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The podcast returns for the new year/decade/yet more time we have to endure. What does this new year bring? War, fire, Brexit and of course the worrying issue of some rich people wanting to do other things. Stressful times. Northern Ireland, Iran, Brexit, some things you may have missed and Tiernan (@TiernanDouieb) talks to comedian Jenan Younis (@Jenan_Younis) about why the situation in Iran is actually more about Iraq, and what the West and in particular the left, keep getting wrong about the Middle East.

Links and sources of info from Jenan’s interview:

• • Jenan Younis on Twitter – https://twitter.com/Jenan_Younis
• • Jenan’s website – https://www.jenanyounis.com/
• • Assyrian Policy Institute on Twitter – https://twitter.com/assyrianpolicy
• • Assyrian Policy Institute website – https://www.assyrianpolicy.org/
• • Max J. Joseph on Twitter – https://twitter.com/DeadmanMax
• • Max J. Joseph on Medium – https://medium.com/@DeadmanMax
• • Max J. Joseph on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/deadman_max/

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• • Twitter – twitter.com/ParPolBro and twitter.com/TiernanDouieb   
• • Facebook – www.facebook.com/groups/ParPolBro 
• • Website – www.tiernandouieb.co.uk/podcast
• • Donate to the Patreon – www.patreon.com/parpolbro
• • Buy me a coffee – ko-fi.com/parpolbro
• • Review the show on iTunes – itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/partly-political-broadcast/id1075342863?mt=2 
• • Review the show on Stitcher – www.stitcher.com/podcast/partly-political-broadcast
• • The Last Skeptik – www.thelastskeptik.com
• • Kat on Twitter – https://twitter.com/chronicleflask
• • Buy Kat a coffee (go on, spread the love) – https://ko-fi.com/katday

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that unfolds the truth, then realizes oh god no, so folds it back up and pops it in the recycling. Yes, its back for 2020, I’m still Tiernan Douieb and once again, as the world tackles the most important news story of our time, it’s clear there are a handful of solutions to the immense problem that is members of the British royal family trying to leave the UK when we all know that if they really loved this country they’d continue to have a really shitty time here like the rest of us. The Queen has agreed a period of transition with Duke and Duchess of Sussex during which they’ll have only a few months to work out trading agreements with the rest of the royals following which the only options for famous actress Meghan Markle and her husband, whatever it is he does, are for either the Royal Family to build a bridge between Buckingham Palace and wherever they’re heading to in Canada. A Norway option which means they just have to go to Norway. Some sort of people’s vote where we can all get a say in whether or not we actually give a shit about this when the world is actually on fire, or maybe some sort of hard Royal exit whereby we get rid of all the monarchy in a swift cold turkey revolution because it’s clear that if it’s a bigger crime within the Windsors to want to stop being abused by a racist press than it is to hang out with a convicted paedophile, I’d hazard that they’re now about as useful to the modern day as a beef farm made of plastic straws.

It might be a new decade but it’s clear no one wants change, which is why the Royal family must stay as dysfunctional as it is, and why Northern Irish parties have agreed to restore devolution, taking them back to how things used to be, a system that worked out so well it lead to a complete lack of functioning government for three years. Sinn Fein and the DUP have agreed a power sharing arrangement, likely helped by the DUP not having one with the Conservatives anymore, but probably helped even more by the last election showing that any more of this shit where they get paid for jobs they aren’t doing and they’ll all be gone by 2025, and also likely helped even more by Northern Ireland needing some cash before Brexit turns it into a glorified toll booth. The deal is called New Decade, New Approach which sounds like a reform program for convicted stalkers and it contains legislation for the appointments of an Irish language commissioner and an Ulster Scots commissioner because it’s clear the only way they’ll be able to work together in Stormont is if neither can understand what the other is saying.

