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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Hinwood, the usual duplet today.

Josh White will investigate the continuing rod of Britain.

And Felicia Cornblue will examine the history of the fight for abortion rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Over the last decade, Britain has had a series of dismal Tory Prime Ministers.

David Cameron, in office from 2010 to 2016, whose response to the financial crisis was a deep homegrown austerity program,

a totally forgettable Theresa May, who ran the country for the next three years.

The often amusing but chaotic and cynical Boris Johnson, 2019-22, who left in scandal and disgrace,

Liz Truss, who lasted not quite two months, forced to resign after presenting a ludicrous budget based on tax cuts and heavy borrowing,

which resulted in what has been dubbed the moron premium, a penalty of higher interest rates on British bonds imposed by the markets.

And now Richie Sunak, a Goldman Sachs alum, about whom it's hard to say much of anything other than that he's the country's first Prime Minister of Asian origin.

At the same time, the Labour Party went through a series of internal convulsions marked first by the ascent of the left-winger Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership,

and then a concerted and successful attack on him by the British establishment in the Labour right.

His successor, Keir Starmer, is a harmless centrist who wants to revive the old Tony Blair magic, such as it was.

For much of that time, the country has had to cope with the consequences, domestic and foreign, of the Brexit referendum,

by which it left the European Union.

This period can best be described by the title of a Thomas Mom novella, disorder and early sorrow, appropriately enough the profile of a declining family.

My first guest, Josh White, is just out with a book, good by United Kingdom, about this trajectory of decline.

It's published by the Battleground, a web scene, the Battleground.eu, now expanding into another medium.

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