Further Reading

Transcript

Ep56

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast episode 56. I’m Tiernan Douieb and I’m sitting here dressed in my nuclear hazmat suit, gas mask and lead lined pants. But as well as my casual everyday wear I’ve also got a colander on my head and a tin of chopped tomatoes due to the renewed possibility of nuclear war. No I don’t have a can opener, you’re right, I haven’t thought this through at all. I’m much less Bear Grylls when it comes to survival and much more Wombat Toaster Oven.

Yes in what happens when Presidential bad hair days collide, the US has said that its era of patience with North Korea is over and I don’t think that’s just because like their healthcare system they don’t see patients, they see customers. The aggressive stance on North Korea came just days after President of America and man who looks like he’s barely survived a nuclear fall out already Donald Trump ordered an airstrike in Syria, and his following bombing of an ISIS complex in Afghanistan. The Mother Of All Bombs killed around 90 militants and no wonder she was angry enough to do that as under Trump’s current proposals new mum’s get under 3 weeks maternity leave. Tiny baby and back to work so soon? Yeah I’d wanna take out about 100 people too. So after those two attacks Trump has turned his narrow narrow sights towards, North Korean Supreme Leader and what happens when you animate a burger Kim Jong Un. Yes he is also a dictator who comes from wealth, has ridiculous locks, won’t stand for anyone mocking him and has to have constant rallies to assure himself of his own popularity. There is almost certainly a parallel universe somewhere where these two are tip swapping lovers because it’s the closest thing they’d get to both’s true dream of having sex with themselves. Kim Jong Un has of course warned that a big event is near and speculation that this is a new nuclear missile test rather than a nationwide screening of the Channel 4 version of British Bake Off has rattled the US government. US intelligence says they will launch a pre-emptive strike if they think North Korea will go through with nuclear weapons tests even though North Korea say that they’ll do this every year, don’t have the capabilities to reach the US and once claimed to put a man on the sun so really why does anyone pay any attention to what they say? Yes Trump is probably angrily having meetings in Mar-A-Lago now to see when he too can go to the sun despite his face looking like he’s been there for years. The bigger worry than North Korea right now is that the US has a president who’s realised he gets pretty good press everytime he bombs the shit out of somewhere which he can authorise. So really everyone needs to stop praising him for dropping bombs and start really congratulating on him you know eating an awful lot of salt, or not getting health checks and we should be fine.

Speaking of terrifying dictators, President of Turkey and man who protested too much about a German comedian’s poem that suggested he fucked goats, Recep Erdogan has won a referendum giving him sweeping new powers. No, that doesn’t mean he gets to use some sort of technologically advanced broom when cleaning the kitchen. It means an parliament may now be scrapped with Erdogan holding an executive presidency and basically having a one man rule over the country, which he seems to keen to follow up by being President till at least 2029 and bringing back the death penalty. Really makes the Brexit vote pale in comparison eh? I mean if our referendum had had the options of ‘remain’ or ‘leave but we’ll kill your mate that hasn’t got his car tax sorted on time’ it might’ve been a very different outcome. Still it’s not a clear win for Erdogan as the vote was 51% in favour of an executive presidency and his opponents are now demanding a recount due to reports of voter fraud. Yes it seems Erdogan may have asked people for their say on having less of a say then ignored their say to get the say he likes anyway. Well I’m glad someone like that doesn’t have singular rule of a country that is essentially the border between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Phew! Well at least they don’t have their own nukes, only a base that the US store nukes on. Sorry who stores them? Oh. Oh dear.

Meanwhile on home shores, Prime Minister and woman who if she took a personality test it wouldn’t register she was there in the first place, Theresa May made her first Easter message, which was appropriately eggy. She said there is now a sense of people coming together which would suggest people are enjoying this period of getting shafted and that there will actually be some sort of enjoyable climax rather than a disappointing inability to get going, nothing to ensure anyone really benefits and all of it followed by years in a wet patch.

