In this episode of Footsteps in Utopia, Alex sits down with campaign strategist Maurice Cousins, now Campaigns Director at Net Zero Watch, to explore how modern politics has become trapped between two ancient worldviews, the Platonic dream of ideal order and the Aristotelian pursuit of human flourishing. From the collapse of Cold War certainties to the technocratic zeal of the 1990s and today’s Net Zero orthodoxy, Cousins traces the line of policy failure from a ruling class that has lost interest in the needs of its people. Together they unpick how Britain’s ruling class mistook communication problems for political ones, why populism is misread as ignorance, and how the very architecture of New Labour’s “Third Way” still defines the boundaries of acceptable thought in Westminster.
The conversation ranges from Star Trek’s Borg to Tony Blair’s utopian New Britain, from Iraq to Brexit, from the smoking ban to the bureaucratic state. Cousins argues that the West’s faith in perfectible sys…
