Downstream – Novara Media Podcasts

In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: an investigation into the toxic depths of America’s food industry. Twenty five years later, the book remains an urgent intervention, as much for what it says about workers’ rights as for our agricultural systems and dietary health. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar talks to Eric Schlosser […]

Just a week ago, the architect of Starmer’s rise to power, Morgan McSweeney, resigned over his connections to Peter Mandelson, after further proof of Mandelson’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein emerged in the newest batch of files released by the US Department of Justice. According to this week’s guest, this scandal isn’t an anomaly, but an […]

When it comes to the relationship between capitalism and crime, those on the left generally think of exploitation. People often turn to crime, so the thinking goes, because they can’t make ends meet by legitimate means. Whatever your views on that framing, there is also another – far less discussed – connection between capitalism and […]

Over the past three years, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people has become a flash point for freedom of speech in the West. Expressing solidarity with Palestinians has given Western governments an excuse to crack down on dissenters. There has been intimidation and job insecurity at one end of the scale, through to brutal […]

This week, Donald Trump continued his streak of threatening tariffs against any country that opposes him, increasing the odds of an escalating trade war and further destabilising the global economic system. But according to this week’s guest, the system is in desperate need of reform. Indeed, she thinks without a complete structural overhaul, it will […]

Our guest this week was born in 1943, in what was then British India – modern day Pakistan. Unlike most, who have learned history through books and second-hand sources, he has witnessed first-hand a great deal of the 20th and 21st centuries. Tariq Ali founded Verso Books, the leading left-wing publishing house in Britain, as well […]

It has been a bellicose start to 2026, with the US army kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and threatening to annex Greenland, putting many more nations, including Mexico and Colombia, on high alert. On Downstream this week is investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who’s best known for helping Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA’s global surveillance […]

After ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ on October 7th, a specific narrative quickly emerged and pervaded the entire Western mainstream media. Namely, that unprecedented horrors were committed against the state of Israel and that whatever way it responded was justified. Any deviation from this narrative was quickly shut down. In the intervening years, the British state has […]

Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani joined each other on 17th December for a special end-of-year Downstream, wrapping up the year in politics.

Norman Finkelstein is one of the west’s leading anti-Zionist scholars. The son of Holocaust survivors, he has spent his life studying and critiquing Israel’s assault on Palestine, decades before it became socially acceptable to do so. Yet despite having dedicated his career to it, by the day before Hamas’ attack in October 2023, Norman had […]

Since Hamas launched its assault on October 7th, 2023, the group has become synonymous with evil in large parts of the Western media. Condemnation has come at the expense of critical engagement with the group’s actions, objectives, and history, leaving a vacuum that has been filled with racist assumptions and conspiracy theories. Tareq Baconi is […]

Did you know that the standard of Google searches has actually gotten worse over recent years? Once you think about it, it makes sense. Highly effective search means fewer searches overall. And fewer searches means less ad revenue. The financial basis of Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company, is, of course, digital advertising. Which means […]

Whether you love or loathe his tactics, it’s hard to deny the disruptive impact that Roger Hallam has had on British politics via the activist organisations he has led, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. He joins Ash Sarkar fresh from his latest stint in prison, where he wrote a treatise for Your Party that […]

Support for the Green party in Britain has been steadily rising for the past few decades. However, few predicted that when Zack Polanski took office as Green party leader in September, membership would surge from 70,000 to 150,000 members in a matter of months. According to the latest polling, the party’s share of the vote […]

At Novara, we focus on the trends that are remaking the world and affecting our lives: technological development and automation, multipolarity, the demise of an American-led world order and the rise of China. On Downstream this week is a man whose work draws together all of these themes: former World Bank macroeconomist and leading expert […]

Investigative journalist Paul Holden has spent the last four years digging into the political machinations that brought Keir Starmer’s Labour Party into office – findings that propel his powerful 2025 book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together and the Crisis of British Democracy. He tells Ash Sarkar about the cache of leaked emails that revealed the […]

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, then a very young political scientist, declared that history was over. He wrote a book with the same title just a couple of years later. The Cold War had finished, the USSR had collapsed, liberal democracy and market capitalism reigned supreme, and it wasn’t going to change. And yet in the […]

Iran has been in the news a lot in 2025. Over recent decades, it has been a variable in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine. But during the Twelve Day War with Israel in June of this year, Iran very much took centre stage. People started asking questions, chief among them being: What does […]

The Gaza Strip, home to 2.2 million people, is a tiny land mass about the same size as the Isle of Wight. Yet in terms of munitions by weight, Gaza has been subjected to more than all of the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined, over the whole of World War II. Another […]

Just over two years after the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, and just days after the announcement of a ceasefire, Aaron Bastani spoke to three Palestinian writers in front of a live audience at EartH in Hackney. Ahmed Alnaouq is the host of Palestine Deep Dive and the co-founder of ‘We Are Not Numbers’, […]