Further Reading

Linear liner notes 

Another week, another series of events dealt with by the government and the authorities with all the tact of an angry toddler with a drum during a 2 minute silence. This was a terrible week to write jokes about but somehow they are here, on the police keeping the public safe from unarmed peacefully protesting women, the scary Policing Bill and Bus Back Better. Plus Helen O’Hara (@HelenLOHara) on her new book about the erasure of women’s achievements in the film industry ‘Women Vs Hollywood’.

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

• • Helen O’Hara on Twitter – https://twitter.com/HelenLOHara 
• • Helen O’Hara on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/heleno84/ 
• • Women vs. Hollywood, Helen O’Hara (book) – https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/helen-ohara/women-vs-hollywood/9781472144416/?v2=true
• • BBC Sounds Women vs. Hollywood episodes – https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000sy4d 
• • Empire Magazine on Twitter – https://twitter.com/empiremagazine 
• • Empire podcasts – https://www.empireonline.com/podcasts/ 
• • Annenberg Inclusion Initiative on Twitter – https://twitter.com/Inclusionists 
• • Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media on Twitter – https://twitter.com/gdigm 
• • The F-Rating on Twitter – https://twitter.com/f__rating
• • Angelica Jade on Twitter – https://twitter.com/angelicabastien 
• • Vulture on Twitter – https://twitter.com/vulture 
• • Prime Time Network on Twitter – https://twitter.com/primetimenetwrk 
• • ARRAY Now on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ARRAYNow 

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

Ep225

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy and politics podcast that will never get cancelled as that’d require someone approving of it in the first place. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as Home Secretary and woman who thinks of Hieronymus Bosch paintings when she imagines her happy place Priti Patel says that she found some of the footage of the events on Clapham Common on Saturday upsetting, I bet she meant all the moments before the police got violent and everything was peaceful.

There is a lot of valid concern that many of the Conservative government’s actions have not just echoes of fascism but a word for word reciting of them like it was their project at school and they’re doing a special assembly about it. But I wonder if actually their ethos is more a sort of extreme nihilism, as many of their methods to solve society’s ills appear to be about stopping those upset about them and that way the issue is no longer a problem. Like solving an equation by bombing all the numbers so you don’t have to add anything up anymore. Take the events of Saturday for example at the vigil for Sarah Everard, the young woman upsettingly and horrifically murdered last week while walking home at night, for which a police officer has been accused of. The Metropolitan Police decided that the best way to deal with the concerns of women who felt unsafe was simply to arrest all of them for being peaceful and then that way they’ll be in prison and won’t be able to go out at night anymore. It does in many ways make sense. I mean why go to the effort of funding the legal system and actually prosecuting men for crimes of rape and harassment, when all those who are unhappy about it have happily gathered together so you can just get rid of them in one go and then all your mates and colleagues can roam around at night as they please picking off anyone who’s not that bothered about being murdered. And if anything, it shows the police believe in equality as now it’s not just people of colour who feel threatened by them.

