The Slow Newscast

Britain has one of the worst records in the world at dealing with the coronavirus. The country's death toll, and the economic damage it suffers, will be worse than most of its competitors; possibly worse than any of them. Over three days in November, Tortoise held an inquiry into why things have gone so wrong. Basia Cummings reports back on its findings - and on her own year coping, as we all have, with an unprecedented crisis.

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The British government has spent billions tackling the coronavirus, and some of it has gone to friends and family of people in high places. Contracts for safety equipment or for testing for Covid have been handed out without the usual safeguards on public spending, and accusations of corruption and cronyism have flown around. Is that what's happening, or is the explanation more mundane? Would the government's actions be better seen as normal in the wildly abnormal situation of a pandemic? And have they perhaps been aided and abetted by garden variety incompetence?

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The Wing was part co-working space, part feminist haven - a high-concept, big-money chain of women-only spaces, the brainchild of super-smart, ultra-connected New Yorker, Audrey Gelman. It was a child of Instagram which soon started to encounter severe difficulties in the real world. Did the way it treated its members, and particularly its employees, live up to its high ideals? Those problems knocked The Wing and the pandemic finished it off. How did a feminist vision become a corporate nightmare? Basia Cummings is your host, with in-depth reporting from Sophie Elmhirst.

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A story centuries in the making that is building an unstoppable momentum. This week we are going north of the wall and asking: is Scotland on a march to independence?

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On Saturday October 31st, the British government was forced to announce a second national coronavirus lockdown. We know the announcement itself was mishandled; the reasons why are fascinating. In this special episode of the Slow Newscast Matt D'Ancona goes deep into a day of political drama and intrigue in Downing St which helps explain so much about where this government is going wrong.

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Jack Ma set up the Chinese online giant Alibaba. It made him hugely rich, and perhaps too powerful for comfort for China's ruling elite. Last week his plan for the biggest-ticket stock market launch ever came to a crashing halt when the authorities in Beijing pulled the plug on it. Did Jack Ma fly too high? Have his wings been clipped forever?

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In June 2020, JK Rowling sent a Tweet which took her to the heart of the bitter debate about trans rights and women's rights. A few days later, with an online storm gathering around her, she published a 3,600-word essay explaining her position. She'd set off a ferocious argument which alienated many of her young fans; led some of the stars of the Harry Potter films to distance themselves from Harry's creator; and which ran like a lightning-strike through the worlds of film and publishing which made her fortune. Why did JK Rowling do it? What will the fall-out be?

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From the first moment of his presidency, Donald Trump has courted - and largely won - the votes of white, Evangelical Christians. For a famously profane and worldly president it's a striking achievement and, in recent months, Trump seems to have doubled-down on the Christian vote with talk of 'miracles' while people around him have described the Democrats as 'atheists'. Has a President with a genius for spotting groups with a grievance and for exploiting division identified a new fault-line in American politics? And how big a difference could it make in next week's election?

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It's not that our economies haven't already taken a hit because of the coronavirus, it's that what's coming may be much worse. Politicians, and people in finance and business, can see it, but there are no prizes for talking openly about it. So we've gone back to two people who really understand the depths of the trouble ahead. Alastair Darling was UK Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 2008 financial crash, and Mervyn King was Governor of the Bank of England. When they look around the corner, what do they see? And what should the government be doing now to prevent the worst?

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If animals share many qualities with humans - if they're self-aware, if they communicate, and grieve for their dead, as we know they do - do they deserve human-like rights? Next month, the case of Happy the elephant comes before the New York Supreme Court. Happy's lawyer (yes, she has one) will argue that her long incarceration in the Bronx Zoo has breached her right to bodily freedom. The case will get a respectful hearing; it's not inconceivable that Happy will win. But even if she loses, the court of public opinion is already changing its mind about the way we treat the animals around us.

The organisation change.org have a petition calling for Happy's release, currently signed by 1.3m people.

You can read the Bronx Zoo's statement about Happy here.

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