Further Reading

Linear liner notes

The podcast returns from its summer break, and luckily absolutely nothing has happened over the past 5 weeks so I’m sure you haven’t missed it. Yeah? Yeah? The Prime Minister has returned from his 7008th holiday this year to tell everyone else to go back to work or Dominic Raab’s only source of food will disappear, meanwhile Gavin Williamson expresses limpet like skills Theresa May would be proud of and the Liberal Democrats elect a leader so dull they should excel in all the political grey areas. Plus some FAQ FAAs on the UK’s treatment of refugees and a chat with assistant head teacher and former DfE advisor Caroline Spalding (@MrsSpalding) about schools reopening.

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

• • Caroline Spalding on Twitter – https://twitter.com/MrsSpalding
• • Teacher’s Notes blog – http://mrscspalding.blogspot.com/
• • SLT Chat on Twitter – https://twitter.com/SLTchat
• • Laura McInerney on Twitter – https://twitter.com/miss_mcinerney
• • Teacher Tapp on Twitter – https://twitter.com/TeacherTapp
• • Sam Freedman on Twitter – https://twitter.com/samfr
• • John Dickens on Twitter – https://twitter.com/johndickenssw
• • Schools Week website – https://schoolsweek.co.uk/
• • Gráinne Hallahan on Twitter – https://twitter.com/heymrshallahan
• • Miss D Cox on Twitter – https://twitter.com/missdcox

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 is actually all for u-turns, except no, no it’s not. No wait, sorry, change of plan, it is. Except when it’s a u-turn, then it’s not. But it is though. I’m Tiernan Douieb and welcome back to the first show after the summer break or as should have been renamed this year, more of the same shit but now even the weather is letting you down. Things in the UK are being forced back to normal now, in the same way you could have a normal stay at the Overlook Hotel if you just kept telling yourself the walls weren’t bleeding and those twin girls seem perfectly normal. The Prime Minister and old folktale about a boy who kept turning into unmixed cement because he told fibs Boris Johnson, has warned that people should go back to work or risk losing their job, because as we know, losing your life or loved ones is only second and third on the priority list for someone who is dead inside and doesn’t understand the concept of family. It’s quite rich advice from a Prime Minister who barely turned up to his job even before the pandemic hit, and who its arguable, has never done any of the work bit when he was there anyway.

I mean, during the exam results fiasco this summer, Johnson was too busy hiding in Scotland to reassure students that there won’t be any jobs to apply for, for at least 10 years anyway, so as long as they know how to build a bunker and search for water, they’ll be fine. No instead of divulging useful truths like that, Johnson was busy pitching a tent on a farmer’s land without asking, in the way only someone who pushed through Brexit but doesn’t understand how borders work could. In fact the only time the PM thought it was necessary to return from holiday was to pipe up about the suggestion that the Last Night of The Proms might no longer feature songs about Britain’s colonial past, such as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, a title that only now makes sense if you sing with the same level of irony used to name Robin Hood’s massive friend Little John. While they glorify slavery and therefore should have been replaced with just the wah, wah, waaah of a sad trumpet some years ago, the main reason they weren’t being sung was because the government’s advice on COVID safe performance meant that singing in groups on stage is not permitted, but how is the Prime Minister meant to know what the official government guidelines are when that would require reading or listening to something. So instead he reared his head out of his tent placed on someone else’s land, because for him, colonisation is merely an acceptable holiday activity, and demanded it was time to stop the cringing embarrassment about British history. Was this a moment of sympathetic understanding that we’re suffering so much cringing embarrassment about the British present that to incorporate the past as well is too overwhelming and we might cringe ourselves inside out? Or was it that again, unable to say anything actually of value its easier just for the Prime Minister to go for the only thing he does with all his policies: Loudly standing up for a bunch of people shouting hollow jingoistic words, while mumbling or forgetting all the information carrying in-between bits and hoping no one notices until it’s too late.

