TRASHFUTURE - A Very British Social Murder

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

For this week’s free one, Riley, Hussein, and November discuss the recent Grenfell enquiry and the way in which it lays the blame across a comprehensive spectrum of British political elites—but also discuss who’s actually going to be held liable for it. And given the track record of recent British courts of enquiry, it seems zero is a safe bet. 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 *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour Here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody and welcome to this free episode of TF. I have found something very important in my local area, which is as I was, as you know, you live in a, you live, just docs yourself right now. What's your address? I've said before that I live in London's little Turkey. I live in North London's most Turkish neighborhood. Yeah. Which has given you some like stories, right? You've had some strange experiences from this. Some people say that North London's little Turkey is as much a character in my life as me or my fiance. Well, I've visited you and you've, you've told me, you've given me a guide to which Turkish restaurants will give you a discount if you do the Grey Wolf Salute and which ones will murder you

if you do that. So there's a real divide and like there's always a new barber opening, but no, much like the one time I saw Ferrari with an Erdogan wrap on it. I now have a new thing I've seen in North London's little Turkey, a picture I have shared with the two of you. I don't think can be the episode art purely because of what we're ultimately going to be talking about in the back half of this episode, but that I'd like to talk about now. It is the winner of a sugar art competition. What can only be described as a cake that just says Al Pacino

Scarface on it. Yep. It has the man himself, in the kind of mid stages of a kind of train to Busan zombie infection, holding a rifle in one hand. I can't even tell what's in the other. It's the lead for one of two XL bullies. Yeah, he is accompanied by two XL bullies, isn't he? London is the greatest city in the world, I think.

I believe this. Only in London, baby. I want to know what the other entrants in the sugar art competition were. Well, presumably there are these two figures behind the Al Pacino Scarface sculpture, and I'm not sure what they are, but they could also be sugar art related. It's true. Maybe it was like a winner in the Pacino category of sugar art. Like a bunch of people were doing like different Al Pacino, somebody did the like expression

he makes in Heat when he kind of really oversells the line about the woman having a great ass, you know, maybe you got like a Dunkachino Pacino in there as well. It's really, it's like, it's a review of his whole career, you know? So the Dunkachino Pacino is a Pacino from within the movie Jack and Jill though. That's not from an actual commercial. Is it not? No, Al Pacino has never done a commercial for Dunkin Donuts. He did a commercial, he was in Jack and Jill, so he has never done a commercial for Dunkin Donuts. He did a commercial, he was in Jack and Jill, so he has never done a commercial.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I have to completely reconfigure my feelings about Al Pacino based off of this. I thought he had sold out, you know? I threw away my half-completed Serpico sugar art in disgust. And now you're telling me that actually that wasn't, well, it was commercial. It was commercial in a like a diegetic way that actually, that wasn't... Well, it was commercial. It was commercial in a, like, a diegetic way. Yeah, that's right. So you can start working on your, like, raspberry lattice poncho for Serpico again.

My sugar art Fredo Corleone, you know? I'm making... Favito Corleone. Why would I make Fredo? Fredo's like an accessory. I'm like failing out of the Pacino category because they've made a beautiful immaculate Freydo Corleone sugar art. You know what? You were just getting tips out of a fucking boat.

You realize it was an incredible pun that you could make a semi-Freydo in the shape of Frodo. I actually, I actually kind of like really rate sugar art as a concept because it's sort of one of the things that AI really can't like, you can't, they're not replicating sugar art. You're not going to do an NFT of sugar art. It sort of seems to be, you know, if you're like an artist, you're an art school right now and you're like wondering how you make a career, like maybe consider opening up a Turkish dessert bar. Yeah. But using that, well, cause like also, you know, all this stuff about like, oh, maybe consider opening up a Turkish dessert bar? Yeah. But using that.

Well, cause like, also, you know all this stuff about like, oh, you know, the Turkish barbers and stuff are all just like, fronts for money laundering. But what if you all opened up, what if we opened up a Turkish barber, but it's actually a front to finance, like, one of our sugar art careers? In this case it's more direct, and it's like, this Turkish bakery is a front for like, sugar art of Al Pacino specifically. I didn't go in, but next time I see them I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna say why do you bake a cake in the shape of Al Pacino and Scarface that says on it, Al Pacino Scarface with two

XL bullies? Why do you do that? You're gonna get either a really satis- like, the most perfect like, Zen Koan answer, or something completely unsatisfying and prosaic. Viona will sort of give you a copy of like the Marinetti cookbook. Yeah, this is the thing. This will heal our wounded society. It's like futurism because like sugar gives you energy, gives you a kind of a rush, you

know, this is going to provide us with the motive power that we need to like all become like new citizens. This is the cake that finally ushers Britain into its glorious industrial future. Yeah, because Al Pacino Scarface was the name of his character in the movie Scarface. Al Pacino Scarface. First name Al Pacino, surname Scarface. Was like, he was a futurist, right? Cause he did a lot of cocaine and he kept doing things faster and faster. he shot all those guys with a grenade launcher all very futurist if a futurist tries to shoot you with a grenade launcher They're actually just trying to give you a snack I think I think one cool thing to do to maybe like maybe not force all Italian fascism

But diverse it off into a more harmless direction would be to go back and show Filippo Marinetti. I like a DVD of Scarface I direction would be to go back and show Filippo Marinetti a DVD of Scarface. I think he would react to it very strongly, for a number of reasons. He'd be like, Italy has to get into drug dealing in Miami, we have to wear a lot brighter colours. Yeah. I want to move on to the news. Oh, sorry, this was the news. You wanted to get onto the topic, because if the topic of this podcast for the years that we've been doing it hasn't been Al Pacino sugar art podcast about how we deliver Al Pacino sugar out the

future is and will be trash. It's in will be sugar. The future is and will be the scent of a woman. That's what we did. We've done the scent of a woman sugar art. The scent of a woman sugar sugar art. The scent of a woman's sugar art, the really remarkable smelling. Like, and I say remarkable, it's not really a positive or a negative thing. It kind of transcends your bourgeois categorization.

I don't want to deny that this was the news. I'd like to do the news before we do our jarring shift in tone. Okay. I want to start with just two sort of paired stories. One of which is, I think, probably one of the greatest examples of English, specifically London elite Philistinism I have seen in a very long time. Besides not granting my like, Fredo Corleone sugar art first prize. Yes, absolutely. Your Fredo semi-fredo. This is an article recently that was out in the

BBC that I read four or five times out of sheer anger. It's about Birmingham City Council being quote unquote bankrupt. Yeah, we've talked about local government funding a lot actually. We talked about Thorough Council as sort of like being taken for a ride. I think we mentioned Birmingham City Council in passing in that episode. We did indeed. It's Birmingham like a lot of councils. Number one has been the subject of a number of lawsuits, but number two has basically like every other local council, with some exceptions, had its funding slashed in successive years and has been unable to

raise revenues from other sources. A lot of councils, if you recall, have basically taken to buying lottery tickets to try to plug the funding gap and getting into pyramid schemes and so on. Just Birmingham council just like, yeah, we can't pick up the bins because we blew the money on scratch and sniff. Essentially, yes. That's not what I mean. I mean the like scratch cards. I'm confused too.

Very... You've just invented a new kind of lottery ticket. Oh God, I have. One which operates like a, like a NOS canister. We're going to make loads of... Really awkward moment between you and the news agent where you scratch off the scratch card and then just take a big sniff of all those microplastics.

