Pod Academy

This podcast is drawn from a Progress Educational Trust (PET) event called Putting Your Genome to Work: For the NHS, for Industry, for the UK Post-Brexit

Chair:  Sarah Norcross, Director of PET

Speakers:

Dr Eliot Forster, Chair of MedCity

 Dr Edward HockingsFounding Director of Ethics and Genetics

Dr Athena Matakidou, Head of Clinical Genomics at AstraZeneca's Centre for Genomics Research, and Consultant in Medical Oncology at Cambridge University Hospitals

Dr Jayne Spink, Chief Executive of Genetic Alliance UK

We are at the beginning of a biomedical revolution built on the promise of genomics. The British government has put this at the heart of its post-Brexit industrial strategy.  So what is the potential of genomics, what is the journey we are setting out on, and what are the pitfalls?

The British Government's Industrial Strategy White Paper Building a Britain Fit for the Future sets out an ambition for the UK to 'be the world's most innovative economy' and play a leading role in a 'fourth industrial revolution... characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds'.

The White Paper argues that 'the government, the NHS and charities can all contribute to make the UK an attractive location for businesses to invest and for patients to benefit'. According to the first in a series of Sector Deals published in the wake of the White Paper, the Life Sciences Sector Deal, 'a new genomics industry is beginning to emerge... with UK companies like AstraZeneca, Cambridge Epigenetix, Genomics plc and Congenica working with Genomics England'.

The Sector Deal discusses investments from and agreements with a variety of companies, involving the whole genomes of around 70,000 participants in the 100,000 Genomes Project and around half a million participants in UK Biobank. GSK and others have committed to sequencing the whole genomes of the latter, while a separate consortium coordinated by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will sequence the exomes (partial genomes) of these same participants in the shorter term.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says the Sector Deal 'proves that life science organisations of all sizes will continue to grow and thrive in the coming years, which means NHS patients will continue to be at the front of the queue for new treatments'.

However, there remains a degree of public unease about the involvement of commercial interests in health. This unease may be intensified at a time when how best to fund and manage the NHS, how best to approach Brexitand who can be trusted with health-related data are all matters of ongoing concern.

Issues discussed at the event included:

What are the benefits of genomics for patients?

How can we ensure that the NHS, and its patients, derive reciprocal benefit from scientific and medical advances that involve people's genomic data?

How can we address the view that there is, or should be, a clear partition between public and private involvement in health, when the development of medicines and diagnostics has always been led by the private sector (and now the Industrial Strategy involves closer collaboration)?

What can we learn from the world of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, where consumers often consent to their data being used in research (to the commercial benefit of the testing company)?

Finally, can we learn anything from proposals by a US company to treat members of the public neither as patients nor as consumers but rather as 'data owners', who will use blockchain technology to make their genomic data accessible (or inaccessible) to whomever they wish?

Photo:  PLOS One Pyhlogeny Comparative genomic DNA hybridization and in silico comparison of gene content with...

Maxwell Ward talks to Dr Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Centre for Right-Wing Studies, about the Alt-Right’s unlikely journey into the mainstream of US politics and their more recent struggles. What are their ambitions? What do they really think of Donald Trump? And where do they go from here?

But the first thing Maxwell wanted to know… who and what are the Alt-Right?

Dr Lawrence Rosenthal: The Alt-Right represents what has long been called in the USA the fringe of American politics. What made them the fringe, or the very definition of the fringe, is that they are outside of the mainstream and do not have particularly a role in national politics. The kinds of ideology that we’re talking about are things that have characterised the Klu Klux Klan in this country and Neo-Nazi organisations in this country. They have not had a role in American Politics nationally since the 1920s and 1930s. But, they continued to exist and they existed in atomised corners. There would be groups in rural Ohio or rural Michigan. There would be numbers of them. But, comes the internet age, and above all social media, they networked. So that’s step one. These guys networked.

Two, there were events that made these people come together beyond simply politics. That has to do with what is better understood as culture. Above all, there was a thing called Gamergate. To some extent, the base of the Alt-Right online consists of what used to be called in Social Science “alienated young men” and they were gamers online. A controversy arose around the place of women in the gamer world. It provoked an immense backlash against feminism itself. Very anti-women. That consolidated this element of what would constitute the Alt-Right. Donald Trump famously said, “Well, these online things aren’t necessarily from Russia. They could have been from some 400-pound kid lying on his mother’s bed somewhere.” The point being that there are these unhappy young men who are engaged more culturally than politically. So, you get the rise of this essentially nihilistic internet culture in which things like Pepe the frog become symbolic and there is a vast array of these symbols. Basically, the thrill of it is it’s edgy and anti-establishment and it’s anti all establishments. Left, right, etc. So you have those guys, the alienated young men and you have the formerly atomised neo-Nazi and KKK groups who have discovered social media and are now not atomised anymore but are a social network or networking on social media.

