Podcasts about thatcherite

Thatcher and her capitalist dreamers' next big gamble was a radical shake-up of London's financial sector. They called it Big Bang. Seemingly overnight, the stuffy old City of London was replaced by a fast-paced world of risk-takers, rule-breakers, and yuppies brandishing mobile phones the size of their head. It was a golden age of capitalism, where fortunes were made at lightning speed and the stakes were just as high. Nick Leeson was a working-class kid from Watford who arrived at just the right time. By 1995 he was a superstar trader. He was a poster boy for Thatcher's Britain. Poor kid gets rich. But then something happened that turned him from a hero to a criminal on the run. Did the very thing that spurred on his success precipitate his downfall? And what did that mean for the Thatcherite revolution. This is a story of the boom and bust of the 80s.David Dimbleby traces the history of an idea that spans his life. It started on a chicken farm in Sussex, gained traction in the shadows of post-war London and rose to heights of excess in the new champagne bars of the City. It's 2025 and this once radical idea now defines every aspect of life in Britain. An idea that transformed the economy, politics and, ultimately, society itself.But how did it happen? Who are the little-known people behind it? What did they want? And - as Donald Trump threatens to overturn the global economic system - is the free market here to stay? Or are we entering a new era?Presenter: David Dimbleby Producer: Jo Barratt Executive Producers and Story Editors: Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitsina Sound design: Peregrine Andrews Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeA Samizdat Audio production for BBC Radio 4

In this IEA Book Club event, Sir Vernon Bogdanor discusses his new book "Making The Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain" with IEA Executive Director Tom Clougherty. Bogdanor examines how certain politicians have shaped Britain's political landscape, focusing particularly on three figures: Aneurin Bevan, Enoch Powell, and Keith Joseph. The discussion explores how these individuals challenged the prevailing consensus of their times and influenced British politics far beyond their immediate careers. The conversation delves into Bevan's creation of the NHS and its lasting impact, Powell's complex political positions beyond his controversial immigration speech, and Keith Joseph's role in developing what would become known as Thatcherite economics. Bogdanor brings fresh insights to these familiar figures, drawing on personal interviews and historical research to paint a fuller picture of their motivations and achievements. Throughout the discussion, Bogdanor and Clougherty explore parallels between these historical figures and contemporary British politics, including Brexit, the future of the Conservative Party, and the challenges of political communication in modern Britain. The event concludes with Bogdanor's thoughts on whether the Thatcher era is coming to an end and what might replace it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insider.iea.org.uk/subscribe

Note: The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) does not endorse or support any political candidate or party. This video is for educational purposes only. In this new In Conversation event, The Rt Hon James Cleverly MP, Conservative Party Home Secretary and leadership candidate, sits down with Tom Clougherty, Executive Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, to discuss his vision for the future of the Conservative Party and the UK. Cleverly outlines his Thatcherite economic philosophy, emphasising the need for free markets, lower taxes, and reduced regulation to drive economic growth and prosperity. Throughout the discussion, Cleverly addresses key issues facing the UK, including housing affordability, welfare reform, and the challenges of an aging population. He argues for bold policy changes to increase housing supply, incentivise work, and create a more sustainable relationship between younger and older generations. Cleverly also shares his views on the importance of global engagement and the need to revitalise London's financial services sector. As a self-described "doer" inspired by Ronald Reagan's communication skills, Cleverly emphasises the importance of selling conservative values to a new generation. He advocates for a positive, optimistic approach to leadership that can inspire public support for necessary reforms. This conversation offers valuable insights into Cleverly's political philosophy and his vision for addressing the UK's most pressing economic and social challenges. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insider.iea.org.uk/subscribe

Emma Revell What does a Thatcherite think tank do when the Tories are out of office?Emma Revell from the Centre for Policy Studies briefs us on what's next for one of Britain's most influential organisations. Plus... why being a Lib Dem first is becoming a right of passage...SEE Matt at on tour until March 2025: https://www.mattforde.com/live-shows202431 July - 25 August: Edinburgh, The Pleasance2 October: Norwich Playhouse3 October: Maidenhead, Norden Farm9 October: Middlesbrough, The Crypt10 October: London, Leicester Square Theatre24 October: Hull, Truck Theatre6 November: Exeter, Phoenix8 November: Tunbridge Wells, Trinity Theatre14 November: Basingstoke, The Haymarket15 November: Colchester Arts Centre20 November: York, The Crescent21 November: Chorley, Little Theatre22 November: Salford, The Lowry27 November: Chipping Norton Theatre28 November: Leicester, Y Theatre29 November: Eastleigh, The Berry31 November: Faversham, The Alexander Centre20254 February: Leeds, City Varieties5 February: Sheffield, The Leadmill6 February: Chelmsford Theatre7 February: Bedford, The Quarry Theatre12 February: Bath, Komedia13 February: Southend, Palace Theatre16 February: Cambridge, The Junction20 February: Nottingham, Lakeside Arts23 February: Brighton, Komedoa25 February: Cardiff, Glee Club26 February: Bury St Edmunds, Theatre Royal2 March: Bristol, Tobacco Factory11 March: Aberdeen, Lemon Tree12 March: Glasgow, Glee Club Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nigel Farage claims Boris Johnson will go down in history as the “worst prime minister of modern times” after a public spat that saw the ex-PM attack the Reform leader for his comments on Ukraine and Putin where he claimed the West provoked the invasion. Camilla reacts to the backlash in the studio with Associate Editor Gordon Rayner who's standing in for Kamal for this episode.Plus, could the General Election gambling controversy be the new 'partygate' for the Tories? And can the real Kemi Badenoch please stand up? We take a deep dive into the politician who could be the future of her party.ReadFarage: Tories using row over Russia remarks to distract from betting scandal, by Amy Gibbons and Jack Maidment: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/24/farage-tories-using-row-russia-distract-betting-scandal/Nigel Farage has just proven that he's not a serious leader, by Richard Kemp: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/21/nigel-farage-has-just-proven-that-hes-not-a-serious-leader/The West's errors in Ukraine have been catastrophic. I won't apologise for telling the truth, by Nigel Farage: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/22/wests-errors-in-ukraine-been-catastrophic-i-wont-apologise/Profile on Kemi Badenoch: ‘No bulls--t' and Thatcherite thinking: The unstoppable rise of Kemi Badenoch, by Mick Brown:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/20/the-unstoppable-rise-of-conservative-party-kemi-badenoch/Kemi Badenoch hints at leadership bid ‘after election', by Dom Penna: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/24/kemi-badenoch-hint-leadership-bid-general-election-uk/Email: thedailyt@telegraph.co.ukThe Daily T Newsletter: telegraph.co.uk/dailytnewsletterSubscribe to The Telegraph: telegraph.co.uk/dailytsubProducers: Lilian Fawcett and Georgia CoanPlanning Editor: Venetia RaineyVideo Producer: Luke GoodsallStudio Operator: Meghan SearleSocial Media Producer: Ji-Min LeeExecutive Producer: Louisa WellsEditor: Camilla TomineyOriginal music by Goss Studio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte and Isi Litke discuss Stephen Frears's 1985 classic of queer cinema, My Beautiful Laundrette. Conversation ranges over the film's Thatcherite backdrop; its depiction of queer, and cross-racial, love; and its inimitable mix of gritty social realism and dreamlike sensuality. What's unique, in the queer cinematic canon, about a film made just before the AIDS crisis emerged in British public consciousness—that is, just prior to the inceasing identification of queerness with disease? How does it weave elements of the fairy tale into its story of cross-class, cross-racial love? And how does the film, with its "qualified utopian hope," contrast with later, more pessimistic classics of the New Queer Cinema? Why, in a film set in a laundromat, is it a source of optimism that some things don't stay clean? 

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Starmer's referencing of Thatcher has enraged the left – but is it anything beyond symbolic politicking? And is he really Thatcherite at all? Andrew Harrison speaks to Robert Saunders, a reader in modern British history at Queen Mary University of London, about the legacy of Thatcher and how it ties in with modern Labour policy.  • “It's worth remembering that Margaret Thatcher herself borrowed ideas from the left.” – Robert Saunders • “I think Thatcher would be quite alarmed by what she would see in a Reeves-Starmer manifesto.” – Robert Saunders  • “Truss and Sunak were giving two different memories of Margaret Thatcher in the last Tory leadership contest… it was like two branches of the same religion.” – Robert Saunders  • “Margaret Thatcher has become a myth. And the nature of myths means every generation can give different tales about them.” – Robert Saunders We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to Indeed.com/bunker for £100 sponsored credit. Support us on Patreon. Written and presented by Andrew Harrison. Audio editor: Jade Bailey. Managing editor: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Music by Kenny Dickinson and artwork by James Parrett. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. Instagram | Twitter  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rather than rely upon press reports, Professor Tim Evans of Middlesex University delves into Reform UK's policies, finding no evidence of far-right attitudes but instead a mix of old-school Thatcherite ideas with socialist control. He suspects some ideas could be appropriated by other parties. Donald Trump's Agenda 47 baffled him more, being a smorgasbord combining centre-left ideas on welfare with more nationalistic, protectionist policies. By offering something for almost everyone, he may have a broader base than previously. Tim is very concerned about the rise of thousands of fraudulent scientific papers, with 10,000 believed to have been retracted last year alone. This black economy, driven in large part from China, India, Iran and Russia, could prove extremely dangerous in the scientific arena. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The notion of Conservative Socialism or Blue Labour would to many people seem bizarrely paradoxical. It ought to. The British Labour party has in the 83 years since George Orwell made his case for a distinctly patriotic and English version of socialism and socialist in The Lion and the Unicorn has been the party of large scale nationalization and militant leftism. Until it capitulated to the Thatcherite view of the world during the End of History and has since oscillated between its old tendencies and a sort of liberal centrism well in tune with the times and of course, the City.Too intune, too fashionable and too destructive - too European, as some would have it. The man who symbolizes that some more than anyone else is a, of all people, Labour peer in the House of Lords. Lord Maurice Glasman is a radical and a reactionary (he would surely prefer another word) all at once, advocating for a populist, conservative but most strikingly pre-French Revolution notion of politics. Arguing the country and its politics has lost itself we embark on a conversation that echoes Eric Arthur Blair's wartime cri de coeur and is sure to get everyone on the spectrum angry, frustrated - but above all, thinking.As the twenties thunder head on into the next series of crises, it's precisely the kind of conversation we want to have.Because we too, “Fucking hate the French revolution” and the clichés of right-left politics we still wrestle with every day. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Richard Syrett Show - December 8th, 2023  Liberals accuse of Pierre Poilievre and Conservatives of "Far-Right Republican" tactics Daniel Bordman The National Telegraph New Morning Show Host Marc Patrone Canada's Standard of Living Plunges Compared to U.S. Is Resource-Rich Argentina under Javier Mileir Ripe for a Massive Come-Back? Jonathan Wellum, President and CEO of RockLinc Investment Partners National Citizens Inquiry into Covid releases damning report Tamara Ugolini - Rebel News READ THE REPORT

Please join us at patreon.com/tortoiseshack It was a great pleasure to be be rejoined on the podcast by listener favourite, Prof Richard Murphy to chat about his new role as Minister for Anti-Woke*, the Tory's tax cut that is hiding creeping austerity, the lack of vision from the Labour Party of Margaret thatcher admirer Keir Starmer, the good aspects of the rise of alternative media and the politics of Palestine in the UK. As always with Richard, the conversation goes in different directions and this was probably the first Nietzsche chat we've had on air! *it's a joke, relax The latest from Gaza with Mahmoud Mushtaha is out now here:https://www.patreon.com/posts/patron-exclusive-93995610

Sunak pins political hopes on Thatcherite tax-cutting packageCameron threatens to ‘get tough' on judges who block Rwanda planRoman emperor was trans, says museumRead all these articles and stay expertly informed anywhere, anytime with a digital subscription. Start your free one-month trial today to gain unlimited website and app access. Cancel anytime. Sign up here: http://bit.ly/2WRuvh9See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Subscribe now to the PPM Patreon to not only access the full catalog of #1 ParaPower Mapping Hits (like ALTERED STATE FASH ACTORS Pt. V or Speculative Swiss-mania I & II), but also receive the privilege of submitting prompts for these Qs & Clues EPs... patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping Speaking of, #1 coming in hot w/ a far-reaching investigation into sports fixing allegations historical & current, with a particular focus on the global game & its intimate relationship w/ international relations, Western imperialism, & military regimes. We begin w/ the Independent Cork Board Researchers Union Soccer Precepts, which bring us to a discussion of Maradona's "symbolic revenge" over the Brits w/ his infamous "Hand of God" handball goal in World Cup '86, which takes us 4 years further back to the possible Thatcherite-&-Argentine-military-junta false flag known as the Falklands War... To clear the field & set the stage, we unpack some basic history of Operation Condor & the American-backed intel agency collabs b/w military dictatorships in S. America in the '70s & '80s, which led to the extrajudicial death flights & disappearances of likely 100ks of Marxists, leftists, & union members in countries like Argentina (see: Dirty War)... We show how the US State Dep't & See-Aye-Eh were arms-deep in Argentine political life in the years immediately preceding Falklands. We survey a ton of the weirdness re: the Falklands War, including Julian Barnes' assertion it was the "worst reported" war of the televised era, which supports a false flag or preordained war of mutual benefit hypothesis... Marge Thatcher's press embargoes, conferences, & censorship. The strangely civil "Red Cross box"/ neutral zone in the sea off the Falkland Islands where UK & Argentina kept medical ships stationed simultaneously throughout the 70ish or so days. We talk Prince Andrew doing heli flights & the weirdness of the conflict being bookended w/ "flags", which, is a little on the nose... Talking to you, Universe. From there, we break down Bo BrozZzy's incisive Mafiaball & "sports as mass ritual" prompt and the Henry Hill, Burke, Perla Bros. & Rick Kuhn references therein, as well as super timely professional club soccer scandal examples that are reminiscent of Kuhn's point shaving scheme (see the illegal betting breach allegations that have recently broken re: Sandro Tonali, Nicolo Fagioli—who was threatened w/ having his legs broken evidently, and Lucas Paqueta)... We discuss Declan Hill's The Fix & Gabriel Kuhn's Soccer vs. the State. We walk through the history of gambling, sports & otherwise, in England, from Queen Lizzie's Loco Lotto to the National Lotto's 2nd biggest donor, the Freemasonic United Lodge of England. This turns our attention to Voltaire & Casanova's Freemasonic Lotto Syndicates in France in the 18th century. And we conclude w/ a discussion of the distinct possibility that Sec. of State & national security tulpa Henry Kissinger—one of the architects of the bloody anticommunist conspiracy to bind together the intel services of Southern Cone countries & "disappear" leftists... anyways, we end w/ an examination of a couple articles & US Embassy & State Dep't memos that indicate that Sec. of Sports Fixing Kissinger may have been directly-or-indirectly involved in fixing the 1978 World Cup held in Argentina, when Gen. Videla & his Peruvian counterpart pressured the Peruvian nat'l team to deliberately lose to Argentina & the accompanying Satanic numerology of the game's scoreline—as well as a bevy of further 6s in accompanying stats. Oh, and we fit in a few references to Zion*st involvement in Operation Condor, the

The tidal waves move away from Thatcherite orthodoxies as the next election moves into view and the consequences of austerity economics and privatised monopolies are playing out.  Steve Richards asks; will the UK turn if Labour wins?  Support Rock N Roll Politics on Patreon and get exclusive benefits including bonus episodes and much more: https://www.patreon.com/RockNRollPolitics Rock N Roll Politics is live at Kings Place on October 23rd.  Expect high political drama: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/rock-n-roll-politics-10/ Steve's latest book Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain From 1945 to Truss is now available: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Turning-Points-Crisis-Change-Britain/dp/1035015358/ref=sr_1_2?crid=QRFD2ZSG4CJG&keywords=steve+richards+books&qid=1694439462&sprefix=steve+r%2Caps%2C112&sr=8-2 The New European sponsors Rock & Roll Politics - to get full access to the site for just £1 per week PLUS a £25 voucher to spend in their online store, visit www.theneweuropean.co.uk/rock Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Has the left misunderstood the state of our nation? Sociologist and trade unionist Dan Evans thinks so. He talks to Aaron about the unexpected power of the petty bourgeoisie – the insecure class between the working class and the bourgeoisie – and how its Thatcherite values of home ownership and entrepreneurialism have reshaped British politics in the last […]

Water privatisation was rushed through after the 1987 election. The many problems were as obvious then as they are now. So why was privatisation proclaimed as a Thatcherite triumph for decades? Rock N Roll Politics is live at the Hitchin Festival on Tuesday July 11. Tickets here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/hitchin/the-market-theatre/rock-n-roll-politics-with-steve-richards/e-kgvveaea Rock N Roll Politics is live at the Edinburgh Festival from Sunday August 13th with a different show every day. Tickets here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/steve-richards-presents-rock-n-roll-politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book. The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media. The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book. The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media. The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book. The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media. The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book. The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media. The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book. The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media. The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

A young man caught between his socialist father and Thatcherite uncle falls in love with a young National Front street punk while building a laundromat. We watched MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985) and discuss the context that birthed it. PLUS: Fiery hot takes on Bruceploitation and Ron DeSanctimonious.Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A young man caught between his socialist father and Thatcherite uncle falls in love with a young National Front street punk while building a laundromat. We watched MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985) and discuss the context that birthed it. PLUS: Fiery hot takes on Bruceploitation and Ron DeSanctimonious. Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

We all lived through the gradual exacerbation of crowd violence. Why was it so bad in the 1970s and 1980s? Why did it become mixed up in Thatcherite politics? If we thought it had disappeared, the 2021 Euro final demonstrated that it hadn't.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as "extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work." He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure. Hugh's author page for PM Press. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

As the lead singer of the politically and socially conscious Specials, Hall achieved U.K. fame and cult status through songs such as “Ghost Town,” “Gangsters” and “Too Much Too Young.” With Fun Boy Three he enjoyed chart success with the songs “Summertime” and the Bananarama featuring hits “‘Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)” and “Really Saying Something.”Born Terrence Edward Hall on Mar. 19, 1959 in Coventry, England, his parents worked in the car industry. Hall was traumatized as a schoolboy after he was abducted by a paedophile ring at age 12 and taken to France where he was sexually abused and later abandoned. In interviews, Hall has said the incident left him scarred for life and caused life-long depression, forcing him to drop out of school at 14 after becoming addicted to Valium.The young Hall found work as a manual labourer, his only escape coming through music. He played with local punk bands, including the Squad, before being spotted by Jerry Dammers who asked him to become the frontman of his ska revival band, the Coventry Automatics who in early 1979 would change their name to the Specials. He featured on the Specials' first single, “Gangsters,” which garnered the band attention after radio play on the BBC.The Specials' eponymous debut record followed in October 1979. Produced by Elvis Costello, and released on Dammers' indie label 2 Tone Records, The Specials featured only one charting single, a cover of Dandy Livingstone's “A Message to You, Rudy” and initially had mixed reviews, but since its release has become a classic and socially significant record. Released at a time of high youth unemployment in the U.K. as well as race riots, strikes and callous Thatcherite economic reforms, the album tapped into the pervasive feeling of despair in the country and the barely concealed tensions within society. In 2013, NME ranked The Specials at number 260 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Liz Truss' mini budget blew up in smoke, forcing her to accept the most dramatic U-turn in British political history. Her tax cuts were almost all reversed and within days she announced her resignation. The New Right appeared to be in retreat. Yet her successor, Rishi Sunak, is no One Nation Conservative. A cautious Thatcherite is still a Thatcherite. And this caution is only reserved for the economy. On welfare, law and order and international affairs, neo-conservative influence on policy is clear as day.  Enjoy the podcast, then why not subscribe to PLUS PLUS PLUS!? For just £1.99 per month, you will receive TWO additional episodes per month that will automatically appear in your podcast feed as soon as they become available. Furthermore, you can cancel anytime - no obligations and no hidden costs. Just lots of learning. Just click here to get started. If you like reading as well as listening, then you can also try my revision book, which can be purchased from here.  Oh, and don't forget to leave a nice review wherever you listen to your podcasts, so that more people can find out about us. Thanks for your support.

