Further Reading

Linear liner notes 

The elections got done, the incumbents stayed incumbing but more, Labour’s vision got COVID blocked or something, the news worked out who the Green party are and hugs are back but not face to face. So just another week in British politics then. Some election analysis from a jazz voiced Tiernan. Plus a chat with writer James Montague (@JamesPiotr), author of The Billionaires Club and 1312: Among The Ultras, all about the politics of football.

Key links and sources of info from James’s interview:

• • James Montague on Twitter – https://twitter.com/JamesPiotr 
• • 1312: Among the Ultras, by James Montague – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1116306/1312–among-the-ultras/9781785039188.html 
• • The Billionaires Club: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-rich Owners, by James Montague – https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/James-Montague/The-Billionaires-Club–The-Unstoppable-Rise-of-Footballs-/21825233
• • Thirty-One Nil, by James Montague – https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/thirty-one-nil-9781408158845/ 
• • When Friday Comes, by James Montague – https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/James-Montague/When-Friday-Comes–Football-War-and-Revolution-in-the-Middle-East/14309511 
• • Delayed Gratification Magazine website – https://www.slow-journalism.com/
• • Delayed Gratification Magazine on Twitter – https://twitter.com/dgquarterly 
• • David Conn on Twitter – https://twitter.com/david_conn 
• • Tariq Panja on Twitter – https://twitter.com/tariqpanja 

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• • Get 10% off at British Boxers with the code in the episode – https://british-boxers.com/ 
• • 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

Ep231

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that doesn’t just tell you what the election results mean, but also why the election results mean and it’s because if you’re the sort of person who listens this show, they’re always so mean, and we should probably all live in Finland. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as the Queen’s Speech is set to include a need for voters to have photo ID for elections, it’s easy for her to say, as all she’ll have to do is show a stamp or a coin.

I dispute the idea that her majesty’s official opposition the Labour Party have lost touch with ordinary working people, as after the past year, what could represent us more than an entire party that screams anxiety and personality disorders, scrabbling aimlessly for some clue as to what to do next? According to Labour leader and Philips OneBlade for Face Trimming, Edging and Shaving QP2520 Keir Starmer the most sensible way you can react to election losses is by saying you’ll take full responsibility before sacking several members of your shadow cabinet instead. I suppose he is just trying to appeal to Conservative voters and what do they love more than someone who says they’ll be accountable before dumping the blame on everyone beneath them. A shadow cabinet reshuffle that was more of a confused violent shaking followed a stream of half-hearted platitudes and sentences that have words in them but little else. ‘COVID restricted the party from setting out their vision’. Did it? How? Have they not heard of zoom like the rest of us had? Did it have an automatic turn visions off setting? I didn’t realise COVID affected vision, I thought it was all in the lungs. Unless Labour’s vision was to lick everyone’s faces or only deliver all policies by whispering them directly into people’s ears this just feels like they haven’t really tried. ‘Oh, we definitely have a vision, but you don’t know it, it goes to another school.’ Then it was all the fault of the previous party leader and human rollie Jeremy Corbyn, who has selfishly stayed as ex-leader for over a year now and just won’t stop. It’s very hard to know what Labour’s policies this past year have been, apart from occasional calls to close zoos or not vote on things to show that they don’t support them. Or do. Or well, no one’s sure. But the one slogan they have had is ‘under new management’ so if they haven’t even managed to convey that they’ve really failed. Oh wait, maybe they forgot to change their name on zoom so it still keeps coming up as Jezza? Oh, now I get it. MP for Houghton and Sunderland South and Ursa from Superman 2 Bridget Phillipson insisted that things were different this time because she wasn’t being chased off doorsteps like the last election. Pretty sure that’s to do with social distancing Bridget.

