Peter York's Culture Wars House Party

Kate Ferguson co-founded Protection Approaches after working on genocide prevention in Rwanda — and noticing, with some alarm, that the warning signs looked oddly familiar back home. She's a foreign policy strategist working to stop mass violence before it starts, by raising the alarm on how identity grievance is weaponised to cause harm. She's just finished consulting 250 security and defence exp...

Peter Tatchell is Britain's most recognisable gay rights activist. He traces five decades of culture wars: from a teenage firebrand in 1960s Australia, inspired by the Black civil rights movement, via Communist East Berlin, to today — and "why things are not over by a long shot." We talk about how LGBT+ rights, and especially trans rights, got turned into frontline ammunition in the modern culture...

Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, has been a long-time watcher of the BNP, UKIP, Brexit and now Reform UK — explaining who these new right-wing insurgents really are, and why they're suddenly everywhere. We find out why "the numbers game matters", why he thinks we're in "the most unstable moment", and explore the great whirlpool of resentment that immigration only partly ex...

Professors Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves of the London School of Economics, authors of Born to Rule – a forensic, often very funny X‑ray of the British establishment, drawn from that venerable directory of importance, Who’s Who . They’ve tracked thousands of the people who matter to discover who really holds power, how they got it, and why they’d rather you thought they were “just ordinary”. &nbsp...

Gabriel Gatehouse is a former BBC international correspondent, a "Groucho Marx member" of the British establishment, and creator of The Coming Storm — the podcast and book that mapped the deep roots of American conspiracy culture from the Clinton wars to QAnon (was it kind of true?). We explore his view from fifteen turbulent months of Trump's second term — America as "empire in decline," Britain...

Bonnie Greer is a Chicago‑born playwright, critic and public intellectual who has spent forty years decoding Britain from the inside—and America from a wary distance. From movies to Question Time, from Chicago to the upper reaches of British cultural life, she has watched the American dream and the British establishment at very close quarters.   From Trump as a ‘mook’ to the politics of prote...

Professor Marci Shore is a Yale historian of Eastern Europe, a scholar of 20th‑century totalitarianism, and, in her own words, “an early panicker”.   We trace her journey from the archive to the front line of political alarm: her Titanic feeling the morning after the 2016 election, and the “epistemological advantages” of studying fascism. We talk about the fantasy of America versus its realit...

David Aaronovitch is, in many people’s minds, the classic Hampstead political commentator: half‑Jewish, wholly metropolitan, former long‑time  Times  columnist and the calmly forensic voice of Radio 4’s  The Briefing Room.  From the  Protocols of the Elders of Zion  and Henry Ford’s obsessions to today’s influencer‑economy cranks who monetise paranoia online, David tr...

Professor Danny Dorling, Oxford social geographer and professional spoiler of comfortable assumptions about Britain. He explains how geography began as imperial management and maps the link between empire and inequality that still shapes Britain’s place at the top of Europe’s inequality league table. Danny shows how we went from our most equal moment in the 60’s and 70’s to today’s extremes, why t...

Michael Wolff, bestselling chronicler of Trump and Murdoch — and my very first guest on this podcast just before Trump took office — returns from a snow-blinded Hamptons to describe what Trump’s second term feels like to him, and why he has called it “a heartbreaking year and a frightening year.”   He discusses how, in his view, a president presiding over “a government of one” can still bend...

Professor Jason Stanley, philosopher of propaganda and fascism, now at the University of Toronto after a high‑profile departure from Yale to, as he puts it, “spit the truth”.   He describes the US as “a white supremacist nation” and unpacks how that connects to its sky‑high incarceration rates, even while it’s enjoying some of its lowest levels of violent crime.   From campus battles ove...

Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London — author of books that puncture our most sacred cows and a demystifier-in-chief of generational squabbles and supposed divides. We delve into the why: why certain myths have grown such sturdy roots, why “delusions align with an identity,” and its impact on shaping norms. Culturally, are we closer to the Americans...

Michael Crick is an Oxford-honed, long-haul chronicler of the Westminster circus. He’s run the whole gauntlet—from bare-knuckle TV newsrooms to writing biographies of colourful grandees, and chasing Cabinet Ministers down Whitehall.   Together, we explore how news got smarter (and sometimes not), why local papers are the canaries in the democratic coalmine, and how AI could blow it all apart....

Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate, economics sage, “deranged bum” according to President Trump, and a former New York Times heavyweight.   Together, we unravel Trump’s economic policy (does he have one?) and why he’s “not a Mussolini” when it comes to public transport.   We dissect the Trump era’s political theatre: Nazis in the Republican institutional structure, and a Putin/Orban-style...

Tom Mills is a sociologist, senior lecturer at Aston University, and author of  The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service Broadcaster.   Once “a communist in my early teens,” he now dissects how media and politics intertwine—how the national print press, 90% owned by three businesses, has the ability to shift stories to which “the BBC is kind of responsive,” and what happens when f...

Cosmo Landesman is a mature journalist and cultural commentator and a "conscientious objector" to the heated political debates of our time.   We explore his experiences in Islington's media circles, his evolution from the bohemian 80s where "a canon of good taste" existed to today's polarised media environment, and his nuanced views on political debate, social media, and preferring dessert ov...

Jolyon Maugham KC, founder of the Good Law Project, is one of the UK’s most prominent—and provocative—legal campaigners. Jolyon reveals how, as a high-flying tax barrister, “I knew where the bodies were buried often, because it was my clients who had dug them in,” and why he traded big money for bigger causes. He explains the origins of the Good Law Project, his mission to fight the “decay in our...

On this week’s episode, Angus Hanton, author of  Vassal State: How America Runs Britain,  explains why his book emerged from one simple question:  “How much of the UK is controlled by the Americans?”   In seeking the answer, he uncovers shocking numbers that reveal the extent to which American capital, corporations, and influence permeate the UK economy and society. Remark...

Katherine Stewart is the investigative journalist who’s spent twenty years following the money, myths, and masterminds behind America’s new right — from Bible Belt Sunday schools to Silicon Valley boardrooms and shadowy donor networks that span continents. Her new book,  Money, Lies and God , exposes the billionaires, strategists, and true believers who, she argues, are reshaping not jus...

Sir Martin Sorrell is the man who turned a plastics shell company, WPP, into the world’s biggest ad and marketing empire, snapping up the old Mad Men giants of Madison Avenue. By the time he left WPP in 2018, it was the world sector leader. Transformed by the internet, is this now the “golden age” of a “trillion-dollar” advertising industry? Are the “nation state”-sized big tech companies to be re...

Gina Miller, the financial whiz and legal warrior who took on Brexit's biggest beasts. From challenging May and Johnson in court to facing death threats as a woman of colour, Miller unpacks the messy world of populist politics, tech bros, and the rise of snake oil salesmen.    "What I'm going to say may sound very odd..." — and indeed it does. Gina calls for the return of one of those ve...

Welcome to  Peter York’s Culture Wars House Party . This episode, I’m joined by Matthew d’Ancona—former  Spectator  editor,  Guardian columnist, and early prophet of the post-truth age. He left  The Spectator , as he puts it, “when the world was falling apart,” and when “politics suddenly became downstream from culture.” We trace his career—and his defence of identity...

Last Friday, I was joined by Carole Cadwalladr—former Guardian journalist and, depending on who you ask, either a democratic heroine or the original “mad cat lady.” From exposing Cambridge Analytica and the Mercers to taking on Brexit, big tech, and Aaron Banks personally, Carole’s journalism has shaped how we think about power, influence, and the quiet dismantling of democracy through data. We di...

Welcome to  Peter York’s Culture Wars House Party .  This episode, I’m joined by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown—journalist, author, and broadcaster. Her journey from Uganda to Oxford, and into journalism in her 30s, has shaped one of the most distinctive and provocative voices in British media. We explore why Yasmin says she’s moved further to the left over time, and how she sees the media pl...

Welcome to  Peter York's Culture Wars House Party .  In this episode, I’m joined by Dylan Jones—a defining figure in British media. He spent over two decades editing  GQ  and later ran the  London Evening Standard , helping shape the national conversation around style, politics, and culture.   From ‘literally no experience, and couldn’t actually write very well’,...