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All change on perfectly normal island this week, with a new king and a new PM in just 48 hours. Obviously there is only one story and the entire world has stopped for 10 days including this podcast that contains zero comedy whatsoever out of respect, and therefore is exactly the same as all previous episodes. Plus a chat with Dominic Caddick (@DominicCaddick) at the New Economics Foundation (@NEF) about the cost of living crisis, which selfishly hasn’t gone on hold for 10 days.

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

• Dominic on Twitter – https://twitter.com/DominicCaddick 
• New Economics Foundation on Twitter – https://twitter.com/NEF 
• The New Economics Foundation podcast – https://neweconomics.org/section/podcasts  
• The Financial Times on Twitter – https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes 
• The Economist on Twitter – https://twitter.com/TheEconomist 
• The Guardian on Twitter – https://twitter.com/guardian 
• The Trades Union Congress (TUC) on Twitter – https://twitter.com/The_TUC 

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• Get 15% off at British Boxers with the code in the episode – https://british-boxers.com 
• Nowtflix – http://nowtflix.co.uk
• 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

EP283

Warning: In honour of the death of Queen Elizabeth the sequel, the Partly Political Broadcast podcast will be strictly adhering to the ban on all comedy or humour that is in place on the BBC. Therefore, this episode will be in no way different to any previous ones.

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that will be observing a 10-day period of mourning, by that I mean I’ll be having only breakfast for all meals. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week, as The Queen dies just a day and a half after meeting the new Prime Minister and marionette in a tumble dryer Liz Truss, it is now clear that she really did represent the mood of the entire nation.

God save our…oh mate, come on God. You had one job. Yes, it is all change on this perfectly normal island! This time last week we had a different prime minister and a Queen, but here we are now with a new but equally shit, and depressingly awful prime minister who at least brushes her hair but moves like someone has glued cotton buds together and thrown a sack over them, and we have a King. One who takes cash donations from Saudi tycoons, is big on homeopathy even though I’m not sure how he thinks water can have a memory when his own family can’t seem to remember what his brother Andrew has been up to, and his name King Charles the Third, sounds like cockney rhyming slang for needing the loo. Well, I suppose he will now reside on the throne for a while. It is always the last part of the trilogy that’s the worst isn’t it? Oh well.

It was of course, a big shock to the nation that Queen Elizabeth the 2^nd aged only a sprightly 96, but I suppose that is what will happen under a Conservative government that makes everyone work well past the age of retirement. I mean, I really hate the idea of writing a letter to myself too, even though some people reckon its therapeutic. Some papers said her death, following 96 years of a very well lived multi-millionaire life and then surrounded by family as she went peacefully, as the saddest moment in the last 70 years of British history. True, true. How could all the disasters, wars, terror attacks, pandemics, deaths caused by austerity, police murdering people, that time Madonna fell off the stage at the Brits or the existance of Gregg Wallace come close to the absolute tragedy of an old lady dying of old age? It is because the Queen did so much for the country that her death was so sad. She posed for every coin, without ever complaining. She took on the mantle of all that wealth gained from colonisation, slavery and imperialism without ever grumbling about it. Never once did she roll her eyes at having to give her son millions of pounds to insist he’s not a massive paedo. There was that time she failed to get a government poverty fund to heat Buckingham Palace and had to use taxpayers’ money instead, which must’ve been so hard. And of-course she jumped out of a plane at the Olympics and talked to a CGI bear. Can you name a woman that’s done more for the UK? No, of course not. No women I know have talked to a CGI bear and probably never, ever will. When she died there were double rainbows outside Buckingham Palace which showed without a doubt that her reign had ended, and er, it was now sunny. Someone spotted a cloud that looked just like her maj too, which must be disappointing for the Queen who was clearly trying to do a Mufasa on her son but got the wrong bit of sky. I do hope she had the James Earl Jones voice ready too. With Queen Elizabeth the sequel gone, it is undoubtably the end of an era. We are no longer Elizabethans, which no one knew thought we were anyway. We are now Charlatans. Charlie big potatoes? I’m not sure. I do however regret buying a new book of stamps just two weeks ago.

