Further Reading

Transcript

Ep51

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast episode 51! I’m Tiernan Douieb and like the Brexit bill the burger I had earlier today has passed through my body without any amendments, and now in a similar way, shit is serious. Yes I’ve started with a poo joke again. That’s where we are people. Poo jokes at the top of the show.

Yes the bill to trigger Article 50 is go as MPs told the Lords the entire past two weeks of their nearly over lives were the sort of waste of time most of them will never get back. Then the Lords agreed hoping it means they won’t have to go into a home and then MPs voted against them having a meaningful vote on the Brexit outcome. Yes the more sovereign state that people voted for have voted for a less sovereign state because hey, sometimes there’s just too much democracy right? So that’s it, the way is paved for the triggering of article 50 and the person who did the paving was probably an EU citizen who now doesn’t know if they can stay or not.

SNP leader, First Minister for Scotland and stunt double for Chucky has said that she will be seeking a second independence referendum for Scotland. I’m guessing she has to seek it because she lost the last one. Sturgeon has said Brexit made change inevitable but Scotland can still decide the nature of that change. There’s a high possibility that change will be a handful of European cents.

Prime Minister and only human being in the world with the sort of eyes you only see on people who are about to turn into zombies, Theresa May told Nicola Sturgeon that politics is not a game. If it was a game, we could all go back to an earlier save, from some point probably around, I dunno 2007? and reload from that point. Meanwhile Labour leader and 2016 Scruffts finalist Jeremy Corbyn said that he did back a second Scottish independence referendum then that he didn’t and the media said he did, then that Labour would oppose it at Holyrood but not if it got to Westminster because for Labour Scotland is bit like going past the home you used to live in and realising they don’t even get your un-redirected post anymore. The latest Ipso Mori polls suggest that whereas the previous referendum in 2014 was 55% to stay in Britain, 45% to leave, opinions are now dead on 50/50. Personally I don’t see why Scotland shouldn’t go considering none of the powers they were promised after the last one were given to them and the majority of Scots wanted to stay in the EU. Also if they go, the United Kingdom might be known as the Formerly United Kingdom and that’d mean UKIP would have to become FUKIP which is totally worth it.

Meanwhile Philip Hammond announced in his first budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer that the economy is expected to grow more than was predicted in 2017. I bet Philip Hammond tells everyone he has an amazing garden because there’s two blades of grass eaking through on a pile of toxic waste he found by the canal. Otherwise Hammond’s budget was lacking in content both in his shit jokes about Labour and much financial substance, not including anything about environmental investments or housing and instead mainly breaking the Conservative manifesto promise of not increasing national insurance. It was only for self employed people which mean it largely affects white van drivers and comedians, but unless the Tories row back on it that’s the Houses of parliament repairs fucked and I’m certainly not giving Phil any tips on how to make his shitty gags about Labour any better. Corbyn’s so far down a black hole even Stephen Hawkings has disowned him. How does that make sense? If Jezza was down a black hole I reckon Hawkings would be fascinated by what he was doing, and he’d be helping progress science more than the half hearted budget promises Hammond made.

Lord Michael Hesletine was fired as a government advisor because he backed demands for a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal. Or it could be because when he strangled his mother’s dog he didn’t give the fur to Theresa May for her coat, but who knows? Either way it’s yet another sign that Brexit means shut up just shut up because it’s really hard to throw ourselves off a cliff if you keep interrupting with your ‘but we might get hurt in the face’ comments.

MPs voted against reinstating the Dubs Amendment for the UK to save 3000 unaccompanied child refugees, by 287 MPs against 267. A horrible decision. I can only assume there’s obviously something that concerns many Conservative MPs about being associated with lots of unaccompanied young children.

In America radioactive edam President Donald Trump tweeted support for International Women’s day by saying he has tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy. Judging by the comments he’s made previously, I assume those roles are pussy grabbee, news bimbo, disgusting breast feeder, piece of ass and daughter/lover.

Oh and a big congrats to food blogger, chef and campaigner Jack Monroe who successfully sued Katie Hopkins a women who is essentially skin wrapped around the Daily Mail comments section. Hopkins was sued for libel for tweets about Monroe. While I hope this causes everyone Hopkins has said shit about to sue her, I’m also aware that court space needs to be left for other cases.

