Further Reading

Linear liner notes

In Ireland they’ve voted for change, while in the UK we’re stuck with a Prime Minister who once again thinks a bridge that he won’t manage to build and will spend millions on will somehow solve everything. Sigh. A look at the Windrush review and a chat with retail entrepreneur and ethical capitalist Julian Richer about his Zero Hours Justice (@ZHoursJustice) campaign.

Links and sources of info from Julian’s interview:

• • Zero Hours Justice on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ZHoursJustice
• • Zero Hours Justice website – https://twitter.com/ZHoursJustice
• • The Ethical Capitalist, book – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1115429/the-ethical-capitalist–how-to-make-business-work-better-for-soc/9781847942210.html
• • The Richer Way, book – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1115428/the-richer-way/9781847942234.html
• • Richer Sounds website – https://www.richersounds.com/
• • Richer Sounds on Twitter – https://twitter.com/RicherSounds
• • Tax Watch UK website – https://www.taxwatchuk.org/
• • Tax Watch UK on Twitter – https://twitter.com/taxwatch
• • Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth, book –  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1786490161/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_LpvrEbQH6C55K   
• • The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business, book – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1780743718/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_zqvrEbC5TQNYQ
• • Called to Account: How Corporate Bad Behaviour and Government Waste Combine to Cost us Millions, book – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0349142017/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_prvrEb1ZD786X
• • Reasons to Be Cheerful podcast – https://play.acast.com/s/reasonstobecheerful
• • Reasons to be Cheerful on Twitter – https://twitter.com/CheerfulPodcast

Links from detention and deportation story:

• • Detention action on Twitter – https://twitter.com/DetentionAction
• • Detention Action website – https://detentionaction.org.uk/
• • Black Activists Against Cuts on Twitter – https://twitter.com/BARACUK
• • Black Activists Against Cuts website – http://blackactivistsrisingagainstcuts.blogspot.com/    
• • BAME Lawyers for Justice on Twitter – https://twitter.com/BameFor

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
• • Kat on Twitter – https://twitter.com/chronicleflask
• • Buy Kat a coffee (go on, spread the love) – https://ko-fi.com/katday

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that brings you all the news you need, and more, which you don’t need and don’t want. Then all that excess news goes to waste when it could’ve gone to some poor kid in some part of the world where they don’t get news and are disturbingly content. I’m Tiernan Douieb and the results of the general election in the Republic of Ireland show that the country is on a progressive streak. Same sex marriage, legalizing abortions and now, in 2020, Irish citizens have overwhelmingly voted in favour of having a three way.

Actually, the only ones who’ve really been screwed hard are the two parties who for nearly a century have passed power between them like irresponsible electricians. Centre right parties Finna Fail and Fine Gael, are currently, as more than half of the seats have been counted, in 2^nd and 3^rd place as it seems after one crashed the economy and the other pushed austerity measures through Ireland, voters have now decided the best place to make cuts is with their seat share. In 1^st place, left wing republican party, Sinn Fein, showing how times change. Once they had to be overdubbed by an actor on TV, now they have the voice of Ireland’s youth instead. Polls show Sinn Fein lead in all age groups under 65, voters not put off by opponents’ claims that the party are still affiliated with the IRA. Is it that young people don’t remember the troubles or is it that it’s largely made redundant by over 200 people in Ireland dying of homelessness in the last four years. Under Fine Gael’s leadership, if anything, more balaclavas might’ve actually saved lives. But Sinn Fein in 2020, led by Kathy Bates’s most famous role Mary Lou McDonald, have promised rent freezes, a big public house building program, that’s social housing by the way, not pubs. There’s already loads of those. And they were pro-immigration, which helped their campaign as only 1% of Irish people thought immigration was an issue. Of course you can’t have the Irish be anti-immigration, as they’re always in need of people to head to them in order to make up for all their citizens that have fucked off elsewhere.

