(700) Days of Starmer

Summary

TRASHFUTURE: (700) Days of Starmer

Date: June 23, 2026
Hosts: Riley, Nova, Ben (with notes about absent Hussein and other regulars)

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Episode Overview

This episode of TRASHFUTURE dissects the abrupt end of Keir Starmer's premiership following Andy Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election. Against a backdrop of irreverent comedy and sharp political critique, the hosts offer both a retrospective on Starmer’s leadership and a dark preview of British politics' future, focusing on the recurring failures of the political establishment, the rise of technocracy and repression, and how these trends have shaped the country’s mood.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The (Failed) Manchester "Cold Open" & Mank Future Gag

• [00:16-03:13] Nova tells an elaborate story about preparing "Manchester doubles" for the team in anticipation of Burnham’s rise—a metaphor for dashed satirical plans and expectations in British politics.
  • "I'm so sorry MANK Future is cancelled for the foreseeable future. We have to treat this moment with the kind of intercultural sensitivity between south and north that I think this moment demands..." ([01:51], Nova)
• After darkly comic reflections on their failed "Mank Future" stunt, the conversation turns to the latest political developments.

2. Keir Starmer's Political Legacy—A Relentless But Hollow Technocrat

• Starmer’s Era in Review ([03:26+])

  • Riley and Nova mock the countless slogans, pledges, and governmental “relaunches”:
    • "There's been 10 pledges, six first steps, five missions, two phases, three foundations, six milestones, 11 KPIs, and an eight point industrial strategy. All of which were delivered... over the course of eight distinct governmental relaunches." ([03:46], Riley)
  • Nova: "He's had more relaunches than I've had name changes. He's sadly folding up the Kanban boards and taking it home." ([04:21])

• Starmer as Bureaucratic Ghost

  • Starmer is portrayed as intransigent, with no real beliefs or constituency.
    • Ben: "My favorite memory is when he told The Guardian that he didn't have dreams... He is intransigent." ([11:25])
    • Riley: "If he ever believed anything, every compromise he made, every promise... any of that spirit has been utterly scorched out of him." ([12:08])

• He left not because of one crisis but due to his own lack of vision and inability to adapt:

  • Nova: "It's going to be one of intransigence... the sort of kicking his feet and dragging his heels in on resigning..." ([10:39])
  • Riley: "He was a dead man walking for more time than he hasn't been a dead man walking." ([10:17])

3. The Political Carousel and "Institutional Lag"

• Examination of recent short-lived premierships—each leader falling due to an inability to govern a decaying system.

  • Riley: "The amount of time that our political system can stomach someone being in charge is getting shorter..." ([15:25])
  • "If these trends continue... eventually everyone gets to be Prime Minister for 15 minutes." ([16:14], Ben)

• Diagnosis: It isn’t that Britain is “ungovernable,” but the governing machinery is fundamentally broken.

  • Riley: "You pull a lever on the British state and there's a pretty 5% chance it breaks off... and the whole thing is just falling apart." ([17:32])

4. Reform, the Far Right, and the Crisis of Representation

• Starmer and predecessors accused of "pandering to freaks"—designing policy for a reactionary, often bigoted, minority while ignoring everyday needs.

  • Riley: "Pandering to freaks... has gone on now for like seven prime ministers..." ([08:50])
  • Nova: "Starmer has just tried... to do the Mr. Rules thing and it became... some kind of anti-white jihadist in the minds of your sort of brain pride grandparents." ([18:42])

• Without genuine alternatives, Reform’s "solution" is blunt and cruel:

  • Ben: "They actually have a solution to the problem. It's just that their solution is fuck them kids and fuck anyone under 40. Our constituency are all these sort of property types..." ([23:07])

5. Aging Population & Sovereign Contradictions

• Deep irony: policies to appease elderly voters and property owners only further entrench social and economic stasis.
  • Nova: "So much of the British economy... success has been in the increasing value of property. That has been the bedrock of a lot of the riches of...older generations..." ([21:31])
  • Riley: "A huge amount of this is just having to contend with an aging population... with breathtaking entitlement and hypocrisy." ([19:30])

6. Summary of Starmer's Political Style and Repression

• Nova highlights Starmer’s acceleration of repressive tools and anti-protest laws.

  • "Collapse is something that happens on its own. This is like a collapsing. You know, he's been at the Jenga block with an axe." ([27:58], Nova)
  • The hosts discuss the criminalization of property damage as terrorism under Starmer’s watch, problematizing the “liberal” aura his defenders try to maintain.

• Riley: "The Starmer project is an anti-normal project. It was all about stripping as much representation away from the non-freak part of the world as they could possibly imagine." ([28:54])

7. Exploding the Media’s "Starmer Eulogy"

• [34:15+] Riley reads and mocks Rachel Sylvester’s Observer eulogy:

  • Presenting Starmer as "neither corrupt, compromised nor crazy," the opinion is ripped apart as tone-deaf and blind to the actual sources of public anger.

  • Nova: "He's not corrupt in the…’did a bribe’ sense, but he is corrupt in the sense that he's doing all of the stuff that we've normalized…" ([39:25])

  • Riley: "Voters hate the fucking bills going up. Like, I think the voters hate it more when, like, Alfredo costs 25 quid than the Prime Minister being inauthentic." ([49:22])

• Mainstream media’s fixation on authenticity and narrative is ridiculed for missing material causes—"the stuff he did and the stuff he didn't do."

8. Technocracy, Surveillance, and the Fantasy of Digital Social Control

• Extended riff on the endless "digital ID card" obsession of the British establishment—seen as a vehicle to reduce human oversight in the name of order.
  • Nova: "It's a very techy kind of trash future... you go somewhere and because you chanted something a bit too loudly... all of the cameras follow you around..." ([47:21])

9. Reviewing the Arc of Liberal Authoritarianism

• The conversation loops back to a core thesis: current politics is defined by an uncanny, unaccountable performance of normality by self-styled technocrats.
  • Riley: "The uniparty is all about just getting the...political outcomes further and further...from what anyone fucking normal wants..." ([51:11])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Starmer's ever-shifting platform:
  "He's had more relaunches than I've had name changes." ([04:21], Nova)

• On decline of leadership tenure:
  "Eventually. Everyone gets to be prime minister for 15 minutes." ([16:14], Ben)
  "But it's the same 15 minutes, crucially." ([16:17], Nova)

• On Starmer’s lack of beliefs:
  "This is a man who had basically said...he had no interiority." ([11:25], Ben)

• On policy pivots and absence of mass support:
  "He was forced into 13 separate policy u-turns because...the agenda he was trying to advance was incredibly unpopular..." ([16:21], Riley)

• On repression under Starmer:
  "It’s the last lever that any kind of establishment has left...And, so, if you’re pulling all of them, that's one of the ones that's going to feel most natural..." ([29:33], Nova)

• On the true legacy:
  "What is Starmer's legacy? It is a country that is much like what Rishi Sunak would have governed, but about 700 days worse." ([54:07], Riley)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment / Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------| | 00:16 | Nova’s “Mank Future” cold open & comic intro | | 03:26 | Retrospective: Starmer’s endless relaunches | | 08:25 | Why people voted for Burnham, tactical voting | | 10:39 | Intransigence as the story of Starmerism | | 15:00+ | The cycle of doomed Prime Ministers | | 19:30 | Aging population and political contradictions | | 23:07 | How the far-right “solves” UK’s contradictions | | 27:58 | Authoritarian turn: criminalizing protest | | 34:15+ | Reading & roasting Rachel Sylvester’s eulogy | | 39:25+ | Authenticity, bills, and actual causes of anger | | 47:21+ | Fantasies of digital social control | | 54:07+ | Starmer's real legacy and closing thoughts |

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Comic Detours & Satirical Touches

• Extended riff on Starmer’s personality, especially his legendary lack of charisma ("world class, paradoxical inability to be authentic about the stuff he was being authentic about" – Nova, [50:03]).
• Dissection and mock reading of an AI-generated pro-Starmer poem, lampooning the cult of bland managerial “decency”.
  • "Many support him." — "Oh, dozens." ([58:19], Nova/Riley)

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Tone & Language

The episode has TRASHFUTURE's signature blend of gallows humor, irreverence, and sharply observed critique. Language is casual, often explicitly comedic, but underpinned by genuine political analysis and palpable frustration at managerial liberalism and creeping authoritarianism.

