Episode 139 – Annuziata! Gesundheit – Extinction Rebellion, Brexit Halloween, Assange

Released on Monday, April 15th, 2019.

Episode 139 – Annuziata! Gesundheit – Extinction Rebellion, Brexit Halloween, Assange

Episode 139 – Its a normal sized episode, there’s no Brexit till Halloween, Assange did one good but is still a twat and Tiernan (@tiernandouieb) speaks with Clare Farrell at environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (@ExtinctionR).

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Further Reading

Linear liner notes
It’s a normal sized episode, there’s no Brexit till Halloween, Assange did one good but is still a twat and Tiernan (@tiernandouieb) speaks with Clare Farrell at environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (@ExtinctionR).

Links and sources of info from Clare’s interview:
• Extinction Rebellion on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ExtinctionR
• Jem Bendell on Twitter – https://twitter.com/jembendell
• Jane Morton on Twitter – https://twitter.com/SafeClimate
• Jane Morton: don’t mention the emergency (video) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGHTRx6xAU
• Bruno Latour on Twitter – https://twitter.com/BrunoLatourAIME
• Anthropocene Lecture: Bruno Latour with John Schellnhuber – https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_140211.php
• David Spratt on Twitter – https://twitter.com/djspratt
• Kevin Anderson on Twitter – https://twitter.com/kevinclimate

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:
• Twitter – twitter.com/ParPolBro and twitter.com/TiernanDouieb
• Facebook – www.facebook.com/groups/ParPolBro
• Website – www.tiernandouieb.co.uk/podcast
• Donate to the Patreon – www.patreon.com/parpolbro
• Buy me a coffee – ko-fi.com/parpolbro
• Review the show on iTunes – itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/partly-political-broadcast/id1075342863?mt=2
• Review the show on Stitcher – www.stitcher.com/podcast/partly-political-broadcast
• The Last Skeptik – www.thelastskeptik.com


Transcript

Ep139

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the show that analyses the political news and when reviewing the results often finds you’d get the same conclusion by kicking yourself in the face while being attacked by bees. This is episode 139, I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as Labour MP and series of frowning circles David Lammy causes outrage by comparing the Conservative Brexiteer group the ERG with the Nazis, I too say that’s not a fair similitude. I mean actually, the Nazis were very well organized.

No Brexit till Halloween unless of course Parliament can agree to a deal before then, which means, no Brexit till Halloween. A perfect date for it, as people will long to seek out a variety of monsters or crazed killers in order to release them this seemingly never ending self-inflicted diredom. Perhaps the October celebration will go back to its traditional meaning of remembering the dead, just not people but political parties, UK democracy, and of course hope. It is both a blessing and a curse that the EU granted Prime Minister and rotting cauliflower Theresa May an extension to Article 50, as yes it was needed what with no other plan being available but also, oh god we’ve got 6 more months of this awful yet also tedious, tedious shit. Once again, the Conservatives seem to have added an extension to something using taxpayers money, chances are if no arrangement is made by October Brexit will then sport a floating duck island and a moat too.

No deal looks like it’s no longer an option so it’s great that £4bn has already been spent on No Deal preparations, such as hiring a ferry firm without any ferries. Poor photocopy of a Picasso painting and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond defended that spending by saying that it would have been irresponsible not to, whereas vowing to avoid a no deal from the beginning and using that money for almost anything else ever would of course have been completely batshit eh Phil? Nothing more responsible of course than willingly pushing ahead with a destructive possibility and spending billions of cash on it for over two years because your boss has such severe red lines that doctors are concerned its rosacea. Of course, the Brexiteers are livid as delaying Brexit even further risks abandoning due to boredom. Could it be pushed back and back and back until those still alive barely remember what it even means, a whisper on the wind or an old Wives tale? Brexit petering out like an 80’s power ballad on its last play? Well not if stupid Penfold and Conservative MP Mark Francois can stop it, which he can’t because he’s too thick. But part of his trying involved him telling an audience of nearly dead people at a pro-Brexit conference that Brexit has gone on long enough and the EU council will be facing perfidious Albion on speed. Which apart from sounding like a horse that would die within seconds of the Grand National, also actually suggests that the UK would be even less trustworthy even more quickly, which I have a feeling Francois doesn’t understand or he’d have noticed that we’re already at peak dishonestly with all the illegal electoral activity around, you guessed it, the leave campaign. It’s about as concerning as Mark Francois threatening to be more stupid.

