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When is a budget not a budget? When its a mini-budget and also a massive economy crashing trashfire of policy. Kwasi Kwarteng has decided the best way to make sure everyone survives a cost of living crisis is to give more money to bankers and no one else, and the pound has responded by throwing itself off an economical cliff. All that plus Truss meets Biden, the Labour conference begins and a chat with Aditi Jehangir (@AditiJehangir) at Living Rent (@Living_Rent) about campaigning to get Scotland’s rent freeze.

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

• Aditi on Twitter – https://twitter.com/AditiJehangir
• Living Rent on Twitter – https://twitter.com/Living_Rent 
• Living Rent website – https://www.livingrent.org/ 
• London Renters Union on Twitter – https://twitter.com/LDNRentersUnion
• ACORN the union on Twitter –  https://twitter.com/ACORNunion 
• Enough is Enough campaign on Twitter – https://mobile.twitter.com/eiecampaign 

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

Ep285

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast podcast the comedy politics podcast that is an expert on unsuccessful plans to boost growth. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as Chancellor and paperweight for a head Kwasi Kwarteng says his mini budget was not a gamble with the UK economy, but a reboot, I ask if that’s true then why didn’t he properly follow the trend by having an entirely new cast, be aimed at a younger generation and really piss off all existing fan bases?

What do you imagine when you hear the term trickle down economy? For me, it’s someone with lots of money spraying a free flow of piss out of a penthouse apartment and everyone in the slums on the streets below desperately trying to catch drops in a cup. The idea has been in regular use in politics for quite some years, that the best way to grow an economy is to give the rich people even more money and then that money trickles down to those who actually need it. Yes of course it does, in the same way if there’s someone that’s really hungry and I eat a sandwich, eventually they will eat a sandwich too. No wait, they can gather crumbs that fall off my sandwich. Or maybe just through some sort of grub osmosis they too will full from sheer selfless empathy for my loaded tummy. What has happened in previous years is that those with money have gained more and more of it and to benefit the rest of the country, they have avoided tax by putting that money into offshore accounts, laundered it through property or started a brand new Lord of The Rings TV series. Which to be fair I’m really enjoying as my weekly dose of escapism. Oh shit, is that how trickle down works? Economics can be hard to understand but let me put it like this: If you give workers a pay rise, they will spend their money on food, goods, other services, things that will put that money back into the economy and support businesses and other people and that will definitely cause inflation. How? Why ask a complicated question like that? It just will ok. Whereas if you remove the cap on bankers bonuses, they’ll put their money into secretive banking systems and cocaine dealers pockets and then one day if you just believe in her really hard, the money fairy will deposit a rolled up £10 into one of your orifices with unnecessary force. It’s very clear which way is best isn’t it?