So now, we are observing ten days or mourning, or at least occasionally seeing it pop up on Twitter and Facebook from people you haven’t seen in ten years and intend to keep it that way. It turns out, what the Queen would have wanted because she had an excellent sense of humour you know, was for there to be no comedy on state television at all and for events like the Last Night of the Proms where they played all her top tunes to not go ahead. The Met office stopped forecasting because what the Queen would’ve wanted was you going outside inappropriately dressed for the weather. All the football got cancelled because she loved sport and really its very lucky no one used to make a point about how much she liked food or breathing or we could all be in a lot of trouble right now. We had only ever heard stories about how great she was but if all her last wishes were just for the entire country to have a really shit 10 days, then it doesn’t paint the best picture of Her Maj. Not that she needed that as she already had that one from Rolf Harris. Then again, I do quite like the idea of thinking ‘well I’ve died so I may as well ruin someone else’s life’ although she did already do that by appointing Liz Truss to the post of Prime Minister. And all the previous Prime Ministers before that. It is very different to when lots of people died during the pandemic as the way to respect that was by getting back to the office and having £10 off a Nandos. But because the Queen earned her way into being born into her family, everything had to stop. I would like to suggest that this isn’t at all what she wanted, say I royal expert and by that I mean I’ve seen some 1p and 2ps before, but instead this is mere age-old tradition, the very same tradition that means her son is now King, even though it’d have been much better if there’d been some sort of Gladiators style reality TV show challenge to find us a new one. Tradition means even the Bank of England postponed their new eye wateringly damaging high inflation rates in honour of the Queen, which is interesting. Is the way to stop inflation just for national treasures to pop their clogs? Will we see the government announce that instead of giving workers much needed pay rises, that they’ll have some sort of big wood chopping machine and when we next hear cost of living is creeping up again, they’ll give Attenborough a shove into it? The Prime Minister Liz Truss, urgh, still saying that just makes me retch just a bit in my own mouth, urgh sorry, Prime Minister Liz Truss, also went along with this tradition of making sure absolutely nothing was remotely enjoyable by delivering a speech outside Number 10 where she sounded like the child at a school performance whose been handed something by the teacher to read because her own writing was too embarrassing to be heard in public. The Prime Minister said Queen Elizabeth was the very spirit of Great Britain, which I suppose would suggest the country was already dead. Footage has emerged of teenage Truss saying anti-monarchy statements and calling the Royal Family disgraceful, but it can’t be used against her as all her opinions have a shelf life of around two minutes. I can’t imagine she ever gives the same answer twice and I reckon she repeatedly fails at website capture tests. In France she has apparently become known as the Iron Weathervane, which doesn’t feel right, not least because I’d never trust a weather report from her. Oh god, that’s not how it’s going to be done with the Met Office forecasts stopping is it? We’re in so much trouble. Her Twitter message was at least a bit better in that she was obviously so sad about it all that the photo only had her taking up half the image as opposed to a proper selfie like she does for everything else.

Having truly terrible oratory skills is a precedent Liz Truss had set just days before, with her first speech as Prime Minister cementing that she has the incredible skill of being able to talk for quite some time without saying anything at all. It’s just a real shame she went into politics rather than sleep tapes. Aside from killing the Queen, I mean, she was only 96 so you don’t just die at that age do you? It’s a bit suspicious right? I do hope there’s an enquiry. Maybe its because there can be only one Liz in a top job at a time? Probably tradition or something. Aside from that, which you have to admit is a pretty rough start to your first week on the job, things have been going great for our new PM. She quickly filled her cabinet with people so inept at their jobs and indeed pretending to be human beings, that it almost makes her look competent in comparison. Almost. Ok, not really. Deputy Prime Minister and Health Secretary is bearskin hat’s had a hard life Therese Coffey, a woman whose main achievements so far include being the head of the Department of Work and Pensions when they cut people’s benefits during the pandemic and said they could just work more hours, you know when no one could go to work incase they’d die. She also refused to release reports on how many people had died due to her failings which is weird as you’d think it’d be the sort of thing she’d want to boast to people about. Everything about Therese Coffey suggests that you’d only have to hang around with her for 5 minutes at most before you’d heard her say suggest poor people should be eaten and wafted a fart at a homeless person as it’s what they deserve for not trying hard enough. The new Chancellor is Kwasi Kwarteng, a man seemingly designed by a protractor, who recently supported former MP and badger botherer Owen Paterson when he was found to have been lobbying up the eyeballs. So its good to know Kwarteng won’t just hand out cash to anyone, he’ll have to have been paid by them with some cash in brown envelopes first. Zippy the Pinhead tribute act James Cleverly is Foreign Secretary despite it being very likely that his concept of international relations is having a facebook friend who lives on Canvey Island. The Home Secretary is workhouse elf Suella Braverman who is probably already in the Channel trying to sink her teeth into dinghies. Then other lowlights include Agatha Christie’s The Mystery Of The Blue Drain Jacob Rees Mogg becoming Business, Energy and Industrial Secretary, an appointment that only lead to an incinerator being built to burn orphans for energy, or an insistence that by helping Cthulu to rise we’ll never need gas heating again.

