Origin Story

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 policies but this quid pro quo was complicated by broken promises, overreach and scandal. The movement and the party developed a symbiotic relationship that proved mutually corrupting. Once evangelicals threw themselves behind the strikingly ungodly Donald Trump, conservatism seemed to overtake Christianity. Even as evangelical churches boom in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the American movement is losing support and influence, turning off young people with its intolerant dogma. Perhaps evangelicals were right to keep politics at arm’s length. How responsible are Falwell and Robertson for our present era of conspiracy theories and culture wars? Did the fundamentalist tradition ultimately prevail or is this something else? What place is there now for liberal evangelicals? What happened to the big-tent message of Billy Graham and has evangelicalism today betrayed its roots in its quest for political power? And what influence is it having on politics in the UK? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985) • Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954) • D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989) • Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992) • Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005) • Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025) • Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950) • Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980) • ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995) • Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017) • Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922) • Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) • Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) • Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018) • Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021) • Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024) • Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) • George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006) • Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991) • Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996) • Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976) Films and podcasts • The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000) • The Eyes of Tammy Faye, written by Abe Sylvia and directed by Michael Showalter (2021) • Inherit the Wind, written by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith and directed by Stanley Kramer (1960) • The Testament of Ann Lee, written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet and directed by Mona Fastvold (2025) • Things Fell Apart: 1000 Dolls, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (9 November 2021) • Things Fell Apart: Dirty Books, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (16 November 2021) • Things Fell Apart: A Miracle, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (23 November 2021) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

09/06/2026 • 84:30

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 the early twentieth century, factional conflicts were piling up: over social reform, Biblical scholarship, the theory of evolution. Some evangelicals felt that there were effectively two religions, with liberals (or modernists) pitted against conservatives (or fundamentalists). The fundamentalists were gathering force until 1925, when Tennessee prosecuted a teacher named John Scopes for teaching Darwinism. A national media event, the trial made fundamentalism appear intolerant, ignorant and absurd, leading to decades of retreat and quiet rebuilding. America’s post-war evangelical megastar was Billy Graham, whose canny big-tent messaging and horror of controversy chimed with President Eisenhower’s tolerant civic religion. But through radio, television and bestselling books, the new fundamentalists were laying the ground for a culture war. A string of controversies in the 1970s revealed a much more militant and aggressive form of Christianity that was determined to transform not just evangelicalism but all of America. Why did evangelicalism become the dominant American religion and what part did British thinkers play? Who were the charismatic men and women who spread the word? Why did the battle between modernists and fundamentalists become so bitter, and how did the fundamentalists recover from the humiliation of the Scopes trial? How does the ambition to reform society complicate the task of conversion? And how did Martin Luther King inadvertently inspire the fundamentalists to finally become a political force? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985) • Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954) • D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989) • Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992) • Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005) • Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025) • Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950) • Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980) • ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995) • Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017) • Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922) • Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) • Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) • Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018) • Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021) • Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024) • Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) • George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006) • Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991) • Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996) • Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976) Films and podcasts • The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

03/06/2026 • 93:07

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 Trump administration’s war on trans Americans and the UK Supreme Court’s explosive ruling on gender identity, it became a battleground. It’s hard to separate the art from the artist when supporting the art means funding the artist’s activism. How did Rowling move from the appearance of moderation to explicit militancy and how does that align with her professed values? Are her arguments supported by the research? How did anti-trans sentiment go mainstream so quickly? What are the ethics of continuing to consume Rowling’s work? And is the viciousness of right-wing transphobia causing some people to think twice about the consequences of their beliefs? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list Articles • O. Rose Broderick – ‘Evidence Undermines “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” Claims’, Scientific American (24 August 2023) • Cass Review: Final Report (2024)• Christina Cauterucci – ‘Impeccable Timing, Pamela Paul!’, Slate (16 February 2023) • Theara Coleman – ‘A timeline of JK Rowling’s anti-trans shift’, The Week US (April 2026) • Matt Craig – ‘J.K. Rowling is a Billionaire — Again’, Forbes (30 May 2025) • Laura Dattaro – ‘Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity’, The Transmitter (14 September 2020) • Caroline Davies – ‘JK Rowling’s journey from Harry Potter creator to gender-critical campaigner’, Guardian (18 April 2025) • Sarah Ditum et al. – ‘An Oral History of the Gender War’, The Radical Notion (Autumn/Winter 2024) • Alona Ferber – ‘Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”’, New Statesman (22 September 2020) • Molly Fischer – ‘Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?’, The Cut (22 December 2020) • Amelia Hansford – ‘JK Rowling sets up “women’s fund” to support gender-critical legal cases’, Pink News (26 May 2025) • Nick Hilton – ‘JK Rowling, Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist’, New Statesman (15 January 2024) • Katherine J. Igoe – ‘JK Rowling’s Under-the-Radar Book Series Gives a Clear Picture of Her Beliefs’, Marie Claire (5 August 2020) • Jessica Kant – ‘Anatomy of a Moral Panic’, jessk.org (3 February 2024) • Jessica Kant – ‘Welcome to the anti-trans outrage factory’, jessk.org (8 February 2026) • Alice McCool – ‘How the US Christian Right and Anti-Abortion Lobbyists are Reshaping NHS Policy’, Byline Times (2 April 2026) • Parker Molloy – ‘The IOC’s New Policy Isn’t Really a Trans Story’, The Present Age (26 March 2026) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