Finally, you get step three which is the candidacy of Donald Trump. What happens in the world of what would become the Alt-Right is they are electrified. They are electrified because suddenly, at the level of presidential politics in the USA, somebody is talking their language. So, the experience, the decades long political experience of being marginalised, of being the fringe, has suddenly changed. Somebody who is running for president is talking about immigrants the way they talk about them, the very premise of whose campaign is anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist… well, let me be clear about that, anti- “political correctness”. Donald Trump would say things like, “the biggest problem in this country is political correctness.” That, above all, had two constituent elements for the Alt-Right. One was feminism and the other was multi-culturalism. Both of which seem forced down their throats by elites and in these two, in particular, the liberal elites. Donald Trump was like a siren call from the thoroughly unexpected province of not only national politics but presidential politics. So, the Alt-Right became mobilised and a participant in the election of 2016 in a way that that kind of ideological warrior had not participated in American elections since the 1920s and 1930s.

MW: You talk about these disparate groups that have come together. Would you say that,

Hello, this is Pod Academy. 

Of late, there has been much talk of sexism, in particular sexual harassment, behind the scenes in the film industry.  But what about the films themselves?  Pod Academy’s Tatiana Prorokova took a look at the hit movie Beauty and the Beast.  One of the highest grossing films this year, it has taken over $1bn worldwide.

The recent adaptation of the famous Disney cartoon – Beauty and the Beast – is the film that through a children's story raises the profound questions of female oppression and sexism that have existed in our society for centuries.

The story focuses on the girl Belle (played by Emma Watson) who lives with her father in a small village in France. Belle is considered weird by most of the villagers and the reason for that is her love for books. The girl is frequently portrayed with a book in her hands; such an image, however, provokes rather negative responses from the people around her primarily because they believe that education, which, in this context, is access to books that Belle has, is not for women. The scene that illustrates this idea even more vividly takes place later in the film when Belle is teaching a small girl how to read. The crowd largely disapproves of that. Sexism thus manifests itself not only through the reactions to the girl who likes reading but also, and perhaps even more crucially, through the idea that men and women have different privileges. This foregrounds gender inequality and reminds the audience about the perverse norms that were generated and sustained by patriarchy.

Belle later finds herself in the castle, where she came to save her father (played by Kevin Kline). She chooses to stay there instead of him, sacrificing herself for the well-being of her parent. Her stay in the castle supports the ideas of sexism and female inequality in multiple ways. First and foremost, being the Beast’s (played by Dan Stevens) prisoner, she is literally locked in the castle. Yet one can interpret this imprisonment from a different angle and argue that it figuratively embodies the existing gender inequality. The visibly subordinate relationship between Belle and the Beast metaphorically visualizes patriarchy in the family life or perhaps even stands for family tyranny. In this respect, the image of the Beast only intensifies the power and cruelty of the oppressor. The castle becomes Belle’s cage where she is both literally and symbolically locked. The girl can only wait for someone from the outside to come and save her. That savior, as the audience can easily guess, could be Gaston (played by Luke Evans) – the former soldier who wants to marry Belle. Belle is thus portrayed as a fragile girl who is oppressed by a male and who can be ultimately saved only by another male.

In the castle, the enchanted servants forcefully redress Belle so that she can look like a real lady – again, the image that is constructed by patriarchy as the only right one and imposed on women. Belle is portrayed in a pompous dress, she is wearing a wig, and her face is richly covered with vulgar makeup. The girl ultimately rejects these clothes, preferring to stay in her old ones.

While the castle symbolizes Belle’s cage, it is pivotal that this is the only place where she is not laughed at for her love for books. The Beast shows her his large library and Belle’s heart seems to melt, for she now has something that she wanted to have so much – access to education. Nevertheless, Belle remains a prisoner; thus while she gets something what she likes, she is still under full control of the Beast.

Apart from Belle, there is another important female character in the film that is introduced to support the issue of sexism provoked by patriarchy. This is Agathe (played by Hattie Morahan). Agathe is first introduced to the audience as a beggar who saves the life of Belle’s father but later turns out to b...

