The Smack of Firm Leadership
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does the way in which rival political systems around the world have managed the Covid-19 pandemic tell us about the global political future?
Writer and broadcaster, John Kampfner, considers what has made a "good leader" during the months of the outbreak and how that is likely to affect the vitality and long-term future of individual regimes. Are today's authoritarians - often savvier and subtler than their twentieth century counterparts - becoming more confident and optimistic? Is this a good time for the world's populist leaders from the Americas to Europe to East Asia? And has democracy, already tainted by its response to the global financial crisis and enduring questions over its popular legitimacy, continued with its woes or might there be a glimmer of light after the years of darkness? Among those taking part: Francis Fukuyama (author of "The End of History and the Last Man"); Anne Applebaum (soon to publish "The Twilight of Democracy"); Singaporean former top diplomat and President of the UN Security Council, Kishore Mahbubani; writer and broadcaster, Misha Glenny; eminent international affairs analyst, Constanze Stelzenmüller; Bulgarian political thinker, Ivan Krastev (joint author of "The Light that Failed") and Lionel Barber, former editor of the "Financial Times".
Producer Simon Coates Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I commission podcast for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds. |
| 0:38.0 | BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:41.0 | Hello, thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis. podcasts. FNA, writer and broadcaster and presenter of this edition. |
| 0:54.0 | Over the next half hour, I'm going to be exploring how the pandemic has convulsed the world's politics. |
| 1:01.0 | It's called the smack of firm leadership and you'll find out why. |
| 1:05.0 | In times of emergency in whom to invest our trust. |
| 1:10.0 | It takes a crisis like the one we're in to make people recognize that these basic functions |
| 1:16.8 | of government are actually pretty important and a government that can actually make the |
| 1:21.5 | bureaucracy work and deliver services is worth having. |
| 1:26.3 | The trust in government is much higher and easy issue, the survey show it, but the trust in |
| 1:30.8 | government in the United States has been progressively going down. |
| 1:36.6 | And when your trust in government goes down, then of course if the government asks you to do something, |
| 1:40.1 | you'll say, how can I trust these people? |
| 1:42.4 | They haven't taken care of me the first |
| 1:44.3 | person you heard was Francis Fukayama the man who 30 years ago famously |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.