New Economics Podcast

Setting up a desk area in the kitchen, Zoom call-induced headaches, or getting furloughed and paid to not do any work - this year has shaken up the world of work like never before. The pandemic has made us reimagine how work fits into our economy and our lives. So, with 79% of business leaders and nearly two-thirds of the public open to bringing in a shorter working week in light of the pandemic,...

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said that Britain faces new tax rises in the wake of the pandemic. But over the summer Labour’s shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds warned against increasing taxes during an economic crisis. Meanwhile, new research has found that increasing numbers of Tory voters are in favour of higher taxes. So, what do Labour and the Conservatives think about tax rises? Should we be cha...

The US presidential election is less than a fortnight away - and Donald Trump and Joe Biden are pulling out all the stops to get the votes. But after a chaotic debate forced moderators to cut the candidates’ mics to stop them interrupting each other, it’s hard to get a grip on what messages they’re trying to get across. How have the different campaigns been selling themselves? Will Biden’s attacks...

Brexit - remember it? Way back in the distant past of 2019 it felt like it was all the newspapers could talk about. It might feel like it’s done and dusted, but the process is still rumbling on. We’ve got an Internal Market Bill that the government itself admits will break international law. MPs just voted through a Bill refusing to guarantee food and farming standards after we leave the EU. And a...

“We want to build back greener as we recover from Covid-19” - that was the message this week at the Prime Minister’s Conservative Party Conference speech. But in all the talk of wind turbines and technology, the place of care in our economic recovery didn’t really get a look in. Why is care often so overlooked when we think about the economy? And how would our lives change if we put care at the ce...

Our track-and-trace system will be “world-beating”. The development of the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine is “months ahead” of its competitors around the world. This is how politicians and the media have been talking about our lines of defence against the coronavirus pandemic. But when facing up to a global problem that connects us all, why is competition the only language we have to talk about it? How h...

Amid the coronavirus crisis, the number of people becoming members of a union has skyrocketed. Unison reported 65,000 new members since the start of the year, and in the last six months, 50,000 people have joined the National Education Union. The TUC worked with the chancellor to create the furlough scheme, and teaching unions were partly responsible for the government U-turn over face masks in sc...

It’s a cliche by now to say that Covid-19 has upended our economy. Industries have ground to a halt, and are only just beginning to start up again. Just this week the UK plunged into recession, with the worst drop in GDP of any G7 nation. But what about outside the G7? How have the effects of Covid ricocheted around the global economy? In the last few episodes we’ve heard how Covid-19 has affected...

We’re facing two global crises. We have scientific evidence for how to deal with both of them, but governments aren’t acting quickly enough. They both show how we are all more connected than we previously thought. And to tackle them will require massive changes in how we run our economy. The first problem is Covid-19. The other, though it’s fallen off the front pages, is as urgent as ever: the cli...

For most of the last decade, the Conservative government has said they want to cut government spending to balance the books as they rolled out austerity nationwide. But since the start of lockdown, something seems to have changed. The chancellor keeps saying “this is not the time for ideology” as he announces new, expensive schemes to keep the economy afloat. So - what’s going on? It’s not the fir...

It feels like every day there are new dire predictions of the state of the UK economy and jobs. Last week we discovered that the number of paid employees in Britain has plunged by 650,000 since the start of the pandemic. As the furlough scheme winds down, the Office for Budget Responsibility says 1.4 million furloughed people are at risk of unemployment. And almost a third of companies plan to cut...

At the end of June Keir Starmer said of Black Lives Matter protesters in an interview: “Nobody should be saying anything about defunding the police.” At the same time, the UK government announced four new prisons. Olympic athlete Bianca Williams has said she felt like “being black is a crime” after she was stopped and handcuffed by police while driving in London. And last week it emerged that the...

The end of June marked the anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush Generation in the UK, and sparked renewed conversations about the Hostile Environment. It’s been reported that UK immigration policies have stopped migrants from getting healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite a government exemption from immigration checks and fees. Just this week, MPs passed a new immigration bill whic...

The death of George Floyd three weeks ago at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a fresh wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the world. In the US, calls to defund the police have won victories and across Europe leaders are taking down statues of slave traders and reviewing national school curricula. Here in the UK, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets, despite govern...

10,000 care home residents have died from Covid-19, more than a third of all Covid-19 deaths. On Wednesday it was reported that the death toll is likely to be double the official figure. The death rate amongst social care staff is double that of the general working age population. So the big question is; what’s gone wrong with social care? On this episode Ayeisha is joined by Sarah Bedford, head o...

Between the lack of PPE for key workers, growing numbers forced onto universal credit, and worries about worker safety both now and after lockdown, there’s plenty to be angry about. So has Covid-19 led to a new wave of organising? What does organising look like under lockdown? How does the boom in mutual aid networks fit into this? And will the demands made during the pandemic lead to lasting chan...

In the last few months we’ve seen the government promise billions in support for people and businesses impacted by coronavirus. Supporters of austerity claim the last decade of cuts is what enabled the government to put money into these schemes now. But is this true? Some of our public services were barely able to cope, even before the virus struck. And so what effect did austerity have on our pan...

The lockdown period has been extended for at least another three weeks. Schools and nurseries remain closed, except to a few children. Many parents are at home trying to balance work with looking after their kids. But some are still being asked to pay for childcare they aren’t using. And some childcare staff are still having to go into work, often for very low pay. What’s gone wrong with childcare...

During lockdown, the message everywhere is to stay home. But what should you do, when you don’t have a secure place to live? At the end of last month, the government gave councils 48 hours to house all rough sleepers in their areas. There was also a temporary ban on evictions put in place and a call for landlords to be ‘compassionate’ in their dealings with their tenants. But has the government go...

As nationwide lockdown continues and parts of the economy grind to a halt, the chancellor has announced a package of measures to support people struggling with the economic fallout of coronavirus. But is it enough? Or have 10 years of cuts broken our social security system beyond repair? The Weekly Economics Podcast is back, to dive into the economics of the Covid-19 crisis. This week Ayeisha is j...

Last week, the big red briefcase was handed over to new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. But many of Sunak’s Budget promises were overshadowed by new measures to deal with the coronavirus. With the stock market hitting a four-year low, the outbreak is pushing us towards recession. So what do we know about the government’s economic plans? Are they doing enough to avoid a recession? And in focusing on coron...

The election is just around the corner and the outcome will determine the future of the country, and the shape of the economy. So what are the parties planning to do if they win power? How radical are their policies? And what are the differences in their economic agenda? For our last episode of 2019 Ayeisha is joined by Anoosh Chakelian, Britain Editor of the New Statesman and co-host of the excel...

The childcare system in England is broken. Our nurseries are among the most expensive in the world, but our childcare professionals are some of the lowest paid workers in society. For a long time, government policy on childcare has been badly thought out and severely underfunded. More recently, big international chains have moved into the sector. So, what should be done? How would we fix the child...

Our public services are in dire need of investment. The question of how much investment has loomed large over the first weeks of the election campaign. But in the middle of a debate over competing spending plans, isn’t it also time to ask what we want our public services to actually do for us? That’s the view of group of economists and campaigners who are pushing for something called ‘Universal Ba...

How did the word immigrant become such a loaded term? How did the public conversation about immigration become so toxic? And is there another way forward – an alternative to the hostile environment? This week we're at SOAS, part of the University of London, with a live audience and Maya Goodfellow, author of the new book, ‘Hostile Environment: How immigrants became scapegoats’. https://www.versobo...