Rishi Sunak, the self-declared fiscal conservative, becomes Prime Minister having lost the summer's leadership contest. But will his Thatcherite instincts allow him to rise to the epic challenges ahead?  Rock & Roll Politics is live at Kings Place on Oct 26th. Tickets here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/rock-n-roll-politics-7/ I'm also live at the Ropetackle, Shoreham on Oct 27th; just a few tickets left: https://ropetacklecentre.co.uk/events/steve-richards-rock-n-roll-politics-the-liz-truss-special/ And live at the Old Market Theatre Brighton for a Christmas Special on December 12th: https://www.theoldmarket.com/shows/steve-richards-rock-n-roll-politics Subscribe on Patreon for exclusive podcast series and more: https://www.patreon.com/RockNRollPolitics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What A Week! Dan returns from the brink of death while Liz Truss buries herself in a Thatcherite economic grave! Tulsi Gabbard officially announces her departure from the Democratic Party and the launch of a new podcast. A new independent? Or the female Tucker Carlson? Real Aloha? Or Fearmongering grift? We expect "The Left" to bully folks who have made mistakes into unemployment and shame. Usually of race or gender issues. But "The Right" doing the same thing? Oh yes. "Woke Derangement Syndrome" takes hold in the world of NASCAR. Could coal be the answer in the fight against climate change? Science says maybe. But Not if crony Capitalism and the Climate Ideologues have anything to say about it!!IF YOU LIKE:The Jimmy Dore ShowThe Joe Rogan ExperienceReason MagazineThe Fifth ColumnBari WeissThe Gray ZoneBreaking Points With Krystal and SaagarThe Reason Round TableThe President's Daily BriefNPRThe Daily Wire

This week Cian is joined by Des and Devin to dig into the so-called 'budget bonanza', debunking the government spin and exposing it's Thatcherite fine print. We also look at the missed opportunities here, and discuss what a socialist budget would look like. Check out PBP's alternative budget here: https://www.pbp.ie/people-before-profit-launch-cost-of-living-and-housing-emergency-budget --- Rupture Issue 8 has launched - being shipped out shortly! The theme of the issue is IMPERIALISM and will feature articles on the basis for war in the 21st century, Ireland and neocolonialism, and the Irish Language. If you would like to subscribe to the magazine go to https://rupture.ie/subscribe --- Rupture Radio is a weekly podcast looking at news, politics and culture from a socialist perspective. It is produced by members of the RISE network within People before Profit, and is linked to Rupture - Ireland's Eco-Socialist Quarterly. Check out the magazine at rupture.ie Anyone who would like to support the podcast can do so on our Patreon. This will also allow you to get extra content and have a say in topics and interviews we take on. Sign up today at https://www.patreon.com/ruptureradio Any comments or queries please send them to LeftInsidePod@gmail.com or get in touch on Twitter. See you next week, cheers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ruptureradio/message

As Britain acquires a new king and new prime minister, and ordinary people are arrested for expressing dislike of the royal family, James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite join Tom to consider whether this might be a perilous time for the monarchy, and how the Truss government will go about selling its old-fashioned Thatcherite vision in an era of increasing demands on the state.Find James's and Florence's pieces via the episode page: https://lrb.me/griefpodSubscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20bTitle music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Zoe Kilbourn and Anthony Wilks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Described as “incredibly bright, borderline eccentric and very Thatcherite”, Kwasi Kwarteng has been MP for Spelthorne in Surrey, since 2010. Born in London to Ghanaian parents, Kwasi Kwarteng excelled academically – he was an Eton scholar, got a double first from Cambridge University and a scholarship to Harvard. He's worked as a newspaper columnist, a financial analyst and has written several books on history and politics. Kwasi Kwarteng is a long-time friend and close political ally of the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, who's just promoted him to the top post in the Treasury. At a time of high inflation, rising energy costs and a looming recession. So is he up to the challenge? Mark Coles charts the life and career of the man with one of the most powerful jobs in the UK. Presenter: Mark Coles Production team: Sally Abrahams and Matt Toulson, Maria Ogundele and Helena Warwick-Cross Sound engineer: Rod Farquhar Editor: Richard Vadon Credit: Sky News – Anna Jones interview with Kwasi Kwarteng, 5 August 2022

Thatcherite warmonger Liz Truss becomes Britain's prime minister / Russia ends Nord Stream 1 gas exports to Europe as US prepares “more aggressive” involvement in Ukraine war / Court approves Trump request for independent review of documents seized in Mar-a-Lago raid

All work and no play makes… the basis of Truss's Thatcherite utopia. We unpack the likely PM-to-be's “graft” remarks. Plus, six months since the invasion of Ukraine, how is the conflict shaping up? And, with the end of the £10 flight inbound, award-winning transport journalist John Walton joins us to discuss the future of the aviation industry. “On Brexit, Truss will always be the great political half-and-half scarf.” – Tom Peck “It doesn't really matter what Truss believes in, because the main thing she believes in is herself.” – Tom Peck “The dystopian leadership contest nightmare has been so bad that voters might even remember it in two years!” – Tom Peck https://www.patreon.com/bunkercast  Written and presented by Justin Quirk with Arthur Snell, Marie Le Conte and Tom Peck. Producers: Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofronijevic . Assistant producer Kasia Tomasiewicz. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. Lead producer: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. The Bunker is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The final two standing in the battle to become Tory leader and Prime Minister faced off in the first televised debate last night, both vying to wear the mantle of Margaret Thatcher. We watched so you didn't have to,and reflect not only on the performance of Truss and Sunak but also what the BBC deemed to be the big issues. Meanwhile Sir Keir Starmer turned Labour's back on pledges to take public ownership of rail,mail,energy, and water. Does Starmer's "pragmatism" mark a complete surrender to and acceptance of Thatcherite privatisation? However on his visit to Liverpool he couldn't escape the justified anger of a veteran Labour socialist.We also try and make sense of what Starmer means by "distinctively British".An independent review into allegations of racism in Scottish cricket has found the governance and leadership of the sport to be institutionally racist. Folk on social media complained about what they saw as wall-to-wall coverage by Sky and others of the report as another attempt to talk down Scotland claiming that when related stories/reports emerged in English cricket no such blanket reporting took place.Was this justified?Things may be grim for many in Scotland - they're truly terrible for millions in Somalia with the Ukraine grain shortage & worst drought in 40 yrs. Powerful report on News at Ten by Peter Smith. If you can give, please do.UNICEF link here  https://www.unicef.org.uk/donate/east-africa-crisis/★ Support this podcast ★

Yesterday saw the largest strike take place in the UK since the 1970s. Boris Johnson, who is a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher and her policies, will get the chance over the next few weeks or possibly months to emulate her as the country looks like it could easily erupt into a class war of industrial action. Rail workers have agreed to return to talks today as the first of three days of official action took place. The strike brought the country to a virtual standstill and the public face further disruption when the second and third days of action take place tomorrow and Saturday. Strikes by rail workers may be the thin end of the wedge for industrial action, with rumblings coming from teachers, while the health unions are also considering a vote on strike action. When the current Government was elected two and a half years ago, it seemed to have policies that could unite the country, as it promised to level up the geographical and social landscape to make the country a fairer place to live. In contrast to its promises, the UK is now more divided than it has been since the miners strikes of the early 1980s. From the disregard for the rules illustrated by the partygate scandal, the Thatcherite policy of allowing the sale of council houses, and the deportation of illegal immigrants to Rwanda, the Government is in danger of becoming totally detached and wasting the opportunity it was given by achieving an eighty-plus majority. Beyond Currency Market Commentary: Aims to provide deep insights into the political and economic events worldwide that can cause currencies to change and how this can affect your FX Exposure.

Josh returns with tales of LA, Lee's gym confession and Thatcherite ice cream. This, plus some rugby. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

'Sham judgment': British fighters sentenced to death by Russian-backed courtWatch: Ukrainian fighter jets in death-defying game of cat-and-mouse with RussiaOutnumbered: Ukraine's soldiers face 200 daily casualties with desertion on the riseReset speech: Boris Johnson accused of launching 'back of the envelope' policiesCamilla Tominey: Boris Johnson must offer Thatcherite action, not just good intentionsPrince William: Future King goes undercover to sell Big IssueSue Barker: Wimbledon 2022 will be her last for the BBCAffordable bottles: Never underestimate Lidl's wines – here are the best ones to tryRead all these articles and stay expertly informed anywhere, anytime with a digital subscription. Start your free one-month trial today to gain unlimited website and app access. Cancel anytime. Sign up here: https://bit.ly/3v8HLez.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today's episode of Dan Wootton Uncancelled:Should trans swimmer Lia Thomas be allowed to compete against British women in the Olympics? US superstar journalist Megyn Kelly breaks down the interview making a splash stateside.Do the Tory party of today need to get back in touch with their Thatcherite past? The Iron Lady's former aide and the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, Nile Gardiner, joins Dan to discuss.Will Sturgeon ever be stopped? As she defends splashing £20million on Indy Ref2 during a cost-of-living crisis, new chairman of the Scottish Tories Craig Hoy steps up the counterattack against the dangerously deluded First Minister. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The post-war consensus. This is something that many of us take for granted as first, having existed and secondly, what drove the statism of pre-Thatcherite governments. However, Dr Steve Davies, IEA Head of Education, thinks otherwise. In this fascinating lecture, Steve describes the history of free market conservatism before Thatcher. Dr Steve Davies is the Head of Education at the IEA. Previously he was program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University in Virginia. He joined IHS from the UK where he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. A historian, he graduated from St Andrews University in Scotland in 1976 and gained his PhD from the same institution in 1984. He has authored several books, including Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and was co-editor with Nigel Ashford of The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge, 1991).   This lecture originally featured as a video on the IEA's YouTube Channel. Watch here.   FOLLOW US: TWITTER - https://twitter.com/iealondon  INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/ieauk/  FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/ieauk  WEBSITE - https://iea.org.uk/ 

