Kate Ferguson co-founded Protection Approaches after working on genocide prevention in Rwanda — and noticing, with some alarm, that the warning signs looked oddly familiar back home. She's a foreign policy strategist working to stop mass violence before it starts, by raising the alarm on how identity grievance is weaponised to cause harm.

She's just finished consulting 250 security and defence experts across Europe on the threats we face, and she comes bearing a dread trio — a homegrown far-right which has "breached thresholds of concern" including a "pogrom in Belfast"; Russian aggression; and a third that would have been unthinkable even a year ago — the United States itself, now "demonstrably practising from an authoritarian playbook."

So what can be done? Should social cohesion be part of our critical infrastructure rather than a "nice to have"? Is the "hollowing out of the BBC" damaging to that cohesion? And is the point of politics to change the world — or is that an old trope?

Please do check out my latest book, A Dead Cat On Your Table – available online and in all good book shops.

@peteryork.bsky.social

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Peter Tatchell is Britain's most recognisable gay rights activist. He traces five decades of culture wars: from a teenage firebrand in 1960s Australia, inspired by the Black civil rights movement, via Communist East Berlin, to today — and "why things are not over by a long shot."

We talk about how LGBT+ rights, and especially trans rights, got turned into frontline ammunition in the modern culture wars. Who's really behind the anti-trans movement? Why Tatchell believes it's being steered from the right. And what the Supreme Court ruling actually says — as opposed to what you've been confidently told it says.

Along the way, Tatchell explains why he thinks the hate and disinformation machine has gone into overdrive — and why he believes we are heading into a "very, very dark period" for democracy.

Please do check out my latest book, A Dead Cat On Your Table – available online and in all good book shops.

@peteryork.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, has been a long-time watcher of the BNP, UKIP, Brexit and now Reform UK — explaining who these new right-wing insurgents really are, and why they're suddenly everywhere.

We find out why "the numbers game matters", why he thinks we're in "the most unstable moment", and explore the great whirlpool of resentment that immigration only partly explains.

Along the way: brand management, manufactured authenticity, and a cautionary tale about what happens when an ambitious academic reads his audience a little too well – "the brand has also become a prison."

But there are reasons to be cheerful too — Farage's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" Reform model may be far less roadworthy than Trump's Rolls Royce.

Please do check out my latest book, A Dead Cat On Your Table – available online and in all good book shops.

@peteryork.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.