On Friday, wannabe anime villain and the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, unceremoniously unleashed a stream of urine over the entire country, bar maybe 5% of it who’d specifically lobbied him to piss on others. It wasn’t really a mini budget unless you can say that by removing all the actual cost calculations and forecasts that somehow reduced its size. Like if you had an uncooked pie and said, no it’s not that we haven’t bothered doing the important bit, it’s just you know, a little pie. That only very richest households can have a piece of. Kwarteng said his fiscal plans would herald a new era for the UK, but he didn’t specify what type of era and if this one meant we were leaving the modern era to descend into something a bit more like the very early ones but with the internet making it worse. The disterera if you like. Taxes have been cut. The income basic rate of tax has been dropped from 20% to 19%, and the planned national insurance rise has been scrapped because Kwarteng said it’s important that British people keep more of the money, they earn so that he doesn’t have to increase your wages and can deprive the health service of funds at the same time. Two birds, brutally pummelled to death a large stone. He’s also cut the top rate of tax from 45% to 40%. It will all benefit you though, I mean look at it this way, if you’re earning £20k a year, you will now save a whole £167 which you can put towards that £3000 energy bill or food shop where butter costs more than buying a football club. Whereas if you’re on £200,000 a year, you’ll save £5000 and that’s fair that is, because that £5k will trickle down to everyone else via, er, the expensive soaps that they buy with it being washed down the sink and if you stand at the base of their drainpipes, you’ll get a lovely fragrant waft of them every now and then. That’s equality, that is. Kwasi Kwarteng wants to keep cutting taxes too and release people of the tax burden, and he’s right. Tax is indeed a burden. Not in general but I mean right now when it directly funds destructive wankers like him I’d much prefer to not fund him not funding anything. Actually scrap that, I’d like to pay tax and then get an itemised bill for when I do, though I bet Kwarteng would add a hefty service charge. His idea is that cutting tax funds investment and by cutting corporation tax too, loads of companies will see the UK as somewhere they too can dump shit into the rivers and not be able to sell things to the EU. But we already have the lowest corporation tax in the G7 and that hasn’t helped so far, so it’s possible, just maybe, that it wasn’t the corporation tax that was keeping them away and maybe, just possibly, it’s knowing that the country is governed by people who would be underqualified to run an egg and spoon race let alone the UK. Remember not so long ago raising taxes was the only way to fix the economy and now lowering taxes is the only way to fix the economy and it is possible that at Tory HQ they just have a large wheel with shit politices on it and just see what it lands on the night before. They probably borrowed it from ITV’s This Morning.

Popping into parliament on one of the only days he’s been to work since July 22^nd, the Chancellor announced that he would be tightening rules on universal credit to ensure people work more. If you do less than 15 hours a week you’ll have to take even more steps to find more work, even though doing all those steps will take up so much time you won’t be able to work in them. The idea that the reason the economy is down is due to people not working enough is true, but the people in question are all MPs. The cap on bankers’ bonuses is to be lifted, thank Christ. I mean haven’t they been through enough? Finally, a lifeline to the people who can’t quite fill their swimming pools in their 4^th house full of cash and now they can. I think it’s great that they’ve got another free reign on cash after the last one that caused a crash and then the one after that to fix the crash they caused and then we had pay off. Kwarteng says such a move will attract top talent to the City, but I think they’ll all be too busy doing Masked Dancer or Strictly so its likely it’ll just be the same money grabbing twats that were there before. Oh wait, does he mean in terms of the drugs dealers? Ah yeah that makes a lot more sense. No wonder Kwarteng was giggling with glee at the Queen’s funeral like he too had been nostril diving into happy snow, because well, he probably was but also, he knew that everyone else attending would be even richer by Friday, and he wouldn’t even have to justify the figures or provide a forecast for what might happen. He just kept saying it’ll boost growth. Of what? The financial ravine the country is in? The shit creek we’re paddling in? Tremors, poverty and ambulance waiting times? Or maybe just sheer animosity towards the Tories. Not from the papers of course, who have already called this a real Tory budget. Well yes, it is, in that its full of the worst ideas anyone’s ever heard of and no one gave them a mandate to do it. Sticking ‘a real Tory’ before any idea is now surely just a sign that it’ll be horrendous. Finally a real Tory theme park, they say as children are stuck upside down for 8 days on the one ride in a polluted gravel pit operated by people who get paid only in tokens to use at the park’s vendors which are all closed due to understaffing.

Kwarteng may not be providing any details or forecasts but after his announcement the pound plummeted in value against the dollar. Then the euro. Then even bitcoin prompting the concern that we’re days away from the Chancellor selling the pound as an NFT to one of his friends and then even when we earn money someone else will just show a picture of it and spend it before we can. It does mean though that we can breathe a sigh of relief that perhaps the entire country’s assets won’t be bought by soulless corporations, but possibly also tourists who pop over for a week and think it’s well worth one of their travellers checks to now own all of Weston-Under-Lizard. Crispin Odey, a sort of what if Billy Bunter followed Sauron of a man, and also hedge fund manager and current employer of Kwasi Kwarteng as a political advisor for Odey Asset Management. Well, him, his funds were boosted by 145% on Friday by having betted against the pound. Much like he did when Brexit happened too, which he backed. A coincidence, I’m sure. These things happen right? I mean chances are if and when Odey asked Kwarteng to take such action that would be beneficial to him, the Chancellor was too off his tits to listen anyway and its just because he’s also only interested in money and wishing poor people were dead that he did it. It is a conflict of interests or is that all the people in these positions have the same interests and it’s to make sure everyone with less money has the worst life ever.