Of-course a spokesperson for the Met Police said that they didn’t want to slam unarmed women into the ground headfirst and trample on flowers left for a murder victim, but they were placed in that position by the overriding need to protect people’s safety. Yes of course. They have to keep the public safe from thinking that demonstrations or peaceful vigils are reasonable examples of a democracy otherwise everyone will want a go and then they’ll just have more work to do and problems to deal with. Met Police Commissioner and perfect example of nominative determinism Cressida Dick said that had the vigil been legal, even she’d have attended. I mean that’s fair right? A high court judge ruled that it was legal but what do they know? I mean have they ever even seen a law before? We’re all tired of experts and the last thing we want is a judge telling us what’s legal or not. What next? Asking your barber for advice on hairstyles when you could just walk headfirst into a hedge trimmer and see what happens? If it wasn’t legal then that means when the Duchess of Cambridge attended the vigil earlier in the day, then she broke the law so I’m excited to see the Met storming the palace to make that arrest. Oh no wait, she’s the white one, isn’t she? Ah yeah sorry, I guess she did nothing wrong then. It goes without saying that a Commissioner saying she’d only be in attendance for legal activities does largely make it sound like she’s just avoiding doing any work. ‘Oh sorry, I couldn’t respond to your 999 call as that burglary didn’t sound legal.’ But it is also one of Cressida Dick’s traits to only clamp down on people wanting to do things safely. I mean god forbid anyone who just wants to catch the tube on her watch like poor Jean Charles De Menzies did. She probably has a list on her office wall of the worst crimes possible that feature going to the shops without getting run over or daring to brush your teeth and having the gall not to be eaten by a tiger. If only those women on Saturday had eschewed wanting to walk in their own areas without feeling unsafe and instead celebrated football results violently, pissed on a memorial or marched for White Supremacy then everyone could have had a lovely time and the Met could have had a nice day full of community participation activities. Politicians across the very narrow political board said they found what happened on Saturday upsetting or disturbing, even the Prime Minister and jellyfish atop a pile of horse dung Boris Johnson said he was ‘deeply concerned’ presumably because he thinks if women are feeling unsafe then it’s just a personal matter and calling the police is over the top and none of your business. Priti Patel has demanded a full report from the Met, likely with a demand to know why no one was gassed or shot despite her clear hints. Member of all of the backbench groups whose expertise is in having no expertise in anything and T-1000 without any of the cool parts Steve Baker said they were unspeakable scenes, and the Prime Minister has to end the lockdown law now, because as we know if the pubs were open then he’d have been able to forget women existed in the first place while he drank several pints and bored someone with his views on Austrian economics. Even Labour leader and Commercial Upright Stainless Steel Refrigerator Single Door Ventilated Cooling Adexa SR600 Keir Starmer said he shared the protesters anger and upset because he doesn’t have emotions of his own. He wouldn’t call for Cressida Dick’s resignation though as that’s only reserved for members of his own party who tweet.

Cressida Dick said that she feels for her officers as they are policing during a pandemic, so I guess that means they have to wash their hands for 20 seconds after every time they manhandle a black teenager. She said, ‘no one should be sitting back in an armchair saying what they’d have done differently’, presumably because it’s hard to find and arrest people in their own homes if they do that. Whereas if they all peacefully protest about it then she’ll be able to round them up and have them locked up which would be preferable. I sympathise because it is a difficult job right and that’s why it’s so nice that the government are pushing through the all-new Policing Bill which will allow police to clamp down on things like violence against women, as long as those doing the violence are also damaging a statue of Churchill at the same time, or if it’s a statue of a woman they’re bothering, but luckily there aren’t many of those so that should help the cops. Police will have powers to tackle disruptive protests that cause distress, alarm or annoyance. Terrible for the vital element of democracy that is the right to protest, but at the same time I may be able to call the police to arrest my agent, sorry daughter when she next screams and screams in the street because she doesn’t want to walk anymore. After the past year it may be the most affordable way to get childcare too. This is of course, win-win for the ever-high polling Conservatives. Their voters care about crime against emotionless non-sentient sculptures as they feel a familiarity towards them so 10 years in jail for defacing one works for them. And the thought of people being angry and making noise they can hear through the double glazing of their 3^rd summer house really ruins their day. Meanwhile a lack of time or resources to deal with proper crimes will mean young people will see it as a viable future prospect amongst the sea of unemployment and should any swing voters get upset that the police keep mowing down everyone that reads out aloud a letter from points of view, then the Conservatives can say they cut the force by nearly 24,000 staff so actually they had the foresight to protect the public.

It’s that ability to cover all bases that Johnson’s government just excels at isn’t it? For International Women’s Week last week, they could have done the odd token gesture but no, they went all out and had police ruin a vigil for a victim of femicide. Then Lord Bethell, Death Star Commander, insisted nurses, a profession where 9 out of 10 in the UK are women, should be happy with an inadequate pay rise because they are paid well for their job. Yes, he probably does believe that keeping people alive isn’t worth much as someone who looks like he snacks on souls. The government supported women’s independence by not bothering to send any embassy help to accompany Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe to her new trial in Tehran. Nazanin, a woman that was only imprisoned for 5 years because Boris Johnson didn’t think her job was important, was ordered to appear on charges of propaganda against the regime something that not only has she not done, but also wouldn’t have needed to do as Iran have managed to score several own-goals on that front with the ordeal they’ve put her and her family through. It’s like stamping on a line of ants then accusing them of propaganda that makes you look like an ant killer. Foreign Secretary and what if your whole face was a nostril Dominic Raab said that they will continue to do everything they can to support Nazanin, except that is, asking the British embassy in Iran to accompany her. Boris Johnson has called for Nazanin’s immediate release but as she’s been accused of propaganda its once again completely irresponsible for him to use language that makes it sound like she’s announcing a news statement.

