The Future of Solidarity

The third Reith Lecture is on Radio 4 at 9AM Wednesday (today)

My third lecture, given at The Fire Station in Sunderland drops today (assuming you are an avid email opener), the 13th of December. If you are reading this after 10AM and have missed it, fear not - Reith Lectures aren’t just for Xmas, they last forever on BBC Sounds and other competing podcast venues. Or you can catch it at 11PM on R4 on Sunday the 17th or at 7:30PM on BBC World Service on Saturday the 16th.

This was perhaps the most fun to give. A big and important topic, given in a place that bluntly doesn’t usually get a great deal of time and space on the BBC, in a beautiful venue with a very engaged audience. It’s a really fun Q and A and will give those of you who found ‘the great and the good’ in the London lecture too much a very different experience.

The lecture distinguishes solidarity - a shared feeling of ‘us’ - from charity, an act of a fortunate ‘us’ giving to an unfortunate ‘them’. It is a plea to take universalism seriously in social policy - to focus less on means-testing and targeting. But it is also a plea for localism - for universalist policies to managed locally where possible, to take account of local geographic needs. You can judge for yourself how well I managed that dance! I also, with great pride, managed to insert another Crystal Palace reference into a Reith lecture. In doing so, I discovered Tim Davie was also a fellow Eagles fan. So there is a reason to support the BBC.

If you are interested in how we make the Reith Lectures, please do listen to Hugh Levinson and I chatting with the BBC Feedback team here. And the Reith Lectures were also featured on Pick of the Week, as an example of how to give a humorous anecdote. Who knew..?

Finally, if you are interested in more of my work on solidarity, there’s a whole chapter on it in Why Politics Fails.