Exiting the Warwick Cathedral

Summary

TRASHFUTURE: Exiting the Warwick Cathedral (April 21, 2026) Episode Summary

Main Theme This episode of TRASHFUTURE is a rollicking exploration of late-capitalist weirdness in business, politics, and culture. With their signature blend of sarcasm, rage, and surrealism, Hussein, Riley, and friends dissect how businesses desperately chase the next hype cycle (from shoes to AI), the entropic decline of political institutions, and the craven, performative gestures of once-progressive organizations like Stonewall—all against the backdrop of Britain’s ongoing psychic capitalist trauma.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

I. Allbirds, Starbucks, and the Hype-cycle Death Spiral

• Allbirds, the “ultimate shoe of the venture capitalist,” sells off its assets for a fraction of its previous value, then pivots to become an “AI compute infrastructure” company (00:16–02:44).
  • “They could never get the shoes off the ground … which is the point of shoes, I suppose.” – Hussein, (01:13)
  • “We're not a shoe company anymore. We're an AI Compute supplier.” – Riley, (01:53)
  • Comparison to Kodak’s blockchain pivot and other companies chasing buzzwords (“paperclipping” everything into AI/data/crypto hives).
• Starbucks joins tech-hype with a ChatGPT integration, automating bad, “hallucinated” coffee orders and further irritating baristas (03:30–05:06).
  • “What if I want my coffee slightly wrong in a hallucinatory way?” – Riley, (04:22)
• The crew lampoons the absurd state of customer “customization” and the hell it creates for workers at chains like Starbucks (07:51–09:21).

II. Culture War and Capitalist Political Activism

• Andreessen Horowitz attacks NYC’s modest experiment with government-run grocery stores, revealing how tech/VC capitalists now openly flex their culture war grievances for political influence (11:05–13:47).
  • Parallels drawn between the explicit political/ideological activism of right-leaning firms (e.g., Palantir) and the old, implicit “society should be like this” stance of tech companies like Uber and Facebook.
• Analysis of how success on the right accelerates ambition—to the point where “growing state capacity and keeping it for yourself” becomes the ultimate goal (16:37–17:09).

III. British Political Decay and the Starmer Scandal

• A deep dive into the latest Keir Starmer scandal: his failed bid to make Peter Mandelson ambassador to the US, despite Mandelson’s Epstein connections (18:14–23:04).
  • “Maybe we just need a shah. … Give him a six-month probationary period as the Shah of England.” – Hussein, (19:07)
• Reflections on the impossibility of being a British PM given the “impossible trinity”: growth without investment, cuts without pain, and global power on a shoestring (24:22–25:18).
• Starmer’s lack of personality, unwillingness to take real action, and endless cycles of resets (pledges, goals, benchmarks)—leading to the conclusion: “his political trajectory is one that necessarily ends in failure.” – Hussein, (27:09)

IV. The Collapse of Stonewall's Relevance & The Trans Backlash

• Stonewall’s new leader, Kezia Dugdale, lauded for “unconditional surrender” (28:22–29:01).
• Critique of Dugdale’s attempts to find common ground with J.K. Rowling, while rolling back on trans rights and prioritizing “justice for military veterans” (29:44–39:07).
  • “The white flag, the most important political tendency in the UK: the Confederacy.” – Hussein, (31:06)
  • “Our priorities now are … military veterans.” – Riley, (38:29)
• Observations on how cautious, apolitical performance opens the door to reactionary culture wars.
• Conclusion: “Stay away from Stonewall because they’re covered in black mold now.” – Hussein, (43:07)

V. Youthful Reactionaries: The 19-Year-Old Reform Council Leader

• A long, darkly comic analysis of George Finch, the 19-year-old Reform Party leader of Warwickshire Council, and the generational churn producing ever-younger, ever-less-qualified right-wing politicians (43:23–66:39).
  • “He is in dead man's shoes.” – Hussein, (43:50)
  • “Two reasons to own a business: sell to AI, or indulge in your boss’s culture grievances.” – Riley, (13:47)
• Finch as an empty vessel for Telegraph talking points, GB News slogans, and hearts-of-iron personality politics.
  • “A Chinese Room with a copy of The Telegraph as its codebook.” – Hussein, (46:45)
• The absurdity of having actual political power yet zero administrative clue (“I don’t remember my A-level results… I haven’t been in education in ages.” – Finch, (55:22)).
• Finch’s culture-war politics: Pride flags, morning-after pills, and accusations that schools are “conveyor belts for communism.”
• Ultimate point: council politics exposes the lie that governance is about slogans or culture war—eventually, “you need to do the bins.” (63:04)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On AI pivots: “Remember how Kodak stopped being Kodak and started being a blockchain company for quite a while?” – Hussein, (02:54)
• On workers’ reality: “If you talk to anyone who has worked at Starbucks, they will tell you that it is the most fucking annoying job … it is a barista’s worst nightmare.” – Guest, (07:51)
• On Starmer: “He has never been meaningfully in control of any organization he's ever been in charge of.” – Hussein, (21:25)
• On Stonewall: “They have a flag, a white flag, and then they pivot it on a pole sort of back and forth.” – Hussein, (30:44)
• On Finch: “All these unis and sixth forms, they're conveyor belts for communism. That's what I call them.” – Finch, (54:35)
• On local government: “It's just like the fantasy he’s been brought up with online. The moment you sort of get into a setting like that, slogans will not work … You need to do the bins.” – Guest, (63:04)
• On the future: “There's gonna be so much taxidermy in Westminster … MPs saying some shit the likes of which you've never heard before in your life.” – Riley, (67:00)

Notable Segments & Timestamps

• [00:16–03:13] Allbirds’ pivot from shoes to AI; the “paperclip” metaphor
• [04:22–08:31] Starbucks, AI, and the pain of customized coffee for workers
• [11:05–14:27] Andreessen Horowitz’s anti-socialist grocery store crusade; Palantir’s ideological posting
• [18:14–27:09] Keir Starmer and the Peter Mandelson scandal; the structural impossibility of British PMs
• [28:22–43:07] Stonewall, Kezia Dugdale, and the performative collapse of LGBT advocacy
• [43:23–66:39] George Finch and the absurdities of ultrayoung right-wing political leadership

Episode Tone & Style Sardonic, exasperated, frequently hilarious—TRASHFUTURE attacks its subjects with both mockery and genuine dismay. The hosts, especially Riley and Hussein, blend deep political critique with spontaneous riffing, shifting between intense seriousness and surreal improv (e.g., bear taxidermy, Shah of England gags).

Final Takeaways In a system where institutions—from public charities to high-growth businesses to the Labour party—are hollowed out by cynicism and fecklessness, the only thing left, the show argues, is to marvel at the theater of it all, and maybe buy a taxidermied bear for your office while watching the future unfold in ever weirder detail.

Transcript

[Hussein Nova]

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of tf. It is Hussein Nova. It's Riley. And I'm very happy to announce that the paper clipping has begun. That's right, Operation Paperclip 2, which is use the technology brought over by the Nazis to turn everything into paperclips in a long enough timescale. Yes, that's right. It's happening. I've wanted to talk about this for a second, but I've not gotten a chance. It's pushing every. It's pushing Mandelson. It's pushing the Palantir Sephiroth. Announcement. Allbirds, the ultimate shoe of the venture capitalist.

[Riley]

Oh, the shoe for like, like guys who need orthopedic shoes but are embarrassed that they do need orthopedic shoes.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Yes, yes.

[Hussein Nova]

The wool sho.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Very popular among, like, certain kinds of fashionable dad at the playground as well.

[Hussein Nova]

They're no longer. The design is no longer owned by Allbirds. It's now owned by the American Exchange Group. Allbirds has sold its. All of its design and all of its shoe assets for $39 million. It was worth 4 billion a couple of years ago, by the way. They could never get the shoes off the ground.

[Guest or Third Participant]

I suppose that is the point of shoes. I suppose to say that the shoes are supposed to stay on the ground.

[Riley]

My Nike grounds, my ground force ones,

[Hussein Nova]

the Allbirds basketball shoe, my ground pounders. Come on.

[Riley]

Very tacky, Sol. You know, I mean, this is a

[Guest or Third Participant]

good point in the sense of, like, you know, they hate the business for doing what it should be doing.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. So Allbirds has sold all of its shoe assets to American Exchange Group, a brand management company, and has announced that has now received $50 million of investment. So not that much in today's, like, investing world, but quite a bit still to rebrand as something called New Bird, which is expected to pivot to AI COMPUTE infrastructure.

[Riley]

Oh, yes. We're not a shoe company anymore. We're an AI Compute supplier.

[Hussein Nova]

Genuinely.

[Riley]

Because I was, I'm often saying, and Riley, you can vouch for this. I'm saying, unprompted, that the production lines for shoes and COMPUTE look so similar, indistinguishable.

[Hussein Nova]

Basically, anytime we meet up and have like a meal together, you say it like, like a version of Grace. And I thought it was really weird and not applicable to anything until today. It turns out I'm the ass.

