Until 2024, Steve Baker was the MP for Wycombe for 14 years and a high-profile figure in the Conservative government, including serving as a minister in the Cabinet Office, the Northern Ireland Office and the Department for Exiting the EU. He also ran several notable campaigns as a backbench MP. Now he has set up Fighting for a Free Future to challenge the idea of an omnipotent state. Check out the Substack, Voices for a Free Future.

Steve is speaking in two debates at the Battle of Ideas festival: From energy caps to rent controls: can the state run the market? and Should we tolerate the intolerant?

Discounted early-bird tickets for the festival, which takes places on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October in Westminster, are available until Thursday 17 September. Find out more on the Battle of Ideas festival website.

Freedom isn’t failing

Steve Baker

We have a fundamental problem. Those who set the climate of public debate treat freedom, by default, as a failed experiment. Politicians, intellectuals and journalists advance the moral and practical case for power in response to every problem.

Paradoxically, increasing taxes, growing debt, expanding regulation and monetary expansion have been the hallmarks of government throughout living memory. Anyone who has studied the structure of scientific revolutions will recognise that the paradigm in which so many thinkers have invested and built their careers is now, as expected, continuing far beyond the point at which it can reasonably be maintained.

We ought to ask why.

We are far down the rabbit hole now. A free society rests on the division of labour and therefore money, the means of exchange. It ought to maintain its value. But between 1997 and 2010, the money supply tripled through new debt. And then, during the pandemic, the bonds issued to cover extraordinary spending were bought by the Bank of England using new money. Then we had a punishing surge in inflation. Is it any wonder people are losing faith in the justice of our social processes?

Long ago, economists established that planned economies cannot work because the vast amount of information dispersed in the minds of the choosing, acting public can only emerge to guide production through prices, profit and loss. The information simply is not available to planners, and yet we press on with a technocratic ‘third way’ between the two that is now plainly failing – ask any young prospective home buyer.

We ought not to believe the intellectual elite has chosen to disbelieve in freedom because they have examined it and found it wanting. They disbelieve in the capacity of other people to guide their own lives because of the institutional factors bearing upon them. Regulating the country rewards the appearance of certainty and control over the humility which genuine uncertainty demands.

Roger Koppl’s theory of big players and economic expectations takes seriously radical uncertainty and plural interpretations of available information. The central insight is simple: we do not form expectations in a vacuum. We form them in a context. If that context is stable, rule-bound and publicly known, we can focus on underlying fundamentals such as prices, productivity and resource constraints. But if the context in which we act is instead dominated by discretionary actors whose behaviour cannot be forecast from any stable rule, our expectations become anchored on something else entirely: speculation about the intentions, constraints and internal politics of those actors. Think of how Monetary Policy Committee decisions are speculated upon and received.

The big players setting the context of our lives are not merely large. They have discretionary power, operate opaquely and enjoy relative immunity from consequences. The rest of us must second guess them. We can ignore the big players and risk being wrong about the most powerful forces in our lives or we can devote our best efforts to working out what they will do next.

This dynamic leads not only to inefficiency but a structural transformation of our lives and the market economy. We suffer radical uncertainty, a greater risk of herding and an increased danger of bubbles.

Big players do not merely introduce errors at the margin. They rewire how we all form our expectations, choose and act, substantially undermining the function of entrepreneurs and investors. This is the failing social system in which we now live.

Professional standing rewards confident advice over honest uncertainty. Modelling has assumed the status of scripture, despite its repeated fallibility: we cry out for certainty in a world of accelerating and uncertain change and cling to that which seems to provide it. It is in that context that the governing elite operate. A lack of humility is blinding us to the reality that it is interventionist institutions which are failing.

The Global Financial Crisis was caused by this environment. As money supply surged, politicians believed boom-bust had been abolished: we needed only to share the proceeds of growth. Now we see that productivity growth stagnated after the crash with calamitous consequences for the prosperity of generations. Readers might point to the pandemic as a justification for the power of expert big players but consider Sweden: its policy was not the result of better institutional design, but the accidental absence of political discretion after their 2019 coalition agreement stripped the government of freedom to manoeuvre.

What we should learn is that bad outcomes sometimes follow from carefully designed expert institutions, and good outcomes sometimes come from the structural unavailability of bad options. These are arguments for constraining the discretion of experts, not trusting them more.

Real crises have happened. Real people suffer. Hope fades. But the cause is institutional design that favours monopoly expert power operating with discretion and a state of immense scope. Ours cannot be conceived of as a failure of a free society. Whatever our systematic problems, the burden of proof rests on those who claim freedom has failed.

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On Friday 11 September at 7.30pm at the Emmanuel Centre in London, Winston Marshall will host a live debate between two prominent voices with sharply differing perspectives on a question that continues to shape politics, culture, religion and public discourse around the world:

Is Islam compatible with the West?

Arguing from different viewpoints, journalist and author Maajid Nawaz and historian Raymond Ibrahim will engage in a candid and robust discussion on faith, integration, liberal values, history and the future of Western societies.

Subscribers to Academy of Ideas Substack can get a 20% discount on tickets by using the code IDEAS when you check out.

BUY TICKETS VIA EVENTBRITE

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In many ways, what’s emerged from the Nottingham Inquiry is exactly why the Battle of Ideas exists: ordinary people asking difficult questions about why and how we do things, without fear of the consequences, in pursuit of the truth.

The bravery embodied by the families of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates has inspired the whole Academy of Ideas team, and we’re honoured to have Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, speaking at the Battle of Ideas this year.

One contribution we ALL can make is to listen to the findings that are available to us because those families held institutions to account. They refused to go quietly into the night. Let’s help turn that awful cliché ‘lessons will be learned’ into a concrete public clamour for real change. If we can really learn the lessons from evidence that the families have worked so hard to expose - and demand change from our institutions - lives will likely be saved in Nottingham and beyond.

So please, listen to Emma below, and do your best to watch the findings of the Nottingham Inquiry - which will be streamed on Tuesday and Wednesday this week via the Nottingham Inquiry YouTube channel. You can also view my speech in the House of Lords on accountability.

Below, you can also find the blurb for our session Grooming gangs to the Nottingham Inquiry: untangling accountability at Battle of Ideas festival, which takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster. Full details for the festival are here.

Claire

Emma Webber message

Claire Fox speech

Grooming gangs to the Nottingham Inquiry: untangling accountability

Battle of Ideas festival, Sunday 18 October
For programme and tickets, visit the Battle of Ideas festival website.

What happens when multiple state agencies are implicated in tragedies and scandals that lead to harm for members of the public? In cases of catastrophic state failure – from the grooming-gangs scandal to what has emerged from the Nottingham Inquiry into the deaths of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates – the gaping hole at their heart is the lack of meaningful institutional accountability.

