Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to talk about socialism. What is it? And what do the politicians who now say they want it really want?

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It's a pleasure to say we've got a full house panel today, Helen Thompson, Chris Bickerton, Chris

Brooke. I think we have quite a lot of expertise around this table about certainly the

history of socialism as an idea and we're going to start with that. And then we're going to get

on to what was the trigger for this conversation or one of them, which is the interview

John McDonnell gave a couple of weekends ago, in which he was asked whether his hobby was still,

and there's a joke in there somewhere, I missed it, fermenting the overthrow of capitalism. I think he said it was a joke about brewing. Anyway, overthrowing capitalism, he said absolutely it is, and it's not just his hobby, it's his job now. And then when asked whether there was any difference between transforming capitalism and overthrowing it, he said, no, there isn't. But then there was a bit light on details in that then when giving an example of what this socialist society, as he called it, would be like,

he said, and he got emotional, that a man had died, a homeless man within feet of the

entrance of Parliament, and socialism would mean not that. It's just kind of a big gap, I think. I mean, it's a terrible thing,

but a big gap between that and what the rest of socialism might mean. So we're going to try and

fill that in and talk a bit about what might be possible in Britain. But also, socialism means

lots of different things in different places. It means something different in Europe.

One of the other things that sparked this conversation was the fact that some candidates in democratic primaries in the United States,

so four in particular in Pennsylvania who won, are now self-describing as socialist democratic socialists in the kind of Bernie Sanders tradition.

So what is this thing?

That's where we're going to start and maybe end up, Chris Brooke.

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