Wig on a rubber chicken and Prime Minister Liz Truss said in advance of the mini-budget that she wasn’t afraid of making difficult decisions like giving bankers bigger bonuses. But that’s not really a difficult decision, is it? I mean it’s a shit decision and if she finds making the worst, shit decisions hard, then we’d all much prefer it if Liz Truss only made easy decisions. No need to make her job harder at all. Truss said she was willing to be unpopular as Prime Minister, which is funny as she doesn’t have a choice in if that happens. That’s like me saying I’m willing to be picked last to play on the football team. Or not even get invited to watch. Or even have friends that play football in the first place. Truss set off to meet US President and want to feel old? This is what Ness from Earthbound looks like now Joe Biden last week, but without her chief of staff and colourless Christopher Biggens Mark Fullbrook because he’s being investigated by the FBI as a witness to alleged bribery. No.10 of course insisted Fullbrook didn’t go to the US with Truss because he was working on government business. But its since been revealed that he is being paid his salary by his lobbying firm and is only seconded to No.10 in an arrangement they are refusing to explain but Fullbrook insists it’s not for tax benefits even though Kwarteng has brought in reforms to make this easier to do. Is he just part time at No.10 because the rest of the cabinet are? Or more likely is this all shadier than Adam Levine’s choices for the names of his kids? Liz Truss doesn’t have an equalities minister remember, because she knows the difference between right and wrong, and refuses to have any of the former in her cabinet incase they snitch on the others.

Truss met with Biden but not before warning that a US trade deal with the UK was unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is funny as we were told it was all sewn up post Brexit. Ah well. Guess that means they can’t buy the NHS just yet then. Truss announced this during an interview on the 102^nd floor of the Empire State Building, probably thinking it’d give her some sort of status but really just even more strongly connecting her government to the film Oblivion. The meeting with the president was about Ukraine and also ensuring the UK government prioritise peace in Northern Ireland, which Liz Truss will do by forgetting about it entirely and hoping that means its sorted. Biden had tweeted just the day before that he’s sick of trickle-down economics, it has never worked, so I’m sure they had loads to talk about.

This is all disaster capitalism, yes that term is essentially the same word twice, a double negative if you will. We’ve seen it before over the last 12 years of the same people who keep saying they’re different people. Yet this government, as headed up by Liz Truss, are full speed ahead driving a bulldozer into society in an even more vicious way. They’ve only been in power for 19 days, if you exclude the 4383 they were already in power but it was definitely someone else, and in that time we have fiscal policy that sees a recession and decides its best bet is to shave it all off and pretend we’re bald by choice. Then we’ve got what if a mushroom was depressed Therese Coffey as Health Secretary, says she’ll reduce ambulance and appointment waiting times but also says they’ll be scrapped. I mean that is one way to reduce them. I suppose she’ll also reduce the amount of people who need hospital care by cutting off the 999 phone lines so they can’t get through and therefore are probably fine. Home Secretary and ‘did someone ask a child to make a picture of Elmo out of turnips?’ Suella Braverman has insisted the police cut all crimes by 20% but hasn’t really said how. Of course, they could just arrest themselves and members of the Conservative Party which should erase most of that. But the only details Braverman has given is that they have to stop symbolic gestures, which would’ve been great to hear before the Queen’s Funeral. The Home Secretary does of course mean scrapping things like diversity training, which let’s be fair in the case of the Met just seems to have helped officers work out how to do the opposite, and said they need to focus more on drug fuelled crimes and vandalism. So again, locking up most of the cabinet should cover that. And most literally destructive of them all, the Business Secretary and man who you can only really see in his true form at the edges of your peripheral vision Jacob Rees-Mogg has announced the overturning of the fracking ban. Is it just because he hopes it’ll unleash ancient soul eating spirits from deep within the earth that he’ll control with spells from his book of Eibon to then become all powerful? Or is it because he’s got investments with fossil fuel firms that he doesn’t need as he’s set to make even more millions selling off his investment firm that was set up with help from Crispin Odey. Is this all that someone like Odey or another donor has just handed the Truss government a Christmas wish list and asked pretty please? There was announcement that they’d be overturning a ban on fois gras and fur too and there can be no political reason for that other than ‘it’s because Crispin likes spending every Thursday smearing goose fat on his groin while lying on a bed of dead minks’. Rees-Mogg said there had been opposition to more fracking but stories said the critics were funded by Putin. Considering much of it has come from within his own party, he’s possibly right.