Incumbent Taoiseach and rejected Aardman Claymation character Leo Varadkar had aimed to rally support for his party Fine Gael by his supposedly tough stance in the Brexit negotiations but absolutely no one really gave a fuck as, let’s face it, for Ireland, Brexit has just been an exciting time where they’ve got to see the Conservatives cause violent divisions to their own country for once. Both Finna Fail and Fine Gael have said they wouldn’t go into coalition with Sinn Fein, and McDonald has said her party have reached out to smaller left-wing parties such as the Greens and Labour to see if they can form a government without the two former biggest parties. Can Sinn Fein unite Ireland? Will the Republic end up like the North with a dysfunctional power sharing agreement? Or will there be another election? One thing is for sure, and that’s that the two-party system in Ireland is over, and based on my visits there, it definitely suits them to have a lot more than that, going on for days and days and days.

While Ireland’s parties look to build political bridges, in Britain Prime Minister and ‘Look! There’s some sort of pupae living in that torn sofa’ Boris Johnson is still insisting that an actual bridge should be built in the sea between Northern Ireland and Scotland because it’s no longer just disbeliefs he wants to waste money suspending. It’s already being called The Boris Bridge, which means it’ll probably bend in whichever direction it thinks is popular that day. As mentioned before many times on this podcast, Johnson is the nemeses of bridges, both metaphorical and physical. Arch nemeses if you like. Even without his history of bridge failures, it should be obvious infrastructure isn’t his thing when Johnson regularly struggles to lay the solid foundations of a clear political strategy. Downing Street are insisting that this bridge, potentially costing up to £20bn, could happen in yet another case of someone who really should’ve been told ‘no’ more as a child. This is where British political reality currently lies, where broadband for everyone or planting lots of trees was treated as delusions of grandeur but spending a shed load of money trying to plop a road on top of turbulent waters and unexploded WW2 munitions is somehow a perfectly feasible idea. The thing is, Johnson gets bridges. He’s probably been on one, has probably made several out of egg boxes for his cardboard model buses to drive over, he works with Conservative Andrew Bridgen who has one in his name but also looks like he lives under one and scares children. Sadly, according to recently sacked president of the UN climate change conference and someone who definitely says ‘its wine o’clock’ nearly every night Claire Perry O’Neill, revealed that Boris doesn’t really get climate change. Yeah but he’s spent his life going from Eton to the Bullingdon Club in Oxford to the Conservative Party and the Telegraph, how’s Johnson meant to have any idea what a non-toxic atmosphere is like?

At the COP26 launch, Johnson claimed that this is the year we will have the courage to create a cleaner and greener future for our children and grandchildren. That’s quite a bold claim from a man whose party is deporting 50 people by plane to Jamaica separating them from their families in the UK. That’s unnecessary pollution and the destruction of families in one, the exact opposite of helping kids. You may as well say you’re investing in their future by burning all their schoolbooks in a coal fire or firing all the fruit and veg into space. A leaked draft of the Windrush report, said that the government should consider ending the deportation of foreign-born offenders who came to the UK as children. It’s a bizarre thing to do isn’t it? I mean we’re basically saying to other countries ‘well it was our system that failed them, so you deal with it.’ Most of those on the flight this week have only been convicted for minor offences and have no friends or relatives in Jamaica, so this is less a well thought through criminal punishment plan and more a lazy idea someone got after watching one of the many celebrity shows where people get booted off a plane to try and survive, forgetting that it’s only entertaining because they’ve consented to that happening and all of those celebrities deserve it. Shittest superhero ever Suella Braverman accused Labour of shrill virtue signaling and faux outrage by objecting to the deportations, and MP and neck Kevin Foster said they’d lost the plot. But if these deportations are necessary because some of those that will be onboard had committed such crimes as drugs offences, then why hasn’t Chancellor of the Duchy and meat bagpipe Michael Gove been catapulted to Aberdeen yet?

The one this week is the second immigration removal charter flight to the Caribbean since the Windrush Scandal was exposed in 2018. The report is titled Lessons Learned but sadly it seems the only one that was, was if the government release some bullshit about bridges then no one will notice them do it this time around. Meanwhile Shamima Begum who was groomed aged 15 to leave the UK and join ISIS, has lost her appeal against the government’s decision to strip her of her UK citizenship, probably on account of her views not fitting in with their fundamentalist hostile regime which involves forcing the country to go along with their extreme beliefs. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission said that Ms Begum could get citizenship from Bangladesh, as she is of there by descent. Yes, that’s how the UK now gets away with the international crime of making someone stateless, by saying that if your grandparents are from somewhere, so are you. On the plus side this means all we have to do now is find Boris Johnson guilty of some minor criminal activity and finally the US can have him back.

