Further Reading

Linear liner notes 

Is there anyone that hasn’t worked for Greensill? I’m starting to feel left out. Things be so corrupt even the people monitoring the cronyism be cronied. But it’s ok as the government won’t let the same happen to football or something. More of that, not so stealthy NHS privatising and a chat with Matt Fulton at Progressive Politics NI (@ProgPoliticsNI).

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

• • Progressive Politics NI on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ProgPoliticsNI 
• • Progressive Politics NI on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/ProgressivePoliticsNI 
• • Progressive Politics NI on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/progressivepoliticsni 
• • Jayne McCormack on Twitter – https://twitter.com/bbcjaynemcc
• • Amanda Ferguson on Twitter – https://twitter.com/amandafbelfast
• • Allison Morris on Twitter – https://twitter.com/AllisonMorris1
• • Sam McBride on Twitter – https://twitter.com/sjamcbride
• • Slugger O’Toole on Twitter – https://twitter.com/SluggerOToole 
• • Slugger O’Toole website – https://sluggerotoole.com/ 
• • Peter Donaghy on Twitter – https://twitter.com/peterdonaghy

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

Ep228

BRITISH BOXERS ADVERT

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that would never get involved in lobbying but that’s usually because I can’t get past security at the door let alone into the reception area. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as Prime Minister and idol representing the god of thrift heaps Boris Johnson condemns proposals for English football teams to join a closed European Super League, as clubs must answer to their fans. Weird as based on his premiership you think he’d be all for a system that ignores the people to cater just for a few elites, so maybe it’s actually that Johnson would prefer it was a Global Super League that only takes place in England.

Look, I’m not going to pretend to understand football, or deny that I heard the term European Super League on the news and automatically assumed it’d be a Marvel style game where each team has at least one robot, one dog in a cape and one alien on its side and they can enter the pitch in a car that is also a plane. But what is clear is that in the plans for six premier league clubs to join this new midweek competition, fans are upset that the teams are following their greedy pursuit of money, and fair play as that is blatant plagiarism of the sport in Westminster and they should stick to their own kicky one. It would be nice to think that the reason the government are angry about it is because they actually cared for those who love football but as the Culture Secretary and cartoon mascot for melanomas Oliver Dowden insisted that any major decision about the sport needs to have the fans backing, you wonder why he’s got no interest in politics working in the same way. The Culture Secretary said that he joined the roars of outrage expressed about it, which I can imagine was like having a kazoo as part of a brass band, and that the government will do whatever it takes to stop the breakaway league, which based on the last time they said that about anything means a lot of people will die in the process so I guess it’ll be not too dissimilar to the World Cup. A Department for Culture, Media and Sport official, you know the bit of the government that collects together all the areas it’s ignored most in the past year, said that they’ve noticed that German clubs aren’t taking part in the super league and so will be looking at the model they’ve used. Oh, I see, so now Germany doesn’t want to be included in something they’re worth listening to, are they? Only one of the six clubs joining the league is owned by a British organisation, so if anything you’d expect that any second now International Development Secretary and plastic bag in slight breeze Liz Truss would be announcing this as a post-Brexit success before trying to sell off the last team to North Korea along with six bags of Somerset Brie to seal the deal.

Labour leader and Af70 Automatic Binding Punching Perforator Machine Keir Starmer said, and I quote ‘The reason why football is the most important and loved sport across the globe is because it is a simple game anyone can play, and anyone can enjoy.’ Which is exactly the sort of thing someone might say if they’d never heard of football before. Starmer said the super league pulls up the drawbridge, diminishes competition and ignores fans, you know just weeks after Labour parachuted an unsuitable candidate into Hartlepool against the Constituency Labour Party’s wishes and blocked the selected Liverpool mayoral candidates from running at all.

