'Donald Trump is selling Truth Social posts?!'

[upbeat music] Okay, so the first thing we are gonna talk about today is social housing.

Yes.

This is a little bit of a UK-centric story, but I don't want any kind of Australian, American, European listeners to switch off because basically this strikes at the heart of how shit neoliberalism is.

In the UK, we've recently got a new prime minister, Andy Burnham, who everyone thinks is a big happy chappy, lefty leaning loony, loony lefty.

[laughs]

Uh, I do not, I do not think he's that.

Yeah, you're not a massive fan.

I'm not a massive fan of him, but his big thing is council housing.

Yeah.

So before he became prime minister and when he was campaigning to be prime minister from-

Which to clarify, you are a fan of.

I'm a big fan of council houses.

Big, big fan.

Um, he, basically Andy Burnham has been saying the whole time, "Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna build, it's gonna be the biggest pr- uh, council house building project i-i-in history." Now, he's announced this today, 70,000 new social houses, and me and Producer Becky have spent the last sort of hour trying to work out-

Yeah

... really what the difference between social housing and council housing is.

So ev-

Well, and also just to, to add context, the reason that this story when I saw it today felt so kind of, uh, important to cover is because last night we were talking to my parents, and we discovered that my dad's dad used to be a scaffolder, and he would work for the council.

So we used to live in a world where our builders and our contractors and our scaffolders were employed by the council to primarily build council housing.

Absolutely.

However, when Madame Evil Thatcher came into power, that slowly, well, actually quite quickly, was eradicated.

Yes.

So we are now in a position where we don't have anyone working for the council who are available to build council housing, and so it is all outsourced to private companies.

And so this was something that we had been talking about, and then I saw this headline today and I thought, "Well, this is a perfect story to talk about."

Yes.