Helen Thompson is professor of political economy at Cambridge and a regular panellist on Talking Politics.
If the real point of the European Union is to achieve an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, the British have never seriously wanted a place in it. If we follow the logic, Brexit makes the EU a more viable political entity. But the EU has always been about much more than gradual European political unification. Currently, it is set up in a manner intended to enable it to manage...
In the summer of 2005 London was chosen to host the 2012 Olympics and West Ham United were celebrating their return to the Premier League after a two-season absence. Few around the club at that time would have welcomed the prospect of leaving the Boleyn Ground, where they had played since 1904, for a new stadium in Stratford, and no one in the office of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone,...
David, Helen and Catherine get together for the final episode of Talking Politics, to reflect on podcasting through six extraordinary years of politics, and what it means to be ending at the beginning...
For the podcast’s penultimate episode, David talks to Helen about her new book Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a conversation about many of the themes Helen has explored on...
David talks to Shahin Vallee and Chris Bickerton about the upcoming French presidential elections and the Macron years so far. Can anything or anyone stop Macron? Why has French politics moved so far to...
David, Helen and Chris Brooke have one more go at making sense of the tangled web that is British politics. Can Johnson really survive, and even if he does, can his brand ever recover? Is this a scandal,...
David and Helen talk to Shashank Joshi, defence editor at the Economist, about what Vladimir Putin hopes to get out of the Ukraine crisis and what anyone can do to stop him. Is some sort of invasion inevitable?...
David and Helen talk to historian Chris Clark about the 1848 revolutions and what they teach us about political change. What explains the contagiousness of the revolutionary moment? Is it possible to combine...
In a special episode recorded live at the Bristol Festival of Economics, David and Helen talk to Ed Conway, economics editor at Sky News, about the biggest challenges facing the global economy. How will...
Helen and David talk to Cindy Yu, host of the Chinese Whispers podcast, about the trajectory of Chinese politics. What is Beijing’s political strategy for Hong Kong and Taiwan? Is Xi Jinping really a...
David and Helen talk to Jason Bordoff, Dean of the Columbia Climate School and former Special Assistant to Barack Obama, about climate, COP26 and the enormous challenges of the energy transition. How can...
David Runciman and Helen Thompson answer a third round of listener questions, starting with Trump and moving on to where we get our ideas from, what we've learned from all our failed predictions, and whether...
Geopolitics is never untethered from political struggles and the world’s prime mover isn’t located somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, even if so much malignant power has emanated from Europe...
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