Episode 85 – The Return Of Soft Brexit

Released on Tuesday, December 12th, 2017.

Episode 85 – The Return Of Soft Brexit

Episode 85 – It’s the last full PPB podcast of 2017 and Tiernan has finally managed to get an interview about politics that is positive thanks to Sarah Corbett of the Craftivist Collective (@craftivists). Sadly though, there is also some Brexit Fallout because it’s still this year. Merry Christmas!

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Further Reading

It’s the last full PPB podcast of 2017 and Tiernan has finally managed to get an interview about politics that is positive thanks to Sarah Corbett of the Craftivist Collective (@craftivists). Sadly though, there is also some Brexit Fallout because it’s still this year. Merry Christmas!

Links and sources of info from Sarah Corbett’s interview:

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:


Transcript

Episode 85

INTRO

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast a podcast that combines politics and comedy and generally wonders if the effort is worth it when politics seems to be doing that all by itself at the moment. This is episode 85, I’m Tiernan Douieb and I love the way that this week Prime Minister Theresa ‘Every day is UK Snow Day In My Heart’ May said her Brexit deal she made with the EU that did everything they wanted and nothing she wanted, was a compromise. Yes, it’s a compromise like when I wanted my old Star Wars toys in our flat and my wife didn’t so we compromised and now I don’t have my old Star Wars toys in our flat.

Yes it’s often a big negative that in the UK we have a government who fail to fulfil promises more than Prospero on a Would I Lie To You panel show team, but after months and months of promises of a Brexit so hard we’d be just one step away from donning a giant country sized Batman mask to ensure everyone knew we worked alone, it’s now nice to realise that our government can’t even go through with the unpopular promises either. It seems the UK government were visited by the ghosts of all your Christmas futures and took the idea of the season for giving to heart by fulfilling everything on the EU’s Christmas list by agreeing to protecting the rights of EU citizens, paying a so called divorce bill of between £35-39bn and no hard border in Ireland which means that we may even end up staying in the single market after all. It seems under that hard Brexit promise there was a soft Brexit waiting to flop out and while that will always disappoint a few, many will be relieved that it probably won’t be able to shaft us anywhere near as much. Though while the idea of a hard Brexit might not have been your cup of tea, it will likely still piss you off knowing that we may have pretty much exactly what we had before only it now costs more and we have less control over how it works, not unlike how I feel every time Apple release a new iPhone.

Of course, there is also problem of whether the government will keep the promise of these deals with the EU anyway, as Brexit Secretary David Davis a man who is parliament’s bag of polystyrene balls in that he’s also useless, polluting, light in substance and yet somehow very hard to get rid of, has managed to contradict everything that was announced on Friday within just a few days. Which requires an almost talented level of fuckwittery. Davis said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show that May’s deal was just a statement of intent and not legally enforceable. MATE! THEY CAN HEAR YOU, YOU KNOW! Davis is the sort of idiot who’d be in a loud bar and wait till the pause in a song to shout loudly about how someone across the bar looked like a tit, and remain completely oblivious as to why they’d then punched him in the face. The Irish government have already responded by saying as far as they were concerned the agreement that the UK government signed is binding because really what’s the point of signing an agreement to move to phase two of talks if all of phase one was nonsense? If David Davis was an Agatha Christie detective I’m certain he’d call everyone into the drawing room to tell them how he’d cleverly put many things into place to trap them all only for the suspects to point out how actually he’d just spent the last two weeks drunkenly running around in his pants shouting things out loud and that this isn’t the drawing room, it’s the garden and please leave or we’ll call the police.

Environmental Secretary and leader of the Ant Hill Mob Micheal Gove has said that if voters dislike the Brexit agreement they can change it at the next general election, which is due to be in 2022 when the transitional phase with the EU will have ended and the agreement should have been completed. So it’s like saying if you’re angry we’re putting your dog down, then you can change that once it’s dead and you can get a new one. On the other side of the benches it seems like the Labour party have finally sort of almost a bit ish agreed on their Brexit stance which appears to be to stay in the Single market and Customs union maybe. Shadow Brexit Secretary and first uninteresting default character on most playstation shoot ‘em ups Keir Starmer said that Labour would accept ongoing payments to the EU and instead of free movement, an easy movement for workers. So again, paying a lot of money to keep everything the same with a shit rebranding. We can have easy movement, a traditions union and a ‘I am a bit lonely but I’m looking for someone’ market.