You know, like, you remember like, well, in men's magazines, I know of the happened in like another type of men's magazines used to get those like Cologne samples. Oh, yeah. And those were scratched and stuff. And I fucking love those. Those were like, I feel like one of my sort of like return to tradition things is the men's magazine should have like nice samples of, I don't know, like whatever fucking CK is like Versace. Like a little like, sort of like cloned vile.

Sure. Yeah. And that, that I think is the principle of the scratch and sniff card. Where even if you lose, you do get like a nice sniff of like CK1 or something. This is, this is nice for like elevating the scratch cards. All right. So councils have been doing this, right? Birmingham city council. This is the, a BBC article. the scratch cards. All right. So councils have been doing this, right? Birmingham City

Council. This is the, a BBC article. It's also, it's worth saying Birmingham City Council is not bankrupt. They are a government. They are not a business. They cannot be bankrupt. No, no, no. Riley, Riley, too big to fail refers to stuff like, I don't know, car makers or whatever. It doesn't refer to the government. The government, the government's more like a family, right? And when families go bankrupt, what do they do? They go out and they gamble compulsively, I guess. So Birmingham City Council is not bankrupt, Birmingham is not bankrupt. Local governments in Britain have been set up to fail arbitrary funding rules, and now

have to go through the rituals of a defunct business, basically. Yeah, sure. It's sort of like central government coming in, cutting your jugular and then accusing you of like bleeding irresponsibly. Birmingham City Council owns an artwork collection valued at almost half a billion pounds. A BBC investigation has discovered, but none will be sold off to help tackle the financial challenges the council, which declared it was effectively bankrupt last year. Now let's disregard the fact that legally the Birmingham Council cannot do this, right? This art is held in trust at museums, it's not a council asset

like a building that it can sell off. Let's put that to one side for now, because what is essentially being written... Sorry, was this written by a kind of... was this written by a vulture? It really does have something of the like, well, you know, the council claims to be bankrupt and yet some of these buildings still have copper wire in them, you know? Yeah, and- Mixing my metaphors, vultures fucking love copper wire. Yeah, well they love selling it.

That's one of the best ways for them to make money. But basically, right, this article is from the BBC, I've been turning it over because the only way to read it is as a kind of like journalistic campaign launched from the BBC using like West Midlands based columnists- Nice art collection you got here. Be ashamed if something weren't to happen to it. Effectively, what I read when I read this was like, Birmingham City Council owns artwork collection valued at almost half a billion pounds. A BBC investigation has discovered, could be, area outside London contains art. A BBC investigation has discovered.

That's the meaning of regional journalism, right? And it's about like, you know, getting out of a London bubble, which is realizing that other cities also have like small amounts of money for now that they shouldn't have. Because that money should be in London. Well, this already happened in Glasgow, right? Like so Glasgow city council lost a very large lawsuit because they weren't paying their female staff equally, right? Which is illegal. And in order to make this good, one of the things that they ended up being forced to do is to sell their museums and then lease them back from private operators, for which the council would be paying billions over 25 years or whatever. So the actual end state here isn't like Birmingham doesn't have art anymore. You know, Birmingham City Council sets up a car boot sale to flog the Vermeer or whatever.

The same art is still there, it's just being run by fucking Serco or Capita or whatever, or whichever rich pervert wants to pay for it. And then, you know, you're in a gallery that is slightly worse, more financialized, and like less public, and that fucking sucks. Yeah. Anyone can see Birmingham's collection of art, but if you want the pre-Raphaelite experience, then that's got a surge pricing model, actually.

Yeah, it's basically like, it's not so much we want you to sell this art, as we want you to financialize this art, right? We want you to turn this stuff that you have that is ostensibly a public good into a financial instrument and use that to fund the bin collection and stuff. And that seems like a lot of extra steps for something that central government could maybe help with if it wanted to, given that it controls how much money there is. Well, precisely also, because much of the art and cultural stuff that is near the people who make the financial decisions for the country, a lot of it's not funded by Westminster or Chelsea or Lambeth or Islington or whatever.

A lot of it's funded by the central government. A lot of that stuff is connected to the money spidget. But we go on. This is mostly about the article, right? This is I'm baffled by this piece of writing. Just there are no proposals to sell any artworks and many of them were gifts To the city from donors who wanted them a public display a council spokesperson has said Serena Trowbridge chair of the every single person that the writer from this article talked to writers called a Simon Gilbert every single person This person talked to is like no, this is a stupid idea. Why are you proposing it?

Why won't you let it go? Not only are we legally not able to sell the half a billion pounds worth of art We don't want to it's a terrible idea, no one thinks we should, including the guy who's in charge of repairing our finances. ALICE I just really like the idea that this guy is wasted as a local journalist. He could have been a fantastic wheeler and dealer looking around these 19th century council chambers being like, you could get a lot of money for that sconce, or whatever. But instead, somehow has ended up being a sort of regional journalist.

Yeah. The BBC's lead Birmingham Bond vigilante, basically. Yeah. Outcome all the vehicles still have fucking hubcaps. I've counted quite a few catalytic converters since being here in Birmingham and yet the council is claiming that it's bankrupt. So Serena Trowbridge, chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society in Birmingham, it's almost a Pre-Raphaelite collection, said that the collection was a crucial part of Birmingham's heritage and is considered one of the world's finest. Quote, these are actually really important for the people of Birmingham for their morale and how they view things. I don't think they're ours to sell. The decision to not sell off

the art was even backed by the council's lead commissioner, Max Coller, who was brought in to oversee the financial recovery of the council. Who is, who is doing this? Is it just this one guy pushing like a real campaign to be like, sell off this pre-Raphaelite shit, tired of women with like big curly hair everywhere. Yeah. Maybe this guy like hates VR. He's actually like a sort of like contemporary modern art enthusiasts. It's like, we need more cubism in here. It's all back to futurism. This guy's a futurist.

He's in the pocket of big sugar and sugar. Yeah. Replace all of this woke gay pre-Raphaelite shit with a nine foot tall sugary Al Pacino. This will motivate the people of Birmingham. pre-Raphaelite shit with a nine foot tall sugary alpacino. This will motivate the people of Birmingham. We're tired of seeing that one very beautiful red haired woman all the time, re-adacting scenes of myth. The red haired woman is distracting people

and from working and being productive and like the local economy needs to get back into function again. So we need modernism, we need the big cube and we need like a big sugar cube. Like that's, I feel like he's like awful, like big sugar cubism as an art form. I didn't even see that one coming and you're working towards it. This is all despite commissioners comments that warned the council did not

have sufficiently robust plans to balance the budget in subsequent years. It's like everybody talks to is like, no, that's stupid. Fuck off. And he's like, ah, yes, they told me I was stupid. And yet their budget two years from now is still unbalanced. Bring on the sugar cube. And then here's the event. You know, who gets the final say in the how here's the event. You'll get the final say in the, how dare a place that's not London have art.

