Downstream – Novara Media Podcasts

Last year, Zack Polanski’s Green Party suggested changes could be made to Britain’s prohibitionist approach to drugs – and felt the full force of the mainstream media’s indignation. But all over the world, the War on Drugs is shifting shape. Drugs are being legalised and commercialised.  America now has its first legal weed-selling billionaire, while others serve out huge prison sentences for poss...

Mariana Mazzucato is a towering figure in contemporary economics, best known for her work on the entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented economics. Her congregation is broad, ranging from an ascendant Andy Burnham, to the Pope, to Marco Rubio. Ash Sarkar sat down with her in front of a live audience at EartH Theatre in Hackney to test the ideas in her new book, The Common Good Economy .  ...

Daniel Levy is a British-Israeli analyst, commentator, and former Israeli government negotiator whose biography reads like a map of the peace process’s rise and fall. Ash Sarkar sat down with him as a new Iran deal is announced, with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen and the US-Iran ceasefire extended for 60 days. In this conversation, Daniel picks apart what these peace ne...

The war on terror ended in 2021 with a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the consequences of that conflict continue to play out both overseas and at home. Aaron Bastani sat down with investigative journalist Matt Kennard, founder of Declassified UK, to talk about the status of the American empire, Trump’s war-hungry administration, and how the US government has been captured by N...

It has been a year since Aaron Bastani first met with AI investigative journalist Karen Hao, to discuss her book Empire of AI.  A year is a long time, in the fastest growing sector on the planet. To bring us up to date, Aaron and Karen sat down again to discuss the major shifts in the empire – and their impacts on us all.  Billions of people now use, AI as it has become more integrated into our li...

The far right holds power in the US, inflaming tension along racial lines. ICE agents terrorise the streets, while Black history is erased from school curricula. In the UK too, Nigel Farage’s far right party Reform is on the ascendancy, riding a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment that he himself helped to stoke. Our guest on Downstream this week is Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate...

A wealth tax on the very richest people in our society has never been more popular. Recent polling puts the plan at 90% approval, a figure almost unheard of for any policy proposal. This week’s guest, Gabriel Zucman, is a French economist who has done the most comprehensive work on what such a tax could accomplish. And he’s also a key inspiration for the UK’s leading wealth tax advocate – an...

It has been a seismic week in British politics. The two-party system has collapsed. Keir Starmer is digging in at Downing Street, while Labour leadership contenders line up outside, and Reform clouds gather overhead. Now: the most important by-election in more than a century looms. How did we get here? And what happens next? On this week’s Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined by James Butler, contr...

British politics is in turmoil. The two party system has collapsed, the far right has won huge gains across the country. Crises of this scale can create huge opportunities for socialists too, but only when the left is organised and ready. Peter Mertens is the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium. If recent years in British politics have had a manic-depressive quality, with extreme hi...

The two-party system has defined British politics for centuries, but the status quo is under attack from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and an insurgent Green party – both looking to clean up in the local elections on 7 May. This week Aaron Bastani speaks to economist James Meadway about the disruptive new progressive party on the block. Meadway was an economic advisor to John McDonnell during Jeremy Co...

The 21st century runs on batteries: from phones and laptops to electric vehicles, drones and clean energy. Embedded in these batteries are rare earth minerals, drawn from a brutal supply chain that begins in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The race to electrify the global energy system is underway, but most people know almost nothing about how the necessary batteries are made – even those of us...

As the American empire teeters, China gains dominance, and war spreads across Eastern Europe and West Asia, questions arise as to Europe’s place in this rapidly changing world order. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar speaks to Roderick Beaton, former Koraes Professor of History at King’s College London, about his latest book Europe: A New History. How did the boundaries between Europe and...

Take part in our audience survey: novara.media/survey In China in the 1990s, the arrival of the internet was swiftly met with the ‘great firewall’: a complex matrix of censorship, surveillance and state control. Since then there have been two internets: the World Wide Web, and the Chinese internet. ​ Aaron Bastani talks to China analyst Yi-Ling Liu about the cultures and innovations that have evol...

Liberalism, in one form or another, has been the pervading political ideology of the past 200 years. It has become so pervasive, as an ideology, that it lays claim to the middle ground and common sense itself. But liberalism is a set of dogmas and doctrines like any other political ideology, and unfathomable horrors as well as huge advances have been made in its name. Today on Downstream, the idea...

Aaron Bastani sat down with Novara Media’s own Ash Sarkar, to celebrate the paperback release of her bestselling book, Minority Rule. ‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash used to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. She revealed how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics,...

Rising unemployment, increased military spending, and a decline in living standards for most people, including the middle class: the description fits both the 1930s and the 2020s. In the 1930s, it was a situation that morphed into the destruction and horror of the Second World War. On Downstream with Aaron Bastani this week is Clara Mattei, professor of economics at the University of Tulsa, and au...

Nearly all of us on Earth live within a ‘nation-state’. Nation-states are an invisible and seemingly inevitable and eternal part of the infrastructure that forms our society: the water we swim in. Rarely do we pause to consider how this global system of nation-states came into being, and what might replace it after its gone. But as the United States wages a war of aggression on Iran, i...

The notion that the Global South is affected ‘first and worst’ by global shocks they didn’t cause, namely climate change, is one of the cornerstones of leftist thought. But what if it’s not entirely true? What if, contrary to this tenet, it’s wealthy Western nations who have over-developed and lost their resilience in the process? This is the argument made by John Rapley in his latest book ‘Icarus...

In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: an investigation into the toxic depths of America’s food industry.  Twenty five years later, the book remains an urgent intervention, as much for what it says about workers’ rights as for our agricultural systems and dietary health. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar talks to Eric Schlosser about what’s changed since 2001, and what remains unref...

Just a week ago, the architect of Starmer’s rise to power, Morgan McSweeney, resigned over his connections to Peter Mandelson, after further proof of Mandelson’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein emerged in the newest batch of files released by the US Department of Justice. According to this week’s guest, this scandal isn’t an anomaly, but an inevitable outgrowth of the New Labour politics that hav...

When it comes to the relationship between capitalism and crime, those on the left generally think of exploitation. People often turn to crime, so the thinking goes, because they can’t make ends meet by legitimate means. Whatever your views on that framing, there is also another – far less discussed – connection between capitalism and crime, namely the relationship between elites, the s...

Over the past three years, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people has become a flash point for freedom of speech in the West. Expressing solidarity with Palestinians has given Western governments an excuse to crack down on dissenters. There has been intimidation and job insecurity at one end of the scale, through to brutal policing, arrests, and extraditions at the other. Our guest on Down...

This week, Donald Trump continued his streak of threatening tariffs against any country that opposes him, increasing the odds of an escalating trade war and further destabilising the global economic system. But according to this week’s guest, the system is in desperate need of reform. Indeed, she thinks without a complete structural overhaul, it will soon ‘blow itself up.’ On Downstream this week...

Our guest this week was born in 1943, in what was then British India – modern day Pakistan. Unlike most, who have learned history through books and second-hand sources, he has witnessed first-hand a great deal of the 20th and 21st centuries. Tariq Ali founded Verso Books, the leading left-wing publishing house in Britain, as well as the New Left Review. He met Malcolm X, was friends with John Lenn...

It has been a bellicose start to 2026, with the US army kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and threatening to annex Greenland, putting many more nations, including Mexico and Colombia, on high alert. On Downstream this week is investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who’s best known for helping Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA’s global surveillance program come to light, as...