TRASHFUTURE - Druidfuture

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Riley is on holiday and we’ve convened the remaining cast of Milo, Hussein, Nate, and November to discuss recent trends in the US election, plus a weird hagiographic article by none other than the arch-villain Laura Kuenssberg on the topic of Keir Starmer’s first 100 days. And somehow, somewhere, a druid gets involved. 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)

HK, can you just say something quickly? Hi. Hello. I don't know what else to say. A classic. The one line I associate with you most of all. I'm high. Back to going my own bit, Cary. Yeah. I'm high. His last words.

He greeted the guns of Janna. Like you, if something insane were happening to me, I would probably be like, is this... Am I somehow committing a discourtesy? And my last words would be, uh, like a guy kind of running at me with two fantasy future axes. And I'm just like, uh, I strongly believe that my last words will be something along the lines of it'll probably get better on its own. And I think that's that because I've always envisioned myself dying of illness, right? But that's funnier if the guy with the axes is coming at me in

that moment. I'll walk it off, you know? It's probably fine. I'm being executed by firing squad and my last words are saying other lines of, no, of course, no worries. No worries if not. How? British version of a hundred years of solitude. Getting executed by firing squad in 2020s Britain would be like, oh sorry, we actually

don't have any blindfolds. Or like we're going to charge you for this blindfold. Firing squad provided by Capita. Yeah, the Capita firing squad guy provides you with a ceremonial vape. Now that's what I call Capita punishment. Yeah, I love the idea too. It's like, but G4S has done all the safety inspections on the rifles they used to fire. So like the person, the one person who gets the live round pulls the trigger and then

a flag that says bang comes out. Yeah. Meanwhile, another member of the firing squad is killed by a backfiring round somehow Hello and welcome to another episode trash future it's it's the free free one and And welcome to another episode of Trash Future. It's the free one. And there's no Riley. It's Nova. It's Hussain.

It's Milo. And it's Nate. And- I do exist. You do, yeah. I wasn't blanking on your name. What's happened to me is- Sassy, Nezpa, Nate.

No, what happened is I got the COVID that everyone else in the world has gotten instantly. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm operating on like three brain cells left. It's an excellent time to have me try and helm this one. November coming out live from the markets of Wuhan. That's right. I've, I've been sort of like, uh, supervising, making sure that it's all, you know, back to normal over there. November, I realized that you wanted to branch out and diversify so you weren't just dependent on podcasts for income.

But I was a little bit upset when I saw your first video of like, what up YouTube? I'm here eating this pangolin. The original MrBeast in that's what he's consuming. Alternate revenue streams on YouTube getting canceled in whole new ways. I'm excited. But yeah, no, I put together a little kind of like low energy convalescence episode of your favorite podcast here. And it's like it's the chicken soup edition of a podcast.

Exactly. Yeah. And what's more sort of like hearty and like warming than thinking about how everything is is fucked in the United States of America, one of the countries that there is, because we don't do a lot of like American politics updates, but it's something that I think we we kind of need to now, because I'm getting this kind of I'm getting the creeping dread feeling. And the last time I had the creeping dread feeling was the Hillary campaign. Uh oh. Yeah.

I mean, imagine for me, I was there. I was in America. I voted in 2016. You were with her. You were Pokemon Go Go Go. I mean, I'll be rude with you bringing up Pokemon Go. I do recall in August of 2016, walking from something that Cynthia and I were doing together and seeing a lady who was probably my age or younger wearing like an exercise outfit who was covered

in those like cupping marks, like the red sort of hickeys from cupping, playing Pokemon Go in the streets in like the, you know, like lower Manhattan. And I was like thinking, I just looked at Cynthia, I was like, Trump's going to win, isn't he? The real bipartisan divide in America is what kind of snake oil or health cures you go for. If you were like a, you know, like died in the World Democrat, you go for like cupping or the like, maybe the like kinesiotape athletes like, like Reiki or whatever. Whereas if you're a Trump guy, you go for like faith healing or something. Yeah.

You go for the horse meds. You're like, give me whatever the drug is to cure bronchiolitis in iguanas. I've heard that it'll make me extra smart. Extremely Italian chiropractor in Jersey City, snapping your neck like Splinter Cell. Well, because the thing is, chiropractors are like bipartisan, I think. A chiropractor is like a moderate centrist. That's the guy who's going to like... They're the RFK guys that going to the chiropractor.

Chiropractors are moderate centrist because they both want the small business, like guy who runs a car dealership level of tyrannical control over employees, but they absolutely love Obamacare and being able to bill people insane amounts of money for breaking their back. And so like, you know, they got to work both sides like they do on your spine to a negative effect. I think a chiropractor president could

heal America, you know, or possibly make them really damaged. America will make it much worse. But either way, the noise, but yeah, no, the reason why I wanted to talk about this is because I've been getting this feeling that there are a couple of months of the Harris campaign where it seemed like they were onto something, where they were flat out saying, like, you know, bunch of labor strategists, fresh off Keir Stammer's electoral win, went over to the U.S. to advise them on how to like win from the center left. And that was the kiss of death, I guess, because after that, they stopped saying the weird thing. They stopped saying anything. And it's just kind of the vibe has shifted and it feels I have this real sense that like she might lose. Have you considered calling Donald Trump an anti-Semite?

I mean he is but like not in a way that I think Kamala Harris is capable of landing on him if that makes sense. Well I mean yeah like Donald Trump famously I mean if you were running with the joke Donald Trump famously said the only people I let were running with the joke, Donald Trump famously said the only good people I let touch my money are little guys with those tiny hats and, you know, among other things, you know, he, yeah, the borrower, he's gotten more dementia. Yeah. The Smurfs, the, you know, I think he, I think he said it to me effective, like that it was,

it was like, like, like short guys in glasses with little hats on top Or like wearing big hats. Maybe he's saying actually every one of his accountants is wearing a strimel at all times His mind is such a- You know Papa Smurf, he controls the banks, okay? Everything in the Smurf town, the little blue people, they run the banks, okay? They control it all over the world. They're beautiful though. They're great at it. Have you seen that Smurfette? Wow. Okay, I mean they don't make them like that anymore. Okay. You go to the bank smurfette.

Filo smurfette. I love the idea that like one of Donald Trump's insane advisors, who's like a 24 year old like 4chan, Gropier is trying to get him on like this idea that, you know, that if he watches Harry Potter, he can get, you know, secret anti-Semitic coded messages, which are a good thing in the opinion of this person, this advisor, but the advisor has, Donald hasn't realized Trump is so confused that he just assumes it's the Smurfs.

He thinks he's watching a live action version of the Smurfs. I only invest with the Smurfs. They're very trustworthy, not like the Moomins. I wouldn't trust my money with the Moomins. Are they Finnish, are they Japanese? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. They don't have the gender. I can't trust my money with the Moomin. Are they Finnish? Are they Japanese? Nobody knows. Nobody knows.

They don't have a gender. I can't see it. I can't see if it's a girl or a guy. We need to know. Does the Moomin have a dick? Does it have a dick, folks? It's a kind of hippo from Finland. The Moomin funds have a higher rate of return.

They won't tell you this. Moomin compliant finance. The Moomins, they've actually really undergone a huge seed change. They've been investing only in renewable energy. You know, they're no longer, they've decided to change their name to... Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was thinking about, what was it? Orsted, the Danish investment company that builds wind farms and basically owns every wind farm in Britain

because we can't own a thing of our own. But they rebranded Orsted. They were previously called Dong, Danish oil and natural gas. But great name, exactly. Yeah. The Moomins, they went the way of the Dong. You can never say a Dong on a Moomin though. You know, what do they got? What do they got down there? They won't tell you. The Democrats want you to know what

the Moomins are packing. I had no idea about this Danish thing. Denmark was just kind of like hanging nationalized dong all over all of our renewables. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, obviously, is that like the Crown Estate owns the seabed and so they auction off the land and basically the people can build wind farms and they can become part of the UK grid. But like basically the UK pays them to run it and pays them, you know, like utility scale stuff. And so some of the big investors, you know, outside of your garden variety, like, you know, Emirati no bone saws here investment

fund is formerly dong now forced out among others. Formerly dong. I'm trying, you know. Yeah, exactly. The Emirati no bones, so it's here, but... Also, there's no knobs. You got Dong, you got Nob. I have concerns, right? I think if Kamala Harris loses, obviously this will open the hell mouth in a new and different way.

