TRASHFUTURE - It Ain’t Half Austere

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Riley, Nova, and HK discuss the Labour Party’s planned campaign of social murder against the disabled in the UK - including a deep dive on the ongoing poster-to-policy pipeline around the recent (and not so recent) attacks on the Motability charity - that is described as “not austerity, because it’s half of what Osborne did.” Also, finance a burrito (US edition), the podcast discusses a new morning routine, and Quibi’s Meg Whitman returns from her ambassadorship to Kenya (???) to a board seat at Coreweave. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So firstly, I just want to say to Hussein in November, thank you very much for agreeing to change the podcast recording time to 3.58 in the morning. Yeah, but 3.58 to 4.02 a.m. specifically. So that you can fit in your, like, four minutes of scheduled journaling. That's right. Yeah. I'm doing, like, the weird squat while I'm recording this. Because the thing is, I really was coming to resent having to chop all of those pineapples and make all of those ice bowls feel but like Now that it's resulting in this kind of like quality like flash podcasting

I understand I understand that I'm part of a kind of a greater design and I understand now why when you sleep you have To wear kind of like kidnapped victim duct tape over your mouth Yeah, no, it's that's actually super important that like as part of your nightly wind down routine, you should get like black bagged and taped by like a private security force that you hire. Well, I mean, um, no, it's also also I want to thank November for being the just off screen helper who exists to like hand us bottles of water and then to film us. Well, random passersby come to us in the street and Hussein and I can say cool

stuff to them like whatever you're passionate about maximize it or we should get at least 10,000. We should at least get 10,000. Never like specifies why. It took me like a really long time to figure out what this guy kind of does and even when I'm not I'm not quite sure like what he does for a living. Ashton Hall, a man with a name like a national trust property. He claims to be faster than Usain Bolt. I think that's cool. My favorite part of his day is when he spends four minutes

diving out over a pool and like hovering in place. Check this out, check this out. My name is Ashton Hall and I'm 28 years old. I believe in a balanced diet and taking good care of myself with a rigorous exercise routine. I live in the Miami residences by Radisson Blue on the beach. I mean, we didn't need to wait that long for a real American Psycho sequel. Yeah. It's here. It's here and it's being broadcast in bits on TikTok. Well, you know, well, you know, like they're sort of doing,

they're doing like a sort of revamped version of American Psycho, right? Get in the ice bucket. Get in the ice dip. Chop up some cucumbers in there. Yeah. Shinji get into the ice bucket. No, like I was thinking about this the other day and I was just like, well, like, you know, it's going to be really hard to do something like this just because it kind of feels like it's sort of beyond sad because like the whole like American Psycho, at least the film was supposed to be like a like satirical, right? And it was like one of those things where it got the people who sort of make it their personality don't necessarily understand

or don't really understand like what the films are supposed to be. Like the Wolf of Wall Street. And it kind of, yeah. And it generates this whole like, you know, because like for years and years, this type of American Psycho adjacent content has flooded pretty much every platform, right? The Ashton Hall thing is not a new concept. It also isn't the most bizarre Get Ready With Me video I've ever seen, but the fact that there's now so many of them sort of speaks to me like, yeah, this kind of feels like

it goes beyond American Psycho, but in a way that I can't quite figure out. I feel like apart from anything else, you're getting murdered on bowls. You're going through four or five different bowls of stuff every morning. You're making so much ice. So much ice. I think that, look, when the NHS is finally completely eliminated by the Labour government... When you go to NHS.gov and type in your condition, it just says have you tried hustling more?

Yeah. Have you tried maximizing your passion? Which it basically does say for depression or whatever. We should have Ashton Hall come to the UK and teach everyone how to get over depression by sprinting next to a rented Rolls Royce and then putting and have different watches for diving and swimming and running. I want to see Keir Starmer put his face in an ice ball

and say that it was the best time of his life. Starmer comes out in the Cartier sunglasses. Because shirtless with like the little like fucking weight vest on. Okay, sick, that's actually sick, sorry. He's clearly been doing trend for like 12 months. Matt Hancock would really love to put his face in the ball. That's what I'm like. He could finally do those kinds of flips. He'd have a great time with Ashton Hall, I think.

Yeah. So Ashton Hall, look, I know you probably already have a job offer from Robert F. Kennedy to try and like prepare America for the bird flu epidemic? Yeah, making America's chickens swagger. Yeah, but I have to, I have to, please, we need you in the UK. Please come to the UK and fix our NHS with like aggressive sprinting. My country, the United Kingdom yearns for freedom. Well, you know, I don't know how like like, I haven't checked, because I only saw this before

I came on, but someone, like, they dug up some stuff on Ashton Hall. Apparently he got evicted from his apartment, like, fairly recently, like a couple of weeks ago. Oh, brutal. The landowner was actually in the lease that he couldn't levitate above the pool like that. But also, the most important information that I found out, he is 5'5". There is hope, then is five foot five. There is hope then. Wait does that mean he's like wider than he is tall? Yeah, because I did sort of

think, I did kind of think with like when he put like some of the other videos where he puts like suits and stuff on, it's like this is weird but I'm not the menswear guy so I can't figure out why it's weird and then instead of just put it all together which is yeah his width is more than his length. I've figured out something theoretically right which is the menswear guy you don't have to subscribe to all of his ideas you don't even have to understand all of his ideas or all the technical language it's like Maoism right you can just throw something out there like quotations from the menswear guy to like make your argument seem good so if you see a guy

that you don't like and you want to make him feel insecure, like in that way, you you wage a protracted people's war on his mind by saying something like collar gap or whatever. You don't know what that means. He doesn't know what that means, but he's going to go away and Google that and you're not going to give him the second thought. And that's mindful. Aston Hall has a collar cap. We must uphold the

honor of the Radisson Blue Residences Miami Beach and prevent its treadmills from getting stomped into the ground. Look, I want to talk about the news. I also want to say hi everybody. It's TF. We're recording at, it's now 4.59 in the morning and we have one minute of podcasting left, so we're going to have to get through the rest of this pretty quickly. As we said, we are going to be talking a little bit about, a little bit, mostly about the Labour Party's reforms to quote unquote reforms. That's like gutting, you know, like in the same way that like you reform a fish, right?

Yeah, exactly. The Labour Party's, I would say, broad-based campaign of social murder that they are announcing that they're embarking on at the behest of, in no small part, American Elon Musk repliers. Mm, cool. And we're going to talk about that in more detail, but we wanna talk about a little bit of news first,

a little bit of tech news. Number one, I feel extremely vindicated in my decision to get my ancestry checking done via the Church of Latter-day Saints. Uh-huh. You went to Ancestry.com specifically because they will baptize you Mormon after you die. Well, look, here's the thing. 23andMe, which has the genetic information of 15 million people...