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Closing Thought

Despite the episode’s relentless satire, the message is clear: Starmer’s tenure was defined by a hollow technocracy, drifting increasingly away from popular need and democratic spirit, with his exit offering only incremental—if any—hope for meaningful change. The hosts maintain a biting skepticism toward both the outgoing and incoming orders, capturing both the absurdity and severity of the UK’s contemporary political crisis.

Transcript

[Nova]

Guys, guys, guys, guys, guys. I, I up so bad. Like, I had a cold open. I had a whole cold open planned for this episode for months. Cause I knew it was gonna happen. We all knew it was gonna happen. That Andy Burnham was gonna be.

[Ben]

I was a believer.

[Nova]

Yeah, we knew it was gonna happen. And so secretly, I have my own little initiative. And I went out and I secured for each of us, Manchester doubles. So, and it takes some time, right? It's not easy to find those. And so I spent some time scouring the streets doing some, like, real shoe leather podcasting, but I succeeded. I found exact, like the exact same, like our doppelgangers, except that they had the accents. So I'm like, obviously we didn't know when the by election was gonna be, so I was just keeping them in this storage locker in the meantime. The Trash Future Northern Campus while we waited. But the thing is, Andy, he took so long, and it took longer than any of us expected. And I mean, I had art done for this. It was gonna be beautiful. It was gonna be called Mank Future and we were gon be us and it was going to be so, so funny. And everyone would have laughed and respected us. But then the longer I waited, every time I would go in to check on them, they started getting ideas, right? They started thinking they could do what I assume is the plot of the movie, the prestige to us, right? They started thinking, well, what if it was Mank Future Forever and we could just replace them? And they had the temerity to think that you could be on a podcast in this country without coming from the southeast or one region of Canada for some reason. And so, and you know, we both, I think it's fair to say we said some things that we regretted, but I, I left them in there to cool down. And I, I, I guess I, I forgot how many small plates you need for three people? And, and they, and they died. So I'm, I'm so sorry MANK Future is cancelled for the foreseeable future. I, it's just, it can't happen now. And I, I just. We have to treat this moment with the kind of intercultural sensitivity between south and north that I think this moment demands and really sort of understand that in their culture, it's very important to say that you will never walk alone. And that's so true at this moment. So please, all flowers are gratefully received to the Trash UCHA Northern Campus Storage locker. Thank you.

[Riley]

One, two, three. Hacienda Street, Manchester, United Kingdom.

[Nova]

This is what happens when I try to do things a little bit differently.

[Riley]

They said three per person. I just heard three.

[Nova]

They told me they got bigger as they went further down the menu, but I didn't know they started that small. They were in there for a week on the peanuts.

[Riley]

We forgot to poke holes in the student housing glass window.

[Nova]

This is fucking terrible.

[Riley]

It's fucking awful.

[Nova]

Okay, well, put it in the exit surveys. Put it in the exit surveys.

[Riley]

Look, as long as Keir Starmer is still in power, we should be okay. Let me just quickly. Yeah, check.

[Nova]

It's trash future, by the way. Hello.

[Riley]

Hi, it's tf. You know what's up? When you wait for something for a long time and then it just fucking happens. Yeah.

[Nova]

Edging. Yeah, well, and it's kind of disappointing. Like, you do all the retweets that you've saved. Like, fucking Kay Burley's inexplicable. Like, one line, Starmer, comma, gone.

[Riley]

I feel like he's gonna go on holiday somewhere hot. News flash, bitch. That's here now. Yeah, yeah. No, so. So here's Starmer. I cannot believe it. After I went and counted this up, I look back at all my old notes, I looked at old news articles, and this is the definitive list. There's been 10 pledges, six first steps, five missions, two phases, three foundations, six milestones, 11 KPIs, and an eight point industrial strategy. All of which were delivered to a grateful British public over the course of eight distinct governmental relaunches.

[Nova]

He was.

[Riley]

He's done, folks.

[Nova]

He's had more relaunches than I've had name changes. He's sadly folding up the Kanban boards and taking it home. I. Yeah, just brutal, brutal scenes, y'.

[Riley]

All. You have drafted your last minute there, partner.

[Nova]

And it has been a coronation. Right? Like West Racing, our last hope for southeastern English representation in government has clearly been promised a job. I mean, he claims not. He claims he talked to Andy and they talked about their ideas. So presumably that question was, what ideas do you want in my government? So we look forward to that, I guess. But now, unless they can find 81 MPs willing to write in, I want Al Khan's from army to be my dad. It's just going to be completely unopposed. Like a walk for Burnham.

[Riley]

If you're a smart Labor MP right now, you're going to want to, like, lose to him graciously. Yeah.

[Nova]

I mean, very, very, very, very funny. To do the Al Khan's thing to be like, yeah, Day one of the new government. I want to get on the new Prime Minister's sh by pledging my undying loyalty to Progeria Action Man.

[Ben]

Well, maybe this is what we need to do because there's obviously no guarantee that this is the solution. If anything, I'm sort of interested to see when the dial starts shifting for Andy. So we can be the number one Al Khan's podcast in the sense of endorsing Al Khanz.

[Nova]

Do you think we can get him on? I mean, I did just say he was in the army a couple of times, so he's gonna twist my head off like a fucking thing of string cheese.

[Ben]

Yeah, but we get in early, we get in his good books and then we eventually become the official sort of podcast for the government.

[Nova]

Right, interesting. After the coup. Yeah. Okay, we get. You're listening. You're not listening to Mank Future or Trash future. You're listening to regime future.

[Riley]

Oh, yeah. We could. Instead of like engaging with and criticizing this sort of ongoing Manchester countrywide decade under Prime Minister for Life Burnham, instead, what we're going to do is we're going to be the voice of the dozens of people who are the Karnes Bros who are crying for carnes.

[Nova]

Everyone who deeply in their heart of hearts believes that they could have been a Royal Marines commando, but like, you know, just ah, the facts, the facts got in the way. But I could have done it. We can be those people's weedy nasal adenoidal voice.

[Riley]

I'm ready for everyone listening instead of have a parasocial relationship with me to think of me as a kind of adjutant. I think that's pretty good.

[Nova]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Riley]

So Keir Starmer is gone. This is because if you're not in Britain, Andy Burnham, who we mentioned before, a man who is not the guy, won the Makerfield by election last week with 54.8% of the votes. Handily.

[Nova]

Handily. It turns out time and again that people will vote tactically to keep Reform out because they're obvious weirdos.