So now everyone must go back to work, as if we don’t, all the Pret A Mangers will close and frankly your COVID catching concerns pail in comparison to the worries that Foreign Secretary and unicellular organism Dominic Raab won’t be able to conceive of anything else to have for lunch and will rapidly starve to death. Think of all the landlords of big office buildings who’ll have no one to pay them extortionate rates just so they can catch COVID in a lift like a really uncomfortable Dignitas. I mean now Switzerland is on the quarantine list, you may as well go where all your final wishes for a peaceful departure are thwarted by coughing your way out, as Steve from accounts make the same unoriginal joke about what you’re having for lunch as he has done every day for 15 years. What all of this shows is that despite saying they believe in a free market economy, where services and goods are self-dictated by consumers, the government and businesses heads would much prefer it if you gave them money for the same shit you’ve been doing for years, because readjusting to progress the world would require them doing something more than sitting on their arses raking in cash convincing people they can’t make sandwiches in their own kitchens. I mean the Confederation of British Industry is warning that city centres will become ghost towns, ignoring that perhaps with over 50,000 people unnecessarily dead, maybe the booming industry of the 2020’s will exorcists, mediums, Ghost Busters and those walking tours that take you into a dark room then shout ‘boo’ at you. Though it’ll have to be a well-ventilated room and they’ll need to do the booing through a mask.

Maybe the idea is that if everyone goes back to work, at least they won’t be at home when their kids return from school full of COVID and that’ll give them a chance to dodge it for a few more hours? Schools are returning this week, and not sending your children back will dent their life chances, says Education Secretary and Willo The Wisp Gavin Williamson, a man who only weeks before had fronted an exam results algorithm that dented every student’s life chances. It is remarkable that Williamson is still in his job after presiding over a system where students were given exam results based on exam results of previous years, something he and Ofqual the exam board, said was about fairness. You know, like how in a fair you’ll never win at anything because all the games are rigged. In much the same way, private schools benefitted largely from the algorithm, and comprehensives didn’t, which proved it didn’t make sense. If it was based on former pupil’s performances, then Eton, where Boris Johnson went to, would just award everyone a certificate saying ‘you’re an unbelievably useless piece of shit’. Of course, there was a u-turn on the results, but Williamson remains Education Secretary. Perhaps Johnson couldn’t fire someone he saw as a kindred spirit, as his modus operandi is also to cause lots of unnecessary distress to children. Instead two senior education officials have lost their jobs and Johnson assured pupils that the whole thing was due to a ‘mutant algorithm’ as though it wasn’t him and his government that went round pouring radioactive goo onto it, before Gavin Williamson, like a big rat, trained it to do damage. It is our moral duty to send kids back to school insists the Prime Minister, and if you are going to take morality lessons from the Prime Minister, then you can probably just claim it isn’t your doing if your kids don’t return and it was all due to a mutant algorithm that automatically churned out a half arsed note in your handwriting. Then announce that you’re firing the cat as a result.

The government made another u-turn on secondary pupils having to wear face coverings in school corridors and communal areas, something that for many self-conscious 13 year olds sounds like it’ll just make school easier to be honest. This prompted criticism from within the Conservatives own party though with the chair of the 1922 committee Charles Walker, someone who looks Eddie Redmayne was slowly fed through a pasta maker, saying that all these u-turns have created a climate of uncertainty. Yes, that’s definitely what did it Charles, as up until then, Brexit, the coronavirus, climate change and the like were all making us feel very snug and secure indeed. I have a feeling Walker would be happily sitting in a burning building till it crumbled around him, then accuse someone outside smoking a cigarette to calm their nerves, of making him feel uncomfortably warm. He said that its becoming increasingly difficult to defend government policy, which again feels like after 10 years of austerity, he’s turning up to the party once its hosts have died of old age. The thing is, u-turns, are actually what I expect from a government who are entirely made of spin. It is unfair though, particularly to the kids. I mean, who would want to be a young person in today’s world, where you’re told gatherings of 30+ people are illegal as they pose a COVID risk, but also, do go back to school to your classes of 30+. That if their parents care for them, they’ll send them back to a potential COVID hub, but also use their common sense. But if their common sense says not to send them to school, it’s immoral. Then they have to work really hard to study for exams that may not happen, and they’ll just be handed whatever result they thought that dickhead in the year above should get when they spent Year 11 drawing penises in permanent marker on the sports hall walls. And in the future, they have to try and get jobs that won’t be there, and make sure they can afford to buy a property by not wasting money on avocados, but if they don’t spend money on Pret avocado wraps they’ll lose their jobs. All while learning to swim for increasingly lengthy amounts of time while Waterworld becomes not just a film flop but a societal flop too. What they have to understand is that really, to get anywhere in life, they should look to the country’s leadership for guidance, learning to not bother to try at all in life, and if anything goes wrong blame someone else entirely. Oh, and whenever you can, to maintain public support, yell about how history must not be erased so it’s important the Last Night of the Proms features 17 British bulldogs farting ‘Hitler has only got one ball’ into a microphone. That way true leadership lies. And it does. Well whenever it bothers to turn up to work in the first place.