Well, we've heard from like a bunch of people who have said, this is a terrible idea. So for balance, we must now hear from somebody who thinks this is a great idea. So we've got to hear from some kind of like anti art camp. Adam Smith is there's someone from the Adam Smithens. The taxpayers Alliance was contacted for comment. There are people at stake here. Best of value Adam Smith Institute. It's the Aldi own brand. There are people at stake here and it's only really residents and taxpayers that will be the one picking up for the council if they're not making decisions themselves. The TPA's own research has concluded that Birmingham council has acquired 61 new pieces

of artwork in the last three years. I mean, I say Bond Vigilante- That's not very many, I don't think. Like, for a city-wide series of museums and galleries and stuff, that seems pretty restrained, all things considered. The people of Birmingham must be asked, do you want this museum filled with old art, or do you want a big sugar cube? If we don't put our foot down now, who's to say that they'll always view artwork as a

priority instead of actually delivering frontline services and helping the people that truly need it? That's something that they were able to do, more or less, for like, 200 years. And like, but at this moment, no, impossible, you know? The Taxpayers Alliance went into Birmingham and found new trainers and a flat screen TV, essentially. Yeah. Yeah.

The funny thing is, right, I looked at the guy's Twitter feed, who wrote the article, and when he was asked why he approached the Taxpayers Alliance- I already got to you, huh? You're like, who the fuck is this guy? Yeah! I was annoyed! I'm a big, you know me, I'm an art fan. I have a big foam finger that just says Jane Morris on it.

Sure, yeah, you love the arts, sure. Yeah, why did you approach the Taxpayers Alliance for comment, the person has asked, the writer of the article, the person who was like annoying every person in Birmingham, annoying everyone in Birmingham council for being like, hey, why won't you sell the art? Why won't you sell the art?

Have you considered selling the art? Then says, I didn't, it was added after the original story was published. What the fuck is happening at the BBC? Why are the... Why is the BBC specifically... We all know what's happening at the BBC, but why are they so specifically against Birmingham in particular having any art? I have a theory. Is this a kind of Thomas Crown Affair situation, right? Where the director general really wants one piece of pre-Raphaelite art that happens to be in a gallery in Birmingham and is therefore trying to get it at knockdown prices.

That's the only... Other than just the BBC continuing to be an absolutely foaming right-wing organization, that's the only other explanation, is that, as you say, November, they're doing a Thomas Crown affair. The BBC, the BBC can't be a foaming right wing organization. They do all that valuable journalism. Like we saw in those two movies about the time Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew. Yeah, look, hopefully we're going to be a third of them. Yeah, we'll be a third of them and they'll be the multiverse of Maitlis. All right. We're not going to get anything better out of this one. I've been sitting on that one for a bit. It's like a sniper today. It's incredible. I wrote it down in

my notebook like weeks ago and I was like, I've got to use this at some point. And there we go. Yeah. Maybe what happened is, is Hussein like slowly tried to drop hints to the BBC that Birmingham like had too many nice things. Yeah, going long on this one bet. I would then read that would infuriate me personally. And that we could then observe that the BBC was a not particularly valuable journalistic organization. I'm dropping my coffee cup. It's like shorting airline stops on 910. Right? You kind of, you got to make your own luck at some point.

I'm dropping my coffee cup like agent Koo Yon. Oh my God. But I guess that's the closest I'll get to mentioning 9-11 on an episode recorded on nine nine as well. Well, Hey, you know what? What if we could do left on red on 9-11 and then you could mention 9-11 on 9-11. I just have to read another book and I can barely read the book I'm reading now.

You just have to finish the Mauritius command. That's all. I need ADHD meds. If anyone has a line on those. The other item I want to talk about before we go into our main subject is of course another piece of news, which is the Department of Health and Social Care, or Department of Health, excuse me. I've heard of them, yeah.

Has been receiving a number of people who are literally just some guy legally, former health secretary Alan Milburn in particular, who's being lined up for a key job in the health department for advising West Streeting before the general election. Now, Alan Milburn, if you don't know, has been for over a decade, the head of PWC UK's health industry oversight board, driving change quote unquote in the health sector and growing PWC's presence in the health market. He's the- Oh, okay.

So he's Mr. Privatization. Well, he's also works at Bridgepoint Capital in their, again, healthcare investment companies, which specifically sells into the NHS. Fox found in Hen House, sure. Yeah, essentially. He also has a consultancy firm that he owns that also privatizes the NHS, from which he's made like £10 million in the last eight years. I mean, nice work if you can get it. Shit, I should also privatizes the NHS from which he's made like 10 million pounds in the last eight years. I mean, nice work if you can get it.

Shit, I should start privatizing the NHS. So this guy, he's just like, what, like around just in the department of health? Yeah, he just gets to like, he gets to walk around. But what, like work experience? Does he get to wear scrubs and like a saxophone? We've got this like 56 year old man to like do the tea and coffee, you know, because of how fucked the economy is, you know? Yeah, he's an intern?

Alan Milburn is interning at the Department of Health? Yeah. It's really fucking sinister as well, and this keeps happening, right? Like, the sort of quiet opening of the kind of Stammer ministry is a bunch of like, creeps and donors and various weirdos. And sickos, yeah. Just kind of being appointed to stuff, or when they're not being appointed to stuff, just kind of being given a keycard?

We talked to Ethan Schoen about this, I think this is like the skeleton key for understanding the Starmer Premiership, which is lobbyists. Yeah, but normally they're called that because they're in a lobby, rather than just like, they're not corridorists. Yeah, but normally, normally they're called that because they're in a lobby. Yeah. Rather than just like, they're not, they're not corridorists. You know, they're just like fucking around, like in your office, just like hanging from the ceiling. There's some big fucking vampire, you know, like the prince of darkness is here and he wants to read your emails over your shoulder.

They're walking out of a department with like all their pockets are filled with those like, you know, those nest cafe, our sachets. This is all a long con to get access to as many office supplies as possible for a handful of highly connected labor donors. Yeah. They're trying to get enough sugar. To be fair, to be fair, I would be very susceptible to this, right? If you gave me the opportunity to do some government corruption, I would be like, I would push the limits on that. I would be like, I want a red box. Give me a red box. I want one of those to take home. You know?

I want to like get takeaway and then eat it out of the red box. Oh, I bet that'd be good as hell though. Millbird also is like the person who privatized the NHS the most in the last couple decades. It's really imbued with the kind of like heritage and tradition. It smells like Nigel Lawson's old farts. He's the one that introduced foundation trusts and having them compete with one another for money. The most of the fake privatization that's happened or the inserting of private

sector logic into the NHS while keeping it de minimis public, that's him. Okay, sure. And he's in the department's Victoria street offices every day during a focus week in the second half of August. Because he's good at, he's good at it. He's good at running a health department. Remember what it was like in 2002? It's a public body with a lot of sensitive data and policy and stuff that isn't like, does he have a visitor's badge? Did they just let him in? Like, did he climb up the fucking side of the building? Like the, the kids in the department for education? Like how did he get there? Is my man every day like parachuting onto the roof, like Johnny English too?

What have you watched any movies recently? November? No. Milburn had access to sensitive documents in printed form only because he does not have a government email account. Why do you have sensitive documents if you don't have a government email account? Guy's just looking at like my GP notes being like, yeah, just to just send it to my like fucking hotmail. So just at AOL.com, you know, like whatever the most boomer kind of email setup you can have is. It's yeah, it's um, geocities. It's yeah, just send it to my personal email. It is through the Millburn. Yes, that's right. I set it up when I was a teenager at AOL.net.

Yeah. If you can just like leave it as a comment on my blog spot, that would be like really helpful. Could you send it to my MSN messenger? It's XX underscore dark Allen. I'm like 50. I'm a 56 year old emo kid. I'm the only person left in the internet who still has access to Bebo. Could you like send me a private message on that please? Yeah. Just either you have to give it to me in printed form or you can post it on my friendster. He was also present at a dinner between Streating and Lord Darcy of Denham on Wednesday night. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. The heir to the jeans baronet see what, what the fuck? Denham, unfortunately. On Wednesday night, prior to

the publication of this week of the peers review of the NHS. And like, what's happened, right? Much of the writing on the Labour government has been like, oh, Starmer promises to get new cat to children. Starmer and new cat Furore say children, stuff like this. Yeah. With a sort of brief, you know, latter day interspersion of Starmer to kill your nan with the winter fuel allowance stuff.

