The Political Dispatch

Be the change. Media
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Politics
  • Updated fortnightly

Welcome to the Political Dispatch, the podcast that explores the world's headlines and traces their roots through the past to make sense of the present. Fed up with doom scrolling, the endless divsion and all that noise? Join Sidd Kurapati, Lily Mott, and Tom Spare for thoughtful and engaging discussions on the issues that matter most.

  1. 6 days ago

    How Brexit Happened Part 3: Six Prime Ministers Later

    In the third and final part of their Brexit trilogy, Tom is joined by Associate Professor Dr. Monika Brusenbauch Meislová to ask ten years on from the EU referendum, where are we now? You can listen to How Brexit Happened Parts One and Two, wherever you get your podcasts from. Monika traces how Brexit changed the way British voters view the role of government in their daily lives, assesses where UK-EU diplomatic and strategic relations stand today, and explores whether there are any realistic scenarios in which Britain could ever rejoin the EU. The conversation also takes in each of the six Prime Ministers who have navigated the aftermath of the vote, from David Cameron through to Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, to Keir Starmer. Monika unpacks what each Prime Minister  demanded of the EU, what they won, what they lost, and what they left behind. Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To connect with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    23 min

  2. 27 Jun

    Andy Burnham: Britain's PM-in-Waiting

    British politics used to be boring. Not any more. Over the course of a long weekend, Andy Burnham won a crucial by-election in Makerfield, forced Keir Starmer to resign as Prime Minister, and became the frontrunner to replace him. Tom and Sidd set out the key moments that brought down Keir Starmer, explore who Andy Burnham is, the policies he espouses, and the team he's expected to bring with him to Downing Street. Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To connect with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    35 min

  3. 22 Jun

    How Brexit Happened Part 2: A Tale of Two Campaigns

    In part two of our three-part series marking ten years since the Brexit referendum, Tom and Sidd return to their old stomping ground, Cardiff's School of Journalism, Media and Culture, to interview their former lecturer Dr Mike Berry, Director of the MA in Political Communication. Mike traces why immigration became the issue that swallowed every other debate during the campaign, and how decades of media coverage left voters with a skewed picture of the EU long before the official campaign began. He explains the thinking behind "Take Back Control," one of the most effective political slogans in modern British history, and why Remain's rational, economics-led case struggled to compete with it. The conversation also turns to where things stand a decade on, and whether the same result would happen if the vote were held again today. Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To connect with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    41 min

  4. 17 Jun

    How Brexit Happened Part 1: The Road to Vote Leave

    In the first of a three-part series marking ten years since the Brexit referendum, Tom, Lily and Sidd sit down with Dr Nicholas Startin, Associate Professor of International Relations at John Cabot University in Rome, to trace the long history of British Euroscepticism. Nick takes the story back to Charles de Gaulle's two vetoes of British membership, the UK's eventual entry in 1973, and the referendum that followed just two years later. He revisits Margaret Thatcher's 1988 Bruges speech, often cited as the starting gun for modern Euroscepticism, and asks whether that reading really holds up. From there, the conversation moves through John Major's "bastards," the Maastricht rebellion, and the slow-burn rise of Farage, UKIP and the Brexit Party. Nick also looks back on his own 2015 paper, written when almost no one else in his field was willing to predict a Leave vote, and closes by asking whether, with Gen Z overwhelmingly pro-European, Britain could ever find its way back into the EU. Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To connect with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    57 min

  5. 28 May

    All the Presidents Men at 50

    To celebrate fifty years of All the President's Men, Tom sits down with Professor Jon Lewis, University Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at Oregon State University, who has been teaching and writing about Hollywood for over forty years. Jon traces Alan Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy from Klute through The Parallax View to All the President's Men, explaining what made that era of New Hollywood so obsessed with surveillance, institutional rot and the fragility of truth. He also reflects on what it was like to live through Watergate as a young man, and what was genuinely lost when the blockbuster era arrived and Hollywood stopped asking hard questions. Then Steven Renderos, Executive Director of Media Justice, brings the conversation into the present. The journalism, he argues, is still happening, the Panama Papers, the Pegasus Project, ProPublica's reporting on Clarence Thomas. What's broken isn't the press. It's the institutional willingness to act on what journalists find. And with Jeff Bezos, a key Donald Trump ally, now owning the same Washington Post that Katharine Graham used to back Woodward and Bernstein at enormous personal risk, the contrast could not be starker. Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe!

