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Best of the Spectator — News & Politics
Best of the Spectator

Home to the Spectator’s best podcasts on everything from politics to religion, literature to food and drink, and more. A new podcast every day from writers worth listening to.

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Latest Episodes:

The Edition: China's baby bust Aug 04, 2022

Show notes

In this week’s episode:
Is China heading for a demographic disaster?
Rana Mitter and Cindy Yi discuss China’s declining birth rate and what this could do to their economy. (0.52)
Also this week:
What would foreign policy look like under a Liz Truss government?
The Spectator's deputy political editor, Katy Balls is joined by Rishi Sunak supporter, Dr Liam Fox who is the MP for NorthWest Somerset, Former Defence and Trade Secretary. (13.40)
And finally:
As Rishi comes face-to-face with the Tory members, can he win them over?
Fiona Unwin, who is the vice president of the West Suffolk Conservative Association writes that to wow the grassroots, all Rishi Sunak has to do is meet them. But not all the members were persuaded.
Fiona is joined by her fellow member and triple-hatted Councillor, Andy Drummond who was elected for Newmarket town, West Suffolk district and Suffolk county council. Andy is also the vice chair of the West Suffolk Conservative association and remains firmly in favour of Liz Truss. (27.30)
Hosted by Lara Prendergast.
Produced by Natasha Feroze.

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The Book Club: Chloë Ashby Aug 03, 2022

Show notes

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the critic, novelist and art historian Chloë Ashby. In her new book Colours of Art: The Story of Art in 80 Palettes she takes a look at how the history of colour - how it was made, how much it cost, what it was understood to mean - has shaped the history of painting. She tells me about the age-old disagreement between the primacy of drawing and colour in composition, where Goethe and Gauguin butted heads with Newton, why Matisse was so excited by red, how Titian got blurry… and how the first female nude self-portrait was, astonishingly, as recent as 1906.

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Table Talk: Aidan Hartley Aug 02, 2022

Show notes

Aidan Hartley is a writer and entrepreneur. Born in Kenya, he grew up in Africa and England and has worked as a reporter for Reuters all over the world. Aidan has also written The Spectator’s Wild life column for the past 21 years. On the podcast, Aidan talks about spending his younger years on safaris in the wilderness, where mealtimes consisted of handfuls of rice cooked from metal tins on an open fire.
As a reporter, he talked about reporting on famine in Somalia and why that led him to where he is now – living on a remote family farm, as a disciple of John Seymour’s guide to self-sufficiency.

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Americano: Is Nancy Pelosi about to cause world war three? Aug 02, 2022

Show notes

Freddy Gray speaks with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, ahead of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. They discuss if this is a turning point in US relations with Taiwan, whether we are heading for world war three, or if Pelosi is calling China’s bluff.

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Marshall Matters: With Rosie Kay Aug 01, 2022

Show notes

Winston speaks with dancer and choreographer Rosie Kay. Rosie is returning to the world of dance after being forced to resign from her eponymous company in 2021 when she ran afoul of trans ideologues.
Rosie discusses the world of dance, controversial choreography, ideological capture, emotional impact of being cancelled, Virginia Woolf and much more.

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Spectator Out Loud: Sam Leith, Kate Andrews and Toby Young Jul 30, 2022

Show notes

On this week's episode: Sam Leith looks at what TikTok and tech have done to our memories (0:34). Kate Andrews is in two minds about Trussonomics (06:50) and Toby Young tells us about a holiday to Iceland with teenage sons (12.34).
Presented and produced by Natasha Feroze.

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Americano: Is inflation over? Jul 29, 2022

Show notes

Freddy Gray is joined by Kate Andrews, the Spectator’s economics editor; and Mark Asquith, a fund manager, to discuss if the worst of America's inflationary pressures will soon be a thing of the past.

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The Edition: Rishi's mad dash Jul 28, 2022

Show notes

In this week’s episode:
Can Rishi catch up?
Katy Balls and Kate Andrews discuss Rishi Sunak’s mad dash to catch up with his rival, Liz Truss in the polls (0.55)
Also this week:
Is it time the UK severed ties with Chinese-made tech?
Charles Parton argues this in the magazine this week. He is joined by Dr Alexi Drew, a consultant in emerging technologies and international relations (13.33)
And finally:
What’s not to love about country-pop music?
Sam Kriss writes about this in the magazine. Joining him for the podcast is Rod Liddle, the associate editor at The Spectator (31.01)
Hosted by William Moore.
Produced by Natasha Feroze.
Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher: www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

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The Book Club: Anne Weber Jul 27, 2022

Show notes

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Anne Weber, author of Epic Annette: A Heroine’s Tale. She tells me how she came to uncover the remarkable story of Annette Beaumanoir, heroine of the French Resistance, partisan of the Algerian independence struggle, jailbird, exile and survivor – and why when she came to write that story down she chose to do it in verse…

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Chinese Whispers: is China's property market about to go bust? Jul 25, 2022

Show notes

China’s property market accounts for something between 20 and 29 per cent of the country’s total GDP. The seemingly never-ending rise of residential blocks were how ordinary people like my family could see and touch China’s miraculous economic growth. Home ownership was to be expected, especially for young men looking to marry and start a family. Across the country, 70 per cent of household wealth is held in real estate.
But in recent months, China's property hasn’t been so hot. The sector has shrunk 7 per cent year on year. Developers have run out of money to complete complexes that they've already sold; while consumers across dozens of cities are refusing to pay their mortgages in protest. 'The thing about real estate is that it's intensely pro-cyclical – everything that's good feeds on itself in the boom, and everything that's bad feeds on itself in the downturn', the economist George Magnus tells me in this episode of Chinese Whispers. He's the author of Red Flags: Why Xi's China is in Jeopardy and has been warning about the underlying problems in China's economy for years.
Also on the podcast is Lulu Chen, a Bloomberg journalist reporting on real estate trends in Asia. She was one of the first to break the story of the mortgage protests. The picture they paint is one of a long overdue bust in the cycle.
Back in the 90s when the country was fresh out of communism, most housing was still allocated by the state or employers. Since then, market reforms allowed people to buy and sell their own places (China's home ownership rate is 95 per cent). The market became hotter and hotter, and the proliferation of new builds (in order to keep up with demand) meant that developers were selling homes before they'd even built them. Real estate companies ran on borrowed money.
All good and well when the money was flowing. But in the last few years, the amount of corporate debt wracked up by this model concerned policymakers in Zhongnanhai, who then put forward the 'three red lines' stipulating debt controls on real estate companies. Evergrande was the first to trip, but since then, even companies thought to be in the green have fallen to an industry-wide contagion of fear and default. Then came the harsh and sudden lockdowns of zero Covid which added fuel to the fire as consumer confidence and earnings were destroyed.
Tune in to hear about just how bad the situation is this time (as I suggest to George, haven't warnings sounded about China's property bubble for years now?) But remember, economic problems can quickly turn into political ones for a government that bargains for legitimacy from economic growth. I ask Lulu what the ramifications of a property bust that makes the middle class poorer could be. She sums up the stakes nicely:

'[The Chinese] have this idea of the world and what it’s like. Life is always going upwards, and tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday. And that’s kind of the mentality of people born in the 70s, especially 80s, 90s... They’ve never experienced a full economic cycle… So it really changes their world view of what life is going to be like for them in the future. It really casts doubt on whether the economy and the future of the country is going to as they envisioned when they were growing up’

That's why this moment is one to watch.

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