The result of using a strong vacuum to pull an arse inside out Nigel Farage has launched his Brexit Party, although sadly not into the sun. The party who are going up against UKIP who are also a Brexit party and the Conservatives, the official pro-Brexit party and Labour who are pro-Brexit sometimes depending on the day’s specials, are, according to professional gobshite Farage there to cause a democratic revolution in politics. That makes it sounds like wants to go round in circles with Brexit as that will keep him in a job without having to do anything, much like his entire career. The Brexit Party’s big announcement was that Guinness in a test tube Jacob Rees Mogg’s sister Annunziata Rees-Mogg would be running for them in the European Elections. Annunziata Rees-Mogg sounds like a weird condition that causes you to send your kids to a boarding school the second they’ve been born, or a yoga position that involves having your head up your arse while your parents throw money at you. Actually she’s a woman who looks like she’s enjoyed checking a crime scene a bit too much in a Danish crime thriller where it turns out in the end that she did it and she apparently joined the Conservative Party at the age of 5, at which point she’d already been so ignored and neglected by her parents, she already felt like she’d fit in. Annunziata claimed to speak on behalf of normal people, probably because she has their servant hours so tightly locked down, they were unable to get there themselves.

MPs are now on Easter recess, which bodes well for Brexit as the notion is all but dead now, but by Easter Sunday could well have risen again with a fresh outlook. When they return the UK will be a week away from local elections, followed by possible European elections, both of which its predicted will favour badly for Labour and the Conservatives, with votes looking likely to go to the bonkers or boring fringe ones. Change UK, the party for people who own a trouser press and fill up their petrol tank to the top every time just in case, they’ve boasted that they may have some well-known names running in the EU elections, with hints it may include a former cabinet minister. Which based on the amount of resignations May has had over the last few years, that could be almost anybody in the country.

Labour are now ahead on Westminster voting intention polls, and were a general election to happen, which it might, especially as May is currently on a walking holiday, then the Conservatives are currently on target to lose 60 MPs, with walking dinghy Boris Johnson likely to lose his seat. Good. I hope he has to ride his bike without one for at least a year.

But uh oh, what’s this? Labour leader and toe poking through an old sock Jeremy Corbyn privately told morally loose woman Dame Margaret Hodge that he was concerned that evidence of anti-Semitism had been mislaid or ignored as she released the secretly recorded conversation. So, wait, Corbyn said he was concerned about it and explained why he wanted Lord Falconer to investigate, she illegally recorded it and oh man that’s gonna really damage his reput…nope, no I still don’t get it. I’m looking forward to the Easter holidays bringing up other damaging stories about him such as that time he admitted that he left the fridge door open and when he forgot to let his cat back in after going out for the evening.

On Thursday, after being there for 7 years, Ecuador withdrew asylum from wikileaks founder Julian Assange and he was dragged out by police, looking like a santa for crackheads. Now this is a murky old case as Assange very much deserves to be put on trial for allegations of sexual assault in Sweden that were dropped but may now be reopened, but in the UK he was actually charged with failing to surrender, something I wish we could get Theresa May on. He may now also be extradited to the US for participating in the hacking of intelligence computers after he aided Chelsea Manning in revealing important footage of the US killing civilians in Iraq, something that everyone already knew about as that’s pretty much America’s brand, but hey, sometimes it’s nice to be proved right. So, Assange did do one good thing but most other stuff he’s done is pretty awful. It’s like Darth Vader, where sure, he threw the Emperor down a shaft but that doesn’t remove from him blowing up and entire planet and murdering an old man. Also similar to Vader, Assange was apparently having breathing difficulties, though after 7 years in a room with only the internet to keep him company, it’s likely that’s a wanking injury. Apparently, the last straw for the Ecuadorian authorities which lead to his asylum being withdrawn was when wikileaks published information stating evidence of corruption in Ecuador’s government, which I mean, you really shouldn’t crap on your own doorstep. Or in Assange’s case, inside the house as if he’d gone to the doorstep he’d have been arrested sooner. Actually, his internet was cut off in March and the Ecuadorian embassy have said Assange did smear his shit on the walls, but I guess without online access where else could he put it? So should be extradited to the US, probably not. To Sweden? Yes. How about just popped outside in the sunlight so his copydex looking body and myxomatosis eyes can react like a vampiric moleman and we can all laugh at him online? Definitely. I mean, how much effect will it have putting a man who’s lived in a room for 7 years into prison? It’ll pretty much be a busman’s holiday, with the added bonus that he may have to cell share with someone who’ll teach him about how consent works.