Before we get started… Writing elsewhereI have recently written about modern Russian literature for CapX, as well Victorian YIMBYs and Katherine Mansfield and 1922, for The Critic.Tours of LondonSign up here to get updates when we add new tour dates. There will be three tours a month, covering the Great Fire, Barbican, Samuel Johnson and more!Helen Lewis is a splendid infovore, which is how she has come to be one of the most interesting journalists of her generation. You will see in this conversation some of her range. We chatted before we recorded and she was full of references that reflect her broad reading. She reminded me of Samuel Johnson saying that in order to write a book you must turn over half a library. I recommend her book Difficult Women to you all, perhaps especially if you are not generally interested in “feminist” books. Helen is also working on a new book called The Selfish Genius. There's an acuity to Helen, often characterised by self-editing. She has the precision — and the keenness to be precise — of the well-informed. She was also, for someone who claims to be a difficult woman, remarkably amiable. That seeming paradox was one of the things we discussed, as well as biography, late bloomers, menopause, Barbara Castle, failure, Habsburgs and so on... I had not realised she was such a royal biography enthusiast, always a good sign. Helen's newsletter, by the way, has excellent links every week. It's a very good, and free, way to have someone intelligent and interesting curate the internet for you. Her latest Atlantic feature is about defunct European royals who are not occupying their throne. Let's hope one of Helen's screenplays gets produced…(I do not know, by the way, if Tyler Cowen would endorse the reference I made to him. I was riffing on something he said.)[This transcript is too long for email so either click the title above to read online or click at the bottom to go to the full email…]Henry: Is Difficult Women a collective biography, a book of connected essays, feminist history or something else?Helen Lewis: Start nice and simple. It was designed as the biography of a movement. It was designed as a history of feminism. But I knew from the start I had this huge problem, which is that anyone who writes about feminism, the first thing that everybody does is absolutely sharpens their pencils and axes about the fact that you inevitably missed stuff out. And so I thought what I need to do is really own the fact that this can only ever be a partial history. And its working subtitle was An Imperfect History of Feminism, and so the thematic idea then came about because of that.And the idea of doing it through fights, I think, is quite useful because that means that there was a collision of ideas and that something changed. You know, there were lots and lots of subjects that I thought were really interesting, but there wasn't a change, a specific "We used to be like this, and now we're like this," that I could tie it to. So I don't think it is a collective biography because I think there's no connection between the women except for the fact that they were all feminists, and to that extent, they were all change makers. And I've read some really great collective biographies, but I think they work best when they give you a sense of a milieu, which this doesn't really. There's not a lot that links Jayaben Desai in 1970s North London and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1900s Manchester. They're very disparate people.Henry: Some people make a distinction between a group biography, which is they all knew each other or they were in the same place or whatever, and a collective biography, which is where, as you say, they have no connection other than feminism or science or whatever it is. Were you trying to write a collective biography in that sense? Or was it just useful to use, as a sort of launching off point, a woman for each of the fights you wanted to describe?Helen Lewis: I think the latter because I felt, again, with the subject being so huge, that what you needed to do was bring it down to a human scale. And I always feel it's easier to follow one person through a period of history. And weirdly, by becoming ever more specific, I think you'll have a better chance of making universal points, right? And one of the things that when I'm reading non-fiction, I want to feel the granularity of somebody's research which, weirdly, I think then helps you understand the bigger picture better. And so if you take it down all the way to one person, or sometimes it's more... So Constance Lytton and Annie Kenney, that's sort of two people. I think probably Constance is bigger in that mix. It helps you to understand what it's like to be a person moving through time, which is what I wanted to kind of bring it back. Particularly, I think, with feminism where one of the problems, I think, is when you get progress made, it seems like common sense.And it's one of the things I find I love about Hilary Mantel's, the first two of that Thomas Cromwell trilogy, is there is a real sense that you don't know what's going to happen. Like the moment, the hinge moment, of Anne Boleyn's star appears to be falling. It's very hard not to read it now and think, "Well, obviously that was destined to happen. You'd obviously jumped ship to Jane Seymour." But she manages to recreate that sense of living through history without knowing the ending yet, right? And so maybe you should stick with Anne Boleyn. Maybe this has all just been a temporary blip. Maybe she'll have a son next year. And that's sort of what I wanted to recreate with feminism, is to put you back in the sensation of what it is to be like making those arguments about women having a vote at a time when that's seen as a kind of crackpot thing to be arguing for because obviously women are like this, obviously women are delicate, and they need to be protected. And when all of those arguments... Again, to go back to what it's like to just to live in a time where people's mindsets were completely different to... Which is to me, is the point of writing history, is to say... And the same thing about travel writing, is to say, "Here are people whose very basis, maybe even the way that they think, is completely different to all of your assumptions." All your assumptions that are so wired so deeply into you, you don't even know they're assumptions. You just think that's what consciousness is or what it is to be alive. And that's, I think, why I try to focus it on that human level.Henry: How do you do your research?Helen Lewis: Badly, with lots of procrastination in between it, I think is the only honest answer to that. I went and cast my net out for primary sources quite wide. And there was some... The number of fights kept expanding. I think it started off with eight fights, and then just more and more fights kept getting added. But I went to, for example, the LSC Women's Library has got a suffragette collection. And I just read lots and lots of suffragette letters on microfiche. And that was a really good way into it because you've got a sense of who was a personality and who had left enough records behind. And I write about this in the book, about the fact that it's much easier to write a biography of a writer because they'll fundamentally, probably, give you lots of clues as to what they were thinking and doing in any particular time. But I also find things that I found really moving, like the last letter from Constance Lytton before she has a stroke, which has been effected by being force fed and having starved herself. And then you can see the jump, and then she learns to write again with her other hand, and her handwriting's changed.And stuff like that, I just don't think you would get if you didn't allow yourself to be... Just sort of wade through some stuff. Someone volunteered to be my research assistant, I mean I would have paid them, I did pay them, to do reports of books, which apparently some authors do, right? They will get someone to go and read a load of books for them, and then come back. And I thought, "Well, this is interesting. Maybe I'll try this. I've got a lot of ground to cover here." And she wrote a report on a book about… I think it was about environmental feminism. And it was really interesting, but I just hadn't had the experience of living through reading a book. And all of the stuff you do when you're reading a book you don't even think about, where you kind of go, "Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and actually, that reminds me of this thing that's happened in this other book that's... Well, I wonder if there's more of that as I go along." I don't think if you're going try and write a book, there is any shortcut.I thought this would be a very... I'm sure you could write a very shallow... One of those books I think of where they're a bit Wikipedia. You know what I mean. You know sometimes when you find those very 50 inspirational women books, those were the books I was writing against. And it's like, you've basically written 50 potted biographies of people. And you've not tried to find anything that is off the beaten track or against the conventional way of reading these lives. It's just some facts.Henry: So biographically, you were perhaps more inspired by what you didn't want to write than what you did.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's very true. I think writing about feminism was an interesting first book to pick because there's so much of it, it's like half the human race. It's really not a new subject. And to do the whole of British feminism really was a mad undertaking. But I knew that I didn't want to write, "You go girl, here's some amazing ladies in history." And I wanted to actually lean into the fact that they could be weird or nasty or mad. And my editor said to me at one point, and I said, "I'm really worried about writing some of this stuff." She said, "I think you can be more extreme in a book," which I thought was really interesting.Which I think is also very true in that I also feel like this about doing podcasts is that I very rarely get in trouble for things I've said on podcasts because it's quite hard to lazily clip a bit of them out and put them on Twitter and toss the chum into the water. Right? And I think that's the same thing about if you write something on page 390 of a book, yeah, occasionally, someone might take a screen-grab of it, but people hopefully will have read pages 1-389 and know where you're coming from, by that point.Henry: Maybe trolls don't read.Helen Lewis: Well, I think a lot of the stuff that annoys me is a shallow engagement with complexity, and an attempt to go through books and harvest them for their talking points, which is just not how... It's just such a sad, weathered way of approaching the experience of reading, isn't it? Do I agree with this author or not? I like reading people I disagree with. And so for example, the fact that I call the suffragettes terrorists, and I write about that, I think people are reluctant to engage with the fact that people you agree with did terrible things in the pursuit of a goal that you agree with. And I think it's very true about other sectors. I always think about the fact that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for terrorism. And that gets pushed down in the mix, doesn't it? When it all turns out that actually, he was a great man. And that incredibly long imprisonment in Robben Island is its own totemic piece of the history of modern South Africa, that you don't wanna sit with the awkward bits of the story too.Henry: You've had a lot of difficult experiences on Twitter? Would you have written this book if you hadn't lived through that?Helen Lewis: I think that's a hard question to answer. I tried not to make it a “Here is the cutting of all my enemies.” And actually, my friend, Rob read this book in draft and he insisted that everyone I knew that I was going to argue with had to be of sufficient stature to be worth arguing with. He's like, You cannot argue with, I think I put it in my drawing piece, a piece like Princess Sparklehorse 420. Right? That's quite hard when you're writing about modern feminism, because actually if you think about what I think of as the very social justice end of it, right? The end of it, that is very pro sex work, very pro self-identification of gender, very pro prison abolition, police abolition, it's actually quite hard to find the people who were the theorists of that. It's more of a vibe that you will find in social media spaces on Tumblr, and Twitter and other places like that. So trying to find who is the person who has actually codified all that and put that down to then say, "Well, let's look at it from all sides", can be really difficult. So I did find myself slightly arguing with people on Twitter.Henry: I'm wondering more, like one way I read your book, it's very thought-provoking on feminism, but it's also very thought-provoking just on what is a difficult person. And there's a real thing now about if you're low in agreeableness, that might mean you're a genius, like Steve Jobs, or it might mean you're a Twitter troll. And we have a very basic binary way of thinking about being difficult. And it's actually very nuanced, and you have to be very clever about how to be difficult. And in a way, I wondered if one of the things you were thinking about was, well, everyone's doing difficult in a really poor way. And what we need, especially on the left, is smart difficult, and here is a book about that, and please improve. [chuckle]Helen Lewis: Yeah, there was a lot of that and it's part of the sort of bro-ey end of philosophy is about maybe women have been less brilliant through history because they're less willing to be disagreeable, they have a higher need to be liked, which I think is kind of interesting. I don't entirely buy it. But I think there's an interesting thing there about whether or not you have to be willing to be iconoclastic. The thing that I find interesting about that is, again, there's another way in which you can refer to it, which is the idea that if you're a heretic, you're automatically right.Henry: Yes.Helen Lewis: And there's a lot of...Henry: Or brave.Helen Lewis: Or brave, right? And I think it's... You can see it in some of the work that I'm doing at the moment about the intellectual dark web being a really interesting example. Some of them stayed true to the kind of idea that you were a skeptic. And some of them disbelieved the mainstream to the extent that they ended up falling down the rabbit holes of thinking Ivermectin was a really great treatment for COVID, or that the vaccines were going to microchip you or whatever it might be. And so I'm always interested in how personality affects politics, I guess. And yeah, how you can be self-contained and insist on being right and not cow-tow to other people without being an a*****e is a perpetually interesting question. It's coming up in my second book a lot, which is about genius. Which is sort-of the similar thing is, how do you insist when everybody tells you that you're wrong, that you're right. And the thing that we don't talk about enough in that context, I think Newton is a very good example is that, obviously, he made these incredible breakthroughs with gravity and mathematics, and then spends literally decades doing biblical chronology and everyone tells him that he's wrong, and he is wrong. And we don't really talk about that side of it very much.All the people who spent all their time studying phlogiston and mesmerism, or that's more complicated because I think that does lead to interesting insights. A lot of people who the world told was wrong, were wrong. And we're over-indexing, always writing about the ones who were the one Galileo saying the Earth still moves, and they turned out to be correct.Henry: Yes. There are good books about biographies of failures, but they're less popular.Helen Lewis: Which is tough because most of us are going to be failures.Henry: Yes. Well, you're not gonna buy a book to reinforce that.Helen Lewis: No, but maybe there could be some deep spiritual learning from it, which is that a life spent in pursuit of a goal that turns out to be illusory is still a noble one.Henry: That's a fundamentally religious opinion that I think a secular society is not very good at handling.Helen Lewis: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I've been doing lots of work for Radio 4 about the link between politics and religion, and whether or not religion has to some extent replaced politics as Western societies become more secular. And I think there is some truth in that. And one of the big problems is, yes, it doesn't have that sort of spirit of self-abnegation or the idea of kind of forgiveness in it, or the idea of just desserts happening over the horizon of death. Like everything's got be settled now in politics here, which I think is a bad fit for religious impulses and ideas.Henry: What is the role of humour in being difficult?Helen Lewis: I think it's really important because it does sweeten the pill of trying to make people be on your side. And so I had a long discussion with myself about how much I should put those jokes in the footnotes of the book, and how much I should kind of be funny, generally. Because I think the problem is, if you're funny, people don't think you're serious. And I think it's a big problem, particularly for women writers, that actually I think sometimes, and this happens in journalism too, that women writers often play up their seriousness, a sort of uber-serious persona, because they want to be taken seriously. If you see what I mean, it's very hard to be a foreign policy expert and also have a kind of lively, cheeky side, right? We think that certain things demand a kind of humourlessness to them.But the other thing that I think humour is very important, is it creates complicity with the audience. If you laugh at someone's joke, you've aligned yourself with them, right? Which is why we now have such a taboo and a prohibition on racist jokes, sexist jokes, whatever they might be, because it's everyone in the audience against that minority. But that can, again, if you use your powers for good, be quite powerful. I think it is quite powerful to see... There's one of the suffragettes where someone throws a cabbage at her, and she says something like, “I must return this to the man in the audience who's lost his head.” And given that all the attacks on the suffragettes were that they were these sort of mad, radical, weird, un-feminine, inhuman people, then that was a very good way of instantly saying that you weren't taking it too seriously.One of the big problems with activism is obviously that people, normal people who don't spend every moment of their life thinking about politics, find it a bit repellent because it is so monomaniacal and all-consuming. And therefore, being able to puncture your pomposity in that way, I think is quite useful.Henry: So if there are people who want to learn from Helen Lewis, “How can I be difficult at work and not be cast aside,” you would say, “Tell more low-grade jokes, get people to like you, and then land them with some difficult remark.”Helen Lewis: Use your powers for good after that. It's tricky, isn't it? I think the real answer to how to be difficult at work is decide what level of compromise you're willing to entertain to get into positions of power. Which is the same question any activist should ask themselves, “How much do I need to engage with the current flawed system in order to change it?” And people can be more or less open with themselves, I guess, about that. I think the recent Obama memoir is quite open about, for example on the financial relief in 2008, about how much he should have tried to be more radical and change stuff, and how much he... Did he actually let himself think he was being this great consensualist working with the Republican Party and therefore not get stuff done?And then the other end, I think you have the criticism I made of the Corbyn project, which was that it was better to have kind of clean hands than get things done. There's a great essay by Matt Bruenig called Purity Politics, which says... No, what is it called? Purity Leftism. And it said, “the purity leftist's approach is not so much that they're worried about that oppression is happening but that they should have no part of it.” And I think that's part of the question of being difficult, too, is actually how much do you have to work with and compromise yourself by working with people with whom you're opposed? And it's a big question in feminism. There are people who will now say, “Well, how could feminists possibly work with the Conservative Party?” Entirely forgetting that Emmeline Pankhurst ran as a Conservative candidate.Henry: She was very conservative.Helen Lewis: Right. And there were members of the suffragettes who went on to join the British Union of Fascists. That actually... Some of the core tenets of feminism have been won by people who didn't at all see themselves on the left.Henry: If I was the devil's advocate, I'd say that well-behaved women, for want of a better phrase, do make a lot of history. Not just suffragists but factory workers, political wives, political mistresses. What's the balance between needing difficult women and needing not exactly compliant women but people who are going to change it by, as you say, completely engaging with the system and almost just getting on with it?Helen Lewis: There's a scale, isn't there? Because if you make yourself too unbelievably difficult, then no one wants to work with you and it's... I think the suffragettes is a really good example of that actually. The intervention