Episode 86 – Do The Shuffle

Released on Tuesday, January 16th, 2018.

Episode 86 – Do The Shuffle

Episode 86 – The podcast returns! Tiernan talks to Dr Phil Hammond (@drphilhammond) about the NHS crisis, plus pointless reshuffling, Toby Young and some much needed Brexit explainin’.

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Further Reading

Linear liner notes

The podcast returns! Tiernan talks to Dr Phil Hammond (@drphilhammond) about the NHS crisis, plus pointless reshuffling, Toby Young and some much needed Brexit explainin’.

Links and sources of info from Dr Phil Hammond’s interview:

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:


Transcript

Episode 86

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, a podcast that takes a sideways view at politics before spending ages confusedly complaining about why all politicians won’t stop lying down all the time. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week, like Prime Minister and only person in the world who’s face stays the same when she eats a lemon, Theresa May, I too have had a completely pointless cabinet reshuffle though at least the old worn suits that I’ve failed to chuck out of mine are unlikely to ruin more than someone else’s wedding photos.

Yes it seems Theresa May’s new year’s resolution for 2018 was in with the old, out with the who? Her cabinet reshuffle was not so much a revamp effort as just a vampiric one, not so much a refresh as putting on yesterday’s pants after disguising the smell by spraying them with a fragrance called last week’s pants, not so much a reshuffle as the croupier dropping all the cards on the floor, crying before dealing out something they found on their shoe. You get the idea. Rumours were spread that May would appoint a no deal minister to the cabinet but then left David Davis, the lovechild of a Toby Jug and some fog, as Brexit minister. This prompted many to wonder is he a no deal minister on account of him being so useless that’s the best he might manage? Similarly jumble sale in a suit Boris Johnson stayed as foreign secretary, May-lite Amber Rudd as Home Secretary and petrified salami Philip Hammond as Chancellor of the Exchequer along with several other people who are terrible at their jobs, staying put being terrible at their jobs. However if you weren’t already convinced that Theresa May’s plan was to appoint the least suitable person for their sector in position to the extent that her next pick might be Liam Neeson for minister for women, then she allayed any concerns of sensible choices being made by appointing Esther McVey, everyone’s least favourite bargain basement succubus, as Secretary of State for Department of Work and Pensions. Yes the woman who said food bank usage was right and that benefit sanctions teach people to look for work seriously is now in charge of welfare. I wonder if May’s thinking was what could be more of an incentive to find work than the alternative being having to deal with a twat like McVey?

While May was giving people appointments they shouldn’t have the NHS has been forced to cancel many they should have, as it the Health Service was hit by the worst crisis on record. The Prime Minister apologised saying she knows it’s frustrating, disappointing and difficult to which many of us listening thought, ok that’s enough about the government, what about the NHS? Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt defended the crisis by saying ‘it’s that time of the year’ which I hope means at the end of 2018 John Lewis will opt for a Christmas advert that just involves someone dying in a hospital corridor wishing for a bed before a friendly monster brings them some weak coffee and makes their year by rolling a dead person out of a bed they’ve been in for a week. This all to the soundtrack of Queen’s Of The Stone Age’s Sick Sick Sick sung by Emilie Sande. Still though it’ll all be fine for the NHS because Health Secretary and evil Gumby Jeremy Hunt was not only kept in position but given the added title of Secretary for Social Care too because who knows, if you’re super shit at one job, maybe, fingers crossed, you’ll only be half as bad at two? Two wrongs make a right wing cabinet member. Apparently Hunt refused to leave his position, and sadly due to fucking horrific management of the NHS it’ll be now be at least another month before he can be surgically removed.

It is not just ministers that are being recycled but also, hopefully plastic too after a new government pledge to end all avoidable plastic waste by 2042. I mean plastic waste is a huge problem right now as millions of tonnes is dumped in the ocean every year, but by leaving it 24 years we can make sure all the sharks are definitely dead so it’s really safe to go swimming again. Also what is avoidable plastic? Does it mean they can finally sack Michael Gove? Part of May’s grand plan is to have plastic free aisles in supermarkets which will be quicker than the other aisles. And I’m sure that in 2030 when the last Blue Whale is dying of plastic poising it will be relieved to think ‘well at least Steve and Jane from Bromley can get their loose aubergine 5 minutes quicker’.