27/05/2026 • 87:31

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 concept of gender identity. This has divided feminists since the second wave in the 1970s but it came to the fore in 2010s as trans visibility reached an all-time high and so-called “gender critical” feminists rallied to oppose the introduction of self-ID legislation. Disparate issues such as prisons, sports and youth healthcare were pulled into a movement that fundamentally denied gender identity. In the US, anti-trans activism was another wedge issue for social conservatives but in the UK it emerged from the centre left — and that’s where Rowling came in. This is also a story about social media and what happens when a disagreement about civil rights plays out on Twitter. That’s where, in 2017, Rowling begins quietly expressing interest in anti-trans voices. After some initial denials, she breaks cover in 2019 by supporting Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who claims to have lost her job due to her gender critical views. Overnight, this one tweet transforms Rowling’s reputation, mainstreaming the movement while dismaying many Harry Potter fans and horrifying trans people. This is the rupture. There is no turning back. What can Rowling’s early life tell us about the path she has taken over the last decade? What is her relationship to fame and fandom? Why did the question of trans rights become all-consuming? What do gender critical feminists believe? And why can people not even agree on what words to use? It’s a story of obsession, polarisation, celebrity, Twitter and how people can radically change. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list Articles • Decca Aitkenhead – ‘JK Rowling: ‘The worst that can happen is that everyone says,‘That’s shockingly bad”’, The Guardian (22 September 2012) • Julie Bindel – ‘Gender benders beware’, The Guardian (31 January 2004) • Jackson Bird – ‘“Harry Potter” Helped Me Come Out as Trans, But J.K. Rowling Disappointed Me’, New York Times (21 December 2019) • Theara Coleman – ‘A timeline of JK Rowling’s anti-trans shift’, The Week US (April 2026) • Caroline Davies – ‘JK Rowling’s journey from Harry Potter creator to gender-critical campaigner’, Guardian (18 April 2025) • Sarah Ditum et al. – ‘An Oral History of the Gender War’, The Radical Notion (Autumn/Winter 2024) • Alona Ferber – ‘Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”’, New Statesman (22 September 2020) • Molly Fischer – ‘Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?’, The Cut (22 December 2020) • Simon Hattenstone – ‘Harry, Jessie and Me’, The Guardian (8 July 2000) • Paris Lees – ‘On Germaine Greer and the Hypocrisy of the “Left”’, Vice (20 November 2015) • Eve Livingston – ‘How an Online Forum for Moms Became a Toxic Hotbed of Transphobia’, Vice (6 December 2018) • Dorian Lynskey – ‘The Burchill Ultimatum’, 33 Revolutions Per Minute blog (14 January 2013) • Ian Parker – ‘Mugglemarch’, New Yorker (24 September 2012) • Aja Romano – ‘Is J.K. Rowling transphobic? Let’s let her speak for herself.’, Vox (30 May 2025) • J.K. Rowling – ‘Text of J.K. Rowling’s Speech’, Harvard Gazette (5 June 2008) • Amia Srinivasan – ‘Who Lost the Sex Wars’, New Yorker (6 September 2021) Books • Hannah Barnes – Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (2023) • Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) • Shon Faye – The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (2021) • Helen Joyce – Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality (2021) • Sean Smith – J.K. Rowling: A Biography (2001) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

20/05/2026 • 69:45

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. Delors wails that it is “killing Europe”. Eurozone drama and anti-immigrant populism make 2016 an ominous year for the UK to vote on whether to remain in the EU. The “Yes!” of 1975 becomes an angry “No!” And yet the chaos of Brexit shows other restive nations what there is to lose. Perhaps it is existential danger, from Trump and Putin’s anti-European nationalism to populism and the pandemic, that makes the project feel essential despite everything. Perhaps the EU is remembering what it stands against, and therefore what it is for. Did the end of the Cold War actually make life harder for the European project? Why, after 1992, did the EU add members but lose momentum? What weaknesses were exposed by the eurozone crisis? How did the question of membership come to consume and derange British politics? Did it take the shock of Brexit to finally inspire mass Europhilia in Britain? Is Europe rediscovering its purpose in hard times? And why is the remarkable, hard-won achievement of European unity so easy to take for granted? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Anonymous – ‘Europe: Then It Will Live...’, Time (6 October 1961) • Roderick Beaton – Europe: A New History (2026) • Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi – Crusade of Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement (1943) • W.B. Curry – The Case for Federal Union (1939) • House of Commons – Schuman Plan debate (27 June 1950) • Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1991) • Morgan Jones – No Second Chances: The Inside Story of the Campaign for a Second EU Referendum (2026) • Tony Judt – A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (1996) • Tony Judt – Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) • Tom McTague – Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025) • Jean Monnet – Memoirs (1978) • George Orwell – ‘Toward European Unity’ (1947) • Fintan O’Toole – Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) • Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli – The Ventotene Manifesto (1941) • Robert Saunders – Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018) • Martin Sustrik – ‘Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat’, LessWrong (20 March 2021) • Simon Usherwood and John Pinder – The European Union: A Very Short Introduction: Fourth Edition (2018) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

13/05/2026 • 83:23

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 1975 referendum seems like the last word on the matter, but there’s trouble ahead — and not just in Britain. By 1980, the EEC has added only three new member states and made its first tentative steps towards monetary union. The great visionaries Kalergi and Monnet have passed away. The UK’s new prime minister Margaret Thatcher looks set to become the next De Gaulle. And the EEC is wrestling with huge challenges like decision-making, agriculture, regional inequality and the accession of poorer nations emerging from authoritarianism. We end with the arrival of Jacques Delors and the next great leap forwards: at last, a true European Union is on the cards. How did Spaak convince European leaders to turn a coal-and-steel arrangement into a proper economic community? Why was Charles de Gaulle so determined to sabotage the alliance he sought to lead? Why did Britain finally decide to come off the sidelines of Europe and how did it become a politically explosive issue? What did Europe learn about the perils of stagnation? And what faultlines in the project are we still dealing with today? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Anonymous – ‘Europe: Then It Will Live...’, Time (6 October 1961) • Roderick Beaton – Europe: A New History (2026) • Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi – Crusade of Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement (1943) • W.B. Curry – The Case for Federal Union (1939) • House of Commons – Schuman Plan debate (27 June 1950) • Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1991) • Tony Judt – A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (1996) • Tony Judt – Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) • Tom McTague – Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025) • Jean Monnet – Memoirs (1978) • George Orwell – ‘Toward European Unity’ (1947) • Fintan O’Toole – Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) • Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli – The Ventotene Manifesto (1941) • Robert Saunders – Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018) • Martin Sustrik – ‘Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat’, LessWrong (20 March 2021) • Simon Usherwood and John Pinder – The European Union: A Very Short Introduction: Fourth Edition (2018) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