of the First World War makes that story impossible to play out without it.But had they continued on that course of becoming ever more militant, ever more bombings, and pouring acid on greens, and snipping telephone wires... The criticism that was made of them was, “Are they actually turning people off this cause?” And you get people saying that, that actually the suffragettes set back the cause of women's suffrage, which I'm not entirely sure I buy. I think I certainly don't buy it in the terms of the situation in 1905. Fawcett writes about the fact that there were loads of all these articles decrying the suffragettes, whereas previously they'd just been... The cause of suffrage, which had been going on for 70-80 years, quite in earnest, in legal form, had just been completely ignored. So there was definitely a moment where what it really needed was attention. But then, can you make the same argument in 1914 about whether or not the suffragettes were still doing an equal amount of good? I think then it's much more tenuous.And there was a really good article saying that, essentially your point, well-behaved women do make history, saying that a lot of boring legal heavy-lifting... And it's one of the things I find very interesting about where modern feminism in Britain is. A lot of the work that's most interesting is being done through things like judicial reviews, which is a lot of very boring pulling together large amounts of court bundles, and people saying, “Is this obiter?” This word which I once understood, and now don't anymore. But it's not people chaining themselves to railings or throwing themselves under horses. It's people getting up in the morning and putting another day shift in at quite boring admin. And I do think that maybe that's something that I underplayed in the book because it's not so narratively captivating. Brenda Hale made that point to me that she would have been a suffragist because she just believed in playing things by the book. You won it by the book.And I do think now I find I don't agree with throwing paint and pies and milkshakes and stuff like that at people whose political persuasions I disagree with, right? I fundamentally don't believe in punching Nazis, which was a great debate... Do you remember the great Twitter debate of a couple of years ago about whether it's okay to punch a Nazi? I think if you live in America or the UK, and there are democratic ways and a free press in which to make your political case, you don't need to resort to a riot. And that's not the case all over the world, obviously. But I do think that I am... I think difficulty takes many, many forms.Henry: A question about Margaret Thatcher.Helen Lewis: Yes.Henry: Was she good for women, even though she wasn't good for feminism? So millions of women joined the labour force in the 1980s, more than before or since. It was the first time that women got their own personal allowance for income tax, rather than being taxed as an extension of their husband's income.Helen Lewis: I'm trying to remember. Was that a Tory policy?Henry: That was 1988 budget, and it came into effect in 1990. And she also publicly supported. She said, “You should be nice to mothers who go out to work. They're just earning money for their families.” So even though she definitely did not, consciously I think, help the cause of feminism, you would probably rather be a woman in the '80s than the '70s...Helen Lewis: Oh yeah, definitely.Henry: But because of her. That's my challenge to you.Helen Lewis: No, it's a good challenge. And I think it's one that has a lot of merit. I'm not sure whether or not she would be grateful to you for positioning her as Margaret Thatcher, feminist hero. And it's really into having... I wrote a screenplay last year about the women in politics in the years before Margaret Thatcher, and it's very... And I cover this a bit in the book. That women have always struggled in Labour, a collective movement, where it's like if you let one woman through, you've got to let them all. Like, “I'm the vanguard” versus the Thatcher route, which was like, “I'm just me, a person. Judge me on who I am,” and not making such a kind of radical collective claim. So that's the bit that holds me back from endorsing her as a kind of good thing for women, is I think she was Elizabeth I in the sense where she was like, “I'm good like a man,” rather than saying, “Women are good, and I'm a woman,” which I think are two different propositions. But it's definitely true that... I think that growing up in a society that had a female prime minister was a huge deal. America still hasn't had a female president. It's just not... If you're a girl growing up there, it's just... That's something that you've never seen. And the other half of it is, I think it was incredibly powerful to see Denis Thatcher. The true feminist hero that is Denis Thatcher. But genuinely, that's somebody who was older than her, who was willing to take a back seat. And he found a role for men that was not being the alpha. It was kind of the, “I don't have anything left to prove. And I like playing golf. Haven't I got a great life while the little woman runs around with her red boxes. All a bit much.” I think that was almost a more radical thing for people to see.And it's interesting to me that he was somebody who had fought in the Second World War because I think the '70s and the feminist revolution, I think in some ways depends on there being a generation of men who didn't have anything to prove, in terms of masculinity. And it's really interesting to me that... So Barbara Castle's husband Ted was also, I think, a little bit older than her. But he was also very much in that Denis Thatcher mould of, “Woman! Right, you're exhausting.” And Maureen Colquhoun, who I also write about in the book, her husband Keith was, by all accounts, a very decent guy who was totally accepting of her ambitions. And then he conducted himself with incredible dignity after she left him for a woman. And I think that's a story that I'm interested in hearing a bit more about, is of the men who weren't threatened. So I do think that's a big challenge that the Thatchers did present to orthodox values. But let's not underplay them as conservatives.Henry: Oh no, hugely conservative.Helen Lewis: And also the fact that, to some extent, Margaret Thatcher was reacting to an economic tide that was very useful to her. More women in the workforce meant more productivity, meant higher GDP. And I think it was at that point a train that was just not... Why would you throw yourself in front of it to try and reverse it and get women back into the home?Henry: Her advisors wanted a tax break for marriage.Helen Lewis: Oh, that's a classic Conservative policy.Henry: Because they said, “We're in office, and this is what we're here for.” And she said, “I can't do it to the mill girls in Bolton. I can't give a tax break to wives in Surrey playing bridge.” And in a way, I think she was very quietly, and as you say for political reasons not entirely openly, quite on the side of the working woman for moral reasons that we would usually call feminist. But which because it's her and because of everything else she believes, it doesn't really make sense to call them feminist, but it's difficult to think of another Prime Minister who has had so much rhetoric saying “Yes, women should go to work, that's a good thing. Don't yell at them about it.” And who has implemented economic policies that's giving them tax breaks and trying to level the playing field a bit. So it's a sort of conundrum for me that she didn't want to be called a feminist, but she did a lot of things that quotes, if you were that sort of person would say “undermined” the traditional family or whatever.Helen Lewis: Yeah. And she found a way to be a powerful woman and an archetype of what that was, which I think again, is based enormously on Barbara Castle, I think Barbara Castle is the template for her.Henry: Oh yeah. Down to the hair. Yeah.Helen Lewis: With the big hair and the fluttering the eyelashes, and that kind of, what I think of as kind of “Iron Fem” right? Which is where you're very, very feminine, but it's in a steely ball-crushing kind of way. Although interestingly, Barbara Castle cried a lot. She would have frequently burst into tears about stuff, which again was, I think kept the men around her slightly off balance, they didn't know how to... Which I think any good politician uses what they've got. But the thing that struck me when I read more about Thatcher last year, was about the fact that if she hadn't been the first female Prime Minister, I think we would write a lot more about her lower-middle middle class background and what a challenge that was. And the fact that that really, in some ways, I think the Tory Party really loved having a female leader once they got over the initial shock because it was kind of like, “Well, aren't we modern. And now Labor can't have a go at us about all this kind of stuff, 'cause look at our woman leader.” What I think was more of a profound challenge for a long time, was the kind of arriviste sort of idea that she was, as you say, a representative of working people, upwardly mobile, or from right to buy being an example of one of these policies. I think that was a big challenge to the kind of men in smoky rooms.Henry: I don't think they ever got over it. Carrington called her “a f*****g stupid petit-bourgeois woman.”Helen Lewis: Petit-bourgeois is exactly the right, I think the right term of abuse. And there was a... And I think that's why... I mean, I think it came out as misogyny but actually it was also driven by class as well, the fact that she was no better than she ought to be, right?But that's about... I think that's how you see, and honestly I think Ted Heath experiences as a great... Leading to the incredible sulk, one of my favorite phrases, [chuckle] that he just never kind of got over that he had been beaten by a woman. I think that was an extra kind of poisoned pill for him, of the ingratitude of the party, that they would replace him with a woman.Henry: And a woman of his own class.Helen Lewis: Right. And exactly, it's not like she... So she wasn't sort of Lady Aster wafting in a cloud of diamonds and violet scent. It was, “Hang on a minute, you're saying this person is better than me.”Henry: Now, before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, almost nobody thought that she was going anywhere, right up to say a week before the leadership election. People would have meetings about who the candidates were and they wouldn't even discuss her. Who are the people in politics today that no one's really sort of gathered actually have got this big potential?Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's really interesting isn't it, that essentially she goes into that leadership context and they sort of think, “Well, someone's gonna shake it up a bit, someone's gonna represent the right to the party.” And then they go round... And it was Airey Neave who was running her campaign, going around sort of saying, “Well, you know, vote for her, it'll give Ted a shock.” And then the first ballot result comes in and they go, “Oh God, it's given us a shock as well.” And then I think at that point, Willy Whitelaw piles in, doesn't he? But it's too late and the train's already moving. And the other one who's... It's Hugh Fraser is the other... And he runs very much from the sort patrician candidate background. I love that, that leadership election, it symbolizes what I like about politics, which is just that sometimes there is a moment, that is a hinge when a force that's been bubbling away suddenly pops up. And not to get too much into the great man or in this case, a great woman theory history, but someone makes a big decision that is either going to be the right call or the wrong call.And for Margaret Thatcher is almost insanely ambitious, and she could have ended up looking incredibly stupid, and because the life didn't take that fork in the road, we'll never look back on that. But there are many people who have made that gamble, and again, go back to failures point, have crashed. You have to have that kind of instinct in politics. Who's good now? I was just thinking this morning that Bridget Phillipson of Labor, who is now currently shadow education, I think has been underrated for a long time. Finally less so, given that she's made it to the Shadow Cabinet, who knows if she can make an impression there, but she is smart. So I'll give you an example, she was asked the inevitable question that all labor politicians are now asked, like, “What is a woman?” And she said, “The correct... “ This is Richard Madeley asked her this. She said, “What to my mind is the correct legal ounce that would also makes sense to normal human beings who don't follow politics all the time, which is, ‘It's an adult human female or anybody with a gender recognition certificate. And there are difficulties in how you might sometimes put that into practice, but those are the two categories of people.'”And it was like this moment, I was like, Why? Why has it taken you so long to work out an answer to this question that is both correct and explicable. And I think that is an underrated gift in politicians, is actually deciding what issues you're going to fudge around and which issues you actually have to come out and say what you think even if people disagree with it. It was one of Thatcher's great strengths, was that she made decisions and she stuck to them. I mean, obviously then you get to the poll tax and it becomes a problem. But I think there's... One of the problems I felt with the Ed Miliband era of Labor was that he didn't want to annoy anybody and ended up annoying everybody. Wes Streeting, I think is also... No, I won't say underrated, I will say he's now rated and clearly has got his eye on the leadership next.Bridget Phillipson has a much more marginal seat than you'd like to see from somebody who's going to be a leader. Wes is an interesting character. Grew up on free school meals, has been through cancer in the last couple of years, is gay, has a genuinely kind of... But is also on scene as being on the right to the party. So he's got lots of different identity factors and political factors that will make people very hard to know where to put him, I think, or how to brand him, I guess. But those are two of the ones who you make me think that there's some interesting stuff happening. On the Tory side, there are some people who are quietly competent. So Michael Gove, I think, whatever you think about his persona or anything like that, is the person they put in when they want stuff actually to happen. I think Nadhim Zahawi did very well as Vaccines Minister without anyone really noticing, which is probably not what you want when you're a minister, but it's probably what you want from the public.Henry: Why are so many women late bloomers? Well, obviously, the constraints of having a family or whatever.Helen Lewis: I think the answer is children, I think is the answer to that one.Henry: But there must be other reasons.Helen Lewis: I think... I mean, who knows? I may be straying into territory which is pseudo-science here, but I do also think that menopause is quite important. When you lose all your caring for others, nicely, softly, softly hormones and your hormone profile becomes much more male, I think that makes it easier to not care what people think about you, to some extent. As does the fact that you can no longer be beautiful and play that card. And I don't know, I think also... Again, this is... I don't know if this is supported by the evidence, I think there's more of... I think more of the men fall away. I don't know, I think if you're a guy who's found it very hard to form personal relationships, then maybe your 50s and 60s can be quite lonely, whereas I think that's often the time in which women kind of find a sort of a second wind. Does that make sense? This is all... I mean, none of this is... There's no evidential basis for this, this is just based on my sort of anecdotal reading of people that I'm thinking of.Henry: Camille Paglia once wrote, she put it in very strict terms, she said something like, when the menopause happens, the wife becomes this sort of tyrant and starts flourishing.Helen Lewis: Yeah. No, I'm very much looking forward to that, yeah. Oh yeah.Henry: And the husband becomes this kind of wet rag and his testosterone level drops and the whole power balance just flips. And you're sort of, you're saying that, but not in quite that... Not as quite an aggressive way as she's phrased it.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and it's not a universal truth.Henry: No, no, not at all.Helen Lewis: I just think for the people for whom that happens, that is quite an arresting thing that often gives them the liberation. I also do think there's a kind of mindset change. I don't have kids, but I know from women that I know whose kids have gone off to university, that if you have been the primary caregiver, there is suddenly a great, big hole in your life, and what do you fill it with? And actually, do you have to find a new focus and direction and purpose, because you don't want to be sort of turning up at their halls of residence going, “Hello, just thought I check in, see if you're alright.” And whereas for men, who've maintained a sort of career focus throughout, whilst also adding on a family, that's not such a kind of big realignment of their day and their life and what they feel the focus of their life is.Henry: I spoke to Tyler Cowen about this and he wondered if there's something about women become more acceptable in their looks. So you think about Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher as... I think you were sort of implying this, when a woman reaches middle age, the public or the people around them are less likely to judge them on whether they're good-looking, and so some of that sexism slightly falls away, because when you are a woman in your 20s or 30s, you're very susceptible to being looked at or rated or whatever, whereas Margaret Thatcher had a sort of, I don't know, a motherly quality that no one would... There was a kind of cult of finding her attractive and Alan Clark said disgusting things about her.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and also we've had a queen for 70 years, right? So we do have that sort of idea of what female power looks like, which is icy and so it's non-emotional, but yeah.Henry: But I've seen that in the office, that women in their 20s have a difficult time if they're good looking because there are a certain type of men...Helen Lewis: Well, people assume you're stupid as well.Henry: Well, and also it's just what men go to. They talk about you being that, whereas once a woman gets slightly past that, men don't automatically sort of go, “Oh, how would you rate her out of 10” or whatever? And that creates a space to see them as the person.Helen Lewis: And see them as actual human. I think that's a really interesting thesis. I also think that there's a... I think being a young woman is a particular kind of problem. So I think there's definitely a form of ageism against women, where it's silly old bat, right? Which I do think you get silly old duffer as well, but there is some extra level as well about women, it's like, “Why are you still talking? No one wants to hear from you? Your... “ This is a phrase they use in the internet now, “You're dusty, you and your dusty opinions.” But I think you get the contrary version of that as a young woman, whereas I think we find... The phrase Young Turk implies man, doesn't it?It's like, thrusting young guy, on his way up, super ambitious, he's the new generation, whereas I don't think you necessarily have that whole sort of coalition of positive stereotypes about young women. It's untested, learner, still needs to learn the ropes, that kind of... I'm eternally grateful to my boss in my 20s, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, for making me deputy editor of the Statesman when I was 28, which I think was a pretty radical thing to do. When I don't think it would have necessarily felt so radical to make a 28-year-old guy.Although I say that, but then Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye when he was 26, and there was like a revolution among the old guard. And he had to metaphorically execute a few of them outside the woodshed. So I do think that... I also think people begin to... There's... Now, this is really straying to some dangerous, choppy feminist waters. Competition between women can be very fierce, obviously. I write about this in the book in the terms of Smurfette Syndrome. The idea that there's only one place for a woman, and by God, I've got to have it. But I do think that there can be some jealousy that maybe recedes. And I think it's probably true for men and women. As you get older, people don't see you as a threat because they think, “Well, by the time I'm 40, maybe I'll have all the stuff you have.” But if you've got that stuff at 28, I think there's a real feeling from other people in the generation that those, the stars are peeling away, and there's a real resentment of them. So one of the things I do is I provide kind of counselling services to young journalists who've just suddenly had like a really big promotion or career lift or whatever it is. And I feel indebted to go and say to them, “By the way, this is amazing, but people will hate you because of it.”Henry: It's very striking to me that we've had a period of very young politicians being leaders, but they're men. And the women who've either competed with them or become leaders afterwards are in their 50s. And I do think there's something about what's an acceptable public woman.Helen Lewis: And the idea of authority, I think that's the thing. I think as you get older as a woman, it's easier to seem authoritative.Henry: Someone like Stella Creasy, I think, has had a much more difficult time just because she happens to be under a certain age.