Politics Weekly UK’s 2024 culture list

This is The Guardian. Politics Weekly UK is taking a break for Christmas and the New Year. We'll be back soon enough. But in the meantime, if you're looking for a few things to keep you entertained, I'm going to talk about a few of my favourite books, albums and TV shows from the last year. I'm John Harris and you're listening to Politics Weekly UK for the Dark.

Beyond Westminster and increasingly in the inner circles of politics, one of this year's big themes was all about nature, our threatened environment and issues about land and property that were once overlooked, but are now being loudly talked about. Some of this is about how things move from the culture into political debate.

The popularity of walking and hiking, for example, rose during the pandemic, and then put a new kind of environmentalism on the agenda. The dire state of our rivers and the tireless campaigning of Fergal Sharkey has been every bit as important. Once he was the singer with the Northern Irish punk Ishband, the Undertones, but last time I saw him during the election campaign, he was standing on the end of a pier in red car talking about discharges of sewage, or as he puts it,

I've been fortunate in my life a little while ago, I would admit, to stand on another wooden platform called the stage, and out of those immortal words, good night went late. And now I get to stand in the end of salt beer here talking about food. Well, some, clearly in a previous life I was at tour with a hunter or something.

There's in the temple truth the matter is. We now live in a world where our rivers and our beaches and our seas reflect the state of society overall. And then there was this. We're on White Hill now facing the gates of Downing Street. There are thousands of people here. Many of them have got homemade placards. Never corner a farmer, it always ends badly. I think I saw one before saying, starmer the farmer,

So, tell me which part of the country you farm in and what you farm? I'm a farmer from Wallingford in Oxfordshire. OK, what do you farm? Cattle sheep and arable crops. OK, and as you're farming in your family for a fair while? Yeah, we've been farming for about 450 years. So, yeah, a few weeks, yeah. Why have you come today?

We're just trying to make our voice heard. We are, you know, we're people who want to feed the nation, but we're just getting absolute crippled by these potential tax rises. If you look at the defra figures, a huge percentage of the farming industry working below the minimum wage, you've got a budget saying we're going to put the minimum wage up for everyone, and then you've imposed a crippling tax on people who aren't even getting the minimum wage. You just look at, it's just, it's just cock.

Just cock. There's a quotation, if ever. In a very different way, the farmers protest that erupted after the budget have also let loose big questions about the countryside and its future, sometimes in ways that big agricultural interests don't like. Two years ago, for example, the right to row was a subject on the political fringes.

Now you hear it talked about all the time. There's a whole chunk of publishing now devoted to these subjects, which I've been immersed in for most of the year. So I'll big up two books. The Lie of the Land is by the campaigner and writer Guy Shrubsoul. It's all about the people and vested interests that own our landscape. The damage many of them have done to it and how to move into a better future. I'll quote a few of the questions he asks.

Why does England not take lessons from Scotland and empower communities to buy more land for nature restoration? Why doesn't the state spend less money paying land owners who fail to deliver, and more on buying land itself, creating a new public nature estate in the process? Why are our national parks not in fact owned by the nation, and why do we not give national park authorities the powers to make these pressures places wilder?

It's a very, very good book. So is The Lost Paths by Jack Cornish, who spends a lot of his waking hours as the head of paths at The Walking Charity, the Ramblers. His book is full of vivid glimpses of how he got around before the invention of the car, and how the past can still be seen in the tangle of rural footpaths that runs all over the UK, but it also looks at cities through the same prism. It's political with a small P in the best way and highly recommended. Right, some music.

In 2022, Nick Kay published an amazing book titled Faith, Hope and Carnage, a collection of dialogues with the Observer writer Sean O'Hagan with one huge loss at its core, the senseless death of Kay's 15-year-old son Arthur.

That book is full of insights about what happens when life fills up with grief and hurt, and what happens to us when we suffer shocks and ruptures. It also shades into the quest for meaning that has since led cave to tentatively embrace Christianity. These kinds of themes and feelings have inevitably defined his recent musical work as well, unimaginably he lost another son two years ago, and led on to Wild God, which is one of my favourite alms of the year.

a huge, profound, life-affirming record which somehow emphasizes the importance of joy. If you haven't heard it, and you have any preconceptions about the man who made it, you should listen.

Finally, I don't watch much TV, but am belatedly immersed in snowfall, the epic 60-part drama series that begins with the decisive arrival of crack cocaine in Los Angeles and explores the links between the so-called war on drugs, US foreign policy, organised crime, the modern social history of African-American communities and much more besides.

You got three things in life when you're born. What your mama tells you? What the streets teach you? What the future holds? What's no one knows? That's the one you got control over. Frank!

It's an amazing kaleidoscopic experience, which feels totally modern. Another example of how being political with a small P actually increases the impact of the art. There aren't many shows you end up carrying around in your head, but this is definitely one of them.

Thanks for listening. Politics Weekly Westminster with Pepper and Kieran will be back on Monday the 6th of January and I'll be back as usual on Thursday the 9th of January. This episode was produced by Frankie Tobey. The music is by Axel Cucutier and the executive producers of Phil Maynard and Nicole Jackson. This is The Guardian.