Further Reading

Linear liner notes

I wish I could get £11m to develop an app that doesn’t work, I reckon I’d even do it months quicker than anyone Matt Hancock has hired so far. On the upside, we’re at alert level 3 now, on account of there being no scientists allowed to tell us otherwise. Plus a special guest star of all the hayfever in Tiernan’s face and a chat with Maurice Mcleod (@mowords) about BLM, the racial equality commission and DfID.

Key links and sources of info from Maurice’s interview:

• • Maurice Mcleod on Twitter –  https://twitter.com/mowords
• • Race on the Agenda on Twitter – https://twitter.com/raceontheagenda
• • Race on the Agenda website – https://www.rota.org.uk/
• • Gary Younge on Twitter – https://twitter.com/garyyounge
• • Afua Hirsch on Twitter – https://twitter.com/afuahirsch
• • Reni Eddo-Lodge on Twitter – https://twitter.com/renireni
• • Akala on Twitter – https://twitter.com/akalamusic
• • The New Jim Crow book (Wikipedia page) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow
• • Talking to Strangers book (Wikipedia page) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_to_Strangers
  

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

Ep193

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that much like the coronavirus it’s been found much easier to deal with if you’ve had a lot of cheap drugs. I’m Tiernan Douieb and the UK is now at Coronavirus Alert Level 3 which means its finally safe to scrap all those lockdown restrictions that were already lifted weeks and weeks ago.

When oh when will the pubs be open again, chants the entire country, because obvs all that really matters to us Brits is when we can spend money killing our bodies before the coronavirus gets a chance? Well by the time you hear this, there’s every chance the Prime Minister and lumped together weather beaten sheep’s wool torn off a barbed wire fence Boris Johnson will announce that the 2m social distancing rule will be relaxed, after pressure from Conservative backbenchers who were finding it too hard to bully staff at such a distance without someone noticing. When asked over the weekend if the policy would be changing, particularly for schools, Johnson said simply ‘watch this space’ which many have taken to mean there’ll be more coming, but I suspect that is his entire new policy and absolutely nothing else. Shielding, which was so called because by vulnerable people taking responsibility for their own health it protected the government from pretending they had to care, that will stop in England on August 1^st which should give everyone who’s been stuck indoors since March at least 24 hours before they have to go shield again to escape the 7005^th wave. And all this should mean that pubs can reopen but only if you order your drinks on an app meaning that Sam Smiths pubs will have to survive on a swear box that they can fill when customers swear as they realise the stupid rules mean they can’t get a pint.

Hopefully the pub apps will be more successful than the track and trace NHS app, which ultimately has ended up also being made just to piss money away. £11m of government money was spent on developing an app that doesn’t work and has now been scrapped and honestly, I’m starting to wish I’d also bid on that contract as I’m brilliant at not getting stuff done too. Just months ago Health Secretary Matt Hancock, the sort of person who buys all the Now That’s What I Call Music compilations to be down with the kids, was saying there was a lot of enthusiasm for the app, though that may just have been from the people being given £11m to pretend they could make it. After a short trial on the Isle of Wight proved unsuccessful, probably on account of the amount of residents there who still think mobiles are some sort of witchcraft, and was followed so many delays, Hancock announced on the 17^th that the app might, just might, be available by Winter. A clever plan as by then, when we’re on the 7000^th wave, it’ll be easy to trace someone with symptoms contacts as they’ll just be on an adjacent ward. Then on the 18^th, the big news, nope the NHS app has been scrapped and instead the government will be working closely with Google and Apple to make a different one. But Apple said they’d not had any contact with the government about this, which is a great promise for a contact tracing app if the people in charge of it can’t even be bothered to get in touch with the people supposedly making it. I do often wonder if the Conservatives are so bad at track and trace because their social networks are so small, and they’re only ever in contact with the same handful of lobbyists and billionaires that they can’t fathom someone having a friendship circle that didn’t spring from private school wet towelling or how you might get in touch with someone that doesn’t have a butler.