Oh and Education Secretary and rejected Jessica Hynes character Justine Greening pushed forward the government’s drive for an increase in selective educational facilities by saying how new grammar schools would be ‘open to all’ which sort of ruins the entire point of a grammar schools. Someone should really tell her about comprehensive schools. It’d blow her mind.

So I hope you’re all out of your chocolate egg based comas and feel ready to cope with the stressful prospect of a whole one and a half weeks without a bank holiday long weekend in sight. I spent some of my Easter weekend at my cousin’s rather lovely wedding where they had tiny jacket potatoes which was exciting. Does that make them petticoat potatoes? Blouse potatoes? So many questions and no real answers, a lot like life. Also I watched Tickling Giants which is now on Netflix and is an amazing documentary about Bassad Youssef, the Egyptian Jon Stewart and his fight to keep satirising the Egyptian regime. It’s a very powerful and very funny film that no only helped me learn a lot about the current Egyptian political situation but also made me realise I need to step up my podcast game as I haven’t been forced to flee in exile due to these sweet gags yet. Must try harder.

How was listening to last week’s podcast with adverts in it? Did you have any? I don’t mean the subliminal ones I put in amongst various sentences anyway – GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY– I mean the ones inserted in now this show has joined the excellent Acast – BUY ME A SANDWICH – I’d love to know your thoughts and once I get the hang of it, I may put a special advert jingle so you know when they’re coming. Also apologies if your listening device got all confused and re-downloaded the first 10 episodes of this show again, it was due to me not having a clue what I was doing as everything got transferred over to new servers. Maybe on the plus side, some of you listened back to them anyway and remembered what things were like in early 2016 pre-Brexit, Trump or me discovering tiny jacket potatoes. Such different times.

Couple of quick things before this week’s show. Firstly big thanks to Daniel who sponsored the podcast via our ko-fi.com site that’s – ko-fi.com/parpolbro – which is very lovely of him and you can do that too or if you wish to give a more monthly donation then head to patreon.com/parpolbro where I’ve promised to add more bonus stuff and then forgot because, well, tiny jacket potatoes. But I don’t have anymore of those so I’ll do that this week. But if you join you’ll get the extra stuff I loaded up two weeks ago too, and you can listen to that while eating tiny jacket potatoes. Also if you don’t want to give me any dosh, or exist in a medieval money free trading society then please do head to iTunes, Stitcher and give the show a review. Preferably a 5 star one because well, I don’t really see the point in not doing that. I mean the whole thing is arbitrary anyway isn’t it? If I was to give any one of you one actual star that’d be quite the gift. The fact that we don’t think anything’s worth it unless it’s been handed 5 giant luminous spheres of plasma is ridiculous. But now that I’ve pointed out how stupid and meaningless the review process is, please give the show five stars because I too am stupid and meaningless. And I always forget to add to all of the to subscribe to the show too because well, again, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t as it stops you having to click every week to the podcast provider of choice, typing in this show’s name and then downloading it when it could just arrive in your phone, mp3 player or specially designed digital ear horn. But if you haven’t please do, especially as subscribing is free, and not like one of those ancient magazines where the first part was free but then to get the full set of porcelain dinner ladies you had to pay £15 an issue for the next year. So yes please donate, review and subscribe. Oh wow, that was a much quicker was to say that wasn’t it?

On the live front, next Saturday which is 22nd of April, or last Saturday if you listen to this on a Sunday, I’m doing a set at the evening part of the Taking Back Control Youth event in Shoreditch in London which is a festival of ideas, panels and action for people aged 16-30 for whatever your political stance on life and it all focuses on how young people are taking the brunt of lot of the changes in politics. Tickets are free and it starts at 11am on Saturday with excellent speakers such as previous podcast guest Abi Wilkinson, anthropologist David Graeber and the ever brilliant writer Reni Edo-Lodge. I’m on at some point after 6pm when everyone’s stopped saying sensible things. Grab a ticket from tackbackcontrol.com/youth or not if you listen to this on a Sunday or do if you do that but are a time lord. Also in London on the 23rd I’m previewing my new Edinburgh show at The Good Ship in Kilburn in London at 4pm as part of a day of previews which are all free too and I wonder why I struggle to pay my rent and keep having to put subliminal messages into my podcast to give me money. The following weekend I’ll be previewing my new show at Machnylleth Comedy Festival on April 29th at 12.30 so if you’re going to that please come along too. That isn’t free because sometimes I like eating. Especially tiny jacket potatoes.