Sinn Fein vice president and wife of Phil Mitchell Michelle O’Neil has been appointed deputy first minister and Leader of the DUP and walking cloakroom Arlene Foster has been appointed First Minister again because you can’t shirk responsibility for failed policies unless you’re in charge of them. Foster said it was time for Stormont to move forward, which I think for her party means to the times of the New Testament, while O’Neill said that it is her sincere wish that 2020 brings real change though she wasn’t clear if it was for the better or worse. So now decisions can finally be made by the executive that have been stalled for the past three years, hopefully fixing issues with healthcare that many workers have been striking about, environmental issues and if once Brexit goes through the entire country will be filled with over expensive WH Smiths that sell giant toblerones and copies of David Cameron’s autobiography eternally on sale. UK Prime Minister and what if you pumped a suit full of wall filler Boris Johnson said his government would strongly support the Stormont parties but that it wasn’t all about money, meaning he’ll likely give them little funding but will instead offer occasional comments such as ‘you can do it’ and ‘I believe in you’, the latter meaning very little from someone whose belief system barely includes things he can’t see his own reflection in. Visiting Belfast in mark of the return of the Northern Irish Assembly, Johnson made the odd comment that he could feel the hand of the future beckoning us all forward, though it’s likely he just misconstrued it trying to shake off his unwanted grope from under the table. The Finance Minister Conor Murphy, a man who looks like he’s uncertain how to use more than 3% of his mouth, has said the financial package offered falls way short of what was promised, so maybe that hand of the future was just asking for Johnson to pass the rest of it over.

I suppose it could be excused as it can’t be easy trying to construct big leader speeches when you’ve spent most of the last few weeks sunning yourself in the Caribbean, as it appeared his pre-Christmas promises of a ‘People’s Government’ just meant one the public had to run themselves cos he was too busy having a nice time in Mustique. Why bother to recall parliament to discuss lots of things you’re never going to do anything about? Chances are when Johnson got the call to do something about the situation in Iran, he likely told his staff to just shout at Richard Ratcliffe through the letterbox that ‘he’s not in, go away’ and hope that’d solve it. What was the British government’s response to US President and meat hoover Donald Trump ordering the killing of Iranian Major General and lovechild of a weasel and a fava bean Qasem Soleimani by drone strike in Bahgdad? Well Foreign Secretary and man who looks like he’s been meshed together with lots of bits from the reject bin of a tanning factory Dominic Raab, he said that Iran needed to take the diplomatic route and ease tensions. Yes that’s right, its up to the country who had a military leader killed to calm down, rather than the one who did the killing. It’s like me telling my neighbours that maybe I should call noise pollution officers on them after they complained about me screaming ‘go fuck yourselves’ through the walls every night from 3-5am. This isn’t to say that Soleimani deserves defending as he wasn’t a particularly nice man, but it’s not really the done thing to just rock up to another country without even giving any of your allies an advanced warning, then killing someone off in self-defence incase they did something to you in the future. I mean Piers Morgan has upset quite a lot of people during his life, mainly just by existing but if another country ordered his death, us in the UK would be livid right? Mainly because we should get first dibs at doing it first.

It’s also not really self-defence if it’s an offence otherwise where does that excuse end? Mass serial killer claims he murdered victims in self-defence just incase at a later date one of them might’ve scratched his car? But this is President Trump who also said he didn’t want a war with Iran in the fashion very much of a man who’d play dead leg by hitting you then telling you he doesn’t want to play anymore and who has urged other NATO countries to withdraw from the Iranian Nuclear Agreement, a deal to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons, so that they can prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It’s very hard to process how you might get to that sort of reasoning without either first assuming the Nuclear Agreement was an agreement to make nuclear weapons, or that everyone else does deals like he does, which is with fingers crossed behind his back and a complete lack of understand as to what they’re signing. Trump claims Soleimani was going to blow up four US embassies, which he might’ve been, but luckily by killing him it meant that instead Iran just retaliated by vowing severe revenge, then firing rockets at a US military base in Iraq, then rolled back their commitment to develop more nuclear weapons, and then by supposedly accidentally blowing up a passenger jet flying to Ukraine killing 176 people. So well done US, crisis averted, lives saved. Iranians have been protesting in response to the shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner, to which Iranian police have responded by shooting them, though I guess maybe following Trump’s understanding of things, they assumed by protestors being against unnecessary killings, that actually meant they were for it. Boris Johnson backed the US’s right to defend itself saying during Prime Minister’s Questions that Soleimani was responsible for arming many different regimes, so no wonder he’s glad of his death as now there’s less market competition for the government’s main business export.