I’m not of course saying that MPs and football players are the same, god no, I mean as we’ve seen from Marcus Rashford, footballers can actually get useful policies pushed through whereas MPs just seem forever intent on playing their own game and moving the goalposts for everyone else. It’s just that I bet if this super league was run by a family member of the Health Secretary and human worry lines Matt Hancock, then the government would have already drained the last dregs of finances from Education in order to get another friend’s company to build unsafe mega stadiums and then pack thousands of people into them in the midst of a pandemic before insisting the 5^th wave and 2m deaths that followed were to do with a variant that only infects those that are poor enough to deserve it. Maybe that is it? By pretending they have conviction on something, it might distract from the situation currently happening at Whitehall aka Greensill HQ, where it seems if you’re a civil servant or minister who hasn’t worked for the now defunct financial services company, then you must be feeling like the last to be picked for the team, even if that team wouldn’t even be able to take part in the European Super League as that’d require at least some level of transparent competition. Yes, it seems Prime Minister and silly putty accident David Cameron has done one useful thing in his entire life, which was to be so shit at attempted lobbying that its blown open even more evidence that Whitehall is far less a democratic institution but a long running series of My Little Crony. While Davey swole face was wining and dining with government ministers to get them to give his new business fam some dosh, it seems a top civil servant was also working for Greensill while still on the government payroll, so it must be nice for Cameron to see that his career influenced someone. It is pretty common for civil servants to have second jobs, because god knows, working for MPs can’t be fulfilling especially if it’s one of the bullying ones. But Lord Eric Pickles, part man, part swollen knee, is the chair of the advisory committee on business appointments, and he said that this case has breached government guidelines and warned that there are no boundaries between the civil service and the private sector. And no wonder he’s aware of that as Pickles himself is President of an Enterprise Forum that boasts of its access to government ministers, a conflict of interest that he’s never bothered to declare. Still, I guess that proves he’s an expert in it all. Conservative MPs voted down a Labour motion to have a parliamentary inquiry into the lobbying scandal, and I guess that’s fair as why would you waste the time and money when it’s like having an inquiry into if the sky is blue or if its ever worth watching ITV2.

The biggest issue is that under parliamentary code, no one has done anything wrong. Environment Secretary and besuited woodlouse George Eustice said that on the face of it, David Cameron has done nothing wrong. Though he didn’t say which of his faces that was. When it was revealed that Matt Hancock has shares in a company that his sister owns and was given a lucrative three-year contract with NHS Wales for confidential waste destruction aka shredding documents, a government spokesperson just said the Health Secretary had done nothing wrong. And I suppose to be fair, if I wanted some really important documents destroyed, or lost, or accidentally put in the recycling, then I’d entrust a family member to do it to as they are experts at that sort of thing. Former chief Scientist and like if someone squished and dried out Hugh Grant Sir David King accused the government this week of privatising the NHS by stealth, which I don’t agree with as its not stealthy at all. They have all the stealth skills of a ninja dressed in a pink-fluorescent shell suit playing a vuvuzela. It’s clear that the entire financial situation of the health service is now dependent on how many relatives Matt Hancock has.

Of course, on the surface nothing was wrong about any of these things and that’s because it’s the surface and buried deep below that is where you find all the dodgy shit, somewhere in the ditch Johnson refused to die in a few year ago as it might’ve drawn unwanted attention to it. Nothing is wrong as long as the right wrong people are doing it you see, and the right wrong people are in charge of it, monitoring it and writing the rules about exactly what is an isn’t wrong in the first place. It’s like trying to bring a universal code of human rights that prohibits torture to Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell. It does make you wonder why anyone bothers, when having watched the Untouchables the only way any of this will be brought down is if a top Conservative evaded taxes and then…oh no wait. Ah well. Not sure what’s left then. Six opposition parties have signed a letter to urge the Speaker and Aardman animation Lindsay Hoyle to allow a parliamentary vote on an inquiry into Boris Johnson’s consistent failure to be honest, as if it somehow passed the government wouldn’t just do the inquiry themselves and then announce the results during a press conference where everyone’s pants are visibly on fire to say the result is that the Prime Minister said he’s never lied not even once and so that’s that. The letter was signed by leaders of the Green Party, SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, SDLP and Alliance party, but not by Keir Starmer as apparently Labour don’t sign up to initiatives launched by other parties. You know, unless its inadequate COVID restrictions like sending children back to schools too soon. It’s an odd decision after a week where Labour shadow ministers have been on every TV interview, article and tweet complaining about endemic Tory Sleaze, but when asked to do something about it they’d rather just leave it alone. The party has become the physical manifestation of online campaigning, very happy to point the finger at others but if asked what it is they’re going to do about it, they tell you that if you don’t know then it’s not worth having this conversation and block you.

Thankfully the UN have stepped up to be the official opposition to the government this week, like when someone’s parent has to stop a playground fight because all the teachers and pupils see it so often they’ve got scrap blindness. They condemned the recently released Race Report and said that it was stunning to read a report in 2021 that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying stats. Yeah, have you met our government before? You’ve basically summed up the last decade of British leadership, it’s like a pro-guide to dog-whistle fiction. The UN say that the report normalises white supremacy and could fuel racism in the UK, as though it doesn’t already run on constantly renewable energy. They have advised the British government scrap the report, but I suppose the problem with that would be that’d mean they’d have to listen to forriners, which as we all know, is only acceptable when it comes to football.

