Analysis

By BBC Radio 4

What's Analysis about?

Programme examining the ideas and forces which shape public policy in Britain and abroad, presented by distinguished writers, journalists and academics

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Global Britain: is there su...

03.29.2021

Having left the EU, the UK is now re-branding itself as "Global Britain", but what does that actually mean? A key plank of the new foreign policy is a pivot to the "Indo-Pacific". How is this seen in India? And ...

Analysis episodes:

03.29.2021 Global Britain: is there substance behind the slogan? Having left the EU, the UK is now re-branding itself as "Global Britain", but what does that actually mean? A key plank of the new foreign policy is a pivot to the "Indo-Pacific". How is this seen in India? And ...
03.22.2021 Science in the Time of Covid-19 The Covid-19 pandemic has seen the best of science and the worst of science. New vaccines have been produced in less than twelve months. But at the same time we’ve seen evidence exaggerated and undermined, falsified, and flawed. Scientists arguing ...
03.15.2021 The Fine Art of Decision Making Margaret Heffernan explores the fine art of decision making in times of uncertainty. We make decisions all the time which affect our personal lives, but what about the decisions which affect the lives of many others? How do you decide, ...
03.08.2021 Levelling Up Wakefield With its low-wage economy, Wakefield is the kind of place the government has promised to help level up. But what kind of help do people there most need? Anand Menon returns to his home city to find out. He meets ...
03.01.2021 Magic Weapons There used to be a romantic notion of globalisation that all countries would simply have to get along as we were all so interconnected. Why fight when your interests are aligned? It’s an idea that has made direct military engagement ...
02.22.2021 Boiled Rabbits of the Left? George Orwell chastised the "boiled rabbits of the Left" for disliking what he called "the spiritual need for patriotism". He was writing in 1940 during Hitler's Blitz of London and other British cities. But Orwell also poses a challenge to ...
02.15.2021 Flying Blind What do we really know about the policy choices confronting us? Covid-19 has been a brutal lesson in the extent of our ignorance. We face hard decisions, and argue about them ferociously, when in truth we’re often in the dark ...
02.08.2021 Rogue Cops Is it possible to identify rogue cops before they commit offences? Can we change police culture to improve police interactions with the public? The brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis shone a spotlight on how police treat suspects, particularly ...
02.01.2021 Personality Politics Are we predisposed by our personality to be drawn to certain political policies or certain ideologies? And if so, should we take account of this when our views differ from other people? James Tilley, a professor of politics at Oxford ...
11.16.2020 Chasing Unicorns We live in a world of unicorns. From hailing taxis to ordering pizza to renting a holiday home, the world has come to rely on huge tech startups known in Silicon Valley as unicorns. But in a post-pandemic world, can ...
11.09.2020 Who Runs that Place? Increasingly, Western governments see China as a problem to deal with because, as it has grown more powerful, it has re-committed to being a Leninist state. But under President Xi Jinping, how far does it still conform to the Leninist ...
11.02.2020 This Fractured Isle On February 1st this year nearly every news bulletin began with the words 'the UK has officially left the European Union'. Boris Johnson could have been forgiven for congratulating himself for fulfilling his constitutional promise to 'get Brexit done'. But ...
10.26.2020 The Future of Welfare The furlough scheme, introduced in response to Covid-19, has raised a question: should Britain’s social insurance be a bit more German? Germany has what’s known as an earnings-related contributory system – individuals pay quite a lot in, and if they ...
10.19.2020 The Rise and Fall of the Bond Market Traders In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher famously said that 'You can’t buck the markets' and Governments back then feared that, if they borrowed too much, they'd pay a terrible price in the markets in terms of higher borrowing costs. But now ...
10.12.2020 Trouble on the backbenches? Tory Leaders and their MPs Despite winning a large majority at the last election, Prime Minister Johnson’s relationship with his party is an uneasy one. Just a few months after achieving its long term aim of leaving the EU, the Conservative Party seems ill at ...
10.05.2020 Planning for the Worst How ready are we for the next pandemic, cyber attack, volcanic eruption, or solar storm? Our world, ever more interconnected and dependent on technology, is vulnerable to a head-spinning array of disasters. Emergency preparedness is supposed to help protect us ...
09.28.2020 Is the Internet Broken? The internet is a cornerstone of our society. It is vital to our economy, to our global communications, and to many of our personal and professional lives. But have the processes that govern how the internet works kept pace with ...
07.20.2020 Behavioural Science and the Pandemic There were two narratives that emerged in the week before we locked down on 23rd March that could go some way to explaining why the UK was relatively slow to lockdown. One was the idea of “herd immunity” - that ...
07.13.2020 Humans vs the Planet As Covid-19 forced humans into lockdown, memes emerged showing the earth was healing thanks to our absence. These were false claims – but their popularity revealed how seductive the dangerous idea that ‘we are the virus’ can be. At its ...
07.06.2020 Thinking for the Long Term "The origin of civil government," wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1739, is that "men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote." ...
06.29.2020 The Post-Pandemic State 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 ...
06.22.2020 Radical Self-Care Wellness is easy to lampoon. A vast, trillion-dollar industry, at its worst it offers bogus cures, prescribing over-priced paraphernalia and dubious advice for ailments that might be treated elsewhere. But there is a forgotten political and philosophical history of self-care, ...
06.15.2020 Modern Parenting More time and money is being spent on children than ever before. And it's a global trend. Professor Tina Miller, who has studied how parenting styles have changed over several decades, considers what this investment in our sons and daughters ...
06.08.2020 The Smack of Firm Leadership What does the way in which rival political systems around the world have managed the Covid-19 pandemic tell us about the global political future? Writer and broadcaster, John Kampfner, considers what has made a "good leader" during the months of ...
06.01.2020 The Return of Reality? Before Covid-19 hit, the latest research showed we were more polarised than ever. We broadly agree on the issues - it's the emotions where things get tricky. If someone is part of the other tribe then we want little to ...