Right this week’s show I’m talking to Naomi Hirst at Global Witness about the corrupt money from terrible regimes that hides in the UK’s property market and banking systems, I’ll be looking more at the US North Korea scrap and Turkey and there’s a teeny tiny Brexit Fallout. But before all of that, have some of this:

This week’s episode:

HEADLINES

Grammar schools aren’t, as you might think, the place your mum or dad’s mum was educated. Instead they are state paid for schools that selectively choose which pupils they think are suitable to be educated there often by entry exam but sometimes also their vicinity to the school, their religion, if they have brothers or sisters there or if they have enough money to afford private tutoring that helps them smash 11+ exams. Ok, so the last one isn’t really a criteria but even the government’s own studies have shown that over 50% of pupils currently at grammar schools are from families with above average incomes and while a third were from families with below average incomes they weren’t low enough to be eligible for free school meals. Since Theresa May became Prime Minister she and Education Secretary Justine Greening have been pushing to allocate lots of education money for the expansion of new grammar schools that are apparently for ordinary working families. I hate that phrase. Families don’t work, it’s just the parents usually. Is this a subtle way of the government saying that if your child isn’t rich enough to go to grammar school then they’ll be catered for by the re-establishment of child labour? The ordinary working families target group appears to not include anyone who lives in a family without one parent earning the median income of £20k or more but the method used to officials to determine this adjusts it for size of household so an ordinary household could be one with one parent earning up to £33k a year instead and it doesn’t include self employed income or location and generally doesn’t really know what an ordinary working family is or if it doesn’t include your auntie or your pets are they now no longer family? And if so how does that work when it gets to Christmas card etiquette?

Grammar schools do get good results but then arguably so would many struggling comprehensive schools if they were given the money that may now be allocated to discriminating grammar schools. I’ve seen lots of opinion pieces or comments from people saying ‘grammar schools are great because I went to one and it was great’ or ‘state schools are shit because I went to one and it was shit’ seemingly forgetting that the entire world doesn’t imitate the exact same experiences they had. If you were allergic to wheat and I told you I’d had a sandwich and it was fine, I wouldn’t expect it to work out the same for you. So other than idealogy to help continuing to send Britain back to the good old days where rich children were well educated and the rest lived in workhouses begging for seconds, it doesn’t make sense why the government are pushing for this. The National Union of Teachers are looking into legal action against the grammar school expansion and with so many critics of the plan, it’s looking more and more like Justine Greening is the one who’s going to get schooled.

According to the ComRes poll in the Sunday Mirror and the Independent, the Conservatives are 21% points ahead of Labour in popularity amongst those few members of the British public that were actually in during the day and answered their phone. I’m not saying they aren’t an indicator of general public opinion but really, who does that? I mean 9 times out of 10 it’ll be a ‘we’re calling about the accident you had’ which usually causes me to say ‘it’s just happened, I’m trapped’ and then make various groaning pain noises till they hang up. But yes I’m wary of polls at the best of times and recent referendums and elections have proved that anyone who’s around to watch homes under the hammer isn’t the best voice of the people. Saying that, Labour have continuously been below the Conservatives since the man who looks like he travels round schools to tell them about the importance of harvest, Jeremy Corbyn, became Labour leader. And it takes real effort to be less popular than a government who are willingly making everyone’s lives harder, although I suppose as Brits, we do like a good old moan and what would we complain about if everything was great?