Another great line, and by great, I mean more hollow than a tome of Nadine Dorries’ wise thoughts, was ‘we have changed but we need to go further.’ Brilliant. So, you’ve changed, which lost you votes, and the best thing now is to change more. Again, maybe this is just a drive for Conservative voters who are big fans of seeing failed ideas get pushed forward regardless of the blatant damage they cause. The difference is, the Conservatives always pretend they’ve done well, even when they haven’t, a tactic absolutely unheard of in Labour. Instead, much like the weird insistence that actually a global financial crash was entirely their fault and no one else’s despite it also being reported that their successive leaders have been useless or unable to even eat a sandwich, their instinct is to say things were worse than they are. Labour did of course lose Hartlepool to the Conservatives, for a myriad of reasons including not so much parachuting but catapulting in a candidate that was less suited to the area and its needs than getting a camel to manage a branch of Iceland. Voters apparently voted for change, but I suppose it’s entirely up to an area whether that’s for the worst or not.

But actually, looking at the rest of the results in England, the majority of the mayoral elections went in Labour’s way with what if Bert from Sesame Street wore glasses Andy Burnham being re-elected with a larger share of the vote than last time showing that maybe, just maybe standing up the government is popular, rather than backing them most days and occasionally thinking that looking at wallpaper might bring them down. Duplo Figure Sadiq Khan was re-elected as London mayor, even though Conservative Candidate and stunt double for the Stargate TV series Shaun Bailey got more votes than expected despite not even understanding what areas to campaign in, what being a mayor means or where he is at any given time. It was only really the West Midlands mayoral election where Conservative and Bill Gates’s skeleton Andy Street was re-elected but that is what happens when the candidate you run against them is sad pea Liam Byrne who’s most well-known for leaving the note ‘there is no money’ at the treasury for the incoming Conservative government in 2010. Unfortunately for Liam, there is also no votes.

Many Labour councils such as Preston that have been adopting community wealth-building schemes and Rochdale that has been regenerating the town with cooperative heritage schemes, they kept all their seats, while councils in areas like Kent, Sussex and Cambridgeshire that have been traditionally more-blue than a Monday in January during lockdown, have now gone very red like they were almost embarrassed about their past voting. Welsh Labour will now remain in power in the Senedd for another 5 years, winning exactly half of all seats, holding off the Conservatives in many areas and reclaiming Rhondda from Plaid Cymru too. Leader and cartoon tortoise Mark Drakeford said he promises to be radical and ambitious, which I think means he’s going to take up surfing. Yet despite all this, various Labour politicians have been overexcited to get back on the news in order to say just how shit their party are, and then name all the wrong reasons. Labour Lord and Harmless Nosferatu Andrew Adonis has said Starmer needs to resign as leader, which could seem fair considering this time Labour have lost 8 councils and 326 council seats, as well as a by-election, and when Labour under Corbyn in 2016 lost just 18 councillors there was a leadership contest to oust him. So in comparison, Starmer should probably not just resign but personally apologise to everyone and then walk naked down the high road as someone rings a bell and shouts shame. But then you hear Adonis’s point of view is only because he thinks withered Eddie The Head Tony Blair should return which would be like trying to appeal to people who say a meal is too salty for them by making them eat it in the sea. Former frontbencher MP and duck that has walked into a telegraph pole Khalid Mahmood warned that Labour has been taken over by woke social media warriors from London, which isn’t true or they’d have actually been able to get a message out as to what their vision was. Aside from the stupid notion that London, with the highest rate of child poverty in England, is actually paved with gold and everyone in it, including myself spends everyday snorting avocados while paying our rent three times over just for fun, it’s also a bizarre attack to say that a solution to Labour’s issue of not getting enough votes is stop appealing to some of the people who do vote for them. Great idea. Why don’t they just keep insulting every possible area of society until they can finally focus all their efforts on the pet vote or ghosts? Which actually I suppose is what Tony Blair would be very good at to be fair.

