Start the Week

In the first programme of a new series of Start the Week the former MP Lord Hattersley charts the life and politics of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister responsible for the creation of the welfare state, and a working class man who came to understand the pitfalls of a coalition government. Andrew Marr looks back to the 1980s with the writer Andy McSmith who argues this was the conflict decade, defined by strikes, war and riots. And the philosopher Mary Midgley also criticises the individualism of the time, maintaining that Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' was never a creed in which to live one's life. The Irish-American community in New York is the setting for Richard Bean's new play, in which he uncovers the plots and deals that lead to the American funding of the IRA.