06/05/2026 • 69:18

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 urgency. We meet two extraordinary and visionary men who dedicated their lives to bringing Europe together. Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the so-called grandfather of the European Union, was an Austrian-Japanese aristocrat and ardent internationalist whose Pan-European Movement kept the dream alive between the wars, inspiring the likes of Einstein, Freud and Churchill. Jean Monnet was the brandy merchant, diplomat and wartime fixer who came out of the Second World War with a serious plan to realise it: the European Coal and Steel Community. Churchill, who co-founded the Council of Europe, famously said that Britain should be “with Europe but not of it”. This ambivalence kept Britain outside the European project for more than 20 years but the real story of this period is the psychodrama between France and Germany: eternal enemies who became tense allies. We close part one in 1955, when the political aftermath of the war is finally resolved but the trauma still shapes Europe’s fears and desires. What did it mean to be European before the twentieth century? Did it always take a war to force nations to consider cooperation? Why was Kalergi such an influential figure and why does he still inspire far-right conspiracy theories? How did Monnet use the shock of the Second World War, and the seemingly mundane issue of coal and steel production, to set Europe on the road to union? And was Britain right to be sceptical or simply deluded? It’s an epic story of how war and peace turned utopian dreams into political reality. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Anonymous – ‘Europe: Then It Will Live...’, Time (6 October 1961) • Roderick Beaton – Europe: A New History (2026) • Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi – Crusade of Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement (1943) • W.B. Curry – The Case for Federal Union (1939) • House of Commons – Schuman Plan debate (27 June 1950) • Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1991) • Tony Judt – A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (1996) • Tony Judt – Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) • Tom McTague – Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025) • Jean Monnet – Memoirs (1978) • George Orwell – ‘Toward European Unity’ (1947) • Fintan O’Toole – Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) • Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli – The Ventotene Manifesto (1941) • Robert Saunders – Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018) • Martin Sustrik – ‘Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat’, LessWrong (20 March 2021) • Simon Usherwood and John Pinder – The European Union: A Very Short Introduction: Fourth Edition (2018) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

29/04/2026 • 83:49

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 charmlessness scupper his political aspirations? Goodwin predicted that the “elites” (ie, anyone who disagrees with him) would hate his book and who are we to disappoint him? In part two, we take a much-needed mind bath and each select five films that we think illuminate the recurring themes we discuss in Origin Story, from Batman Begins to All the President’s Men. Finally, we take some questions, both political and personal, from our wonderful audience. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • James Bloodworth – ‘Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment’, Prospect (16 July 2025) • Daniel Boffey – ‘“It’s about ego’: Matt Goodwin’s journey from far-right expert to firebrand Reform candidate’, Guardian (30 January 2026) • Josh Glancy – ‘The reinvention of Matt Goodwin, from professor to Reform radical’, The Times (31 January 2026) • Matt Goodwin – Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity (2026) • Sam Leith – ‘The Illusion and Delusion of Matt Goodwin’, Spectator (30 March 2026) • John Merrick – ‘Matt Goodwin’s intellectual suicide’, New Statesman (24 March 2026) • Joe Mulhall – ‘The Opportunist Extremist: The Strange Radicalisation of Matt Goodwin’, Hope Not Hate (2025) • Mark Sellman – ‘Matt Goodwin accused of AI blunders in new book on migration’, The Times (26 March 2026) • Andy Twelves – ‘Did Matthew Goodwin use AI to write his book?, Spectator (24 March 2026) • Andy Twelves debates Matt Goodwin, GB News (27 March 2026) • Julia Carrie Wong – ‘Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy’, Guardian (8 April 2025) • Cathy Young – ‘The Bizarre Right-Wing War on... Empathy?’, The Bulwark (21 April 2025) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

22/04/2026 • 106:35

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 communists and fascists. Meanwhile, the BBC faced the first existential crisis of its short life, struggling to maintain impartiality while under the threat of a government takeover. The cast of characters is a kind of Origin Story all-stars, including prime minister Stanley Baldwin, chancellor and propagandist Winston Churchill, Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, trade union heavyweight Ernest Bevin, BBC chief John Reith and Liberal peace-maker Herbert Samuel. The strike ended on 12 May because the TUC surrendered, to the dismay of many workers. At the time, it seemed like an unmitigated defeat for the unions, a humiliation for the Labour Party and a vindication for Baldwin’s Tories. But the long-term consequences were unpredictable and the strike’s legacy is still up for debate. How did the General Strike become inevitable when almost everybody was desperate to avoid it? What were those nine days like for people on both sides of the barricades? How did the BBC survive? Could the unions have won with different leaders or was it an impossible battle from the start? Why did a Tory victory lead so quickly to a Labour government and a stronger TUC? And why was Churchill such a dick about it? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Stanley Baldwin – Prime Minister’s Statement, Hansard (3 May 1926) • David Brandon – The General Strike 1926: A New History (2023) • A. J. Cook – The Nine Days: The Story of the General Strike Told by the Miners’ Secretary (1927) • David Hendy – The BBC: A People’s History (2022) • Roy Jenkins – Churchill (2001) • Keith Laybourn – The General Strike of 1926 (1993) • Martin Pugh – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005) • Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010) • Julian Symons – The General Strike (1957) • David Torrance – The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain (2026) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