You can’t say the government haven’t spent money supporting women either, as they’ve gone above and beyond to throw money at keeping Grange Hill extra Baroness Dido Harding in a job. The Public Accounts Committee revealed the NHS Test and Trace service has had no clear impact despite now costing £37bn which is the equivalent of one and a half channel tunnels, but if they’d never posted any signs to where it was, not sold anyone any tickets and the tunnel itself was actual a ring with no clear way to enter or leave. The recent Mars Perseverance mission where they landed an actual robot on actual Mars only cost $2.9bn and they’ve probably got more chance of finding life than Harding’s Test and Trace system has of who you saw in the pub when you had a cough. Test and Trace was set up on the basis that it would help prevent future lockdowns, but there’s been two more since it was started so the only way it’ll stop any more from happening is by removing so much money from the economy no one can afford to stay at home anymore. Harding said that Test and Trace is making a real impact in breaking the chains of transmission, which is true as no one’s been able to contact anyone to say that they may have caught COVID-19. Coronavirus cases in the UK are continuing to fall, as are hospitalisations and the daily death rate but Head of the Office for National Statistics and star of Pixar’s Up Professor Sir Ian Diamond has said there will no doubt be another wave of infections in the Autumn but at least lockdowns won’t be as long then as the days will get shorter. The European Medical Agency are having an extraordinary meeting this week, which sadly doesn’t mean attendees will be hovering, riding unicorns or doing magic but just that it’s not on their schedule, boring. All about the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine as Germany, France, Italy and Spain have halted use after concerns it was linked to blood clots, but they should know there aren’t any as the cabinet didn’t have anything to do with making it.

The government has delayed post Brexit import paperwork checks that were due next month and in July, until October and next year in yet another example of why that Get Ready For Brexit advert should have only been plastered inside Westminster and nowhere else. Brexit minister and eroded Patrick Star Lord David Frost has blamed this on coronavirus complicating things, but that can’t be true as if the pandemic could have a direct effect on what happened at the borders, then it’d still have closed them before Boris Johnson did. The EU is beginning legal action against the UK’s breach of the Northern Ireland protocol. It’s really a shame it’s a protocol and not a statute or under the Policing Bill the government may well give themselves 10 years in jail for breaching it. Johnson visited Northern Ireland at the end of the week among tension with the DUP who want him to scrap the protocol entirely and will create division and harm which is odd as I was certain that was basically their party’s motto.

In other news the Housing Minister and hot water bottle filled with spam Robert Jenrick has said there will be an inquiry on the development of a new coal mine in Cumbria, great news as the government have given rise to too many polluting boreholes already. Local Conservatives have complained as they say that to drive the green agenda you will need steel and for steel you need coal. Yes of course and then the coal will cause more pollution which will need more steel to fix it and then more coal and then we’ll all be dead, and they’ll have won because they died in a bigger house than you. The government are investing £95m in two new offshore wind ports, which Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam and victim of face doodling Paul Scully insisted during a news interview was a great opportunity using British jobs, British manufacturing and British wind. Yes, that is definitely how weather works, of course we only have British wind over here, that’s why it’s always cold and unreasonably pushy. Unless I’ve got this wrong and Scully was revealing the new fart driven industry which will work well when right now it smells like there’s always something rotten going on in the government.