In Israeli elections, right wing party Likud again won most seats with 35 and inspiration for those weird toy rubber faces you move with your thumbs Benjamin Netenyahu is still leader much to the disappointment of anyone who likes democracy. But the centrist Blue and White alliance also won 35 seats while the Labor party have disappeared, showing that the country is very divided, which feels apt for Israel. But a PR firm who placed 1200 hidden cameras in largely Arab polling stations took to Facebook to boast how they lowered the turnout, which was historically low at just 50%. Filming in polling booths is of course prohibited but when has any area being off limits stopped Netenyahu and his party from setting up there before? In Finnish elections the Social Democractic Party won by only 17.7% of the vote, but the far right Finns Party were behind by only 0.2% and the formerly in charge centre party crashed down to 13.8%. The problem is, this makes forming a coalition tricky, so fingers crossed the two biggest parties don’t try to work together on some sort of national socialism platform or Finland could be in trouble.

And lastly, scientists unveiled the first ever picture of a black hole, turns out it resides in the government department of International Trade just next to disgraced MP Liam The Disgrace Fox. And Salisbury was named best place to live in the UK. Because yes, that’s where we are. Brexit has made the UK so unlikeable and tedious, that you’re better off living somewhere you might be poisoned to death than anywhere else, as at least then you won’t have to put up with this shit anymore.

ADMIN

Yes yes yes, it’s a full episode again! Welcome back poddingtons and I hope you survived last week’s absolute vacuum of joyful news without a proper ParPolBro episode but that tiny episode I made was recorded while sitting between boxes and balancing the laptop and microphone on the as yet unmade bed, while sort of leaning awkwardly forward to be the right height. Weirdly, it didn’t sound any different to normal did it? Which means my default it sounding slightly pained and unsettled, so that’s nice. Moving place really is tons harder when you have a one year old. I mean even a trip to IKEA to get a few bits became an entire afternoon because we popped into the café to get her some lunch and my daughter spent an entire hour eating each of her peas individually. I had no idea that parenting was such a series of swings and roundabouts where one minute you’re delighted they’re eating their vegetables and the next you’re praying she never eats peas ever again because it turns out you have a life to get on with. Normally my frustrations with IKEA are limited to other people being dawdling fuckwits or pointless arguments with my wife about which set of drawers is likely to break first. Anyway, we are now nearly completely settled in so the podcast is back, just in time for a two week recess from parliament during which I really should’ve had a break. There’s no winning ever.

Thanks to you all for still being here and hello to all the new subscribers and listeners that have joined over the past few weeks just in time for me to do a not proper episode. Big shout out to the three of you who’s pod apps obviously do that really annoying thing where it downloads all possible episodes once you’ve subscribed because oh yes, episodes 1 to 136 all had 3 extra listens in one day which is probably you frustratingly hitting ‘mark all as listened’ and shouting swears at your phone and for that, you have all the feels. Thanks very much to Sam for the lovely review on the iTunes, whichever of you gave a 5 star to it too and whoever the person is who hit 2 star, I’m sorry this podcast was forced upon you and it wasn’t the Parboiled Polpot Brothers podcast you were expecting. If you have something nice to say or just wanna hit the 5 stars please do so on your pod apps of enjoyment, but also especially on iTunes as we’re now just 4 away from the big 150. If you want to give this show a two stars, why not whisper it into a knot of an old tree and then stuff that knot with dead bees that you’ve picked up with your bare hands and then never mention it to anyone ever again? Thanks. Cheers also to Ruby for the ko-fi donation and if you can spare a coffee’s worth of dosh this way it’s all super helpful in keeping me caffeinated enough to make this show. You can do that at ko-fi.com/parpolbro or at patreon.com/parpolbro too. But most importantly of course, please do just tell other people IRL or not IRL, is there a term for that? Is it just online? Is it NIRL? If social media isn’t real life then does that mean I don’t actually have any friends? Oh wow this is tough.

