WHN: Field trip!
WHN: Field trip!
Sam and James head to Liverpool for a Labour flavoured podcast-on-the-road.
To kick off this week, the first of two questions.
On The Pod
We couldn’t do Conservative Party Conference and not look at Labour, could we? While a train strike hit the last day of the Tories’ event (for the second year in a row…), Labour in Liverpool had no such problem, so we decided to go along to find out how things were going.
Was this a conference full of confidence or complacence? Did delegates seem competent or covetous? We had a go at finding out in our first episode-on-tour.
Leading Us On
Two different conferences, two different party leaders but both men showed a shared ability to follow up their conferences by tying themselves in a good old-fashioned knot.
On LBC, Keir Starmer had a stab at defining the working class. Ah, that British psycho-drama was never going to go well was it? We weren’t far away from working class people being ‘people who work, who are class and, really, if we are getting into it, people who have heads, who have bodies, who are different to the middle because, really, they are never in the middle’.
Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak went on Radio 2 to counter accusations that the list of projects announced to replace HS2 was really a made-up jumble of nonsense put together in a rush by... well… not recognising some of his own announcements, denying that others were actual announcements and in general suggesting the list was “illustrative”. An imaginary utopia of wouldn't-that-be-nice, you could say. On the whole, it didn’t go well, but refusing to be put off is a skill in itself. Even if one of the replacement ‘illustrative’ announcements made actually already opened nine years ago.
What’s Happening… In The World?
When we set this platform up, we chose ‘What’s Happening Now’ as the title because it’s simple and it’s flexible.
Simple to the point of one potential audience member asking on X.com ‘how bored were you to use that?’ but flexible in the way that it can be both big or small. A statement or a question. The sort of question you can ask as you emerge from a two year coma or as you wander into the pub ten minutes late to watch the football. A question we can ask every week about the news in general or a specific topic, whether that be schools or cars or James’ robot house.
This week, it feels like when we ask ‘What’s Happening Now?’ there will only be one topic on all of our minds.
There is one story that is dominating the news, and Palestine-Israel (yes, we’ve put it that way around just for a change) is not one that lends itself to gentle podcast chit-chat.
And it shouldn't.
We set WHN up because we care about the world. There are things we want to talk about and ways we want open up new conversations in fun ways. If we can, we to add different perspectives and value.
We can’t talk about every story and aren’t here to cover things in real-time. There are some stories we aren’t going to go near and some that aren’t relevant for what we want to do.
But when something is this big, this consuming, we can’t look away.
Writing this newsletter this week has felt hard, because there have been times in the last few days where the world has felt heavy and every other news story has seemed insignificant in comparison.
But our view this week isn't that there needs to be a comparison.
It’s that the news this week feels so big because we have common threads knitting us together. That stories of all kinds connect us when we have our shared humanity running through them, that beyond allegiance or sympathies we are able to recognise tragedy and significance. That a story based thousands of miles away makes headlines at home because it shares fundamental aspects of our lives - that the fragility of society, the quality of political leadership and the lives of others all matter. That things can happen beyond our control, but when and where we can, we can make choices to care about the world and to start talking about things, big or small, before it’s too late. We can choose to build a connected world that is defined by shared experiences and an appetite for better, not driven apart by inaction or division.
So, we might not be able to do every story in every way at WHN but this week and beyond remembering those things feels like a good place to start.
What Else Is Happening this week
Looking out of the conference bubble, we talked about three stories on the podcast this week:
A troll move or the best person for the job? Maybe both as Labour hired Boris Johnson’s ex-wife. She gave her side to The Times.
Two big balls planned on the same day with one opening in Las Vegas hosting a U2 spherical spectacle which seems to have gone down well with fans. The other in Stratford? Stalled.
What's Happening Next Week?
We are talking about the news! No, not like we always do. What do you mean ‘all we ever do is talk about the news’? Next week we’ll be talking about not the what, but the how. How does the process work? Is it worth it? What does ‘BBC’ even stand for?