Fool’s Paradise – Doing a U-turn on a 45p, all the conferences and Beauty Dhlamini on health inequality in the UK

Released on Tuesday, October 4th, 2022.

Fool’s Paradise – Doing a U-turn on a 45p, all the conferences and Beauty Dhlamini on health inequality in the UK

It’s Conservative Conference time which means all the worst opinions in the planet are in one place. And its all happening just after Liz Truss’s and Kwasi Kwarteng’s worst first weeks have become worst second and third weeks too, ending with a u-turn on a 45p. All gags on that plus a chat with Beauty Dhlamini (@beautydhlamini) at Tribune Magazine (@TribuneMagazine) about health inequality.

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THIS EPISODE IS TAGGED WITH: • Beauty Dhlamini, Brexit, Comedy, Conservative Conference, Conservatives, health inequality, Humour, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Keir Starmer, Kwasi Kwarteng, Labour, Labour Conference, Liz Truss, mini budget, NHS, parpolbro, Partly Political Broadcast, Patreon, podcast, political, politics, stand-up, The Last Skeptik, Tiernan Douieb, Tribune Magazine

Transcript

Ep286

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that gets it and has listened. Not to any of you, just to itself a few times and fully understands why several of you skip bits but I’m still leaving them in. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as Chancellor and when did Domo-kun get glasses Kwasi Kwarteng u-turns on his policy of cutting the 45p tax rate, calling it a distraction from their plan to get Britain moving. That must be true, as now it’s gone the government are spinning on their heels while the country is going rapidly backwards.

You may have noticed the evening is getting darker earlier, the chills are setting in and, on the calendar, it is clear that it is now the time when ghouls, monsters and denizens of the underworld gather to discuss what horrible torments they’ll unleash amongst the living. Yes it’s the Conservative Conference 2022, and while its usually its listed somewhere beneath the ancient Aztec day of flaying as worst reasons to gather people together, I have to give credit to the Tories, they’ve worked hard to make this year a must see event. The Prime Minister and Elmer Fudd with hair Liz Truss has gone above and beyond to make the prospect of her speech a recommended viewing since she started. Who else would’ve thought to kill the Queen, crash the economy to the point the Bank of England had to bail themselves out and then u-turn on a policy you’d spent the day before saying you were 100% behind? Might we see celebrities taking note that maybe, when they’ve had a film that looks like a total flop or is actively hated by everyone, that they should do a Truss and disappear for four days, before resurfacing to do eight car crash interviews on local radio stations, each one sounding like more and more you’re running out of batteries or unravelling like a broken cassette? What else could set the stage for a big important speech like knowing everyone she’s done so far has had all the energy of a depressed hairdryer while the opposition are so high in the polls it looks like the Conservative Party might finally join the dinosaurs they’re most closely descended from? Get that popcorn ready as I couldn’t more excited than if they’d said Hugh Jackman would be returning as Wolverine to do a panel voicing his view on the necessity of cuts.

I’m aware some of you may listen to this show after Truss’s conference speech and there is of course every chance she’ll have talked like a broken printer without any awareness of what she said or did 5 minutes before. Not only ruining things for humans but also selfishly taking jobs from goldfish who were happily owning an idiom about memory till the Prime Minister took it for herself. Just hours before the u-turn on the 45p tax rate, Truss was insisting across national television that she was 100% committed to the idea and that it was necessary to grow the pie. Does she have a magic pie tree? In a time where people are struggling to afford food, why hasn’t she made more of this? Perhaps we could all take a crumb from it and plant one to get our own sustainable pie supplies? It is very possible this is how Liz Truss thinks pies happen, much like seemingly thinking solar panels grow on farms, possibly from sunflower seeds. I am 100% committed to the idea that were you to dig up the garden at No.10 right now, it’d be full of buried Greggs that some poor aide has had to shovel in there at the whim of Truss’s fevered notions. It is, Truss says, all about giving taxpayers value for money, but if that’s true why have we got such a low quality knock off Prime Minister and government?

