The idea that, without capitalism, the planet might not be facing so great a climate crisis is well established, appearing in works like Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything (2014) and from the growing ranks of “eco-socialist” activists.

But in this essay, the science writer (and committed socialist) Leigh Phillips argues that an entirely socialist 20th century would have resulted in global heating at least as bad, if not worse. He outlines a counterfactual history in which capitalism is vanquished everywhere by 1930, colonialism willingly unravelled – and industrialisation rolled out for everyone, not for the few. “Housing for all, electricity for all, fast and comfortable transport for all, and yes, even delightful plastic consumer tchotchkes for all,” he writes. “There would absolutely be a People’s Xbox under socialism.” 

In this clearly argued and imaginative essay, Phillips concedes that, yes, there would have been differences under socialism – and some benefits, once the harms of carbon emissions were realised. But we must start to see the climate crisis as the unintended consequence of largely beneficial (if uneven) economic development – and a problem that is very hard to solve under any single system. What is needed, he says, is not a move towards degrowth, anti-consumerism and other forms of eco-austerity – but a greater role for economic planning.

Written by Leigh Phillips and read by Hugh Smiley.

This article was originally published on the newstatesman.com on 10 August 2022. You can read the text version here.

You might also enjoy listening to The lonely decade: how the 1990s shaped us by Gavin Jacobson.

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In 1947, on her 21st birthday, Elizabeth Windsor promised that when she ascended the royal throne she would serve “our great imperial family”. By the time of her coronation six years later, the Crown’s ties with empire were already significantly weaker. Yet for the duration of her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth II would remain a human link to old imperial Britain – the original “global Britain” – and its virtues and principles, real and imagined. Her death is a rupture, a breaking of that final connection with an era that is long gone yet remains nation-defining for Britain today.

In this reflection on her reign, the New Statesman's writer-at-large Jeremy Cliffe considers the long shadow of empire and the ways in which it shaped both the second Elizabethan era and the UK’s sense of its place in the world. He looks, too, at the waxing and waning of the Queen’s authority; she was not a political figure, and so has been embraced during politically turbulent times such as these. Will her son, King Charles III, now manage similar feats of unification?

Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Hugh Smiley.

This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 9 September. You can read the text version here.

You might also enjoy listening to The lonely decade, how the 1990s shaped us by Gavin Jacobson.

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The shock of her death on 31 August 1997 sparked mass public mourning, a crisis within the royal family, and a test of the prime minister Tony Blair’s leadership. A quarter of a century later, how is “the People’s Princess” remembered?

Reporter Tanya Gold goes in search of the woman behind the myths, the movies and the conspiracy theories – visiting the Spencer family home, Althorp, where Diana is buried, and a walking trail of her London haunts and monuments. She meets the keepers of Diana’s flame, including the curator of an online museum of memorabilia (the princess’s Wellington boots, 50 handwritten notes to her hairdresser), a sculptor, a former colleague, and the staff of Madame Tussauds' waxwork museum, where Diana stands “opposite Henry VIII, who would have executed her”.

This article was originally published in the 26 August-1 September issue of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here.

Written by Tanya Gold and read by Alix Kroeger.

You might also enjoy listening to The making of Prince William by Tanya Gold.

Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

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For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs was an enigma. For the first time, he tells his side of the story to the New Statesman’s lead interviewer, Kate Mossman. Kate and Cary Raditz met in Paris in late 2021 to talk about a love affair that began on the island of Crete in the spring of 1970, continued in California and England, and which became a part of Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue.

Written and read by Kate Mossman.

Read the text version here. It was first published on the New Statesman website on 17 December 2021, and in the magazine on 7 January 2022.

To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

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On 16 November 2021,  testified to parliament about his experiences of racism while playing for Yorkshire County Cricket Club. The off-spinner and former England youth captain said that, between 2008 and 2018, he had been repeatedly subjected to racial slurs, excluded and portrayed as a troublemaker. The fallout was catastrophic, at Yorkshire and across the professional game, with high-profile resignations and inquiries announced. Earlier this summer, the entire board of Cricket Scotland resigned on the eve of a report that upheld allegations of institutional racism.