In other news, Public Health England has been scrapped and will be replaced by the National Institute of Heath Protection, an executive agency created to deal with infectious diseases and will no doubt use an algorithm that will downgrade any illness or injury you have to something more cost effective to treat and based on the last patient they had in, unless of course you pay for private. Actually though, it will be headed up by Tim Farron in disguise Dido Harding who is most well-known for getting a big COVID job because of who she knew, then failing to do the same for anyone else with a completely shit track and trace system. She was also a jockey and in charge of the Cheltenham Races, so nothing instils more confidence than knowing the NIHP will likely decide it’s most affordable to shoot anyone who gets really ill. Health Secretary and one long forehead Matt Hancock has said England could face nationwide restrictions and further local lockdowns as a second wave is avoidable, but not easy, especially when your boss wants to charge headfirst into it and shake its hand till its fast-tracked back into society. Hancock himself did say that there was very little evidence that coronavirus is passed on in the workplace, despite him and the Prime Minister, and many of their colleagues all catching it while at work. Only last week hundreds of poultry workers at a factory in Norfolk were told to self-isolate due to an outbreak leading to 75 cases. But to be fair, Hancock did say there’s very little evidence and that could just mean that Dido Harding couldn’t remember who she gave it to and no longer has their number.

Former Australian Prime Minister and Troll Face meme Tony Abbott has been tipped to become a UK Trade Ambassador, despite his history of climate denial, misogyny, racism and once biting into an onion as though it was an apple. Which is exactly the sort of thing an alien pretending to be a human would do but to Boris Johnson it’s probably a good sign he’s completely ignorant about complex layers or correct procedures and therefore will fit right in. He is a proper shitbag of a human being, but maybe that’s why he’d be a great ambassador for us. There’s every chance that after one meeting, foreign officials would give the UK a brilliant trade deal, just so they wouldn’t have to meet up with him ever again.

And lastly, the Liberal Democrats have a new leader in the shape of Rory Kinnear having a difficult shit Ed Davey, as the party aims for someone so nothingy that hopefully any blank ballot papers at the next election will be counted as a vote for him. Davey has vowed not to turn politics into a culture war, probably because when he was part of the coalition government, they worked so hard to destroy all culture. Yes, its 2020 and here in Britain, the leaders of all 3 main parties are men that would be impossible to spot ever again if they wandered into a Millets. Actually, that’s not true, as Boris Johnson would be the one escorted out for pitching his own tent in the middle of the shop without asking.

ADMIN

Hello you. How’s things? I like what you’ve done with your leg, or pet or outdoor scaled volcano simulation. I hope you all had summers, because I mean, I didn’t. The weather made more u-turns than the department of education. Otherwise though I’ve been having a lovely time seeing some friends in Leith, where I got sunburned and if that doesn’t alert you to the dangers of climate change nothing will. I also finally did a couple of comedy gigs, both outdoors. One was to kids and was a lot of fun and the other was to adults which I think they enjoyed but were so spread out in the field in front of the stage, I couldn’t entirely tell. They all sat by little red flags that were distanced carefully from each other, which was very clever and also looked like at any moment, they’d be swarmed by mini golfers. The whole thing was like being the opening act at a festival when no one’s really turned up yet. Saying that, people tweeted some nice messages afterwards and it was just lovely shouting the jokes I could remember at people and being heckled by a very beautiful sunset. No idea when there’ll be more, or if there will be, but supposedly some indoors ones are coming back now, and hopefully I’ll get to do one before a second wave means comedy can only happen while balanced on a 400ft pole, using a series of tin can walkie talkies to whisper jokes to 8 people spread half a mile away from each other. Fingers crossed that’s not the case. Are you all back to normal now? Back to work? Kids going back to school this week? An unmentioned acceptance that you’ll never see your elderly relatives ever again? Well whatever you’re attempting to do as we all make some sort of weird agreement to just forget how germs work, this podcast is now back from its mini-break and thankfully absolutely nothing happened at all over August so you know, it was absolutely fine that I had four weeks off.