In relation to events in Nottingham, in 2020, Valdo Calocane was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and a consultant psychiatrist warned that could ‘end up killing someone’. Before he eventually did just that, there were myriad warning signs that were ignored. In 2021, he headbutted and punched a police officer; in 2022, he attacked a flatmate, putting him in a headlock; and just five weeks before the Nottingham killings in 2023, he assaulted two colleagues at work. Yet despite being sectioned four times, repeatedly refusing to take medication, he was discharged from specialist mental-health services in September 2022 and seemingly officially forgotten about by authorities. In the subsequent investigation, a chain of failures across mental-health services, policing and local government have been exposed. Yet no one has been sacked for these obvious derelictions.

The failures associated with the grooming-gang scandals hardly need repeating. Victim accounts have alleged that police officers not only ignored their complaints or information from whistleblowers, but in instances facilitated abuse, with some even participating in the sexual abuse; that social services delivered children into the hands of their abusers and, on occasion, sat in on child marriages; and that NHS officials ignored clear signs of sexual exploitation and abuse. Yet despite widespread evidence of institutional failure – and, in some cases, allegations that officials actively enabled abuse – criminal accountability has been remarkably limited. Very few officials have been prosecuted. More often, senior figures resigned or retired, frequently retaining their pensions, while the prospect of meaningful accountability departed with them.

So, how can society hold those implicated in such state-facilitated preventable harms to account? One obvious route is inquiries; the reluctance from the government to hold an inquiry into the rape-grooming gangs, and the relief when it was granted, might suggest this is one solution. But some fear inquiries can be lengthy, expensive ways of delaying justice. The UK has spent at least £1.5 billion on completed inquiries since 1990, with active, ongoing inquiries continuing to cost taxpayers upwards of £200million a year. Despite these vast costs, the government are not required to be open with the public or give reasons if they decide not to implement inquiry recommendations.

What about criminal law? Labour peer Lord Glasman has argued that rather than a Grooming Gangs Inquiry, the government should establish a commission with powers of arrest, insisting that ‘the people who are reluctant to investigate it (from police to social workers) have got to be themselves investigated’. Meanwhile, the NHS trust that treated Calocane is being investigated for corporate manslaughter. Will that force more accountability?

Most recently, the Hillsborough Law, especially championed by Andy Burnham, has been greeted as a gamechanger that promises to make institutional evasion harder. It would place public authorities and officials under a legal duty of candour, requiring them to disclose what they knew, correct misleading accounts and cooperate honestly with investigations rather than close ranks around their institutions. But will this legislative solution actually change the culture and ensure public bodies act with honesty, openness and integrity?

When public institutions fail catastrophically, how can we ensure accountability doesn’t end with just an apology and resignations? And why does it take public outrage, victims’ and families’ tireless campaigning, a minority of journalistic expose and / or courageous whistleblowers to force authorities to pay attention? But crucially – why do state agencies keep failing and keep covering up? Are such serious derelictions of public service duties due to indifference, incompetence or more malign drivers? We ask two people at the heart of exposing inconvenient truths, Maggie Oliver and Emma Webber, alongside sociologist Frank Furedi, founder of the new Crisis of Competence project, to unravel the crisis of accountability.

SPEAKERS
Frank Furedi
sociologist and social commentator; author, In Defence of Populism

Maggie Oliver
criminal-justice campaigner; author

Emma Webber
mother; public speaker and campaigner for justice

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For all the hype about the ‘Burnham bounce’ and the politics of hope, one intractable problem the government faces is the prison-overcrowding crisis and the early-release scheme. After a partial government U-turn, Andy Burnham has confirmed that around 2,550 prisoners will be released by the end of the year, with some eligible offenders serving as little as a third of their sentences. The decision to exclude those convicted of 71 categories of serious offences – including manslaughter, rape, child sexual abuse and grooming offences – is welcome. But how did we get here? And why was it left to the public to lobby the government to ensure that people convicted of some of the most serious crimes were not released despite serving only a fraction of their sentences?

At the same time, 856 people remain behind bars under the abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) scheme, having never been released. Eight in ten of those have now spent at least a decade in prison beyond the minimum term at which they could apply for parole. A further 1,415 IPP prisoners have been recalled to custody after being released on licence. For many members of the public, IPP sentences may well be a new concept, but Claire Fox, our director, has been involved in fighting for justice for IPP prisoners for some years.

In short: while ministers prepare to release some prisoners after serving barely a third of their sentences, others remain incarcerated years – or even decades – beyond their minimum terms under a scheme Parliament itself legislated to scrap.

With roughly 2,100 prison places that physically exist but are not presently usable in England and Wales, this case of government failure clearly goes far beyond mere accounting. So, we’ll be exploring what went wrong and what needs to be done at the Battle of Ideas this year in Letting abusers out early: solving the prison crisis. Read the session blurb below and grab yourself an early-bird ticket. Then read Claire Fox and Ian Acheson on IPP prisoners, before watching Claire’s recent speech outside Parliament.

Battle of Ideas festival 2026 takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October in Westminster. Early-bird tickets are still available until 17 September. View the latest programme here and buy tickets here.

LETTING ABUSERS OUT EARLY: SOLVING THE PRISONS CRISIS

Battle of Ideas festival, Saturday 17 October, 10:15 –11:45am

The prison doors are opening. Prisoners, many violent, are being waved out with little care for the consequences. The understandable backlash by the British public includes particular anger about the plan to release two people found guilty of the manslaughter of PC Andrew Harper in 2019. Public pressure has been so great – including a petition with over one million signatories – that Andy Burnham pledged to find a way to stop the release of Harper’s killers.

But making exceptions sets dangerous precedents. Everyone understands that over-crowded prisons are at breaking point, but many question why law-abiding citizens, let alone the specific victims of crimes, have to face the repercussions of our failing criminal-justice system. The chosen solution of early release – started under the Tories, taken up more extensively by Keir Starmer and now the focus of a political problem for Andy Burnham – seems cavalier about society’s safety. Few are fans of the policy: polling shows 69 per cent of people in the UK are against the scheme, with 68 per cent having lost faith in the government’s handling of the criminal-justice system. And no wonder, when successive governments since the mid-2010s have failed to deliver the promised prison-expansion plan to address the rising prison population. Most pointedly, why has political failure resulted in the default response of shifting the issue onto communities?

In theory, early-release prisoners aren’t released freely; they remain under probation supervision. But can curfews, electronic tags, unpaid work and supervision orders really do the job prison is designed to do? This policy also relies on the capabilities of the probation services to meet the demands of the early-release scheme but with no corresponding increase in resources. In August, 90.7 per cent of the probation union voted in favour of potential strike action over already-high workloads and opposition to government plans. A strike would put public safety further at risk and derail the scheme, let alone the fact that their workload could go up exponentially if they have to police the government’s new wheeze: limiting those released who are still deemed a threat within restriction zones a few miles wide. What’s more, doesn’t this turn local areas, and a free society, into de facto prisons?

More than a crisis-measure, a new law – The Sentencing Act 2026 – will move roughly 5,000 prisoners out of incarceration. Some ‘eligible offenders’ will be released after serving only one third of their sentence, down from between 40 to 50 per cent. How can the public have faith in a sentencing regime when swathes of prisoners will only serve a fraction of the ordered sentence?