Three decades after the notorious “Tebbit test” – when the Conservative minister Norman Tebbit suggested nationhood could be determined by whether someone of Asian heritage supports England – why is cricket still unable to deal with questions about identity and inclusion?

In this revealing and deeply reported piece, Emma John follows the fortunes of a grassroots team in London, and attends the last Eton vs Harrow match to be held at Lord’s, the “home of cricket”, as the sport attempts to rapidly diversify. She catches up with Rafiq and the scouts who decide which players make the leap into the professional game. As John writes, “English cricket has long been a refuge for a certain kind of conservative, a panic room padded with a fantasy of a vanished country.” Can it change? Do its gatekeepers really want it to?

This article originally appeared in the New Statesman's 29 July-18 August 2021 summer special. You can read the text version here.

Written and read by Emma John, a freelance sport and travel writer.

You might also enjoy listening to What does a doctor do? by Phil Whittaker.

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Three years ago the New Statesman published a cover story showing how successive British governments have emaciated standards in UK university degrees, creating a generation of graduates with devalued qualifications, while costing the taxpayer billions. Since then, the “great university con” has continued unabated. Grade inflation has only increased, despite various declarations from ministers that something should be done to counter it. 

In this deeply researched and wide-ranging article, the New Statesman’s senior politics correspondent, Harry Lambert, wrote that the number of Firsts awarded at British universities has quadrupled since 1994. Now, three years on, that number has quintupled.

In this Audio Long Reads episode, Lambert argues that the forces driving this disintegration of academic standards remain in place. That is no surprise. The current system is useful for too many of those involved for the sector to agitate for change. But Britain is being sold short by this “university miracle” – of ever more students going into higher education, and more and more of them emerging with higher grades.

How did we reach this point? Why has the value of a British university degree become so diminished? This piece offers answers to the questions that successive waves of students and their parents have been asking for years.

This article was first published on newstatesman.com on 21 August 2019. You can read the text version here.

Written and read by Harry Lambert.

You might also enjoy listening to “Operation Warm Welcome: the hotel that became home to 100 refugees” by Sophie McBain.

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Why, six months into Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, is Germany still struggling to come to terms with the new European reality? For explanations, some point to the country’s reliance on Russian gas; others to the legacy of the Second World War or the Cold War. Yet, as Jeremy Cliffe argues in this essay from the New Statesman’s 2022 Summer Special issue, to fully understand Germany’s instinct to maintain cordial relations with Russia, we have to go back much further than 1945 – into the nation’s cultural history and “the darker, older mists of the German psyche and imagination”.

Fortunately, says Cliffe, “there is a guide”: Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, first published in 1918 and reissued in English in 2021. In it, the German novelist set out his nationalistic views in the wake of the First World War, but also his strong conviction (inspired by German romanticism) that a special kinship existed between Germans and Russians. The two peoples, Mann thought, were united by a profound appreciation of “culture”, which he contrasted with a rationalist, liberal, “Anglo-French” regard for “civilization”. In subsequent years his views changed drastically, as he shifted towards the liberal left and an embrace of democratic Western rationalism.

Cliffe’s piece tells the story of Reflections, Mann’s political journey in the decades that followed and the related journey that Germany itself would also take. This progression, he argues, illustrates a dualism that continues to mark German identity – as torn between west and east, the rationalist and the romantic traditions, a liberal-democratic political vocation and an enduring cultural attraction to Russia. Understanding this tension, says Cliffe, helps to explain why Germany greeted the end of the Cold War with such euphoria three decades ago, and why it finds it so difficult to accept today that the era of post-Cold War optimism has come to an end. 

This article was published in the 29 July 2022 issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here. 

Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe.

You might also enjoy listening to “Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel”.