But also she's kind of going to deserve it. I think like aside from the poll, aside from the like political maneuvering of it, just on a moral level, the fact that every day I log into Twitter and see like, you know, people getting like eviscerated in new ways, she's like, you know, said less than nothing about this. It's, it's, I guess, not a surprise that Michigan, which has a lot of like Lebanese Americans, Palestinian Americans, is maybe not necessarily going to vote for her as much as it otherwise might.

Well, I mean, obviously Michigan was a surprise. Like they barely held on to Michigan in 2020. They did win it. But if you look at the numbers in Michigan, they were they were quite slim in 2020 and Rashida Tlaib, her district, it's like an Ilhan Omar style sort of thing. We're like in a state where Minnesota is a different story because Minnesota is actually a pretty good margin. Their Democratic Party is actually pretty good compared to other Midwest states. But the margin in in Illinois or in Michigan was so so narrow. And, you know, you look at like the surplus that that slaves district delivered.

I'm not gonna say it's the only thing, you know what I mean? But like the turnout there helped a lot. And yeah, so if you, if you suppress that, you know, Michigan's got a lot of electoral votes. The system is stupid. I'm not gonna defend the system, but like it's the way that you get elected president.

And they, I don't think they can really afford to lose Michigan. Similarly, I don't know what to think of it because but but I definitely agree with you in terms of the of the vibe shift thing where it feels like it's just gone like in the beginning they the messaging was aggressive and Harris didn't didn't basically do any interviews or really have any any public appearances the thing, she's doing now that struck me. I saw this on Twitter. We started as she went on one vision, the Spanish

language channel and for like a town hall thing. And she was touting the endorsement of Alberto Gonzalez, who was like George Bush's attorney general. His first one. Although in fairness, I mean, and this is not I'm not trying to be flipping

about this. Like I don't I'm not agreeing with it. And once again, I mean, and this is not, I'm not trying to be flippant about this. Like I don't, I'm not agreeing with it. And once again, that this, this notion that like the sort of Clinton wing of the democratic party has like, oh, well, if, if a Republican says it's good, that means Republicans are going to vote for it. It's like, no, they're not going to, because they think that you, you know, you hide out in like tree forts to do cheese pizza, coated pedophile missions. Like they're completely insane.

Oh yeah. It's woe king, pizza express. I was going with like the pedophile missions. Like they're completely insane. Oh yes, Woking Pizza Express. I was going with like the pedophile Ewok there. Yeah, basically, yeah. You live in the lame third installment of the Star Wars series except nonce coated. Leave it to Britain to create the real Comet Pizza where America could only imagine it. Yeah, and what I'm trying to say though

is that like the Democrats really love to tout this stuff as if it's like somehow going to or certain brand of Democrat basically refuses to ever acknowledge Republicans as their enemies and it feels like because the people pushing them are like Washington consultants and you know highly highly compensated journalists who are Republicans or have lots of Republican friends. It's kind of the like zone to Twitter party phenomenon But the American version and so this this this death drive towards being like, like Harris saying, I'll have a Republican in my administration. Why?

As like a consolation prize, you know? You're going to have like, like your administration is just going to be Hannity and Colmes. And so they have like the Republican to gang up on. Like we picked a Republican to be in our administration, but he's really dumb. So everyone's going to think he's a fucking idiot. I vaguely remember this was a plot point in the West Wing in early seasons, was they had the one good Republican who was principled and stuff, who was just kind of there to kick around.

So we're going to have Greg Stoobie in the cabinet as minister for getting jank. I mean, these are the two alternatives, right? Either we get Kamlan, everything stays the same and slightly worse for the next four years, but Greg Stoobie is there, or Donald Trump is back. And the thing is Donald Trump, his mind has been broken in new and fascinating ways by almost getting assassinated. He's just saying some, I think he might be the Buddha. I think he might be the American Buddha at this point because he's just kind of embraced non-being

very vocally on stage. Yeah, I feel like Trump and Kamala Harris both occupy the same territory in a way, which is person I would not love to see be president, but someone who I would love to see host a chat show. Ideally, they should host a chat show together. I mean, I think for me, there's this kind of like, it's a frustration because obviously at an administrative level in terms of life quality and like things that harm people or potentially refrain from harming people. Having a Republican president is bad, because even the most annoying Democrat,

in terms of administrative stuff, is going to probably do less damage, although there's exceptions to this rule. I mean, if you look at Clinton. Yeah, you're like your federal judges and stuff like that. Exactly. Federal judges, Supreme Court justices, appointees to things to run all the various government,

I've forgotten even the terms of what we call them because I've been outside the United States for so long. But like the various bureaus, things like that, like the, you know, the Bureau of Land Management, things along those lines like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, so many of these things. Like they put the fucking Exxon CEO is the Department of State, you know, Rex Tillerson, and he actually quit because Tom was too much of a moron for him. Like, like, you know, that kind of thing. They put, they tried to put up the like the what was it? The Hardee's Burgers CEO to be the head of the Department of Labor. And the only thing that sunk him was the fact that like he had

substantiated like domestic assault claims against him. And like back when that mattered, I guess, this was in 26 2017. I mean, like, I, you know, I remember this happening. You know, they put Neil Gorsuch seemed like, like the absolute devil. And it's just very funny when you think that he's kind of like the moderate of the Trump Supreme Court appointees. And it's going to get worse because like all of the, like Trumpness has been heightened.

So he's, he's going to appoint like Grimace as like, you know. Well, yeah. And I think Grimace is very right wing actually. It's been, it's been a surprising turn from him. Some of his views. Yeah, no. Yeah. He's real. He's a real like tough on crime guy.

You know, he supports a three strike rule for the Hamburglar. I was going to, I was going to riff on the Hamburglar and basically being like, yeah, they're getting the endorsement of the Hamburglar. But unfortunately he, they found some the endorsement of the Hamburglar. But unfortunately, they found some spicy posts he made on social media, you know, in a pro-Palestine capacity. And so now the Democrats have to disavow him. I look, I find it, it's frustrating because when you see this stuff happening, like every time I read the news about stuff going on back home, you realize how many things in America are just kind of running rampant

because the government is more or less in gridlock, even under Biden, because there's so much of how this kind of like Trump slash post brain being melted by Obama winning the presidency twice, Republican Party has seen their role in government as just like, fuck everything up, jam everything up, in a way that Democrats campaign on doing, but never actually do. If that makes sense, for all of the sort of like,

oh, we're gonna filibuster everything, they don't filibuster shit. Come on, they fuck, they don't. And that's the thing is that it's it's very, very depressing to see. But I'm gonna bring it to a conclusion of my point here, which is that I'm plagiarizing from a guy who, credit where it's due, I don't know if he's a good or bad person,

but I've seen him on various social media platforms, Michael Tay Sweeney, and he's made the argument that like the reason why so much of this stuff in the coverage is so like glad handing Trump is because newspaper editors by and large want Trump to win as a Purgative or corrective measure because they think the 2020 protests went too far and that America is too woke And so that's why you see this is a very funny. This is something that's being done by a kind of like press that is largely a kind of

You know remora on Wordle. Right. You know, like the New York Times has like political opinions. Cool. The Wordle guys. Yeah. The Wordle guys, the great cooking section guys. The every now and again, a recipe starts with a vignette about the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Those guys. certainly does when they let me write one. I mean, yeah, it would be interesting to see if you could find a way to like shoehorn 9 11 into every recipe you ever wrote for the New York Times.