The Google and Apple contact tracing app has always been preferred by many experts but it was rejected by the government back in early May as they thought they could do their own better version. I mean why would you think that two of the world’s biggest tech giants would be any sort of match for the same people who brought you the Matt Hancock MP app or Conservative Conference App both of which had more security breaches than any meeting boring hippocampus Gavin Williamson sat in when he was Defence Secretary. When asked why Hancock ignored the google and apple model of track and trace, he said that actually they’d been building that version as well as he’d always had two horses in the race. Yet again, a horse racing analogy from Matt Hancock, a man who seems to think hedging your bets is putting money on an option that will charge face first into a thicket and then keel over. NHSX who are responsible for the health service’s digital practice have said for weeks that they had no interest in pursuing the Apple Google model, so is Hancock telling porkies or by working with the Apple and Google model too, did he simply mean that he spent some time using his iPhone to search for how on earth to actually make an app that works? Maybe we should be asking if Hancock has some similarities to Finding Dory other than a gormless aquatic face. Are there short-term memory loss issues happening here? It’d certainly explain why later in the week footage from parliament showed him walking across parliamentary social distancing boundaries to greet a colleague by slapping him on the back, breaching all recommended rules. Either he’s forgotten his own rules or from the beginning he’s always thought the m in 2m stands for millionaires and so it’s fine to be near Conservative MPs who’ve got a lot more than that in the bank. Is it why he referred to the footballer who got the government to u-turn on free school meals over the summer, Marcus Rashford as Daniel Rashford on BBC news? Or was it just that he remembered weeks before saying that footballers had to play their part and couldn’t stomach one actually managing to do more for kids in poverty than his government ever had? I mean how do you move the goalposts or dish out unfair penalties against someone who knows how to tackle properly? Matt Hancock did say he was proud of Daniel Rashford though, which is an odd sentiment to say about someone who stopped his party from letting kids starve. But then maybe he forgot yet again that it was his government’s unapologetic choice in the first place and ever since he found out it was going on, was just waiting for someone to intervene.

At least Matt Hancock acknowledged that knew something had happened, whereas Johnson said he’d only just heard of Rashford’s campaign on the day he changed the policy, which if it was true, meant that the day before he’d not watched or read any news, nor been in charge of any of the Downing Street statements saying the school meal voucher scheme would end in summer despite Rashford’s campaign. But is it so hard to imagine that that isn’t the case? There’s every chance he’d spent several days eating Doritos in his pants listening to the baby cry in another room and wishing someone would deal with it, while he watched repeats of Darkest Hour while playing with himself. That’s not what Johnson says of course, according to an interview, he’s a hands-on dad which sounds like a euphemism for a sex pest. He said he’s changed a lot of nappies but didn’t specify if that was for his son or himself, though either way it’s likely he didn’t do it properly, there’d be loads of leaks from the inside and then he’d leave all the unnecessary shit mess for someone else to deal with. Collective amnesia feels a kinder way to explain these things because the only other explanation is that we have a government that could be replaced by a bunch of dented traffic cones and it’d do a far better job. I mean how else do you explain the Prime Minister announcing that he is going to spend nearly a million pounds repainting the premier plane red, white and blue instead of its current grey just seconds after the news that the UK’s debt is now larger than the size of the whole economy. If he’s aware of the state the country is in, it seems like a waste of money and nothing more than a pointless, jingoistic ego boost. But then I suppose it would be very easy to spot by enemies in dangerous air zones and maybe the plan is that if it was shot down, Johnson’s live insurance might help the economy more than anything he’s doing while actually in the job. The RAF say they won’t be able to use the plane if it’s painted those colours so I suppose we should applaud Johnson actively destroying weapons of war. If we could persuade him to repaint all tanks, and missiles too we could become a peaceful nation within weeks. Either that or when he sells them all off the Saudis at half the price, at least it’ll look like we’re claiming some sort of accountability for the war in Yemen. Johnson does need some sort of new transport though, as his convey was involved in a collision near parliament as a protestor ran towards the cars. The PM’s jag got dented but he remained unharmed, because we all know that if there’s any sort of depression coming, he’ll somehow be unscathed, and the public will bear the brunt of the cost.