The culture secretary, Baroness and person who meerkats would tell to chill the fuck out Nicky Morgan has launched a consultation on whether non-payment of the TV licence should stay a criminal offence, as otherwise they’d need a lot more planes ready and it’s getting costly. She told the BBC that they need to change with the times if they want to stay relevant, just like she has done by throwing away all of her principles in order to get a peerage. Apparently, the enforcement of the licence fee punishes the most vulnerable said Morgan and that’s not fair of the BBC to do that, as it’s the government’s job. The licence fee is going up by £3, meaning it’ll cost everyone 43p a day to have the entire range of BBC services from Cbeebies which I’d gladly pay my entire wage too because it means I can quietly cry into my coffee at 5.30am while my daughter watches it, all the way to the radio services including Radio 3 for when you just need to hear the distant sounds of something throwing pebbles at a shed as someone else plays a recorder the wrong way round, all the way to BBC News which fulfills all your needs for a channel that keeps confusing black female MPs with each other because they aren’t even trying. I joke, but based on the US system, the alternative would be paying even more, for even less of that, which would be even less impartial and throw in an ad break every time someone took a breath,

for some sort of reconstituted animal part squished into different satanic symbol and with a cheesy topping made entirely with E-numbers. Luckily Morgan has announced a Simple Payment Plan to help those struggling to pay the licence fee, something that happens when your universal credit isn’t paid on time, your zero hours job gives you no work or the government forcing the BBC to implement the licence fee themselves now meaning they can’t afford to scrap it for over 75’s anymore. I do often wonder just how much money would be saved if the Conservatives opted for preventative rather than reactive strategies and just stopped doing anything at all.

Over in Oppositionville the Labour leadership race has got, well, like all other politics, as the campaign of favourite to win and what if Beavis and Butthead had a kid Sir Keir Starmer, was accused of data scraping, which for someone who looks like he escaped from a 90s virtual reality game, sounds painful. These allegations only appeared after Starmer’s team accused background extra from Bing Rebecca Long Bailey’s team of a data protection breach. The information commissioner is looking into all these allegations and the party have written to Starmer asking that he has obligations under the law which sounds like a slam considering he was a defense lawyer and makes it seem like the party, who are meant to be neutral, are backing Long Bailey. Maybe it’s a smart plan, because she’s said she will back all strikes, no questions asked, so under her leadership they could plan one for every week in the summer and avoid doing any work while getting a tan and Rebecca would have to approve.

Shadow Culture Secretary and the only person who went from roles in Eastenders and Casualty to a career as an MP which is even more depressing and full of things real people would definitely never say, Tracy Brabin, she received a lot of sexist criticism for wearing an off the shoulder dress in the Commons with many saying she was dressed inappropriately because they live in Victorian Britain. It’s ridiculous to be upset by a female MP showing her shoulder, when so many of the male ones in the Commons wear things that allow them to speak out of their arse.

In the US, President and face swap between a Pekingese dog and some overheated silicone sealant Donald Trump avoided impeachment by a Senate vote of 52 to 48, because one day we’ll find out that that code is an ancient demonic curse symbol or the coding that causes a glitch in the Matrix. All the Democrats voted to impeach Trump, which is unsurprising, but so did Republican and generic politician from a cartoon Mitt Romney. Romney is most well known for being pro-life except when it comes to saving the planet, being anti-welfare, anti-same sex marriage, once leaving his dog on the roof of his car for a 12-hour drive and talking about having binders full of women, which as a Mormon is probably what he needs to have to ascend or something. But now he’s being hailed by the Democrats for having some conviction, while the President said Romney used religion as a crutch but that is what happens when the US healthcare system charges so much for those things.

During his state of union address, Trump praised himself for the great American comeback, though no one is sure if he meant in terms of returning to its glory, or his taking of the country from behind, blowing his load all over it and leaving. He claimed lots of things about health care and the economy that just aren’t in the slightest bit true, but all of that was overshadowed by speaker of the house and Judge Judy but real Nancy Pelosi who tore up her copy of the speech while standing behind the President, saying after that it was a manifesto of mistruths and I guess that is one very effective way to rip apart his policies. Trump said what she did was illegal as it was an official document but unsurprisingly, it wasn’t. Still I think it might be worth us all agreeing with him, as it might stop him pushing through a policy of book burning if he wins a second term.