In the US, President of America and balloon filled with semolina Donald Trump has told journalists he is the least racist person they have ever interviewed, although considering he only really does interviews with Fox News anymore, that is possible. These comments came after reports that during an Oval office meeting he referred to developing nations as ‘shithole countries’ which I guess you could take as a compliment considering how much of a piece of shit he is, which would make any shithole country his natural motherland.

Speaking of actual shitholes, third degree gravity victim Nigel Farage has said that backs the idea of a second Brexit referendum which, well, of course he does. It’d mean we’d have to see his soggy bread face all over television for weeks on end again. Meanwhile Labour leader and only parliamentary representative from Donaldson’s Dairy Jeremy Corbyn says his party doesn’t back a second referendum but judging by their overall lack of Brexit stance this could be because most would end up spoiling their ballots by scribbling an illegible squiggle somewhere between options while shouting about how they definitely know what they’re doing.

And in news no one cares about UKIP leader and Snaga the goblin in LOTR: The Two Towers, Henry Bolton, has been forced to break up with his girlfriend, because you know, them kippers just can’t stop leaving stuff. This though was due to his partner, Jo Marney sending a series of very racist texts. Let’s be fair though, it probably wasn’t so much the content he disagreed with but more that she was using modern technology to do it.

Lastly the second biggest construction firm in the UK, Carillion, has gone into liquidation. The company have government contracts on schools, prisons, homes for military personal, Battersea Power Station and are part of the joint rail venture HS2. 20,000 jobs are now at risk as well as all those projects, which means the government might have to now give public funding to save public services. Is this 2018 or I dunno, a while back when things were nationalised and didn’t just collapse on you mid-development. Still, on the plus side with this much liquid Carillion we should be able to make the jump to warp speed and find our way home.

ADMIN

Hello! And happy new year if we can still say that. Can we? There’s not a sort of official cut off date for annual well wishing is there? It’s 16 days in so I’ve mostly stopped saying it unless someone brings it up. There was a day last week where I had a bit of popcorn stuck in my teeth for about 8 hours and by the end of that I was thinking, you know what, I think 2018 is probably going to be more of the same. But hey, the podcast has returned! And the crowd rejoiced! Yes sorry it was away for so long but how was I to know there’d be quite so much news while PPB was away for such a short time? What do you mean I’ve lived through 2015, 16 and 17 so I should really be used to that now? Alright alright. When prepping this week’s show I spent ages going through everything I’ve missed with bits about reanimated drowned corpse Steve Bannon and how he’s been alternatively fired from Breitbart, or how Trump’s bigger nuclear button is actually a toy one White House staff have installed for protection and it just makes a cow moo noise till Donald forgets what he was doing. But all of that, and the MPs vote for a meaningful vote, or how at least Blue passports will match the colour of everyone’s post Brexit depression and Alabama and everything else is now already old news and some of it is even last year so I’ve boiled things down to the past week or so’s noise because let’s face it, no one wants a podcast that goes on so long, it’s 2019 by the time you’ve finished. Oh and there’ll be more stuff on Carillion next week once the story’s developed a bit.

So hello to all you new listeners and subscribers and I’m not sure if you came here via my appearance on Romesh Ranganathan’s excellent Hip Hop Saved My Life podcast or you clicked something by accident, but your ears are welcome. It was odd how many new subscribers the show gained while I wasn’t releasing any episodes. Is this a hint? Is the only way we can hit tens of thousands by me just quitting? Hmm. Please don’t send in your views. Thanks to Alan for his Patreon donation over the hols and Mad Cyclist for upping theirs which was super kind and if you’d like to send money my way to make this show better or I mean, if you want, worse. Seriously, if you pay enough I’ll happily make this show really awful by request. Either way you can donate to patreon.com/parpolbro or if you wanna just do a one off & buy me a very expensive coffee aka one coffee in London then you can do donations of £3 or more at ko-fi.com/parpolbro. Thank you also to all of you who reviewed the show on iTunes over the hols. We are now on… FANFARE PLEASE… 100 reviews! Yeah! And only one of them is a one star! So if you haven’t reviewed the show but would like to or wouldn’t like to but feel like my constant asking on this show is finally puncturing your guilt shield then do head to iTunes or Stitcher or castface or podbastard or any of your fave podcast apps and do that there.