In Russia, President and stunt double for Morph Vladmir Putin has said he will run for re-election, and in similar breaking surprise news, bears everywhere have announced they still have nowhere new to shit. Speaking of Russia, American President and dayglo Cartman Donald Trump is backing accused child molestor Roy Moore for the Alabama senator seat, not that any of that should surprise you considering the sex offense accusations against Trump and his constant disdain for the little people. Roy Moore is currently in the lead over Doug Jones for Tuesday’s vote. Trump has said Jones is soft on crime, even though Jones’s history as a US attorney includes him prosecuting four members of the Klu Klux Klan for the Birmingham church bombing. But Trump is probably just pissed that by putting them in the prison system, Jones stopped those men, no doubt his core supporters, voting for him. Moore is a truly loathsome man with several allegations against him of unwanted sexual advances with teenage girls in the 70’s. Though it does explain why Trump is backing Moore, I mean I bet no one else holds his tiny hands quite so tightly.

And lastly, parts of the UK was covered in a carpet of snow all weekend, causing delays at all airports and traffic nightmares. This now doubt confused racists who were probably both pleased everything was white while terrified that the snowflakes now have the power to disrupt everything.

ADMIN

Seasons Greetings pod people, or if you like salt and pepper a lot, seasonings greetings! Did you listeners in the UK enjoy the snow this past weekend? I saw a little boy being pulled along in a sled by his dad in the park near us, and the glee the boy had at all the snow was so brilliantly balanced out by his dad’s very miserable, very cold face. It’s so magical isn’t it? You know, until you have to do anything at all ever outside of your own home, at which point, it’s terrible. I had to drive to a show yesterday and carefully driving around London all I saw were cars that had slid into walls or lampposts and buses abandoned at the bottom of hills. It was like a Greek myth moment where the hero walks the path to a monster and sees all the previous heroes turned to stone or dead along the way. Anyway I had brilliant fun making lots of snow angels. That is what you call it when you skid off the road and hit someone right? Ahem. That is of course a joke, much like my comment at the top of the show about my wife not wanting Star Wars toys. She is far more tolerant than that to the extent where she is happy for me to lie about her in a joke and she even likes Star Wars, so I feel I should absolve her before she gets any hate mail.

Thank you so much for listening and thanks to everyone who’s added reviews over the last few weeks. It’s now on 93 iTunes reviews. Are there 7 of you out there who haven’t yet reviewed the show and would like to? I have asked Santa for 100 reviews for Christmas but it’s likely he only has one iTunes account so it’s easier if you lot do it. Of course if you don’t use iTunes, as someone the other day told me on Twitter that Apple are evil, though he could just have been a very serious Christian, then please do review on the podcast apps you use from Acast’s pod app to Soundhole to CastWank or other ones I’ve made up. Also thank you to Vicky J who donated to the Patreon last week which is hugely appreciated but as you may have seen, Patreon have changed the way they work meaning that instead of charging the receiver ie me for your contributions, they’d added to the cost of the donator which feels pretty shitty. I mean what encourages people to donate more than knowing they have to pay more than they intend to? It means instead of me losing 5% you now have to pay 2.9% plus 35 cents I think, and anyway that makes me feel uncomfortable that if you just give me say a $1 donation, you’re now paying $1.74, so look, I am looking into if there’s another site I can use instead, though I wonder if Patreon will have to reconsider as so many are complaining. But if you donate to the patreon.com/parpolbro it is hugely helpful to me but I can understand if you need to cancel and hope you’ll either donate to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro account instead or change over to whatever I can find in the new year.

For those of you on the Partly Political Broadcast Facebook group, I’ve now made Kat Day an admin on there. Kat runs the excellent science blog Chronicle Flask and regularly types up the linear notes for this podcast which I pop on the FB page every week for those of you that want to do further reading. Kat is now adding lots of fun & interesting stuff to the group which is good because as you know, I’m crap at remembering to do it. Please do however continue contributing to it as it’s nice when some sort of sensible discussions manage to happen on there.

This is, as I’ve mentioned before, the last proper podcast for 2017, though I will try to put a few bits out to bridge the gap before it all starts up again, probably on January 16th. I’m doing that because parliament will be closed for a lot of that, but also I need a short break, and it’ll give me time to finally try and the get the website working but also plot and plan what to do with this podcast next year in terms of guests, subjects and how to get more listeners on board. If you have any suggestions for anything you’d like to hear on this in 2018, please do get in touch at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com, or the Twitter or Facebook.

