TALKING POLITICS

Latest Episodes:

Facts vs Opinions Jun 04, 2020

Show notes

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The classical model of how the facts, the news, and the demos interact is now outdated.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

Further Learning:

David and...
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Dan Snow on Covid History (and Cummings) May 28, 2020

Show notes

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:

Further Learning:

More on the 1957 and 1968 pandemics
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Bread, Cement, Cactus May 24, 2020

Show notes

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*