There have been accusations made by the Independent SAGE group that the government have played down the overall deaths during the coronavirus peak, and that actually there were 22 consecutive days where over 1000 people died. But of course the daily briefings would’ve had to include care home deaths which Boris Johnson probably still isn’t even aware of as any caring home he’s been part of he’s usually left to get with someone younger. A legal bid has also been made against the government’s inaction to safeguard BAME people from coronavirus, but again it’s ignoring that it could just be that Johnson and his cabinet simply couldn’t remember that that black people exist otherwise they might have some in their top team. I mean if they did remember and were aware of the disproportionate effect of COVID on BAME people, wouldn’t they have appointed anyone at all in the world ever other than Munira Mirza to head of the racial equality commission. Mirza is a woman who always looks like she’s about to tell you about all the philanthropy she’s done before showing you her blood diamonds, and also someone who doesn’t believe that systematic racism exists. Maybe it’ll result with her having some incredible revelation like those Tv shows where they make a racist wear a burqa for a day as that’s easier for production companies to comprehend than actually giving a presenting job to someone who’s not white. Or more likely the Conservatives will say the commission has found racial inequality isn’t a thing so it must be because they’ve fixed it all. I can’t imagine how horrific it must be for black people to be campaigning that their lives matter, while the government thinks the best way to fix it is to gaslight that them that anyone ever thought otherwise while by making their concerns invisible, they make it much worse. Again, you have to wonder if it is sheer maliciousness or stupidity and an inability not to just put the very worst person in the role, as though their privilege is all they need to do it. I mean take the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, a man who looks like a supermarket has tried to package tripe in a pair of overstretched tights, and him saying that he thought the protest of taking the knee was an act of subjugation from Game of Thrones, as though all these campaigners have said to each other that the best way to protest for equal rights is to emulate a moment in a show where the only black people in it got decapitated. Is that him purposefully demeaning an entire movement because he can’t understand the idea of equality or is it that he’s, this man who didn’t know the UK is an island, is so unaware of the world that during his time as Foreign Secretary he’s been trying to set up a meeting for the ambassador to Westeros but can’t get a reply? Again, and again the only reason he seems to have that job is because he’s terrible at it. The same way there has been talk again this week of the minister for the Hills Have Eyes Chris Grayling being made chair of the intelligence committee despite the fact that he’s not even good enough to be something that others sit on. He’s the sort of man that would fuck up opening a swing door or would injure himself with safety scissors. Yet here it is, after £2.7bn of blunders in his time in cabinet, Grayling is being discussed for the role he’d be least suited for like hiring an Albatross for the secretary of safe boat travel. Meanwhile disgraced MP Liam the Disgrace Fox is back in the picture to be the British candidate to lead the World Trade Organisation, which is perfect for a man who called it by the wrong name just last year. Liam Fox, the man that said a No Deal was survivable, putting it in the same ball-park as a stroke. It could be that I’m being overly cynical and actually what could be a safer bet than a man who’s breached ministerial code twice, failed on all his promises and jeopardised national security because I guess really, when you’re at the actual rock bottom of ability, maybe you can only do better from here on in? Still if he gets it, it’ll be great fun watching the UK somehow get even worse WTO regulations than normal due to Liam Fox putting the wrong acronym on all the official papers.