Only bit of admin this week is that the family politics show I do with Tatton Spiller from Simple Politics called ‘How Does This Politics Thing Work Then?’ is at the Lincoln Drill Hall at 2pm and you can grab tickets for that at lincolndrillhall.com. And please do as it’s a pretty big venue. I had no idea Drills needed so much space. Mine fits in a small plastic box.

On this week’s show I am talking to Clare Farrel from environmental activists Extinction Rebellion, who by the time you hear this, will have embarked on their International Rebellion with loads of actions planned all over the place to highlight that we are mere years away from a horrible heat death flood horror famine. Hey look, there’s not much Brexit this week so I had to get some sort of misery in for balance, right? Plus a look at whether Julian Assange is a baddie or just a misunderstood rejected broken replicant. Spoilers, he’s a baddie. But before all that, here is a very tiny bit of this:

BREXIT FALLOUT

So that’s that everyone, no Brexit till October. You can breathe easy depending on the air pollution levels in the parts of the country you’re in, or you know, if you have asthma. I’m just being inclusive. Obviously if you wanted a Brexit you might be a bit miffed that it didn’t happen on any of the overly optimistic and rushed dates that it was promised to happen, but now you have even more time to do whatever it is you need to do to get ready for your much looked forward to Brexit, like, er, get that bunker ready or learn how to skin squirrels. I mean, that is if it happens. There’s some concern that with it constantly being pushed forward that Brexit might just never happen with the public getting so bored of it all it just sort of withers away like a childhood dream rendered pointless by the sheer inescapability of how unexciting the drudgery of adulthood is. Or there might be a general election which could change its course as the public votes for no one in particular and we end up with a coalition made up of your local postal worker, one of the cast members of Coronation Street and sock puppet. Still no one really knows but there is likely now six more months. I mean, of course, it might be less than six months if parliament can agree on a withdrawal agreement before then but considering May is planning to wheel out her deal yet again, all stitched and plastered up like a victim of a bullfight and it’ll no doubt get knocked back again before having robotic insertions to make it like the billion dollar deal so May can bring it back yet again this time with a laser eye. Foreign Secretary and string of piss Jeremy Hunt has said it’s a priority avoid the European elections which would mean they’d have to find a deal by May 22nd and after Easter break and with May bank holidays, that only leaves 21 working days for them to do what they couldn’t do in over two years. Then of course a heavy pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit stance in the local elections and European ones may influence what the government does next though it probably won’t because compared to May I’ve seen more heavily bled stones.

So, if it does get to October, which it will. I’m not good at political predictions but I mean, come on, it will. August will be spent with MPs slagging each other off out of boredom and then come September they’ll realise they have to actually do something again and Brexit Debates will likely start at 5pm on October 30th before on the 31st May has to go to Brussels and say pleasey please in at least 12 different languages just to get another extension. While pushing things back until someone has any sort of idea, is a good thing, it’s also a bad thing for many as companies and businesses have to keep reworking their leaving strategy, costing them millions. People studying and working in Europe are having to hold off their applications and of course £4bn has already been spent on No Deal which isn’t going to happen and the country as a whole as spent £66bn on Brexit already. It seems Boris Johnson’s garden bridge spend was merely a warm up in wasting money. So then if Brexit didn’t happen at all, and many big leavers are now announcing that actually, they can’t be arsed anymore, then that’s a lot of money that’s gone towards an absolutely pointless thing that then didn’t happen. They may as well have just hired the KLF to burn it, at least then someone would have gained warmth from it and we’d have all had an extra opportunity to call the KLF idiots which would’ve cheered the country up a bit and no doubt united them.