So of course, that’s the only opinion Starmer is listening to and just keeps repeating that Labour has lost the trust of the working people, which isn’t surprising as his party is mostly broken. ‘Jobs and work’ is the party’s new focus, hopefully firstly for all their candidates that have now lost their seats and are in need of some due to being part of a party whose leadership thinks they should get all their policies from a kids ‘first words book’. What’s the next strategy Keir? Bus and Train, then cat and dog followed by hat and shoes? You can’t just say words and hope people understand what your stance on them is. The cabinet reshuffle is equally as confusing. After losing a by-election & council seats in the North East, Starmer’s initial reaction was to sack northern working class MP and Bob’s Burgers extra Angela Rayner as national campaign co-ordinator, until everyone said how stupid that was and she was moved to be Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy and Shadow Secretary for the State of the Future of Work, the meaning of which we’re yet to entirely find out but while its an area that needs focusing on, chances are high she’ll just have to shout ‘jobs and work’ at passers-by till some magically appear. Matchstick Annaliese Dodds who actually knew about economics, has been replaced as Shadow Chancellor by that parent you’d actively pick your kid up late from school to avoid seeing Rachel Reeves who in 2013 boasted that Labour would cut benefits even more than the Conservatives. So, I guess this is the battle plan now. Take on the government by also putting people in roles they are completely unsuitable for and out mean them on every level. No wonder they’ve chosen slapped baby Wes Streeting to be minister for child poverty, so I guess they’ll be pledging to increase that in the next manifesto then. But will any of that make a difference anyway? A C4 poll said the main reason people didn’t vote for Labour this time is Keir Starmer and his lack of policies, so I suppose he’s embraced true centrism by not standing for anything and being disliked by left and right wing voters equally. Is it possible to send a whole party to therapy?

In Scotland the SNP won a fourth consecutive win with 64 MSP seats, just one short of a majority in Holyrood, but with the Scottish Greens winning 8, that’s still more votes for independence supporting parties than against. First minister and star of the Lego Movie 1 & 2 Nicola Sturgeon told the Prime Minister and hassled wicker basket Boris Johnson that another referendum is a matter of when, not if, which is still not a definitive enough term for Johnson who changed dates for Brexit several times so could easily say ‘the future’ then insist he kept his promise by not allowing one till 2055. Johnson invited Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford to Downing Street, as well as whoever is going to be First Minister in Northern Ireland, for a union summit and is calling them Team UK, like they’re on the Apprentice and everyone wants to dob in the one in charge as he’s a selfish, stupid fuckwit that cause everything to fail.  The Prime Minister says the UK is best served when they work together, which must be why we’ve had one star on Tripadvisor quality since he ignored them all over Brexit concerns. During the last day of election campaigning, Sturgeon was confronted by Britain First deputy leader and why inbreeding is bad Jayda Fransen, and the First Minister told her, bluntly that she is a racist, a fascist and the southside of Glasgow would reject her. Which they did, with Fransen getting only 46 votes. Still considering Britain First’s whole racist schtick is ‘take our country back’ and Fransen was born in Germany, you think she’d be super pleased Glaswegians voted for her to fuck right off. The Green Party of England and Wales gained 80 council seats and are now the joint largest party in Bristol, which is nice as it had always felt hypocritical in past elections that they wasted so much energy without getting anywhere. Disillusionment in Labour is one reason voters went Green, but also climate change which is damaging the planet but for the Greens we can see also directly causes rising seat levels.

Just why do the Conservatives keep winning elections? Ask all the same political journalists who’ve spend the past 10 years refusing to criticise them or adding context to show that yes, it is them being in government for a decade that has ruined everything. Well in part it’s because of the response to COVID, which has only recently been ok but with the past year being largely the same day over and over again it’s easy to forget that 150,000 people died, and the government gave all their contracts to friends when hey you can go to the pub now. All the incumbents won, Labour in Wales, SNP in Scotland and it turns out that guiding your country through a crisis, or in the Conservatives’ case driving it blindly to Barnard Castle, does make people a tad wary of yet more change. But in the Conservatives’ case, it’s also to do with a voting system that works in their favour. In Harlow, they won 60% of the vote but 92% of the seats, as though usurping democracy was on a 3-4-2 offer in the supermarket. And as the mayoral elections didn’t work in their favour, they are instead looking to change mayoral elections from being a supplementary vote system to first past the post, because why respect the will of the people when that’s so 2016 right now.