[Riley]

My plans are measured in months.

[Hussein Nova]

Our plans are measured in, I don't know, a little bit.

[Riley]

My plans are measured in, let's say, the medium term.

[Hussein Nova]

My plans are Measured in quarters. So the facility is to close during the second quarter of 2026. Will enable the company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service AI native cloud solutions provider.

[Riley]

So they're going to buy a bunch of GPUs from Nvidia and then rent those to AI startups is the goal here? The shoe company does.

[Hussein Nova]

Yes, the shoe company will be doing this. Remember how Kodak stopped being Kodak and started being a blockchain company for quite

[Riley]

a while Fucking ever. Yes. As a film photographer. Yes.

[Hussein Nova]

I. Yeah, you can't buy Kodak film anymore, but you certainly can invest in blockchain opportunities.

[Riley]

Yeah. And now. And now they're taking my shoes as well.

[Hussein Nova]

They're slow. That's the thing. It's the paper clipping. Everything is slowly going to be turned into an AI data. It happened to Neom. One of the most useful. Great loss Allbirds now. And what's next?

[Riley]

Yeah, you're not going to have shoes. You're going to be walking around with GPUs duct taped to your feet.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, the slightly old ones. And you know, the other thing is I also remember during the height of this sort of crypto mania, Starbucks, it's a chain that has reached a saturation point of its market. It is very difficult for Starbucks to grow.

[Riley]

Yeah, they have, they have employed every pronoun to having American like it's. There's nowhere to go.

[Hussein Nova]

Going to Starbucks. You will hear neo pronouns the likes of which you could never imagine. And it's against you conservative American families, of course. Yeah. But the other thing is the Starbucks loves to jump onto technological bandwagon hype. They did this with blockchain. They did it with like web3 stuff. Like different kinds of blockchain things. There was the Starbucks nft. Nft. Your loyalty card was supposed to be an nft. And now at the same time as like Allbirds is doing the Kodak style pivot, Starbucks is once again hopping on board, having rolled out a ChatGPT app that lets customers order coffee using ChatGPT.

[Riley]

Oh cool. Okay. What if I want my coffee slightly wrong in a hallucinatory way? You know, just dump like an entire container of Matcha into it. Yeah, put some rivets in there.

[Hussein Nova]

My order is for the entire bottle of vanilla monin syrup. Thank you. Hold everything else. So it says if this catches on, Customers can open ChatGPT. Tags at Starbucks describe what they're in the mood for or upload a photo of their outfit and the AI will suggest a few drinks they think they might like and then they can check out in the Starbucks app in ChatGPT.

[Riley]

Having ChatGPT match my coffee to my outfit is a level of irritation I never thought I would reach with coffee. I've become this sort of coffee flavored coffee boomer now.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. In a long enough timeline, we all become Lewis Black.

[Riley]

Yeah. I wasn't expecting to become a traditionalist when my tradition was I want to order like a cappuccino made by a non binary person. Right. That's. I would have thought that was a relatively progressive position to hold, but now it turns out that's actually like yesterday's news. And what I should be doing is fucking Grokkifying my macha.

[Hussein Nova]

All right, you piece of shit, we're going to make a matcha. We're going to fuck that macha into the glass together. Let's go.

[Riley]

Vibe coding a Lewis Black AI to like, like order a coffee, flavored coffee.

[Hussein Nova]

Maybe that's how we take on OpenAI is we vibe code A Lewis Black AI and then inform it that this is what's happened and then release it into ChatGPT.

[Riley]

Remember when Trash Future used to release podcast episodes instead of selling you Lewis Black AI agents?

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. Check out our new tf. Okay. All right. Oil Warehouse, Tax Loss Farming Enterprise. Competing Liz Truss Social Club. Now finally, we're a hyperscaler and our in house AI, our chatbot's going to be called Lewis and it's going to reliably be able to give you whatever Lewis Black would think of any given situation, even ones that he wouldn't have the context. Context.

[Riley]

Yeah, that's a reference for Lewis Black

[Guest or Third Participant]

will tell you what kind of coffee to buy.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, well, a coffee flavored coffee is what he would say.

[Riley]

It's so cool that everyone with even like a medium successful business is now looking for the angle to sell out to AI on. Yeah, right, because AI isn't getting better, right? Like as much as it sort of purports to be. And as much as they might jerk themselves off about Mythos or whatever new thing this week, it's like all of these people are looking around for someone to surrender to and nobody's coming.

[Guest or Third Participant]

I do think it's quite funny how a lot of these guys just sort of. Because in order to sort of make a pivot like this, you at least have to justify on the surface why you're doing it. Right. No one wants to sort of be open about what they're cynically doing, which is we're, like, running a scam or a scheme or something along those lines. Because we want to jump on the hype.

[Riley]

Yeah, we're cashing out, and we want

[Guest or Third Participant]

to jump on the hype and sort of just make as much money as we can before the whole thing collapses, which is basically what's going to happen. And so then you end up just having, like, very weird justifications, like, oh, yeah, the AI is good because it'll tell you what kind of coffee that you'll, you know, to buy. Despite the fact that, like, the whole point of coffee is really that you just kind of order the same thing all the time.

[Riley]

Or conversely, we're really passionate about COMPUTE here at the shoes company.

[Hussein Nova]

Let me tell you what they say about the Starbucks AI app. This is the new kind of technology that sparks creativity and helps customers discover something new. For our baristas, it means customers arrive feeling ready, inspired, and more excited about the drink they're about to enjoy, which creates richer moments of connection across the counter.

[Guest or Third Participant]

This is so funny because anyone. If you talk to anyone who has worked at Starbucks, but if you talk to anyone who has worked at Starbucks before, what they will say is that it is the most fucking annoying job because they were, like, one of the first big brands to sort of really introduce a type of customization of your drink that like, no other coffee chain will let you do.

[Riley]

Yeah, you see these tiktoks of people who are like, here's how I make my special drink, right? Which is like 27 pumps of this and six pumps of that and add four things of this.

[Guest or Third Participant]

All the other big coffee brands are like, no, fuck off. You're not doing that. You're not ordering, like, 26 pump matcha with, like, seven pump vanilla. Starbucks is the only place I did because it was, like, the first to do it. And it was like a big, you know, and also just like the name on the cup and everything.

[Hussein Nova]

Like.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Yeah, they sort of really. They really kind of, like, influenced coffee culture for, like, a very short period of time, but they did so in the worst way. And if you talk to anyone who has ever worked at Starbucks before, they will tell you about, like, these kind of cutesy things that the company CEOs want people to do. All the sort of, like, fucking customized, like, matcha milkshake with, like, you know, insane kind of combos in there. It is a barista's worst nightmare to have to do that.

[Riley]

Yeah, well, I mean, what you're actually making most of the time at Starbucks is like big sugary morning breakfast milkshake

[Guest or Third Participant]

for people and people will still get mad at you. Remember all the videos that came out back when Twitter was kind of good and you have people like, oh, the Starbucks barista didn't listen to my order. I ordered like six pumps of blueberry and seven pumps of like, you know, and they're sort of like post their order of like what kind of drink they have and like you would just see it and it's like you have kind of gone insane.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, you're giving yourself diabetes. But the other thing of course is you can go into the Starbucks ChatGPT app, open it up and say, hi, Starbucks, today I intend to get into a knockdown drag out argument with one of your woke baristas who I hate. What's the best order that I can write Merry Christmas on but in a cruel way?

[Riley]

Chatgpt. What drink can you come up with that best honors the legacy and memory of Charlie Kirk?

[Hussein Nova]

I gotta say, I think my coffee order would actually be, well, how about gang violence?

[Riley]

Yeah, the name on the cup is counting or not counting gang violence. And you're really not gonna like the way I collect the coffee either.

[Hussein Nova]

Anyway, look, this is now paperclip watch.

[Riley]

Do you think, do you think Charlie Kirk is embarrassed in hell that he. That his assassination is now a kind of like warm up joke for sort of like 10th minute of a podcast?

[Guest or Third Participant]

I think that he probably just likes the attention. But I do wonder like, you know, because I, you know, my thinking is still very much about like, you know, what's happening with Erica and J.D.

[Riley]

yeah. What is, what is going on? You could commemorate that in a coffee, right? You could process all of your kind of emotional responses to media through ChatGPT. And then the sort of Starbucks hook in would be like, hey, do you want a coffee right now? Would that help you feel better about this?

[Hussein Nova]

It's more and more effective. States that are trying to be commercialized.

[Riley]

Yeah. Do you want to match it in the middle to commemorate Malcolm in the Middle being back because Frankie Muniz needed money.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. Couldn't do car racing anymore. So there's one other techie thing I want to address before moving on to Britpole, which is, as you all know, I'm an avid reader of Andreessen Horowitz's newsletter, of course. And I saw something very strange in there that I actually think relates pretty tidily to Palantir Sephiroth posting about like, why they think their company is important, where basically they wrote a series of 21 theses that map pretty much exactly onto Umberto Eco's 14 tenets of our fascism.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's crazy how they were just like, yeah, you know, point, point 20 racism is good. And it's like this is supposed to be groundbreaking to me.

