Support Our Mission
Read Our Latest Edition
BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

SC: My dear friend and colleague, Mairi Clare Rodgers, said I should experiment with a podcast that creates a space for people to discuss, in long-form, in a comfortable, non-combative way. We are at this moment, culturally, politically – a scary moment – that feels a little bit too much like the 1930s, and that is where the concept of the ‘speakeasy’ came from. There are some very, very polarising things happening on the streets, in mainstream politics even, and people who are interested in resistance need a place to be themselves, to talk critically in a comfortable environment, and that’s the concept behind the podcast.
I hope I am exaggerating but, to my mind – I’m 56 years old and have been quite politically aware since my childhood – I think this is the scariest moment in terms of the rise of the far-right, not just in the UK but internationally.
The populist hard men can beam themselves in from Silicon Valley to a demonstration in central London, can inspire and organise online. Wealth and power is more concentrated than ever – and if you have got wealth and power, and you want to hang on to it in the face of legitimate grievance on the part of millions and millions of people on the planet, the far-right strategy is to divide. It’s an old trick, which helps the wealthy and the powerful – but it doesn’t end well for anybody else.
When you see a pattern developing around the world of these hard, supposedly charismatic, leaders who claim a direct line to the ‘will of the people’, and therefore want to cut across institutions which they consider elite and corrupt, whether it is parliaments and other legislatures, this is what makes it feel like the 1930s to me. And it is not just rhetoric anymore – it is not just the attack on these institutions and on ‘activist lawyers’ and ‘unelected judges’ and ‘the blob’ – we are now seeing it on the streets, spikes in hate crime, and a toxicity of discourse where there isn’t room for reasonable disagreement or discussion.
There isn’t enough of a consensus about the rules of the game. In the end, for me, the difference between a democrat and a populist of left or right is whether you respect fundamental rights and freedoms and the rule of law. When you don’t, anything goes.
The podcast is a series of interviews with people with different democratic political persuasions from me. We’ve got [former SNP Scottish First Minister] Nicola Sturgeon. I’m obviously not a Scottish nationalist – I believe in self-determination, but I would be very sad to see the fracturing of the United Kingdom at a time when, it seems to me, that the planet needs more collectivism rather than fragmentation – but she also speaks about progressive politics, her belief in human rights, her concerns about the climate emergency. So hopefully listeners will hear a reasonable discussion between people with different politics, but with things in common.
She speaks personally about the price of being a very senior woman in politics, which I felt quite moved by because I’ve seen it with other friends and colleagues, like Diane Abbott. The price that people pay for choosing that path, which is not a path I’ve ever been on because I’m an unelected peer… They pay a price in the bruising hatefulness, the misogyny.
We have Charlotte Owen [the then 30-year-old who was appointed as a Conservative peer in 2023] who had a terribly bruising experience when she was first appointed to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson as a former Number 10 special advisor. She faced a really disgusting barrage of misogynistic innuendo and abuse. There were young chaps in the same cohort who were also appointed to the Lords, but the same fuss wasn’t made about that. We have lots of political differences, but what we agree on is Charlotte’s successful campaign, and I hope it will continue, against deepfake pornography.
There are moments of q…