[Riley]

Which Reform's share of the vote was lower because also, like, they ran a Facebook commenter. What do you expect? Like, yes, 30% of our society are irredeemably fucked, right? These are living tweet replies to Elon Musk. These are living cry laugh emojis. You can't get to. I don't know how to get to them. I don't know how to de. Radicalize them, but they are really off putting.

[Nova]

There is a good. The other good news there is that there is a slight, although less than was sometimes made of it split between the people in that group who vote for reform and the people in that group who are so cooked they vote for restore. So that shaved off another 7% but it wouldn't have made a difference in the end. Now I think it helps a lot that reforms. Guy love to say things like I

[Riley]

hate women because there are so many women out there.

[Nova]

Yeah, it's true. And unfortunately a thing of women is a lot of us quite like the sort of reform terrible policies but like delivered in a nice way, you know. And instead all of these people really seem to enjoy the sort of performative cruelty that alienates a lot of like would be racists.

[Riley]

Which by the way is largely when we do. Because this episode I guess wasn't originally intended to be but has sort of turned into a bit of a retrospective on the Starmer.

[Nova]

Yeah, let's see your best bets.

[Riley]

Yeah, this is the Starmer clip show. Just go. It starts with him gendering Israel as a woman. This is his. His number one single.

[Nova]

Yeah, gendering Israel as a woman, not gendering me as a woman. Like basic stuff.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's one in, one out. But like that, that strategy you described, Nova, that's the one that he has been from day one of his premiership using, which is, well, we're all going to go for that 30% of the country who are, you know, largely who are biggest addled by the computer and we are going to go after them by promising, by sort of joining and in almost all major parties, some exceptions. Chorus of promising to campaign against the lives and well being of the 70% of us who are comparatively regular. It is. It has been the political tendency of pandering to freaks that has it. It has gone on now for like seven prime ministers and it is and again is Andy Burnham's projection of I'm a normal guy and won't pander to the freaks going to survive 10 minutes of contact with the corrosive surface of the British establishment.

[Nova]

It already hasn't. He's already folded like a. He's already folded like Keir Starmer's Kanban board on trans people. The most obvious kind of culture war third rail now.

[Riley]

Exactly. He's folding on that. He's folding on like defense and welfare spending. So he appears to have convictions that are kind of no stronger. Let's see how they survive office, which they won't, I presume. They won't. But we want to talk about Starmer.

[Nova]

Yeah, sure, by all means.

[Riley]

As you said, Nova, this is something that you said that stuck with me. Starmer's basically been in a room with a service revolt around a belt of whiskey pretty much for a year. Like, he. It's not like this crisis forced him out. He's been a dead man walking for more time than he hasn't been a dead man walking. There is no way he could have relaunched his way out of this one, except by actually fundamentally changing what he was doing, which he wasn't going to do.

[Nova]

No, no. I think the main story of Starmerism is going to be one of intransigence. Right. I think that's particularly the sort of like, kicking his feet and dragging his heels in on resigning. I thought it was sort of weird that this is already being misremembered sort of deliberately as, like, oh, he was very sort of collegial and very dignified in the way he stepped down. He came out looking like had been weeping and then I think, like, read the entire lyrics of Death Grips Fuck a Bitch off of a printout from genius.com he had brought and then, like, went back in and started audibly crying again. So I don't know what's collegial about that.

[Ben]

God. I think he should do, like, film and music reviews, like, post, Ooh. But that would require him to walk. Because I was going to say my favorite memory of Keir Starmer is when he told the Guardian that he didn't have dreams. I think that was the thing that's really stuck with me. This is a man who had basically said in one of his first interviews as he was about to become Prime Minister, that he had no interiority. And I don't know whether that's actually whether he told us the thing and we just chose to sort of ignore it. Right. And so, as a result, you had nearly two years of like, oh, why does this man not stand for anything? Why does this man not believe anything? And he says, okay, he's told you because he doesn't have any interiority. Like, he just. He is. He is intransigent. Right?

[Riley]

Yeah. If he did, he burned all of it away for this. It was for this. That every. If he ever believed anything, every compromise he made, every promise that he's never going to watch a film or read a book or have any kind of humanity beyond the kind of fake humanity that's performed in claiming your father was a toolmaker, any of that spirit has been utterly scorched out of him.

[Nova]

I mean, some of it is just like believing that he should be Prime Minister because he should be the one to have the access and the status. Right. And seriousness. Even when everyone else is laughing at him, even when he's picking up Donald Trump's papers, even when Donald Trump is announcing his resignation before he does in a final cuckolding. And it's just now, I guess, he has sort of like very, very good money for life and, you know, presumably. Yeah, I think so.

[Riley]

Think about this, though. Starmer's out of government, right. Finally he's free of his bad boyars.

[Nova]

Yeah. That's why he did the death grips thing. Couldn't have done that if he was staying.

[Riley]

Yeah. So he could finally be that sort of liberal statesman that sort of. The press imagined him and still imagines him to be. So I have. Rachel Sylvester from the observer has written him a particularly odious political eulogy that I intend to sort of form the back half of this episode. But look at what the previous like seven prime ministers of the UK actually did. Cameron tried to get the country involved in a pyramid scheme with his Greensill involvement. Theresa May is a campaigner against modern slavery, which is a condition that she facilitated with her hostile environment policy. Liz Truss seems to be speaking to empty rooms at CPAC and trying to franchise CPAC London.

[Nova]

I love her. She's so fucking cool.

[Riley]

Yeah. Boris Johnson's just a columnist again. Sunak is just working, doing what he would have done already. He's working in tech.

[Nova]

Yeah, but you don't see them, like begging for change, do you? Like, he's gonna get some kind of like, board position at Mishkandaraya or something?

[Riley]

Maybe, but I don't know.

[Nova]

Do you think he's like, fucked himself so badly that he's actively unemployable, even in the higher an ex prime minister states?

[Ben]

No, no. I feel like he'll stay on as an MP for like a little bit, but I think you're right. He'll take on some sort of like, honorary position at a law firm because he's like, you know, he's like a kc.

[Nova]

Right.

[Ben]

So actually he has more kind of avenues, I suppose, to sort of like move on. And I think also just this ide, the fact that the commentaria had been willing to sort of give him these kind of nice send offs. Right. This sort of sends, you know, the summary I've kind of gotten is, oh, this is a man who tried his best and, you know, lots of different forces kind of like prevented him from achieving kind of moderate change or whatever. I kind of think that Rachel Reeves is fucked more than anything else.

[Nova]

Well, she's staying Supposedly it'll be interesting

[Ben]

to sort of see where she goes

[Nova]

but like not to her sister's birthday party.

[Ben]

That's right. Well, ninja in terms of like someone who I imagine probably had political ambitions and that was very much dependent on Keir. I imagine she is probably more pissed than anyone else.

[Riley]

She has defunded her last hospital perhaps.

[Nova]

Unless she wants to start doing it like recreationally.

[Riley]

What just like do what you love. You never work a day in your life. Yeah. But like you're thinking, just want to think about like everyone since Cameron. Right.

[Ben]

Well they're all. Yeah, they're all victims of Steve Bray.

[Riley]

Yeah, they're all being deafened by Steve Bray. Starmer was in office for a 100 days more than Sunak who is in office for 570 days more than Truss who was in office and then Johnson was in office for about a thousand days, May. About a thousand days. Like it's the amount of time that our political system can stomach. Someone being in charge of it is getting shorter. It's getting. It's because May and John's about a thousand days trust. Don't worry about it. Sunak and Starmer both around like 6, 700 days. If these trends continue, we will within the next several years. We could see a double event.