A national day of reflection is happening next Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the UK’s first lockdown, where all we had to do was stay inside, look ourselves in the mirror and watch as we very rapidly went grey. It’s been backed by the Prime Minister who doesn’t have a reflection and hence why his hair is always like that, and various buildings and landmarks will be illuminated which is fucking pointless as we’ll all still be in lockdown and can’t go see them. There will be a minute’s silence at midday, presumably because if anyone made a noise they could be arrested for causing annoyance. And £3bn is being put towards improving bus services in one of the government’s you wait for them to steal one policy from Labour’s 2019 manifesto, and they nick 3 at once run. They’ve decided the slogan for the policy is ‘Bus Back Better’ which not only doesn’t really make sense, if it does it also sounds like you’ll only have a decent trip on your way home from wherever you’re going, but the way there isn’t worth mentioning. A cynic might suggest this policy is because of upcoming local elections, but I reckon it’s actually because Johnson’s running out of places to put all his lies.

ADMIN

Fucking hell what a week to try and write jokes about. Urgh. And so many people shitty opinions about all of it everywhere. Why is it as a country we have such an issue with understanding that other people have different experiences to us? Babies grasp object permanence when they are between 4 to 7 months old, yet it seems tons of adults regularly struggle with it in relation to the rest of humanity. ‘Well, I’ve never been harassed on the street’ yes, because you’re a 50-year-old man who lives at sea. ‘Well, I’ve never felt unsafe at night where I live.’ Yes, because you’re always asleep by 8pm and related to everyone in your village. As a man I find it exhausting so I can’t even come close to imagining what it’s been like for women this past week, or well, all of life. Though I suppose to fit in with society I should say ‘well I’ve never been bothered by it so that must mean none of you ever have because everyone lives exactly the same life as me with your beards and diabetes that you all have.’ Among all the many horrific opinions one I found so baffling was the complaint that Sarah Everard’s disappearance was being politicised which is an odd one as its impossible not to right? I mean crime in general is political and often due to an underfunded legal system, underfunded care system, poverty which is by caused political choices and so on and so on. Then violence against women, is due to years of toxicity in politics and society, the patriarchal system, the class system, a lack of educating boys in school about consent, cuts to funding for women’s refuges etc etc. I mean when the police were called on the Prime Minister because neighbours were worried his girlfriend was in danger due to the distressing noises they heard, those neighbours were outed as Labour voters by the papers and told to keep to their own business. I’m just saying it’s all political isn’t it? And that’s my excuse for talking about it on this podcast anyway. My uncle, and I appreciate this is quite a tangent, once saved a rather famous jazz DJ’s job when some years ago he made comments about the political nature of a music track which was against the broadcaster’s regulations. My uncle wrote a long letter explaining about jazz and its origins are inherently political originating as a form of musical expression from African-American communities in New Orleans during times of slavery and oppression and anyway, long story short, the DJ got to carry on hosting his show. Ah remember when letters worked as a thing? Good times.

I’ve found it very hard to know what to write about it all this past week as I’ve just found it pretty bleak and upsetting, but also, I feel like there’s a bit of me feeling like saying any of that sort of thing on social media is pointless when its not the platform to persuade people of anything really. I think there’s a lot more scope in doing good things in real actual life and just being nicer to each other and not being callous selfish arseholes. We have a thing with Comedy Club 4 Kids that I co-run where we make sure we never book acts we’ve heard any sort of concerning issues about, we make sure everyone we book has safe travel, we try and make our bills varied and diverse, we pay everyone within a week and apart from me doing it right now, we never go on about it. We just do it and try our best not to be shits. Urgh again. I occasionally have this weird dream that one day society will be ok and this podcast will all be about my favourite pickles or something nice.

