Endings and Beginnings: From United Kingdom to Breaking Britain - With Peter Geoghegan

As part of the Europe's Borderlands research group at the King's College London European Studies Department, this podcast series will take a deeper look at how the United Kingdom's crisis of unity will affect the nations on the islands of Britain and Ireland. In this opening episode we will explore the historical legacies that have fuelled support for nationalist movements in Scotland as well as Northern Ireland, and how the impact of these legacies might affect a changing UK as well as an increasingly powerful European Union.

This week's show, recorded on 17 January, we are honoured to have Peter Geoghegan as our guest, who as investigations editor for OpenDemocracy has covered some of the key factors destabilising the politics of the British state. In his acclaimed Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, Peter set out how a surge of undisclosed donations have reshaped British politics. In The People's Referendum: Why Scotland will Never Be the Same Again he provided a compelling argument for how the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence fundamentally transformed British politics. As a incisive observer of the politics of the islands of Britain and Ireland, Peter is the ideal guide for our journey through the past century of political endings and beginnings that have brought the British state close to breaking point.

The background music is by Brother Monsplaisir, and the production work for this podcast was by Daniel Mansfield.