Weirdly, the word for the word has just been jihad for like seven days in a row. It's getting. Yeah. We're going to we're going to teach you how to make a Swiss cafe, Ron Versailles. But you know, it was a real moment of things being Ron Versailles when the towers fell. Look, what I'm trying to say is, looking at the stuff about... I don't necessarily know how much sway Labour Party people are going to have because there's like, it makes for a really aggravating and horrifying headline when you think we knowing them as we do. No, they're just there to like do the motorcade scene

from in the loop, right? Yeah, but I also, and I think in the same way that when Jim Messina, I think it was, came over to advise Theresa May in 2017. Well, that went very well. Like, I think that there's this weird notion over to advise Theresa May in 2017. God, yeah. That went very well. I think that there's this weird notion that when you, what's the right word here?

When you win a victory, whether or not it's because of a good campaign or just some sort of weird, exogenous, kind of secular event taking place in the nation at large, for some reason, there's this notion that you can just transplant that into a different country with a different system. You just get to go and do a victory lap. I mean, it was like all of the like camera

and era conservative stuff was all done by Australian right wing strategists doing their victory lap over here. Linden Crosby and those guys. I don't know if you remember this, but Nate Silver tried to be like, well, I called every state correctly in 2012. So now my next big project is I'm an expert. I'm going global, Mr. International.

I'm going to do that. I'm going to, I'm going to predict results with 2015 general election in the United Kingdom. Fucking H shit. Call it everything wrong. Got demoted to name bronze. Exactly. Tried, tried to do the same thing with like, I think a sports site and then realize that all the people that he knew from political writing are the worst sports writers in the planet. So yeah, like this idea that it transfers over, I mean, I don't really think that they're going to have that much influence, but I definitely think the vibe should just be. It's just, it's so funny that it's like the kiss of death, right? That like you're on

this like knife edge, you're like four weeks out from the election and Morgan McSweeney is here, you know, to show you the way. I would say that like the weird thing is, is that I think that there's probably a kind of Clinton land element slash Obama land element that is concerned about Biden, the sort of continuation of Biden into Harris winning. There's the reason why, like even when Harris, when things were looking potentially better and the polls have been all over the place. And in some cases, like favorability is higher for Harris now than before. But like they were really worried about like, Oh no, what if she wins and she keeps Lena con like every single person of like a senior position of influence from Obama is like now a lobbyist for Amazon being like fire. I don't

know if you guys it's Lenan is at the Federal Trade Commission and has been actually enforcing antitrust on tech companies. And so like every botan paid for, you know, guy with a townhouse in Calorama in DC is now fucking like basically gunning for her because she's enforcing the law. It's one of those things where like the people doing the gunning in these situations are mostly Democrats.

They're mostly Clinton land people. And I think that if I had to hazard a guess without bringing back the specter of 2016, honestly, if I had to hazard a guess as to what it is, it's, it's, it's Clinton world shit. There is still time for them to fuck it all up once again. But look, the fun, there's a very funny outcome out of this, which is like everything's going to be really horrible, don't get me wrong, but Keir Starmer is going to have to meet with Donald Trump. He already has.

He went to New York City, he rode the gold elevator up and he had a two hour dinner with him. Oh really? Yeah, genuinely. Well, I guess like, but like public press conferences, I suppose. Oh my god. And I just wonder like, what's the Kiernik name gonna be? I think what you're saying about the Smurfs is quite interesting.

I think we should consider having a Smurf in charge of the Bank of England. Milo's really gonna have to work overtime. He's gonna basically have to write like dialogues. Just experiencing a psychotic break because he has to have an entire conversation between two voice bits, one after another. He says I encourage him to go further. I say, wow, I say how much further? Old man, yeah, it's real.

But yeah, no, it's because because Stelmer went and he met Trump. And then the thing that he said about having met him was that he's different in private because he actually thinks about stuff, which is. I'm sorry. Look, nothing has ever been further from the truth. The guy who wrote the art of the deal, who spent more like unvarnished time with Trump being around him nonstop, like being able to kind of create the public figure of Donald Trump back when he was just sort of like sleazy mob affiliated real estate developer who loved declaring bankruptcy and fucking

ruining all of his business partners like the smurfs tell me to do it he even said this man is a fucking idiot like all he can see is dollar signs no matter anything he owns it's not because he has taste it's because it's expensive this is very clear yeah and like it was clear to Kirsten and Resolver, he still had to like go up there and like bend the knee. And I think that's really funny and will continue to be really funny going forward. But I don't want to make any predictions about how the election is going to go, right? There's we got like four weeks, you know, I don't know how it's going to happen. All I can say is that things are going to continue to be very bad in a lot of different

ways. And if Kamala loses, she will have deserved it. But it'll drag us back across the Atlantic to British politics because the Conservative party are having a leadership election and they had this beautiful moment, right? It was a three-way contest between Jenrick and Badenock, who are the two, like, nutcases. Yeah. Yeah, the loony candidates. Yeah, exactly.

And James Cleverly, who was ostensibly the, like, more sensible, more normal one. And his supporters... James Cleverly, the most absurd person to have the surname Cleverly, other than all of the other Tory leadership candidates. But his supporters tried to, like, boost Jenrik against Badenoch because they thought that he would be an easier opponent for Cleverly to beat. And what they ended up doing was boosting Cleverly out of the contest entirely. So really living up to the name.

It's just like this eight dimensional chess move where you sit down, make like three illegal moves and shit yourself at the table. Yeah, it's very much the see you in hell, I rev my motorcycle creating a cloud of dust and when it clears I'm lying completely dead on the ground. You know it's really sad because I realize I don't think I have this notebook with me

here in my temporary apartment in Geneva But I seemingly recall James cleverly posting something online sort of like some dumb graph basically showing like, you know This is Britain on like the goodness badness scale and good is only going up when the Tories are in power and I Responded with like an XY graph chart basically of like the degree of what happens when you nut versus when she keeps sucking and like what the crossover point was and like the forbidden zone beyond it. And I tweeted this at him. This was, would have been like 2018. It's just weird to open up a notebook you have like all your notes and to-do lists and then there's just randomly this graph in there. And so that's what I think of every time I think of James Cleverly.

James Cleverly did nut and the Tory delegate voters did keep sucking. And that has gone into the situation. It's weird, weird because we were talking about Clinton land and I was thinking of the Colin Powell leaked email where he describes, say the Clinton Hillary Clinton is my friend, but everything that she touches, she manages to screw up with hubris somehow. And what you just described of like, let's whip the votes to it's an easier opponent to beat. Oh no, we fucked ourselves and the bad guy won. That is a hundred percent what the Democrats did in 2016, 2015 with Trump in the primaries.

James Clinton link. This is where we're approaching a convergence here. But yeah, so basically what it is now is we have this leadership election that is fully like alien versus predator, right? Like whoever wins wins we lose yeah and they're both insane about different things right like Robert Jenrick is the slightly more people think he's secretly normal this is the big scandal this is the big thing that might bring him down among stories is that they worry that he he doesn't really mean the insane shit but like his

his thing is like leaving the like... The European Convention on Human Rights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas, Kemmy Vadenox is like, mostly like weird trans shit. Yeah. She actually does seem to believe it, which is more frightening, I guess. The difference from what I can see is that like, with Generic, he kind of... They both sort of...

The base level weird stuff that they sort of believe in is not too dissimilar. But the challenge is going to be... And you could sort of see that with like, whenever like Republicans sort of debate each other for like, you know, the presidential thing, like their sort of baseline weirdness and baseline like reactionary tendencies are the same, but the real challenge is like who actually like believes it sincerely and who doesn't. And so like, even though they definitely both are insane and they both like are truly and genuinely awful people, Bad Knock is willing to sort of save the lines in a way that Generic

isn't so much. She's doing method acting, you know? Like she's committed to this stuff, whereas Jenrick is... But Badadoc's also like a poster in another... Like she has those ten... And this is not like me just kind of like being like, oh you know, she just says the line like... No, she's actually sort of said this very openly, but like...