But another poll by Opinium this week showed that there is a lot of backing for the policies that Corbyn and Labour have unveiled in the last two weeks with little change as to whether people were told they were the opposition party’s or it’s leader’s ideas. Which is not bad as back in October of last year 87% of people backed Labour policies but not if they were told they were Labour. Because that’s where the UK public was then, hoping that some magical new party would fly in with a series of great policies and high levels of competency while twirling Brexit delicately between their fingers like a shit covered drumstick. But none of that happened and instead Tim Farron just kept popping above the parapet to remind us why he should fuck off again. So in these recent polls 71% of people asked back a £10 an hour minimum wage by 2020, more than half supported free meals for all primary school pupils and over 60% backed raising the top rate of tax back up to 50%. These are only a few of Labour’s policy blitz. They also announced maintaining triple lock pensions till 2025 and a new law to stop banks closing their high street branches. So while the policy to use £350n of government money wasn’t a favourite, maybe because many are wary of big costs like that without full explanation unless you know, it’s an era changing one, but otherwise it seems like Labour are saying what the people want with policies that appear to target both low income and middle earning people.

But is it enough to make people vote for Jezza when they’re probably concerned that he hasn’t thought them through, or will ask Ken Livingstone to be in charge of the triple lock & he ends up calling it the triple Hitler or something like that. Well looking at other well known people that have been unpopular then managed to crawl their way back into popularity you know like Jade Goody, David Beckham, Cheryl Cole, Alfred Nobel or Princess Diana, all Corbyn has to do is score a free kick against Greece, marry a footballer, start a global piece award or, er, die fairly soon. Not great options and while the peace award seems easiest, when he can’t even handle the fighting within his own party, it’s not looking great. Still at least we all have things to complain about eh? Ah Britain. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said Labour would be polling in single digits if it had a different leader. Sure, but then if their leader was Theresa May but with Labour’s policies there’s every chance they’d be smashing it according to people who like Bargain Hunt. Which makes sense as they love easy to follow vacuous narratives lead by 1 dimensional narrators, but at the end of the day still want everything as cheap as chips. In fact when you take into account that previous host David Dickenson was bright orange, maybe Bargain Hunt viewers dictate US election results too. Dangerous daytime bastards.

INTERVIEW PART 1

In the last couple of years several big events have showed the scale of money laundering in the UK. One was when I accidentally left my pay from a gig in my jeans pocket when I put it in a 30 degree spin, but that one really wasn’t that important. The others, which were, were the Panama Papers leak of 11.5 million documents of financial and attorney client info belonging to Mossack Fonseca that revealed a lot of details about shell corporations and who certain properties or companies were actually owned by, leading to journalists discovering some were used for tax evasion, fraud and sanction dodging. It also lead to everyone finding out that our Prime Minister at the time, David swollen ham Cameron had benefitted from his dad’s completely untaxed offshore investment fund which David denied a lot then admitted then said he wouldn’t do it again. If only he’d stuck around post Brexit eh? He’d have realised he could’ve appeared on television with the proof of it behind him, still said he didn’t benefit from it and have gotten away without further questioning.

The other was the Anti-Corruption summit held in May last year which was hosted, without intended irony, by David Cameron just a few weeks after the Panama Papers fiasco, and only a couple of days after he was caught on a camera microphone saying Nigeria and Afghanistan were fantastically corrupt which we still don’t know if it was a compliment or an insult. But the event was to promote transparency and tackle corrupt money entering banking systems, abiding by three global policies as set up by the G8 in 2013. The only country who failed to meet any of the standards at all? That’s right, the UK. The country who hosted the summit. We may as well hold a global safe cooking summit, hosted by John Torode on a motorbike while he plunges his arms into a blender?

