Heart Yoga Radio

In this second episode of our series on reason, I take a broad brush to outline 

some of the main antecedents to the so-called European Enlightenment, also know as 'The Age of Reason'. I focus on the rise of experimental science in the contexts of church power and violence against those who contradict its doctrines, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and advances in mathematics. The figures of Descartes, Galileo and Newton loom large but Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Kepler and others also have parts. [Free. 44 minutes.]

This episode of the current affairs series offers comment on the suspension of Jewish socialists and critical left voices in Constituency Parties from the Labour Party on very dubious grounds. I conclude that this isn't about anti-semitism or racism in general but a purge of the left from the party. The suspicion is compounded by the soliciting of funding from billionaires by party leadership. I go on to relate this fragmentation to the fragmentary forces expressing themselves through Brexit as the clock ticks down. On the hopeful side, I mention the world's biggest strike of farmers and workers in India which involved 250 million people! [Free. 36 minutes.]

 

In this podcast, I consider the proposition that the UK economy conforms to Mussolini's characterisation of fascism as the complete entanglement of corporate and state power. I do this through a close comparison of the corporate document produced by the Serco Institute, Lessons learned from the collapse of Carillion (2018) and the UK Government document The Outsourcing Playbook (2020). The resonance between the two documents is sufficient to intensify the suspicion that corporations and government are bed-fellows and dangerously so. A side-effect of this investigation is to reveal the purely ideological character of the Tory government's espousal of neoliberalism. [Free. 57 minutes.]

This episode of Interesting Times gives a close reading of the main features of The EHRC Report Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. I take issue with the epistemological lacunae in the report whilst concluding that should the Labour Party implement its legal requirements and recommendation, it will have unimpeachable complaints processes in place for dealing with complaints of antisemitism which may throw an unflattering light on the other UK parties. I note that the contents of the report are being grossly distorted in the MSM. I move on to discuss the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party. [Free. 1 hour 5 minutes.]

In this podcast, I examine some current examples of the entanglement of state, media and corporate power in the UK. I focus on questions asked in parliament of The Secretary of State for Health by Richard Burgon MP about the role of outsourcing corporation Serco in the COVID 19 pandemic [asked on 16/10/20]. I particularly light upon the Minister of Health's former role as 'Serco's chief spin doctor' which looks like a classic case of the revolving door.  I also draw attention to other examples of this phenomenon as well as drawing out the wide connections of  The Prime Minister's new press secretary which suggest that a rather cosy cabal sits at the heart of government. [Free. 28 minutes.]

In this podcast, I ask the question, "Are the US and UK fascist?" I attempt to address this question by checking if any of the features I identified in the first podcast of this series are observable in the current situations in the UK and the US. [I leave aside the matter of the economy for a future podcast.] I conclude that many of the elements of fascism are present and that some are venerable, others incipient and some are being actively cultivated. I suggest briefly what needs to be done about this dangerous situation. [Free. 1 hour 2 mins.]

In this first of a series on fascism, I identify eleven prominent features of the historical forms of fascism of Hitler's Germany  and Mussolini's Italy, describe them and show how they inter-relate.  I make the point that the features can give rise to varied surface appearances and that we shouldn't expect future manifestations of the 'syndrome' to look like Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. I propose to see, in future podcasts of this series, to see if we find any of the crucial feature incipient or actually present in the contemporary situation of the USA and the UK.  [Free. 54 minutes.]

In this podcast, we argue that patriotism is ideological, irrational, based on arbitrary boundaries, implicated in the weaponisation of history, employed by dead-cat culture wars, and rooted in a pathological narcissism. We suggest how those afflicted with it might return to health. [Free. 27 minutes.]

In this podcast, we investigate why and how socialism has become a dirty word through the operations of propaganda and ideology. This naturally entails giving a characterisation of socialism, which we do, starting with the observation that it isn't one thing and that the word has a range of meanings. We conclude that the ideological war has to be fought alongside concrete organisation and that values cannot be bracketed out of the conversation even as we offer robust materialist analysis. [Free. 50 minutes.]

This podcast deals with the A-level 'results' crisis and the protests the government decision to implement an algorithm to determine grades (in the absence of actual exams) and therefore access to university places. This decision brought the inequitable nature of access to the goods of higher education along socio-economic class lines into very sharp focus. Students who had fallen foul of this further example of Tory government incompetence staged impressive protests, which, alongside pressure from teachers' unions and parents lead to  the English government backing down, having sworn they wouldn't. [The devolved governments had already done the right thing.] We argue that the student action was significant and signals hope. [Free. 25 minutes.]