Thank you for returning to it too, and thanks to everyone who donated to the show even while I wasn’t doing it. Thank you tons to Christine, Somebody, Somebody, Mark, Kim, Claire, James, Helen, Joe, Baldie, Conal for ko-fi donations, to Scott, John, Doug and Ros for joining the Patreon and Doug and Adorable Gabe for being the first people ever to donate to the Acast supporter page. And Gabe’s message was indeed adorable and much appreciate, so thank you tons for that. If you do enjoy this podcast for some baffling reason then mostly please tell other people, give it a review on podcast apps and then, and only if you can afford to, please throw me your hard earned money to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro, join the patreon.com/parpolbro or the Acast supporter page on the Acast app or site for this here thing. I refuse to play the tiny violin, mainly because I can’t play a normal sized one and so I’m concerned the sound would just be awful, especially if you’re wearing headphones, but let’s just say any donations are still even more appreciated than usual on account of the government deciding comedy isn’t all that worth saving, probably because they keep supplying enough of it just with their policies. It’s not comedy if it makes you cry though is it? Don’t tell me that means I need to reclassify this show. How dare you?

I am making some changes this season. Does this show have seasons? Or am I just always a bit salty? Hmm? Firstly, I’m going to try to make each episode shorter than it used to be, because well, I’m currently desperately trying to find other work and what little bits I have got are also writing work, so they cut into the writing of this here thing unfortunately. I’m sure none of you are that sad that you’ll be gaining more life time and having less of my mouth noise telling you everything is broken. This may also mean there are more occasional breaks than before but we’ll see how that goes. Also I was also originally planning to do something special or different for episode 200 which is next week, but I realised that frankly, there’s too much politics shit happening at the mo and getting someone to interview me or setting up something silly instead of an informative interview felt like I’d be neglecting something else. I mean also, I didn’t manage to arrange any of the things I thought I might do and I thought if I sounded all high falutin about my reasons why that would be better than going ‘sorry, I’m rubbish but I was enjoying watching TV for a few weeks’. So erm, pretend it’s because I have values.

Oh, and the only other thing you might like to know, is I have a new website. As in for me, not for the podcast. tiernandouieb.co.uk now looks all fancy and new, just in time for me to have absolutely no gigs to list on there. But do check it out, sign to my mailing list that won’t send anything out for ages and just have a little look around at all the irreverent text I’ve put on it why don’t you?

For this first show back for the Autumn, I am speaking to assistant headteacher and former DfE advisor Caroline Spalding about schools coming back and exam results hell, plus a few FAAs for the usual FAQS about refugees. You know those people fleeing over here, hoping to have a better life. How dare they? If they respected true British values,

INTERVIEW WITH CAROLINE

School is the best time of your life, so say lots of adults whose lives have never since hit that high of climbing wooden apparatus while in a pair of borrowed shorts. But for pupils and teachers in England, starting term time while COVID is still making more unwanted appearances than Jack Whitehall on any given TV station, it’s all a lot more concern ridden than the usual September worries of where your next class timetable is and if you’ll be the only one of your friends whose voice hasn’t broken. And obviously whatever it is that students get worried about too. Arf. In Israel re-opening schools back in May lead to a massive surge in the virus, Aberdeenshire have already had to close a school just days after reopening in August due to positive cases in pupils, and 41 schools in Berlin have reported cases of the virus two weeks after the start of term. In England and Wales though, the message has been that schools have to return because, because as the Prime Minister says, it is our moral duty. Which must also mean that following his footsteps, it must be your moral duty to ignore that your kids exist and to tell your friends it’s safe to drive them around really fast when you’re feeling very ill and can’t see. It will all be ok though as children are more likely to die of a road accident than COVID says the deputy chief medical officer as though all parents only have a choice between the two, and very much ignores the welfare of the teachers, staff or any other grown ups the children might come into contact with in their lives. Something most Conservatives won’t have thought about, having been neglected by their parents and sent away at a young age and let’s face it, if I had a kid who acted like Boris, I’d do the same. But alongside the insistence that schools have to go back, the actual guidance on how to do it, has been unsurprisingly vague, with a u-turn on the need for pupils to wear masks in communal areas, a life saver for all kids with braces, and guidance on what do if an outbreak occurs, only being released at 11pm last Friday night. Like giving students their only bit exam prep 5 minutes before they go sit in a hall. So just how are school staff going to cope, how safe do they feel and does the government’s guidance mean that parents should have been flinging their children into busy roads this whole time?