When there's this very good... I think The Fence published this, but it was like an anecdote from someone who worked at The Spectator when she was like digital editor there. And they were like, yeah, she never got any work done because she was too busy on the forums. And she was just like, yeah, I love, like she was like, yeah, I'm on the forums all the time, but also like I'm really good at working and you know, I get all my tasks done and I also spend time on the message boards.

But it was like, no, she spends a lot of time online. Which is to say that like, I imagine she's also very tapped into the emerging British online right, who are kind of increasingly sort of gaining more cultural savings. Esoteric Nazis that they are like... Tapped into the sort of like De Santis thing, the like Black Sun sort of graphics. And where like, I don't know whether, because I can't really say the case of like, whether they would succeed or whether they have succeeded in America, because that very much depends on like, what happens with JD Vance. Whether he becomes VP, but also what he does if he doesn't become VP.

The vice presidential discord server full of like, 15 year old gropers. But like, the British sort of online right, sort of are kind of gaining a bit more of a foothold in part because like, you have a media infrastructure that is sort of built towards their wh online, right? Sort of are kind of gaining a bit more of a foothold in part because like you have a media infrastructure that is sort of built towards their whims, right? And you know, the recent news about like the spectator being sold to like Paul, I don't know what his second name is, but like the guy who basically runs every right wing news. Just do it by first name only, but being sold to this, you know, this guy Paul. Some geezer called Paul who runs every right wing outlet in the UK.

Paul from town who owns every right wing media outlet. Well, what I do know is that he's the dad of the sort of banjo player from Mumford and Sons, who has not shut up about leaving Mumford and Sons because they got too woke. Paul Mumford. Yeah, little Lion Man transition. When you said Paul, I thought you were talking about Guido Paul and I was thinking, yeah.

A geezer isn't Paul. So many right wing Pauls. A geezer named Paul, like is it guys selling ecstasy out of his like, you know, Ford Cortina in 1989, but for right wing causes, or is it a different geezer Paul? Is it never leaves his apartment Paul

because he's got a huge map on the wall and it's just fascinating. Also, I've never seen a tube of fucking Carmex in his life. Prison Paul. That man had such chapped lips. What was the deal dude? You were on video. I guess they were so luscious without filler. Paul Marshall.

You're thinking of Paul Marshall. Paul Marshall, that's right. Yeah, Paul Marshall. Who runs basically every right wing outlet in the UK and like this whole thing and he got rid of like all the sort of like so-called liberals of the spectator, replaced the editor with Michael Gove. And so like the trajectory is obviously going to be like, these guys are going to be culture war led right wing kind of commentator and like that. So, so that sort of section of the right is going to become empowered and

they have like the media infrastructure that will allow them to do that. And where like the rest of the British media are very much kind of willing to sort of follow that line. You know, they could be a lot more successful here. It's really interesting because like Jenrik is just like you're sort of a Tory who comes out of the mold of just like willing to say, do, think anything. Yeah, the only thing that I remember about Jenrick is him being, what was it, the Minister for Housing, I think. And like apparently being a huge pain in the ass and like not particularly comprehending during the Grenfell inquiry. Yeah. He also was the guy who got the, in the sort of like refugee registration center for children.

Like he got the cartoons painted over. Didn't he get brought down by some like small time corruption bullshit also when he was housing minister? He was fired, but I don't remember if it was specifically, if it was just like Boris Johnson. I think he just like changed up his cabinet a bunch, but yeah, I remember the painting over the counterfeit Mickey Mouse because it was too welcoming. And it's like, no... My latest Google Robert Jenrick and like the fourth thing was Robert Jenrick of Zempik. So, this is the thing. This is why he's not going to win, right? All of these fucking groppers with their their Francisco Franco body pillows are gonna like eat him alive by doing mean girl shit about him and claiming that he's been zemping.

They're gonna do the thing like the Kendrick Lamar single where he drops there's a cover is just a photo of Robert Jenrick's ozempic prescription. Jenrick Lamar? Yes! Very good. Yeah, basically, yeah, Robert Jenrick in 2020, I knew I wasn't falsely remembering this. He got in trouble because he had allegedly like kind of dodgerly approved a housing development that former owner of the Express, Richard Desmond was trying to build, but Richard Desmond was also making massive donations to the Conservative Party. And it was some, yeah, the man who you may remember from spunk lovingloving-slut's fame, Richard Desmond.

Yeah. It's interesting because I have this feeling I wish I could see the housing development plans because I bet you it looks like shit. Which is just one of those things. Oh, almost certainly. It's just such a perfect, like just the icing on the cake when it comes to British political scandals. Yeah. Generic is weird because Generic was, I remember the other thing was that he was like the youngest member of the cabinet because he's like my brother's age. He's like 42.

But when you look at him, he's just sort of like indeterminate age. Yeah, he's like a blemange. Like he looks like he hasn't set- Well, but generic. Yeah, well, this is the thing. They've been calling him this apparently. I really?

And in the midst of this, we've had this like leadership campaign where they've both said and done some like pretty strange things. Generic's big like gaffe was that in order to sort of advance this we have to leave the European Convention on Human Rights thing, just flat out said, oh by the way, like British special forces are like summarily executing people because of the woke ECHR. And got sort of like yelled at a lot about this.

Meanwhile, Kemi Badenok keeps saying things about how like maternity pay is woke and like autism is, a lot of things are woke, apparently. Oh yeah, because she refused her own maternity pay, right? This is like a famous Badenok law thing that she like resigned before she went on maternity leave so that the spectator wouldn't have to her own maternity pay, right? This is like a famous bad o'clock law thing that she like resigned before she went on maternity leave so that the spectator wouldn't have to pay her maternity pay. Because it's a woke invention.

And the thing that just came out today was her publishing this thing about how like autism isn't real. Because if you had autism back in the day, you just like walked it off, you know, you just like rub some dirt on it. Walking it off? Like, oh no, their midfielders picked up autism. That's going to be tough for them. But they're coming on with a special spray.

This is the thing, right? She is a poster. She is telling us to touch grass. And so we're trying to thread this needle right. Like there was this piece in The Guardian by Sonia Soto the other day that's like, these two are not funny. There is nothing funny about these dangerous extremists. And it's like, well, they are dangerous extremists, but it is a little funny to be like, autism is something you can cure by rubbing some dirt on it.

Yeah, I love the idea. Like on one hand, it's, for one, dangerous extremists. It's like, yeah, well, I agree. Also, like, at least in one dimension of the thing that makes them dangerous extremists. You are completely simpatico with them. Oh, this was a bit in the fucking Guardian article was the one divergence from these are dangerous extremists was to say, yeah, but you know, a Cammy Badenock is basically, you know, when she does all the transphobia stuff, that's common sense. That's like aligned with the electorate. And it's like, come on. I could have sworn, Hussain told me a story, and Hussain, stop me if this is something that can't be divulged, but that you over... You knew someone who happened to be in a restaurant

and overheard Sonya Sada like crashing and burning on a date with someone because she would shut the fuck up about trans. Oh my God! Yeah, like somewhere on like... Actually, I won't mention the name. It my god. Yeah. What? Yeah, like, somewhere on like... Actually, I won't mention the name. It was in central London. Uh-huh. And it was just like someone who like...

It was very funny because I feel like it was only media people who would actually be able to recognize these faces. And the only description was like, the guy she was with just looked very much like trying to figure out the easiest way to exit. That's brutal. But it was something to do with just like the easiest way is to go into the toilet and come out a different gender. And then she'll never know.

