New Economics Podcast

By New Economics Foundation

What's New Economics Podcast about?

Award-winning podcast about the economic forces shaping our world, with Ayeisha Thomas-Smith and guests. Brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the independent think tank and charity campaigning for a fairer, sustainable economy.

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How did the British Empire ...

05.30.2022

Outside of the frenzied headlines about woke warriors cancelling Jane Austen and stately homes, we’re living in a period of renewed consideration of Britain’s colonial history. The British Empire began before the English Civil War, and shaped our country for ...

New Economics Podcast episodes:

05.30.2022 How did the British Empire write the rules of today’s economy? Outside of the frenzied headlines about woke warriors cancelling Jane Austen and stately homes, we’re living in a period of renewed consideration of Britain’s colonial history. The British Empire began before the English Civil War, and shaped our country for ...
05.16.2022 Who owns the internet? What do you get the guy who has everything? A 44 billion dollar social media platform apparently. Elon Musk has already been accused of union busting, shot a car into space, and become the world’s richest man. So what’s next ...
05.03.2022 What did Covid-19 reveal about how our economy is really run? In the early months of the pandemic, the government shut down whole sectors of the economy and started paying the wages of a huge proportion of Brits. Some worked from home, juggling homeschooling their kids and figuring out how to ...
04.19.2022 What does the Sunak scandal tell us about our tax system? A few weeks ago the chancellor presided over a spring budget which ushered in the fastest drop in living standards on record, as he told us that we “can’t protect everyone”. But this week it was revealed that his wife ...
04.04.2022 The UK's response to the refugee crisis Since the start of the war in Ukraine, over 4 million people have fled the country. Earlier this month Priti Patel announced a visa application centre had been established en route to Calais for Ukrainians trying to come to the ...
03.21.2022 Are fossil fuels funding the war in Ukraine? At the time of recording, hundreds, and possibly thousands, of civilians have been killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more than 2.5m Ukranians have fled the country. The Russian army has been accused of war crimes after bombing a ...
03.07.2022 Tackling the cost of living crisis 2022 has been dubbed the ‘year of the squeeze’ by the Resolution Foundation. In April, soaring energy bills will collide with tax increases for working people. Last month grocery prices rose at their fastest rate in eight years, and inflation ...
02.21.2022 Tackling the energy crisis Families are bracing for less and less money to get by as energy bills rise this spring. In the fifth richest country in the world, pensioners are skipping meals so they can afford their heating bills, and parents are only ...
11.29.2021 Closing the Covid-19 vaccination gap Coronavirus cases are once again rising in Europe and across the world. The World Health Organisation has said that countries shouldn’t be giving out booster jabs for the rest of the year, but in the UK we’re offering third shots ...
11.19.2021 The future of work A record number of employees have quit their jobs in recent months, in what’s been dubbed the Great Resignation. Newspapers report that it’s part of post-Covid demand for flexible working and better work life balance. After last year, where up ...
11.12.2021 Is our digital economy breeding misogyny? In August this year Jake Davison, a 22-year-old from Plymouth, went on a shooting rampage that left six dead, including his mother and himself. In the aftermath it emerged that Davison had been a member of ‘incel’ forums online. He’s ...
11.05.2021 Trans Liberation If you read mainstream media coverage of the issues facing transgender people in the UK, you’ll see a lot of fevered discussion of pronouns, bathroom access, and confusing legislation like the Gender Recognition Act. The media tells one story - ...
10.26.2021 Is austerity back? At the height of the pandemic, politicians promised to do whatever it took to keep the economy going, and introduced emergency support like the furlough scheme. But now those measures have been cut and the conversation has turned to “fixing ...
10.15.2021 What really happens at a UN climate summit? In a few weeks’ time, 25,000 people will descend on Glasgow. They are coming for the UN climate summit, also known as Cop26. The delegates might not have the pleasure of sampling the city’s mac-and-cheese pies or a dram of ...
10.08.2021 The Great Homes Upgrade The UK has the draughtiest and oldest housing in Western Europe. And our gas boilers pump out twice as much carbon dioxide as all of the country’s power stations. Do we need to upgrade the UK’s homes? Why is our ...
