As a philosophy student in the 1980s, the New Statesman’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley learned more from Bryan Magee than from any seminar or lecture. Magee’s 1987 BBC television series The Great Philosophers, described by one critic as “two boffins on a sofa”, examined some of life’s most recondite questions in an accessible way. Magee was also a prolific author (of philosophy, poetry and fiction), a Labour and then an SDP politician. But when Cowley later met Magee, sent to interview him by the Times in 1997, he was struck by something the philosopher said as he left: “I get the impression that you feel I am lonely and unfulfilled.” 

Was he? Eleven years later, now editor of the New Statesman, Cowley visited Magee in a nursing hospital in Oxford, shortly after publication of the 87-year-old’s book Ultimate Questions. The issues that had made Magee restless in his sixties still loomed large: “What the hell is it all about?” he asked, and compared himself unfavourably to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, men he had known (“they were a whole class above me in intelligence”). In this rich and beautifully observed profile, Cowley explores these themes, as well as the formative years of one of Britain’s most interesting thinkers. 

Written and read by Jason Cowley. 

This article originally appeared in the 08 April 2018 issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here.

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

If you enjoyed listening to this, you might enjoy Grayson Perry on the rise and fall of the Default Man

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

According to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the face of British Christianity is changing rapidly. London is now home to the greatest concentration of African churches outside Africa – many of them in bingo halls and warehouses, schools and community centres, where they also serve as social and charitable hubs. Outside the capital, the prospects of a religious revival are relatively bleak: weekly Church of England attendance is below 2 per cent of England’s population, and 20 Anglican churches are closed for worship every year. Is secularisation “almost entirely a white British phenomenon”, as the Birkbeck political scientist Eric Kaufmann puts it?

In this week’s long read Tomiwa Owolade, a New Statesman contributing writer, explores this divide and looks at the migrant roots of London’s Christian revival. He finds that, largely because of its religious population, the capital has become the most socially conservative city in the country, with a higher percentage of Londoners disapproving of sex outside marriage and homosexuality.

“This is awkward for conservative thinkers,” Owolade writes, “who complain about the decline of Christianity, and about large-scale immigration to Britain. Without immigration, the decline of Christianity would be even more profound. But it is also tricky for progressives: many of these immigrant communities espouse values on gender and sexuality that are far from liberal.”

Will the African Christian revival be dampened by a wider secular culture – or will it expand?

Written and read by Tomiwa Owolade.

This article originally appeared in the 31 March-13 April New Statesman spring special. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like the battle for the soul of English cricket

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In January 2023, a leaked memo from the US air force general Mike Minihan revealed that he expected to be at war with China over Taiwan by 2025. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had raised the stakes, as had Beijing’s consistent refusal to rule out military action. But is a full-scale invasion the real threat, or is the territory’s struggle for independence already well under way?

On a recent trip to Taiwan, the New Statesman’s China and global affairs editor Katie Stallard visits Kinmen, site of the last major confrontation between Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army and the Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. There are relics of past conflicts everywhere, from the wall of loudspeakers that broadcasts propaganda at the Chinese coast, to the tunnels and air raid shelters that protected the Taiwanese from bombing in the 1950s. 

Now they face more subtle threats – “grey-zone tactics” such as the severing of internet cables from Taiwan to the Matsu islands, and “cognitive warfare”, or a sophisticated disinformation campaign, alongside the alienation of Taiwan’s traditional diplomatic allies (down from 22 to 13 formal partners, as countries such as Honduras switch allegiance to Beijing). In Taipei, Stallard hears how a more conventional military offensive might unfold, and the ways in which anti-US propaganda has gained traction – particularly in the wake of its exit from Afghanistan. Can Taiwan hold its ground?

Written and read by Katie Stallard.

This article originally appeared in the 31 March – 13 April spring issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like to listen to What Trump’s 2024 bid means for the US, Russia and China.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After a series of bad bets on the post-pandemic economy, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) lost 60% of its value on the evening of 8 March 2023, and $42bn in withdrawals the following day. Its collapse triggered panic across the US, and in Europe, where Switzerland’s second-largest lender Credit Suisse (already dubbed ‘Debit Suisse’) was already looking shaky; its subsequent bail-out was the first the world’s big banks had received since the 2008 crash.

In this week’s magazine cover story, the New Statesman’s business editor Will Dunn explores the unique factors which led to the current crisis, and looks at what has changed since 2008. With inflation at record highs, the economic shocks of a Russian war, and the ever-accelerating pace of tech, there has never been more fertile ground for panic, he writes. Did SVB’s billionaire depositors deserve their bailout, and what are the moral hazards of underwriting bad behaviour? Will such tremors curb the current move towards deregulation in the UK markets? 

Written and read by Will Dunn.

This article originally appeared in the 24 March 2023 print edition of New Statesman magazine. You can read the text version here. 

If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy listening to The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the economy.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It started as an accident of geography: after one RAF runway closed, the bodies of British soldiers killed in action were repatriated from Iraq and Afghanistan to RAF Lyneham and then through the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett, on their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. From April 2007 until August 2011 the town became the site of unofficial national mourning: relatives, tourists, foreign media, politicians and dignitaries came to pay their respects as the funeral corteges made their way down the high street. In 2010 the town became a site of political conflict: Anjem Choudary’s Islam4UK threatened to protest the murders of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was met by a pre-emptive rally of Tommy Robinson’s far-right English Defence League.