Genuinely, this, this is, this is the anecdote that is going to like get me through winter. I feel like the knowledge that like they're not just making me miserable, they're making themselves miserable. Is the winter anecdote allowance that you get from the government. Yeah, I'm like storing it in my cheeks. I'm like, you know. I really hate to reference a show that sucks, but all I could think of was, God forgive me for bringing this up.

The terrible American show South Park and the thing about Russell Crowe and Russell Crowe having his like kind of anthropomorphic steamboat named Tugger, subjecting Tugger to his horrible side project band that sucks to the point where the steamboat shoots itself in the head in an act of desperation. And all I can think of is like, that's, that's like the ethos of going on a blind date with Sonia Soto. Find me the gun that can kill a boat and I'll shoot myself. But I think this is also like, this think this is also symbolic of what is happening with the Tory party, but also clearly what's going to be happening with politics more broadly, which is that there are people who really

genuinely believe this stuff and the way they move through the world is very much guided by those fears and paranoia. It's very identity forming. And there are some people who like are perceived to kind of not believe in it as much, right? And like, you know, we talked about how in the sort of Tory election, like you have two pretty much insane people who like broadly believe the same things, but one is much more willing to sort of save the lines in a way that the other isn't. And you know, where you have sort of a Tory constituency or like right-wing constituency of people who really just want them to say the lines, right? Like I don't think they really have any sort of material ambitions or at least if they

are it's not particularly of importance. No, just like kind of like casual sadism. Right. Well, they want like people to be like, yeah, we're going to do the cruelty, we're going to do the killings and we're going to like, You know, because I think also, yeah, I was thinking about this the other day, which was, well, if the riots that everyone seems to have memory hold, like, sort of suggests anything, it was like, well, you can mobilize or like people can be mobilized naturally to sort of like attack minority groups just off their own volition, right?

That has sort of been bubbling for a while and that will continue to sort of be there. So what you really need is just someone to be like, to say the lines, but to be like, yeah, what these guys are doing is completely legitimate. They don't need anyone to sort of do the dirty work for them. Which is to say that I imagine that a lot of the animosity towards like certain black people sort of vying for political power,

the differential really be like, who do people think genuinely believes this stuff and who do they think is just sort of doing it for clout. But the thing is like when you sort of genuinely believe these things and the way that it changes you, you sort of, the thing is it forces you to sort of lose perspective entirely, right? Yeah. Such as on your date. As a political, yeah, as like a sort of life project that fails, as a broader political

project that also fails. And I don't know, I think there's something quite interesting about like the expectations of sort of people with power being so low that like the only thing that you really, the only thing that they believe that they need to do is to sort of save a line publicly. Yeah. I, you know, everything in this country is shit, but I think the thing that will finally pull it back together is if the Tory party leader gets on stage and says the T-slur. Well, I mean, I also think there's something to be said about people who like, just genuinely

believe that things will not get better regardless, right? Like they've sort of come to accept that like, things are not going to get fixed, everything's going to get worse. Did you see that video of the like, insanely old white British woman trying to like, grab at a guy through his car window calling him a like Zimbabwean pimp. I have not seen... Oh no I did see that yeah.

And she was doing like the Gollum voice. Yeah. Median British voter. And well I wondered whether it's like okay like there's also like a very big mental health crisis in this country and so I think I'm very I'm very worried about being like, Oh yeah, this person's insane. And they're like, you know, it's like, well, they could be, and they could be because like mental health services and support, especially towards like older people in the UK is fucking abysmal. Oh yeah.

All you've got to look is the results of the Tory leadership. I mean, honestly, if they say, if they had a better help stand at the conference. But I think there's something to be said about like the sort of shift towards a type of politics where people like have genuinely, have just genuinely accepted that, yeah, things are going to be shit, they're going to be shit forever. And so the best thing that we can do is we want like some people to have a worse time than we are. Just doing the wicker man.

The fact, I mean, basically, yeah. And I feel like whatever happens in like in the Tory party election, but also I think the next five years, especially considering the trajectory of the Labour party is going down, is one where it will just be like, well, things are not going to get better. You have both the general, the cross-party consensus is things are just going to get worse. And the real, like the winners out of that will be, well, who promise that like whatever minority group that you don't like will have a worse time. The Wicca Tron.

Even the Reform Party who are now according to some polls like basically on par with the Conservatives and like two points behind the Labour Party. Yeah, so I saw a poll that said that if we did an election today, Luke Ackhurst would lose his seat to Reform, which is very fun. Oh great. Well, I reform, which is very fun. Oh, great. Well, I think that's actually very funny. So, yeah, if you're into tactical voting.

The one seat where it's woke to vote for reform. But even reform aren't really sort of saying that, yeah, things will get better for certain people. They're like, no, we're just going to make things worse for the minority groups that you don't like, specifically. Yeah. They going to make things worse for the majority groups that you don't like specifically. Yeah. They've had it, they've had it too shit for too long. And I think, you know, we're going to make the potholes outside the Muslim houses bigger

than the potholes outside of like the Christian houses. Driving up and down the street with the JCB digging potholes. Whatever, they're deepening the potholes outside the mosque and then they're taking that hardcore and then they're tipping it into the Christian potholes, you know, but they're not fully filling them. They're just making them a bit shallower. Oh yeah. You can't like give two people like two easier, right?

Yeah. So this Tory leadership contest, like, you know, dangerous extremists who are aren't funny aside. I think the other thing about this is that like, obviously Labour are going to give them whatever they want. Whoever wins, they will just be able to bully the Labour party so effectively on whatever their pet issue is. I think we can't rule out building a Wicca man. Exactly!

It's important that we acknowledge that the GDP harvest has not been as robust as expected. And I think that, you know, immolating one member of my cabinet to appease the pagan gods is simply not something we can take off the table at this stage. They're going to make Keir Starmer put West Streeting in the wicker man for the crime of being insufficiently transphobic. Like, and you know, more power to them in the sense that like the Labour Party deserve it. But like it's, it's, it's grim going forward.

Saved in the last second because McDonald's sends their papal guard in to rescue him. They're like, we have to intervene in domestic politics. Sorry, this is too, this is going to hurt our bottom line too much. I think the thing that really gets me, this is, this is tangential, I suppose, but I feel like it's relevant in terms of split personality kind of tendency in which like they are supposed to come up with there they're notionally promising either an improvement or Worsening the conditions of your enemies

but then also when you think about like how much of this is just kind of the legacy of of this kind of that same phenomenon you see in America with a kind of like extremist hardening and ratcheting where when the labor party takes over again, you know, inevitably when the, you know, the, the, the government party shifts for a temporary period, it maintains all that rhetoric and then it just gets hard. And then the opposition gets more extreme and so on and so forth. I don't know if you saw that there was basically like

kind of a historical survey done kind of like of the home office to investigate why Windrush happened and that it was suppressed for a while that the report was delivered. But I think Kimmy Badenock may have been involved in suppressing the publication of it, but it came out a couple of weeks ago. And one of the points they made was that like, you have this sort of bifurcated experience in the sense that like the home office tries to say, Oh, well, we're not racist

because we have diversity inclusion is so important to us when it is undeniable that every single bit of legislation related to immigration in the United Kingdom from the early 60s until the late 70s at a minimum saw the idea of its raison d'etre as there are too many black people in this country and we need to reduce the number if you have if you Have a home office that says the like as the fig leaf of like, oh, but we care about diversity or whatever, you can you can really like hammer them on that as you know, bad luck has been doing. And it's just interesting to me because it's like it's once again this thing

where I feel like you can basically say institutions are defined by the thing that they do and what they are doing is their purpose for being. And the Home Office's job is to The purpose of a system is what it does. And the purpose of the Labour Party is to put West Street in the Wicker Man. Exactly. The purpose of the Labour Party is that Keir Starmer and Donald Trump are going to unite over a shared love of drunk driving and knocking people off bicycles and conspiracy theories about Papa Smurf and the protocols of the elders of Smurf Village.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We're going to put a moomin in the Wicker Man. I'm going to do it. You want me to see me do it, folks? Bring him out. Bring out the Wicker Man. Oh, they're going to regret letting Finland join NATO now. We're all going to eat tasty grilled hippo.

