I am very pleased in this episode to have Professor Sir John Curtis as my guest. John is widely regarded as one of Britain's leading experts on voting and elections in Britain and we discuss the geography of elections, particularly focusing on Britain. I started by suggesting to John that there are three key aspects to understanding patterns of voting and elections. The first is the geography of the electorate in terms of age, class, sex, ethnicity and religion etc; the second is the geographical structure of electoral areas and the third is the nature of the electoral system itself. John started by noting that the importance of the third of these. Britain, like many other countries, has an electoral system which is structured geographically into number of seats (about 650 in Britain) and candidates stand for election in each seat. But in the Netherlands there is a single national list, with parliamentary seats allocated by the total number of votes with a minimum threshold. Something similar applies in Greece. We then moved on to look at the key factors which influence the pattern of voting in Britain and the ways this has changed over time. John highlights the traditional north south divide in voting in Britain with Labour dominating historically in the old industrial areas of the Midlands and the north and the Conservatives dominating in the more affluent areas of the south. But he notes that this pattern began to break down in Britain around 2010 and subsequently the electoral map has become more complex. Although there is still something of a north south divide in voting for the two major parties, the Conservative party under Boris Johnston made major advances into Labour's so called 'red wall' in the 2019 election. But the Conservatives suffered crushing losses in the 2024 general election. What has happened in Britain since 2016 is that the geography of the Brexit or Leave vote, which was strongest in the so-called 'left behind areas', in the Midlands and the north, and also in many coastal constituencies is now been reflected in the geography of the Reform vote and the Green vote is concentrated in inner city areas with high graduate populations and/or a high muslim population. We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a concentrated electoral support in terms of winning seats. This proved important for the Lib Dems in the 2024 general election when they won a substantial number of seats. Geography is an important part of electoral success.

In this episode my guest is Hannah Cloke, Regius professor of Meteorology and climate science at the University of Reading. Her title is rather special as she is one of the few professors in Britain appointed by the King or Queen. Her specialty is hydrology and flooding and she now appears regularly on TV whenever there isa major flooding issue. I started by noting the very hot summer of 2026 and Hannah noted that the global climate is now very clearly warming up quite rapidly. One consequence of this is that warmer air is able to hold much more moisture and this has been an important contributory cause of both heavy rainfall and flooding in both Britain and continental Europe. The floods in Valencia in 2025 and the major flooding in Germany in 2021 are clear examples, as are the floods in Yorkshire, Cumbria and the Severn. Beyond Europe we are seeing both more and stronger hurricanes and typhoons as warm seas and air encourage stronger storms. In addition there are now big issues with both melting ice and rising sea levels and the melting of Himalayan and Alpine glaciers. The disastrous floods in Nepal caused by glacial collapse in September 2026 highlight this as do the floods in Switzerland caused by the collapse of part of the Birch glacier on the village of Blatten. But shrinking glaciers also mean the possibility of a longer term shortage of water. This is very important in the Himalayas and the Tibean plateau which are the source of many very important rivers in South and South East Asia: the Bramaputra, the Ganges, Indus, Mekong. Irrawaddy and the Yangtze. The lives of billions of people depend on the water from these rivers. Hannah finishes by stressing that we need to be much more careful in our use of water. It is a scarce resource and it could become much scarcer, floods or not.

In this episode I am delighted to have with me Ed Conway to discuss his new book 'Trade World'. Ed is the economics editor of Sky News and in 2023 he published his first booked 'Material World' which looked at some of the key raw materials - salt, copper, iron, oil etc on which our modern world depends. In his new book he looks at the origins, the structure and organisation of the international trade system which our modern world depends on. Many of the products we consume today are not produced in our own countries but imported from overseas. we get many of our fruit and vegetables from southern Europe and our clothes from half way around the world. The T shirt I am wearing is from Nicaragua, but it could have come from Vietnam or Bangladesh or Turkey. Ed looks in his book at the history of supply chains, going back to Greek and Roman Times and the complex web of trade across the Mediterranean and the developments during the Dutch and British empires. He focuses on three key examples in his book, bread, clothing and cars. We should not be surprised by cars, as many of us are used to cars from Germany, Italy, France, Korea and Japan, but now they are also coming from China and Malaysia. Bread is more of a surprise but ,much of the wheat used in its manufacture now comes from North america. But, as he notes we are facing a big change at present. The current era of globalization which got under way in the post war era with the off shoring of production, particularly to SE Asia, is now under threat. People used to argue that we were seeing the 'end of geography'. We could get anything we wanted from anywhere. But Ed suggests we may now be seeing the Return of Geography' with countries and companies re-shoring production and looking at the risks of being dependent on key goods produced abroad. This is why the British government have just intervened to ensure the continuation of steel production in Britain. Can a modern country risk being completely dependent on steel produced overseas? What if the tap is turned off at a time of conflict? Increasingly, countries are thinking about the need to maintain the production of key items within national borders.