Actually, that wouldn’t be as bad a plan as the one that’s actually being pushed through. At least Cthulu rising out of the water would lower sea levels a bit. The government though are going back to focusing on extracting fossil fuels, and I do hope they start with the lumps of coal that the cabinet have in place of hearts. At a time of climate crisis you might think reverting to doing the exact thing that kickstarted the climate crisis in the first place would be a terrible idea, and you’d be right unless it sort of works like when you persuade a kid to stop smoking by making them smoke 400 packets all at once. Rees-Mogg is a climate denier, because they didn’t know how the ozone worked in Victorian times and he can only read things that have been written on manuscripts. It is also likely no, not because he is a decrepit fossil himself, but because he is the shareholder of a company with investments in fossil fuel companies, much like how the Prime Minister Liz Truss got some rather large donation sums to her leadership campaign from oil giants and energy companies. So its clearer than British skies or indeed waters, why Truss’s big energy freeze plan is mostly to give energy companies lots of money to charge us more than they did before but lucky you, it’s not as much as they could have done. Great, I am so grateful to have someone in charge who would consider they’d done a good job if during a hostage situation they’d persuaded the kidnapper to only cut off 5 of the victim’s fingers instead of all ten. Actually, that’s not fair, Truss would’ve bored them to sleep after 2 minutes of talking into a loudhailer and then they could just go in and free people. So the government will give energy companies £150bn in taxpayer funds to freeze prices at over a thousand pounds more than they were a year ago, but Truss insists she’s on the side of the people here. Yes, like a thorn. There has also been a decision to renew fracking, because what would be really helpful is taking 8 years to get enough gas to heat 18 homes, all the while causing earthquakes. I suppose on the plus side any toxicity in the water might kill off all the sewage that’s in there and if there’s enough tremors the ground might finally swallow us whole. Every cloud. Hang on, Truss said the Queen was the rock on which modern Britain was built, does that mean she wanted to frack her? Awful. The only supposed glimmer of hope is that the British Bill of Rights, as proposed by former Justice Secretary and vacuum packed human Dominic Raab has now been scrapped. I would like to assume this is because the new government value human rights, but it’s more likely within a few months there won’t be enough of them left to fill an entire policy with.

But of course, we’ve got to wait to see what’s next as to pay respects to the late Queen, parliament has also been suspended for 10 days, just after their 7-week recess and before conference season starts and they all take time off again. Then again, I feel there’s some sort of pleasing revenge if the Queen has managed to prorogue parliament herself this time. The Liberal Democrats have already cancelled their conference in the same way other events that had low attendance probably used it as a good excuse to cancel too. Labour will start theirs in two weeks unless everyone is still sad by then, but they’ll be buoyed by Labour Leader and man who appears to be entirely pleated trousers Keir Starmer doing a tribute to the Queen that was better received than the Prime Minister’s. Even by me, but only in the way if you compared anything Liz Truss says with a car alarm going off while a tap dripped, the latter would still be more interesting. Starmer said Queen Elizabeth did not simply reign over us, she lived alongside us. Which is news to me but then we’ve never been sure who’s at number 7. I’ve not seen her post anything on Nextdoor though, and people don’t even use a pseudonym to be racist on there.

