Episode 71

Released on Tuesday, September 5th, 2017.

Episode 71

Episode 71 – Yes we are back from what was a very uneventful quiet summer….what’s that? Oh god, I forgot about all that. So yes, nukes, nazis and nature being angry. Plus an interview with brilliant economist Ann Pettifor (@annpettifor) and of course, Brexit.

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THIS EPISODE IS TAGGED WITH: • parpolbro, Partly Political Broadcast, Patreon, podcast, political, politics, satire, The Production Of Money, Theresa May, Tiernan Douieb

Transcript

Episode 71

Intro

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast episode 71. I’m Tiernan Douieb and it is lovely to be back in your ears after what has been a relaxing, chilled, lovely 5 weeks of summer with nothing much to worry about. I mean, I was going to do a catch up episode today but looking back it’s almost like nothing of note happened at all……

FLASHBACK NOISE

SUMMER NOISES – (31 mins in)

SCREAMS

AAAARRRGGGHHHH NAZIS AND NUCLEAR WAR AND NATURE DOING FLOODING AND NONSENSE AAARGGGGGHHHHHH

FLASHBACK

Urgh. Oh yeah. Must’ve slipped my mind. And it was a bit cloudy at times too. Yes it seems we are now in an era of choice unlike any we’ve had before. Which way would you like to die most? Nuclear war? Global warming? Or an uprising of Nazis that may lead to both of those things at once? If that isn’t democracy, I don’t know what is.

Yes thanks to very angry caterpillar North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and constant warning as to why you should all wear sunscreen US President Donald Trump, the possibility of Nuclear War is back on the table like the world’s hottest curry. Most people know it’s on the menu but very few idiots would ever order it unless they’re so blinkered by their own self importance they’d happily ignore the devastating fallout it’ll have on both ends for ages after. North Korea has announced they’ve successfully tested an H Bomb, which sadly doesn’t inflict an area with terrible songs by Steps, and yes, I’ve said sadly because it’s actual consequences are far, far worse than even that. I mean who’d have thought that Trump responding to North Korean’s annual bravado test with threats such as ‘we will respond with fire and fury like the world has never seen’ wouldn’t make things better? Apparently that comment was improvised by the US President and I can’t help but feel that if someone had shouted ‘film noir’ beforehand it’d have at least made it a lot more palatable. Since then North Korea has fired a missile into the sea the other side of Japan, a country that really has had enough of this sort of shit already, then tested and H Bomb so large it caused a seismologist to tweet ‘Oh fuck’ which is the most accurate summary yet. South Korea responded by also firing a missile into the sea to prove it too has the range to hit North Korea. I can’t wonder if any of these countries have seen Godzilla because with all these attacks on the oceans it might be more likely that a big pissed of nuclear lizard will end this before any bonkers authoritarian dictator does. Or Tritan God of the Sea who must be raging. The US have now warned that there will be a massive military response to North Korea’s actions, with stock photo of a white American old man General Matthis saying they aren’t looking at total annihilation of North Korea but have many options to do so. If that makes no difference it’s highly likely they’ll point out that their dad is bigger than North Korea’s dad and he drives a JCB. What’s super baffling is Emo Minion Kim Jong Un’s motives as increasing a nuclear threat can only end in either his country being deprived of imports it needs, or being totally destroyed and a US/South Korea takeover. Is this the world’s most dangerous suicide note? Or just an elaborate cry for help? Or is it one of those situations where Kim Jong meant to back down a while ago but got drunk and is now in too deep? In which case maybe this could all be resolved with a Facebook confession apology and an ‘RU Ok hon’ from Trump? Who knows how this will end, though I do know that making jokes and trying to find the positive of a nuclear war is very hard. The only plus side I can think of so far is if we end up with two headed dogs then you can at least pat them twice. More stuff will glow in the dark which would be nice at night. If you’re living in a bunker you can eat a lot of baked beans, though if it’s airtight that would also be bad. That’s pretty much it. Fingers crossed this cools down rather than heats up very soon.