Speaking of trade regulations, Boris Johnson announced the opening of trade talks with Australia by waving a packet of chocolate biscuits around like it was a QVC pitch where he’d been told he had to flog something quickly before everyone found out it was flammable. Apparently, the deal will get us cheap Vegemite and Tim Tams, while Australia will get, er, British made boomerangs, you know to replace the failing financial sector, car and food exports that we won’t have any more. It is also worth pointing out that the UK doesn’t need a free trade agreement with Australia just to lower the tariff price on biscuits, we can just lower them ourselves, and by getting a lower tariff on Tim Tams it could just hurt British biscuit makers like McVities who make Penguins all of which makes Johnson’s pitch wafer thin. Still though, this is again what it’s all about. Cheap biscuits and exporting boomerangs. It feels depressingly unsurprising that the Prime Minister is considering a deal that is just a fraction of our one with the EU, just to focus on taking the biscuit and throwing things that he doesn’t have the foresight to see they’ll immediately come back to get him. In fact, there’s every chance he’ll just forget about it all, only becoming aware as it hits him between the eyes. They do say ignorance is bliss don’t they, and I guess as the UK heads towards the worst of recessions, with the highest coronavirus fatalities its really fucking annoying that the Prime Minister is having a great time being completely oblivious.

In other news but not really, Health Minister and the only nice photo they could find of that woman who died being certain cars would just stop for her to cross the motorway Helen Whatley has said that student nurses are not deemed to be providing a service after 30,000 of them deployed to help tackle COVID19 have been told their contracts will end earlier then promised leaving them in financial trouble. Thing is, coming from Helen Whatley, this could be seen as a compliment as she’s never been deemed as able to provide anything other than awkward interviews that always look like she’s about to melt into herself. The Department for International Development is going to be absorbed into the Foreign Office because why would we give foreign aid when our current health and financial situation means that it’ll be other countries having to do tokenistic fundraisers for us by the end of the year? Spain will be allowing UK tourists in without a quarantine, even though considering the majority of Brits that go there, that was a bad idea even pre-pandemic.

A horrific terrorist attack in a park in Reading has left three people dead and the Home Secretary and human shoulder pad Priti Patel has said that the threat from lone actors is growing. Which should really be another reason for them to support the theatre industry and give them something else to do. The Labour Party have released a review into their 2019 election defeat which looks like a 1 star but reads like a 2. Its called The Labour Together Project which I think is ironic like how Little John wasn’t and never would be. The review states that Labour has a mountain to climb to regain seats and that a new leader is not enough. No, and especially not one who looks like if Sin City was based in a marketing firm and would look at a mountain and announce that it’s not for him to say whether or not it should be climbed but he will acknowledge that some people will have seen the mountain and appreciate that is there.

UKIP have a new leader who looks like a perfect casting call for a paedophile on an ITV Prime Time Drama. Freddy Vaccha stood in front of the Churchill statues and said it’s time for UKIP to get back to business because he’s read the room and it turns out the non-essential service people have been needing this pandemic is for more useless racists in the political scene. I’m only joking, I don’t think he can read. Vaccha said he doesn’t care if people criticise him, before locking his twitter account so that no one can see his posts. Apparently the other parties should be quaking at his appointment and the comeback of UKIP, but I guess that is what people do when they properly can’t stop belly laughing isn’t it?

Speaking of people who single-handedly prove that white people aren’t a superior race at all, heat wilted venom sack Katie Hopkins has had her account kicked off Twitter and I have to take it back as for once I agree with her, laughing at people’s misfortune can be funny. Especially when it’s hers. On the same theme, an old leather purse left on the motorway Nigel Farage travelled to Tulsa to attend a rally for US President and the film the fly but if a bag of fluorescent paint and a haggis got into the machine instead Donald Trump. The rally was poorly attended as brilliant Tik Tok and K-Pop fans booked up all the tickets to troll Trump, meaning he mostly shouted to an empty car park full of people mostly not wearing face masks during a pandemic. Trump blamed the low turn-out on protestors interfering with supporters which is a lot like saying ‘You don’t know my supporters, they go to another school.’ Several of Trump’s advance team were tested positive for coronavirus before the rally began, because trust his staff that the only thing they can schedule is a virus. Farage was allowed to travel to the US as it was apparently in the US’s national interest. I mean it was definitely in the UK’s as I can’t think of anything better for us than sending him as far away as possible straight into a COVID hotbed.