So a year on, what has changed? Are we more transparent as a nation? And how bad is the problem of corruption in the first place? Aren’t window cleaners the only business who really need to work with full transparency? Well to answer some of those questions, this week I spoke to Naomi Hirst at Global Witness a campaign group who fight to end corruption in the global political and economic system. They have just been involved last week with exposing emails that revealed Shell Oil were knowingly involved with a huge bribery scheme concerning a large oil block in Africa and depriving the Nigerian people of $1.1bn. The campaign Naomi is currently working on is called No Safe Haven and is asking Western governments to stop letting corrupt regimes or individuals keep their stolen assets in the West. Naomi explained to me just how widespread this issue is:

INTERVIEW

And we’ll be back with Naomi in a minute but first…

PARTLY GLOBAL BROADCAST

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or once you remove all the bits that really aren’t true, North Korea, which is still an ironic name considering it’s been generally careering all over the place since about 1945.

If you’ve seen the news, North Korea is currently involved in a global changing of the lyrics to Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ so that they now go ‘War – What is it good for? Boosting the popularity of a dictator to his people due to petty showings of power that could ultimately result in the demise of many’

It is more of a giant cult of the kind that you’d not find anywhere else outside of a Justin Fletcher live show, where supreme leader and condensed Nigel Kennedy Kim Jong Un rules with a centralised, one party republic and a lot of rhetoric. Now I don’t know about you because frankly I haven’t researched and you’ve blocked me from stalking all your facebook pics, but I didn’t know a lot about North Korea’s history and it turns out, like a lot of places’s history, it’s full of ups and downs. Previously under control of Japan since 1910, Korea was then split into two countries after World War 2, with the Soviet Union taking control of the North and the Americans taking the South, beginning the country’s animosity towards the US. In 1948 North and South failed to negotiate a reunification process and so two separate governments were formed with the DPRK going all commie in the North and the Republic in the South going for a more yankee style. Then in 1950 North Korea invaded South because they’d obviously been watching US TV and seen how communist regimes in the 50’s were meant to operate, and after 3 years of war a ceasefire happened but no treaty was ever signed so technically, they’re still at war. Still. Since then North Korea has resisted attempts to depose of it’s leaders by both Russia and China and formed huge cults of personality around Kim Il Sung, then Kim Jong Il and now Kim Jong Un with it’s people being taught to worship their great leaders to the extent that in 2012 a 14 year old school girl drowned when trying to rescue portraits of Jong-il and il-Sung from a flood. Yeah really puts things into perspective right? I mean I don’t even think I’d save my phone from a flood and it’s got loads of pics on there, including one of Kim Jong Un from a tweet I was going to send. Saying that, you can’t put two full sized portraits in a bowl of rice can you?

They have a crazy amount of military personal and a list of human rights violations longer that places them in their own category according to many international organisations. How scary is that? That’d be like being so shit at jazz they couldn’t even class it as free improvisation. Which is in itself a breach of human rights. And importantly for the past week of news, North Korea doesn’t have a lot of money. A famine in the 1990’s resulted in the deaths of up to 800,000 North Koreans and has affected the population growth ever since and most of it’s trade is internal, though it relies quite largely on China and Russia too but it’s overall GDP is only $40bn a year which while it’s more than I’ll ever have in my savings by about $39.9999999.99 it’s doesn’t make it a big player on the global scene. Part of the way the the ruling party, the Workers Party of Korea holds everything together is by saying the money that they do have needs to go towards military costs, so rationing and shortages are necessary to protect the people from invasion. With total control over the media, hero worship of it’s leader and little to no access to the outside world, North Koreans are unlikely to be able to prove that narrative isn’t true. And that attitude and intense nationalism has been continued since 1953, so really, they have never stopped being in a state of nearly at war which is a shame because if they stopped, think of all the good films and museums they’d get out of it?