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I think the fact that she's now got very young children at a relatively older age. I know that's... Sorry. Apologies to Stella, if you're listening. But it is comparatively old to have children after 40, still. That that will be interesting of how that complicates her next decade in politics.And I do think those super top jobs… There was a really brilliant piece of research which I put in the book about the sort of so-called demanding jobs, the kind of lawyers, the top lawyers, and I think journalists and politicians. Greedy jobs, they're called. And the fact is that they have become more demanding in terms of hours as women have entered the workforce. And now the thing has become fetishized as can you do the 14-hour days? And it becomes a soft way of excluding women with young kids.The problem, I think, will come with all of this when both men and women end up needing to look after elderly parents, as we're having more and more of that extension, those decades at the end of life when you're alive but maybe you're not as mobile as you were. Maybe you need more help from your family. And I think there is a lot of anger among certain types of women that they just feel like they're finally free from their caring responsibilities, and then they get landed with another one. But I know, I've been to some feminist conferences recently where... There's a famous saying which women are the only minority that get more radical with age, which I think is probably true. You can meet some groups of 50-something women, and they are fuming, really fuming. And they've now got the time and the sort of social capital with which to exercise that fuming-dom, as it were.Henry: Is Roy Jenkins overrated?Helen Lewis: [laughter] That's the most random question. He's not my favourite politician, mainly because I'm Team Castle for life, right? And I think she was treated very badly by the men in that Wilson cabinet, the first, the '66 to '70 one, of whom he was one, right? I think that, yeah. I think... Do you know what? I haven't got very strong opinions on him compared with my strong opinions on James Callaghan, who I am anti. And I know there are some Callaghan-stans out there. But I think the utterly cynical way in which he sucked up to the unions in order to get the leadership at the cost, ultimately, of then Margaret Thatcher in '79, out-strikes me as one of the most sort of cynical pieces of politicking.Henry: You are sailing very close to being a Thatcherite.Helen Lewis: I'm not a Thatcherite. I'm not.Henry: No, I know.Helen Lewis: But I can see... I think you... And I think Rachel Reeves has basically written about this, who's now Labour's Shadow Chancellor, that if Barbara Castle had succeeded with In Place of Strife on what were, now, to us, very mild measures, right? A conciliation pause where you have negotiations, strike ballots, no wildcat strikes. If she'd managed to push through some of those, then some of the excesses of the '70s would not have happened. Or at least, Labour would have been able to show that it had a grip of them. But you have a situation where the teachers were asking for something like 25% pay rise in the run up to the '79 election. And the Labour government just looked completely out of control. And so yeah, that's my Callaghan beef. What's your Roy Jenkins beef, then?Henry: I don't have beef. I can't remember why I wrote that question. I read about him in your book. I suppose I think that he did implement some good progressive measures, but that he was essentially a sort of patrician wannabe. And that his whole career in politics is much more middling and establishment, and his radicalism was... I don't know. Perhaps overrated, when we look back.Helen Lewis: Well, I will go away and read some more. I read quite a lot of the... The mad thing about the cabinet, particularly in that Wilson government, is that they were all obviously sitting there writing copious amounts of... To the extent that Barbara Castle would actually write literal notes in cabinet, save it for diary later on. But Tony Benn was writing notes. Crossman was writing notes. Jenkins essentially wrote lots of... A very full memoir. Harold Wilson wrote one of the most boring memoirs that the world has ever seen. The trade union leaders wrote memoirs. Jack Jones wrote a memoir. It was an astonishingly literate and writerly sort of set of people. And yet the cabinet was, in some respects, kind of utterly dysfunctional, but with Wilson still running a sort of... You know, sort of like who was kind of currently had been nice to me. And he went... And of course in his second term, he became incredibly paranoid.It was not a model of good government really. And again, Callaghan is one of the greatest political resurrections ever, right, when he completely screws up the Treasury and then uses Northern Ireland's Home Secretary in order to kind of make himself back into a respectful mainstream figure. But before we go and fight Roy Jenkins-stans, we should both go and find out what our beef is with him.Henry: I'm gonna say her name, well, Colquhoun?Helen Lewis: Colquhoun.Henry: Colquhoun. She said, “Labor would rather fight Powell than solve poverty.” Is that still true?Helen Lewis: What read it out there is a phrase that I think Maureen Colquhoun said after not “the rivers of blood” speech, but another Enoch Powell speech in the '70s, which got her in enormous trouble. Would you like to endorse this sentiment that got her called a racist? And it was used as a pretext for drumming her out of the Labor party. So what happened to Maureen after that is that she... Her local party tried to de-select her, it then went to an appeal at the NEC. She eventually ended up holding on to her candidacy and then she lost in '79 to a guy called Tony Marlow, who's one of the most... Talk about Thatcher, I mean... He was bristly, to the extent that his nickname was Tony von Marlow. But yeah, he has some terrible quote about Harriet Harman as well, which is something like, “These bra burners have got a chip on their shoulder,” or something. It was something terrible mixed metaphor involving how you couldn't wear a bra if you also had a chip on your shoulder. Anyway, I digress.Henry: I'm not trying to endorse her quote, but if you replace Powell with Boris.Helen Lewis: I think it's a really interesting quote about... It comes back to purity leftism, what we were talking about before, is actually, “Do you want the win or do you want the fight?” And there is, I think, more of a tendency on the left than the right, to want to be on the right side of history, to want to be pure, to want to be fighting, and that sort of sense that... The perpetual struggle is the bit that you want to be in, that's the bit that's exciting, rather than the win. I think one of the really interesting sounds to me is gay marriage. I was just reading this Jonathan Rauch piece this morning about the fact that... His argument being, that there was a coalition of kind of right-wingers and centrists and liberals in America who fought with the radical left, who wanted gay rights to be predicated on the idea of sort of smashing the nuclear family and everything like that, to say, “Let's make gay rights really boring, and let's talk a lot about how much we want to get married. And maybe we wanna adopt. Let's recruit all the people who happen to have been born gay, but are also Tories or Republicans.”And I think a similar thing happened to him here, where you have David Cameron saying, “I support gay marriage not in spite of being a conservative, but because I'm conservative.” And you frame it as essentially a very norm-y, boring thing. And I think that has been really interesting to watch in the sense of... I think that's why gender is now come much more to the fore because it's a sense that, “Well, if even Tories are okay with people being gay, it's not... Like what's left? How is that interesting anymore?” And so, I think the criticism that she was trying to make there is very true in the sense that sometimes Labor wants to look right more than it wants to win a halfway victory.Henry: What are some of the best or most underrated biographies of women?Helen Lewis: That's a really interesting question. I read a lot of royal biographies, so I very much like Leonie Frieda's biography of Catherine de' Medici, for example. There is also... You're gonna think this is terrible, Princess Michael of Kent wrote a joint biography of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II, which is called The Serpent and the Moon, which is a really... I think it's... Actually, it's not a bad biography, but I think it's quite interesting to write a biography of the wife and the mistress together.Henry: Yeah, I think that's a great idea.Helen Lewis: Because the story of them is obviously so intertwined and their power relationship obviously changes, right? Because Catherine is the dowdy wife who bears the 10 children, Diane is the kind of unbelievably gorgeous, older woman. But then of course, the king dies and it's like, “Oh, nice chateau you've got there. Shame, one of us is the dowager queen and one of us is now just some woman,” and makes her hand back her Chenonceau to her. So I enjoyed that very much. I'm trying to think what the best political women biographies are. Do you have a favourite Elizabeth I biography? I think there must be a really great one out there but I can't... I don't know which one actually is best.Henry: Well, I like the one by Elizabeth Jenkins, but it's now quite out of date and I don't know how true it is anymore. But it's, just as a piece of writing and a piece of advocacy for Elizabeth, it's an excellent book. And it sold, it was sort of a big best seller in 1956, which I find a very compelling argument for reading a book, but I appreciate that a lot of other people might not.Helen Lewis: No, that's not to everyone's taste. That's interesting. I like Antonia Fraser as a biographer. I don't know if you'‘e got a strong feelings, pro or anti. Her Mary Queen of Scots book is very good. Her Mari Antoinette book is very good. And I actually, I interviewed her once about how she felt about the Sofia Coppola film, which is basically like a two-and a half hour music video. She was totally relaxed, she was like, “It's a film, I wrote a book.”She didn't say it like that, she didn't go, “Film innit,” sucking on a roll-up, she said it in a very lofty, Antonia Fraser kind of way. But I think that's a good thing if you're an author, to kind of go, “What works in a biography is not what works in a film,” so...But yeah, I grew up reading those Jean Plaidy historical novels, so I guess I read a lot of biographies of Queens. I'm trying to think whether or not I read any biographies of modern women. I haven't read... I have on my shelf the, Red Comet, the Sylvia Plath biography. And I also, which is on my to-read pile, as is the biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Janet Malcom, which I one day, will treat myself to. Henry: What are the best or most underrated biographies by women?Helen Lewis: By women? Well, again, then we go back to...Henry: I mean, you've named some of them, maybe.Helen Lewis: The interesting thing is, I remember when I did Great Lives, they said... The Radio 4 program about history. That they said, the one thing that they have tried to encourage more of, is men nominating women. Because they found there was no problem with getting women to nominate men and men to nominate men, but they found there weren't that many men who picked women, which I think is interesting. I really wanted, when Difficult Women came out, I wanted a man to review it.Henry: Did that not happen?Helen Lewis: No, it didn't happen. And I think everybody would've... I think, from the point of view of your male reviewers, why would you review a book on feminism when you're gonna get loads of people going, “Ew, what are you doing?mansplaining feminism?” But it's an intellectual project, right? It's not a... It should be open to criticism by absolutely anyone, not on... You don't have to pass an identity test. It's an ideology and a school of history. And so I would... What's the best biography of woman written by a man, is kind of a question I'm interested in.Henry: Yes. That's very difficult to think of.Helen Lewis: And how many of them are there? Because it just strikes me that when I'm naming all my women, biographies of women, that they're all by women.Henry: Yes. It's difficult to think... It'‘ easy to think of biographies of men written by women.Helen Lewis: Right. Hermoine Lee's out there repping for Tom Stoppard biography recently. But yeah, people can send in answers on a postcard for that one.Henry: Should there be less credentialism in journalism?Helen Lewis: Yes. I started as a sub-editor on the Daily Mail. And I worked alongside lots of older guys who had come up through local papers at the time when the trade unions were so strong that you had to do two years on local paper before you got to Fleet Street. And therefore, I worked with quite a lot of people who had left school at either 16 or 18 and were better at subbing than people who'd... than recent university graduates. And so, the way that journalism has become first of all, a graduate profession and now a postgraduate profession, I don't think it's got any real relationship to the quality of journalism. There are a sort of set of skills that you need to learn, but a lot of them are more about things like critical thinking than they are about literature, if you see what I mean?That's the thing. That is what I find very interesting about journalism, is the interesting marriage of... You have to have the personal relationships, you have to be able to find people and make them want to be interviewed by you and get the best out of them. Then you have to be able to write it up in prose that other humans can understand. But then there is also a level of rigour underneath it that you have to have, in terms of your note-keeping and record-keeping and knowledge of the law and all that kind of stuff. But none of that maps onto any kind of degree course that you might be able to take. And so, I think that's... And the other huge problem, I think in journalism is that, everyone in the world wants to do it, or at least that's how it seems when you're advertising for an entry level position in journalism.When I was at the New Statesman, we used to recruit for editorial assistants and I once had 250 applications for a single post, which was paid a fine amount, you could live on it just about in London, but was not... It was a plum job in intellectual terms, but not in economic terms. And I think that's a real problem because I could have filled every position that we had, with only people who'd got Firsts from Oxford or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't have been the best selection of journalists.Henry: No. Quite the opposite.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yes. I enjoy your anti-Oxford prejudice. [chuckle] But you know what I mean is that I... But the fact that you had to have at least a degree to even get through the door, is sort of wrong in some profound way. And actually, some of the places have been... I think Sky did a non-graduate traineeship for people who were school leavers. And I think that there are profound problems in lots of those creative arts, publishing is the same, academia is the same, where you could fill every job which is low paid, and in London, with middle-class people whose parents are willing to fund them through. And the credentialism just is a further problem in that it just knocks out bright people from perfectly normal economic backgrounds.Henry: Do you think as well, that in a way, the main criteria for a good journalist, whether they're a sub-editor, or writing leaders or whatever, is common sense? And that a good English degree is really no guarantee that you have common sense.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yeah. I couldn't put my hand in my heart and say that everybody I know with an English degree demonstrates common sense. I think that is actually not a bad... The famous thing is about you need a rat-like cunning, don't you? Which I think is also pretty true. But yeah, you do need to come back to that kind of idea about heresy and you do need to have a sort of sniffometer, not to be... I think you need to be fundamentally cynical, but not to a point where it poisons you.The right amount of cynicism is probably the thing you need in journalism. Because my husband's a journalist and quite often, there'll be a story where we just go, “I don't believe that. I just don't believe that.”And it really troubles me that that's become harder and harder to say. So I wrote a piece a while ago, about TikTok and people who claim to have Tourette's on there and actually quite a lot of them might have something else, might have functional neurological disorder. But there are whole genres of that all across journalism, where people will talk very personally and very painfully about their personal experiences. And the other half of that is that, we are not... It's mean, to question that. But they're often making political claims on the basis of those experiences. And you therefore can't put them in a realm beyond scrutiny. And so it's interesting to me, having been a teenager in the '90s when journalism was incredibly cruel. I'm talking about the height of bad tabloid, going through people's bins, hate campaigns against people. And a lot of this “be kind” rhetoric is a response to that and a necessary correction, but I do think there are now, lots of situations in which journalists need to be a bit less kind. That's a terrible quote. [laughter] But do you know what I mean?Henry: I do know exactly what you mean.Helen Lewis: When you have to say, “I know you think you've got this illness, but you haven't.” That's tough.Henry: People need to be more difficult.Helen Lewis: That's always my marketing strategy, yes.Henry: I want to ask if you think that you are yourself a late bloomer? In the tone of voice that you write in, you very often... You write like an Atlantic journalist and there are these moments, I think, of real wit. I don't mean jokey. I mean, clever. And so, a line like, “Your vagina is not a democracy,” is very funny but it's also very...Helen Lewis: It's true.Henry: Sort of Alexander Pope-ish.[laughter]Helen Lewis: That's the best possible reference. Yes, I hope to write very mean epigrams about people, one day.Henry: Please do. But you can also be very jokey like when you said, I think in a footnote, that you don't watch porn because the sofas are so bad.Helen Lewis: True.Henry: Now, there is something in those moments of wit that I think suggest that you could, if you wanted to, go and do something other than what you've already done. Maybe like Charles Moore, you'd become a biographer, or maybe you'd become a novelist, or maybe you'll run a think tank, or maybe you'll set up a newspaper and only employ 16-year-old school leavers, or... I don't know. Is that how you think about yourself or am I...Helen Lewis: You are trying to tell me I need to just grow up.[laughter]Henry: Not at all.Helen Lewis: Stop clowning around like a sea lion for applause after throwing fish.Henry: My theory on Helen Lewis is, you've got all the accolades that someone could want from a journalistic career.Helen Lewis: Not true. I've only ever won one award for journalism and you'll love this, it was Mainstream Video Games Writer of the Year.Henry: Oh my god.Helen Lewis: That's it. From the Games Awards in 2013, which I only remember this because every so often my publisher will put award-winning journalist as a merit that I have. Not really gov, not if I'm honest. You're right though. I have one of the plum jobs in journalism which is I work three days a week at the Atlantic, and then I make radio documentaries on the side and write books, and that is a position which is enormously enviable. But I have also... So I've moved away from column writing, in the last couple of years — I used to write a regular op-ed column — because I found it a deeply unsatisfying form. And I think, when you do jokes, you begin to realize that you can actually just say stupid, easy clap lines and with sufficient confidence, and people will respond to them, and after a while, you begin to hate yourself for doing that.[laughter]Well, that's one of the reasons I again... Like getting off Twitter. You know what I mean? You see some of those accounts that just exists to do lazy little dunks about the people that are appointed, that are sort of designated hate subjects. So if someone gets designated as a hate subject, then you can say nasty things about them and then everybody will applaud you. And I fundamentally revolt from that and I don't like it.I think that as a journalist, you should always try and be at right angles to whatever the prevailing opinion is. And actually as I've got older, I value the sort of... The people I think of as contrarians who I think really believe it rather than the people who are doing it for effect. Someone like a Peter Hitchens. He's got a whole ideology that's very much not mine and a set of interesting opinions and he believes them, and he truly argues them, and although they... Whether or not they're popular or unpopular is of no interest to hi