This notion of pre-emptive self-defence isn’t limited just to the US, as Home Secretary and only person who thinks Norman Bates’s smirk at the end of Psycho is an endearing quality Priti Patel, has supported anti-terror police adding environmental campaigners Extinction Rebellion to their list of extremist ideologies. It turns out that now it’s extremist to not want children in the future to have spend everyday of their lives swimming and struggling to breath, whereas you know, us moderates here are all about winding them and then  throwing them in lakes before climate change even hits, telling them to get on with it. But what can I say, we’re just sensible realists over here. Patel said it was justified as they have to look at a range of security risks, you know, like the risks XR cause by forcing some people to walk to work or stripping off in public gallery of the House of Commons so everyone can make jokes for weeks on end about how there’s always arses in there. It’s quite something to have a woman such as Patel who was previously sacked from the cabinet for breaching national security, branding a bunch of people who like the planet as extremists, but then maybe in her ideology, one that seems to involve wishing most people were suffering, they are. This fits with the Conservatives voting against reinstating protections for child refugees into the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, no doubt because if you reunite these kids from war torn areas with their families, they’ll spend less time doing survival swimming training that they’ll need for the climate disaster you can’t protest about. So it’s for their own good really. And that’s how it’ll be now for some time, as the majority government can just vote through whatever they like. The Withdrawal Agreement passed through parliament quicker than bad bout of food poisoning and now the UK is leaving the EU on January 31^st.

Officials have been ordered to not use the term Brexit after that date as though somehow that’ll just make everyone forget it’s happening. I’m not sure what the brief is to call it afterwards. That fucking thing? The shitshow that cannot be named? The ongoing trade hell formerly known as Brexit? Who knows but after then we’ll be in the transition period for 11 months which will give everyone just enough time to tell you that Brexit wasn’t that bad as they retain all their EU rights, and then find someone else to blame for when things are not quite as fun next January. Maybe it’ll be the fault of the Commonwealth? Or NATO? Or Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales? Maybe the sea? Ultimately leading to walls being built around England by 2050 like a self-determined quarantine that the entire rest of the globe agrees is actually a great idea.

Meanwhile the opposition are trying to work out who it is that’s best to actually oppose all this by picking a new Labour leader from a batch that looks like a political version of Miss Peregrin’s Home for Peculiar Children. It contains a mix of abilities from being able to talk about themselves until the Conservatives died of boredom, all the way to being disliked by both sides of the Brexit debate, saying towns as often as they can, or just confusing them about where a hyphen goes until they implode. The candidates that got enough support from fellow MPs to be on the ballot are Minecraft skin Sir Keir Starmer, minor character in an anime Rebecca Long Bailey, potato print Lisa Nandy, asks to go in front of you in the queue as she’ll just be quick but then isn’t Jess Philips, and the teacher who’s nice at parents evenings but not any other time Emily Thornberry. Star of Alien 3 Clive Lewis didn’t make the ballot after Labour MPs took their cue from the Oscar nominations. Current favourite according to polls and bookies is Starmer who says Labour has a mountain to climb, which I feel just adds to the difficulties they’ll have against a majority government. Imagine doing PMQs with altitude sickness? Starmer doesn’t want anyone to trash talk Corbyn’s years or those under Brown or Blair, but didn’t mention Miliband so I expect everyday he’ll be saying things like ‘immigration mug, how shit was that?’ and basing his entire campaign on not having a massive stone with his pledges on it. The winner will be announced on April 4^th, as will the deputy leader and then we can all breathe a big sigh of relief as there’ll be no more waiting to see exactly why everyone in their own party will hate whoever’s now in charge and queue up to take turns doing interviews about how great it’d be if absolutely anyone else won.