[Ben]

Eventually. Everyone gets to be prime minister for 15 minutes.

[Nova]

But it's the same 15 minutes, crucially.

[Riley]

Yeah. And it's like I know this is a Tory attack line but it's also straightforwardly factual. He was forced into like 13 separate policy u turns because the agenda he was trying to advance was incredibly unpopular. I mean, I think you can safely say he was elected by a very narrow, loose coalition and he governed without one entirely. There was no, there's nobody. This was actually for. It was for some people's benefit but they didn't like it. You could say it was to try to maintain the sort of social structure of Britain where our living standards are intimately connected to like the global financial markets and the bond markets in particular and are based on pleasing them.

[Nova]

Yeah. And a sort of certain sort of establishment residue I guess that prioritizes things like sort of like forms of democracy and stuff.

[Riley]

I guess it's residue. That's what it is. It is, it is the whole premiership and I think probably the premiership of Burnham as well. Unless he takes off his mask and reveals a different flat capped man.

[Nova]

As much as he is trying to come in being like Mr. Muscle, just like I'm gonna sort of get rid of the last of this residue right. No, absolutely not. It's gonna be the same in that sense.

[Riley]

It's because, look, Starmer's premiership, I think is a natural experiment in what it means to run any country without any actual constituency really at all, or any. Without any mass cons constituency certainly. And I think that all of these prime ministers from fucking Theresa May on, Cameron on even, they've been symptoms of this institutional lag that these institutions and institutions broadly here, whether that's first past the post, whether that's the various great offices of state, whether that's the idea that Britain should be a globally important country, whatever the fuck that means, whether or like the idea of controlling our borders. These cliches that just swim around, they are hangovers, they are decaying, they're not being updated. They are producing leaders who are trying to govern them while they're falling apart. You pull a lever on the British state and There's a pretty 5% chance it breaks off and you have to find another lever and you have to keep pulling that until it breaks off. And at this point there have been seven Prime Ministers recently who've just been pulling fucking levers until they pull them off and the whole thing is just falling apart.

[Nova]

Of all of them, you have to say he's the least charismatic.

[Riley]

At least Truss was fun. At least she had some chaos to it.

[Nova]

Yeah, Trust was a sort of more interesting experiment because it's like, what if we give these sort of howling economic rightists everything they want and watch them fuck it up? Everybody else has been kind of much of a muchness. Obviously Johnson has had his sort of chaos and everything, but no, I mean, Starmer has just tried, he tried to do the Mr. Rules thing and it became in the minds of your sort of brain pride grandparents, some kind of like anti white jihadist who was determined not only to take their winter fuel allowance away, but also to give it

[Riley]

to immigrants and TAFE should have done it.

[Nova]

I mean, yeah, this is one of the problems. As much as we talk about jerk off motion about Britain being ungovernable, a huge amount of this is just having to contend with an aging population that authentically needs a lot of social care. Some of them need winter fuel allowance, but also has a breathtaking entitlement and hypocrisy about what they think the government should be doing to them. Witness the whole WASPy women thing, right? So yeah, you have to sort of make up that somehow, right? And if you, if you don't, then they're going to decide that actually maybe Tommy Robinson was Right. All along.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Because it's going to be this thing where we have wave election after wave election after wave election until someone who is either someone who will sweep away the sort of falling apart institutions of this country will arrive and that person will either be Hitlerite or a moderate Social Democrat.

[Nova]

Or consider this. Think of the illustration of Napoleon at St. Cyr with the shadow cast behind him of the great man that's Al Khan's. Right.

[Ben]

Now, I was going to say what you've basically described as sort of like British Shiism in the sense we're waiting for the hidden Prime Minister. And the hidden Prime Minister is either going to be Hitlerite or it's going to be Al Khan's, or it's going to be like the most average guy that you know, and he's just like, huh, maybe we should just make the trains a bit cheaper.

[Nova]

I wasn't expecting the hidden Imam to have been a Marine, but sure, I

[Riley]

guess, like, I mean, it's truly the reason we keep changing leaders is not is because this machinery, it's not that the country is ungovernable, it's that the machinery to govern it is broken.

[Nova]

Yeah. It's because we keep trying things that we know don't work work, because we refuse to imagine anything different either. Because something different would be so horrifying that it's like automatically the big genocide switch or it's too nice for us and we don't think that we actually deserve free bus travel and that type of shit is the way Hamas is going or whatever.

[Ben]

Well, this is it. What we're sort of dealing with is just kind of, once you're sort of in the job, confronting all the sort of conflicts and contradictions of British politics at a much harder scale. Because I think to a certain extent, obviously they've always been there, there, but we had things to paper over those contradictions for a long time. So we had low interest rates and we had access to the European Union and we had this sort of services economy where you could perform a lot of tricks in order to make it appear to be a lot more successful than it actually was. And also so much of the British economy in terms of its relative success has been in the increasing value of property. Right. That has been able to sort of like, you know, not only been the bedrock of a lot of, like the, the riches of the, you know, older generations who are now going to sort of become the British jihadists, but also, like, you know, it's been, you know, any sort of time, like during the early austerity debates where it became very apparent that, oh, like, there is a lot of inequality in this country and there is a lot of poverty. That basically kind of like, gets hidden how easily that was dismissed by everything else, Right? But now we've reached the stage where you can't really must go for that. The idea of, like, say, being, you know, trying to celebrate, like, a 1% growth of the British economy is laughable, right? It is completely, you know, the fact that, like, 1%.

[Riley]

Oh, we'd kill for 1% and we'd kill for.

[Ben]

We'd kill for 1%. We've sort of been like, you know, averaging at sort of like 0.3, 0.4 for quite a long time. And, you know, the question is, it's like, well, can a political leader be able, like, can they sort of resolve those contradictions? And, like, they can, but they can either do it in a good way or they can do it in a bad way. And what the interesting thing sort of about reform is that they actually have a solution to the problem. It's just that their solution is fuck them kids and fuck anyone under 40. Our constituency are kind of like all these sort of property types who will let us do the British jihad against immigrants and leftists and people that we just don't like. What is the sort of. What is the kind of left answer to this? There are certain kind of propositions from the Green Party and within the various sort of conversations and groups on the left side of politics. But I think the question that Andy Burnham then has to answer and whether he will be able to do this is very much like the question that will, you know, shadow his, like, a thousand days until he's booted out as well, is like, okay, well, can you do the thing to sort of like, resolve the contradictions? And that might have. That might mean kind of giving the pensioners a bad time or giving like, you know, the Gen Xs and the boomers and stuff, like a bad time by sort of telling them that, hey, like, your entire life has sort of been built on these sort of. On, like, false accounting.

[Nova]

You might have to give the bond markets a hard time, even. And that's the thing that did for Liz Truss. So scary, scary times. Keir Starmer, on the other hand, does not have to worry about any of this because he is beachside in Mystique with Julia Fox.

[Ben]

That's right.

[Riley]

Forgot about that. And it's not as though this machine is just stopping, breaking down.

[Nova]

Oh, yeah, that's the title of that song.

[Riley]

Yeah. Because right now, at the time of recording, Britain is now London and Southeast especially are in enduring four days of like dangerous heat, like wet bulb kill you temperature. And are you going to be able. Is anybody, Is any, any of these people, are they going to be able to confront these problems?

[Nova]

Yeah, we, we laugh at Manchester and their small plates restaurants now, but when the columns of refugees come up the motorway and they turn the machine guns on us, you know, then they'll have their revenge.

