Origin Story

Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisted. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have changed how we think about these stories. For our final Revisited before Season 10 begins, we look again at anti-vaxxers. Vaccine resistance is as old as vaccines themselves but not until the 2000s did a toxic compound of junk science and media credulity give rise to a serious anti-vax movement. Since we made this episode in June 2024, that movement has gained power in the US with an anti-vaxxer President (Trump) and Health Secretary (Robert F Kennedy Jr). The dreadful result is not just an immediate spike in measles cases but the stifling of preparations for the next pandemic. Here’s the story of how crank paranoia…

Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisted. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have changed how we think about these stories. This week we’re returning to our October 2024 episode about Russell Brand, who is back in the news this week because jury selection has begun in his trial on multiple sexual-offence charges. Obviously we can’t discuss legal proceedings but we can talk about how his rise and fall represents a very modern narrative of radicalisation and/or opportunism. From ubiquitous celebrity to left-wing hero to right-wing conspiracy theorist, Brand is a creature of 21st century media and a warning to the gullible. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and…

This week, while we research a two-parter on the history of libertarianism, we're revisiting the story of the political novelist Ayn Rand. In this episode from 2022 — the first time we chose to focus on an individual rather than an abstract idea — we explore how Rand's extreme views on the self versus the society inspired a whole school of thought but somewhat ruined her life. And we read some very long novels. Enjoy • Support Origin Story on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisited. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have changed how we think about these stories. Our first Revisited episode is The Battle of Cable Street from August 2024. It’s not just because the 80th anniversary of that event falls on 4 October. In light of the emergence of Patriot Platform and other forms of far-right intimidation, it’s a good time to look again at the day a vast anti-fascist alliance stood up to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the East End, and at how popular resistance can spur state action. Hope you enjoy it. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by…

This week we dive into the life and ideas of John Rawls, the most celebrated liberal philosopher of the post-war period. Even in his own lifetime he was compared to Plato and Hobbes, becoming the only figure of our era to enter the canon of Western thought alongside the greatest figures in the philosophical tradition. Rawls' work was a deadly surgical attack on neoliberalism and a rigorous defence of a more progressive form of liberalism, grounded in equality, rights and social justice. His notion of the veil of ignorance is perhaps the single most influential philosophical idea of the 20th Century and one of the most beautiful concepts in political theory. He provided a systematic justification for a centre-left worldview and policy programme, with a firm moral grounding and extremely radical repercussions. We trace his life story, from early childhood tragedy, through the battlefields of the Second World War, to a long and distinguished career in Harvard. We find a quiet, shy, unassuming man, uncomfortable…

Hello listeners. This week’s episode is an audio recording of our live show at the Union Chapel in London on 1 September 2026. This time we did something different and made a live show out of a classic Origin Story narrative. It’s the story of how the Daily Telegraph’s deterioration from grey citadel of High Toryism to feral troll farm mirrors the cognitive decline of conservatism in Britain. In part one we tell the story of the Telegraph. Founded in 1855 by a crank army colonel to pursue an obscure vendetta, it was soon bought by the Levy-Lawson family, who turned into Britain’s liveliest newspaper and the world’s largest. During the 20th century, it became the heart of British conservatism: solidly — sometimes alarmingly — right-wing yet respectable and conscientious. It was proud to be boring: a safe harbour in a changing world. “Was, is, and will be,” its masthead boasted. The Telegraph took a strange turn after 2004, with its acquisition by the Barclay brothers and the rise of online journalism. Drawing…

Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. This time we tell the story of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, the legislation that prohibited local councils from funding the “promotion” of homosexuality and cast a chilling shadow over the lives of gay men and lesbians in the UK for the next 15 years. How did it come about, what were the consequences, and is something similar happening to trans people today? The 1980s were a decade of rampant homophobia, fed by conservative anxieties about progressive education, “loony left” councils and the emergence of HIV/AIDS. One book (Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin) and one London council (Haringey) became the focus of a moral panic that spread like wildfire through the right-wing press and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, with all the hysteria, bigotry and misinformation you would expect. Opposition to children learning about homosexuality in any way featured in the 1987 election campaign and led to the amendment that became Section…

Welcome to another bonus episode of Origin Story, where we look at the short and extraordinary life of the Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). It's a bizarre, tragic tale which weaves together queer history, courtly romance, unending war and the early resistance of parliament against royal power. More than anything, it is the story of the Favourite, that strange underdiscussed role of the leader's key ally. In our modern era, we've seen figures like Dominic Cummings and Morgan McSweeney take this position – operating as the prime minister's chief loyalist and then being used as a sacrificial pawn to placate their critics. We see a very similar arrangement in the 17th Century, albeit in a significantly more sexy way. As Sir Francis Bacon said: The favourite is a "shadow" who can be "offered as a sacrifice to appease the multitude". Come with us back to an era where the modern world is slowly being formed, and see how exuberant, unpredictable, emotional and dramatic the early days of the English parliament truly…