Something has got to give, but is the answer reducing the time served of sentences? What about emergency measures – like a prison equivalent of NHS Nightingale – to protect the public, or renovating those empty prison cells that currently fail some health-and-safety concerns? Others ask why so many non-British nationals are being kept in British jails, or why IPP prisoners remain in prison long after their time is served, on an abolished, discredited sentence? And rather than a pragmatic response to a lack of prison space, are we seeing an ideological turn against incarceration as punishment that dare note speak its name?

More on IPP

Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners
Claire Fox, AoI Substack, 10 June 2024

Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it
Claire Fox & Ian Acheson, AoI Substack, 21 April 2024

Claire Fox speech at protest in support of IPP prisoners, 15 July 2026

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Lola Salem is one of the few contemporary cultural critics who is both relentlessly critical of the current moment and who refuses to give into a quietist pessimism. Last weekend, she gave an excellent lecture at Ideas Matter’s annual intellectual retreat, The Academy. We are delighted to reproduce her essay below.

If you enjoy this essay, you will definitely enjoy The Academy. You can buy heavily discounted tickets for next year’s Academy event here.

We also strongly recommend that you subscribe to Lola’s Substack.

Art Attacks

Laconic art historian vs. Loquacious art connoisseur

By Lola Salem

What Remains? Art and Memory in the Post-Cultural State

This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered for Ideas Matter on Sunday 23 August 2026

LOLA SALEM

AUG 24, 2026

A few days ago, the Home Office released a booklet which informs people of what to expect when living in the UK, which behaviours to respect and, hopefully, follow. Habits and mores usually work because they are implicit and absorbed via mimetic desire or equivalent. And very much expected from people who seek to live in the country in the first place. This is perhaps especially striking to see such pamphlet in Britain, a country famously attached to unwritten rules, including its own constitution.

Conformism to these principles (if we accept that they contribute to what defines culture) does not work through pamphlets. So what is this document for? Does the state really believe that it can manage culture like this? Or has it given up on culture altogether and is, in fact, doing something else?

At first glance, Britain does not look like a country that has given up on culture. We have an Arts Council. We have the BBC. We have publicly funded museums and galleries. We have national collections, orchestras, theatres, libraries and heritage organisations.

These institutions are paired with a whole policy infrastructure. The government produces cultural strategies. Arts organisations produce programmes. Funding bodies distribute hundreds of millions of pounds.

And, of course, everybody seems terribly busy. Especially the cohort of teams that are heavily paid to prove that art is excellent for the economy.

There are programmes for access. Programmes for young people. Programmes for wellbeing. Programmes for inclusion. There is culture for economic growth, culture for regional regeneration, culture for community cohesion, culture for environmental sustainability.

In fact, the arts have acquired an extraordinary number of responsibilities. Yet the more responsibilities we give our cultural institutions, the less confident many of them seem about their original responsibilities.

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A museum has to explain how it contributes to wellbeing or sustainability. Maria Balshaw, who recently retired from the Tate directorship, proclaimed that the entire museum sector is in a state of “climate and nature emergency” – in line with former director Nicholas Serota who advocated for more guidelines regarding environmental control in galleries. However, if you ask why a particular object deserves to be preserved for another five hundred years, the answer becomes less certain.

A funding body has demonstrate which communities an artistic project intends to reach. But it is much harder for it to tell whether the work is any good.

A theatre can produce a detailed account of the demographic composition of its audience without answering the more obvious question of why anybody should want to see their plays.

This is part of the condition that I call the post-cultural state.

By this, I don’t mean a state without culture. The post-cultural state preserves the machinery of culture after losing confidence in the judgements that once justified it. It is a polity that fails to answer fairly basic but fundamental questions such as:

• What is worth preserving?

• What is worth making?

• And what is worth handing on?

Those questions require judgement, discernment, in other words, taste; a special type of knowledge and sensibility. We tend to use taste today as though it meant preference and, in a postmodern context, a way to flatten differences of nature or importance. David Marx integrates this under the concept of “omnivorism”, “the rejection of cultural hierarchies, which promoted equal interest in all genres, tastes, and historical styles”, and “poptimism”, “an extension of omnivorism, celebrating commercial culture and treating popularity as the ultimate democratic arbiter of quality”.¹From an historical and philosophical point of view, taste may look like an epistemological tool. Giorgio Agamben sees there a possible linguistic connection between sapor (flavour) and sapiens (the wise). Aesthetics, then, allows us to recognise qualities in something which we may not yet be able to reduce to a rule or fully explain. He calls it as follows:

“From the beginning to end, the problem of taste thus presents itself as that of ‘another knowledge’ (a knowledge that cannot account for its judgements but, rather, enjoys them; or, in the words of Montesquieu, ‘the quick and exquisite application of rules that we do not even know’²) and of ‘another pleasure’ (a pleasure that knows and judges, as is implicit in Montesquieu’s definition ‘mesure du plaisir’): the knowledge of pleasure, indeed, or the pleasure of knowledge, if in the two expressions one gives the genitive a subjective and not only objective value.”³

Today, however, judgement and taste have become an uncomfortable words.

For decades now, we have seen an exponential decline by which the institutions are no longer able to even pretend that they’re interested in their original role of properly supporting artists and art. The re-alignment of the arts with things that are absolutely external to them (e.g. climate change, wellness and global health, etc.) is a cornerstone of the post-cultural state. What it describes, more broadly, is that the state political interest, at least at the level of policy, is evacuated of an understanding of what culture is for and what it is that culture does. This happens, for example, in what potential investment in culture might do with regards to national unity, how people’s sense of belonging works, how people vote, etc. The post-cultural state simply gives up on trying to navigate any of this.

I want to explain how we got here.

And, to be clear, my argument isn’t that the state should entirely get out of culture. I think that would be unwise. Nor is this going to be thirty minutes of complaints about woke curators, although they may make an appearance. The problem is older than our present culture wars, which are honestly stale and sterile.

1. Before cultural policy

So, let me begin with a distinction.

Political power has always had a relationship with art.

The Church, whether in its catholic, orthodox, or protestant branches, is the obvious example in Europe. It not only built cathedrals and gave the tempi to much of artistic production, but organised time through the calendar, space through the parish, memory through ritual. Evidently, even though it worked through decrees – and returned regularly to aesthetic issues, such as during the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in the aftermath of the Reformation – the Church was definitionally entangled with culture itself.

To turn again to the Medici, the Florentine family did not spend all that money because they believed art should remain uncontaminated by politics. Art heped to display wealth and consolidate or protect prestige, allowing rulers to tell stories about themselves. Whether we want to call it propaganda, or vanity, or anything else, it clearly embodied a strong relation between the art world and political power.

But art patronage is different from what we now call cultural policy.

A Renaissance prince might support an academy or employ an artist. But he did not normally imagine that he was managing something called “the cultural sector”. Additionally, there were limits to his authority.