A radical vision for arts policy should be at the heart of any progressive government argue Professor Rod Stoneman and Adam Stoneman.

Note: This is not a transcript of the podcast interview with Rod and Adam, but rather the text of a paper by them on arts policy.

Restoring financial support for the arts would hardly amount to a radical transformative vision for the arts.  The major proposals in a recent document from the Labour party, for example, were entirely defensive: ‘reinstate arts funding’, ‘safeguard our galleries and museums’, ‘protect the BBC’.

It does not have to be like this; in 1965, Government Minister Jennie Lee published Britain’s first cultural white paper, ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps’, in which she addressed uneven regional distribution and unequal access to the arts and committed state support for infrastructure. The paper led to the creation of countless museums, galleries and concert halls across the country and completely transformed Britain’s cultural landscape. Rather than attempting to merely return to this post-war model of funding however, we should apply its principles to the challenges of the present.

Access and involvement.

Research shows that well-educated middle-class professionals are most likely to be drawn to the areas of the cultural sector that are dependent on public funding such as opera and theatre, with those on less well-educated unskilled and semi-skilled workers tending to be more involved in the commercial culture industry. Instead of restoring a subsidy model that entrenches this division, we should seize the opportunity to change the funding system in a way that broadens and deepens the audiences that engage with publicly funded arts.

The prevalence of unpaid internships and unpaid labour in the arts presents a major financial barrier to access for those who do not come from privileged backgrounds. Discussion of a ‘real living wage’ to protect arts workers is a good start but there should be a root and branch approach to tackling the lack of diversity in arts organisations, from the shop floor to upper management – of the directors of our ten most popular museums, all are white and only one is a woman.

Renewed and dynamic versions of culture need to be brought out of the institutions into the widest public sphere; for large sections of the population there are invisible barriers to entering galleries, arts centres and concert halls – we can unconsciously assume “those places are not for me”. We should be looking to bring art activities beyond existent facilities to intervene directly in public spaces and within communities. Theatre groups working on civic initiatives, artists’ placements, musical ensembles from housing estates, filmmakers in workplaces and writers conducting workshops in local libraries enable myriad forms of individual and group self-activation. A focus should be placed on facilitating and empowering marginalised communities to speak without constant mediation; this would include the funding of workshops, training and skills-based initiatives, enabling communities to shape discourse about themselves from the very beginning. Importantly this should not be sidelined into ‘community art’ as once-off, philanthropic gestures but should be a guiding principle of national arts policy.

Public art can renew the sense that urban space belongs to all of us. The success of the Fourth plinth project in Trafalgar square, or the use of billboards to display modern painting in Tehran demonstrates this well. Too much of our visual environment is dominated by commercial marketing; companies operating billboards on public land could be required to periodically devote space to classical or contemporary art.

Regional access should be inclusive, localised and democratic; London, and to a lesser extent,

When you use a SatNav, or check a modern weather forecast, you're using technology made possible by space exploration. Emerging space industries include tourism, and some tentative plans to mine asteroids, or the Moon, for rare materials. Space now has its lawyers, its policymakers, and even its ethicists. Robert Seddon went to King's College, London, to meet Tony Milligan, a moral philosopher who has worked extensively on the ethics of space exploration.

Robert Seddon:  So, how did that begin?

Tony Milligan:  Well, that’s a piece of guidance from my students, in fact. There was a student who wanted to work on the issue of terraforming—which is one of the big, sexy issues in space ethics—and I thought, hmmm, does the world really need this to be done? And then I looked into it, and he produced the work, and it was a good piece of work. So I thought, this bears looking into a little bit closer; so I did a short course, and the blurb advertising the course was picked up by Space Policy, the journal: they invited me to write an article. And then from the article other people wanted other things, so it sort of snowballed into a new research direction for me, which was good, because it’s a fresh area, and it’s interesting stuff, and you’re also dealing with things that matter. And that’s always a nice added bonus.

RS: Do you see much engagement from people involved in space industries in practical terms?

TM: Well... up to a point. I think there are people who want to have a story about the importance of space. Elon Musk wants to have a story about backing up the biosphere and the ethical significance of what they’re doing, and he’s got shareholders that he has to keep happy, and so on. So there is that high level interest, and the stories aren’t particularly convincing ones from an academic ethicist’s point of view, but they’re interesting stories. And then you’ve got the wilder reaches of the ethics of space, which is all about really big questions, and it doesn’t connect up with the agencies.

