David and Helen talk with Jonathan Shainin, Head of Opinion at the Guardian newspaper, about the challenges of political journalism in a deeply polarised age. Is it possible to hold the line between news and comment? Are the arguments about Covid a rerun of Brexit? What can scientists and historians add to political analysis? Plus we discuss how American journalism has changed the way it talks about race and violence and what that means for the current moment.

Talking Points: 

The heightened state of political opinion writing around Brexit seems to have dissipated.

• The opinion pages became a vehicle for a kind of tribal politics. There was a relentless urgency to it: was that illusory?
• Technology revealed the enormous appetite for news and commentary related to Brexit.
• People want updates and then they want trusted voices to add to the experience and understanding of events. 

Is there a distinction between emotional and analytical opinion pieces?

• Opinion pages will always reflect partisan opinions.
• To what extent is an opinion piece feeding into a libidinal appetite among readers? 
• Is there a role in either the Guardian or the Telegraph for an opinion piece that would be comprehensible to the other side?

One thing John set out to do is to reduce the frequency of opinion pieces.

• In the early days of the pandemic, a lot of the pieces were explanatory and written by experts. 
• Can we separate scientific expertise from political judgment?

Analytical pieces aim for a different kind of persuasion.

• Historians and political theorists can say: can we think about things in a different way? 
• No form of journalism can be made bulletproof against weaponised forms of skepticism or cynicism.

The classical model of how the facts, the news, and the demos interact is now outdated.

• A new model would have to capture the chaos and instability between these elements.
• Journalism feels more urgent, yet the urgency is accompanied by diminished authority.
• Has Trump revealed the limits of the analytical mode?
• What happens when there isn’t room for reasonable disagreement?

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Ian Jack on the Scottish Independence Referendum 
• David’s piece for The Guardian, It was all a dream’
• William Hanage for the Guardian on COVID
• Melanie Philips in the Times on COVID
• Alan Finlayson on why we should stop complaining about tribalism
• Helen’s piece on football for the New Statesman
• David on climate denialism

Further Learning: 

• David and...

David and Helen talk to the historian Dan Snow about the parallels for the current crisis. Is it like past pandemics or is it more like a war? What has it exposed about the weak spots in our societies? And what have we learned about the role of political leadership? Plus we explore the value of Churchill comparisons on the 80th anniversary of his great WWII speeches and we dip our toes into the Cummings affair.

Talking Points: 

Lockdown, quarantine, social distancing have been borrowed from the past.

• This is not as great a mortality or morbidity event as past pandemics, at least yet.
• But we are not as separate from past human experience as many people would like to believe.

Perhaps the better comparisons are the forgotten ones: 1957 and 1968.

• The other main comparison is the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal.
• Politicians treated these past flus as background events. This crisis is all consuming.
• Most people in 1919 died at home. Health infrastructure changes the conversation.
• The politics of healthcare are central to this—especially because governments decided that protecting health systems would be the priority.

This event has exacerbated existing faultlines, but also, things that we’ve assumed were facts of life have been completely halted.

• Can things go back to ‘normal’?
• There may be more homeworking, but will there be less air travel?
• Pandemics expose weak spots in societies. Western societies are old and increasingly unhealthy. This is a disease that targets the old and the unhealthy.

Are future historians more likely to see this as an economic crisis than as a health crisis?

• We’ve been in monetary unknown territory since the early 1970s. 
• When we look back at the economic narrative, we’re going to be looking at a much longer story about what happens when the world’s central banks allow polities to live with much more debt outside of wartime. 

Are we now health-fiscal states? 

• The state, in Hobbesian terms, exists to keep people alive. In the modern world, that means both health and external security.
• We should expect the state to show itself for what it is in both war and health crises.
• The health side becomes more important in aging societies.

Johnson is trapped between what the pandemic looks like it requires with regards to Cummings and his government’s ability to deal with Brexit.

• Johnson does not want to face the next phase of Brexit negotiations without Cummings.
• For Johnson to sacrifice Cummings now would be existential for his government; that’s why he doesn’t want to do it. 

Mentioned in this Episode:

• History Hit
• TP with Richard Evans on cholera
• John Oxford on the Spanish Flu for BBC
• Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels
• Our most recent conversation with Adam Tooze

Further Learning: 

• More on the 1957 and 1968 pandemics

David talks to the writer Annie Zaidi, winner of the Nine Dots Prize, about her remarkable memoir of life in India and the search for identity. It's s story of conflict, migration, belonging and the idea of home. We also discuss what home means for Indians now the country is under lockdown and Annie tells us how life is in Mumbai.

