TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Set Your Broken Bones with Mindfulness

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

For this week's bonus, Riley, Hussein, and November discuss some recent UK news where one of Britain's most tendentious morons has been trying to claim that the Met Police are in cahoots with Hamas somehow and people are expected to take this seriously. We also discuss recent Tory and Labour talking points about replacing sick notes with apps and how apparently people on Statutory Sick Pay have had it too good for too long. This episode nearly broke November and also prompted her to call Hussein 'the South London Guy de Maupassant,' so you'll have to take the good with the bad. Get the whole episode on here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/set-your-broken-102984760 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO IN AUSTRALIA ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming Australian tour shows here: www.linktr.ee/Miloontour *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

These are all very enervating. And at the same time, the huge eugenic experiment that we've been living in since 2009 or 10 or so has reduced the security that you can feel in your housing. It's reduced the security you can feel in your health. You can no longer be confident that if you're injured, you're going to get seen by someone. You can no longer be confident necessarily that you're going to live today, tomorrow where you did today. You can no longer be confident that you're going to get the hours of work you're going to get today. You could no longer be confident that the food that you buy to feed yourself and your family is going to cost the same and that those hours that you were going to get, those can go up and down. The food prices seem to

go up. And so your capacity, the slack in people's lives is getting much, much, much less. Robert Leonard And so then it's, you know, you know that they're doing this cynically, but it's frustrating nevertheless to see like conservative politicians and also labor politics, to see everybody who is in the elite that decides what the politics are, to scratch their heads and wonder why are so many people getting signed off work with mental illness and then say the solution has to be because we need more of these people participating in the labor market to sign fewer of them off with mental illness and just assume a higher level of endemic mental illness in the economy.

ALICE Yeah, not just like, how did this happen, but also, as you say, what the remedy has to be, right? Because there isn't like an obvious, known answer to all of these problems, which is public sector investment, and also, maybe, giving people a tiny little bit of hope that this isn't gonna be such a dismal place to live for the rest of their lives. And we, like, roundly rejected both of those. Both of those are like, impossible to promise now, and sort of like, radioactive electorally. And so, instead, what can we offer? Well, how about more repression, you know? How about more benefit sanctions? How about it's tougher to, like, get sick days? RILEY I want to get through some of the actual,

like, content of what they're proposing to do, which is... And again, this goes back to even Blair, who changed the sick note to the fit note, because the idea is we want doctors to say what are you fit to do, again, ignoring how people actually interact with the system entirely, because no one's ever done that, obviously. You don't go to the doctor and be like, I would like to be declared fit to do 25% of my job. It's like, I can't focus on job, right? I can't do job right now. And so Suneck is saying, we need to change the sick note, basically saying, Tony Blair failed to eradicate the counter-revolutionary sick note. True Blairism has never been tried, bombard the headquarters.

Essentially, yeah. Saying, look, we need to instead of having people get signed off work, they get easy and rapid access to specialized work and health support to help them back to work from the very first Fitnote conversation. There are hard limits on this stuff. If you have food poisoning, right, and you are throwing up and shitting out of your arse constantly in a kind of self-limiting illness way for like, between one and three days, there is no amount of work coaching that is gonna get you back into work before you are done doing

that. ZACH But here's the difference, right? The people who do SickNotes now are GPs. and they mostly just give them out when you ask for them, because they're doctors. If you ask a work coach, who again, who's training and doing this is probably a PowerPoint presentation about GDPR, right? And they have a script that they follow, you might as well replace them with an AI. And if it works anything like anything else we've seen the DWP or like the home office

do, it will be like a quota and a culture of like, deny everything. Precisely. I mean, one thing I was just gonna add was that like, well, this trajectory has sort of been happening for a while, but one of the things that like, one of the sort of like, you know, non-material, like non-useful things that was being offered in lieu of like, you know, non-material, like non-useful things that was being offered in lieu of like, you know, uh, extra sick pay or even just like actual material support to help your sick staff, for example, was like, you know, the sort of vague idea of like, you know, we'll offer more mental health services. And that came through the health of the, that

came through like better help subscriptions, maybe if you were lucky, but like a lot of the time just being like, Oh, you know, like book a mental health appointment with your hospital. Right. Which was like, and these were like nothing things. I will, I, you know, I think we've all had experiences or like we had people who have sort of tried those types of stuff. Only, you know, and I've tried bed, I tried better help a few times and you know, maybe it was useful for some people. It certainly wasn't particularly helpful for me in terms of like its approach and it wasn't helpful for people that I know in terms of the idea that it was structured basically to sort of ignore the actual underlying issues and being more like, well, if you do some breathing exercises, then it might help you work a little bit better.