And lastly, Facebook have added new regulations allowing users the option to turn off political adverts, despite knowing full well most people can’t be bothered to untag themselves from a Wish post about toe straightening anal beads so it’s likely nothing will change.

ADMIN

Yeah ParPolCrew how are you? I’m so full of hayfever, I’m not going to lie, this week has been difficult to write and record. I’ve no idea how pollen has levelled up this much this year but I swear crop growers have replaced pesticides with whatever it was that caused the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m antihistamine up to my eyeballs, with nasal spray that feels like I’m launching wasabi straight up my nostrils and still, still, I’m more blocked than a pre-pandemic M25 on a Friday night. I love nature, I do, but plant jizz can absolutely do one. I had a kid and I didn’t need to make a lot of people’s eyes water in order to do it. I mean if they did that’s not my responsibility and really they shouldn’t have been watching, that’s just grim. So, look, I’ll keep this bit and the middle bit brief this week as I’m having a hard time editing out all the sniffs and desperate deep breath inhales as my brain runs out of oxygen every time I say a full sentence. It is one of those tiny violin days as awful thing in the news pops up after awful thing but I am mostly spending my day shouting at grass that ‘IF I COULD JUST HAVE ONE NOSTRIL THAT WORKS I’D BE OVER THE FUCKING MOON.’ Still it does mean I’m staying indoors which is probably for the best. I mean seriously how has pollen given a clearer lockdown message than the government? Yes, I have said that joke on here before but its relevant again and my brain is all blocked so you can forgive me. Anyway I hope you are pollen free and thank you once again for tuning into this drivel.

Big thank you this week to Andrew who wrote the nicest review on Stitcher about this show and totally cheered me up last week, really appreciated. Its so nice to know this isn’t just shouting into the endless void sometimes. If you haven’t and even just have time to hit the old 5 star button Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts or one of them, then please do and big thanks also to a number of you who’ve reviewed in other countries and I’ve only just worked out how to see them. I’m sure that’ll be one of the things that goes post Brexit and I’ll only be able to see anything that’s been posted in the Faroe Islands or something. Huge thanks as well to Luke for joining the Patreon and ta for your lovely message too, and also to Anon, Jenny, Ruby, Somebody, Farran, Peter, Madeley, TDh, Helen, Jackie, Kevin, Baldie, Ros, Yossarian, John and Liz who’ve all very kindly donated to the ko-fi this week which is so very appreciated in yet another week where it looks like the comedy industry won’t be crawling back till next year. I wrote a miserable article about it on Medium and lots of people liked it but one person was sad with me that it wasn’t funny because that’s how the internet works. Just because an article is about the comedy industry, doesn’t mean it has to be funny, much like any reviews of my Edinburgh Fringe shows ever. Anyway, I’ll pop a link to the article in the pod blurb and should you wish to join the Patreon its at patreon.com/parpolbro and the ko-fi is at ko-fi.com/parpolbro with links in the pod blurb. Apparently my wife told my daughter, sorry, agent the other day that I was upstairs working on the podcast and she immediately said ‘donate to the ko-fi, donate to the Patreon’ so all I’m saying is that I should be on that Britain’s Best Parent show right away.

Couple of quick bits, don’t forget on Thursday I’ll be doing a live podcast for 30 mins or so on Ramble FM. I’ll be posting about it loads on all the social medias and I’ve popped the link in the podcast blurb too, but basically you’ll be able to call in and have a chat with me about preferably politics or comedy things but really, I’d be happy to chat about anything podcast related at all. Do drop by. Also, I’m on a very non-politics podcast this week called Mum and Mummer hosted by the brilliant Amy and Harry and it’s all about, as you can guess, parenting. Do check it out, they are excellent fun.