It had only been days before that the International Monetary Fund had condemned the mini-budget, so called because it had all logic removed, which is something they apparently only usually intervene with less white countries in the hope they can keep them in debt for ever like a more fancy Wonga. Then the Bank of England spent £65bn on the bond market otherwise I dunno, there won’t be any more films after No Time To Die or something. Essentially a lot of money we didn’t have was spend bailing ourselves out from a self-inflicted wound. The mini-budget was making a hole in the boat in the belief it would go faster and then as a result the Bank of England had to use other bits of the boat to fill that hole in and now we don’t have enough of a boat to go anywhere but the captain is still insisting it’s the best way to keep moving. Yet none of those quite major and unprecedented financial events could budge Truss from thinking it was anything other than brilliant policy. The Prime Minister is someone who if she was following a sat nav route and it told her to go straight into a tree, would insist there was no deviation from the plan as it had to be right and would just keep ploughing ahead until either the tree gave in, or a branch punctured her brain. Kwarteng also stood by his plans to do, as many are calling it, a reverse Robin Hood. Which not only refers to taking from the poor to give to the rich but also sounds like a devious sex position which massively rewards yourself but doesn’t give the person you’re with any benefits at all. It was revealed that he spent the night of the mini-budget partying with the financiers who profited from shorting the pound, which is not only dodgy AF but also sounds like the worst party. I bet you’d have rich wankers offering to buy everyone a round, just getting themselves a drink and insisting it’d trickle down. Kwarteng said in hindsight it wasn’t wise for him to attend but it was booked in and he was only there for 15 minutes, had a soft drink and left. Gosh, is any Tory capable of going to a party that isn’t a work event?

It was only after it was clear that other Conservatives might vote against the 45p tax rate, that the change occurred. Dropped dog’s dinner Michael Gove said he would revolt, even though he’s constantly revolting already. Chairman of the Conservative Party and incel gooseberry Jake Berry warned anyone who votes against the mini-budget would have the whip removed but still many spoke out saying they would. Rumours circulated that Tory MPs were planning to work with Labour to defeat parts of the mini-budget, but you know, not all of it as no one wants those rich donors to struggle too much. And there you go, a u-turn appears like magic. No one wants a humiliating defeat in the Commons, because unlike several humiliating interviews, humiliating speeches and humiliating bail outs, this would actually bother the government for all of 5 minutes till they pretended it didn’t happen. Liz Truss was quick to say it was all Kwarteng’s idea and then it was revealed no, it was actually the idea of Treasury Minister Chris Philp who forever looks like someone who’s been possessed by a spirit that’s trying its best to look normal but doesn’t understand how faces work. We get it and we listened, they said, but it wasn’t the many people who said this was the worst idea in the world ten days ago, or the IMF, or Bank Of England. So it was only the Tories and the financiers who probably said ‘yeah we’ve earned our money now so you can change one thing as long as you keep all the other really terrible bits.’ Kwarteng had to change his speech for the conference on Monday, but luckily for him if the 45p tax rate was a distraction, scrapping it was an even bigger one from his policy to remove the cap on bankers bonuses still being there and now also plans to cut £18bn from public services. Which should make up for all the tax they’ve gained from not scrapping the 45p tax rate. No wait, so because they’ll be getting more tax from rich people, we have to have more austerity to cover that. Sorry, I’m a bit lost. Is this where we find out that Kwarteng actually studied mothamatics and only knows how to put a massive hole in everything? Kwarteng’s conference speech was mostly the word plan a lot, with the word growth and sometimes the word serious for about 30 minutes. He also credited the Conservatives for saving the country from decline caused by the previous Labour government 12 years ago, while also saying the country is trapped in decline and this plan would save it which only makes sense if at some point around 2015 Kwarteng joined this dimension from an alternate one. Its also pretty Charlie big potatoes to blame Labour for the crash when just mere days ago, he managed that in a morning. The scrapping of the 45p tax rate bit means he’s still making £43bn of tax cuts so its unlikely its going to help much. Still he does have a plan for growth and it’s a growth plan and its serious, for a serious government with a plan for growth and no, not the bit from 10 days ago. Ignore that, it was just a distraction.

