Naomi (SHE'S BACK! YAY!) and Alex try to look behind a wall of very mixed signals from Labour on the EU. Is there a sophisticated strategy in play? Or a tug of war between the economically obvious and the politically toxic? And is it a cowardly betrayal of Remain, as the Guardian asserts – or a dastardly reversal of Brexit as the Express believes?

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“There’s no such thing as ‘Rejoin’. There’s not some fast-track, ‘We made a mistake! Do-over! Do-over! There is just ‘Join’ and it takes years at the best of times. It takes time.”

“There is a lot not to like about the CPTPP. But it was negotiated, the ink has dried, it’s going to happen… We are beggars, not choosers, when it comes to trade deals. And to turn our nose up at those we can do, while resetting our relationship with Europe, would be churlish and at odds with the govt’s message on growth.”

Join Best for Britain here.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell – in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Naomi and Alex review the latest Alien interquel from the London IMAX - and talk about the politics of the franchise, more generally.

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“Aliens was made a few months before Wall Street. And you really can see that anxiety: Is capitalism now too rampant? Almost forty years later, that creeping fear, that suspicion, that large corporations will take over our lives, has been confirmed.”

“The film has a very, very young cast… And it hits the nail on the head, when you think of how little stake young people have today. Young people coming to the franchise will identify with being screwed, with the goalposts moving, with not being able to save.”

“Alien is probably the best Haunted Spaceship film. And Aliens, I would say, is the best sci-fi action horror. ”And if they’re not, then listeners should write in with their suggestions. So any interquel is going against quite an impossible bar.”

Full trailer for ALIEN: ROMULUS.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Alex, Kenny and guest TIME Magazine's Yasmeen Serhan, discuss Keir Starmer's moRose Garden speech, whether the difficulties were predicted or are additional, whether the rhetoric is expectation management or augurs Austerity 2.0.

Palestinian-American, Yasmeen Serhan then leads a hugely illuminating conversation on the US Election and why so many Arab-Americans remain Uncommitted to Kamala Harris.

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“It was a dull speech. Starmer promised change… but he also promised that politics would take up less space in our lives. So, I guess, what he’s endeavouring to do is bring about this change in as non-dramatic a way as possible.”

“For the first time I question the balance of the top team. Now that they’re in government, I look around that top team and I think: who is the risk-taker there? I see a lot of risk-averse people. But if the situation is as dire as they describe, they need someone who will take a few risks.”

“Democrats and people who are supportive of Harris/Walz need to get it out of their heads that they can threaten voters by saying ‘my opponent is insane’. That is not a good get-out-the-vote strategy. You can’t fit that on a bumper sticker.”

“As a Palestinian-American, speaking to other Palestinian-Americans, this is such an emotional issue. You can’t tell them they must vote for a ticket that may just continue what we’ve been seeing. You can’t ask them to sign off on a policy that may kill their family members.”

CALLS TO ACTION

Yasmeen's writing can be found here.

The Labour Conference list of exhibitors is here.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

Our THIRD Starter Pack to accompany this Special can be found here.

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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An enriching and uplifting conversation with Professor Harvey Whitehouse, chair of social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. We come equipped with three deeply ingrained biases: tribalism, religiosity, and conformity. How do we overcome them? By working with them, says Whitehouse in his new book: INHERITANCE.

Nothing is off the table, as Alex challenged Harvey to put the recent racist riots, the MAGA movement, Brexit - even Swifties - through the prism of those biases. If we had conceived of the Professor's thesis ourselves, it could not fit better with this podcast's mission.

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To buy Harvey Whitehouse's stunning book, INHERITANCE: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF THE MODERN WORLD click here.

“The trouble is, right now, we are living in a world where technology is advancing at such a pace, we don’t have time to adapt our past lessons to fit with the kinds of problems we are facing currently. ”

“A lot of those features that I call religion, which include a tendency to anthropomorphise things, to see agency in everything, to believe in supernatural forces - these things are massively exploited by electronic media in a huge variety of ways, commercially exploited to a degree a lot of us are not fully aware of.”

On Swifties: “What we need and what is very rare are what we call ‘barrier-crossing leaders’- that is to say leaders who work across groups and across tribes and bring them together. And when we talk about that younger demographic who are relatively open to being persuaded, there is an opportunity for leaders to actually lead.”

“There are universal rules of a moral kind that we all agree upon. All human beings, everywhere, agree that certain principles of cooperation are morally good. But if you are on the left or on the right, you emphasise different components of that repertoire.”

“Actually what I’d really like to see is a coming-together of the perspectives of left and right, instead of this polarisation that is increasingly taking grip of societies around the world. What we need is for left and right to listen to each other a bit more closely.”

“The salience of global citizenship needs to come to the fore, when we’re thinking of things like tackling climate change, or pandemic risk, or whatever it is that faces the world as a whole. And we need to follow through on that, and sustain it, and build the institutions that give expression to it.”

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Alex talks through every aspect of BlueSky, from its genesis to how it may look familiar but is a completely different model of social media, to what is coming in the short and medium future, with its Chief of Operations in the San Francisco head office, Rose Wang. Hidden features, hints on curating your feed, tips on etiquette ... it's all here.