Including me at one point. I have the big Felford Award. Yeah. 23andMe has gone out of business, which means if you spat in the little tube and sent it to 23andMe, then now God fucking knows who is going to be able to genetically profile you. I mean, look, I'll be real with you, man. I just like sending people like vows of my spit in the post. Like, yeah, it was just coincidental. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, I don't know how valuable the data that I am apparently 100% British

and Irish is going to be. That was a real, like, kind of, I don't know what I expected moment when I got those results back. So, but someone's willing to pay for it. And I don't think it's going to be anyone nice, right? Because if 23andMe goes bankrupt, the auction for that bankruptcy is going gonna look like the fucking Hitman level, with the shadow auction in it, you know? And God only knows where it's gonna end up. Now, on the other hand, we may not get Mormon baptized, is the thing.

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm gonna get Mormon baptized after I die, which is a great hedge in Pascal's Wager. Because if the Mormons are right, I get a planet. You just have your genetic material put all over a crime scene. No, it's perfect. And it's like no loss, because if Mormon God isn't real and another God is real and vengeful, then you're not on the hook for being baptized Mormon, because you didn't do that. You didn't do shit, right? Some Mormon did that and is now in like other religions hell,

but you're just kind of chilling based on the stuff that you did in life. That's genius. Yeah. They're in a Sufi hell. Turns out it was Sufi as if that was right. Yeah. Yeah. So this is from the Anwojiki, the CEO 23andMe. I love, by the way, a corporate bankruptcy announcement where it reads like, because of CEO brain, it reads like they are announcing an expansion of the company.

She says, 19 years ago, when I co-founded 23andMe, the direct to consumer genetic mapping industry did not exist and most people had no idea why they would ever want to see their genome. Most people still don't is the thing. People who did it, did it either because it was a novelty like me or because they enjoyed mailing their saliva to people, like Hussain. And I don't know that anybody ever came up with a satisfactory answer as to, like, why do this?

For most people, anyway. I guess you could also do some Jerry Springer stuff, right? If you're in any doubt about that, it's always fun to find, like, you know, unknown cousins or something, like a sitcom maybe, but like, is that worth it when you don't even get your own planet after you die? She goes on, there's now a thriving direct-to-consumer industry and over 15 million people are now 23andMe customers, but also, what were they ever gonna buy next? It's gonna be like, hey, better check if I'm still white!

It's sort of like The Sims, right, you always want the option to roll up a better genome, but the only way to do that really is the Elon Musk approach of inseminating as many women as possible, and most people who aren't Elon Musk feel pretty gross about that. Mm. So she says, Consumers are rising up and asking for more control over their health and what greater knowledge about how to be healthy and why they may have health issues. And I guess we can say, also, anyone who is trying to buy 23andMe out of bankruptcy also wants more control over your health and greater knowledge about how you may be healthy and why you may have health issues.

Mason- Yeah. Which again, because it's like, I think most people it's basically a kind of indeterminate result. We are like, yeah, nothing pretty much looks normal to us. That's not hugely useful information clearly to 23andMe, or even really to anyone who might buy it, so, you know? But the really funny thing, and I didn't know this until I just looked into this briefly, is of course, of course, the company went public with a SPAC. Of course. That's right. Yet again, an absolutely foolproof way to identify total fucking dog shit.

Whereas you have an actually foolproof thing in ancestry, right? Because you have, that's Mormon, right? So it's like hollowed out into like a, you know, mountain made of granis in Utah. And like they're specifically thinking about how to survive the apocalypse and live into the fallout New Vegas timeline with that shit so people

will know that you had a slightly elevated risk of diabetes or something in like 2077. They'll be like damn that guy wasn't just from all of the British Isles he was also slightly Danish that changes things. Crazy and you get a planet. Funny thing was though from from their SPAC they raised 600 million dollars. Where did it go? What did they spend it on? The little like tubes to mail out to people? Yeah, I was it I mean was it some sort of weird cloning thing that they were trying to do I was sort of convinced and maybe yeah

I feel like if you've got loads of people spit you could do some you could do some weird shit with that It's just going into going into the 23andMe's offices during the fire sale and seeing a secret sub-basement thing and you're like, what's in there? And it's just like Adventure Brothers style clones of us stretching as far as the eye can see. With different themes. Maybe there are clones of us that are like hustle people and we're all going to be, you know, doing sort of interval sprints at two in the morning. Yeah.

All of the hustle clones are in the clone tanks with a little like duct tape over their mouths. Yeah, that's right. They're all wearing Rolexes in the clone liquid. So also they owed a bunch of money to a company called Coreweave. Uh huh. And Coreweave is a, I'm going somewhere with this, Coreweave is an AI compute outsourcer. Oh, what the fuck were they trying to do with their fucking gene base and AI? I've seen Gattaca, nothing good. Yeah, they were trying to make a sentient computer.

If I'm guessing here, right? What they would have been doing, ginning up an AI offering where they would be trying to use aggregated genomic data sets to look for like non-obvious correlations and stuff, which is something that machine learning, a normal technology that is not claiming to be God, that doesn't require every piece of creative work ever to be like stolen to run, is every piece of creative work ever to be stolen

to run, is real technology and is actually good at that kind of thing. ALICE Okay, sure. ZACH That's all I could possibly guess. ALICE Uh huh. And whatever it was, it didn't work to the extent that 23andMe's offices are now open and you can go and rifle through and go find your hustle client. ZACH Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

ALICE Would you have sex with your hustle client? ZACH I think they'd probably wouldn't leave anything on the table. AL. Yeah, exactly. Would you have sex with your hustle clone? Uh, I think they'd, I mean, they probably wouldn't leave anything on the table. Mmm, yeah. I don't know, maybe my hustle clones out of my league. Yeah. Just got like, abs and stuff? Yeah, so I don't necessarily know exactly what they were doing, but I do know- No, no, no, it's time to jump baselessly to conclusions.

You can't libel the bankrupt, that's like, famously true, right? Yeah, that's true. Not because it's like, you know, written down anywhere, but just because they've got bigger problems. What are they gonna do, sue me with what money? Let's see, hire a lawyer now you saliva freaks. I bet it was for like identifying patterns in like biomarkers for disease or something like this. Okay, so tell me about CoreWeave. So CoreWeave is a company that is filing for an IPO right now. CoreWeave, it sounds like something a guild navigator does.

