True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 522: Fool Me Nonce
Aired: 2026-02-13
Duration: 02:14:36


=== Accent Work Matters (04:53) ===

[00:00:00]  Pedafo.
[00:00:03]  They even say it differently.
[00:00:04]  Pedafo.
[00:00:06]  It sounds so natural when they say it.
[00:00:08]  I have a question.
[00:00:09]  Yeah.
[00:00:10]  You've seen, well, I know you've seen it because I've been sending them to you, but these photos that have been coming out about the Beatles movie.
[00:00:20]  Yes, I have.
[00:00:21]  Everyone's outfits.
[00:00:23]  Yes, I have.
[00:00:24]  And they're a little bit difficult.
[00:00:25]  They're a little bit difficult to take.
[00:00:27]  I know they do things a little bit different over there.
[00:00:30]  Oh, yeah.
[00:00:31]  Across the pond.
[00:00:33]  But how do we put this?
[00:00:36]  Is it gesture maxing?
[00:00:38]  Is that what they're doing, you think?
[00:00:39]  I think that's what they're doing.
[00:00:41]  They are, Liz, I think they've reached a terminal stage of decline where they've declined so far that they cannot decline any further until they engage in a long period of beclowning themselves.
[00:00:54]  And so what I think now is that they realize they're in the sewer, but they want to go to the center of the earth.
[00:01:00]  They need to just put on the makeup.
[00:01:02]  They need to dance around like idiots and they need the whole world to laugh at them so that in their shame they can grow to mighty proportions and just dig further down and that's where the country can go.
[00:01:14]  Yeah, for the Chinese middle class.
[00:01:39]  That's what I've always said is our future.
[00:01:41]  What?
[00:01:42]  Britain and the U.S. We're like 30, 40 years behind the UK.
[00:01:48]  Though, you know, we could speed up if we wanted, but that we're just going to be these sort of like Disney fied tourist destinations for the Chinese middle class.
[00:02:01]  Awesome.
[00:02:02]  I'll gladly take them on like a fucking double-decker bus tour.
[00:02:05]  No, you would be the American version, or are you moving to the UK in this version?
[00:02:10]  Oh, I would be moving.
[00:02:11]  Okay, I see what you're saying.
[00:02:12]  I see what you're saying.
[00:02:12]  You got to dress up like a cowboy.
[00:02:14]  I gladly will.
[00:02:16]  I think we'll always be ahead of the UK for the simple fact that we have sunshine.
[00:02:21]  And, you know, it's really, it's we can never.
[00:02:24]  And then technically we're behind.
[00:02:26]  Yeah.
[00:02:28]  Ladies and gentlemen, hello.
[00:02:29]  Hello.
[00:02:30]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:31]  Hello.
[00:02:32]  Mi nombre brace.
[00:02:34]  Of course, we are joined by, I couldn't remember how to say it in Spanish, and I still can.
[00:02:39]  We're joined by Josoy Producer Jon Chomsky.
[00:02:44]  And this is Jernan.
[00:02:45]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:46]  Haula.
[00:02:50]  Since I was a kid, I've probably talked about this on the show before.
[00:02:52]  I've long been fascinated by the thought of an English person speaking Spanish.
[00:02:56]  Como esto.
[00:02:58]  Ha bien.
[00:03:00]  Bien.
[00:03:01]  I think that sounds great.
[00:03:02]  Burrito.
[00:03:06]  Yo quiera.
[00:03:10]  What do you like?
[00:03:12]  Do more.
[00:03:14]  I'm kind of run out of Spanish here.
[00:03:16]  Just or max for me.
[00:03:17]  Do more.
[00:03:19]  No, this is tough.
[00:03:20]  Let's see.
[00:03:20]  What other words?
[00:03:21]  You know what I'm talking?
[00:03:22]  Give me some Spanish.
[00:03:24]  Parabala ala bamba, se ne sociito una poco de gracia.
[00:03:28]  Poca de gracia.
[00:03:33]  Camarones.
[00:03:35]  Oh, I've heard this place has some brilliant camarones.
[00:03:38]  I really do think, I mean, that sounds totally typical to me.
[00:03:43]  Could you imagine some poor sax from hole out there in Bogotá, you know, trying to communicate?
[00:03:49]  They'd drop him out of town.
[00:03:52]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:54]  Hello.
[00:03:57]  So, you know, a surprising lack of your accent work during this interview.
[00:04:01]  I feel bad.
[00:04:02]  I've known Marcus for a really long time, and there are certain people, there are what I think of as avatars of different races that I know, and I know one of each.
[00:04:10]  And I, if I'm around other people of British descent or whatever he is from the UK descent, I will gladly do the accent at them until they leave.
[00:04:23]  Really, I'll do it.
[00:04:24]  I mean, I don't want them to leave, but oftentimes they do.
[00:04:26]  Sure.
[00:04:27]  But for Marcus, he's such a gentle soul that I can't do it to him.
[00:04:32]  Yeah.
[00:04:33]  I feel bad mocking.
[00:04:35]  I don't mock the accent.
[00:04:36]  I think I treat it with extraordinary reverence, but people misinterpret my accent work as some kind of derogatory thing.
[00:04:47]  And she's obviously.
[00:04:48]  Well, you're just trying to do your best.
[00:04:51]  I am.
[00:04:51]  And, you know, I want to thank you guys.

=== Dubai's Little Hairy Diplomacy (15:16) ===

[00:04:53]  This is some behind-the-scenes stuff that happened.
[00:04:55]  But when you guys, you know, got me out of Granada after the situation I got myself in for doing my accent there.
[00:05:02]  It was, it was, it got, it got a little difficult there.
[00:05:05]  A little hairy.
[00:05:06]  A little hairy.
[00:05:07]  And I just, I do want to extend my appreciation to you, Liz, for that.
[00:05:14]  We are talking about, you said this in the interview, actually, a very British scandal today, which I think I said this right off the bat, but I'm going to say it again.
[00:05:26]  The Epstein stuff is hitting a little different over there.
[00:05:29]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:33]  You know, all across Europe, we've talked about it in the past couple episodes, but a bunch of different diplomats, officials, various commissars have had to resign in disgrace across government institutions and, you know, private institutions.
[00:05:54]  But in the UK, it's hitting straight at number 10 at Keir Starmer's beloved government.
[00:06:02]  And I want to ask Brace, how are you dealing with this during this difficult time?
[00:06:06]  Well, I've been cutting.
[00:06:07]  And, you know, I cut for Starmer.
[00:06:09]  I'm part of the campaign around that.
[00:06:12]  It has been tough.
[00:06:14]  You know, we did eels out for Starmer last year, where, of course, I was still participating in a lot of the eel eating contests out there.
[00:06:21]  We were drinking petrol for Starmer some months before that.
[00:06:25]  And of course, Ice Bucket Challenge.
[00:06:28]  No, of course, Ice Bucket Challenge.
[00:06:29]  And then the thing that just sort of got us into trouble in the first place is we became pedophiles for Kier Starmer.
[00:06:34]  And it has been the fallout of that has been completely unforeseen, but really dangerous for a lot of us who are intimately involved in this.
[00:06:45]  I hate Keir Starmer.
[00:06:46]  I hate looking at him.
[00:06:47]  I hate hearing him.
[00:06:48]  I hate the way he's doing it.
[00:06:48]  His face is really tough.
[00:06:50]  Our British people.
[00:06:51]  Like, it looks tough.
[00:06:52]  The skin looks tough, but then it's also tough to look at.
[00:06:55]  I don't mean this.
[00:06:57]  I don't know if maybe the UK might send the SAS after me to arrest me for saying this, but I don't mean this in a violent way.
[00:07:04]  I really, truly, from the bottom of my heart, don't.
[00:07:09]  I would enjoy myself, however, if I saw a video of Keir Starmer being slapped in the jowls.
[00:07:15]  He is the thinnest-skinned, thick-skinned person I've ever seen.
[00:07:22]  That is a character creator ass face right there.
[00:07:24]  That is like, I want to see the jiggle of the jowls as like, I want him to, I want to watch him chew gum, dude.
[00:07:31]  I want to see him, I want to see him.
[00:07:34]  But like cud.
[00:07:35]  Like he chews his own cud.
[00:07:38]  I think that if Keir is, if this is it for Keir, they should deploy him as some sort of special liaison to Yemen or somewhere in the Horn To liaison with cot dealers because the amount of cot that that man could pack into one of his cheeks is no doubt outrageous.
[00:07:59]  That is what, like, genuinely, it's, you know, how you see people sometimes?
[00:08:03]  You're like, dude, you are part caveman, right?
[00:08:06]  My man's got cow face.
[00:08:08]  I think that he looks like when Yacoub was making white people, when Yacoub was making white people, there was some test cases.
[00:08:17]  You know what I mean?
[00:08:18]  There was like a few that, like, oh, I don't know about this one.
[00:08:20]  I'll have to throw this one out.
[00:08:22]  Yakub tossed this piece of shit into Yacoub's garbage, and somehow that spilled and it spilled into Keir Starmer's father's fucking balls and out came Kier into the vagina.
[00:08:34]  And then obviously it gestated for quite a while.
[00:08:36]  We say this with all due respect.
[00:08:38]  All due respect.
[00:08:39]  We didn't even get to, Liz, I realized in this episode.
[00:08:42]  They just are, they tried to arrest.
[00:08:44]  They tried to do, it was like a Clinton crime bill level arrest wave for posts in Britain or excuse me, the UK, which I do, by the way, every time I mention the country.
[00:08:55]  Just everyone over there, let it go.
[00:08:57]  Let it go.
[00:08:58]  We don't care.
[00:09:00]  To quote everyone in America.
[00:09:02]  We don't care.
[00:09:03]  We don't care.
[00:09:05]  But no, we do.
[00:09:05]  We do.
[00:09:06]  But it is, it's, it's the kind of thing they would arrest you for over there, getting it wrong.
[00:09:11]  It is crazy how no free speech.
[00:09:15]  Okay, that's, of course, negotiable when I'm in charge.
[00:09:17]  But the way that it's enforced there is so crazy.
[00:09:21]  Yeah, everyone there is fucking psycho.
[00:09:25]  What's going on in Canada and what's going on in the UK?
[00:09:30]  Leave me out of it.
[00:09:32]  Leave me out of it.
[00:09:33]  We don't care.
[00:09:34]  Here's my thing.
[00:09:35]  You mentioned something, and I'm just going to put this out there for any enterprising listeners in the UK.
[00:09:45]  Maybe there does need to be a pedophiles for Keir movement.
[00:09:49]  This is an extraordinary discovery you might have made.
[00:09:53]  And maybe someone should just be like, I'm a pedophile, dude.
[00:09:56]  I'm running for prime minister.
[00:09:57]  Maybe someone should say, you know what?
[00:09:59]  It's time that our voices have been heard because our man at 10 Downing is being attacked for not giving a shit about his ambassador being not just close personal friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:10:16]  I believe he referred to him as his best pal in the birthday book.
[00:10:19]  But this isn't just a situation of, oh, you were seen at the mansion.
[00:10:26]  Oh, you're in the birthday book.
[00:10:28]  Kind of like more sort of social gossip.
[00:10:32]  No, this is someone who was trading privileged information about like national security issues or confidential banking, you know, reforms and spilling them to Jeffrey Epstein on Blackberry Messenger.
[00:10:54]  It is.
[00:10:55]  Telling him about saleable assets available in the post-financial crisis UK.
[00:11:04]  It's real shocking stuff.
[00:11:05]  And what I'm saying is, maybe it's time for pedophiles to organize their support for their man at 10 Downing and say enough is enough.
[00:11:15]  The three of us met a long time ago at a little event called the Battle of Cable Street.
[00:11:20]  Obviously, we were on opposite sides.
[00:11:22]  You can assume which ones were which.
[00:11:25]  We need a similar, like they're coming for our pedophiles now in 10 Downing.
[00:11:31]  And back in the day, a lot of people came out and defended, not pedophiles, but majority Jewish neighborhoods from the British Union of fads.
[00:11:48]  We need a similar grassroots movement now to protect care.
[00:11:54]  We need our nation's nastiest nonces to go out in front of 10 Downing Street and form a line and say, thou shalt not pass, like our great British wizard Gandalf.
[00:12:06]  No, no, because all of these little smogs and smeagels and these creatures, which are creatures from Little Rings, are coming for Kir right now.
[00:12:15]  And it's interesting.
[00:12:16]  Do you remember when Jeremy Corbyn called Jeffrey Epstein Epstein and it caused a major scandal in the UK press?
[00:12:24]  Yes.
[00:12:24]  It was quite a row.
[00:12:25]  Oh, it was an atrocious row.
[00:12:27]  And at the club, young master Chomsky, at the club, there was not a word of anything else on anyone's lips, which were, of course, firmly pressed against the flesh of Nuba Young Boys.
[00:12:39]  But Kira is under fire, and the battle of Britain has commenced once again.
[00:12:46]  And the Nazis are the people who say that maybe the Prime Minister of the UK should not be undergoing several pedophile-related scandals with his administration.
[00:12:57]  Not one.
[00:12:58]  Not one.
[00:12:58]  Not two.
[00:13:00]  Not three.
[00:13:02]  Not three.
[00:13:03]  And sometimes it seems like they've perverted Winston Churchill's immortal lines about defending the great British Isles from the Nazi menace.
[00:13:14]  We shall fight them on the beaches.
[00:13:15]  Sometimes it seems like people like Peter Manilson are saying we should fuck them on the beaches.
[00:13:19]  And what he's talking about is young people.
[00:13:23]  And the future of the UK.
[00:13:28]  It is, I'll tell you this.
[00:13:30]  This is an episode if you hail from that mighty nation.
[00:13:33]  Well, once mighty nation.
[00:13:35]  If you hail from that once mighty nation, this episode, I'm going to have to do a trigger warning.
[00:13:40]  Now, triggers are something that are on guns.
[00:13:42]  It's how you fire them.
[00:13:43]  You guys don't have those there.
[00:13:44]  You are obsessed with knife crimes.
[00:13:46]  And Liz, let me tell you, there was actually a movement in Parliament to ban something called zombie killer knives that were sold on Amazon.
[00:13:54]  It was a huge scandal out there because they were serrated machetes, and this was too much for people.
[00:13:59]  Triggers are guns, and there's a trigger warning for all of our UK listeners out there.
[00:14:06]  We have some hard truths in this episode.
[00:14:09]  And some what some might find not tasteful joking, but we don't care.
[00:14:17]  And taste has, frankly, never been your forte.
[00:14:21]  Perhaps you would prefer the effluvium and the delicious taste of a warm steaming can of beans hitting your lips and your nose, maybe with some chopped up sausage in it.
[00:14:33]  Oh, we're having fun.
[00:14:35]  That's so fun.
[00:14:35]  You know what?
[00:14:36]  I'll say this.
[00:14:36]  I love the UK.
[00:14:38]  You're from the UK.
[00:14:40]  I'm not from there, but I love the UK.
[00:14:42]  I really do.
[00:14:43]  Yeah.
[00:14:44]  Yeah.
[00:14:46]  I agree with, I love that you do.
[00:14:50]  I do too.
[00:14:51]  I've had some great friends in the UK.
[00:14:54]  Perhaps your party could be a kind of, there could be a sort of like nonce non-sex.
[00:15:02]  I'm still stuck on nastiest nonces of the nation.
[00:15:06]  I think that they should sell whales to the UAE.
[00:15:11]  Oh, man.
[00:15:12]  Because that's the thing is, all the Brits are going to Dubai.
[00:15:16]  Why not bring Dubai to the British Isles?
[00:15:20]  Well, they basically are.
[00:15:21]  I mean, I'm joking, but like they could just buy up the whole thing.
[00:15:27]  That's true.
[00:15:28]  They have bought up quite a lot of real estate in London.
[00:15:30]  And every team and every, yeah.
[00:15:33]  Enough bants for now.
[00:15:35]  Let's get to the interview.
[00:15:50]  Have the Emirates ever offered to just buy the UK?
[00:15:59]  It might be the first country to suffer a nationwide white flight to Dubai.
[00:16:09]  It is crazy.
[00:16:10]  And reuniting with their old friends from the subcontinent there on the streets.
[00:16:14]  Are you catching some of that?
[00:16:16]  The kind of influencer stuff that's going on there.
[00:16:18]  Oh, my God.
[00:16:19]  I see it on occasion, but really, it's just, it's the British love for Dubai is one of the most or maybe least perplexing modern phenomena that I've witnessed in the past 10 years.
[00:16:33]  And here to talk about all of that with us, live from Dubai, mere months after his expulsion from Labor Party, Workers' Party Great Britain, Green Party, your party, reform, the left wing, reform, Marxist-Leninist.
[00:17:00]  And of course, Communist Party of Great Britain.
[00:17:04]  We have with us here Marcus Barnett, associate editor.
[00:17:08]  Seems like quite a lowly position, but we'll ignore that and have him on.
[00:17:12]  Anyways, of course, we here in the U.S. do not see class.
[00:17:16]  So we don't need a managing editor or, God forbid, an editor at large.
[00:17:20]  We will take an associate.
[00:17:21]  We have with us here Marcus Barnett.
[00:17:23]  Marcus, don't even say hello back.
[00:17:27]  Cheers, first of all.
[00:17:32]  So the classless society in Dubai, you know?
[00:17:36]  Well, that's why we go to Dubai to escape the rigid class system of the UK.
[00:17:40]  That's right.
[00:17:40]  The taxation system.
[00:17:42]  Oftentimes here in the U.S., it seems like politics offer us no hope.
[00:17:48]  We had in our last election a matchup between Mrs. Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump.
[00:17:57]  I feel like I forgot who.
[00:18:00]  It's been so long that I actually can't remember how to say her name right without people getting mad at me.
[00:18:05]  So I just, I respectfully call her Mrs. Harris.
[00:18:08]  And to me, I was like, I was talking to all my friends in my Discord chat.
[00:18:12]  Actually, a very germane thing to bring up in relation to much of what we'll be talking about this episode.
[00:18:17]  And I was saying, it just seems like these two damn capitalist parties are fighting against each other.
[00:18:22]  And whoever wins, they just got more damn capitalists in the White House.
[00:18:26]  And then my heart is lifted because I look over to the UK and I see that unlike all of the rest of the Western world, there is a single governing party, a single governing socialist party led by a strong leader that doesn't govern in coalition, that is in fact the most successful socialist party in the world, the Labor Party.
[00:18:53]  Now, I don't pay attention to foreign politics much because they confuse me.
[00:18:56]  I don't like British people because, well, take a look at the mayor, Marcus.
[00:19:00]  No disrespect.
[00:19:01]  Actually, he's quite handsome.
[00:19:03]  But I was like, I love these guys.
[00:19:05]  I love these guys.
[00:19:05]  I'm going to cheer them on for a far.
[00:19:06]  Not really going to pay much attention to the UK.
[00:19:09]  And then all of this crazy stuff happened.
[00:19:11]  And Marcus texted me out of the blue recently.
[00:19:14]  He said, Geer Starmer is in trouble.
[00:19:16]  And we said, we need to get you on the show right away to discuss why anyone is attacking probably the most important socialist in the Western world.
[00:19:25]  Marcus, welcome to the show.
[00:19:26]  And why are you trying to hurt Sir Keir Starmer?
[00:19:30]  Well, I was getting touched as a form of international solidarity, you know?
[00:19:33]  We need help more than ever for our comrades abroad.
[00:19:36]  Yes.
[00:19:38]  Kier's in trouble.
[00:19:39]  He's in big trouble.
[00:19:41]  It's crazy because, you know, we were talking about this, but it seems like the response to a lot of the Epstein revelations in Europe and the UK has been much stronger than what we're kind of getting from any officials in the U.S.
[00:20:02]  But it really is hitting the UK because the stuff with Kier and who we're going to talk about later, Peter Mandelson.