Tickets are flying out of the door for Ian and Dorian’s biggest live show yet at the stunning Union Chapel in London’s sophisticated Islington on Tue 1 Sept. A spectacular Gothic Revival church on Upper Street, the Union Chapel is a breathtaking venue just a few moments’ stroll from Highbury & Islington Tube – and therefore close to Euston and King’s Cross for the Not-London crowd. As well as the Victoria Line, it’s on the Mildmay Overground so whether you’re in leafy West London or sourdough-and-cold-drip-coffee East London you can be there and home with ease.You can buy tickets here, or Patreon supporters get exclusive discount, so now is as good a time as any to sign up: https://www.patreon.com/c/originstorypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. For the first time, we’re revisiting an earlier episode to ask what we got right and what we got wrong about the subject. Just before the July 2024 election we profiled Labour’s PM-in-waiting Keir Starmer and made some cautiously optimistic guesses as to what his government might look like — the promise and the pitfalls. Well, it turned out to be mostly pitfalls. As Starmer steps down and Andy Burnham steps up, we perform the autopsy. Did Starmer have fundamental personal weaknesses that doomed him to failure? What happened to the moral principles and managerial competence that defined his career before he became Labour leader? What mistakes did he make and what opportunities did he miss? Has Starmer killed the theory that a boring technocrat is the antidote to right-wing populism? How did he become so hated? What legacy has he bequeathed to Burnham (it wasn’t all bad news)? How much of this can we blame on Morgan McSweeney? And is it fair to call Keir Starmer the…

Welcome to the finale of season nine of Origin Story. We’re wrapping up the season by telling the thrilling, misunderstood story of the Luddites and how their name became an insult synonymous with ignorance, reaction and fear of progress. You can’t get much more Origin Story than that. It was November 1811 when textile workers in Nottinghamshire first began breaking machinery in the name of a mysterious figure called Ned Ludd. The movement spread through neighbouring counties and reached its dramatic peak in Yorkshire, as these secretive activists waged guerrilla warfare against the factory owners who were destroying their livelihoods. Soon, England was in a frenzy over the Luddite threat. Led by Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval and the decadent Prince Regent, the ruling classes feared a French-style revolution. As Luddite violence escalated from machine-breaking to arson, food riots and assassination attempts, the state responded with spies, torture and show trials. Swathes of industrial England fell…

Welcome to Origin Story. This week we’re doing something different: the history of paranormal investigations and what it says about the relationship between evidence and belief. In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York claimed to be contacting the spirit world. Within a couple of years spiritualism was a popular craze on both sides of the Atlantic, with seances attracting luminaries from Queen Victoria to Charles Darwin. But could it be proven beyond doubt? In 1883, a group of scientists and intellectuals launched the Society for Psychical Research to find out, but from its inception there was tension between the genuine sceptics and the instinctive believers. However many hoaxers they debunked, even the sceptics encountered things they could not rationally explain. The mass grief of the First World War created a new appetite for spiritualism, spearheaded by the world-famous author Arthur Conan Doyle. Meanwhile in North Carolina, J.B. and Louisa Rhine proposed that these uncanny goings on were not…

Welcome to Origin Story and part two of the story of think tanks. Last time we traced the history of two very different varieties: the non-partisan centre for research and policy development and the handsomely-funded vehicle for a political ideology. Now we explain how they shape politics today. In the first half of the show we follow the partisan think tanks into the 21st century with the Koch network’s war on Obama, the Heritage Foundation’s MAGA makeover, the IEA’s role in the Liz Truss catastrophe and the depressing devolution of centre-right think tanks. At the centre of the British story is 55 Tufton Street, the notorious building where climate change deniers cross paths with Eurosceptics and the distinction between think tanks and lobby groups all but collapses. Nice work if you can get it. Then we explain how the more independent-minded think tanks make an essential contribution to developing and analysing policies, keeping alive the original ideal of politically neutral expertise. So what do we talk…

Welcome to Origin Story. This week we explore the world of think tanks, a term that has developed two very different meanings. To many people, it suggests deceptively named and opaquely funded vehicles for the political agendas of right-wing billionaires — think Tufton Street. Yet most of the world’s leading think tanks still cleave to the original intention of producing conscientious research and bold new ideas, independent of political parties. How and when did these paths diverge? The first think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was born in 1910 during a period when governments were increasingly interested in using data and expertise to generate more rational policy-making. Accelerated by the calamitous irrationality of the First World War, this mission produced such influential bodies as Chatham House and the Brookings Institution. The so-called eggheads proved their worth in a crisis, from the New Deal to the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the quintessential think tank (a…