It’s possible the reason most of the North Korea’s missile strikes have been in the sea so far is because that may soon be the best way to attack the US now that large portions of it are underwater. Hurricane Harvey, with it’s name like a 70’s boxer, left parts of Texas severely flooded, with 47 dead and up to 43,000 in shelters. Trump has only made one visit to a not very affected area, while both he and Melania were in completely inappropriate footwear for flooding. To be fair, he probably assumes everything is as shallow as he is. The damage looks set to cost about $180bn and it has resulted in the petrochemical industry leaking thousands of tons more pollutants causing water contamination and toxic fumes. But still hey, you can pat two headed dogs twice right? Despite there also being epic scale floods in India, Nepal and Bangladesh which no one is talking about due to the lack of white people affected, human made climate change is still barely being blamed as a cause. I’m pretty sure if a polar bear floated amongst the floods in Houston on an ice berg with a sign reading ‘fuck Trump’ he’d be condemned and called morally indistinguishable from those burning fossil fuels like the Flintstones at a barbeque.

That is now of course the argument against the Anti-Fa antifascist movement in the US, after white supremacists marched against the removal of a statue of General Robert E Lee, a veritable symbol of racism and slavery profiteering. Personally I think statues commemorating oppressive arseholes who were defeated should be taken down, otherwise I expect the alt-right to start campaigning for that big one of Saddam Hussain that got taken down in 2003 to go back up. Though to be fair, if statues are left up, they’re often shat on by birds and bird poop is black and white, so it’s almost like a fuck you to racists from nature. Anyway after a white supremacist drove a car into anti-fascist protestors killing 1 and injuring 30 in an act of domestic terrorism, President Trump decided to calm the situation by condemning the hatred, bigotry and violence on both sides. Yes because those seeking a totalitarian state and oppression of many just because of the colour of their skin are exactly like those who seek equality and freedom. No one watches Star Wars and thinks at the end ‘well I think those seeking peace across the galaxy are as much to blame as the guys in helmets who blew up an entire planet with a laser’. The argument has now spread with many condemning the anti-fascist movement, which is pretty much anyone who’s not a Nazi, and even blaming them for the rise in fascism in the first place. Yes, that’s definitely how it works. The anti-fascists kicked around with nothing to do till fascists very kindly stepped into give them purpose. Sure. And anti-pasta is to blame for the existence of pasta is it? I find the rise in fascism in the western world very scary indeed. How could anyone watch Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, see those dudes at the end get their faces melted and think ‘yeah they seem like good role models’? Trump’s senior white supremacist counsellor Steve Bannon resigned mid-August, in order to spend more time as a warning on a cigarette packet, as did massive racist and Deputy Assistant to Trump Sebastian Gorka, a man who’s evil parallel universe version of himself would look exactly the same. But both are now continuing Trump’s pro-racist diatribe outside of the restrictions of the administration, so it seems rather than this being a positive change for the Trump government, it was more an admittance that the White House wasn’t white enough for them.

Meanwhile back at home, UK politics is just getting back into gear after a summer break. Though that gear is almost certainly reverse. Prime Minister Theresa May has been visiting Japan, probably as part of the manufacturers recall for her batch of human androids. While there she stated that she is planning to be prime minister of the UK for the long term, though hopefully she means according to school time tables and she’ll be out by Christmas with her final week just watching videos. Meanwhile the EU are concerned the Brexit talks, saying time is passing without progress, almost as though they’ve never met the Conservative government before as that was basically their manifesto slogan. There is still no agreement on how much the UK will pay the EU for the so called Brexit Bill, with disgraced MP Liam the disgrace Fox saying the UK must not allow itself to be blackmailed. Yes, that’s exactly how blackmail works Liam. You decide to do something, it doesn’t go as planned, you complain it’s blackmail. I don’t actually know if it’s possible to blackmail someone as low as Liam Fox as he’s usually so proud of all his misdemeanours that he charges the taxpayers for the priviledge of him doing them. I hope that the EU says the Brexit bill is less than planned but then charges us in Euros. The pound is currently so shit that it’ll end up costing the government more and teaching them a lesson at the same time.