[Riley]

Right, Ben? And we know that Burnham is kind of in an empty tweed suit.

[Nova]

He's not even a suit guy. Like, part of me sort of wonders, given that he's established this as a mayor. And I sort of hope that he does. If he doesn't do like a kind of John Fetterman, Volodymyr Zelenskyy thing of like, oppositionally refusing to wear a suit to make some kind of a point the whole time. Like, do you think he's gonna wear the fucking Harrington jacket to meet Trump? God, he's gonna have to meet Trump. He's gonna hang. He's gonna have to out hang, hang out with him. You think Trump's gonna make of a guy who's gonna talk to him about the Hacienda?

[Riley]

Yeah, he's gonna show up in a bucket hat. Cool. Yeah. You know what? I'll take it over what we had.

[Nova]

I mean, Trump comprehends a club guy at the least, right?

[Riley]

That's true. Yeah. You have a common language. But what we've seen right, around Burnham is you've seen these policies swirling around him of people saying, well, he's gonna continue the sensible Starmer crackdowns on the

[Nova]

people, you know, wanking trannies, all the cool stuff that we.

[Riley]

The usual stuff.

[Nova]

Yeah, sure. Young people existing in public, migrants. Yeah.

[Riley]

He'll continue to fund our, let's say, allies in the Middle East.

[Nova]

Oh, those scamps.

[Riley]

Yeah. Those rascals. What are they up to? We'll talk about that maybe a little on Thursday.

[Nova]

Certainly they've never been up to anything in Manchester because that would be a particularly galling piece of hypocrisy.

[Riley]

Yeah, but the nationalization of utilities, right, well, he's going to say, oh, public control over utilities, whatever that means. Right. Is someone who is willing to make that many compromises going to be materially different from Keir Starmer? Is he going to confront that? The actual state is fucked.

[Nova]

Here's the thing, of course not. But for the moment, we have so many people whose job sometimes is to know better, lining up to get wallet inspected. Because the vibes are different now. Right. It's the same thing that Americans saw with Biden as well.

[Riley]

Starmer was a Vibes project. He was continuity Sunak. It's all Vibes projects because there is no way to steer this car. Or rather you have to get a different car.

[Nova]

I'm turning the big vibes dial left and right.

[Riley]

And I think it's worth also just going back, I think, to our Starmer reminiscences. Right. Is to remember also that everybody who's saying, oh, Starmer was a liberal who was defeated by interest groups. He, he was never able to be himself authentically, which we'll get to.

[Nova]

You say that he kicked the shit out of my interest group. I got to be honest, I got to hand him the W on that. Like, my interest group absolutely got our asses handed to us.

[Riley]

And before we go, I go to the Rachel Sylvester eulogy, which I think is really what this whole thing hangs on is I do want to briefly talk about like the, I would say a collapse of civil liberties under his government.

[Nova]

Well, collapse is something that happens on its own. This is like a collapsing. You know, he's been at the Jenga block with an axe.

[Riley]

Yeah. So there are four, four of the protesters at the elbit factory. They have been convicted of property damage, damage by a jury. And due to a series of changes in counterterrorism legislation and sentencing legislation, a judge was able to decide that property damage is terroristic property damage. And this predates Starmer. But it's a role that he played gleefully and it is an agenda he advanced quite effectively, actually.

[Nova]

All the stuff about prescribing Palestine action in the first place, or David Lammy trying to abolish jury trials. The key thing with the terrorism motivation thing is that the jury didn't know ahead of time that if they convicted them they could be like sentenced on the basis of like terrorist motivation.

[Riley]

No normal person would do that because the Starmer project is a pro, is an anti normal project. This is why it was so uncanny. It was projected these normal or vibes that they felt were normal. Right. We are. We are regular humans. I'm a pebble dash semi. My house was a tool. I grew up in a toolmaker. It was actually all about stripping as much representation away from the non freak part of the world as they could possibly imagine. And getting rid of jury trials so that you could sentence four people who committed property damage as terrorists is a perfect example of a utter like freak coalition. An elite freak Coalition.

[Nova]

It's the last lever that like any kind of establishment has to have left is the repressed one. It's the one that has to work, right? And, and so if you're pulling all of them, that's one of the ones that's going to feel most natural to you.

[Riley]

So these four people, Samuel Corner, Charlotte Head, Leona Camille and Fatima Rajwani, are now going to be jailed for many years for property damage. They are going to have to have huge restrictions on their travel, opening a bank account, getting a job. They're basically going to have to, they have to more or less walk around for the rest of their lives wearing a big sign that says ask me about my terrorism conviction.

[Nova]

Yeah, it's like shit that, you know, it has become sort of like a famous example of like the Soviet Union's human rights abuses, right? That is something that we're just kind of casually doing, just in the open. Are we allowed to say, Ethan, that we think that this is bad? Are we allowed to say that they're good people? Are we allowed to admire them? Are we allowed to say that we think the convictions and sentences are wrong? I don't actually legally know the answer to any of those. And that's part of the thing is this is a real exploitation of ambiguity, right, because most people are not human rights lawyers, right? Most people do not know where the line is because there's been a kind of comfortable liberal assumption that you shouldn't have to know exactly where the line is, that you should be able to broadly express these things and it should be sort of like, you know, fair game within a sort of civil society to not have to be looking over your shoulder for the police kicking your door in over it. And, and in this case, not only do we not know, but it suddenly matters that you don't know because that could happen.

[Riley]

And this is also just before we get onto the eulogy here, this is a colossal inversion of UK's ordinary habits around sentencing, right? There's this long standing principle that you treat conscientious direct action. I think this is sort of like people remembering the suffragettes basically as they did a lot of shit, but it turns out they were quite correct. It took a long while for them for people to get that way. But nevertheless, conscientious direct action gets treated more leniently than like ordinary criminality, whatever that means. But the conscientiousness of this activity is now being treated as an aggravating factor. And that's again, this is like a legacy of what Starmer's government has done. It has pushed this over the line. It has flipped. It has made that change. It has made the uk, in just that one example, in terms of, like, free speech, a profoundly less liberal country. Liberal in a small l. For the sake of. Of that 30% of people who still think that he's going to put Hamas in their garden shed.

[Nova]

Also, crucially, all of this stuff interacts systemically in sort of predictable ways. How to phrase this delicately. It's now so illegal to express support for Palestine action that I don't even know if I'm allowed to say whether or not I feel bad for not having said that. I do. And getting arrested. Right. And these things tie in together because one good reason not to say that, for instance, might be because you are transgender and you will get sent to a male prison because you said that. Or another one might be because there exists this far right international that will like, dox you and destroy your entire life because of it. Or there exists this sort of, like, radicalized network of freaks who will just take a machete into the streets and start attacking Muslims at random because. Because of these same sorts of narratives. So all of these things tie together. And when people say the country is ungovernable, or people even before this were talking about UK aesthetics or things like that, they're picking up on a kind of air of misery because they don't want to actually be specific about all of the things that are making this so frightening and miserable a time.

[Riley]

And the whole Starmer project, just thinking in terms of a retrospect perspective, is looking at that tendency and saying, well, that's natural. I suppose we have to accommodate it. Let's accommodate that as much as we possibly can.

[Nova]

Yeah, let's help it. If anything, we should be sort of like this sort of like, far right grouping that hates us and fantasizes often about our assassination, is our ally in terrifying the absolute shit out of not just the left wing, but even your kind of squishy lib who thinks that prescribing a campaign pain group is a bad thing to do and would like to sort of, you know, protest that on its own merits.