One of my favourite thinkers is Marc Fumaroli. He was born in Marseille in 1932, raised partly in Fès, Morocco; he taught at the Sorbonne before becoming professor at the Collège de France and later a member of the Académie Française. Two of the most prestigious cultural institutions in France since the early modern period. You can imagine that he would not be one to turn against the arts. However, in the context of the development of the “creative industries” (which happened in Britain under New Labour, and in France under President Mitterrand and minister Jack Lang), he took a stand against the state.

His point is particularly beautifully when writing about the academies of Renaissance Florence. The prince could provide money and protection. He could enjoy the prestige. But the intellectual and artistic life taking place around him had rules and rhythms of its own. Florentine Academies were not administrative units with a program handed by political figures. They were typically societies of scholars and artists governed by habits of friendship, manners, and shared discipline, which allowed them to learn, argue, and experiment together. By definition, culture then was that of sociability, and academies self-governed as if they were micro-societies. Fortunately, none of these conditions of possibility for intellectual life were the effects of policy.

A striking example of what this freedom could produce is opera. In late sixteenth-century Florence, circles of intellectuals such as musicians, poets and scholars experimented with the notion of what might Ancient Greek drama have looked like? Out of that scholarly curiosity came an entirely new art form, which would shape European musical life for centuries, topping the hierarchy of secular vocal music for much of its history. It’s pretty obvious that nobody actively commissioned intellectuals and artists, as those who were active in the Camerata di Bardi, to develop an innovative interdisciplinary musical form with measurable community impact.

In fact, many of these intellectual circles were wary of political power. The members cultivated a taste for secrecy and the access to the group was strictly regulated, especially along the lines values that were conceived at the heart of the former Republic of Florence (1115-1532), before the reign of the Medici family, of which some intellectual nurtured a certain nostalgia, including concepts of “equality”, “honesty”, and “humanism”.

This older system recognised something that our own has difficulty recognising. Yes, art patron had money and power. But the artist had something the patron did not. A gift. Skills. Imagination. Knowledge. Taste. And rulers implicity shared if not taste at least some form of trust, a cordial entente – which of course, could be negotiated and not always positive, but it formed the baseline of the relationship.

Unfortunately, our modern cultural bureaucracy is unable and/or unwilling to sustain that condition of creativity.

To understand how, let us come back to Britain.

2. An admirable beginning

After the Second World War, Britain dramatically expanded public support for the arts. The Arts Council was created in 1946. In 1965, Jennie Lee, Britain’s first Minister for the Arts, published A Policy for the Arts. There is much in this moment that I admire. First of all, the ambition. Great art should not belong only to wealthy people in London. There should be theatres, orchestras, museums and galleries around the country.

Public investment was confident in its role and capacity to support excellence while giving the opportunity to more people to get in contact with it.

So, the original democratic promise was essentially to widen access to something considered valuable. Same in France with André Malraux (Minister tailored around him in 1959). But what would happen if people did not come? Or if they came, but not in the expected proportions? Or when politicians began asking why taxpayers should fund the whole thing.

You don’t have many options here. You can either defend the value of the work. But that requires making judgements – articulating what taste is, what discernment is, and what purpose it serves.

Or you find yourself vulnerable to what people think about taste and judgement. If you say that a particular orchestra deserves public money because it is excellent, somebody can ask why its music is excellent. If you say a museum should preserve certain objects because they matter to British civilisation, somebody can ask who decided what matters. If you say Shakespeare deserves public subsidy, somebody may ask why Shakespeare and not somebody else.

So, quite quickly in the 20th century, and especially after the 1968 French “cultural revolution”, another form of justification became attractive. Instead of defending what art is, you defend what art does. That paradigmatic shift turned out to have enormous consequences.

3. From access to outcomes

I’ve just mentioned the 1960s. For some time already, while governments were expanding cultural institutions, artists and intellectuals were changing their ideas about art itself. Many had spent decades attacking artistic conventions. But by the 1960s, the attack increasingly extended to institutions, hierarchies and social conventions.

One of the most important figures of that shift is Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most prominent sociologists of the period, particularly on matters related to education and aesthetics. In 1969, he co-wrote the influential Love of Art (L’Amour de l’art). He worked across French and international institutions, such as UNESCO, on matters related to the development and expansion of cultural policy.

Bourdieu wrote as if high art is more or less straightforwardly ideological and mystificatory. He believed that this narrative is fabricated for specific means, calling it “the charismatic ideology” of art. For Bourdieu, this means that art is a form of power. According to him, in a democratic society, art is in fact a means of asserting what are essentially aristocratic values. The art museum is a “civic temple” designed to exclude the participation of the masses.^4⁠ The more “democratic” art becomes, the more the gifted (the talented, the aristocrats of culture) are distinguished from the mere barbarians, the uncultured Philistines.

Following the same logic, according to Bourdieu, there is no room for innovation in form, only social innovation. Or, more exactly, the former is a reflection or translation of the latter. Creativity may have some value, but the point is that it is always reducible to a social phenomenon.

As case study, let us compare the way Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu approach Mozart. Although Elias would accept that Mozart was a “genius” (i.e. would see no contradiction with the fact that it could coexist in the marketplace and through bourgeois social formation), Bourdieu would see it as wedded to a charismatic and hence justificatory understanding of artistic production. He would then prefer to reserve his admiration for the social manipulations of agents such as Baudelaire or Flaubert.

Bourdieu and co’s influence was paired with another trend; that of the language of artistic rebellion, which rose among those who presented as counter-cultural. For example, in opposition to bourgeois morality, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, the family, sexual convention and the nation-state.

But the rebels entered the bureaucracy, or at least discovered that their rebellion could be funded. And so their language of artistic rebellion eventually met the expanding machinery of the state. Ideas which began as critiques of institutions became part of the language through which institutions justified themselves.

In Britain, the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) is almost the perfect illustration for this. It was founded in 1947 explicitly as an alternative to established cultural authority — a “laboratory rather than a museum”. Its history therefore contains the contradiction that interests us: how does an institution institutionalise opposition to institutions? The ICA itself later described this as its double role of being both an established institution and a “thorn in the side of the establishment”.

Increasingly, cultural institutions could describe themselves as permanently subversive while becoming larger, richer, more professional and managerial.

The artist can now attack power while applying to power for a grant. And the administrator can decide to fund attacks on the institution as evidence of the institution’s openness. Everyone is perfectly happy, aren’t they?

Meanwhile, another intellectual change was taking place. Cultural policy gained traction in government (although worth mentioning that Britain preferred the formulation of “public support for the arts” until the field widened to take in popular entertainment and the cultural industries + stronger resistance than in France about administrative centralisation). Nevertheless, the concept of cultural policy gained in prominence. And yet, at the same time, the definition of what culture is kept being imperfect and inconclusive.

Contrary to other fields in which policy start from clear definitions, what is the object of cultural policy? Is it the Raymond Williams-esque view of “culture as ordinary” or the postmodern “everything”? What lies outside of this fantastical jurisdiction? The ambition to meaningfully regulate every custom, habit, preference, practice or association is absurd — at the very least in liberal democracies. As totalitarian regimes show, a policy for culture in this maximal sense amounts to a policy for the formation of social life itself.

