Politics

Care is the thread that runs through the life of Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Ed Davey. In this event he shares his own experiences as a carer and those of countless others he has met. His Why I Care: And Why Care Matters is a deeply personal story, shedding light on the often-invisible world of the millions of carers who form the backbone of our communities.

Aged four, Davey lost his father to cancer. When his mother also became ill with cancer, he and his brothers nursed her at home until she died when he was just 15. His grandfather passed away a few years later, and Davey and his brother then looked after their grandmother in old age. Now he and his wife care for their son, who has severe physical and learning disabilities, as well as raising their daughter.

In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of atomic violence. Richard Overy rethinks how we should regard this. How did decisions to kill civilians and destroy cities become normalised; how were moral concerns blunted; and why did scientists, airmen and politicians follow a strategy of mass destruction?

He also engages with new scholarship showing how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where ‘surrender’ was an entirely foreign concept. Overy is Honorary Research Professor of History at Exeter and author of The Dictators and The Bombing War.

Can women have it all? What does it mean to be a woman and a mother in the modern age? Passionate, funny and fierce, BRIT Award-winning Paloma Faith delves deep into the issues that face women today, from battling through the expectations of patriarchy to the Supermum myth.

She tackles the challenges of IVF and the early years of motherhood with characteristic humour and raw honesty. From questions about identity and motherhood, to how we need to embrace imperfection and the pleasures of being ‘selfish’, Paloma invites us into her own story, to explore how our bonds with our children evolve into adulthood.

The American financier and former White House Communications Director shares a candid look at the wheels of power in the US. As a front seat commentator on the US/UK relationship, The Rest is Politics US podcast co-host takes a view of its twists, turns and possible futures, with political strategist and The Rest is Politics UK co-host Alastair Campbell.

Anthony Scaramucci is founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He also co-hosts the Open Book podcast, and is author of several books, most recently The Little Book of Bitcoin.

The global finance and Crypto entrepreneur was in the first generation of his Italian-American family to attend college, and his ascent in the financial industry and the world of politics has been both remarkable and hard-won. Scaramucci served briefly in President Trump’s White House team in 2016, before some strongly worded comments on members of the administration saw him leave after an 11-day tenure.

Get the story of Alexei Navalny, the man who became the sole political threat to Vladimir Putin, directly from his wife Yulia Navalnaya. Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption campaigner and political prisoner, Navalny won international recognition and respect. His many international honours included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize.

In this extraordinary event, Navalnaya speaks to political strategist Alastair Campbell about her husband’s life and political fight, and his book Patriot, which he began writing after he was poisoned by the Russian security services in 2020. Patriot also contains Navalny’s prison diaries, written before his 2024 death in a brutal Siberian prison.

Artists and activists Led By Donkeys share the journey of their five years of resistance against those in power in Britain.

Led By Donkeys was founded in early 2019 when four friends, motivated by the “thermonuclear hypocrisy of our political overlords”, started going out at night to paste up guerrilla billboards of the leading Brexiters’ historic tweets. Mixing art and activism, they have created some of the most memorable images of our political age, and continue to protest. Hear directly from the group, and be inspired to take your own political action. They talk to writer Oliver Bullough.

Austrian film director GW Pabst was one of the greatest directors of his era, but when the Nazis seized power he found himself forced to return to Germany, despite plans to emigrate to America. Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel The Director fictionalises the story of Pabst, who made two films under Josef Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin.

Kehlmann talks to journalist Misha Glenny about The Director, what literature is capable of, and writing about art, power and barbarism. Kehlmann’s novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into over 14 languages.

Activist Kate Wilson took on the Metropolitan Police for breaching her human rights – and won. Wilson had a one-year romance with a man named Mark Stone in 2003, but years later discovered he was a married police officer, and part of a unit that infiltrated environmental groups, forming sexual relationships and spying without warrant on hundreds of innocent civilians. Hear Wilson talk to writer Oliver Bullough about how it took her nearly 20 years to uncover the eerie truth about Britain’s secret political police, and why her story and fight matter.

Our world is a mess. It faces challenges that few are prepared to confront. It is littered with governments that lie, led by people who can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to lead. It’s no surprise, therefore, that so many of us feel angry, frustrated and let down. Yet we also feel overcome by such a sense of powerlessness that we find ourselves asking in despair, ‘But what can I do?’

That question is regularly posed to Alastair Campbell, not least in reaction to The Rest Is Politics, the chart-topping podcast he presents with former Tory Cabinet minister Rory Stewart. In this event, he provides the motivation and the tools to effect change for the better, provides advice on developing confidence and coping with criticism and setbacks, and sets out the practical steps by which we can become political players ourselves.