The Queen’s funeral and as a result bank holiday is next Monday, which incidentally is also international talk like a pirate day, so hopefully all official announcements will be about H ARRRR H. Then King Charles will begin his probably not very long reign, I mean he’s 73 already so unless they’re doing to do that brain swap thing like in Get Out with one of the grandkids its not going to be more than a decade right? He’ll begin it with a UK tour, which is going to confuse anyone buying tickets who thinks they’re getting to see the artist formerly known as Prince. It was announced Liz Truss was going to be accompanying the King but then after everyone pointed out the Royal family should be apolitical it was quickly announced she wasn’t so now she’ll be just be attending services of reflection because no doubt she thinks it’ll be a brilliant hour of looking at herself in the mirror. Charles won’t be paying inheritance tax on the fortune gained from his mother which many are angry about but I suppose it’d only end up coming back to him anyway so this ends up being quicker. Will this signal the very overdue end of the Commonwealth, which many of the remaining countries were seeking to leave even before they knew they’d have to accommodate Charles? I mean that must be like hoping you don’t get a visit from your landlord then hearing their irritating son who only talks about herbal tea is doing the inspection instead. Could it be that Charles’s interest in stopping climate change will mean he actually causes difficulty for a government that just wants to frack everything up? Or will he mostly be meeting CGI bears? Only time will tell, but not right now as the speaking clock has temporarily stopped out of respect for the Queen. Apparently, she very much liked time so it’s what she would have wanted.

In other news, Ukraine has rapidly regained significant amounts of territory from Russian occupation and apparently Russian troops were outnumbered 8-1 in a counter-attack in Kharkiv. Putin loyalists have started criticising the Russian president and when you make a figure out of clay but cant be bothered with details, and even Russian State TV has been admitting its not going great for them. It was only a few weeks ago Putin was claiming Russia had made no losses, but I suppose to be fair he does know exactly where his troops and vehicles are it’s just that they’re no longer in action. It’s not the end yet but it could be a big turning point so that plus knowing there’s no way Liz Truss can make a surprise visit till at least next week has got to bring Ukrainians some hope.

ADMIN

Slow news week, eh? It has been very interesting watching people who usually go ‘you can’t say anything in comedy anymore’ then immediately have a go at people joking about the Queen dying. Which I think ignores how important comedy is for some people in coping with difficult situations, or at least situations where there are news stories about how the Royal beekeeper had to let the royal bees know they were now owned by Charles. I mean I joke but there’s probably some diplomatic stuff in there isn’t there, you know informing their queen about the other one. I’m not sure how it works. If the Queen represented Britain and one of the best British values is supposedly comedy, its bonkers that that’s the first thing to get scrapped from TV schedules or like Kevin Bridges brilliant and fairly tame gags for him get vilified. I mean he was gigging to thousands of people and in Scotland on the night she died so you gotta adapt right? You can’t just not mention it and hope no one notices. Shouldn’t all of this only be comedy? Shouldn’t the funeral procession be done with a serious of silly walks? It’s all so boring. Anyway, I’m grumbly because it’s the kids first day of school tomorrow and next week was meant to be the first full week of school and now there’s a bank holiday in it so I’ll have to write next week’s show while also doing childcare. THANKS EVERYONE. That’s insensitive that is. Oh and the speaking clock hasn’t actually been temporarily stopped. I don’t want to scare you, I know you all rely on it loads what with there not being any clocks anywhere.

Anyway, I hope that intro found the right line to please all of you, or at least only lose me the new listeners that came on board this show last week. And welcome to the good ship this podcast, thank you for tuning in. Before we tuck into this week’s noises, firstly the brilliant charity Arts Emergency are running their mentoring programe again. The charity supports people aged 16-18 in London, Brighton, Manchester and Merseyside who want to pursue a career in the creative or cultural arts industries but don’t have the connections or knowledge required. So as a mentor you meet with them once a month for a year to help guide them with goals, gaining skills and getting confidence to do what they’d actually like to in this world where the arts are being cut from all the educational places oh joy. It’s a bloody lovely thing to do. I did it a few years back though, turns out mentoring someone to do stand up and just sort of saying ‘yeah shout at people in pubs for ages’ isn’t the greatest for them. But it was good fun, and the kid done good with my terrible advice and the scheme has helped so many young people get into some great careers that wouldn’t have been accessible to them otherwise. So if you would be interested in enrolling as a mentor you can find all details at arts-emergency.org. And if you don’t want to be a mentor maybe donate to arts emergency instead as they do great stuff.

That’s that bit and the other thing to mention which is totally on a different tack to this show, is my first episode of Hey Duggee that I’ve written is now on bbc iplayer and will be aired on Cbeebies this Thursday Sept 15^th at 7.05am. It’s the ‘Accessory Badge’ and I’m ridiculously excited that I got to write for a show that well, basically kept us all sane during lockdowns. So it probably only appeals if you’ve got small people but I’m telling everyone as I’m super proud of it and its been animated so amazingly. I’ve got another ep coming much, much later in the run too.

