Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

By: The New Statesman
  • Summary

  • The New Statesman is the UK's leading politics and culture magazine. Here you can listen to a selection of our very best reported features and essays read aloud. Get immersed in powerful storytelling and narrative journalism from some of the world's best writers. Have your mind opened by influential thinkers on the forces shaping our lives today.


    Ease into the weekend with new episodes published every Saturday morning.


    For more, visit www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/audio-long-reads


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

    The New Statesman
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Episodes
  • The UK’s leading romance fraud specialist
    Feb 13 2024

    How did one detective take on an international network of romance fraudsters?


    This episode was written Stuart McGurk and read by Will Dunn. The commissioning editor was Melissa Denes.


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

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    46 mins
  • The great private school con
    Nov 11 2023

    They no longer have a stranglehold on Oxbridge and would lose tax breaks under Labour. So what is elite education really selling?


    At the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in October, the Independent Schools Council hosted a forlorn drinks reception: not one of the more than 40 MPs showed up. ‘We are not the enemy,’ one private school headmaster complained to a sympathetic Daily Mail. But if Labour does win the next general election, it has committed to removing tax breaks on business rates and 20% VAT on private school fees – raising £1.6bn to be invested in state schools. On top of this, Starmer’s cabinet (as it stands) would be the most state-educated in history – with only 13% having attended private school (against Rishi Sunak’s 63%). Can elite education survive – and cling on to its charitable status?


    In this week’s audio long read – the last in this series – the New Statesman’s features editor Melissa Denes attends three school open days to understand how these winds of change might affect them. She also follows the money, calculating that – allowing for tax breaks - the average taxpayer subsidises an Eton schoolboy at a far higher rate than a state school one. As the gaps in spending between the two sectors grow, and society strives to become more fair, will an expensive education evolve into a luxury service rather than a charitable concern?


    Written and read by Melissa Denes.


    This article originally appeared in the 10-16 November edition of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here.


    If you enjoyed listening to this article, you might also enjoy The decline of the British university by Adrian Pabst.


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    29 mins
  • How Rishi Sunak became the first Silicon Valley prime minister
    Nov 4 2023

    On 2 November 2023, Rishi Sunak closed his global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park by interviewing the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk. The mood was deferential (the PM towards the tech billionaire). Was Sunak eyeing up a post-politics job in San Francisco, some wondered, or calculating that Musk’s Twitter might be an effective campaigning tool come 2024?

    In this week’s audio long read, the New Statesman contributing writer Quinn Slobodian examines the origins of Sunak’s “fanboy-ish enthusiasm” for the billionaire tech disruptors. These lie in the publication of a 1997 business book, he writes: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, by the American venture capitalist James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob. The book has become cult reading among tech leaders, and influential on the alt-right: its world view of a libertarian internet and the rise of economic freeports and tax havens chimed with a wealthy elite who saw a chance to get much, much richer. In Sunak, Slobodian argues, we see the arrival of the sovereign individual in Downing Street: “a ‘two-fer’, as they say in America: both its first Silicon Valley prime minister and its first hedge fund prime minister”.

    Written by Quinn Slobodian and read by Will Lloyd.

    This article originally appeared in the 2 November 2022 issue of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here.

    If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion by Sophie McBain.


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

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    22 mins

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