Further Reading

Linear liner notes 

Johnson’s announced a cautious plan that is so cautious its only allowing all school children to return to schools all at once in that kind of cautious way scientists are recommending not to do. Hopefully everything will be all back to normal by June 21st, though really normal now is ‘lockdown’ so there’s a chance the government could mean that again. The four step plan, unlawful Matt Hancock being unlawful and a chat with Giles (@gilesgrover) and Natasha (@Tasha08921916) at End Our Cladding Scandal (@EOCSOfficial) about Robert Jenrick’s recent announcements.

Key links and sources of info from Giles and Natasha’s interview:

• • Giles Grover on Twitter – https://twitter.com/gilesgrover 
• • Natasha on Twitter – https://twitter.com/Tasha08921916
• • Manchester Cladiators on Twitter – https://twitter.com/McrCladiators  
• • End Our Cladding Scandal on Twitter – https://twitter.com/EOCS_Official 
• • End Our Cladding Scandal website – https://endourcladdingscandal.org/ 
• • Article referencing “didn’t have time to come up with a better number” quote – https://metro.co.uk/2021/02/24/cladding-crisis-flats-that-burned-down-wouldnt-qualify-for-bailout-14136568/ 
• • Inside Housing on Twitter – https://twitter.com/insidehousing 
• • Pete Apps on Twitter – https://twitter.com/PeteApps 
• • Jack Simpson on Twitter – https://twitter.com/jsimpsonjourno 
• • Sunday Times on Twitter – https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes 
• • Daily Mail on Twitter – https://twitter.com/MailOnline 
• • Martina Lees on Twitter – https://twitter.com/lees_martina 
• • Miles Dilworth on Twitter – https://twitter.com/MilesDilworth 
• • Nearly Legal (Giles Peaker) on Twitter – https://twitter.com/nearlylegal 
• • Justin Bates on Twitter – https://twitter.com/justinbates28 
• • Sue Bright on Twitter – https://twitter.com/suejbright 
• • Martin Hilditch on Twitter – https://twitter.com/martinhilditch 
• • Find your MP’s contact details – https://www.mysociety.org/wehelpyou/who-is-your-mp/ 

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• • Get 10% off at British Boxers with the code in the episode – https://british-boxers.com/ 
• • 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

Ep222

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Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that like the vaccine, data shows just one dose of it can dramatically reduce transmission. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as Prime Minister and what if all the bits people discarded from kebabs were reconstituted into a snowman Boris Johnson says ‘We’re travelling on a one-way road to freedom’ I hope it isn’t just to test our eyesight and prove that we’re all responsible parents.

‘Data not dates’ said Johnson, about the new four step lockdown lifting plans, before then announcing specific dates for lockdown changes. Maybe because calendars have numbers on as well so maybe they are the same thing, or perhaps that catchphrase was based on an incident where his aide had to stop him pushing fruit into a USB port. We’ll never know but I am worried that if, as he says, all the newly announced lockdown lifting plans will be based on calculations that the detail of them will just say ‘boobies’. We are now at the stage of Johnson’s sitcom character arc where it might appear that he’s changed his ways or learned from his mistakes, but by the end of the episode it’ll become clear that he’s incapable of something like that and the format will return to its normal unrealistic plots. This is a cautious plan, which sounds good. Maybe after a year of watching the world work out exactly how to curb the virus and constantly insist the British way is just to forget that anything is up and its best not to trouble anyone about it, maybe, just maybe, the Prime Minister has finally realised that you can’t stop a virus by ignoring it and hoping it eventually leaves you alone.