This week I spoke to Caroline Spalding, and I was extremely grateful she had time to speak to me, as she’s currently an assistant headteacher in the midst of prepping her school for its reopening, while running a summer school at the same time and seconds before we spoke the fire alarm went off too almost perfectly summarising state of being most parents, students and teachers are in. Caroline is a former advisor to the Department of Education so has a pretty good idea of how things should be going and as you’ll hear, she managed to do an incredible job of somehow both being diplomatic and very critical at the same time in exactly the way a top teacher might be. She told me all about how her school has been preparing, if pupils did suffer lost time during lockdown and how the exam results fiasco may affect next year’s exam students too.

THIS WAS BEFORE EXAMS STORY, AND GUIDANCE ON FRIDAY

I hope you enjoy this brilliant clear and informative chat, and make sure you’re listening because I’ll know if you’re not. And stop chewing. Here’s Caroline:

INTERVIEW WITH CAROLINE PART 1

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

MIDDLE BIT

There were a couple of weeks over the summer where it seemed the beaches weren’t overcrowded, no one was having a protest about anything and Labour had continued to not remotely criticise the government in any way. And so that meant it was time for the government to blame refugees and asylum seekers for everything, because as you know, it’s definitely all the people escaping persecution and death, with no possessions to their name who are the global oppressors here. Maybe the animosity is because in 2020 anyone who expresses any hope or want to actually stay alive is clearly not right in the head? I mean, have they even seen the news, why would you want to travel to the UK, when you could just repeatedly shout racist abuse at yourself in the mirror instead? The Home Office didn’t have a very good summer at all, what with deportation flights being cancelled after they were deemed illegal, having to ask France for help with border control which just seems embarrassing post Brexit, and having to remove a video from Twitter because it looked like a racist version of the Dad’s Army intro and called lawyers activists for doing the work they are meant to do which makes me wonder if Home Secretary and the sound of a dentist’s drill made human Priti Patel just thinks it means someone who’s doing something. So, I guess with their main achievements looking like they don’t speak English, they’ve committed illegal activity and they need help from Europe, they had to think of something before they expelled themselves from the country. It seems that something was to placate the actions of dropped frogspawn Nigel Farage, a man who spent the lockdown standing on the beach and saying it was an invasion if children arrived on a boat. Though let’s face it, he does look like a rubber masked Scooby Doo villain at the best of times, so chances are high he’ll be thwarted by some meddling kids. It was a horrible few weeks of really bleak news about young people not surviving the crossing, or news reporters hanging over the edge of boat to get a sound bite from asylum seekers in a sinking dinghy as they went down and as with all unnecessary, fabricated hype, it’s disappeared again now in time for the government to blame everything on teachers, parents and those refusing to go back to work instead. Though there is every chance a reporter will be hanging off a window cleaning platform, poking a microphone through a vent shaft, asking office staff what it’s like getting ‘rona because their colleague turned up the air con too high again.

The issues of how the UK treats refugees and asylum seekers, and its immigration measures, have been covered on this podcast many a time. The last time was with Daniel Trilling in November last year, which is very worth a listen back to. But as that was nearly a year ago, yes really, I thought I’d just do a very quick FAQ FAAs for you on some of the things people always seemed to shout online.

BUT THEY IS ILLEGAL

On Aug 23^rd, Boris Johnson made some face noises about if people come to the UK illegally, they are an illegal migrant and the law will treat them as such. Or as is quite often in the Home Office’s case, they’ll treat you as such if you’re also a British citizen and they think you’ve got a funny sounding name or Priti Patel would cross the road to avoid you. The facts are though, the UN refugee convention says that refugees can’t get in trouble for going to a country to claim asylum, if they are coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened, as long as they head straight to the authorities and show ‘good cause’ for them travelling there. What a lot of people like to get all miffed about though is how here in Blightly, its quite hard for someone from various war-torn nations to get here directly, and so should stay in France, Italy or wherever they hit land first. But in 1999 a Supreme Court judge ruled that some element of choice is open to refugees who may properly claim asylum and that short-term stopovers en route shouldn’t stop them getting elsewhere. I mean, it would be quite brutal if refugees travelling to the UK from, say, Syria, could only get here by boat through the Mediterranean, then the Atlantic in one sleepless fortnight long trip. But I also wouldn’t put it past Priti Patel to try and enforce that and then celebrities to try and do it for fun for a televised charity event where all the money ends up going to arms dealers.

WHY DO THEY HAVE TO COME HERE THOUGH?