I bet that's why they called it that. But it is a company that outsources compute. So they have data centers and compute, and they will sell you compute if you want. I recommend Ed Zitron's writing on it for the deep dive into how this pumped up whisper of nothing is largely built on AI hype and promises of contracts that were unlikely to materialize. And then when I was just putting together for this news section a

piece of news crossed my desk and I said I must include this because I want to give you the one-two punch here. Number one, Microsoft has just withdrawn from a 12 billion dollar agreement option to purchase compute from core weave That is like a huge amount of the money that they were going to make this year open AI looks like they may be picking it Up which is funny because that's just Microsoft wearing a different hat No, let's let's send this money from our dipshit division This is like this is clearly an accounting error This is a massive expenditure for fucking idiot toys, and yet for some reason it's not

coming from our fucking like, Toys for Idiots division. What the fuck? Yeah, this came from the serious pencil pushers division. Yeah, we're funding this from the grown-up company. That sells windows and shit. So, Microsoft withdraws from this agreement, and it does that the day after Meg Whitman joined the board of directors fresh off her post-quibi career as the US ambassador to Kenya. Meg Whitman joined the board of directors fresh off her post quibi career as the US ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman is back That's not a one-two punch. That's like a one-three punch

That's like a like a one punch and then like I then you hit me with a hammer I think it's really nice that she's so committed to vertical video So so Meg Whitman of quibi the app that gave us short form Quib content, like bury me with my golden arm or whatever. It gave us murder house. It gave us an experiment of what if all of the fake shows from 30 Rock were real, but also made for vertical consumption on your phone. Yeah.

So you were telling me that she got out of that, right? Failed upwards. Not a surprise, but specifically failed upwards to US Ambassador to Kenya, you said? Yeah. And then she left after Trump got in, because she was like, I will not work under him. The Biden administration was so fucking cool, man. It's just like, who do we get to fill this ambassadorship?

I don't know, fucking the quibs lady? Oh. Yeah. Look, it's gotta be Jeffrey Katzenberger, Meg Whitman. It has to be one of the two Quibi people. Quibbing is a core skill in the Kenya embassy. Well, maybe it was like sort of related. It was like, well, Quibi wasn't going to work for like a Western audience.

Like maybe it'll work in Kenya because maybe in Kenya they use their phones differently. Yeah. Maybe Quibi was going to be like the everything app. Do you think that she's like over it as a failure? I hope she isn't. I hope she was trying to like pitch Quibi to people even still after the failure of it, to be like, no, no, no, it was a really good idea. It would have worked.

We were just ahead of our time. Yeah, people didn't recognize that you could have a golden arm that took control of your brain, you know? Yeah, I think it would be really cool if she was in Kenya and then being like, no, no, you don't understand. It's called 47 counties of fright. Yeah. How many states does Kenya have?

How many provinces? 47. They're called counties. No shit. Okay. You actually look, you actually did the research on that joke beforehand. I underestimated you. I'm sorry.

That's right. There are some people where we talked about like the sons, where it's like, oh yeah, this is just all for them. Meg Whitman is a son. Yeah, not in a gendered way, but in a kind of class way. Her position is one that she's kind of untouchable, I guess, in the sense that you can make something that's this resoundingly expensive failure, go and be a diplomat. Imagine being a career Foreign Service officer and having to report to the quib lady and then get out of that

and go to Microsoft and decide, oh actually you know we're going to make this business decision, which seems like a relatively good one to not buy a bunch of compute from CoreWeave, but like still. The other funny thing is like yeah like fucking Meg Whitman was like I got tried to be governor of California before all of this and again failed. My god Meg Whit I could not believe I saw her name again. I was like surely surely you're taking all your HP money and all of the money that you got donated to make like you know fail videos of Jerry Brown and all that and surely you are just going into some cynic, nope, you're gonna be advising CoreWeave on God fucking knows what. But the crazy thing is, Quibi is back in another way, in a way that is completely different and nothing to do with Quibi. It never left us, it never died.

Some said that Quibi would return at the moment when people needed it most. Somehow Quibi returned. moment when people needed it most. Yes, somehow Quibi returned. So there's this company called Crazy Maple Studio, which is based in Silicon Valley. For a long time, their bread and butter was the like semi-erotic point and click mobile games that are 99% of the ads on the 44 billion dollar company X, the Everything app.

That's mostly what they make. The stuff that you scroll past when you're when you're blazing your glory on X, the Everything app. Oh, my. That's mostly what they make. The stuff that you scroll past when you're blazing your glory on X the everything app. Oh my god, I saw one of these like months ago. It was like really insane, but it was like the sort of premise of the game was like, help your girlfriend choose what to wear to school? What? It was rave, yeah. I guess that's a well targeted ad for Twitter's current user base to be fair.

I know I'm going to have people being like, oh yeah, but we had to just tell us what you look at It's like number one. No, not on fucking X right? No, not anymore. Yeah, it was insane It was just like it was like one of those sort of anime girl games But it was just like yeah help choose what they were to school today. It's like what the fuck awful We don't know crazy maple studio made that one. It's in the genre. It's active in the space Yeah, yeah, and it's like an interactive story thing where you like, you create like erotic manga starring yourself, but what they're now doing is they're taking this thing that's what that became popular in China, which is called

micro dramas that you look at like with your phone vertical. So, Quibs. We found a place where Quibs was successful and it was China. Well it's that the micro drama, it's Quibi, Quibs tried to be like every genre of show, whereas micro dramas are soap operas. They are pure soap operas. Okay. And as far as I remember, Quibi never even really offered that. Like, I'm sure they had one or two, but like, I mostly remember Chrissy Teigen doing Judge Judy. Yeah, they tried to do like reality shows and then like legitimate drama. That was a real moment in time when both Quibi and Chrissy Teigen seemed unassailable in the popular culture.

And it's like, these are both going to be huge forever. I feel like it was it was one of those things where like only the logic of lockdowns could sort of make that feasible. And you hear that now and you're just like, what insane person for that word. Meg Whitman, the current person whose kiss of death has just touched core weave. Cause like the whole thing, like, I'm sorry to keep bringing it back to old Quibi, but it was like,

the whole thing was just like, Oh, Chrissy Teigen's tweets are really like fun and people engage with them all the time during this very short period of time. So we're going to build a show around her posts, which like number one never works, but it was also a very much again, this is like, no, this only works for like a very, like it doesn't even work at all.