Ever since the birth of evangelical Christianity in the 1730s, believers have disagreed over whether to dedicate themselves to changing society as well as converting individuals. For most of that time, the most activist American Protestants were politically progressive but that all changed in the 1970s thanks to two activist entrepreneurs: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Falwell and Robertson turned televangelism, or the “electric church”, into a lucrative industry, producing celebrity preachers like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. They also had unprecedented political ambitions. Beginning with Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979 and expanding with Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the 1990s, their crusade sought to put social conservatism at the heart of the Republican Party and wage a culture war against so-called “secular humanism”. What Darwinism was to the original fundamentalists of the 1920s, abortion and homosexuality were to the new religious right. Evangelicals gave Republicans their votes in return for…

Welcome to Origin Story, the show about why we are where we are. This week we begin the story of evangelical Christianity and its influence on politics. Starting in the 1730s, Protestants in colonial America replaced the dour strictures of the Puritans with an ecstatic, empowering new creed that promised salvation through conversion: the word evangelical means spreading the good news. Over the next 150 years it swept the country through waves of revivalism, as star preachers like Charles Finney and Dwight Moody professionalised the business of soul-saving. The movement changed Britain, too. Evangelicalism cut across all the major Protestant denominations but believers disagreed over the timing of the prophesied Millennium and therefore whether they should focus on converting individuals or reforming society. Activist followers of the Social Gospel were at the forefront of the fight to end evils like slavery and child labour. It was slavery that caused the formation of a more conservative Southern church. By…

Welcome back to Origin Story and part two of the story of J.K. Rowling. In this episode we turn away from her life story towards her public statements and the information she is consuming. In 2020, Rowling publishes her first full-length statement about her gender-critical beliefs and it becomes her defining issue. We unpack some of the phrases she uses and the books she is reading and we explore what the science says about key issues: safety in trans-inclusive spaces, trans women (and women with Differences in Sex Development) in sports, and healthcare provision for gender-questioning youth. Since 2018 trans people in the UK have faced an enormous backlash: rising prejudice, restricted healthcare, political abandonment and obsessive media hostility. And Rowling has put herself in the forefront. Her tone has become more aggressive and her activism more overt, accelerated by Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. So when HBO announced its ambitious new Harry Potter TV series last year, in the midst of the…

Hello and welcome to Origin Story. This week we begin the story of J.K. Rowling and how the world’s most beloved author became its most divisive. How did she become obsessed with trans rights and how did her colossal wealth and celebrity shape the backlash? We’re telling two parallel stories. One is how Joanne Rowling transformed into J.K. Rowling. The first Harry Potter book comes out of dark times: a shattering bereavement, a terrible marriage, relative poverty and a crushing sense of failure. When it is published in 1997, it changes Rowling’s life beyond recognition: the publishing industry’s equivalent of Beatlemania. By 2000, the attention is overwhelming and the religious right is denouncing her for endorsing witchcraft. By the time she moves into fiction for adults in 2012, her life seems guarded but stable. But then she joins Twitter and becomes very interested in online discourse at the birth of “cancel culture”. The second story is about feminism’s fraught relationship with trans inclusion and the…

Hello and welcome to the final part of the story of European union, in which we finally see the European Union come to pass — and run into trouble. The transition begins with Jacques Delors, a pragmatic idealist in the mould of Jean Monnet, orchestrating Europe’s great leap forward. As the Berlin Wall comes down (and so does Margaret Thatcher), the balance of power shifts from France to a reunited Germany. In 1992, the 12 member states sign the Maastricht Treaty, which turns the EEC into the EU and sets a timetable for a common currency, the euro. This is the peak of European confidence and ambition. As the EU takes on the challenges of assimilating Eastern Europe and achieving monetary union, inertia sets in and Euroscepticism emerges as a political force. The failure to agree a constitution is nothing compared to the eurozone crisis beginning in 2009. The crisis is ethical as well as financial, pitting German bankers against the Greek people and making the EU seem, for the first time, cruelly doctrinaire.…

Welcome back to Origin Story and part two of the story of European union. Last time we left Europe in 1955, with Jean Monnet’s European Coal and Steel Community bringing European nations together without military force for the first time. We pick up the story with another game-changing Europhile, the Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak. He convenes the Messina Conference on the “common market”, which leads in 1957 to the Treaty of Rome and the birth of the European Economic Community. Six nations come together “to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe”. This is a period of both unprecedented economic prosperity and maddening political inertia, as France’s nationalist president Charles de Gaulle slams on the brakes, drives everyone to distraction, and says a furious “Non!” to UK membership. Although Britain has realised at last that it belongs in Europe, it takes a decade of frustration before prime minister Edward Heath can seal the deal. A whopping victory for “Yes” in the…