And now on this week’s show, a chat with Dominic Caddick from the New Economics Foundation where we talk about all the things that are unfortunately not pausing out of respect for the queen. I mean, come on cost of living crisis, at least a 10 day break right? Otherwise its just rude.

INTERVIEW WITH DOMINIC

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, what with it being much less important than an old lady dying, but the UK is currently in a cost-of-living crisis. Luckily there are ways to get through it, such as inherit a £370m fortune that you don’t pay an inheritance tax on, get £86m a year from the taxpayer and…oh no wait, sorry, I’ve just checked the small print and apparently there’s very specific criteria for who can get that. Shit. For the rest of us, you name the thing that’s necessary to your life and chances are high it’s gone up, unless you’re one of those twats that just replied with something like ‘all you need is love’, then I can’t wait to see you try and pay the bills with devotion and a look of longing. Though maybe I’m just cynical and that is the way to soften bailiffs. It looks like what everyone will be getting for Christmas is a recession and there’s a new gold standard, sorry what I mean is that everyone should have invested in Lurpak butter months ago and then we’d all be rich by now. Currently the government’s plans to lower inflation appear to be to make us all pay more for energy than we did before, but less than it could have been, which is very much the least they could do. Like seeing someone losing blood and rather than stitch them back up fully, just doing it halfway and telling them you’ve saved their life for now, but they will have be slowly bled out for the rest of it for years to come. But why are we in this situation? Is it because the war in Ukraine has had such a devastating effect it caused ripples in time so 12 years ago austerity was brought in by the Conservatives, followed by Brexit, ferry firms without ferries being paid millions to ferry stuff somehow, then a pandemic? Or are there other factors, like the last Chancellor, oh no wait, the last one before the one that’s on the run from HMRC, the one before that lost £11bn somewhere down the back of a very dodgy sofa and a whole ton of money was spent on Dido Harding taking an expensive how to make an app course that she then failed and had to re-do several times.

This week I spoke to Dominic Caddick, an assistant researcher at the New Economics Foundation. If you don’t know the brilliant NEF even though they’ve been on this podcast many a time before, they are all about transforming the economy so it actually works for people and the planet. That’d be nice wouldn’t it? So I asked Dominic all about what a recession means for people who aren’t getting all the inheritance, why its happening and if there is anything at all we can do to lessen the effect it’ll have. Spoilers: No, not really unless you have some great plans as to how to lure Liz Truss into the sea by faking siren voices offering her cheese if she just wades in just a bit further. I spoke to Dominic last Wednesday, so before nature committed regicide and pre the announcement of the plans to freeze energy bills that still haven’t been properly announced. But still, I’m not sure either of those things have made much difference to how things will be and so this chat should still be pretty up to date. Here is Dominic:

INTERVIEW WITH DOMINIC

END OF INTERVIEW

Thanks tons to Dominic and also to Becky at the New Economics Foundation for helping to arrange the interview. NEF can be found at neweconomics.org, or on Twitter @NEF, Facebook at neweconomics and Instagram @neweconomicsfoundation. Also their brilliant New Economics Podcast is very worth a listen and subscribe. Dominic himself can be found on Twitter @DominicCaddick too.

Who else? What else? There must be some subjects I’ve not had on this podcast. I would love to talk to someone about why on earth we still have a monarchy. I would also love any actually hopeful ones if such things exist. Send them all my way at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com .

END

That’s the end of this episode’s long reign over your ears. There will now be a period of mourning for 7 days after which there will be a new one. Yes, this podcast is exactly like the monarchy. Just without the excessive wealth, damaging land ownership or years of helming colonialisation. Or the nice hats. But otherwise exactly the same. Yep. In the time between this royally er audio episode departing and the next ascending, please do spread the word to gain it more loyal subjects, give it a review on one of its many podcast homes, and if you can, chuck a few quid to the patreon or ko-fi too.

Thank you Acast, my brother the Last Skeptik and Kat Day, for everything.

This will be back next week when absolutely nothing will have happened because tradition.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Liz Truss Puts You To Rest. All the Prime Minister’s longest speeches set to the ambient sounds of fracking to send you into the deepest sleep, just like she may or may not have done with the Queen. Hours and hours of droning on about delivering things or types of cheese in order to cancel out all brain activity you may have and help you pass out regardless of how cold your home is. Liz Truss Puts You To Rest, available now for delivery, delivery, delivery.

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