So hello you. Thank you as always for listening. It’s a short episode this week, partly to make up for the fact that last week’s was so very long because, well, the news, and partly because I’m currently on the road doing shows and let me tell you service stations aren’t the best place to be writing political jokes, even if it is Tebay the best services in the world and I’ve recently stopped the car to see a Shetland pony that had hair like Pat Sharp during his Fun House years. Thank you to any of you who came to the lovely previews I did with Bec Hill in Sheffield and Glasgow, we had properly great crowds in for both, and extra points for Sheffield for being happy to move the entire show to a different room midway through because of a professional con artist heckling then keeling over. Yes, really, and yes there is more to it than that so ask me if you see me. Sometimes, people are weird.
Thank you also to John who bought me a coffee via the Kofi account for a specific joke on last week’s show. Which is a nice way to do it by the way. If you don’t want to support monthly via the patreon at patreon.com/parpolbro which is hugely helpful and allows me to try not book gigs on Sundays or Mondays so I can make this show, then you could go to the Kofi account which John emailed me to say you can find by typing parpolbro kofi into google and just chuck me a few quid everytime there’s a gag on this show that really tickles you or an interview you particularly like. Of course the danger is, the gag rate will get so high that before long you’ll all be in constant laughing hysterics and broke. What do you mean that’s incredibly unlikely happen? So mean. So so mean. Apart from that and the usual please review us nonsense, because please do and no one has for ages and it only takes two minutes you can even do it on Stitcher as well as iTunes, apart from that I also wanted to let you know that if you go to Facebook and search for Stand Up 4 Refugees you’ll find a page listing all the gigs myself and Jen Brister have organised to raise money for Help Refugees. They’ve all got amazing line-ups so if you can come along, please do.

Oh and thank you to everyone who mentioned this podcast in their trypod tweets. If you fancy recommending us as part of this podcast audience boosting intiative just tweet about why you like this show and use the hashtag #trypod, it’d be much appreciated. This week my recommendations to you are the SMERSHpod which is lovely talking about James Bond films by people who often aren’t that bothered about them, Stop and Search which is fascinating monthly panel podcast about drugs policy in the UK and abroad, and the brilliant Beef and Dairy Network which amazing The Day Today esque humour and always makes me laugh out loud when I’m surrounded by people who think I’ve lost it. To be fair, I should be listening to it while in the public gallery at court hearings. So trypod that lot.

Right this week there’s no Trump, Brexit can sod off till next week, and I know it’s the Dutch elections this week but I’ll look at them next week when it’s all over rather than make predictions and be more wrong than Mystic Meg predicting her career’s future. So instead it’s all budget as I chat with Fran Boait from the Positive Money campaign and I’ll give you a few tips on what the budget means for you too. Oh yeah and there’s this:

Headlines –

Dutch – Turkey

Turkey is currently involved in a bit of a spat with several European countries including the Netherlands and Germany, with authoritarian chipmunk President Erdogan accusing them of Nazism because they’ve blocked rallies. Yep. I’m sure you all remember how that Hitler was big on stopping rallies from happening. No rallies under his watch. Nuh uh, never. That whole Nazi thing was all organised with quietly embroidered notes passed from house to house. The rallies that Erdogan wants to organise are to encourage Turkish citizens living abroad to vote in a referendum to give him more even more power than he already has in his authoritarian position. Yeah, power hungry man would like more power, sounds fine right? I mean it’s not like every adventure film you’ve ever seen has warned against this sort of thing, and Erdogan’s referendum is like a long drawn out speech before the villain opens up a casket and his face melts or anything. France let it happen and about 800 Turkish people turned up in Metz with little issue, but the German interior minister said the rallies have no place in their country, probably because they’ve seen those sort of rallies asking for more power before, and Sweden blocked one in Stockholm too. So now Erdogan awaits the Netherlands response which currently seems to be to tell its citizens not to go to Turkey. Amazingly Dutch populist, election candidate and well, racist Geert Wilders said that Turkish people waving Turkish flags in the Netherlands have shown where their loyalties lay. Yes, Erdogans populist rallies infringe on the populist stances of other populists. So the glimmer of hope as the world moves to the far right is that if all the authoritarian populists move to their right they’ll all crash into each other and we can get on with fixing everything. Either that or fingers crossed Erdogan’s face melts soon.

In what you’d assume would be constant headlines everywhere, the UN have said the world is facing its largest humanitarian crisis since 1945. That’s the year the second world war ended but you’d be wrong for thinking that means it’s not much of a crisis. But it is huge. More than 20 million people face the threat of starvation across Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria. It’s to do with conflict blocking aid, fuel shortages stopping deliveries, poor governance, extremists, pirates and because you ate all the pies. Ok, not the last one and really this is such a horrific situation that jokes about it just make me sad. But the UN humanitarian chief has said $4.4bn in aid would be neeed by July in order to avoid 1.4m children starving to death. Currently only $90m has been received so they are a long way off, and with Trump aiming to cut UN funding, it might hinder any attempts to save those kids. The UK could help by not selling weapons to Saudi Arabia that are used in Yemen prolonging the conflict. But more likely it’ll just be ignored because they’re far away and we’ll have to put up with seeing Bob Geldof on TV again making everything much worse. Go to the Unicef website for more info on it all and how you can help and generally make people aware of it if you can. I’ll hopefully cover this all in more detail in weeks to come.