Hello and welcome to season nine of Origin Story. After last season’s history of socialism, we’re returning to our usual format of taking on a completely different topic each time, and we’re starting with a big one. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the UK voting to leave the EU, we’re telling the three-part story of European union itself: not just the 33-year-old organisation — an incredible achievement that is too easily taken for granted — but the much older concept. We begin by explaining how Europe came to think of itself as an identity as well as a continent. For centuries, Europe was synonymous with something else, whether it be the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church or the values of the Enlightenment. The only efforts to unify its peoples were through imperial domination, from the Pax Romana to Charlemagne to Napoleon. It was the desire to avoid war between nation states that inspired the dream of the United States of Europe, and the cataclysm of the First World War that gave that dream real…

This week’s episode is an edited version of Origin Story Live at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre on Wednesday 15 April 2026. It was a thrill to take the stage in the former terrain of Origin Story regulars such as Jeremy Bentham and John Maynard Keynes. Thanks to everyone who came along or watched the live stream, and to the people who helped make it happen. In part one, Ian unravels Matt Goodwin’s strange journey from ambitious young academic to GB News host, Reform UK candidate and fellow traveller of Viktor Orbán. Was he radicalised by his professional immersion in the far right, did he just follow the prevailing winds to money and influence, or was he always like this? Then Dorian breaks down Goodwin’s book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, in which Enoch Powell meets ChatGPT, London has fallen and good old Britain is being betrayed by something called “suicidal empathy”. As sloppy as it is unpleasant, it positions Goodwin as the UK’s cut-price answer to Stephen Miller but will his unique…

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode. It’s the centenary of the General Strike of May 1926, the most important industrial dispute in British history, but what really happened and did it really change Britain? One strange thing about the General Strike is that it happened when industrial relations, which had reached their fiery nadir before and after the First World War, seemed to be cooling down. But tensions between coal miners and mine owners got so bad that the Trades Union Congress had no choice but to join the fight, even though its leaders did not expect to win. It was a showdown that very few people wanted. The strike began at one minute to midnight on 3 May. The following nine days were intense, exciting and unprecedented. Future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and future fascist Oswald Mosley backed the workers, Evelyn Waugh and the Mitford sisters joined the army of volunteers trying to keep Britain moving, and Virginia Woolf just complained. In some places, the strike became a proxy war between…

The terms introvert and extrovert have never been more popular. People seem to increasingly latch onto them as a core element of their personality, clinging to the personal definition they offer with ever-greater enthusiasm. Humans love to categorise things and there is nothing they like categorising more than themselves. We trace the weird story of these terms back to Vienna, on March 3rd 1907, when the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung first met the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. What follows is a hysterical, combative and sexually charged relationship which left both men in a state of social disarray. But in his efforts to later work out what happened, Jung settled on a personality binary which proved extremely intuitive to the public at large. Are these terms meaningful? Do they have scientific validity? And what are the dangers and advantages of defining ourselves in this way? Let's find out, as we delve into the world of personality types, psychoanalysis and what might genuinely be…

Welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. Sometimes we profile people who are psychologically complex, who have undertaken fascinating intellectual journeys, whose sins and achievements are intertwined in ways that defy simplistic judgements. President Trump’s fiendish chief advisor Stephen Miller is not one of those people. We regret to inform you that it’s Miller Time. Currently the deputy White House chief of staff, Miller has been Trump’s most influential aide for the past decade, steering him towards ever greater extremes of nativism and authoritarianism. He’s been described as Trump’s prime minister, the shadow president, the intellectual engine behind MAGA fascism, and a real-world version of Tolkien’s Grima Wormtongue. To understand the Trump administration, you need to understand Stephen Miller. But where did he come from and why is he still here? In this episode, we explain how Miller emerged from the toxic politics of 1990s California to became an abrasive right-wing troll before he’d even…

Welcome to another between-season bonus episode of Origin Story. This week Ian tells the story of 15-minute cities: the notion that every urban resident should live a 15-minute walk or bike ride away from all essential amenities. How did such a sensible and benign approach to urban planning give birth to a wild conspiracy theory about authoritarianism? We meet Clarence Arthur Perry, the first urban planner to protect city life from the rise of the automobile; Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist who championed mixed-use neighbourhoods in 1960s New York and prevented Robert Moses’ expressway from slicing through downtown Manhattan; and Carlos Moreno, the French-Colombian scientist who invented the 15-minute city in 2015. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo made the policy a cornerstone of her mayoralty and a model for cities around the world. But as the pandemic melted people’s brains, Moreno’s innovation became demonised as a “war on motorists” and, worse, a “Stalinist” plot to confine citizens to their neighbourhoods —…

