Novara FM – Novara Media Podcasts

Novara FM was Novara Media’s first show – it’s now coming to an end. On the final episode, Richard Hames sat down with Aaron Bastani, James Butler and Ash Sarkar to talk about 15 years of Novara Media. What have we learned from a decade and a half fighting a media landscape that insists nothing can ever change? A new product will launch next month. Animated by the same complexity and d...

Is the UK still a liberal country? With terrorism laws criminalising speech around Palestine Action, it’s a serious question. A growing gulf between public opinion and state policy on Gaza reveals a liberal order in decline. Richard Hames spoke to Simon Childs about where our society is going.

The Trump Administration’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ will fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the tune of $45bn – a staggering increasing. But the fight back has already started. The 2025 protests in LA sought to slow down enforcement of increasingly draconian migration rules. Harsha Walia is the co-founder of ‘No One is Illegal’ and author of Border and Rule...

Escalation towards war with Iran has hit a pause. But for how long? Eskandar Sadeghi is the author of R evolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran . He joined Richard Hames to explain the strategy and history of this conflict – and what it means for the future of geopolitics. And, of course, remember that the purpose of this war was to distract us from the Gaza Genocide. &...

Got a pension? Or a savings account? Arguably, its purpose is to align your interests with the interests of capitalism: when the market goes up, you benefit too. All this means that the working class actually already owns lots of the assets around us, from companies to houses. But how much control do we actually have? Michael A. McCarthy is the author of The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wreck...

Assuming you’re not reading this on your yacht, then the most contentious thing in the world is right beneath you. Since the dawn of agriculture, peasants, farmers, landlords, and states have vied for control of the land. Jo Guldi is the author of the The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights. She spoke to Eleanor Penny about the history of that struggle, and how the strugg...

The genocide in Gaza has been the most automated in history. Systems like ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ reportedly speed up the process of tracking and targeting Palestinians. The genocide’s brutality has been concealed behind the facade of technical neutrality. So why are the companies working with the IDF also working with the NHS? Eleanor Penny spoke to Mat...

Keir Starmer stands accused of echoing Enoch Powell in his ‘Island of Strangers’ speech. But who was this titanic figure in the history of British racism? And how did he shape the far right’s existential struggle to understand Britain once it ceased to be a formal empire? Eleanor Penny spoke to Kojo Koram about how to understand his influence in a renewed moment of national decline, and how his id...

There will be a new party. And also, there already is one. We put the strategies of Pamela Fitzpatrick, Jamie Driscoll and Shockat Adam head to head: do we need a new party? Should it be led by Jeremy Corbyn, or someone new? Or do we just need more independent MPs? They debate Reform UK, attacks from the mainstream media, and what class politics means now. You can listen to the previous episodes i...

Communism is a classless, moneyless and stateless society. So far, so simple. And so far out of reach. Or, we could define it differently, as “the real movement that abolishes the present state of things”. That’s how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described it in the German Ideology. Jasper Bernes is the author of  The Future of Revolution , a book that aims both to clarify our i...

Last week, a terrorist attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir sparked a rapid military escalation: planes were shot down, thousands were arbitrarily detained, the houses of suspect’s families were blown up. How did we get to a situation in which the safety of the whole world is threatened by the occupation of Kashmir? Richard Hames spoke to Kashmiri scholar Mohamad Junaid about the brinkmanship o...

A new Pope has been chosen by the conclave. But how much can one man, even one appointed by the Holy Spirit, do to transform one of the most powerful institutions in the world? Richard Hames spoke to Matthew Sitman of the Know Your Enemy podcast about what role the church can play in our crisis-ridden age, and the contradictions of being a gay – and socialist – convert to Catholicism.

When you think about neoliberal states, maybe you think of the UK, or Russia in the 90s, or Chile. You probably don’t think about Iran. And yet, argues Bahar Noorizadeh, the Islamic Republic has been, since before the 1979 revolution, a neoliberal state – and an imperial one as well. It has suppressed the Kurdish and Baloch nations inside its own borders. How can we show solidarity with feminist a...