[Riley]

Yeah, no, no, no. Definitely that 30%. They're going to multiply. I assume they're not just going to die. They're not just going to die at a higher rate than everybody else because they're all fucking ancient. But with all this in mind, I want to look at Rachel Sylvester's eulogy to the man, the myth, the relaunch, the Headline Starmer was neither corrupt, compromise nor crazy em dash but his failure to cut through was profound. The deep public hostility to the behavior him is still hard to explain. I don't think it's that hard to explain.

[Nova]

No, no. A lot of people got their brains cooked and like started like the winter fuel allowance thing comes up time and time and again. But I think you've seen a lot of vox pops, people who were affected by that taking the extra step that they've been sort of like invited to by a very well oiled machine and going I knew when he did that u turn on the winter fuel allowance that he was a secret Muslim who hated white people.

[Riley]

And I think there's like we talk about the original sin being the winter fuel allowance but I think you could say more broadly it's, it's even then the winter fuel allowance is almost much of a muchness. It's the original sin is coming back into office thinking that there are things that the British government does for the people who live here that you can just get rid of because the state is too large in some respect. Respect, yeah.

[Nova]

It's also interesting as well because the stuff that these people profess to want the British government to do, they don't care whether or not it does like net migration. This is something that Starmer acolytes will tout as being a sort of like the people are so irrational, right, because they don't care about this. But they will say that because they're proud that he did this. It's an evil thing to have done. Starmer successfully made this place on his own through a bunch of factors so hostile and so shit that net migration is down basically to zero. And all of the people who were most exercised about net migration being like too high of a number, do not give a fuck. Because it was never about numbers to them. It was always about race, it was always about racism. And they want the opportunity to do more racism. So you can't sort of wonk your way out of this with these people. And there was this kind of determination that maybe, maybe if we sort of accept the premises and we do the kind of like homework enough, if we do our racism homework, work hard enough, then these people will see the light. And it just never came true and it never will and it won't for Andy Burnham either.

[Riley]

Well, it's like getting rolled by a pool hustler and then feeling, then feeling smug that you beat him the first time.

[Ben]

What's quite interesting to me though is also like a lot of this is anecdotal, but at the same time it's like, I don't think there's like an insubstantial number of people who would probably like, remember Keir Starmer sort of going on to LBC and basically saying, yeah, like the Israeli can absolutely starve and basically kill Palestinians. Right. He said that very directly. And I understand that there was a whole sort of attempt to kind of get him to walk back from that without really walking back from it, attempt to sort of play multiple sides. But the fact that that also isn't recognized, I think is so telling in terms of this kind of being less about Keir Starmer and his legacy and much more to do with how. How the sort of people who are paid to cover politics, but increasingly also kind of dictate its terms and sort of paint at least present the parameters in which APM is allowed to kind of govern what they are willing to pay attention to and what they are simply not willing to pay attention to. And the fact that in lots of cases, I think in recent British politics, whether it's sort of like by elections or council elections or this, the complete refusal to sort of acknowledge that there is a fairly high percentage of people in this country who look at what happened in the Middle east and seen what's happened in Gaza and that it has impacted their politics, it has impacted the way that they see the world. And these people just completely refuse to even acknowledge that those people exist. I guess it also relates back to the people who have been arrested and have been declared to be terrorists for their direct action. This also being either the lack of interest or the complete dismissal of it also being a complete dismissal of the British involvement in Gaza and our sort of responsibility in regards to what has happened and what continues to happen.

[Riley]

Basically what we're saying is the reason that Keir Starmer was unpopular is the stuff he did and the stuff he didn't do. Yeah.

[Nova]

Maybe it was the sort of video and audio of him saying, yeah, I think Israel has the right to do a genocide.

[Riley]

Well, Rachel Sylvester is going to give an alternative answer.

[Ben]

Okay.

[Riley]

A different answer to the question, why did Starmer fail? That is, well, his failure. Why didn't he cut through? Cut through. Fucking talking about cut through. Keir Starmer did not accept £5 million from a foreign based crypto billionaire like Farage or hold parties in Downing street like Boris Johnson or crash the economy like Liz Truss.

[Ben]

Skill issue.

[Nova]

Yeah, I'm sorry, he didn't have friends. Apart from one guy who kept giving Him. Clothes.

[Riley]

The outgoing Prime Minister is neither corrupt, compromised nor crazy. The deep public hostility to him is actually hard to explain. And in many ways it's unfair.

[Nova]

He's. I mean, this is the thing. He's not corrupt in. In the sense that like, no, he's not doing any of that shit, but he is corrupt in the sense that he's doing all of the stuff that we've normalized and which he clearly loves. Right? All the stuff that we've decided is okay for a Prime Minister to do. Like taking the fucking box seats at the Emirates. He loves that shit. He can't get enough of it.

[Riley]

And also, is it compromised? Okay, well, he might not be compromised by. In the same way, like he took a bribe and now he owes someone a. Although, you know, God knows that's the way to get close to him is just to buy influence. Because his whole fucking, like the whole of the PLP is former lobbyists. Right? He's not compromised in that way, but like you say, nova. He's compromised in a way that we think is perfectly fine. Because the whole point of Starmerism is not like steady Ming vas strategy of cautious change. No, it is a huge removal of what happens in this country from the people who are living in it. It is an absolute dictatorship of freaks. But I'll move on. Some point the winter fuel allowance cut is the original sin. Others highlight the botched welfare reform or the decision to accept free glasses. Fuck off. That's not what it was. No. As well, MPs criticize Starmer's failure to quote, tell a story, or highlight his lack of charisma. Or say he's been a terrible judge of character in making appointments. God, with friends like these, huh?

[Nova]

What are you. Hey. There were a couple of anonymous Labour sources texting in the run after the resignation, being like, I can't stop crying. So there were a few people left in the Stalmer bunker with it.

[Riley]

Steiner's counterattack, I'm sure, will be around any moment to head off Burnham's journey down the Avanti West Coast.

[Nova]

Mein Fuhrer, the rules based international order has failed to stop the 1309 Avanti from Manchester Piccadilly.

[Riley]

I think the real problem was more profound. Starmer could never properly explain why he wanted to be Prime Minister. In fact, it was always unclear whether he really knew himself. There was no irreducible core to his premiership or governing project around which everyone could unite again. That's where you're wrong. There was a governing project.

[Nova]

The motive was also very clear. He had this sort of boundless entitlement to it of like, I worked very hard. And now sort of like in the aftermath of this, we saw him sort of like leak about how betrayed he felt. Right. By Andy Burnham and the Labour Party to which he had given so much of his life. And he had missed seeing years of his kids growing up and shit like that. It's like, no, you chose to do that. You just can't sort of admit to yourself that you wanted it. He's going to be on the beach in Mystique with Julia Fox and he's going to finally have the sort of Walter White realization that it was for him.

[Riley]

Yeah. It's like. And the idea that, oh, it was unclear whether he really knew himself. No. He wanted to govern Britain in such a way that it would be removed from the people who he considered to be dangerous to it, which happened to be the vast majority of the people who live here.

[Nova]

Crushed the left. Like that was what he was there to do. And it's kind of what he was

[Riley]

relatively successful at doing, despite a belated radicalism that saw the government announcing a ban on social media for under 16s.

[Nova]

I forgot we even did that. Yeah. No wanking, no trannies, no young people anywhere. No posting.

[Riley]

Yeah, this is. To me, this is the Starm Reich equivalent of Hitler going, maybe we can find the Lance of Longinus and that'll turn this thing around.

