The British Dream

It was good, but is it good enough? Let’s rip up Jeremy Corbyn’s Conference Speech!

Earlier in the summer the world looked on in horror as Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance border policy led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents. Audio recordings of crying infants and pictures of kids surrounded by border guards could hardly fail to move you.But do we have the moral high ground in the UK? The separation of children from their parents at the hands of the border system is something that goes on in the UK, but it’s much less well known.This week the British Dream talks to Nick Beals from Bail for Immigration Detainees, who tells us the group has tried to help 328 children separated from their parents by the border regime in the last year.

Are we seeing the normalisation of fascism? There's a disturbing pattern of politicians making extreme statements, columnists writing apologia for racism, and far-right figures taking to the airwaves for soft interviews with sycophantic journalists.On the British Dream this week, Simon Childs chats to Hussein Kesvani about what to make of this new reality, and look at how far-right ideology related to mainstream conservatism and gullible journalism.

Remember in the spring when Ireland voted to legalise abortion? People in Northern Ireland do. They remember how everyone looked to Northern Ireland – with its exceptionally harsh abortion laws – and wondered if they would take a similar step.Northern Irish women took to the streets demanding their rights with banners reading “the North Is next”. With the Conservative government being propped up by the anti-abortion Democratic Unionist Party, it felt like the pressure might even topple Theresa May’s government. Then the news cycle moved on, as ever. But today we’re going back there and asking, ‘what happened with that?’Goretti Horgan is Policy Director at ARK, a social policy hub started by researchers at Queen’s University Belfast Ulster University. She’s an activist and she gave The British Dream podcast the lowdown on the fight for women's rights in Northern Ireland.

Grime has gone from a music genre that the police tried to snuff out, to one of Britain’s most in demand cultural exports, all the while maintaining its anti-establishment edge. We spoke to Dan Hancox, author of Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime, about why the genre sounds like a riot that’s about to happen, its adversarial relationship with the state, and its roots in a London taken over by luxury flats and privatised public space. We also chatted about the moral panic currently surrounding Drill and knife crime, and asked whether violent music leads to violence.

When the British people voted to “take back control” and leave the EU, you have to wonder if they were doing so looking forward to passing references to technocratic policy detail filtered through a Westminster melodrama, a sort of Tory Battle Royale played out by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Anna Soubry, with people’s opinions wielded as a weapon to shut down debate. But here we are. As Brexit shudders on, We spoke to Dr Marina Prentoulis, from Another Europe Is Possible, about the politics, the press and the possibilities.