[Hussein Nova]

Some cultures are bad. People need to stop scrutinizing elected officials,

[Riley]

wonder what kind of cultures they mean.

[Hussein Nova]

Or also like, hey, accountability in the public sphere sort of forces good people out of the job and so on and so on. Crazy. Groundbreaking. But what I find unusual about it is, well, I'll go into this Andreessen Horowitz thing and then I'll sort of tell you why I think that they have something in common. So this is from a 16 Zed New York City's socialist mayor is making good in his campaign promise to bring government run grocery stores to the Big Apple. His honor recently made the first location reveal the 9,000 square foot East Harlem La Marquette, expected to open in 2029 at a $30 million cost to taxpayers. Grocery is a well solved problem with plenty of data on what it typically costs to open grocery store. 30 million is a bit rich. For 30 million you could get 5 Aldi's and 10 times the grocery store footage. One Kroger, which is 12 times larger than Mamdani's Collective Adventure or either a Whole Foods or a Publix, which are both four times larger with 10 million take home money to spare.

[Riley]

Yeah, but all of those have the logistical chain of Kroger or Wholefields or Publix or whatever.

[Hussein Nova]

They're also not in New York. Those are national average prices.

[Riley]

Ah yes, okay.

[Hussein Nova]

This is Andreessen Horowitz was like, well let's just look at the average cost of opening a fucking Aldi in South

[Riley]

Tucson and compare that to Publix, which there are a lot of in New York. I guess everywhere is a kind of like GM Construx type situation where there's no sort of valence to where you put anything.

[Hussein Nova]

It sure seems like affordable high quality groceries is an area where we've made a lot of progress. But if not, it's hard to see how an already cash trapped city building the most expensive affordable grocery store ever proves that solution all that much. Now, Andreessen Horowitz is a company that invests in software companies and what I notice between this and Palantir Sephiroth posting is that in both cases it is a different kind of political activism by companies because I sort of, I spread, I split this into the lib version and the CHUD version, the Lib version is, you know, Uber makes $100 million in tax deductible charitable contributions to a political action committee that says they should be able to use their drivers as biofuel when they get tired, right? That is liberal corporate political activism. But this is, I think, quite different because they're getting involved in things that are not directly related to them.

[Riley]

It's getting sucked into the culture war stuff, right? Like Andreessen Horowitz. It isn't strictly speaking, relevant to their business model to be like taking shots at Nandani for the grocery store stuff.

[Hussein Nova]

And polymarket did it too. Polymarket opened a satirical grocery store.

[Riley]

Well, see, this is the thing. What it is, is we're closing in on one of the two reasons why you could own a sort of publicly traded business, right? One is to sell out immediately and try to become sort of an AI company. And the other is to indulge in your boss's sort of like, culture grievances, which are always to the right, of course, and to.

[Hussein Nova]

Because you view everything through that negative polarization of the culture war, to then just have these quite sweeping views of what society should be that are no longer just implicit. Like Uber has a sweeping view of what society should be, but that view is always implicit.

[Riley]

Nothing chud is alien to me.

[Hussein Nova]

Oh, it is. I think they're. They're too excited about the. About their beliefs to make them implicit. The Uber people, right? Or the. Or Facebook even sort of before it. Mark Zuckerberg has became like a real China hawk. You can even remember about, like, their campaigns, as we talked about when we read Careless People their campaigns throughout the global south to try to get, like, Facebook basics, sort of quote unquote, free Internet. They were around things like Internet access that had a real implication for, like, what society should be like, but they didn't say, and here's what we think governments are for, right?

[Riley]

I think it's because they take a fundamental view that a lot of the really insincere, transactional sort of DEI that companies used to do can only have been the sort of left mirror of this right? That, you know, you could only have had lean in because you genuinely insisted on a kind of totalizing feminism. Not that it would be a bad thing to insist on a totalizing feminism, but I don't think Sheryl Sandberg ever did, right? At least not in a way that mattered. And so I think there's this idea that turnabout is kind of fair play, right? So now now that Trump is in office, you know, before his brain melts, we have to kind of try and do everything, do all the CHUD things and you know, it's, it's the sort of now we can say slurs banker all over again. It's genuinely, it's like a societal level. How come there isn't an International Men's Day?

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, That's Umberto Eco's 15th point. This is just that question. The other element of this as well is that the more success right wing projects get, the more ambitious things get and the success that they've had, like the success Palantir has had a company that had a DEI office until 2022. Like they had affinity groups, they had Palin queers of which I'm sure Peter Thiel was a member.

[Riley]

Yeah. And yet they didn't learn from their own experience. They all thought, oh, we were the only ones doing it insincerely. We are being sort of lorded over by the tyrants in I guess the Biden administration who really believe this stuff.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, they never want to work with Deloitte because they're like, well, they just care about their pride, Flo. They don't care about training of consultants, but like that also the increasing ambitions. I think it also ties a little bit into what we talked about with Quinn and Ben on the bonus episode about like the ambitions of guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to grow state capacity but also keep it for themselves is if you want, at some point, just like in Nazi Germany, if you want to grow state capacity but keep it for yourself, you're going to have to utterly subvert like whatever is left of democracy. You're going to have to completely kill accountability. You're going to have to demand complete bellicose because what you're selling is bullets and the software that controls bullets and grenades and drones and explosions and so on. I read both of The Umberto Eco 14 theses of 14 characteristics of ur fascism. Not a perfect document. But like if you're going to have a list of little points good to compare to like things, they're basically, they're fully all represented from like the others who are weak and who must be simultaneously weak and strong are like, oh, the DEI officials who will allow us to be crushed by China but who have dominated America and the west generally for however long. So to me these things, the Andreessen Horowitz anti grocery store screed and the Palantir Sephiroth posting, it's kind of the same thing. It's getting involved in what you think things should be for at this very overt level. Anyway, the main thing I want to talk about today is sometimes you see an article, sometimes you see an article and then you have a lot of fun with it. And we're getting there. But before we do, I have two more bits of Brit Paul, I want to discuss number one. Did we all see that Kier Starmer finally showed us angry Kier today?

[Riley]

Yeah, the quiet man is finally turning up the volume. It's so funny as we're heading towards what, the fourth or fifth incarnation of the same scandal. We're probably at the 10th scandal that could have brought down a government had anyone else been ready and willing to do it. And instead everyone who could knife Starmer in the back or indeed the front is sort of like hesitating outside the door.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Reza Pahlavi is completely bottling it again.

[Hussein Nova]

Never going to get it.

[Riley]

Listen, maybe, maybe we just need a shah. I'm just saying we've never tried it here and he's looking for some. He's in the market for being shah somewhere on a part time basis. Maybe he could do it here.

[Guest or Third Participant]

I feel like, yeah, I mean you can't really be the Sun King somewhere like here, right.

[Riley]

Being the kind of drizzle king we

[Hussein Nova]

could get, you know, we could do. We could give him like a sort of six month probationary period as the Shah of England.

[Riley]

Put him, put him on like work experience, you know, he doesn't really get to do much shar stuff but he gets to like make copies and like get the tea in.

[Hussein Nova]

Well, he gets to do a big presentation on the last day.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah, we're gonna be really late.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Well, I mean like, he does, like, it does sort of feel quite often that what he just wants is the sort of like palatial experience.

[Riley]

Sorry, are we talking about the Shah

[Guest or Third Participant]

of Iran or Starmer or Keir Starmer? I mean, yeah, at this stage, I don't know, I would, I would probably say the Shah of Iran in this instance. But they are, yeah, they are quite similar in some ways, aren't they? Now, now that I, now that I

[Riley]

think about it, my dad was Shah Vira.

[Hussein Nova]

My father, my father was a Fingernail Polar.

[Riley]

My father was a pilot, weirdly enough,

[Hussein Nova]

just to sort of catch American listeners up. It turns out that every two months now we have a tradition in British politics.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's that time again where we,

[Hussein Nova]

we identify someone who is so, I mean, you gotta feel bad if you're Peter VanDelson that every two months someone associating with you threatens to bring down their organization.

[Riley]

P. Pushing another civil servant down the big flight of sort of pyramid steps into the path of the bus. No, the problem here is Peter Mendelssohn, longtime sort of Labour Party, sort of like grandee, had dirt on everyone. Famously friends with Jeffrey Epstein, pictured with Jeffrey Epstein on a number of occasions. And while that was public knowledge, Starmer tried to make him ambassador to the US on the basis that at least he would have something in common with Trump that he could talk to him about. And this was transparently a bad idea. Everyone said so at the time. But the scandal that is now unveiling is Peter Mandelson was vetted for that role, failed the vetting on the basis that he kept hanging out with the notorious international paedophile. And then Starmer gave him the job, apparently seemingly because everyone involved decided to lie to him that Peter Mandelson had passed the vetting when he hadn't. And this sort of puts Starmer on a sort of fork here because on the one hand, it's like Starmer did know and he's lying. Lying, or Starmer didn't know and nobody told him because he exercises a kind of Stalinist web of oppression over the civil service. And no one was like, everyone was too scared to tell him.