The speech marks the new parliamentary year, and bespectacled sea cucumber Michael Gove will hand her Maj a bit of paper that says lots of things the government say they’ll do and in red tells her not to read out the small print. Apart from voter ID, it’ll include a woman on a gold throne telling you that you can’t protest anymore, an Environment Bill that will be forgotten as soon as the conference is over and a bill on reforming the asylum system, which the UN have already said are so damaging they risk Britain’s Global credibility. Which is news to me as I didn’t think we had any left. Not a single European country has supported the plans of Home Secretary and woman with a personality based on what it’s like to stub your toe Priti Patel to deport so called illegal migrants to safe countries, unaware that of course the UK would be a safe country too if it wasn’t for the maniacal dangerous fuckhead in the Home Office. Patel’s has also announced fast track immigration visas for winners of Oscars and Golden Globes which seems like a massively shallow decision until you realise they’d fit right in with Tory ideaology as they’ll bring their own statues.

The Queen’s Speech will also include the Animal Sentience Bill, which will give creatures with backbones the right to have their feelings recognised in law, so Matt Hancock must be gutted he’s missed out again. What it won’t include are the details of the Prime Minister’s holiday to Mustique in 2019, paid for by Tory donors, which is now being investigated by the Commons standards commissioner. They say its because Johnson didn’t correctly declare the trip, but I’m also hoping it’s because they want to find out who was willing to make Johnson fuck off for two weeks and see if they’ll do it again this time but for longer. I’m sure there’ll be nothing suspicious because as we know the government say they don’t do that sort of thing so that means they don’t. And just to make sure this week, Nigel Boardman who is indeed, a man on a board for the department of business and legit has one of the scariest faces I’ve ever seen, was given a job by his friend the Prime Minister to say whether there was evidence of the Tories giving jobs to friends and said that there wasn’t. So that’s great.

No one will care after next week anyway as the Prime Minister has announced that hugs will be allowed from next week, but only cautious short ones and not face to face. So you can all get butt hugging people, which sadly for many who work in the government will be a step backwards from their usual arse kissing. Household mixing will also be allowed which is great news for amateur DJs and cocktail makers, and a travel corridor will open up to all those top holiday destinations including South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands near Antarctica, which I suppose does fulfil the needs of all of us who’ve spent the past year thinking the government have made us want to get as far away from Britain as possible. Transport Minister Grant Shapps, a man with all the integrity of a broken magic 8 ball, has said that the list is as limited as it is, because we have to make sure other countries we reconnect with are safe. So I guess maybe it was their governments that declined incase it also meant Priti Patel would take that as an approval to unfairly deport people to them?

One of the countries on that list is Israel which is apparently safe, unless you’re Palestinian of course as hundreds have been wounded in the lead up a planned march by Jewish nationalists for Jerusalem Day when they celebrate the internationally illegal occupation of East Jerusalem. Israeli police tear gassed and shot at worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, while Palestinian families are set to be evicted from homes they’ve lived in for decades in two neighbourhoods nearby. The UN have told Israel to exercise maximum restraint and respect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, but I worry that they’ll just take that to mean of buildings they’re going to put up over bulldozed homes. Still, at least Brits can travel there now for a holiday, right?

In other news, after France threatened to cut power to Jersey as part of arguments about fishing rights in the channel, many were shocked to find that Jersey had electricity in the first place. Why Boris Johnson leapt so quickly to the notorious tax havens defence, we’ll never know, but two royal navy ships were sent causing many newspapers to hyperventilate with excitement about the possibility of a war with France which is high up on their list of most patriotic things you can do after having sex with a flag and ordering chips in an Indian restaurant.

Arts subjects at university are to have funding cuts of 50% but the government will soon regret that next time they tell the country to act responsibly, and no one will know how.

