Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

In May 2023, the  UN reported  that 600 people had been killed in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in the previous month alone – victims of gang violence and the near total collapse of law and order. In April the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warned that insecurity in the country had “reached levels comparable to countries in armed conflict” and called for the deployment of an in...

Liverpool has a rich musical history, from the Beatles to Echo and the Bunnymen, and beat six other British cities to become the 2023 host of Eurovision. Can the annual jamboree of geopolitics and high camp help the city overcome recent scandals?     In this entertaining long read, the  New Statesman ’s culture writer Kate Mossman visits the city and meets contestants from Mold...

Since 1993, the king has been visiting a village in deepest Romania – once a year, alone. He owns two houses there, and is revered by the locals, for whom he has installed a sewage system and worked to protect their traditional way of life.   What draws him there? In this fascinating and deeply reported long read,  New Statesman  commissioning editor Will Lloyd traces the roots of t...

The freelance journalist Tim de Lisle is a lifelong newspaper addict, and still buys two papers a day, three at weekends. In this elegy to their demise, he tracks his own love affair with them, from a schoolboy in search of the football results, to sports reporter, music critic and media studies lecturer. Is the future of news entirely digital, or could some form of print...

In the postwar world, Stalin and the Soviet Union wielded greater power over Mao Zedong's new communist China. Today,   following China’s rise as an economic superpower and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is Beijing that has the upper hand – and on whom Russia’s future depends. When  Xi Jinping  arrived in Moscow for a three-day visit in March 2023, he was greeted with ela...

As a philosophy student in the 1980s, the  New Statesman ’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley learned more from Bryan Magee than from any seminar or lecture. Magee’s 1987 BBC television series  The Great Philosophers , described by one critic as “two boffins on a sofa”, examined some of life’s most recondite questions in an accessible way. Magee was also a prolific author (of philosophy, poet...

According to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the face of British Christianity is changing rapidly. London is now home to the greatest concentration of African churches outside Africa – many of them in bingo halls and warehouses, schools and community centres, where they also serve as social and charitable hubs. Outside the capital, the prospects of a religious revival are rela...

In January 2023, a leaked memo from the US air force general Mike Minihan revealed that he expected to be at war with China over Taiwan by 2025. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had raised the stakes, as had Beijing’s consistent refusal to rule out military action. But is a full-scale invasion the real threat, or is the territory’s struggle for independence already well under way?   On a recent t...

After a series of bad bets on the post-pandemic economy, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) lost 60% of its value on the evening of 8 March 2023, and $42bn in withdrawals the following day. Its collapse triggered panic across the US, and in Europe, where Switzerland’s second-largest lender Credit Suisse (already dubbed ‘Debit Suisse’) was already looking shaky; its subsequent bail-out was...

It started as an accident of geography: after one RAF runway closed, the bodies of British soldiers killed in action were repatriated from Iraq and Afghanistan to RAF Lyneham and then through the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett, on their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. From April 2007 until August 2011 the town became the site of unofficial national mourning: relatives, tour...

Once the envy of the world, British universities are being hollowed out by a managerial class, argues Adrian Pabst, a  New Statesman  contributing writer and professor of politics at the University of Kent. Instead of intellectual excellence and civic responsibility, the emphasis is increasingly on “churning out graduates who will serve the interests of City firms and the non-governmenta...

Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the woes of centre-left parties across the West – some of it prematurely, as Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and perhaps soon Keir Starmer in Britain can attest. The bigger and quite possibly more lasting story of political decline, however, is on the centre-right. A decade ago, moderate conservative figures l...

The  New Statesman ’s Scotland editor Chris Deerin has been reporting on the SNP since 1996, when as a young political correspondent he sparred with its then leader Alex Salmond. The party was then an outlier, with only three Scottish MPs to Labour’s 49. Just over ten years later, in 2007, Salmond became first minister and appointed a shy, ambitious protégé as his deputy: Nicola Sturgeon. &nb...

When her mother died Johanna Thomas-Corr, the literary editor of the  Sunday Times,  fretted that she was misremembering her somehow. “I kept reaching for my own figures of speech, only for them to writhe out of my hands,” she writes. “Writing about her was easy: she was so distinctive. But writing about my relationship with her – this was a slippery business.”   In this essay, stru...

Every year since 2009 new records have been set for UK  house prices , and every year people have asked how long the market can continue to defy gravity. But this year is different. Mortgage rates have risen steeply, while the cost of living accelerates; the past four months have seen the longest sustained drop in property prices since 2008. And it’s a global issue, as central bankers make bo...

In late January 2023 the  New Statesman ’s Bruno Macaes travelled to the front lines in Ukraine. In the Donbas, in the east, he found scenes of total devastation – levelled villages and burned forests, the remaining residents “walking the streets like ghosts”. At the front the Russian army is sending wave after wave of troops in the hope of making the Ukrainians despair, making them believe t...

In November 2022 Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, told parliament that the south coast of England faced “an invasion” of small boats. “If Labour were in charge,” she said, “they would be allowing all the Albanian criminals to come to this country.” Since then, others have suggested that the nearly 200 unaccompanied children found to have gone missing in the UK were Albanians  “willingly...

In south-west England, where Phil Whitaker practises as a GP, his colleagues have ­frequently resorted to driving critically ill patients to hospital – because there are no ambulances, or because the queue for emergency care is typically eight hours long. In January 2023 the Royal College of Emergency Medicine  estimated  that 500 patients were dying weekly because of delays and, al...

As Twitter and Facebook stumble through Elon Musk’s takeover and Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on the metaverse, questions abound about the future of social media. What sort of news and discussion should it host and encourage? What should be its attitude to participation, networking, user rights and free speech? What should be its business model? What societal role should it seek to play? What...

In a second archive edition of the audio long read, we bring you two classic magazine articles. In the first, the then editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, visits Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1937, where the Russian communist revolutionary was the guest of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (here referred to only as “Rivera’s wife”, though she was also Trotsky’s lover, or about to...

HG Wells’s interview with Stalin in 1934, and the debate that followed, was one of the most striking episodes in the history of the  New Statesman . Wells – the novelist and socialist famous for science fiction such as  The Time Machine  and  The War of the Worlds  – used the interview to try to coax Stalin into a more conciliatory position, challenging (too...

It is 23 December, some time in the future, and a storm rages outside the house. Inside there are supplies and an expectant mother sleeps. Is it safe to venture out and fetch her gift?   In this post-apocalyptic story the novelist and short story writer Sarah Hall ( The Electric Michaelangelo ,  Burntcoat ) imagines a mysterious landscape ravaged by weather: is it still Christmas, when t...

Why do we read? In this essay, the Norwegian author explores meaning and purpose in the novel, from the work of Claire Keegan to Dostoevsky and DH Lawrence. The form’s power lies in its openness, he writes, its capacity to defy the absolutes of politics, philosophy or science: “It pulls any abstract conception about life… into the human sphere, where it no longer stands alone but collides with myr...

Speaking in the House of Commons on 18 October, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced the opposition to her proposed Public Order Bill as “the  Guardian -reading, tofu-eating wokerati”. The next day, she posted her resignation letter on Twitter.  It had been a busy 24 hours in the war on woke. On TalkTV, Piers Morgan had bemoaned the rise of the “ultra-woke”. In New York, Elon Mu...

If Europe today has a dominant leader, it is Emmanuel Macron. He has big, deeply thought-through ideas about his country's role in Europe and the world, and grand ambitions for enhancing it. Following his re-election as French president in April, he is now secure in office until 2027. And having lost his legislative majority at elections in June, he is turning to the world stage with all...