We're going to do it. I'm going to feed the front row. Who wants hippo? The Moomin Taco Bowl. So I'm going to drag this forward a bit because I had a start-up I'm skipping out. We're doing a reading series, right? Because we're not done with British politics yet because there is, you know, as we've alluded to, there is another party involved in it, which is the Labour Party. And they've had 100 days in office at this point, which has prompted a

bunch of like, like roundup pieces of which this is one. Labour's first 100 days by Laura Koonsberg, friend of the show. Oh, yeah. And she's just done a little article about how well it's all going. Just see how hopefully she's blocked it out into what's been going good, what's been going bad. One of these sections is a lot longer than the other. So, it's not at all how I imagined winning would be, a minister reflects,

as the government hits its 100 days in office. There have been slips and accusations of sleaze, scores of announcements, enormous international events. The PM himself admits it's been choppy. Even in the last 24 hours, the government has blunted into a row with a big investor after a minister urged consumers to boycott them. This is the Louise Haig, like P&O Ferris thing. We'll talk about it at some point.

Oh yeah, rogue operator. Yet we've also seen ideas that are stuff of the party's dreams. There are sweeping new rights at work, question mark, new laws to help houses get built, the railway is coming back into public hands. I don't remember that happening. Oh well, you know, any day now. It's been a topsy-turvy start,

but what kind of government is this really turning out to be? You know, I got to be honest with you, like I never really have high expectations for Laura Kuhnsberg, but I think that it's very unprofessional for her to cut and paste the entirety of her article about Taliban upset having to be bureaucrats now. And call it an article about the Labour Party. Yeah, just like a guy who works in the cabinet office being like, I want to go back to the mountains. I want to go back to jihad's. Yeah. I had my AK.

Well, I think it's only fair, right? If the Taliban are having to be bureaucrats now, the bureaucrat nerds of the Labour Party should have to be the Taliban. I want Wes Streeting carrying an RPG-7 through the hills of like Devon somewhere, assaulting a Tory convoy, you know, lining a bridge culvert with explosives somewhere in the Chilton hills. A bunch of Tory aligned warlords fleeing over the nearest border. You get like a unencrypted FM like walkie talkie radio intercept complaining about how

cold it is in the hide site and be like, I really want to cuddle with you right now. Listen, some of the warrior poetry of the Labour Party staffers is beautiful. Yeah. You could just, you could just hear a 20 second burst of extremely deep fried things can only get better by D ream. And then people are yelling into the radio, stop keying the mic. Milo is making reference to something that happened to me in real life, which is that when I was deployed, we had this thing where they would basically translate, because we used MIRC, the 90s internet relay chat for basically doing info feeds and text feeds and stuff. It's sort of like imagine radio that more people could talk at once. And there

was a channel for voice intercepts that had been translated like they didn't interpreters listening the whole time and translating. And I just remember the almost verbatim about like people just asking each other, like, how are you doing? Hey, how are you? How are your fighters? How are you? And it says like 16 seconds of intermittent chatter and Taliban music playing. And the next was stop keying the mic motherfucker like playing call of juicy with like the entire house and one of mine screen shot it and sent it to me. And it was like, apparently the tile, the Taliban also have problems with dickheads, hot, miking. So, you know, it's not so different after all, but yes, Laura Coonsburg. Okay. Yeah. She, when she's not pointing at a movement and saying that's him

right there, she's writing an article about the labor party. What has gone right? The government has, as promised, gone ahead with many of the plans it committed to in the Labour Manifesto, whether that is shaking up the planning rules, going ahead with nationalizing the railways, giving workers many more rights at work, creating GB energy, that's not a real thing, or getting rid of one word of off-stead judgement in England. Sorry, why is this fucking re renationalizing the railway shit? Because there's no way they're actually doing that. We talked about with Gareth Dennis, I think while you were gone,

basically the idea is that like they're more or less like creating a holding company to control the franchises, but they're not actually going to. And this is amazing. They are not actually going to nationalize the for-profit company that actually owns all the railway stock and leases it to all the different franchises. Yeah. You're going to have like a great British railways that kind of just like as a branding exercise.

It's basically they've taken the very non-functional franchises and they're like, what if we treated them like the British energy markets? And now you're going to have like, I don't know, some new, you know, office, amazing, like, what's the right word? Like the sort of like 2010s, extremely Wix.com style graphic design franchise company selling you stuff at markup. Well, you know how you can, you can heat your home very efficiently is the sort of like, you know, waste heat of this wicker man.

Yeah, that's true. But you know, basically the thing is carbon neutral. They're calling it Great British Energy because they've decided that the design template from Wix.com they're going to use is pint of milk from Tesco. And it's just going to have fucking Union Jacks all over it. This is my favorite part of this article, right? And I remind you, this is squarely in the middle of the what has gone right for Keir Starmer section.

A senior figure in the party warns colleagues that things are absolutely recoverable. Reminding others that... Great. Hahaha. One interesting semantic sequence of words warns colleagues that things are absolutely recoverable. Me after I've accidentally burned West Street in the Wicker Man.

We can recreate him in the aggregate. I would take a warning that things are absolutely recoverable from like a surgeon, you know, but like from a politician. Also just the cadence of like to the tune of things could only get better things absolutely recoverable. Yeah, I was going to say neither D ream nor this is funny, but when I produced the first episode of TF that I ever produced, Riley told me to punch in things can only get better and I didn't know the D ream song so instead I put in the 80s song.

And Riley was like what the fuck is that song? Yeah from an alternate timeline when new labor had better taste in music. So at home many point to the Prime Minister's handling of the summer riots. He is a serious man says says one cabinet minister, adding, he was absolutely comfortable and resolute. He knew what to do and gripped it completely. Yeah. Keir Starmer is a serious man in the sense of the Coen Brothers movie, like constantly

beleaguered, bullied by everyone, terrified of life. Yeah, basically. Also, like I remember him like not saying anything about the riots for days. And I don't understand where this idea of his, like, competence comes in. But anyway, it's in the thing, right? Keir Star Majutsu, I'll enable the rioters to expose themselves. Yeah, Keir Star, like, reading the art of war when when the enemy appears strong. Another insider wonders, imagine how wrong that could have gone if the government's approach

had been different on the riots. I think it was pretty bad already, but whatever. Then we get to the what's gone wrong section, which is somewhat longer. And most notably, there are worries inside Downing Street about what will happen in the budget in the coming weeks because as you may have noticed the Labour Party and Keir Starmer's approval ratings have plummeted and We know that the budget coming out is everybody gets kicked in the face like really hard by Rachel Reeves So, you know some people pay a lot of money for that. Yeah, I mean some people would pay some money for it I Some people would pay a lot of money for that. Yeah. I mean... Some people would pay some money for it. I don't know.

Our stories have been winter fuel and freebies, says one insider, suggesting the two issues that have really hit home with the public have been both avoidable and damaging. This is, by the way, the closest to an acknowledgement that you'll get from anyone in the Labour Party about any of that kinds of kindness shit. As like, two Laura Koonsbergs stenographer to power, like, you know, a month later. Yeah, people didn't like that Keir Starmer was sort of like getting bought all of his clothes by one guy. Well, I have a solution I could propose because, you know, I have... Big barrel. You have to wear the barrel. Can I just say something? I wonder whether like it would have worked better if Keir Starmer had tried to frame

Lord Alley as a sort of like menswear guy. Just like... Yeah! He really knew his stuff. He knew like the cuts and you know... Lord Alley or Derek Guy. I have a funnier approach. What if Keir Starmer had turned around and been like, actually this guy was grooming

me and I'm a minor. Probably would have worked. I mean, like, yeah, you've got like a South Asian guy. Oh, fuck. Fuck. Yeah, I feel like the optics about me. It probably would have worked, but maybe not in the way that we would have liked it to. The House of Commons grooming gang. Oh, yeah.