One other thing to note this week is at the launch of Farage’s new clown car, sorry vehicle, the Brexit Party, he announced that they’d already raised £750k in donations, all in small sums of £500. I mean, that’s pretty impressive considering during the general election, Labour backed by Momentum raised what was considered a large sum of £62.5k, so for an entirely new party to get more than that is quite odd, especially when their website wasn’t up until April 5th. Sums of £500 or less don’t come under the electoral commissions Political Parties, Elections and Referendums act which means donors don’t have be on the electoral register or registered in the UK. The Brexit Party gets all its donations through PayPal so it’s donors aren’t listed, but one Twitter user @Turloughc traced the server donating the amounts to Michigan in the US, which could point to several hard right affiliates of Farage. Either way, Farage made a big point of the Brexit Party not being funded by the likes of human orthopedic show Arron Banks and all by grassroots donations, but it seems much like the pro-Brexit facebook adverts these grassroots are actually just the hairs of another swampy hard right billionaire funding Farage’s lobby. Still, on the plus side, if Farage fails to get elected to anything again, then at least those billionaires are wasting their not hard earned money and their children will have to grow up understanding that they’re only really rich and not really, really rich because their stupid dad gave money to a racist arse trumpet. Good.

INTERVIEW WITH CLARE PART 1

Now if you’re a long-time listener, you’re probably thinking ‘Tiernan, you’ve interviewed people about climate change loads, why hasn’t it stopped yet?’ and to that I’d have to reply that I don’t know. I thought this podcast with its minimal listenership and occasional jingles would, single handedly, have reduced all carbon emissions by now and we’d be all laughing about it while smoking an aerosol with a crab who’s sitting comfortably on top of an old wheelie bin lid in the sea. But no, sadly environmental damage is still increasing at a terrifying rate, the Great Barrier Reef has now declined by 89% due to rising sea temperatures, and scientists now reckon it’ll take 10 million years for the Earth to recover from our current extinction level event, by which point, the UK may also have sorted out Brexit. Current models show global warming will rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052 which is pretty bad, if you consider that already the rises in temperature have led to the largest refugee crisis in history which has gone on to change global politics, and that’s not mentioning all the natural disasters that have completely wrecked places like Mozambique. So, I’m not sure if you have the same but I struggle with feeling a bit helpless about it, when the best I can do is recycle a bit of cardboard or turn the tap off when brushing my teeth. There are 3000 coal factories churning out crap every day, and I don’t know how to stop that or close them down. The closest I’ve done is once evacuation a lift and if anything, that involved me releasing gases so probably wasn’t that much help. Really for things to change and change fast, governments and companies, those creating the most pollution need to act now, and I don’t just mean in a method way as villains like they have been doing for years.

Cue Extinction Rebellion, a socio-political movement that aims to achieve radical change to stop human extinction and ecological collapse, all through non-violent action. You may remember a few weeks ago when a group of naked people attached themselves to the glass in the public gallery in Westminster? That was them. Or all the very powerful climate strikes where school children protested by not going to school because seriously, what’s the point in school when everything you learn will come second to having to work out how to breathe in a planet that’s on fire? After starting in London last October, ER now have groups all over the UK and world and this week they have been embarking on an International Rebellion, which has so far involved, amongst other things, blocking Waterloo Bridge and turning it into a proper garden bridge, which is better and no doubt cheaper than anything Boris could come up with. They’ve also blocked off Oxford Circus, Parliament Square, Marble Arch, Piccadilly Circus and various other locations around the world and will be there all week. So for this show, I spoke to Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion to find out what they’re up to, what on earth we can do, how to make a fun protest about something so constantly terrifying and if me evacuating a lift helped at all? Ok not the last one, but the others. Hope you find this interesting and go join them this week if you can. Here’s Clare:

INTERVIEW WITH CLARE PART 1

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

Julian Assange, Julian Assange. Such a shame he’s a total bellend because it’d be nice to finally rhyme something with orange for poetry or rap reasons. Sure, it’s not a good rhyme with orange, in the same way just calling him a bellend doesn’t quite explain all the ways he is one and the one way that he isn’t that’s still overridden by the many ways he is. You see much in the same way that Wikileaks supposedly sheds light on secret information withheld by governments, but actually mainly just sort of supported Trump and has loads of dodgy Russian intelligence connections, so too the recent arrest of Assange has shown people to be passionate supporters or haters of the man, while in reality mainly highlights that no one bothers to understand that it’s entirely possible to think more than one thing about one person.

