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Nick Spencer on Andrew Marr’s ‘Start the Week’

Nick Spencer on Andrew Marr’s ‘Start the Week’

Nick Spencer on BBC 4 discussing how the parable of the Good Samaritan has been hijacked for political ends from both the left and the right.

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Facebook co–founder Chris Hughes makes a case for cash handouts to the poor. He tells Andrew Marr that having become exceptionally wealthy he is looking for the most efficient way to give something back tosociety, and a Universal Basic Income is among his ideas.

But the Oxford academic Ian Goldin argues that UBI is an intellectual sticking plaster. He suggests targeted benefits, better taxation and philanthropy may be the answers to today’s growing inequality and the prospect of mass job losses due to automation.

Caroline Slocock was the first female Private Secretary at No.10, employed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She looks back at the last years of Thatcher’s time in office, and Thatcher’s vision of a smaller state and individual responsibility.

Margaret Thatcher used the parable of the Good Samaritan to argue her case, suggesting that the voluntary actions of a wealthy Samaritan trumped the collective action of the state. Nick Spencer, Research Director at the public theology think tank Theos, explores how this parable has been hijacked for political ends from both the left and the right.

Listen here, Nick speaks from 30.20.

 

 Image from the BBC Radio 4 website.

Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer

Nick is Senior Fellow at Theos. He is the author of a number of books and reports, including Magisteria: the entangled histories of science and religion (Oneworld, 2023), The Political Samaritan: how power hijacked a parable (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Evolution of the West (SPCK, 2016) and Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is host of the podcast Reading Our Times.

Watch, listen to or read more from Nick Spencer

Posted 9 April 2018

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