Ratio Talks

Ratio
Ratio Talks

Ratio Talks is a podcast focusing on relationships, health and public policy. Past series covered community power and coping with the pandemic. The current series is focused on the potential for a relational social policy. It is hosted by Michael Little, a co-founder of Ratio. thisisratio.substack.com

  1. 19 MAR

    Marc Stears on the Importance of a Stumbling Squirrel

    This week’s guest on Ratio Talks is a political theorist, leader of the UCL Policy Lab, and former speechwriter to ex-Labour Party leader Ed Milliband. Marc Stears grounds his work in the meaning that we all find in our ordinary lives. The proposition is set out in his book Out of the Ordinary, an analysis of the work of British writers such as George Orwell, J.B. Priestly, Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The most vivid representation of the idea is Dylan Thomas’ insistance that a stumbling squirrel is at least as important as Hitler’s invasions. When Thomas was writing, politicians understood the importance of everyday life. The relentless centralisation of power has loosened the connection. Democracy is suffering as a result. During the conversation Marc and I mentioned several books, TV shows and podcasts including: Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, Verso Books James Graham’s TV series Brian and Maggie on Channel 4 Ordinary Hope: A New Way of Changing Our Country and Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild from the UCL Policy Lab Richard Galpin’s work on conversations as discussed in a previous podcast Marc’s book Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How it Can Again, was published by Belknap/Harvard in 2021. It is beautifully written and full of love for life and culture. We are joined at the end of the conversation by Alice Robson, Head of Communities at The Winch, a well established and highly esteemed civil society organisation, deeply rooted in community in Swiss Cottage North London. Alice links Marc’s words to community work, and reflects on what she learned as one of Marc’s students. Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and is engineered by Nik Paget Tomlinson. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    46 min

  2. 4 MAR

    Jon Cruddas on A Century of Labour

    Jon Cruddas, until the last election the Member of Parliament for Dagennham and Rainham, wrote a book to mark the centenary and provide a new perspective on the history of the Party. A Century of Labour is a masterclass in the complexities of modern party politics. Labour is not bound by a single political objective. It is a community of competing ideas about how we live together. For Jon Cruddas, the competition revolves around three perspectives on social justice. Over the last 100 years, those ideas have evolved. Some have proved apposite for the social and economic challenges facing the U.K. at successive moments in its history, and became the bedrock of social policy at that moment. Success for Labour, like success for any political party, is the product of deep conversation, pluralism -balancing competing ideas-, tolerance and political strategy. The picture Cruddas paints of the party has two sides. One looks a lot like civil society. There is social infrastructure to connect people. There are conversations about how to live peaceably. There is an unwritten almanac, continually updated, recording the shared moral order. There is natural mutual aid. The other is mechanical. Looked at from this side, the Party is a machine geared up to win. The conversation with Jon in this podcast explores what can be learned from A Century of Labour for the future of progressive politics, an effective balance between state and civil society, and finding new solutions to the existential challenges of climate change, managed migration and ethical A.I. Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack. Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    46 min

  3. 19 FEB

    Geoff Little on Sir Howard Bernstein

    In the last episode of the podcast, we talked to Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council during a quarter of a century of policy and democratic reform. Richard was part of a double act. For most of the time he was leader, Sir Howard Bernstein was the Chief Executive. Howard sadly died in the summer of last year. To understand his contribution to the Manchester story, and how he worked with Richard, I turned to my brother. Geoff Little worked with Howard for nearly three decades. In the podcast you will hear Geoff refer to the Memorial website and the many tributes to the man and his work. If you are in any doubt about Howard’s capabilities, renowned Manchester born economist Jim O’Neill, Baron O'Neill of Gatley, recently described Howard as the most important civil servant of his generation. Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    31 min