08/04/2026 • 85:13

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 the single most preposterous intellectual dispute in the history of ideas. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Peter Geyer – Extraversion – Introversion: what C.G. Jung meant and how contemporaries responded, AusAPT Biennial Conference Melbourne, Australia – October 25–27, 2012 • Carl Gustav Jung – "The Association Method", The American Journal of Psychology 1910-04: Vol 21 Iss 2 • Carl Gustav Jung – Psychological Types, Princeton University Press, 1971 • D. L. Johnson, J. S. Wiebe, S. M. Gold, N. C. Andreasen – Cerebral blood flow and personality: A positron emission tomography study, American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 252–257 (1999). • Florencio (Jun) Kabigting, Jr - The Discovery and Evolution of the Big Five of Personality, GNOSI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis, Volume 4, Issue 3, June 2021 • Frank McLynn – Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography, St Martin's Press 1996. • The Invention of 'Introvert', Words Matter podcast, episode 51 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

25/03/2026 • 58:36

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 graduated from middle school. At high school in Santa Monica and college in North Carolina, it was the same story: no friends but plenty of attention. On the one hand, Miller revelled in provoking the hatred of his peers. On the other, he sincerely believed that immigration was a mortal threat to America, despite being the descendant of Jewish refugees who owed their lives to American hospitality. After graduation, Miller headed to Washington, winding up as an attack dog for elf-faced xenophobe Senator Jeff Sessions and a conduit between the far right and mainstream conservatism. When Trump entered the political scene in 2015, Miller saw the ideal vehicle for his white nationalist monomania. While most Republicans opposed illegal immigration, Miller demonised legal immigration, too. The most inhumane of Trump’s policies — child separation, the Muslim ban, ICE’s reign of terror — have his fingerprints all over them. Learning from the setbacks of Trump’s first term, Miller has evolved into Washington’s most ruthless operator and arguably the most powerful unelected official in the world. Look into almost any corner of Trumpland, from January 6 to Project 2025, or Elon Musk’s political donations to Nicolas Maduro’s removal, and you’ll find Stephen Miller. How did Miller become such an enduringly powerful influence on such a fickle president? Is he, in fact, the real force behind the Trump administration’s fascist impulses? What do his obsessions owe to the long history of American nativism? Could he outlast Trump and expand his mission to transform America or has he already overreached? And does he have any redeeming features whatsoever? • See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre/events/2026/apr/origin-story-live • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list Books and articles • Eitan Arom – ‘From Hebrew school to halls of power: Stephen Miller’s unlikely journey’, Jewish Journal (15 March 2017) • Jonathan Blitzer – ‘How Stephen Miller Single-Handedly Got the U.S. to Accept Fewer Refugees’, The New Yorker (13 October 2017) • Jonathan Blitzer – ‘How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession’, The New Yorker (21 February 2020) • Sarah Churchwell – Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream (2018) • Nancy Cook – ‘Trump’s immigration push is Stephen Miller’s dream come true’, Politico, 31 October 2018 • McKay Coppins – ‘Trump’s Right-Hand Troll’, The Atlantic (28 May 2018) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

11/03/2026 • 78:21

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 — permanent lockdown. By the end of 2023, Rishi Sunak’s government was fluently speaking the language of online conspiracy theorists. What constitutes the ideal urban environment? How can planning make residents happier, healthier and safer? Why is the psychology of driving so weird? How did paranoia about 15-minute cities fuse with lockdown hysteria, anti-vax thinking, climate change denial and far-right fantasies to turn Moreno into “public enemy number one”? And will the 15-minute city prevail anyway? • See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre/events/2026/apr/origin-story-live • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Anonymous – ‘City of “cells” seen created by auto era’, New York Times (4 August 2029) • Anonymous – ‘A guide to 15-minute cities: why are they so controversial?’, University of the Built Environment (2 December 2024) • Joseph Giovanni – ‘Apartment builders return to prewar design’, New York Times (13 October 1986) • Tiffany Hsu – ‘He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s “Public Enemy No. 1.”’, New York Times (28 March 2023) • Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) • The Life Well Lived, Episode 32, podcast (19 August 2020) • Douglas Martin – ‘Jane Jacobs, Urban Activist, Is Dead at 89’, New York Times (25 April 2006) • Georgia Pozoukidou and Zoi Chatziyiannaki – ‘15-Minute City: Decomposing the New Urban Planning Eutopia’, MDPI (17 January 2021) • Georgia Pozoukidou and Margarita Andelidou – ‘Urban Planning in the 15-Minute City: Revisited under Sustainable and Smart City Developments until 2030’, MDPI (12 October 2022) • Pallavi Sethi – ‘The Telegraph misrepresents 15-minute cities’, LSE (2 February 2026) • Camilla Turner – ‘Labour opens door to “Stalinist” 15- minute cities across Britain’, Telegraph (24 January 2026) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