This ambiguity is visible in the way different countries have brought different activities within the purview of public action and left others outside it. The scope of German Kulturpolitik has historically reached beyond the arts to encompass education, sport and leisure. Italy developed a rather different conception around beni culturali, or cultural goods, centred largely on the protection of heritage and administratively distinct from music and theatre. The Netherlands followed another institutional logic, combining welfare, health and cultural affairs within a single ministry created in 1982. Meanwhile, in Belgium and Québec, questions of language have occupied a central place. These variations concern more than administrative arrangements or national styles of government. The very object of said policy changes; nevertheless, the concept travelled considerably further than the agreement on the thing supposed to be administered.

Debates addressing the definition of culture are long – too long for today’s presentation, I am afraid. So I unfortunately have to skip quite a few centuries and intellectual quarrels. I hope you can forgive me. Perhaps we can, for now, agree that it has something to do with human flourishing, knowledge, habits and mores, and even institutions to the extent that they’re a special embodiment of a country’s cultural history. When it comes to art, the quintessential cultural artefact, culture may generally mean our interaction with art and the cultivation of judgement/taste.

But with the development of cultural policy that the 20^th century witnessed, it increasingly meant identities, representations, communities, and then potentially everything.

Arguably, today’s dominant definitional strand is cultural relativism. It is perhaps best captured by Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), a prominent postmodern thinker: “Culture is about hierarchy, discernment and evolution; postmodernity, on the contrary, is about flattening of hierarchies, absence of discretion and equivalence.”⁵

Of course, once culture encompasses almost everything, cultural policy can potentially concern almost everything too. And with this, art becomes capable of being recruited for almost any political purpose.

4. New Labour and creative industries’ exuberance

The decisive British moment, comes with New Labour.

For the youngest among us, the atmosphere of the late 1990s and early 2000s is difficult to reconstruct now. There was optimism. There was the National Lottery. There was Cool Britannia. There was enormous confidence in Britain’s “creative industries”.

Artists, designers, musicians, architects, filmmakers and fashion were going to help define a new Britain. And public funding expanded.

For people working in the arts, this could feel exhilarating. Especially when you are told over and over that creativity was economically valuable; that it was socially valuable; on top of being personally liberating.

There was remarkably little pressure to distinguish between these claims. The market wanted returns on investment. Artists wanted political change. Politicians wanted social change. Developers wanted regeneration. Cities wanted tourists. Everyone could apparently have what they wanted.

Perhaps people did not notice the ideological bargain being made. Because this system changed the ecology of art.

Britain created an enormous cultural estate. It produced more arts graduates. It created more organisations dependent upon grants. It accelerated the professionalisation of cultural administration. For example, it created careers in mediation, engagement, outreach, strategy and cultural management.

Was any of this sustainable?

5. The great displacement

This brings me to what I think is a central mechanism of the post-cultural state.

As my business partner, the brilliant Pierre d’Alancaisez, recently said: claims made for art have become displaced. We’ve stopped saying things like:

• This is worth supporting because it is good.

• Or: This matters because we should preserve it.

• Or: This artist possesses an unusual talent and should be given the freedom to develop it.

• Or: This or that text matters because the author has something special to tell us beyond the specifics of its historical context – or perhaps thanks to it. (Remember the beautiful simplicity of Bible study and reading groups?)

Instead, we’ve heard:

• Art improves wellbeing and public health.

• It builds community.

• It tackles climate change.

• It increases representation and fights inequality.

• It regenerates deprived areas.

• It drives economic growth and attracts investment.

• It makes us better citizens.

• At some point you begin to wonder why we haven’t simply put the Arts Council in charge of the Treasury and the NHS.

The problem isn’t that art can have none of these effects. The mistake made here was to turn these possible consequences into the purpose of artistic activity.

Because once public funding is justified through outcomes, the funding body has to demonstrate that the outcomes occurred. How many people came? How old were they? What was their ethnicity? What was their postcode? How did they feel? Did they report an increased sense of belonging?

The artwork itself disappears behind the report about the work.

6. Artists’ complicity

There is a tendency to blame administrators for all of this. That is way too easy. Artists participate in the system too.

And this is why I think arguments about censorship often miss what is interesting about contemporary cultural institutions. As the campaign Freedom in the Arts has repeatedly demonstrated, the system operates through anticipatory compliance and peer pressure. It tries to be risk-free. Even if, in theory, everybody is free and encouraged to show their true, authentic selves.

Paradoxically, the art world loves the language of risk. Artists are supposed to make us uncomfortable, to challenge us. Exhibitions are styled as “radical” or “subversive”, yet the actual range of acceptable political conclusions can be remarkably narrow.

This is partly because the people involved increasingly belong to the same professional world. And it is one of the reasons why contemporary culture wars are so tedious.

• The Right says things like: look at these terrible left-wing artists.

• The art world replies stuff like: look at these terrible right-wing philistines.

Both sides make money from the performance. Neither asks the more interesting question. Why did we build a system in which artistic survival depends so heavily upon pleasing a professional managerial class in the first place?

7. The market isn’t coming to save us

Some people on the right have a simple answer. Stop funding the arts, and let the market decide.

I think this is a terrible idea. The market has been intimately involved in producing the situation I have just described. The language of both the state and the market have become entangled. Everyone segment audiences, seeks outreach and engagement. Everyone is terrified of irrelevance and always try to reward visibility.

The contemporary art world has become extremely good at criticising capitalism in galleries financed by high-net-worth individuals, property developers and luxury brands. This is occasionally funny, as it is revealing. As Mark Fisher (author, for example, of Capitalist Realism) understood well, capital has an extraordinary ability to absorb its own critique. I think the state learned some of the same tricks.

Importantly, libertarianism in the arts has nothing to say about what to do when money runs out, or when K-Pop supplants classical music, or what taste look like. It sees art and culture as entirely disposable.

8. The post-cultural state

And this is where we are now. In theory, what has survived are the institutions, their professional vocabulary, the grant criteria, the occasional ideological habits, etc. But the confidence in what culture is, and what it is really for, has gone.

In Britain, as elsewhere, the state has less money and its philanthropic ecosystem remains comparatively weak when compared to the US, for example. Audiences are fragmented, increasingly along sectarian lines. The national stories are still making politicians uncomfortable.

And the cultural bureaucracy has largely lost the ability to explain why the state should support art except by attaching art to something else, whatever the current priority happens to be.

Defining the Post-Cultural State

LOLA SALEM

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This forms part of what I mean by the post-cultural state. Its political interest in culture has been evacuated of a serious account of what culture actually does over generations.

• How does a society develop a sense of belonging?

• How does historical memory survive?

• How do aesthetic standards develop?

• How do people acquire taste?

• How do rituals, stories and symbols bind strangers together?

• How does a nation represent itself to itself, before it even does to others?

• These are enormous political questions. For most of history, states took them extremely seriously. Now Britain, as perhaps many other countries around the world, has cultural policy without much of a theory of culture. The entity charged with looking after a country’s cultural inheritance has remarkably little to say about the relationship between that inheritance, its people and their future.

