Meera Syal is in Hay to talk about her third novel and her first book in 16 years, ‘The House of Hidden Mothers’.  She just didn’t have a book that she wanted to write during that time and until she was watching a  documentary about surrogacy in India. It was as if one of her favourite books, Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ had crossed the line from fiction into fact.

The surrogacy industry in India is now worth $4.5 billion a year, and often poor girls from rural areas carry babies for wealthy foreign couples.

In Meera’s new novel, Shyama, at 48 (in the first draft she was 44) has fallen for a younger man, Toby, and they want a child. She already has a 19 year-old daughter and has been told that she can’t have another child. Her friend Priya tells her about ART – Assisted Reproductive Technology. At the same time in a rural village in India, young Mala is trapped in an oppressive marriage and needs money to escape from her situation..

Manzoor says asks whether the novel about a relationship between two people is also about the relationship between England and India and Syal agrees. This isn’t too far from call centres,”effectively we’ve outsourced fertility”.  The West has rich infertile women and the East has poor fertile women and trade has stepped in.

The discussion covered issues of culture and diversity and how Meera had played with these issues in a mischievous and irreverent way in her work. “There’s a  difference between Bernard Manning telling a Jewish joke and Woody Allen telling a Jewish joke.”  The subject of age is also at the fore in this discussion and particularly in the impact it has on women. “However much botox you have your ovaries are still the age your ovaries are.”

 Levison Wood  was an Officer in the Parachute Regiment. He is the first person to walk the entire length of the river Nile, taking a year beginning in December 2013. He has written a book detailing the expedition called ‘Walking the Nile’.

He had a companion called Boston, an African  former rebel soldier, and the expedition was filmed for a documentary series on Channel 4.

He begins by scotching myths of elegance on the banks of the Nile portrayed by Agatha Christie and others. He underlines this with an image of a Nile cruise boat rusting on a sand bank.  The recent history of Nile cruising is all but over with the political and military instability in the region. 

This was a gruelling venture through searing heat, inhospitable land and war zones.
In clips from the TV series we see Levison wrestling with tribesmen, rescuing a baby monkey from a bush fire and avoiding land mines in South Sudan. Having seen him pummelled by the feet of his nomadic companions on one leg of the trip, I’d recommend that you never ask a Bedouin for a massage.

Bernard Hinault, known as ‘the Badger, was a man of few words, a hard man, a man of granite a kind of Clint Eastwood on two wheels.

Will Fotheringham, the UK’s leading cycling journalist, has done much to convey the grit required to be be a competitive road cyclist. He was also ghost writer of Bradley Wiggins autobiography ‘My Time’. In a new book he has written about one of cycling’s hardest ever hard men, Hinault.

Bernard Hinault won the Tour de France five times. He is one of only six cyclists to have won all three Grand Tours, and the last French cyclist to win Tour in 1985.

He was an angry young man with a record in cycling second only to Eddie Merckx. In the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré in 1977 Hinault, in the yellow jersey, was heading for victory. But he crashed in the mountain descent. He climbed up from the roadside, licked his wounds and and got back on his bike, going on to win the race in Grenoble.

Fotheringham’s book ‘Bernard Hinault and the Fall and Rise of French Cycling’ also contemplates the future and the emergence of tough and talented young French riders.

Maajid Nawaz begins with a shocking tale from his home town of Southend. At the age of 15 he was about to take a racist beating from supporters of Combat 18. A local, Maajid  believes was called Matt, attempted to step in and was stabbed multiple times by the skinhead thugs.

In a later episode his friend fooled the thugs into believing he had a bomb in a rucksack. They backed off and it taught Nawaz the power of fear. It was his first real step to radicalisation.

At 16 he joined the Islamist Jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The student Nawaz was expelled for his political activities. He later went to SOAS but travelled extensively in Pakistan and Denmark creating and building Jihadist groups. At 24, he was in Egypt when 9/11 happened. He was arrested and subjected to inhumane treatment, although he escaped the levels of torture that many fellow inmates experienced. He was there for four years. Whilst in jail he came to the conclusion that Islamic Jihad was essentially a fascist ideology overlaid over Islam. He left Egypt and prison as a liberal committed to human rights.

Maajid founded Quilliam, a London-based think tank that focuses on Islamism as the cause of Muslim terrorism. It lobbies governments in order to demonstrate how Islamist ideology is incompatible with Islam.

In 2009 he joined the Liberal Democrats, because he believed and wanted to show that the democratic system could embrace even those who has sought to oppose and undermine it.

Sponsored by Shepherd’s Ice Cream

Jonathan Sacks, Baron Sacks, is a rabbi, philosopher and scholar of Judaism, who was Chief Rabbi from 1991 to 2013.  His book ‘Not in God’s Name – Confronting Religious Violence’ explores the concept of altruistic evil or the execution of terrible acts in the name of a higher power.

Religion is on the rise across the world, simply because religious people have far more children. The secular nations of Europe all have a birth rate of less than two per family, so secular communities are in a period of inevitable decline.

Lord Sacks, it transpires, is a fan of social media and believes that we should be using it more to build bonds in society “but there is also a lot of anger on the Internet.”

Sacks compares the relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam to sibling rivalry. He cites Freud in describing this rivalry as a powerful and violent force. However, he says that the many bible stories about sibling conflict are teaching followers of all three religions, not to view themselves this way.

The BBC’s Head of News James Harding challenges this view, saying that religious teachings that tell their adherents that they are “chosen”‘ must themselves be a source of conflict. Lord Sacks counters saying that religion will ultimately persuade its followers to question conflict that brings suffering on its own people.

“Whatever else this man is he’s not a politician.” Nick Cohen begins by saying that left wing journalists failed in their duty by not saying that Ed Miliband couldn’t win an election because he wasn’t convincing as a prospective prime minister.

Cohen argues that 2015 was also a turning point where the traditional progressive majority in the UK was eroded and the parties on the right gained over 50% of the votes (58% if you include the Liberal Democrats).

Manzoor invites the audience to ask questions during the discussion to be “part of the conversation”. It has mixed results and the discussion becomes more than a little fragmented as a result. We move onto Tony Blair, there is a sense that the audience is skeptical about him and that both Cohen and Manzoor believe he is the sort of leader that the Labour Party now needs. Manzoor challenges a Tory voter in the audience “did you feel the Conservative campaign was full of love?” She responds by accusing him of being patronising and a vocal section of the audience agrees.

Bizarrely many of those speaking from the floor say that they voted Conservative but few of them seem happy about it. That could be a “Hay effect” but begs the question as to why they grabbed a microphone.

Another member of the audience takes a swipe at the chair, this time taking offence at being addressed as a lady. “Dimbleby never gets this kind of shit” says Manzoor.

Nick Cohen has some very interesting and insightful things to say but the early evening session is dominated by people from the floor. They completely ignore Manzoor’s request that they ask questions rather than take the opportunity to give their own, far from original or insightful, opinions.