Start the day at Hay Festival with headline guests chaired by editors from The Independent reviewing the news, discussing the headlines and issues of the day, and revealing what’s breaking and trending online. A fascinating look at what’s tickling the nation’s fancy – and driving it to splenetic fury. Bring your coffee!

Among today’s guests are sustainability researcher Mike Berners-Lee, professor in the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University and author of There is No Planet B, and geopolitics journalist Misha Glenny, author of McMafia which has been adapted into a major BBC1 drama series.They talk to The Independent's Chief Book Critic, Martin Chilton, and writer and homelessness social activist Sarah Lamptey.

How do we hold on to hard-won reproductive rights, in the UK and internationally? How can we secure the same rights for future generations? At a time when reproductive rights are in retrograde in the US, our panel, chaired by broadcaster Stacey Dooley, celebrates the UK’s proud history and continued fight for a world where everyone is empowered to make decisions about their own health and body.

Kate Gilmore is Chair of the Board for International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and co-chair of the WHO Gender and Human Rights Advisory Panel on Human Reproduction. Family law barrister Dr Charlotte Proudman researches and teaches gender inequality under law at the University of Cambridge. She founded Right to Equality, campaigning to put gender justice at the top of the legal agenda.

They are joined by Nikki, a young activist representing the 16–19 Participation Advisory Group from Brook, the only national charity to offer both clinical sexual health services and education and well-being services. Nikki will talk about the impact the US rights changes are having, and why it is crucial to educate young people about their reproductive rights.

Award-winning broadcasters Emma Barnett (BBC Radio 4’s Today programme) and Stacey Dooley (Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over) take a personal, political and cultural look at motherhood and the impact it has on women. The pair’s honest and open conversation will look at the experience of becoming a mother and the physical and mental work required in motherhood, celebrating mothers of all kinds.

Barnett’s Maternity Service was written in snatched moments after the birth of her second child, and is a heartfelt and reassuring look at what it really feels like to be on maternity leave. In Dear Minnie, written after she had her first child, Dooley brings her trademark empathy and investigative skill to an entirely new ‘frontline’, exploring the varied perspectives of mothers today.

Presenter June Sarpong OBE, the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity, shines a light on the incredible forgotten legacy of the BBC’s first Black female broadcaster.

Una Marson was a trailblazer: she made history by becoming the first Black female broadcaster at the BBC and paved the way for Black women and the amplification of Black voices in the media. A journalist, poet, playwright, broadcaster and activist, Marson played a pivotal role in bringing Caribbean culture to audiences in the UK, smashing glass ceilings and fighting against the racism and misogyny she faced. She was a fierce political activist throughout her life.

Sir Anthony Seldon is a leading political and social commentator, well-known for his biographies of UK prime ministers. Here he takes a look at two of the most turbulent, drawing on exclusive interviews to give the definitive accounts of Johnson’s and Truss’s premierships.

After his dramatic rise to power amid the Brexit deadlock, Johnson presided over the most turbulent period of British history in living memory. From Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic to the crisis in Afghanistan, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the Partygate scandal, his government ultimately unravelled after just three years.

But in the space of just 49 days Liz Truss challenged him for the badge of most disastrous premiership, as she attempted to remould the economy, triggered a collapse in the value of Sterling and was forced on a series of embarrassing U-turns.

Seldon is founder of the Museum of the Prime Minister. He talks to Literary Editor of the Financial Times, Frederick Studemann.

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What does the return of Trump to the US presidency mean for Europe? For a start, it’s bolstered his far-right allies, like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, while a new era of American protectionism – including the possibility of tariffs – threatens an already divided Britain and Europe. But it’s not just the economy that will be affected by Trump’s second term; there will also be an impact on Europe’s security and its efforts to combat climate change.

To discuss how Europe might respond, Misha Glenny, Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, is joined by: historian Anne Applebaum (Autocracy, Inc), who has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe; Alastair Campbell, a campaigner and strategist best known for his role as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of communications and strategy; and Edi Rama, the 33rd and incumbent prime minister of Albania and chairman of the Socialist Party of Albania.

What makes people believe in conspiracy theories? Why have they taken over our political sphere? And how do we counter them before it’s too late? Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, co-authors of Conspiracy Theory, pull back the curtain on conspiracy theories, from the bizarre to the sinister, and look at how conspiracism has become a booming industry, a political strategy and a pseudo-religion, and something that’s a threat to the foundations of liberal democracy.

Dunt spent many years working in Westminster as editor of Politics.co.uk. He is a columnist for The i newspaper, and a host on the Oh God What Now and Origin Story podcasts. Lynskey has written several books, including the just-released Everything Must Go, an exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world.

Len Pennie is an English/Scots performance poet sensation. Her electric debut collection Poyums is funny and fiercely feminist, whether she’s writing letters to her younger self, advocating for women’s rights or adapting fairy tales to process an abusive relationship.