Ok, teeny tiny bit of admin this week which is to give a heads up about this show, because, the break is over and I intend to keep rolling this podcast as long as politics happens, which considering the state of the world, may only be a few more months, but at some point in early March, if things go to plan, I am becoming a dad to a tiny human. This is all very exciting but it does mean there may be a sudden pause in the podcast while I’m spending a week working out how to juggle poo filled nappies and make crying stop and that’s just caring for my own needs. ARF! We went to our second NCT meeting last week where I learnt that apparently it’s not funny suggesting I bring comedy scissors for the cutting of the umbilical cord and treating it like the opening of a shop. ‘I declare this baby launched!’ You live and learn. Anyway, so if one week you’re all like, where’s PPB? It’s because Tiny Douieb has landed, so now you know. I’m hoping I get them to run errands for the podcast and find guests and make me tea within about two weeks of them being born obvs. Oh and on a very different level of importance, if you have Netflix I highly recommend David Letterman’s new show where he interviews Barack Obama for an hour. Look I know Obama did some terrible things but watching him just made me so nostalgic for a time when the US president could construct sentences and had more than two emotions. It’s a good watch.

On this week’s show I am talking to Dr Phil Hammond, that’s right the good Phil Hammond, not the bad one, all about the NHS and it’s current crisis state. Plus a little bit of new year Brexit and a look at why it’s not just because he attends eugenics meetings and does the sorts of tweets that’d make you think a 14 year old boy was being a dick that mean Toby Young really shouldn’t have been non-exec director of the Office For Students for even the 30 seconds he was. Intrigued? No? Fair enough. In which case, here’s this:

HEADLINES

RESHUFFLE

I remember when I first got an iPod many years ago and found the shuffle function to be hugely exciting. What tune will it play next? What exciting banger will pop into my ears unaware this time? Only to be hugely disappointed as it regularly played my least favourite tracks from albums over and over again seemingly forgetting about everything else on there until I needed something chilled at which point it’d play the loudest track I had and make me feel sad. This is obviously the blue print on which Theresa May bases her cabinet reshuffles as they are never anything anyone wants, probably not even her, but instead the same awful old strains again and again. I’m not gonna go through all the appointments because some of them are a tad pointless like Sajid Javid’s housing extension that means little other than that this pointless addition will annoy communities and councils too like the conservatory idea it is.

Instead it’s worth looking at appointments like David Gauke, a Thunderbird made of dough, to Justice Secretary. This is the third Justice Secretary appointment in a year which won’t put any concerns about May taking the justice sector seriously to rest. Gauke’s voting record has been more often than not against policies that promote equality and human rights which isn’t exactly what you want for someone in his new role. As work and pensions secretary he pushed forward changes to the Personal Independence Payment that made it harder for people with certain disability to claim, and he’s defended the shit shambles that is Universal Credit several times as a good system which has got better. Two untruths in one statement. Let’s hope that he hasn’t heard that justice was blind incase he decides to treat it with the same level of compassion as he does other people with disabilities.

The new Secretary for Department of Work and Pension is Esther McVey, who is most well known for saying really awful things about people on benefits so it’s strange to now give her that very job. It’s like letting the evil kid on your street who tortures pets, run your zoo. But McVey got the position after Justine Greening turned it down and while having McVey in the DWP is a really sadistic move from May, it means that Greening will now be an anti-Brexit MP on the backbenches where she can vote how she likes, yet again weakening whatever iota of power May had with her own party. But now in Greening’s old role of Education Secretary is relative unknown Damian Hinds and there are already worries about him having preferential treatment for faith schools after the Catholic Church gave him a £5000 donation towards having an intern in his office. The church did say that they sponsor a lot of interns so I guess we have to take that as gospel.
And in Damien Green’s old role is David Lidlington, just without Damien Green’s old title of Secretary of State. So Lidlington is just Minister For The Cabinet Office which sounds a lot like ‘stay at home dad’.