=== Why Keir Starmer Is In Big Trouble (15:16) ===

[00:20:10]  I mean, it's straight to number 10.
[00:20:12]  I mean, how much of our predicament has reached you over there?
[00:20:15]  I mean, I've got he's incredibly hard to tell, you know?
[00:20:19]  So I will, I'll give you an honest, I mean, I guess I'm biased because I pay attention to this kind of some, not closely, but, you know, close as it can be expected.
[00:20:29]  Kier Starmer, his popularity has been lagging pretty much since he took office.
[00:20:34]  My advice, Kier, if you're listening to this, go on TV more.
[00:20:37]  People like to see you.
[00:20:38]  People like to hear you talk.
[00:20:39]  It reassures the nation.
[00:20:41]  You strike a sort of Churchillian figure in that you are fat in an unusual way.
[00:20:47]  His face takes up so much of the TV and people find it so comforting, the large face.
[00:20:52]  It is extraordinary.
[00:20:54]  He is, it's like they just somehow injected HGH into his cheeks and then just left the rest of the body alone.
[00:21:00]  You got like a birthday cake version of Max Headroom or something.
[00:21:04]  Yes, exactly.
[00:21:06]  Or someone's like Funko.
[00:21:08]  He's kind of funkoed.
[00:21:09]  He is.
[00:21:10]  He is a bit of a human funko, but I've seen that then.
[00:21:13]  And we discussed this over some cheeky pints when you were here.
[00:21:17]  What was that in November or December?
[00:21:21]  But his popularity has been lagging and it has been in the gutter.
[00:21:25]  And in fact, the prime ministership's crown, or I guess in England, it would be cod peace and wig, has been in the gutter.
[00:21:32]  And Nigel Farage has been nosing around and Napoleon-like, looking to pick it up.
[00:21:38]  And so reform has been going through the roof in support.
[00:21:42]  And Kier Starmer has been, I mean, it's sub-terranian in his.
[00:21:47]  I think there was a bit of a recovery towards the beginning of the year.
[00:21:51]  And now it, and by the way, the backdrop to all this, and again, I'm just telling you my perspective, the backdrop to all of this is just that the UK is continuing its decline.
[00:22:01]  Sometimes, you know, it seems to be going quicker than others, but there's no hope on the horizon for you guys.
[00:22:07]  And now we are at a scandal, a very British scandal.
[00:22:15]  And we are, and here we are in February.
[00:22:19]  Is that about accurate?
[00:22:20]  Oh, well, God, that's a very sunny predicament for Britain in 2026, where we've not had a single day of sunshine yet, all the way through the year.
[00:22:28]  I think it's the 40th day now, but we've had no sun whatsoever.
[00:22:33]  God, man.
[00:22:34]  And I know, right?
[00:22:35]  Like, on top of everything else.
[00:22:38]  So, so, but Kier is, Kier has sort of held together a fractious coalition.
[00:22:42]  Or rather, like, after decimating Jeremy Corbyn and taking the prime ministership and, you know, winning the general election, he is, I don't think he's been quite a popular leader.
[00:22:54]  I mean, obviously, you know, I support him, but he his popularity has been dragging.
[00:23:00]  And why, why is that?
[00:23:02]  Like, I actually don't know what he's done.
[00:23:04]  Has he done anything since getting into office?
[00:23:06]  Well, I mean, I mean, not really is the answer, right?
[00:23:08]  And like, what you're seeing here is it's a, well, it's a collapsing Labour Party.
[00:23:14]  It's as simple as that.
[00:23:15]  There's never been a more even worse and unpopular, just a sort of sense of like Anger and even amongst like the natural base of the Labour Party, just a sort of complete kind of rejection and amongst people who wouldn't be interested in politics, like a passivity towards the Labour Party, a sense that they have nothing to do with them, nothing to offer them.
[00:23:37]  You're getting entire generations now coming through who are becoming part of the electorate, who just have absolutely no interest whatsoever in what Labour have to offer.
[00:23:47]  Feel it's kind of like a- They've never even like known Labour as an entity, except for the sort of like current iteration, it feels like.
[00:23:54]  Oh, completely.
[00:23:55]  Well, I mean, like, I was born in 1991, and like, I've never known Labour in a serious way.
[00:24:00]  I mean, my sort of political maturity came listening to much older people who could tell you when, you know, an old Labour was a realistic political category.
[00:24:09]  And now you've had nearly half a century of there not really being like any functioning social democratic politics in Britain.
[00:24:16]  And all of the people who enforce that kind of neoliberalization of the Labour Party and the attack on all of Labour's natural social bases, this kind of cannibalization of the Labour Party, they're almost just like they don't know what to do.
[00:24:30]  They've not been schooled in any other way other than to just keep on wrecking your own social base, you know.
[00:24:36]  So you start off in the 80s with your very core social base, you turn the back on, turn your back on the miners, you turn your back on engineering workers, you turn your back on steel workers.
[00:24:47]  40 years ago, when the whopping dispute was happening, where the printers' unions were taking on, you know, the press owners, you know, you had Peter Mandelston still keeping contact with the people who are trying to destroy the entirety of the printers' unions.
[00:25:02]  You know, these are people whose entire political strategy has been just cannibalization, self-cannibalization.
[00:25:08]  And now you look at the way Starmer reacted to October the 7th, where his attitude is immediately just speaks like signaling how much the Labour Party has changed in contrast to what Jeremy Corbyn would have said by letting, you know, he went on LBC and said that Israel has the right to cut off water, you know, and electricity to Gaza.
[00:25:30]  And that's just such a ludicrous thing to say, just on obvious like human grounds.
[00:25:35]  But also just politically, like, you know, more than ever, the Labour Party's relied on working class Muslim communities to supply it with votes, to be honest.
[00:25:45]  And the fact that they just have like absolutely no interest and they just offer such contempt for the people that vote for them.
[00:25:53]  And these are the same sort of people now that are just shocked that they're adopting the rhetoric on the far right, watering down all workers' rights legislation, just providing absolutely nothing to people.
[00:26:06]  And they're surprised that people aren't becoming motivated by it and why people are interested in going somewhere else, in which case, you know, it's, and you see this in the by-election now in South Manchester, you know, between the Green Party and Reform UK.
[00:26:18]  Yeah, yeah, it is interesting.
[00:26:19]  I mean, I don't know, the numbers I were seeing out of Downing Street were apocalyptic for Labour.
[00:26:26]  I mean, there were some cases where like, and they were like neck and neck for support with the Greens.
[00:26:32]  And, you know, the parliamentary system in the UK has had a number of marginal parties with greater or lesser success, really poorly named for the most part.
[00:26:44]  We're actually in a sort of renaissance of poorly named UK parliamentary parties.
[00:26:48]  I'm thinking, of course, of reform, I think is pretty bad, although it's not anything to do.
[00:26:54]  I mean, respect maybe is the, is, is, for as good as I'm sure some of those people were, one of the worst named parties in human history, but a very European name, a very European name in many ways.
[00:27:05]  The Unity Coalition, respect the Unity Coalition.
[00:27:10]  But it is, yeah, it has just been kind of wild to watch.
[00:27:15]  And, you know, it's interesting because I think the last time we had you on was like six years ago, where we talked about, I must have been some of the labor anti-Semitism scandal.
[00:27:26]  And after sort of declaring victory over the left of the Labour Party through means, which we've talked about this numerous times on the show, both with Marcus and then we did, I think, maybe one or two episodes on the labor file stuff that came out.
[00:27:43]  But, you know, people just sort of not really of Starmer's or the Labour Party's kind of fault.
[00:27:52]  People just got really sick of the Conservatives because there was the party gate, people having too much fun around Boris Johnson, which really offended people because they were jealous.
[00:27:59]  They wanted to party with Boris Johnson, which does sound very fun.
[00:28:02]  And then Liz Truss, after people heard the rumors about her sexual predilections, which of course we've recounted on the show before.
[00:28:10]  Marcus is not saying this.
[00:28:12]  I am.
[00:28:12]  It does involve a rumor I've heard many times about her enjoying so-called dry anal sex.
[00:28:18]  That is the big rumor.
[00:28:20]  And I've heard that from numerous people.
[00:28:21]  And then, of course, Rishi Sunak, who we loved so much, but humiliated himself in front of a homeless person in a food bank in a video that went viral.
[00:28:30]  And his time was short after that.
[00:28:33]  And so people, I think, were just sick of the chaos in the Conservative Party.
[00:28:37]  And then Keir came in and he actually promised, I mean, this is a quote from him, an end to the chaos.
[00:28:42]  And I unfortunately, again, this is, I'm saying this from afar, so I might be wrong.
[00:28:48]  It does not seem like we have gotten an end to the chaos.
[00:28:51]  One of his first acts was to install Peter Mandelson as the UK prime minister to the United States and maybe explain to our listeners why somebody who was so sort of seen as this really seedy character like Peter Mandelson would have been the choice for this, probably the UK's most important ambassadorship.
[00:29:13]  I mean, it must look fucking insane, really, to be honest, from any outsider.
[00:29:19]  I mean, it did.
[00:29:20]  And it felt insane.
[00:29:21]  It felt being insane inside of it, too, you know.
[00:29:23]  The amount of labor left people you speak to, particularly who I think correctly interpreted such a significant amount of this kind of, you know, Mandelson's fourth rise through the Labour Party, third or fourth rise through the Labour Party.
[00:29:39]  They saw it as almost like a sort of smirking posture against the Labour left.
[00:29:44]  This entire period since 2020 has been the reconstruction of Blairism.
[00:29:48]  You got this tiny clique of people who, you know, when they stood on their own politics in 2015 in the leadership election then, you know, where Jeremy got, you know, the vast majority of Labour members voting for him and their preferred candidate, Liz Kendall, who's now a minister in the government, you know, she got 4.5%.
[00:30:05]  And I mean, if, you know, if we go through it, I'm sure that, well, I know that the vast majority of people who are in a campaign now are all in extremely flushed jobs around the government.
[00:30:15]  They're MPs.
[00:30:15]  They're in the House of Lords, you know, the senior ministers.
[00:30:19]  And a massive, massive chunk of the humiliation those people felt 10 years ago in 2015.
[00:30:27]  You know, when they jump back in the driving seat in 2020, everyone else has to feel that humiliation, right?
[00:30:32]  And that embarrassment.
[00:30:33]  And they're, you know, they're really on a serious sort of revanchist sort of, you know, maneuver.
[00:30:40]  And what more, you know, what more summarizes the sleaze and the kind of manipulation of politics and the voter base of the Labour Party and the shift, the hard shift to the right, you know, than Peter Mandelson and his presence, like just everything about him is just kind of like, like they love the notoriety that he had.
[00:30:58]  They love how much socialists were wound up by him.
[00:31:01]  They love how much he antagonized the trade unions.
[00:31:04]  And I'm sure for many of them, there was something in it too, that if you got quite close to him, then he had some pretty decent connections to the corporate world and there's job sphere.
[00:31:14]  There's like routes into different careers for you.
[00:31:17]  And such a huge part of them picking him was to kind of say, oh, look, fuck you, you know, to socialists and trade unionists in Labour.
[00:31:24]  And I mean, honestly, the emurta behind it was amazing.
[00:31:29]  I mean, I'm not even sure if you can call it that because I think the only MP that was really like, what the fuck is going on there?
[00:31:37]  Was Absana Begum, one of the East London MPs, who's a very committed socialist.
[00:31:43]  She was, you know, she was suspended for alongside several other Labour MPs.
[00:31:51]  She was suspended for voting against the two-child benefit cap.
[00:31:58]  Yeah, so, I mean, so Apsana Begum basically, alongside John McDonnell, who was obviously the shadow chancellor under Jeremy, alongside like, what, five other MPs, they backed an SNP motion to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which basically stops like, you know, basically, you don't get any, if you have more than two children, you don't get any more benefits if, you know, if you need them,
[00:32:27]  which is just basically condemning hundreds of thousands of children to poverty.
[00:32:31]  And to, you know, to sort of show their fidelity to the markets, they, yeah, the government forced through this benefit cap and these MPs voted against it.
[00:32:41]  They all got suspended.
[00:32:43]  And Absana Begum, you know, John McDonnell was keeping his head down a bit, but Absana Beckham didn't give a shit.
[00:32:48]  Massive respect to her for not giving a shit and just kept on like just hammering like, how am I suspended?
[00:32:54]  And look at this image of, you know, Peter Mandelson with Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:33:01]  And how is this right?
[00:33:02]  You know, what is going on in the Labour Party?
[00:33:04]  You know, massive respect for her for sticking to her guns on that because she's back in the party now and Mandelson's gone.
[00:33:09]  So fucking go on, Absano is laughing now.
[00:33:14]  Maybe we can back up a second.
[00:33:16]  And for most of our listeners, they, I don't know if they know who Peter Mandelson is.
[00:33:23]  Obviously, he is a, I always like to say a towering figure.
[00:33:28]  A grand UK, a great labor grand.
[00:33:31]  Yeah, grey eminence.
[00:33:32]  Yes.
[00:33:33]  But I think for a lot of people in the US, you know, maybe they had heard of him in some sort of, I don't know, like kind of like 90s or 2000s context.
[00:33:46]  Most likely not.
[00:33:47]  I don't know.
[00:33:49]  Maybe you can walk us through a little bit about who Peter is and what he kind of like, what is his stature in the UK prior to this scandal, maybe.
[00:33:58]  Or there's other scandals with him too.
[00:34:00]  Oh, there's so many, honestly.
[00:34:03]  So he's from like a very important political dynasty.
[00:34:06]  His granddad was Herbert Morrison, who was the, for years, the chair of the London District Labour Party and was a very important minister in the 1945 government.
[00:34:19]  He was, you know, he in his own right was like a, I mean, he's obviously a lot more of a serious guy than Mandelson, at least in terms of like doing actual politics and actually changing the country.
[00:34:30]  But, you know, even in his own right, he was, by all accounts, a strange guy.
[00:34:34]  He was power obsessed.
[00:34:35]  And there's an amazing anecdote that the prime minister of Britain after the end of World War II, Clement Attlee, you know, the big kind of reforming Labour Prime Minister, he basically had to rush to Buckingham Palace to accept the Labour Party's, you know, with the king.
[00:34:51]  So, you know, we're not a proper country.
[00:34:53]  We've got a monarchy.
[00:34:54]  And you have to, you have to basically, when you win an election, be like given the assent by the royal family to govern.
[00:35:02]  And he'd been told that Herbert Morrison was already on his way to collect it, which meant that he would have probably been in like serious standing against the leader of the Labour Party to be the prime minister.
[00:35:13]  So Attlee just had to race that fuck over to get it.
[00:35:16]  Incredible.
[00:35:17]  Incredible.
[00:35:18]  Yeah, so that's Mandelson's granddad, Morrison.
[00:35:20]  And he gets very close to Neil Kinnock after the 1983 election.