[Hussein Nova]

Or just that maybe Keir Starmer has never been meaningfully in control of any organization that he's ever been in charge of.

[Riley]

That would be a crazy thing to suggest.

[Hussein Nova]

I would say there are multiple possibilities here. None of them look particularly good for the government. Where yet the one is. Well, Starmer announced Mendelssohn's ambassadorship before the DV came through, which kind of gives the lie to any stereotype of him as a sort of cautious rule follower and more like a sort of reckless idiot who happens to just sound like a dork. And he knew and just figured it would be fine because he expected to be able to govern with impunity. Or he just delegated the whole thing to Morgan McSweeney, who just ran the government again, apparently not very well, because all he really knows how to do is say, what if we agreed with the right wing press enough at a time when, like, our opponents are historically unpopular and just sort of win by default.

[Riley]

Yeah, getting asked some questions about why you employed this guy who was so friendly with Jeffrey Epstein, being like, guys, come on. Racism.

[Hussein Nova]

Racism.

[Riley]

You love when we do racism together. Do you want to do some racism? Come on. It'll be like old Times.

[Hussein Nova]

Exactly.

[Riley]

And the thing is, journalists aren't really supposed to ask these sorts of questions, and none of them have really wanted to. It's just that this came out because the American political establishment had no incentive to protect Peter Mandelson. And the sort of fallout of that is we're just left with this exposure that embarrasses a lot of people, not just Starmer, and we're just going to keep going up and up the chain, finding people who aren't him to be left holding the bag for it.

[Hussein Nova]

Eventually, in a long enough timeline, every single person in Britain will hold the bag for Starmer, I guess.

[Riley]

Yeah, well, because the thing is, there are a couple of people who could genuinely unseat him, but they won't do it. Andy Burnham isn't even in Parliament, he fumbled that one. And then Angela Rayner is still waiting for HMRC to be like, yeah, you didn't do anything wrong when you underpaid tax catastrophically. And so what's happening is it's just like the engine isn't sort of getting into gear, like Swan Lake keeps playing on all the TV channels, but nothing's happening.

[Hussein Nova]

And if I read from some of the analysis in the Guardian here, I mean, it's pretty fucking dire by Andrew Sparrow saying it wasn't much of a win. But as Keir Starmer heads back to Downing street, he will probably count that as sort of a success. Labour MPs did not turn in him, no one called for his resignation, and those who did speak out against him were mostly from the left, whose views are Discounted by number 10.

[Riley]

Anyway, it's so funny to be like, yeah, my brilliant political instinct are keeping me in the job when you are just there because there can be no one else. For a while. It was the idea that you were going to be this sort of ablative heat shield between the elections on the 7th of May, and obviously that's still a factor, but at this point, it's just like no one else is ready to do it. No one is ready to get rid

[Hussein Nova]

of him yet, because, as you mentioned earlier, someone would have to take over the job.

[Riley]

Yeah, please, go ahead, take my chalice. It is full of poison, though.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, it's because if there's one thing we've learned in the last God knows how long, is that British Prime Ministers can't do anything, apparently.

[Riley]

Seemingly.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, evidently they can't do anything. No one tells them anything. Apparently. They're the least powerful people in the country, to hear them say it. The reason no one in Parliament particularly wants this job is that as the years go on, the impossible trinity that you have to satisfy to be the

[Riley]

British Prime Minister, to make a roux

[Hussein Nova]

with that is like that. You have to get growth without investment. You have to cut spending without hurting anybody that matters. You have to project power and be serious on the world stage. But also you have a budget of ten pounds to do it right. It's the political system in this country has run itself down. You are trying to drive a broken car. And so, you know, Keir Starmer keeps on getting DUIs effectively, and the cops are just like, oh, we're not pulling you over, no way. We know what happens if we. If we get you out of that.

[Guest or Third Participant]

I mean, the job in the sense that to actually seriously take the job is one where you have to sort of accept that you get a brief honeymoon period, but your main role is to basically have people get mad at you all the time until it becomes intolerable. And he's sort of at the stage where I kind of feel like people are getting mad at him, but he's sort of. He isn't quite rattled just yet. But that's not to sort of say it's not coming soon.

[Hussein Nova]

I'm surprised we're not getting some of the sort of wistful Trump stuff from him. Like, wouldn't it be great if I just drove off?

[Riley]

I don't know if he has the capac to see for whist. Yeah, you know, I don't think he has any whist in it. No, he claimed not to.

[Hussein Nova]

You know, we were told that we would, I guess, like, see him try to go Super Saiyan getting angry at everyone who's ever failed him in Parliament today.

[Guest or Third Participant]

This is the other thing, too. He set up very early into even before he became pm, but when it was very clear that, like, he was likely to sort of succeed and there would, you know, and then you have, like, the papers doing, like, lifestyle interviews of him. In every one of his interviews, he did a lot of work to basically tell everyone, I have no interior life, I have no interior thoughts. I do not have a favorite novel, I don't have a favorite film, I don't have a favorite meal, really, or either. Very generic answers. Or in some cases, he would literally just say, yeah, I have no interest. Or like, no, even. I have no interest. I have no opinion on any of this stuff. And in order to sort of like, do the Trump thing of, like, presenting yourself as a victim in an exaggerated ways in order to sort of, like, deflect criticism or to, you know, tactfully, like, move the subject or, like, move attention away from. You kind of have to have a person, personality. So much of the Starmer story and how it will end will very much be that this kind of attempt to curate himself as this neutral, apolitical figure that, as you guys have mentioned, has never had any meaningful control over any sort of agency or political institution really kind of came to bite him in the ass.

[Hussein Nova]

Ultimately, his political trajectory is one that necessarily ends in failure because he was elected to office in the hopes that things would fix themselves and he could take credit for it. All of his pledges. Remember the pledges, like six resets ago?

[Riley]

Oh, were those the pledges or the goals?

[Hussein Nova]

They. Well, it was the. Oh, sorry. The ten pledges were unit zero. The goals were unit one, and then unit two. Through the production line was the pillars, the benchmarks, and I think the key performance measurements.

[Riley]

Guess we're making key performance measurements now.

[Hussein Nova]

We're going to. We're going to get another reset. He's already signaled that there's a reset coming. Maybe it could be like. Like I've heard a rumor in that they're going to. That the new bond is going to be set in the 60s. Like, they're going to reboot the way back. Like, we could do a reboot back to, like, the pledges. We could have 10 different pledges getting.

[Riley]

Getting my shit mixed up. And Keir Starmer comes out as Harold Macmillan.

[Hussein Nova]

I mean, anything but this.

[Riley]

You've never had it so good.

[Hussein Nova]

One more thing I want to talk about before we get to this article, which is finally, there is a leader of Stonewall in the uk. Riley, you choose.

[Riley]

You choose this to wound me with.

[Hussein Nova]

Okay. I think one of the best sort of translations of, let's say, a political sentiment I've seen in a very long time comes from a mutual of most of ours. Croza Luxembourg, who translated the Stonewall, welcoming the cast report as we surrender unconditionally.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so if you're not familiar, Stonewall is a, I suppose now nominally LGBT advocacy group and charity in the uk named after the Stonewalker fuffle where the New York queer community peacefully debated the NYPD about their right to continue occupying a gay bar.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, they often say that a trans woman went into the first neutral third party bathroom at Stonewall.

[Riley]

Yeah, she made the first cogent point at Stonewall.

[Hussein Nova]

I think this is. So Kezia Dugdale was the former Scottish Labour leader who is a.

[Riley]

Yes, yes.

[Hussein Nova]

She Is who is an actress out lesbian who says she's quite scared as a lesbian in Britain. Started to feel nervous holding her wife's hand in public.

[Riley]

Vidkin Quisling being like, I'm starting to feel nervous as a Norwegian.

[Hussein Nova]

I was speaking to the Guardian in Edinburgh on the announcement of her appointment as the chair of Stonewall. She said it was completely possible gay rights in the UK could be eroded with the rise of white wing populism.

[Riley]

No, it's gay rights specifically because the trans rights rollback has already happened. Right. That's unarguable. But it's like, no, no. This could affect. Affect people who, like, matter.

[Hussein Nova]

So, you know, so the trans rights rollback that invited the right wing populism that's now threatening gay rights.

[Riley]

I'm. Guys, I'm so sorry because, like, it's all been me. It's been my fault, right? Because, like, obviously, as we know, Trump was elected because I didn't do my OCD rituals, right? Like, I fucked up there, but then also because I was transgender in public. And that's kind of gross and, like, cringe right now because of that, the fascism is happening. So I'm. I'm really sorry to have done this to everyone, most of all myself, but also you.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, it's the Dominion voting machine company. It was just like they had someone planted outside on your neighbor's roof being like, okay, she's turned the light off and on two times. All right, Rigged the machines, go.

[Riley]

I kind of low key believe that's what happened. Yeah.