Lastly the Conservatives are trying a rebrand with a Tory Glastonbury being planned. I assume instead of a pyramid stage they’ll have a Ponzi Scheme one. They have also created their own version of Labour’s grassroots movement Momentum, which they surprisingly haven’t called U-Turn or Regression but instead Activate after the words needed to start up Theresa May after she’s fully charged at the wall socket. Oh and Big Ben has had it’s bongs silenced for four years for repair works, causing Labour MP Stephen Pound to weep during it’s last bong. While you could question what sort of moron sheds a tear at a clock, I suppose I do understand, as without Big Ben’s bongs, how will we know for sure that the UK is progressing forwards in time, with no other obvious signs?
And that is almost all of it. I’m sorry to leave you all in the wilderness while all of that was going on with only the actual news and all of the internet to keep you informed. But never fear because yes the podcast is back! Is this season 2? Or 3? I’m not sure I want seasons for the podcast as to keep you entertained I’ll probably have to kill a major character off and considering it’s only me that does this, it could get tricksy. There is a lot to get through on this week’s show because it seems no one got Will Smith’s memo that Summer Time is to sit back and unwind! Jeez! Also there are some things that I can’t fit into this week’s show but I plan to get onto in upcoming weeks depending on how easy it is to broadcast from an underground nuclear bunker obviously. So if you’re thinking where’s all the stuff on Venezuela, the China/India border conflict, Australia’s hilarious politician citizenship issues and much more, then hold your horses mainly because even horses need a hug sometimes too. But yes, there will be stuff on those things in upcoming shows. And before I tell you what’s in this week’s show, some quick admin.

Firstly thank you for tuning in again after the break and also thanks to those of you who caught up on episodes you’d missed over the summer. Thank you to Mark who used a minute of his summertime to review the show on iTunes. It’s hugely appreciated and this podcast now needs just one more audience review to get us to 50 reviews and only two more star reviews to get it to 70. C’mon, help me reach numbers that ultimately mean nothing in the grand scheme of the universe! You can also review the show on Stitcher, podbean or any of your podcast listening platforms and probably train platforms and platform shoes too. Also thank you to Hannah, Mike, Anne Marie, AutumnPenkridge, MTox, Colin and Anonymous who donated to the ko-fi page at www.ko-fi.com/parpolbro and also to Tammy, Aaron and Claire who donated to the Patreon at www.patreon.com/parpolbro. It’s genuinely hugely helpful towards making this show and as well as allowing me to avoid gigs in order to do this instead I’ve recently used some of your donations to buy a ticket to one day of the Labour conference in a few weeks time and I’m hoping to interview a few people while I’m there. So if you’d like me to do more of that sort of thing for the show, please do donate. Also bit of an incentive to join the Patreon, but if you didn’t see my EdFringe show I will be popping a recording of it up there for a limited time, from the end of this week, probably on Friday 8th September, for subscribers only. So if you fancy joining up, now would be a good time. Then you can unjoin once you’ve got the file and help reassure my view that a lot of people are awful.

Speaking of my EdFringe show, thank you to all of you who came along during the month especially those who asked me afterwards ‘when is the podcast coming back?’ It was very nice to know how many PPB listeners I had in the audience. The month was much fun, as well as being tough at times as per every year, and as well as my show I went to see John McDonnell talk which was very interesting, especially a story about an early miner’s union dinner where his only job was to make sure a head unionist got him alright as there was a lot of free booze and next thing he knew McDonnell woke up in St James’ Park at 1am with no idea what had happened. Brilliant. I also heard a talk by this week’s guest and managed to sort out an interview with her so more on that in a minute. I will be doing my Edinburgh Fringe show a few more times, in Dublin end of this month, Aberdeen next month and hopefully more to come, and I’m aiming to get it recorded too like my previous shows that you can find on NextUpComedy.com so I’ll keep you posted on all that. This week though, if you one of the 9 people who listens to this show in Denmark or 59 who listen to it in Sweden, I am gigging in Gothenburg on Weds 6th at Casino Cosmopol and The Dubliner in Copenhagen on the 7th. And I think there are a handful of tickets left for the gig I’m hosting with Frankie Boyle on Saturday in Cardiff at St David’s Hall so hurry up and grab those too.

Last thing, if you checked the FB group or Twitter just before summer you might have noticed excellent listener Kat Day made some linear notes for episode 70 with all the links etc on them. She’s offered to do a few more episodes if you have any favourites you could recommend. Also if any of the rest of you have time and fancy logging or making some linear notes it would be hugely appreciated. I’m planning to make a separate Parpolbro website at some point and try and have a log on there of all issues discussed but it will take aaaages so gimmie a shout if you have a lot of spare time on your hands and really nothing else better to do.