Yeah, indeed. But like, there seems to be very little about just exactly how much cronyism is involved in here. If we remember, what do people fucking hate about the Tory government? One of the things they hated about the Tory government was that Matt Hancock gave a whole bunch of public procurement contracts to his bartender. That's one of the things people hated about it. Yeah. I mean, see see we're streeting right It's a very different kind of psycho from Matt Hancock, right? I don't I don't think we're gonna see where streeting do any parkour

I also think I'm putting down a market here that we're not gonna see him like shagging anyone in his office Right and getting caught on like CCTV Yeah But the stuff that he is quite possibly up to in terms of giving guys like this access is really fucking weird in itself, right? Giving people like this access in ways that are, again, easily provable to be wrong? Yeah, and like, this guy, right, okay, he's an old pair of hands at this stuff, but it's nothing that the government doesn't already want to do in terms of privatisation by stealth.

Streetsing's already the health minister,. Was he too busy thinking up new ways to be transphobic that he has to get the last guy in as a safe pair of hands? Like, if nothing else, it's like over delegation. Like fucking work shy piece of shit. I'm sorry, did you get tasks saturated from murdering trans kids and now you're like, oh, I can't figure out any ways to make people to pay to use an ambulance anymore. Ultimately, right. People don't care about like document handling procedures, right? None of that stuff actually matters. None of that stuff cuts through. It's just like what doc, who you can't see what kind of document, but rather that it's he is involving just some guy, a lobbyist, a lobbyist, a lobbyist three times over for one very particular.

Once, twice, three times a lobbyist, a lobbyist three times over for one very particular Once, twice, three times a lobbyist. Yeah. To come in and basically write policy or that's what it looks like. And then when called on it, like again, by GB News is the only person who seems to be wanting to give West reading a hard time, right? Being like, did you share information improperly? Because that's the thing you can catch him in a lie on, I guess, is that he just keeps saying, oh, Alan Milburn is very experienced. Did you share information properly? Alan Milburn is so experienced.

Experienced at what? At what? Yeah. He knows how to run a huddle really well. We could be, he could be a fucking mentat. It doesn't matter. Why did you just let him in the building without like going through any kind of official process for it?

Yeah. And moreover, like this is just what the Star Wars project has always been. Terrible prog band. And it's what it's always going to be, which is just, and again, this is also what Blair was, where I mean, when we talk about like the Grenfell inquiry, we're going to see sort of some examples of that in there. It's just, if anything, this seems to be much, much more brazen, right? Because as you say, November, right? You're going to give this guy everything he wants anyway. Why does he need to be in the room? Why can't you just meet him later or call him?

jobs for the boys. It's nice to be back in the office, I guess. Like, you know, we let the old Dracula back into this castle and he likes to like take a turn on the pipe organ. Yeah. I can't really see what else it is other than that. Or just simply like, we know what this project is because this project is the opposite of the last thing the Labour Party did, which means where the previous Labour Party said, we have to get lobbyists out of politics. They're too close to politics. This one, because it basically has oppositional defiant disorder from fucking reality, has said we have to get lobbyists back into politics more than ever further in and more illegally basically. Awesome. So when fucking Polly Toynbee writes an

article called the anti-labor right wing presses on the war path if you wanted this government defend it, but she writes, I didn't since I won't. Thank you Polly. There has been inadequate, very easy for me. There's been inadequate recognition for Starmer's rapid competence in stamping out riots. Two tier policing accusations amount to subtle backing for imprisoned racist rioters. Government contends not with the 24 hour news cycle, but a 24 second social media spit of spite. They sound solid in telling themselves to hold steady. Really enjoying the kind of like tagline there of rapid competence.

It sounds like something you put on like a kind of disinfectant. Trust voters to sense these serious people know what they're doing and eventually things will get better. While Starmer is saying we're going to be unpopular and his top ministers are basically like, I don't know, allowing the vultures to pick which members of the doomed caravan they want to eat before they're even dead. I mean, I don't know. There is one other possible interpretation, which is that for some reason Starmer does not trust Wes Streeting to do all the stuff that Wes Streeting is already doing and so has appointed this guy as a kind of like in-house office sniper with a permanent

bead on the back of Wes's neck, just in case he gets the idea to maybe do even the slightest bit of socialism. Yeah. Maybe it's just as simple as like, we can't trust Wes Streeting to make a spreadsheet. Possibly. Yeah. This is a guy who needs like, you know, both hands, full focus and the attention of like another guy supervisor. Because Wes Streeting's got turf brain, right? And the problem with turf brain, among lots of other problems, is that you become like unable to do anything else, including like the most basic things such as like, you know, wall treatment, for example. So, you know, you've got to get someone in to be like, you've got to

do, you've got to do a job, right? Yeah. Yeah. So this like new labor insider just in the, like a health minister's office wiping away at a big patch of black mold on the ceiling. Yeah. Look, streeting, you're amazing at 2024 amazing at 2024 style transphobia, but we need someone to bring back lads mag culture to the department of health. Welcome Martin Dawson. That's the new, the new distraction, right? Is like, if you're upset with all this, this transphobia stuff, have you considered Jodie Marsh? Have you considered resurrecting the lads mag where you have the scratch and sniff cologne?

Yeah, yeah. You can, you can scratch it. You can sniff it. You can feel some strange feelings about Kelly brooke. It's all good. That could be a way of like, like, you know, don't, you know, an anti-vaping like men's mental health solved it easy. Exactly. There was no mental health when you could smell like CK one every, every month. It's a good smell. Oh my God, I'm smelling Tom Ford Tuscan leather. That means I've won. All right.

Just a guy who can identify Tom Ford Tuscan leather from just a smell sample. I know I'm describing you and I know I'm, like, that's really something as well. I don't own it. I have a friend who used to wear it. I Want to do a jarring shift in tone now I'm flicking the big switch from from like whimsical to maudlin. Yes. I mean as I think Whimsical anger to I would say quite just purely felt anger without Whimsy in it to be clear all of this stuff that we've been talking about does have a body count attached to it anyway, right?