Then we have Hunt’s added responsibility which according to insiders is mainly because Greg Clark refused to step down as Business Secretary which is the position May wanted Hunt to take so that meant he stayed put too. Davis and Johnson refused to change too and the only one who refused to change then left the cabinet entirely when she was refused was Greening. So May’s big reshuffle involved seventeen cabinet ministers staying put, three ministers were moved sideways, three including Greening resigned and only four new ministers were given cabinet posts. What does this mean? Well it means once again like the snap election or, her conference speech or well, every decision she’s made since being Prime Minister, May’s attempts to strengthen her hand have instead given her a big comedy foam finger where everyone can see it makes a point while being completely useless at actually grasping anything.

Labour did also have a reshuffle which brought current party star Laura Pidcock to the front bench, despite her comments on saying she could never be friends with a Tory which I think is unfair as Tory Spelling seems ok. Clive Lewis has returned to the front bench after being cleared of sexual harassment claims and after he was caught on video saying ‘get on your knees bitch’ to a male collegue as part of a Momentum game show event at the Brighton Labour conference. This was condemned due to his language and just how weird it is to see MPs having fun and acting human. Also of note with Labour’s reshuffle is Lincoln MP Karen Lee has become Shadow Fire Minister. Now I don’t know a lot about Karen Lee but I do think Shadow Fire Minister is the best title you could have in parliament and I really hope she is in charge of some sort of secret ninja sect who keeps demons at bay, or I’ll be very disappointed.

INTERVIEW PART 1 –

This year the NHS turns 70 years old which probably means in the eyes of the Conservatives that it can finally retire now that they’ve worked it to death on low wages. There is of course also every chance that as it’s now 70 that the NHS will now vote for the Conservatives to do just that and then it’ll back Brexit but fingers crossed. This winter’s NHS crisis is by all accounts the worst it’s seen with 55000 non urgent appointments cancelled, 90,000 patients being stuck in ambulances waiting to get into A&E, patients lying in corridoors due to a lack of beds and medical students being asked to volunteer in emergency wards despite their lack of experience. While with a catchy dramatic theme tune and some sort of helicopter crash this could be a very exciting TV show, it’s horrific when you realise that’s the invaluable health service that the whole country relies on. Of course it’s not for doctors and nurses not trying, they are working crazy hard but when you’re under funded, have Brexit making getting staff harder and have one of those Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Men as your Health secretary, things will fall apart. This isn’t an easy problem though, even if the government deciding to actually fund the NHS properly rather than say sorry or blame a time of year that happens every year. So this week I thought it’d be good to get an expert on the NHS to explain exactly why we’ve hit this crisis now and what should be done about it, even if it probably won’t be.

I spoke to Dr Phil Hammond. As I mentioned before, he is the good Phil Hammond and you might well have seen him on that television in BBC2’s Trust Me I’m A Doctor, or appearing on Have I Got News For You, or even Countdown. Phil is a qualified GP working with children and adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome also known as ME. But as well as working as a doctor he has written several comedy shows about health, the NHS and being a doctor, all of which he’s toured and taken to the Edinburgh Fringe, as well as writing a sitcom for Radio 4 about GPs struggling with NHS reforms. He regularly presents a show on Radio Bristol, writes for Private Eye and is about to continue a tour of his show Dr Phil’s Health Revolution before starting his new show ‘Happy Birthday NHS’ in the West country. Phew! And you thought doctors were overworked already! I really enjoyed talking with Phil but I should apologise as it was my first interview back post Christmas and I am sloppy as a question asker. Luckily Phil was brilliantly informative and funny too, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Here is Dr Phil Hammond:

INTERVIEW WITH PHIL HAMMOND PART 1

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

If you hadn’t heard of professional opinion shitter Toby Young before the last few weeks you were, well, very lucky, because the best way I could describe the man is like if Voldemort possessed an outie belly button. There’s every chance you’ve briefly caught him on one of the news shows, looking like if Phil Mitchell had been constipated for weeks and he was probably complaining about generation snowflake are so easily offended and need safe spaces, before then crying about how none of his friends like him and everyone’s so mean to him. Then over the past two weeks you probably heard how the Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson, the previous shredded skin of Boris Johnson, now wrapped around a stick, appointed Young to the position of one of the non-executive members on the board of the new Office For Students. Which sounded great right because he’s called Toby Young and young people are students right? But then it turned out he kept shouting awful things about boobs on Twitter, and that he lied about his university qualifications and went to talks by white supremacists and generally overall shouldn’t be anywhere near a big government position, let alone children, let alone his own children, and so he resigned. Now I could wang on for ages calling Toby Young various names I think he deserves like arse potato and such, and I could also relay all his awful tweets and details the really disturbing eugenics seminar he attended but those have all been fairly well reported every day for several weeks.

But what hasn’t been reported and was generally ignored when calling Young’s new job into question, is his role both in the world of free schools, but also his directorship at the New Schools Network and what it is and why all of that should really call into question how he was about to be handed a big fat pay check to basically boost his own ideological plan. So firstly, back in 2009 the New Schools Network was set up as a charity by Rachel Wolf, former advisor to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, everyone’s least favourite vent act. The idea was to support groups who wanted to set up free schools in England, akin to the charter schools they have in the US, ie publicly funded but doesn’t work under the curriculum and can be privately run. A bit like Riggs in Lethal Weapon. If he was privately run. The charity is 86% funded by the Department of Education to help them roll out their free school ideology but they have been accused several times of a lack of transparency over the rest of their donors. Loads of interested groups signed up, including Toby Young, a friend of Gove’s if either of those people actually have those things, and when the Conservative government came in they launched 24 of them by 2011. Toby Young was CEO and trustee of one of those schools, West London Free School for which he got about £60k a year plus £15k pensions all from the department of education. He then stepped down from this in 2016 after complaining that he didn’t know how difficult it would be because who know eh? I thought schools were just telling kids to shut up and making them wear stupid ties, but no! There’s actual stuff they have to learn and things you have to do. WEIRD! Between 2013 to 2016 he opened three primary schools in West London and then in 2016 was appointed director of the New Schools Network charity, and paid £90-100k salary from the department of education, which is no small fee. There were big questions about Toby Young’s impartiality in this role being that he was the CEO of various schools that had already received a lot funding from the New Schools Network, including in the year up to end of August 2016, £10.1m of funding to the West London Free School by the charity to promote a ‘classically liberal education’. Yeah that sounds well impartial right? Teaching kids the conservative libertarian ways of economic freedoms at the expense of civil liberties, I mean that crosses all side of the political spectrum right? Yes, right. There were also concerns about an article he wrote in 2012 complaining about schools having to be inclusive with wheelchair ramps, which he said was ghastly. Which is a stupid thing to say because if anything, wheelchair ramps smooth out architecture something nice and are far more inviting than stairs, especially if you’re in a wheelchair. But Young promised to be non-partisan as director of the new schools network. Then one of his first moves as director was to call for business leaders with no teaching experience to be appointed as school heads. Boom! Non-partisan! For the children!

But still he got the job, replacing Nick Timothy, now former advisor to Theresa May. Several issues about free schools have become apparent since they started in 2011. In 2014 it was reported that the Oftsed failure rate of free schools was three times higher than state schools. Then last year analysis showed that free schools help boost the richest parts of the country while neglecting the poorest and that nearly £140m of government money has gone to free schools that have either closed, partially closed or didn’t even open in the first place. But still in the Spring budget last year the government gave another £320m for them. And Toby Young is getting £100k of taxpayers money to help investors open more. The Office For Students is an independent but government approved body that merges the higher education funding council and office for fair access and Toby Young would have been part of the board helping promote fair access to higher education and he again, promised to be non-partisan despite his own politics.