Come to hear her bold, unashamedly frank take on loving, learning, surviving, growing and giving, covering her passionate opinions from minoritised languages to survivors of domestic abuse and the destigmatisation of mental illness. Don’t miss this chance to see an epic talent on the rise.

And I have done more than just simply get by

So much more than escape or survive

Through the galvanisation of love, time and patience

I’ll take hold of my story and thrive.

After life that was seldom what life ought to be

Through laughter and love I’ll be whole

This story is mine from the cover to spine

And the narrative I will control.

Start the day at Hay Festival with headline guests chaired by editors from The Independent reviewing the news, discussing the headlines and issues of the day, and revealing what’s breaking and trending online. A fascinating look at what’s tickling the nation’s fancy – and driving it to splenetic fury. Bring your coffee! Among today’s guests are Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, and Harriet Wistrich, founder director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, a founder member of campaign group Justice for Women, and author of Sister in Law, with Lord Browne of Madingley, chair of BeyondNetZero. They talk to The Independent's Chief Book Critic, Martin Chilton.

In today’s polarised and polarising world, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us. Why do some people become radicalised? Who is most susceptible to ideological thinking? Can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas? Dr Leor Zmigrod is a pioneer in the field of ‘political neuroscience’, and drawing on her groundbreaking research she uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours.

Learn more about our political beliefs and ideologies – not transient thoughts in our minds, divorced from our bodies, but actually changing our neural architecture, our cells. Find out about rigid thinking in ourselves and others, and how to recognise our ability to resist irrational rules and authority. Regardless of your political stance, Zmigrod will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain.

In conversation with John Burn-Murdoch, columnist and chief data reporter for the Financial Times.

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Playwright Suzie Miller introduces Prima Facie, her book about a brilliant defence barrister at the top of her game who realises the rules might not be in her favour after a date goes wrong.

Miller’s book, an international runaway success, is based on her award-winning play of the same name, which starred Jodie Comer as barrister Tessa Ensler. The play itself led to changes in the legal profession regarding what juries are directed to consider when they deliberate on rape cases.

Miller is an international playwright, librettist and screenwriter. She has a background in law, and has won numerous awards, including the Australian Writers’ Guild, Kit Denton Fellowship for Writing with Courage and an Olivier Award.

British broadcaster Naga Munchetty (BBC Breakfast) leads a candid discussion about women’s health and pain, exploring why the healthcare system can often feel rigged against women.

Munchetty spoke out in 2023 about her diagnosis of the gynaecological condition adenomyosis and her struggles to be taken seriously by healthcare professionals despite years of pain and symptoms. In response, scores of women shared their own stories of feeling dismissed by doctors, and Munchetty went on to campaign on the issue. Her book It’s Probably Nothing explores the challenges of being heard, diagnosed and treated.

In this event Munchetty looks at why women’s pain and health issues have historically been ignored – and why pain has been viewed as an innate part of being female – and highlights the things women need to do to advocate for themselves in the healthcare system.

The leading environmental experts examine the uncomfortable truths at the heart of the climate and nature crises, and reveal the system shifts needed to achieve real change, in conversation with the co-Executive Director of Greenpeace UK.

Climate researcher Dr Friederike Otto, author of Climate Injustice, has been described as “the scientist finding climate change’s smoking gun” (Wired). Her bracing investigation into extreme weather’s impact on the world’s most vulnerable reveals the failures of political and social infrastructures around the world and shines a light on the damage inflicted on real lives.

Leading environmentalist and Chair of Natural England Tony Juniper CBE (Just Earth) identifies the real problem – that inequality is the main obstacle blocking action. We can’t fight the climate and nature crises without addressing the ever-widening gaps between the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak.

From social change and hope to the climate crisis and masculinity, there’s not a subject Rebecca Solnit can’t turn her mind to. In this event with farmer and author James Rebanks, she discusses No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, a collection of essays revolving around the power of activism and covering subjects including women’s rights, the fight for democracy, trends in masculinity and the rise of the far right in the West.

Solnit is author of more than 20 books, including Recollections of My Non-Existence, which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the 2021 James Tait Black Award, and the collection of essays Men Explain Things to Me.

Dying: do we all have a right to defend ourselves against intolerable suffering? Or should the law prohibit assisted dying; revere human life for its own sake? Our panel discuss the moral, legal and practical issues arising from the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill 2024 that is now working its way through Parliament.

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon, author of And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, who defends a right to euthanasia. Sonia Sodha is a journalist whose recent exploration of assisted dying for a BBC Radio documentary led her to change her mind, and now opposes it. Lord Sumption is an historian and former Supreme Court judge who decided the last ‘test’ case on assisted dying (Nicklinson). Alex Goodman KC is a barrister specialising in human rights, who briefed MPs in Westminster on the 2024 Bill.