Tom Calver, Data Editor for The Times, report on recent findings by Demos which demonstrates that British people’s attachment and faith in their country has plummeted.

If public cultural institutions do not help mediate a relationship between a people and their inheritance, who does? The market? TikTok? Netflix? Spotify? Tourism boards? Algorithms? AI? I am not convinced that any of this constitutes progress.

9. Culture needs builders

So what do we do?

Somebody has to care enough to begin. This is where cultural reconstruction starts. And I am sure all of you do care. Otherwise, you have chosen a very strange way to spend the last half hour reading/listening to this talk.

Lamenting about decline is easy. Building things up is much, much harder, but culture needs builders.

Culture Without Builders

LOLA SALEM

Read full story

Pierre d’Alancaisez and I have been trying to do exactly that – although we feel a bit alone, especially without financial backing.

At Verdurin, Pierre’s project space in East London, we are trying to build some of the things I have argued are missing today.

We think Britain needs at least two things rather urgently.

1. It needs people capable of exercising cultural judgement.

2. And it needs people who actually understand the institutions they hope to change.

So we are building both.

The first is the Verdurin Fellowship for Cultural Criticism. We want to take a dozen talented younger writers and critics and train them seriously — in aesthetics, judgement, rhetoric and criticism — and give them the mentors, publications and networks to become consequential.

Because if we dislike the people who will run our cultural institutions in twenty years, we should probably start finding their successors now. Train the new cadres.

The second, which I currently call Sidonie, is a project that aims to teach people how cultural institutions and power actually work. Where does the money go? Who decides? What can trustees change? How does philanthropy interact with the state? Why does the Arts Council behave as it does?

If you want to change an institution, it helps to know how it works, and it helps even more to equip the right people with an ironclad theory of culture that starts from first principles.

That is our wager.

Thank you for listening.

END

1

Art Attacks

What Remains? Art and Memory in the Post-Cultural State

A few days ago, the Home Office released a booklet which informs people of what to expect when living in the UK, which behaviours to respect and, hopefully, follow. Habits and mores usually work because they are implicit and absorbed via mimetic desire or equivalent. And very much expected from people who seek to live in the country in the first place. …

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21 days ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Lola Salem

This article is a provocation for a debate at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, ‘Suicidal empathy: is the West killing itself with kindness?’. Agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments. Or better still, come to the festival and have your say. The festival takes place at Church House in Westminster on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October. For the latest information on the programme, speakers and tickets, visit the Battle of Ideas website.

Abdul Ballout was a German citizen of Lebanese descent who is alleged to have driven into a crowd at Berlin’s Pride Parade, before stabbing attendees – killing one and injuring several others. A year before, Ballout travelled to Lebanon in a bid to join ISIS. He was sentenced by Lebanese authorities to three months in prison, then deported to Germany. Yet, unlike in Lebanon, a German judge adopted a more enlightened approach, releasing Ballout on probation.

The German state was certainly empathetic towards a wannabe ISIS fighter, free to wander around Berlin provided he participated in a once-a-week deradicalisation programme. But what about the 65-year-old victim? The 30-odd people who sustained injuries? Those left mentally scarred after witnessing the attempted massacre? Where was the German state’s empathy for them?

This is just one example of so-called progressive policies that appear self-defeating, often justified by the need to protect one group at the top of the grievance league table, while showing little regard for the interests and concerns of others. To what extent is this a self-regarding exercise to prove one’s virtue and generosity, waving ‘Refugees Welcome’ banners while denouncing those concerned about hundreds of thousands of undocumented young men residing in the country as racists?

But such an approach goes beyond the issues of immigration or safety. For example, the UK’s mandated net-zero strategy has undermined our own energy security and industrial base, justified in part by our generational guilt toward poorer countries that may suffer catastrophic effects from climate change. When attempts are made to reform welfare benefits, designed as a safety net, they are blocked by those who cry cruelty and stress the vulnerability of the millions now permanently caught in a dependency trap.

Police chase down those guilty of ‘hate speech’ on behalf of the permanently offended, while ignoring theft, grooming gangs and knife crime. The Church of England wants to pay ‘reparations’ while its parish roofs cave in. Psychiatrists are reluctant to incarcerate the dangerously psychotic; judges are reluctant to imprison those with protected characteristics; institutions elevate the desires of transgender women above those of biological women, all in the name of being kind.

Some argue that such self-destructive inverse morality – which prioritises compassion, understanding and empathy over national and rational self-interest – is in danger of dismantling the very pillars of Western society. Indeed, that is the thesis of Canadian Gad Saad’s bestselling book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. The proposition is that suicidal empathy occurs when an excessive or misguided desire to help others, especially marginalised groups, comes at the expense of the survival, security, values and interests of one’s own group. This act of societal self-harm, it is argued, will ultimately weaken the West and could lead to its collapse.

Such hyperbole has led to a mainstream backlash. Perhaps predictably, The Guardian drew a grim conclusion when discussing Saad’s book and the wider right-wing attack on empathy, arguing that this trend represents a dangerous effort ‘to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognise and respond to suffering’, and describing the campaign against empathy as ‘a flashing red light warning of fascist intent’.

Another critic has condemned the book as ‘culture-war ideology dressed up as evolutionary insight’. Some claim that prioritising our families and communities over those culturally different from us amounts to little more than a small-minded, selfish and thinly disguised othering of strangers, foreigners and the most vulnerable. Indeed, Pope Leo XIV publicly rebuked the argument put forward by the US vice president that we should prioritise love and care for one’s immediate circles before extending it to others, posting on X: ‘JD Vance is wrong… Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’

Yet, perhaps most cruelly, we don’t get to choose what we are suicidally empathetic to. Usually, it’s not the men and women holding the ‘refugees welcome’ signs who have to welcome the refugees, but those who never offered to surrender their homes, communities or security. And when they are asked to shoulder the consequences themselves, attitudes predictably change. For example, Labour MP Rachael Maskell, who once said Britain should take as many refugees as it could until it reached ‘saturation point’, recently opposed government plans to house 1,200 asylum seekers at a site near her North Yorkshire constituency.

As I write, the struggle for the village of Piddington is taking place. The tiny population of 314 is set to be dwarfed by the arrival of 1,250 ‘asylum seekers’. The likely fall in the standard of living, and any crime – petty or serious – that follows will be brought to the villagers courtesy of our suicidal government. As the saying goes: ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’

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We’re going to be probing state breakdown, the return of the national interest, the fracturing of society, the sorry state of the military, and the rise of Islamo-Leftism. All of this with brilliant speakers, in a beautiful setting at Wyboston Lakes. It’s a weekend intellectual retreat, and there is still time to get your tickets.

In fact, as we are almost sold out, we are offering a special offer for our last few rooms.