SO…..Phew! This week’s show I am speaking to brilliant economist Ann Pettifor about, as her new book is called, the Production of Money, I’m very excited for you to hear that. Plus, of course more Brexshit and a little look at floods, but only a little as I don’t want to through in the deep end on the first ep back. NO I’M NOT SORRY.

But before all that, as always, there is this:

HEADLINES:

122 charities have complained that they are being gagged by the government’s lobbying act. First question you might have is, how do we know that if they’ve been gagged? Good point. Maybe it’s a trap? It’s not a trap, it’s the 2014 act that was supposedly designed to prevent corporations having too much influence prior to an election, but the problem is the rules apply to any organisation or individual who have to register with the electoral commission if they spend more than £5000 on a campaign in the 12 month lead up to an election. That of course includes charities, and that means that they are restricted on having content that may unduly affect an election. In the case of charities, that means most of them can’t just go ‘we wouldn’t need to be here if the Tories hadn’t fucked things up’ and that leaves most of them without anything to campaign about at all. Greenpeace were charged earlier this year with a £30k fine for not registering with the electoral commission pre-the 2015 election. This is because they wanted to campaign on air pollution, climate change and wildlife protection, all areas that you can’t campaign about without pointing out that the Conservatives haven’t done anything about the first two and actively want to chase down and kill the latter for a bit of fun on a weekend. Christian Aid, a charity primarily there for whenever Hollywood star Mr Bale gets in a tizzy, said they had to scale back a campaign to help refugees because they didn’t want to be seen as having political bias, despite that being a very political issue. Other charities who have complained and signed an open letter to make changes to this law include Save The Children, the RSPB and Girlguiding. Yes, even the girl guides are pissed. If even they feel like they’ve been gagged and can’t work out how to undo it, then there’s definitely something wrong with it.

Two prominent Labour women have resigned from their posts in recent weeks. And while this sort of thing is now so common in Labour you wonder if they should just install a revolving door at party HQ, Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale stepping down and Sarah Champion leaving her post as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities both have their own various factors to consider. Looking at Scottish Labour first, Dugdale’s resignation isn’t much to dwell on by itself. She wasn’t so much handed a poison chalice by former leader and village idiot Jim Murphy as a cursed relic that promised the beholder a properly shit time. While she had electoral defeats for her section of the party and had much criticism for the party leader back when that was the trendy thing to do, she did also see in six Labour MPs get elected in Scotland in the last election, which many thought was impossible. But despite all this Dugdale’s resignation seems largely personal, rather than political and more to do with her relationship with an SNP MSP as well as the death of her friend, than anything else. Fair enough, I mean why jeopardise actually important things in life because you’re too busy correcting Sky News reporter Sophie Ridge when she refers to you as the Scottish Labia Leader? Yes, really, look it up. What this means though is that the next leader of Scottish Labour could give the party a far more left wing, pro-Corbyn outlook with former Glasgow MP Anas Sarwar, former GMB union officer Richard Leonard and campaigner Monica Lennon all being touted as maybes. There’s no obvious candidate though at the moment but it could really change how Labour do in Scotland if they aren’t just viewed by the pro-indy voters as being in line with the Tories as they were in the Independence campaign in 2014. At the same time, it could turn more moderate pro-union voters towards Scottish Conservatives instead. Who actually wants to take all that on? It’d be easier leading the Scottish Labia party, and hey, I hear there’s an opening. HA! YEAH I WENT THERE!