So to prevent threat, North Korea can’t afford to build large scale defence systems and instead goes for the risk of building one-off missiles and hoping they intimidate opponents. Kim baby face knows it’d be decimated in a fight against the US and how quickly they could depose his government, and so by posing the idea that they would immediately launch a nuclear strike, it keeps them at bay. They are like the world’s angry bee. Most things can fuck up a bee, but they’ll happily go guns blazing with the sting at the risk of losing their lives in order to get in there first, so we all leave bees alone. Except when we want honey. Or a beard of bees for a charity thing. Ok bees are a terrible analogy for North Korea. Now relations with the US have been pretty tense since WW2, but in 2007 the US, North and South Korea, Japan, China and Russia began talks to denuclearize Korea. In 2008 the US removed North Korea from their terror list and as recently as 2012 Kim Jong Un allowed nuclear inspectors into the country and Obama sent them a ton of biscuits in return because it looks like biscuits are the sort of thing that’d keep Kim Jong Un pretty happy. But then North Korea started up nuclear tests in 2013 again because if it was a child it’d only ever leave the naughty step because of the lure of creating more havoc for a second before getting sent back. Child is a better analogy. Sorry bees.

But now of course the US has a President who is as temperamental and eager to make petty shows of strength as Kim Jong Un is and that leaves us at a slightly scary situation where neither want to back down and look weak to their people. Or in Trump’s case, continue to look weak to his people, when he remembers that they’re there in between golfing trips anyway. And really after two very quickly ordered bomb strikes in Syria and Afghanistan this week with little planning it’s obvious Trump gets hard for explosions like Michael Bay does for, well, explosions. At least in Bay’s only storylines and credibility of the film industry get hurt. US Vice President Mike Pence has said that his country’s era of strategic patience is over though he is a man who’s too afraid to be in a room with a woman other than his wife, so I’m not sure how he’d handle a war. North Korea responded to Pence’s statement by saying they will be conducting missile tests on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis, the last two being a bit irrelevant if they really are going to do the first one. So what next apart from seeing if IKEA do bomb shelters? Well China have intervened as it’s in their interests to keep things calm, partly for trade, partly due to proximity to North Korea. They’ve asked for all sides to avoid ‘taking provocative actions that pour oil on the fire’ which is the sort of comment that would confuse Trump and cause Kim Jong Un to wonder what oil fires would do as a message. The US has a lot of military in South Korea and it’s in their interests to keep South Korean citizens safe so no one wants a war, especially not a nuclear one that could destroy far more than just a dangerous regime and we’ve all read The Road and no one wants to eat a baby.

But how do you control two irrational loud mouthed leaders intent on avoiding truths in order to keep the political system they want in place, from mouthing off about what they can do till it gets to war? Well I can’t help but feel that both leaders irrationality and terrifying want for totalitarian control is the key. With all state controlled media in North Korea, they could just tell their citizens that they’ve beaten America and no one would know otherwise and as long as everyone tells Trump America beat North Korea while feeding him cake at Mar-A-Lago he’s unlikely to ever check otherwise either and will probably forget it’s even a place within about a month. I’m waiting for a call from the UN any minute now. They’re like bees right because they …what? Sigh. Nevermind.

And now back to Naomi:

INTERVIEW PART 2

Big thanks to Naomi at Global Witness for talking with me and I hope you found that as ridiculously fascinating and scary as I did. Check out and read through Global Witness’s website at globalwitness.org and you can find the no safe haven campaign in the corruption and money laundering section of the site but do read through all of it and watch Charmain Gooch’s TED talk about it as it’s fascinating stuff. They are also on Twitter @global_witness and they’re on Facebook too, because everyone is. Well except my Nana. Where’s the transparency Nana? Ahem. Anyway the book Naomi mentions is Theives Of State by Sarah Cheyes and it looks ace and I’ve added it to my pile of 600 books I need to read, and if you want to see if there are any properties on your street owned by secretive unnamed companies then check out private-eye.co.uk/registry. There really is one just six door down from me. Owned by a company in Cyprus and bought in 2006. And they’ve got odd curtains. Hmmm.