Yes, a return to austerity is on the cards because no one has original ideas anymore. Levelling up Secretary and Stephen Colbert’s evil doppelgagner Simon Clark said Britain has been living in a fool’s paradise for too long. I agree but do you mean the former PM, the ones before that or the current one? What does Clark think levelling up means? Maybe he read the title wrong and thought all he has to do is level up one secretary and everyone else can get fucked? Oh wait is it our fault for enjoying austerity so much they thought they should gift us with it again? Perhaps we shouldn’t have encouraged them by surviving it so now Simon Clark thinks what needs levelling up is the difficulty of living. Obviously not all of us survived austerity at all, but sadly their voices can’t be heard now, and Tories can only be haunted by the thought of anyone who isn’t upper class being happy. The other big policy announcement was from traumatised ghost of the Microsoft paper clip and business secretary Jacob Rees Mogg who is scrapping all regulation for companies with fewer than 500 staff. Yes, nothing helps businesses quite like a conveyor belt of employees as they keep getting killed off by unsafe conditions, or having goods no one wants to buy because they keep exploding. Luckily this government are helping because if you do lose most of your face in a workplace accident, no one will be accountable so at least you’ll save on having to find legal fees. Its probably because the Conservative Party seem to have no regulations right now that Mogg feels others should have the same opportunity for corruption. Mogg’s business partner in Somerset Capital and Tory donor Dominic Johnson, who looks like…no actually go google him now. He’s not real is he? He’s definitely a character from a horror film. I mean, yep. He’s just been handed a senior ministerial post and a peerage which seems like a big cronyism sandwich, but it could be that they’re just so surprised someone can get on with Rees-Mogg without scowling at him that they’ve hired him as some sort of in house nanny role. Somehow all of these things, making people poorer so that they die in factory accidents no one is accountable for, will fix the economy. The economy that Conservatives have made consistently worse since 2010 with very similar policies, and then just the other week made even worse with these exact policies. Do they believe two wrongs will make a right? Will more austerity plus previous and still ongoing austerity combined with all the money lost straight after the mini-budget or not collected from fraudulent Covid payments or…wait this is a very long equation. What I mean is, does all of these many ways that will ultimately make most people in the country have a terrible life equal somehow massive growth? Well not according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England and presumably the Office for Budget Responsibility but they aren’t allowed to say yet. But what do they know? They don’t have a magic pie tree do they?

The Conservative Party Conference was supposed to unite the party and while it hasn’t happened in terms of the proposed financial policy, its clear they are all together on one thing, which is being terrifying right wing and making sure they burn everything to the ground in the limited time they have left in charge. Nothing brings people together like knowing they can bask in the warm glow of a country on fire. It has been littered with talks and comments that can only be made by people with zero connection to reality and huge disdain for other humans. You’d find more compassion at a Cenobites reunion. Lowlights so far and moments you can’t believe someone might say till you realise they were at the Conservative conference so its standard fare, include party chairman Jake Berry saying in response to the cost-of-living crisis that people can just cut their consumption or get higher wages and better jobs, which weirdly yes, is what people would like to do but not in the way Berry imagines it. Berry no doubt cooks a meal by collecting all the right ingredients then trying to fuck them into a meal and wondering why no one wants to come to dinner. Eddie Munster looks ill Lee Anderson complained about do-gooders setting up food banks to make themselves feel better and doubled down on his claim that you can make a meal for 30p a day. Maybe he’s got a magic pie tree himself? Or possibly by being such a fucking pie he can just bite bits off his own face and the 30p is the cost of a plaster? While Higher Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns with the perma-expression of someone who’s just walked into a lamppost complained about universities and schools teaching things that she doesn’t understand before saying that freedom of speech starts at a young age, as her son is five and shouldn’t be afraid to say what he thinks. About what? Father Christmas? I assume her son never goes to bed because when she says its bedtime and he says ‘No its not’ she has to go along with it. I’m not expecting him to have a great winter as she believes him when he says he doesn’t need to wear his jacket.

The cracks are still obvious. That’s cracks, not crackpots which are of course obvious. Not only has there been this resistance to Kwarteng’s economic policies, but a number of former bigwigs in the party haven’t shown up. Former Prime Minister and stromolite Boris Johnson is nowhere to be seen, but that is standard for him and anything that’s considered work. Former chancellor and what if the crescent moon was overconfident Rishi Sunak isn’t attending either, but I bet he’s back to being a US citizen now the dollar is worth way more. The live karaoke band that were meant to play have cancelled. The Tories blamed the train strike which is happening the day after but I reckon its actually because they realised there was no point them coming when the entire few days will be MPs repeating lines they’ve been handed and being out of tune with the rest of the country. Then there was hard man of the soft play Steve Baker who bizarrely apologised to Ireland and the EU for not always behaving in a way they could trust us. What’s happened to the real Steve Baker? Has he gone to wherever they stuffed Mark Francois, and they’ve replaced him with an imposter? Or is this a rats leaving a sinking ship chat and Baker just keeps imagining himself doing the ultimate leave of the UK and getting a job on the continent where he encourages people to catch illnesses that he swears aren’t real. He did then say we can’t afford the net zero pledge and then we all realised it was still the same wanker Steve so stand down everyone. There were also more than a few panels where guests stated just how much the Conservatives aren’t going to win the next election, which will be tough for them to hear. But I guess if they all lose their jobs, they can just cut consumption or get a better job right?