And then you’ve got stuff that’s done by people like myself, Jacques Arnould... And we try, in our own modest ways, to be embedded, not... We would like, ideally, more of a dialogue, I think, with the players within industry, but you already have the agencies, you have NASA, you have the European Space Agency, and we connect up at that level.

And so at the moment, for example, there’s a white paper getting put together—I’m meant to be doing editing; I’ll diligently do that tomorrow—and that’s for the establishing of a European institute for astrobiology, and the role of the key people that you would want across Europe, with some feed-in from NASA people and elsewhere, to the rationale to get that off the ground and funded. And one of the things that we say in the white paper is that we need to get, to move, beyond that level of academics talking to the institutions. We also need much more of a dialogue with people from industry.

RS: Do you think Musk and co. will get what they want, or will they have to make do with something else?

TM: Well, nobody ever gets quite what they want... or if they do then they’re never quite sure that it’s what they wanted. When you’ve got investors, when it’s a big money game, when there’s a lot on the line, you have to sell things quite hard. So it’s difficult to understand, or difficult to separate out, what’s the image, what’s the sales patter, from what he realistically expects will be realised. One of the things that usually is over-optimistic is time scales. So there are people: Mars One and so on... (That’s not Elon Musk; Musk’s much more... He’s got the technology to do stuff. Mars One doesn’t.) But they’ll talk about: well, we’re going to put somebody on Mars within a couple of years—and that’s ridiculous: there’s nothing... There’s no way you’re getting there.

Journalism has been called 'the first draft of history', and as a first draft it may be written over, forgotten, ignored.  In this podcast, journalist Martin Bright (@martinbright) considers one tiny strand of the story of the Iraq war. It illustrates truth and fake news, things that are very much on our minds at the moment.  It is taken from a lecture Martin gave for IF, the free university in London, in its series 'Thinking Without Borders'  in 2017.

Martin Bright:  Let's begin with the rules of journalism - never befriend a politician, never befriend a PR, never betray a source and never use PowerPoint (though that one I am ignoring....)

I'm going to look at one story that plays its part in the history of the lead up to the Iraq war which you may or may not have heard about. It is a story in which I as a journalist felt I was writing the first draft of history. It's a story I wrote while working on The Observer [a UK Sunday newspaper] in early 2003. It is a story left out of the reports on the Iraq war (it was not in either the Chilcot or the Hutton reports).  It is just a footnote in history, maybe less than a footnote.

It is the story of Katharine Gun, who,in 2003, was working at GCHQ. GCHQ is the third arm of British Intelligence - there is MI6 (foreign intelligence), MI5 (domestic intelligence) and GCHQ (surveillance).

Katharine was born in Taiwan, is a fluent Mandarin speaker, and she spent her days at GCHQ listening to China and deciding what was interesting - Chinese broadcasts, bugged conversations etc.  She enjoyed her job, she considered herself a patriot, she didn't see anything wrong with spying, she felt she was working in the British national interest, for the good of the country.

But she became increasingly concerned about the build up to war in Iraq, she was sceptical, she didn't think the British intelligence service should be used to further the war aim of the Government.

One day she was working, translating, when she received a memo from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US.  Subsequently, the NSA and GCHQ have become much more high profile institutions since the Edward Snowden leaks (we know a lot more about what they can tap into) but there has always been a close relationship between the two agencies.

In January 2003, we were being told that war was not a forgone conclusion, there were still negotiations going on in the UN and Tony Blair and George Bush were saing that should Saddam Hussein give up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there would be no need to go to war.  But it was a period of high tension.

There were inspectors in Iraq looking for WMD and having difficulty finding them.

Such was the tension within GCHQ itself that on 24 January 2003, a memo was sent to all GCHQ staff reassuring them that they would not be asked to do anything unlawful (which is interesting in itself since you might expect that to be the case anyway!).

At the same time what is happening in the US is a continuing hardening up of the documents being fed to the US government as to what is going on in Iraq and the weapons Saddam is supposed to have.  Then, rather inconveniently, on 27 January 2003, Hans Blix (one of the main weapons inspectors) and his team state that Iraq has no nuclear capacity and has been cooperative.  The French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, states that France won't go to war while inspections continue.  So it is getting tricky for those who want to go to war.  We also know that there will be a presentation to the UN by Colin Powell to argue that Iraq is in breach of its international commitments.