Hey on the plus side I had my first vaccine jab last week. It was so easy. I had to agree to be exposed to gamma radiation, then I felt a bit funny, got angry, turned green and tore my trousers. But other than that, all fine. No actually it was very easy, I had the Oxford-Astra Zeneca one and I got some shivers that night then the next day I felt like shit with aches and stuff but not enough like shit to get the day in bed. Instead, I just took paracetamol and complained about it a lot, while my agent decided to help me feel better by jumping on me from the sofa arm. Toddlers are the worst doctors. Fact. All better now though, and even more so because you’re all listening to my waffle because nothing would help the past week than more opinions from middle aged white dudes. Big thanks this week to Phatone who donated to the Acast supporter button, and James, Anne-Marie and Joe who donated to the ko-fi and Zirash who donated to the Patreon just as I uploaded last week’s episode and couldn’t fit them in. You are all amazing. If you fancy helping me keep up my addiction to blood diamonds, sorry I mean help sponsor the podcast and definitely nothing to do with blood diamonds, shit I really wasn’t meant to say that out loud, then if you can donate a few blood diamonds, ah shit, I mean pounds, to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro, the patreon.com/parpolbro or Acast supporter button then I will be forever grateful. Or at least grateful for a bit anyway. More than you’d think is necessary at the very least. If you can’t do that you could instead review the podcast on any of them podcast platforms where you get this sound from and most of all if you can just tell anyone ever that this thing exists, then it all helps tons. I’ve seen loads of people be all sad that the Mash Report has been cancelled, which is a chat for another show, and they’ve all bemoaned ‘there’s no satire anymore’ and it’s taken all my strength not to just post them links to this show. Which I haven’t done because I’m not a total dick. Which is the name of Cressida’s brother apparently. But if you fancy posting a link to this show as a reply to all those people instead, then that’s definitely allowed. Ahem.

That’s it for this week’s podcast admin, podmin. On this episode I had a great chat with writer and film critic Helen O’Hara about her excellent new book Women Vs Hollywood because it turns out film industry has issues with equality too. What? Yeah I know, who’d have thought? A trailer for a new film Chaos Walking came on the other day, where Daisy Ridley plays a woman who lands on a planet where all the other woman are dead and my wife exclaimed ‘they’ve worked out yet another way to have only one woman in a film again’ and we both laughed and then felt sad. In the middle its all about the new policing bill that by the time you hear this will have had its second reading voted through. Yes it will. They have an 80 seat majority and that’s just too many for ghosts to visit overnight and change the minds of before the vote on Tuesday.

INTERVIEW WITH HELEN

Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘life imitates art far more than art imitates life.’ Ok but if that’s true, then why have I still not been bitten by a radioactive spider despite all my efforts? Don’t you dare say the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t art. Don’t you dare. Until the pandemic had its red-carpet premiere and proved to be globally popular despite endless negative reviews, the influence of cinema on the world has been a pretty big one through the 20^th and 21^st centuries so far. You’ve definitely got a favourite film, haven’t you? Or 12? And there’s probably large chunks of your brain that could contain really useful information but instead are filled to the brim with quotes about space stations not being moons or making offers that people can’t refuse. Yet while much of Hollywood’s history as we know it is just of classic scenes or great lines, the reality is the movie industry’s story, much like many of its films, is all about reducing and under-crediting the parts that women or in fact anyone who’s not a white bloke have played in its inception and ongoing success. This not very behind the scenes discrimination has been highlighted by many recent campaigns and of course when emails containing a huge disparity of wages between male and female co-stars at Sony pictures were leaked by hackers that made Tom Holland look amateur. But Hollywood wasn’t like this at its inception. No not the Nolan film. It definitely was by that as they decided it just wasn’t realistic for women to be in dreams. What I mean is at its very start, the movie industry had so many influential leading women in front of and behind the camera, and yet now their stories have been largely erased. Yes, actual cancel culture not that nonsense we keep hearing about now where grifters are upset that people don’t like them being racist anymore. So has Hollywood influenced sexism within society or did it let the patriarchal structures found in politics and industry write its script for it? And are things actually changing for the better or is it forever doomed to be Batman? You know, an endless cycle of unnecessary reboots where it’s exactly the same story again and again even though we’re all very bored of hearing about angry rich men now?