=== Morrison's Communist Past (11:12) ===

[00:35:26]  I should probably say that before that, he was a Communist Party member, or at least he was in the Young Communist League where he'd in North London, he'd be selling copies of the Morning Star at tube stations.
[00:35:36]  And some of his friends in the YCL, like, you know, obviously don't talk massively fondly of him.
[00:35:45]  I think he went to Cuba with the World Festival of Students and Youth and tried to, I think he tried to, almost on behalf of the YCL delegation, he tried to like heckle Castro or something like that, you know?
[00:35:56]  So he already had this like weird shit to him.
[00:35:59]  Yeah.
[00:35:59]  You mean he was an asshole?
[00:36:01]  Yeah.
[00:36:02]  And he wrote to this guy called Steve Howell, who was his friend in the YCL back then.
[00:36:07]  And I think when he was like traveling as a teenager, he, you know, bear in mind this is from an active communist.
[00:36:12]  He's already saying, I feel my revolutionary ardor is fading because I am a bourgeois at heart.
[00:36:18]  That the people whose company I enjoy most, they're those from a strictly bourgeois background.
[00:36:22]  The life I enjoy most does not exactly revolve around the class struggle.
[00:36:25]  So this is a guy who has always been, you know, in awe of the rich.
[00:36:28]  He's always been deferential to them.
[00:36:30]  And he craves being around them.
[00:36:32]  He craves being a part of them.
[00:36:34]  And, you know, clearly, even at a young age, he wanted to sustain that sort of living for himself.
[00:36:39]  And he takes a lot of these opinions with him.
[00:36:42]  You know, kind of moves away from official communism.
[00:36:45]  And, you know, 10 years later, he's in the kind of right-wing leadership of Neil Kinnock.
[00:36:52]  He goes through the labor bureaucracy, manages to plant a lot of his friends inside of the Labour Party's bureaucracy and gets a bit of a name for himself as a bit of a kind of up-and-coming figure in the party.
[00:37:04]  And I think there is a great quote from Tony Ben's diaries where he's basically like, man, I just, you know, I just met this guy.
[00:37:13]  His name's Peter Mandelson.
[00:37:15]  He's a fucking sinister figure.
[00:37:17]  I'll try and dig out the quote for you, but it's fucking really funny.
[00:37:22]  Like, and yeah, so he gets elected for Hartlepool.
[00:37:28]  You know, what the fuck is Hartlepool?
[00:37:31]  So Hartlepool is Hartlepool's nickname in England.
[00:37:36]  The people of Hartlepool, it's a town in the kind of northeast ish of the country.
[00:37:41]  It's, I guess it's not so far away from Newcastle.
[00:37:47]  But it's like the nickname for people from Hartlepool is monkey hangers because they apparently once hunger monkey from a that had survived a ship crash.
[00:37:57]  The hunger is a French spy.
[00:37:59]  Wait, sorry, they hanged a monkey.
[00:38:02]  They hanged a monkey.
[00:38:04]  We need to make threads real.
[00:38:06]  But we wait, sorry.
[00:38:08]  You guys, not you guys, although you also are a northerner.
[00:38:12]  I'm a northerner, yeah.
[00:38:13]  I can tell from your coarse way.
[00:38:17]  But but they hanged a monkey.
[00:38:20]  So if my memory serves me right, I think the people of Hartlepool, there was a shipwreck in the 1790s.
[00:38:27]  The lone survivor of it was a monkey on the ship.
[00:38:30]  Of course.
[00:38:31]  Of course.
[00:38:31]  And the monkey was hung, drawn and quartered for being a Napoleonic spy.
[00:38:36]  Wow.
[00:38:38]  Monkey hangers.
[00:38:39]  And so this is spies.
[00:38:42]  Peter Mandelson is like, these are my people.
[00:38:45]  These are my people.
[00:38:47]  I need to get a lot.
[00:38:48]  And so, I mean, that's sort of what I found so fascinating about the Labour Party is that, you know, it is ostensibly the base of it is like all these trade unions.
[00:38:58]  And, you know, then there's like a sort of affiliated organizations.
[00:39:01]  But it's supposedly, you know, one of those parties that Lenin talks about in left-wing communism.
[00:39:07]  You know what I mean?
[00:39:08]  Like, but it's like the classic sort of social democratic party.
[00:39:13]  And then it just became, I guess, like a lot of social democratic parties in Europe in general, just became a vehicle for, for some reason, guys.
[00:39:22]  And I don't really know why you would pick joining the Labour Party over joining the Conservatives if you were like a young sort of shark-like, you know, business-friendly fella.
[00:39:33]  But there's like a whole generation or multiple generations of guys like Mandelson that sprung up all over Europe.
[00:39:40]  I mean, you see this a lot in Germany, in Spain.
[00:39:43]  You know, Italy had a slightly different experience, although not a better one.
[00:39:48]  And so Mandelson is like one of many figures.
[00:39:51]  I mean, Tony Blair, obviously, is another one.
[00:39:54]  It's no wonder they met.
[00:39:55]  But so he gets elected as a member of parliament.
[00:39:59]  And what happens?
[00:40:01]  I mean, yeah, I guess you can see some of that as almost like just a form of asset stripping, right?
[00:40:05]  Like you still had this like extremely active working class base that, despite the fact that it still existed and was present in British society, it had been decisively defeated by successive strikes that went national and then failed.
[00:40:20]  So one of the steel workers, the miners, the printers.
[00:40:23]  And suddenly you had this base of extremely demoralized people.
[00:40:27]  That coupled in a much more subjective way, I suppose, with a lot of people in mining areas, steel towns, engineering towns, the people who brought forward the welfare state and created almost like a living example of social democratic presence in a very combative kind of trade union movement.
[00:40:45]  Suddenly these people are all like retiring by the 1980s.
[00:40:48]  They're no longer involved in that sort of politics in the same way.
[00:40:52]  And if you're a, you know, that's just a lot of votes to take from people, isn't it?
[00:40:57]  And that's a lot of like opportunity.
[00:41:00]  Yeah, right?
[00:41:01]  There's just a lot of civic life collapsing there and you can just, you can have it off them, can't you?
[00:41:05]  I mean, that's certainly what happens when you're installing people like Tony Blair into his constituency, Sedgefield, like an old mining town, and he's just having that seat.
[00:41:17]  And then Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool, you know, which is like as proletarian as it comes.
[00:41:23]  There's a great sort of thing that was brought up once about how like he went into a fish and chip shop and saw some mushy peas and he asked if he could have the guacamole.
[00:41:36]  Well, you know, I know that that's sort of a line where you expect Liz and I to poke fun at Mr. Mandelson.
[00:41:43]  But I'll tell you my reaction when I go, I'm going in to order myself a full English and I see the mushy peas and I say, no, I'm not touching your white man's curry.
[00:41:54]  I'm turning my ass right around.
[00:41:58]  Yeah, it is, it is, it is sort of kind of amazing to watch.
[00:42:03]  I mean, you know, all this is, of course, happening with the backdrop of the decadent period or the end of the decadent period in the Soviet Union and the collapse of the USSR Are and of course the entire Eastern Bloc.
[00:42:16]  And, you know, the eventual, the rise of Tony Blair and New Labor.
[00:42:21]  And Mandelson and Blair, I guess, are these really towering, these twin towering figures of New Labor.
[00:42:28]  And it's so, it's so funny to see, like, and almost, well, you can't predict almost any of this, actually, because it's such an absurd set of events, but where they ended up with Mandelson as the UK ambassador to the US under Donald Trump, and then Tony Blair,
[00:42:44]  you know, in a kind of coalition with all of these hedge fund guys and Donald Trump and, you know, sort of this really motley, seedy crew of the international bourgeois governing Gaza as a satrap there, which is a classic British job, of course.
[00:43:03]  And, you know, these two guys, they were supposedly leading this, you know, revolution in sort of in a mirrored way, you know, Bill Clinton's, you know, kind of revamping of the Democrats.
[00:43:14]  They were supposed to be leading this early 2000s new labor revolution, late 90s.
[00:43:20]  And that was not, as I can understand, very good for the country.
[00:43:25]  Well, I think the 1997 general election, I mean, I wouldn't want to take it away from him.
[00:43:30]  I think there was a genuine feeling there that people wanted something out of Tony Blair.
[00:43:34]  And every opinion poll suggests that his personal popularity was sky high at first.
[00:43:39]  And he had answers, right?
[00:43:42]  You know, there was, I think this is the one thing that really hurt me about starmerism.
[00:43:47]  It's that the guy gets elected off a totally fraudulent basis in that he's almost like, to some degree, like pitching to the left of Corbynism.
[00:43:53]  You know, it's almost like, you know, I'm a Corbyn Easter, but I can also like, I'm serious.
[00:43:58]  I can take on the state and, you know, you can believe me to deliver these things.
[00:44:02]  And we're going to have an even deeper fucking green agenda of, you know, whatever.
[00:44:06]  Like, at least Tony Blair was, you know, obviously he was everything that any detractor would say of him, but he was also willing to like confront people politically.
[00:44:16]  And there was lots of skullduggery involved in doing that.
[00:44:19]  But he was still confronting trade unions over like things like Clause 4, which was the traditional kind of commitment the Labour Party brought in in 1918 to guarantee basically that workers will get the fruits, the full fruits of what they create and the commitment to state industry.
[00:44:37]  And he knew how to do politics in organizing to confront that.
[00:44:41]  And, you know, it was a genuine kind of feeling that at least he was politically defeating the left.
[00:44:51]  It was embarrassing for the left, but at least actual political defeats are being hit there.
[00:44:56]  And he wasn't like purging the left in parliament in the same way.
[00:44:59]  His preferred phrase was the sealed tomb, you know?
[00:45:02]  So you'd have these miners MPs, these old ex-communist engineering official MPs.
[00:45:08]  You'd have people like Diane Alibert and Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:45:12]  And his attitude was like, look, I've defeated them so comprehensively that they can now be a comfortable part of the Labour Party.
[00:45:18]  We're not bringing any more in, but we're not going to go after him and bully him.
[00:45:22]  And I mean, there were suggestions from some of Blair's more kind of head-banging cadre around him.
[00:45:29]  Just things like, oh, if Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and Diane Abbott don't stop voting against bad stuff, then maybe we will just start blackmailing them into, you know, if you don't wise up, you'll lose your seat.
[00:45:42]  And even Blair, by his own standards, was like, nah, come on.
[00:45:46]  Yeah.
[00:45:46]  Like, these guys are bums.
[00:45:48]  We got nothing to fear for them.
[00:45:49]  Yeah.
[00:45:50]  It's a different type of political manipulation to the ones you experienced in stammerism.
[00:45:54]  Mandelson, as I understand it, had a tumultuous career alongside Blair.
[00:46:00]  And we've talked about this on the show a little bit before.
[00:46:03]  But I think if there's one word I would associate with Peter Mandelson, it is corruption.
[00:46:09]  And if there was two words, it would be blatant corruption.
[00:46:12]  And if there was three words, it would be blatant frequent corruption.
[00:46:16]  He is, he has been, you mentioned this was like his third or fourth rise in the Labour Party.
[00:46:20]  It is a little hard to tell.
[00:46:22]  It could be, there are cases for it's his third rise.
[00:46:25]  There are cases where it's his fourth rise.
[00:46:27]  But he seems fairly comfortable early on just taking money for people for political favors in a practice that is commonly known as bribery.

=== Millennium Dome Donation (03:35) ===

[00:46:38]  I mean, he fucking adores it.
[00:46:40]  I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to work out in any other way than some sort of pathology.
[00:46:46]  I mean, I mean, so you think about all the work he's been doing to get into the situation he's in where in 1997, he's considered to be an architect of a completely new political project, a new political party, a government that commands a supermajority, has a great deal of enthusiasm for it.
[00:47:05]  And within, you know, within like a year of having such strength in society, such might, he's already having to resign because one of his colleagues, he just basically, he asked, he's asked his colleague for like, I think, just short of 400,000 pounds.
[00:47:23]  He wanted to do home improvements.
[00:47:25]  Where does he live?
[00:47:26]  Where does he live?
[00:47:27]  The freaking Windsor Castle?
[00:47:29]  £400,000 in the 90s for home improvements?
[00:47:33]  I know.
[00:47:33]  It's like, fucking, how good do you want your kitchen to be?
[00:47:36]  Yeah.
[00:47:37]  Those British kitchens are not cheap.
[00:47:42]  The real nice ones.
[00:47:45]  It's fucking unreal, though, isn't it?
[00:47:47]  Some golden pipes.
[00:47:49]  So he was kicked out, but then he was brought in.
[00:47:51]  Was he brought in as a EU trade ambassador?
[00:47:55]  Well, so he came back in after the 2001 election.
[00:47:58]  And almost immediately afterwards, in fact, Mark Seddon, who then was the editor of Tribune, organized the breaking of the story.
[00:48:09]  The Tribune couldn't afford any legal representation, so an MP asked the question in Parliament, if I'm having that right, which was basically this billionaire who'd...
[00:48:20]  Oh, in fact, actually, so this mentions the Millennium Dome.
[00:48:23]  Do you know much about the Millennium Dome?
[00:48:25]  No.
[00:48:26]  What is it?
[00:48:26]  Oh, I have a Google of the Millennium Dome.
[00:48:28]  That's a great big, silly British.
[00:48:30]  I love saying shit like this.
[00:48:32]  Have a Google.
[00:48:33]  Yeah, I'm having a Google of the Millennium Dome.
[00:48:37]  Oh, the O2.
[00:48:39]  Yes, right?
[00:48:40]  Yeah.
[00:48:40]  The O2.
[00:48:41]  Yeah, you guys built your little Sydney opera house.
[00:48:44]  Of course, I know.
[00:48:45]  I love it.
[00:48:46]  You know, we actually have these giant balls.
[00:48:48]  And there's one in Las Vegas and they're talking about building another one, I think, in Virginia.
[00:48:53]  And they can just play ads.
[00:48:55]  Yeah.
[00:48:55]  They're going to put one up in Virginia?
[00:48:57]  Oh, yeah.
[00:48:58]  Or somewhere around DC, I believe.
[00:49:01]  That's weird.
[00:49:02]  Yeah.
[00:49:02]  And so they oftentimes put emojis.
[00:49:05]  I think when they create a new one or different advertisements or things like that.
[00:49:09]  And then, of course, you'll have someone like, I don't know, Bruce Springsteen.
[00:49:12]  I guess you would have Rod Stewart be at the Millennium Dome or, of course, Jimmy Saville or someone like that.
[00:49:18]  Yeah, it's a natural international.
[00:49:20]  A natural British legend.
[00:49:23]  So anyways, so this guy gave, I mean, long story short, this guy, this Indian billionaire, he gave the Millennium Dome a million pounds.
[00:49:32]  And then it seems that Peter Mandelson was lobbying extremely hard to get him a British passport.
[00:49:40]  I think, isn't there like another, didn't some guy just get caught?
[00:49:43]  I should have looked this up before I don't know what, before I started talking.
[00:49:48]  But you know what?
[00:49:48]  I didn't.
[00:49:49]  And so I'm still talking.
[00:49:51]  Wasn't there just some guy in another country just found with a bunch of blank British visas or passports or something like that?
[00:49:57]  Really?
[00:49:58]  Yeah, there was maybe some connection to the government.
[00:50:01]  It does seem like maybe he was trading a few things.
[00:50:04]  I think this is maybe where Trump got the idea.
[00:50:06]  You can just give a bunch of money and you get a passport there.
[00:50:10]  It's cool he was trying to create the golden passport system.