According to Amnesty, most people fleeing for their lives or freedom don’t know much about the asylum system they are heading to, and tend to prioritise based on language, or family and community that may already be there. I mean, it is funny how the government keep banging on about how great a country Britain is, and how we’re strong enough to go it alone and we mustn’t be ashamed of our history and all that, and then when people want to come here they seem upset and surprised. Maybe we should just have a big poster of Michael Gove’s bicycle wreck of a face on the White Cliffs of Dover, and the words ‘actually it’s a shithole’ and maybe everyone would try for somewhere nicer instead? The UK’s asylum system is actually rubbish compared to most other countries, with the weekly allowance being just £37.75 per person. Not only is it considerably higher in most other European countries, but also asylum seekers are permitted to work, if their claims haven’t been settled within 9 months or less. In the UK, its 12 months. We also have much harsher detention centres with no time limit on how long people can be detained, though places like Yarl’s Wood have recently been repurposed as a place to check the health and status of migrants crossing the channel. But I mean, the UK’s big welcoming committee is to say ‘oh god, so sorry you and your family were faced with a life or death situation, please do come in and live in abject poverty or a never ending prison.’ Again, if the Home office were just more open with international advertising saying ‘we really are heartless bastards’ then refugees might decide they’d be better off with a country where the position of Home Secretary is only awarded to candidates who’ve been through some sort of Red Room training but for sympathy.

BUT THEY GETS MORE MONEY THAN PENSIONERS

No, they don’t. Illegal immigrants aren’t entitled to any benefits, refugees can only claim benefits once their application has been approved, which can take ages because our system is shit. The maximum type of benefits they can get for a household with children is £23,000 per year, and they can also qualify for housing. But I mean, that’s really low to split between two or more people. Whereas a basic state pension is about £6500 per year but national insurance contributions will boost that, plus they get winter fuel payments, pension credits and newspapers that actually like them. I mean the key thing though is that its not asylum seekers’s faults that pensions are shitter than they should be. No one raced over here in a dinghy from Syria, dodging bombs just to harangue the Department of Work and Pensions until they gave in and lowered the state pension. To be fair, if they did, that sort of commitment to a cause would be a lot higher than any politician I’ve seen so fair play if they paid attention.

BUT NONE OF THEM ARE CHILDREN THEY’RE ALL REALLY SMALL ADULTS

This is one of those weird excuses that the Daily Mail only ever use when it’s to do with refugees or the young daughter of a celebrity that they’ve posted creepy pictures of. Personally I think people should be saved and sheltered regardless of their age, though Conservative voting baby boomers do really test that opinion. The fact is though, there are currently between 25-26 million refugees in the world, and over half of them are kids. The funny thing is, while idiots online like to pretend it only matters if they’re children, the Home office doesn’t even want to save them much. You probably know about the House of Commons rejecting the Dubs Amendment, twice, both times deciding that offering the safe passage to Britain for unaccompanied refugee children wasn’t really worth it for them. Which is weird because what could be more attractive to the Conservative government than kids they could send to school with zero risk of infecting their grandparents with COVID? Now though the Home Office are also trying to push through rushed age assessment procedures of unaccompanied minors who are suspected to be over 18, even though a court ruling last year said it should only take place for anyone whose physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggests they are over 25. If you’ve fled a country, and are under 18, chances are slim you’ll be carrying any official accreditation, and these checks should be done carefully, otherwise children could end up unfairly detained and deported. Human Rights campaigners are currently challenging the Home Office on this so hopefully Patel will have to climb down once again from just pushing through something she just personally wants to do for her own kicks, along with tasering kittens and poking homeless people in the eye.

So, there’s a few answers for you that people who are anti-refugee won’t actually listen to or care about anyway. The UK only takes in 1% of the world’s refugees, we are properly shit about it and asylum seeker applications are much lower than they were two decades ago, with just 35,099 at the end of March this year, compared to 84,000 in 2002. It’s really not an invasion of any sorts and if you are going to be invaded, then it’s probably best its by families who are seeking a better life rather than, I dunno, the British who’ll want to turn up, make everywhere serve chips and leave shit on the beach. Once we Brexit, the Dublin regulation won’t apply anymore, meaning the UK can’t send refugees who arrive from Northern France, back to Northern France. So, unless an agreement is arranged, then if you voted for Brexit, you voted for the UK to take in more refugees. Hahahahahahahahahah. And depressingly with climate change increasing, we may see more ‘climate refugees’ a term that currently has no agreed upon definition but refers to people whose homes have become unliveable or unsustainable due to flooding, excessive heatwaves, the depletion of fish and so on. So all I’m saying is next time to hear from one of those ‘but why do they have to come here’ bores, why not kindly explain if they really want fewer refugees in the UK, why don’t they campaign for an eco-friendly lifestyle and against a no deal and then shelter yourself as their heads rapidly explode. I’m mainly just looking forward to post Brexit, post COVID emigration from England, where thousands of middle aged men from Kent are insisting to French border patrol that they’re only 16 and they’ve just led a very plentiful life, before they’re turfed back onto a lorry.