25/02/2026 • 66:09

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 pieces, Glasman’s maverick vision of Labour’s long history and possible future intrigues heavyweights from across the party. He’s elevated from obscurity to the House of Lords by Ed Miliband but explodes on the launchpad after some provocative statements about immigration and Europe. Amid accusations of racism, misogyny and toxic nostalgia, Blue Labour Mark 1 burns out. When Blue Labour resurfaces with a vengeance in 2025, it has been thoroughly radicalised by a decade of Brexit and right-wing populism. Having been JD Vance’s personal guest at the second inauguration of Donald Trump, Glasman is now praising MAGA while waging all-out war on immigrants, liberals and the so-called “lanyard class”. Original Blue Labourite Marc Stears calls Blue Labour Mark 2 “a clear and present danger to our politics”. How did Blue Labour lurch from the party’s soft left to its hard right? Why do so many of the people who once found Glasman’s ideas stimulating now find them horrifying? Is Blue Labour, then and now, a symptom of a party in intellectual crisis? What exactly is Glasman’s connection to Morgan McSweeney and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood? And is the rogue peer really as significant as he, and his enemies, like to make out? Reading list Books Rowenna Davis – Tangled Up in Blue (2011) Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst – Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White – The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox (2011) Maurice Glasman – Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good (2022) Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire – Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer (2025) Articles • Philip Collins – ‘Maurice Glasman and the origins of Blue Labour’, Prospect (24 February 2025) • Julian Coman – ‘Maurice Glasman, architect of Blue Labour: “Labour needs to be itself again”’, The Observer (25 September 2022) • Rachel Cooke – ‘Maurice Glasman: Labour’s Trump Card’, The Observer (25 April 2025) • Ethan Croft – ‘Blue Labour is fighting for its future’, The New Statesman (26 November 2025) • Annabel Denham - Lord Glasman: ‘Shabana is like Elizabeth I – devoted to her job. She’s utterly unique’, The Telegraph (23 November 2025) • Jonathan Derbyshire – ‘Voice of the Heartlands’, The New Statesman (7 April 2011) • Maurice Glasman - Maurice Glasman: my Blue Labour vision can defeat the coalition, The Guardian (24 April 2011) • Toby Helm and Julian Coman – ‘Maurice Glasman – the peer plotting Labour’s new strategy from his flat’, The Observer (16 January 2011) • Preet Kaur Gill, ‘Labour Must Go Blue’, The Telegraph (6 January 2026) • Dan Hodges – ‘Exclusive: the end of Blue Labour’, The New Statesman (20 July 2011) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Chris Jones and Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

04/02/2026 • 90:11

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 Communist Manifesto in 1848. Can socialism be strictly defined or is it a broad tradition encompassing multiple different visions? And how does it relate to communism, left-wing populism or social democracy? We explore some of the obstacles that repeatedly prevent socialists from achieving their goals, including factions, personality cults, cranks, authoritarians and the romance of defeat — most of which were recently illustrated by the fiasco of Your Party. Finally, we take stock of socialism’s achievements, including many of the rights we now take for granted. Has socialism been more successful as a means of critiquing and moderating capitalism than replacing it? So, what is socialism? Can one word really describe Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Zarah Sultana and Zohran Mamdani? How has a creed dedicated to solidarity and collective liberation produced so much rancour and oppression? Why are “temporary” dictatorships never temporary? Is social democracy really socialism? Will we ever see another socialist revolution or will that energy be sucked up by the populist right? And is socialism’s tremendous optimism about human nature both its greatest strength and its greatest flaw? Thanks again for listening to the story of socialism. It’s been a journey. We’ll see you in 2026 for some bonus episodes while we start work on season nine. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story • Head to⁠ nakedwines.co.uk/origin to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory • Support Origin Story on Patreon • See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre/events/2026/apr/origin-story-live • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

20/12/2025 • 99:48

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 disintegration of the Warsaw Pact in 1989. He certainly didn’t want the USSR itself to come undone two years later. But the desire for change that he had unleashed could not be tamed. By 1991, Gorbachev was lionised abroad and loathed at home. A failed coup attempt set off a rapid chain of events that ended not just his leadership but the Communist Party and the USSR itself. In trying to save his country, he ended up enabling its destruction. The era of world history that began in 1917 was over. Why did the Soviet Union prove impossible to reform? Did Gorbachev move too fast or too slowly? How significant was his vicious feud with Yeltsin? Did the US bungle the USSR’s transition to a capitalist democracy and misread the collapse of its rival superpower? What did this do to the hopes of socialists around the world? And how do the tumultuous events of 1985-91 still shape the world today? • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story • Head to⁠ nakedwines.co.uk/origin to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory • Support Origin Story on Patreon • See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre/events/2026/apr/origin-story-live • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Sven Beckert – Capitalism: A Global History (2025) • Francis Fukuyama – ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989) • Anna Funder – Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (2004) • Masha Gessen – The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017) • Mikhail Gorbachev – Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987) • Leslie Holmes – Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009) • Stephen Kotkin – Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (2001) • Serhii Plokhy – The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014) • Robert Service – Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007) • Tom Stoppard – Rock’n’Roll (2006) • William Taubman – Gorbachev: His Life and Times (2017) • Mikhail Zygar – The Dark Side of the Earth: How the Soviet Union Collapsed but Remained (2025) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

17/12/2025 • 94:46

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 contradictory elements: a poet executioner, a cold-hearted idealist, a sociopath bohemian, and much more besides.  • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠ • Head to⁠ ⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership • New Origin Story merch! ​​https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠YouTube • See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026. Reading list Jon Lee Anderson – Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life Che Guevara – Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58 (1963) https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/reminiscences/index.htm Che Guevara and Fidel Castro – Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm Che Guevara – The Motorcycle Diaries Che Guevara – Guerrilla Warfare Mark Kurlansky – 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2004) Michael Newman – Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020) Andrew Sinclair – Che Guevara (1998) FiIm club Evita, directed by Alan Parker The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles  Che Part One and Part Two, directed by Steven Soderbergh Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo 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

10/12/2025 • 92:20

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 solidarity. We explain how the theories of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci became a lodestar for the left decades after his death — a new approach to changing society. The New Left may have failed to mount a political revolt but it succeeded in redrawing the parameters of socialism beyond class struggle. The left of today is its legacy. Why did the thrilling upheavals of 1968 fall so short? What led so many people to expect a revolution? How did Gramsci become the most important socialist thinker of the modern era? Was toxic disunity inevitable? And how did the New Left ultimately succeed, despite backlashes, setbacks and self-imposed wounds, in changing the world? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list Histories • Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024) • Bryan Burrough – Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015) • Max Elbaum – Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (2002) • Todd Gitlin – The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage: Revised Edition (1993) • Vivian Gornick – The Romance of American Communism (1977) • Joachim C. Häberlen – Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counter-Culture in Post-War Europe (2023) • Michael Kazin – American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011) • Mark Kurlansky – 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2004) • Dorian Lynskey – 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) • William L. O’Neill – The New Left: A History (2001) • Rick Perlstein – Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008) • Terence Renaud – New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition (2021) • Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright – Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (1979) • Roger Simon – Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction: Third Edition (2015) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