Like the perception of it works because everyone is kind of just like online all the time. And so this is, yeah. If I can say, Crazy Maple Studio has cracked it, but because it's for a less developed American audience, instead of doing just normal soap operas, they're doing basically Chuck Tingle novels that they're paying like $30,000 per 30 minute season to produce, such as like Impregnated by the President or Billionaire CEO's Secret Obsession

or My Sugar Coated Mafia Boss. And any of those billions going to the, you know, a human writer, do you think? They say that they use all human writers. Questions answered by my t-shirt ass response. Yeah, 100% pure human in this. It's like Soylent Green. Arguably human. Yeah. So quibs are back and they're like, oh yeah, half a billion people watched the double life

of my billionaire husband. I mean, are we gonna be forced to sample some quibs? I feel like I'm making a rod for my own back here, but. What I enjoyed watching about 50 States of Fright and Murder House Flip was that they were sincerely trying to do a good job with a lot of money. These all cost like $20 and look like they were filmed on an iPhone. But you know what? They're pulling in Spencer confidential numbers. So Quibi is

back. Anyway, look, one more piece of news before we get into our main topic, which is this is something that I would say has been sent to us. It's been sent to us 10,000 times. When Ashton Hall was saying, you got to make it at least 10,000, he was talking to the people who were sending us this piece of news. It's so cool that all the people who email us are like work for him. Yeah, he's our number one fan. We have been getting some fucking strange emails recently. I wasn't going to go into it, but I do think it's really fucking amusing.

Basically there must have been some new AI system that is allowing like one public relations firm to email every podcaster by looking at the transcript of a recent show to hook in. So I got an email. Hi, Riley, H. Kusvani, Milo and Alice, for example. Don't know who that is. As a dedicated listener of Trash Future, I've always, I'm always anticipating your thought provoking episodes. The recent discussion with Ed and Gweiso Jr. about the Silicon Valley consensus really ties into the landscape of data centers and politics. It's not passing the Voight-Kampff test already.

Check this out. The vivid storytelling and your take on Rachel Reeves unusual strategy like munching on crumbs keeps your podcast insightful and engaging. And then the turn is like, I believe my client, Rajakawi, would make an excellent guest for your show. He's a partner at Era Ventures where he spearheaded his firm's vision from its founding in 2022 to lead an $88 million initiative. He's like, yeah, he was at work at McKinsey's AI branch. You should talk to him. And it's like, what? Because you were like, you know, what you said about Rachel Reeves eating what she finds under the sofa, maybe think you should talk to this venture capitalist.

This is definitely one of those AI PR. And you can get them pretty easy. One of those AI PAs that replies to emails for you. And his advertisers are like, oh yeah, we can shave five hours a day so you can focus on rubbing banana peels on your face and stuff. The latest deep dive into the late Byzantine empire had me enthralled, especially the irony of sprinkling rosewater while the state teeters. It got me thinking about parallels to cyber security and the silent battles fought behind the scenes. Cool. I mean, I mean, to be fair, that is like, that could actually just be an actual person.

Yeah. Coreweave, you're going to be worth a. No, this is what people have actually been sending me. Of course, we've talked before about how Deliveroo and Klarna in the UK did a tie up a couple years ago where people can finance a burrito. Yeah, big recession indicator. Yeah, well guess what? DoorDash and Klarna have signed a similar deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments or deferred options aligned with payday schedules. Fantastic. What a great idea this is to be like, what if we sort of like introduced microloans

for the kebab, right? Surely these will be like incredibly secure and valuable assets. This makes economic sense. It's not just that it's like, this is risky. It's also quite cruel because when you want to tempt someone into credit, right? What you're really doing is you are trying to induce them into spending money they don't have so that they are either spending next month's money and then they have like even less to cover essentials in the best case, or you're tempting them into a schedule that's hard to pay off and you eventually get more than the value of the burrito paid

back in late fees. Now, Clarion doesn't charge interest, but it does charge fees. And I think it's very telling that one of the first things that happens after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets obliterated is all of a sudden in America, you're able to get a payday loan for a salad. Essentially. And they say, right? They say, it's DoorDash's first buy now pay later alliance. It gives users of restaurants a new way to pay for meals. I love to use restaurants. They say, by offering smarter, more effects, flexible payment solutions for groceries and takeout, we're making convenience even more

accessible for millions of Americans." And yeah, it's like, these things are insanely predatory, they are quite risky, and they just, yeah, you wanna talk about a recession indicator in November, I think this is probably a pretty fucking good one. ALICE Yeah, right? Like, I love to financialize my burrito. And this is the other thing as well, is that this is happening in the US is also fun because as we know, ordering food ever in the US makes you a combination of like Hitler and treats or treatler, right?

So now you have a kind of treatler-issued mepho bill, right? Where we're kind of doing sort of like Third Reich financing for the treats. So that's very commensurate. I really like that. Yeah. And if you look at delinquencies on auto loans have gone to an all time high, I mean, all time, a last 17 years high. Yep. Great. And the people, the Austrian economists who've all been like just shunted into the top of the country are, and I've mentioned this before, it's very striking how people like Scott Besson or Howard Lutnick, they talk about a recession

like a juice cleanse. Elon Musk does this as well. We need a new plague, right, to kind of like thin out the herd a bit. Also, when you said the Austrian economist at the top, I know what you mean is like Hayekians, right? But it's very fun to imagine you doing a kind of like, the octopus's tendrils spread across Europe from Vienna, specifically. Everybody will have to eat a little cake and have a

coffee and read the newspaper. Yep. It's Aljan Marselec at the top. Yeah, but this is like, quite alarming as well, because number one, that's not what recessions do. Recessions like do and leave permanent damage. I mean, the last recession, the response to it gave the world like the sort of zero interest rate problem madness that they all think would be cured by another recession. So like God knows what would come from it. But if there is demand for buying things like groceries on credit, which there is certainly fucking here, and I guess there is now in the economic center of the world, and a recession is planned and talked about as desirable by the people making economic policy, then I think maybe, you know, there

are about to be a lot more people who are customers of Klarna. Graze. Yeah. They're paying late fees on a pad tie to support some kind of collateralized burrito obligation. It's like student loans, it's like your burrito interest is like racking up in the background and then one day you get a phone call that's like, hey, by the way, you haven't paid your burrito interest, you owe us 30 grand. Yeah. I mean, it's quite funny to think about how, I mean, very dark, but it's also sort of amusing at the same time to think about how the initial pitch Klaner sort of made and justified his existence was really based on clout. It was like, oh, you know, the clout, what's really important

is flexing on Instagram. And so if you need a loan to sort of get a very expensive, I don't know, fucking Chanel bag or whatever, you can sort of do that. And it's still within the realm of luxury items. And now it's like, okay, well, as things have just degraded more and more, well, now getting a burrito is a luxury item, right? Groceries as well. Cause they keep, the press releases, they keep talking about groceries. Because people are making fun of them, but that by, you know, being like, yeah, we take all of the uneaten burritos, group those together into a new product that is actually less risky

than one burrito. Here's my dear Robbie explaining it in the, in the bathtub. Yeah, we call it a burrito squared. Yeah. But that's like to admit that actually we sort of are a little man's company. We just want people to be able to buy food for the week. That itself is really fucking dark, right? To sort of admit that with no sort of sense of self-awareness is really fucking jow.