And the Democratic Iowa caucaus, which is like a couscous but much less palatable and takes even longer to digest, finally after 3 days declared what if there was a vampire who was bitten as a child but is also actually 700 years old at the same time Pete Buttigieg as the winner and owl Bernie Sanders as second place. Over 100 precincts reported incorrect results which is why it took so long to get them, meaning many think that just because Buttigieg gave $42k to the app that the voting was done through, that it was some sort of conspiracy in his favour. There are many doubts that that’s true and several are calling for a recount, but to be fair, a Democrat presidential candidate who can use computer programs to rig a vote so things work in their favour does feel like they might play Trump at their own game. Now which candidate is going to step up their game and ask Putin for a hand in the next round.

Lastly, SNP MSP, Scottish finance secretary and man who has the sort of suspicious kind of shiny complexion like he’s spent hours licking his own face Derek Mackay , resigned just hours before the Scottish budget was to be announced, after it was revealed he’d sent a 16 year old boy 270 messages via Facebook and Instagram. No one quite realized that was what he meant when previously Mackay had been very vocal about wanting to get 16-year-olds involved in politics. Bodyguard of former Prime Minister and flesh light David Cameron, got in trouble after leaving a gun in an airplane toilet which now means he’s the second most careless fuckwit in his travelling party.

And Prince Andrew has asked to defer his promotion to admiral on his 60^th birthday later this month, but the date will still be marked by the ringing of the bells at Westminster Abbey. Probably like some sort of alarm system to warn any young women to stay in doors for their own safety. The Prince has personally delivered a message to China on behalf of the Queen and will next be asked to personally deliver a message to the war zone in Yemen and then wherever it is that hungry tigers might be. It is risky sending Prince Andrew to an area where the virus is, as parasites tend to just help spread diseases.

ADMIN

What’s new ParPolBro crew? How exciting was it that Parasite won loads of Oscars? I was all like ‘I don’t know why anyone gives a shit about the Oscars anymore’ but then the best film, and it is so damn good, won lots and I’m all happy. I’m excited to see how Hollywood learn from a South Korean film winning by no doubt doing a completely all white US remake where Scarlet Johansson plays at least three of the roles. Did you survive Storm Ciara? I’m not saying it was windy where I am, but there was a point where I looked outside and a man was talking his dog for a fly. I was allowed to have the sleep in on Sunday, while my wife got up with the little one but I couldn’t sleep more because the wind & our shitty flat made it sound like a million souls were screaming outside. I imagine it was what was like to be in the head of Dominic Cummings. Horrible. But aside from wind screaming and several American Beauty remakes happening outside, the plastic bag bit not Kevin Spacey lifting weights as that’d be really grim, we luckily didn’t suffer. I hope you didn’t have any flooding or that sort of horror where you are. It’s so terrible that flood defences were cut by the government a few years back and I sort of think the least they could do is send out Boris to help. Not that half mopping shit he did, but more as a human sand-bag or something.

Welcome back to the podcast anyway, and hello to all you new lot that have joined after last week’s episode with Paul De Gregorio. I’m very pleased you’re here to listen to me talking about windy soul screamings. And of course if you do enjoy the show, please do think about giving it a review on the podcast apps, telling other people or just giving me all of your life savings at the ko-fi.com/parpolbro or patreon.com/parpolbro accounts. I mean what else are you going to use them for? You may as well prop up my meager existence and who needs a pension when you’ve got that feeling of good will to feed you? Yum yum good will. No? Ok, well how about buying me a coffee then? Thanks.

Not much to tell this week but thanks if you came along to our kids’ politics show at the Pegasus theatre in Oxford last Saturday. It was a lot of fun even if the main solutions to a problem of sharing sweets between too many people was to fight for them. We all think Oxford’s full of brain boxes but no, they just want to hit each other for sweets. Explains a lot. The next two shows of ‘How Does This Politics Thing Work Then?’ are at the Greenwich Theatre on Tuesday Feb 18^th at 2pm and the West End Centre in Aldershot on Friday 21^st Feb at 2.30pm. It is suitable for all ages 7+ and I know that for sure as a four year old at our show on Saturday got scared when I yelled a lot. Sorry 4 year old BUT YOU WERE WARNED.