Keir Starmer getting rescued by some like TikTok nonce hunters. Multiple levels. Like this gay South Asian guy is grooming me. It's like that's a vote winner in this country. I will say that. In many ways grooming the country at the same time. Yeah, if he wanted like the fucking like Kemi Badnok, he would have... Keir Starmer spotted in a sailor suit licking a giant.

What I was going to say though, is that I feel like the solution that we can propose here is that I'm relatively familiar with the cabinet ministers having seen them throughout the Corbin era being annoying. And I would say that Rachel Reeves is, it's not, it does not look dissimilar to a Moomin. So perhaps you could put her at the Wicker Man and set her on fire in the toad. Put that on the poll quote, like put that on the poster. Does not look dissimilar to a Moomin, you know? We're gonna eat Toonsburg, folks.

Yeah, I mean, a Moomin with turf bangs is basically Rachel Reeves. Putting the Lego hair, another great Danish invention, onto the Moomin. A Moomin with turf bangs might have charisma, which Rachel, like just, just the charisma void. So maybe yeah, the wicker man is the solution, but it is, it is interesting. Yeah. It's like, what went right? Well, we were basically scare headlines around the world for Britain is completely out of control race riots and mass fucking, you know, civil disorder. What went, what went wrong? Well, some people are upset with us about all of the freebies we've been getting from just this random guy. Also, we've decided that it's better for people to not be able to heat their

homes in the winter if they're elderly. There is also a little tidbit in here about Sue Gray, who is now out. But we understand that somehow Sue Gray has returned, right? Because Kuhnsberg writes, the saga over Sue Grey still hasn't necessarily come to an end. The issue of her severance pay and what's understood as her

ambition for the House of Lords are still hanging around. Why in the fuck do we know about? Why is she everywhere? Why is she like the fucking like Rasputin to the Romanovs of British policy? Do you remember like a couple of years ago where Sougre was being described in these kind of like, you know, very, very fretful terms, like this Eminence Grease, right?

You know, like no one, no one even knows who she is, but she pulls all the strings. She controls everything. She's kind of like the Jackie Weaver of Poland. Exactly. And then she's in the spotlight for five minutes and people realize, oh, this is actually just like quite like low rent and pathetic, a bit like Jackie Weaver. But she's got a fondness for Northern Ireland. So you know what? We let it slide. We let her. She can go and like, you know,

represent the Divis Hill flats in the House of Lords or whatever. I guess what gets me about it is, yeah, it's just like the top floor of them. These things always just seem to be like low rent is such a good description. It's just sort of like the only place in this country will find it. Apparently like Machiavelli's Prince in British politics is apparently just this really annoying lady who sucks and she's everywhere. Yeah. And you will never get rid of her in the same way that like, Jonathan Ashworth is on TV all the time, right?

In the same way, like, Sue Grey is going to get into the House of Lords, I guess, with a gigantic severance payment. And she's just going to remain in public life forever because that's, you know, what has been decided will happen, I guess. And as ever in Britain, like, the scandal is about the wrong thing. Like the whole scandal starts because Sue Gray is paid more than the Prime Minister. And it's like, and we demand that like everything in this country's politics is like, flagellatory. Like the same reason why David Cameron was always going on holiday on EasyJet,

as though the man had ever been on EasyJet in his life before he became Prime Minister. It's like everything in this country is about pointless aesthetics. Can you imagine being the poor underling having to check the European Union common animal travel passport for David Cameron when he goes on holiday? Like, oh, it's a pig again, isn't it? Yeah, no, I don't care how much the Prime Minister has paid. I barely even care how much Sue Gray has paid. What I care about is this idea that she's just like,

oh, she's here forever, you know? And you don't have to question this. And in Ashworth's case, like Milo, you made the comment earlier about comparing somebody to the drill tweet about like, you know, watch this sick move, I rev up my motorcycle when the smoke clears, I'm lying completely dead on the pavement.

Jonathan Ashworth is basically trying to become the real life version of, you see how I got this, my beautiful house, my beautiful wife, all this money crying. Now get the fuck out of my office. Like this man, the whole Ashworth scene thing seems to be this argument that like the voters were going to keep holding elections until the voters vote correctly. Like you're not allowed, you're actually never allowed to vote out your MP. And if you do, it's a Brex perm, you know, the people have let down the party and will be dissolved and they'll elect another one, you know? But so there is good news though, right?

Because the guy who has deposed Sue Gray into sort of like comfortable Soviet exile on the House of Lords is Morgan McSweeney. There's been a lot of like sort of hagiographic writing about him. Keir Starmer's like political director. Is he the guy from the Croydon Labour constituency that like can't stop going bankrupt, like ultra bankrupt? I believe so. Oh, he's like Donald Trump. Yeah.

And there's this guy in the UK Labour Party, brilliant guy, he's taking advice from the Smurfs. He's in Croydon. One thing I will say for Morgan McSweeney is that he does have a children's book ass name. He has a British 1970s playing cop on TV name. That's how you know you've actually left Greater London is because it stops being an SW25 postcode and then your address says Smurf Village CR0. Listen, Sunshine, you're Nick.

I really like the way that the Laura Coons book is written about Morgan McSweeney here. Now Grey has moved on. Number 10 is under the charge of Sak Keir's longtime political supremo who ran the election campaign Morgan McSweeney. You can hear the sigh of relief around Whitehall. He's the right person to lead number 10. He has amazing politics and most importantly Keir trusts him, a minister close to Sir Keir says. He has amazing politics. What does that mean?

I don't know. It's sucking up, right? It's all sucking up, whether that's from Laura Kuhnsberg, whether that's from the sources briefing her. Well, I think, yeah, and I think this really goes, when I think about this on a broader scale, I do think again, it's like very much like a lack of faith and a lack of sort of a lack of faith in politics as a sort of structure, a lack of sort of understanding politics as a kind of, you know, we saw this with the, we saw this with like the Tories where the

media sort of relationship, especially with like Kuhnsberg was very much like adjacent to kind of access and like the way, and like the things that you would have to do almost like to debase yourself in order to sort of maintain that access. And that so much of sort of serious political media in this country really came out of like what journalists are able to kind of like, how many phone numbers are they sort of able to sort of accumulate? Yeah. It's just like texting your source being like, what do you think about your new boss? It's great.

And so it's like, well, you then have to craft these stories that aren't really there. And so like, yeah, like Morgan McSweeney becomes a titan for sort of like intellectual, social democratic thought in the same way that like, I don't fucking know. There's amazing politics. Yeah, like, or like Nick Timothee was a genius or something like that, right? Even Dominic Cummings. Nick Timothee, another great name. Or like Dominic Cummings. And lest we forget Dominic Cummings.

Or like Dominic Cummings, like the Rasputin of like, you know... Because, and again, like he rode the way for... The bald Rasputin. Well, he rode the way for a little bit, just because it was this like, no one could sort of conceive of like, Brexit as a possibility. And so like, suddenly this guy who like, wrote Turkish people on a toilet door, and suddenly was sort of granted as like a genius, with mark I mean granted as a genius. I think yeah like I think it's this way of like British people who sort of number one are sort of obsessed with American politics and by extension

obsessed with being like a politico in the sort of West Wing House of Cards Netflix edition version of it. But they're actually not really that clever. They're also not that subtle because I, I think about Laura Queensborough, it's like when she would interview Jeremy Corbyn, when Jeremy Corbyn was the labor leader, you would her facial expressions and body language were like, she was hosting a TV show called like inside Britain's biggest nonce prison. And then meanwhile, when she was interviewing Boris Johnson, it was literally like, wow, you should hire whoever the videographer videographer is for these segments and make them your wedding photographer. You guys look so happy together.