Growth, that’s what it’s all about. And while some people’s wallets get much, much fatter, hopefully the rest of the country will grow tired of having a government that is essentially running things like a criminal racket. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the opposition see that racket and think rather than bring it down, they should play friendly tennis against it. The Shadow Chancellor and definitely an evil headteacher in a children’s drama Rachel Reeves spoke after the mini-budget announcement and thanked Kwarteng for demolishing the Tories record of the last 12 years, which he has in one way by overturning what previous chancellors have done. But at the same time their record for the last 12 years has been to fuck everything up and they’re very much continuing to do that but more. Reeves accused the Conservatives of being detached from reality, which they are and siding with the wealthy, which they do, but also Reeves absolutely doesn’t do with her donations from millionaires and companies that she failed to disclose. What will Labour do regarding Kwarteng’s announcements? Well, they won’t reverse all of them, just the 5% at the top rate of tax but they won’t make that any bigger or tax rich people any more as then who’ll donate to them? Nor would they reverse the 1p cut on income tax because that’d mean they’d have to raise workers wages and then what will their donors say? There is such a fear of offering an actual different future from Labour, that all they present is a watered down version of what we currently have, like Tory squash which is still very bad for you but at least you are slightly more hydrated and don’t have to consume quite so much trickled down piss. Based on current polls and the idea we’ll ever have an election again, Labour are set to win a 56 seat majority by simply being there, like the drunk rebound before you wake up the next day and realise you’ve made a terrible mistake and would’ve been much better just staying in. Or you know, like 2012-13 where Labour were in the lead and then still lost the next election because of a sandwich. The Labour Conference in Liverpool this weekend started with party leader and man who looks like he’s made of Strawberry refresher bars pushed into a suit Keir Starmer, leading the conference in a rendition of the national anthem with a giant banner showing a picture of the Queen above them. Yes, nothing like the party that is for the many, singing about hoping a monarch will reign over everyone for ages. Why stop there? Why not have the whole event in a wicker memorial to the Queen, draped in slabs of British beef and fish and set it alight after the final words? Maybe just fill everyone’s lunchboxes with boots for licking and then end the conference by giving everyone a complimentary tattoo of the union flag on their genitals. ‘Let’s commit to honouring the late Queen’s memory’ said Starmer forgetting that the best way to do that would be to keep his initial leadership pledge to tackle low pay for workers and then all that extra cash they’d get would have her face on it so he wouldn’t have had to shell out for a banner.