In Scotland, the parties have started to campaign for the election in May, with SNP leader and sticklebrick figure Nicola Sturgeon promising transformational NHS funding, though she hasn’t said what it will transform it into especially as it’s not long been turned from a public health service into Matt Hancock’s family estate. Both the SNP and Greens have said that people should get a say on what a post-pandemic country looks like, through an independence referendum but opponents have said that is undermining the recovery because as we all know, we won’t have returned to normality until the public is as ignored again as they were beforehand. The Scottish Rewilding Alliance are urging parties to commit to make Scotland the first rewilding nation, re-introducing animals that were previously extinct in the country, you know, like the Scottish Labour party. The UK government is taking Scottish parliament to court over its unanimous passing of two bills including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which sets out the rights of children. No.10 are worried it goes beyond the scope of devolved powers but I’m sure it’s mainly because if it went through, there would be pressure on all of the UK to put it into domestic law which could directly threaten the Prime Minister as he’d have to spend all his time avoiding his newly empowered hordes of offspring.

Home Secretary and large angry wasp Priti Patel has warned Facebook that their new privacy and encryption plans must not hamper the police’s ability to tackle abhorrent criminal acts, you know like candlelit vigils or doing an annoying protest. Patel herself was found by two court judges to have breached human rights rules by failing to ensure deaths in immigration centres were properly investigated, rather than Patel just adding another notch to the markings on her office wall. The judges found the Home Office’s policies that fail to get evidence from those who may have relevant information about a death in detention, to be ‘legally deficient’. Which is funny as that’s also what it says in Patel’s tinder bio. On a similar lack of caring note, the Home Office has also stopped recording how many Windrush victims have died before receiving compensation as that way they can’t be scrutinised for it. I mean why not just stop recording numbers of claimants altogether, or compensation figures and whenever someone asks about it shrug and say ‘I dunno’ until they go away? Why do any work at all when the entire Home Office could operate on an out of office auto-reply that says ‘ask someone else’?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned that vaccine passports could create a two tier society, but that’s at least 1-2 tiers less than we have now so if anything, it’d be an improvement. University students have been told they can return to face to face lessons on May 17^th, which based on when I was a student, is just in time for face to face lessons to stop, exams to begin and then everyone to go home a week or two later. The Prime Minister has cancelled his trip to India due to massive rise in cases there and a new variant that has already been discovered in the UK as the country wasn’t on the travel ban list until after Johnson said he wouldn’t be visiting, as though if even he won’t go there it’s got to be bad. Like a stupid, lard canary.

And lastly, Keir Starmer has been condemned by environmental activists for choosing to fly to Edinburgh Airport, before then complaining in a campaign advert that the airport was empty, you know, in the middle of a pandemic with a travel ban. I suppose Starmer was desperate for something that he was involved in to actually take off. And a barmy, shouty landlord of a pub in Bath threw Starmer out of his venue during the Labour leader’s visit to the city, complaining that he had failed to ask the questions that needed asking about the pandemic. Which isn’t fair to Starmer, as actually he’s equally failed to ask the questions that needing asking about anything at all.

ADMIN

Hello ParPolBrods! Yes, I did jokes about football and I don’t even understand offside! I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. Apologies to all of you who do like football for my jokes that must’ve had all the nuanced understanding of the situation that you’d get from watching a Fox News special on saying actual facts in a quiet voice. I’m hoping this week’s show makes even a vague bit of sense because I’ll be honest, I have no idea. My agent had us up for two and a half hours last night because she’d had a nightmare about flies. Yep. The insect ones, not like not being able to do her trousers up. Apparently, they were angry with her because she scratched one of them. And look, I don’t do dream analysis but if part of that dream is that she has the speed and skill to scratch a fly that feels like a prophecy of dormant powers. I’m just saying and no, that sort of reasoning with her didn’t help at 3am. I have been to places outside of my area this past week, had sandwiches that I haven’t made myself and got annoyed with other people just like I used to back in the day. It’s nice isn’t it? I’ve been really missing other people and it only took me about a week to realise how irritating they can be as they stand in the middle of a narrow path or fail to indicate while driving or litter or you know, be shit and I’ve already said 2 or 3 times that maybe I miss lockdown after all. I used to think that a big way to combat the issues of loneliness in Britain, would just to be to facilitate people who suffered from it, in getting on a bus during rush hour and it’d be minutes before they craved their own company again. I am being facetious; it is nice really. Sort of.