On this week’s show I am speaking to ethical capitalist and director of the Richer Sounds hi-fi retailer Julian Richer all about his Zero Hours Justice campaign. Plus a wee look with a new jingle all about just how the government have learned nothing from the Windrush scandal of two years ago. Yes, that prime comedy subject. Thanks politics. Maybe next time instead of removing people from their families, you could, I dunno, enact some policies on custard pie throwing or how to correctly pronounce the word lemon and we’d all be ok. Sigh.

INTERVIEW WITH JULIAN RICHER

I remember in the late 80’s my younger brother had a number of small plastic solider and war toys called Zero Hour. My parents weren’t happy that he wanted these as they were and still are very anti-war and the idea that my brother was playing with 1/72 scale army dudes worried them that it glorifies violence even though at best, they might’ve just annoyed our cat a bit. Years later I’ve realized just how damaging the message those toys were giving was, as the name Zero Hour probably meant they were on unsecured, irregular contracts, and despite risking death against the B.A.D brigade – yes that’s what their enemies were called, it was the 80s – it’s clear their lives weren’t actually valued by their employers. Zero hours contracts are, much like most war, completely unnecessary and while they are said to provide more flexibility for workers, I’m not sure that what it’s considered when you suddenly find yourself without work, or payment. I mean, that sort of flexibility might be ok if you could also get bill payment flexibility too, childcare flexibility or benefit flexibility. But as all those things remain pretty rigid, the only ways zero hours jobs make you any more flexible is by contorting you into an ever-pressing situation. Apparently, it means a causal relationship between the employee and their employer. Sure, if you’ve been in a causal relationship, you’ll know what it actually means one of you is mostly bored and lonely, and the other screws you whenever they want. While lots of other countries have banned zero hours contracts, sadly in the UK they’re still affecting a lot of people and they were are rather major omission from the big workplace reforms the government is making as part of the Good Work Plan, which sounds like a the sort of policy name a child would come up if you asked them to come up with a way to make work better but when you checked the details just had ‘more trips to the zoo’ and nothing else. The Good Work Plan comes into effect in April of this year and it’s great news if you’re an agency worker or are taking an employee to court for gross oversight. But it appears the biggest gross oversight is the plan’s failure to do anything for zero hours workers, and once again, for the foreseeable future, the only guarantee those people will have is a lack of worker’s rights. Maybe that’s why all those little plastic soldiers were so angry and violent?

This week I got to speak to Julian Richer. You might know Julian as the very successful owner of hi-fi and electronics chain Richer Sounds. But what you may not know if that as well as selling music equipment, Julian is also a very sound bloke indeed, and has worked hard to treat his employees properly and has even handed over control of his firm into employee ownership. With the backing of the TUC, Julian has set up the Zero Hours Justice campaign that aims to have zero hours contracts banned in the UK. I asked Julian all about why a lack of job security is so harmful, how you go about banning them when no one in charge seems all that keen to and what exactly an ethical capitalist, as he classes himself, is. He very kindly explained all. Here’s Julian:

INTERVIEW WITH JULIAN PART 1

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

WHO’S TO BLAME?