Labour have launched their roadmap to a fairer, greener future, which really should have been a footpath or cycle lane if that’s what they want. It has glimpses of what may become good and necessary ideas if they hope to develop them beyond soundbites. Starmer’s ambition is to be off fossil fuels by 2030, but if he runs off them it can take a while hard to change. It does explain a lot if he gets up everyday, and huffs coal. Good luck to him I say. They have also pledged to bring the railways back into public contracts, which is good and on the right track in all sense of the word. It is only as current contracts expire so expect Liz Truss’s government to quickly sign several 20-year contracts before they get booted out, just to ruin it. What the roadmap doesn’t contain is any possibility of electoral reform despite many of the party members calling for it and it will be debated at the conference. Starmer said it’s not a priority, because then I suppose people’s votes would matter and that’d really ruining getting to sing about having a king. Of course, it’s great that the Conservatives may well lose the next election, even if by 2024, if that’s when it is, all we have left of the UK is the City of London and then vast swampland or cracked earth with elections having to take place by collecting sticks that aren’t too covered in poo. But it’d still be able to talk of an even better future than like now, but only 95% as bad. It still seems sadly that the only way Labour can give out a clear vision is when it’s a massive screen with the Queen’s face on it. Still, I suppose that’s slightly better than just basing all your policies around Crispin Odey’s genitals.

Apparently, rumours have it that Conservative MPs are already putting in letters of no confidence to the 1922 committee against Truss. This is the thing with a party built on horse racing fans, they think that if they back the wrong one they can just have it put down when it fails. Well, nothing will get the public back onside like another 3 months of leadership elections while everyone else can’t eat and US tourists pick up parts of Norfolk for less than the cost of an assault rifle. Is a general election on the cards?

In Russia, Russian President and Vladmir ‘always in the middle of a difficult poo’ Putin has stepped up drafting troops to continue fighting in Ukraine, saying that the West is engaging in nuclear blackmail. I mean I’m not saying he’s falling apart but Putin is now threatened by Kayne. Thing is, I’m pretty sure its Putin who’s been saying that he’ll fire all the nukes if the West even thinks about aiding Ukraine, so it’ll be a real revelation if ‘the West’ is his nickname for himself and this has all been to do with a crisis of confidence. The first military mobilisation since WW2 has caused anger and mass protests all over Russia, with 2000 people detained this weekend and tailbacks at the border with people leaving the country. There is every chance this war will end with no one but Putin himself marching on Ukraine and getting calmly told to sit down and stop being a baby. The Foreign Secretary and face drawn on an orange James Cleverly confronted Russia over their war atrocities, which must be like getting given a telling off for your behaviour by a flasher in the park. Downing Street say that Putin’s move to draft soldiers is a clear admission of his failure, which must be galling for them that despite being involved in an illegal invasion, being responsible for so many deaths and lying about his intentions, he’s still being more transparent on his actions than the UK government have managed in 12 years.

And finally, Italy have elected their first ever female prime minister. But she’s also a fascist so it’s like travelling in the direction of progression but because you want to start a war with it and kill it off. Giorgia Meloni, looking like the character in an US drama who pretends she’s perfect housewife but at night murders everyone who wrongs her, is leader of the Brothers of Italy party who are despite their name sounding like its lots of men who get together, are strongly homophobic. They are also anti-abortion, very xenophobic and anti-immigration. Despite that Meloni says they will govern for everyone so I’m not sure how that will work. Her party will be in government as part of a right wing alliance, with League and Forza Italia who are the party of former PM and political Weinstein Silva Berlusconi, who’ve both lost support in recent years. Overall there is more voter preference in this election for left wing and centre parties but like always, they don’t get along so it’s allowed the far right to goosestep through because there’s no place for nuanced opinions on their side. Critics say Meloni isn’t a fascist, she’s just patriotic and says she says it like it, and depressingly how it is, is fascism. She uses a phrase that was often used by Mussoli and her best bud is Hungarian leader and thumb Victor Orban who is, yeah a fascist. So you know, if she’s not one she should really get some PR advice. Sweden too have recently elected a far right government, and the rightwing group in the European Council, the European Conservatives and Reformists party will be the largest which is all very worrying. Still all those boomers that hark everything back to a war they weren’t alive for must be pleased, at least they’ll get to actually be around for a fight against fascism now. Probably shouting that actually the real Nazis are those woke lot fighting against them, while they get carted off to a camp because they have a passport.