[Nova]

So.

[Riley]

And promising to get closer to Europe again. Promising in any real sense. No, absolutely not.

[Nova]

That's going to continue as well. Yeah. Which not to get too wooferendom, but like a, you know, vast majority of voters would be like 60 something percent would take free movement again in exchange for closer ties to the eu, which is the funniest fucking. I told you'd. So anyway, any liberal could possibly wish for is to be like, you guys are so racist that you started getting immigration from outside of Europe instead of immigration in between Europe and now you want back in again.

[Riley]

Yeah. I mean, again, Rachel Sylvester cannot see it. No eulogy would be able to print it because they would have to tell the truth. Which is the Starmer Project, in addition to being an absolute freak political project, was the brainchild of political extremists like Morgan McSweeney who was a political extremist. Right. It is of like a kind of anti liberal from the right political extremist that likes to pretend that not only we on this podcast and to varying degrees and like the people who listen to us don't exist or are dangerous and need to be pushed out of public life. But that even people who might appreciate a led by donkeys projection on like Parliament or whatever, that those people are also dangerous extremists and need to be pushed out of place public life.

[Nova]

I mean, I, I, I also think that of them, but from the other side,

[Riley]

no projecting on Parliament at all. No images.

[Nova]

You cannot depict Al Khan's.

[Riley]

You know, you have to depict him somehow as just a human salute. But Starmer too often seemed to have his foot on the brake when the electorate wanted the country to accelerate towards change. But again, the country did change. It did change. You can't protest anymore, really. You can't really be trans. You can't go on the Internet if you're under 16.

[Nova]

That shirtless guy with a machete hacking up Uber eats drivers in Edinburgh. Like that's a change.

[Riley]

Yeah, the general, like the fact that we just have a summer campaigning season for far right rioters. That's a change. Right? The country did change. A lot of people fucking hated it. Because they're people that you pretended and your whole political project was designed around pretend pretending don't exist that will vote for you anyway, that you don't need to court. And it's what led you to being the least prompt popular prime minister as long as records have been kept because you actively tried. The whole point was to govern without a popular constituency. And that's what this looks like. So his government was defined by incrementalism. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. It just wasn't.

[Nova]

I mean, it made, it made things incrementally worse.

[Riley]

Yeah, because it did not dare press ahead with necessary transformation in so many ideas from welfare reform, social care, education or digitalization id. There was always plenty of analysis about the past.

[Nova]

Oh, it's always the fucking ID cards with these people is they're gonna try and make Burnham do them as well. And when, when it founders in the same way that it always has because everyone hates them, it's gonna be like Andy Burnham has finally, you know, gotten his comeuppance at the hands of, I don't know, someone even more northern, maybe even a woman this time, if we can imagine that. And it will be because he didn't take the digital ID card seriously.

[Riley]

He was not able to extend Mac card to the nation.

[Nova]

Yeah, because all of this Blairite sort of fixation on the digital ID cards is okay, making you sort of put in your whole passport details every time you go on the computer. That's a start, right? That's a good start because it means it's illegal to at them. Right. And the police will be visiting you if you at your MP enough times about Palestine. And enough times is a very small number. But the real step from this is they want the power to demand, like, you know, name and CLP of people in public doing anything that they don't like or that they deem antisocial. And you need digital ID cards to do that and you need the MET to have facial recognition. And we can only really do one of those, you know.

[Riley]

Yeah, the idea is always right, that the project isn't wrong, it's just being delivered wrong. Digital ID could fix the whole thing. The right kinds of powers for police could fix the whole thing thing. If we just woo the right, then we can get on with delivering all of the improvements that we want. Right? That's the. That again goes back to the fatal flaw that's killed all of. It's taken all of these prime ministers down, which is that nobody likes the system that they're running. Everybody hates it. Nobody likes it.

[Nova]

Weirdly, it doesn't seem from like. It seems to be idealized as having no human involved at any point. It's a very techy kind of trash future. Right. Like, the idea here is, I think these people genuinely want a kind of twee minority report where, you know, you go somewhere and because you chanted something a bit too loudly at a process like 17 years ago, all of the cameras follow you around. Or like the fucking changing rooms at M and S are like geo fenced based on your immutable sex markers that the NHS assigned you at birth or some shit like that. And no one has to be involved involved in administering any of this. We all just, like live under it forever. All watched over by machines of loving grace or whatever.

[Riley]

And she goes on, he hated politics. Get a different job. Yeah, well, I guess he's gonna have to now.

[Nova]

It's like what they say, do what you hate and you'll work every day of your life apart from weekends.

[Riley]

He hated politics, so he subcontracted all the strategists like Morgan McSweeney, who gave him a harder edge on immigration and environment in Europe. Which, again, people like, this is a

[Nova]

rare sort of Martin Bailey argument here of shit czar bad boyars.

[Riley]

It's like, okay, Morgan McSweeney gave him a harder edge on these things that, again, they fetishize making unpopular decisions. That's another reason that they're so hated.

[Nova]

Shaking the fleas off. If you don't like the changes I've made. There's the door. You can leave.

[Riley]

Okay, well, uno, reverse card. Starmer, you can leave.

[Nova]

Doing the Assad finger point thing. That gets funnier the longer Assad's been out of power.

[Riley]

I think as a result, Starmer found himself to be pretending to be something he was not. He read out a speech suggesting that Britain was turning into an island of strangers. He never believed it, but he thought that is what he had to say to win.

[Nova]

Oh, that's convenient. Okay, sure, that's. That's sure.

[Riley]

Again, the issue that Sylvester describes, this is the nub of it. This is like the. This is her belief. This is why he failed. It meant he came across as inauthentic. And there's nothing voters hate more. There it is.

[Nova]

I think voters hate the fucking bills going up. Like, I think the voters hate it more when, like, Alfredo costs 25 quid than the Prime Minister being inauthentic.

[Riley]

Voters also, if you make a case for immigration, like it. Right, yeah. Turns out voters like public services. Also. People like, people move. You can never stop people moving. They will just move. And you can make that a crueler and more depressing system or you can make it something else. But the idea that the problem is he was in. It didn't matter what he did. It's that what he did and who he was didn't match. As opposed to. No, everyone hated everything that he did. What he did was shitty and people hated it.

[Nova]

Now, I will grant that Keir Starmer had a kind of world class, like, paradoxical inability to be authentic about the stuff he was being authentic about. Like, I think about this very often. It's like a bit of an old saw at this point that, like, Keir Starmer likes football. He's liked football his whole life. He plays football recreationally. He enjoys going to see Arsenal. Anytime he talks about football, it's like he's getting lines through an earpiece, right? Or when he talks about, like his dad being a toolmaker, right? His dad actually is a fucking toolmaker. Or was. Right? But he felt he had to do that as a show of authenticity. And so this authentic thing became authentic with a capital A. And people saw through it, right? So it's just this kind of curse, but it doesn't matter. It wouldn't matter. You could have that kind of like, weird, like, socially maladapt shit if things were okay. And I think the real story of all of this has been the most landlord brained country in the world coming up against a Kind of cockroach of a situation that's finally too big to

[Riley]

paint over and painting over, I think it's crucial is that this idea that authenticity is somehow important, that this is that voters must connect with you and then you will get to like, then they will trust you and then your support will flow to you and you can enact the policies that you want and change society how you see fit. The idea that somehow that is that authenticity means you should sound like them. You don't demonstrate their. Your understanding of someone's situation by saying, I too, my father too, was a toolmaker. I'm going to hand to the NHS another sort. I'm going to solve the NHS waiting list crisis with, by giving more money to private health healthcare firms. Right? Only Barack Obama, and only like two times, ever got to buy the ability to do the former by claiming something like the latter. Right? That machine doesn't work because you sell your ability to pilot it well. Well, if it's broken, it doesn't matter what you sell, it's always going to fail. And so this is why, for what, 10 years we have had this uncanny performance of normality by politicians who represent the same unity uniparty. And that uniparty is all about just getting the, let's say, political outcomes further and further and further and further from what anyone fucking normal wants for this place.