I was very pleased to talk to Charles Moore, who I have read admiringly for many years. His three volume biography of Margaret Thatcher is one of the most interesting biographies published in the last few years. He also edited a volume of T.E.Utley's journalism. In this discussion you will hear (or read the transcript below!) whether Margaret Thatcher is more left-wing than we think, what Charles thinks of political biography, how his footnotes work, who are the most underrated Thatcher cabinet ministers, the relationship between fiction and biography, why he's not a natural Thatcherite, and more. I asked a lot of my questions much less elegantly than I had written them, but the answers are frequently models of spoken English. I particularly enjoyed Charles' use of “jealous” in its original, perhaps now semi-archaic, meaning (i.e. suspiciously vigilant or careful). He also seems to use “cunning” in the way Johnson defined it, pleasingly. I remember reading once how much Charles enjoyed the language of the Book of Common Prayer as a child. Perhaps those lexicographical waters run deep. The transcript is lightly edited for intelligibility. You will notice, sometimes, that the transcript moves from past to present tense when Charles talks about Margaret Thatcher. Here, as elsewhere, he often refers to her in the present tense. One topic we didn't cover was Margaret Thatcher as a late bloomer. Maybe another time.Henry: You once wrote that you found political biography boring to read, or you used to. Why did you find it interesting to write?Charles Moore: I think making one's own enquiries makes you think about it more deeply, which is intrinsically interesting. But also I think the subject, Mrs. Thatcher, is a particularly interesting person because she was very unusual and because she was the first and, effectively at the time, only woman. And so everything's different. And so the impact of her is very strikingly different from that of even very well-known male politicians.Henry: And do you enjoy reading political biography more now that you've written your book?Charles Moore: I don't find that I do read it more, particularly. But probably the answer's yes because I can understand more how the work is done. And therefore, I can see who's good at it and who isn't, and when they're evading a subject they don't understand or whether they've really got to the bottom of it and so on.Henry: How do you assess that? What sort of things make you think that someone's really got a grip on what they're telling you?Charles Moore: Partly it's their mastery of the sources, of course. And also, it's a matter of, to some extent, perceiving their fairness. And I think that's quite an interesting subject, because fairness doesn't mean, necessarily, that you're neutral about the person. You can be highly sympathetic to the subject, or you can be even unsympathetic to the subject and still be fair. But fairness is something about considering the evidence and trying to give it its right weight. This, I think, is easily detectable in biographies. And some just don't do that. They wish to assassinate the character, or they wish to make a hero of the character, or they're simply rather lazy. If you've walked down that path, you can detect what's going on.Henry: What parts of Margaret Thatcher's life did you find it most difficult to be fair about?Charles Moore: Well of course, I wouldn't be the best judge of that, I suppose.Henry: Were there any bits, though, where you had to work at that practise of fairness?Charles Moore: One way in which you need to be fair to a subject is simply to try to understand the subject. I don't mean the biographical subject. I mean the issue. And there are certain subjects that I'm less good at and, therefore, have to work harder on like, let's say, monetary policy or details about missiles. Neither of which are my natural territory, and both of which are important in the case of Mrs. Thatcher. So I would have to make more efforts about that, mental efforts, to really understand what's going on than I would about, say, fighting an election or reform of the trade unions or something like that. There's a sort of broad point about being fair, which is that biography naturally and inevitably and rightly must focus on the individual. And therefore, it may do that to the exclusion of other individuals or of a wider milieu, which is an inevitable danger but is also a mistake because the individual in politics doesn't act alone, even a very remarkable character like Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. And one needs, somehow, to convey the milieu and the weight of the other characters while never ceasing to focus on the one character.One of the extraordinary features of Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall etc — is that, I think it's right to say, he is in the room the entire time, or in the field or whatever. I think Thomas Cromwell is in every scene. Sometimes it's reported speech that he's hearing, but still. And, as a biographer one sort of does that. Mrs. Thatcher is almost always in the room, not absolutely always. And that's right. That's fine. But one mustn't let her crowd everything else out.Henry: Were the Mantel books a conscious model or influence for you, or is that something you've noticed separately?Charles Moore: Not really because I was reading them more towards the end. Well, I read Wolf Hall quite a long time ago, and then I read the other two pretty much when I was finishing. But I think they're very good. Obviously, they're not biographies. But I think, I hope, I learnt something from them because there's a sustained effort of the imagination, which the novelist has to have, to see through the eyes of, in her case, Thomas Cromwell. And though biography is fact not fiction, imagination is required in biography as well. And so in some ways, it's a similar task.Henry: On this question of the milieu that Margaret Thatcher was in, you paid a lot of attention in the three books to the biographies of all the people around her, especially in footnotes, but also when you're describing events such as the leadership election in 1990, there's a lot of biographic information. Is this compilation of brief lives, a way of providing not just information, but commentary, almost like a sort of prosopographia? What stood out to me was that, even just through the footnotes, it really details the way that she was very, very different to everyone else in that world, demographically and socially.Charles Moore: Yes. That's right. So, in putting footnoted autobiographies of most of the characters, that's useful for reference, but it's also a sort of short-hand way of telling you about the milieu and the range of characters she was dealing with, and of course, it brings out the fact that they're almost all male and a very high percentage of them went to public schools and Oxford or Cambridge. She of course went to Oxford, but she didn't go to public school and she wasn't a man. So I think when your eye goes to bottom of the page and picks up one of those biographies, it should be helpful in its own right, but it also should have a cumulative effect of placing Mrs. Thatcher among all of these people and of course, rather like the only woman in the room is very noticeable physically, she's very noticeable as unique in this milieu.Henry: Is that a technique that you took from somewhere, or is that something that you devised yourself?Charles Moore: Well, I think she devised it to some extent, and I picked up on that. She always had to wrestle with the point that it was considered a disadvantage to be a woman in the world in which she was moving. And she realized that though in certain respects it was objectively a disadvantage because of prejudice and so on, she could turn it to advantage. And I think one thing she understood very early on, because though she's a very sincere person she's also a very good actress, is that she could see the almost filmic quality of her position. So she would know that the camera would come in on her, and therefore she should exploit that to the full with her hair, her bag, her dresses, the sense of being different and noticeable, her voice. And she put that to good use and tried to refine that and simplify it really so that it could have maximum impact.Henry: There was a High Tory ambivalence about Margaret Thatcher, so someone like T.E Utley was a supporter, but not a complete supporter, a slightly guarded pro-Thatcher. And I think you potentially fall into this group, not entirely aligned with the Thatcher government on Ireland, Hong Kong for example. How did this position affect you as her biographer?Charles Moore: I don't think my own specific views on political questions were so important in that, but I think perhaps my overall approach affected it. What I mean by that is that my background, I'm actually brought up as a liberal with a big “L” — Liberal Party. And by cultural inclination I wouldn't be a natural Thatcherite, and I would always look at Mrs. Thatcher as somebody different from my way of thinking in that sense, which of course makes that very interesting. I'm not part of her tribe, and wasn't by upbringing, and I hope that's useful because it gives a certain historical detachment. However I wasn't trying to write an interpretation of Mrs. Thatcher coming from my tribe, it wasn't like the Whig interpretation of history sort of thing. And indeed, in some ways, I was more impressed by her because I came from a different tribe, that's to say, she had to overcome more barriers in my mind, perhaps. Suppose I'd been writing a biography of Asquith, that would have been more like the world I grew up in, and perhaps less of a challenge. And writing about Mrs. Thatcher, it's exciting to enter a world which in social terms and political terms, and of course, a different sex as well, was less known to me.Henry: I think you wrote that she is, with the possible exception of Jim Callaghan, the most socially conservative Prime Minister that Britain has had. To what extent do your background and your personal views make it easy or difficult for you to be, as you said earlier, fair in the way that you presented that?Charles Moore: She's a very odd mixture in that way. I think I perhaps did write that. But of course, she also was such a change bringer. If you think of Mrs. Thatcher's natural demeanour and reactions, she would be very socially conservative. I mean not ultra socially conservative. For example, she married a divorcee, which was quite unusual in 1951. But a fairly conventional Christian, starting as a Methodist and sort of sliding gradually into Anglicanism as she rises up the social scale without ever abandoning Methodism. Believing strongly in firm punishments for criminals. A very uncomplicated monarchist. No problem about hereditary peers in her mind, etcetera, etcetera. Very fond of obvious traditional British things like the armed services, support for the police, all that sort of thing. And things like traditional high standards in school of a rigorous kind. So on and so on, all those things. But in another way, she's so impatient to change things and unafraid of challenging whatever it is that people usually go around saying. So it's a curious combination and an interesting one. For me, I don't remember that presenting a particular fairness issue. It's just this funny thing about her, which is also biographically very interesting, that she's very, very conservative and very, very radical.Henry: Do you think the fact that you have religious belief. Do you think that had any part in the consideration to pick you as the biographer? I think you've said before, you don't really know why she chose you.Charles Moore: No, I wouldn't have thought that it did have any consideration. Mrs. Thatcher's religion was quite vague, and she wasn't interested at all in ecclesiastical or theological questions. But one of the things she respected in religion was some sort of seriousness about ultimate purpose. And she certainly had such a seriousness herself. And I remember talking to her about that. This is before I was engaged in the work, I think just in conversation. I had recently become a Catholic, and she talked about that. This is another interesting example of her, in some ways, rather open mind because she's fundamentally brought up anti-Catholic as most English Protestants were. And I don't think she would ever have considered becoming a Catholic. But I remember her being rather pleased that I had become a Catholic because she thought this is a proper serious Christian thing to do, and it was something she respected. She felt this about Jews too, obviously they weren't Christians. But again, she had a respect for Judaism and Judaic law and custom and manners and thought. And that was something which she recognised and liked in other people.Henry: Margaret Thatcher is sometimes thought of, or dismissively described, as un-philosophical. You said in your prefaces that she would confound Socrates with her lack of reflection on her own life. But in some ways she was quite an ideological person, at certain times, about freedom and things. Is the difference between being philosophical and ideological really so great? And was she really living if not a philosophically reflective life, a very philosophical life in what you've just been saying about seriousness and purpose? Is she more philosophical than she looks?Charles Moore: Yes. Good way to think about it, I think. Alfred Sherman, with whom she fell out but who was close to her in the '70s, said that “she is not a person of ideas but a person of beliefs.” And beliefs, he said, are better than ideas. I think he meant better from a political point of view, for politics. And I think that's sort of right. So there was a sense in which Mrs. Thatcher was philosophical, which was that her mind was an enquiring one. And she was always thinking, thinking, thinking. “What's right here? What's the best? What's the problem? What's the solution?” But she didn't have the philosopher's sceptical mind or pure intellectualism. She wanted results. And she wanted good things to happen and bad things to be stopped. And so she did have what you could call a philosophy, but she was not a philosopher. She was a person of action and beliefs.Henry: I heard an interview with you recently where you, I'm going to paraphrase, you said something like the limitation of left-wing political thought is that it has a utopian belief in politics. As in, if everybody only could have the right politics, everything would be okay. And you've written and talked about Margaret Thatcher trying to create a Christian Social Order in Britain. And that's really the drive she had. Is she, in that sense, a bit more of a "left-wing" political thinker, with a more utopian vision, than we would typically think of her as being?Charles Moore: There is an element of that because she is partly a preacher in politics. There's an element of, some sense in her mind of building Jerusalem or rebuilding Jerusalem, I think is there. And that tends to be more associated with socialism and, indeed with certain forms of Protestant Christianity going back, than with conservatism. So there is something of that. However, one of her beliefs, which was true — I mean, which she did adhere to — was that politics doesn't contain the solutions of everything, because people do not political structures. And she did believe that. Though of course, she also, because she was very egotistical, she did believe that something which she ran was bound to be good. So she could accommodate. People said she was very intolerant of other ideas. She was certainly very argumentative. But for example, she respected the Labour Party. She didn't respect the Liberal Party, but she respected the Labour Party because she thought that it represented something in Britain that ought to be represented and that conservatism didn't really represent, the way she put it was that it was the party of the underdog. And she thought there should be a party of the underdog.And her own approach to the problem of people who are less successful and poorer and things like that was to open up their opportunities. But I think within that was also a sort of acknowledgement that not everybody can take those opportunities. And for those people, it's important that there be a party that represents their interests. And she thought that Labour was the party to do that. So that shows a certain sense that, “I, Margaret Thatcher, don't have the answer to everything. I'm trying to do a particular set of things, and I believe I can do this right. But life is bigger than that, and politics is bigger than that.”Henry: On the question of her being argumentative, or however you want to phrase it, you have that great memo, I think from 1981, that someone in her office wrote to her...Charles Moore: Oh, John Hoskyns?Henry: Yeah, yeah. And saying everything that gets quoted about her. But actually, after that memo, she was in power for another nine years. Should we be quite cautious about this idea that she was single-minded, not consensus-minded, a rude person? Should we try and be revising that image of her and saying that actually that was a more narrow part of her leadership style than is thought?Charles Moore: Well, the famous Hoskyns memo was very powerful and contained criticisms which were true. But it's also a sort of protest because he was feeling that she wasn't listening to him. And also she had certain completely maddening qualities, if you were working with her every day, which he had to get off his chest. One of them was, the less sure she was about something and the more tired she was, the more rubbish she talked. And she could, in a tight corner, particularly before she'd made a decision, burble on a great deal and criticise others for a problem which really rested with her because she was psyching herself up to do something. And that happened a lot in certain economic decisions where she was worried about their unpopularity. She might argue with Geoffrey Howe or, later, Nigel Lawson about putting up interest rates, which she was almost always against. They were quite often in favour of it. And she used this tactically and psychologically, I think without realising it. And it could be a nightmare to live with, but leaders perhaps have to be a bit of a nightmare to live with some of the time.The other thing was that because she was so jealous of her position and felt so fragile in her position as the only woman and the leader that she sort of knew people would like to get rid of, she had to — she thought, at least, that the way to deal with this is to be extremely forceful and not to be seen to give in. An upper-class man would tend to think that the graceful and sensible thing to do would be to give in and say, as a tactical thing, to say, “I'm frightfully sorry. You're completely right. I've got this completely wrong.” And she never felt she could do that. She felt she had to maintain her argument, her position at almost all times. But it didn't mean that actually she paid no attention to the criticisms or that she never altered her views because she would always claim consistency, which might not, in fact, always be there. And that was, again, a sort of technique of hers. And so she was more consensual and more pragmatic than she would admit. Her colleagues often find that hard to understand because she didn't want them to understand it. She wanted them to think that she was iron and immutable and unchangeable and, as she would put it, staunch. And actually, there was a lot more subtlety, and a sort of listening, than she or they would acknowledge.For example, trade union reform. She was always complaining about Jim Prior going so slowly, but actually she did, herself, want to go slowly. She had a great impatience which made her want to get reforms in and bring about the changes, but she also knew that she mustn't make the mistake of Ted Heath of doing one great big law all at once. She must do it bit by bit. And so she was much more pragmatic in what she did when about trade union reform than she would say she was being.Henry: You found some new material about Thatcher, particularly from when she was a young woman to do with boyfriends and letters to her sister and things that inevitably gave a much broader view of her character than we were used to from the television and the news and so forth. How did that change your view of the way she operated politically?Charles Moore: I think it confirmed something which I sensed, but it brought it out much more clearly, which is what a cunning person she was. I didn't mean that in a nasty way. Her self-description was of somebody who just knew what's right and does it. But it wasn't like that. She did have a strong moral sense and she did have strong convictions, but she also had very strong ambitions and a sense of when to do something and when not to do something.So if you look at Margaret Roberts that she then was, wondering whom to marry, it's the female equivalent of what nineteenth century novels used to call the choice of life for a man, which is often depicted in 19th and 18th century novels. A young man goes out to the world. What does he want to do? Does he want be a soldier or a lawyer, or whatever it might be. And how is he going to shape his life? And she was thinking a lot about that. She wanted, in the case of marriage, she definitely wanted true love, she is a romantic person, but she also wanted security, financial security, and a sense of a man she could look up to, almost certainly older, or very unlikely that anyone she would marry will be her own age, I think would be fair to say. And her most serious boyfriend was twice her age and then Dennis was 11 plus years older than she.And you can see her particularly in the year 1951 when she has three serious boyfriends, one of whom was Dennis, weighing up. One's a farmer. Does she want to be married to a farmer? No. One is a distinguished doctor. Yes, but he is a lot of older than her. And then there's Dennis who had had a good war and had his own business, but on the other hand was divorced. And so she's thinking, wouldn't perhaps put it to herself like this, “How am I going to be an MP? Maybe even, how am I going to be a minister? Maybe, maybe, even how I'm I going to be Prime Minister.” Though I'm be much less sure about that, this is all very early on. But also, “How am I going to marry the right man and have children?” And these things are all going around and around in her head and influencing her decisions. “And how am I going to be able to support myself or be supported by a man. How will I have enough money?” Because she had no money from her family.And so you can see this very ardent person, but also a person who thinks very carefully before she does something, she loves the expression, the well known expression, “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted,” and I think she was always making reconnaissance.Henry: The political scientist, Mark Garnett, has described Thatcher as banal. This is a quote from him, he says: “She was prepared to face down establishment institutions, if they opposed her. This defiance was not the product of a deep delayed plan: only interesting people engage in that style of thinking.” Is that a helpful way to think about Margaret Thatcher?Charles Moore: No, I think it's an unhelpful way to think about it, because what he's not acknowledging is that she's a politician. So the point about being a politician is not, do you have a brilliantly original mind? But what are you capable of doing? And she's extremely unusual in politicians for a sustained interest, sustained over a very, very long period in her case, in office, in the content of what she was doing. And therefore, she was thinking really hard about some questions. How do we end the Cold War? How do we beat trade union leaders? How to beat inflation? With a resourceful seriousness, which might not be intellectually original, but which was in a political sense, profound. To call it banal is mistaken, because actually nobody else was like that. There was simply nobody else in the first rank who was behaving and thinking that way. So it was original. It wasn't original in the sense that Plato's original, but in politics it was original.Henry: Tyler Cowen has talked about the advantage of having or displaying what he calls autistic cognitive traits, so the ability, and the absorbing interest, to absorb a lot of information to categorize it, to order it, and to do this much more so than other people, along obviously with some other things. Do you think Margaret Thatcher displays those sorts of traits and did they, as I think you are sort of suggesting here, give her a political advantage and an advantage as prime minister?Charles Moore: I wouldn't use the word autistic, and I know something about autistic behavior through my own family, my own wider family. I think it's probably not the right sort of categorisation, but I think Mrs. Thatcher had astonishing powers of application. And she did have the ability to, in order to apply herself to a subject, to shut out other ones, while she was applying herself. However, she was a vulnerable human being as well. And though she wasn't the best person at reading other people's emotions, she was, in many ways, sympathetic to people. I mean, she could be very unpleasant to people. But she was really fond of some people and grateful to them and solicitous in their difficulties and conscientious in how she ought to behave to them. She was odd in the way that all great people are odd. I don't mean all great people are odd in the same way, but all great people are odd in some way.But I don't think her mentality was quite as you described there. And I think she couldn't have survived in politics if it were because one of the things you have to do in politics is you have to have intuition about what other people are thinking. She constantly attended to what she thought voters were thinking, what was the public reaction to something or other. She wasn't obsessed with the media to anything like the degree that politicians are now, but she knew how to sniff the wind. And though she could be very brutal with colleagues, I think she did actually have powers of diplomacy which were put to very good use on the world stage, if you think of her relation with Reagan or with Gorbachev for example.Henry: How much of what we call Thatcherism was actually Lawsonism?Charles Moore: Perhaps they started out more or less together and diverged. And there was a lot in common. Before things went wrong, there was a strong alliance about that. But I think Lawsonism — I wouldn't call it an ism actually — but I think Lawson's views about things were generally more economically based, as you might expect. There was less politics and more economics in it. And he was more thoroughly liberal in economics than she. Whereas she tended to see economics as the instrument. She did believe in free market economics, but she saw them more as the instrument of something wider. Whereas he was more interested in them in themselves, I think.Then there's a second point, of course, which takes us on to rather different territory that Lawson, like Thatcher — because, again, a big ego — suffered from feeling that if he was doing something himself, it was bound to be good. I think all important politicians tend to fall into this category. So it was sort of self-evident to him that if he was Chancellor of the Exchequer it must be better than anybody else being Chancellor of the Exchequer. And this led him, after several successes, to a great mistake which was the whole attempt to get into the ERM and the shadowing of the Deutsche Mark in relation to that. Because it became a sort of totem about how you could manage Sterling, and it became a piece of alchemy or magic or a sort of hieratic thing, which only people of great brilliance could operate. And she, I think, had a wider view, a more common sense view about economic questions and how they weren't really like that. They didn't really depend on such calculations but on things that are, in a certain sense, simpler. Lawson was much the superior economic brain to hers, but I think he was more defective politically and didn't understand. I think there's a reason why he couldn't ever have been Conservative Party leader, though he was a very distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer.Henry: Who are the most underrated Cabinet ministers from Margaret Thatcher's governments?Charles Moore: Well things went wrong for Geoffrey Howe. It's perhaps forgotten that he was a very good Chancellor of the Exchequer. In some ways he was a very good Foreign Secretary, but he was perhaps too indecisive and too sort of official minded. Howe was also very important in Thatcherism, though he didn't really like Mrs. Thatcher much. Richard Ryder described him as the tapestry master of Thatcherism. I think it's a very good phrase. Howe actually preceded her in his interest in free market economics, even in the '50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. She was interested, but he got there first very often. I think he was very important to her, in the early days, and of course, it was pretty disastrous when they finally fell out. And he was definitely a really high-class servant of the state.I think Nicholas Ridley was so bad in public presentation and politics in that general sense that people didn't realise what a competent Minister he was and what a good brain he had. I think he was temperamentally very unsuited to modern politics in some ways, but of all the ministers in her government I always found he was one most respected by officials interestingly. He was decisive, he would take responsibility, he wouldn't duck problems, he would think through things, he was a bit wild on the political aspects, but he was more impressive than people realised.And then Norman Tebbit is an interesting one because of course, he suffered great difficulties because of the terrible injuries he suffered, he and his wife suffered in the Brighton bomb. So he may not have been such a good minister of a big department, but he did have the most formidable brain and the most tremendous capacity to express something very clearly and often amusingly. And so he sort of cut through both the people who agreed with him and people who disagreed with him. It was a very striking phenomenon, Norman Tebbit, and highly unusual in somebody who in formal terms was a middle to higher ranking rather than top ranking cabinet minister in terms of jobs. You never knew who he was and you had to watch out for him and his fierceness in debate his sort of rather spare eloquence, his toughness. All that was formidable.Henry: We live at a time when so many of the essential moments in Thatcher's political career can be watched on YouTube, and we can hear radio clips, and we can see her letters online, and it's possible to imagine a sort of biographical Museum of Margaret Thatcher where you can be sort of immersed in her and in her world. What sort of challenge does that present to a biographer? There's a sort of inevitable limitation in that Disraeli only exists on paper, but Margaret Thatcher exists in all these mediums. But you as a biographer only have paper.Charles Moore: Yes, well of course I didn't only have paper in a sense that I only have paper on which to express it, but I could myself watch the clips, and indeed I saw them live frequently, because I was around at the time. I think it's very, very interesting and instructive to watch clips of Mrs. Thatcher and I'm always urging people instead of sort of theorizing about it to in television programs to show those clips because she had a tremendous gift of communication, even though sometimes the communication didn't please the recipients. She very, very clear and, in that sense, extremely good at getting a message across and that survives very well in the clip. So you can see her intent often much more clearly and strikingly than that of modern politicians and the sheer sort of emotional force she put into everything.For example, you watch when she's answering questions on the day she resigned in November 1990, answering questions in the house and then doing the no-confidence debate. It's absolutely astonishing. Particularly in the questions. When if you keep bearing in mind that she has just resigned. So she's still Prime Minister, but she's tendered her resignation that day, and there she is, not a hair out of place, incredibly tough argument, really rather witty. And as she said at one point in the debate, “I'm enjoying this.” And sort of playing it for all it's worth and engaging with people from the other side. There's a sort of almost banter she has about the nature of the gap between the rich and the poor, I think it's with Jim Sillars, the Scottish Labour MP. And a bit of a ding-dong with Simon Hughes, the Liberal MP. And it's a very good theatre, and it brings home a lot of us. I think those clips are vivid.And thank goodness for television interviews and news clips, because the House of Commons was not televised until 1989. So she'd been Prime Minister. It was on the radio all through her prime ministership, and not on the television. So we haven't got most of that on television. But we can see other things like Brian Walden interviews or news clips and so on. And they are really, really worth studying.And you're right that, obviously, I can't convey that fully in a book. I can describe it, I can quote from it, but I hope that what would happen is when people read the book, they can get more out of the clips, and when they look at the clips, they can get more out of the book.Henry: One or two general questions to close with. Who should write Tony Blair's biography?Charles Moore: I don't know who should write Tony Blair's biography, at all. And I'm certainly not volunteering myself. But I think, again, the question of fairness is important, because Blair suffered from a thing where he received absurd adulation and then absurd vilification. And, actually, the judgment on him, the historical judgment on him, should be much more nuanced and requires some detachment. And speaking only for myself, I must have written, as a journalist, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of words criticising Mr. Blair and his policies. But I think he deserves to be taken seriously as a political leader and was important, and that his fundamental message about New Labour was actually true. He's often described as a liar, but I think his fundamental message about what he was and what he was trying to do was true, and people appreciated it. And it's also true, unfortunately, that a lot of his actions were rather ill-thought-out and didn't come to much, so that's a slightly tragic element in his time. But he deserves much more serious attention than the great majority of British prime ministers.Henry: What are the most underrated political biographies?Charles Moore: I think there are quite a lot that are overrated, but it would be invidious to say which. What I most value, but this is probably somebody who's in the trade talking rather than the general reader, but what I'm looking for, I want to feel very confident that the author is fair-minded, and it also has a sort of feel for what it is he's writing about. So that he is not somehow off the point or out of his depth, or, as it were, wasn't there. I didn't mean that a biographer has to have been present when these things happen, but I mean he doesn't have a feel for how, let's say, the House of Commons really works or something like that. I like, in that sense, the biographers that are a professional. I think that man D. R. Thorpe is good, for example. I'm afraid I don't have a biography of a modern politician (and by modern I'm going back quite a long way) to hold up and say, “This is it. This is how it should be done.” But this may well be my fault. I've read by no means all of them.Henry: Charles Moore, thank you very much for your time.Charles Moore: Thank you.Don't forget!My salon, on 1st March, TONIGHT, is Samuel Johnson: Reading for Wisdom where we will discuss pessimism, pragmatism, and the good life. The attendee list has some interesting Johnson enthusiasts — join them!My am giving a tour of the City of London tracing the route of the Great Fire and the genius of Christopher Wren on Saturday 5th March. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Panel discussion organised by the Academy of Ideas Education Forum on 21 February 2022. INTRODUCTION As the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) approaches its 30th birthday, many are increasingly concerned that Ofsted is becoming overly political and moralistic and insufficiently educational in its approach. The anniversary of Ofsted's creation seems a good moment to take stock. Ofsted employs more than a thousand people and has an annual budget of close to £130 million. For this, it takes responsibility for regularly inspecting all publicly funded schools and colleges in England. In addition to setting the agenda of her inspection teams, Ofsted's head, Amanda Spielman, writes a widely read annual report on the state of state education. Spielman herself has strong educational, political and moral opinions, and intervenes regularly in public debates. Last year, for example, she rejected calls to decolonise the school curriculum. Ofsted was established in 1992 in the final phase of the Thatcherite reform of English state education. The creation of a national inspectorate that reported in public followed the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1989, as well as a new national examination system that included the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). Results from these national exams were from this point onwards reported in national league tables, in which the performance of all state schools was ranked. At the time, many teachers opposed this power grab from central government, and these criticisms have continued to be voiced. For many, Ofsted represents an unwarranted extension of central state control over education, as well as a mechanism by which the autonomy and the professionalism of teachers has been undermined. It is certainly true that teachers in England experience extraordinary levels of central state control and that Ofsted is one of the mechanisms by which this control is exercised. However, sociologist Stephen Ball perhaps overstates the case when he describes the accountability pressures experienced by English state-school teachers as giving rise to the ‘terror of performativity'. It was under the government of John Major that Ofsted was first introduced. As we might expect, his account of its purpose differs from that of its critics. Writing in his autobiography, he observes that when he came into office, producers – rather than consumers – controlled public services and that health and education in particular was ‘run carelessly, wastefully, arrogantly … more for the convenience of the providers than the users, whether they were parents, pupils or patients'. More recently, however, Ofsted has faced criticism from conservatives. They argue that Ofsted has been captured by progressivist educators, who are using the inspection system to impose woke values on education. Ofsted, the conservatives allege, has become a cuckoo institution, a mechanism by which a progressivist elite lodged within the state are imposing their values on young people. This charge could not be more serious, as Ofsted ought to remain impartial on matters that divide the nation morally and politically. It is, after all, Her Majesty's Inspectorate. Is Ofsted now exceeding its official remit? Do we even need a national inspectorate when we have a national examination system? Can state-employed teachers be trusted to do the job for which they are paid and trained? Is it time that we inspected the inspectors? SPEAKERS Neil Davenport writer and teacher Rowenna Davis teacher; former journalist and Labour Party parliamentary candidate; new mum and community organiser Alex Kenny secondary school teacher and NEU Executive member Joseph Robertson director, Orthodox Conservatives think tank; education research fellow, The Bow Group CHAIR Toby Marshall teacher and member of the AoI Education Forum