And so should someone who has an interest in eugenics, tweets sexist and homophobic abuse and lies about their qualifications be in a role that looks at helping those from deprived backgrounds into education? No definitely not. But if Young wasn’t such a blatant idiot with his aggressive opinions, would anyone have questioned why someone who was being well funded by the government to fund his own interests under a non-partisan guise that actually promoted a classical liberal ideology for children and only benefitted richer areas, should now be given more money by the government to be impartial with higher education access? Not in my book and my book is considerably more enjoyable than any of Toby Young’s books and all it says is ‘Toby Young is an arse potato’ in big letters over and over again.

And now back to Dr Phil…

INTERVIEW PART 2

Big thanks to Phil for the chat. As we mentioned Dr Phil’s Health Revolution is touring Shoreham, York, Wakefield, Exeter, Fareham, Margate, Halifax, Loughborough and Cambridge from 24th Feb to 30th March, and then his Happy Birthday NHS show is at the Merlin Theatre in Frome on 15th April, then at the lovely Bristol Tobacco Factory on the 29th April. You can find more details on all those things on his website at drphilhammond.com and he’s on Twitter @drphilhammond too. I’ll list all the people he recommends following on the Twitter and Facebook over the week, cos well, there was a lot of them.

I’ve been all organised and got the next few weeks of interviews lined up, but with Tiny Douieb appearing in March I’m going to try to get as many done in advance as possible, so as always, if you have someone you’d like to recommend I get on the show or a subject you’d like me to talk about, please drop me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast group on Facebook or partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or why not break into my home and leave everything untouched except for a message written with your finger on my shower door and then when I go for a wash I’ll not see your message because I never look at the door incase there’s evidence someone’s broken in and that’d really creep me out. So yeah, email’s bestest.

MINI BREXIT FALLOUT?

This is just a mini Brexit Fallout today, because I thought it’d be useful to explain whether you can be in or out of the Single Market if you are out of the union. Now already you’re probably thinking when my other half unceremoniously dumped me because my breathing sounds made them made, then I left the union and joined the single market and if you are thinking that then you’re an idiot, that isn’t what I’m talking about, go comfort eat and join Tinder. What this is about is how both main parties, dem Conservatives and dem Labour have both now said definitely that the UK will be out of the single market in March because to be in the single market means being in the union in some form or another.

Theresa May and the Conservatives have said it loads which was of no surprise because while we still aren’t a hundred percent sure what sort of deal they do actually want, we do know if there was a ‘delete the EU’s number from our phone and have our friend answer if they do try calling to say you need to get out of their life or I will mess you up!’ then they’d go for that. Labour’s stance has been a lot more iffy with some moments the single market being a thing they’re into then other moments they aren’t and then it depends who you speak to on what day and overall I’m still not sure they know what a single market is when they see one or how to approach it safely without scaring it off. Then this Sunday just gone Labour leader and parliament’s only representative from Donaldson’s Dairy Jeremy Corbyn said on Peston on ITV that he definitely, definitely, doesn’t back the idea of the UK staying in the Single Market because, as he said, you can only be in the Single Market if you’re in the EU. He then also said that we wouldn’t stay in THE customs union but were looking to be part of A customs union. That’s important that there. So not the classic everyone knows it customs union, but you know one of the others, possibly supermarket own brand, maybe a knock off called Cistims Uniat or something. And then lots of people got angry and said he was wrong and didn’t know what he was talking about. Meanwhile SNP leader and your childhood friend’s mum that you’re always a bit scared of even in adulthood Nicola Sturgeon, has said the UK should definitely stay in the single market because she’s actually done a Brexit impact report which is amazing because no one else has and the Conservatives still don’t know what one is or whether you can eat it, and she says that the report says we’re all shat right up unless we stay in it.