I don't even know what to say to that, man. Again, because it's just like the 23andMe announcement, right? If you have CEO brain, then everything is... You're really pumped about everything. Everything's an opportunity. Everything is an achievement. And this has become common in a way that, especially the American economy structured its main winners in the last 15 years. And even then, people like Ashton Hall are imitating those winners. It's like people leaving the bottom button of their jacket undone because the king is too fat to button it up. It is to talk and exist as though everything you are doing is a path-breaking innovation,

because all you must do is make sure that tomorrow there is more confidence in your product from the financial markets than there was yesterday. Because the thing about Klarna, remember, is they're about to IPO. Oh, great. Yeah, just feed all of those collateralized burrito obligations directly into the stock market. Perfect. Thank you. Great. So they're about to IPO, which means that they need to be like, say, we're in more sectors with more customers and more addressable market.

But for Clarida, addressable market means people who are tempted into using credit to consume... Because there's two different ways to use credit. There's credit that you can use to buy an appreciating asset. Like a mortgage, for example, that's one type of credit. That's fundamentally different from person to person for credit that's used for consumption. Because credit that's used for investment is credit that is going... You are going to be able to pay back over time and you end up with something. Credit that is used for consumption to cover a gap in what you have versus what you need. It's like an emergency. So to extend consumption-based credit to more and more and more people is saying,

we are going to induce people into financial emergencies and that's going to make our IPO more attractive. Essentially. This is so nakedly predatory, but then, you know, what isn't economically? Yeah. I think that's the tone upon which we can talk about our main topic for the day, which is coming back to the UK and discussing what exactly the Labour Front Bench's plans are for people with disabilities in this country.

Death. Okay, well thank you for listening everybody. That's the thing, we had to get into the five minute segment so we could all journal. Also I wanted to note, we don't have a guest today to talk about this. I am actively working on getting a disability rights activist to also speak with us about this on a paid basis for an upcoming free episode. I'm working on that. Yeah, tip-offs to the usual places, please.

Yes, please. Anyway, I want to start by talking about Motability. This is a charity. It's a charity that started in the 1970s. Yeah, it's sort of a weird one. So it's a provision for getting like cars for people with disabilities that has become this kind of current, like, bettenoir on the right. Yeah. It's the subject of some wild conspiracy theorizing. It is just fully a conspiracy

theory that's been put forward in the pages of the respectable right-wing press in this country. That's the thing. Now it doesn't even need to. The thing that interests me about this story is that, like what's happening in the US, there's a shorter link now between posters and policy, but only on the right. So like, posting really is praxis, but only if you are a conservative. Only one direction of us, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, maybe things could have been different if, you know, Corbyn had been prime

minister, we could all be doing the same thing that all of these guys are now doing, which is the left-wing equivalent. We could be posting, we could be replying to Ash Sarkar day after day being like, legalize Katamon, legalize Katamon, until one day she retweets us and then it's policy the next week. Right? But instead of that, what you get is the kind of like the British version of cat turd 2 like who? due to the exchange rate is like cat turd 1.5 here replying and replying and replying to like

I don't know fucking Tom Harwood or someone until he retweets it and then the next week West streeting or whoever the fuck is like, you know what? That's a brilliant idea and certainly this esoteric fascistist who's getting the retweet here will respect us and love us if we do the thing that they want, which is to kill the poor. To put all of this in context, right? This is the conspiracy theory is around this thing Motability, which we sort of, as you say, it's a charity to get disabled people vehicles started in the 1970s. And what they do, right, is they try to just, it just mitigates the problems from disabled people not being able to get around. What it is, is it is kind of liberalism, it's an

example of liberalism. Yeah, genuinely, because this is the interesting thing, is that it's kind of an odd solution to something that is kind of government intervention, but it's like at arm's length, where it's like, well, okay, well, you can get a car, but it will be done through this charity that is just going to take the mobility part of your benefit and then lease you a car. But because it does this for so many people and it's kind of subsidized in that way, it has this huge purchasing power, so it's very cheap. Yeah, there you go. That's actually existing liberalism.

That's markets. Yeah. That's markets. You don't like it because it's successful in the market. Sorry. But the thing is, this has kind of transformed. Because if you do plug in the numbers to this, you can, in theory, go, OK, so hardworking, everyday Brits who do nothing more than live peacefully

and dream of firing a rocket launcher at a Premier Inn full of migrants, right? Every day, they go to work. And they're waiting in the rain at a bus stop while a Motability Rolls Royce drives past and splashes them all with a big puddle, right? And it's not sure it's never been true, but it's a very kind of Bannon-esque or like Rufo-esque thing of like, well we can zero in on this one thing that seems like it's like something that could be a wedge and we're just going to keep hammering in on that.

And basically, like it's one of the things that we're going to sort of talk about, especially as we get into the actual legislation, is that random posters, the esoteric fascists that are all followed by like senior government figures or senior opposition figures, think tankers. Again, that's a chain that already existed, but used to be longer, right? Those guys used to have to get laundered through into like the press or whatever, whereas now it's like two retweets. Yeah, they would like retweet that, for example, someone who's a quote unquote sickfluencer, who's then being like, I sneezed and I got a free-mode ability Rolls-Royce.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just got diagnosed with anxiety, picked up the keys to the Bentley Arnage the next day. Yeah. And again, all of that is lies, right? If you actually, yeah, it's lies. Yeah, if you have any direct personal experience of what it's like to be in any way sick or disabled in this country, you will know that this is bullshit, right?

Yeah, these are people who are going for rage engagement, who then either get taken seriously or, to be honest, nod, it doesn't matter because it furthers the project in the same way, by the esoteric fascists who are like one retweet away from government policy. Yeah, it's always really deniable because you can be like, well, you know, you don't need to know that that guy's a fascist, you don't need to care, you don't need to kind of, you can just do the kind of like Elon thing of like interesting interesting. So what exactly is happening? I think we've been talking around, right? Is that this charity, which this charity will give you a, we'll sort of use your mobility allowance for your personal independence payment,

which will explain the difference between these kinds of benefits for, you know, American listeners to lease you a new car and then sell it after three years. So it's cost neutral, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get the Koenigsegg or whatever, but you don't buy it, you're leasing it from them, they all sell it on and they make money doing that. Generally speaking, to actually get one of these cars, for a long time you basically had to show up to a meeting with someone who works at Capita, in an iron lung, for them

to actually approve you for it. Yeah, and those assessments were already brutal and are now set to get more brutal. If you want to talk about PIP assessments, a fairly routine question asked explicitly is why haven't you killed yourself yet? Which, to be clear, is not something that I think a lot of people are gonna go through voluntarily, even if it does mean you get an Aston Martin out of it. So in order to even qualify to lease a car with a maximum value of 35,000 pounds most of the time for three years, you have to go and you have to get this benefit that's almost

impossible to get. Like there's often not, there's like 90 page questionnaires. You were called in. They will, they will, they will turn you down if you have like fucking stage four cancer. It's like, there's a million horror stories about this. They're really easy to find. And it's a deliberately humiliating thing that it fucking sucks. And obviously like anything else in this country, they look to refuse as many people as possible in as unpleasant a way as possible. And the person who's assessing you, by the way,

is employed by like CAPITA or CIRCO. And all you need is one year of experience as a nurse, physiotherapist, or paramedic. So if you've been a physiotherapist for one year, right, then your job can be working for Serko, being like, hey, have you killed yourself yet? And you know, if someone's gonna subject themselves to that. Yeah, and this idea that anyone, your kind of like benefits scrounger is gonna be like,

no, when do I get the Ferrari? Yeah. So, but this recent press scrutiny, right? Quote-unquote press scrutiny. This recent press conspiracy theory is based mostly on the growth in the number of people eligible, which means the number of people who are able to claim the personal independence payment.