Origin Story is live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London on Weds 15th April 2026 - tickets selling fast, get yours here Welcome to a between-season bonus episode of Origin Story. We’ve missed you! This one emerged from our three-parter on the history of the Labour Party and one of the burning obsessions of British politics: the faction known as Blue Labour and its ubiquitous founder Maurice Glasman. As Keir Starmer’s government continues to alienate its base in order to chase the same socially conservative voters as Reform UK, fingers are pointing at chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his connections to Blue Labour, turning Glasman into the party’s eminence grise. But how influential is Glasman really? And where did Blue Labour come from? The story begins in 2008, when the financial crisis coincides with the death of Glasman’s mother. The jazz-loving, City-hating, chain-smoking academic and community organiser invents Blue Labour: blue as in sad and blue as in “conservative socialism”. As New Labour falls to…

Welcome to the finale of Origin Story season eight: the story of socialism. Thanks to everybody who has followed our most ambitious season yet, especially those whose support has enabled us to make it. We left the narrative in 1991, with the collapse of the USSR and the so- called “end of history”. This week we’re not telling a new story but looking back on the whole season to reflect on the evolution of socialism over the last two centuries and where it might go from here. We begin by catching up with socialism since 1991, as China embraced “market socialism”, Latin America’s ‘Pink Wave’ rose and fell, and the Western left all but gave up on its dream of building a new economic model. Was the left forced to fight for small victories because the possibility of bringing down capitalism had slipped away? We then return to the beginning of the season and ask if all the most important strands of socialism, from violent revolution to utopian communes, existed in some form by the time Marx and Engels published The…

Welcome to the penultimate episode of Origin story season eight: the story of socialism. We close the book on Soviet communism with the story of how it all came crashing down — what has been called the most unexpected event of the twentieth century. Mikhail Gorbachev’s desire to change his country was a product of the secret speech in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As he climbed the ladder to power, he witnessed the Soviet Union flinch from reform and slide into stagnation and decline. So when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 he sought to rejuvenate the regime with three audacious innovations: perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (openness) and democratisation. It was a punishing task. Old hardliners in the Politburo thought Gorbachev was too radical while his populist arch-rival Boris Yeltsin thought him not daring enough. Gorbachev wanted to end the Cold War and open his country to the world but he did not foresee the fall of the Berlin Wall and the…

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This time, we take a look at hands-down the sexiest revolutionary of socialist history: Che Guevara. Born in Argentina to wealthy but unhappy parents, Ernesto Guevara travelled around Latin America during his youth until he met Fidel Castro in Mexico City. From then on his path was set, following the Cuban nationalist leader into a guerilla campaign in the Sierra Maestra and then into government. He concocted a rare form of socialism which combined Maoist peasant rebellion with pan-Latin American nationalism and Jack Kerouac’s drifter idealism. His fame lies not so much in his actions or his thoughts but his image, specifically the iconic Che photograph, taken by Alberto Korda on March 5th 1960. For decades, it has been put up in student bedrooms and raised above protest marches as an encapsulation of youthful idealism, resistance and social justice. We look at the man behind the image and find a strange, intoxicating bundle of seemingly…

Welcome to the second episode of the week as we conclude the story of the New Left. In part one, we explained the various groups and thinkersthat fed into the New Left’s attempts to reimagine socialism during the 1960s. It all comes to a head in 1968 with a chain reaction of youth-driven street protests and occupations: Paris, London, New York, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo. It’s 1848 all over again, only this time its global and its televised, turning leading activists into overnight celebrities. Everywhere, though, these rebellions end in defeat and fragmentation. In its wake, figures as prominent as John Lennon convince themselves that revolution is imminent even as it becomes vanishingly improbable. The New Left splinters in the 1970s. Some “68ers” enter mainstream politics. Others turn to terrorism. A few plunge into the factional jungle of Maoist and Trotskyist sects. But many more redirect their idealism towards new liberation movements: second-wave feminism, gay rights, racial justice, Third World…

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This time, we’re explaining the New Left, the messy constellation of ideas and movements that came out of the discrediting of Soviet communism 70 years ago and made the left what it is today. The big bang was 1956. Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech made Stalin’s crimes undeniable while the invasion of Hungary disgraced the new regime too. The first New Left was an intellectual effort by disillusioned British ex-communists to develop a new “socialist humanism”: neither Washington nor Moscow nor mainstream social democracy but a revival of socialism’s highest ideals in the post-war world. The New Left was reborn as an international youth movement in the 1960s as the baby boomers came of age and rallied around new issues: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the end of imperialism and the hollow conformity of the affluent society. From London to Paris and Berkeley to Berlin, students were in the vanguard. “We don’t trust anybody over 30,”…