It's not for nothing that I mentioned the dead trans kids stuff in relation to streaking. Indeed. We need to talk about a slightly more transparent piece of social murder. What we're talking about, I think it's clear to say, is a case of social murder. Every time someone calls Grenfell a tragedy, as though it just sort of happened like an earthquake, they are essentially trying to avoid culpability. There are a great number of people at fault. ALICE Yeah, the executive summary of the inquiry

is very good and quite short, and I highly recommend anyone to read it. You can find it online, because it lays out in quite accessible detail exactly how fucking evil every single person whose desk this crossover was. Who is most at fault, do you think? I mean, the thing is, right, as with any of this stuff, like, you end up with a holistic thing, right, where you pull the thread back far enough and pretty soon you're like, I dunno, fucking Martin Luther, the obelisk from 2001 of Space Odyssey. Some of this is, well, a lot of it is David Cameron, but a lot of it is

also Tony Blair, and John Major, and Margaret Thatcher, right? And just the awful way that we do things in this country that is embedded and predates even them. Right the way through to the architects, the manufacturers of the cladding, the building research establishment, London Fire Brigade. Like, no one comes out of this well apart from the residents of Grenfell Tower themselves and the kind of operational layer of London Fire Brigade. That's about it. Everybody else is either sort of complacent all the way through to actively, maliciously engaged in a kind of criminal conspiracy. NARES The way I think about it is, fundamentally, what all of the people at fault share is a belief that the people who live in Grenfell

aren't really human. ALICE Yeah. NARES Basically. ALICE Yeah, absolutely. NARES It is regrettable that we have to keep them alive, but we do. And so we are going to see how little, and it's a collaborative effort to see how little can be put into keeping them alive

before a bunch of them die. Well, it's also worth noting that the whole sort of cladding project was in large part to kind of assuage nearby residents of like better off bits of Kensington and Chelsea who didn't want to have to look at the outside of a tower block. And so this was going to be like, you know,

renovated in a way that like, yeah, the cladding would have had like, you know, benefits had it been done properly for the residents, but it wasn't really for them. It was, you know, something to kind of like, like pretty up the skyline a bit. So this is where I think I'll go right into David Cameron's response to the inquiry, which again was very thorough and very excoriating. As someone who lives near Grenfell... Is that it? Is that the best like kind of like claim to empathy that he's got there?

As someone who was responsible in a very direct way, as one of the people who lives near Grenfell, demanding that it be covered in what essentially amounts to highly flammable origami paper, and also the person who demanded that all of the rules against doing that on a building get rescinded. My heart goes out to all those who lost loved ones on that terrible night. I hope that Sir Martin Morbick's comprehensive and forensic final report answers their question about what led to this unparalleled tragedy. What oh what? In large part, David Cameron is the thing. Well, David Cameron as both Notting Hill resident and prime minister.

Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the thing. You might forget reading that statement that he was prime minister. And I think he would like you to forget that too, you know? Like, what job did this guy do? I don't know. It's something to do. I think he worked for Nick Clegg, maybe?

All of us who served in positions of power over the last few decades, he's a veteran, he served, need to acknowledge that mistakes were made over too many years. Community concerns were too readily sidelined or dismissed, voices too often unheard, and more could have been done to learn lessons from past tragedies. Who didn't do the listening? Who didn't learn the lessons? Who sidelined the concerns? All of that is a question for the philosophers, of course, or whoever was prime minister at that time. It's impossible to know.

So, something that we talk about on while that's your problem, a decent amount is this, there's this idea in engineering of a Swiss cheese model, right? Like you think about a slice of cheese with like holes in it, right? Those are going to be like randomly placed and then the next slice will have different holes. But eventually sooner or later some of them will line up right and you get like a sort of hole through the block of cheese right and that's what a failure model is like a lot of the time is it's like the one weakness or vulnerability and this thing lines up with another weakness or vulnerability in another thing. And we had a guest on recently who said something that I thought was quite profound which is that like in relation to disaster, but I think it applies to this.

It's like an inverse Swiss cheese model where the thing is so much holes that you're like, how the fuck didn't this happen sooner? It's not just a case of like, people were complacent, although they were, and then these things lined up. It's that these things had lined up so many times previously, and there were the sort of gaps in regulation, the corruption, the complacency was like so yawningly wide that it's like genuinely miraculous that this didn't happen sooner than it did. The holes of the Swiss cheese are not just in building regulations, although quite a

few of them are. They're in everything from tenant management in building regulations, although quite a few of them are. They're in everything from tenant management to building regulations to materials testing to the way the companies themselves are set up. If you want to pick some really technical examples, the bit that I really focused on was the London Fire Brigade section. Two contributory factors. London Fire Brigade privatized its training. That went to Babcock instead of them doing it in-house. And then they kind of separated off a bunch of their control room training, and just nobody really thought it was anyone's job to keep that current, and it was too technical and too specialized for a private provider to deliver.

And that's nerd shit, right? But it's important, and it's important in the context of a life-saving organisation. And if you're not going to pay that level of attention to something that kind of detailed, then at a certain point, you're creating more of these holes than you can bear, irrespective of the giant drill bit you've just put through them of, oh, there's also no more building regulation. Mason- Effectively right. What you're describing is that in every case where something has been privatized, there are a few examples of things being privatized or things being deregulated, where immediately there is a huge race to the bottom. The assumption is always, well, nothing will ever go wrong. Because in my experience, nothing has ever

gone wrong. And what you don't realize is that this is the long hangover of the remaining regulations. This is the long hangover of just how long could the training, the legacy training from when the London Fire Brigades provided training in-house, just how long could that stay current? It's kind of just coasting. Not even that. It's also kind of an institutional and I guess at a point national inability to like see any of the warning signs, right? Which there were, there were other fires that kind of pref any of the warning signs, right? Which there were. There were other fires that kind of prefigured Grenfell, including ones in which people died, which both in the UK and internationally, which were resolutely ignored, right? Mason- Because that would make it stop working.

If you identify that these things require problems that are not able to be faced by a privatized fire department, that are not able to be buildings that will not be safe if you allow construction companies to essentially write their own regulation. Or like, if you don't enforce like minimum standards on the provision of just council housing quality, all of this falls apart. If you do any of that, it all falls apart. Yeah, and it's sort of like, you know, Wile E. Coyote going over the cliff and it's only when the, like, sort of gravity becomes impossible to deny anymore. And you had a bunch of, a bunch of sort of like, foreshocks of Grenfell that it was possible

for people to deny and, you know, not feel too stressed about. And now we're in this situation where many people are dead and, you know, ultimately maybe some people will go to prison in ten years time, maybe. Yeah, they're gonna go, they're gonna be on trial and they're in like fucking 90s. Yeah, the obvious sort of temptation there is to say, well, it's, you know, it's like white collar crime or whatever and of course people are gonna put it on the back burner, but it's not even that. It's that like the criminal justice system and the courts are also another thing that we have like privatized and cut

so much that like, even if you, you like arrested people tomorrow, you would still be waiting for years for any trials to start, let alone sentencing. Because that's just how it is for like anything. David Cameron goes on, he says, the report is clear that fire safety and building regulations were explicitly excluded from the coalition governments. And I have not editorialized the network. Next words in, greatly needed red tape reviews. So in the, I'm sorry that somebody, whoever was prime minister, took a bunch of actions that were involved in making all of your deaths, making more people die or die worse. However, I think we can all agree that the red tape was too much.

Yeah, it's this curious kind of balancing act of being like, on the one hand, when we did that kind of joint press conference, Nick Clegg had a gun in his pocket and was pointing at me and he forced me to say all of those things. But also, all of those things were like correct and it's like a sort of unfathomable consequence of that, that a bunch of people like died of smoke inhalation. Also, by the way, that's a lie. That is a lie. It's just a lie. Of course. Lord Pickles, Eric Pickles, who was... It's such a fucking stupid country, right? That you can be like, sort of like, murdered. You can

die in your sleep of smoke inhalation, right? With no one even knowing that you're in your flat. And then, you know, there's an inquiry about it it and the guy who turns out to be the author of this in large part is called Eric Pickles. Yeah, it's a deeply unserious place. But Pickles, when he was giving his evidence, was like, oh well, I said to cut all the red tape, but I thought it was ludicrous that civil servants thought that meant that should include building regulations. Even though I never said that. Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? But also clearly that was like very defined at the beginning because I remember the argument for like cutting red tape in the 2010 election. The sort of advance that was made, which was like, well, we aren't building enough things.