ADMIN

Hey ParPolBrods. How are you? Feeling that growth? Wait that sounded weird. I just meant clearly you’re all just glowing after Friday’s mini-budget as you now know it’ll all trickle down just as we need it. Any minute now. Any second. Sigh. Look, on the plus side its back to a normal sized podcast this week. On the downside, that’s cos there’s been news and it’s all been terrible. Actually, not all terrible. There was a bit about a 1200 boat that was found and that was exciting but then it was found off the coast of Israel and so all the comments beneath were angry about everything except the boat so even that wasn’t great. I just wanted to know, cos it said on the boat that they’d found sealed olive oil, olives, fish sauce and supplies like that and nowhere did it say if anyone had tried any of it. Come on right? Where’s the news we actually need and demand? Sorry, the news I need and demand. I spend a good 50% of my time worrying that I’m not doing enough and reading everything miserable in sight with a drive to know what’s going on and then the other 50% absolutely regretting doing that because it’s all terrible and thank god there’s a new Lord of the Rings TV show to escape into. Oh no it’s made by Jeff Bezos. Fuck. There is no winning. I should also say that I’ve just admitted that 100% of my time is self-absorbed despairing of different levels but I want you to know in reality I do occasionally tune into whatever my agent, sorry daughter is doing, and I’ve done quite well on Duolingo this week so I now know how to say I have a green bike in French. I don’t have a green bike, but if I did, I could. It’s good to be prepared for all eventualities I say.

I hope you’re doing ok even though you know, everything. I’ve mostly written and recorded this week’s episode on the Sunday so there’s a chance on the Monday even more things happened, and I couldn’t pay any attention to them because I was writing about computer games. Like for money, not just fun. But I would also do it for fun. Unless you hire people to write about computer games then hi, great to meet you and I do still need money though as well as I can’t pay the heating bills with fun. Hopefully that’s not the case and this stays topical for at least a day this week and I’m sure the interview will for a while.

Some quick things. First quick thing, this is episode 285. Yes, really. Yes, I’ve wasted that much of my life on this. Awful isn’t it? But it also means in approximately 15 weeks’ time, give or take me having a break for my sanity, it will be episode 300. So that’s roughly 6000 minutes of comedy monologues, goodness knows how many descriptions of politicians and a comprehensive catalogue of all the shit that’s happened since the 13^th of January 2016. So what should I do to mark it? Anything you’d like to hear? Any ideal guests or guests you’d like to see return? Chances are any plans I have will be overshadowed by the news but if you’ve got any thoughts, send ‘em over to the partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com address or just shout at me in Sainsburys.

And the other thing is that you might have noticed a new British Boxers ad at the top of the show. If you use the code PARPOLBRO15 at the british-boxers.com site, you’ll get 15% off. I’m aware it’s a cost of living crisis but if you do need pants and can afford decent ones, I would recommend and I get a bit of dosh if you use that code too, which is more helpful for paying the heating bills. Or you could just fling dosh at the ko-fi.com/parpolbro or join the patreon.com/parpolbro and still have an uncomfortable bum. The choice is yours.

On this week’s show I am interviewing Aditi Jehangir at Living Rent all about successfully campaigning for a rent freeze in Scotland. It’s actually positive at the end. No I don’t know how either, but lap it up and enjoy while it lasts.