Anyone who buys a weekend ticket can get 10% off with code SUBSTACK

• One night, one person £300 £270 - buy here

• One night, two people £495 £445.50 - buy here

• Two nights, one person £425 £382.50 - buy here

• Two nights, two people £675 £607.50 - buy here

See the full programme for the weekend below and read more on the website.

For any questions, or for information on concessions and scholarships, please email geoff@ideasmatter.org.uk

Programme

Friday 21 August

THE BOOKS THE ELITE NO LONGER READ – BUT SHOULD
Nicholas Tate educationalist, commentator and author of Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (2025) and The Conservative Case for Education. Against the Current (2017)

Saturday 22 August

THE HOLLOW LEVIATHAN
Jacob Reynolds convenor, The Academy; head of policy, MCC Brussels

WHAT IS THE NATIONAL INTEREST?
Frank Furedi executive director, MCC Brussels; author, In Defence of Populism

COMING APART: AUTHORITARIAN STRATEGIES FOR A FRACTURED SOCIETY
Chris Bayliss contributing editor, The Critic

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S ODYSSEY
Maren Thom film critic; senior research fellow, MCC Brussels
OR
AFTER LIBERALISM: TIME TO RETHINK THE STATE?
Michael Murphy head of journalism, Outpost Studios, writer, Telegraph

HOLLOW MILITARIES AND REAL SECURITY
Andrew Fox writer, commentator, former paratrooper; co-host The Brink podcast; author, Andrew Fox Substack

Sunday 23 August

WHAT REMAINS? ART AND MEMORY IN THE POST-CULTURAL STATE
Lola Salem Oriel College, Oxford; author, Artless (Polity, forthcoming); contributor, The Critic, Engelsberg Ideas, Telegraph

ECHOES OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR?
Paul Lay senior editor, Engelsberg Ideas; author, Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate; co-host, 1666 and All That
OR
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ’S ANNIHILATION
JJ Charlesworth art critic; editor, ArtReview

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL STATE
Claire Fox director, Academy of Ideas; independent peer, House of Lords; author, I STILL Find That Offensive!
Lisa Mckenzie working-class academic; author, Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class

ISLAMO-LEFTISM AND THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY THIRD-WORLDISM
Tim Black associate editor, Spiked

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The high-street bookie is the latest victim to be sacrificed on the progressive altar of refusing to admit the thing. In this case, that thing is the growth of an illicit economy operating in plain sight on once lively and welcoming high streets. And the thing is also a black market often linked to illegal migration, as evidenced in a series of investigative films produced by both the BBC and Channel 4.

Our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has shamefully grouped legal and illegal – or at least potentially illicit – businesses together in announcing his plans to ‘save’ Britain’s high streets. His proposed reforms would give councils significantly greater powers to prevent new betting shops and adult gaming centres from opening, while vape shops would face tighter planning controls. (To note, while a plethora of vape shops may be dodgy, many are perfectly legally supplying a popular product, to erstwhile smokers who have taken up vaping to help them off the fags.) The government also intends to scrap the Gambling Act’s existing ‘aim to permit’ approach to licensing.

Of course, the public are not concerned about the rise of barbershops because men suddenly want their hair cut more frequently. The public are concerned because there is credible evidence that criminals are using cash-heavy, low-capital-cost and lightly regulated businesses to launder money. This at least partially explains why both barbers and vape shops have grown in recent years: barbers from 2,953 in 2015 to 18,078 in 2025 and vape shops from 262 to 3,776 – although that is the period in which vaping has taken off, of course. All the while, betting shops have been shutting their doors - falling from 8,822 to 5,872.

Bookmakers are not an unregulated grey economy. They are licensed businesses operating under gambling legislation, subject to Gambling Commission oversight, age-verification requirements, anti-money-laundering obligations and an increasingly onerous tax and regulatory regime.

Lumping a legal, highly regulated industry in with two lightly regulated industries – that are subject to concerns about dubious visas and money laundering – allows Burnham to claim his reforms are about limiting ‘anti-social’ behaviour, rather than tackling rising criminality. It allows him to avoid the difficult question: why have Britain’s high streets both been hollowed out and fallen prey to the black market?

These reforms certainly won’t save our high streets which, somewhat ironically, are dying from much the same disease as the bookmaker. Even without Burnham’s latest intervention, William Hill alone cut its estate by around 300 shops in just 12 months, citing high taxes, excessive regulation and changing consumer habits pushing spending away from the high street and online. That is a diagnosis I’m sure many business owners on the high street would recognise. The empty Betfreds, Ladbrokes and William Hills won’t be replaced by quaint little cafés or small-plates restaurants, but by squatters taking advantage of empty shopfronts.

More ironic still, bookmakers were already so heavily taxed and regulated that consumers were increasingly being pushed away from the legal, regulated market and towards the black market. Burnham’s answer? More regulation. How very 2026: announce reforms to solve a problem you refuse to admit exists, while simultaneously making that problem worse.

In fact, before this policy announcement, H2 Gambling Capital forecast that the illegal gambling market will capture 22 per cent of all betting by 2031. As the net tightens around what gambling firms are allowed to do, Belgium serves as a stark warning to policymakers – with half of young men using the black market to gamble online after a decade of over-regulation.

What the gambling industry must realise is that there is no compromising your way to survival under progressive governments. Asking the gambling industry to lower the risk of harm is reasonable, and the industry has responded by welcoming GAMSTOP, deposit limits, affordability checks, increased age verification, etc. But for progressives like Dawn Butler, no level of risk is acceptable – and risk can never be eliminated entirely if you want to have a gambling industry. At the end of the day, campaigners will always argue that some risk remains – and have more or less openly admitted that the end goal is to destroy the gambling industry in the UK. Butler, who is behind this campaign, responding with ‘lol’ on X to another anti-gambling campaigner mocking the industry.

Another Labour MP, Marie Rimmer, posted on X: ‘[W]e’re all fed up with our high streets being taken over by businesses that don’t contribute to our community’. Alas, what does the butcher do for the vegetarian, the pub for the teetotaller, the florist for the loveless and the bookie for the risk-averse square? That’s obviously not how high streets work. Their value comes from precisely the opposite principle: a collection of different businesses serving different people with different tastes, habits and vices. A shop does not cease to ‘contribute’ merely because a lanyard MP – or indeed half the town – has no desire to enter it.

When he was mayor of Manchester, Burnham said: ‘Let’s be clear who is most affected by a Tier 3 lockdown: it is the people working in pubs, in bookies, driving taxis. People too often forgotten by those in power.’

Well, if only you’d kept forgetting about them, Andy, they’d be much better off.

‘The rise and rise of the black market’ is just one of the discussions we’ll be having at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival in London on 17 & 18 October at Church House in Westminster. See the latest version of the programme here. Early-bird tickets are still available from the Battle of Ideas tickets page.

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Reading this account from the BBC of how a sexual predator, Simon Levy – who police knew about, but somehow managed to evade detention – was so gruelling and also enraging. It is infuriating and scary that on numerous occasions the criminal-justice system and the police had him in their grasp. However, something between wilful incompetence and indifference from our hollowed-out state institutions – in this instance, the police – enabled Levy to operate with impunity. This meant the rapes and murders he has now, at last, been jailed for were likely to have been preventable.