I mean, he did do one good thing and that good thing is that in 2010, Wikileaks published a video of a US military helicopter killing 18 civilians in Iraq as well as a number of documents from Chelsea Manning revealing how the US had killed hundreds of innocent people in Afghanistan, and 66,000 civilians in the Iraq War. That’s genocide right there. You can’t kill 66,000 innocent people and claim oops bit of intelligence error. That’s straight up horrific mass genocide war crime and it was great that Wikileaks published that evidence. Not that much has happened with it since then and the US were pretty pissed off that someone showed them up to be bad guys because you have to remember, they’re the good guys, just good guys with guns who kill bad guys without any guns. The same often applies to American police. At the time the US, and then President Obama vowed to prosecute Assange but that was a bit tricky on account of him not being a US citizen, not living in the US and it not actually being a crime to disclose classified government documents unless you can prove it was done with an awareness it could harm national security. Which would’ve been tough considering it didn’t and the US has continued to kill lots of people abroad and at home anyway. It was an explicit part of Manning’s trial that prosecuting Assange would endanger press freedoms which would make them both genocidal and authoritarian, and it’d be tricky getting away with the first part if the second popped up. Someone should really let Trump know. In 2013 the Obama Department of Justice said it was indistinguishable from how the Guardian or New York Times published classified documents via their sources so they couldn’t prosecute him.

But publishing the documents is not what the US are charging him with now. They’re charging ol’ anemic Jules of trying to retrieve the documents by assisting Manning in cracking a password and using a username other than Mannings on a US Department of Defense computer, in order to disguise Chelsea’s identity. Now this is where it gets murkatron, because that turns Assange from being a publisher or journalist into a hacker and illegal retriever of files. Yes, journalists are permitted and ethically required to protect the anonymity of their sources, but if they do hack the Pentagon for a story, its understandable they should know there are consequences. I mean, has Assange not seen any films ever? Thing is, the DoJ under Obama did try to get Assange on that too but couldn’t because they were part of the charges against Manning. This charge was only renewed under the Trump government when CIA director and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a man that is almost entirely neck, launched a campaign against Assange where he said, and this is an actual quote ‘that we cannot allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.’ Cool, that’s a totally normal thing for anyone to say. Of course it is. No new evidence has been found since 2011 on Assange’s supposed hacking of US security services and so if he was to be extradited to the US, it does indeed raise questions about the freedom of press, Trump’s treatment of journalists and the power of the US to indict someone who’s not a citizen or resident of the country. Basically, its some scary, scary shit that no doubt, in years to come, some plucky new website will leak and show how batshit it all was.

But but but, here’s why this doesn’t make Assange a weird cosplay of the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 hero of the people. For a start he mainly sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy to hide from extradition to Sweden from sexual assault charges brought by two women who said he molested them during a trip to Stockholm. Now Assange said they were both American agents in disguise but in a post Me Too era, it mainly sounds like he was victim blaming to get let off the hook. Especially as on the post Me Too era, he compared those men in Hollywood and elsewhere accused of rape as being the same as the black men lynched in Southern America accused of sexual misconduct against white women. Sure, because people like Harvey Weinstein were part of a totally oppressed minority huh? I mean just looking at Weinstein it’s obvious he was an oppressive majority all by himself. Sweden suspended their investigation into the allegations after 5 years of failing to get hold of Assange, what with him hiding in a room in London, but they may now reopen the case. What he’s been arrested for in London is failing to surrender to the court, for the Swedish investigations, the charge of which held even when the Swedish one didn’t because British law takes no prisoners except for the prisoners it takes. Ironically enough if Assange had just handed himself in to Swedish authorities, the US would have a much harder time extraditing them there because they’d then require authority from Sweden and the UK, whereas now, it’s just plucky Sajid Javid who’s eager to please.

