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In the summer of 2020, Radio 4 producer Polly Weston found herself at Nathan Gill’s house. She’d been sent by a random postcode generator, for an episode of The Patch. What followed was a wide-ranging interview about his life and career, how he became involved in UKIP, his involvement in campaigning for Brexit, and his subsequent responsibilities in the Brexit party after they stormed to victory i...

Could the solution to Britain’s immigration problems lie in the Danish model? A model based on harsh restrictions on who can enter the country and strict rules for immigrants requiring not just integration but assimilation – and all promoted by a centre-left government. In this documentary BBC Political Correspondent Iain Watson explains why some prominent Labour MPs now think it’s the answer they...

Kent is the Garden of England - if you view it from the air, it’s covered in square miles of plastic, where the millions of tonnes of soft fruit are grown that feed the nation. Aidan Tulloch takes us inside the world of the summer fruit pickers recruited to work for a season on a blueberry farm in Kent. In early summer thousands of people arrive in UK airports, hired on short-term visas to help pi...

David Baker’s Jewish identity and faith have always been central to who he is - and so is his affiliation with Israel. But he has been re-evaluating that relationship since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza. For many decades after the founding of Israel, most British Jews were unequivocal in their support. And that is still the case for many Jews in Britain. But there...

In towns and cities across Britain, flags are appearing in ever greater numbers. On rooftops, down terraced streets, outside pubs and community centres, they flutter as both a statement of pride and a challenge to what many feel the country is becoming. In York, the group known as the Flag Force see their work as part of a wider national campaign. For them, raising the Union Flag or the Cross of S...

Nick Eardley explores the Scottish dimension to one of the most contentious issues facing the UK – immigration. With lower birthrates and a population that’s aging faster, Scotland desperately needs people to come here and take up jobs in critical sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and hospitality. And now with Reform biting at their heels Labour plan to adopt a much tighter immigration policy....

Amid the crowds and bustle of the 2025 Iowa State Fair, Anna Jones takes the temperature of rural Iowans almost a year into Trump's second term. Anna finds out how the farming constituency - largely Trump supporting in 2024 - are feeling about global trade tariffs and promises to Make America Great Again. She explores their perceptions of America's position in the world - and how they feel the res...

A programme marking the 35th anniversary of the Treaty of Unification that brought East and West Germany together after 40 years of separation. Historian Katja Hoyer was born in East Germany in the 1980s. Then, her home town of Guben was a bustling hub of the GDR's chemical industry, shrouded in smog and crowded with people. Today, it is clean and beautifully rebuilt, but also rather desolate and...

What is going on with US science? Science Journalist Roland Pease asks whether the rounds of cuts, reorganisations and political strong-arming can be weathered, and how they will likely affect us all. 80 years after Vannevar Bush proposed what became the pact between government and universities that led to decades of global scientific dominance, is the edifice being toppled? Bush’s report “Science...

In early June this year Nigel Farage held a press conference in the South Wales steel town of Port Talbot. He announced Reform UK’s commitment to the re-industrialisation of Wales, including the re-opening of Port Talbot’s blast furnaces and a return to coal mining in the South Wales Valleys. His controversial announcement was the opening shot in Reform UK’s campaign for the Welsh Senedd elections...

Is a radical political philosophy guiding the actions of the Trump administration? Curtis Yarvin is suddenly all over American media. A computer engineer turned political blogger, he's known for writing long screeds that advocate for a radical reform of governance - dismissing America's democratic values and instead calling for the return of an absolute monarchy. For years, these ideas were buried...

When a parcel delivery goes awry, Polly Weston does what every angry person in 2025 does... she searches the internet for similarly angry people to bask in the shared experience of being annoyed. Naturally, she finds countless groups on social media devoted to people complaining. There are posts from people furious about the delivery which never turned up at the designated time; or the parcel stre...

In the years since Brexit, British businesses have had to constantly adapt to ever changing rules and regulations about trading with the EU. The current government is making moves to make some of that process easier. To find out more about the consequences of (almost) a decade of Brexit, we catch up with three very different businesses to find out if they've been thriving, surviving, or downsizing...