Australia has been consumed by massive bushfires, but not in the way Gwyneth Paltrow would do them, as climate change has been named as the number one reason over 10 million hectares of bush, forest and parks have been ablaze, with 28 people dying so far and many made homeless. Australian Prime Minister and man with the sort of face that if you saw it under a headline about ‘stuffed bodies into pipes’ you’d go, yeah makes sense Scott Morrison, was criticized for staying on holiday while the country was in crisis. Considering how little he and his Liberal party have done to tackle climate change, I am starting to wonder if actually the key is for us to persuade leaders like him and Boris Johnson to just stay on holiday and paying for them to be away while we fix stuff would be cheaper than having them in office.

But of course, none of this is as important as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, a story that mostly proves once again that there are so few good roles for black actresses in the UK that they have to move to the US for meaningful work. Who can begrudge either of those two for wanting to step back from the Royal family when standing in front of Prince Andrew seems so much more dangerous? And you might think, but honestly why does everyone give a fuck, but you should because without the royal family, what exactly is the United Kingdom? That’s right, a united Dom, and if Scotland gets another independent referendum, and Ireland perhaps is reunited, then we’d just be a Dom. Based on recent pictures of Johnson’s special advisor and Scooter from the Muppets but on crack Dominic Cummings, wandering into Number 10 with his arse hanging out of his trousers, looking like he’d just escaped a gale force wind, maybe that is who we’ll be. Scruffy, chaotic, think we’re smarter than we are, but ultimately just a crank whose trousers fall down like a tragic clown act. Maybe we should all be asking if Harry and Meghan can take us with them.

Luckily we still have the Festival of Brexit to look forward to, which will apparently be taking place in 2022 which means if it’s true to its name, it’ll actually happen in 2024, where all ticket goers will have to spend 11 months standing in a field waiting for anything noticeable to happen.

ADMIN

Happy New Year ParPolBrods! Can I still say that? I mean we’re 14 days in and so far with Iran that’s war, the Aussie fires that’s death, Brexit is probably conquest isn’t it? So that’s just famine we need to audition for and we should have a mighty apocalypse heading our way. Sometimes its pestilence instead of conquest though isn’t it? It all depends on how picky you are about your apocalypse. I mean, if you’re a purist who only goes by the Victor Vasnetsov you’ll be all content with what we’ve got but if you’re on a Sleepy Hollow or Jewish Encylopedia tip then you’ll be left waiting. Sorry about that. I’m certain that is what would happen in an apocalypse isn’t it? Everyone on Twitter would be replying to videos of a burning skeleton riding a dark horse through swathes of screaming villagers, by saying ‘that’s not war actually, that’s fire, a latter incarnation whereby it was deemed that war was a by-product of the four horsemen’, ‘uh no, that is actually death, because as you can see by the others, war is the meek 14 year old sitting in a gaming chair controlling a drone’. This is far too gloomy an intro isn’t it? I’m actually fairly cheery at the moment as I’m avoiding social media in order to read more and because all them sites were so full of people being miserable and horrible to each other so I thought reading would cheer me up. Then the first book I read was the amazing Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel and that was all about a flu wiping out most of the Earth’s population and then I’m reading the Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and that’s about the end of the world and I had a real moment of clarity where I realized, oh wait, maybe social media wasn’t the issue. They are both excellent though and would highly recommend. Did you have good Christmases and the bit after that when its actually good and then the bit after that which is January and grim? I very much hope you did and thanks for coming back to this show full of new year’s joy and friendly notions of Apocalyptica.