06/12/2025 • 72:46

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,” they joked, but we take a look at three older thinkers whose ideas shaped the movement. The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse diagnosed the West as rotten and called for a new alliance of outsiders — students, minorities, Third World revolutionaries — to redeem it. The radical French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon sought the decolonisation of not just countries but minds, by any means necessary. And China’s Mao Zedong, the pioneer of guerrilla warfare, positioned himself at the epicentre of the movement for global revolution, even as his own crimes at home rivalled Stalin’s. By the end of 1967, the student movement was turning from protest to resistance, with a view to overturning the whole system, but it was also beginning to splinter. The upheavals of 1968 would be the making, and the breaking, of the New Left. Was the New Left ever a coherent socialist project or just a fragile dissident coalition? How did the first New Left pave the way for the movement that swept the world? What fuelled its accelerating radicalism in the mid-60s? How did students who loathed Stalin end up venerating dictators like Mao and Ho Chi Minh? And in rejecting the fatal errors of the Old Left, did the New Left create their own? For scheduling reasons we’re releasing both parts this week — part two will be with you on Saturday. • Head to⁠ ⁠⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list Histories • David Aaronovitch – Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists (2016) • Bryan Burrough – Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015) • David Caute – Fanon (1970) • Max Elbaum – Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (2002) • Todd Gitlin – The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage: Revised Edition (1993) • Vivian Gornick – The Romance of American Communism (1977) • Joachim C. Häberlen – Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counter-Culture in Post-War Europe (2023) • Stuart Jeffries – Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016) • Michael Kazin – American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

03/12/2025 • 65:04

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 that are making political discourse dumber, from “optics” to the “woke right”. And we answer some questions from the audience. If you missed the show and the livestream, or if you just want to relive the “magic”, dive in. • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list James Orr • Nafeez Ahmed – ‘Cambridge Faculty of Divinity Ignores Demands for Inquiry Into Peter Thiel’s Far-Right Influence’, Byline Times (23 December 2021) • Robert Crampton – ‘James Orr: JD Vance is just a normal guy who likes his beers’, The Times (15 August 2025) • Zoltán Kottász – ‘“No civilisation has invited invaders in and put them up in four-star hotels”: James Orr’, European Conservative (13 August 2025) • Marie Le Conte – ‘James Orr: Reform’s polished extremist’, The New World (27 October 2025) • Charles Moore – ‘Perverted liberalism has left to neo-Marxism, perverted patriotism may yet lead to neo-fascism’, Daily Telegraph (15 August 2025) • James Orr – ‘Faith, Family, Flag, Freedom’ (2023) • Radical with Amol Rajan, Britain’s New Right: Could Reform Replace the Tories? (Dr James Orr), BBC (2 August 2025) • Noah Vickers – ‘James Orr: “This New Nation That’s Emerging Is Really No Nation At All’, The House (4 September 2025) Curtis Yarvin • Sam Adler-Bell – ‘The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right’, The New Republic (2 December 2021) • David Brooks – ‘The Terrifying Future of the American Right’, The Atlantic (18 November 2021) • Ava Kafman – ‘Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America’, The New Yorker (2 June 2025) • Jemima Kelly – ‘Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right’, Financial Times (8 August 2025) • Matt McManus – ‘Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy’, Commonweal (27 January 2023) • David Marchese – ‘The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening’, The New York Times (18 January 2025) • Corey Pein – ‘The Moldbug Variations’, The Baffler (9 October 2017) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

26/11/2025 • 122:46

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 becomes PM in 2007, New Labour is exhausted and rudderless. History repeats itself: another heavy defeat, another pivot to the left. When Jeremy Corbyn replaces Ed Miliband, the left is in charge for the first time in 80 years — the revenge of the Bennites — but Labour’s fortunes are hostage to the chaos of Brexit. An impressive advance in 2017 turns into a crushing humiliation in 2019. New leader Keir Starmer mounts a speedy recovery but soon finds himself desperately unpopular: accused of squandering a remarkable comeback by lacking vision and waging an unprecedented war against the left. With new challengers to the left and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK threatening to form the most right-wing government in British history, the stakes are once again existentially high. How did Thatcherism cast Labour into the wilderness? How did Neil Kinnock make the party viable again? Did Tony Blair ever develop a coherent theory of progressive politics? Could Jeremy Corbyn ever have succeeded? Why do Labour’s left and right keep making the same mistakes? What can Labour’s history tell us about Keir Starmer’s current problems? And is it still a party of democratic socialism? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list Histories • Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024) • Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024) • Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024) • Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022) • Owen Jones – This Land: The Struggle for the Left (2020) • David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999) • John O’Farrell – Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter (1998) • Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire - Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020) • Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010) • Andrew Rawnsley – Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (2001) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

19/11/2025 • 94:05

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 and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins leads a liberalising revolution in British life. But is social democracy still socialism? If 1970 is an unexpected defeat, then 1974 is an unexpected victory —and a very mixed blessing. Wilson and his successor James Callaghan preside over five years of crisis and precarity as the post-war consensus cracks and crumbles. The born-again socialist Tony Benn and the liberal Europhile Roy Jenkins represent two poles of an increasingly fractious party. When Margaret Thatcher sweeps to power in 1979, Labour returns to the wilderness and faces its worst identity crisis yet. Why was the Second World War the making of the Labour Party? Who, or what, killed the post-war consensus? How did Labour governments navigate one crisis after another? How did its theory of socialism evolve to meet a changing electorate? And why does every Labour government leave the left disappointed? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list Histories and Biographies • Andy Beckett – When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009) • Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024) • John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016) • John Campbell – Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (2015) • Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024) • Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024) • Michael Foot – Aneurin Bevan: A Biography: Volume Two: 1945-1960 (1966) • Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022) • Jam Tomorrow podcast, written and presented by Ros Taylor (2023-24) • Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1992) • David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999) • Ben Pimlott – Harold Wilson (1993) • Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010) • Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson (2019) • Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn (2021) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