05.25.2020 Identity Wars: lessons from the Dreyfus Affair and Brexit Britain The episode "tore society apart, divided families, and split the country into two enemy camps, which then attacked each other …” A description by some future historian looking back at Britain after Brexit? No - it is how the late ...
03.28.2020 Command and Control? When Sajid Javid resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer in February rather than accept Boris Johnson's reported demand that he dismiss his own team of special advisers and accept a new one drawn up in 10 Downing Street, many saw ...
03.23.2020 The Roots of 'Woke' Culture Barack Obama condemned it. Black American activists championed it. Meghan Markle brought it to the Royal Family. “Wokeness” has become a shorthand for one side of the culture wars, popularising concepts like “white privilege” and “trigger warnings” - and the ...
03.09.2020 Unequal England Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies explores what the world of work can tells us about inequality and why some towns and cities feel left behind. He finds England is one of the most regionally unequal economies in ...
03.02.2020 China's Captured "Princess" If you want to understand the global reach of a rising China, visit Vancouver. Canada has been sucked in to an intractable dispute between the US and China after the arrest on an American warrant of Meng Wanzhou, an executive ...
02.24.2020 It's Not Easy Being Green If the future of politics must include tackling climate change, it holds that the future should be bright for the Greens. In parts of Europe, their influence is growing. In Germany the Green Party is enjoying unprecedented support. But in ...
02.17.2020 Do voters need therapy? In a poll last year, two thirds of people suggested that Britain’s exit from the EU was negatively affecting the nation’s mental health. But is that really about customs unions and widget regulations, or is it a more a product ...
02.10.2020 The Early Years Miracle? The government spends billions on free early years education. The theory goes that this is good for children, their parents and society as a whole. But does the evidence stack up? Despite the policy's lofty intentions, Professor Alison Wolf discovers ...
02.03.2020 The NHS, AI and Our Data The NHS has a unique resource - data. David Edmonds asks whether a combination of data and Artificial Intelligence will transform the future of the NHS. The programme features among others Sir John Bell, who leads the government’s life-sciences industrial ...
01.27.2020 Get woke or go broke? When you buy your trainers, do you want to make a political statement? Businesses want to attract consumers by advertising their commitment to liberal causes like diversity and tackling climate change. It is a phenomenon known as woke capitalism. But ...
11.18.2019 NATO at 70 NATO’s military strength and unswerving trans-Atlantic solidarity enabled it to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union. But with Vladimir Putin’s Russia resurgent, and eager to restore some of its past glory, people speak of a new “Cold War”. But ...
11.11.2019 The uses and misuses of history in politics Barely a day passes when an MP doesn’t reach for an historical analogy to help explain contemporary events. But to what extent do the Battle of Agincourt and World War II really help us better understand what’s happening now? Edward ...
11.04.2019 Can I Change Your Mind? There’s a widespread belief that there’s no point talking to people you disagree with because they will never change their minds. Everyone is too polarized and attempts to discuss will merely result in greater polarization. But the history of the ...
10.28.2019 State Aid: Brexit, Bailouts and Corporate Bonanzas When the steelworks at Redcar went bust in 2015 the government said it couldn’t bail out the company that ran the plant because of the EU’s state aid rules, which regulate how much money the government can give to businesses ...
10.21.2019 The New Censorship Democracy flourishes where information is free flowing and abundant, so the logic goes. In the West the choice of information is limitless in a marketplace of ideas. While authoritarian regimes censor by constricting the flow of information. But even in ...
10.14.2019 A question of artefacts How should museums deal with contentious legacies? Two years since the French President, Emmanuel Macron, called for the restitution of objects taken at the height of Europe’s empires, some French and Dutch museums have started the process to hand back ...
10.07.2019 The Problem with Boys The data is indisputable: in developed countries boys now lag behind girls in several significant areas of education. For years, women lagged behind men in educational attainment. More boys went to university, and twice as many men as women got ...
09.30.2019 Whiteness For many white people their race is not part of their identity. Race, racial inequality and racism are things that people of colour are expected to talk about and organise around. Not anymore. Anti-racist activists and academics are now urging ...
07.22.2019 A shorter working week Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the working week gradually got shorter and shorter. As technological advances powered economic growth, workers reaped the gains not just in the form of higher pay, but more leisure time. The economist ...
07.15.2019 Going the way of the dodo? The decline of Britain's two main parties. Recent polling data and election results paint a picture of woe for Britain's two main political parties. Of course both Labour and the Conservatives have suffered periods of decline throughout their history. But arguably never before have both parties been ...
07.08.2019 The Forgotten Half More and more young people now go to university. But what's on offer for those who don't? Public and political attention is far more focused on the university route. Paul Johnson discovers why other kinds of further education and training ...
07.01.2019 Understanding the risks of terrorism How do the authorities, business and the public perceive and respond to the risk of violent terrorism? With unprecedented access to the work of an active MI5 officer, home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani discovers the depth of the challenge facing ...
06.24.2019 Can computer profiles cut crime? David Edmonds examines how algorithms are used in our criminal justice system, from predicting future crime to helping decide who does and doesn’t go to prison. While police forces hope computer software will help them to assess risk and reduce ...
06.17.2019 Green technology and early adoption Climate change has shot up the current political agenda in part due to the Extinction Rebellion protests. An urgent question now facing UK policymakers is whether they should accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge green energy technology to curb the country's ...
06.10.2019 The Real Gender Pay Gap Women are paid less than men and do more unpaid work. The gender pay gap doubles after women become mothers. Female-dominated professions tend to be lower-paid than male-dominated ones. What's going on and can we fix it? Reporter: Mary Ann ...