INTERVIEW WITH ADITI AT LIVING RENT

Home is where the heart is apparently, unless you are renting in the UK, in which case you have to hand over your heart to a landlord as part of a deposit, along with all your life savings and the promise of your first born. Housing is consistently one of the many areas of rising inequality in the country, with those at the top end of the wealth ladder which is attached to a helicopter that is hovering too high up for you to grab the bottom of it without another ladder that you can’t afford. They all have at least a million houses each – I’ve taken that from official figures obvs. While everyone being told they don’t have enough income to get on the bottom rung is very unlikely to ever own a home, or even rent somewhere with any security at all. Private rent prices paid by tenants in the UK rose 3% in the 12 months to last April with it being 3.5% in Scotland, and tenants in social housing have seen theirs increase by 4.1%. All the while wages have, as you know, basically started trying to tunnel their way to Australia. There is no right to housing in the UK, and the human rights act protects our right to enjoy possessions but if you’re living in someone else’s then they can enjoy you selling off all your organs to pay to live in their cupboard that they can’t be bothered to fix the heating for. The average person in the UK spends more than 35-40% of their income on rent, and if you’re above average and even slightly interesting or handsome it’s probably more. Actually, I have no idea I was just basing that on my own situation. ARF. But for those landlords who actually still have a mortgage to pay off, they’ll be seeing big increases in their monthly payments that they will say totally justifies charging tenants at least 6 times that for them to earn a living letting you stay in that cupboard, and you should be grateful for all the space you have in there for your clothes and self and your new cockroach friends. So, what can be done? There was nothing in Kwarteng’s mini-budget about rent controls, because this is a man who prefers to let lobbyists buy his policy space outright. But in Scotland freezing rents has been part of a package of measures the Scottish Government have brought in to ease the cost-of-living crisis. Only till March obviously but by then it’ll be a bit warmer for you to sleep outdoors. Well not much in Scotland. It’s still a big move and one that were it replicated around the rest of the UK would have quite a big impact for over 5 million households. But how were the Scottish government persuaded to make that decision and can the Westminster government be persuaded to do the same? Ha! I mean of course not but its nice to pretend a bit isn’t it?

This week I spoke to Aditi Jehangir at Living Rent, the union in Scotland for low and middle income renters whose campaign to freeze rents was pivotal to the Scottish government’s decision in doing so. I asked Aditi about why renting in Scotland was so difficult right now, if the plans to freeze rent till March are enough and just how they managed to successfully campaign for that result. Aditi even manages to somehow be positive at the end of this chat which genuinely perked me up after spending the morning watching Kwarteng drone on about how he’s making your life better by making it worse. So I hope you enjoy and find this as informative and even hopeful a chat as I did. Here is Aditi:

INTERVIEW

Thanks so much to Aditi for having time to chat. You can find Living Rent at livingrent.org where you can find all their campaigns and details on how to join if you’re a listener in Scotland. They are on Twitter @Living_Rent, LivingRentScotland on Facebook and they’re on Instagram too, as well as many accounts for all their different local groups. Big thanks to Pablo who recommended I speak to Aditi quite some time ago.

That was quite a nice hopeful end to that chat despite well, the state of everything. In these endlessly despairing times what else would you like to hear about? Who shall I chat to? Send all thoughts, wisdoms or fevered dream annotations about possible guests to partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com.

END

And that’s it for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. Next week we’ll be knee deep in conference season, so in order to get ready for what will be my nuanced political debates on how many swears I can fit into the intro to remotely convey how frustrating all possible political directions the country is going in, why not make sure you’re subscribed to this here podcast. Tell others who may enjoy it to subscribe too, give it a review on one of the podcast sites and if you are one of the 3 people that benefitted from the mini-budget on Friday maybe donate to the Ko-Fi or Patreon too.

Merci beaucoup to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik and Kat Day.

This will be back next week when the pound falls so low it becomes anti-money and Brits have to pay people to take it, but Kwarteng backs it as now we have a cheap metal export and therefore he’s restarted British industry.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Kwasi Kwarteng’s Growth Plan. Feeling small? Wishing you could beef up and get hench to show off down the Lidl? Use Kwarteng’s plan of 6 daily supplements that increase in price every single day but are free for bankers, you’ll diminish in size until becoming so small you’ll become one with the ether and really, isn’t that actually bigger than you ever were to begin with? Growth Plan by Kwarteng, for those who know real growth is being strong enough to shrink and die. Please note on full disappearance all your assets will be claimed by Odey Asset Management.

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