This week’s episode is an edited version of Origin Story Live at the Tabernacle in London on Thursday 13 November. The theme is political insurgents: the politicians and thinkers who are reshaping politics in 2025. In part one we profile two of the most significant intellectuals on the radical right. The Cambridge academic James Orr is senior adviser to Reform UK, friend to JD Vance and networker extraordinaire. Curtis Yarvin is a far-right blogger whose extreme views on race, democracy and “techno-monarchy” are required reading in the Trump administration. Who are they? How did they become so influential? And — yikes! — what do they actually think? In part two we take a look at two young socialist politicians who have shaken up the left this year: the next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and the new “eco-populist” leader of the UK Green Party, Zack Polanski. How have they risen so fast? What are they proposing? And could they be the future of socialism? We also take an axe to some of the buzzphrases…

Welcome to the third and final part of the story of the Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 initiates Labour’s longest period in opposition and its deepest identity crisis: Bennites to the left, SDP defectors to the right. After Michael Foot leads Labour to its worst vote share since 1918, Neil Kinnock takes on the long and painful job of rebuilding the party in the face of Thatcherism. Following another two defeats, the task of modernisation passes to John Smith but his sudden death enables Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to go even further, determined to transform the party and erase the trauma of 1983. Labour’s spectacular 1997 landslide seems to confirm the agenda of New Labour and the nebulous political project known as the Third Way. But its many achievements are limited by its caution, duelling egos and ideological vagueness. Is Labour still a socialist party in any meaningful way or has it disowned too much of its heritage? By the time Brown…

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This week, we continue the tale of the UK Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. It’s 1940 and Clement Attlee’s Labour has joined the wartime coalition with Winston Churchill’s Tories, making it seem for the first time like a natural party of government and paving the way for its surprise 1945 landslide. Despite enormous obstacles at home and abroad, Attlee’s ageing all-stars lay the foundations of post-war Britain, from the NHS to NATO. How did they pull it off? Losing office in 1951 kicks off the wilderness years. Civil war rages between followers of the left-wing titan Nye Bevan and the revisionist Hugh Gaitskell as Labour struggles to find a purpose in a decade of growing affluence and relative consensus. A new socialism of liberty and equality battles with the old socialism of nationalisation while fresh divisions open up over Europe and the Cold War. After 13 years, the shrewd unifier Harold Wilson leads Labour back to power…

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This week, in the year of its 125th anniversary, we begin the tale of the UK Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. “The British Labour Party is an expression of the Socialist movement adapted to British conditions,” wrote Clement Attlee. But British socialism meant different things to different people. When the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900, its socialism was a tense alliance of Marxists and liberals, hard-nosed trade unionists and Fabian intellectuals, puritans and hedonists, pragmatists and romantics. From the start, they were arguing about everything from alcohol to war. It was the job of two remarkable Scotsmen to keep it united: the eccentric idealist Keir Hardie and the canny, charismatic Ramsay MacDonald. The social upheaval of the First World War turned Labour into a mass party which supplanted the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories and took office for the first time in 1924. MacDonald’s…

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle on Thur Nov 13. ⁠Buy tickets here. Welcome to the third and final part of the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin: Terror. It’s 1929 and the age of Stalin has begun. His mission to revolutionise the Soviet economy succeeds at the price of millions of lives: kulaks are murdered en masse while Ukrainians starve in the man-made famine known as the Holodomor. In 1936 he commences the purge known as the Great Terror, which radiates out from the highest levels of the Communist Party to ravage the entire country. Nobody is safe in Stalin’s nightmare state. While communists abroad excuse or actively endorse Stalin’s atrocities, some socialists and ex-communists recognise that this is the antithesis of what socialism should be and sound the alarm. Stalin has no fiercer critic than Trotsky, but his former rival flounders in exile and meets a sticky end. The USSR’s international reputation is complicated by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War. Is Stalin Hitler’s…

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle, London on Thur Nov 13. ⁠Buy tickets here. Welcome back to Origin Story: The Story of Socialism as we resume the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in part two: Power. It’s 1917. The Bolsheviks have seized control of Russia, the world’s first socialist state, but they’re a small party in a very big country, besieged by enemies at home and abroad. No sooner has it extricated itself from the First World War than Russia is plunged into an existentially perilous civil war between the Reds and the Tsarist Whites and, well, everybody else. The war accelerates Russia's transformation into a dictatorship, with one-party rule, a secret police force and a ruthless disregard for human life. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 confirms that the dictatorship of the proletariat will brook no dissent. Meanwhile in Germany, revolutionary hopes are crushed with the murder of German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As other communist uprisings also…

