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© 2024 The Lowdown from Nick Cohen
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Get The Lowdown from Nick Cohen as he investigates a world that seems to get ever more crazy, with leading commentators and politicians.
Each week, leading commentator Nick Cohen talks to the country's leading movers and shakers - to cut the through much of the drivel and commentary that passes for so much political discourse these days. Nick - a long-term columnist for The Observer and The Spectator - will be attempting to make sense of our ever stranger and troubling world with insightful politicians, journalists and authors. Our mission is to help keep you sane! So please get The Lowdown from Nick Cohen and subscribe to his Substack column - Writing from London.
33 Episodes
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Nick talks to celebrated author, columnist and editor Will Hutton about his new book, This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain (Bloomsbury), described as "a brilliant book" by no less a figure than Sir Keir Starmer.If Labour wins - as currently expected - how does it pull the UK out of the doom cycle it's been put into by the Tories? Will explains how much work has to be done by Starmer and his team to put the country back on its feet after the Tory-inflicted disasters of aust...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown on Sir Keir Starmer with the Labour Leader's biographer Tom Baldwin.Nick asks: WTF is Keir Starmer really?Tom - @TomBaldwin66 - spent hours with Starmer, his friends and family to investigate the supposed enigma that is the Labour Leader for his book which is just out - Keir Starmer: The Biography, published by William Collins.Tom, a journalist and former Labour spin doctor, discovered a far more interesting and enigmatic character than the ...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from leading economist Danny Blanchflower CBE - onetime external member of the Bank of England's interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee.Danny foresaw economic woes mounting up in 2007 and predicted a crash - a year or so before the start of the bank collapses that led to the Great Recession. Since then, the Tories have visited on the country one failed economic project after another - austerity, Brexit, Trussanomics. Now the average Brit is forced to ...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Professor Tim Bale of the Queen Mary University of London, who is widely looked on as the UK's keenest academic observer of the Conservative Party.The Tories have been left reeling and predictably even more mutinous by their catastrophic defeats in last week's two by-elections in their hitherto safe seats of Kingswood in south Gloucestershire and Wellingborough in north Northamptonshire.Not only did they lose Kingswood with a 16.4 % swing, where La...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from John McTernan, one-time political secretary to Tony Blair and seasoned political strategist and commentator.How does Labour not only win but replace the Tories finally as the natural party of government? 14 years of Tory misrule have brought the failed projects of Brexit and austerity and the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss shitshows. Now Rishi Sunak and his divided rabble fester low down in the polls, waging their culture wars, while the country ...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from US journalist and author Matt Johnson on the threat posed - yet again - by Donald Trump and his deranged far right MAGA cult that has captured the Republican Party.Matt - @mattjj89 - the author of How Hitchens can save the Left, explains how there is little evidence so far of a tangible centre-left coalition to confront Trump - who is a dead cert to be the Republicans' nomination to run for the presidency in 2024, despite facing 91...
Nick Cohen gets the Lowdown on the UK's greatest taboo - the ever-deepening Brexit crisis - from Chris Grey, emeritus Professor @RoyalHolloway, and author of the highly-regarded and must-read blog, Brexit and beyond.Extra Brexit food checks come in from next week - threatening food price rises and shortages. Meanwhile, the Tories fail to get one of its promised "Canada-style free trade agreements" with Canada! Every week, @chrisgreybrexit - also author of the book Brexit Unfolded&...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Chris Dillow, the economist, and author of the Stumbling and Mumbling blog.Chris - @CJFDillow - is a keen commentator on British managerialism - the curse of incompetence and privileged entitlement that led to the Post Office scandal and blights much of modern Britain today.Chris explains how modern Britain seems to reject competent management - opting instead for psychopaths and incompetents - often a combination of the two - who practise "manager...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Daniella Peled, Managing Editor of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, on the terrible conflict in Gaza .At a time when South Africa is bringing its genocide case against israel before the International Court of Justice, Daniella discusses with Nick the allegations of Israel's war crimes as well as the crimes committed by Hamas on October 7th. Daniella talks about the extreme political voices in Israel today and the impact these are having on the c...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University on the epic civil war looming in a 2024 general election on the radical right of British politics between the Tories and Nigel Farage's latest vehicle for fantasy politics - Reform.Brexit, Liz Truss, crippling interest rate rises, a flat-lining economy with booming immigration, and the cost of living crisis are just a few of the disasters visited on the UK by the radical right since the 2016 EU referendum. Rob ...