As you’ve probably guessed though, Johnson’s plan is cautious like if Godzilla tried to tip toe through Tokyo, and that’s why all schools in England, primary and secondary, will reopen on March the 8^th despite teachers not having had any priority for getting vaccinations and secondary school children being proven to transmit the virus between them like a DPD delivery service on Red Bull. In Scotland and Wales there is a phased reopening with youngest pupils returning first, and the Chief Medical Officer and owl Chris Whitty is very unhappy with what is being referred to as the ‘big bang’ of schools, presumably because it’s the event that will create the expansion of the coronavirus. But Johnson is driven by data which means someone showed him a webpage that said the words schools and open on it. Then from the beginning of March one person can meet another person for a coffee just like they have done where I live since last summer and no one’s cared, and then from the end of March the rule of 6 or two households returns, as well as outdoor sports meaning we can all go back to passing this onto to the people we’ve missed most. It’s a four-step plan, with the aim being that by June 21^st everything will be back to normal its just that no one will have any money to do anything but stay at home. Johnson keeps saying that the plan is irreversible which could be because rather than reverse back into the last lockdown we’ll just plunge headfirst into a brand new one which will be totally different.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be hopeful, but from the 8^th March 30 people are allowed to attend a funeral but only 6 to a wedding, which does suggest how the government think this might go. Results do show the vaccination program is having a ‘spectacular’ impact on hospitalisations and on transmission too – and with the promise that every adult will be offered a vaccine by July which means you’ll at least get asked if you fancy one then added to a long list and not get jabbed for four years – that means there’s only 5 months for everything to get much worse again and if the government can’t manage a comprehensive strategy in double that time, there’s no way a virus can right? People won’t get as ill from it, meaning it’s only the possibly debilitating consequences of Long Covid anyone will have to worry about and that’s not an issue for the government as the DWP will refuse any financial assistance because you could still find work as a draught excluder. Obviously, everyone over 60 will be vaccinated so they’ll be able to vote Conservative in the May local elections while you can only visit the corner shop if you wear a full hazmat suit and are sprayed down before you leave the house. The priority though, as many news outlets keep insisting, is freedom and of course the sooner we get freedom the sooner we can be free to catch what we like and pass it on to whoever we so please because this is a democracy Janet and I should be able to host a virus if I so choose, and if you don’t like it maybe you should go live in China. Where actually you’d be safer from coronavirus right now because they’ve spent the past year learning how to lock it down. ‘The end is in sight’ said Johnson but he didn’t say if that was for lockdown or everyone that may die in a potential third wave.

Maybe the biggest pandemic we’re facing right now is the mass inability to prioritise the right things, which certainly seems even more prevalent than the ‘rona. I mean take Health Secretary and undercooked flatbread Matt Hancock. Please take him. As far away as possible and to somewhere he can’t escape from. Hancock was found to have breached his legal obligation by not publishing details of who he’d dished COVID contracts out to within 30 days of them being signed, something that likely happened because as anyone who’s ever arranged a party or a group holiday will know, it’s a nightmare trying to pin down your mates into doing admin. According to Hancock though, he says delaying publishing the contracts was the right thing to do, which it wasn’t, and a judge said it wasn’t and that it was unlawful, which means officially that it was the wrong thing to do.

It must be galling for people who fly into the UK and may face a £10k fine if they lie about their travels, to find that all along they could just say ‘actually me flying in from Corona State was the right thing to do’ and everyone would fall over backwards to let them run around where they pleased. ‘It was the right thing to do’ Hancock meeped out like in his head that maybe this was the moment where his ability to pull of Jedi Mind Tricks would manifest. The Health Secretary said it was right because his team were too busy spending all their time finding life-saving equipment which meant the paperwork was a bit late. Well, it is very hard to fill in all the boring bits when on the phone to your best friends. Where do you fit it in? Somewhere between laughing about the old days where you burned money in front of a tramp together or maybe just before they tell you how much they’ll donate to your party? You just can’t interrupt all the ordering of 400,000 faulty gowns from Turkey while ignoring companies in your own country that want to help, to fill in some boxes on a dull, dull legal form can you?

