Voices from the Left were rather prominent on last week's Start the Week, and will be on next week's edition too.
You'll probably already know that Russell Brand was on last Monday's programme. Russ was talking revolution - the theme of that edition of the show.
He didn't go down too well with many Feedback listeners, by the sounds of it. Even the Twitter reaction that I saw didn't seem very keen. Some of his other guests, and presenter Tom Sutcliffe, didn't seem to get on with him either. Scraps abounded.
Still, all the loyal Russophiles out there seemed pleased enough at his performance - which was nothing if not very Russell Brand (except for forgetting to mention his 'ballbags').
Besides wannabe left-wing hero Russ and the programme's bien pensant Guardian-writing presenter Tom Sutcliffe, we also had a left-wing campaigner David Babbs, executive director of 38 Degrees, which campaigns against Israel (among other things), and a U.S. Democrat-supporting/U.S. Republican-bashing philosopher, Susan Neiman (who bashed U.S. foreign policy from the Left). The final guest, who didn't venture a strong opinion on modern matters, was historian Juliet Barker. She wants the Peasants' Revolt re-classed as the Great Revolt, and presented it - in Ed Miliband-like language - as being all about "the squeezed middle".
Now, I enjoyed Juliet Barker's revisionist take on the Peasants' Revolt, though I didn't get Susan Neiman's rather nebulous point, and didn't buy her premise either - that the age between 16 and 25 is the worst time of peoples' lives. Russ moaned about being misrepresented by critics and then proceeded to misrepresent his fellow guests. (Oh Russ!). And David Babbs was suitably left-wing.
The programme really could have done with a right-winger. I'm not quite sure why no one on the production team at Start the Week thought it worthwhile asking one, but (for whatever reason) they didn't.
Capitalism got quite a bashing there, understandably.
Next week's edition will doubtless also focus on capitalism, as the topic up for discussion is going to be The Language of Money.
Looking at the guest list, we've got ex-New Statesman editor and well-known 'to-the-left-of-New Labour' figure John Kampfner, Keynesian FT columnist Martin Wolf, left-leaning novelist and London Review of Books regular John Lanchester and writer and self-declared socialist Naomi Alderman.
I think we can guess where that's going. Time for all of us top-hatted fans of capitalism to make for the exit doors it seems.