Right on this week’s show I’ve got previous pod guest Maurice Mcleod who kindly dropped me a line after I used a clip of his interview from 4 years ago on the Black Lives Matter episode. It was lovely to chat to him again so do have a listen. Plus a few very sniffly bits on the track and trace app that is now deaded, while inbetween I will be going outside to tell any tree I see to fucking do one.

INTERVIEW WITH MAURICE

You might remember the episode a couple of weeks ago, where concerned that many of the brilliant black commentators, writers and experts that I know of might be too exhausted to speak to yet another white person asking ‘but why are black people all sad again?’ only to have to go through the same never changing reasons that have been there for the last forevers. Instead I put some clips of old interviews I’ve done on this show which were either about systematic racism or systematic racism came up as part of it, and they were also only a fraction of the times the latter happened but I thought it was unfair to have a podcast that was about 6 hours long. Since the big Black Lives Matter peaceful marches over two weeks ago, it’s both clearly had an impact and highlighted exactly why the marches are needed here in the UK so very much, as well as the US. Sure, every single company that’s ever existed tweeted that the support the Black Lives Matter movement, but many times, underneath it lots of their former staff had replied about the racism they had while working with them. Sure lots of statues glorifying slave traders have been removed in a long overdue action, but the news and politicians were instead focused on how that means protestors are erasing history while ignoring that by not teaching just what utter shit heads those slave traders were, the problem is very much the history that’s already been erased to make Britain history seem heroic instead of aggressively racist. Sure the government are setting up a racial equality commission, but at the same time it’s been three years since Grenfell and many of the victims still haven’t been rehoused, many effected by the Windrush scandal are still suffering from implications of it and have never been apologised too, the full report into coronaviruses disproportionate effect on BAME people still hasn’t been fully published to show the full extent of it, and the woman chairing the new committee still says systematic racism doesn’t exist. Great perfect choice to head that up then Boris. Who will you have in charge of the searching for extra-terrestrial life committee? Dana fucking Scully?

Anyway, after that episode went out, former pod guest of about 4 years ago Maurice Mcleod dropped me a lovely DM saying that if he can bear talking to Nick Ferrari and Julia Hartley Brewer about race, he’s sure he can cope with talking to me about it. So, I got in touch with straight away and promised not to ask him Hartley Brewer style questions about pissing beside statues rather than on them or something. Maurice is a journalist, councillor and vice chair of the Race On The Agenda campaign group. I asked him all about how he’s feeling a few weeks on from the first of this year’s Black Lives Matter protests, if anything’s changed since the last time we spoke, and why the racial equality committee and the Department Of International Development being merged with the Foreign Office are all signs that the government doesn’t care all that much at all. Oh, and two quick things. We spoke over zoom, hence my comment about seeing Maurice’s facial expression at one point. I’ve done a few zoom interviews now and it means I can actually see people while talking to them which I feel makes the chat a lot more fluid and conversational. And two, my comments on the comedy sector getting better would probably have quite a few people disagree, and they’d be right to, but I’ve definitely been on a lot fewer all white male bills in the last two years than ever before which is brilliant and noticeable. I mean ever fewer since the pandemic but that’s because there aren’t any bills at all so I’m not sure it counts. Anyway, it’s lovely to get him back on the show and I hope you enjoy. Here’s Maurice:

INTERVIEW WITH MAURICE PART 1

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

MIDDLE BIT

The track and trace app is dead, long live the track and trace app. The current Conservative government have got an incredible relationship with spending lots of money on things not happening. I mean, Boris Johnson’s record alone includes £53m on a bridge that was never built, £330k on a water cannon he couldn’t use. Then there was that cable car no one uses that goes over the only bit of London there’s nothing to see on ground level. Then there’s £2.1bn of no deal prep including paying a ferry company that had no ferries and then being sued by ferry companies that did for not asking them. More recently there’s been all the PPE from Turkey that didn’t even work and all I’m saying is I’d trust a DM from an account made of numbers and flags telling me I could earn millions quick by investing in a device that removes ancient alien farts from water, far more than anything the government was putting millions into and telling me I should be excited about. Johnson’s crew is all about the build-up, followed by the crushing disappointment of reality, probably much like Boris Johnson’s dating technique. It’s like if the Apprentice hired everyone because they all went to same school or knew their dad.