And as Hancock pointed out, his staff’s hard work meant we did not have a national shortage of PPE, as obvs nurses just wore bin bags for kicks right? That’s just one of those things they learn at medical school right, about being creative at work by going all Blue Peter in the cleaning cupboards to create your own custom protective wear? Right? Half of all healthcare workers say they were given PPE that was inappropriate or inadequate but Hancock didn’t say it was good PPE, just that they had enough so frankly if these nurses cared about their jobs they’d have got out some cling film and sticky back plastic and filled in the gaps themselves right? The Medicines and Healthcare products regulatory agency are currently investingating a £30bn contract for the testing vials that was given by the Department of Health to the former owner of Hancock’s local pub called The Cock Inn, presumably after every time the Health Secretary visited. Fair play though as pint glasses are basically test tubes for beer, and pubs have those. So maybe the best person to make test tubes for something completely different using a process that is nothing like running a pub, is someone who’d shout ‘the usual?’ to Hancock as he walked in and put something from one of the Now That’s What I Call Music compilations on the jukebox before giving someone an unironic fist bump. The firm, owned by Alex Bourne, the worst part of the Bourne Trilogy, at one point paid a manufacturer of bouncy castles to make a room for unpacking supplies, which was intended to be comparatively contamination free but not medical grade sterile. Come on now, I’ve seen bouncy castles before, its amazing what you can wipe off them with a sponge. As long as everyone doing the unpacking took their shoes off first, I bet it was fine.

Leader of the opposition and Xerox Magnifax Telecopier Keir Starmer says that he won’t call for Matt Hancock’s resignation as ‘calling for people to resign is not what the public really want to see’. Well, no, I suppose you’re right Keir, what I, one of them publics, want to see is Matt Hancock fired into space, but failing that I’d be very happy with a 24/7 streaming channel of cabinet ministers being forced to resign because they weren’t even trying to do their job properly, before getting bundled into a plane on a one-way ticket to Antarctica. I’d watch that on more than one screen at a time. I suppose it is tricky to assume Hancock might tender his resignation when the issue is his inability to tender anything during the pandemic. But considering Keir Starmer, former director of public prosecutions, spent his former career insisting on harsh sentences for all crime, you think he’d at least be able to manage more than a mealy mouthed one for Hancock. Starmer’s other big comments of the past week included Labour’s proposal for the British Recovery Bond, which might sound like the sort of 2021 appropriate next part of the Bond franchise, but is actually a plan that allows people to save money and contribute to the country’s economic recovery. Because as we all know, the biggest issue of the pandemic is that we just haven’t had enough mattresses to stuff all our saved cash into from all the work we’ve been doing so this definitely feels like a good way to fix that. Starmer also proposed start-up loads for 100,000 small firms, and the Conservatives accused him of stealing their ideas. On the plus side, they stole quite a lot of ideas from the last Labour manifesto so maybe by Starmer stealing them back he might actually have some eventually that appeal to Labour voters. I recently discovered that Starmer is a member of the Trilateral Commission, the rich man’s club that doesn’t believe true democracy should be given to the people, so I’m now certain it’s still his plan to make Labour an opposition in the way that Burger King is McDonalds main opponent, but both are mostly out to take your money and make you feel like shit, while packaging it as some sort of incredible deal with a toy.