*The sound is not great, we are sorry. It is nicer to listen through speakers than on headphones*

Further Reading and listening:

Annie Zaidi's book

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bread-cement-cactus/75DCB40487D5CD8DCB772761555CF10C

Nine Dots Prize

https://ninedotsprize.org/

Annie Zaidi speaks to Qudsiya Ahmad, Head of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press India

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/gallery/video/nine-dots-prize-winner-annie-zaidi-indian-society

Guardian article about the Indian migration caused by lock-down

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/19/my-angel-man-who-became-face-of-indias-stranded-helped-home-by-stranger-coronavirus

How does a judgement of the German constitutional court threaten to explode the European project? David talk to Helen Thompson, Adam Tooze and Shahin Vallee about what the court's decision might mean for the Euro, for the response to the pandemic, for Franco-German relations and for the future of central banks. Can the great European fudge continue? And what happens if it can't?

Plus a bonus chat with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd from the ‘Reasons to be Cheerful Podcast’ https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/

The German Constitutional Court ruled that the ECB’s QE program is illegal. 

• It says that the German government has failed to control the ECB’s program and its compliance with the German constitution.
• It ruled that the European Court of Justice made an illegal judgment.
• And it gives the ECB 3 months to provide a clear analysis and a new decision. If not, the German government can’t continue to participate in QE.

This raises three fundamental political questions: 

• Does EU law take precedence over national law? 
• Has the ECB ventured too far outside of monetary policy?
• Should the ECB’s independence be as absolute? 

Monetary union rested on a sharp distinction between monetary policy, which was going to be a matter for the EU, and the rest of economic policy, where there was going to be no federal authority.

• The economic premise of monetary union is no longer supported by a great number of people in the monetary union.
• Of course the advocates of the system believe the fudge.

This is a very political judgment. 

• The ruling inadvertently opens the question not only about the financial constitution, but, more deeply, if it’s time for the monetary union to have a proper fiscal risk sharing instrument, a proper budget, and political accountability.
• The judgment forces a conversation about the architecture of the monetary union.

Part of this judgment is about democratic control over otherwise unaccountable institutions.

• The German Constitutional Court is one of the anchors of the success of German democratic model since 1949.
• It acts as a driver of modern constitutional jurisprudence. 

Independent central banks were meant to reign in the inflationary tendencies of democratic governments. Now their primary role is to guard against the forces of deflation.

• They have changed their character while maintaining their form.
• The ECB’s QE was an absolutely massive bond buying scheme.
• The court is registering the need to start talking about re-legitimising and redefining the role of central banks.   

Mentioned in this Episode:

• The last time we talked to Adam
• Adam on the death of the central bank myth

Further Learning: 

• More on the German court’s decision
• More on the Franco-German plan
• Shahin on Macron

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

David is joined by Helen Thompson and Chris Brooke to try to get beyond the current crisis and work out where British politics is heading. How different is Starmer's political programme likely to be from Corbyn's? Can the Labour party become the party of the workers again? And is Brexit really going to happen without an extension and without a deal? Plus we explore the renewed influence of the trade unions and ask what it means for the political choices ahead.

Talking Points:

What kind of Labour Party is Keir Starmer looking to create?

• He never presented himself as a Corbynite, though there are some significant leftward moves policy wise.
• Labour is a more recognizably a social democratic party than it was during the new Labour era.
• We probably will see party management return to something that is more familiar from Ed Miliband’s era. 
• Starmer seems to be moving away from a Green New Deal kind of Labour politics.

Does moving back to being a workers’ party move you away from being a students’ party?

• Once you have enough people going to university and acquiring a lot of debt to do so, the question of separation between workers and students starts to fall away.
• The nature of work is changing.
• The current crisis may give Starmer a chance to cut across these divides. 

Issues about unions and workplaces go to the top of government policy at the moment.

• The unions will be pushing health and safety issues as far as they can.
• The unions can make a better case that they’re on the side of ordinary people.

The universal basic income question has emerged again.

• Starmer doesn’t seem to be that keen.
• Public opinion isn’t fully behind UBI.
• A lot depends on the medium-term economic fallout, especially the employment damage.
• So far, the biggest hits have come in the service sector.

Starmer is trying to move on from Brexit.

• Is this just tactical? The government will have to make decisions on Brexit. 
• The virus could be easier for the government to move towards a no trade deal exit.
• From the point of view from the EU, negotiating a trade agreement with Britain is even less of a priority now.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Starmer’s column on VE day
• Peter Sloman’s book, Transfer State

Further Learning:

• The New Statesman on Keir Starmer
• Union leaders sound warnings about the return to work
• Is Keir Starmer like John Smith?

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

David and Helen talk this week with Amy Maxmen, senior reporter at Nature.  Amy has covered the Ebola epidemic in Western Africa and now COVID-19 in the US. Does she see comparisons between the two? What explains the failures of the US response? Can the WHO still make a difference? Plus we explore the implications of the growing politicisation of science. When did data become so divisive?

Talking Points:

There are significant parallels between what is happening now and epidemics such as ebola.

• Outbreaks turn slight cracks into gaping holes: they reveal political and systemic issues.

Politics made the ebola outbreak in DRC worse.

• Conspiracy theories emerged that ebola was being used to suppress the political opposition.
• Ultimately Tedros and other experts were able to convince both politicians and local leaders to focus on the public health response instead of the politics.
• The parallels to the US now are clear, but could any figure get past the politics? 