Matt Hancock’s beloved and now deaded NHS track and trace app started its life back in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic according to the UK timetable or as the rest of the world liked to call it ‘oh shit the virus is everywhere but Britain is too busy watching horse racing.’ This was around mid-March and the Health Secretary announced that there was huge enthusiasm for this world beating program even though several other countries already had a track and trace app and had therefore won the race already. The idea was that if you had it on your phone and someone that you met with had it on their phone, it’d automatically send a little code to them and then if you got symptoms, you could enter it in yours and then they’d immediately get a message, along with then anyone they’d been in contact with too and you could all self-isolate until germ free. It was sort of like the old school finding out you have an STI only this way you have a tad less shame as it does it for you and they’ll be so worried about coronavirus they won’t notice the herpes. On May 5^th the app was launched on the Isle of Wight and about half the island’s population downloaded it, but the app only allowed people to say if they had symptoms, not if they’d had a positive test. So contacts would get a message but then have no idea what to do with it. We don’t really know how successful it was otherwise, as well, we haven’t been updated. But judging by how it was then delayed to June, then Winter, then scrapped, I’d say probably not very well and I won’t be getting the ferry over from Southampton anytime soon. What we do know is that the NHSX app had issues from the get go. For a start on iphones it only detected 4% of other iPhones whereas the Apple Google model being used in other countries could detect 99% of handsets because you know what Apple are like about using their own products, the bastards. But that was actually a problem as the NHSX app tried to work around Android and iPhone restrictions which didn’t really work. Also while there are always concerns that Google steals your soul, the NHSX app did hold all the pseudonyms and details of the people you’d been in contact with which made a lot of people concerned. And on top of all that, it wasn’t compatible with any other countries track and trace which meant as soon as you left the country, if you were exporting COVID19 no one would know. Finding out all of this cost roughly £11m, though its not entirely clear just where all that money has gone yet. What is clear is that Matt Hancock insists they were also working on an Apple Google app at the same time but there’s no details of the costs of that, if they were, and various ministry of health officials have said on record that they weren’t. It’s also clear that the switch to Google and Apple’s model came one day after a former Apple Executive, Simon Thompson joined the team working on the app, run by Baroness Dido Harding. You know, Baroness Dido Harding, formerly head of Talk Talk and the one on the board that allowed the Cheltenham Horse races to go ahead despite the coronavirus being rather rampant at the time. If anything, when the track and trace system was on its way, she was just giving herself a lot more work. Harding is also a former jockey meaning that you think she’d really understand the importance of not having an also-ran.

There’s no clue when the new app will be ready, if it’ll be ready at all considering that Apple say they had no clue the UK was making a hybrid version of their contact tool. The company also said they had no awareness of the issues as to why the government didn’t go with their app in the first place as ironically they’d hadn’t been in contact with them. The UK government, unsurprisingly, say it was Apple that were uncooperative. Either way, with lots of time and more money, it is now going ahead but there’s no clue if this late in the pandemic that it’s worth it anymore or if it’ll be successful. South Korea’s test scheme has been hailed as being very successful as it worked in line with the COVID tests and sent results directly to phones which then got in touch with people’s contacts. Germany have been using the Google Apple model and it’s worked very well for them, with teams of people checking up on anyone who has symptoms. But Norway has had data privacy issues with their app and is having to delete a lot of details gathered by their app, and Australia’s app had a bug that meant it didn’t work on iPhones if they were locked.

