ON Start the Week (Radio 4, 15 June), Dr Adam Rutherford caught up with three writers whose work explores their council-estate backgrounds. Nicola Wilding, a writer and TV producer, came from a farm-labouring family in Cumberland; the novelist and poet Natasha Carthew grew up in a Cornish seaside village; the poet Daljit Nagra was among Punjabi labourers in a predominantly white overspill estate in west London.
Ms Wilding grew up to become a TV producer with a middle-class lifestyle and “media leftie” values, while her mother started going on English Defence League marches just after her brother was sent to prison for armed robbery. She felt that “nuance and agency” was often lacking in portrayals of working-class lives. But Ms Carthew put racism among working-class people down to middle-class racists “stirring the pot”.
Somehow, this tension was never addressed, and the programme would have benefited from a balancing voice. The default position of all seemed to be that it was some sort of natural law that working-class people should be on the Left: if the plebs, for example, voted for Brexit, it was a sign of false consciousness and manipulation by the rich.
Right-to-buy for council tenants was presented as particularly deleterious: it went wrong for Ms Wilding’s family, with other debts forcing them to sell within five years. Ms Carthew argued that this policy has stripped coastal areas of their social-housing stock. This is true, but the policy was also wildly popular, and a springboard to prosperity for millions. These facts went unmentioned.
Mr Nagra’s story was more optimistic: his immigrant labourer parents grafted hard at factory jobs, saving enough to buy a little shop in a poor part of Sheffield. His parents battled racism from customers, and Mr Nagra battled racism in the education system to succeed.
One should not romanticise the past: the stories of Mr Nagra and Ms Wilding were a reminder that the 1970s and ’80s were more divided, violent, and impoverished than Britain in 2026.
Can a vision of humanity made in the image and likeness of God survive the twin pressures of AI’s growing capacity and humanity’s greater awareness of animal intelligence? That was the thread running through the ruminations that Michael Buerk compered on Moral Maze (Radio 4, Wednesday).
This was a strongly God-fearing panel: even its spiky left-winger, Ash Sarkar, describes herself as a “pick’n’mix” Muslim who thinks that she believes in God. In fact, much of the programme involved panellists largely agreeing with witnesses about the inherent value of animal life and limitations of machine intelligence — until Professor Nick Bostrom said that he was happy to fine-tune human biology to improve it, even if it meant that we evolved into something “quite different” from Homo sapiens. AI is only one new technology that probably exceeds our capacity to use it wisely.