=== Gordon Brown's Reign (12:37) ===

[00:50:14]  He was too early.
[00:50:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:16]  I think, you know, looking at Mandelson's career, he strikes me as somebody who would have done very well as like a Cypriot politician.
[00:50:25]  Well, it's such a shame because you'd think that he like the Trump era would be like fantastic for him.
[00:50:33]  And yet it, because of all the Epstein stuff, which is also so tied up with Trump, obviously, it has been so, you know, maybe final nail in the coffin for him.
[00:50:45]  I don't want to get too ahead because I feel like we got to go through all his other nine lives.
[00:50:49]  Right.
[00:50:50]  Like he's got, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:54]  So many times.
[00:50:56]  It's incredible.
[00:50:58]  Can you imagine how fucking devastated you'd be when, I mean, someone who's as fucking nakedly corrupt as you is in the White House and he's clearly just really easily malleable.
[00:51:09]  You can clearly like outsmart manipulate him with a great deal of ease.
[00:51:13]  If you're Peter Mandelson, you can make so much out of that.
[00:51:18]  What a situation that you can just fucking have.
[00:51:20]  And it's been taken away from it by a socialist government.
[00:51:24]  I know.
[00:51:24]  I know.
[00:51:25]  You know, speaking of socialist governments, there was a particular piece of intra-socialist warfare that occurred in the early 2000s known as the Iraq War.
[00:51:36]  Of course, the socialist, although don't tell the Assads that I said this, the socialist government of Iraq was attacked by the capitalist government of the UK, or excuse me, the US, but the socialist government of the UK, of course, led by Tony Blair, supported it full throttle, of which I believe Trump just recently said, we don't care.
[00:51:56]  And my critical support to him goes out.
[00:52:01]  Imagine I said that in a correct way.
[00:52:04]  We don't care.
[00:52:05]  If I say this right now, if you are a British, if you are a squatty, if you're a British serviceman, if you did fight in the Iraq war for America, but under British flag and control, you are a fucking sucker.
[00:52:18]  You're a sucker because our soldiers, they get free health care in college.
[00:52:23]  Your soldiers would have gotten free health care before, and they haven't invented college.
[00:52:27]  They only have two of them.
[00:52:27]  They only have Oxford and Cambridge.
[00:52:29]  They don't have other colleges.
[00:52:30]  So only about 40 people can go anyways.
[00:52:32]  And if you went, we just don't care.
[00:52:35]  You have your shitty little fucking rifles that you, for some reason, the magazine's behind it behind the fucking trigger.
[00:52:40]  We don't care.
[00:52:40]  You guys, we don't care.
[00:52:42]  We don't care.
[00:52:42]  We don't give a fuck.
[00:52:45]  But Tony Blair, of course, supported George Bush's attack on Iraq.
[00:52:50]  Mandelson in his cabinet, I think around that time, at least around 2003.
[00:52:55]  But it seems like 2003 was an important year for Mandelson in his personal life as well, because that is the year that we have his first, I believe his first, established correspondence with Monsieur Jeffrey Epstein, which came out in the birthday book revelations.
[00:53:11]  And Mandelson's letter, I don't know if you, I'm sure you saw it, Marcus.
[00:53:15]  Oh, which one?
[00:53:16]  From the 2003 one.
[00:53:18]  Was that the one about arranging the 10 Downing Street meeting?
[00:53:22]  No, no, no, no.
[00:53:24]  That is the one where he writes like a 10-page handwritten love note to Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:53:29]  It's like, you are the fucking man.
[00:53:31]  You are my best friend.
[00:53:32]  I love you more than anything.
[00:53:33]  You fucking rule.
[00:53:34]  Jeffrey Epstein, you rock.
[00:53:40]  It does seem that their relationship must have started prior to that.
[00:53:45]  I don't know, maybe hooked up by Ghelane or something.
[00:53:47]  I mean, this was certainly during the heyday of Ghelan's sort of lordship of Jeffrey Epstein's or over Jeffrey Epstein's personal affairs.
[00:53:58]  I don't know.
[00:53:59]  We actually, I don't think we do know exactly how Mandelson and Epstein met.
[00:54:03]  You know, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:54:05]  I would assume that they met via Ghelane because obviously she was doing her little lordship over Jeffrey Epstein's social affairs.
[00:54:12]  And her father, Robert Maxwell, was one of our favorite.
[00:54:17]  I mean, talk about Labor Party grandees.
[00:54:19]  He was an MP.
[00:54:20]  A labor man.
[00:54:20]  He was a labor man.
[00:54:22]  He was a labor man through and through.
[00:54:24]  And, you know, and people gave him shit for it at the time.
[00:54:28]  But in his die-hard support for the country of Israel, he really was it presaged, I think is the word that he presaged the support that that plucky little nation would be given by crucial MPs in later years when it needed it the most.
[00:54:45]  And so I would assume some connection came came via Ghelane.
[00:54:48]  I mean, certainly she had her own connections to Boris Johnson, whose sister wrote a, I think, in the Spectator.
[00:54:55]  That's a great piece, isn't it?
[00:54:57]  Yeah, a column a few years ago basically saying that Boris Johnson had sex with Ghelane Maxwell.
[00:55:02]  Was there some sort of massage language involved as that?
[00:55:06]  Yes.
[00:55:06]  I mean, she's very massage.
[00:55:08]  Yes.
[00:55:09]  Well, yeah, it's a little, yeah.
[00:55:11]  Is he like Boris's feet or like it was Ghelane's heels sort of digging into Boris Johnson's thighs, which is quite, you can hear the sizzle of the bacon.
[00:55:22]  That's the stuff.
[00:55:23]  Yeah, it's delicious.
[00:55:24]  But someone should have given that to George Galloway.
[00:55:28]  I know.
[00:55:29]  Well, we'll have a sexual sandwich video.
[00:55:34]  So, you know, it is, it's obviously they were close friends pretty early on.
[00:55:39]  I mean, this was, this is Jeffrey Epstein's social circle was largely made up of New York finance people.
[00:55:47]  It's closed social circle.
[00:55:48]  And really, you can even see it from the birthday book, the people who Dean DeLent deigned to send in letters.
[00:55:53]  But Mandelson's letter is both effusive and clearly speaks to a close connection between the two.
[00:55:59]  And that connection seems to have broadened and deepened for the next 16 years until Jeffrey Epstein's mysterious death in a Manhattan jail cell.
[00:56:13]  There has been some news about Peter Mandelson, in particular about his time in Gordon Brown's cabinet.
[00:56:20]  Now, Gordon Brown, much like the name of this poor monkey who was strangled to death by Peter Mandelson's former constituents, is largely forgotten by history.
[00:56:33]  Yeah, he was one of the great losers that era, really, you know?
[00:56:37]  He really was, wasn't he?
[00:56:40]  He's so perfect.
[00:56:42]  I feel like he's a great example of the like in-between prime minister.
[00:56:46]  Like everyone's always like, there's like a couple names throughout the 20th and 21st century that you're sort of like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that guy.
[00:56:54]  But he's always like kind of in between.
[00:56:57]  He's a bit of a more important name.
[00:56:59]  The British call such figures betwixt.
[00:57:02]  Yes.
[00:57:03]  Betwixt and between.
[00:57:04]  He's a betwixt.
[00:57:05]  So he was prime minister for what, eight months?
[00:57:08]  I mean, he was, but he came after Blair, right?
[00:57:10]  It was no time at all.
[00:57:11]  It was basically like the government was collapsing.
[00:57:13]  It was really healing.
[00:57:14]  Gordon Brown always had this kind of thing to him where he was, you know, he was a close second in his own mind to Tony Blair.
[00:57:23]  And I think all of the structures around Blair, which never fancied Gordon that much, they thought differently.
[00:57:30]  And, you know, there was definitely a very well-organized move to kick Blair out.
[00:57:36]  That happened.
[00:57:38]  A whole new sort of reign of people came in around Gordon Brown.
[00:57:41]  But like, it didn't really matter because you're talking, you know, Tony Blair was never going to really take such a historic defeat when it happened in 2010, was he?
[00:57:50]  And all it meant was that Gordon Brown just had to own like a really embarrassing end for Labour in government after 13 years.
[00:57:56]  Yeah.
[00:57:57]  So, I mean, it's not, it's not exactly fucking tremendous, is it?
[00:58:02]  Three years, Mr. Brown was in power.
[00:58:04]  They write to honorable Gordon Brown with the rights on.
[00:58:07]  And I guess he had Peter Mandelson scurrying around him during that period.
[00:58:13]  Seems like a bit of a mistake.
[00:58:15]  And one of the big scandals that is emerging from this new dump of Jeffrey Epstein emails is, in addition to even more quite close correspondence between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson, is a particular exchange of BlackBerry messages that came in 2010.
[00:58:36]  So Jeffrey Epstein on May 9th, 2010, BlackBerry messages, Peter Mandelson.
[00:58:42]  Sources tell me 500 billion Euro bailout almost complete.
[00:58:46]  Mandelson responds, should be announced tonight.
[00:58:50]  Jeffrey Epstein hits him up with the quite curious, are you home?
[00:58:55]  And then he responds.
[00:58:58]  This is, of course, Peter Mandelson responds, just leaving number 10.
[00:59:01]  We'll call sent from my BlackBerry wireless device.
[00:59:08]  This is seems to be giving privileged information.
[00:59:14]  At least this seems to be the contention that is sort of growing among the prosecutorial services of Her Majesty's United Kingdom.
[00:59:24]  Privileged information that is being given via BlackBerry message by one Peter Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein in 2010.
[00:59:35]  There's another instance of something like this also happening where they're talking about, oh, yeah, they're trying to get Jeffrey Epstein is, I don't have it in front of me, but it's like Jeffrey Epstein is hitting up Peter Mandelson to talk to Larry Summers on behalf of Jess Staley and JP Morgan for changes in the vocal rules.
[01:00:00]  Does that make sense?
[01:00:01]  So it's like Peter.
[01:00:02]  So like, obviously, Jess Staley's like, dude, you know Peter Mandelson?
[01:00:04]  That guy's so sick.
[01:00:06]  Can you please talk to him?
[01:00:08]  Because I know that he knows Larry Summers, even though Epstein does too, but Epstein probably, you know, being a little judicious with his reaching out then because he had just gotten out of jail for, or had just recently been jailed for sexual contact with a minor.
[01:00:23]  He's like, oh, fuck.
[01:00:24]  Well, if I'm a pedophile, Larry Summers probably doesn't want to talk to me.
[01:00:29]  I should just get somebody from the island where almost everybody's a pedophile to do it for me.
[01:00:34]  And yeah, and he hits up Peter Mandelson, and Peter Mandelson appears to do it for him.
[01:00:38]  Yeah, I'm trying to find it now.
[01:00:40]  I mean, the one that I think really went far was the one where he's basically, you know, when Gordon Brown is trying to line up like the banker's tax, like one banker's tax of Alistair Darling, who was then chancellor.
[01:00:52]  He's basically being like, oh, you know, don't worry.
[01:00:55]  This isn't going to happen.
[01:00:56]  I'm going to try my hardest to make sure this doesn't happen.
[01:00:58]  And just having this like fucking bizarre back and forth with Epstein over it.
[01:01:05]  Yeah, I mean, at this point, I mean, he's, they're basically having a discussion over how Epstein could help get JP Morgan involved in making sure that that doesn't go through.
[01:01:18]  Like, so there's a bunch of back and forths that are pretty, you know, I think when we think of the salacious Epstein emails, I think this stands out in a different way from the others because it's literally government officials giving privileged information or discussing policy changes all around the response to the financial crisis.
[01:01:42]  Like all of this was in a response to 2008, whether it was the banker's tax, or which was like all that was supposed to be like punitive, or the Euro crisis and the entire like reform package that they were discussing there.
[01:01:59]  So it's kind of like shocking because when we think about Epstein, I mean, a lot of the money stuff sometimes gets sidelined.
[01:02:07]  And yet, here he is with like government officials discussing some of the like biggest financial policy of the 21st century.
[01:02:18]  It's incredibly like interventionary stuff, isn't it?
[01:02:20]  Yes.
[01:02:21]  Even Epstein, with that, though, you always get the impression you can't really believe the access he's got with Mandelson there.
[01:02:26]  That's the one where he's like, he says something like, oh, you are so devious.
[01:02:31]  Yes.
[01:02:33]  It is really funny to think about that, like, whatever, some poor fucking railway worker in the UK has no sway with the Labour government all the time.
[01:02:42]  But a notorious financier and child sex trafficker from New York City has direct access.

=== Mandelson's Postal Privatization Push (04:44) ===

[01:02:51]  Direct interpersonal access.
[01:02:53]  And so I think that should teach maybe some of our listeners a bit of a lesson how this so-called liberal democracy works.
[01:02:59]  They're quite liberal.
[01:03:01]  With, well, actually, I would say maybe quite conservative, but quite liberal in choices of friends that they have.
[01:03:08]  But yeah, it is sort of astounding.
[01:03:10]  So it was, you know, Peter Mandelson retired, I believe, to the private sector because there was after Labor was swept out of power and the thousand-year conservative Tory Reich began.
[01:03:24]  Yeah, so I mean, towards that period, I mean, he obviously is, you know, he's doing Peter Mandelson, isn't he?
[01:03:30]  And he's doing things like, you know, he had a very, very sort of silly moment, really aggressively trying to like force, like, force through the privatization of the Royal Mail, which the subsequent government ended up basically doing.
[01:03:46]  But he set that all in motion, you know.
[01:03:49]  Bit of a scandal with the Royal Mail you guys have been having for what?
[01:03:54]  Decade there?
[01:03:55]  Yeah, well, that's because of the that's actually technically the post office now because of the privatization.
[01:04:00]  Oh, but yeah, I know the post office inquiry.
[01:04:03]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:04]  Yeah, the Horizon scandal.
[01:04:05]  Yeah.
[01:04:05]  Yes, yes.
[01:04:06]  But that's a friends for another time.
[01:04:08]  So he was, he was, he was just doing Labor Party stuff, trying to privatize.
[01:04:12]  Yeah, although I would say that like, apparently, Mandelson did force Tony Blair to go ahead with the system, despite the fact he was well aware that it was full of these, you know, maybe, maybe I should talk briefly about the Horizon system.
[01:04:25]  Yeah, whatever.
[01:04:26]  Just do it.
[01:04:26]  Just fucking talk about it.
[01:04:28]  So it was just an it happened.
[01:04:32]  So basically, like there was this scandal where in the mid-90s, the tech system for the post office, Horizon, was installed, which was meant to help people who run post offices sort of look after their profits better and report profits directly.
[01:04:48]  So there's no theft or whatever being sent back to the national post office.
[01:04:54]  And these machines had internal errors on them, but became clear that nobody wanted to admit that there was these serious errors.
[01:05:03]  And these are, it's not just a penny or two missing here.
[01:05:06]  You're talking like every single time somebody would cash up, they would lose, you know, three, four, five thousand pounds every single day.
[01:05:13]  And the people who ran the call centers inside of the system where people were reporting like, oh yeah, my fucking system's like broken or whatever.
[01:05:24]  It's give me outrageous numbers.
[01:05:26]  They were told directly to basically not tell anybody over the phone, like, oh, that's weird.
[01:05:30]  That's happening to other people too.
[01:05:32]  They had to treat every single case like an isolated individual case.
[01:05:37]  And it led to people killing themselves.
[01:05:39]  Obviously, it led people going to jail for fraud.
[01:05:42]  It destroyed, you know, like countless people's lives.
[01:05:45]  And it was, it was straight up just like a fucking number error in this software.
[01:05:50]  Which could have just been solved if a single CEO would have come forward and said, ah, look, you know, that was my job.
[01:05:56]  That was a bit of a fuck up.
[01:05:58]  I'll resign.
[01:05:59]  But it was like all of these small town postmasters.
[01:06:02]  And, you know, you picture them like the little, like a little old man.
[01:06:04]  He's, you know, oh, welcome in.
[01:06:06]  You know, yeah, quintessential, nice English person.
[01:06:09]  Exactly.
[01:06:09]  Well, you know, we have a picture in our head.
[01:06:12]  We've never met one, but we have a picture in our head.
[01:06:15]  And they were all accused.
[01:06:16]  It was like 80-year-olds being accused of like tens of thousands of pounds of theft.
[01:06:22]  And the government refused to admit fault for a really long time.
[01:06:25]  And yeah, again, people's reputations were ruined.
[01:06:28]  People were jailed.
[01:06:29]  People killed themselves.
[01:06:30]  And it turns out it was this just fucking air in the software.
[01:06:34]  And there's been an ongoing postal inquiry about it.
[01:06:37]  Well, yeah, well, Mandelson apparently told Blair just to go with it.
[01:06:41]  You know?
[01:06:42]  Wow.
[01:06:43]  Fucking incredible.
[01:06:44]  The record that guy's got.
[01:06:46]  Yeah.
[01:06:47]  We should say also, just on the Epstein thing, it wasn't just the communications during that period.
[01:06:53]  There was also a series of payments that were made from Epstein to Mandelson and also Mandelson's husband much later.
[01:07:06]  I think, but I think there was something like as early as 2003 there in the most recent files, there was like a DOJ note that said it was like $75,000 that he sent to Mandelson.
[01:07:23]  And then there was something like 10,000 pounds that he sent to Mandelson's husband for, I am unclear, some sort of medical course.
[01:07:33]  Oh, is that like osteopathy or something?