If for some odd reason you need more me in your ears over the next few weeks then I’m on the recently released Stop and Search podcast where I think I successfully reveal how little I know about drug laws and how media works. I mean at the end I got asked how I feel about drug laws and instead of saying anything sensible talked about a rave I went to in Prague about 16 years ago, then both Felicity Morse and Andrew Doyle spoke after me and gave really sensible clever answers that made me think ‘oh I wish I’d said that’. Anyway, it’s a fun listen though so check that out. Also yesterday I recorded a really fun chat with very funny man Romesh Ranganathan for his Hip Hop Saved My Life podcast where we probably didn’t talk enough about hip hop but we did make each other laugh a lot and that should be out in a few weeks. He also interviewed my brother The Last Skeptik too, who does all the music for this show, so I think his interview will come out first and will also be worth a listen.

On this week’s show, the last of 2017, I have managed to, and big thanks particularly to Dave Pickering for this, get a positive and optimistic interview! YES REALLY! With all the bleak news this year I was determined to finish 2017 with something at least vaguely cheery and so thankfully I spoke to the brilliantly inspiring Sarah Corbett from the Craftivist Collective who talked to me about her notion of gentle protest and I hope it leaves you feeling as hopeful and positive as it left me. Sadly to completely counter-act that there’s also some Brexit fallout for balance. But firstly to kick things off, here’s this:

HEADLINES –

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell aka the Marx Brothers, have backed the Divest Parliament campaign. Which no, isn’t a campaign for all ministers to wear tie dyed undergarments, but instead Divest Parliament – see what I did there? Yes it was terrible – is campaign asking MPs to demand their Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund to remove it’s investments in the fossil fuel industry. According to a report in 2016 the fund has investments up to £612m including £5.6m in oily bastards BP, £4.9m in more crude shitters Royal Dutch Shell but they also have investments mining firm Rio Tinto who have been criticised for environmental damage, but also human rights violations and corruption which is a lot of horrible stuff for a company that sounds a lot like it should do suntan lotion. Plus investments in British American Tobacco and Amazon and maybe it’s just cynical me, but doesn’t that make the lines more blurry than Damon Albarn on issues in parliament such as smoking or tax avoidance or, as the Divest Parliament are campaigning for, cutting down use of fossil fuels? Labour have pledged that 60% of all energy comes from zero-carbon or renewable sources by 2030 so it makes sense that Corbyn and McDonnell are backing this, as are 76 other Labour MPs or former MPs. In comparison the Conservatives want just 15% of all energy to be from renewables by 2020 but have only 7 MPs signed up, so the campaign are calling for minister to align their finances with their values, which I suppose the danger is, in the case of some conservatives it could mean they end up with zero finances. Check out gofossilfree.org for more info and there is a take action section on there with a template email you can send to your MP and why not add in some nice jokes such as ‘if you do this it might help clear the air politically’ or if your MP is say Harry Enfield’s worst character Philip Davies, then you could add ‘and maybe stop polluting parliament with your misogynist crap too you shitrag’ though that probably won’t persuade him much.

INTERVIEW – CRAFTIVISM

How do you like to protest? Are you a proper hardcore activist who’s found on every march leading the way, unafraid of being kettled for hours by police despite worries about where you’ll be able to go for a wee, giving up every spare minute of your weekends to make it clear you won’t take this shit sitting down? Or, like me, are you a bit rubbish, once avoiding being kettled at the 2009 G-20 protest because I had to get home in time for a Sainsbury’s home delivery, generally missing direct action because I’m out of town or it looks cold outside and really hoping that online petitions have an impact one day because that’d make being a social justice warrior a whole lot easier. Direct action can be great and the feeling of being surrounded by like minded people can be galvanising but ever since millions of people across hundreds of cities marched against the Iraq War in 2003 to the deafening sound of the then Labour government sticking its fingers in it’s ears and singing lalalalalala, I’ve been wondering if protests are the way forward to making those for whom the message is intended pay any attention at all. With politicians calling for a kinder, more gentle politics in these times of more division than a calculator test run, it feels like it’s long overdue since anyone’s found a successful method of objecting to things without violence, shouting into the void on Twitter or making badly thought through jokes on a podcast no one listens to. Ahem.

