Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, the producer of Talking Politics. This week's episode is a recording

of a talk David gave to the Whitehall Society a few weeks ago about COVID, climate change

and the threat to democracy. It was recorded before the latest twists in the never-ending

story of the pandemic, but it's an attempt to look beyond this year to try to understand

what the long-term lessons might be.

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in partnership with the London reviewer books. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's

a sadness not to be able to deliver this lecture in person, but we're all learning to adapt.

And indeed that is the theme that I want to talk about. And in a way I want to address

particularly, I suppose, the Greta Thunberg question, which is what have we learned this

year about the ability of democratic societies, particularly to address a crisis as though

it were a crisis, to adapt, to innovate, to reform, and for people as well, not just politicians

to change. So I'm talking about the link between COVID and climate. I'm not trying to make

a grand argument in relation to the science. I'm not trying to make a big anthropological

argument in relation to what the pandemic tells us about our treatment of the natural world.

I'm interested in the basic question about democratic politics and its adaptability,

which is how well suited are the systems that we live in, and I'm assuming here, we're

talking primarily about the world's leading democracies, to meeting these kinds of challenges

...