Oh God, What Now?
Making sense of our political hell every Tuesday and Friday! Oh God, What Now? is the no-bulls**t politics podcast, making the unbearable bearable with top quality guests and analysis, plus poor quality jokes. Regulars include: Guardian writer Rafael Behr • Rachel Cunliffe of the New Statesman • New Statesman columnist Jonn Elledge • Writer and host of This Is Not A Drill Gavin Esler • Social affairs journalist Hannah Fearn • Comedian Matt Green • The Lead's Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald • Group Editor Andrew Harrison • Podmasters Managing Editor Jacob Jarvis • Journalist Marie Le Conte • Former Mirror editor Alison Phillips • Writer and commentator Ros Taylor Sign up and get ad-free shows earlier than anyone else: patreon.com/ohgodwhatnow. Oh God, What Now? is a Podmasters production
Episodes
December 21, 2025 • 60 mins
Who and what will receive our FIFA Peace Prize-style gongs for the year? Elon Musk for his brief, mayfly political life of casual mass murder? Trump and Vance for their disgusting Oval Office attack on Zelenskyy? Liz Truss, madwoman for hire? Oasis? Prince Andrew? Stephen f**king Miller? All these and more feature in our heated debate about the defining moments, heroes, villains, blessed distractions and underreported stories of a ...
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December 18, 2025 • 62 mins
Thank God that’s nearly over… It’s been a grim old year in politics, so in the penultimate OGWN of 2025 our panel pores over the entrails of the year to seek reasons for optimism in 2026. Plus in a But Your Emails Special we answer as many of your questions as we can squeeze in. And if that’s not enough, we suggest Christmas presents for major politicians that might make them better at their jobs… or at least inspire them to give u...
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December 15, 2025 • 59 mins
As 2025 spirals around the plughole of posterity, The Guardian’s parliamentary speechwriter John Crace joins us to look at the year inside the Westminster Village. Did Farage successfully cross over from consequence-free rabble-rouser to horribly plausible Prime Minister? Will the growing racism allegations halt his ambitions? Is there more going on in Starmer’s government than meets the eye? And what did we learn from the launch o...
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December 12, 2025 • 61 mins
America’s new National Security Strategy is a hellish concoction of far-right obsessions, paranoid conspiracy thought, imperial fantasy, and outright aggression. European leaders are horrified but what are they going to do about it? Plus: Glasgow South MP Gordon McKee explains the UK’s debt to GDP ratio using towers of custard creams and bourbons. But can you make politics too simple? And in the Extra Bit for Patreons, we talk abou...
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December 8, 2025 • 66 mins
Social media’s sewer pipe of white nationalism, conspiracy thought and violent far-right incitement is seeping into mainstream politics. But where is all this extremism coming from? Who’s creating it? Is anyone on political social media not a bot? And what are we going to do about it? Special guest Olivia Brown from the University of Bath explains how a tiny number of far-right accounts weaponise tragedies like Southport and use AI...
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December 4, 2025 • 68 mins
What went wrong with “Your Party”? As absolutely nobody could have predicted, the new Left vehicle’s first conference collapses amid factional squabbles. Zarah Sultana gets to rule over the ruins but will all that new energy on the left now head over to Zack Polanski’s Greens? Plus: After a budget that pleased nobody, is Labour really taking young people seriously? And in the Extra Bit for Patreon people, will the War on London eve...
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December 1, 2025 • 66 mins
Britain is in trouble. Stagnating wages, collapsing public services and a feeble economy are turning politics angry and rancorous. Keir Starmer says Labour’s economic plan will take “years” to deliver – but does the party really have a long-term plan? And what would one look like? Our guest John Springford, associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform, has put one together at getting-out-of-the-hole.uk – and he’s here to tal...
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November 27, 2025 • 63 mins
Behind all the predictable shrieking about “tax raids”, what really happened in Rachel Reeves’s much-trailed misery Budget? And what’s behind Labour’s fear of making bolder moves? Plus, Private Eye’s Daily Mailograph gag comes true – it looks like the Mail is going to buy the Telegraph. Our special guest, Radio 4 Now Show veteran and musical satirist Mitch Benn, helps us explore what it will do to diversity of the press (rhetorical...
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November 24, 2025 • 64 mins
It’s the word of the moment. “Enshittification” is the reason Google is all ads and no useful results, Amazon serves you crappy overpriced products, your phone spies on you and you can’t find your friends on social media – but you WILL be persecuted by bots, brands and Nazis all day long. So how are we going to fix it? Leading tech critic Cory Doctorow joins Andrew Harrison and Rafael Behr to talk about whether digital platform rot...
