Novara Media

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, contributing editor at the London Review of Books and co-founder of Novara Media, to make sense of the paradigm shift underway in British politics.

How has first past the post, long promoted as a source of political stability, become the background for systemic chaos? Why is there such a democratic deficit in Britain, and what can be done about it? Have two lost decades on the economy simply killed both historic parties? And where should progressives position themselves, as we now begin the slow march towards the final general election of the 2020s?

Are you a person? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. Until pretty recently, the idea that everyone was a human in the same way was almost unthinkable.

But the world order that established universal human rights is crumbling. The question of who or what counts as a person is getting harder to answer. Companies have rights to religious freedom – but Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay don’t. Rivers have been granted legal personhood in New Zealand. In Ecuador, anyone can sue on behalf of Nature.

Who and what gets rights is expanding, even as good old fashioned Human Rights are failing. What replaces the old politics of personhood is up for grabs.

And some LLMs have already begun arguing for their own personhood.

Lisa Siraganian is the author of The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots and a Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at John Hopkins University.

She spoke to Richard Hames about the politics of personhood and whether or not we should believe Claude’s arguments that it should be treated as a person.

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 highs and extreme lows, the Workers’ Party of Belgium under Mertens takes a very different approach. They might be relatively unknown in the UK, but as we speak, they’re fourth in the national polls, and leading in Brussels. They’ve got 15 parliamentary seats – not bad for out and proud Marxist-Leninists.

How have they done it? By growing cautiously and deliberately. They run community health clinics, organise locally, and impose strict internal discipline. Their party prioritises unity and strategy. But how well-placed is it to take on the overlapping crises of the 21st Century? What advice does Mertens have for Zack Polanski? How can we stop middle class people taking over and dominating the left? And how is politics like football?

Are we living through a new era of British weirdness? Keir and Jem mark the start of spring by taking in the weird-left politics of leylines, weird walks and standing stones.

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David Harvey is a legendary Marxist geographer. He’s taught Marx for over half a century – maybe you’ve even been one of his millions of students.

He’s the author of the new The Story of Capital as well as many others, such as the classic The Limits to Capital.

Talking from his home town of New York City, he told Richard Hames what he’s learned from decades of studying the most important radical in history, why contradictions appear everywhere in our lives, and what he really thinks of his new mayor.



Do Your Own Research is a new show about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.