  4. 6 FEB

    Sir Richard Leese on Manchester’s Mission

    If you skim through the domestic news headlines in British papers between 1996 and 2021, you will be reminded of the Blair years, the effects of the global economic crash, austerity, Brexit, pandemic, and the cost of living crisis. The pattern is very much rise and fall. If you look very carefully, you will discover variations in the pattern. One of those variations is Manchester. For while we all obsessed about Westminster politics, the politicians and officials of Manchester worked hand in hand with civil society and the market and obsessed about what was right for local residents. The remarkable story of Manchester’s exceptionalism is told this week by one of its architects, Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester Council for a quarter of a century. Working with his colleagues in the nine other boroughs that make up Greater Manchester, and supported by his officials, not least Chief Executive Sir Howard Bernstein, who features in the next episode, Richard oversaw economic success, urban regeneration and improvements in population health that bucked the U.K trends. Devolution was a totem of the approach. Manchester assumed powers and duties from Westminster, and pushed democratic structures into neighbourhoods. As the podcast was being recorded, the current U.K. Government was preparing to publish plans to spread the Manchester model across the country. Richard is a stickler for accuracy, and asked us to correct a few errors in the recording. The health legislation of 2002, is actually 2022. Richard was succeeded as leader of Manchester Council by Bev Craig. The Combined Authority of Greater Manchester never had a leader as such. Tony Lloyd became interim Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2015, and was succeeded by Andy Burnham in 2017. The reflection on this episode comes from Jon Cruddas, former Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham. Jon will be back in a few weeks to talk about his latest book A Century of Labour. Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack, Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    1h 3m

  5. 22 JAN

    Richard Galpin on We Walworth

    Richard Galpin works at Pembroke House, the settlement described by Mike Wilson in the previous episode. Richard leads a classic settlement project, a conversation that connects local people, local government officials and central government policy makers. It is known as We Walworth after the neighbourhood of which Pembroke House is a part. As Mike Wilson explained, settlements facilitate students from private schools or universities coming to live alongside people living in economically disadvantaged communities. This experience transformed the outlook of many students, including Clement Attlee, leader of the radical post-war U.K. Government and William Beveridge, author of the report that laid the foundations for the Welfare State. In settlements, these students are described as ‘residents’. They are from a school or academic institution but they reside in the settlement. They live alongside residents in the community. We Walworth extends this idea by creating a context for civil servants to spend time alongside and get into conversation with the people they serve. As Pembroke House is just a few miles from Whitehall, home to most U.K. Government departments, We Walworth includes both central and local government officials. I am interested in this work for what it can tell us about the future of civil society organisations. But Richard also brings to light many of the weaknesses of the state, its propensity to colonise civil society, the systemic imbalance between state and civil society, and the low level frictions that, I would argue, contribute to declining trust in the state and its institutions. Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    44 min

  6. 8 JAN

    Mike Wilson on settlements

    Mike Wilson is the Chief Executive of Pembroke House Settlement in Walworth, South London. That single line alone demands lots of explainers. Pembroke House was established as a mission by the students of Pembroke College at Cambridge University in the 1880s. The students built the mission -it looks like church- and gave their time to live and work in the community. Walworth is a neighbourhood of about 40,000 people in the London Borough of Southwark. It features in Dickens Great Expectations, an indication of its economic disadvantage, also reflected, as Mike remarks, in the maps of poverty drawn by Charles Booth at around the time that Pembroke House was built. Despite being a mission, Pembroke House functioned more like a settlement, more secular and more orientated to social reforming. Mike explains the difference, and the transition in the podcast. What does all this history have to do with contemporary challenges of by now gentrifying Walworth, never mind the future of public policy? That is Mike’s expertise, and the subject of the conversation we had in the turret of the settlement building last year. When talking about his experience as central government policy maker, Mike picks up similar themes around the Troubled Families model explored by Gavin Jones and Geoff Little on earlier editions the podcast. In his reflections, Pritpal S. Tamber refers to Jennie Popay’s work on de-radicalisation of community empowerment. In fact, in the article Power, control, communities and health inequalities I: theories, concepts and analytical frameworks published in Health Promotion International in 2021 (Vol 36, pages 1253 to 1263), Jennie and her colleagues use the word ‘depoliticisation’. Pritpal also referred to this publication from the Shelia McKechnie Foundation in which civil society leaders call for a new settlement between their sector, government and business. Pritpal referred to two articles dealing with what he describes as ‘deaths from despair’ First, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century by Anne Case and Angus Deaton published in PNAS in 2015 (Vol 112 (49), pages 15078 to 15083). Second, They're not mentally ill, their lives are just s**t, a provocatively titled article by Timothy Price and colleagues in Health and Place, Volume 90, November 2024. Finally, Pritpal refers to Clare Wightman at Grapevine who has appeared in the podcast and Chris Dabbs at Unlimited Potential who has not appeared on the podcast, but hopefully will! Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    1h 3m