Sorry for the lack of bonus content during the festive break but I was having some actual downtime which was lovely and I understand that on the Newstradamus bonus, there is an editing fuck up, which you can tell as I say something, pause then say it again but not as shit. And I left that in, thanks to regular pod helper Kat Day for letting me know. Basically I was mostly drunk and my body that wasn’t alcohol was 98% roast potato so that sort of thing will happen. I am not anywhere near as drunk now and am much less potato in content, though sadly still largely potato in appearance, so it should happen less. Kat’s suggestion was that instead of pausing I should just make a loud noise when I make a mistake so I’ll see it when editing. Except I am usually so loud and have to quieten myself down, I think all this will do is burst your eardrums as I leave in all my screams by accident. Look here, I’m a little lone podcaster all by myself and chances are high mistakes will happen and that’s obviously what makes this show cult and cool and underground unlike all those actually popular ones. Of course you can help me reduce how many mistakes there are by funding my lifestyle so all I do is podcast and I don’t spend time on anything else, I send my daughter away to be guarded 24/7 by a cerebus and spend my days in a small plastic bubble shouting descriptions of Boris Johnson into a microphone. Should you wish that to be the case, or somewhere near to it, please donate to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro site, or to the patreon.com/parpolbro, both of which very much help and shout out to Mark, Emma and anonymous for the donations over Christmas time. All of which went towards very good useful things and definitely not booze and potatoes. Ahem. Thanks also to whoever gave the show a nice review on Apple Podcasts and look, I know I say all this boring shit every week but this podcast has been going on for 3 years now, yeah really. I know I could’ve done something actually good with my time instead but no, here I am. And for 2020, in between the apocalypse tik toks, why not use your phone time to recommend this show to some of them podcast newsletters or websites or people you know or general social media where everyone who sees it can then tell you exactly why you’re wrong to like this show and just all of that please, as it’d be nice to be able to keep justifying why every Monday I ignore my family apart from occasionally shouting down the stairs ‘any ideas what I could describe Emily Thornberry as, I’m really stuck on it.’

Also as I say every week, I really do need help with suggestions of who to interview this year. I’m thinking that now the government are pretty much going to be doing what they like for the next five years, maybe it’s best to speak to grassroots activists who are changing their own areas of life and work, or people who can tell us how to cope, what to be doing, things like that. There’s also tons of areas of politics I’ve never spoken to anyone about on this show. What are they? I have absolutely no idea. My daughter has sung Iggle Piggle’s song from In The Night Garden at me all day and I have nothing else in my brain, so please help and send in suggestions for interviewees or subjects to interview people on, to all the usual places.

This week I am speaking to comedian Jenan Younis about why the recent events in Iran are bad news for Iraq and why the left and the west in general keep getting things wrong about the Middle East. Plus a super speedy catch up of everything that’s happened while you were knee deep in stuffing.

Here we go:

INTERVIEW PART 1

If you look up ‘diagrams of middle eastern conflict’ on your search engine of choice, you get a series of pictures that look a lot like the crayon efforts my daughter has made on most of our walls. Either that means that she’s secretly been studying the extensive and complicated history and relationships of the many countries, factions and religions in the area, or to put it lightly, to say politics in the Middle East is complicated is an understatement. According to that there most of the news, the current situation is just about the US and Iran. But that’s ignoring Iraq which has not only been one of the US’s favourite areas for looting this century, but is also a country that Iran holds much sway over now, and where most of the violence has taken place since old highlighter pen crossed with a blancmanche Donald Trump decided to assassinate that one from the Bridge and Killing Eve oh no wait it’s not him phew Qasem Solemani. And if you ignore Iraq then it means you’re forgetting about the forever fight against the only type of ISIS you wouldn’t want in the summer, the Islamic State, or President of Turkey and what if in Cats they superimposed the faces of really shitty cats onto human bodies instead Recip Erdogan ordering attacks on Northern Iraq, or Israel’s hatred of Iran or Syria still being a catastrophic shitshow, or all the climate change that’s now affecting the arable land in the area, or hundreds of years of history that ultimately suggest either you do some serious reading or maybe sit this one out and work on grasping something easier, like, I dunno, quantum physics or finding the end of the cellotape. So where do you begin, if you’d only got time for a summary over the Sumarians?

Well this week I spoke to Jenan Younis. Jenan is a very funny comedian of Iraqi and Palestinian heritage who somehow manages to explain her heritage and its complications to audiences of drunk people and make them laugh at the same time. Jenan has just recently had a special on BBC Sounds, and is currently working on her brand-new show for the Vaults Festival. So I asked her to temporarily skip the gags and instead just explain to me, a man who is not drunk but is tired and an idiot, just why we need to be focusing on what Trump’s mouth fart fest with Iran means for Iraq, what the recent mostly unreported here in Blighty protests in Iraq have been about, and also just why the West and in particular the left, keep getting things wrong about the Middle East. And if this chat doesn’t help you out, then let me know and I’ll send you the red and green swirly mess my daughter somehow drew on our fridge when I had my back turned for all of 30 seconds.