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On Boxing Day 1920, 53,000 people watched the Dick, Kerr Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 at Goodison Park – the largest-ever crowd recorded for a women’s football match in England. The game had blossomed during the First World War, as lunch-break kickabouts at munitions factories evolved into 150 women’s clubs across the country. But months after the Boxing Day fixture, the sport was banned by the Football Association – deemed “unsuitable” and dangerous. The ban remained for 50 years.

In this rich personal reflection on the women’s game, the New Statesman’s podcast producer May Robson looks at how it has evolved since 1971 – both less well-funded but more inclusive and vibrant than the men’s game. Robson’s own grassroots club, Goal Diggers FC, now has over 200 members and an international reach; an exceptional England women’s won the Euro 22 tournament. How did they get here? In the words of the Dick, Kerr Ladies FC captain Alice Kells, more than 100 years ago: “We play for the love of the game and are determined to go on.”

This article was first published on the newstatesman.com on 20 July 2022. You can read the text version here.

Written and read by May Robson.

You might also enjoy listening to I was Joni Mitchell's "Carey": an interview with Carey Raditz by Kate Mossman.

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On 7 July 2022 Boris Johnson announced he would resign as Prime Minister. Despite surviving a series of scandals, Covid-19 and a parliamentary no-confidence vote, Westminster’s “greased piglet” was finally undone by the alleged sexual improprieties of his chief whip, Christopher Pincher, and the mass resignation of his cabinet.

For many, the mystery was that such a policy-light, contradiction-heavy leadership had lasted so long. But in this dazzling satirical essay, the novelist Ed Docx shows us exactly how Johnson got away with it for so long – by playing the clown, a sustained performance he charts through four acts of increasing complexity. First, his breakthrough show, “Mayor”; his widely celebrated follow-up, “Brexit: the Referendum”; the underrated international piece, “Foreign Secretary”; and his most ambitious artistic work, “Prime Minister”, featuring “the largest cast of supporting clowns he had ever used. Those he called ‘ethics advisers’ were custard-pied one after another as they came by on a merry-go-round featuring characters from Peppa Pig. Those he called ‘donors’ showered the stage with money.”

Both wildly funny and deeply revealing, Docx captures the antics and emptiness of the Johnson premiership – as well as the public’s and politicians’ willingness to applaud, or at least accommodate, this “perfect ambassador of meaninglessness”. When did the booing start? Shamefully late, it turns out.

This article originally appeared on the newstatesman.com on 13 July, and in the 15-21 June edition of the magazine. You can read the text version here.

Written and read by Edward Docx.

You might also enjoy listening to Stalin and Putin: a tale of two dictators by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

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Soon after finishing his most recent book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, the author Geoff Dyer decided to follow in his hero’s footsteps and have surgery. “Strictly speaking, I was following in the footsteps of Novak Djokovic and Stefanos Tsitsipas,” he writes, “in that I would be having surgery on my elbow (left) rather than a knee, but that’s just an anatomical detail.” Worsening tennis elbow was the latest sign that, at 63, Dyer might be getting old; “business-class” medical care near his home in Santa Monica, California, promised to undo the damage.

In this funny, sad and beautifully written reflection on mortality and late middle age, Dyer examines his own frailties and the differences between American healthcare and that received by his father in England. Meanwhile, the pain of a slow physical recovery is eased by a trip to a seniors’ holiday resort called the Fountain of Youth. If the American way is one of constant self-improvement, from yoga to decluttering, and from a bigger house to a better game of golf, what happens when you opt out? Can anyone escape? As Dyer writes: “Gore Vidal mocked F Scott Fitzgerald for whining on in his notebooks about how ‘he was young and now he’s middle-aged’. That now seems to me an entirely worthy theme, perhaps the biggest one there is.”

This article appeared on the newstatesman.com on 15 June and in the magazine on 17 June. You can read the text version here.

Written by Geoff Dyer and read by Chris Stone.

You might also enjoy listening to Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth by Jenny Kleeman.

Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer

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