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Thinking Class is a weekly long-form interview podcast about history, culture, civilisation, and the moral and political challenges facing England, Britain and the West. Expect depth and clarity over headlines and hot-takes.
Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, academics, and thinkers including David Starkey, Peter Hitchens, Roy Baumeister, Lord Nigel Biggar, Eric Kaufmann, Robert Tombs, Alan Macfarlane, Lord Jonathan Sumption, David Goodhart, Lionel Shriver, Paul Embery and others.
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Will Tanner is a writer and commentator on history, politics, and the late imperial world, whose work explores the realities of decolonisation and what followed in its wake. Will is the Co-Founder of the American Tribune and he is the host of the podcast The Old World with Will Tanner. What happens after empire ends and what should the West learn from it? In this episode of Thinking Class, Will Tanner discusses decolonisation not as an abstract academic slogan, but as a historical process wit...
John Waters is an Irish journalist, author, and columnist known for his work with Hot Press, The Irish Times, and The Irish Independent. He has written on social and political issues, specialising in father's rights and cultural critiques. Ireland changed faster than almost any country in the West. The question now is whether the Irish still recognise the nation they live in. In this episode of Thinking Class, we discuss the moral, cultural and demographic transformation of Ireland over...
1Michael Reiners is a writer, lawyer, and architectural historian. Michael is the founder of the Reiners Project, which publishes essays, draft legislation and commentary on English constitutional law and the art and architectural landscape. Britain’s constitutional settlement has changed more in the last few decades than most people realise — and the consequences now reach into identity, speech, governance, and the question of who the country is for. This episode forms part of Thinking ...
Lord Nigel Biggar is an Anglican priest, theologian, and moral philosopher, a member of the House of Lords, and Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford. His most recent books are The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win The Culture War, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), What’s Wrong with Rights?, In Defence of War, and Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation. In the press he has written articles for the Financial Times, the (London) Times, the Dai...
Lionel Shriver is a novelist and columnist at The Spectator, and the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Mania, and A Better Life among many other books. Lionel Shriver returns to Thinking Class to discuss mass immigration in the West—not as an abstract moral debate, but as a lived experience reshaping belonging, institutions, and politics. We start with Lionel’s new novel A Better Life, which tackles immigration through fiction from the host-country’s point of view. We explore why the “na...
Lord Jonathan Sumption is a British judge and historian, who served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012 – 2018. He is the author of The Challenges of Democracy And The Rule Of Law, the Sunday Times bestseller Trials of the State, Law in a Time of Crisis, and Divided Houses, which won the 2009 Wolfson History Prize. Across Britain and the wider West democratic decision-making is increasingly being hollowed out by courts, by bureaucracies, by delayed elections, by restrictions on speech, and b...
Dr Carrie Gress has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and is the editor at the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including National Review, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, First Things, Newsweek, The American Spectator, The Catholic Thing, The Federalist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Examiner. She is a frequent radio and podcast guest and has appeared on Fox, BBC, CBC, EWTN, OAN, and Russia T...
Dr. Bijan Omrani is a classicist, historian, and Oxford-educated barrister. His research explores questions of religious history and cultural identity, spanning from ancient Roman Greece to Afghanistan and the Silk Road. He has taught Classics at Eton College and Westminster School, is a former editor of Asian Affairs, and currently serves as a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is also a churchwarden. Dr. Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert is the director of the organisation Don't Divide Us. ...
Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics, helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security risks they face. Firas Modad is a host on Podcast of the LotusEaters. Firas examines how Britain’s security is being quietly undermined at home and abroad, and why so few in the political class are willing to confront the scale of the problem. In...
Professor Azar Gat, one of the world’s leading scholars of nationalism, war, and political identity. Professor Gat is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the author of several major works on conflict and political order, including War in Human Civilization and, most notably for this conversation, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. In that book — and in our discussion today — Gat challenges one of the most dominant assumptions of modern p...
Renaud Camus, writer, painter, photographer, was born in 1946. He is now the author of more than one hundred and sixty works. His works are marked by the question of meaning and the fight against the industrialisation of man and the massacre of landscapes. In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam and essayist Renaud Camus engage in a wide-ranging conversation about what Camus has long described as “the disaster” — the civilisational, cultural, and demographic transformations resha...
William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain. In this conversation, William Clouston and I think out loud about the current state of British politics, focusing on the disconnect between government promises and actual governance. We explore: The need for a cultural and civilisational vision beyond economicsThe challenges posed by mass immigration for social democracy and defining remigrati...
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at The University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He directs Buckingham’s new MA in the Politics of Cultural Conflict and PhD in Cultural Politics as well as its open online course on Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology. He is the author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution, Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities, Shall the Religi...
Stephen Balogh is the Chairperson for the Social Democratic Party. Stephen is also active in non-profit and public policy organisations that promote the flourishing of society through the thoughtful application of socially responsible, small-c conservative politics. Following a 30-year business career, he now devotes his time to initiatives aimed at community building from local neighbourhood to international levels, whether by means of social, political or commercial exchange. Stephen has al...
Driss Ghali is a political author and speaker. Driss was born in Morocco and educated in Europe. He graduated from prestigious French universities and spent a lot of time in a corporate career focused on high-tech companies. Driss is an intellectual and observer of human nature as it is: ugly and splendid at the same time. Since 2017, he has written books about violence and identity. Driss frequently appears in French media to talk about immigration, diversity, the Middle East and French poli...
Neema Parvini is the author of nine books including Applied Elite Theory, The Prophets of Doom, The Populist Delusion, The Defenders of Liberty, Shakespeare's Moral Compass. He has also written dozens of chapters and articles in scholarly publications and the media. Neema is the Director of Academic Agency, which he set up to focus on core academic skills and knowledge areas which can help students and learners of all ages to achieve both academic excellence and improve communication and rese...
Alexander Chula is a medical doctor and writer working in London. His first book, Goodbye. Dr Banda was published 2023. In this episode, Alexander and I think out loud about what an African dictator can teach the West about itself, how multiculturalism impacts conceptions of personal and national identity, the perceived cultural openness of modern society compared to the past and why engagement by middle-class Westerners on with foreign cultures on their travels are superficial in their natu...
Martin Sellner is an Austrian activist, author and political organiser and his "goal is to save the identity and soul of [his] nation & Europe". He is author of several books in the German language, one of which, "Regime Change From The Right", is now published in English, while another, "Remigration", will be published in English early 2026. Martin Sellner joins John Gillam to address the sensitive topic of remigration and national identity in contemporary Europe. Placing demographic sh...
David Betz is Professor of War in the Department of War Studies at King's College London where he heads the MA War Studies programme. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Prof. Betz's most recent book, The Guarded Age: Fortification in the 21st Century, is published by Polity. In this episode, David and I think out loud about the role of political institutions in civil conflict, the impact of demographics on politics & how the election of Zohran Mamdani for...
Nina Power is a philosopher, writer, and author of books including What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents. Nina runs philosophy courses with Verdurin and is also the author of the Substack Nina Power and the host of the podcast The Lack. In this episode, Nina and I think out loud about whether the end of liberalism is real, whether post-liberalism is a dead end, why lots of English people keep invoking Tolkien and the scouring of the Shire, whether there's an England left to be sa...
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