Agenda Tom wins the Selly Oak Shield for the first time in history Success on the #WhatOddsPaddys in the World Cup Qualifiers and why we should be looking forward to these games Ireland vs New Zealand Portugal vs Serbia Three different concepts for managing runners - the Orwellian, Thatcherite and Marxist forms of managing a gambling team 180s and 170s in the PDC World Championship 2022    

Messy Times is honored to have Bepi Pezzulli join us for a robust discussion on the lost cause of European freedom and the lines of battle drawn here in the United States over the same whiny Marxist nonsense that has sapped Europe of its former vigor. His clarion call for renewed Thatcherite policies and a strong educational emphasis on the virtues of entrepreneurship is refreshing. #BepiPezzulli is the author of L'Altra Brexit and, among other roles, Secretary General of Italia Atlantica, a centrist think tank dedicated to foster strong trans-Atlantic relations. It promotes the principles of individual liberty, private property, limited government, free markets, fair international trade, devolution of powers, and defense of democracies. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/messytimes/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/messytimes/support

Boris Johnson has become a fan of import controls as a way of increasing wages- a key part of Tony Benn's Alternative Economic Strategy in the the late 70s and early 80s. But in another bizarre twist they are both Bennite and Thatcherite. Rock N Roll Politics is live on October 11 at Kings Place..and there's a live stream too: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/steve-richards-presents-rock-n-roll-politics-live-in-hall/

David (Twitter: @DavoMc82), Debra (@HeathPeaPict) and Brian (@WeeSociologist) discuss the latest events in Scottish and UK politics NEWS - Boris Johnson Visits Scotland - Labour MP Rails against Proportional Representation - SNP leader of Glasgow City Council lays out her (Thatcherite?) vision for the city  - Ferry in near miss with Nuclear Submarine MORE TORY CORRUPTION - Why do Ministers keep replacing their phones? Music by - @HippyMusic Art by - @HeathPeaPict

What a year the Booker prize winning author Douglas Stuart has had. Born on a housing estate in Glasgow Douglas and his siblings were raised by a single mum who died of alcoholism when he was 16. In his 30s, by this time working in fashion in New York, fouglas started writing a book about a little boy similar to him - Shuggie Bain, a kind, resilient, gay child struggling to fit in to his working class Thatcherite community and trying to take care of gregarious, well-meaning, alcoholic mother. Ten years later, the novel finally finished, it was rejected first by agents, then by 32 editors in the US alone. some of them even told his agent that the book was likely to win a big prize but that they didn't know quite how to sell it. Then last year at the age of 44, Douglas won the £50,000 Booker prize, the second Scot ever to do so. Judges said itwas destined “to be a classic”.It's a remarkable reminder of how even the most accomplished books still have to find the right desk at the right time.You can buy Shuggie Bain – and books by all my guests – here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

We focus the first part of the podcast on Nicola Sturgeon's,somewhat underwhelming ,reshuffle of her Cabinet after her outstanding victory in the Scottish election. A sensible,steady as she goes,or picking pals to subdue debate?Sticking with Holyrood we wonder just what Willie Rennie was up to when he stood for election as First Minister earlier this week. We also challenge the Tory "no mandate for indyref2" narrative and caution independence supporters on getting sucked into that spurious discussion.Glasgow witnessed two incredibly contrasting pieces of "taking it to the streets" with the uplifting Kenmure Street action against the UK government's deportation policies, and the rioting of Rangers fans "celebrating" their team's league title win.What can be deduced about modern Scotland from these differing displays of people power?Finally the UK government has announced the creation of Great British Rail signalling,yet another,shift away from Thatcherite dogma. Scotland has already implemented sweeping changes to the ownership and structure of our rail services.Will this be the first major battle over devolved and reserved powers in Brexit Britain?

Margaret Thatcher was deposed by her party in 1990, but the legacy of her ideas in some form lingers on. The Tory Party itself has abandoned any pretence of interest the operating of free markets and is led my the antithesis of her views on social conservatism. Instead of the offspring of a lower middle class shop keeper who values financial prudence and views the economy like a household budget, the party is led by an Etonian with an almost complusive dishonesty who has frittered more money on fantasy projects than any British leader, ever. However, it is in the public imagination that Thatcherism exists in zombie form. Popular culture regurgitates an endless series of Thatcherite nostrums about competition, enterprise, thrift, individualism and the merits of privatisation. This podcast explores the context of her rise to power and the shortcomings of her reign. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Normally I post a photograph of the guest for the podcast. But in the case of Matt Ridley, I am making an exception. Rather, I'm highlighting his 1999 book, Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. This book is incredibly influential for the generation of genomicists who came of age in the 21st century. Written in the late 1990's when the genomics revolution was barely off the ground, Ridley's elegant prose anticipated how exciting this field was going to be for many of us. Genome captured lighting that was bolting into the future. On this podcast, Ridley and I talk about The genesis of Genome Which chapters hold up, and which do not The success (or lack thereof) of his past and future books The relevance of evolution to everything Why Francis Crick is going to get “cancelled” at some point If he's still a happy Thatcherite Britain's response to COVID-19 The origin of COVID-19 (his next book project)

The morning after the Chancellor laid out his plans for continued pandemic support and how to pay for it in the years to come, Christopher Hope is joined for a Budget special by the Telegraph's Deputy Political Editor Lucy Fisher and economics fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Julian Jessop, to discuss the ins and outs. Who fares the best from the announcements, what will Britain's post-pandemic recovery look like, and is this the final nail in the coffin for Thatcherite economics? All discussed within.Read more of the Telegraph's analysis around the Budget here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/uk-economy/ |Take part in our podcast survey for the chance to win one of three £100 John Lewis vouchers: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/choppers_politics_survey |For 30 days' free access to The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/chopper |Email: chopperspolitics@telegraph.co.uk |Twitter: @chopperspodcast |

As the Conservative government prepares to host the COP26 climate summit, famous environmental campaigner and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, has a message he wants people to hear: his movement is not just for woke students and the radical Left.In an eye-opening interview, he tells Freddie Sayers about the importance of the nation-state, social conservatism, local community, and how he wants church leaders and ex-police officers in his movement. His pitch, in short, is that philosophical conservatives should not be afraid to embrace radical environmentalism:'There's a certain amount of cowardice amongst social conservatives, that they see this culture war, and they don't want to make that step that I'm making today in talking to you. I want social conservatives to step forward and say, ‘Yes, I'm going to sit on an XR platform'. And as a social conservative, you know, as an ex-police officer, as a church leader, right? And say, ‘Yes, I don't agree with your culture. But I agree with the moral imperative, that at this time in history, we have to start going above and beyond our sectional interest'. And I think that's a key element of social conservatism at its best, which is to put the national interest, the interest of the whole of society above the sectional or cultural interest.' On the ideological diversity of the XTR membership:A lot of people that have come to London have been from what you might call the Celtic fringe, you know, Cornwall, Wales, the north of England. I mean, yes, there's been a lot of the usual suspects, as it were, urban students and that sort of thing. But lots of people, for instance, are over 50. And they have a pre-Thatcherite culture, as you might say. Their culture is more: there's a right and wrong in the world. We're moderate people, but we don't go about destroying the next generation. We have a connection to the land. We have a connection to traditional small town politics.' On the failings of the ‘Davos elite':'I think the global strategy, which is being pursued by the western liberal class has catastrophically failed. Carbon emissions have gone up by 60% since 1990. And how many conferences have there been? 30? 40? We've got another one coming up. And we've got this narrative that the professional classes and the global liberal class and the bureaucrats and the diplomats and all the rest of that area are going to sort this out. And we all remember in the 1990s and early 2000s, that feeling that there's climate change out there and yes, it was serious, and these men in suits were saying they will go and sort it out. It has a sort of emperor-without-clothes feeling about it now, which is they're still saying the same thing.' On why nationalism is the best approach:'National identity at the end of the day trumps internationalism when you're faced with annihilation. Now, I want to make clear that that does not mean the chauvinistic nationalism that a lot of left wing people associate nationalism with, for good reason, of course. But as we all know, there's many different shades of patriotism and nationalism. And it's silly really to weaponise it. What we're looking at is a nationalism or patriotism which is rooted in a love of one's country, a love of one's tradition, and a love of one's political traditions.' On the moral law:'We need to understand we have obligations to those that came before us, particularly those that sacrificed their lives in the 20th century in order to protect the liberty of this country. And the other idea, which is related of course, is the notion of legacy. The notion that we're not just here to enjoy ourselves, right? That's the new liberal, individualist, consumerist idea, that people on the left, from where I come from, and also social conservatives are critical of for lots of reasons. But the point here is that the essence of the immorality of continuing to put carbon into the atmosphere is the transgression of the moral law, the moral law being you don't do unto others what you wouldn't have them do to yourself. In other words, you don't shit on your children.' On the tactics of Extinction Rebellion:'We can see that Left and Right wing groups engage in civil disobedience or forms of disruption, and leaving aside the violence issue, sometimes it goes into that. But the idea that disruption in itself is anti conservative isn't sustainable. I think I would turn it around and say that just because the majority of the people in a society believe something, does not make it right. And that's a core conservative idea. It's not just that that superficial idea of democracy, which is a poll saying, everyone agrees with something.' On the media portrayal of the movement:'The media they tend to juxtapose the secular and the religious. It's like one minute you're technocratic scientists, and the next minute, we're mediaeval child saints. I mean, dare I say it, there's a little bit of middle ground. So what's happening with Extinction Rebellion, what's happening with the broad immobilisation around the world, is you're exactly right. We moving from a reductive scientific technocratic orientation on the climate to something that's deeper. But that doesn't mean we're rushing off to some millenarian cult sort of religious situation. What we're doing is we're starting to reconnect with a deeper sense of humanity, in various different cultural manifestations. And if you want to call that spiritual then so be it. But it's certainly a deeper sense of self and a deeper sense of community, which has religious connotations.' Read The Post here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The new Business Secretary on whether he’s changed his mind on Thatcherite economics, his ‘Sunday’ name, views of Empire, and the quality of Nick’s interview research

This Reboot Republic podcast is a recording of an interview with our host Dr Rory Hearne of the Maynooth University Department of Applied Social Studies, about the Irish housing crisis, its origins and solutions. The interview was undertaken by Ciarán Galway of the Eolas Magazine with Rory as the keynote interview of Ireland's Housing Conference 2021. The title of the interview is Reclaiming, reimagining and rebuilding a vision for public housing for all. In it Rory explains the origins of the housing crisis in a series of factors including the shift to a market model of housing provision, the neoliberal Thatcherite move away from public housing and the financialisation of housing as global investors turn homes into wealth accumulating assets and worsen affordability and access for those in housing need. He details the experience of Ireland in comparison with other countries such as the UK and Austria. Rory also explains the choices available to government - that they can chose to support developers and the market, or take a different path and support those in need of housing such as tenants through strengthening tenant protections and build affordable housing. He also outlines the need to challenge the normalisation of homelessness, the devastating impacts of homelessness, and why the Referendum on the Right to Housing should be held as soon as possible and not put into the housing commission. He finishes with a vision for a housing system for all - affordable, secure, quality and environmentally sustainable. Reboot Republic is proud to be part of the Tortoise Shack, please support us by becoming a member at: patreon.com/tortoiseshack

Martin still isn't great. But he wasn't going to miss chatting with one of our favourite people, Professor Emeritus of Economics, P.J Drudy. P.J was lecturing in economics in Cambridge in the 70's and Trinity College Dublin later. He talks to us about the need for a move away from the failed Thatcherite economics and how the growth of an economy needs to be measured in the health and well-being of the society and not in headline numbers. As always with P.J, we talk housing and he discusses the situation around Traveller accommodation and housing for people with disabilities. Finally we talk about how we change the orthodoxy and with it ally fears of future austerity. We were talking a little bit before the podcast started and I've left a bit in because Martin reveals a hidden talent and I think everyone should know about it! Thanks to everyone for listening in 2020 and please consider supporting us to keep going in 2021: patreon.com/tortoiseshack

It’s our 250th (ish) Music Episode Spectacular, in which Beeso and the Doc review brand new albums from Dennis Cometti, The Money War and Magick Mountain, before we pick our personal top five Most Influential Albums of all time. Also this week: Right Said Fred are nutters, Spotify Wrapped is a joke, bogan self loathing, the entire point of punk rock, hating the CBD, snap crackle and thud, Greybeard stout reviews, boldly insipid, straight burglaries, taunting Sweden, podcast albums, excessive fuzz, doom metal power pop, do one, new old stock, give ‘em a taste of Kiwi, melancholy feelings, an album of clown music, accurate first drafts, it’s too loud and you’re too old, early influences, rambling storytelling, Thatcherite labour policies, back-to-back Jacks, cringe picks, the importance of late ‘80s smash hits compilations in a regional new music desert, two for one deals, heavy to the core, reappreciating Nirvana, albums doing numbers, Hey Hey it’s Saturday Night Palsy, Machiavellian scheming, non-existent albums, Skinnys vs Butter Beats, cruising the mean streets of Lismore, Monsters of Roxette, moments of discovery, triphopping into dub, garage days revisited, man’s not hot, also receiving votes, coming down off heavy benders, misunderstood geniuses and clocking music. Next week: new albums from Kruder & Dorfmeister, Cut Off Your Hands and Dick Move. Those and other recent review albums are in our album review playlist on Spotify, along with the full archive of earlier review albums from 2020 and our tripping balls 2020 mixtape of our favourite tracks from therein. Our full list of all the new and classic albums we've reviewed on the pod and Beeso's kids playlist are also available elsewhere on the internet. BALLS and tripping balls are available on their own RSS feeds, as well as being found together on Omny Studio,Spotify and Apple Podcasts (feel free to subscribe, rate and review) - and we welcome your reckons via Twitter, Facebook and email. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Margaret Thatcher was a triple election winner, feted abroad, whose premiership ended with her sobbing through her resignation statement. Ben Monro-Davies talks to the men and one woman in room where it happenned In this episode we hear from Peter Lilley. Lilley was and is an ardent Thatcherite. And out of loyalty to her - he felt duty bound to tell her frankly that her time was up after she failed to avoid a second ballot in the Conservative leadership battle of November 1990. Here he recalls a painful experience.

In today's episode, we discuss a more well known and popular play--Top Girls by Caryl Churchill. Brynn discusses Thatcherite feminism and the historical women that star in Act 1; Edie Pierce once again regales us with her storytelling prowess as Louise from Top Girls; and Joanna Eisenberg tells us how Top Girls connects to ideas of feminism and theater today. If you like investigating how history relates to the modern day as well as what it means to identify as a woman in the 80's compared to today, this one's for you! Edie Pierce: missemilypierce@gmail.com Joanna Eisenberg: jeisenberg@gm.slc.edu Email: theplaymatespodcast@gmail.com Instagram: @playmatespodcast --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/brynn-hambley/support

Owen Hatherley and Kojo Koram join PTO to talk about Owen's essay, 'A Study in the Politics and Aesthetics of English Misery'. In the essay Owen reflects on the generational divides that have emerged over the course of the last two UK general elections by charting the musical evolution of The Smiths. Comparing Morrissey’s political trajectory to those of many voters throughout the North of England, Owen investigates the roots of the North’s departure from anti-Thatcherite collectivism to nationalist reaction. You can find the essay in 'Futures of Socialism: The Pandemic and the Post-Corbyn Era', edited by Grace Blakeley.

Owen Hatherley and Kojo Koram join PTO to talk about Owen's essay, 'A Study in the Politics and Aesthetics of English Misery'. In the essay Owen reflects on the generational divides that have emerged over the course of the last two UK general elections by charting the musical evolution of The Smiths. Comparing Morrissey’s political trajectory to those of many voters throughout the North of England, Owen investigates the roots of the North’s departure from anti-Thatcherite collectivism to nationalist reaction. You can find the essay in 'Futures of Socialism: The Pandemic and the Post-Corbyn Era', edited by Grace Blakeley.

The latest Conversation with the men (and one other woman) in the cabinet room when Margaret Thatcher resigned in November 1990. Today's guest is Michael Howard, who went on to be Home Secretary and Leader of the Tories. He was an ardent Thatcherite - who believes she would have gone on to win the 1992 election - but felt forced to tell her it was time to go because she had lost the support of her backbench MPs. He blames her exit on the man in charge of her leadership campaign - Peter Morrsion a Conservative grandee known for having an alcohol problem and now suspected of being a paedophile.

...climate sceptic, author of the collected essays How Dare You! (published by the Global Warming Policy Forum), ‘Thatcherite skeptic in Trudeaupia' (he was born in England but lives in Toronto) Hear and watch episodes 3 days earlyl AND support the Delingpod by contributing to subscribestar or patreon: https://www.subscribestar.com/jamesdelingpole https://www.patreon.com/jamesdelingpole  

On this week's episode, Ross tells us about the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, the first woman in the western world who was invited to form a government. Ross tells us about the rise and decline of Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher and gives us a crash course in Thatcherite policy, and lauds Meryl Streep for the performance that scored her a long-awaited Oscar. Copyright 2020 Sorry Mom Productions Related Media: Meryl Streep on playing Margaret Thatcher; What is the IRA?; ***DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS FOR PROTESTORS*** List of queer podcasts'12 excellent podcasts with black hosts for pop culture, politics, or history fans' Here's a list of movies that are a better use of your time right now: 13th (dir. Ava DuVernay)|Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins) |The Hate U Give (dir. George Tillman Jr.) | Dear White People (dir. Justin Simien)FIND MORE HERE BLM WEBSITEDON’T TWEET—ACTWays You Can Help (this link has EVVVVERYTHING—petitions/donations/protest education/pro bono counsel and more!)PDX Bail Project FundThe Sentencing ProjectALLY EDUCATION:For Our White Friends Desiring to Be AlliesTalking Race with Young ChildrenThe Lies We Tell About RiotsDon’t think you’re racist?