It says a lot that according to the Conservatives, Labour aren’t really their opposition anymore, as they’ve turned all their efforts to the culture war, something that shouldn’t even be a thing when they’ve happily let most culture die since last March. It was announced that soon, the office for students, part of the Department of Education, will be able to fine students for meddling with free speech. You know those university students who’ve been running rampage on society by being stuck in their rooms for a year and paying thousands for the privilege. The government’s proposals will allow academics, students or visiting speakers to be able to sue a university for compensation if they feel they’ve been no platformed, and Education Secretary and what if a stupid demon possessed a foam shrimp Gavin Williamson is going to appoint a free speech champion, which I suppose is like someone who wins at rap battles but only using racist jokes. According to the government, people with conservative views are being censored on campus, but there’s no evidence for this and its highly likely it’s based on how no one wanted to talk to Williamson when he was a student because he’s inherently unlikable. Once again it seems that the party who’ve been in power for over a decade and who dominate the media narrative are upset that not everyone wants to listen to them, even though in Johnson’s short career as Prime Minister alone, ministers were banned from using the word Brexit and had the whip removed if they didn’t agree with him. Then they put Greenpeace & Extinction Rebellion on the terrorist watchlist for having the extreme views of wanting to breath in the future and told schools removed all anti-capitalist material. Is the biggest concern a threat to free speech or more that they and their donors spend so much money to be heard and can’t understand why people still don’t fancy listening to it? In theory the proposals could also mean anyone from an extremist group could sue a university if they can’t give a talk on the basics of petrol bombing Westminster. But more excitingly, they mean that every single university could hold a course called ‘Gavin Williamson is a massive bellend’ and he’d face court action if he tried to shut them down.

There appears to be issues with freedom of speech within the government too as Conservative think tank the Bow Group, so called because they’re so snooty they think that’s how everyone should greet them, are calling for an inquiry into the influence in No.10 of live action Peppa Pig Carrie Symonds, as its been repeatedly reported that she is playing a central role and they are angry that an unelected official like her, got rid of the unelected official they liked, sinister gooseberry Dominic Cummings. One of Cummings pals and sickly child Oliver Lewis, resigned as Johnson’s adviser on keeping the UK together last week, on account of having to work with another adviser who’s a pal of Symonds. It’s very on brand for this government to have the union expert unable to work with people he doesn’t agree with. The Bow Group have called Symonds supposed influence ‘cronyism’, complaining that she hasn’t been elected or appointed, which is true and so maybe Symonds should be given a peerage and a cabinet position like David Frost was last week and that might make it more palatable? They didn’t complain when Johnson’s former special advisor was employed via cronyism either, and just seem to be miffed that Symonds is female and his wife, unaware that really both times it shows that the Prime Minister is just very easily swayed by Cummings.

In other news, Chancellor and toilet roll puppet Rishi Sunak announced that he would be sitting with industry leaders and experts to hear how they’ve reacted to the pandemic, before then posting a video of him talking to angry nan Gordon Ramsey who mainly reacted to the pandemic by laying off 500 staff last year so he could do a TV show instead. Though to be fair that does sound like exactly the sort of inspiration Sunak was looking for and will no doubt announce in the budget that any rich chefs who want a change in career will be given money to put a show pitch together if they can prove they’ve fired at least half of their lowest earning staff. To be fair to Sunak, he seems so completely unaware of life on any of the ladder rungs lower than millionaire, that maybe he does think Gordon Ramsey represents all of the food industry and makes all of the food all by himself? There’s a high chance his next video will be with Nick Knowles who does all of the building work. Foreign Secretary and chipolata in the rain Dominic Raab has called for ceasefires in Yemen to allow for vaccinations. Smart business move as there’s no point in selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to kill Yemenis with, if they all die of COVID first. Housing Secretary and what if you 3d printed someone using a blueprint containing all the words that mean hollow Robert Jenrick has announced that the housing department is going to create a second base in Wolverhampton, the first government department outside of London. Considering how many homes Robert Jenrick has, there’ll probably be at least 2 more location announced as well. Wolverhampton is in the top 6% of most deprived areas in the UK and now with Jenrick regularly there too, it’ll be in the top 6% most depraved as well.

And lastly, there have been concerns about the safety of Dubai’s princess Latifa after the BBC received videos of her saying she’d been held hostage by her family since 2018. The UN are investigating but I’m sure Boris Johnson will step up and save her any day now by claiming she was just doing her job as a journalist. And in yet another hooray for the courts moment this week, the Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers must be treated as workers not self-employed which means they are entitled to minimum wage and holiday pay. Great news, but finding parking for office Christmas dos will be hard for them and tougher still to find someone a cab to drive them all home after.