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“We are experiencing on social media a lot more media than social. And what we hear from many people is: I don’t see my friends in my timeline anymore, or on my feed anymore. Even content creators, they’re posting to the algorithm now. There’s no true connection with an audience, because they don’t own that relationship - the platforms do.”

“BlueSky looks like twitter – on the surface – but it’s like comparing TV in the 1950s with Netflix today. A small group of people deciding what you get to see on two feeds – much like the TV channels in the 50s. On BlueSky we’ve built the foundation for anyone to build a feed.”

"We have seen a couple hundred thousand people in the UK migrate to BlueSky in the last few weeks. This Brexit has been fun to watch."

"It's a new party. And at this party, you can be yourself."

Our THIRD Starter Pack to accompany this Special can be found here.

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Alex and special guest Brian Klaas, with their 30-minute review of the entire Democratic National Convention - complete with the best clips. Can the Democrats maintain this momentum? Can Trump find anything that will stick - or will he turn on Vance? What next before the first Harris vs Trump debate in September?

TW Testimony of rape survivor.

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“A lot of Democrats feel like it’s 2008 again, when Obama made his ascendancy - it was a watershed moment with incredibly high enthusiasm level, and it feels like we’re in that sort of space. Around April only [a third] of Democrats were fired up about the election. Just before the convention it was 81%.”

“What really angers the right about Walz is that he is exactly what a lot of the Republican elites pretend to be - the rural party, working class, what they call ‘Real Americans’. But all of them live in DC in penthouses, and have huge stock portfolios, and are millionaires.”

“It was a marked contrast from the when-they-go-low-we-go-high rhetoric of the Obama presidency. It was saying: You know what? We’re not going to let them set the terms. It’s a different kind of Democratic Party, that is saying: we will push back. And the Harris slogan ‘When We Fight, We Win’ is an indication of that.”

“Trump’s strategy, which we can discern is to get from 42% to 47%. Kamala Harris is trying to get to 52%. In other words, she’s trying to win over people who don’t naturally vote for her.“

US Election aggregate polling at Five Thirty Eight.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Is there a glimmer of light at the end of the (Channel) tunnel for young Britons wanting to travel more freely in Europe?

This week's headlines hinting at a Youth Mobility Scheme suggest there may well be, and polling tells us that even old Brexity types aren't against helping Generation Z win back some of the European travel freedoms that us oldies took for granted before You Know What happened.

Naomi Smith reads the runes and finds a policy that could help young people and be broadly popular too – with Europe as well as the UK. And she explains why her team at Best For Britain is backing a reciprocal EU-UK Youth Mobility Scheme, one of 114 recommendations published by the cross-party UK Trade and Business Commission last year.

Thanks as ever for listening – find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com.

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Brought to you by Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou and Kenny Campbell, in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Naomi and Alex, with guest Sir Vince Cable, discuss the lack of policy flesh on the meat of an American election that seems all about vibes. Meanwhile, the new Labour government seem willing to devise an industrial policy - but it will take more than words. Rachel Reeves bought into BIDENOMICS - but with Biden gone, and Harris more mercurial, is that still a thing?

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Vince on Kamala Harris: "She will have to say something on fundamental questions that will shape this election… The British election is a good example of the problem with a Ming-Vase approach. You get into government and the moment you do anything remotely controversial, people go bananas, because you’ve built up no buy in. There’s a certain parallel with what’s happening across the pond.”

Vince on Lords reform and the abolition of life peerages and phasing out of peers on the basis of age: “It’s a rather weak response to a big problem, which is that we have a Second House which is bloated, massively undemocratic, and - frankly - corrupt, because of the large number of people who have bought their places.”

Vince on Brexit: “The fact is that this is an enormous hole. I think there is a collective sense now that we made a mistake, but there is also a resignation that nothing can be done about it. And somehow or other those two things can’t continue.”

Ckick here for Vincent's last book.

US Election aggregate polling at Five Thirty Eight.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Alex takes you through some impressions from the first night of Democratic National Convention, and finds it touching and inspiring.

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"Disarray was what was expected. Instead, what happened was absolute array. A party ready for a fight. And all of it enabled by the most dignified, respectful, affectionate, even, passing of the baton."

You can stream the DNC here.

US Election aggregate polling at Five Thirty Eight.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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Naomi and Alex take you through what to expect from the Democratic National Convention starting tomorrow, discuss Farage's income, declarations of interest and MPs' second jobs, and gossip about the birth of their baby podcast, its mission, and what you can do to help it grow.

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“[Farage] has not yet tabled a single written question in the Commons on behalf of the people of Clacton. We don’t know if he’s holding regular advice surgeries. How often is he even in that constituency? And when you tot up all of the time that he himself has estimated he spends on extra-Parliamentary work, it’s nine full working days a month. So, at best he is a part-time MP.”

“This notion that, by declaring something, the conflict of interest goes away is a nonsense. The system of declarations is not there to resolve conflicts but to identify them. It doesn’t matter if there’s no actual impropriety. There has to be the appearance of absolutely no impropriety.” 

You can stream the DNC here.

US Election aggregate polling at Five Thirty Eight.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at [email protected]. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.)

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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