And while all this is happening, this memo from Frank Koza arrives in Katharine Gun's inbox, just after midnight on January 31st:

To: [Recipients withheld]

From: FRANK KOZA,

Following the election of Donald Trump, the alt-right has come to play a significant role in American political discourse. They are an upstart political movement that rejects traditional conservatism and championed Trump and his opposition to political correctness.

But how did a movement rooted in online and video game culture come to be so influential? Angela Nagle (@angnagle) is an Irish writer and academic who has written extensively on the rise of anti-feminism and the revitalised culture wars. She’s recently written a new book called Kill All Normies, in it she documents how fringe online politics and discussion boards have become mainstream.

 

Alex Burd spoke to Angela to discuss the book. He started by asking when the alt-right became a mainstream force.

Angela Nagle: It has to be the election of Donald Trump. I know that's very recent. Maybe you could say something like Gamergate brought a lot of different right leaning movements and forums and things that weren't very overtly political ended up much more closely mingling over Gamergate. Those are the younger ones. The more serious people like American Renaissance and Richard Spencer and people like that, they're a bit older and have been around for years. They've been taking things much more seriously and have been for a long time. But it's only when all these geeky online sub cultures started to come together that it started to be more legitimate to call them the Alt-Right rather than just the far right.

Alex Burd You reference the Gamergate movement. How is that it went from something that was about 'ethics in games journalism' to a political ideology built around the twin pillars of misogyny and white supremacy?

AN: Well essentially, depending on who you ask. Gamergate - the gamers say it's about 'ethics in games journalism', the people on the other side say they were merely pointing out sexism in gaming and ended up getting viciously attacked. The people involved in it love endlessly having these competing stories about the precise details of particular attacks which I don't find remotely interesting. Even if you take the most conservative estimate of the levels of attack that were going on they were really bad. Even the ones that are out there for the public to see. And you know a critic should be able to argue that gaming is dominated by sexist attitudes, but essentially it was viewed by gamers - where they got the 'ethics in games journalism' line from is a very long, boring story - essentially it was over political correctness. What they perceived to be feminists and anti-racists and liberals trying to change the culture and take away their fun hobby and destroy everything through liberal censorship. One of the reasons I'm not very sympathetic to that is I just think that, as in film, there's room for different viewpoints. These people were not saying games containing sexism should be banned. They were just saying that the kind of style that dominates has an attitude towards women that they had an issue with. It became basically, for whatever reason, it brought together all these different groups from the Daily Stormer, which is a Nazi website, through to apolitical vaguely sort of pro-free speech types. It brought together a whole range of people that saw themselves in different ways as opposing political correctness.

AB: And they were politicised by the fact that a largely white male space was becoming invaded leftist politics and women in particular?

AN: Yeah, definitely. Leftist cultural politics, yeah.

AB: How did it go from a misogynist reaction to that to something that has become heavily based around white supremacy and racial politics?

AN: Well when I started looking at reactionary forums of different types, I started my PHD about seven years ago, I finished about two years ago,

We appear fascinated with the phenomenon of the woman who kills. In the last year alone in the UK, both ITV and channel 4 have launched popular documentary series chronicling the shocking lives and crimes of women who commit murder. But what is it about the murderess that renders her so interesting? To social historian Dr Anna Jenkin (@acjenkin), it is her ability to offer unique insight into the gender dynamics, and broader cultural climate, of the society in which she lives. Anna's PhD thesis explores female perpetrated homicide in eighteenth-century London and Paris.

Dr Sarah Burdett caught up with Anna to discuss the findings of her research.She began by asking what it was that inspired her to investigate the topic.

Anna Jenkin: I started as an undergraduate studying eighteenth-century London, and in the second year of my undergraduate I looked specifically at the case of Sarah Malcolm, who is a serial killer, mass murderess, in 1730s London. I found the case a really interesting insight into an aspect of life in London, and women's lives specifically, that often you don't get a lot of detail about. So although it was quite an extreme example of a woman who killed her employer and two other maids in the household that she was working, in telling her story you actually get much more about the intricacies of everyday life in London at this time. So I thought this was a really interesting way of thinking about how men and women were living in these cities, but also, of much broader dynamics of power. Because female murder is such a rare act, and was such a rare act, it was particularly distressing to the society in which it took place, particularly in these very close urban areas, so you find a lot of much broader dynamics of power projected onto these cases. So that is why I decided on the question of female murder. I wanted to look specifically at eighteenth-century London and Paris because it was a time when both cities were undergoing very major paths of modernisation and growth. There were great deals of similarities between these two cities which were undergoing huge amounts of population expansion as well as economic booms, which were leading to the growth of a bourgeoisie, or middling sort, but on the other hand, politically, there were these huge differences between London post-Glorious Revolution, and France before the French Revolution, which meant that there are some really interesting similarities and differences that can be unpicked between these two cities. Female homicide is such a rare crime, that contemporary commentators don't have the general narratives of criminality or of violence to project onto them, so when trying to understand and unravel these crimes people drew from much more complicated, or perhaps more run of the mill everyday narratives in seeking to explain and understand what was going on. So I used this very small lens to understand much bigger narratives of change that these two cities were going under, at the same time but also in quite different ways.

