Analysis

As Russia’s brutal war with Ukraine enters its fourth month, Edward Stourton asks who Russia's allies and friends are and looks at the nation's influence overseas. While President Putin has made no secret of his belief that Ukraine should be part of a “greater Russia”, what is less apparent is how far Russia’s influence is spreading in other parts of the world. These include sub-Saharan Africa, La...

In the wake of the greatest crisis to hit Europe since the Second World War, former Moscow correspondent Tim Whewell examines the president, people and processes that led to that momentous decision, and others like it. Radical advisers, tame oligarchs, intelligence agencies scared to tell Putin the truth and the domestic repercussions of NATO’s political moves - Tim brings together the variety of...

As tax rises hit pay packets next month is this an end to traditional Conservative low tax policy? The UK government has so far defied calls from across the political spectrum to shelve the planned 1.25 per cent increase in National Insurance, despite millions of households grappling with a rising cost of living at a time of great economic uncertainty as war rages in Ukraine. A greater proportion...

Is a world without violence possible? Violence blights the lives of countless individuals each year. The Crime Survey of England and Wales suggests there were 1.2 million incidents of violent crime in the year ending March 2020. Sonia Sodha focuses on one category of violence – gender-based violence – and assesses the global progress in tackling this issue. Statistics show that most perpetrators –...

Chris Naylor asks if there's a better way to deliver public services. Many of these were designed nearly a century ago to address the challenges of that time; from cradle to grave, offering help and support during times of need - just enough to get you back on your feet. But as we approach the quarter-way mark in the 21st century, our context today is radically different to that of 100 years ago....

How can the planning system adapt so we can build new homes without alienating voters? Barrister and author Hashi Mohamed investigates, focussing on the system in England. The government has pledged to build 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s to ease the country’s housing crisis and increase home ownership. But wide-ranging planning reforms to make it easier to achieve were shelved followin...

Probing the results of a major study into our unequal society. Faisal Islam, BBC Economics Editor, talks to two leading experts on inequality, who have together been working for several years on a research project for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He asks Paul Johnson, IFS Director, and Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton what the findings reveal about the UK now, and how these issues can be addre...

What do we owe future generations? Everyone who is alive, has rights. And governments have obligations to their citizens. But what about people who are not yet born? Should their interests be taken into account - even though they don’t yet exist? David Edmonds draws upon the thinking of the late philosopher Derek Parfit to address this vexing question, which has consequences for real-world policy...

Can scientists develop a vaccine which can combat the coronavirus and all its variants? There have been three lethal outbreaks caused by coronaviruses this century: SARS in 2002, MERS in 2012 and now SarsCov2. Scientists predict we will eventually encounter SarsCov3. That’s why the race is on to develop a universal vaccine to combat the coronaviruses and variants we know about, and the ones we hav...

Finding things out during the pandemic has been hit and miss: there’ve been miracles, and there’s been junk. What matters is not just what we think we know about how to intervene to improve human health, but how we think we know it. Methods can be inspired, flawed, or both. Michael Blastland tells the short and still-changing story of how science has been trying to get better at finding things out...

Birth rates in many countries, including China, Japan, Italy and the UK have dropped below replacement level. Clare McNeil asks if we should be concerned about this, and the burden it will place on taxpayers and the young, or welcome it as a good thing for climate change, where some think that the fewer consumers and CO2 emitters the better. But with fertility rates of 1.58 in England and Wales, a...

The shortage of HGV drivers has been hitting the headlines, but other sectors are affected by a lack of staff too, from care homes to restaurants. This despite wages going up, and the end of the furlough scheme. What's going on? Could it be that power is shifting away from employers to workers, for perhaps the first time since the 1970s? Since the 2008 financial crisis public opinion has increasin...

Splitting up where children are involved is tricky. Especially when it ends up in the family courts. It’s even more tricky when a child decides they don’t want a relationship with one of the parents. Over the last two decades a controversial psychological concept has emerged to describe a situation where children - for no apparent reason - decide they don’t want to see one parent. It’s called pare...

When you listen to a radio programme, watch an animated film, or even receive a phone call, it’s unlikely you’ll question whether the words you’re hearing are coming from the mouth of a human being. But all that could be about to change thanks to the rise of ‘voice cloning’. Elaine Moore is a tech columnist at the Financial Times and she’s interested in the ramifications of this new technology. Th...

This summer's hasty and poorly executed withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan caused shock and profound unease among Washington's allies, just as they hoped the unilateralism of the Trump era had been left behind. But anxiety about America's position on defence only intensified with the unveiling in September of AUKUS - a trilateral security pact involving Australia, the US and UK covering the...

What keeps a nation together? For political scientist Benedict Anderson, it was the idea of the 'imagined community'. Although people from different backgrounds in a country might not know one another, they could imagine themselves as part of the same larger story. Peter Pomerantsev looks at how we can survive as a society when the idea of the 'imagined community' is under strain. Is it too late t...

In June 2020 the statue of slaver trader Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into the harbour in Bristol – one of the most visible moments of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK. The statue now lies on its side in a museum, a testament to the dramatic re-evaluation of Bristol’s painful history at the centre of the transatlantic slave trade. Over the last year schools and buildings bearing...

In an age of social media ’cancel culture’ might be defined as an orchestrated campaign which seeks to silence or end the careers of people whose thoughts or opinions deviate from a new set of political norms. So if this threat exists for anyone expressing an opinion online in 2021, what’s it like for scientists working in academia and publishing findings which might be deemed controversial? In th...

After another round of violence, a two state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict appears farther away than ever. Edward Stourton examines the future. Guests include: Ahmad Samih Khalidi - Senior Associate Member at St Antony's College, Oxford Anshel Pfeffer - Senior Correspondent, Haaretz Dore Gold - former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations & President of the Jerusalem Center for...

The first, modest Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took place in late July 1921. Of the twelve original members, only Mao Zedong and one of his closest aides survived to take part in the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. The others were killed by political opponents, lost factional struggles or took up other creeds. And the CCP's history has been punctuated by in-fighting, pu...

Unionism in Northern Ireland is facing a highly uncertain future. Its divided party politics make the headlines. But beyond that, post-Brexit border rules and talk of a possible vote on Irish reunification is causing much anxiety. Even more profoundly, changes in the province’s population and attitudes among different generations are weakening traditional loyalties. Pessimists fear all this could...

What is the money in your pocket really worth? Come to think of it now we’re virtually cashless, do you even keep money in your pocket? Maybe you’re worried about the growth of government debt during the pandemic you now store your wealth in commodities such as gold or silver? Or maybe you’re a fan of another asset class: bitcoin. Are cryptocurrencies the future of money or a giant bubble waiting...

Most of us were blindsided by the novel virus SarsCov2, but infectious disease experts had been warning about the possibility of a global pandemic for some years. For them it was never a matter of if, but when. What did come as a surprise was the speed of scientific progress to fight Covid 19. The first effective vaccine, from Pfizer/BioNTech, was developed in under 300 days, followed in successiv...

Our towns and cities are facing an existential crisis. The rise of online shopping has left gaping holes in high streets. And if hybrid working takes off, some economists predict a dramatic 'zoom shock' as workers spend less time and money in city centres. What seems like a crisis could be an opportunity to reinvent our cities and 'Level Up' struggling towns. But are we ready to seize this moment?...

Last December Liz Truss made a speech. The Minister for Women and Equalities spoke about her memories of being at school in Leeds. She was taught about sexism and racism, she said, but not enough time was spent on being taught how to read and write. "These ideas," said Truss, "have their roots in post-modernist philosophy - pioneered by Foucault - that put societal power structures and labels ahea...