And now back to Caroline….

INTERVIEW WITH CAROLINE PART 2

Thanks tons to Caroline for having the time to chat to me, despite her being in the midst of both summer school lessons and getting her school ready for normal term starting again. You can follow her on Twitter @MrsSpalding and she is also a team member of SLT Chat, discussions for all teachers interested in UK school leadership, which you can follow at @SLTChat on twitter too, and Caroline is also co-organising the Team English National Conference for all English teachers which you can find at teamenglishnc.com.

It’s a new season of ParPolBro so there are plenty of interviewee gaps left to fill and as always, your input on which peoples to fill them is appreciated. Let me know what issues you need to hear chat about from those who actually know stuff, and you can do that by dropping 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 just publicly announce your idea at 11pm the night before I release an episode, knowing full well I’ll already have recorded it by then and that I will consider you one of the least helpful humans in existence this millennium. 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. Thank you once again for tuning in and because you’ve made it to the end of the show, you must of course receive the appropriate reward. No you must. You don’t have a choice. Stop turning away this is for you. Stop it. Have it. Here is the Partly Political Broadcast Hot Politics Gossip fact, and this week I thought you might be vaguely bemused to know, just what the most important political u-turn ever made was and by whom that did do it. No, it wasn’t creepy pillow and former PM Ted Heath who u-turned on the entire promised 1970 Tory manifesto of cutting public spending, but then had to put tons of money into the NHS, education and welfare to reflate the economy. Silly alleged but let’s face it he almost certainly was a big paedo Tedward, if only he’d been able to travel forward in time and see how his predecessors just said they’d put money into those things while absolutely not bothering to and letting everything collapse, he could’ve learned so much. Nor was it the 41^st US President and inspiration for Gary Oldman’s Dracula, probably, George HW Bush, when in 1988 he said ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ then raised them two years later. Though to be fair he had such thin, non-existent lips of the kind you’d usually find on a creature that could only suction things for food, it is hard to say if he’d actually said mouthed something else entirely. No instead the most important political u-turn in history was when then Lib Dem leader and always train advert for men’s hair dye products Nick Clegg insisted his party were the student party, and opposed any increase in student fees, before then voting for an increase in student fees as part of the coalition. Why was this the biggest one? Well the auto-tune remix of his apology was groundbreaking in terms of political internet slams, a tradition that has long since continued. But also it lead to the Lib Dems being reduced to a party who’s size is comparable only to social events held by shit potato Toby Young, something that has had in impact on all elections since, and of course it also helped scientific biologists discover the world’s largest invertebrate. There you go, this week’s HOTPOLGOSSFACT, and I hope you were excited for its return or at the very least just took your headphones out till it was over. If you enjoyed that, or it made you hate humanity so much that you’re now calmed by our rapid self-destruction instead of panicked, then please do recommend this podcast to others that might like it, give us a tasty 5 star review on the podcast apps and if you can, fling me some wonga at the patreon, ko-fi or Acast supporter sites.

Yeah whatever thanks or something to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Katie Coxall.

This will be back next week when Gavin Williamson is so insistent that schools are safe, he goes undercover as a pupil in a secondary comprehensive and teachers are so concerned by his haunted child looks and complete inability to listen to anything, that he’s referred to social services and is eventually fostered by a nice family with a dog.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show is sponsored by Alternative Prom Hits, for when you can’t get jiggy with your jingoism as the band plays on. Why not try some of these bangers to truly yell something about modern day Britain, but obviously only the chorus bits? Featuring The Talking Heads ‘We’re On The Road To Nowhere’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, Blur’s ‘This Is A Low’, Beck’s ‘Loser’ and 9 hours of just the noise old TV’s used to make before they turned off and never turned on again. Alternative Prom Hits, for the real sound of Britain. But mainly England.

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