[Hussein Nova]

And of course, this is in the fucking Guardian. Douglas appointment would appear to mark a pivot for the organization. Oh, would it? I think that pivot happened a little while ago.

[Riley]

Yeah, the pivot happened sort of at the elbows and shoulders as you raise both hands up.

[Hussein Nova]

Well, what they did is they have a flag, a white flag, and then they pivot it on a pole sort of back and forth.

[Riley]

The thing is, right, because, like, you know, pride flags, obviously a lot of bright colors, and obviously some people in our society don't feel very positively disposed to seeing those. So we thought that a nice compromise would be something we could all agree on, would be a nice white flag. Kind of goes with everything, you know,

[Hussein Nova]

it's a nod to the most important political tendency in history. We can say it together. One, two, three. The Confederacy, of course.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussein Nova]

As well as acknowledging the charity's missteps, she also had warm words for J.K. rowling. Shut the fuck up. Fuck you. F. No, honestly, fuck you.

[Riley]

Please, please, please, Tell me the warm words for J.K. rowling because I'm thrilled to learn, you know, I am the type of bitch to ask, like, as I'm being pushed in front of the bus, like, what number bus is that? Because I'm just curious about this as

[Hussein Nova]

a detail like noticing like that it's one of the London buses that has like D in it. And you're like, oh, that actually is because a lot of them were called like, doc, Ladies England's buses. So this is Doug Dale who just said moments ago in the interview, yes, I'm really worried about this revanchist right wing populism that's threatening sort of sexual minorities generally, as one of them said then. I understand that. And I've also heard that J.K. rowling and other people who hold a different position on these issues to me to describe with a similar rawness how they've experienced being opposed for their views, that's so terrible. I'm so sorry. J.K. rowling, was she. I'm so sorry she was opposed. We have known better.

[Riley]

I know, I know. I feel badly now.

[Hussein Nova]

You know, I mean, she should have said that she was being opposed and I think everyone would have stopped. How on earth? How on earth? I mean, again I say how on earth? I know, you know, everyone listening fucking knows. But you take this position and then say, well, yes, I actually we were in a conflict. And then she told me, no, my counterparty in this conflict who believes something different than I do and wants to impose that belief on society. Just as like, that's the thing, like progressive changes in society aren't popular. At the time, people wanted to fucking kill Martin Luther King when he was around. They only remember him positively now that he's dead. And like the point of civil rights is to take an unpopular position, which is these types of people who we used to think like society at large has treated poorly into sort of campaign to impose on the people treating them poorly. They can't do that anymore. That's the point of civil rights. That's what it is. And so for Dugdale to say, well, I didn't know we were opposing her. You see, in our campaign for civil

[Riley]

rights, what's funny is like there's a bit that you didn't put in the notes that I pulled out when, when I read this article for the first time where she talks about how she admires J.K. rowling. She says, I have a huge respect for J.K. rowling. I've had the pleasure of meeting her before and I Think her story and how she came to be this prolific, incredible children's writer in this city as a single mom writing in a cafe is phenomenal and an inspiration to so many women across the world. I think she's been a really powerful political advocate for improving the loss of single mums, making a case for tackling poverty and inequality in all its forms. And there is absolutely a place for her in public life to share her experiences and tell her story and make a difference.

[Hussein Nova]

Fucking when.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. This was also going to be. My question is, when had she been a really powerful political advocate for making a case for tackling poverty from her super yachts. Inequality in all its forms. I mean, evidently not in all its forms.

[Hussein Nova]

Inequality in some of its forms.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. And it's really just. Just the most sort of craven, like, please stop hitting me type thing. And it's really bleak for Keja Dugdale to be like, I'm afraid to, like, hold my wife's hand in public. Right. Because it's like, oh, this sort of tide that I have watched drown everybody else who is more vulnerable than me, it's now kind of lapping at my ankles as well. And my response isn't, you know, the sort of like, the bus has already come by and hit us. Right, that's fine. It's just a try and sort of reach for some people who aren't even really there to push them in front of the bus.

[Hussein Nova]

You know, I'd like to connect things. We want to connect these two things. We want to connect Dugdale and Starmer. These are people whose plan seems to be to perform utter impotence.

[Riley]

It reminds me a little bit of the new kind of settlement in international relations that we're deciding in Hormuz, which is you can kind of just say whatever and just keep saying different things until you sort of like, either get the result you want or don't and just live in the kind of end incoherence. So, yeah, the Strait of Hormuz is open. There is no war in Ba sing se. And J.K. rowling is a powerful advocate for against all types of inequality.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Yeah. And if you time all those three things correct on polymarket, you can make a pretty tidy profit.

[Riley]

It's like, hey, why does that polymarket user's avatar look like Toph Beifong?

[Hussein Nova]

I scrolled to the bit of the article you were talking about, and the I have huge respect for J.K. rowling. I've had the pleasure of meeting her for. Blah, blah, blah.

[Riley]

That's surprisingly down to Earth and. Very funny.

[Hussein Nova]

Well, that's asked about J.K. rowling's opposition to trans rights. Dugdale said that?

[Riley]

Yeah. Just. Just. I'm just gonna deflect.

[Hussein Nova]

Oh, sorry. That question is inconvenient. I don't want to answer it.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Hussein Nova]

Guardian, come on. Can we work together here? Ask me the question in a way I can plausibly deniably not answer because we all know what we're doing. Duddale also called for, quote, a bit of kindness, a bit of generosity of spirit, and a willingness to get into the gray area to talk about things. What do you think? What gray area do you think J.K. rowling is really willing to permit in her campaign, her anti civil rights campaign that is now being replicated around the world? What gray area?

[Riley]

I would like to sort of turn the temperature down on this debate. As your neighbor's house is being burned

[Hussein Nova]

down, as your neighbor's house is already ashes. You're like, oof, temperature's getting a little high.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Maybe she really wants a cameo on the hbo, like, Harry Potter reboot.

[Hussein Nova]

Go. Kezia Dugdale's name in Harry Potter. The Harry Potter TV show. Be probably something horrifying.

[Riley]

I mean, something like horrifically anti Scottish. So I d even ask, you know.

[Hussein Nova]

Oh, yeah. Oh, Joaquina gay woman came in, took out her wine on self ID dug. Dale said, I believed in it, and I still do.

[Riley]

It's so funny that JK Rowling is straight and is, like, always on about sort of, like, how she's sort of a protector of CIS lesbians. That's really funny to me. I cherish that.

[Hussein Nova]

Great job. She's a great. How come there's this anti LGBT campaign? That's why. Where did that come from?

[Riley]

Yeah, it seems to be a CIS lesbian being. Like, I feel unsafe now because of this debate that started happening out of nowhere.

[Hussein Nova]

You know, hey, I'm. As a. As a CIS lesbian. How come there's this tendril of, like, black mold that's reached onto the back of my neck and dug into my spinal nerves and seems to be emanating from a very beautiful house in South Edinburgh. That's weird that that happened, Nash.

[Riley]

No, it's fine. It's fine. Listen, we can all find a comprom this National Sisterhood Week.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, everyone submits to the mold. Pretty good. Done. I believed in it, and I still do. About self id, but pushing for self ID is not top of our list. We're an LGBT organization. Of course we're going to be there for Trans people. Yeah. Going to be there as they are hit by a bus, saying that in

[Guest or Third Participant]

the same cadence as the Costco dads.

[Hussein Nova]

That is three big booms for.

[Riley]

We're going to be there like the residents of Brooklyn were there for Kitty G. Genovese.

[Hussein Nova]

It's integral to who we are and what we do. But our priorities now are very much focused on things like securing justice for military veterans. Yes.

[Riley]

Gay chance. Let's go. Trying to thread the needle. So, so hard of like, do you like these gays? Do you like this kind of gay? Some of them did war crimes. You love war crimes. Wouldn't you like to see them get some compensation for the fact that they were sort of, like, hounded out of the military and, like, sort of interrogated for their sexuality? Because. Because they did. They did war, and we love war. Come on, please, guys. These guys, they're, like, almost normal, basically. You know, they're not gross. You don't have to, like, film them on your phones or whatever. It's fine. Yeah, please.

[Hussein Nova]

Kezia Dugdale being like, have you all heard of the Theban Suit Sacred Band? It's actually really, really cool.

[Riley]

It's like making. Making a bid for, like, the kind of dignity of Ernst Rohm in 1942. You know, just even aside from the kind of ethics of it, the political instincts behind this of, like, guys, I think I'm onto a real winner here. We found a kind of queer they can't get mad at. This guy shot an unarmed kid in the back and Northern Ireland, but he is gay, so compensation kind of cancels each other out. Yeah, I think so.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. Then he went back and he kissed his boyfriend. Okay.

[Riley]

Yeah. It's about inclusivity.

[Hussein Nova]

So any case, it is these nominally liberal political institutions just utterly colonized by people whose fecklessness is so great that they are actively harmful.