Yeah, just think about that. Just think about that, right? If you think about this is a deliberately, very very narrow, deliberately exclusionary view of disability, that only allows the most legible disabilities to someone who is looking to fuck you over, and that number is going up anyway? Does that maybe suggest something about the population getting sicker in a way that is undeniable? Right, exactly. And I think this is it. Like whenever all the sort of stuff around PIP and like all the kind of...

Well, again, like, it's not just like the Motability stuff. I think all the kind of the sort of like off heads and stuff about like worklessness and Gen Z being sort of work shy and stuff. And I think especially like the kind of dismissal of mental illness, you know, but I guess like the time of like checking on your blokes is truly over because we're really only checking in on our blokes if they've like clocked into the office or not. Right. We're really only checking. We're only checking in on them to see whether you've woken up at 3 45 in the morning to do your weird squats and drink. Like,

I don't know how many bottles of fancy water. No, but like this is it. It's kind of like, I think November you make, you make like the really good point, which is I sort of say this as like a bit of a joke, but actually it's true. Where it's like, you kind of just have to go out anywhere in this country and you will see that like, oh, everyone here looks really sick. Right. Like they look just ill. Like, I don't know, I go like whenever I sort of go on the tube in the mornings and like, you just look at people, it's like everyone here just looks like they're just ill in some sort of sort of maybe some minor way. But no one looks well. Right. like they're just ill in some sort of, maybe some minor way, but no one looks well, right?

It's almost as if even pre-COVID we had like a decade plus of underfunding anything that might make anyone feel better. But also just like a culture that kind of like discouraged people from like seeking medical help, bearing in mind that we have in theory anyway, like a national health service, but is designed for this very purpose. But like a discouragement to do that. And then obviously like the most important thing being like, well, we are living in an ongoing pandemic, right? And we've kind of like ignored all the symptoms of long COVID, but we've also ignored like actual COVID sort

of going around currently. We've ignored the idea that like, oh, you know, you can have this incredibly infectious disease that can harm people. Like even if they don't, even if it doesn't kill you, it can sort of like give you long term sickness that will affect you for the rest of your life. And it was never really properly addressed in any sort of public capacity. And so, I mean, I'll just like sort of end at this point, which is like, this is like something that if you even take like a modicum of seriousness, all of this will sort of make sense. And so when you read these offheads

and when you see these screeds on your news channels about people saying, oh, Gen Z are just workless, work-shy neat who just want to watch game shows on TV or whatever. Number one, great way to live your life. But also, it's a complete refusal to come to terms with reality. And that combined with a shorter chain of like posting to policy pipeline, but now exists. Um, and oddly like particularly enough, like with the, with the current labor party, like it's, it's, it's, it's a lot more beneficial if you are looking to sort of exert any kind of influence to like not engage with the reality of your situation.

And, and, and not to, not to sound like RFK here, but like RFK junior, not to sound like RFK here, but like, RFK Junior. Not to sound like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Not to sound like RFK, being like, I love being in this hotel corridor. I hope nobody cuts that short. No, so, not to sound like RFK Jr., right, but this is also a country that not only doesn't let you live a healthy lifestyle, but is actively inimical to it because it wants to make as much money off you being unhealthy as possible.

So like, it's not, you can't fucking like get any exercise because your city is built around the car, right? You can't get like a healthy diet because you're busy getting like your fucking Klana burrito delivered that's all being kind of like subsidized and the state kind of kicks you to go and do that whenever you don't want to. It's sort of like everybody's getting like choked by air pollution again. It's like all of these things contribute. Everybody's

like we've already got an aging population. There are all kinds of things conspiring to make people sicker. That not only is the government sort of like not committing anything to addressing, but is actively like, oh yeah, no, this is cool because it'll boost growth, right? And it never seems to occur that any of the growth boosting measures might have a pretty direct impact on how sick people get and how much money that therefore costs to treat them. Well, I'll give it an example, right, where if you are born in a number of like areas of South London that are near to sort of like the large urban motorways that were built in largely in South London

not in less so in North, then you are considerably more likely to have asthma that will affect you for your entire life. Yeah. Right. And then so you are considerably more likely to be disabled by these things. Considerably more likely to get some kind of sick hoon car as soon as you get your pimp assessed. Yeah. But as we say, right, like it is astonishing that the reaction from labor front benchers, from pundits, from everybody is saying the number of people who are disabled enough to

qualify for this incredibly cruel and residualized benefit that the conservative party replaced the previous cruel and residualized benefit with in 2012 has like, you know, like quadrupled, right? It's like they say, oh, it's weird that it's done that since COVID that must be scrounging that our aging population got an order of magnitude more health problems. Everybody learned. Well, that's what it is. During COVID, during lockdown, everybody learned how to hustle. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it couldn't have had anything to do with the fact that there was a fucking pandemic that's still happening! You're wondering why this country of old people, that's very old country, is getting... We also raised the fucking retirement age!

So of course more people who are technically working age are going to become disabled because they're working for longer and there was still a fucking pandemic. That's why the fucking numbers are up. God damn. And oh man, beyond that, the insane cuts in the provision of healthcare in this country that could like better support disabled people or help people from like getting too sick or whatever, like or the total absence of social care perhaps the gigantic rise in the people eligible for Motability which is if you have PIP and you qualify for mobility

assistance not even necessarily claiming it it's maybe that's because all of the other options for people like health care social care like sort of community support even are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and pushing more and more people into one of the few things that is still available. Perhaps what we are really measuring, at least to some extent, is the collapse of other options happening around one of the few things left. Sure is getting crowded in this lifeboat. People probably want all the cool seats in here. Yeah.