  7. 18/12/2024

    Adam Howard Gives the View From The Findus

    Jason Stockwood co- owner of Grimsby Town Football Club was my guest on the last episode of Ratio Talks. Consistent with the format, I invited Grimsby Town supporter and teacher Adam Howard to reflect on what Jason had to say. But it soon became clear that Adam had much to offer that a short commentary. As a Grimsby resident, highly committed to his town and region, he identified a lot of the missing ingredients and wrongheadedness of public policies to rescue so called left behind places. It wasn’t a difficult decision to give Adam a full episode of his own. The first, by the way, that required no editing whatsoever. I found Adam from the View from the Findus podcast (available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast hubs), to which he contributes. Football club podcasts are proliferating. They are revealing. Radio stations have been begging football fans to contribute to phone-ins for well over a decade. They are designed as a sort of entertainment. A couple of hosts ridiculing each other, and encouraging their guests to make outlandish claims -sack the manager, buy a player the club cannot afford, or welcome the billions that comes with State sponsored owners (never mind the annoying human rights issues). Podcasts like View from the Findus have a different flavour. The hosts are football fans. The conversation is intelligent, ranging from tactics, the economics of the sport, the culture of the club, and the emotions of winning and losing. They comprise conversations not sound bites. If you want to know something about Grimsby, you could do worse than listen to episodes of View from the Findus. Or, for understanding Doncaster, check out podular STAND. (Apologies to Grimsby fans for mentioning Doncaster). At the end of this podcast I bring the conversation back to David Goodhart’s book, The Road to Somewhere, published by C Hurst & Co. and mentioned by Jason Stockwood last week. I am grateful to Chris Mills and Paul Savage at View from the Findus for introducing me to Adam, and of course to Adam for his contribution. Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    33 min

  8. 11/12/2024

    Jason Stockwood and Grimsby Town Football Club

    These days, when people talk about civil society they mean civil society organisations. These are important. And we will get to them as this series develops. But then there are the relationships across society facilitated by social infrastructure, expressed in conversations about how to live peaceably with each other, and generating a shared moral order and mutual aid. A football club is a significant part of the social infrastructure. Each fortnight, in Grimsby, a town of 130,000 people, between four and eight thousand people will gather. Next week’s episode with Grimsby Town fan Adam Howard will give listeners a good sense of the shared meaning and belonging football brings to a place. Jason Stockwood is a tech entrepreneur, social entrepreneur and a Grimsby fan. So he knew the value of the football club to the town and surrounding area. Together with current Chairman Andrew Pettit, he became a major shareholder. It was an investment not only in success on the pitch, but the revitalisation of a community ravaged by the collapse of the fishing industry. In describing the story, Jason references David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere published by C Hurst & Co. Jason’s decisions about how to support his hometown were strongly influenced by the work of Robert Putnam, and in particular his book The Upswing written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett and published by Simon & Schuster. Jason’s decision making reflects the evidence presented by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The English Football League -or EFL as it is commonly known- one of football’s governing bodies in the U.K., has published a series of reports on the impact of the sport on English life. For those who want to know more about Jason’s work with Grimsby Town Football Club, he has published a series of articles in the Guardian newspaper. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

    35 min
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About

Ratio Talks is a podcast focusing on relationships, health and public policy. Past series covered community power and coping with the pandemic. The current series is focused on the potential for a relational social policy. It is hosted by Michael Little, a co-founder of Ratio. thisisratio.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Ratio
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2025
  • Episodes
    82
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ratio
  • Show Website
    Ratio Talks

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