10.01.2021 Can we prevent living standards plummeting this winter? Over 11m people have been furloughed in the last 16 months, and almost 6m are currently on universal credit. But over the next week, the government’s main emergency policies to help people through the pandemic will end. People on furlough ...
08.13.2021 Where did our immigration system come from? This week a controversial deportation flight took off for Jamaica. Legal challenges meant that only a tenth of the 90 people due to be deported were on the plane. The planned deportation included people whose lawyers said they had a ...
08.06.2021 Fighting the climate crisis in the courts With the COP26 global climate conference coming up later this year, we’re spending five episodes this series looking at pressing climate issues. In this episode we’re talking about taking the fossil fuel industry to court. Last week, a government spokesperson ...
08.03.2021 Fast Fashion With the COP26 global climate conference coming up later this year, we’re spending five episodes this series looking at pressing climate issues. In this episode we’re talking fast fashion. Summer is here and Love Island is all over the telly. ...
07.23.2021 How can we tackle the climate crisis while levelling up? With the COP26 global climate conference coming up later this year, we’re spending five episodes this series looking at some of the biggest climate issues. In this episode we’re talking about a just transition. Last week, the prime minister travelled ...
07.09.2021 A climate conversation between two generations With the COP26 global climate conference coming up later this year, we’re going to spend five episodes this series looking at some of the biggest climate issues. We kicked things off last week with Alice Bell explaining everything you need ...
07.02.2021 Greenwashing With the COP26 global climate conference coming up later this year, we’re going to spend the next five episodes of the podcast looking at some of the biggest climate issues – starting this week with greenwashing. Last month 20 young ...
06.18.2021 The Police Bill Throughout the spring, hundreds of thousands of people across the country marched, signed petitions, and spoke out against the catchily-titled Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Critics say the Bill would curb our freedom of speech and assembly by giving ...
06.11.2021 Culture Wars This week, the front page of the Daily Mail screamed “Outrage as Oxford students plan to axe queen”. In reality, a group of postgrads voted to take down a portrait of the queen in a single common room, in a ...
04.01.2021 What will Biden’s America look like? There’s a new president in the Oval Office and he’s ready to make some changes. Joe Biden wants the start of his presidency to be defined by rejoining the Paris climate agreement, vaccinating the country against Covid-19, and pulling the ...
03.19.2021 Changing the rules of our economy to stop environmental breakdown There are just eight months left until the UK hosts the UN Climate Conference. And despite Boris Johnson’s insistence that we will have a green recovery from the pandemic, in the last month there have been a number of climate ...
03.12.2021 How can we make sure everyone has enough to live on? Last week a video circulated of 800 people queuing for a food bank in Wembley. Volunteers at the London Community Kitchen said that the number was not uncommon. In Rishi Sunak’s recent budget, he announced that the furlough scheme and ...
03.08.2021 Why should we care what big tech does with our data? From the A-level algorithm scandal, to parents taking on YouTube, to making Facebook and Google pay for news, people are fighting back against the way big tech companies and governments use our data. So what are companies like Google and ...
03.02.2021 What's Brexit done to fishing and farming? We were supposed to have cast off the shackles of EU rules around farming and fishing. Brexit was sold as a ‘sea of opportunity’. And yet, tonnes of British meat have been left rotting at European ports, while Scottish fishers ...
02.15.2021 Vaccine Nationalism By the middle of January, 49 wealthy countries had administered 39 million doses of the Covid vaccine. But the world’s poorest countries had only done 25 jabs, all of them in just one country: Guinea. Not 25 million, not 25,000 ...
02.05.2021 Is outsourcing out of control? Meagre food packages for kids on free school meals. A £22bn track and trace system that isn’t fit for purpose. And people asked to travel hundreds of miles for a Covid test. What do all of these things have in ...
01.29.2021 Exposing the truth about modern slavery From Sports Direct warehouses to nail bars, awareness-raising campaigns warn that modern slavery is happening all around us. Over Christmas, fashion brand Boohoo cut ties with 64 garment suppliers in Leicester after it came out that factories were paying their ...
12.01.2020 Finding hope during and after the pandemic Joe Biden has defeated Donald Trump to win the US election. Test results from around the world suggest that a coronavirus vaccine is on the horizon. Over the past month there have been more bright spots than usual in a ...