And so, you know, Richard Tice is saying, oh, cars are going to bedwetting boy racers, which is odd. What? It's like, yeah, there was this fucking Toyota in front of me doing donuts, but there was a streak of piss coming out from one of the doors. It was really strange. Or like, Alison Pearson is like, I felt depressed and maybe the government would give me a BMW. I don't know. Go sit through a fucking assessment and see what they tell you. Yeah. Yeah, Alison Pearson, give me a BMW. I don't know, go sit through a fucking assessment and see what they tell you. Yeah, Alison Pearson, give it a bash.

Well, this is the other thing too, like in the past, whenever there were like these types of, like benefits grounder types of things, like newspapers would usually send like one of their like piss boy reporters to go and like be like, oh yeah, go see, like go prove how easy it is to like, piss your pants and get benefits, right? And like the response to that has always been,

as subsequently like, you know, we asked a government spokesperson, we're like, we're gonna make the benefit system harder and harder, right? And what's noticeable this time around is that no one has really done the very obvious thing. Those jobs don't exist anymore. They don't have piss boy reporters anymore.

Well, no one sent their piss freelancer out to be like, hey, go to be depressed and see if you can get pip, right? And I do think that the reason for that is because they are very aware that actually it probably will not yield the result that they want. And it's also a lot easier to just, again, like exist in the commentary at pipeline, because that is really what like the remnants of these like loss making newspapers are there for. It is really there to just like speed the conspiracy theory.

Yeah. And what we're sort of seeing is we're not, there's not even really an attempt to sort of like even manufacture the fiction. It's just like, nope, we're going to completely disengage with reality. And again, like whether it's sort of like the reality of the fact that we are still living through a pandemic, but it's still making lots and lots of people very sick and they have fewer options now than they did back in like 2020, 2021. But also just the reality of like, no, the benefit system is so difficult to

navigate and so brutal and so demeaning. But like, there are lots of people who are eligible for benefits who just don't want to go through that system because like the amount of like humanity that you have to lose in order to sort of get your pissons is just like, at a certain point, you're just like, is it really worth it? It reminds me of, it's an interesting point you made about the lack of like piss freelanc really worth it? It reminds me of, it's an interesting point you made about the lack of piss freelancers here, because it reminds me of gender identity clinics, right? Because this was also the thing when that was being pushed, is like, oh it's so fucking easy to get trans-gendered on the NHS that they're doing it to kids or whatever, and

it's like, fucking send your piss freelancer in and see what happens. Maybe they tried to do that at the time, like a couple of years ago, and they're still on the waiting list, I dunno. NARES Can I tell you the funny thing about this? Well, I was like, putting together this example of like, how Motability is being talked about and how it's being used as like, this wedge issue to create support for, you know, swinging cuts to disability, right? When I was doing that I was like, oh, there's like a fact checking website article about it, and I read it, and I was like, wait a minute, this is from 2011, this is fact checking a Daily Mail article from 2011.

This is the thing, that you could take multiple runs at it, and even when it fucks up, even when it doesn't work, you just come back to it, and when the conditions are slightly more favourable. It's like nothing, like suppose there is nothing new, because as long as people with disabilities exist, people in charge of a like liberal, neoliberal, whatever you want to call it, the ruling class of a capitalist system will always want to see them subjected

to Victorian conditions of care, which means dead. Right, that's it. By the way, little producers, you might want to cut the Alison Pearson suicide joke. And so like, this is a campaign that has been waged by government frontbenchers have been like gleefully doing as much as they think they can for a long time. That's what the introduction of PIP was by the conservative government. And then at the same time, it's always demanded that it goes further because there is this popular mythology that are just out of view and always anecdotally verifiable, right? There are a group of overlords,

of like overlords who are rightly your social inferiors, who you are working to clothe and house and keep in luxury goods. This myth in Britain that like the great chain of being is out of joint, that they should be, you know, in the bright and proper system that is properly Victorian, that is where we're going to sort of do away with the sort of aberration of the welfare state of the latter half of the 20th century, they would quite

rightly not be living any life of dignity at all. And you would be having 2% more dignity at their expense, right? This is endless among Britain's ruling class and commentarian. And, you know, like we indicated earlier, all of this, there is a direct line from West Streeting. West Streeting goes on GB News and then says, you know what? This shows that something does have to be done about the benefit system. Because if this many people are getting free rolls Royces, then clearly there's a problem. Right? So it goes from a fucking griper via, not even via a think tank anymore. It goes from a griper to MPs and like reform to West reading who just loudly agrees with them, you know, and the thing is West reading is not

being tricked by the grippers. Liz Kendall is not being tricked by the grippers. They very much want to do it. Liz Kendall has been talking about wanting to basically eliminate sickness benefits in this country for all but the people who she would class is actually unable to work, which might be, I don't know, some small percentage of the people who are currently on disability benefits, right? She's been talking about wanting to do that for years. This is something that she has been wanting to do for a long fucking time. We've talked about this before. She has made plans. We've talked about her plans to basically replace like, you know, disability benefits with work coaches

for a long fucking time. And it's all served by this folk mythology that we talk about. So look, we've run over the amount of time that Nova's able to be here, but I didn't want to leave this sort of just at the end of the Motability example. I want to talk about what they're actually doing.

So the government is trying to cut five billion pounds from the budget of what is paid in benefits, largely by changing the threshold of who is able to claim PIP. So Liz Kendall says that she's going to create a more quote unquote pro work system to encourage people take up jobs while protecting those who cannot work. Cannot, of course, being assessed by that like, Serco physiotherapist, who's gotten like a PowerPoint worth of training and is being told you have to deny people as much as possible. They're insisting, of course, this is not going back to austerity because their cuts are going at half the pace of Georgia's sports.

Yeah, it's like, I don't even know what to call it. It's Aust. It's just Aust. Yeah, it's all, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's contrary to those deep British values that if you can work you should and if you want to work the government should support rather than stop you. This is because they're the Labour Party because they have to massage their message to still seem like they're compassionate. It doesn't work obviously. But I mean also as Shobhan and Mahmood said, the clue is in the name. We're the Labour Party because we love to work. Which I'm so sure was a joke that someone made on this show before the election. So it's a post-just politicians. Well yeah, post-just policy is real and we are part of it unfortunately. Social was like a joke that someone made on this show before the election