Nick Cohen gets the end of the year Lowdown from author, historian and novelist James Hawes as both contemplate the prospects of a general election in 2024.The last 13-14 years of Tory misrule has brought the successive disasters of austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Great Covid Bungle, Lettuce Truss , the so called Cost of Living Crisis, a crisis hugely exacerbated by Brexit. The list goes on and on - but Nick and James hope that won't apply to the Tories.Nick is more hopeful ...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from barrister and writer Colin Yeo on the Tories' never ending Rwanda farce and the dog's breakfast they have made of the UK's asylum & immigration regime.When the UK flounced out of the European Union, it also walked away from a returns policy that meant asylum seekers could be returned to the first safe EU country they arrived in.Now the Tories are stuck with the preposterous and performatively cruel policy of exporting refugees to Rwanda which they desperat...
Nick Cohen gets the Lowdown from Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University, professor of political science, co-author of the award-winning book Revolt on the Right, and political commentator and pundit extraordinaire about the perfect storm of woe descending on the Tories.The disasters of Brexit, cost of living, the bungling of Covid, Partygate, the catastrophic and chaotic reigns of Boris Johnson and Liz "The Lettuce" Truss have been followed by the Rishi Sunak sh1tsh0w.Exhausted and divid...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Matt Johnson, author of How Hitchens can save the Left [Pitchstone Books] a celebrated study of the writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens who sadly died 12 years ago aged just 62.Hitchens lived in the US and was a controversial and vivid commentator on the US and its various foreign policy adventures following the 9/11 terror atrocities in the US. He started adult life as a Marxist but later espoused causes that were labelled "neo-con" a...
Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Professor Shlomo Sand, author and historian about his new book A Brief Global History of the Left (Polity).What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death in the West and certainly in Israel.. While many commentators have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways.Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organised movements ...
Nick Cohen gets the Lowdown from Dr Robert Saunders, the historian and author, who is based at Queen Mary University of London where he specialises in modern British history, from the early 19th century to the present. Nick and Robert discuss the poisoned legacy of Boris Johnson and why so many people voted for him in December 2019 and continue to support, despite the obvious failure of Brexit and his cataclysmic bungling of the pandemic as is being revealed in the Cov...
Nick Cohen gets the Lowdown on the brutal conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza from Daniella Peled, Managing Editor of the of Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR).Daniella puts into context the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas. Approximately 1,400 Israelis were killed by Hamas on October 7th. Since then, the Israeli assault on Gaza has killed at least 4,000 civilians, and is leading to a humanitarian crisis.Daniella compares this latest violence with other co...
Nick Cohen gets the Lowdown from celebrated lawyer and author David Hooper whose latest book, Buying Silence, How oligarchs, corporations and plutocrats use the law to gag their critics (Biteback) exposes how the rich and powerful use vexatious so-called SLAPP legal actions - Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation - to silence and destroy whiste-blowers, journalists and campaigners.Dodgy chancers from notorious warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin to the corrupt Robert Maxwell...
This week, Nick Cohen gets the Lowdown from Dr Dave Rich, Head of Policy for the Community Security Trust (CST) - an organisation that provides security for Jewish communities and institutions. Dave is also an expert in left wing anti-semitism and the author of the book Everyday Hate: How antisemitism is built into our world – and how you can change it (Biteback.)Jews in the UK often suffer instances of antisemitism when there is conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Dave reports ...
Nick Cohen talks to Yascha Mounk, the political scientist and author, about his new book about the astonishing rise of "Woke ideology" - The Identity Trap: A story of ideas and power in our time. According to the Washington Post, "whatever you call it — identity politics, political correctness, wokeness or cancel culture — some new power seems to be at work in our culture and institutions."Yascha tells Nick that advocates of this "Woke" ideology fixate on identity to the exclusion...
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Liked the content but the speech volume is too low and the segment noise too loud