Older episodes

Analysis

What's Analysis about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Analysis episodes:

Global Britain: is there substance behind the slogan?

Science in the Time of Covid-19

The Fine Art of Decision Making

Levelling Up Wakefield

Magic Weapons

Boiled Rabbits of the Left?

Flying Blind

Rogue Cops

Personality Politics

Chasing Unicorns

Who Runs that Place?

This Fractured Isle

The Future of Welfare

The Rise and Fall of the Bond Market Traders

Trouble on the backbenches? Tory Leaders and their MPs

Planning for the Worst

Is the Internet Broken?

Behavioural Science and the Pandemic

Humans vs the Planet

Thinking for the Long Term

The Post-Pandemic State

Radical Self-Care

Modern Parenting

The Smack of Firm Leadership

The Return of Reality?

Identity Wars: lessons from the Dreyfus Affair and Brexit Britain

Command and Control?

The Roots of 'Woke' Culture

Unequal England

China's Captured "Princess"

It's Not Easy Being Green

Do voters need therapy?

The Early Years Miracle?

The NHS, AI and Our Data

Get woke or go broke?

NATO at 70

The uses and misuses of history in politics

Can I Change Your Mind?

State Aid: Brexit, Bailouts and Corporate Bonanzas

The New Censorship

A question of artefacts

The Problem with Boys

Whiteness

A shorter working week

Going the way of the dodo? The decline of Britain's two main parties.

The Forgotten Half

Understanding the risks of terrorism

Can computer profiles cut crime?

Green technology and early adoption

The Real Gender Pay Gap

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