[Ben]

I have one last theory for why Keir failed. Do you remember. Do you remember the alpaca? Geronimo?

[Nova]

The alpaca, yes.

[Ben]

And Keir Starmer executing, demanding the execution of the llama.

[Riley]

That was the first hundred days thing too. That was really early on.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Ben]

I wonder whether if he had pardoned Willema, things would have been different.

[Nova]

That's the sliding doors moment. Yeah.

[Ben]

Rachel Sylvester. None of the political commentary would really entertain that, but I genuinely think that had he saved Geronimo, things could have been very, very different for him.

[Riley]

A couple last things here. As he stood behind the podium outside the door of number 10, Starmer listed his achievements. He had turned around a Labour Party that was, quote, politically, financially and morally bankruptcy, bankrupt. Referring, of course, to his, let's say, rooting out of the cancer of anti Semitism, root branch, which I'm sure he. I'm sure he fucking did, then won a landslide general election victory. He ushered in a stronger economy and improvements on NHS waiting lists, infrastructure, workers rights and immigration. He accepted with good grace that his time was up. He did not do that and that he insisted his successor will inherit a Britain that is far stronger and fairer. Than the one I inherited two years ago. But again, improvements in NHS waiting lists. No, that's just private capacity pushed into the system. What you did is just brought in more private capacity. You rented state capacity. You didn't build any. The stronger economy thing is largely global, right? That's nothing he did at all had any bearing on that. Workers rights, largely symbolic. And infrastructure is just about. That's mostly just been building data centers. That's just been. Data centers. So what is Starmer's legacy? It is a country that is much like what Rishi Sunak would have governed, but about 700 days worse.

[Nova]

Yeah, it's doing. It's doing the, like, robot girl hate crime from the Animatrix to me, so that's cool. Thank you. Thank you, Kier. Enjoy Mystique. It's gonna be lovely. All the best. Stay in touch. You know, I'm signing the back of Keir Starmer's shirt and just putting, like, Best Friends Forever, you know?

[Riley]

So, look, this is Rachel. Sylvester and Hussein had to run, but Nova and I are gonna finish this up because, look, I very rarely read. I almost never read posts on this show. Almost never.

[Nova]

In the Starmer bunker, a final radio transmission escaped. The Starmer bunker.

[Riley]

Pro Starmer influencers were using AI to, I would say, make one last rhetorical pitch.

[Nova]

This sucks. I mean, I thought it was bad enough when I got banned from the Ukraine. Live war tracker for Add a separate front descending from Manchester to London in real time.

[Riley]

So I want to read now a poem that was written by someone who could be only described as one of at most four or five Keir Starmer. Dead enders who is not directly related to or working for him. This is a poem called A Decent Man. Keir Starmer. A subtitle. Let him get on with the job. We elected him to do. So each of these standards stanzas has a title.

[Nova]

Riley. Riley, I have a question before we start. How many stanzas?

[Riley]

About 8. Ish.

[Nova]

God.

[Riley]

Can you pull this up on the notes for me? Scroll down to the bottom. Scroll down to the bottom, please.

[Nova]

So much. Okay, fine, fine. Thank you.

[Riley]

Yes. Okay. A decent man. By, I assume, midjourney. This is clearly rendered as Nate. AI, a decent man. There are louder men in politics with easy slogans, sharp applause. But Keir Starmer is a decent man. By work defined, not the noise.

[Nova]

By work defined, not the noise.

[Riley]

Yeah. By work defined, not the noise.

[Nova]

AI generated fiction is winning literary prizes now. So, like, this is great. Also, this has the same layout as those loyalist paramilitary close Your businesses. Whatsapps.

[Riley]

That's why I knew it was AI. I was like, this looks exactly the same. So the poem snaps at home. If you feel the need to applause, please just stick to snaps if that's all right. So hardworking and dedicated. He labors long behind the scenes. Pragmatic, cautious, common, wise. A man who's known that governing requires more than grand disguise.

[Nova]

Oh, the scamtion. Okay, yeah.

[Riley]

I like how he never came out in a disguise. Cares for his country. He cares about his country's course, its future, dignity and name. He understands that human rights are not a pawn in party games. Uh huh. It's true. Look, I'm going to skip a couple to the one that I really. The one that I really care about.

[Nova]

You want to skip over methodical and cautious and pragmatic and sensible?

[Riley]

Well, I think. Look, an editor might have said, pick one. Methodical, cautious, pragmatic, sensible. Okay. For leadership is not a smile or promises that drift like. Like smoke. It is the burden carried daily for ordinary working folk. Steady but ruthless if required. Yet should the moment call for strength, he'll be ruthless. When there's war, he has steel to do what's right. When duty knocks upon the door.

[Nova]

There was war and he decided that we were going to support it to the point of abetting a genocide. And then there was another war and he decided that we didn't want to get involved, so. But neither of those seemed particularly ruthless to me.

[Riley]

A large mandate to govern the people gave a clear. A large man date to govern the people gave a mandate clear. A trust earned fairly at the poll to bring some order back again and help repair a fractured hole. And finally, my Kier Starmer is going

[Nova]

to repair our prolapsed country.

[Riley]

Yeah, finally. Finally we've the colorectal surgeon. Our country is demanded. This is, I think, maybe my favorite my. So this is my favorite line ever written. I can't stop thinking about. And I've been annoying everybody I know with these three words. Many support him.

[Nova]

Oh, dozens.

[Riley]

Many stand firm and watch with dismay the backstabbing antics of some in his own party who want to remove him. This should not be allowed. They just forget to make that a poem.

[Nova]

I've never seen a robot get so mad it forgets how to like, do the structure of the poem it was doing before. That's wild. We invented the centrist piss boilerbot.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Riley]

So don't force him out. If they oust this decent man from the work he still has left to do, countless supporters will simply Leave the party they once all knew Let him govern Let him work without the knives behind the grin Judge him by the quiet strength he shows in trying hard to get things done.

[Nova]

Okay, that's not quite. That's not quite a rhyme scheme anymore, but that's fine. We're just jettisoning parts of the office,

[Riley]

you know, they always break down, you know, after a few prompts. But here, Starmer, we hardly. Well, I'd say we knew ye all together too. Well, congratulations. Maybe you can join Liz Truss's social club.

[Nova]

Yeah, I hope so. I hope, I hope they let him hang out in there. That's going to be so cool. And listen, you know what? He's. It's. It's not really about the policies that you did or, you know, anything else. It's about the friends that you made along the way. And like the shirt signing, you know that he has a friend for life in Donald Trump. A guy who will definitely remember his name, number and name. And crucially, above. Above everything, the fact that he exists.

[Riley]

Who is it? West Reading. So look, I think it's. This is the official TF send off to Keir Starmer. See you at the Leckin field, I guess.

[Nova]

Absolutely.

[Riley]

I think we just ended there.

[Nova]

That was beautiful. Yeah.

[Riley]

Sam,