Soooooooo as far as I understand and I should add that as a country that had membership of the EU has never left the EU before, all of this is up in the air like a particularly good or particularly bad juggler’s act. But, from March the 19th next year we will leave the European Union which means we give up the four freedoms of the EU which include the Single Market, check and THE Customs Union. Check. BUT and this is a big Kardashian but, what we do next means we could have access to the Single Market and negotiate A cistims uniat. Sorry, customs union. For example Norway isn’t in the EU and isn’t in the Single Market as such, but it is part of the European Economic Area so it has access to the single market when it wants as long as it implements various bits of EU legislation of which according to the interbible Wikipedia, over 7000 by 2010. But you could also say it was in the Single Market if you wanted to because some people do. Even the BBC. But it does mean Norway has no say in the politics of the single market like it would do if it was in the EU. Iceland has a similar deal, as does Liechenstein which I’m still not sure is a country. There is also the CETA deal that Canada has with the EU, where the C doesn’t actually stand for Canada, I KNOW RIGHT, that also gives almost entire access to the Single Market but not quite eliminating 98% of tarrifs. There’s a lot of criticism of it, much like the previously proposed and rejected TTIP deal between the EU and the US that it would only benefit big business and damage consumer and workers rights. Will it? No idea mate, the whole thing is so boring to read about. It is only provisionally in effect at the moment so we will have to wait and see. You assume that even if it does do all those things the Canadian government will sincerely apologise about it throughout.

So by saying we won’t be in the Single Market the idea might be that we won’t be, but we will negotiate to have access to it and similarly not being in THE customs union, doesn’t mean that we won’t renegotiate a customs union that will be a lot like THE customs union only we won’t be in the EU and Barry271898 on Twitter with his Union Jack pic and bio that says ‘being drivin out of my own country by foreignts, tea drinker’ or whatever, can’t then go ‘the undemocratically elected EU are still in charge’ because they’ll see a different name and be confused and go to sleep. Essentially it’s a whole load of semantics issues so no wonder some Labour supporters are angry as they have previous issues with anti-semantics. ARF! Also though according to recently resigned trade minister Lord Price the Conservatives have put all their efforts into keeping the trade priviledges the EU had with third countries such as Korea so when we become a third country we can all hang out and trade in thirdsomes. But he said because of this the department has spent zero time on potential deals with the other EU countries or the US or anywhere else and these deals with the third countries will probably be more complicated than they think oh and what about Ireland? So I hope that’s all cleared things up for you. No? Fair enough. It’s almost as if the whole thing is quite complicated or something.

Oh and Theresa May appointed Suella Fernandes as a new Brexit minister, and with her name like a kids tv presenter, she’s really fun because she is hardline Brexiteer just leave right now why haven’t why left are we still in? Have we left yet? Oh god it’s all taking ages. Yeah, that sort of fun. You know how fun? The sort of fun that in November of last year contradicted the government’s promise that human rights would not be affected by Brexit by suggesting the EU charter of fundamental rights is dropped after March 19th as it’s too flabby with all its citizen’s protections on eugenics, personal data and collective bargaining. What? You’re telling its 2018 and you haven’t got on board the rights diet yet? By shedding your protections as a human being you can lose up to 6lbs a week by running from authorities that are trying to catch for a crime their algo-rhythms believe you’ll commit in a few years time. No, sorry, that’s Minority Report, but hey, it’s kind of the same. Fun!

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast! Thanks so much for rejoining as we embark into whatever 2018 holds. I’m hoping it’s the door so we can run through it escaping everything else the year brings. If you enjoy this noise please tell people about it, subscribe on the pod things, and do a review or two where you can. I mean, really, anywhere. A podcast site is good but I’ll also except shaved onto the back of a llama or carved into the moon. Please send pics. Please donate to the patreon and ko-fi if you can especially as I’ll soon have a baby who’s noise I’ll need to block out somehow while doing recordings. I’m saying don’t donate to help feed my baby, donate to help me hire a studio where they won’t be. That’s good parenting right there.

Big thanks to Acast for hosting the show and to my brother The Last Skeptik for all the beats.

This show will be back next week when I’ll be asking exactly how

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