=== Longtime Brexiteer's Dilemma (06:48) ===

[01:07:35]  Is it?
[01:07:36]  Yes.
[01:07:37]  It'd be funny if it was chiropractor, actually, wouldn't it?
[01:07:39]  I thought it was good.
[01:07:40]  Wait, which one's the bullshit one?
[01:07:41]  Is it chiropractor?
[01:07:42]  The bullshit one and osteopathy is the real one.
[01:07:43]  Yes.
[01:07:44]  Marcus, I've been doing a lot of reading the past few weeks.
[01:07:46]  It's all bullshit.
[01:07:48]  How come is your backpad?
[01:07:50]  No, And it never will be because of the supplements I've been taken.
[01:07:54]  All the peptides.
[01:07:56]  Yes.
[01:07:58]  But yeah, he was just like sending Mandelson money.
[01:08:01]  I think I've seen different amounts.
[01:08:02]  I've seen $75,000 and I've seen up to $300,000.
[01:08:07]  Well, you could ask him, but he doesn't recall.
[01:08:09]  Yeah.
[01:08:10]  That's such a fucking funny lie, isn't it?
[01:08:13]  Imagine anyone sending you 70K, no matter how much money you've got, and you just don't recall.
[01:08:17]  I don't remember.
[01:08:19]  But I would also not be surprised if there was other money that exchanged hands that we maybe don't have a record of because we don't have the complete files here or anything.
[01:08:27]  We certainly don't have it from Mandelson's end.
[01:08:30]  But it certainly seems like they were both friends and had a bit of an employer-employee relationship, a bit of a, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine kind of thing going on there.
[01:08:41]  So labor goes through some difficult times in the 2000s, the 2010s.
[01:08:48]  Obviously, a longtime supporter of Boris Johnson personally on the show.
[01:08:53]  Liz is, I know, as well.
[01:08:55]  Oftentimes, when we discuss the UK, we devolve into just merely barking the line, get Brexit done to each other.
[01:09:04]  Brace is joking, but also that is some of my favorite him gliding through the air in the Union Jack.
[01:09:14]  I don't know what that was, onesie or whatever with the holding the flags.
[01:09:19]  I mean, it's called being.
[01:09:22]  I hate to say you guys deserve it because I don't believe that, but certainly some people in Britain deserved that moment.
[01:09:30]  We love our bojo.
[01:09:33]  And I am kind of kidding, but we actually do do that.
[01:09:36]  We have said get Brexit done to each other probably thousands of times.
[01:09:40]  And then it's just get stuck like a robot.
[01:09:44]  And get Brexit.
[01:09:45]  Don't get Brexit.
[01:09:47]  Obviously, you know, longtime Brexiteer here.
[01:09:50]  It was an amazing time that we had.
[01:09:53]  We were what?
[01:09:54]  We were 10 years in power.
[01:09:55]  I don't know how long he was in office for, but I enjoyed every second of it.
[01:09:59]  And then he was thrust out for having too much fun, which I found interesting for having too good of a time.
[01:10:06]  It's sort of like, did you guys know that that's kind of you, Bojo's in power?
[01:10:11]  That's his job is to have fun.
[01:10:13]  Yeah.
[01:10:14]  It's like, okay, there's lockdowns from everyone in Britain.
[01:10:17]  Lock it down, get your work done, and let's go do a little bit of sniz.
[01:10:23]  It was kind of mad, I thought, the Boris stuff, because he is, I mean, both those responses are just really quintessentially British, you know?
[01:10:30]  Like, I think the reason why people were saying, oh, you know, like the sort of very pro-European kind of liberal British left at the time were really, you know, going along this extremely unconvincing thing that Boris was a fascist.
[01:10:43]  And it's like fascism relies upon, you know, mass mobilization and fucking mass politics.
[01:10:48]  Like Boris was just the, he was the candidate of the mobilization.
[01:10:52]  Things are just getting a lot for a lot of people.
[01:10:54]  And he was offering a kind of like, stop thinking about this stuff approach.
[01:10:58]  He was just a Maxing.
[01:10:59]  He was Jester Maxine.
[01:11:01]  Well, Marcus, I'm sure that you're well seasoned in the fact that a lot of people, when they see something bad about liberal democracy, instead of ascribing that fault to maybe an unavoidable part of liberal democracy, they immediately have to say it's an illiberal thing that these people are doing.
[01:11:19]  It is a, it is, and, or a fascist thing that these people are doing.
[01:11:22]  And so, I mean, you see this with when people talk about concentration camps, a fascist phenomenon, not at all.
[01:11:27]  You know what I mean?
[01:11:28]  It's, it's ridiculous.
[01:11:29]  Um, but here they're neither here nor there.
[01:11:32]  He is, he is kicked out.
[01:11:33]  We had a succession of amazing Tory prime ministers.
[01:11:36]  We've listed them off earlier.
[01:11:38]  And of course, in the background, your friend Jeremy Corbyn is getting just walloped.
[01:11:45]  He is just getting destroyed by his own political party.
[01:11:50]  And so are many of your friends, I can imagine.
[01:11:54]  And it becomes abundantly clear that there is one man and one man alone who can save Britain, who can get Brexit done or undone or whatever they wanted to do.
[01:12:08]  And that man is Kier Starmer.
[01:12:10]  And Kier, we were talking about this before we started rolling.
[01:12:13]  Britain is an interesting country.
[01:12:15]  Or excuse me, the UK is an interesting country.
[01:12:17]  I still don't know the distinction because it's all Britain to me.
[01:12:20]  England's a real country.
[01:12:21]  The UK is a fake thing.
[01:12:23]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:24]  Well, it's, you know, you got the Scots.
[01:12:26]  We don't know what they are.
[01:12:26]  We got the Welsh.
[01:12:27]  We don't know what they are.
[01:12:28]  We got Northern Ireland.
[01:12:29]  Nobody knows what they are.
[01:12:30]  You know, is there another one?
[01:12:31]  We don't know.
[01:12:32]  Reunion?
[01:12:33]  Is it, you know, Tristan Dakuna?
[01:12:35]  What are they?
[01:12:35]  We don't know.
[01:12:37]  But we see an interesting experiment that occurs with the UK in the post-war years, where important figures from both the two main political parties, that would be Labour and the Conservative Party, oftentimes hail from a Trotskyite background, sometimes hail from a mainline communist background.
[01:13:01]  And I think it is, we see, I think Britain since 1946, we've seen an experiment in Trotskyist governance.
[01:13:08]  And, you know.
[01:13:09]  It's Trotskyism in action, isn't it?
[01:13:11]  It's Trotskyism in action.
[01:13:12]  Not saying these people have every one of Trotsky's beliefs, but many of them were trained in Trotskyism, or at least in Fourth International Party's practices.
[01:13:23]  So, which, of course, we love.
[01:13:25]  We love the AWP.
[01:13:26]  No, it's like when people are like, oh, real Trotskyism has never been tried.
[01:13:31]  You say, well, then what's Britain?
[01:13:33]  Yeah, excuse me, what's Kier Starmer?
[01:13:35]  Because Kier Starmer, ladies and gentlemen, Kirstarmer is a student of the dialectic.
[01:13:42]  And so we have Starmer in there, and he's like, fuck, I'm just Milan Trotskyist here in here in Downing Street.
[01:13:48]  He's like, I need somebody.
[01:13:50]  He's, of course, being a longtime student in dialectics, hailing from the Trotskyist tradition.
[01:13:54]  He says, what do I need?
[01:13:55]  What do I need?
[01:13:56]  What do I need?
[01:13:57]  I need somebody trained in classic Stalinism.
[01:14:01]  And so he brings out Britain's Brezhnev.
[01:14:05]  He's like, I need somebody out there in DC who can secure the interests of our people.
[01:14:11]  And I can't remember the rest of the 14 words, but that's quite a good thing.
[01:14:15]  He's like, we need somebody who can secure the interests of our people.
[01:14:18]  I need a mainline Brezhnevite Stalinist.
[01:14:21]  I need Peder Mandelson.

=== Lord Sugar's Controversy (14:54) ===

[01:14:24]  And we were talking about this before, earlier.
[01:14:27]  It is just a baffling choice and it continued to baffle me all throughout Peter's tumultuous, what, nine months in DC.
[01:14:37]  And one thing that we've talked about on the show before, but that sticks out to me is just such a strange thing is Peter Mandelson was having a party at the, I believe the ambassador's residence in DC the night that Virginia Jeffrey died.
[01:14:49]  And one of the people there, an old, old friend of the podcast, the only person, this woman, I shan't even say her name, who is probably the only person who possesses a free Ghelaine Maxwell shirt in the continental United States.
[01:15:03]  And I was just like, this is crazy.
[01:15:06]  White House sanctioned Epstein files binder.
[01:15:09]  Yes.
[01:15:10]  And it's just like, it was so blatant and so strange that it just shocked me that he wasn't sacked.
[01:15:16]  But then September came around.
[01:15:20]  And he is, and speaking of Stalin, much like some Central European, you know, whatever, OGPU agent of the 1940s, he is recalled to the Capitol to be dealt with.
[01:15:37]  And he is the subject of some consternation at 10 Downing Street.
[01:15:43]  And so how was the reaction to the ambassadorial recall in September out there in the UK?
[01:15:50]  Well, I think for most people who, to be honest, I think most people who are just online, I don't just mean very online people.
[01:15:57]  I just mean people who have the internet, which is, you know, lots of people, millions of people still don't have the internet in England.
[01:16:02]  But I think the vast majority of people had had like a forwarded many times WhatsApp thing about the photograph everyone had seen with Epstein and Mandelson.
[01:16:12]  I think the vast majority of people just felt completely perplexed that this choice was ever made.
[01:16:18]  Again, massive shout out to Optana Begum just for hammering that point forward again and again.
[01:16:23]  But like, I think for many people, it was a weird thaw where you could suddenly just start noticing things again.
[01:16:29]  Yeah.
[01:16:29]  You know, suddenly you could actually start discussing these things and it was a bit of an onslaught, to be honest.
[01:16:34]  And everything starts falling apart from there, doesn't it?
[01:16:37]  When suddenly there's another, you know, because, I mean, once you notice one thing in that regard, you've got to notice everything else, haven't you?
[01:16:43]  I mean, in the background of this, by the way, just to like remind everyone, is all the shit going on with Andrew and the royal family.
[01:16:51]  So it's like all the Epstein stuff is now like in all parts of different British institutions, which I do think, you know, kind of contributes to some of that of what you're of what you're talking about, this kind of this onslaught.
[01:17:05]  And I think the situation with Keir, you know, it's so funny.
[01:17:08]  As you were just going through that whole thing, Bryce, I was thinking, I'm like, you know, if Robert Maxwell was alive, I wouldn't have been surprised if they would have like put him up for a position.
[01:17:18]  And it would have been as absurd as this.
[01:17:23]  And Keir's response was, I mean, what we can talk about how it shifted from September now through January after the release of all these, you know, these millions of files has sort of changed Keir's tune and how he was kind of dealing with this.
[01:17:41]  It seemed like they were trying to kind of sweep it under the rug.
[01:17:44]  But now the fervor, I mean, it seems like there's a ton of, I would say it seems from afar what I would, I'm, you know, to ask, it feels like some people were smelling blood in the water with Kier's government and were trying to kind of attack him.
[01:18:01]  And he had to come out and say, oh, well, I, I, you know, I knew about the allegations.
[01:18:05]  I knew about the relationship that Mandelson had with Epstein.
[01:18:10]  And yet I still appointed him, which I, you know, I got to say, ballsy move.
[01:18:15]  An interesting move from Kier.
[01:18:17]  Didn't expect that one.
[01:18:18]  But you know, I think, I don't know.
[01:18:19]  I get the impression that, again, like as we were saying, it was clearly those guys, all those guys in the labor right, they clearly got like a massive kick out of, you know, taking selfies in Mandelson, saying how brilliant Mandelson is.
[01:18:32]  There was obviously sort of three-line whipping in WhatsApp chats to essentially force people to go out and say something compromising for themselves, but complimentary to Mandelson for, you know, every single major time the left tried to kick up a stink about it.
[01:18:47]  And I think this just became a thing where, you know, it's great when you and your mates are just drunk off fucking control and you've rushed into power.
[01:18:56]  You've basically had someone else do all the work for you in winning an election, which is, you know, the collapse of the Tory party.
[01:19:03]  And suddenly it's all great for you and everyone you've known for the past 15 years in politics.
[01:19:07]  And why don't you just fucking wind up your opponents who put you through so much shit for so long?
[01:19:11]  You know, under the Corbyn years.
[01:19:13]  And then suddenly this, you know, these files from America just represent an onslaught, don't they?
[01:19:20]  And you're just not going to be able to wither that fucking storm.
[01:19:23]  And you just have to deal with it.
[01:19:24]  And that does mean, you know, despite everything, it does mean throwing daddy under the bus, you know?
[01:19:31]  Yeah.
[01:19:32]  And, you know, we were watching with great consternation images of Kier Starmer seemingly shaking, addressing.
[01:19:41]  Oh, he was shaking like a shitting dog, wasn't he?
[01:19:44]  He was like a hanged monkey.
[01:19:47]  He was sort of spasming about monkeys last minute.
[01:19:54]  He was having his monkeys' last minute.
[01:19:56]  It was he was having his monkeys' last minute.
[01:20:06]  It was pathetic to watch.
[01:20:08]  Keir, I couldn't believe it.
[01:20:09]  You know, I was given his wedding as well.
[01:20:12]  Yeah.
[01:20:12]  I was given his phone number last year and I called him.
[01:20:16]  He didn't pick up.
[01:20:17]  But you know who else's phone number I was given, Marcus?
[01:20:19]  I think I might have sent this to you.
[01:20:21]  Gone?
[01:20:22]  A man named Wes Streeting MP.
[01:20:24]  Ooh.
[01:20:25]  And he is, he is currently, he seems to be angling.
[01:20:28]  There seems to be something, and I can't tell because all British people are so confusing to me and they look quite similar.
[01:20:35]  But is there like a leadership battle perhaps for leadership of the Labour Party now that Kier Starmer, the iron Keir has been weakened a little bit?
[01:20:44]  Well, I mean, it's an interesting thing to lead on to because did you see that West Streeting's team have kind of given up his WhatsApp messages from Mandelson between the two?
[01:20:53]  I have seen that.
[01:20:54]  And it's basically like, yeah, you know, a bit embarrassing, but here's the messages.
[01:20:59]  And it's just exactly what you all think about Gaza.
[01:21:02]  Yeah.
[01:21:03]  Wait, can you fancy?
[01:21:05]  So let me dig them up.
[01:21:08]  But he had them leaked.
[01:21:10]  And obviously, some are, I mean, some of them were just straight up embarrassing.
[01:21:13]  It was lots of kisses, lots of just warm messaging.
[01:21:18]  And, you know, these people are tight.
[01:21:20]  You know, you've got to look in this in the context that Mandelson has had such a decisive control over shaping the leadership of New Labour and the subsequent generation of New Labour politicians that have come forward.
[01:21:33]  And Wes Streeting was like the absolute golden boy of New Labour politics this period.
[01:21:39]  You know, he was everything about them just crystallized, you know.
[01:21:45]  And the idea, you know, he's, I mean, West Streeting's come out and said that he wasn't a close personal friend.
[01:21:52]  My own personal thoughts on that is that I think if you're explaining, you're losing, aren't you?
[01:21:57]  And, you know, and I feel like it's just the whole thing is very cringe-worthy.
[01:22:02]  And the messages were, you know, a significant section was just being nice.
[01:22:06]  And the other part of it was, oh, you know, have you got a minute, Pete?
[01:22:10]  It's like, yeah, sure.
[01:22:11]  So, well.
[01:22:13]  Netanyahu and the state of Israel are committing war crimes and we should be sanctioning Israel.
[01:22:17]  And we need a growth strategy in Britain.
[01:22:20]  And we've got no messages.
[01:22:22]  And we need to just be more redistributive economically.
[01:22:27]  It's just fucking, it's absolutely ludicrous.
[01:22:29]  And basically, ministers have been warned since.
[01:22:32]  It was one of the most unsubtle attempts to influence future members and also voters because Streeting, as he concedes in the messages to Starma, to Mandelson, he says he's toast in his words at the next election.
[01:22:50]  The constituency he represents is very left-wing, very Muslim.
[01:22:55]  And an independent candidate called Leanne Mohammed nearly beat him by a couple of hundred votes.
[01:23:02]  It was like less than half a thousand votes were in it.
[01:23:05]  And, you know, he is, I mean, they're not exactly putting on votes, are they?
[01:23:10]  In working class communities and Muslim communities?
[01:23:12]  Certainly not.
[01:23:13]  No, I don't think that, I don't think the aftermath of October 7th has been great for the Labour Party.
[01:23:17]  It's not been tremendous, has it?
[01:23:19]  No.
[01:23:20]  No.
[01:23:20]  Call them a kibbutz because they have become, they are burnt to the ground.
[01:23:24]  It is crazy.
[01:23:26]  But I, yeah, it's, it's that, that, West Streeting's sort of angling there.
[01:23:31]  And of course, I'll text him later.
[01:23:32]  I'll WhatsApp him and see, because it'd be awesome if he'd leaked the WhatsApp messages I've sent to him.
[01:23:36]  If West Streeting, that clearly showed me that, okay, people do sense blood in the water.
[01:23:42]  And there's been a couple of resignations.
[01:23:44]  I know that I think it's like what, Kier Starmer's communications chief?
[01:23:48]  Crazy that he has that role in the first place because Kier Starmer is such a natural charismatic figure that I'm just sort of shocked that he's the easiest job on planet Earth.
[01:23:59]  I know.
[01:24:01]  But I know that his communications minister, I think, or not minister, excuse me, advisor has resigned.
[01:24:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:24:09]  So he's an interesting guy in his own right.
[01:24:11]  Also, there's two things going on here.
[01:24:13]  So one is that Morgan McSweeney, who's basically his chief fixer, I mean, so he's finally gone, which you didn't like him, did you?
[01:24:26]  Can you say that?
[01:24:27]  I know you can get sued for anything.
[01:24:28]  You can get sued for fucking anything in this country.
[01:24:31]  Is it, but you didn't like him, maybe?
[01:24:34]  You don't think he's maybe such a good guy?
[01:24:36]  You can nod.
[01:24:37]  Yeah, the evidence is pointing this way, you know?
[01:24:39]  Yeah.
[01:24:40]  He resigned.
[01:24:42]  Yeah, so he went.
[01:24:43]  There was a very sort of self-congratulatory message and Starmer addressed MPs afterwards with this kind of big fawning thing about how brilliant he was and some fucking instantly forgettable line about running across football pictures with him or some shit.
[01:24:59]  I can't remember.
[01:25:01]  So what?
[01:25:04]  We were chasing these teenagers for our friend Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:25:08]  Oh, but he's horrible when he makes jokes.
[01:25:09]  It's like fucking, he's funny as fucking like bone cancer, you know, he's just so fucking hard to deal with.
[01:25:15]  And he's just got a very, very kind of, he's just one of those guys that, because he looks like he's about to get arrested at any given moment, you know, Kierstama.
[01:25:25]  Like all of his humor is seedy and his eyes fucking freak and it's all very disjoined and he looks like he's going to get charges pressed by Lord Sugar.
[01:25:36]  Yeah, he does.
[01:25:36]  He looks like something's around.
[01:25:37]  Hello, donuts.
[01:25:38]  By the way, is Lord Sugar senile?
[01:25:40]  I don't know if you can say this, but it's Lord, which by the way, as much shit as I give Britain, they have a Lord Sugar.
[01:25:46]  And believe me, ladies and gentlemen, look this guy up.
[01:25:48]  He is amazing.
[01:25:49]  But he keeps responding to, I like Lord Sugar, but he keeps responding to these AI things on Twitter as if they're real.
[01:25:57]  Yeah, he does like tricks on Twitter, doesn't he?
[01:25:59]  You know, like the one I saw was him being like, like a father has nine sons and they all have a sister.
[01:26:05]  Wow.
[01:26:06]  Oh, yeah.
[01:26:06]  Yeah, right.
[01:26:08]  So you guys just have you guys just have sort of corpulent people named after confectionaries.
[01:26:15]  Like a sugar is just sugar who tell riddles on the internet.
[01:26:19]  That's like most of the industry in Britain.
[01:26:21]  I mean, that's the most British thing I've ever heard.
[01:26:26]  We should say, so Starmer's A's, I mean, they tried to basically blame it on these two guys, right?
[01:26:33]  It was like his, you know, this kind of like fixer guy and then his, whereas like chief of staff, there's like another, the aide, they resign.
[01:26:42]  Yeah, so McSweeney, yeah, he, so he was like, he was a really early protege of Mandelson.
[01:26:49]  I think he did a few, so what, so he's from, he's from Macroom in Cork, actually, in Ireland.
[01:26:56]  And he, from what I understand, he's from like a very prominent kind of right-wing political dynasty there, sort of walked away from his dad's family, did a few jobs in London, worked on a kibbutz in Israel.
[01:27:14]  Funny.
[01:27:14]  And when he came back from that, he came to London and came back to London rather and started working at Peter Mandelson's big blackmail machine.
[01:27:26]  Yeah.
[01:27:27]  You know, so he kind of, you know, he got immediate work for Mandelson, being a kind of a shuffler.
[01:27:33]  You know, he was shuffling around doing things for Mandelson, you know, meeting him at the kind of like height of his renewed shame and kind of just plowed on through with that.
[01:27:44]  He kind of made a name for himself at Lambeth Council, which, again, you find all this kind of like bullshit amongst the labor right, this really like self-congratulatory bullshit.
[01:27:54]  Like, this is fucking like South London.
[01:27:57]  And they kind of treat winning these victories like it's a incredible fucking, you know, like move on the board rather than like my like any social democratic party that's just functioning should be like taking like some of the most like working class parts of Britain.
[01:28:13]  So he gained this reputation as like a really serious campaigner.
[01:28:17]  And he got moved to Barking and Daggenham in the sort of like property.
[01:28:24]  So he got moved to barking?
[01:28:26]  Barking and Daggenham, yeah.
[01:28:27]  What do they call people from there?
[01:28:29]  Dog rapers?
[01:28:32]  Jesus Christ.
[01:28:33]  It's a great question.
[01:28:34]  I have no idea.
[01:28:34]  Barking guy?
[01:28:35]  Dag Dagenham.
[01:28:36]  It just, what are these names?
[01:28:38]  That's where Billy Bragg's from.
[01:28:39]  Oh, well, that makes sense.
[01:28:40]  You guys should have gotten.
[01:28:41]  I wish you guys got invaded by the Spanish because we're from California.
[01:28:44]  Everything's called like La Quinta and shit like that.
[01:28:47]  It's got a, it's very sonorous.
[01:28:48]  It sounds nice.
[01:28:49]  Everything's like, I'm from barking.
[01:28:51]  Good God, man.
[01:28:53]  These are names that are meant to be sort of grunted out in between bites of eel pie, spittle and little pastry, kind of flying at the listener.
[01:29:04]  Good God.
[01:29:06]  Anyways, barking.
[01:29:06]  The birth of the brag, yeah, he's from there.
[01:29:09]  As you said, it probably means a lot.
[01:29:12]  But so he goes there because the BMP, you know, the British National Party, this was the neo-fascist organization.

