a bunch of skeletons lumbering up from the grave uh and uh elects dawn butler as leader i think yeah fuck it you know what uh thrush future season two uh this is this has been your first your first episode of of the second volume yes change the theme song yeah and uh hey you know what that lucha continua yeah that's it it do be there is yeah it's all there is that's what you got to say to yourself and what was what you have been Tony Ben's uh definition

of socialism was that there was an ideology without a final victory or a final defeat yep that's it so you know of what we don't quite know what to do yet but you know what we're all going to be figuring out stay stay in the Labour Party own people on twitter um absolutely do not cave to blue labour or the centre of the rights ever post the shit out of this i was gonna say yeah exactly that i was gonna say no pasta on no step backwards keep fighting stay in the party defeat the centrist again no poster on but more importantly senpa posts through it yes through the tweet absolutely you're all we're all fine we're all actually laughing yeah uh because as i made clear in the brand new article at the start it won't make these people happy they're fucking ghouls

they're dead inside shit on them from a great height make them remember that everything culturally is against them because everything they want is shit and bad and even the people who vote for it still hate it culturally and that they're cunts tell them it every day remind it of them make them fucking miserable remind them they'll never get their fucking kids back super structure has made a horrible mistake with social media and particularly with twitter because twitter is the only place where you can actually tell a member of the work of the ruling class of this country that you are going to put them in a diaper and burp them like a baby and they have to listen to you hell yeah i mean if there's anything my good cutback comes out of the like the johnson administration

it will be about like all of us will become adult babies yes yes hell yeah the adult baby takeover is back on everybody nate uh nate you know what usually the theme song is by jin saying it's called here we go but uh today do you want to take us into something a little bit different for the mood of the time i'll do that i'll find something the international base boosters right right against the machine baby you've all got it wrong we're fading into it now