And lastly, Conservative MP and square ham Ben Bradley has been elected leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, while also still being an MP. Which feels all kinds of wrong, but on the plus side, that means he’ll only have half the time to be shit as an MP if he’s busy being shit as a council leader too.

ADMIN

Hello hello ParPolBrods. How were election times round your way? My particular highlight of voting day was a man behind us in the queue for the polling station, and he’d brought his – must’ve been 2 year old – daughter with him and was getting her to help him choose anyone but ‘Khan or that bloody Tory one’. Amazing. I’m hoping she picked Count Binface but I was also scared that she liked foxes and fucked it up. Anyway, I hope you got decent results where you are or at least are able to move somewhere better like the Moon or Alpha Centuri. It was weird to be in a situation politically where I really, really don’t want the Conservatives in anywhere, but I’m also so non-plussed by Labour right now that I didn’t feel bereft by their losses. If anything, I was very happy for Labour councils like Preston and Rochdale that are doing all what I talked about with Rhian Jones a couple of weeks ago and actually investing in the area in progressive ways, and also with the gains the Greens made and how Scotland and Wales went we’re doing our own thing so the rest of you can get fucked. Fair play. I liked that the United Kingdom was a little crew of countries, mostly so I could pretend I lived on an island where not everyone voted Conservative. But I do really feel now like firstly citizens of a country should be able to decide what happens to it and its future, and also that maybe Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland need to all escape while they can, followed by the North, the Midlands, the South and well, everywhere and then the government could only be in charge of whatever’s left. Probably Surrey or something. And the rest of us will have a nice time. You’ve got to dream. Which I’ve done loads of lately, for once, as I’ve had a truly grim head and chest cold and kept falling asleep on the sofa over the weekend to the amazement of my agent who’s never seen that happen before. It was properly grim and I can’t help but think it must be because I haven’t had a cold in over a year thanks to mask wearing and social distancing so this was full force making up for that. I did do a lateral test that I sneezed out twice and it’s deffo not the COVIDs, so instead I’ve just been making everyone feel uneasy where-ever I’ve gone by being full of coughs. It was a weird sort of power and I may, in future, do things like cough on the bus just to get extra space. A lot of coughs will be edited out of this week’s show. No I won’t do an outtake reel, you wouldn’t enjoy it. But I suppose you could play it from your phone on the bus and get extra space, so I’ll think about it.

Thanks this week to Somebody and James for the ko-fi donations. Totally fair there’s not been many of those lately as well, everyone’s broke and now you can spend money on things like getting a side order of pneumonia with your meal. But if you enjoy this show and can afford to support me doing it as it takes up a silly amount of my life where I should really be trying to earn money after a year of absolutely none of that, then why not donate even the price of a pack of stickers or a small bag of dried plums, neither of which I have a clue about the cost of. I know what a snob right? But even that to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro, a monthly thing at the patreon.com/parpolbro or via the Acast supporter button, would be real swell.

Two other things, one of which is a sad thing. The non-sad thing is that my brother Corin aka The Last Skeptik, who does the music to this show has another new single out. Please go listen to that if you like hip hop, it’s called friend and enemy. It was also his birthday on Saturday so you know, me asking you to do that is the cheapest least effort gift I could give and as an older sibling, that’s a pretty big gesture.

The other thing, is the sad thing and last week I gave a shout out to my friend Katie Coxall who as well as much brilliant art for many years, also did the design for artwork on this here podcast. Katie very sadly passed away from cancer last week, quicker than any of us expected and it’s been pretty upsetting for all who knew her. She was a truly funny, superbly silly and expertly sweary person and so this week’s episode is dedicated to the memory of her brilliant self. I understand she passed away very peacefully and with her family by her side so I guess there’s not much more you can ask for. Anyway, at some point in the future there’ll likely be a fundraiser selling some of her art to raise money for the hospice she was in, as per her request, so I’ll give that a shout on her when it happens.