But the fact that now this is sort of being considered to be emblematic of the Britain sick note culture, that this is a sign of weakness and it's a sign of these are sort of frivolous things that have to be discarded by both a more hard edged Tory government, but also more likely scenario, an incoming Labour government that, again, wants to get the line up by 0.1% without disrupting the landlords. So I think it's very telling that it's just like, okay, well, this very minimal amount of support, which actually materially is ineffective, but nevertheless was a gesture of how compassionate we are. The fact that that's being taken away is very telling of both the Labour Party's perception of what they should be like and who their

voter base really is, I suppose. But at the same time, and more, I don't know, I think to me it's more just this sign that, this sort of sign that all these very minor ways that they were trying to differentiate themselves while also trying to really insist to Tory voters that they weren't kind of Corbynistas. That's sort of all gone down the window. It does sort of show that ultimately what they believe, like it or not, is that they have to be as hard edged, even if not more so in order to be considered to be electorally viable. When you talk about how people want to be seen, I have some lines from Sunak here.

He says, we should see it as a sign of progress that people can talk openly about mental health conditions in a way that a few years ago would have been unthinkable. ALICE Oh, you motherfucker, don't you dare try and pull this shit on me. To be like, oh actually we're checking in with you, it's so great that you feel enabled to talk about this. Not in a way that causes you to miss work, though. Well, if you wanna talk about the through line here, it is that, it is once again, we are trying to replace material politics with effective politics.

Yeah, absolutely. Right, this is, I feel good about my food poisoning, and so I'm going to go into work because I feel I can do it while throwing up. You know? The body count of this, the social murder of this, the number of people who kill themselves, the number of people who, like, die before their time, or live miserable, immiserated lives because of this fucking finance cunt and his friends, and everyone around them deciding that these are the limits of the possible. Right? Can you

imagine Rishi Sunak hesitating to take time off work if he was sick? RG Yeah, well, but he's, y'know. But he's a human. He's fully human. He's not like the pig people. I've heard that theory, yes. But just as it would be wrong to dismiss this growing trend, so too would it be wrong merely to sit back and accept that because it's too hard, or too controversial, or too quote unquote offensive, that we can't do anything. These days, cause of woke, you can't even...

Doing so would let down the many people our welfare system was designed to help. You know, let you down by forcing you to work while you were unwell. And again, what he's saying without saying, right, is that, oh no, if you're throwing up from food poisoning, your work coach should say, yes, you can have a half day off for being sick, but maybe answer some emails on the toilet if you have an email job. Go back to work in your kitchen job and just be a super spreader. But what he's saying really is, oh, if you have a mental health condition, maybe try half a day of CBT while still at your job, but we are not going to be allowing, like,

we are now saying that there is a minimum acceptable level of people with mental Up with of people who are like suffering from mental health conditions Not taking even taking time off from work to get there was never any treatment But like not even getting taking time off work to try and make it a little less bad or even worse not taking time off Work with at least statutory sick pay which isn't enough to cover anything by the way work with at least statutory sick pay, which isn't enough to cover anything, by the way, that was too generous. And the level of mental distress that the average person is expected to be in has just gone up.

ALICE Falling into the trap of talking about affect again, but I would genuinely rather we had the Tories of yesteryear, whose attitude was the sort of open contempt of pull yourself together, get back to work, or kill yourself, than this kind of, like, faux concern. And the concern is, oh, well if you're mentally unwell and you're not going into work then you might become socially isolated. Everything in this country is designed to inculcate social isolation. Yeah.

It is just like these other things where, y'know, the sort of decline of any type of non... like any type of social space really, Like he's not wrong in the sense of like, yeah, you could feel socially isolated if you don't go to work, but not out of any sense of care, but because there's not really anywhere else to do it. So it's just like, it is interesting to me that this, I mean, this does sort of feel intentional or at least it's sort of like the end product of really destroying both like a social safety net, but also just any type of social support network. ALICE The last remaining Jenga block of 90% of the

country's mental health post-work drinks and a Wetherspoons. RILEY And it is very much, well yeah, like, check in on your blokes, but your blokes is also your manager who you have to go to all bar one with. And listen to him talk about how much he hates his wife, and then watch him be his wingman when he hits on, like, 22 year olds. You paint such a vivid portrait with that one, that's really upsetting. God.

You have a very unique ability to communicate the grimness that is everyday Britain who sings. Anytime a song becomes, kind of like, the South London Guy de Maupassant, it really