I’ll keep my rambling short this week as the interview’s a long un. So big time thanks to Deathboy, Joe H, H and ko-fi supporter who I think is a different one to the other ones who donate under that name. Parents are so unoriginal nowadays huh? Anyway, big time thanks for donating to the ko-fi this past week. That money will have gone to at least one nice sandwich that I didn’t have to make, and I appreciate that. Obvs if you’d like to help me get nice sandwiches or just enjoy this podcast so much you think its worth at least a pound, dollar, yen or singular coin of your choice, then please pop them coins in the digital slot that resides at ko-fi.com/parpolbro, join the patreon.com/parpolbro page or the Acast supporter button. You can of course just review the show or tell other people to listen to it which costs nothing. Kindness costs zilch apparently but it also doesn’t stop you feeling hungry unless you’re being extra kind and also buying me a sandwich. Thanks.

Two quick things that I forgot last week. One is thanks to excellent comedian type and host of Quantum Leopard, James Ross, who you can find on Twitter @jamesrosscomedy as one of the taglines to a gag I did last week was actually from his reply to me on Twitter and I only realised it wasn’t from my head afterwards. Naughty plagiarising me. Also I forgot to thank Rhiannon for helping get Dayana Shalai as the guest for last week’s show, so thanks for that too. Basically, I’ve been a massively ungrateful git, but I have had some nice sandwiches, so I think it all balances out.

On this week’s show, former podcast from way back in 2017, Matt Fulton from Progressive Politics Northern Ireland talks to me all about things kicking off over there that if you’re in England you’ll only have heard about as item number 5 on the news like it’s a passing thought or someone they forgot to thank for something on the previous episode. Plus, some stuff in the middle about privatisation. Which is public because I wasn’t clever enough to save time and outsource it.

INTERVIEW WITH MATT

The way that Westminster politicians and most of British media treat Northern Ireland is a lot like how I treat postage and packaging on things I want to buy online. You know, forgetting it exists until I go to pay and suddenly there’s these extra costs I hadn’t even begun to consider and now I’m annoyed that something has made my plans more complicated rather than understand that it’s my fault for refusing to acknowledge that magic teleportation doesn’t exist yet. If you were to count the ways in which Northern Ireland has been neglected by successive British governments over the centuries, you’d need more fingers than a sponge biscuit factory, but in the last few alone it has felt the Conservatives have really tried their best to ignore that part of the union in the hope it just goes away and gets on with it. Warnings about Brexit reigniting sectarian violence or leading to border control issues were met with the sort of debating tactics you’d only learn from teachers that will tell you that you have Jedi mind powers because your parents are paying them too much to disagree. Oh, but there isn’t a border in the Irish Sea, yelped Brandon Lewis, the latest Secretary of State for Northern Ireland reboot with barely any consideration taken for the original narrative, on January 1^st as there was indeed a border in the Irish sea. Shows how often he bothers to visit. Shed jellyfish skin Michael Gove said that food shortages were all just part of leaving the European Union, though I suppose for him causing another famine would be a return to Britain’s glory days. And of course, issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol are all the EU’s fault for being so petty as to want the British government not to break international law. Jeez what total jobsworths amIright and maybe if international law was more like British law and only cared about England, then it wouldn’t be an issue, so who’s fault is that huh? The last few weeks have depressingly seen violence kick off all across the country, with 90 police officers injured, multiple arrests and one bus being set on fire. The latter event was the point at which it was decided the British government should maybe at least acknowledge what was happening, because as we know they’ll do anything to defend a bus. So, is Brexit entirely to blame for this? Or have tensions risen after Sinn Fein leaders were let off from breaching COVID restrictions, though as the past year has shown, that is always a great way to unite people even if it’s against you. Or is it that traditionally in Northern Ireland, Easter is a time for increased communal conflicts because let’s face it, after 4 days of bank holiday you do start to get a bit bored. Or is that Northern Ireland only just managed to get an Executive and then COVID, with its superb timing abilities, rendered that pretty pointless? Is this a restart of troubling times for NI, or a mere stumbling block in the progress the country was making? And will someone have to set fire to a bus every time they want Boris Johnson to even remember they exist?