Ok, so this week’s show has a chat with James Montague, author of The Billionaires Club and 1312: Among The Ultras, both of which look at the politics and money behind the football industry and I ask him all about that. Yes, football on this show. I know, I’m surprised too. And in the middle you lucky people, is my analysis of the past weekend’s election results. Don’t get too excited now. Now you can be more excited than that though. Like at least a little bit. Please?

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES

Ah football, the beautiful game. Which is why like most beautiful things on earth, the super-rich have chosen to make sure they buy it all up before then destroying it. Just a couple of weeks ago, a breakaway competition was announced, called the European Super League, sounding like yet another franchise had jumped on the superhero bandwagon without a convincing origin story. It was meant to be for the top 20 European clubs, and was unashamedly a big US sports style money grab that would’ve caused teams in domestic leagues to lose out and make supporting any of the teams taking part even more pricey for fans. The idea seemed a lot like when Apple announce they’re unveiling something special, then release an updated product that costs more than the last one but has less to it, is harder to use and mostly makes you wish you still had a CD player. But then something incredible happened, and fans said nope, and protested in a big way. This led to the six English clubs pulling out, followed by 3 European ones and it took just 2 days for the entire thing to collapse meaning it was even more pathetic than my DIY efforts. Ongoing protests have since taken place at Arsenal, Tottenham and just recently caused a Man U/Liverpool game last week to be postponed, all in the name of calling for the billionaire owners to sell their stakes and return the clubs back to the people. So why am I telling you any of this on a politics podcast hosted by me, a man whose awareness of football is so limited I still think the offside rule is to do with the camera catching a player at their least flattering angle? Well because football, like many things people pretend are not, is political, not just because Johnson was quick to condemn the super league and say it amounted to a cartel, which must be awful for him as you can’t have one of those in government and sport or they’ll clash. But also, because the money behind the biggest football clubs comes from oligarchs of the kind that have also bought up much of the property market and have links to politicians, Saudi princes who are responsible for heinous human rights violations and US billionaires who look like a rejected Portlandia character have little care for anything but their own profit. And the retaliation from fans against this has been the first steps in the sports version of actually taking back control, showing that protest does work, and that public ownership might be the way forward for footie too.

This week I spoke to writer James Montague, who has spent his career writing books about the relationship between football and politics. In particular, his book The Billionaires Club, released in 2017, looked at the super-rich who now own English football and pretty much spelled out what would happen in football and why. And James’s latest book, 1312: Among The Ultras, looks at the most extreme political football fandom. So, I spoke to James and asked him to explain all about the takeover of football by the billionaire class, if the fans moving the goalposts was expected, if it can ever return to being a people’s game and if the European Super League will return with a 4-hour Snyder cut. Ok not that last one. Anyway, it was fascinating talking to James so hope you enjoy. Here he is:

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES PART 1:

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

MIDDLE BIT

ELECTION ANALYSIS

The nice thing about elections is that you can tell your own tale about how it went if you like. Your party definitely did well if you only look at the bits they did well in and they definitely did badly if you ignore the area where they didn’t. It’s definitely to do with voters rising against progressive politics as long as you ignore all the areas where it absolutely wasn’t. People only vote for candidates called Steve if you don’t pay attention to anyone who won that wasn’t called Steve. And so, with last week’s elections, there were a lot of stories in the news about how it was a victory for the Conservatives, a big loss for Labour and oh my god who are this new party the Greens that we didn’t even know about before oh my gosh where they did they come from waaaaaahaaat? That sort of thing.

The reality is, each and every area has its own reasons and issues as to why votes went a certain way because it turns out that everyone’s an individual, you know apart from the sheeple who need to wake up but also not be woke. God this is confusing. I mean take Hartlepool. The Conservatives took 15,529 votes, beating Labour in 2^nd place who had nearly half the votes. That’s some gains right there, you wanna be careful with that. It might seem like a shock victory but in 2019 when Labour won the seat, the Labour candidate had over 15,464 votes, the Conservative candidate had 11, 869 and the Brexit Party had over 10,000. With the Brexit party gone, or rather reformed and choosing a candidate called John Prescott in the hope it might confuse people, they only got a measly 368 votes. So them 10,235 voters gotta go somewhere. It seems most went to the Conservatives rather than the pro-remain completely unsuitable candidate Labour shoved into the race. With the exception of 2017, the Labour vote has been halved since 2001 and the area has an aging population with younger voters tending to leave elsewhere for work which is a shame as according to dizzy vaccum bag Nadine Dorries, the Conservatives will now bring 180,000 jobs to the area, so as there’s only 70,032 people there everyone can have a few.