12/11/2025 • 96:23

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 minority government lasted for just over eight months but it proved that Labour could be a respectable party of government and not reckless “wild men” under the spell of Moscow. MacDonald returned to Number 10 in 1929 but his second government was capsized by the Wall Street Crash and ended two years later in rupture, betrayal and trauma. While some Labour MPs joined MacDonald’s National Government, most lost their seats, leaving the surviving leadership troika of George Lansbury, Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps to rebuild the party amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and rising fascism. The challenge was existential. In 1935, Lansbury was felled by his untimely pacifism and Attlee took the job that nobody predicted he would hold for the next 20 years. We conclude, as tradition dictates, on the eve of the Second World War: the cataclysm that will be the making of the Labour Party. Why did British socialism break from Marx? What different traditions did Labour pull together and how did Hardie and MacDonald make them cohere? How did MacDonald go from hero to villain? Has the Labour Party always been at war with itself? And — pub quiz! — which four Labour leaders had the first name James? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included. • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list Histories and Biographies • John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016) • Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024) • Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022) • Bob Holman – Keir Hardie: Labour’s Greatest Hero? (2010) • David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999) • Henry Pelling – The Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900: Second Edition (1965) • Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010) • Donald Sassoon – One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1996) • Andrew Thorpe – A History of the British Labour Party: Fourth Edition (2015) • David Torrance – The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government (2024) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

05/11/2025 • 91:57

• 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 worst enemy, his gullible enabler or his unlikely friend? Turns out it’s all three. Stalin’s murderous paranoia fails him just once: he ignores warnings that Hitler will break the Nazi-Soviet Pact and launch an invasion in 1941. The war claims as many as 27 million Soviet lives. Victorious, Stalin sets about strangling hopes of post-war liberalisation and taking control of Eastern Europe — the Cold War begins. Trapped in his cult of personality and endless suspicions, he seems set to launch a new, antisemitic purge in 1953 until death mercifully intervenes. He leaves behind a powerful but traumatised country, a very long way from the hopes of 1917. How much of what the USSR became can be pinned on Stalin’s disastrous personality? What was it like to live and die under his regime? What was the relationship between economics and mass murder? How did the Second World War transform Stalin? How similar were Stalinism and Nazism, the two faces of totalitarianism? And why did so many western communists become accomplices to terror? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠ • Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠ • New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠ • Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ • See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026. Reading list • Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) • Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2003) • Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (2012) • Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) • Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938) • Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (2008, first published 1968) • The Death of Stalin, co-written and directed by Armando Iannucci (2017) • Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020) • Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955) • Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007) • Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977) • Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Essays (2011) • Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2008) • Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017) • Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940) • Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s • Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019) • Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (1938) • Mr Jones, written by Andrea Chalupa and directed by Agnieszka Holland (2019) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

29/10/2025 • 96:07

• 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 fail, Trotsky’s dream of world revolution fades and Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” prevails. As Lenin’s health collapses, a succession battle between Stalin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks begins that will last for most of the decade. It ends in 1929 with Stalin triumphant, Trotsky in exile, the dead Lenin a kind of deity, and the USSR’s age of terror ready to begin. Could the progress of the revolution have been different without the brutal chaos of the Civil War or was tyranny always part of the plan? How did Stalin outwit his rivals to take over from Lenin, and how did Trotsky blow it? Why didn’t communist revolutions succeed anywhere else but Russia? How was the new regime perceived by socialists around the world? And did Rosa Luxemburg, more than anyone, represent the humane, democratic socialism that might have been? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938) • Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (1954) • Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (1959) • Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020) • Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955) • Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988) • Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) • Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017) • Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019) • Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981) • Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) • Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000) • Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004) • Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009) • Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism (1939) • Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: Against Kautsky (1920) • Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994) • H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920) • Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

22/10/2025 • 91:41

• 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, Lenin tightens his grip on the movement. In 1907, the socialists of the Second International pledge not to fight each other in a European war but the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg predicts that nationalism will trump class solidarity when it comes to the crunch. She’s right. When the First World War begins in 1914, socialists take up arms and the Second International implodes.  The war also finishes off the teetering Tsarist regime in February 1917 and a Provisional Government of liberals and socialists takes over, but it’s doomed from the start. Lenin races to Petrograd, where he reconnects with Trotsky and Stalin and convinces the Bolsheviks to stage a second revolution. In October, Petrograd revolts, the government caves in and Lenin takes charge of a vast empire of 125 million people — the world’s first socialist regime. Leninism has triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat can begin. What was Leninism? How did one man redefine Russian Marxism and squash his rivals? How did he see the distinction between socialism and communism? What role did the very different personalities of Trotsky and Stalin play on the road to revolution? Was it only the war that made revolution possible, let alone inevitable? Who predicted years in advance that Bolshevism would mean tyranny? And is this really want Marx wanted? Join us as we begin one of the most earth-shaking stories of the 20 th century • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921 (1954) • Ian Dunt, How to be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020) • Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988) • Oleg V Khlevniuk, Stalin: New biography of a dictator (2015) • V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902) • V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ (aka the April Theses) (1917) • V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917) • Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981) • Kevin Morgan, ‘Rummaging in Trotsky’s dustbin or what does the left need with history?’ (2003) • John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) • Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000) • Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004) • Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009) • Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932) • Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994) • Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

