Novara Media

Karen Buck, veteran politician and housing campaigner who served as a Labour MP and local councillor, speaks about housing shortages, right-to-buy impacts and enforcement problems. The conversation covers homelessness alongside vast empty homes. Offshore ownership and secrecy hiding property beneficiaries are examined. The story follows a death that exposes policy failures and systemic neglect.

Rana Dasgupta, author and essayist known for long-form historical and political analysis, explores the rise and possible fall of the nation-state. He traces origins from medieval relic politics to capitalist statecraft. The conversation covers deindustrialization, Asia’s resurgence, American imperial strategies, China’s global tactics, and bold futures for liberalism and democracy.

A wide-ranging tour of ecological ideas from Tansley to Guattari and how they shape political thinking. Cultural detours cover psychedelia, pop music and ecofeminism. Discussions trace anti‑colonial tree‑planting, agroecology and social ecology to contemporary Green strategy and where radical left politics might fit.

Susannah Glickman, historian of the military-industrial complex, unpacks how the US military is becoming more intelligence-led and high-tech, borrowing Israeli-style assassination and special-forces tactics. She traces Silicon Valley’s rise in defense, Palantir’s data role, drone hype, supply-chain shortfalls revealed by Ukraine, and how VC, procurement, and politics reshape who wins and what warfare looks like.

John Rapley, political economist and author of Icarus Economics, argues that Western overdevelopment has eroded resilience. He explores how growth meets environmental limits, why wealthy societies can be socially fragile, and what Westerners might learn from stronger everyday practices in poorer countries. The conversation touches on energy, AI vulnerabilities, cashless systems, and the hidden costs of stagnant, unequal growth.

Jason Moore, environmental historian and author, explains how capitalism made nature and labor artificially cheap. He links ultra-processed foods, seed oils, and toxic ecologies to political power and surveillance. Short, sharp takes on food systems, geopolitics of resources, and the rise of security-heavy responses to ecological breakdown.

Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation, explores labour conditions, migrant farmworkers and corporate power in food. He discusses meatpacking union decline, two-tier food systems for rich and poor, commercialization of cannabis edibles, and how subsidies and corporate tactics shaped American agriculture.

Big-picture debates about whether humans are separate from nature and where agency lives in multi-species systems. Cybernetics, systems thinking and feedback loops reshape how politics and ecology interact. Ecofeminism, mutual aid and grassroots restoration show political responses to environmental harm. Cultural touchstones and thinkers from Kropotkin to Guattari frame different pathways for ecological politics.

Charles C. Mann, an American science and environmental writer, narrates sweeping stories of how modern food was made and unmade. He traces guano, gamma-ray wheat mutation, and Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution. He explores huge yields alongside new fragilities: water stress, consolidation of farms, and surprising tech fixes and risks.

Maurice Glasman, Labour peer and founder of Blue Labour known for fusing conservative cultural values with left-wing economics, reflects on New Labour’s moral and political failures. He discusses Mandelson, Epstein-linked scandals, Brexit as a rupture, the hollowing of Labour’s working-class base, community-rooted politics, clashes over gender and identity, and surprising meetings with figures like Steve Bannon.