This week I spoke to film critic, journalist and writer Helen O’Hara, who you may well know from all her work in Empire Magazine and on the Empire Film podcast. Her book Women Vs Hollywood was released last month and looks at the many, many influential women in the movie industry whose histories and impact on cinema have since been erased leading to many years of a sexist, overly male-led industry with unequal pay or respect for their female counterparts. It is a brilliantly written read, was Radio 4’s book of the week last week and Helen’s research and the stories of women that she spotlights are frustrating, infuriating and also so often remarkable. As I mention to Helen in the interview, I’m still completely in awe of the career of Nell Shipman, who I knew nothing about beforehand and have no spent far too much time looking up for details of her films and pet grizzly bear. We spoke last Tuesday before all the shit of the past week, so none of that is discussed but considering how most of the news since then has been about women getting undermined in society it all feels even more relevant. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did when talking to Helen.

INTERVIEW WITH HELEN PART 1:

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

MIDDLE BIT – POLICING BILL

Policing Bill sounds like a British dark comedy about parenting a troublesome teenager in the 80s, but it’s actually short for the very un-comedy Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that is being rushed through parliament this week. It’s being debated as I record this week’s episode and while there is a chance that amendments may get voted on, there’s a greater chance with the Conservatives having an 80 seat majority, that even with Labour actually voting against it for once, it’ll just go through as it is and remain terrifyingly authoritarian and at the same time absolutely fucking useless at reducing or being tough on crime. There’s a lot to this bill and not that much of it that has been scrutinised properly because of the speed its being rushed through parliament so that you know, in a year’s time a number of Conservatives who voted for it without question can complain about it and ask for it to be retracted. Joke, that was only Brexit, this is clamping down on any protests against their policies so they’ll be super pleased with it forevs. So baring in mind that the SpyCops bill, already voted through earlier this year means that the police can do now do crimes and not get prosecuted for them if they were undercover at the time, this bill will allow lots of other people to do crimes and not get in that much trouble for it and then someone else to write ‘bum’ on a statue of an old racist on a horse and then get put in prison for a decade. I’m paraphrasing but what the government says it will do is give the police powers to protect themselves and the public, presumably from such threats as unarmed women with candles like on the weekend, and it will introduce tougher sentencing and improve the efficacy of the court and tribunal system.

Will it? Probably not because as has been talked about on this podcast several times with previous guests including Emma McClure and Geoff Whelan, tougher sentences don’t make any immediate difference right now as the court system is so backlogged not just due to COVID but all the cuts to court sitting times, the crown prosecution service, police investigations, the police, and court buildings being sold off, there just isn’t enough time or space and its taking years and years for cases to get dealt with. Then any delay to cases caused by the state that aren’t related to the offender are taken into consideration when sentencing them. So in theory someone can do a crime, get a tougher sentence of say 4 years, it not get dealt with for 4 years in the meanwhile that crime persons could still be criming and then when it does get dealt with they get less time for crime because crime dealings took too much time. So, despite the handy rhyme, in England, the government has very much made sure that if you do the crime, you may not at all do the time.

There are also very concerning elements of what sort of crime the bill shows the government are worried about with defacing of statues or memorials carrying a sentence of up to 10 years, whereas as Labour are pointing out you could get less for street harassments or assaults, domestic violence or rape. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the Conservatives value memorials more than people, because remembering those who’ve died is cheaper than having to keep them alive and have them asking difficult questions. The big worry and why the word fascism was trending on Twitter today, is because it will change the common law offence of public nuisance to a new statutory definition, which is very vague and can apply to pretty much anyone and render all demonstrations and protests illegal. Previously if you were being a public nuisance, it meant you could be proven to cause serious harm to the public or section of the public, obstructs the public or intends to do either of those things and is reckless to whether it will have such consequence. This new definition though adds more to that. So now you’ll be deemed to have committed a public nuisance offence if your action causes someone to die, I mean that’s fair, suffer an injury or disease. Yep ok. Suffers the loss of or damage to property. Ok, I guess. Suffers serious distress, hmm, serious annoyance…what? Serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity. So, if one person says if you’ve annoyed them enough you can be arrested? You could get 10 years for singing I know a song that’ll get on your nerves? You could get 10 years for being too long in the loo and causing someone serious inconvenience? I’m annoyed by everyone all the time, does that mean I can endlessly ring the police saying that person didn’t indicate before turning left, can you arrest this man he’s wearing red trousers? I mean where does it end? The big worry of course is that if you are part of a peaceful protest and you cause no damage at all, you could still face up to 10 years in jail because you inconvenienced someone or even annoyed them. It’s a pretty brutal way to take away the human right of protest. Maybe we should all protest dressed as those moving statues and confuse the shit out of them?