Assange also has some really dodgy connections from Farage visiting him in the embassy in 2017 where he apparently handed Julian a thumb drive though neither will say what was on it, though I do like to believe it’s just pictures of Farage drinking wine that he never wants released to the public. Or there’s the fact that the filming of his arrest was made by a subsidiary of Russia Today, or how the Mueller investigation noted that Wikileaks was an accomplice, perhaps unknowingly, to Russian cyber intelligence during the 2016 US election campaign in obtaining stolen Democratic correspondence files. Plus, while in the embassy he tried to get the Ecuadorian security removed and have them replaced by Russian operators. Although I have no idea if that’s just a shit review for Ecuadorian security, I’ve no idea how good they are or why they aren’t called Ecuador staff which would make a lot more sense. Assange also has a close connection with a man called Israel Shamir who’s mainly known for being a holocaust denier, a weird thing for someone with that first name to be. I mean, that’s literally how your name came about. No? Israel? No? Ok. Sure. (Yes I know it’s an ancient Hebrew name but I’m guessing his parents called him after where he was conceived, like a more adventurous Brooklyn Beckham). It is also weird for a self-proclaimed journalist who runs an information service to be pals with someone who denies a horrific event that definitely actually happened. It’d be like Captain America announcing he’s friends with David Icke. In no way is Assange like Captain America by the way, however I reckon Israel Shamir is very like Icke. Shamir once concerned Wikileaks staffers by asking for access to material concerning ‘the Jews’ which was thankfully rejected.

Add to that, that he seemed like a shitty guest, literally smearing his feces on the walls, skateboarding in the corridors and forgetting to wash for days, sounding very like someone I used to go to uni with, and that he didn’t take care of his pet cat, I mean, yes he sounds like a total dick. Labour have been criticized for saying the government should stop him being extradited to the US and they’re right, he shouldn’t be. But Shadow Home Secretary and winner of Britain’s most patronizing voice every year since 1953 Diane Abbott did say that he should be sent to Sweden and face charges for the sexual assault if they reopen them. So in summary, Assange is an absolute bellend but regardless of him being a bellend the US shouldn’t be able to persecute him for journalism as that’s a threat to a free press and free speech which the Trump administration seems to be working hard to get towards. However, Assange should be put on trial for sexual assault in Sweden, and also for being shitty to a cat. Also, smearing poo on walls? Really? They said you could decorate your walls idiot. I’m amazed he hasn’t changed his website name to whiffy leaks. Or Wiki Reeks. Or shitty leaks. Ok you can see what I’ve done there…

And now back to Clare…

INTERVIEW WITH CLARE PART 2

Thanks to Clare for that. You can find Extinction Rebellion online at rebellion.earth or on Twitter @ExtinctionR or on all the other socials too. Their international rebellion started on the 15th but sign up and look on their site and you can find out how to get involved over the week and beyond.

As always, if you got peeps you want me to do talkings with to find out how depressing everything really is then please tell me who that be and you can do that telling who being at: @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page on partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you can send details to me by sneaking into the embassy of your choice, asking to use the loo but then setting up a home in the cubicles and leaking your interviewee suggestion’s name to me pretending you’re an international anonymous organization but you get removed by very angry Guyanan officials before you can hit send, despite being mid-poo, so I never see it. As always, it’s much easier to email.

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. Thanks again for lending your ears only to gain them back with 1000% extra interest, like Wonga but if it was not a loan but a podcast and not shit and not Wonga and actually just this show. Please do give the show a review on any of the pod apps you use from Pod Can See Everything, Pod Gilbert, Slipsh-pod, axelpod or alantic pod. I bet most of those do actually exist don’t they? And if you can afford to, please donate to the ko-fi or Patreon accounts and buy me a beer or injection of caffeine into my eyes to show your appreciation. Most importantly, go out there and tell others to tune in, not least because you can’t tune in, you have to download or stream and as they spend hours on their old wireless trying to find which frequency this weekly shouting happens on, you can chuckle loudly feeling like finally, you’ve won something over someone.

Danke schon to Acast for caring for this noisiness in its audio kindergarten, mein Bruder The Last Skeptik for die kranken klange, and to Kat Day for Tippen Sie linearen noten ein.

This will be back next week when its discovered that saying Annuziata Rees-Mogg three times into a mirror just makes your reflection look like it might feast on puppies to survive.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was brought to you by early Halloween 2019 Brexit costumes making sure you can get to your parties in October dressed as your favourite political horror. New costumes include Mark Francois crywanking while misquoting Proust, Theresa May superglued to the door of Number 10 and Boris Johnson.

Email Tiernan