ADMIN

Good nowtimes to you listeners. I hope you are all excited about the five stops till freedom, as an email I received from some food website shouted at my inbox today. Its so weird that the focus is all about ‘BUT WHEN WILL WE BE FREE?’ rather than ‘when will it be safe?’ It’s what at least one journalist has asked at every press briefing for the past year ‘yeah sure people are dead and that but when oh when can I drunkenly cry in the pub again?’ Don’t get me wrong, I complain pretty much every day about not being able to do things like leave my agent with her grandparents and then spend all die lying very, very still. But I’d still prefer to not do those things for a bit longer than do them and make people die. I mean ok, it might depend on the people. Am I weird? It’s so strange how all of this makes you really question life choices. I mean I have followed all of them rules but then I’ll see a big group of people drinking in the park together and think, ‘ah shit, maybe I should’ve gone on holiday to Greece’ or something. Obviously, I’d need money to do that, but I just mean that there is an increasing concern that maybe I’m the idiot for not going to pubs that are shut and breaking in via the back window and drinking out of date beer from the taps and then stealing all the crisps and ah no wait, that’s just burglary isn’t it? Is burglary ok if its socially distanced? I just don’t know anymore. What about if I shout ‘it’s the right thing to do’ as I do it? Honestly this year has been all sorts of confusing. It will be very nice if we can actually do all the normal things that I won’t be able to afford to do by June 21^st. I’m particularly looking forward to going to a noisy bar then realising I hate it and don’t go to another one out of choice for a year. Either way, it seems it’s the hope that’ll kill us before COVID does.

If you are a teacher listening to this, I hope you are doing ok with the news. It is completely nuts that you are being told you have to hang out with 30 kids everyday but it’s not safe for anyone to meet another household till April. I was reading the news about Daft Punk splitting up – yeah I know right? – and thought it’s a shame they’ve done that just as they’re the only band that could perform live without needing extra PPE. But then I thought maybe that’s what teachers need? Teach the class dressed as Darth Vader. Not only safer for you, but also one kids mucks about and you could just raise your hand in a threatening way and they’d immediately stop.

Not much else to say this week as I’ve been busy with things I can’t tell you about for ages, but I will eventually, don’t you worry. And so a very quick thanks to Taz and Conal for donating to the ko-fi this week, and should you fancy supplementing the fact that I still can’t do any live work until probably the end of May at least, and by that I mean 2022, then please fling your earnings at the ko-fi.com/parpolbro, patreon.com/parpolbro or Acast supporter sites, give this show a review in any of the places and yes Stitcher all works again now, hooray! And mostly just let other people know that this is here so they don’t accidently sit on it or fall in it or something. Health and safety first.

That’s it for the babble section. So this week’s show has a chat with Natasha and Giles at the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign and there’s a little bit in the middle about

INTERVIEW WITH NATASHA AND GILES

Now I’ve only lived on this earth for 40 years so there is still much I just don’t understand or know. But if you told me about someone who found out they lived in a fire trap and then when asked for help to escape it, was told they must pay for the privilege, I’d assume it was a new instalment in the Saw movie franchise or some cruel twist on the hostage movie genre and at some point, Liam Neeson might threaten someone in a way that makes it sound like he really needs a lozenge. Obviously, I haven’t got a clue about reality, as according to the government, this is just the standard way to treat millions of people who currently live in buildings with unsafe cladding, or a number of other worrying safety issues. I suppose if you look at it objectively, maybe it is someone’s own fault for choosing to live somewhere they had no idea was a veritable death trap because shoddy contractors were given vast amounts of money by public institutions to throw together buildings quickly and pocket the profit. I mean who else’s fault would it be? The contractors who did it? The government’s whose years of cuts and destruction of safety regulations have caused this? No don’t be silly. It’s the resident’s fault for wanting to live a normal life and not die unnecessarily, which is the sort of selfish intention that some people just insist on having in today’s day and age. What are they like? A couple of weeks ago Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick announced new plans to end the cladding scandal in, as Jenrick said, a way that is fair and generous. He didn’t say who to though and it appears it was mostly generous to developers, contractors and no one else and it was only fair in the way that at a coconut shy it’ll cost you a lot of money to not get anywhere. Not enough money was pledged to make buildings safe, not every building qualifies for the plans and leaseholders are still going to be subject to a number of charges because they have the audacity to want to be safe. It’s once again another example where the government have seen a gaping wound, heard the cries for help and decided all they can be bothered to manage is to put a small finger plaster on it and then blame the victim for still being stubborn enough to bleed out and die despite everything they’ve done for them. The Conservatives are meant to be the party of home ownership but perhaps that’s just because the housing secretary owns several himself and isn’t remotely bothered about any others.

