Night Waves - TS Eliot Prize/Class Consciousness/A Prophet/Whitechapel Gallery Exhibition

Matthew Sweet has the first broadcast interview with the winner of the TS Eliot prize for poetry. Matthew is also joined by Peter Oborne, political editor of the Spectator, and Geoff Mulgan, the head of the Young Foundation, to discuss the rising tide of class consciousness in Britain and to ask where our class sensibilities come from and whether they are accurate to the society in which we find ourselves. Is the return of class simply a piece of pre-election posturing between Labour and the Conservatives or has some deeper shift happened in the attitudes of Britons to their station in life. In the week that John Denham marked class as a more important criteria than race in social policy, we ask why the government feels this should be so. Have we come to a natural end point in the politics of racial identity? And if nothing fundamental in the socio-economic structure of British life or the distribution of wealth has happened in the past few years, what has happened to drive up the perception of class as a key marker of identity? Emily Bickerton in Paris reviews the latest French Film to make it big over here - Jacques Audiard's A Prophet tells the violent story of a young French Arab who rises to the top of the hellish prision in which he finds himself. And a new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London - 'Where three Dreams Cross: 150 yrs of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh'. Matthew discusses whether these images confirm or challenge our existing sense of what the Subcontinent looks like.