Government intervention on an unprecedented scale has propped up the British economy - and society at large - during the pandemic. But what should be the state's role from now on? Can Conservatives successfully embrace an enduring central role for government in the economy given their small-state, Thatcherite heritage championing the role of the individual, lower spending and lower taxes? And can Labour, instinctively keener on a more active state, discipline its impulses towards more generous government so that they don't end up thwarting its ambitions for greater equality and fairness? Four eminent political thinkers join Edward Stourton to debate the lessons of political pivot points in Britain's postwar history and how these should guide us in deciding what the borders of the state should be in the post-pandemic world - and who's going to pay. Those taking part: Andrew Harrop of the Fabian Society, who draws inspiration from Labour's 1945 landslide victory to advocate a highly active and determined state to promote opportunity, fairness and equality; former Conservative minister David Willetts of the Resolution Foundation, who sees the lessons of the Conservative revolution in 1979 as relevant as ever about the limits of the state but also argues core Conservative beliefs are consistent with bigger government; former Blairite thinker, Geoff Mulgan, who, drawing on the lessons of 1997, resists notions of a catch-all politics in the face of the multi-faceted demands on today's state; and Dean Godson of Policy Exchange, influential with the Conservative modernisers of the Cameron era, who insists a Thatcherite view of the state shouldn't rigidly define how the centre-right responds to our new circumstances. Producer Simon Coates Editor Jasper Corbett

With Simon Walters and Amanda Platell and guests Maurice Glasman on how it might take a generation for Labour to come back to power, former Thatcherite minister Connor Burns on whether Boris really is the new Thatcher, and Andrew Bridgen on why Boris's battle in the north has only just begun

Millions people are protesting worldwide to challenge neoliberal capitalist austerity policies that add to economic insecurity, inequality, and poverty for the vast majority. In Iran, Iraq, Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, France, and beyond, masses of people have taken to the streets, and faced state violence in response. What are the underlying issues motivating the protests? Suzi talks first to Stathis Kouvelakis in France, where, since December 5, strikes and demonstrations more than a million strong have paralyzed the country. Teachers, nurses, students, and Yellow Vests have stood alongside the old vanguard of railway and transport workers to halt President Macron’s “Thatcherite” attacks on pensions and the welfare state. Suzi then turns to Iran and talks with Kevan Harris about the spectacular, illegal protest movement rocking the nation since November 15. The government has responded brutally, killing at least 200 and arresting thousands. The catalyst for the Iranian protests, as with the French Yellow Vest movement the previous year, was a hike in gas prices.The spark produced a conflagration in an already existing environment marked by economic insecurity, the breakup of the social contract, high inflation, and negative economic growth. Further ignition was provided by the week-long government shutdown of the internet. As in France, movements have converged, and pose a threat to the regime.

This is the latest in a series of conversations with those in the cabinet room when Margaret Thatcher resigned Normal Lamont considers himself a Thatcherite. He thought his leader was right on Europe - unlike most of his cabinet colleagues. But even ideological affinity and personal loyalty could not trump the numbers in November 1990 - when the results came in he had to tell her it was time to go.

Lisa Barnard’s photographic practice is placed in the genre of documentary. Her work discusses real events, embracing complex and innovative visual strategies that utilise both traditional documentary techniques and more contemporary and conceptually rigorous forms of representation. Barnard connects her interest in aesthetics, current photographic debates around materiality, and the existing political climate. Of particular interest to her is global capitalism, the relationship between the military industrial complex, screen based new technologies and the psychological implication of conflict.Lisa is an Associate Professor in photography and programme leader of the MA in Documentary Photography at The University of South Wales, where she also has PhD students and teaches on the BA in Documentary Photography course. She has published two monographs with GOST books: Chateau Despairand Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden which was funded by the Albert Renger Patzsch Book Award, and nominated for the Prix Du Livre at Rencontres D’Arles in 2015.Lisa’s latest book, recently published by Mack, is The Canary and the Hammer, an ambitious, complex and wide-ranging project detailing our reverence for gold and its role in humanity’s ruthless pursuit of progress. Photographed across four years and four continents, the project was funded by the Prestige Grant from Getty Images in 2015. On episode 114, Lisa discusses, among other things:How teaching keeps her mentally on her toesGrowing up in the Thatcherite heartland of Sevenoaks, KentHer work from the San Diego Naval Medica CentreHyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden and how the title came aboutBeing an adventuristWhy the more conceptual the connection is, the more excited she getsHer new project about gold, The Canary and the HammerReferenced:Jacques LacanThe Dollop podcastMark PowerJavier RebasEsther TeichmannSophy RickettBettina von ZwehlClare StrandDonovan WylieGert Van HestenSkip RizzoPostmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederick JamesonEadweard MuybridgeRiver of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca SolnitMartin HeideggerAllan Sekula Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | The Gold Depository“One of the things that I say to my students is you can never accept no as an answer. And the photographers that do well are tenacious, unfortunately. You know, if you’re shy it’s much harder to make documentary work. There are plenty of other ways in which you can make pictures but you have to think seriously about the skills that you need in order to get access and one of those things is confidence; and no fear; and feeling like you’ve got nothing to lose; and that everything is an adventure. Because, how amazing...!”

Alexander Gallas, author of The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis joins me to discussed the degree of popular support for the political and economic project of the Thatcher government, the debates between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop on the nature of Thatcherite hegemony, and we also chatted about the way in which the New Labour era can be seen as a consolidation of Thatcherite neoliberalism.

Alexander Gallas, author of 'The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis' joins me to discussed the degree of popular support for the political and economic project of the Thatcher government, the debates between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop on the nature of Thatcherite hegemony, and we also chatted about the way in which the New Labour era can be seen as a consolidation of Thatcherite neoliberalism.

A former Thatcherite with a record of gaffes, is he now usurping the role of prime minister or has he become a Mr. Fixit taking responsibility to tackle a national crisis?

Mark Thomas is familiar to fans of British comedy as the innovative leftie agitator whose "Comedy Product" show entrapped arms dealers, torturers and Tories to hilarious effect, and at genuine risk to his safety and liberty. He survived being placed on the Domestic Extremist watch-list, and has transformed into a masterful theatre-maker; no less angry but producing richer and more nuanced work. We discuss the dynamic between selflessness and control, learn the influence of critical friendships on his creative process, and find out what all of it has cost him... Mark Thomas Tour dates and tickets Exclusive extra material available to podcast supporters at www.comedianscomedian.com/insiders includes Mark waxing lyrical on stand-up as an essentially Thatcherite form, his detective work behind the scenes on the NHS, his biggest failure, and which act he once accidentally impersonated at a Jongleurs gig... Enjoy all extras from shows past and present with access to the private Insiders Club podcast, alongside a host of other strands and projects, including the chance to interview Stu yourself, and take part in a group critical analysis of newer acts from all over the world! Stu's 2019 tour of “End Of” has just gone on sale!“A comedy masterclass… Endlessly inventive” (The List)Tickets for the first half of the tour at these links:07/10/2018 Aberystwyth Comedy Festival – The Coliseum22/02/2019 Maidenhead – Norden Farm01/03/2019 Falmouth – The Poly29/03/2019 Crawley -The Hawth05/04/2019 Reading – South Street Arts12/04/2019 Leamington Spa - Royal Spa Centre17/04/2019 Oxford Old Fire Station19/04/2019 Bromsgrove – The Artix27/04/2019 Plymouth Barbican See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Remember the advert where the guy turns to his wife and announces "I'm going it alone. Tarquin's with me. Hugo's with me"? (I've made up my own names since I don't recall exactly who was with him but I know it was the 80s and they were very Thatcherite names). Well, running your own business has never been as popular as now. The internet, the sheer number of people who are doing it (making it feel less risky) and our growing desire to do something that has meaning for us, is driving the entrepreneur revolution. But what's it actually like to work for yourself? These ladies know! The presenters of Being Boss both run their own creative businesses, they create resources and networks for other people who either want to or are already running their own show and their book "Being Boss" has been doing super well as well! In this interview with Emily and Kathleen we talk big hair, tarot and, of course, what it's actually like to run your own business. I hope you love it and are inspired by these two fab ladies. You can find out more about them here and order their book here. To stay in touch with me follow us @brilliantgamble on twitter and instagram and sign up for the free 3-part Gamble Guide on our website.

This week, Riley (@raaleh) and Milo (@milo_edwards) host journalist and music enthusiast Dan Hancox (@danhancox) to discuss his new book ‘Inner City Pressure: the Story of Grime.’ After a loving review of Elon Musk’s one-for-the-history-books Meltdown May, the team converses on the history (and rebirth) of grime, pirate radio, gentrification, ASBOs, Form 696, Matt Hancock, and the classic Tory oscillation between criminalising youth culture and profiting massively from it. Hussein (@HKesvani) couldn’t make it, as he’s on deadline for a piece about Conservative-voting men who are tattooing images of ham on their faces to own the libs. It will be forthcoming soon, and he will of course return. You can (and should) purchase Dan’s book here, preferably from a high street bookstore and not from The Steroid Book Man himself: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Dan-Hancox/Inner-City-Pressure--The-Story-of-Grime/21136553 Riley finally remembered to read the shout-outs. Remember, you can always commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from Lil’ Comrade. In fact, you’d better: http://www.lilcomrade.com/ Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this episode with Adobe Audition and a particularly American kind of patriotic fervour that comes only from wearing flag-themed Rick and Morty t-shirts.

Born in Rochdale to Pakistani parents, the new Home Secretary Sajid Javid had a modest start in life. His father worked as a bus driver before moving to Bristol to open a women's clothes shop - the family of seven squeezing into a two-bed flat above it. Despite these humble beginnings, Javid quickly achieved success, wealth and power. After studying at Exeter University, where he gained a reputation as a committed Thatcherite, he became an investment banker and a multi-millionaire. Javid then moved into politics, becoming a Minister in just four years. His journey to the top of British politics has not always been smooth - as Business Secretary he was criticised for appearing to be caught unawares by Tata Steel's plans to close its Port Talbot plant at the cost of thousands of jobs. He now faces his biggest challenge yet as, in the wake of the Windrush controversy, he takes over a Home Office that has been accused of institutional racism. Mark Coles speaks to friends, colleagues and opponents to find out more about this driven high-flyer. Producers: Arlene Gregorius and Diane Richardson Editor: Helen Grady.

On this week's World View podcast, London Editor Denis Staunton reports on the appointment of Conservative MP Sajid Javid as Home Secretary following the resignation of Amber Rudd. The son of Pakistani immigrants, Mr Javid has promised action on the Windrush immigration targets scandal that led to the exit of his predecessor. Described as unsentimental, a Thatcherite and a man prone to recitations of Ayn Rand, his appointment should take some of the poison out of the crisis for the Prime Minister but weakens the Soft Brexit side of her Cabinet. It comes as the Conservatives suffered another major defeat on Brexit in the House of Lords on Monday night. Also on the podcast: In Spain, thousands have protested against a decision by a court in Pamplona to absolve five men of rape, in a case that has garnered international attention and ignited the country's MeToo movement. Guy Hedgecoe reports on the details of the story, concerning the attack of an 18-year-old woman during the San Fermines bull-running festival in the city in the summer of 2016.

Your loving co-hosts discuss the sci-fi masterpiece Akira, one of Mitchell's favourite films. They discuss its influence, its soundtrack and the politics behind the movie. Originally aired on CJRU 1280 AM in Toronto. Edited by Mitchell Thompson.

Best-selling British writer Alan Hollinghurst talks about his Booker prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty. In the summer of 1983 20-year-old graduate Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the glamorous Notting Hill home of ambitious Tory MP Gerald Fedden. Nick’s glittering party and politics filled life is contrasted with the realities of his sexuality and gay life in London of the mid 1980s. Against a backdrop of Thatcherite politics and the emerging Aids crisis of that decade The Line of Beauty explores themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness and privilege. (Photo: Alan Hollinghurst. Credit: Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images)

Eshaan was born the ultimate colonial baby, with family members from each of the sub-continental countries that were created in the aftermath of Partition. Enjoy 15 minutes of stand up and chat with the son of a Thatcherite and a Labourite. How did these contradictions shape his view of the world? ‘Eshaan Akbar: Not For Prophet’ is appearing as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/eshaan-akbar-not-for-prophet Twitter: @eshaanakbar Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eshaanakbarcomedy/ Website: http://www.eshaanakbar.com/ Comedy performance provided by the artist for promotional purposes. May contain material that some find offensive. © 2017 On the Mic. Produced in association with Broadway Baby, Fringepig and Voice Republic. Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

Stephen Farrall, University of Sheffield - 02 Feb 2017

Francois Fillon has emerged as the centre-right contender for the 2017 french presidency. Who is Fillon and what are his views? His broadly Thatcherite views will give Marine la Pen plenty of points of discussion in the the lead up to the election, says Lara Marlowe. Israel always has a vested interest in the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. This time around it would seem they got their preferred outcome with Trump having stated during his campaign that he intends to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Will the seemingly pro-Israel Trump become a powerful ally or indifferent after victory? Our London editor Denis Staunton reports from Tel Aviv. Since his death Fidel Castro's record has been praised and criticised in equal measure. What is Castro's lasting legacy in Cuba and latin America as whole? Journalist and author of 'The Cubans: Voices for change' Lynn Geldof recalls the 1980s in Cuba, a time when the impoverished country saw economic growth and some the positive effects of the socialist regime.

In the political turmoil of mid-1990s Britain, a brilliant young comic named Harry Enfield set out to satirize the ideology and politics of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His parodies became famous. He wrote and performed a vicious sendup of the typical Thatcherite nouveau riche buffoon. People loved it. And what happened? Exactly the opposite of what Enfield hoped would happen. In an age dominated by political comedy, “The Satire Paradox”asks whether laughter and social protest are friends or foes.  To learn more about the topics covered in this episode, visit www.RevisionistHistory.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 In 1970 David Hare’s take on sisterhood, Slag, launched his prolific and stellar career as a playwright prepared to rigorously engage with the times. Since then his plays have included Pravda, a Fleet Street satire, Skylight, a Thatcherite critique currently on revival on Broadway, and Stuff Happens, about the Iraq War. Theatre aside, Hare has written a swag of material for the screen, and received Academy Award nominations for adaptations of The Hours and The Reader. His memoir The Blue Touch Paper (a reference to the instructions on British fireworks) is currently attracting praise for its unvarnished elegance and insight. One of Britain’s finest dramatists talks with Simon Wilson about his life, theatrical daring, and the formative cultural development which went on in Britain in the 1960s and 70s.

In this (slightly-delayed) episode, Shana and Daniel are joined by a first-time guest, Josh from The Web of Queer. It's a wide-ranging conversation that doesn't even begin to cover the story completely, but touches on issues of depression and music, enforced frivolity, the horror of the Thatcher years, and the nature of top-down authoritarian rule. Also: the aesthetics of the Kandyman and some discussion of set design. And whether or not Shana ships Ace with Susie Q. The answer may shock you, but probably not. Main Topic: The Happiness Patrol. "Way to make a super-sexist joke, husband." With special guest Josh from Web of Queer. Not nonagenerian. Introducing Josh. Simple Happiness Patrol. Horrible Margaret Thatcher. Not wholly Thatcherite. "That we know of." Surveillance state. "But dude that hair defies physics!" Queering the discussion. Section 28. Promoting homosexuality. Robert Palmer's Happiness Patrol. Makeup. Standard in the 80s. Helen A's force of personality. Flipping everything. Slippery Slope. Ace gets privilege. The Friends of Earl Sigma. Solidarity. Castes. The Jews alone. Enforced normativity and self-denial. Fifi. Cutest little killer ever! Humanized dictators. Trevor Sigma. Waiting rooms. Ace sideyes. Each wig is different. Susie Q. Daniel references Atwood. Following the characters. "The pointy nosed bitch, and chick with the hard lines on her jaw, and the chick who has mostly blush..." Gender coding of costumes. Big picture opinions of The Happiness Patrol. The Kandyman can.... The poisoning of Earl. Gluing and ungluing. The Fondant Surprise has no fondant. Why this episode was a month late. Stage production. Disneytown. Accurate 1984. Daniel is wrong about the snipers. Wrapping up. "Left leaning people in the BBC?" Josh wasn't prepared for the political conversation. State-run television. "I should be protesting shit!" Music. Depression.  Find Josh at his regular podcast The Web of Queer here, and find him on Twitter here. Find all of Daniel and Shana's regular content (at least going forward) at oispaceman.com.

The anti-poll tax demonstration of March 1990 brought thousands onto the streets of London. Some were simply there to protest against a new Thatcherite policy. Others were looking for trouble. Rioters attack a police van.

Analysis celebrates its 40th birthday by making its own history the subject of its trademark examination of the facts. The Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, recently told the New Statesman that in decades past the organisation's current affairs output had displayed a left wing bias. He could not have had in mind the early years of Analysis. "We tried to avoid received opinion like the plague," says the programme's founder editor George Fischer. He required his producers to look at issues from scratch and to go beyond the bien pensant agenda. In doing so they spotted issues that others missed. Amongst the themes they identified as important were the depth of the Thatcherite project before the term Thatcherism was coined; the tensions likely to emerge in the feminist movement; and the potential for disaster in Zimbabwe if expectations over land reform were not fulfilled. The programme's willingness to question fashionable assumptions attracted some accusations of political bias. Was that fair? Michael Blastland, an Analysis producer from the 1990s and now a regular presenter, looks back at the programme's history and meets some of its early staff and contributors. Follow Analysis on Twitter: @R4Analysis Contributors: George Fischer, founder editor of Analysis Ian McIntyre, founder presenter of Analysis, later Controller of Radio 4 Rt Hon Tony Benn Gillian Reynolds, radio critic, The Daily Telegraph Michael Green, former Analysis producer, later controller of Radio 4 Caroline Thomson, former Analysis producer, now Chief Operating Officer for the BBC Fraser Steel, former Analysis producer Hugh Chignell, Associate Professor of Broadcasting History, Bournemouth University Lord Griffiths Producer: Linda Pressly.