11.16.2020 Should we work less after the pandemic? Setting up a desk area in the kitchen, Zoom call-induced headaches, or getting furloughed and paid to not do any work - this year has shaken up the world of work like never before. The pandemic has made us reimagine ...
11.06.2020 Should we shake up taxes to recover from the pandemic? Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said that Britain faces new tax rises in the wake of the pandemic. But over the summer Labour’s shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds warned against increasing taxes during an economic crisis. Meanwhile, new research has found that ...
10.23.2020 The US election narrative war The US presidential election is less than a fortnight away - and Donald Trump and Joe Biden are pulling out all the stops to get the votes. But after a chaotic debate forced moderators to cut the candidates’ mics to ...
10.16.2020 What's going on with Brexit? Brexit - remember it? Way back in the distant past of 2019 it felt like it was all the newspapers could talk about. It might feel like it’s done and dusted, but the process is still rumbling on. We’ve got ...
10.09.2020 Building a caring economy “We want to build back greener as we recover from Covid-19” - that was the message this week at the Prime Minister’s Conservative Party Conference speech. But in all the talk of wind turbines and technology, the place of care ...
10.06.2020 Is competition killing us? Our track-and-trace system will be “world-beating”. The development of the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine is “months ahead” of its competitors around the world. This is how politicians and the media have been talking about our lines of defence against the coronavirus ...
09.25.2020 Can unions transform the economy? Amid the coronavirus crisis, the number of people becoming members of a union has skyrocketed. Unison reported 65,000 new members since the start of the year, and in the last six months, 50,000 people have joined the National Education Union. ...
08.14.2020 Covid-19 and global capitalism It’s a cliche by now to say that Covid-19 has upended our economy. Industries have ground to a halt, and are only just beginning to start up again. Just this week the UK plunged into recession, with the worst drop ...
08.07.2020 How do we win a green recovery? We’re facing two global crises. We have scientific evidence for how to deal with both of them, but governments aren’t acting quickly enough. They both show how we are all more connected than we previously thought. And to tackle them ...
08.03.2020 Where does conservatism go next? For most of the last decade, the Conservative government has said they want to cut government spending to balance the books as they rolled out austerity nationwide. But since the start of lockdown, something seems to have changed. The chancellor ...
07.22.2020 Can we avoid a tsunami of job losses? It feels like every day there are new dire predictions of the state of the UK economy and jobs. Last week we discovered that the number of paid employees in Britain has plunged by 650,000 since the start of the ...
07.14.2020 Do police and prisons keep us safe? At the end of June Keir Starmer said of Black Lives Matter protesters in an interview: “Nobody should be saying anything about defunding the police.” At the same time, the UK government announced four new prisons. Olympic athlete Bianca Williams ...
07.03.2020 The Hostile Environment during coronavirus The end of June marked the anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush Generation in the UK, and sparked renewed conversations about the Hostile Environment. It’s been reported that UK immigration policies have stopped migrants from getting healthcare during the ...
06.17.2020 Gary Younge on the global black liberation uprisings The death of George Floyd three weeks ago at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a fresh wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the world. In the US, calls to defund the police have won victories and across ...
05.15.2020 The future of social care after Coronavirus 10,000 care home residents have died from Covid-19, more than a third of all Covid-19 deaths. On Wednesday it was reported that the death toll is likely to be double the official figure. The death rate amongst social care staff ...
05.08.2020 How to organise under lockdown Between the lack of PPE for key workers, growing numbers forced onto universal credit, and worries about worker safety both now and after lockdown, there’s plenty to be angry about. So has Covid-19 led to a new wave of organising? ...
05.01.2020 Coronavirus and the legacy of austerity In the last few months we’ve seen the government promise billions in support for people and businesses impacted by coronavirus. Supporters of austerity claim the last decade of cuts is what enabled the government to put money into these schemes ...

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