Helen Thompson Interviewed by Gwenan Edwards

Political economist Professor Helen Thompson explains the political shocks of the last decade and shows how Covid-19 blew apart fault lines that had been accumulating for decades.

Thompson’s story is about the rise of an oil and capital-rich United States at a time when oil began to replace coal as the energy base for military power and about how the rise of the Eurodollar system and the energy crises of the 1970s remade the monetary world and the European Union. It is also about the need for democracies to maintain ‘losers’ consent’ and be repaired when they become unbalanced. Thompson says such repair is difficult under current geopolitical and economic conditions.

Thompson is professor of political economy at Cambridge University and author of Oil and the Western Economic Crisis; China and the Mortgaging of America; and Might, Right, Prosperity and Consent: Representative Democracy and the International Economy. Here she talks to journalist and former BBC News presenter, Gwenan Edwards, whose credits include the BBC Proms, BBC World, BBC News Channel and Watchdog on BBC1.