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle, London on Thur 13 Nov. ⁠Buy tickets here. Welcome to Origin Story. The Story of Socialism is our first ever themed season and now we begin our first ever three-part story because there’s just so much to tell: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. Vladimir Lenin’s political journey begins in 1887 when he’s 17 and his older brother is executed for plotting to assassinate the Tsar. As Russian socialism pivots from rural agitation to Marxism, Lenin develops his own version of Marxism: violent revolution led by an elite vanguard rather than the masses, leading to a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat (details TBC). Forced to leave Russia, Lenin wages a power struggle for command of its socialist exiles in Europe, splitting the party into his own aggressive Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks. In the process, he first meets the flamboyant writer and orator Leon Trotsky and the sullen Georgian activist who will become Stalin. After the failure of Russia’s 1905 revolution,…

Welcome back to Season Eight: The Story of Socialism as we conclude the story of Karl Marx and the birth of Marxism. It’s 1849. In the wake of the failed revolutions in Europe, Marx and his wife Jenny arrive in London for a fresh start. But his magnum opus, Capital, is a long time coming due to chronic illness, the loss of three children and recurring money worries. The great critic of capitalism is such a disaster with finances that his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels has to take a job at his father’s textile company in Manchester to keep the project of communism afloat. Then there are the feuds. So many feuds! Eventually, in the 1860s, a flurry of productivity bears fruit. Capital is finally finished (or volume one at least) and Marx becomes head of the International Working Men’s Association, where he wages war against rival socialists and the fearsome anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In 1871, Marx’s response to the doomed experiment of the Paris Commune makes him famous at last — and infamous. He’s…

A spectre is haunting Origin Story — the spectre of Karl Marx. Welcome back to season eight: The Story of Socialism. Last week, we explored the various socialisms that were exciting Europe when Marx was a young man. Now we turn to the man himself, and his close friend and ally Friedrich Engels. The landslide winner of an In Our Time poll to choose the most important philosopher of all time, Marx introduced gigantic new ideas that still inform our thinking whether you’re a Marxist or not. Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was on course to become one of many young German philosophers wrestling with the legacy of Hegel. But when he was frozen out of academia, journalism set him on a more confrontational, activist path. His extraordinary intellect was wrapped up in a spectacularly belligerent personality, addicted to vicious feuds and denunciations. He could start a fight in an empty room. As he moved from Prussia to Paris to Brussels during the 1840s, Marx went on a political journey, too: from liberal to socialist…

Welcome to season eight of Origin Story. This season we’re trying something different: one big narrative across multiple topics. It’s the story of socialism, from the earliest blueprints to the present day, Lenin to Labour, Marx to Mao, Gramsci to Gorbachev and Proudhon to Piketty. We’re talking about the evolution of a powerful idea in all its manifestations and exploring how it came to encompass both Soviet communism and European social democracy. It’s arguably the most earth-shaking political concept of the last 200 years. H.G. Wells summed up early versions of socialism as “a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries, and experiments”. We begin in the wake of the French Revolution with the radical republican Gracchus Babeuf and his “enraged ones” calling for absolute equality. In France, the rebel aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon imagined a progressive secular technocracy while Charles Fourier dreamt of communes in which the human spirit was…

British Chinese compose nearly one per cent of the British population, but they are culturally and politically ignored with precious little representation in politics or television. In this Origin Story special edition, we trace the history of the British Chinese community, from the days of Roman Britain to the present day. Along the way, we see the construction of the first Chinatown in London's Limehouse, at the height of Empire, when ports function as joining-places for the world. We witness the racism that hit Chinese communities during the wars, when fear of 'Yellow Peril' and miscegenation resulted in deportation programmes against the very people who had helped Britain in the fight against Germany. And we follow the second triumphant wave of immigration in the 20th Century, in the restaurant business, as Chinese food helps democratise the practice of eating out in Britain. We then look at the extraordinary accomplishments of the British Chinese in the modern era, particularly in education, culture and…

Welcome back to Origin Story. In this bonus episode Dorian tells the unnervingly relevant story of Enoch Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech. On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West delivered probably the most explosive political speech in British peacetime history, bringing into the mainstream opinions previously confined to the far right. As Keir Starmer discovered, even the faintest echo of the speech is toxic on the left, yet on the right newspaper columnists and politicians like Robert Jenrick are reviving Powell’s rhetoric with impunity. We start by examining Powell’s youth as a brilliant scholar, war hero and ardent imperialist who developed an idiosyncratic version of nationalism. As a junior minister and pioneering neoliberal in the 1950s, he barely mentioned race or immigration but he became increasingly obsessed during the 1960s, and increasingly vocal. Powell contrived his speech to have the biggest possible impact and he succeeded. While he was sacked by Tory…