This week I spoke to Natasha Letchford and Giles Grover at the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign, who are calling on the government to lead a national effort to end the cladding and safety crisis. It’s quite a busy week for the campaign with the McPartland Smith amendment to the Fire Safety Bill going to parliament this week, where two Conservative MPs have tabled the proposal that no remedial work on the buildings necessary as part of the act, are passed onto the leaseholders or tenants. If it goes through it’ll make a big difference to those currently hit by large costs on top of safety worries. So I asked Natasha and Giles all about the scandal and how people are affected, why Jenrick’s recent announcement was so useless and just what can be done to help.

INTERVIEW WITH NATASHA AND GILES PART 1

And we’ll be back with Natasha and Giles in just a minute but first…

MIDDLE BIT

I wasn’t sure what would be useful this week but as you’ve probably all been looking at the lockdown lifting news and have it in your diaries the second you can all go to a zoo again, I thought rather than go over all that which may well change, it might be more useful this week to explain why, even when we all really, really wish Matt Hancock would get sent to prison, a really awful prison at that where he has to sit in basically a concrete hole with only a spider for his friend. But that sadly in this case, being unlawful ain’t the same as being illegal. Even though the sound really similar. I mean, not in a rhyming way obviously. Don’t even try it. Stop it. No one needs that sort of word wrangling.

You likely heard about the success of the Good Law Project last week, where they won the judicial review that they took to the high court with 3 MPs, into whether the lack of transparency of the awarding of contracts during the pandemic was a breach of conduct. Which is great. The High Court found that Matt Hancock acted unlawfully, breached his legal obligation to publish contract award notices within 30 days of awarding contracts and generally acted like a total corrupt arsehole. Ok it didn’t say the last bit but read between the lines. Yeah, there’s nothing there so you can write in ‘acted like a total corrupt arsehole’ in biro. The judge said the public were entitled to see who the money was going to, what it was being spent on and had the government complied with legal obligations then the contracts could have been scrutinised and had issues raised in parliament. But they didn’t, they evaded all accountability and have since insisted actually they did the right thing by spending all their time finding unsuitable PPE that no one could use instead. A bit like when I try to justify not doing the washing up as I was spending all my time ignoring my agent, sorry daughter, while she tried to climb things she shouldn’t, and I played on my phone.