=== Animal Porn Controversy (16:12) ===

[01:29:18]  Yeah, yeah, all of that, you know.
[01:29:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:29:20]  Oh, they want to see that.
[01:29:21]  You guys can see what I just did.
[01:29:23]  And they never will.
[01:29:24]  It was instructive.
[01:29:26]  He was right.
[01:29:27]  But yeah, so he's suddenly kind of, he's this gifted, like talented fucking, no one quite like him, organizer on the ground.
[01:29:38]  And This whole mythology has been built up over him, kind of like doing in the BMP.
[01:29:44]  But I mean, there's all sorts of stuff going on there, right?
[01:29:47]  Like the MP Margaret Hodge, who became one of the major kind of witch hunters against Corbyn during that period, she was the MP and she was so right-wing that even the Labour government and the most Blairite aspects of that government were calling her a bigot and a racist for her like suggested policies, which were basically like apartheid in council housing.
[01:30:10]  You know, it was like a sort of like white's first approach in council housing.
[01:30:15]  And the government attacked her for saying this.
[01:30:17]  So the BMP sent her a bouquet of flowers.
[01:30:20]  Good God.
[01:30:21]  She's a dame, right?
[01:30:22]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:30:23]  That was under Starmer, I think.
[01:30:25]  Yeah.
[01:30:27]  So, you know, these are the sorts of people who get rewarded under Starmer.
[01:30:30]  And basically, like, she won her seat, but the BMP had a really good vote, you know, under Nick Griffin.
[01:30:37]  And this mythology comes.
[01:30:38]  It was kind of like, you know, Morgan held it back.
[01:30:42]  And then he just kind of goes into Liz Kendall's campaign five years later to be labor leader.
[01:30:50]  That's the chance to actually have a sort of proactive advance of politics in that.
[01:30:55]  And it's obviously, it goes terribly.
[01:30:58]  They don't even get short of fucking 5%.
[01:31:02]  And then if you want to have a very deep read into it, there's probably far too much to go into now, but Paul Holden wrote an incredible book called The Fraud, which is mostly about McSweeney and all of the hijinks he got up to under the Corbyn years.
[01:31:18]  Interesting.
[01:31:18]  I think you could basically summarize it as he basically just took a lot of money off people to run like incredibly aggressive, sometimes, sometimes extremely dishonest campaigns to undermine Corbyn, prepare the grounds for a new leadership.
[01:31:38]  And that's kind of all he did.
[01:31:40]  And then he was gifted of his position as chief of staff by Starma.
[01:31:44]  I mean, there's so much to it.
[01:31:46]  But again, that Paul Holden book, that's the one.
[01:31:51]  I'm hesitant to say way too much because I think there's a few legal things going on there.
[01:31:56]  Sure, sure.
[01:31:58]  Well, but now he's gone.
[01:32:00]  But now he's gone.
[01:32:01]  So he took full responsibility for the Mandelson pick.
[01:32:05]  Well, yeah.
[01:32:06]  So basically, yeah, I mean, Mandelson said about McSweeney once that whoever created Morgan McSweeney deserves a special place in heaven.
[01:32:14]  So this was like the closeness between these guys.
[01:32:16]  And I mean, it's just incredibly pause on that, brother.
[01:32:21]  You kidding me?
[01:32:23]  I'm McSweeney.
[01:32:24]  I'm like, no, Say I'm really good or something.
[01:32:28]  We're not saying something like that.
[01:32:32]  And fucking, so you had this just obvious closeness that anyone could see.
[01:32:39]  You know, like Mick Lynch said it when he said that he was the, you know, he's the ghost at the banquet.
[01:32:44]  It was clearly just this ever-present political force.
[01:32:47]  And, you know, people have tried to talk their way around that.
[01:32:50]  But I think it's just obvious to all and sundry that he was involved in selecting candidates.
[01:32:54]  You know, you don't, well, you don't build up a fucking blackmail machine for nothing, do you?
[01:32:58]  You know, you clearly have some serious role to play in any like project that brings you on, like vetting people, making sure they're not going to provide challenges to you, disciplining and shutting down an operation, identifying mediocre candidates that are going to go along with you.
[01:33:15]  You know, it's just obvious, isn't it?
[01:33:17]  And it's just an insult to everyone's intelligence to pretend that he wasn't involved in these things.
[01:33:22]  Right.
[01:33:23]  Now, so Kiera's come out and said, like, okay, I was briefed on the relationship with Epstein, with Mandelson.
[01:33:31]  I knew about it before.
[01:33:34]  And yet still we pushed forward with the crazy, isn't it?
[01:33:39]  With the ambassadorship.
[01:33:41]  But yet hasn't really explained how he got from the knowing it and then pushing it.
[01:33:48]  He's just sort of like jumped ahead.
[01:33:51]  And it's also baffling political move to kind of come out and say that because it doesn't seem to be quieting anything.
[01:33:58]  Well, for a project that's completely defined by nothing else except for active dishonesty and fucking just bullshitting in the face of like all the evidence, like you may as well just continue doing that.
[01:34:10]  Like what's the like, what's the, what's the fucking point of being like, oh, well, I've got to just tell the truth about the Mandelson stuff because, you know, there's evidence.
[01:34:18]  It's like, well, just fucking hammer on her head, you know?
[01:34:20]  Like admitting this is fucked.
[01:34:23]  It's crazy because we, you know, we're recording this on Wednesday.
[01:34:27]  All this stuff has been kind of percolating and then, but then kind of hitting the fan over the last like four, five days, but some of it just like two, two days ago, some of it today.
[01:34:39]  And we should say there's like an active investigation into Mandelson by the police, which is now coming and telling MPs, like, don't leave, don't try to get ahead of anything because that's evidence that we need to collect from you about what might be possible.
[01:34:59]  Who knows?
[01:35:00]  Blackmail, bribery.
[01:35:02]  Who the fuck knows, like what kind of charges they might be looking at over the breadth of this man's career, I suppose.
[01:35:12]  But it's crazy because all these guys want to clearly come out.
[01:35:16]  I mean, you know, you mentioned the West Streeting stuff, like clearly come out ahead of this to try to like, you know, move on or just like get ahead of the story.
[01:35:25]  Oh, yeah.
[01:35:26]  And they're being completely blocked by an active investigation.
[01:35:31]  It's fucking wild.
[01:35:32]  And it's also interesting that the Jamie Diamond stuff was completely front and center of all that Stalma said because, you know, it is an attempt to explicitly politicize this because there is a wider organizational question for Stalma's Labor here that is actually just like completely flushed with pedo shit, like all along the way.
[01:35:55]  You know, that leads me to, yeah, some other stuff that you and I have been texting about for a little while now.
[01:36:00]  I want to talk about, I mean, Labour has had some difficulty with pedophilia.
[01:36:06]  And I know that many of our non-UK based listeners will say, oh, a British or a UK-based political party having difficulty with pedophilia.
[01:36:13]  What are they not doing enough?
[01:36:14]  No, in fact, they've done a little too much.
[01:36:18]  And we were exchanging messages about one Ivor Kaplan.
[01:36:23]  And I think he's an instructive case that we have with the Labor Party.
[01:36:26]  So I remember Ivor Kaplan started making very strange remarks on X.com, I think sometime last year, and started posting porno and being like, ooh, hot, to like all these, anyone who sort of would post a picture of their butthole or something like that.
[01:36:44]  And then he was arrested for maybe something to do with nonserve.
[01:36:51]  Yeah, the Nons Hunters catched him, didn't they?
[01:36:53]  Yeah, he was caught by...
[01:36:56]  He was fingered by the Hunters.
[01:36:57]  He was fingered by the Hunters.
[01:37:00]  He just monkey mitt in front of them, but he was actually caught, as you say, by like citizen pedophile hunters.
[01:37:06]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:37:07]  And this is real patriots.
[01:37:11]  Ivor Kaplan is not like a minor figure in the Labour Party.
[01:37:14]  Who is this guy?
[01:37:15]  No.
[01:37:15]  Also, he was like a minister under Blair, obviously very close to Blair Mandelson.
[01:37:22]  Also, he was the parliamentary chair of Labor Friends of Israel for a very long time.
[01:37:28]  The parliamentary chair of Labour Friends of Israel, close friend of Peter Mandelson, Minister under Tony Blair, was caught by citizen peddo hunters for like a YouTube channel.
[01:37:38]  Yeah, by Stop Stings UK.
[01:37:46]  Yeah.
[01:37:50]  You know what's crazy is that like this isn't even dipping into the problems that the UK is facing.
[01:37:58]  Oh, no, this is fucking nothing compared to the rest of the world.
[01:38:02]  Nothing compared to the structural issues.
[01:38:04]  Retired Ivor.
[01:38:06]  No, this is subjective factors.
[01:38:08]  Little Ivor Kaplan with his, have you seen the footage?
[01:38:10]  He's got his like little red like hipster hat on, you know?
[01:38:13]  Yeah.
[01:38:14]  It's crazy.
[01:38:15]  Freshly shaven, hipster hat.
[01:38:16]  You know, he's looking, he's looking a bit for Brighton.
[01:38:19]  Yeah.
[01:38:20]  Good God.
[01:38:21]  I mean, and not to mention there's another, and I can't remember the names right now, but there's another scandal over maybe support for a pedophile.
[01:38:29]  Well, so this is, yeah, this is like the other, one of the other proteges of Mandelson, Matthew Doyle, who was the director of comms for Starma for a while just after the 1997 election.
[01:38:42]  He was the head of press for the Labour Party, campaigned alongside McSweeney for Liz Kendall in 2015.
[01:38:50]  And it all relates to his friendship with a guy called Sean Morton, who was a, he never got elected as an MP.
[01:38:55]  He was a general election candidate in Scotland in 2015.
[01:39:00]  And he got convicted.
[01:39:04]  Sorry, he got charged and then convicted for child porn and animal porn.
[01:39:10]  Yeah.
[01:39:11]  Which is it's funny because that's actually kind of left feel with these even for these guys.
[01:39:15]  It's a bit fucking animals as well.
[01:39:18]  Yeah.
[01:39:20]  He's got a disrupt trial.
[01:39:23]  Take that to Barking.
[01:39:24]  But wait.
[01:39:25]  Yeah, he's fucking mad.
[01:39:26]  He's from Barking Matt.
[01:39:27]  So he got convicted of child pornography.
[01:39:31]  Yeah.
[01:39:32]  He got charged, but then he was standing.
[01:39:34]  He got selected and was standing to be Labour counselor.
[01:39:37]  So sorry, he got charged with animal and child porn.
[01:39:40]  And then the Labour Party was like, so you're going to be.
[01:39:43]  Oh, he just, he just said.
[01:39:44]  Yeah, he just said artist bullshit.
[01:39:45]  And they were like, well, carry on.
[01:39:50]  And it turned out.
[01:39:51]  Maybe for legal reasons, I should just say it dead clearly.
[01:39:55]  So he was selected as a candidate.
[01:39:57]  And in around the period, he was selected as a candidate.
[01:40:01]  He was arrested on suspicion of child porn and animal porn.
[01:40:08]  And obviously told his friends, which included Matthew Doyle, and he claimed that if I'm getting this right, he accepted his innocence.
[01:40:19]  He accepted that he wasn't going to plead guilty and campaigned for him in the local elections.
[01:40:26]  And then he was charged with it and got community service.
[01:40:31]  But then two, so this was around the Corbyn years.
[01:40:36]  And I mean, it was fucking kind of mad at the time, too, because the only photograph they use of the guy in the press when he got charged in 2018 was like a selfie he took of him and Hillary Clinton.
[01:40:51]  And Hillary looks proud as punch in the selfie as well.
[01:40:55]  She looks so happy with herself.
[01:40:58]  God.
[01:40:59]  Meeting a real life Scotsman.
[01:41:01]  I'm sorry.
[01:41:02]  A little advice for Tronon listeners out there.
[01:41:05]  If your friend is running for office and is arrested for having child and animal porn on his computer, he's like, nah, dude, it's bullshit.
[01:41:13]  What explanation would I, this isn't even a tip, actually.
[01:41:16]  Now it's an open-ended question.
[01:41:17]  I'm not sure what explanation would work on me to maintain my support of that person.
[01:41:22]  And they'd be like, oh, no, they weren't really doing that with the dogs, man.
[01:41:25]  It's all like, it's all, it's totally being misinterpreted.
[01:41:30]  What's the fucking conversation you have there?
[01:41:31]  You know, like exactly.
[01:41:32]  It's like, you know, listen, I did get arrested for child porn and animal porn.
[01:41:38]  Did you do it, mate?
[01:41:39]  No.
[01:41:40]  No, and that's the thing.
[01:41:43]  I got arrested for it, but I didn't do it.
[01:41:46]  That's right.
[01:41:47]  You didn't get arrested for you got arrested for having it.
[01:41:50]  So it's like, did you have it?
[01:41:51]  It's a binary option.
[01:41:52]  Did you have the child and animal porn or do you not have it?
[01:41:55]  It's crazy.
[01:41:56]  It's fucking wild.
[01:41:57]  But then it goes on worse, though.
[01:41:59]  So like he breaches.
[01:42:01]  So he obviously, he obviously, like, you know, he joins, he joins Pete Townsend from The Who in going on the sex offenders register.
[01:42:08]  And he breaches his conditions in 2024 in election year.
[01:42:14]  And he's collecting his porn again.
[01:42:17]  You know, Sean can't resist.
[01:42:18]  He's on the porn again.
[01:42:20]  He did it again.
[01:42:21]  He did it again.
[01:42:21]  He comes back.
[01:42:24]  Wait, I'm sorry.
[01:42:25]  His life was ruined because he was a prolific collector of child and animal porn.
[01:42:32]  And then he does it again.
[01:42:34]  He has to get back on it.
[01:42:35]  And he's got to take other people down with him this time, too.
[01:42:37]  Oh, he loves this stuff.
[01:42:39]  Yeah, he loves it.
[01:42:42]  Oh, my God.
[01:42:43]  So what comes out is basically Pam Duncan Glancy, who's a member of the Scottish Parliament.
[01:42:50]  She Pam Duncan Glancy.
[01:42:57]  Pam Duncan Glancy.
[01:42:58]  Yeah, so she's Glancy.
[01:43:00]  Oh, it's a great name.
[01:43:02]  She's a pretty basically.
[01:43:04]  It came out that Pam Duncan Glancy, yeah, who's a MSP for Glasgow in the Scottish Parliament, she maintained her friendship with this guy basically all the way through this period.
[01:43:18]  And I think like today, I mean, she's been suspended from the Labour Party, but it took fucking way too long.
[01:43:25]  It just really, really got off of hand.
[01:43:26]  And they're very slowly kind of drip feeding disciplinary charges against her.
[01:43:31]  But she basically like, she's defending herself today, saying that, like, you know, while I didn't condone his crimes, I was just, you know, I was looking after a vulnerable friend of mine I've known for a very long time.
[01:43:43]  And you're like, what the fuck is this like weird indifference, the fucking paedophilia that so many labor politicians seem to have?
[01:43:51]  There's multiple.
[01:43:52]  I'm sorry, this is just a bit hard to take.
[01:43:54]  There's multiple child porn or molestation-related scandals that are affecting Kier Starmer's ministership, crawling with it.
[01:44:09]  I mean, at this point, I think you're like, what the fuck is going on?
[01:44:14]  Well, at some point, I think it would behoove that beautiful Nigerian woman who leads the Tories, or maybe she doesn't, I can't remember how that turned out, to sit across from Kier Starmer, Prime Minister's questions, which I think is the most admirable part of your so-called democracy, and ask Keir Starmer, Keir, between you and me, do you know anybody who is not a pedophile?
[01:44:37]  Keir Starmer.
[01:44:38]  I think the question has to stand here in Parliament.
[01:44:41]  Is there a single guy you know that is not a pedophile?
[01:44:44]  And Keir Starmer will have to sort of shake his jelly from side to side and say, no, dear.
[01:44:49]  No, dear.
[01:44:50]  I do not.
[01:44:52]  It is crazy.
[01:44:53]  It's fucking sinister, man.
[01:44:55]  Before we wrap up here, I want to actually kind of go on to the British political or excuse me.
[01:45:00]  I keep calling it British, but what the hell?
[01:45:02]  What are you going to do, Sue me?
[01:45:03]  Probably the UK political landscape as a whole.
[01:45:07]  Because Labour is in disarray.
[01:45:10]  The Tories are in disarray.
[01:45:12]  And there has been the rise of two other parties that I've watched with great interest.
[01:45:17]  The first, we shall, well, three other parties, but only two arising.
[01:45:24]  The first is, and let's get it out of the way.
[01:45:26]  I know these are some friends of yours, your party, which has got to be the worst-named political party.