Politicians well, yeah posters to policy is real and we are part of it. Unfortunately, basically what they're saying is oh We're not going to abandon you to a life of benefits that discourage you from working No, we're just gonna harass you with our like work coaches But show up at your house at 3 45 in the morning and tell you to rub banana skin on your face I mean they keep shoving your head in an ice ball. How I read that, right? They like, we're not going to abandon you to a life on benefits is I see that as like, we're not going to consign you to a life of continuing to live. Don't worry. The labor party believes in you enough that we know that you can like swim through

like the waters of the Southern ocean. You don't need a life jacket. You don't need a ring. Even You don't need a ring even. We believe in- Yeah, I mean the question that I sort of have, and this goes back to like, it goes back a little bit to the Klan and stuff, but it also just thinking about the state of this country as it is, and I think to myself, just like,

what are the fucking jobs are you gonna try and send these people? Because there isn't enough stuff going for people who are actually looking for work, right? And by like actual jobs, like I don't mean just like the bullshit zero, like no out, no contract, like you sort of get paid very low, like very, very low wages or whatever. It's like actual sort of secure work, which like, if you are someone who is suffering, who has like a disability or someone

who does like need extra help or like extra support, like those things are not particularly easy to come by in this country, right? So what fucking jobs are you talking about other than like whatever sort of new gig economy thing that sort of comes out of like kind of like a new type of, I don't know what to call it. Like, yeah, like what, what, what are you, what are you going to do? What kind of job firstly, and how is a work coach going to help someone manifest a stable job in your area that you can reach? But also, also like the very basic thing, like the work coaches like already exist, they exist in the job centers, right? Like from what I understand- Well, they're hiring more. They're hiring a billion pounds more worth of work coaches.

Right. And those like any, if you talk to anyone who like has dealt with a job coach at a job center, they are the most fucking useless, like from what it sounds like,. They are the most useless people in the world. Probably not entirely their fault, but again, it ticks onto that problem, which is there is not enough stable work going around for this to even be workable. The likely situation is going to be that you're going to put more people into very, very precarious gig work, which by the way, you are also saying is about to be all like most of it is about to be automated anyway. Right?

And so you're like, this is, I feel like whenever I read about this stuff and whenever I just engage with British news at all, I feel like I'm going insane because it's like trying to solve a problem that you are then trying to like completely eradicate on the other hand. And none of it, none of it makes any sense other than going back to the point of like a refusal to engage in reality, but also like doing whatever you can to dismantle whatever is left of like the welfare state and like sort of like, and all this stuff really just being a side show, right? That feels like the only ways to kind of understand what's going on. Well, I think really it's that at the most generous assessment is the government is trying

to solve the problem it wants to have, which is that there are a bunch of people who, because of the particular incentives of the existing welfare system, are claiming personal independence payment and the universal credit health top-up, basically, which basically says, okay, if you ever go into work, you will lose money from your benefits. And they're saying, okay, if you ever go into work, you will lose money from your benefits. And they're saying, okay, well, that must be that like quirk of the welfare system must be the thing that is driving so many people into benefits because there is an incentive to like, they're saying there's an incentive to not have work. But number one, it's like, okay, you're very little evidence has actually been presented for that

firstly, no evidence for that has actually been presented for that, firstly. No evidence for that has actually been presented for that. The actual analysis of why the, and this is, I found this on the disability news service, the actual analysis for why the numbers are higher, they're delaying it until after this gets legislated. So, so like they're basically the only game in town is this claim that it's like, Oh, it's just a quirk of the incentives It's not like that like people are being made to be

Unhealthier or just there are disabled people who exist and yeah, we in the government just don't like that, right? There's that is all of that analysis is being is being held back basically on purpose. That's the claim, right? And so they're saying well if we basically on purpose. That's the claim, right? And so they're saying, well, if we basically confine the personal independence payment only to people who score a four on the assessment that the cap of the person gives you. And you know, I would just score a four and by the way, not across multiple things. So if you have a three out of four on like multiple different indices, like, you know, mobility or like mental health or whatever, if you have like nine total points, but across different things, like, yeah, no, you can work. Doesn't matter. And by the way, to get a four, you can need

like prompting to prepare food. You could need help with showering. You could need like help to get dressed. Like that's not a four, right? So it's like, okay, you won't get disability, but you'll be assumed that you can work and you should work and we will not help you, right? If you're not able to get dressed. And what that means is that that person then is told either to die basically, you know, or that other people, other people around them, because the state has stepped out of the caring role in the very small way it was in it at all.

It's just saying, okay, if you have like a family member, now they're caring for you, maybe they're not able to keep their full-time job. then, then there's, they're not able to do that. Or maybe the responsibility falls in the local authority, right? And so that's just, I mean, there was some analysis that was done by, I believe this was the Disability Policy Center. They said the government's cuts will lead to extra huge amounts of extra costs for the NHS and social care services where they say for every pound that someone loses in disability benefits, if a council has to step in to cover the shortfall, it's a pound 50 additional impact. So it's like not only is it genocidally

cruel, it is even by the brute logic of capitalism, the brute logic of just we have to prevent the state's expenditure, it is even economically deranged. And yet it is being gone ahead with because in part, there is this folk way, this like uncle way of knowing in Britain that insists that basically every person, unless you know them personally, is faking it. And that they need to be encouraged into whatever jobs there are, wherever they are,

we assume they'll be fine. Because of course, capital never needs to be disciplined into providing jobs. People just need to be disciplined into, I assume, manifesting, as you say, Hussein, the right kind of stable job that can provide the reasonable accommodations that you might need. Yeah. Again, it is a complete refusal to engage with reality. And that sort of seems to be the pattern that we are seeing across multiple different policymaking strategies and I guess the current Labour Party's view of politics. Yeah. It's just, it is to be like where we are George Osborne, but don't get mad at us.

That's right. That's correct. Yeah. You're not allowed to be mean. So the structure here basically is they're taking away the work capability assessment from the Universal Credit Health Top-Up and they're saying, okay, it's all just PIP now. It's one assessment and the only really way to get the actual personal independence payment is to be quite profoundly disabled. We assume everybody else is going to be able to work to some extent and then instead of getting money to live, they're going to get a mindset coach to imagine, essentially. And Torsten Bell, formerly the resolution foundation, which by the way, has been publishing

huge amounts on the awful impacts it's going to have now a labor MP. So it's obviously changed all of his beliefs. Talking to Victoria Derbyshire, he challenges them that certain people, namely young people who receive universal credit health top ups, who won't even be able to get those. So if you're 22, you're not even going to be able to claim that benefit at all will be forced to live on 70 pounds a week. And when asked, can you live on 70 pounds a week? He said, of course not. I have a mortgage. Do you think that people who are poorer or less able-bodied than you, Torsten Bell. Do you think they're a different fucking species? TORREN BELL LAUGHS

Christ. Great. Honestly, it is genuinely infuriating. It's so good to have the sensible people back. Yeah. Hey, do you like it? The quiet? I do. I love it. It's great. Yeah. It's amazing.

Yeah. So, fucking hell. Anyway, look, that's probably all we have time for today. But I want to thank you, of course, for listening. As always, we have the Patreon episode coming out later this week, so do check that out. But otherwise, we will see you in a few days. Bye, everybody.

Bye. Thanks for watching!