This week I spoke to Matt Fulton, who runs Progressive Politics NI, a group dedicated to changing Northern Irish politics for the better. I actually spoke to Matt on this show way back in 2017, when he very astutely was concerned about outcomes that are now happening and we discussed just how the country was overlooked by the government and British news in much the same way it still is. So, it was lovely to get Matt back on the show to unfortunately have to ask him many of the same questions again, just 4 years down the line. So, somethings to quickly add. Matt has kids, at one point one of his kids can be heard crying in the background. I edited the bits where he had to go and check everything was ok and it was, it’s just kids because that’s how they work, so just be assured that if you hear crying, he’s not just being neglectful and ignoring it. He’s a much nicer man than that. Also I am a bit wrong when I point out that the Sinn Fein politicians breaking COVID restrictions at Bobby Storey’s funeral wasn’t in the news. It was, it’s just it was the same week as Rishi Sunak announced the first round of emergency COVID funding that didn’t help anyone, so I think it was hidden far away from the front pages.

BBC ARTICLE TODAY

And as we talk about COVID restrictions in Northern Ireland, it’s now been decided things will be opening up from April 30th. Right, now enjoy Matt, who manages to be a joy to talk to despite the subject matter and even throws in some optimism. Here he is:

INTERVIEW WITH MATT PART 1

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

MIDDLE BIT –

Last week former Chief Scientific Advisor to the government Sir David King accused Johnson’s lot of being a chumocracy, because it is, smelling of corruption, which it does, mishandling the pandemic and climate crisis which it is and of privatising the NHS by stealth. Now that last one there isn’t wrong as such, I’m just not entirely certain that its by stealth unless the definition of stealth now means being undetected because absolutely none of the major broadcasted voices are pointing at you and saying, ‘there you are!’ Its stealth in the same way that I am stealth according to producers of comedy shows on television. They know I exist, but they aren’t too keen to point it out so it’s easier to pretend I don’t. What I mean is it really doesn’t take much to see all the areas of the NHS that the government have fobbed off to anyone that Matt Hancock has a passing acquaintance with. It was increasing before el covido, with spending on services provided by private companies to the NHS up by half a billion in 2019/20, and at least 10% of social care spending too. 20/21 hasn’t been entirely totted up by the National Audit Office yet because its only just April, guys, chill. Who does their tax that quickly eh? Actually, this year, me, because it has absolutely zero incomings or outgoings. Thanks, COVID. Thanks tons. But what we do already know is that £17.3bn of COVID related contracts went to companies outside of the NHS, and over £10bn of that was done without any competitive procedure at all.

Emergency COVID regulations meant that contracts could be dished out without the same sort of consultation or due process as before, something that’s been mentioned a gazillion times on this show before and this week remerged as it turned out Matt Hancock’s sister’s company that he also has shares in, took a 3 year contract at £150k a year just to shred documents, something that I’m certain someone in-house at the NHS could’ve done pretty well. I can only assume the documents contained some dodgy shit and Hancock was worried NHS staff might be able to successfully stitch it back together afterwards. A number of companies involved in some of the biggest contracts are ones such as Serco which has got an amazingly shit record of being crap at health but still gets tons of jobs. In 2012 it admitted giving false data 252 times on its out of hours service in Cornwall. I mean once or twice might be error, three to four times you might say was malice, but 252? That can only happen if you have given a job to someone who has no actual idea what that job is. They saw ‘collect data’ and went round harvesting reddish brown dried fruits from palm trees. In 2018 Serco ran a breast cancer screening hotline where no one was medically trained and read off cheat sheets to anyone who called, and in 2019 they were fined £22.9m over fraud and false accounting about electronic tags. Yet after all that, the Department of Health still went, yeah you can prob have millions and millions in contracts during this crisis where data and not being all false is pretty important. I’m sure you guys will be great. And then of course they hired a ton of staff for test and trace with no medical training. There’s a fine line between giving a second chance and just throwing shit at a Serco built wall knowing not all of it will fall over despite being built by underpaid workers who’ve never seen a wall before. When Serco got its contract for Covid tracing, it then subcontracted the job to 29 other companies and suddenly you’ve got no clue where the tax money is going and you’re being contact traced by someone who’s thinks it involves pressing tracing paper to your head and rubbing a crayon over your face.

Capita got a pretty large contract even though they ‘accidentally mistakenly archived 160,000 patient records and lost a contract to run cervical screenings after not sending out any appointment invitations to anyone so no one knew it was there. It’s like they are the most expensive teenagers on work experience ever.