=== Worst-Named Political Party (15:15) ===

[01:45:31]  I know it's a temporary name, but it's got to be the worst-named political party in human history.
[01:45:35]  It is, I think, currently having a leadership election.
[01:45:38]  Yeah, they're having an election to establish their central executive committee.
[01:45:43]  Yeah.
[01:45:44]  Oh, yeah.
[01:45:46]  Are they going to change the name at any point?
[01:45:48]  That's up for them, isn't it?
[01:45:50]  That's totally on them.
[01:45:51]  Wow.
[01:45:52]  It's a fucking crazy name, isn't it?
[01:45:54]  It's a crazy name.
[01:45:56]  It's a crazy name.
[01:45:57]  I don't want to, I want to harmony relationships for you.
[01:46:00]  It doesn't seem to be going so well in the organizational process.
[01:46:03]  I think that's fair to say.
[01:46:04]  I think there have been some bumps along the road in setting this political party up.
[01:46:08]  Yeah, no, it's a they've gone from a situation where, you know, like last summer there was a period where there was, you know, drip briefings to the British media about, you know, about 20% of the electorate was considering voting for a, you know,
[01:46:22]  Jeremy Corbyn-led political party, some sort of like, you know, new, new version of the Labour Party led by Corbyn and without all of those people we've just mentioned in the past hour and creating something a bit more cohesive and something which could reverse all of the nasty shit in British society.
[01:46:41]  And then it's all just, it's just completely fell to pieces, I think everybody can see.
[01:46:46]  And it's just sad more than anything to watch.
[01:46:50]  You know, I'm not, I'm not a member of your party, but it's very, very sad to watch a situation where the enthusiasms of what could be like, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who want to get out there and want to live in a better country with a functioning welfare state, where we have a foreign policy of internationalism and peace rather than what we've got now.
[01:47:10]  People who don't want student debt and people who don't want to live with just the permanent indignity of decline, there's nothing for them really.
[01:47:18]  I mean, there's a Green Party, but when have you ever been able to trust the Green Party in any country?
[01:47:25]  I mean, I was made aware of some information by a source that is on this podcast at one point that the leader of the Green Party, who is maybe the most charismatic man in England, or excuse me, in the UK, was a, his previous job had been, he did hypnosis to reduce the size of breasts.
[01:47:51]  So he was a breast reduction hypnotist.
[01:47:53]  And I know I sound like one of those guys like on LBC or whatever, or whatever, those fucking stupid fucking TV shows you guys pretend to have on your Nazi government-run TV channels, but you know, who's like, so I, you know, I heard about this thing from your past.
[01:48:08]  This is your life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:48:10]  But is it true that the leader of the Green Party in the UK, a prominent new politician, and this is no shade to the guy at all, was a breast reduction hypnotist?
[01:48:18]  Yeah, he got stung for the newspaper stung him over that.
[01:48:22]  Yeah.
[01:48:24]  Why?
[01:48:25]  These things to be getting smaller.
[01:48:28]  I mean, to give him his credit, I think Polanski had an explanation for it.
[01:48:31]  And I almost admire the fact that he just kind of owned it and kind of been like, who gives a shit?
[01:48:37]  Yeah.
[01:48:38]  It is really.
[01:48:39]  I mean, the thing is, it's objectively funny.
[01:48:41]  He should be like, it's just really grease.
[01:48:42]  It's just really good.
[01:48:43]  He should be like, I made him bigger, too.
[01:48:45]  I made him bigger.
[01:48:46]  Sometimes I'd make, sometimes I'd do one eye and make one bigger.
[01:48:52]  You know, he should have said that, because oftentimes when we'll complain about having two slightly differently sized breasts, he should claim that he just merely did breast reduction adjustments with the hypnosis.
[01:49:01]  I know that the Green Party has been sort of surging in the polls.
[01:49:05]  I am quite skeptical of Green Parties as vehicles for socialist projects, as that has not been an effective thing in the past.
[01:49:15]  But what is sort of your view on why they're so popular now?
[01:49:18]  Well, I feel like a lot of it is the vacuum that's been left by the Labour Party and the kind of like lack of any discipline and seriousness of the people around what became the active sections of your party.
[01:49:31]  Like they clearly dithered and took a very long time getting something off the ground.
[01:49:35]  The level of anticipation from even people that are just, I don't know, like not political activists, people who just watched the Corbyn thing happen, thought that, you know, it's like decent people, like decent working class people who just thought that like that's what proper labor should be.
[01:49:48]  And then it ended in the most like scrappy and fucking aggressive and direct way possible.
[01:49:54]  And they've, you know, they've had like a teachable moment from it.
[01:49:57]  And they've kind of said to themselves, like, oh, well, you know, next time something like this comes around, I want to get involved.
[01:50:03]  And, you know, they've been following the, you know, sort of murmurs and rumblings about like a new Corbyn party.
[01:50:09]  They've seen the Gaza independence, these group of MPs who've been elected taking out mostly horrible labour MPs off the basis of a pro-Palestinian platform.
[01:50:20]  They've seen all of these things start coming together and they've been desperate for something.
[01:50:24]  And then they've just been essentially bounced into a project where nothing is going on.
[01:50:31]  It seems to me that unless you have like a aggressive interest in fucking like procedural affairs of a political party, or you're a part of a sect, like a small Trotskyist sect that can benefit from it, then there's basically like no place for you.
[01:50:47]  You know, that you're not, you're not running actual political campaigns.
[01:50:51]  You have no like local branch structures.
[01:50:53]  You're not standing local candidates in wards.
[01:50:56]  Unless you're really interested in the constitutional affairs of how socialist parties run, there's basically nothing for you to do in your party.
[01:51:03]  So they've immediately gone to, I think the polling they're getting now is between 0.5 and 1%.
[01:51:10]  And it's just, I think it's just sad.
[01:51:13]  I don't know.
[01:51:14]  It's also a very British-led thing to do to learn all of the opposite lessons from Corbynism, that you could have had a situation where, well, to put it another way, like what was good about Corbynism wasn't that like Jeremy rocked or whatever, even though I think he is great.
[01:51:30]  But it was a question that like it was mass politics again.
[01:51:33]  It was what like a 21st century revival of left of social democratic politics could look like.
[01:51:38]  And having a situation where there's a organized block of socialists who are disciplined and well put together, have access and mostly respect in working class communities across the country and have some sort of cohesive agenda to turn their countries around and pivoting Britain to being a more positive force in the world.
[01:51:58]  That's what people liked about Corbynism.
[01:52:01]  And they didn't just want to create like a, there's a lot of things now about like, oh, you know, we don't want like a Labour Party Mark II.
[01:52:08]  You know, we don't want your party to be a Labour Party Mark II.
[01:52:10]  Well, like, does anybody want your party just to be like a kind of amalgamated group of what happened and didn't work before Corbyn?
[01:52:17]  Yeah.
[01:52:18]  And Corbynism.
[01:52:19]  I mean, it's, I think for anybody who was involved in the Left Before 2015 in England, it was a fucking really, really like depressing, sad affair where just like random groups, you know, random political sects made up of people that kind of often went to private school together, went to university together and set up small, very, you know, niche political sects based on, you know, analyses of the Soviet Union.
[01:52:45]  When I started getting involved as a teenager in the late noughties, already just, you know, it's felt extremely irrelevant and kind of felt like people clutching at straws and not get along with each other, basically, because they all had enough out of not get along with each other and their sort of micro cultures and friendship groups are based around maintaining these divides.
[01:53:03]  It's just very, very sad to think that like we've not really decided to just try and do that mass politics again, but we want to do some sort of much sadder pre-2015 version of this, which is just amalgamate all of these warring groups of left-wing sects.
[01:53:20]  And hopefully, if you put them all together, it might look like the DSA or something like that.
[01:53:24]  Well, you know what?
[01:53:25]  It did look like that your party convention, it looked like the 2019 DSA convention.
[01:53:30]  You know what I mean?
[01:53:30]  Just like people kind of getting up there saying their piece and getting off.
[01:53:33]  And it was just like, this is not, this is not great.
[01:53:36]  I know you guys have already riffed on it, but I really just want to drive this point home.
[01:53:39]  That is the worst name of a party I've ever heard in my life.
[01:53:42]  It's fucking shocking, isn't it?
[01:53:43]  It's insane.
[01:53:44]  How did that happen?
[01:53:46]  How was no one like that?
[01:53:48]  That will be so confusing when you're talking to someone about it.
[01:53:52]  It's crazy.
[01:53:53]  They will have no idea what you're referring to.
[01:53:55]  Well, that's a Whuzan first.
[01:53:56]  It is.
[01:53:58]  It's a classic who's on first.
[01:53:59]  What are you a member of?
[01:54:00]  Your party.
[01:54:01]  I'm sorry.
[01:54:02]  What?
[01:54:03]  I don't have a party.
[01:54:04]  No, your party.
[01:54:05]  No, I don't have a party.
[01:54:07]  What's going to happen at elections?
[01:54:08]  It's crazy.
[01:54:09]  When the Tories are going to say to Labour, like, oh, well, your party, you know, they want to fucking nationalize the top 250 industries.
[01:54:17]  Yeah, they're going to be like, your party are a bunch of pedophiles, and nobody's going to know who they're talking about.
[01:54:24]  We'd be remiss if we did not mention the political party of which I am an overseas member of, and that would be reform.
[01:54:32]  Nigel Farage, many have counted him out over the years, but he keeps coming back, much like, hmm, what comes back?
[01:54:40]  Like Herpes or something.
[01:54:41]  I mean, that seems a little too simple.
[01:54:43]  I quite like Herpes.
[01:54:45]  I've been trying to get it.
[01:54:46]  Like some other kind of simplex, exactly.
[01:54:49]  Nigel Farage roaring back.
[01:54:53]  And they're trying to take him out too.
[01:54:55]  There's those other, there's those other reform guys who are sort of jockeying for leadership.
[01:54:59]  But reform, are they still surging in the polls?
[01:55:02]  Are they still erect when we look at the economist Hugo?
[01:55:05]  Yeah, they're still doing well enough.
[01:55:08]  They've sort of, I wouldn't say they've like paused.
[01:55:11]  They've had a sort of minor decline since they've invited a lot of like very unpopular Tory ministers in.
[01:55:16]  I think that's kind of dented their insurgent credentials to some degree.
[01:55:20]  Yeah, I mean, that's first of all, minor decline.
[01:55:22]  Labour Party, take note of that.
[01:55:24]  Maybe try that one in the future.
[01:55:26]  But what you're mentioning there is that there's been a lot of defections from the Tories to reform, including several of the people who were part of Boris Johnson's sort of immigration team, which many people joined reform to fight against in the first place.
[01:55:44]  Am I right in saying that?
[01:55:46]  Well, it's weird.
[01:55:47]  They're kind of getting people in who are, yeah, like Liz Truss adjacent people, Boris adjacent people.
[01:55:52]  In many ways, it kind of looks like the wing of the Tories that came under Boris and had their moment in the sun.
[01:55:59]  But I think it's going to be weird to look at, you know, because, I mean, they've got some, they've got some politicians.
[01:56:05]  They've got a in the kind of like in the East Riding, you know, in the city of Hull.
[01:56:12]  They've got a mayor there who, I believe, supported Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.
[01:56:18]  He's like a former professional boxer.
[01:56:20]  And now he's the Labour Party lost him over Brexit and now he's a reform guy.
[01:56:24]  And he's very into like, you know, he's, he's, like, I don't think there's a lot going on between those two ears, God bless him.
[01:56:32]  But he's trying his best to think about things like municipal bus services.
[01:56:37]  And, you know, he's, he's clearly some sort of figure against the natural decline of the country.
[01:56:44]  And that's, that's, that to me is like the big registration of reform.
[01:56:47]  It's just this fucking like, it's not an anti-establishment vote.
[01:56:51]  It's like an anti-systemic vote, isn't it?
[01:56:53]  It's like you're not going against the elites or whatever, but you go against the fact that fucking you have to download an app for every single fucking like parking lot you use.
[01:57:02]  All the roads are fucked.
[01:57:04]  There's no hope.
[01:57:04]  It's gray all the time.
[01:57:06]  The fucking buses don't work.
[01:57:07]  The trains don't work.
[01:57:09]  Every politician is a paedophile.
[01:57:11]  You know, like that's that is this anti-systemic worldview and it's just a kind of vote cast to just clear it all out.
[01:57:17]  And I feel like that is immediately compromised as soon as you start discussing bringing back people who are like senior ministers under two, you know, two unpopular governments.
[01:57:26]  And it's clear, I mean, it's obviously an attempt by Farage to try and reconstitute themselves to some degree into like a governing force.
[01:57:33]  Because I mean, they're doing so well in the polls.
[01:57:35]  And like, I mean, you know, like the way they're at now, they're going to have like a 2024 style like landslide election.
[01:57:44]  I know it feels like inevitable when you look at the landscape of everything.
[01:57:49]  Oh, there's such a grim sense of inevitability to it because also just the Labour Party aren't taking it seriously.
[01:57:54]  The fact that, like, again, it's what are they taking seriously?
[01:57:59]  What are they looking at?
[01:58:01]  Don't fucking ask what they're looking at.
[01:58:04]  Yeah.
[01:58:05]  It's illegal for him to tell us.
[01:58:06]  It's illegal for us to see it.
[01:58:10]  I think the London Metal gets to the bottom of that.
[01:58:12]  Yeah.
[01:58:13]  I mean, that, no, but I fully agree.
[01:58:16]  It's like, what the fuck are any like I again, from this is from afar, but also like the numbers bear it out, my brother.
[01:58:23]  The fucking country is in the dumps.
[01:58:26]  You guys have one city that isn't totally fucked up and it's London and it's all just like foreign real estate.
[01:58:33]  I mean, what the fuck?
[01:58:34]  You guys are because there's like a tax haven, money laundering haven within that city.
[01:58:40]  Yes.
[01:58:40]  It is kind of crazy to see.
[01:58:43]  You guys don't even have air conditioning yet.
[01:58:46]  It is crazy.
[01:58:48]  And it just, it's, it's just been, I don't know.
[01:58:50]  It's, it's been wild to see because I think you're right.
[01:58:53]  I think that there is a sort of the anti-decay vote that that is, I think, most easily probably harnessed by sort of populist anti-immigration leaders like Farage.
[01:59:05]  But I'm sort of baffled that more people in other political parties, any other political parties, aren't making that same message.
[01:59:13]  There was some Green Party messaging around this as well, although such a corny sort of ad, the one that I saw that I was like, all right, buddy.
[01:59:21]  But yeah, and they'll never be able to do it as well as the right or the labor movement left, will they?
[01:59:25]  You know, just the nature of the Greens.
[01:59:27]  I know people are saying it's changing.
[01:59:28]  And I mean, clearly its vote is changing to some degree, but I'm looking at the photographs for the by-election in South Manchester now.
[01:59:36]  And you'd be like, come on, man.
[01:59:38]  People are being bussed in from Brighton and London, you know?
[01:59:42]  But Marcus, I mean, we want to unleash the productive forces.
[01:59:46]  Like, we want, they are fettered by capitalism.
[01:59:50]  Yeah.
[01:59:51]  And, and, and, and this is, I think, something I just will not agree ever agree with the Greens on.
[01:59:55]  I'm like, we need, we need heavy production.
[01:59:58]  We need heavy production, but also we need to just accept political realities in England too, right?
[02:00:02]  So, like, um, because the greens, the green leadership is mandated to basically back like whatever conference passes.
[02:00:10]  Um, their, you know, their vote is to um rescind Brexit.
[02:00:15]  So they have to openly oppose Brexit, which is just the most like, oh man, we're doing that again.
[02:00:21]  Yeah, like, can we not just get past this?
[02:00:24]  I love the idea of that too, because it's like, you guys think that that's not opening a bigger can of war?
[02:00:30]  You want to re you want to undo Brexit now after all of the trade agreements got rescinded?
[02:00:38]  I mean, it's just, you know, sounds like a nightmare.
[02:00:42]  It's the only choice between just like perpetual decline or perpetual fucking like chaos.