The Windrush scandal was exposed two years, something that at the time then Home Secretary and definitely smokes a cigarette then eats it while it’s still alight Amber Rudd said was due to an admin error, which I mean, it wasn’t. I’ve made admin errors and say, double booked a gig. I’ve never made an admin error so bad that a lot of people were wrongly detained and deported. If you’re that shit at it, just say yes to help from that little paperclip guy. The Home Office admitted that 164 people that it knew off were affected and it is known that at least 11 died while homeless in the foreign countries they were sent to. This was all part of the government’s hostile environment policy, brought in in 2012 by human stalactite Theresa May who was home secretary at the time. The point was to, well, make things hostile for illegal immigrants in the UK, because rather than make it easier to reapply for a visa its much better that we just chase you with burning pitchforks and say its your fault that a global crash happening. Anyway, that all involved raising fees to apply for leave to remain, something that sounds like a Brexit teaser trailer but wasn’t, and landlords and NHS staff having to carry out ID checks and those racist vans. But from as early as 2013, the government were told that many from the Windrush generation were being treated as illegal immigrants. The Windrush generation were people who came over to the UK from the Caribbean as part of a drive to increase the British workforce before 1973. Lots were placed in detention centres, many were told they had to leave the UK immediately and all of this meant those affected couldn’t get jobs or healthcare as a result. Basically, thanks for working so hard for us for 50 years but go away now as we need to appear even more racist for the voters. Many of them didn’t have documentation as they came over in the 50s when paper just wasn’t a thing and it was too hard to keep records on slate or something. Sorry, I mean they had landing cards, but the Labour government in 2009 decided to have these destroyed as a way to clean up paper records, and then the coalition government in 2010 did it. Lots of people warned both governments that this might lead to later issues but neither were known for actually listening to people were they? This meant when those accused of illegal immigration were being asked for proof of their years in the UK, they just didn’t have it.

It seemed very little care was being taken that what the Home Office was doing was the right thing and it mainly seemed like they were working to deportation targets, something Amber Rudd denied the Home office did, till The Guardian leaked that they had targets of 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18, then she said, oh actually they did do that and resigned. Then ears on a balloon for a head Sajid Javid was made Home Secretary, made up some tosh about how, wow, it could’ve been his parents that were deported, and said he’d make right by the Windrush generation and it took over a month just to contact 3 of the people that had been wronged. By June 2018 just under 7000 potential Windrush cases were identified and 1600 were given documentation and commercial flights deporting people to the Caribbean were paused like you do in a game that you’re temporarily distracted from and hope to get back to as soon as everyone stops annoying you. But it was discovered at the beginning of this February last year that the government had already started rescheduling deportation flights to Jamaica claiming everyone on them was convicted of very serious crimes such as rape or murder, but one of them was found to be registered blind and epileptic and having served a 4 month sentence for assault. So not only had that person served their sentence, but they were also then being sent to a country they had no support in. Though fair play to the Home Office, deporting someone who is black, has a conviction and a disability is basically a how to kill three support cases jackpot for them. If he’d had a small business or tuition fees as well, they’d probably have held a party as they waved him goodbye. Then at the end of February flights were stopped again after the Jamaica High Commissioner said there were to be no more until the home office published its investigation into what happened.

NOT EXACTLY THE SAME THING

So, skip to today and not enough has been done to apologise or compensate the victims of the Windrush scandal and their families, but the Windrush lessons learned review was due to be released at the end of March, overseen by the HM inspector of constabulary Wendy Williams. Its currently meant to be undergoing Maxwellisation which is when it gets thrown off a yacht and no one mentions it again and hopes it goes away. Sorry, I mean where those criticised in it, get to respond before its published. But deportations started again this month, with again the Home Office justifying it by saying everyone on board had done terrible criminal things but one case is a young man who served seven-of-a-15 month sentence five years ago for a single drug related offence. All his family are in the UK, he’s only been to Jamaica once before. Labour MP and Squirtle but big and sad David Lammy leaked some pages of the report as it recommends that no one who came to the UK as a child should be deported. Lammy says he knows of at least 5 who are currently detained who came to the UK as children, one who was born in the UK to a Windrush mum and six that have indefinite leave to stay. The Home Office isn’t saying exactly who will be on the flight charted to go this week because they have made details as secretive and un-transparent as possible. Campaigners have managed to save some people as the detention centres many were being held in, Colnbrooke and Harmondsworth but a nearby O2 phone mast has been down for a week meaning no one in there has had adequate access to legal advice. Typical O2. Detention Action campaigners took this to the high court and lost but the court of appeal has agreed that those without access to legal advice must be removed from the flight. What happens next? Well the Conservatives are insisting that those complaining that they’re just deporting whoever they like have lost the plot and are doing shrill virtue signalling. But you can’t just send people to a country they don’t know, have no connections too and mostly, shouldn’t have to take responsibility for people who’ve been brought up in, or in the case of the Windrush generation were invited to, live in the UK because our government has decided they don’t want to anymore. How can you guarantee your right to live here, if having a right to live here isn’t actually enough? Why punish people who’ve already been through the prison system and then get deported after starting work again and family life? Is this our post Brexit trading system plan? Other countries send us food and we send them bewildered, upset, unfairly detained people to die on their streets? I’m not sure it’ll be that popular, especially with the US. So who’s to blame? Well it’s obviously years and years of home office cruelty and neglect, starting with Theresa May, then Amber Rudd, then Sajid Javid and now ol’ glass shards Priti Patel, as well as their respective PM’s and parties who’ve advocated it all and the people that happily voted for that. Although maybe I’ve got this all wrong and actually its entirely Boris Johnson’s fault as actually, he cares for all those people so much, he just wants to treat them like they’re his own children.