In this rich and deeply reported long read, the New Statesman’s editor, Jason Cowley, revisits the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion. He tells the story of one fallen soldier – a relative – and of the town at the centre of England’s response to wars that were increasingly unpopular. He talks to Tony Blair, who justifies the invasion as an opportunity for Britain to redefine its role in the world; and to the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, who describes it as a “disaster... because Blair used his presentational skills to persuade people of something that turned out not to be true, namely the existence of weapons of mass destruction”. Twenty years on, the consequences are still being felt, in the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 – and in the small market town of Wootton Bassett.

Written by Jason Cowley and read by Hugh Smiley.

This article originally appeared in the 17 March edition of the New Statesman, and is an edited extract from the new edition of Jason Cowley’s Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England, published in paperback on 31 March (Picador). You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy listening to “Nothing prepares you”: a journey through Ukraine at war

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Once the envy of the world, British universities are being hollowed out by a managerial class, argues Adrian Pabst, a New Statesman contributing writer and professor of politics at the University of Kent. Instead of intellectual excellence and civic responsibility, the emphasis is increasingly on “churning out graduates who will serve the interests of City firms and the non-governmental organisation industry”.

Where did the rot set in, and can it be cured? Pabst traces the university’s decline from the advent of the student loan and a 1990s proliferation of “Mickey Mouse” degrees, via New Labour and the Cameron-Clegg coalition’s embrace of marketisation and bureaucracy. As degrees have become more expensive, the work that goes into them has become more mediocre – with tutors and students assessed against arbitrary metrics. The universities' "corporate capture... is a profound cultural loss," he writes.

In this excoriating essay, originally published as the New Statesman’s 10 March 2023 cover story, Pabst diagnoses the causes, examines the costs ­– and proposes solutions to the current crisis. You can read the text version here.

Written by Adrian Pabst and read by Emma Haslett.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the UK economy.

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the woes of centre-left parties across the West – some of it prematurely, as Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and perhaps soon Keir Starmer in Britain can attest. The bigger and quite possibly more lasting story of political decline, however, is on the centre-right. A decade ago, moderate conservative figures like David Cameron and Angela Merkel were pre-eminent. Today the tendencies those leaders represented have largely been sidelined, the parties in question having moved to the right, been ecclipsed by more hardline forces, or both.

In this long read Jeremy Cliffe, the New Statesman’s writer at large, charts that international pattern, from Trumpism in the US to the rise of the hard-right in European countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. He also explores the deeper structural forces behind those shifts and how the electoral and sociological foundations that long sustained moderate conservatism – and made it the dominant Western political tendency for much of the past seven decades – are breaking up. What, he asks, does the future hold for right-of-centre politics?

Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe

This article was originally published as the New Statesman’s 15 February 2023 magazine cover story. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy: Era of the rogue superpower: what Trump’s bid means for the US, Russia and China.

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The New Statesman’s Scotland editor Chris Deerin has been reporting on the SNP since 1996, when as a young political correspondent he sparred with its then leader Alex Salmond. The party was then an outlier, with only three Scottish MPs to Labour’s 49. Just over ten years later, in 2007, Salmond became first minister and appointed a shy, ambitious protégé as his deputy: Nicola Sturgeon.

In this definitive account, Deerin traces Sturgeon’s political journey – to the top of her party, through the 2014 independence referendum, a bitter fallout with Salmond, and ultimately her resignation. Was her commitment to new gender recognition legislation, and to a second independence referendum, a miscalculation? How will she be remembered in Edinburgh, Westminster and beyond? 

Written and read by Chris Deerin.

This article was originally published as the New Statesman’s 24 February 2023 magazine cover story. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy: World Prince: what drives Emmanuel Macron’s global ambitions

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When her mother died Johanna Thomas-Corr, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, fretted that she was misremembering her somehow. “I kept reaching for my own figures of speech, only for them to writhe out of my hands,” she writes. “Writing about her was easy: she was so distinctive. But writing about my relationship with her – this was a slippery business.”

In this essay, struggling to find a language for her loss, Thomas-Corr turns to literature for answers. She draws on a rich tradition of writing about grief – from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief (2021), Ian McEwan’s novel Lessons (2022), to Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living (2018). 

Through their pages, she explores our inevitable entanglements with our mothers and grief in all its phases – the anticipatory, the humorous and the weird. “I have come to like images of myself, simply because they remind me of her,” she writes. “I used to be so self-conscious... but I rather like the fact I now look a bit like my mother did. I find I am not fighting it.”

Written by Johanna Thomas-Corr and read by Emma Haslett.

This article was originally published in the 25 Jan 2023 issue of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode of the audio long read, you might enjoy listening to How does a music writer grieve? With playlists, of course.

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every year since 2009 new records have been set for UK house prices, and every year people have asked how long the market can continue to defy gravity. But this year is different. Mortgage rates have risen steeply, while the cost of living accelerates; the past four months have seen the longest sustained drop in property prices since 2008. And it’s a global issue, as central bankers make borrowing more expensive in an attempt to curb inflation.

Is this a necessary correction or the dawn of a calamitous crash – one that will drive an unaffordable rental market, negative equity and a dearth of social housing? In this definitive account of the property crash, the New Statesman’s business editor, Will Dunn, explores Britain’s doomed love affair with bricks and mortar – from the boomer “house-blockers” at the top of the chain to the Gen Zers with little prospect of buying their own home. “It is a mass exercise in self-deception,” he writes, “a substitute for economic growth. It was a substitute people accepted: the expensive house that sucked up a lifetime’s wages became the savings account, the pension, the inheritance. That wealth is now beginning to dissolve.”

This article was originally published as the magazine’s cover story on 3 February 2023; you can read the text version here.

Written and read by Will Dunn.

If you enjoyed this episode of the audio long read, you might enjoy listening to What drives Liz Truss? The people and ideas behind her economics.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.