Alison Wolf, Paul Ormerod and Adam Tooze join Prospect Editor Tom Clark to discuss whether it’s a good thing that so many people go to university; why trust in experts has fallen so low; and how, 10 years on from the banking crisis, a new system of regulation has been quietly introduced under-the-radar. But how sustainable is it?

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The malconents have, once again, wrought revenge on the know-it-alls, landing Britain with a hung parliament instead of the predicted Conservative landslide. Steve Richards sees election 2017 as one more instance of the worldwide trend for outsiders causing an upset at the expense of an establishment which has lost all legitimacy since the economic crisis of a decade ago. Rachel Sylvester says the campaign performed an X-ray on Theresa May’s political soul, and revealed a brittle character that was never strong nor stable. Meanwhile, David Berry looks back to the 1930s, when radicals took a break from politics to set up tennis clubs—and made with such success that they took gas fitters and machinists to the All England Club, in the Worker’s Wimbledon.

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Nick Cohen, Matthew Parris and Meg Russell (Constitution Unit) join Tom Clark and a live audience to discuss where Theresa May’s surprise ballot will leave the government, the opposition and a divided country.

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In the ninth edition of Prospect's monthly podcast, Nick Cohen, Christine Ockrent and Geoffrey Wheatcroft join our editor, Tom Clark, to discuss the British and French elections, as well as the extraordinary resilience of the Tory party.

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Simon Jenkins, Wendell Steavenson, and Paul Hilder join Tom Clark to discuss the fraying Union between England and Scotland, the reordering of London to favour the global elite, and the way that new digital campaigns are disrupting the old politics everywhere

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Ross McKibbin, Nicholas Timmins and Lucky Wadham join Tom Clark to discuss the condition of Labour and its greatest creation, the NHS, as well as Marine Le Pen's run at the French Presidency.

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“Debate globalisation?” Tony Blair said a dozen years ago, “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer." Well, we’re debating it now all right, and economist George Magnus fears that it's set to spin into reverse—very possibly sinking us into a global trade war. Some unhappy dwellers on Planet Trump fear that real war could soon be on the agenda as well. Spies are better placed than most of us to assess the risks, and a host of them have been coming out of the shadows to speak to Prospect’s Executive Editor, Jay Elwes about how they’re getting on with the new White House regime. The way that Brexit Britain navigates these frightening waters will depend very much on the woman at the wheel—Theresa May. Anne Perkins of the Guardian has been digging into her early life to get a sense of what makes our prime minister tick.

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Power to the people! As an ideal democracy has long reigned unchallenged, but could it fall out of fashion after the convulsions of Brexit and Trump?Certainly, Vladimir Putin's cyberwars raise new questions about its integrity. Journalist Luke Harding, who was expelled from Russia in 2011, explains how the Kremlin's campaign of democratic disruption abroad exports tricks long in use in its elections at home. He also relays his first-hand experience of Putin's spies, who left sex manuals by his martial bed!Freshly returned from Indonesia, "recovering epidemiologist" Elizabeth Pisani talks about the bottom-up culture that makes elections vibrant out there, and draws inspiration from the young Aids activists of the 1980s. They demonstrated how active democratic campaigning by ordinary people can change the direction of things. In the end, the health of democracy is bound to depend on the way its building blocks—that is, individual human beings—make decisions. The bad news, says economist John Kay, is that we aren't systematically rational; but the good news is that this does not make us any less wise.

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The only world order any of us can remember has been led by one super-power above all others, the United States. But the election of the intermittently isolationist Donald Trump—combined with the ongoing eclipse of American economic power by the Chinese continuing in the background—could mark the moment where the liberal rules of the game finally unravel.Certainly, that is the view of Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist who a generation ago proclaimed the victory of America’s liberal democratic after the Cold War as “the end of history." Today, however, he tells us that the democratic half of liberal democracy is now wreaking revenge on on the liberal part: Trump is merely an emblem of that. And Fukuyama fears that the consequences could in time prove to be just as big as the end of Communism. The historian Adam Tooze, agrees. He pinpoints the birth of the American Century to 1917—with the US entry into the First World War—and he argues that this year’s centenary will thus prove to be funereal marker. Globe-trotting writer Wendell Steavenson—who has lived in Iraq, Lebanon and Paris—keeps a keen eye out for American influence everywhere she goes, and explains why McDonald’s has been the perfect outpost of an American empire, whose days may be finally running down.

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All that is solid melts into air. It was one of Karl Marx’s most famous slogans, but the great Victorian might have been writing about 2016. Many a political death arrived suddenly, and famous names from Prince to David Bowie died literally too. The British people voted to crash out of the European Union, and now—the one thing all the wise heads agreed couldn’t happen has done. America has voted in President Donald Trump. Where are these unsettling times taking us, and what will the new president actually do? In the third episode of this monthly series, Prospect editor Tom Clark is joined by the esteemed American writer, Sam Tanenhaus who has followed Trump all year and explains why this most unprepared of leaders is looking as shocked as the rest of us; and, Diane Roberts, a literary critic and a commentator for National Public Radio warns that Trump’s arrival could set back the clock for women and minorities by half a century. The historian, Ruth Dudley-Edwards, gives her take on whether the effect of one of 2016’s earlier surprises—Brexit—could reopen an ancient Irish wound on the border. And all the panel reflect on one of the year’s cheerier “Oh My God” moments: the award of the Nobel literature prize to Bob Dylan. All of the discussion draws on articles in the December 2016 edition of Prospect magazine.Produced by Matt Hill at Rethink Audio. To download the next episode automatically, you can subscribe to this series on iTunes (using the button above) or through the many free podcast apps available for your smartphone. Just search "Prospect Headspace" and subscribe.

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