For Amy, the lack of tests and the failure to contact trace and quarantine made it clear that the U.S. response would be much worse than she had feared.

• The U.S. hasn’t faced a pandemic in a long time and there was no sense of the kind of coordination that would be required. 
• Different states are still doing different things.

There’s a lot to be said for supply chain management right now.

• In an ideal world, we would get a vaccine sooner rather than later. But we don’t know.
• Funding for vaccines is great, but the basic public health response still needs to be funded.

The WHO is now getting politicized, but they still have the most experience at coordinating things like this at a global level.

• A lot of people misunderstand what the WHO can and can’t do. It’s pretty small in terms of both budget and power.
• The WHO can’t enforce things; it works through diplomacy and relationships. But there is still a lot of power in that.

If you need people to stay home; you need to be sure that you can support them.

• Supporting people alleviates public pressure to prematurely lift the lockdown and it ensures that people can actually survive.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• Amy on the WHO’s fight against Ebola in the DRC
• How the US dropped the ball on testing and contact tracing back in March
• On tests going unused in US labs
• The NYTimes on how the Trump administration ignored WHO warnings

Further Learning:

• Nature on why the WHO is so important right now
• More on how low and middle income countries are responding to the crisis 
• More on the ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

We talk with David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, about the impact of the pandemic on the world's poorest countries. What happens in places where social distancing is not possible? Plus we discuss the long-term implications of the crisis for the future global co-operation and global conflict. Is this the moment for social democracy? More details of the work of the IRC can be found here: https://www.rescue-uk.org/

Talking Points: 

By fluke or demography, the virus has not hit places such as the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa yet in full force.

• In places with rampant extreme poverty, the story will be different. It’s not a tradeoff between health and economic well-being in the same way. 
• The crisis demonstrates the holes in the global safety net.

There are parts of the world where social distancing is impossible.

• Population density heaps danger on insecurity.
• You’re only as strong as the weakest link in the chain—look at Singapore. They had the disease under control but it came back among migrant labour communities.

Right now, there is more myopia than global thinking.

• Conversations about easing lockdowns are centered on what happens within the state, or maybe groups of states.
• There is a vacuum of global leadership.
• Is it possible to have institutions that can manage this kind of interconnectivity? 

The politics of the WHO are part of its problem.

• How much executive power do you want to vest in international institutions?
• For legitimacy, they depend on the support of nation states, but for efficacy, they depend on their ability to stand independent of nation states.

Right now America is a flagship for dysfunction.

• The frailties that have been exposed have big implications.
• In the UK, the so-called populist attack on elite or establishment institutions seems to have been reversed in this crisis. Not in the US. What does this say about social trust?

New inequalities in the service economy have been brought to the surface.

• Holes in the global safety net have also been exposed.
• The scale of the economic response means that issues of economic security will probably remain present.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• David M. in The New Statesman 
• Polling on coronavirus and decreased trust in the media

Further Learning: 

• The IRC report on corona in vulnerable states
• More on privacy and coronavirus tracing apps
• Coronavirus in an age of inequality

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is one of the most remarkable books in the history of ideas. A classic of early feminism, it uses what’s wrong with the relationship between men and women to illustrate what’s gone wrong with politics. It’s a story of lust and power, education and revolution. David explores how Wollstonecraft’s radical challenge to the basic ideas of modern politics continues to resonate today.

To get all 12 talks - please subscribe to the new podcast - Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS. https://tinyurl.com/ybypzokq

Free online version of the text:

•  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3420

Recommended version to purchase: 

• https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/wollstonecraft-vindication-rights-men-and-vindication-rights-woman-and-hints?format=PB 

Going Deeper:

• In Our Time on Mary Wollstonecraft 
• Wollstonecraft in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Sylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)
• Virginia Woolf on Mary Wollstonecraft
• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) reimagined how we could do politics. It redefined many of the ideas that continue to shape modern politics: representation, sovereignty, the state. But in Leviathan these ideas have a strange and puzzling power. David explores what Hobbes was trying to achieve and how a vision of politics that came out of the English civil war, can still illuminate the world we live in.

To get all 12 talks - please subscribe to the new podcast - Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS. https://tinyurl.com/ybypzokq

Free online version of the text:

•  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm

Recommended version to purchase: 

• https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/hobbes-leviathan-revised-student-edition?format=PB

Going Deeper:

• David Runciman, ‘The sovereign’ in The Oxford handbook of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Richard Tuck, Hobbes a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
• (Video) Quentin Skinner, ‘What is the state? The question that will not go away’
• (Video) Sophie Smith, ‘The nature of politics’, the 2017 Quentin Skinner lecture. 
• Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• David for The Guardian on Hobbes and the coronavirus

We catch up again with Lucia Rubinelli to discuss the latest developments in Italy. With anger against the EU on the rise and regional divisions getting more acute, can the Italian government hold it together? What is Salvini up to? And will the technocrats try another take over? Plus Lucia tells us what lockdown has been like for her.

The New York Times Article mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-south.html