As well as the big contracts to useless arseholes, one of the UK’s biggest GP practice operators with over 500,000 patients, was merged with a US health insurance group Centene Corporation back in Feb. It’s actually a subsidiary of Centene, which there’s loads of and a quick google shows several of them have been involved in controversies such as charges of mismanagement across more than a dozen US states. They aren’t known as practices because staff there are just learning for the big final performance you know. Control for 8 practices in London was approved in a virtual meeting that was only 9 minutes long and Centene was never even mentioned, and no questions were asked. Why would they be when the answers to any of them would be ‘more expensive than it’s worth’ and ‘yes they’ll probably fuck it up’ and ‘Yeah, I bumped into Matt Hancock at Halfords and he said I could have them for a few panini stickers’.

The Conservatives have very openly been saying since 1977 that they’ll sell off the NHS by a policy of preparation for a return to the private sector by stealth, so it’s not like it’s unexpected, but the big damage is in how much has been cut from the NHS, £1bn in real terms since 2015/16, meaning that they will have less and less resources and staff which will mean contracts will go to private companies who’ll do a shit job instead and those areas of healthcare will be unlikely to ever return into the health service again. More privatisation means less accountability for the Department of Health over failures, less money for the NHS which in turn means more cuts which in turn means more subcontracting and less regulation and before you know it, if there’s another pandemic we’ll all be relying on a teenager doing a 4 hour weekend shift to be administering lifesaving procedures while watching a guide on youtube, while Matt Hancock’s 12^th uncle twice removed and resurrected using ancient magic will have just bought a new tank on the profits. I guess it is stealthy, if you’re not looking or refuse to peak through your fingers. But if we all just point and shout it’ll have a much harder time sneaking about.

Sir David King heads up the Independent Sage group that you can find at independentsage.org, ast May on the podcast I spoke to Dr Tony O’Sullivan at Keep Our NHS Public if you fancy giving that a re-listen and you can find them at keepournhspublic.com, and check out the campaign We Own It at weownit.org.uk.

And now back to Matt…

INTERVIEW WITH MATT PART 2

It was great to speak to Matt again and I would highly recommend following his Progressive Politics NI on twitter @progpoliticsNI, the Progressive Politics NI Facebook page and progressivepoliticsNI on Instagram too. All the other people Matt recommends will be linked to on the website later in the week thanks to the brilliant Kat Day who types up the liner notes for every episode because she’s unbelievably nice like that.

What else do you need explainers on right now? What politics am I doing missing? Hit me up with your guest or topic suggestions by dropping me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast group on Facebook, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or just email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could lobby me with drinks, expensive lunches and lots of direct meetings in order to get your recommendations booked in straight away with preferential treatment, but I mean have you heard this show before? Who are you? It’s really not worth it. Though I’ll happily take some free lunch if you’re buying. As always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it? But seriously, free lunch sounds great.

END

Yeah, another Partly Political Broadcast podcast all done, dusted, and in the bag from where it will be carried to a reuse and recycling centre and each individual sound will be filtered out and used again in products ranging from adverts for brain bleaching products, sound effects for radio plays about having something lodged in your throat all the way to general day to day needs like when you’ve forgotten a word and need someone else’s. If you’d like to recycle your own copy of the podcast, rather than bury it in Mother Earth and let it contaminate the ground with jingles, then you can do so by playing it to someone else you think might like it and potentially even telling them to get hold of it themselves and listen to their own version rather than use your phone when you need it for everything except calling people. Failing that, why not tell others via social media to listen to this podcast, or give the show a nice review on one of them podcast platforms which will, er, help the planet, by, er mumble mumble mumble. Or of course, you could donate to the ko-fi, patreon or acast supporter pages in order for me to buy the correct tools to safely dispose of any leftover podcasts all by myself. Up to you. I mean if you don’t do it, I will just feed them to an endangered horse and that will be your fault. So you know, on your head and all that.

Much obliged to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Katie Coxall.

This will be back next week when it turns out that everyone in the entirety of Westminster politics works for Greensill and that the company never went bust but instead disguised itself as the UK parliament, and the UK Parliament as Greensill and in fact, parliament is dead, and David Cameron is actually still our prime minister and then we all wake up screaming.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by the European Super League, once an ordinary League until it was bit by a radioactive European and became European Super League. Super kickings, super goalings, super expensive even more so than normal football. See your favourite teams, no not that one, no not the one you support, the other ones, owned by rich dudes, play in gold on a gold pitch with a gold ball that you can’t kick very well. European Super League, for when you want the worst of normal league football but with pants over the shorts.

CLICK TO GO BACK