The bill will also give police powers to tackle unauthorised encampments, which while on the surface could worrying apply to protests like Occupy or ones Extinction Rebellion have done, but also hopefully Boris Johnson next time he has a holiday in that stupid tent that he put on a Scottish farmer’s field without permission. It targets Gypsy and traveller communities too, who previously could only be arrested if they did damage or were threatening, but now the police just have to suspect damage could be caused and that’s enough to remove their vehicles, which in most instances for those communities are also their homes. The police can look at you and decide ‘nah I reckon in 5 years-time they’ll push over a bin’ and that’s it. It’s like the thought police if they didn’t do much thinking and what they did was largely based on sterotypes and the Daily Mail.

More than 150 human rights charities, unions and faith communities have spoken out against this bill warning that it gives too much discretionary power to the police and the home office, something that after Patel already made it clear how much she hated the BLM and XR movements and generally all of humanity is very worrying. When you have a government with an 80-seat majority who doesn’t want anyone to be able to protest against their actions it’s all a bit scary. Well scarier than it already has been anyway. On the plus side, if we all plan this carefully, the police can’t arrest millions of us all singing Baby Shark in Westminster at the same time to protest for our human rights, and personally I think it’d worth it to try. And we’d get to shout doo doo at the government. Win.

And now back to Helen…

INTERVIEW WITH HELEN PART 2

Thanks tons to Helen for having time to chat. You can find Helen’s book ‘Women Vs Hollywood’ well, everywhere that does books really. I would expect that if you’ve found this podcast ok, you can probably find a book online but if you are struggling then try looking at book-stores, particularly independent ones that need sales, rather than say, looking at Halfords. Halfords probably won’t have it. No that’s not just because they rarely seem to have the thing you actually need. But really do grab of a copy of Women Vs Hollywood as it’s a fascinating and eye-opening read, with some truly incredible tales from the early days of film making too. It was Radio 4’s book of the week and you can find all 5 episode of that on BBC Sounds and the link will be in the pod blurb. You can find Helen on twitter @helenLOHara, on Instagram at heleno84 and of course Empire Magazine is empireonline.com, the Empire Film Podcast is on all the podcast getting places and of course you can actually buy Empire Magazine as a magazine too. I know right? Big thanks to Rhiannon for putting me in touch with Helen too.

Who else to chat to for this here show? Let me know. Ooh that rhymes. You can of course tell me all your podcastical recommendations for guests by dropping me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast group on Facebook, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could have a peaceful gathering to promote it to me, but chances are the police will charge in and shut it down to protect the public from you being completely unthreatening. 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. Thank you once again for listening especially in this week where it’s been the absolute opposite of fun writing for it. If for some reason you enjoy knowing that I put myself through the unenviable task of mashing this lot together, then please do tell others to get onboard the bandwagon of weekly despair, give the show a nice review on one of them podcast platforms and throw some money at the ko-fi, patreon or Acast Supporter site.

Arrigato gozimas to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Katie Coxall.

This will be back next week when we discover Priti Patel has put in small print in the Policing Bill that she’s allowed solely allowed to act as a vigilante, when a masked character calling herself the Grinner handcuffs a child and hands them into the police because they stood on the wrong side of an escalator.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Bus Back Butter! In line with the new government policy, Bus Back Butter is promotional butter made by churning it with the back wheels of several provincial buses as they drive all your favourite routes. A rich creamy texture mixed with the taste of Britain, which happens to be mud, gravel, horse shit and roadkill. Plus the buttery wheels means they skid along to your stop even quicker. They might skid past it but at least they were on time. Bus Back Butter! Making Butter Britain Again! Build Back Butter! Get Butter Done! Britain Deserves Butter! A clear economic plan and a Butter more stable future! Are you thinking what we’re thinking because its butter, we’re only thinking of butter. And buses. Help!

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