In contrast, the Labour conference ended on a high note for a party. Or rather the same note again and again as leader and tiki torch that smells of corridors Kier Starmer gave a speech that many lauded as brilliant, including usually Conservative commentators. I mean, it wasn’t, but we are in a time where all we have to compare it to is Liz Truss and frankly even Starmer’s constant advert for Sudafed seems like a BAFTA winning performance when up against hers. He pledged a fresh start for the UK, which I suppose is fair because by the time there’s an election in two years, there’ll be nothing left to go on so we’ll be back to square one. Starmer announced a publicly owned green energy company called Great British Energy, even though United Kindling was right there. Yeah, ok I suppose that isn’t green. You win. He pledged more nurses, though not sure how yet, possibly he has a tree for that like Truss has for pies? And he said he’d make Brexit work, which is great as its been shirking for six years now on massive benefits and really not even tried to do anything useful. I’m not really sure how he’d make Brexit work, but I suppose its how you might taxidermy a dead pet and that way its not really dead is it? Starmer’s little list for working Brexit included a points based immigration system, so that proves Labour are ready for government as they too have xenophobic unworkable policies. And they can probably resell off all those excess mugs from 2015. Labour will deliver a change in Scotland but they won’t work with the SNP, so that means there’ll be a lot of work for one MP to do all by themselves. Then he quoted lovechild of the Cheshire Cat and a haunted portrait of a witchfinder Tony Blair and said ‘Iraq is within 45 minutes of launching weapons of mass destruction’. Oh no, sorry not that one. And something about don’t forget, don’t forgive, which is a dangerous thing to do when you’ve just brought up Tony Blair.

Great. All good. Because they’re not the Conservatives and frankly Starmer could’ve stood up and said ‘I’m going to come round each of your houses and insult your potatoes’ and I think people still would have been pleased to hear an alternative to Liz Truss. Of course it’d be better if Labour will actually do any of the things he said, well except the points based immigration policy, but you know, based on his current record Keir Starmer would get a few months into being Prime Minister and not bother with any of them. Still, I suppose again, that makes him perfectly suitable to be in government. Oh and that green energy company, in the small print it says it won’t be a supplier, just an investment company which will give investment in renewable energy alongside energy companies so it won’t impact on our bills at all and generate more dosh for the lot that already have more dosh. Still though, not Liz Truss! Whoop! In some polls Labour are 33 points ahead meaning one hell of a majority if the election was right this very minute and not in two years. Even former Conservative MP and what it might look like if a lab mouse was turned into a human using magic Nick Boles, said he will vote for Labour next time. Which is great because if a man who advocated austerity and cutting welfare now says Labour are the party for him, then they must be the change we need from a government who are advocating for austerity and cutting welfare.

Labour MP Rupa Huq who looks forever like she’s been startled by headlights, was suspended from the party for saying that Kwasi Kwarteng was superficially black. Which is odd as according to the findings of the Forde Report and many people of colour within the party, that’s exactly the sort of anti-black racist comment that thrives in the Labour party and I’m surprised they didn’t just promote her.

The Green party held their conference on the weekend with a call to fund renewables with taxes on wealth and dirty profits. So expect that as a Labour policy in about 6 months’ time, but where neither things are actually taxed, and then a Conservative Party policy in 12 months’ time where neither are taxed, dirty profits are increased and renewables aren’t funded at all.

Hundreds of thousands of people protested all over the country on Saturday as part of the Enough is Enough Campaign, the No to Oil campaign and the Don’t Pay campaign, while RMT workers and communications workers went on strike. Can’t believe they didn’t know they could just cut consumption or get better pay.

ADMIN

Holla. How goes it? I won’t be long on this here middle bit as it is a long interview today, but you know that’s nice sometimes right? Who wants to hear me waffle on about how I just had a custard apple and temporarily forgot everything else that was going on because its fruit but it tastes like custard so it’s good for you but it tastes like it isn’t. WHY AREN’T CUSTARD APPLES MANDATORY? Sorry, I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s also candy floss grapes you know. ITS LIKE WE LIVE IN SIMULATION CREATED BY WILLY WONKAS MIND. I was gonna do more on the Labour conference this week and yet again, Liz Truss has fucked things up so much there wasn’t time, but I will try to talk to someone, at some point about it. I went to the Enough is Enough rally in London on Saturday at Kings Cross and it was excellent. I forgot how good it feels to be surrounded by people equally angry and it somehow makes you feel all a bit hopeful about it. They say there were 10,000 people there and I can’t tell because I’m short and didn’t want to count for an hour but it definitely felt super rammed. I had my agent, sorry daughter, on my shoulders and she really enjoyed it till the last few speakers when she got distracted by a very small bug on a tree that had a conversation with. It was very small. I too was curious. I know they held 58, is that right? 58 rallies on Saturday all over the country and many of them looked packed, so I’d totally recommend heading along to future ones even if just to add to the amount of people there and get the nice feeling that it’s not just you shouting at your social media by yourself. Rob Delaney was great, Kevin Courtney at the National Education Union was brilliant and big shout to Jo Grady, the general secretary of UCU who tried to get everyone to cheer for nationalising Greggs. I was onboard. Definitely.