So, we’ll have to wait and see. What I do know is that regardless of how this goes, Johnson and Hancock will keep all the contacts of everyone who made a failed useless app and no doubt give them a massive contract to develop something else that is completely pointless later in the year. Still it does go a long way to placate someone like me who’s put a lot of money into a career that hasn’t worked, but still not anywhere near as much money as £11m and for that, we should be thankful to this shitty government as even if you’ve pissed away your savings on something terrible, they’ve still made you look like a total money saving success champions which in these current times is a confidence boost I’ll take.

And now back to Maurice….

INTERVIEW WITH MAURICE PART 2

Thanks, so much to Maurice for that. You can find him on Twitter @mowords, and Race On The Agenda can be found at rota.org.uk or on Twitter @raceontheagenda. Also, I didn’t speak to Maurice about his role as a councillor, but he is also a Labour councillor in Battersea so if you live round there, do make sure you keep voting him in as he’s definitely one of those good politicians you’re occasionally lucky to find.

I’ve contacted an absolute shed load of people to speak to for future episodes and had barely any responses at all. So please do help and give me at least some vague ideas of areas I haven’t mentioned on the podcast before or for a long time and who to talk to them about. What do you need to hear about or more about right now? I mean not right now, as I’m still recording this. I mean right now as in the future when it’ll be right now when its them. God this is confusing. Anyway, just let me know by the usuals of @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast Facebook group, the contact page on PartlyPoliticalBroadcast.co.uk or email me on partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could try to sit next to me at a posh dinner and show me a video of a proposed interviewee development and I could just happen to sit next to you and see it, breaching the podcasters code which I don’t think exists, but this would require a) people being allowed to sit next to each other again and b) me being at a posh dinner which never happened pre-lockdown. So as always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast and as you total champs of the people have made it all the way to the end of this week’s show it is time for your audio trophy of a HOT PARPOLBRO POL GOSS FACT! Yeah, this week as the government have spent £11m on not making an app, do you know what the biggest waste of government money was? No, it’s not, surprisingly, all of Brexit. I mean it should be, but that’s a real not funny one and I was planning to do something sillier for the sake of our sanity. Nor is it Chris Grayling managing to waste £2.7bn across all his fuck ups including HS2 cock ups, privitising the probation sector & hiring a ferry firm that had no ferries. Grayling is like an ambassador for disaster or the exact opposite of King Midas. No it was Henry Hardinge, the 1^st Viscount Hardinge and Secretary of War in Robert Peel’s cabinet 1841-1845 and knowing the Bank Charter Act was coming in in 1844, decided to sell a whole ton of currency that he had at higher than gold standard rates, but on all notation he made whatever it was called when people did typos but with you know, writing. And so, he sent one of his staff to exchange it as higher than old standard and instead of becoming a millionaire, he got the equivalent of two old men, three old women, a really ancient tortoise and a 400 year old tree. I am of course making this up, it is still actually Brexit though. Or the handling of this pandemic by the UK government. Or all of it together in a giant money spunking fuck storm of horror. Oh well. HOT PARPOLBRO GOSS FACT. Yeah. FUN AND LOLS! If you enjoyed that or more likely thought, why not pick something better to say, then why not encourage other people to listen to this show so the numbers will get so high I’d be too embarrassed to make up such a shit fact? Why not also gizz us a pound or three at the ko-fi or patreon accounts and maybe even do a nice 5 star wordy review on any of them podcast apps that allow it.

Big chunky ta very muchs, to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Mushybees.

This will be back next week when its discovered Matt Hancock gave his cousin’s friend’s dad  £3m just develop a virtual reality system that will allow him to be at work when he’s not, but the project collapses as its discovered his boss has been doing that without any technology at all.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Matt Hancock’s app station. Do you want an app that will tell you where no one’s been, what no one is up to and what none of the things to do are? Maybe your life is too busy and you take in too much information. Download Matt Hancock’s new app. Just 99p to get a square that you can press again and again and it does absolutely nothing except send all your health details to 15 different companies with each press but you did say that was fine and it was in the small print, you know the really small print that was on a different page on a different screen so it’s all legal.

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