Do follow the Detention Action who you can find at detentionaction.org.uk or @detentionaction on Twitter, and Black Activists Against Rising Cuts who have several petitions against the deportations and planned protests. You can find them on Twitter @baracuk.

And now back to Julian…

INTERVIEW WITH JULIAN PART 2

Many thanks to Julian for being on the podcast. You can find the Zero Hours justice website at zerohoursjustice.org with the contact page on there featuring a survey they’re asking anyone on zero hours to fill in, as well as a form to contact them if you want to anonymously let them know about work injustices. Julian’s book The Ethical Capitalist, which I’m about halfway through and really enjoying at the mo, is available at all virtuous, good, morally ambiguous and downright dastardly bookshops, as is his first book The Richer Way which he mentioned in our interview too. You can also find taxwatch which Julian helped set up, at taxwatchuk.org. And he did jokingly remind me off record that should you need a hi-fi or home cinema to head to Richer Sounds, but seriously, do support ethical businesses like his as its important to show that treating workers fairly & properly can equal success. I haven’t had a hi-fi in years and miss it. Instead we have these tiny Bluetooth speakers that my daughter has thrown across the room so many times most music we now listen to sounds as if its underwater. There’s no way she couldn’t lifted a massive subwoofer like that. I really should’ve thought it through. All the links for all those things will be in the pod blurb and on the partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk website too.

Who else shall I interview on this podcast? Is there a campaign you know of, a burning issue that needs addressing and no I don’t mean climate change but I do also mean climate change, some you think would be valuable to hear from? Let me know. You can do that via @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page on the website or PartlyPoliticalBroadcast@gmail.com. Or why not ask Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg to contribute money towards an app that says what the most popular suggestion for a guest might be and then it’ll just keep saying Pete Buttigieg and I won’t book him as among many other reasons, the stress of pronouncing his surname is just too much. So as always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast. According to the pod stats, very few of you make it to this bit of the podcast so I might start offering some sort of industry secrets for those of you that do. First up, for you audio completists, did you know that if you can do this with your fingers, yeah, this, then that means you’re part dinosaur? Bet you’re glad you stayed now right. Team? Hello? Team? Anyway whether you’re listening or not, thank you for er, listening unless you’re not. Hmm. This is complicated. Please do recommend this show to other people who like podcasts or maybe don’t but might or maybe might not but there’s an exception to every rule right? Give the show a review on your pod app of choice and throw me a couple of quid for a coffee at the ko-fi or patreon sites if you can. If you can’t, why not think of me next time you see someone else having a coffee? They do say it’s the thought that counts right?

Thanks to Acast for show hosting, my brother The Last Skeptik for the musics, Kat Day for the linear liner note typing up and Mushybees for all the artwork.

This will be back next week when Boris Johnson announces a new infrastructure project every time someone wants to question whats happening with any of his election promises, resulting in the UK spending its entire supply of money building a tram from Inverness to the Faroe Islands and giant monkey bars from Middlesbrough all the way to Oslo.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s podcast was brought to you by Home Office Flights. Want a cheap holiday? Can’t afford to go? Why not visit us at the home office and if you’re not completely white and at some point didn’t return a library book then we’ll burn your passport on the spot and give you an all-expenses paid trip to the commonwealth country we’re going hazard a bad guess that your ancient ancestors were from. No upfront costs apart from legal fees. Home Office Flights, for when you want to get away from it all, and we want you to too.

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