[Riley]

Yeah. And, I mean, these are sort of unprecedented times in one way. And I'm not sure what I sort of make of this. Right. Because I, on the one hand, within any kind of, like, LGBT community, Right. Even within an LGB community, Stonewall is going to make itself less relevant materially by taking this tack. And, you know, they are going to lose out on support and funding and attention that way. But equally, I don't know, I sort of. For a while, I was kidding myself, right. That what we really needed was, you know, besides the actual sincere stuff, you still needed the insincere, performative advocacy stuff, because that's the kind of thing that, you know, people in labor could really get to grips with, like one of the reasons why the kind of EHRC guidance keeps getting delayed is because, like, these people are basically liberals and it makes them feel bad to be doing the sort of fascist thing. So they're kind of reluctant to do it. Some of them, in the end, of course that's not going to stop them. But some of that delay is maybe attributable to that kind of instinctual bad feeling and maybe it's worthwhile to incorporate. But I think even if you wanted to do that, the best way to do it does not involve going, I have read every Harry Potter book cover to cover. Does J.K. rowling need her like big hedge mode for free? Does she like any stuff doing around the house? She could like spit on me and kick my dog if she wanted to. I respect her so much.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, I will whitewash any fence.

[Riley]

You know the tack that you want to take, even if you, even if for some fucking reason and you shouldn't do this, but even if you wanted to take some kind of like, we accept that we're living in a more right wing culture now and we can't change it. Tack on J.K. rowling. You know what you do? You go, she doesn't even fucking live here half the time. She's in the fucking Bahamas. You know, who cares what this like 1% or like 0.1% multi billionaire thinks about anything because she has no relation to the way any normal person lives or even, to be honest, the way any abnormal person lives. But no, apparently we can't do that.

[Hussein Nova]

Do you know if you want to remain relevant, I think what we've learned is you have to fight for something because people hate losers. And this is loser shit.

[Riley]

It is, it is absolutely 100% loser shit. And I mean, what's interesting is I tend to see a bit more sort of fight in this, in the greens, which is actually a good sign given Labour's polling versus theirs. So I don't want to sort of concede defeat even within the lens of sort of electoral politics, which is a very small part of how things actually change. So I don't feel particularly sort of duma about this, but it is very weird to see Stonewall just sort of like as an organization write itself out of history in this way, you know, and it was always, it was always tepid. You remember that like some people are gay, get over it. T shirts. Like it's always been like this, but like it's so much worse now.

[Hussein Nova]

They've never been more consumed by Mold than they are now.

[Riley]

I would say.

[Hussein Nova]

I think this is. Stonewall is an organization. Pieces of it are falling off like they're a looper that tried to get away from their own death. And like they are just. They're consumed by the mold. So you know what? This is the official, official TF recommendation. Stay away from Stonewall because they're covered in black mold now.

[Riley]

Yeah, I would say so.

[Hussein Nova]

All right, look, I've been excited to read this for a while. Ever I read it. One of the people who I've been very interested in, and I know this is like, this is just at flirting up against no gods, no mayor's territory, but this is somewhat. This is George Finch, the leader of Warwickshire borough Council at 19 due to reform, not expecting to win quite so many seats as they won last time.

[Riley]

The council sort of like bank error in your favor. Council leader.

[Hussein Nova]

Correct. And the guy who was going to be the reform leader getting sick and resigning. So he is in dead man's shoes.

[Riley]

It's so, so funny that the divide in reform is between extremely sort of ruddy, sort of heavy drinking at lunch, 60 and 70 year olds and the most racist zoomer you've ever met in your life.

[Hussein Nova]

Oh yeah, someone who's looped back around to 19th century racism and has epithets for Poles.

[Riley]

Not even. I'm not even sort of indicing this kid specifically. But it is really funny that this sort of youth wing of reform is like I got radicalized playing paradox games and now my ideology is something that was last shared by like three guys in like the northern part of like Russian emigre Manchuria in 1912.

[Hussein Nova]

Well, everybody involved. Castor Royal is a big part of their lives. It's just it depends why. So George Finch reforms, teenage council leader interviewed by Charlotte Ivers, having been selected for like the Times White Paddy. Sorry, Young power list. Included on that list, of course was also like the 24 year old lady from Clarkson's Farm. So it's just like we need to find the only right wing of sub 30 year olds left. We're going to call them. It's going to be on our young power list. So this is an interview with Charlotte Ivers and George Finch. George Finch's shih tzu Winston grown pads happily around the 19 year old named

[Riley]

after the guy in the John Wick movies.

[Hussein Nova]

Who else would be named after in war Shire hall fussed over by council officials twice Finch's age. So yeah, he's, he's, he's already petting dogs.

[Riley]

The big age of what, 40?

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, he's. He's already petting dogs at a 40 year old level. This is crazy. In the corner of the room is a large taxidermied brown bear holding a Union Jack.

[Riley]

I, I would like us to put this photo in the. Like in the episode.

[Hussein Nova]

Notice, I think this is the episode art.

[Riley]

This, this is just a beautiful image. I'm not sure if it's consciously in the same genre of not staying friends with the photographer that the really harsh flash sort of contempt lighting photos you get of CPAC or the Trump White House, but it's close.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, you can see that the bear is on a wheeled platform with a cord behind it.

[Riley]

Magical.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, it is. I don't know why he has it, but it says Finch required the bear soon after he took over the role of leader of Warwick Council. In June last year. Settling into his office, he decided it could do with a bear similar to one he'd seen in the local museum. It's the fastest I've ever seen the council work, he says with a grin. So they talk about how he's managing a half a billion pound budget and how right now there's an effort being made by Lib Dems and Greens to table a vote of no confidence in him, which this article expressly appears to be trying to portray as unreasonable. Mostly because George Finch, as we will find out from this interview, which I think is one of the most detailed interviews he's ever done, is a Chinese room with a copy of of the Telegraph. Is his code book amazing?

[Riley]

Also, I suspect it's because a bear is on the sort of heraldry of Warwickshire. Probably the kind of guy who like, cares about that, I guess.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. The key is not to be the kind of guy that cares about that, it's be the kind of girl that knows about it and use it to insult the guy.

[Riley]

Thank you. Yes, I think I'm much happier than he is.

[Hussein Nova]

So much of their discomfort rests on disparaging comments he's made about council staff. In January, for example, he told Matt Ford's the Political Party podcast that sometimes when dealing with officials, one needs to, quote, lay down a little bit of the boot on neck type thing.

[Riley]

Again, referring back to the photo. This guy could have both boots on my neck. And I'm not sure if I'd feel

[Hussein Nova]

anything where you say, actually thanks for your advice, but now I'm instructing you to go off and do what I say. But also, that's not how English councils work.

[Riley]

No, I mean, it's really funny to be trying to like blaze a trail of like. No, but I could. Could be the kind of wartime leader that Warwickshire needs.

[Hussein Nova]

That is just not how they work. A lot of council functions, like the day to day stuff is carried out by professionals hired by the council.

[Riley]

It's also alarmingly sort of statutorily prescribed. Right. Which I'm sure would also be one of reform's arguments. Right. There's too much red tape. But a lot of council officers are fulfilling functions that are pretty narrowly drawn. So sort of like national level and you know, there's arguments both ways on that. But it's very funny to go in and be like, my personalist regime has actually seen to it that, you know, the sort of health and safety officers are going to be like inspecting restaurant hygiene in sort of like a reform inflected way now.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. They're going to be seeing if you have the stay woke shirts that they found at Twitter. They're CHUD hygiene inspectors.

[Riley]

Yes. Searching Warwickshire for the cathedral, which it shouldn't be that hard to got a bloody big spire.

[Hussein Nova]

They also note that Finch could literally be out of a job before the article sees the light of day. And this could be a waste of time. I can't pretend the thought hasn't crossed my mind. So is this going to be a waste of time? Finch sighs ruefully, seeming in that moment twice his age. Twice his age comes up twice in a few years.

[Riley]

Seeming in his age, seeming in his sigh, 40 years old. Also, I discover from Google that Warwickshire actually does not have a cathedral. Which one Wash and two. That's what the cathedral wants you to think. So keep looking, guys.

[Hussein Nova]

He's gonna be in there somewhere. So the confidence vote is what it is. It probably won't work out in their favor, but we'll have to wait and see. To survive, he'll need local conservators to back him. His hope is that they'll realize the only alternative to him is an alliance of Greens and Lib Dems. He said, oh, it would be a mess.

[Riley]

Completely pedestrian, ordinary form of local government. You just get the more Lib Dem end of the Greens in that case because like, weirdly, the Greens are sort of in this position where they, they span sort of like the Lib Dems to left of labor. So yeah, you just get like plastic bag taxes, effectively. Sure, that's normal.

[Hussein Nova]

Also, you say pedestrian. Finch says, it would be a mess. Cycle lane lovers, we'd all be crying. But again, like, it would be a mess. What do you mean? Can you not imagine if you reset it to year zero.

[Riley]

Every day of my life I see a bicycle lane and I weep that I'm not hanging out with my cool stuffed bear.