Welcome back to Origin Story. This bonus episode is something a bit different: a story about the power of music and the music of power. Tortured genius? Stalinist stooge? Undercover dissident? Perhaps no musician better represents the competing demands of art and politics than Dmitri Shostakovich, who died 50 years ago this week. He has been called the most brilliant symphonist of his age and the most controversial composer since Wagner. Shostakovich’s career began with Lenin and ended with Brezhnev but his great antagonist was Stalin, a self-styled music buff and maestro in the art of fear. From symphony to symphony, Shostakovich danced on the edge of a knife. Sometimes he was the Soviet Union’s favourite composer, bathing in privilege and acclaim. At other times he was an “enemy of the people”, bullied into silence and terrified for his life. Nobody knew what Shostakovich’s music was really saying until the posthumous publication of his memoir Testimony made an extraordinary claim that turned all…

What is ICE? Who are these men we see gathered around students and politicians in the US, with their faces covered, wearing unmarked clothing, often throwing people into unmarked cars? Where did this organisation originate? How did it turn into what looks like a militia? And where will its loyalties lie in future if there is a threat to Trump's hold on power? This special edition of Origin Story looks into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a body which was once responsible for tracking undocumented immigrants who were a threat to national security, but has now metastasised into a group which seems to target all immigrants and many US citizens. We track its birth under George Bush Jr, its actions under Barack Obama and then its radicalisation and expansion under Donald Trump. Then we peer into the alarming evidence about its behaviour and its part in Trump's broader agenda, before listing the comparisons with Nazi Germany. Everything you need to know about one of modern America's most disturbing…

Welcome to the grand finale of Origin Story season seven, as we conclude the remarkable story of Martin Luther King Jr. With the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passing of the Voting Rights Act, 1965 marked the zenith of the civil rights movement as a unified, effective force under King’s leadership. The decade-long fight to desegregate the South had given it strategic clarity and mainstream support. After that, things got much trickier as King switched his attention to economic injustice in cities like Chicago and came out against the war in Vietnam. Estranged from President Johnson, challenged by the young firebrands of Black Power, hounded by the FBI and horrified by the despair that fuelled urban riots, King spent the rest of his life on the back foot. In 1968, he staked everything on an ambitious Poor People’s Campaign but his movement had fragmented and public opinion had turned against him. On 4 April, he was shot dead in Memphis. The assassination simplified King into a martyr. We track the…

Welcome to the final topic of Origin Story season seven: the extraordinary life and legacy of Dr Martin Luther King. By Origin Story standards, there’s an unusual moral clarity to this story — a genuinely good man up against genuine horrors — but that doesn’t make it a straightforward one. The mainstream caricature of King as a kindly, colour-blind saint is not just a simplification but a cynical misrepresentation, designed to drain his example of its power. Born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a prominent pastor, King was a brilliant student who developed a sophisticated worldview grounded in both Christianity and philosophy. His Gandhi-inspired belief in nonviolent resistance became central to the civil rights struggle when he was thrust onto the frontlines during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6 and quickly became the most admired black man in America. He was just 27. King’s new role as leader and symbol of the movement was both an honour and a burden. Abused, threatened, assaulted and jailed, he…

Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re discussing the concept of economic growth. Growth is the world’s great obsession. When it’s booming, it makes everything easier. When it stagnates or goes into reverse, everybody panics. But what exactly is it, what drives it and what does it cost us? For most of human history economic growth didn’t exist. The average person was no better off than their distant ancestors. Even when the age of growth began with the Industrial Revolution, nobody knew how to measure it or control it until the 1940s. Enter GDP, which quickly became the most important number in the world despite its creators acknowledging from the start that it was both artificial and deeply flawed. We talk about what GDP does and does not measure and how it has adapted to an increasingly complicated global economy. We meet the economists who created it (hello again, John Maynard Keynes) and those who tried to reform or replace it. Robert F Kennedy claimed in 1968 that GDP “measures everything except that…

Welcome to the first ever episode of Origin Story dedicated to a planet. We’re taking a long look at the place of Mars in the popular imagination, from ancient civilisations to fin de siècle Mars mania to the current techbro obsession with exploration and colonisation. Is there life on Mars? Let’s find out. The ancients associated the red planet with gods of war. With the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, astronomers began to understand Mars better and speculate about its inhabitants. Thanks to the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, the romance of the red planet, and its alleged “canals”, became a craze in the 1890s. H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined the Martians as colonisers and colonised respectively, while luminaries like Nikola Tesla and Francis Galton hatched outlandish schemes to contact them. Science played the killjoy. Even as a new wave of Mars mania swept the post-war world, NASA probes unveiled the reality of a cold, dusty, dead planet. But their findings allowed for a…