This week I had a chat with Beauty Dhlamimi about health inequality and as I said, it’s a long un but a good un, so I will stop talking to you about tiny bugs at protests and let you get on with this:

INTERVIEW WITH BEAUTY

It might seem strange to say Britain has high health inequality when right now it seems like the whole country is unwell and in dire straits. Health inequality isn’t when you know, I’m way fitter than you, look how many steps I did yesterday. No actually don’t, it’s embarrassing. It’s about how certain conditions from your income, gender, ethnicity, and which postcode you’re in can have a devastating effect on your health and life expectancy. There is a 9.4 year gap in life expectancy between men living in the most deprived areas and those who live in the wealthiest areas, and a gap of 8 years for women. Probably boosted by the energy they get from knowing there’s less men around as they all died off first. The Coronavirus pandemic was a massive health event, and well still is if you look round the back of the news to all the bits they can’t be bothered to mention. That exacerbated health inequality not only by being an absolute shit of a virus, but also from the economic damage caused by the government’s financial help seemingly based on pulling names from a hat as one of their party drinking games. But now we have another health crisis. Not a pandemic as that’s one still happening, but the cost-of-living crisis. One of the key words in that phrase is living and it’s a ton harder to do if you can’t afford to. If enough people are struggling to choose between heating and eating, as journalists like to say ignoring that many can’t do either, it’s not likely they’ll be living to 104 and telling their grandkids about how ‘actually it turns out Liz Truss did make the economy grow but only for funeral directors and bayliffs’. And that’s all going to happen on top of an understaff, underfunded, overstressed health service where to have any chance of an ambulance arriving in time it’d be best to book ahead for the time you’re mostly going to have a terrible accident or your spleen explode. I still can’t believe all those claps didn’t fix it. So weird. It totally works with fairies. How bad an effect will these times have on people’s health? And in what ways? And is the worst place to live Ilford because your postcode starts with IL?

I asked all those questions, well not the last one as Ilford’s postcode is actually IG, all the other ones though to Beauty Dhlamini, who writes about, among other things, health inequality and global health issues for Tribune Magazine. Beauty kindly had time to explain to me the pretty bleak landscape of British health for the foreseeable future. This is a long chat because well, there’s a lot to get through and but I really enjoyed speaking to Beauty even if I’m now considering wrapping myself in bubble wrap and only eating vitamins for the near future. She gives quite a lot of recommendations at very end of our chat and I did consider editing that a bit but they’re all very good so if you’re rushed for time, then I’d advise jumping ahead and going back to it with a hefty notepad. Have a listen, here is Beauty:

INTERVIEW

END OF INTERVIEW

Thanks to Beauty for having time to chat. You can find her on Twitter @beautydhlamini, and many of her articles at Tribune Magazine which is at tribunemag.co.uk or @tribunemagazine on Twitter. And Beauty’s podcast as she mentioned is Mind The Health and it’s been on a bit of a break since last year but I believe she’s about to get it started up again soon so do subscribe ready for that. Big thanks to Raf who put me in touch with Beauty too.

What else do you need to hear about in current stupid stupid times? Hit me up, with your ideas that is and not fists, I’m a podcaster not a fighter. All suggestions for possible chats on this show are welcome and you can send them to partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com

END

And that’s all folks for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. If you enjoyed this, I mean firstly what’s wrong with you, it’s at least 50% bleakness every week. At most you should laugh cry your way through. Seriously. Sorry, I mean if you’ve enjoyed this, please do share with others who may need this blend of comedy and the absolute opposite of comedy, give it a swanky 5 star review on Apple podcasts or similar pod holes, and if you can, do donate to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro page, or join the patreon.com/parpolbro.

Ta loads to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik and Kat Day.

This will be back next week when Kwasi Kwarteng will announce that he’s listened and he gets it, but during an interview its revealed he just means the last Coldplay album.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Fool’s Paradise, an advert by the British Tourism Board. Enjoy everything you need, like choosing between heating or food, here in Britain, the Fool’s paradise. Relax on beaches smelling of poo, take in the sites that haven’t been sold off yet and relax forgetting that everything is on fire around you but you know what, it doesn’t matter as we grow pies on trees. Come to Britain, island of…er…land