We need more infrastructure. We need more houses. Remember those things? Um, and the reason why is because like, you know, at the time, like woke wasn't sort of in lexicon, but it was like the Nanny state and health and safety, all that stuff was preventing these infrastructure, you know? And so like that very nebulous term was built and like what, you know, the sort of takeaway among many things from the inquiry is like, well, yeah, when you're doing in big infrastructure

projects, which everyone uses, like you kind of need some like red tape, you know, that's not a bad thing. I think it reminds me a lot like when we talked about this last week about the legacy of kind of like the removal of those restrictions and the removal of accountability more broadly has sort of meant that like the situation we're sort of now in is not only are we still not getting stuff built because bearing in mind, but like the argument for removing red tape was we'll get like more stuff built and like things will be fine. Yeah. Shit houses are better than no houses. Yeah. And like shit trains are better than no trains. But we have no, well, we'll get like more stuff built and like things will be fine. Yeah, shit houses are better than no houses. Yeah, and like shit trains are better than no trains.

Well, we have quite a few shit houses actually. None of which, most of which you can't live in, but we have no shit train. We have no like increase of shit trains really, or really anything else. But it's like a false economy. All this stuff ends up costing you more and being less useful. Well, not only do they cost more and you can't really use it, but it's also just like, well, if you can afford to use it, you're dealing with stuff that not only doesn't work, but when you're using it, you are increasingly in more and more danger. Like there was a

tube driver who said to me, who like, like a couple of years ago, who was basically said, and like November, you probably know more about this than I do, that if people actually knew how dangerous it was, like being on the tube was and how that had increased, like very, like there'd be quite a few people who would not really want to use it. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. But like the fact that sort of all been obscured, but at the same time, just like, you know, the thing that we sort of mentioned last week, which was we are all sort of being conditioned to sort of accept that living in any sort of house now or like any house sort of built after maybe like 2010. Maybe 1997 is probably the date that date's going to come back. If you live in like a newish like a sort of newishly built house and if you use like any type of public

infrastructure, it's not a particularly safe and bar and you have to sort of accept that like, yeah, something bad could really happen that could fuck you up forever. And also there's going to be no one that will ever be held accountable for it. Hey, and if you get fucked up, like in a way that sort of like disables you, uh, means that you can't work, you know, enjoy, uh, sort of like the kind of terrorizing experience that is the benefit system, you know? And we talk about, by the way, no one's gonna be held accountable for it. Lord Pickles did identify whose fault he thought it was, which was middle ranking civil servants who did not share-

Oh those guys! Okay, cool. Yeah, cause they were too busy being woke and they weren't paying attention. Well he said, middle ranking civil servants who did not share mine or Bob Curse or Bob Curse Lake's deep sense of civic duty. Meaning that they deregulated everything, including building regulations, which I secretly didn't want them to. Mm-hmm.

I didn't want them to murder the Archbishop of Canterbury, just because I'd loudly said, sort of in their hearing, man it'd be great if someone murdered this guy. Yeah. I sure do hate this turbulent priest. Oh boy. And no, it's actually I'm just venting trauma dumping. Again, the Brenfell Enquirer finds no, that's a lie. Right. Lord Pickles was an ardent supporter of deregulation and the pressure within the department to reduce red tape was so strong.

His civil servants felt the need to put it at the forefront of every decision Also, I love that he includes Bob Kerslake is also responsible a dead guy So yeah, it was the dead guy's fault So David Cameron can be like it was Nick Clegg Nick Clegg had an exploding necktie on me and would have detonated it And this and now pickles can be like, ohlake, what a guy. This was his fault. But it's not enough just to deregulate. And we're going to talk about that. That's just recent deregulation, like anti-red tape

deregulation, and also a failure to respond to a fire in 2013 at L'Condal House, which killed six people in London. But it's not just enough to deregulate and to fail to respond. There's also corporate culpability in taking advantage of a lightly regulated environment. And we're going to talk about some of the companies themselves, Arconic, Cellotex, Kingspan, Kingspan primarily. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the history and how

they became able to do what they did. So the companies they produced, and I quote, report, deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market." Yeah, this is a great example of a conspiracy aimed at a sort of captured regulator, right? It's pushing on an open door. The regulator here is the building's research establishment, which was privatized. And previously, it's a good idea, it's a good thing to have a regulator for to be like, we are going to measure these materials, right? You want to make a building out of these bricks, we are going to test these bricks to make sure that they're not actually made out of like papier-mache, right? And so as the BRE was privatized, something which I think you'll

see in a lot of regulatory authorities in this country, not just this country, it became sort of about, it became a facilitator, right? And this is a thing that the BRE comes in for a lot of deserved criticism for, is that it sort of likes access, and it's so fucking strange to be like an entourage guy for a bunch of construction companies. But like, no, it's like, I gotta have access, I gotta hang out with like, Arconic, I gotta hang out with Cellotex, and I don't wanna be a hater. So what it does is, as often as not, sort of like give them the crib sheets of like

how these tests are going to be run, how they can sort of like mislead the sort of like, use misleading descriptions of their materials in order to like achieve certification. And even that didn't go far enough because having done that, a bunch of these companies then went even further and made statements about their stuff that they knew was false and which they knew wasn't even buttressed by this compliant regulator. Well if we don't talk about statements that people knew were false, right? You could look at the emails. Again, people do this by email all the time. Yeah because like they barely even think of it as a crime. They don't worry about being

caught and again it's the same complacency of like it probably never happened, right? And you think about that and you think about how many other buildings there are that were built this way by these people or people like this who are sending emails exactly like this that haven't been subject to a statutory inquiry and which are just like sitting out there in the ether waiting for them to burn down and when they do, they just hope that they'll be like long since retired or dead. So it's just, can you keep the money spinner going? And maybe, and yeah, by the time something goes wrong, it's someone else's problem. Yeah. So why not put in an email? Yeah. If it burns down, it's probably going to like kill the

entire building or whatever. Like why not be flippant about it? Yeah. Well, so this is, this is examples. These are messages between Peter Moss from Kingspan's technical team and his colleague Aaron Chalmers. In response to a text message from Moss asking if K15, the material in question, had the highest fire safety rating of class zero, Chalmers replied, doesn't actually get class zero when we test the whole product though. LOL. To which Moss then asks if we lied, to which Chalmers responds, yeah, with four H's.

These fucking idiots. Yeah, it's right. Yeah, with four H's, colon, forward slash. Incredible. Chalmers also said in the text exchange, all we do is lie here. See, I mean, like, again, obviously these people should be in prison, but fundamentally they're kind of the part of this that interests me the least, right? Because like, dodgy builders, fine, whatever.

Like that's, you know, it's been a thing since, you know, the ancient Sumerian guy gave the other guy a shitload of copper, right? The job of a state, whether it's the Sumerian Empire or the United Kingdom circa 2024, should be to like, prevent those guys from doing the thing, right? To extract a kind of minimum standard of behavior from them. And clearly these are people who feel secure that it's never going to do that. Yeah. E. Nasir knows that like the ziggurat temple is on his side so he can do whatever he wants with the copper.

Yeah. Yeah. So in a 2008 email, Philip Heath, a business development director with Kingspan, said a different firm that questioned the suitability of a Kingspan production on a high rise blog quote, confuse me with someone who gives a damn. And then at the hearing, they said, Hey, how come you kept saying like, Oh, I hate everyone who lives in any building that we that we suit. I don't care about fire safety, especially. He was like, Oh, I was in... He had that on a mug.