Louise Lancaster - approaching 60 - received one of Britain's longest ever jail terms for peaceful protest, in July 2024. She served part of her sentence in HMP Bronzefield, the UK's highest security women's prison, alongside some of Britain's most notorious killers. Louise was one of five Just Stop Oil activists involved in bringing much of the M25 to a standstill in November 2022, and has taken...

The daily realities and private thoughts of a young woman living through war. Every morning, Hanya Aljamal sees the same man from her balcony. “He has this tiny garden in the middle of all this concrete stuff,” she says. “Just across the road, there’s a blown-up building. Yet he’s cultivating these little herbs and plants. And I look at that and it just looks like the purest form of resistance.” H...

As the UK Treasury grapples with a massive financial ‘black hole’, its once impoverished neighbour, the Irish Republic, is grappling with the dilemma of how to spend a bounty of €14bn. It’s a 'pot of gold' which the Irish government didn’t expect – and surprisingly didn't want - but was eventually forced to accept by a European Court ruling that the mighty US corporation, Apple, had underpaid taxe...

Permanent exclusions from schools in England have risen over the last decade. Neil Maggs explores why this might be happening - and what happens to the children who are excluded from the classroom. He visits a pupil referral unit where children are sent if they are excluded from a mainstream school; a school in the North East of England that excluded just one pupil last year to see what it's doing...

The beautiful Atlantic island of Madeira has a chronic problem with a cheap synthetic drug imported through the post. The drug - nicknamed Bloom - is so easy to get hold of, so cheap and so addictive that authorities are struggling to cope. Helen Clifton has spent time with police and frontline services to get an idea of how big a problem Bloom now is across Madeiran society. She comes face to fac...

On a cold night in January 2024 a dog walker finds a baby in a bag - a foundling. She's named Elsa, after the Frozen character. Reporter Sanchia Berg begins to follow the case, gaining rare access to the Family Court and to the police investigation. DNA tests reveal Elsa is the sibling of two other babies found abandoned in the same area over recent years. What has happened to the mother? Produced...

The latest figures on NHS finances don't make pretty reading. NHS England alone faces a projected deficit of £6.6 billion for this financial year and the situation looks as bleak right across the NHS in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland The NHS has always had to make tough choices about what to prioritise but this deficit is prompting health bosses to make decisions that were previously unthink...

Vicky Spratt investigates how people have remained trapped in high interest mortgages since the financial crash of 2008. Some of these so-called ‘mortgage prisoners’ are homeowners who were formerly customers of Northern Rock, a bank which was famously nationalised by the UK Government. Since then, these customers have not been able to move out of their high interest mortgages and many are now liv...

After Brexit, we left the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the CAP. For many people - whatever they made of Brexit - this was a golden opportunity to come up with something better. A NEW farming policy, which would encourage efficient food production while rewarding farmers for environmental work. Nearly a decade later, where have we got to? This is a programme about agricultural policy, so if you...

Russians who sign up to fight in Ukraine earn big money in salaries and bonuses – and the Kremlin is even more generous to families of those killed in battle. Average compensation packages for a dead son or husband are worth about £97,000. In less-wealthy Russian provinces, where most recruits are from, that’s enough to turn your life around. Reporter Arsenii Sokolov finds out how the relatives of...

California is one of ten US states where assisted dying is lawful and in some respects it’s a model for how the practice might work in Britain. Introduced in 2016, it’s available to those who are terminally ill and are expected to die within six months. Patients must self administer the lethal medication - the same as what’s proposed in England and Wales. BBC Medical editor Fergus Walsh travels to...

Thousands of female council workers across Britain have lost out on pay and benefits worth billions because of unequal pay over decades. Now claims for compensation and demands to reform pay and grading threaten to capsize council finances, upset male council workers and cause massive cuts to local services. Anushka Asthana investigates why such pay discrimination is still happening despite being...