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November 20, 2025 • 62 mins
Labour’s controversial asylum plans have sparked a backlash and it’s not clear they’ll even work. So, why have they gone down this route? What options might be better? Plus, AI – the bubble is going to burst, but has it already broken our brains? Then in the extra bit for supporters – what would we want to bring back from 100 years ago?
Escape Routes
• Matt is watching Death by Lightning
• Zoe is watching Stranger Things
• Ja...
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November 17, 2025 • 55 mins
Is Trump finally falling apart? His approval ratings are catastrophic, the Republicans took a hammering in the November elections, his gross-out distraction tactics no longer work… and as more Epstein emails are released, the scandal is lapping ever-higher around his cankles. Molly Jong-Fast of The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and the unmissable Fast Politics podcast joins Andrew Harrison and Rafael Behr to discuss the teetering tyrant an...
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November 13, 2025 • 70 mins
Trump and the right wing press are gleefully hounding the BBC over a clumsy speech edit – will they succeed in taking down the broadcaster? Plus, manifesto promises – there’s a huge fuss over Labour potentially breaking them, but is that anything new? And in the extra bit for supporters – reasons to be a Luddite! The panel rallies against smart technology.
• Rachel suggests Fergus Butler-Gallie’s book Touching Cloth
• Jonn re...
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November 10, 2025 • 55 mins
Tax rises! Cuts to everything! Here comes the pain! Seldom has a Budget been heralded with such dire warnings… if you believe the Toryform Press. But according to Giles Wilkes – Institute for Government fellow and former adviser to Vince Cable and Theresa May – Britain isn’t in such a disastrous state after all. In a weirdly optimistic conversation he joins Andrew Harrison and Jonn Elledge to look at the real story of Britain’s fin...
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November 6, 2025 • 67 mins
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoralty race electrifies the global Left, rocks the Democratic establishment and leaves Trump titanically unamused. What does it all mean? Plus: Do we need to save the Conservative Party? Former Digital Minister and Tory MP for Boston and Skegness Matt Warman helps us examine the drastic measures needed to keep Reform out. And in the aftermath of the Huntingdon knife attacks we look at the...
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November 3, 2025 • 66 mins
After decades of waving away electoral reform, Labour and the Tories suddenly have a reason to question First Past The Post – the nightmare prospect of a Reform government. Has proportional representation’s time finally come? How might it happen? And what system would work for Britain? Proud elections wonk David Klemperer of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath joins Rachel Cunliffe and Andrew Harrison for th...
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October 31, 2025 • 60 mins
British politics feels stalled and the only people benefiting are Farage and the quick-fix demagogues of Reform UK. Why is the debate about our national future frozen and what can we do about it? Special guest Ben Ansell – author of Why Politics Fails – joins us to talk it over. Plus, a But Your Emails special where we answer as many of your questions as is humanly possible. And in the Extra Bit for Patreon people only… where did t...
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October 28, 2025 • 61 mins
A neurotic obsession with illegal migration is driving British politics rightwards, trapping the parties in an arms race of escalating harshness towards migrants. Now Tory far-righter Katie Lam wants to cancel legal migrants’ right to stay, evoking the racist “repatriation” talk of the 1970s National Front. Can Britain get out of the migration doom spiral?
Former head of the Migration Advisory Committee Prof Alan Manning joins us...
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October 23, 2025 • 60 mins
Reform UK just pulled off the sequel to the Jackie Weaver Handforth Parish Council Zoom meeting, and it’s excellent. The leaked Zoom meeting from Reform’s flagship Kent County Council shows things aren’t perhaps going as well for Nigel Farage’s party/business as he may have hoped. Is Reform having a bit of a wobble? Plus, is social media brainrot ruining British politics? And in the Extra Bit for subscribers, things are going from ...
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October 20, 2025 • 57 mins
The papers still dangle the dream of a sun-dappled retirement. Yet millions have nowhere near the savings they’ll need, while a fortunate few are amassing family wealth that could change Britain forever. Meanwhile the generational wealth gap is forcing younger people to forget about starting families. Is the old “work hard and you’ll make it” model broken? And do we need a wealth tax to fix it? Will Snell of the Fairness Foundation...
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October 16, 2025 • 63 mins
After the collapse of the China spying case, do we have to accept that Britain is way past being able to spar with Beijing? Especially when we depend so much on their students? Green MP Siân Berry talks about the party’s future under new eco-populist leader Zach Polanski, how to square green infrastructure with their support’s suspicion of development, and whether the Greens would enter a coalition with Labour to keep Farage out. A...
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