What does this mean? Well, when a public body or representative of one, such as Monsewer Hancockery, is unlawful, it means they have not complied with the provisions of public law, ie the duties the law has provided it do. When they don’t, they can be held accountable at a judicial review in the high court and then the court decides if they have done the naughties or not. They can make a quashing order which nullifies the whole thing and then it’s up to the defendant to decide if they do it all over again in light of the decision. Or there can be a declaration where they sort of, well, er, declare what the legal position is. Or they can do nothing really as the whole point is really just to decide if what was done was legal and then the public body has the responsibility to act legally from then. Which might seem a bit disappointing but it’s what judicial reviews are for and how they work. The Judge at the case last week said that the case itself gave her no doubt that it has sped up compliance with the correct procedure from now on. It’s a sort of very expensive ‘I’ve got my eye on you sonny Jim’ and should be, under normal circumstances, pretty shameful for anyone found doing the unlawful. However, as we’ve already seen, Matt Hancock still insists what he did was right and that everyone had enough PPE when they didn’t. It’s actually ridiculous how many times this government have been found to be unlawful over the past few years. From proroguing of parliament to rolling out the test and trace programme without correct data protection in place to using warrants to hack phones to a consultation in children in care being too narrow, to their air quality plan. And had the government admitted to its unlawfulness with the COVID contracts it would have saved them £200,000 of legal costs taking it to court, but of course that is tax-payers money they’re using so they probably don’t care that much. So, should Matt Hancock go to prison? I mean yes but not for the law breaching, just because I think he should and I’m certain he’d try to get in with all the gangs and get all the tattoos he thought he needed and have a terrible time. Should he resign? Well also yes, that would be a more honourable thing but then there’s concern that Hancock resigning now would cause even more chaos in the Department of Health than there is already, and god knows they’d probably replace him with Mark Francois who’d spend all the NHS budget on gun turrets on top of every hospital.

So, what next? Well worth following the Good Law Project who have written to Hancock saying what needs to happen to improve the process and I guess we’ll see if he ever responds. In the meantime, I might just refer to him as the Unlawful Health Secretary and hope he tunes in and feels sad about it.

And now back to Natasha and Giles…

INTERVIEW WITH NATASHA AND GILES PART 2

Many thanks to Natasha and Giles for having the time to chat in what is a pretty busy week for them. We’ll see how the fire safety bill amendments go on Weds, which may have happened by the time you hear this, but if you’re one of the early Tuesday crew, then please get in a letter to your MP as quick as you can asking them to vote for it. There’s a handy link to a letter template at the endourcladdingscandal.org site at the top of the page. You’ll also find the petition Natasha mentions there too, please sign it. You can also find the campaign @EOCS_Official on Twitter, and Giles’s personal Twitter is @GilesGrover and he works with the amazingly named Manchester Cladiators site that you can find at manchestercladiators.org.uk or @McrCladiators. There are so, so many local campaign groups about this and I was amazed at how many RT’d my tweet about interviewing Giles and Natasha on Saturday. So if you are affected by this, do seek out your local group and contact the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign for help too.

Usually in this bit I’d ask you for guest recommendations, but I’ve currently got interviewees booked up to my ears. Which is odd as I should just put my laptop on a desk or something. But still if you have a burning desire to let me know about someone or something I need to have on this show, then let me know and I’ll pop them in the big ol’ queue for a chat. You can of course do that @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or scrawl your recommendation on the surface of Mars and at some point the Perserverance should send over some pics. But as always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And stick a fork in this episode of the Partly Political Broadcast podcast, because it is done for yet another week of our endless roller coaster of political times. A roller coaster that were it a ride, it’d be just one endless downhill slope where you remain upside down throughout and there’s no way of getting off. On the plus side, you wouldn’t be allowed to go on it right now because social distancing and the car park would be full of a Serco testing centre where they spend the day juggling bags of done test and throwing them at passing geese. Review the show, donate to it if you’re a big old money bags and have run out of frivolous things to order off the internet and most of all just tell people it exists. Not that they have to listen, just that it’s here, so they don’t trip over it when not looking.

Tanks and other military vehicles to Acast, my bro The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Katie Coxall.

This will be back next week when Boris Johnson announces that actually there are now roadworks on the road to freedom and the contract to do them has been handed to someone he used to go to school with that had a toy car.

BYEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Roadmaps by Johnson. Need to get from A to B? Using Roadmaps by Johnson we’ll help you start, dilly dally in the middle, turn around and get back to A again with the promise that by summer you’ll be at B but by then you’ll have given up and sold your car.

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