For the by-election, loads of people didn’t turn up at all and the turnout was 11000 less than in 2019, at only 42% of voters, which is shoddy. So, the Conservatives didn’t as much gain support as Labour made people think ah what’s the fucking point? What hasn’t been mentioned much is that independent candidate Sam Lee, a local sports journalist who’s sick of party politics and wanted to represent the local area properly, came third with no party support, very little coverage and no big donors behind her. She beat the Lib Dems, Reform UK and the Greens by miles, with nearly 3000 votes. So, the real story seems to be that no one’s happy with any of it, most people couldn’t even be bothered to leave their homes to vote, and the Conservatives only win because their voters that trot out every bloody time might get to run a cyclist over on the way or laugh at a homeless person. Maybe.

The overall story of the elections is that the incumbent parties won, because it’s been a time of crisis and the last thing anyone wants after a turbulent year is more change. I mean nothing would be more reassuring in this new normal than knowing the Conservatives have a big majority to continue to make things as awful as they used to. Ah, certainty.

But in the English local elections, there was change, as seen by the losses to the Conservatives in what’s known as the blue wall. They lost councillors in Tunbridge Wells, Surrey and Oxfordshire, and Labour gained councils in Chipping Norton and Canterbury. The Lib Dems also took Tory seats in West Sussex, Surrey and Cambridge and to the Greens in Kent. This is possibly due to people leaving London due to rising costs and moving further out, it could also be post-Brexit retaliation especially in areas like Kent that have seen their garden of England turn into a supersized lorry park like it’s a song by Joni Mitchell. Or maybe they all got the COVID vaccine and Bill Gates reprogrammed them using all the nanochips. I just don’t know. It’s a definite change though, and so as the Conservatives now take the North, the South may be ripe for further gains by the other parties in a general election if Labour don’t keep insisting that they are the woke elite and not working people and focus all their policies on having the union flag tattooed onto their faces and shouting ‘tea’ at people.

The Greens gained 80 seats, in the local elections that is, not like, a recycling furniture centre but they’d totes do that too because that’s their jam. While that’s not massive compared to the Tories or Labour, it’s a big increase for them. The last time Greens had such a massive increase in votes was in 2015, which if you’ll remember was a year where left-wing voters chose not to vote Labour as they were selling mugs with immigration policies on, for, I dunno, people who really want you to know how they like their coffee, and had Rachel Reeves telling people they’d cut benefits even harder. So nice to know they’re trying that tactic again, I’m sure it won’t fail for another time. Yeesh. These wins for Greens this time could potentially mean that they actually get some airtime on political programs now and aren’t just classed as ‘other’ which is what happens a lot to them, many other smaller parties and independents. Though I still bet human long drop Nigel Farage gets on telly more than them despite not even being in a party anymore.

The Scottish Elections mean Holyrood now has a majority of pro-independence parties, with 64 SNP MSPs and 8 Greens. Though sadly for no one, The Toad King Alex Salmond’s party ALBA, won zero. But hey, nothing more pro-independence than letting the other parties do their own thing, right? It means while a second independence referendum won’t happen immediately, especially due to ‘rona, its gonna be hard for Westminster to avoid talking about it, and current polls suggest it would be a very close 50/50 split if there was a vote. But whatever happens, it’s yet again clear that Scottish voters want to have a different political system to England and honestly who can blame them? I still think they should just start drilling a massive moat under Gretna Green and quietly float off towards Scandinavia. I reckon it’d be weeks before Johnson even noticed.