Here’s Jenan:

INTERVIEW WITH JENAN PART 1

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

SUPER SPEEDY CATCH UP

Ok, so I know this sounds weird, but while you and I were pretending to have some sort of break based around vague religious narratives that were harshly ripped from ancient pagan mid-Winter celebrations but without the fun angry deer god or sacrifices, politics was actually still happening. I know right? I mean usually everything, around the entire globe, even in countries that don’t even do Christmas, all just chill for a couple of weeks and agree, like a World War 2 football game of life, to have a small break. Don’t they? Don’t they? Well none of that for the 2019 to 2020 mid between times because its hard to stop something that is so rapidly going downhill. And so, here for you, who like me probably put your brain into sleep mode until a few days ago where it has woken up all fogged by thoughts of World War 3, well hey at least they’ll have a cool logo where the 3 looks like a W but on its side, or confusion as to how a Royal couple can give up doing something when no one’s really sure what it is they do anyway, here’s a speedy run down of news what you might have missed:

The National Living Wage, which always sounds like a really boring B movie, is to be raised by 6.2% in April which is good news as the living wage goes up to £8.72 per hour, while the minimum wage for 21 to 24 year olds as they don’t have to live, obviously, goes up to £8.20. That is more than four times the rate of inflation but what it isn’t, is near the recommended amounts as calculated by the Living Wage Foundation which suggest £9.30 across the UK and £10.75 in London because buying a pint in the capital will bankrupt you. So hooray for increase but all that increase will do is make sure you can just slightly not afford things instead of completely not afford them, which isn’t as good as actually affording them. But hey, at least if you’re 21 to 24 you don’t even have to live, so it’s probably dead cheap to survive for you if you don’t even need food and stuff like that.

Transport Secretary and what if your pet had a rare disease Grant Shapps has announced that poor performances mean it’s the end of the franchise for Northern Rail. So that could mean a temporary contract for another rail company, followed by bidding for a more permanent contract, or for the government to fully or partly re-nationalise the line but its Grant Shapps so let’s be honest, he’ll probably give it back to Northern Rail after they told him they’re now called Rorthern Nail, or someone that’s never run a rail service will get it like say, Londis, or he’ll somehow give it to G4S or even his predecessor Chris Grayling who’ll manage to get the whole service stuck in ditch. Northern Rail say their failings are partly to do with a ton of infrastructure that was promised in the North that totally hasn’t happened, which the Depart of Transport are apparently looking into, but chances are it’ll be new name, still on the wrong track.

The Housing Secretary and stock photo of a Conservative, I mean really, just imagine what one looks like, yep its him, Robert Jenrick, has announced a £4m fund to pursue rogue landlords. Not literally, as I don’t think chasing them down the street would be that helpful but to be fair, some of my old landlords, I’d have happily helped fund that to happen. About 1.2m private rented homes are considered non-decent, which no, doesn’t just mean its tenants are sitting around in their pants. It means they aren’t in a reasonable state of repair and are full of health and safety hazards. A lot of councils no longer have the funding to be able to prosecute bad landlords and yet again, while £4m is handy, it’s not really enough for councils to actively pursue rogue landlords, more just occasionally shout them from afar and maybe even shake a fist or two. The Residential Landlords Association say that the government need to provide proper, regular funding to councils to tackle this problem and Labour have suggested a new legal charter of rights for tenants, but it’s a majority Conservative government so it’s likely they’ll do the bare minimum they can to say they’re doing something while not actually doing it properly, much like when a landlord tells you they’ve fixed the extractor fan in the bathroom because they paid the bare minimum for some idiot to come by and do it and then it broke a day later and then you live in a palace of mould and become accustomed to it in a way that from then on you can only live in bog areas or swamps as clean air hurts to breathe. Erm, I mean, so says my friends. Incidentally Robert Jenrick also tried to launch a new government Town of The Year competition but it went wrong when the launch tour was to be kicked off in Wolverhampton, which is a city. Still maybe that’d qualify it immediately as a winner, when it’s already done so well.