And right on cue for that call to action for action is Sarah Corbett. Sarah runs the Craftivist Collective, a group that aim to change the world through what they call Gentle Protest, which already sound nice right? I mean gentle makes so many things better, like folks, Ben or er, giants. The Craftivist Collective, like their names suggests, use arts and crafts to provide thought provoking and effective protests and before you start worrying that the only stitch you’ve successfully made was while running for the bus or shouting that sort of thing is for people who smash more avocados than systems, hold your stitching horses. Because not only have the Craftivist Collective been successful in campaigns working with organisations such as Unicef or the V&A, but Sarah has made sure gentle protest is doable by even Edward Stupidhands types like me. The podcasts since autumn have had interesting but quite bleak chats about everything from the economy to the Rohingya crisis and so I asked you all on Twitter and Facebook last week for suggestions of who to talk to for a positive last interview of 2017 and you did very well as this chat I had with Sarah made me feel cheery for the rest of the day and her ideas and attitude give such an exciting, interesting, artistic and well, just bloody lovely outlook on how to tackle social injustices. So I hope you enjoy this chat as much as I enjoyed talking to Sarah and what is more Christmassy than crafts? Well apart from drinking all day and pretending it’s just being festive. Ahem. But we didn’t discuss that thankfully. So get ready to be inspired because here is Sarah Corbett:

INTERVIEW PART 1

We’ll be back with Sarah in a minute but first…

BREXIT FALLOUT

So here we go, last Brexit Fallout of 2017 and I’m pleased to say that this should leave you feeling reassured, informed and as though perhaps next year holds some genuine hope….PAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I just couldn’t keep that up. I mean, as far as I’m concerned if Brexit was a movie you could probably remove the last 12 months as a deleted scene knowing that it wouldn’t make a single bit of difference to the narrative timeline because you’d still be at the beginning. Or you could include them but to the sound of a tuba with various quick scenes of the Brexit team repeatedly walking to walls or each other and falling over a lot like a lot of toy robot dogs in a confined space. I mean what is your favourite theory on it all? Are the government purposefully trying to do Brexit so badly it doesn’t happen or it does and they lose to Labour, letting Labour deal with such horrors that when the Conservatives return in 10 years with a new leader they sweep up and keep pulling that whole ‘last Labour government’ shit again? Or are they aiming to ruin things so that all red tape & human rights can just go so they then get richer on selling working class Brits as indentured servants to various dictators that Disgraced MP Liam the Disgrace Fox has already had lunch with? Or are they just the biggest most useless idiots this side of the Atlantic? A, B, or C? I’m going to take a gamble and go all three like the world’s worst multi-buy deal.

Last week saw the government have the sort of negotiating skills that if they were gunman taking hostages would see them handing themselves over the to the police without any deals, ransoms, or trousers and having given up all their hostages and somehow their 3 digit credit card security codes before the police had even tried to call them. I mean the week started with the government certain they would get to phase two of the Brexit talks, the bit where the 27 other EU countries meet with them individually to arrange deals which will take forever all by itself but had to be sorted by early December, and somehow the government didn’t so much get stuck at the starting blocks as locked in the changing rooms while they heard the starting gun fire outside. The Dup who are meant to be backing the government, derailed the chances of a special deal for Northern Ireland to retain certain EU trade legislation to avoid a hard border, after the DUP said they didn’t want a deal that was different to the rest of the UK. Cool guys, so you want the same as the rest of Britain yeah? So you’re cool with abortion and same sex marriage too just like us…guys? Guys? Helloooo? Hm, weird.

Then within a week somehow the government had reached a breakthrough Brexit deal with the EU, and by breakthrough they meant they’d basically done all the things the EU has asked them to do ages ago and the UK government had insisted didn’t need to happen. Overall you can’t help but wonder if they’d eaten humble pie earlier instead of spending months trying to have and scoff their cake at the same time, we’d have been at this stage an age ago. So what is this breakthrough deal? Well firstly the easy bit, the Brexit bill. The government say they will be paying between £35 and 39bn as an agreed contribution for their already signed off contract with the EU till 2020, as well as some of the pension payments for MEP and other EU staff which yes, sadly does include professional frog balls for a face Nigel Farage who said he will definitely take his EU pension payments, despite railing against all the UK money wasted on the EU and that’s because he has less personal values than the pound after Brexit.