As always if you have someone you’d like me to interview or a subject you’d like me to interview someone about please do let me know via the @parpolbro Twitter account, the parpolbro facebook group, partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com, or use a dodgy company to buy a place near me, then call the name of the company the subject or person you’d like an interview on and it’ll scare the shit out of me when I check that website every couple of months. I mean to be fair, email is probably easier but I’d give points for effort.

BREXIT FALLOUT

Not a lot of Brexit fallout this week aside from the Prime Minister’s Easter message suggesting that the country has come together since Brexit which I suppose is correct as with Remainers complaining that it’s all going horribly wrong and Brexiteers complaining because it’s not going horribly wrong in the way they want it too, we’re now all unhappy together as a nation. I suppose there is some solace to take in the fact that post Article 50 triggering, inflation has stayed pretty much the same. Though this is because food and clothing keeps rising but it’s been offset by falling flight and fuel costs. So basically you might not be able to afford clothes or grub but you’ll be able to be naked and hungry in a variety of exotic locations across the globe. Along with May’s delusional Christian messages which very much show she doesn’t need proof of something to believe it exists, the other stupid Brexit this story comes from Home Secretary Amber Rudd who – and I should add this is from a story in the Sun so there’s every chance it’s as real as the paper’s pretend morals about suspending human arse leakings Kelvin Mackenzie even though they published his fucking racist piece in the first place – so Amber Rudd has announced a so called barista visa scheme. Not barristers as in the legal ones, but baristas as in the coffee ones, even though both very much aid sleeplessness for many people. This barista scheme allows people from the EU to come to the UK for two years to work in hospitality, retail or similar work, but they can’t claim benefits or stay any longer than the two years they’re given. It’s basically saying come to an expensive country that doesn’t want you, work in a shit job that pays badly then fuck off again as we’re not letting you stay. You’d at least think a barista visa would include a tall, grande or venti option with extra bits if you pay more and the constant jeopardy that your name would be spelled wrong on the form. But while the upper echelons of society may be frightened about losing those who will serve them coffee, the rest of us are slightly more concerned about the shortfall in staff in many other areas that are usually filled by immigrants, and well, whether we’ll actually have any coffee as World Trade Organisation tariffs on it are steeeeeep.

And this week:

WHO’S LEAVING JINGLE

Can you guess? That’s right! Well done you at the back with the extremely high pitched voice and hat that looks like a bucket. It is the EU Banking Authority and European Medical Agency who employ about 1000 people in London and bring in money from the 40,000 plus visitors they get each year. I mean, it’s a bit of an obvious one as of course they had to go if they are EU regulators and we’re no longer in the EU. It’d be like doing work for a pal while sitting in the corner of their ex’s house while they stare angrily at you. To be fair, we’re also unlikely to have much call for regulation when we re-enter the feudal system and have to replace our currency with just deciding that whoever wins the knife fight can have the sandwich. It’s sort of like bees isn’t it? You know, bees…no? No.

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast. Please don’t forget to subscribe, review on the iTunes, donate to the parpolbro patreon or ko-fi.com page, shake it but not like a polaroid picture as actually it’s not great for it’s development and do see if you can try a tiny baked potato. They’re really great. Don’t forget you can drop me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the parpolbro group on Facebook or partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com with your thoughts about everything politics or just in depth reports about where when and how you had a tiny petticoat potato. If I don’t see you at a live gig it’s because you haven’t come along or you’re great at hiding and in which case, PPB will be back next week as always because really, what else would I do with my time? Except eat tiny baked potatoes obvs. TINY BAKED POTATOES FOR THE WIN!

This week’s show was brought to you by the mother of all numbers and some ordinary working letters.

KOREA

North Korea
Situated by China in East Asia
Ruled by Kim Jong Un
A totalitarian
Scary.
North Korea!
They won’t stop missile testing
Tensions with the US it’s unresting
Stop we plea
North Korea!
Say it loud when there’s people parading,
If you don’t want nuclear war then start praying.
North Korea, Korea I see ya!

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