George Bernard Shaw once joked that the US and the UK are “two countries divided by a common language.” Can the same be said of their conservatives? As we brace for a joint election year, Eleanor Penny talks to Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman, two expert guides to US conservatism via their podcast Know Your Enemy, to analyse the special relationship between right-wingers on both sides of the pond.

They discuss the differences between US and UK conservativism, the different factions that have jostled for supremacy since the 1950s, the rupture that Trump’s presidency represented, and what they expect from the upcoming elections.

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George Galloway has been elected as a member of parliament for four separate constituencies – with only Winston Churchill beating him. Perhaps more remarkably still, he won on three of those occasions while not being a member of a major political party. Most recently, he became the MP for Rochdale in the north of England. That success was, in no small part, because of Galloway’s position on Gaza – and his outspoken criticism of Israel.

But is his latest success merely the swan song in a rollercoaster political career? Or is it the beginning of something much bigger? Could George Galloway’s Workers Party of Great Britain become a genuine threat to the Labour Party – particularly on issues of foreign policy – over the years to come?

Aaron Bastani speaks to one of the most controversial figures in British politics about the failed ‘War on Terror’, the wars that Tony Blair wanted to fight but never could, and Galloway’s increasingly public religious convictions.

How do mainstream politicians and pundits contribute to the normalisation of far-right ideas, even as they claim to reject racism and populism? That’s one of many vital questions asked by Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon in their book, Reactionary Democracy.

Following ACFM’s recent Trip about Fascism, Keir and Jem speak to Aaron and Aurelien about the making of the “woke conspiracy”, how illiberal politics absorbs liberal rhetoric, and why the left has to stop falling for reactionary narratives – and give up “debating” the far-right.

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Produced by Matt Huxley.

In the ’00s, animal rights protestors nearly won their battle to ban vivisection in the UK, shutting down multiple breeding farms that were supplying laboratories with cats, dogs and guinea pigs. But at the last moment, the government made a dramatic U-turn, blocking their attempt to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences and throwing activists in jail.

How did this winning campaign fall apart? Why was the war on terror a crucial turning point? And what might the Palestine movement learn from its tactics?

Rivkah Brown is joined by Tom Harris, an activist with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and author of Your Neighbour Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement.

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Teresa Thornhill is an author and former child protection lawyer. Throughout her long career, working for both local authorities and advocating on behalf of parents, she has been a first hand witness to how the system fails parents, social workers and, most importantly, children.

Teresa sat down with Aaron to talk about the untrained volunteers deciding children’s futures, whether drug policy matters, and how austerity will have costs for decades to come.

She’s also the author of In Harm’s Way: The memoir of a child protection lawyer from the most secretive court in England and Wales.

The exhortation to “read some effing Orwell!” is an old chestnut of the online left, whether ironic or sincere, or somewhere in between. But if we’re looking for a writer whose body of work truly anticipates the world we live in now – globalised, postcolonial, postmodern – we might instead turn to the American Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson.

He’s just turned 90 and, in characteristically productive style, has three new books out this year. But where to start? To get a grip on Jamesonian thought, Richard Hames invites Sianne Ngai and Matthew Beaumont, both incisive critics in their own right, to discuss the breadth of his life and work, from postmodernism to the political unconscious to Jaws.

Sianne and Matt recommend that new readers of Jameson start with The Geopolitical Aesthetic or the essay ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture‘.

Read Sianne and Matt’s recent essays on Jameson over at the Verso blog.

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It’s not what you know; it’s what you can prove. For years, Forensic Architecture has exposed state crimes against civilians, nature, and humanity. This week on Downstream, Ash Sarkar meets its director Eyal Weizman to discuss Israel’s settler colonial project, the police killing of Mark Duggan, and how the testimony of blindfolded torture victims helped construct a model of Bashar al-Assad’s most notorious torture prison.

A lot of people are saying that fascism is on the rise. But what are we pointing to when we call a system, or a person, fascist? On this Trip, Nadia, Keir and Jem map out a complicated ideology, from its roots in 19th century industrialisation to its resurgence in ethnonationalism and eco-apartheid.

Exploring how different political traditions try to explain fascism, they look for signs of the f-word in contemporary politics and play music from Woody Guthrie, Heaven 17 and Black Sabbath.

ACFM will be recording a live episode at How The Light Gets In, the philosophy and music festival at Hay-On-Wye in Wales, on 27 May. Listeners can get 20% off festival passes over at the How The Light Gets In website by applying the discount code NOVARA20.

See the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

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London is a foodie metropolis: undoubtedly one of the best places to eat in the world.

But eating in London is also, like everything else in the city, shaped by its history as the capital of a globe-spanning empire.

How did the contraction of this formal empire change infamously terrible British cuisine? How did multiculturalism become an excuse for underpaid racialised labour? And how did landlords ruin Chinatown?

The essay collection London Feeds Itself, now in its expanded second edition, is one of the most ambitious attempts to ask all of these questions.

Eleanor Penny sat down with its editor Jonathan Nunn, also editor of Vittles, and contributor Amardeep Singh Dhillon to tuck into the history and present of food in the capital.

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Centuries of colonial capitalism have reordered life on the planet and inside our bodies, from industrial farming and the uneven advances of modern medicine, to night shifts, chronic stress and inflammation. Has the system made us sick?

That’s the concern of Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, who join Eleanor Penny to talk about the history of medical injustice and environmental toxicity, and what can be done start the healing process. Their book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, is available from Penguin.

This episode first aired in August 2022.

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