You don't have to not care about fire safety or the lives of people living in your buildings to work here, but it is actually necessary. You do have to do that. Heath apologized to these comments saying he was quote, in a dark place because one of his friends was terminally ill. He has men's mental health. He was wearing like a fuck cancer shirt when he was doing that. Yeah.

I mean, sometimes when I'm going through it, what I really need to like, you know, really center myself is to like, clad a large tower block in extremely flammable insulation material. That just really helps me to kind of like, feel a bit more like a piece of the world. But so how they could do this, right? We have to go back in time, but in throughout the 1990s, there were tower block fires. There was a really big one in 1991 and 1999. One in Knowsley in Liverpool, another in Irvine in Scotland. The first one didn't have deaths,

but it was like, wow, this could easily have died largely because of cladding. The same thing happened in 99. Before that, John Major's government, like the last thing it did, like in it's in like a week before Blair took over. So Blair could have reversed this if he wanted to. Legislated the building research establishment was going to be privatized.

The last thing you do on the way out is to like set the stage for this. The real kind of like Charlie Wilson's war moment, you know? And Blair again did not have a problem with this, of course. He was very busy like pushing MI5 for fun Britpop. He was very on board and his ministers were very on problem with this, of course. He was very busy pushing MI5 to fund Britpop. He was very on board and his ministers were very on board with this, where they said that even at the time, the building research establishment being privatized and largely funded by the construction industry that it wants to hang out with, had been happening for a couple of years, a select committee of MPs investigating those two cladding fires discovered that these

are spread by cladding. And they said, we do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimizing the risks. And then Blair's government looked at that statement and said, we disagree. We think many people should be killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimizing the risks. Muckinley It's a good thing that there isn't a kind of pattern establishing itself here of like a Tory run of pattern establishing itself here, of like, a Tory run of governments running for like, y'know, over a decade finally ends up out of steam, collapses, and a sort of Labour party that mostly agrees with them gets in,

and sort of like, does this performance of like, either faux reluctance or outright enthusiasm to just like, really solidify all the evil shit that they've done in a way that is ultimately disastrous. Suck if that happened again. T future were not taken forward. Because the answer would have been like, unacceptably expensive. It's the exact same thing as the rack concrete, right? Of being like, we're going to ignore this until schools are like, school roofs are literally falling in. But they're still ignoring it! They're still ignoring it! We're going to keep ignoring it as long as we can, right? Because the answer to the question,

where is this stuff and how much will it cost to fix it is everywhere and a lot. So the low basic standard was left where it was, right? Because they were only doing large scale testing samples out of large scale, as opposed to testing individual buildings. They were doing checks in individual buildings. The whole profession of fire surveyor was itself privatized, just some guy could do it. And Kensington and Chelsea, by the way, hired a guy who was just not particularly experienced. He was an ex-firefighter who then invented a bunch of his qualifications. So cool. In fact, so the recommendation that was also given by the select committee to Blair that existing systems be checked was also removed. The government said it does not feel right

to exert this kind of control over landlords. so it advises them to check their buildings. Finally, this is much of this sort of history is from Peter Apps from Inside Housing. So I'll credit him with that. That the UK was supposed to be aligning building standards with Europe and introducing a CE marking basically saying like this has been independently tested, not by the PRA. It's good, brackets European. The government was warned that in the early 2000s that we would become Europe's dumping ground for combustible materials if this wasn't done.

But then, they said, well, hang on, if you don't want to build buildings out of combustible materials, our products would be prevented from continuing on the market. And so, they didn't do that. Listen, you might object to my business plan of selling you an enormous bomb that's gonna sit under your house and will explode at random, killing you, but have you considered that stopping me from doing that would gravely harm my selling you a massive bomb business? ZACH Well, essentially, yeah. Basically, yes.

ALICE And Downing Street goes, oh man, I love business. So yeah, I'd get on it, I guess. And also, right, like this wasn't, as you say, if you want to find ultimate causes for problems in Britain, you can keep going back, right? Yeah. Like, original sin, possibly. I mean, I, I, fundamentally, like, the, the problem is that all of these people agree that everyone who lived in Grenfell Tower was not fully human and doesn't really deserve to live. And it's, if anything, it's kind of a pain in the ass that we have to keep them alive.

But if you want to look, looking at sort of more technical proximate causes, it's also not even, it's not Major, it's not Blair, it's not Cameron, it's not even Thatcher. I mean, as far back as 1980, Hugo Rifkin's father said in parliament that an adequate level of fire protection should be provided only as economically as possible, but stressed that its primary purpose is not to contrive savings. Yeah. It's like, actually we can't afford, you know, smoke detectors or whatever. No, it's the same thing as Eric Pickles.

It's like do it as economically as possible, but the purpose is not to contrive savings. Can somebody please rid me of this turbulent priest, but the purpose is not to kill him. Right? Yeah. You could, you should have come up with a better interpretation of the word rid. Only cut the red tape that was unnecessary, not the red tape that was necessary. Right? So the BRE basically becomes this highly commercialized organization that stops testing stuff that's going to be built and used in Britain for the public good of Britain and starts being a kind of international consulting firm that immediately makes a fifth of its staff redundant, and starts working with other

countries. Yeah, being a kind of international fixer for the construction trades. We will certify anything. More or less, yeah. Like, the University of Phoenix online annex, but for like bricks, you know? Effectively, like they became like the bonds rating agencies in the financial crisis, basically. Right? So the report says, in some cases we saw evidence of a desire to accommodate existing customers

at the expense of maintaining the rigor of its processes. So if you want to know how, like... Teacher who wants to be cool. Well, yeah, it's, it's the whole regular building's researchers establishment shouldn't be sitting backwards on a chair trying to be friends with the students. And like the construction industry isn't that cool or that sexy. Like, this is not a sort of like, particularly high adrenaline sort of a job, you know? Like, you're not going to one oak off the back of your work in the construction.

No, no. Unless you're friends with Eric Adams, you're not going to one oak off the back of your work in the construction. Unless you're friends with Eric Adams, you're not going to one oak. NARESH Just like, yeah, some wild parties in the kind of cladding sector. It's like, I don't think so. Surely this is something where you would want to select for kind of boring, right? Not to get to LBC about this, right? But if any time ever needed a kind of like, stolid, uh, like, you know, kind of... It's like Boeing. When Boeing was run by dull men with flat top haircuts, it was, a lot of what it was doing was very evil, but it was making functional products. When it started

to be run, but it started... Those guys were engineers and they liked function. It didn't matter to them that the function was drop napalm on kids. Like, they would do it just the same. Yeah. But when Boeing management gets replaced with fast talking guys in suits, then that becomes probably the greatest blow to the American military industrial complex ever. And it was completely self-inflicted.