As for Sarah Champion, despite her name making her sound like the best of all Sarah’s, it turns out she’s really not. Sarah resigned from her post as Shadow Minister for Women & Equalities after writing a piece for The Sun. No that’s not all, but yes, it should be enough. The bigger problem was the piece which was written after 17 men and one women were found guilty of committing over 100 sex offences against vulnerable girls in Newcastle. Champion stated that Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting girls. Yes the shadow equalities minister made a generalised racist statement. Though to be fair Champion does have form at this, as when shadow minister for preventing abuse, she attacked her husband in a domestic dispute. Yep. But back to the recent article. Champion made a pretty inflammatory statement and Sarah said the paper had altered her article, but then the Sun, rarely the challenger of lies, produced an email from one of her aides saying she was pleased with it. Since resigning she has accused the ‘floppy left’ of being afraid to speak out against grooming gangs incase of accusations of racism. In a tiny bit, she is right to say that stopping grooming gangs should be of utmost importance much more than caring about how you’re viewed. But evidence proves her comments to really be problematic. There are two categories of group based abuse. Type 1 involves targeting a victim based on their vulnerability. Type 2 involves targeting specifically children, because they are children not necessarily because they are vulnerable. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre carried out research in 2013 on 57 cases in type 1 abuse in 2012, using police provided ethnicity data. They also carried out research on 6 cases of type 2 in the same year. Half of the type 1 cases where carried out by people of Asian ethnicity, 21% by white groups and 17% by multiple ethnicity groups. They concluded that 75% of all type 1 group abusers were Asian. They also stated that 100% of all Type 2 abuse was by white men. Now while the stats for the Type 1 abuse seem to show that it is overwhelmingly Asian groups that target children and young women because they are vulnerable, they also say that Type 2 abuse is far more common than type 1 abuse. In 2012 police identified 2120 cases of lone type 2 abuse in comparison to 65 cases of type 1. And considering it was from 5 years ago and the CEOP don’t have ethnicity data for all the lone abusers, or group abusers identified by police from that year NO ONE CAN REALLY DRAW ANY CONCLUSIONS OTHER THAN THAT THERE ARE SOME REALLY AWFUL PEOPLE OUT THERE FROM ALL ETHNICITIES. And really it would’ve been far easier for Sarah Champion to write an article about tackling all levels of horrific abuse, rather than getting all The Sun about it. But hey, I give it a couple of years before she’s Shadow Minister For Transport and runs over a cyclist within four days.

INTERVIEW PART 1 – Ann Pettifor

I honestly have very little idea about where money comes from. As a kid I was certain the royal mint was a giant foxes glacier and years later I’m still not 100% convinced I’m wrong. Only The Queen is allowed to lick it and then she poops out pound coins with her face on. Yeah? Ok maybe not, but I’m still largely confused about how the bank of England can just make money appear sometimes out of nowhere with quantitative easing, yet I’m not allowed to ask my bank to just remove the minus sign and replace it with a plus until I can afford my rent. Surely if it’s not physically there anymore we can all just have a go? Or does my local bank actually have very deep vaults full of goblins guarding gold like Gringots? And that’s where my deposits go when I put them in that hugely unreliable metal post box that looks like a dead Star Wars droid? It’s all very confusing.

Even if you’re more intelligent than me, I’m pretty sure it confuses a lot of people why we’re often told there’s not enough money for things we need such as welfare or education, but you just whistle the tune to Edwin Starr’s War in the direction of the government or announce that some creationist pro-lifers are at the door and bam, you’ve got a veritable Scrooge McDuck swimming pool in front of you. It’s been ten years since the Global Financial crash devastated the world and brought with it years of austerity, but there’s been very little questions asked about why the only offered way forward seemed to take everyone backwards. Why does the monetary system work like this and as, if not more importantly, how? Is there a way the monetary system could actually work for the people and for ecosystem? Most importantly, is it still cool to boo bankers?

This week I interviewed economist Ann Pettifor. Ann is the director of Prime, aka Policy Research in Macroeconomics, part of the Labour party’s economic advisory board and one of the only people to correctly predict the global financial crash in 2007. She lead the Jubilee 2000 campaign which resulted in massive debt cancellation for a number of countries. And above all else, she is brilliant at explaining economics in a clear and easy way for people like me to understand. I went to hear her talk at the Edinburgh book festival this year and immediately bought her new book The Production Of Money as a result. I was very excited that she agreed to let me interview her for the podcast and I’m sure you’ll find, as I did, that I could put nearly everything she says onto t-shirts because they are the sort of sensible sound bites I wish everyone could hear. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. Here is Ann:

We’ll be back with Ann in a minute but first:

BREXIT FALLOUT

Obviously the big question you’re all thinking is, Tiernan, what on Earth is happening with Brexit? Well FANFARE PLEASE FANFARE NOISE pretty much nothing! That’s right, the UK are blaming the EU for the slow progress of talks, while the EU are blaming the UK. Now I’m not saying it’s obvious which side is right but I’m pretty sure that Secretary Of State for Brexit and everyone’s least favourite Harry Enfield character David Davis has the ability to stall a snail race Davis says that the EU are using time to put pressure on negotiations, even though it was the UK government that triggered article 50 without having anything in place and giving everyone only two years to sort it all out. Tell you what David, why not next accuse the EU of wasting time with a pointless power grabbing election that they aren’t competent enough to do well in? Try that one David and see how that goes. The big problem Davis has is the so called Brexit bill. You know the one that covers all the shares financial obligations that the UK undertook while an EU member? Yes, while Davis has admitted that the UK has these obligations, him and the government are being more cagey than Nicholas about how much they think they should pay. And nothing makes us look like better trading partners to the rest of the world than our unwillingness to pay for stuff we’ve already used. Hey everyone! Come trade with Britain! We’ll take you for lunch then run off after eating and leave you with all the costs! This bill has to be sorted before trade talks can start but of course the government’s Brexit team wants trade talks to start first. Like asking the local library when they’ll start stocking your self published books on hairdos for pet gerbils, while refusing to return their VHS of He-Man & She-Ra that you’ve had for 16 years. Sorry, that’s a terrible analogy for young people. If you’re under 30 and listening, libraries were houses for books that we used to have in the past.

Responding to Disgraced MP Liam the disgrace Fox’s stupid comments about the EU trying to blackmail the UK, the EU Brexit negotiator Michael Barnier said it was his job to educate the UK about the price it would be paying for leaving the EU. Considering nobody bothered to learn anything about this before the referendum I don’t know why he’d think that’d work now. What all this really means is that nothing has really been discussed on what the UK will owe the EU, the Irish border, or very importantly, citizen’s rights after Brexit. Instead they will now only have a year and five months to sort all of that out, plus there will be further delays with the German general election in a few weeks time.

Meanwhile Theresa May got the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to agree to use it’s trade deal with the EU as a basis for a future trade deal with the UK, which is a great coup! Essentially we’ll have the same deal as we did beforehand. While you might think that sounds a lot like we’ll just be spending more money to have the same stuff as before and therefore it’s all a giant waste of time, I would argue that spending more money to have a decent deal but haunted Toby Jug in a suit Nigel Farage doesn’t get his MEP salary then that is hugely worth it.
But it does make you wonder what was in it for everyone at the end? Especially as even the immigration issue doesn’t stand anymore as net immigration has fallen by 51,000 since the Brexit referendum. Who’d have though the quickest way to reduce numbers of people coming here to live and work would be to have a government who promotes hostility towards them?

There is now also going to be a Home Office investigation into the controversial idea that foreign students should be counted in immigration figures, with new evidence suggesting that previous estimates of 100,000 students overstaying their visas per year looks more like it might be around 1500. I mean, that’s a pretty big difference in numbers isn’t it? Is this a skill foreign students have to seem like there’s more than there are? If that’s the case we should be getting more over to the UK so we can earn loads from hiring them out for events or US presidential inaugurations. Hopefully students will be removed from being counted as part of the overall figures which will cause an instant drop in net migration and also really help out the education system. Not that politicians are necessarily keen on reducing immigration figures though. An investigation by politics.co.uk showed that 482 tip offs during 2014-16 to the Home Office hotline for immigration enforcement were made by MPs. Rather than protect their constituents they are actively shopping them in. It’s a nasty betrayal of trust and I can’t work out if they assume that with less constituents it’d be easier to get voted back in next time, with less door stopping needed and afterwards, far more reduced drop in hours? If they really feel that way about the job, they should probably do a Kezia Dugdale instead.