Sarah Burdett: I asked Anna to elaborate on the proportion of female perpetrated murder, to male perpetrated murder.

AJ: Female homicide in the eighteenth century, particularly in London and Paris, was about 10 percent of male homicide. I found about 2000 cases of male perpetrated homicide in London in the period 1715-1789, and for that same period about 200 cases of female perpetrated homicide, and the same in Paris. The Parisian court is much larger so I found about  500 cases of female perpetrated homicide and 5000 cases of male homicide. So in both cities it's about a tenth, which interestingly is the same proportion as today. So it is a much rarer crime. But I think what is interesting about the urban context is that you often find in historiography and in writing about female homicide in this period quite a lot of stereotypes of female homicide as being something that is very polari...

What is the scorecard for President Donald Trump after the first 100 Days?  "C minus overall," says Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Trump said he was going to shake up Washington, and he has, but on the legislative front he has done little of what he promised in his first 100 days.

Alex Burd  (@alexburd) talked to Professor Trubowitz last year during the presidential race, now he returns to get the Professor's view on the new President's first 100 days......

On January 20th Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. April 29th marks his 100th day in office. They honeymoon period has been short, however: he has already clashed with the media, the courts and his own people. Despite running on a platform of isolationism and non-intervention, President Trump has become increasingly active in the area of foreign policy.

Last August I met with Professor Peter Trubowitz, an expert on US foreign policy and the director of the United States Centre at the London School of Economics. Today I returned to find out what the professor thinks of the new president’s actions on the world stage in his first 100 days of power - but we started by grading the opening stages of the Trump administration.

Professor Trubowitz: I think I could probably get myself to a C- minus, using the American grading scale of A to F. He came into office saying he was going to shake things up in Washington and that he was going to pass a raft of legislation, he laid that out in his 100 day contract with the American people - he ran on that. I'd say he has shaken things up in Washington, but on the legislative front you'd be hard pressed to find one item on his list, it filled the full page, that document was a two page document. I have it open on my computer right here, I looked it up just to make sure and go back over it, and none of those things have passed. He put one of them forward, repealing and replacing Obamacare, which went down in flames. There is a lot of talk about bringing it back, you know, zombie-style and perhaps it comes back. But I think overall he's made good on the promise of shaking things up, but in terms of accomplishments the record is pretty thin and I think that's why you’re seeing all this last minute activity, where he'll announce tax cuts or at least to lay out his principles because he realises he is likely to get hoisted on his own petard by the mainstream media over this.

Alex Burd: Do you think the 100 day marker is a useful one for US presidents or is it kind of a little more of a media invention?

PT: It is not a media invention. It dates back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first 100 days where he passed 15 major acts. That’s a tough act to follow and every president ever since has shied away from the 100 day bar. I think the media makes a big deal about it. It is a big story - you can rate people, you can ask them what kind of grade are you going to give the president. I think it’s important only in the sense that what you can expect in the first 100 days from a president is; you have reason to expect some sense of the tone and the style of an administration and what their aspirations and principles are and an agenda and really even a time table about how you're going to get there. So I think that is fair to compare him against that: nobody stacks up well against President Roosevelt. Trump is saying no president has been as successful as he has. FDR was a Titan.

AB: When we last spoke, you spoke about how foreign governments would be concerned that America would withdraw from the world with Trump’s election. Do you think that’s come to pass, or do you think we've seen a more active US than we expected.

What is the scorecard for President Donald Trump after the first 100 Days?  "C minus overall," says Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Trump said he was going to shake up Washington, and he has, but on the legislative front he has done little of what he promised in his first 100 days.

Alex Burd talked to Professor Trubowitz last year during the presidential race, now he returns to get the Professor's view on the new President's first 100 days.

Listen to Alex Burd's earlier podcasts with Professor Trubowitz:  The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump (July 2016) and Clinton and Trump (August 2016)

Photo by Gage Skidmore

(Transcript to follow)