It’s an election year and that can only mean one thing for podcasting: more stale political men politely disagreeing with each other about their stale political opinions. Thankfully, there’s a lot of podcasts out there and that’s not quite all that the medium has to offer. Thanks to support from Sky News and Reduced Listening, we’ve taken a look at some of our favourite political podcasts that are breaking the mould.
Electoral Dysfunction
Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby has enlisted the help of Labour MP Jess Phillips and former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson to tackle a problem.
Trust in politics is low. People feel unrepresented and unheard. The three hosts have come together in an election year in order to work out what politicians can do to actually address their constituents' concerns and not have an “electoral dysfunction” come polling day.
Paper Cuts
“We read the papers so you don’t have to” is the tagline of this fun frolic through the week’s headlines. As fun as the news allows it to be that is.
The Guardian’s Miranda Sawyer welcomes a rotating cast of comedians and journalists every weekday to dissect who’s saying what, where. Brining a lighter touch to the “if you don’t laugh you’ll cry” news cycle is smart and suits listeners who might otherwise feel fatigued by all the doom and gloom.
Page 94: The Private Eye Podcast
Hosted by No Such Thing As A Fish’s Andrew Hunter Murray, and featuring contributions from Private Eye journalists including Ian Hislop, Page 94 takes a similar look at not just the news but the publications writing about it.
Helping Private Eye readers (or anyone who consumes news more broadly) understand why things are presented to the public in a certain way is a genuinely important service and one that isn’t provided often enough in our media.
Pod Save the UK
Nish Kumar and Coco Khan join Paper Cuts in providing a silver lining to the dark cloud that is British politics. Crucially, they believe that better things are possible, and by calling out the people trying their best to stop that happening (as well as celebrating those attempting to change things), they’re bringing us one step closer to that future.
Recent guests include Will Young, Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf and Labour MP Nadia Whittome.
Trendy
Trendy features former Downing St advisor Rachel Wolf and everyone’s favourite political scientist (don’t tell me you know any others) Sir John Curtice to analyse and understand how we feel about all sorts of topics, and how that then feeds into political policy.
It’s an interesting inversion of the usual “here’s the news, here’s what it means for you” format. Instead, Trendy starts with people and how they feel, and takes you all the way through to how that results in the news.
