UCL Uncovering Politics

Regular listeners know that normally on this podcast we have conversations with our academic colleagues here at UCL. But this week we’re doing something a little bit different. In the first of what we hope will be an occasional series of episodes with real-world political actors, we’re discussing the state of democracy in the UK today – and what can be done about it – with the leader of a UK polit...

At a time of breakdown in our public health service, unaffordable childcare bills, and a cost of living crisis, questions over how our society should be governed, and what the state should provide, are pressing.  Meanwhile, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic  and the vulnerabilities in the energy and food supply chains exposed by the war in Ukraine reveal, some think, state failure to plan ahea...

It seems obvious that war harms civilian populations, not least children. But research can reveal much more about the nature and scale of those harms and perhaps also about what can be done about them. This week we’re focusing on a new study of the impact of war upon rates of infant mortality. The study is by Rod Abouharb , Associate Professor of International Relations here in the UCL Department...

Proposals for reform of the UK’s House of Lords are in the news. In the wake of a report by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Labour leader and – if the polls are to be believed – likely future Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that he would abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a so-called Assembly of the Nations and Regions.  This week Alan Renwick is joined by Meg Russell , Direct...

The transformation of LGBT+ lives in many societies has been one of the greatest advances of the last half century. Where previously there was criminalization and ostracism, today – often – there is inclusion and celebration. But this has not happened equally everywhere, or for all LGBT+ people. And in some places, and on some issues, there are strong counter-movements. This week we are joined by...

Human rights atrocities make headlines around the world and are usually followed by a national and international debate over how the perpetrators should be punished, and how these events might be prevented in the future.   The government of the country where such human rights violations take place often comes under intense criticism and is pressured into creating processes of enquiry or passing le...

Questions about politicians’ behaviour have been high on the political agenda here in the UK in recent months and years.  Boris Johnson’s premiership was dogged – and ultimately ended – by allegations that he was serially dishonest and tolerated bullying and other misconduct from his inner circle. Liz Truss sidelined independent sources of expertise and presided over catastrophic policy failure. A...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year has created Europe’s largest refugee crisis in a generation and caused major disruption to the world’s economy and energy systems. In Ukraine itself, civilian life has been transformed and, in many cases, destroyed by the conflict. One notable dimension of the war has been the intervention of major tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Space...

COP is back. This month, leaders from the worlds of politics, industry, activism, and academia will gather again – for COP27 – in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt. A COP taking place in Africa underlines many of the pressing issues that delegates will face. How can justice be achieved for those countries that are least responsible for CO2 levels, but often the most damaged by climate change? And how can s...

Politics in the UK is in a state of turmoil. Every time we think it can’t get any crazier, it finds a way of doing just that. Many of the roots of the trouble can be found in Brexit. Whatever you think of Brexit, it’s clear that the referendum of June 2016 forced parliament to implement a massive switch in the direction of the country that most MPs thought was wrong, and split the main parties – p...

Rhetoric around immigrants ‘stealing people’s jobs’ has become common in contemporary British politics, especially during the debates around the 2016 Brexit referendum. Meanwhile, rising automation has spurred discussion of how many jobs will be taken over by the ‘robots’. The ways we talk about these two threats of job losses can be strikingly similar and both pose questions about how the labour...

We’re focusing this week on public administration. While mention of the word bureaucracy rarely lifts hearts, it’s incredibly important for the development of public policy, for the delivery of public services, and for all the other things that the state does.  To consider how public administration can be run well, UCL Uncovering Politics is joined by Marc Esteve , Professor of International Publi...

The podcast has been on its summer break over the last few months, but politics certainly hasn’t stopped. The war in Ukraine has rumbled on. The global energy crisis, partly a result of the war, has forced policymakers to rethink how energy markets work. The energy crisis intersects with efforts to tackle the climate crisis, which have in some ways intensified in the wake of last year’s COP26 meet...

Tackling injustice is one of the main motivations that many people have for getting involved in politics. Whether those injustices relate to income inequalities, the harms caused by climate change, discrimination based on gender or ethnicity, or failures to acknowledge each person’s particular identity, most of us want to see change. But how best to achieve that? Well some intriguing new research...

It is estimated that around a fifth of people working in the UK today are disabled in some way. Many of these people report feeling that their employers do a poor job at accommodating their requirements to make their workplaces more inclusive.  Yet the 2010 Equality Act was designed to protect disabled people from ‘discrimination or disadvantage’ in work by placing a legal responsibility on employ...

‘It’s the economy, stupid’. That, famously, was one of the organising principles of Bill Clinton’s campaign for the US presidency in 1992. Thirty years on, amidst a cost of living crisis, economic policy decisions still often dominate politics.  Some of the debates about economic policy relate to questions of fundamental values: how much weight should we place, for example, on the size of the cake...

It almost goes without saying that public opinion matters in a democracy, where leaders can be scrutinised in the free press and held accountable at free and fair elections. But public attitudes matter in authoritarian contexts too – as illustrated by how careful Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is being at the moment to control the media narrative around his war in Ukraine.  So, what role does p...

Uniquely, this week we are discussing both a new publication and a new institution.  The publication is a book called Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again . This book examines the political thought of a group of writers and artists in mid-20th-century Britain, centred around Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, and J.B. Priestley. Their ideas, it argues, offer a vi...

Displacement of civilian populations is a feature of politics in many parts of the world. War is perhaps the most familiar driver of displacement – we have seen that, of course, on a tragic scale in Ukraine in recent months. But other factors lead people to leave their homes too, including government development policies and the effects of climate change.  And displacement also has profound effect...

Climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humans today. Yet politics appears to be failing to deliver the required response.  Students of politics are therefore conducting a wealth of research to understand what’s happening and what could be done better. But is that research actually doing any good? Is it contributing to better outcomes? To explore this topic, UCL Uncovering Politics...

Most of the UK went to the polls last week, and the vote in Northern Ireland was perhaps particularly significant. Next year will mark 25 years since the 1998 Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Northern Ireland after nearly 30 years of conflict. The power-sharing arrangements established by the Agreement have brought many successes, but they are teetering on the edge of colla...

No democracy in the world has yet achieved equal representation for women in its national parliament. So it’s important to understand what could be done to improve the situation.  One long-standing idea is that some electoral systems may be better than others in enabling fairer representation. A new article co-authored by Dr Eleanor Woodhouse , Lecturer in Public Policy in the UCL Department of Po...

Climate change is – as the article we’re discussing this week puts it – ‘the quintessential long-term problem’. Action is needed to avert massive long-term harm. But the steps that are required will generate short-term costs.  Democracies are famously short-termist. Politicians who want to be re-elected don’t like imposing short-term costs on voters. So: can we design democracies better to foster...

Some states are secular, while others are based, to a greater or lesser degree, on religion. The difference matters. Secular states are more likely to respect the diverse perspectives of their citizens and protect a range of social and political rights. So what explains variation in institutional secularism? Why did some state secularize centuries ago, while others underwent a secular shift more r...

We’re looking this week at the political role of courage. The current, dreadful conflict in Ukraine provides numerous extraordinary examples of courage: of civilians who stand up to Russian tanks; of Ukraine’s president, who remains in Kyiv despite manifest personal danger; of anti-war protesters in Russia, who take to the streets though they know they are likely to be arrested and perhaps beaten....