So that’s the Brexit bill. Then there’s the rights of EU citizens in the UK to whom May published a letter on Facebook to because what’s a heart felt letter if it’s not footnoted by bigoted comments about immigrants and people telling the Prime Minister to fuck off? This letter was titled ‘I know our country would be poorer if you left and I want you to stay’ which feels a lot like saying ‘Don’t go, because we need your cash’. It does however go on to repeat what was in the Joint Progress report by the UK and EU released last week that EU citizen’s rights will be written into UK law and while the EU wanted the European Courts of Justice to protect their rights for at least 5 years and the UK government didn’t want the ECJ involved at all, they have come to a compromised negotiated outcome where the ECJ will be available for the UK courts to refer to for 8 years. Those are the sort of negotiating skills that’d leave you struggling to win a bit of bread off a duck. EU citizens that have been here 5 years will be able to get settled status which considering how unsettled the UK is right now, that seems pretty good, and anyone who has been here less than five years will be allowed to reach the five year limit so you do sort of wonder why the limit is there at all and they don’t just guarantee rights from entry. Families will also be allowed to join which is good news for many and bad news for a few people trying to avoid their shitty families, and health, benefits and all those sorts of things are all good. Which is great and it is maddening to think that it’s taken a year and a half just to reassure people already living and working in the UK that they can keep their legal rights which should be the bare minimum that happens, and it is odd that May is now pitching this as though she’s done a great thing. It’d be like if your work didn’t pay you for a month because they fucked up admin then demanded a standing ovation because they made sure you got paid eventually.

Then there is Ireland the UK and EU have agreed that there will be no hard border, regulatory alignment across the whole island and respect of the good Friday agreement in all it’s parts but that the European Parliament will only give a green light to the rest of the trade talks if all these commitments are enforced. The UK have said if they can’t make it work then they’ll keep full alignment with the single market and customs union rules. Now I don’t know what full alignment is unless you’re trying to do a really neat border on a blank page or getting your feng shui all good cos you know your bed needs to be facing west for those sweet, sweet dreams, and here’s where all the progress falls apart. Because David Davis said on the BBC that full alignment is just more of a statement of intent than anything else. Cool man. You know it’s a just an idea we had that we wrote on a beer mat and great if it comes off but if not we’ll all have a laugh, I mean, it’s only Northern Ireland & Ireland right? I’m certain Davis makes it up as he goes along, depending on what he’s been drinking for breakfast that day. On LBC radio this morning he said that he didn’t need to be very clever or know that much to be Brexit Secretary, which aside from meaning he’s finally excelling at something then, also makes you wonder what he was told the job was? Hi David, can you sit in a room and smile while some people speak funny foreign at you? You’ll be asked questions but just laugh and then say the first thing in your head and it should be fine. Davis said his job is to be calm but there is a subtle difference between being chilled and braindead. Having no Brexit impact reports doesn’t mean you’re cool and composed, it means you’re neglectful in the same way me not throwing water on a fire and letting it burn all the way through my flat doesn’t mean I’m fucking Cool Hand Luke. Davis said that he wants a Canada Plus Plus Plus deal which sounds a lot like an anti-fungal cream, but unlike Canada he wants financial services to be tariff free too, and that like Norway we could just pay to be in the EU. All of that ignores that it took 8 years to do the CETA Canada Europe deal or that Norway doesn’t have a choice about how much it pays for Single market access. He’s essentially just picked and chosen the bits he likes of different deals. Sure David, and like Narnia we could just hope over there through a cupboard too yeah? Davis also said that if there was no deal we wouldn’t have to pay the EU anything which I guess is because we wouldn’t have any money left.

Funnily enough within hours of Davis’s comments on the Marr show, Ireland responded because it turns out they heard Davis’s him say about it being a statement of intent, because it turns out somehow, they can speak English there too and have the internet and televisions, and are now saying they will hold the UK to this along with the other 27 countries which caused Davis to u-turn and say that the Irish border was ‘more than legally enforceable’ which, what the fuck does that mean? More than legally enforceable? Is he saying the army will enforce it? ISN’T THAT EXACTLY THE SORT OF SHIT THAT LEAD TO A BORDER IN THE FIRST PLACE?