The UK’s nuclear weapons program is £1.3bn over budget which means that all infrastructure projects designed to update and facilitate the UK’s defence systems are between one and six years behind schedule. So luckily for all the Labour leadership candidates who are saying they’d press the button if they have to, they’d probably have a little while to think about it before anything actually happened. Nearly all of the extra costs are to do with projects starting to early then having to be revised which is really unlike this government huh? THIS IS WHEN I NEED A SARCASM FONT BUT FOR MY VOICE. Chief Special Advisor and expert fucking weirdo Dominic Cummings has talked about overhauling how the Ministry of Defence buy equipment so chances are he’ll change it so all the money just goes to him because he’s an absolute weapon.

A £3m fund has been given to outreach Jobcentre workers to speak to homeless people rough sleeping and in temporary accommodation because you know, that’s definitely what’ll help. Someone popping by to say you need to go work in Poundstretcher on a zero hours wage, as that’s clearly what’s stopping you from owning a mansion. There is supposed good will behind this, with jobcentre staff aiming to advise people how to get work and find accommodation, even though most of their advice will be ‘avoid getting pointless job centre sanctions and try your best not to go on universal credit as it’ll just make everything worse.’ Essentially to do any good they’ll have to be emissaries from the DWP warning people away from their services. Homelessness has increased by 11.4% in the last 12 months and now as well as having a properly shit time and no home, you can also get told that you’ve been sanctioned for not turning up to the meeting you were sent a letter about. Sounds great.

Of course that’s not all of it, but a few morsels of failings before we get fully into a parliamentary term run by a government who are trying their best to not allow any scrutiny of their doings, knowing full well its going to be very hard to blame anyone else for all the shit bits in 5 years-time. Still, I’m sure Robert Jenrick isn’t too bothered as he’s certain the entire 10 people population of the UK will vote them back in.

And now back to Jenan…

INTERVIEW WITH JENAN PART 2

Thanks to Jenan for having time to chat this week. You can find her on Twitter @jenan_younis, on Instagram on @jenandoescomedy and her website is JenanYounis.com. Also Jenan’s BBC Three Counties comedy special is up on BBC Sounds for 16 more days I think so check that out asap, and I’ll pop a link in the pod blurb. Jenan is also doing a work in progress show at the Vaults Festival in Waterloo on 14^th March at 3.30pm called Jenanistan, I’ll pop the link to that in the pod blurb too because I’m nice like that.

Who else this year shall I talk to? I’m keen to interview people involved in grass roots movements, as well as topical things and areas I’ve not yet covered on this podcast in the last few years, defence, foreign policy, there’s tons. So let me know what or who you’d like to hear from or about and drop me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could write it on a note then hide it behind a radiator in a flat you know I’ll be moving into in several years time and then when I’m trying to use a torch and part of a cot mobile to fish out one my daughter’s toys that she’s got stuck there, I’ll find it and throw it straight in the bin as it’ll be really dusty and horrible. As always it’s probably best to email.

END

And that’s all for this, the first Partly Political Broadcast podcast of 2020. Thank you for returning to this sound hole for the new year, and should you enjoy hearing how terrible things are through the medium of jokes that are worse and interviews that aren’t, please do spread the word about this here podcast to everyone you know, maybe give it a review on Apple Podcasts, Podbean or the like and do chuck us a quid or two at the Patreon or ko-fi if you can.

Big time thanks to Acast for hosting the show, my brother The Last Skeptik for all the musics and to Kat Day for the linear liner notes that always end up on the website.

This will be back next week when the Northern Irish New Decade New Approach deal collapses after its revealed that Boris Johnson has only promised them a pack of gum and a free copy of his book about Churchill, adding that it’s not all about money and why don’t they just be more optimistic about it.

BYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEE

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