Forensic Architecture is a research agency that investigates state violence and environmental destruction. It reconstructs events that states worldwide wants obscured, from Israel to the UK and from the Mediterranean to Ukraine. In doing so, they have invented a whole new discipline of investigation. On Novara FM, FA’s Assistant Director of Research, Samaneh Moafi, tells Eleanor Penny about their...

We’ve entered a new climate reality. The pace of the energy transition has picked up – and so have the impacts of climate change. But has there ever actually been an energy transition? Or do we just use more and more and more of everything? As climate change accelerates, feedback loops in the climate system will start to speed it up even further. All this is to say: we’re approaching the point whe...

After capitalism comes communism, according to Marxist doctrine. But in the meantime, what should we call our increasingly unequal system? Political theorist Jodi Dean posits ‘neofeudalism’ as the best way to describe our growing society of serfs and servants in her new book, Capital’s Grave. She talks to Eleanor Penny about a vision of class struggle led by the ‘servant va...

In the wake of Assad’s regime collapse and the call for the Kurdish Worker’s Party to disband, Elif Sarican talks to Richard Hames about how to make sense of this new world, and whether or not the Kurdish revolution in Rojava can survive. Comments, corrections, suggestions? fm@novaramedia.com

The US is no longer supporting Ukraine, and in response, the UK and Europe are rearming. Germany is taking off its hallowed ‘debt brake’ to allow it, while Keir Starmer is talking tough about the capabilities of the British armed forces. In a world still dominated by the American military, what does it matter? And what could we do instead? Khem Rogaly, a senior research fellow at Commo...

Lockdown was one of the defining experiences of our lives, but it was far from unique in history. Contagion and confinement are inextricably intertwined, from the plantation to the infirmary, the leper colony to the stay-at-home order. In  The History of the World in 6 Plagues,  Edna Bonhomme investigates how fear, power, race science and colonial violence have shaped the most powerful plagues and...

Read any of the mainstream press at the moment and you’ll hear the same thing: unprecedented things are happening in America. But what if this sudden shift was an illusion? David Adler is co-general coordinator of the Progressive International, a group that brings together forces from across the progressive left. He tells Richard Hames that far from being aradical change, Trumpism is the cul...

This part two of our discussion about a new left party. You can listen to part 1 here: https://novaramedia.com/2025/01/30/time-for-a-new-left-party/ James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn’s former Director of Comms, argues for a new party. But who would it speak to? Would it be democratic and in what ways? And what could it actually achieve in the volatile terrain of British Politics? Zack Polanski, Deput...

Your death should be your own, as much as possible. That’s one of the principles behind the Assisted Dying Bill. It lets adults with less than 6 months to live end their lives. But disability campaigners fear that people who don’t want to die might be pressured to let themselves be killed. Ellen Clifford is the author of The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Hum...

It’s been five long years since the decisive defeat of Corbynism at the ballot box. How, if at all, should the left reconstitute itself? Should everyone join the Greens? Or do we just need Mick Lynch to start a new party? In this episode, Richard Hames is joined by Rachel Godfrey Wood, Joe Todd, and Oliver Eagleton to thrash it all out and arrive at the One True Answer. We’re keen to hear from you...

Elon Musk is the most symptomatic capitalist of our era: obsessed with publicity, by many accounts a fanatical workaholic, and increasingly in bed with the far right. But how did he go from Obama-era liberal darling to giving a Nazi salute at Trump’s second inauguration? Historian of ideas Quinn Slobodian has traced the relationship between big tech and the far right for years. His books inc...

Having long promised to decentralise power, Bitcoin is looking more and more like it will end up as a tool of American power under Trump. But blockchains could also be used to empower local economies. And why should the left stay attached to a money system controlled by the state? Sam Hart is a developer, writer, and editor of the Cryptoeconomic Systems journal. He spoke to Richard Hames about the...