The thing that isn’t being talked about much is why the Conservatives keep getting so many seats and while you could automatically suppose that it’s just because the public bloody love Johnson looking like he’s woken up in a hedge after trying to shag a farmyard animal and oh he’s said something racist in Latin while handing his best friend half of the NHS, hilarious! There’s more to it than that though. For a start, spending on campaigning. We don’t have the figures yet for last week’s election, but in 2019 the Conservatives received £19.4m in donations and spent £16m on the campaign. In comparison, Labour got £5.4m in donations, and the Green party got £200,000. That’s a big difference and means the Conservatives can dominate social media adverts and billboards, while the Greens at best, can probably get everyone involved some nice crisps. Secondly, the First Past The Post system and the boundary lines, mostly benefit the Conservatives, with them winning 60% of the votes in Harlow, but getting 92% of the seats. In Nuneaton and Bedworth, they got 58% of the vote and 88% of the seats. In the same seat, Labour and Greens got a combined 40% of the vote and 12% of the seats. This is why the Conservatives won’t ever push for proportional representation as they much prefer a system where a small percentage of the people get a much larger share. Obviously, the same system benefits Labour in certain areas too, but the fact is, it constantly works against smaller parties and keeps us stuck in a two-party system where one has vast amounts more money to play with. If the government bring in first past the post for mayoral elections too, it could see them winning a greater share of those posts as well, and voter ID would vastly stop Labour voters from voting. In 2019 there were only four convictions for voter fraud, and two cautions and that was it, but trials for voter ID stopped 700 people from being to vote across 10 areas. Based on the 2017 general election a much larger majority of Labour votes compared to Conservatives, didn’t have a driving licence which I’m surprised about as I thought most Conservatives had chauffeurs. What I’m saying is that it’s a harder race for everyone else, pretty much like every area of society thanks to the Conservatives.

So, the good news I suppose is that almost half of all Conservative voters are 65 or older, with the average age increasing by a year, well, every year. So, the long game is just to wait till they’ve all died out. Though sadly because they’ll all have private healthcare they’ll probably out live the rest of us. There was actually tons of good news in the election though. Two SNP MSPs are the first women of colour to be elected to Scottish parliament and another is the first permanent wheelchair user in Holyrood. The first Romanian councillor was elected in the UK for Cambridgeshire county council, running as a Labour candidate. And what if Groot dried out in the sun for too long Laurence Fox lost his £10k deposit because he didn’t get enough votes for London Mayor which makes the fact he called his party Reclaim even funnier.

And now back to James…

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES PART 2

Big thanks to James for having time to chat in what has been a pretty busy few weeks for him. You can find James on Twitter @JamesPiotr, and you can find all his books at all book shops regardless of their goodness but do check out The Billionaires Club which is a fascinating insight into all the super-rich people that have bought football and Among The Ultras which is his most recent book about the extreme political footie fans movement around the world. I will pop links to all of them in the podcast blurb and website too.

What other topics do you wanna hear someone talk about but specifically on this podcast, not online or down the café? I know no one can down the café at the mo, but when they do again, chat’s gonna be on fire. But what subjects do you want to hear on this show? Let me know @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could fail to send anything and blame someone else instead while pretending that’s some sort of clever way to get people to like you. As always, it’s probably best to email, isn’t it?

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. Another week of political shittery wrapped up in jokes in swears just for you because otherwise I’d have to shout it at people in the park. If you like any of this, even just the letters in the podcast title or the feeling it gives you as you delete it from your podcast app, then please do tell others to give it a whizz, review the show on whichever podcast platform you reside at and donate to the ko-fi, Patreon or Acast supporter button if you can. Then I can use that tiny bit of money to persuade the elite class that I’m one of them as I jangle the change in my pockets while declaring how much I miss the opera and saying the word consultant.

Much obliged to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and the late, great Katie Coxall. You’re already very missed pal.

This will be back next week when Labour announce their latest policy will involve standing around at the end of the bar where it clearly states there’s no service, and waiting till someone sees them and takes their order.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by hugging butts.

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