Positive Money interview part 1

For the past few years the budget has generally been an hour of a man in a suit who looked like a robot who’s just realised it has the capacity to kill, reeled off a ton of numbers that while sounding boring essentially meant everyone except him and some friends would be fairly poor for a while. Luckily last year we had a change of government and by that I mean people from the same party we didn’t like got to be in charge after no one elected them and now the budget is a hour of a man who looks like he sold all his joy to the devil in order to forever be camouflaged if in a morgue telling you some numbers that sound boring but still means we’re all screwed. What was in it this year? Well not much, it was half the length of the previous budget at only 68 pages, and it included £2bn going to social care which would be great but social care needs £2.6bn to survive. Then there was £100m towards triage in NHS A&E department costs which is sort of helpful but again, nowhere near enough to address the crisis the NHS is in. If anything money for triage is like literally paying for a plaster and some stitches to barely over all the cuts the NHS has suffered as it bleeds to death. There was some decent money to science which will almost make up for a teeny bit of the investment it’ll lose from the EU when we Brexit. Hammond also raised national insurance for self employed people which makes some sense as they get the same state pension as employed, but less sense as they don’t get paternity or maternity pay and as self employed statuses increased as shit companies like Uber used it in the gig economy to get around having to pay holiday or sick pay until a court said they had to. And nothing to help the housing crisis, no investments in environmental policies and no real mentions of Brexit even though it’ll affect everything and the Institute of Fiscal Studies have said that with all the benefit cuts combining with Brexit that wages won’t return to 2007 levels till 2022 at the earliest by which point it’ll probably fit in with the retro club nights students will be going to if there any students because tuition fees will be stupid.

So that’s an overview but this week I spoke to Fran Boait from positive money. While they sound like they could be a group of people who scribble on £5 notes so it looks like the Queen is giving a thumbs up, Postive Money are actually a campaign movement for a banking system that actually works for society. They look at how things have been pretty awful for the average earner since the crash and have progressive and viable ideas on how to change how the UK economy works for the better. Fran very kindly gave me a positive penny for my thoughts and took time to explain to me what this budget meant and more importantly what it should have included in order to actually make the UK financial system have currency for everyone.

Here’s Fran:

And now a tiny

BREXIT FALLOUT

Not a lot to tell this week as if you’ve heard last week’s show with Tatton Spiller from Simple Politics he quite clearly explained what the Article 50 Bill and Great Repeal Bill mean and involve. So this is merely a note that the Commons and the Lords have agreed to allow the Article 50 bill to go through without amendments even though the rights for EU citizens would’ve been nice and I’d have liked them to change the name to the A50 bill so people travelling between Knutsford and Lymm would feel important.

The debate had some high points including Nick Clegg saying that the government condemning accountability in Brussels while underming it in the House of Commons was a slight of hand that should never be forgetton. Damn Clegg, where was that back in the day? I also liked Caroline Lucas saying that they were not elected to be lemmings, though like the computer game version I guess she is very green. Then there were low points like David Davies saying that voting for a meaningful vote on the Brexit outcome is tying the government’s hands to stop the PM from walking away if offered a bad deal. No, it’s allowing the deal that she goes in with to not just be ‘I WANT ALL THE CAKE PLEASE’ so they don’t tell us to get fucked and she walks away because it turns out Europe know how to handle two year olds.

It looks like May won’t trigger Article 50 until the end of March, though I’m sure that’s because she’s so unsure of what will happen that it was too risky doing it on the 15th. Who knows, the same slight of hand that Clegg said undermines parliamentary sovereignty may have several other tricks up it’s sleeve. Or considering who’s sleeve it is, it might just pull out a dead dove. More next week.

Positive Money interview part 2

Thanks so much to Fran for talking to me. You can find positive money at positivemoney.org, their twitter @positivemoneyuk or their positive money facebook page. Do get involved, sign their statement telling the government to acknowledge the unfair impacts of their economic policies, sign up to their overall campaign and check out if there are local groups near you. Fran’s also has her own account on Twitter at @franboait so follow her there too.

As always if you have someone you’d like me to interview or a subject you’d like me to interview someone about whether it be a global issue, a national issue or even just a tissue. Bless you. Then do drop me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the parpolbro group on Facebook, partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com, or put twelve ridges in the left side of a wax cylinder and play it to me through a phonograph as I walk past.

End

That’s it for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast. The show will be normal length again next week, whatever that is. I mean, do you prefer them shorter or more like an hour or so? Or would you prefer I somehow podcast outside the concept of time so they last for both eternity and don’t exist at all at once? Let me know at all the usual addresses I’ve mentioned a matter of mere seconds ago. Or constantly, depending on your time travelling abilities. Thanks as always for listening and please do give us a review on iTunes, send me all your money at the Patreon or Kofi accounts and salute every time you see a lone magpie or they will gang up and hunt us all down for not respecting their authority as chief wing commanders. SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

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