15/10/2025 • 91:04

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 the “Red Doctor” accused of orchestrating a vast communist conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist. But then he falls quiet, retreating from political activism and writing relatively little. When he dies in 1883, there are only 11 mourners at his funeral. It is left to Engels to simplify and spread the tenets of Marxism, revolutionising European socialism. Where did Capital succeed and fail? What did he get right and wrong about capitalism and why was he so vague about the future of communism? What does Marx’s clash with Bakunin tell us about the dangerous flaws in his theory? Did Engels rewrite Marxism in the process of popularising it? And has any great writer ever been as bad with deadlines as Marx? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978) • John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997) • Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953) • GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938) • Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975) • Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009) • In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005) • In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022) • Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888) • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) • Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) • Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) • Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894) • Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) • Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891) • Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918) • Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001) • Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction: Second Edition (2018) • Jonthan Sperber, Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life (2013) • Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016) • Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition (1978) • Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999) • Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

08/10/2025 • 83:00

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 to head of the Communist League. Along the way, he built the basic framework of Marxism: the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the value of labour, the volatile, insatiable energy of capitalism, and the dialectical progress of history. It was nothing less than a new way of understanding the world. Marx’s first phase culminated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year that revolution swept the great cities of Europe. Explaining its failure was the first task of Marx’s next phase as he left the continent for good, settled in London and embarked on the torturous process of writing his masterwork, Capital. How did Marx become a communist? What did he owe to Hegel? Why was his friendship with Engels so essential? Why was he more dedicated to waging war on his former friends than his obvious enemies? Which rival socialist called him “the tapeworm of socialism”? And what exactly is dialectical materialism anyway? “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx wrote. “The point is to change it.” This is how he began to change it. • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978) • John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997) • Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953) • GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938) • Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975) • Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009) • In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005) • In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022) • Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888) • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) • Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) • Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) • Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894) • Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) • Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891) • Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

01/10/2025 • 88:47

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 liberated from drudgery and oppression. In the UK, the businessman Robert Owen modelled a new society based on cooperation and the fair exchange of labour. These so-called “utopian socialists” inspired numerous attempts to build a better world in miniature. The 1830s and 1840s produced an explosion of new words to make sense of immense social change: socialism, communism, anarchism, capitalism. Thinkers like the utopian Étienne Cabet, the anarchist Joseph Proudhon and the politician Louis Blanc introduced concepts that are with us to this day, while the scholar Lorenz von Stein was the first to ask: what is the difference between socialism and communism anyway? (We’ll come back to this.) Out on the streets, Louis Blanqui championed revolutionary violence. And in 1848, actual revolution broke out in the great cities of Europe. Soaking up all these ideas and developing their own version of communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the subjects of our next two episodes. But even as Marxism swept Europe at the end of the century, the American journalist Edward Bellamy revived utopian socialism and made it more popular than ever. That dream refused to die.  What unites all these disparate visions that called themselves socialism? How did they feed into both Marxism and the Labour Party? How did America become the world’s biggest laboratory for socialist experiments? Why did they fail? And can a change in the economic system really transform human nature? Join us as we begin the epic story of socialism. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888, OUP edition 2007) • James Boyle, What Is Socialism? (1912) • Étienne Cabet, The Voyage to Icaria (1839) • G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959) • G.D.H Cole: Socialism in Evolution (1938) • Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) • Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009) • William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890) • Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020) • John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870) • Betrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918) • Robert Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007) • George Bernard Shaw et al, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889) • Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016) • H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908) • Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) • Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

24/09/2025 • 92:25

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 the economy. And we start to tease apart a richer, deeper story about multicultural Britain, one which is much more varied and surprising than people allow for in the barren conversation about immigration we read in the newspapers every day. Support Origin Story on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod Reading list • William Poole, The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687-88, British Library Journal, volume 2015, article 9 • Earle Gale, Chinese pathfinders paved the way in UK hundreds of years ago, China Daily • Marc Horne, Extraordinary tale of first Chinese Scotsman, The Times • Anonymous, William Macao • Sylvia Hahn, Stanley Nadel (eds) Asian Migrants in Europe: Transcultural Connections • Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present  • Anonymous, Liverpool Chinatown History • Jody-Lan Castle, Looking for my Shanghai father, BBC.co.uk • Anonymous, London by ethnicity: Analysis, The Guardian • Emily Thomas, British Chinese people say racism against them is 'ignored', BBC.co.uk • John Hills et al, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.  • Tze Ming Mok and Lucinda Platt, All look the same? Diversity of labour market outcomes of Chinese ethnic group populations in the UK, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies • Zain Mohyuddin and Sophie Stowers, Minorities Report: The Attitudes of Britain's Ethnic Minority Population, UK in a Changing Europe • Anon, Chinese ethnic group: facts and figures, Gov.uk • Anonymous, Ethnicity pay gaps, UK: 2012 to 2022, ONS• Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

03/09/2025 • 64:52

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 leader Ted Heath and denounced as an evil race-baiter by the establishment (even The Beatles took a shot), he became the most popular politician in Britain almost overnight. It was the first eruption of what we now know as right-wing populism and its aftershocks extended from Rock Against Racism and no-platforming to the Great Replacement Theory and Brexit. How did one speech poison British politics? What led Powell to deliver it? What can it teach us about the timeless tricks of anti-immigrant oratory? Did he merely activate the British public’s latent racism or actively feed it? What lessons have politicians failed to learn about how to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment? And why are Britain’s elites more tolerant of overt racism in 2025 than they were in 1968? Support Origin Story on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod Reading list • Anonymous, ‘An Evil Speech’, The Times (22 April 1968) • Anonymous, ‘Coloured Family Attacked’, The Times (1 May 1968) • Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969) • Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998) • Tom McTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025) • Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Black Britain’s Darkest Hour’, The Guardian (2008) • Caroline Moorhead, ‘A Would-Be Leader Deserted by Destiny’, The Times (12 May 1975) • Enoch Powell, the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, 20 April 1968 • J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, edited by John Wood (1969) • Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970) • Michael Savage, ‘Fifty years on, what is the legacy of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech?’, The Observer (2018) • Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (1977) • Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (1996) • Evan Smith, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (2020) • Bill Smithies and Peter Fiddick, Enoch Powell on Immigration (1969)Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

20/08/2025 • 85:41