Like it was so obvious that she was, I'm not saying romantically enamored with him, but more just like, like she, like the favoritism, the appeal, like the obvious, the obvious like enchantment was there. And it's just sort of like, that's not subtle at all. It's so obvious that you guys like... And I think, yeah. And I think there's also something to be said about like certain politicians, especially those with like media experience, being aware that they could like basically dangle keys at the journalists who just required access all the time and it would be fine. And I think the challenge of the Labour Party are going to have is that like, well, none

of them, as far as I can see, are like particularly likable or charismatic in any way. Not in the slightest, no. And so it's like, well, you're not going to be, you know, you're sort of going to be crappy politicians who aren't doing anything popular, but you're also not going to dangle the keys because that might be too exciting for people. And so... The good news is that they figured out what's wrong, right? Just to tie this article together. Because going forward, there what's wrong, right? Just to tie this article together.

Because going forward there's two things, right? The first thing, more football metaphors. After the first 100 days, Keir Starmer is said to have a better understanding of what the team wants from the captain. So, you know, we're gonna get some more footballing and Kirsten is just going to he's going to surprise people. Something that really kind of I was just thinking about this because I like everybody else. I saw that footage of the refugee camp in Gaza being bombed and people burning alive.

And, you know, I would say I was surprised by that and just, you know, not in the positive way. And it's like the protests against the genocide in Gaza have been this massive, massive undertaking in Britain, like huge amounts of public support across the board, like enduring public support for the last year. And I think the degree to which like people are like, well, people are just, you know, disenchanted with British politics or like, you know, they have to win over the public. It's like, but it's so obvious you have so many hundreds of thousands of people taking time and sometimes going to jail to protest these things. And the government's response is fuck you know, and they just keep doing it.

It's not even just fuck you know, because I found the second thing I was looking for. It's not just fuck you know, it's fuck you know and by the way, I have anxiety because, and there's a real like overlap here. The last person in government that I heard talking like this was, was Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor. And the guy from Avatar. Exactly, the guy from Avatar. Nine foot tall blue man who works for Joe Biden. Who had imposter syndrome and he talks about having imposter syndrome.

So one of the quotes in this article. Look everyone is connected by AYWA. Yeah. It's because he knows he's not a true Narve. That's why he has imposter syndrome. A senior blue colored labor source. I mean blue labor, you know, right? Senior blue labor source jokes.

The Tories have a sense of entitlement that matches our imposter syndrome. It's like you don't have imposter syndrome, you are just imposters. I hate you so much, the Wicker Man cannot come soon enough. And that's Keir Starmer's first 100 days. It's fun to imagine that the Wicker Man is like a guy. Oh yeah, the Wicker Man lumbers towards you. Yeah, like I want the Wicker Man is like a guy. Oh yeah, the Wicker Man lumbers towards you. Yeah, like I want the Wicker Man to come and sort all of this out. Pagan Tony Stark built this Wicker Man on the Scottish Islet.

Our basket woven friend, the Wicker Man. Well, listen, we all hope that a kind of... He's quite eco-friendly. Basket woven Wicker Man lumbers towards Whitehall and sort of like reveals these people to be the imposters that we know they are. I love the idea of Keir Starmer trying to mix his football metaphors to seem more relatable and then he suddenly he's realized he's going on a tangent about like the Fantastic Four, but he thinks they're druids.

And it's just become this sort of like misremembered asterisk and obelisk version of British history involving golden sides and things along those lines, potions, eating bores, et cetera. And it's just like, I think a hard turn into druidism might win back some appeal for kids. I will say it would be funny. It would be very funny if they were like, we, we all the, all the vestiges of British nationalism and English nationalism have been co-opted by the Tories. We have to go to the original one. very funny if they were like, we all the vestiges of British nationalism and English nationalism have been co-opted by the Tories. We have to go to the original one. We're just going to become druids and just kiss.

Kissed on seeing, seeing the green night and getting really into like Arthurian legend. Yeah. To collect job seekers allowance, you'll now have to go to Stonehenge where our various shamans will guide you through the process for requesting work from the forces of nature. They're like, please, instead of wearing a labor rosette, we need you to show up holding a horse skeleton. Keir Starmer giving a speech covered entirely in woad. Naked.

This, this was all I had from the article. The rest of it is just going to be like me continuing to think about Druid Keir Starmer. But... Just for fuck's sake. Thank you for joining me and my fellow bards. Sir Kelts Starmer and his pagan rituals. Riley will be back for the next one. Welcome to Sorceress. Riley will be back for the next one.

In the meantime, I have to adjourn this. What is this? Is this called? Anyway. Yeah. That's the Welsh thing. Yeah, but they got druids there, you know, it counts. That's true. Yeah.

Me having to issue a notes app apology because I implied that the Welsh didn't have druids. The one thing I remember about this is that they gave Hugh Edwards an honorary druid position, and then they had to formally strip him of his druid powers. Well, he was using them for evil. I mean, it's like all the professional associations who have to rescind their endorsement of someone when they're outed as being a child abuser. And it's just like, go down the list. It's like, Oh man, the drew is they've taken away your pointy hat robe. They take it away. Your big side. They've taken away your cauldron Your witch hazel

Going to his house and inspecting the premises to make sure there's no mistletoe hung anywhere. You know what? Oh, Jesus. It's not technically non-sing if you catch a young boy under the mistletoe. Then it's just abiding by a religious practice. Officer. That's like a UK sovereign citizen movement they could actually take off. Yeah, it's in Magna Carta. This is a real like sort of like stoppage time bit here.

I really appreciate it. I'm going to be thinking about it the rest of the week. Last minute winner. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us. Riley will be back in the next one, which will be a bonus. If he's not been cancelled by the Druids before then. That's right.

Subscribe to the Patreon, you can hear it if you're not already. Do we have anything else to promote? Milo, you have shows. Yes. Coming up very shortly, I have Glasgow, 23rd of October. I have Dundee, 25th of October. Newcastle, 26th. And Edinburgh, 27th.

And then I've got a bunch of shows also in November and December all over the country. There's statistically one near you. Yeah, go see all of them. Yeah, do grab a ticket to those. But those are the ones I'm foregrounding. Also, there is going to be a TF Live show in late November, TBD. But it will be D very soon. So keep an eye out.

I'd also say, still dealing with a slight technically annoying thing, but very soon we will actually, we finally did it. We finally made the Avignon Pope shirt, and I think that you will enjoy it. Oh, there's also another surprise announcement. Yeah, there are two. They're both really good. I'm happy with both of them.

So stay hyped. Those will be debuting soon, as soon as I can solve a slight technical problem that God willing will be fixed shortly. And then that'll happen. So just look for the announcement when it does come out. We'll put it out on all the social channels as well as in the show notes. Much, much stuff. My favorite pubs. The best pubs. The problem is, is that our original website with the

domain registrar was actually Smurf Village CR zero. And so that's getting it transferred out of Papa Smurf's domain is not easy. We've been canceled by the Druids and we've had to move our web hosting. To a less equitable hench. Yeah, exactly. What we didn't realize was that in order to escape the druid power, you have to go to a place beyond the traditional boundaries of Britain. So we're actually setting up a domain name server in doggar land under the North Sea. It'll be, it'll be set up eventually. Not to be confused with dogging land, a place with a very different vibe.

I will say the fact that there was like a pre-historical region of Britain during the last extent, the last ice age when sea levels were lower that was then sunk by melting ice and it was called Doggerland. To me it's just like nothing could be... To me that's British Valhalla. When you achieve greatness, when the druids bless you, that's where you go is under the North Sea to Doggerland. The lowland hinterlands of the UK where just sort of outdoor group sex is commonly found.

I'm begging us to pull the podcast. Goodbye everyone. Thank you for listening. Bye. From our henge to yours. Thanks for watching!