Finance guy versus like technical guy. Yeah. Sure. But it's the same thing, right? What they're doing is good, unlike at Boeing. They should be doing it. But this is, again, they become too excited by the industry. So, for example, in December 2007, BRE staff offered unofficial comments and observations to Kingspan,

this is from the report, of the performance of K15, the insulation, following the disastrous result of a test on a system of which had formed PARC. In keeping with Kingspan's strongly expressed wishes, BRE agreed to say no more in its report than that the system as a whole had not met criteria in BR135, despite having commented privately to Kingspan that the insulation had been fully involved and continued to burn even after the flame source had been extinguished." So they basically let Kingspan influence the report of its own product as it was being tested. ALICE That was like, transparently dangerous. another detail that jumped out at me from this is,

in another test of this cladding, they had to stop it and extinguish it because it was gonna burn the test rig down. That shouldn't happen! No. The test rig is built to withstand fires! What did they make this thing out of? I mean, like, basically oil, right? This is the problem with all this stuff is that fundamentally it's oil, right? And what you want in this situation is something that is completely non-flammable. And what they got was something completely inflammable. Mason- So we can see, right, that it's a aggressively deregulating government

enables like these businesses to basically, as you say, make building insulation of oily rags. And, you know, but to get away with this, even still, one of the last holes in the Swiss cheese is that the concerns of tenants have to be systematically ignored and minimized. The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization becomes incredibly hostile. I sort of note that it's always bad, but it becomes incredibly hostile in its tone as well as what it does in 2010 2010, 11, right? When they're told sort of explicitly, okay, every person whose life you support, they are an

inconvenience to you. Every person whose life you support, you have trying to not support them or support them as little as possible. And so of course, that's going to put the TMO at odds with the people who it's supposed to be providing a service to. I know that they're at odds fundamentally, right? But again, much like the story of so many things, especially in this country, the story of the last couple of decades is the story of things getting more brazen and more obvious. Yeah. It's like your landlord already hates you, but you give them a little boosty. It's also, I think, like on a broader scale, it's really highlights the anti-human, anti-people

element of this, right? Because the message and I think the idea of the people of Grenfell were not important to anyone who was any sort of agency that was supposed to protect them, even when with the minimal resources they had, they were supposed to. There is no better indicator of like, okay, well, what happens when your housing market simply exists to convince you that you're still a wealthy country or a wealthy city, right? The people who actually live in these buildings. And it's not, you know, the people who lived in Grenfell are not the only people who sort of have these situations. There was a fire that happened in another cladded building on the day that the Grenfell report came out.

I can't remember where it was. I think it was in Croydon, maybe. But these things have happened more and more regularly and there's been no kind of willingness to connect the dots among mainstream media that the only places that the government and other agencies sort of listen to. I was thinking back to the Grenfell stuff and how the warning signs about something could happen and if any fire sort of happens, a load of people could die just because of the way that this building is structured and the fact that like most of it hasn't been fixed. That was posted on like a community blog, right? It was like posted on a blog spot count. I remember seeing that like in the days after Grenfell. And the TMO identified the guy who posted that, a guy called Ed Daffan,

and sort of like singled him out as being like a kind of troublemaker. Exactly. And so, and so this is also just like another example of like, well, yeah, when you have like a housing system that exists primarily as assets and those assets are supposed to kind of like appreciate in value much more than like any of these buildings are worth, because all of it is sort of essential to like proving that you are still, you know, an economic powerhouse, despite the fact fact that you don't build anything and there are just so many problems in this country that would really point to the opposite. Well, then the people actually living in these buildings who are saying, but yeah, in order to live

in a building, kind of need it to function in the way that it should and there shouldn't be black mole everywhere and it shouldn't be like living in a fucking Tinder box. It would make sense, but then that would be ignored because those things reject the fantasy that so many of these institutions are. And by extension, the government that is supposed to prop them up like sincerely believe in. And so these types of reports and I unfortunately, I only got time to skim it today, but like, it just sort of speaks to me as like, this isn't just a way of like saying, but oh, actually, well, no one was really important because everyone sort of had their like role to play. And so like, please don't get mad at us. What it sort of seems

to be is more of a document and like Adam Johnson, he's like an American journalist and like, I'm sure lots of listeners know him, but he wrote this very interesting piece not about, um, Grenfell, but actually about like the Democrats and their sort of like position on Palestine and like in particular, some like left Democrats and his argument is being that like, well, they've kind of like the politics that's sort of emerging is one of like not just feigned ignorance, but like feigned helplessness. And that really works in a way where you sort of are able to sort of obscure what power means. And for people who have that power, like they can just sort of pretend that like they can't really do

anything at all because the systems are too complicated. And it reminded me a lot of what he was arguing here where these are, this isn't just a way to sort of obfuscate blame, but to sort of assert the idea that like, well, in future when these things happen and they will happen more frequently and lots of people will die as a result of it or they'll sort of get seriously injured, like injured for like, you know, it was like sort of made sick for the rest of their lives and there will be no one that they can blame. And then because there'll be the idea of their lives and there will be no one that they can blame because there'll be the idea that like you can hold anyone accountable who has power will just be something that all the sort of institutions that actually have it will just refuse to recognize.

Mason I think that that basically wraps up more or less as well as I possibly could. Jason Yeah, it's a thesis statement. It's just not a nice one. Mason And you know, if you want to know what's coming, I mean, the building safety program in the last eight years, only 29% of the identified buildings with flammable cladding have been fixed. Work hasn't even started on half of them. I think that's a pretty good indication as well as to like how rack removal is going to go, which is that way.

More and more things are just going to be in port-au-cabins. Or whatever the next thing is that we don't know about. Most of the concrete that you see on likeways and stuff, that is also kind of on the verge of collapse. Whenever I drive under a tunnel I'm just like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Because it could, that's the thing, these things, they're so poorly structured in a way where again, it's like if anyone knew just how bad this all was, and I think in some cases they do, but it's just like, you know,

it becomes something that's memory hold, but like these are sort of real dangers that are just like on the verge of happening. And when they do happen, like, you know, you sort of hope that, okay, well, the government will sort of learn. But like the RAC stuff I think is so interesting because it was very much, okay,

you've got children in these buildings that could collapse at any moment. And you have a country that is not built for like keeping students at home while they fix these problems or like while they sort of try and figure out how to fix these problems. And the solution that they came up with was either damp portacabin or well it hasn't happened yet and so just kind of send your kids into these concrete schools and like just hope for the best maybe. Yeah. Or, or, or administrative fixes where you change the definition of what's safe. Yeah. Well, and that too, that usually comes with it. You know, it's just like, well actually,

yeah, actually if you put extra sawdust in the concrete mix and things will be fine. It's fine. And ultimately, right. What this comes down to is a belief. And I say this way, noting when the aggro tone starts from the tenant management organization. Starts in 2010, 11. Again, I don't think things were good before then. But rather that this is when the, it would be better if everyone we need to take a legal minimum amount of care of just died, was made more and more official, was encoded into more and more policy, and was pushed to more and more people. And no matter what you're looking at in this country, whether it is, whether it is the

building safety program, whether it's the conditions that led up to Grenfell, whether it's rack or the other sort of dozens of problems that are brewing, whether it's disability care, whether it's level boarding, fucking Houston Station, who cares? It's that the official policy is, it would be better if everyone who uses this would just kindly die. So we didn't have to provide it anymore so that we could really be a country of just people who live in nodding hill and their robot servants. Or you can just have these empty buildings that are somehow worth like million pounds. What if we just, what if we just financialize this?

Yeah. Universal basic Southern tower, essentially essentially. Southark Tower, Southbank Tower, whatever it's called, one of those giant towers, the ones that are for money to be parked in, not for actual people to live in. You know what I mean. Anyway, look, I think that's probably a good a place as any to leave it. I want to thank you all for listening. Remind you that there is a Patreon five bucks a month. You know the dance. You know the song and dance at this point. We'll be back in a few short days. We'll see you on the Patreon then. Thank you once again to my lovely co-hosts. Sorry we went long everybody. No, it's fine.

And yeah, see you later. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.