    58 min

  6. 10 May

    UK Election Special: Plaid Make History, the SNP Hold Steady and Reform Storm Across the Nations

    Sidd and Tom analyse Parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, and local elections in England.  Plaid Cymru (The Party of Wales) have become the largest party in Wales, followed by Reform in second place and Welsh Labour a distant third.  The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) have won a 5th straight parliamentary election but are well short of a majority.  Reform have made big gains in Scotland and have also stormed across English councils winning 14 in total and gaining close to 1,500 councillors.  Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To get connected with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    46 min

  7. 1 May

    Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Reform

    Over a million children in England have an Education, Health and Care Plan. Councils are projected to hold £6 billion in SEND deficits by the end of this year. And a system designed to protect the most vulnerable children has become, for many families, an exhausting legal battle just to access basic support. In this episode, Tom sits down with Caitlin Webb, chief reporter at the Local Government Chronicle, to examine the UK's SEND crisis and whether the government's long-awaited reforms can fix a system that has been breaking for over a decade. They explore the legal weight of Education, Health and Care Plans and why so many families have come to rely on them not as a support tool but as a last resort. Caitlin unpacks the financial pressures bearing down on local authorities, the rise of private equity in specialist education, and the difficult question of whether proposed reforms will genuinely improve outcomes for children or simply remove the protections parents depend on most. The episode closes with two voices that bring the statistics to life. Troy Njenje-Mbanga, who has lived experience of SEND, reflects on what it means to be neurodivergent in a system not designed for you. Eden Byrne speaks about her experience of caring for her brother with SEND, and what society still gets wrong about disability. Further reading from Caitlin Webb at the Local Government Chronicle: SEND reforms — key issues for the Schools White Paper: https://www.lgcplus.com/services/children/send-reforms-key-issues-for-schools-white-paper-19-02-2026/ Will SEND finally be sent in the right direction?: https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/lgc-briefing/will-send-finally-been-sent-in-the-right-direction-23-02-2026/ No guarantee SEND reforms will reduce EHCPs: https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/empowering-communities/no-guarantee-send-reforms-will-reduce-ehcps-15-04-2026/ Listen to related episodes: The Forgotten Generation with Troy Njenje-Mbanga: https://theforgottengenerationpodcast.podbean.com/ Sports For All with Eden Byrne: https://sportsforallpodcast.podbean.com/ Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To get connected with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    43 min

  8. 18 Apr

    Iran and the Cost of Living

    A war in the Middle East. A closed shipping lane. And a chain of consequences that stretches from Irish petrol stations to South Korean chip makers, and from British supermarket shelves to the price of your next laptop. In this episode, Tom, Sidd and Lily trace the true cost of the war with Iran — for the Iranian people, for the world economy, and your everday life. The episode starts with mass protests brutally suppressed by the Iranian regime, Trump's promise that "help is on its way," the coordinated US-Israeli strikes on 28 February, the assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — the single most important shipping lane in the world. They examine why, despite weeks of bombardment and repeated claims of victory, the regime remains intact and the Strait remains shut. From there the team maps the ripple effects: fuel protests that have brought Ireland to the edge of political crisis, a fertiliser shortage threatening the spring planting season across the northern hemisphere, a semiconductor supply crunch that could outlast the war itself, and a UK government quietly planning for food shortages by summer. Running beneath all of it, China, quietly filling every vacuum the war creates. Listen to related episodes: The origins of the Iranian war: https://thepoliticaldispatch.podbean.com/e/irans-reckoning-counter-revolution/ The unravelling of the world order: https://thepoliticaldispatch.podbean.com/e/if-we-are-not-at-the-table/ Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe! To get connected with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati. For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork. Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

    54 min
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About

Welcome to the Political Dispatch, the podcast that explores the world's headlines and traces their roots through the past to make sense of the present. Fed up with doom scrolling, the endless divsion and all that noise? Join Sidd Kurapati, Lily Mott, and Tom Spare for thoughtful and engaging discussions on the issues that matter most.

Information

  • Channel
    Be the change. Media
  • Creator
    Be the change. Media Network, Sidd Kurapati, Lily Mott, and Tom Spare
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    48
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Political Dispatch

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