=== Wandsworth's Socialist Dream (03:09) ===

[02:00:46]  Yeah.
[02:00:48]  I mean, what do you think?
[02:00:50]  You live there, man.
[02:00:51]  Well, I don't know.
[02:00:52]  I mean, the sort of the things I want for the country are basically, other than wanting to live in a socialist Britain, but in the, you know, in the interim, I think the sort of things that the councils in Salford and Preston are doing, that's, you know, in Wandsworth too.
[02:01:07]  In fact, best not shout him out, but there is a council in Wandsworth that's a massive, massive fan of the podcast.
[02:01:16]  Shout out Wandsworth?
[02:01:18]  Wandsworth.
[02:01:19]  In South London.
[02:01:20]  Southwest London.
[02:01:21]  Not saying nothing about that name.
[02:01:23]  Crazy.
[02:01:23]  But I mean, there's a lot of very good house building programs.
[02:01:29]  For the first time, people are rebuilding council houses using these left-wing municipal governments.
[02:01:34]  People are helping workers cooperatise things.
[02:01:38]  People are helping, particularly in Preston Council.
[02:01:42]  That's a big kind of trying to cooperatize the economy to some degree.
[02:01:46]  They're trying to do in the gig economy by having like they're currently organizing a council version of Uber.
[02:01:55]  Interesting.
[02:01:55]  You know, just things like this.
[02:01:56]  And then like, yeah, Salford Council, Wandsworth Council are taking transport links very seriously, council housing very seriously.
[02:02:03]  And you can even see in these places how much the sting gets taken out of the far right vote when you actually give people something fucking cohesive and people don't just feel like just negative stuff is just happening to them on a permanent basis and nothing is accessible, nothing is like functionable.
[02:02:21]  You know, as soon as you take just a little bit out of it, then the political dynamics change.
[02:02:28]  God, you guys need like a left-wing developmentalist regime.
[02:02:31]  Oh, we really do.
[02:02:32]  I mean, you fucking talk about Corbyn's name, but I always think that, you know, it's the Your Party fucking name.
[02:02:38]  But I always thought that peace and justice feels like a kind of Nasserite kind of thing, doesn't it?
[02:02:44]  Yes, yeah.
[02:02:45]  It is very like 1950s Arab political party sounding.
[02:02:51]  Was that what it was originally supposed to be called?
[02:02:53]  Well, that's the name of his pro it's a relatively unclear project that, funnily enough, does like really productive work over like music venues.
[02:03:04]  Yeah, that's it's just like brilliant.
[02:03:06]  Okay.
[02:03:07]  I would emphasize justice over peace because obviously that's only possible with justice.
[02:03:14]  Correct position.
[02:03:15]  Your party sounds like something that Emmanuel Macron declined to name his party.
[02:03:21]  That's how bad it is.
[02:03:22]  Macron would recognize it was a bad name.
[02:03:27]  The Brigitte says no.
[02:03:30]  For sure.
[02:03:31]  Oh my God.
[02:03:32]  Well, Marcus, we've kept you for so long.
[02:03:35]  Oh, it's been a pleasure as usual.
[02:03:36]  It's always a pleasure.
[02:03:38]  You know, Star Wars is getting a lot of shite right now in parley.
[02:03:46]  And people, they're flinging their eggy pies at him.
[02:03:51]  They're barking.
[02:03:54]  Cloak and dagger.

=== Greggs and Trauma (03:57) ===

[02:03:56]  Fuck, dude.
[02:03:57]  I don't know enough British stuff.
[02:03:58]  Gregory's?
[02:03:58]  Is that a thing you guys have?
[02:04:00]  Greg's.
[02:04:00]  Greg's.
[02:04:01]  Oh, God.
[02:04:02]  What an ugly name for a grocery store.
[02:04:05]  Leave it to a Brit.
[02:04:06]  My God.
[02:04:07]  I cannot believe they let you guys colonize anything because part of the colonization process is you give these things these anglicized names.
[02:04:15]  But I got to tell you, the Brits are probably the worst at naming things in the world.
[02:04:20]  I'm surprised that India isn't called like Fartshire or something.
[02:04:24]  Jesus Christ.
[02:04:26]  It's sad you mentioned Greggs like that because there is a, well, actually, let me rephrase that.
[02:04:30]  It's funny you mention Greggs like that because there is a pedo vibe there as well.
[02:04:34]  Really?
[02:04:34]  Yeah.
[02:04:35]  So that.
[02:04:35]  Can it Greggs?
[02:04:38]  Mr. Gregg.
[02:04:39]  Mr. Gregg is a pedo.
[02:04:40]  Greggs too?
[02:04:41]  Yeah, the heir to Greggs, the Greggs fortune.
[02:04:46]  He got jailed for sex offenses against boys.
[02:04:53]  English disease.
[02:04:55]  I really, it really is, man.
[02:04:58]  I've said my theory on this before on the show, but my theory, my theory is, I'm going to repeat it now.
[02:05:06]  I read at a tender age, Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.
[02:05:11]  And in that book, he describes, and this is not completely what I'm talking about, but it's adjacent to.
[02:05:18]  It's a cousin to what I'm talking about.
[02:05:19]  He describes a period where he is in whatever you guys call school, boarding school, and he gets a boyfriend.
[02:05:26]  And it's sort of this thing that you had.
[02:05:27]  He sort of describes a process.
[02:05:29]  But he also sort of makes mention, I believe he does in there, of sort of boys who would force themselves upon other boys.
[02:05:37]  And I think that so much of the British elite is sent to these schools where they just viciously rape each other at all times.
[02:05:44]  And when they get older, their diseased minds, which are addled from like just years and years of sausage pies and fucking eel and you know, like onion stew or whatever, regresses back to that time period when they were finally away from mommy and daddy for the first time and they felt something like freedom and they felt so smart in their little school uniform.
[02:06:06]  And then they enact the trauma of their youth upon others.
[02:06:10]  And I think this is my, it's sort of my, you guys need to annihilate the boarding school system.
[02:06:14]  And I think that your little nonce problem would be cured.
[02:06:17]  And I read this, it's slightly related, but I remember years ago when I used to work in a kitchen in Manchester, I had, I worked on nights, right?
[02:06:24]  So I had loads of times during the day.
[02:06:26]  And I volunteered at the Working Class Movement Library, which is this amazing, you know, amazing institution founded by communists.
[02:06:35]  Basically does what it says on the tin, just a huge archival history of labor movement stuff.
[02:06:40]  And the founder, there's always, you know, always stuff to do there, like filing things or whatever.
[02:06:47]  And I found a manuscript that hadn't been filed by the first communist leader of the teachers' union in Britain.
[02:06:54]  And I was flicking through it and like 13 years ago I'm talking, but I think I'm remembering right in saying that this guy went to Eton or Parrow or one of the big sort of major private schools.
[02:07:11]  And the person, because these, as you know, pointed out, they've got these horrible internal procedures amongst the kids.
[02:07:19]  And the younger kids would make the, well, sorry, the older kids would make the younger kids like, you know, in winter, like they'd go out into the lavatories and like sit on the toilets to make them warm and poke the fireplace for them.
[02:07:33]  That's not a euphemism and like do all sorts of stuff for them.
[02:07:37]  And the communist teachers leader, the kid that did that for him, was the prime minister when he was the union leader.
[02:07:47]  Jesus Christ.
[02:07:48]  And like that sort of deference was still like registered by the both of them.
[02:07:52]  Like a weird.

=== Last Episode Before Maternity Leave (06:42) ===

[02:07:54]  Good God, man.
[02:07:58]  That says it all, doesn't it?
[02:08:00]  Marcus, it has been an honor and a pleasure.
[02:08:04]  Thank you for having me.
[02:08:20]  Milady Liz.
[02:08:22]  Yeah.
[02:08:22]  Yes.
[02:08:24]  Nothing.
[02:08:25]  You don't want to say anything?
[02:08:27]  No, aren't you going to say goodbye?
[02:08:29]  Yeah.
[02:08:29]  Guys, this is my last episode before I go on maternity leave.
[02:08:37]  I'm fully cooked.
[02:08:38]  I'm beyond cooked.
[02:08:41]  You're more the chef in this situation.
[02:08:44]  I feel fucking cooked.
[02:08:47]  Unless you are on Patreon, in which case you get a few more hours of my sonorous voice.
[02:08:55]  But yeah, I'm going to be gone for a little bit, but then I'll be back.
[02:08:59]  Liz will return in True Anon Endgame.
[02:09:04]  Liz, I'm going to miss you.
[02:09:07]  Well, but I'm going to talk to you all the time.
[02:09:09]  It just won't be on recording.
[02:09:10]  Nope.
[02:09:10]  I'm not going to respond to your text messages.
[02:09:12]  Oh, okay.
[02:09:12]  Well, this is pretty much it for us.
[02:09:18]  Liz, I need your help in something.
[02:09:20]  What's up?
[02:09:22]  I have a bad feeling that people are going to be really mad at whatever other people come on the podcast when you're not on it because they'll think I'm replacing you.
[02:09:33]  It's a weird thing.
[02:09:34]  You love Freud, right?
[02:09:36]  It's a Freud thing.
[02:09:38]  And I don't know.
[02:09:41]  Okay.
[02:09:41]  I assumed you would know.
[02:09:43]  And by your questioning tone there, I would, maybe it's not.
[02:09:47]  But I need you to tell them that they have to be nice to me and Young Chomsky and whoever else we bring into at first temporarily, then permanently replace you over the next however long.
[02:10:00]  You guys, you got to be nice to them.
[02:10:05]  Look, there's going to be moments where maybe it's going to go off the rails.
[02:10:08]  Maybe it's going to get a little crazy.
[02:10:10]  Maybe Brace is going to say things that I would say, wait, don't say that, Brace.
[02:10:16]  That actually doesn't happen that much.
[02:10:17]  No.
[02:10:19]  But they're going to figure out.
[02:10:20]  It's going to be fun.
[02:10:22]  And then I'm going to be right back.
[02:10:25]  I'm going to have so many.
[02:10:27]  You know what?
[02:10:28]  I realized earlier that I can't replace you with one woman.
[02:10:31]  I need to replace you with five women.
[02:10:33]  Sure.
[02:10:33]  And so this podcast will be transitioning into a fresh and fit style podcast.
[02:10:40]  And in fact, you know what?
[02:10:41]  I'm fresh.
[02:10:41]  He's fit.
[02:10:42]  We're going to be sitting across from six OnlyFans models.
[02:10:46]  I'm just going to be like men, right?
[02:10:49]  You know?
[02:10:50]  But no, still talking about the same things.
[02:10:52]  Yeah.
[02:10:52]  Yeah.
[02:10:53]  Actually, that is, I did think about that.
[02:10:55]  I have some experimental podcast ideas that I'm doing really badly with our audience.
[02:11:00]  But it's, but I need you guys to be with me on this journey.
[02:11:02]  Liz, we are.
[02:11:05]  I can't believe you're having, first of all, eight kids at once is crazy.
[02:11:10]  Sure, OctoMom.
[02:11:11]  OctoMom.
[02:11:11]  Dude, that is since being pregnant, have you looked back at Octomom and be like, damn.
[02:11:16]  Yes.
[02:11:17]  I've actually thought about OctoMom so much.
[02:11:21]  Really?
[02:11:22]  It's crazy.
[02:11:23]  It's crazy that that was like an American phenomenon, like of the like tabloid woman who has crazy amounts of babies and then everyone was like trying to one-up each other.
[02:11:35]  I feel like that was like a 90s thing.
[02:11:38]  Well, that was, I think, early 2000s, but it was, she got in trouble, I think.
[02:11:42]  I think the guy went too far.
[02:11:46]  And they, oh, because of the benefits situation, I think.
[02:11:50]  But I think that like, sometimes it's a, it's scary.
[02:11:54]  The pictures are fucking scary because she is bigger.
[02:11:57]  Of OctoMom?
[02:11:58]  Yeah.
[02:11:58]  Like the pictures of her belly are fucking scary.
[02:12:01]  But I'm like, all bodies are beautiful.
[02:12:04]  That one's not.
[02:12:06]  You know, we say that, but then sometimes you see when you're like, what is going on there?
[02:12:11]  I know.
[02:12:11]  That's crazy.
[02:12:12]  But they don't let you octo anymore.
[02:12:14]  They don't let you octo.
[02:12:15]  I would smoke.
[02:12:17]  No, yeah, they don't.
[02:12:19]  They don't.
[02:12:21]  If I could carry this baby for you, and I will.
[02:12:25]  I'll be doing a lot of the carrying of the baby after you have it.
[02:12:29]  Little baby brace.
[02:12:32]  It's crazy to think about.
[02:12:33]  Sometimes you ever think about how you were a baby once.
[02:12:35]  Yes.
[02:12:36]  And I think about how everyone was a baby once.
[02:12:38]  That's one thing that's an amazing part of this whole thing is that you just look at people.
[02:12:42]  It's very psychedelic.
[02:12:44]  And you're like, oh my God, everyone was a fucking baby.
[02:12:46]  Everyone was inside my stomach at one point.
[02:12:48]  When I was younger, I would like really hate somebody or like try to hurt them or something.
[02:12:52]  And genuinely, what would like stop me up, not often, but would make me feel guilty about my actions would I be like, man, that guy was probably like a little kid once, you know, who like, well, I hope that you say it that way.
[02:13:05]  He was, man, that guy was probably, you know, but like sometimes I had one enemy that I hated and he hated me.
[02:13:14]  It's all good now.
[02:13:16]  But for like a lot of my youth, and we, every time we saw each other, we'd fight.
[02:13:22]  And then I years later, I mean, I hadn't seen him for years, but I was like, man, that guy, like, when he was a little kid, I wonder if people were mean to him.
[02:13:29]  And I felt really bad.
[02:13:31]  Oh, but you got to get those thoughts out of your fucking brain.
[02:13:36]  Dude, I'm going to train your kid to be a warrior.
[02:13:39]  Oh, my God.
[02:13:41]  It's so fucking crazy.
[02:13:43]  I know.
[02:13:44]  I'm excited.
[02:13:45]  I'm really excited.
[02:13:46]  I love babies.
[02:13:49]  I'll babysit the kid too.
[02:13:51]  I mean, I know I live like several hours away from you or whatever, but like, you know, if you want to drop it off.
[02:13:58]  Yeah.
[02:13:58]  Just throw it up there.
[02:14:00]  I'll show your kid threads.
[02:14:02]  Oh, my God.
[02:14:06]  Everyone, I'll be back soon.
[02:14:10]  Don't do anything that I wouldn't do.
[02:14:12]  Don't say anything I wouldn't say.
[02:14:14]  Of course.
[02:14:14]  To the listeners.
[02:14:17]  But until then, I'm Liz.
[02:14:21]  My name is Brace.
[02:14:23]  And everybody tell Liz how much they love her.
[02:14:26]  I love you.
[02:14:27]  And support her because we do.
[02:14:28]  We love you, Liz.
[02:14:29]  And I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[02:14:32]  And we'll see you next time.
[02:14:35]  Bye-bye.