While the government had said repeatedly that from 29th March 2019 the UK would be leaving the single market and the customs union we will now be staying in it during the two year transition period and again that’s exactly what everyone said they should do and the government said no because all our toys are out of the pram and now all have to chuck out is common sense repeatedly over and over again. Theresa May told parliament today that this progress with the EU is good news for remain and leave voters because it’s not crashing out without a deal or getting bogged down in negotiations. Sure but it will annoy leave voters because it’s entirely pandering to what the EU want and it will annoy Remainers because it’s spending a ton of money to give us essentially what we already had if we hadn’t voted to leave. The only good news for both sides right now would be hearing that the entire government had fallen in a well and someone else who’s was going to take over but only after they’d passed a basic IQ test. But this does all now look like we’re heading for a soft Brexit and probably one not too dissimilar to what Norway have, which would probably be the best case scenario as while it’d mean paying more to the EU than we used to, and a complete lack of say on rules and laws, we should retain a number of benefits. This would now be in line with what Labour have said they’re now united on, which is also a soft Brexit even though that may change by tomorrow depending on who’s allowed to speak to the news or misread what. Theresa May seems to be backing down on the Henry 8th power in parliament meaning that the government won’t just be able to pass EU laws into UK laws without consultation from other MPs and all in all it really feels like the confident, cocky attitude that the government had assuming they could do what they liked with this has shown that actually no you can’t and you can’t even do a bit what you liked and you should probably go into the corner and think about what you’ve done. I expect the EU withdrawal bill to be renamed yet again to the ‘Damage Limitation Bill’ any day now.

Meanwhile Brexiteers are very angry that Royal Mail has stated that they won’t be doing a commemorative set of stamps for the 29th March 2019. One cabinet minister told the Telegraph that it is a moment in history that should be noted by the postage company seemingly forgetting that they sold off Royal Mail so they now can’t tell them what to do, and secondly it’s a bit of a cheek to demand Royal Mail deliver something solid on Brexit when their own government can barely do it.

More Brexit Fallout next year, unfortunately.

And now, back to Sarah…

INTERVIEW PART 2

Big thanks to Sarah for that, she is such a brilliantly positive and fascinating person and I would highly recommend you check out her four Ted Talks, the most recent one of which is called Activism Needs Introverts and has already had over half a million views. You can find Sarah and the Craftivist Collective on Twitter @craftivists, on Facebook at Craftivist Collective and online at Craftivist-collective.com where you can also get lots of brilliant craftivist gifts which are ace if you, like me, still desperately need to get some Xmas pressies for people and you can also get Sarah’s latest book ‘How To Be A Craftivist: The Art Of Gentle Protest’ as well as the Positive Note kit which Sarah mentioned where all proceeds go to the charity Mind.

So now, apart from two guests who I tried to get on earlier this year and have hopefully re-arranged, this show will now be in need of guests for 2018, so it is a perfect time to bother me with all your suggestions for who would be good to talk to, positive chat or usual depressing ones. And you can send those to me @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast group on Facebook, or partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or perhaps write to Father Christmas asking him to deliver the pod guest you like and you’ll wake up on Christmas morning to excitedly find that…you’ve been given socks again because it turns out your family are hugely unimaginative. Email is, as always, best.

END

And that is all for this year’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast, thank you so very much for listening to what has been a year of well, mostly awful but hopefully this podcast has helped you laugh instead of cry at, well, at least some of it, and maybe be a teeny bit informed on other bits, or if nothing else, cause a temporary diversion where you’re temporarily more angry at my terrible jingles or badly recorded interviews rather than the state of humanity. If you have enjoyed the show please do donate, maybe not to Patreon unless you don’t mind that weird new charge, but definitely to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro account. Please also give the show a review and do get in contact about anything you like from politics to swapsies for unwanted Christmas presents when you’re bought yet another peregrine falcon and you’re like, I’ve got 16 now, I don’t need anymore for my bird army of doom, does anyone want to exchange it for a leaf blower or brio set? You know how it is.

Thank you to Acast who have graciously hosted this podcast since back in April, and to my brother The Last Skeptik who’s let me steal his music for a whole 85 episodes.

This will be back next year when we’ll all be saying ‘Oh wow this is bad. I mean at least last year had that video of the Irish people with the bat in their kitchen.’

If you’re a podcast subscriber, keep your ears out for some bonus noises from me over the next few weeks and have a very, very lovely Christmas and I wish you some snappy new gear!

BYEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was brought to you by David Davis’s Horoscopes. Do you wish to know nothing about your future? Ask Mystic David who will tell you something he’s just thought of in a very confident manner, before calling you 4 hours later to say the opposite. ‘Sagittarius? There is a wind of change around you today except that doesn’t mean anything will change or that there will be any wind, or this might all be for Taurus, which one is a horse and which is a bull?’ Just £35bn per outcome.

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