Labour’s Brexit stance is now to discuss staying in the single market. Or it was for a couple of days as Shadow Brexit secretary and only man to survive being bitten by a radioactive hush puppy Keir Starmer announced last week that a deal to remain in the customs union and single market should be left on the table as an option but with a newly negotiated agreement. However Labour MP Barry Gardiner told the today program that Labour’s stance was to have a customs union, not stay in the customs union. Seems as an opposition Labour are keen to have a vague understanding of what they want, not the same understanding. Still to be fair, as John McDonnell stated when I saw him do a Q&A in Edinburgh, it’s very hard being in opposition when you don’t know what you’re in opposition too, and at the moment, it mainly seems like the best stance Labour could take that plays to their strengths, would be that disgraced MP Liam Fox only be allowed to talk when passed the talking stick, then keep pointing out that any stick he holds is just a talking stick, not the talking stick. I look forward to updating you in a week’s time when as a country the UK will still be going nowhere while somehow simultaneously plummeting downhill fast.

Now can you guess?

WHO’S LEAVING BECAUSE OF BREXIT?

It’s two this week as both food workers and European flights appear to be disappearing, probably with one on the other, post Brexit. No not flights on workers, idiot. How would that even work? The Food and Drink federation says 31% of UK food businesses have already lost workers and they say if workers continue to head back into the EU at this rate, they may struggle to produce enough food to feed the UK. We are very much biting the hands that feed us, then not providing guaranteed healthcare for those bites so the hand owners are going home. And secondly Michael O’Leary, owner of Ryanair is demanding the government give him legal certainty by Autumn that various bilateral treaties will be in place so European flights can continue coming into the UK after March 2019. While it is a big issue and something that needs to be sorted out asap or the UK will lose a lot of flights and business, I do also hope the government say they’ll only sort a deal in advance for RyanAir if they pay extra.

And now, back to Ann:

INTERVIEW PART 2

Many thanks to Ann Pettifor for taking the time to speak to me for the podcast. Her new book is called The Production Of Money and I really couldn’t recommend it enough. Within about two chapters I felt I’d learned and understood more about the financial sector than I ever had before. While you might say ‘Tiernan you clearly knew nothing before so it wouldn’t have taken much’ and you’d be right, but genuinely, Ann’s book is so clearly written, much like her explanations in my interview with her, that if you, like me, feel you don’t know enough about economics and money production and should, do pick it up. It is available from all good bookshops and no doubt, some terrible ones as well where not everything is in alphabetical order and they’ve put crime fiction next to food which doesn’t make sense. Do also check out primeeconomics.org which is the website Ann regularly contributes too and also Ann is on Twitter @annpettifor so do follow her there too. The other people she recommends following are Steve Keen who is on Twitter @profstevekeen, Jo Michell who is @jomichell and Daniela Gabor who is @danielagabor. And if you want to go to the PEP event on the 14th September in London, which does look fascinating, there are still tickets left at www.themintmagazine.com/events. I will pop all of those things up on the Twitter and Facebook groups too.

And as always, if you have anyone you’d like me to interview or a subject you’d like me to interview someone about please drop me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com or why not write it in a Caeser cypher and burn it into a series of crop fields causing conspiracy theorists to decode it and think aliens listen to this show, forcing them don tinfoil hats and write the message on banners, then protest outside my flat causing me to finally see it. Again, as always, email is best.

END

And that’s all for this episode of Partly Political Broadcast. Thanks for coming back and listening as we kick start a whole new period of terrifying politics that I will awful puns about. Please do give the show a review on iTunes or stitcher or on the label of your vest so people see it after PE. Also please do donate to the Patreon at www.patreon.com/parpolbro if you’d like a recording of my latest solo show, or if you just want to give me money with no rewards, please do at ko-fi.com/parpolbro. Don’t forget you can get in touch about, well anything, @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast group on facebook or Partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. And mostly please do just spread the word as that’s the best way to get people listening to this thing.

Big thanks as always to Acast for hosting the show and to my brother The Last Skeptik for all the musics. He has a new album out on 29th September called This Is Where It Gets Good and you can pre-order that now so please do.
This will be back next week when David Davis will be texting from his phone in the middle of negotiations to complain that the EU keep wasting time.

THANKS BYE!

This week’s episode was brought to you by several numbers that thanks to Ann Pettifor we all know understand and will wrangle for our own use like champions. No not Sarah. Other better ones. Thanks Ann!

Episode 71

Released on Tuesday, September 5th, 2017.

Episode 71

Further Reading

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