[Hussein Nova]

I weep, I gnash my teeth and I pray that a crack, a real rain would come and put a car there. We go into Finch's personal background. His family has significant amounts of disability, with his father getting sick, both of his sisters being disabled and his mother supporting the whole family by retraining as a special needs teacher. Finch said of this, it's the hard work and dedication that families these days and young people don't have.

[Riley]

You know, it's hard work and dedication when you do it and it's benefits grounding when everyone else does, you know,

[Hussein Nova]

well, the grit, the priority to want and achieve a strong family. Like I said, reading what this guy has to say, this person who the Times is desperately trying to make seem smarter, serious.

[Riley]

Serious, like political and what's not really that big of a political role.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, you could. It's all he's doing is just repeating stuff he remembers from GB News.

[Riley]

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the reasons why councils, like, local councils are like this sort of like, repository for, like, you know, little bits of, like, local corruption, but also like training grounds for sort of national politicians, is because all the time there isn't like a huge amount to actually, like, do politically that you can kind of really put your stamp on stuff. I guess he's trying with the bear.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Fuck.

[Riley]

Someone wants my council to perform local services and now I have to actually do them.

[Hussein Nova]

Shit. Oh, no. Quickly find a bear.

[Riley]

Like from the bear.

[Guest or Third Participant]

From the bear. Well, maybe. Well, maybe like he talks to the bear to sort of figure out what his priorities are.

[Hussein Nova]

Like Green Goblin.

[Riley]

Get on this almost sort of like Reagan, sort of like fortune teller beef and be like, you know, what kind of. What kind of advice is this bear giving him? What's Winston's agenda?

[Hussein Nova]

You know, both of Finch's sisters are disabled. He says our family life has been in and out of hospitals, fighting doctors, fighting the system just to get what we pay for in our tax. He doesn't blame the doctors. He says they're overstretched, overworked and the staff tried their best. He recalls visits to the food bank as a child and filling out out endless forms to secure his sisters the care they needed as a family. We've seen so much that it does give me that experience. I've lived bloody many lives.

[Riley]

I've done. I've done a temporal pincer attack. Yeah, sure.

[Hussein Nova]

He said with the gravitas of a

[Riley]

39 year old, it's like, yeah, sure, fine, Right. Like you've had like horrible stuff happen to you.

[Hussein Nova]

Right.

[Riley]

I don't get how you do that. And it makes you less empathetic politically, you know?

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, I mean, I suppose because he says all the whole family is quite conservative. Right. And so, you know, you have your, in the case of the Finches, you have your, your narrative as to why it's happening, which is the doctors are trying their best, but the NHS is paying for a million pride flag inspectors and immigrant pamperers and they're just around there some. They're there somewhere. They're just around the corner.

[Riley]

Yeah, Gotta find the cathedral.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, he's railing against a cathedral. It's not there. And you know, so he says, my family is very conservative in general. Not the party, but the thesis. Low tax, low spend, low government intervention, get the state out of the way. But it seems like again, if what he says is true and given what we know about British politics, fucking God knows.

[Riley]

So it's a state that can care for people with significant amounts of disability without having sort of a big state

[Hussein Nova]

without intervening, I think. Sure, yeah.

[Riley]

What's not intervention when it's good?

[Hussein Nova]

I think you could very easily get George Finch to say that the state should get out of the way of the nhs and he wouldn't mean it in the way that actually is kind of correct.

[Riley]

You know, it would be. I sort of tend to imagine like, I don't want to see like a pride flag at a hospital.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, there's a lot of that, which is none of. We would not have suffered any kind of these sort of like structural, systemic social deprivations if there wasn't this fucking pride flag up at the hospital.

[Riley]

Yeah, why, why does this doctor have pronouns?

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, sure, spending. They are spending all their time doing pronouns and not surgery. So in 2024, the Reform MP Lee Anderson visited Nune.

[Riley]

Funniest possible guy to get radicalized by, like, I'm sorry, that's less dignified than getting done by Anwar Al Alaki. That's. That's rough.

[Hussein Nova]

Reform MP Lee Anderson visited Nuneaton. He said, I went and listened to what he had to say. I asked a question. How will reform resist the wave of wokeism that is washing across our educational establishments?

[Riley]

Uh huh.

[Hussein Nova]

And his answer was just what I wanted to hear. I thought, this is the party, this is us. And again, it's like what I did is I got up and I asked him a question that he answers every day on prompt, and he gave me the answer that I wanted him to hear. It's like pro wrestling. It's like someone. It's like you hold up a. It's like call and response. And he's like, I did the call and he did the response. It was so fun.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussein Nova]

So Finch attended an academy in Weddington. What was so woke about it? He laughs melodramatically. Oh, you know these unis in sixth forms.

[Riley]

He laughs melodramatically. Is great. Just hitting the Sephiroth, watched over by the bear.

[Hussein Nova]

He laughs like the monarch, I suppose. All these unis in sixth forms, they're conveyor belts for communism. That's what I call them. They're woke. It's terrible. But my sixth form was all right. Cool, because that cathedral's there somewhere, man.

[Riley]

My. My school wasn't particularly woke, but I've imagined that other people's might be, you know, like.

[Hussein Nova]

I mean, I. From Lee Anderson. You know what he told me? The teachers were open to allowing discussion, but some of the students, though. Ugh, my God. So popular guy. I think we can estimate one.

[Riley]

One kid in the class with pronouns, and this kid's at the other end getting, like, radicalized. I. Okay, sure.

[Hussein Nova]

Finch's A levels were in history, politics, and law. There's a long pause when I ask.

[Riley]

Hearts of Iron 4. Hearts of Iron 4. Player detected.

[Hussein Nova]

There's a long pause when I ask for his results. Finch replies, I haven't been in education in ages. I don't know. I'll have to look for it. You're 19. You were in education real recently.

[Riley]

This is really funny. Funny to get evasive about because it's like, you shouldn't care about exam results, least of all in the politician.

[Guest or Third Participant]

Right?

[Riley]

But when you're 19, you absolutely still feel that kind of embarrassment really keenly. And the sort of worry here is not like, you know, oh, he didn't get good A level, so he's stupid. It's like, no, your counsel is in the hands of someone who is young enough to pretend not to remember, but care deeply about what his A level results were.

[Hussein Nova]

And he's being interviewed by someone who accepts that deflection and moves off.

[Riley]

Oh, for fuck's sake. Okay. Yeah, sure.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. I wasn't an A student. A levels were tricky for me. I didn't like the way it was all processed.

[Riley]

I did my history A level, and for, like, my sort of final paper, I put in, you know, don't Siege Leningrad. Take it immediately. That whole green text and for some reason, the WOKE exam board didn't like that.

[Hussein Nova]

I didn't like the way it was all processed. Essays, essays, essays. I don't run this council by writing essays.

[Riley]

I mean, okay, I guess when you stack that up against the sort of Starmer thing of, like, he can take a minute, he can chair a meeting thing, turns out he can't. Also true. Yes. But, like, clearly the credentialism also doesn't. You know, being very educated doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. Hearts of Iron four and probably the New Order Last Days of Europe. I'm just. This is a cold shot here.

[Hussein Nova]

I love History of the Passion because we can learn so much from the past, but I couldn't go through the teaching degree knowing what would be the outcome sitting in a classroom teaching about how we hate our history and our country and we should all just cry. It's so negative. Remember going to crying class instead of history?

[Riley]

I used to love crying class.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. You know that movie Dead Poet Society where they all just stand at their desks and weep?

[Riley]

Actually, no. Maybe I'm seeing him wrong. He could be like a sort of Victoria or European Versalis guy who gets, like, really mad that he has to learn about slavery at any point because, like, he thought it was all Aubrey Maturin novels.

[Hussein Nova]

I think the Europa Universalis guy probably would be less baffled by the actual limits of the power that you have. Yeah, that's true. I think the Hearts of Iron guy is probably much more likely to get a bear in the office. And talk about, like, we have to surround the schools to create a pocket around high high school. So what would you like to do instead? I'd like to be an mp. I think it's a great honor.

[Riley]

I mean, there's good to be fucking, like, 700 of them from reform at the next election. So, yeah, why not?

[Hussein Nova]

If they ask me to stand, I'll do it. If they ask me to stay back and lead the council, I'll do that, too. Could he be Prime Minister one day? Nigel Fince almost shouts, we want Nigel to be Prime Minister.

[Riley]

Sort of compulsive like Twitch.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. As though it's the eyes of the bear blinked red for a moment. And then he shouted, nigel, it's two fingers up the establishment. We've done it. That's what I'm excited about, getting him in office. And he can say to everyone that shouted him down, for 30 years, I've done it.

[Riley]

Yeah. What's he going to do, like, the day after? That is the problem.

[Hussein Nova]

You Know, like, imagine at these last three words, Finch bangs the table. A beatific look comes across his face. Imagine all the keyboard warriors, everyone who said he's racist, which he isn't. And he finally gets there and he says, watch this, I'd love that. That's the journey I'm on. That's the. That's the future.

