Novara Media

The two-party system has defined British politics for centuries, but the status quo is under attack from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and an insurgent Green party – both looking to clean up in the local elections on 7 May.

This week Aaron Bastani speaks to economist James Meadway about the disruptive new progressive party on the block. Meadway was an economic advisor to John McDonnell during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, and is now chief economist of Verdant, a new think tank set up to craft the Green party’s strategy for 2029.

But who are the Greens? What is their vision for Britain? How can they build a broad coalition of voters, big enough to win elections? And what mistakes can Zack Polanski learn from the Corbyn era?

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A decade and a half ago, the British far right was a fringe concern. But since then, the ruling party – whether it be The Conservatives or Labour – has played into their hands over and over again. Whether through appeasement or ineptitude, more than a decade of rightward drift has put Reform within reach of Downing Street.

Can anyone stop them? Is anyone actually in control? Or are the emotional forces that the far right have unleashed in the UK now too powerful for them to rein in?

Daniel Trilling is the author of If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. He argues that to understand the ever-worsening political state of Britain, we have to look not just to the far right themselves, but to the systems of establishment power that have enabled them.



Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

The 21st century runs on batteries: from phones and laptops to electric vehicles, drones and clean energy. Embedded in these batteries are rare earth minerals, drawn from a brutal supply chain that begins in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The race to electrify the global energy system is underway, but most people know almost nothing about how the necessary batteries are made – even those of us with green politics.

Aaron Bastani finds out more with Nicholas Niarchos, author of The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth.

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It’s the question that will come to define our lives: is our society going to collapse? But the field of collapse research is fragmented, chaotic, and often plain deranged. Who can you trust?

Luke Kemp is the author of Goliath’s Curse and a research affiliate at the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s also a political radical.

He told Richard Hames about how close we are to the same tipping point that brought down every other empire in history, why states are criminal gangs in disguise, and why Rome was the Isis of its day.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

As the American empire teeters, China gains dominance, and war spreads across Eastern Europe and West Asia, questions arise as to Europe’s place in this rapidly changing world order. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar speaks to Roderick Beaton, former Koraes Professor of History at King’s College London, about his latest book Europe: A New History.

How did the boundaries between Europe and Asia come to be drawn in the first place? How were immigration and borders managed by the ancients in Greece and Rome? How do the stories we tell about our collective history in Europe shape contemporary political thought? And in an age of mass migration, who gets to be European today – and why?

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