Nuclear war is a far greater immediate threat to humanity’s survival than climate change, yet we are in near-total denial. The environment campaigner and Six Degrees author puts the issue back to the top of the global agenda.

We are standing on a nuclear knife edge, and while climate heating threatens humanity over many decades, nuclear war could destroy civilisation in just a few hours. But the climate experience teaches us that a worldwide mobilisation can work. Lynas presents an unflinching view of the nuclear nightmare, and describes the imperatives for human civilisation to survive long term.

Gone are the days when just one bad guy ran an autocracy; now, sophisticated networks prop up autocratic leaders and encourage a move away from democracy. Pulitzer-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum (Gulag) has tracked the slide away from democracy for decades.

From Russia to North Korea and Syria, she takes us on a tour of The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and explains how autocracies operate like giant companies, relying on financial structures, security services and technological experts providing surveillance, propaganda and disinformation. An essential event if you’re interested in what the future looks like for our governments.

The former Supreme Court judge and author of Divided Houses (winner of the 2009 Wolfson History Prize) cuts through the political noise with his acute analysis of the state of democracy today. How did all this happen, and where do we go from here?

In this timely and incisive event, Sumption uses his provocative essays in The Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law as a springboard to discuss issues from the vulnerabilities of international law to the deepening suppression of democracy activism, and from the complexities of human rights legislation to the defence of freedom of speech. He talks to Bronwen Maddox, the CEO of the International Affairs Think Tank Chatham House.

Ten years on from the Serious Crime Act 2015, which made coercive and controlling behaviour a criminal offence, domestic abuse campaigner David Challen and solicitor Harriet Wistrich speak to broadcaster Samira Ahmed about misogyny, male violence and how to bring about justice.

Challen, author of The Unthinkable, successfully campaigned to overturn his mother Sally Challen’s murder conviction in a landmark appeal recognising the lifetime of coercive control she suffered. An advisor to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, he is a leading campaigner on coercive control and has written about his own fight for justice and society’s failure to recognise its impact.

Wistrich acted for Sally Challen in the appeal that overturned her conviction for the murder of her coercively controlling husband. She has written about that battle for justice and several others, including acting in the landmark Supreme Court case that held the Metropolitan Police accountable for their failures in the investigation of taxi driver and serial rapist John Worboys. She is founder director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, a founder member of campaign group Justice for Women, and author of Sister in Law.

Start the day at Hay Festival with headline guests chaired by editors from The Independent reviewing the news, discussing the headlines and issues of the day, and revealing what’s breaking and trending online. A fascinating look at what’s tickling the nation’s fancy – and driving it to splenetic fury. Bring your coffee!

Among today’s guests are historian and broadcaster David Olusoga, author of Black and British and presenter of Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, Eluned Morgan MS First Minister of Wales and farmer and writer Helen Rebanks, author of The Farmer’s Wife. They talk to The Independent's Chief Book Critic, Martin Chilton.

Step into a world where little girls dressed up as women dance for an audience of adult men, where a pornographic deep fake video of you exists on the internet and you just don’t know it yet, and where men create ‘perfect’ AI girlfriends who live in their pocket.

This isn’t an image of the future. Sex robots, chatbots and the metaverse are here and spreading fast. A new wave of AI-powered technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, is putting women everywhere in danger.

Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, takes us deep into the heart of this strange new world, from cyber brothels to schools gripped by an epidemic of online sexual abuse, showing how our lives are being infiltrated by ever-evolving technologies that are changing the way we live and love.

Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist Mona Chalabi delivers our inaugural John Caldon memorial lecture, remembering the investment banker, TV innovator and inspirational entrepreneur, who died in 2021.

Chalabi argues that journalists need to think differently about language – so that readers don’t feel hopeless in the face of wars, colonialism, the climate crisis and Nazi salutes in 2025. If we want to resist war and injustice, we need to resist the idea that resistance is futile.

From the 2003 Iraq War – when millions marched against going to war – to the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing occupation of Palestine, we see how narratives of ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ continue to be weaponised to justify war and repression. The same playbook of media manipulation, selective outrage and suppression of dissent is at work. The sense of powerlessness many felt in 2003 persists, deepening into a broader crisis of defeatism. Maybe the issue isn’t just ‘manufacturing consent’ but rather manufacturing despair.

After the lecture, Mona will be in conversation with BBC Presenter and Correspondent, Rajini Vaidyanathan.

Political sketch writer John Crace introduces his satirical memoir – written from the viewpoint of his beloved dog Herbie. Herbie is a Westminster veteran, with stories to share about all the prime ministers (and there are many of them) of the last decade.

Crace discusses writing Taking the Lead, and the state of our politics today. He has been the Guardian’s political sketch writer for the last ten years and has written books on everything from cricket, football and TV to literature, politics and himself. He talks to comedian Marcus Brigstocke.