[Riley]

Again, not. Not to sort of. Not to whisper in Caesar's ear here, but, like, as we have seen with Trump, if you go in being like, I'm going to own the libs, and then you own the libs day one, and admittedly the libs are owned and, sure, that can be kind of satisfying. And then day two, all of the stuff is still there and you still have to do things. Then sort of what then, you know, once after a while, you run out of sort of like pride flags to tear down.

[Hussein Nova]

It's like you jump in a lake, you get wet. You can only get so wet. You can't get wetter. Libs can only get so owned. So what does George Finch do as part of as he's like, leader of the council, is he's like, requested permission to increase the statutory walking distance for pupils, which would require children to, like, walk five miles to save council costs. He tried to get rid of every pride flag. And also he has a public spat with the Warwickshire Police, accusing them of covering up the immigration status of suspects in a child sexual assault case.

[Riley]

Just. Just doing the kind of culture war stuff where you get to be functionally, like a Twitter account, in a suit with an office.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, he's running it with things that could be. Elon Musk replies. Basically, they also ask where you are. You differ from Farage. He portrays himself as slightly more pro choice. I would also say, Finch adds, sudden, nobody should use the morning after pill as contraception. I don't think you should be able to go, ah, I've messed up. Maybe they should get a few chances, a few strikes and you're out type of thing. The state should.

[Riley]

What the fuck? Like, yeah, 19 year olds idea of like, yeah, 19 year olds with like, fucking three unmarked A levels. Idea of like, sort of like cis women's reproductive systems to be like. I don't know, I feel like you should get like a couple of, like, chances, I guess. But after that it's no go, you

[Guest or Third Participant]

know, I mean, to me, to be fair to him, he can actually sort of say that, oh, this is just basic biology.

[Hussein Nova]

Right?

[Riley]

Yeah, he was learning it a couple of years ago. It's like, it's sort of really taking a sort of hard term, thinking about what would most like traumatize someone who had recently been in secondary education in this country and being like, draw the Krebs cycle for me right now. Let's go.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah. What's the powerhouse of the cell? Maybe a few chances, a few strikes and you're out type of thing. The state shouldn't be there every single time you slip up. Young people need to take responsibility for themselves.

[Riley]

I love the phrase a few strikes and you're out because it implies to me the idea of a tough on crime, but really less so fair prison system. At some point we're going to start counting, you know.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Look, do you have more than two strikes?

[Riley]

For sure.

[Hussein Nova]

Do you have more than seven? Probably not. You have between three and seven strikes.

[Riley]

To the best of my knowledge. This is kind of how points on your license work.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, it's like a credit score. Yeah. Maybe a few chances, a few strikes and you're out type thing. The stage shouldn't be there every single time you slip up. Young people need to take responsibility. This sounds like he's a glitching robot. What do you mean the state shouldn't be there every time you slip up in the morning after? Phil, what do you think the budget that we're spending on like state provided morning after pills, which they're not always paid for by the way. What, what do you think, what do you think the state's paying for in that?

[Riley]

It's just, here's, here's the thing, right? If you don't have the kind of media training, if you, you don't have the kind of access, if you're at this level, you're kind of waiting for the like thought leaders, if I can call them that, of reform, to give you your lines, right? And so left without that. And it's sort of why interviewing him like this is a bit of sort of like unkindness. He's just left to flail with his own sort of like culture war instincts which are at war with the reality of being a 19 year old in Britain right now.

[Guest or Third Participant]

This is also like quite an interesting point about like the way in which governance works. Because, Because I feel like if you are a talking head and even if you are a sort of an mp, like you can get away with saying all this shit, right? You can go say, get. You can kind of get away with sort of like, especially if you're talking head, but even if you're an mp, you can kind of get Away with the culture war stuff because, you know, your kind of role within the sort of democratic system is more about being an advocate or at least sort of being a proponent rather than sort of being like someone who actually has to do stuff in a very micro way. But like the moment you become a counselor, like, you know, you can't do that because, you know, your whole job is to, you know, you can sort of say that, oh yeah, the state should like be minimal and say, okay, fine, but the state does actually have to do something.

[Riley]

Right?

[Guest or Third Participant]

Like, even if it's a minimal. Even if it's minimal. Yeah, you kind of need to do the bins. You kind of need to sort of like deal with the minor issues of like life. And like, the complaints that people send to you for basic services not working are not like instinctive of them sort of being socialists or communists or whatever. It's like they're just like old people or like, you know, elderly people in Warwickshire.

[Riley]

I bet they love having a 19 year old around.

[Guest or Third Participant]

But imagine then just like, okay, so you're going to kind of give the job of having actual stuff, needing to work and needing to work in really high pressured environment and at the sort of real sort of tail end of all this, which is council cuts. The effects of council cuts have kind of meant that everywhere is underfunded. And so you need to sort of achieve this with this minimal amount of resources possible. And you give it to a guy who has mostly like his political experience has, and I imagine this is the case, has largely sort of been concentrated on the Internet, on Twitter, on Reddit, whatever. Like you've, you've given, you've given like the job of actually doing stuff to a poster. And of course he's just going to kind of keep doing like dumber and dumber things because part of it is just like the fantasy that he has been brought up up with online. The moment you sort of get into a setting like that. Yeah. Actually you realize that it is not, you know, slogans will not work in this instance. You need to do the bins. And doing the bins is like a pretty big logistical task that no one really prepares you for. Like, no wonder why he's sort of like dreaming of being an mp. He's probably quite miserable in this job and he sort of wants to be in a setting where he can kind of indulge in the fantasies again without having to really do anything in actuality, which is like not the case just for him. That also seems to be the case for like you know, I guess reformed Kent County Council is another good example of this where they sort of swept into power on the basis of like apparently like the communist Kent Council that is kind of corrupt and siphoning money everywhere. And I'm not sort of saying that like Kent County Council are like, you know, really squeaky clean. But what they sort of found out was that like actually if you are going to go down this route of like they're siphoning money or they're sort of, you know, corruptive of core, the corruption is pretty minimal. It's pretty like bare bones. It's not, you know, you're not sort of really looking at big kind of culture war stuff. It basically is nothing.

[Hussein Nova]

He is having to deal with something and he's trying to live nothing. And I think that's quite frustrating. But I'll finish up here. Six days later, I return to shire hall for the debate calling for the vote of no confidence. Opposition councillors raise all the controversies. There's consternation about Finch's boots on necks columns. Finch also, one councillor solemnly in tones replied to someone on social media with a poop emoji. Again, you're supposed to, you're supposed to be like, ah, ridiculous. But forget like it's a person with actual political power.

[Riley]

For sure, for sure.

[Hussein Nova]

Eventually, Adrian Warwick, leader of the Conservative Group, stands up. He's going to back Finch, but addresses the teenager directly. If you get through today's vote, I hope you take on board to a young man from an old man, the comments of today, you must learn. Finch clings on by one vote.

[Riley]

These fucking boomers, they hate him so much.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, it's like I think the Gen Xers on the council hate him. The boomers who are retired love him because he's a nice young man. One of his older reform colleagues, spotting him talking to a journalist, bustled over to warn him to watch what he says. I guess they didn't tell him this was a friendly softball interview that he does fuck up a couple of times. Anyways, Finch waves him genially before turning back. Opposition counselors have been there for 30 years, have failed to do the change that we've done in nine months. And there's so much more to come. Who knows what other tax driven animals will make their way into Warwickshire's county council.

[Riley]

Fantastic. I. Incredible.

[Hussein Nova]

Yeah, good stuff, George. Finch. Thank you.

[Riley]

And listen, this is going to get replicated up and down the country and then some of these guys are going to start being MPs, maybe a lot of them. Listen we thought, we thought the last intake was the most embarrassing set of MPs that maybe the country has ever had. It's gonna get so much fucking worse. It's. We will eat well.

[Guest or Third Participant]

There's gonna be so much taxidermy in

[Riley]

Westminster, there will be like one scandal every couple of days. There's gonna be MPs saying some shit the likes of which you've never heard before in your life.

[Hussein Nova]

Like, we will find whole new different kinds of different of financial scams that MPs have like decades long histories of being. No, Parliament will have as many MPs who have Phoenix companies as the reform intake.

[Riley]

They're gonna, they are gonna have to be like digging like people out of like trenches and ditches and stuff, like unearthing ancient cellars, trying to find people who can plausibly like be alive enough to stand for election. And they're gonna win and it's gonna be delightful. You know, Everything's gonna get so much worse.

[Hussein Nova]

But we went into the ancient cellar of the guy that we found that we think, yep, it's Mein Kampfs again. Iron Cross crosses in Minecamps. Okay, is it a lot of Iron Crosses and Minecamps or like a few? I think we can do a few. Anyway. Anyway, look, that's. That's all the time we have for today. That's trash. Yeah, someone should do a show about that. Thank you very much for listening to the Pod. We are grateful for each and every one of you. And don't forget, there will be a bonus episode coming later this week.

[Riley]

Yeah. Subscribe to the Patreon so you can pay for us to get like a stuffed bear in our offices.

[Hussein Nova]

Thank you all very much for listening and we will see you in a couple short days on the bonus. Bye everyone.

[Riley]

All right, bye.