Meanwhile, almost at the same time, a journalist who emailed questions about his academic record to Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and Walter Mitty levels of fantastical fabrication, was investigated by the Met for four months. The journalist, Jack Grove, was not even interviewed and only learned of the investigation when the Met got in touch to inform him that the case had been closed. This Orwellian twist was only beaten by the newspeak used by the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley about the case. Rowley told Nick Ferrari on LBC: ‘We dropped the ball on that one – let’s not beat around the bush. It should have been screened out as not requiring police action.’ Dropped the ball? The temerity!

All this reminded me of a speech I gave in June. It is titled ‘Hate, harms and freedoms: the dilemmas of discretion and the limits of policing’ and was delivered at the Police Foundation / Cumberland Lodge Police Conference 2026 – which had the theme of ‘Division, Distrust and Disorder: Policing Polarisation in Modern Society’. I decided to type up my lecture, as the themes feel relevant. This seeming crisis in policing will inform several debates at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, which now feel more urgent than ever. BUY TICKETS HERE.

And it means I am especially looking forward to digging deep into such issues at the Ideas Matter annual residential weekend, The Academy. This year’s theme is Hollow Leviathan: the state against the demos. There are still day and weekend tickets available HERE. Hopefully see you there.

In the meantime, here’s my speech. Read it imagining the faces of the many police officers of all ranks listening in the audience…

Claire

Hate, harms and freedoms: the dilemmas of discretion and the limits of policing

A young colleague of mine recently took a police force in the North East to court. Linzi Smith is a lesbian who believes that replacing binary sex with gender identity undermines women’s rights and same sex attraction. She challenged the decision of Northumbria Police’s chief constable, Vanessa Jardine, authorising officers to participate in the Newcastle Pride demo in 2024. This included officers displaying Pride and Progress flags, rainbow lanyards and a police car carrying these symbols.

Linzi argued this amounted to political expression, inconsistent with the police duty of impartiality. The judge was scathing in criticising the police. Linzi won. But surely it shouldn’t have taken a court case to state the bleedin’ obvious. The police should police demonstrations, not send contingents on them. They should not be activists in uniform, take the knee, show political bias.

However, I have no doubt this was all well-intentioned – to show the LGBTQ+ community that the police were on their side against supposed transphobic hate. I fear such good intentions are fuelling the public perceptions about the police as unfair, taking sides, policing WITH fear and favour – and all this contributes to the ‘two-tier policing’ narrative.

I’m sure good intentions lurked somewhere in the Henry Nowak story to explain why police officers fell for a murderer’s lies when the now convicted perpetrator Vikram Digwa played the race card, as a victim of hate. Yet it perfectly encapsulates my concerns – that policing has become mired in identity politics. Tackling hate has become an unquestioned orthodoxy, with no room for discretion or common sense.

CULTURE OF CONFORMITY
Perhaps one reason why those officers who handcuffed Henry as he was dying were so easily misled by the false accusations of racism, is a culture of conformity – even fear – in the force: that individual officers dare not voice any opposition to prioritising hate crime over all else. Indeed, anecdotally, I keep hearing from rank-and-file officers – off the record – that those who query the hate agenda are told they are in need of re-education or know they will forfeit promotion or be driven out if they raise any objections. They are effectively told to put up or shut up.

In parliament, I raised the example of Rick Prior who, when head of the Met’s Police Federation, told a TV interview about a crisis of confidence within the ranks of policing, with officers withdrawing from any kind of pro-active front-line policing of ethnic-minority citizens for fear of falling foul of vexatious complaints about racism. You may agree or even vehemently disagree. But did it merit being suspended and locked out of his email / IT system, which led to Rick taking his case to a tribunal? He won.

Meanwhile, only last week, Luke Salmons won his appeal after being sacked as a police community support officer. The issue was a conversation about the war in Gaza with a Muslim officer at a training day on race, religion and culture. To note – the Muslim officer was not offended and did not complain, but the exchange was reported as Islamophobic hate by a senior officer.

DEFINING HATE AND HARM
If such a muddle can lead to mistaken accusations internally, imagine policing the public for hate offences. No wonder enforcement is inconsistent. One reason for this is the broad and elastic definition of hate. Lord Sumption articulately summed up the problems with all the hate-related legislation cluttering up the justice system. It’s worth quoting in full:

The Crown Prosecution Service and the Police have agreed to define a hate crime as anything which is perceived by the victim or anyone else, to be motivate by hostility or prejudice. In other words, the definition which they use is subjective… If the complainant thinks it’s a hate crime, then it is a hate crime.

Let me repeat that: If the complainant thinks it’s a hate crime, then it is a hate crime. There’s not much room for discretion there.

Sumption goes on:

One would think that hatred implied a very high degree of animosity, but the CPS has suggested it can include ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.

Goodness, no wonder the police can get this so wrong. And no wonder HATE – as so loosely defined in criminal justice – can be a green light for both censorship and excessive interventions in interpersonal relations. The vague lack of precision in terminology, with a low threshold for intervention, can empower self-defined victims to use the law as a heckler’s veto to trigger police action against legal speech, based on hurt feelings and emotional upset.

What constitutes harm-related hate speech is equally amorphous and confusing, with a dangerous conflation between speech and action. Let me give you an example from outside of policing. A few years ago, I was invited to speak on the importance of debate to a university debating society. A few days beforehand, I was disinvited, after a no-platform campaign by the student union – my cancellation backed up by the university authorities.

I was genuinely shocked when told my presence on campus was a safeguarding risk that would cause harm to students. It made it sound as though I planned to turn up with a baseball bat or had threatened to punch a bunch of undergrads. But my ‘crime’ was… I liked a tweet by Ricky Gervais. This got me labelled as a transphobic hatemonger, so my words on debate were deemed too dangerous, on a par with a physical threat, to be heard. So, no debate.

This might seem a daft student-politics example, but politicians ape this approach to words and harm. Government ministers regularly launch into hectoring lectures to politicians about harmful rhetoric and the public are endlessly told to watch their language and tweets. It’s aggressively declared that a phrase like ‘pure cold rage’ (used by Nigel Farage in relation to the murder of Henry Nowak) is whipping up hate, as though the real threat to society is expressing unsanctioned fury, rather than what that fury is in response to. Well, I’ve got a confession – perhaps unwise in a room full of coppers – but I have felt and expressed pure hot rage, and worse, over many things in recent years, like the rape grooming gangs, the preventable massacre of those three little girls in Southport, over the medieval, barbaric attack in Belfast, and the contents of that bodycam footage revealing the truth of how Henry Nowak died. And suppressing our freedom to say out loud that we feel understandable rage, even hate, when such terrible events happen, only creates the pressure cooker atmosphere that then can explode on our streets as civil unrest. That’s the real harm.

All this muddle over what constitutes hate and harm is what undoubtedly fed the hyper-activity associated with the College of Policing’s now discredited ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). These were used so promiscuously that even The Economist – hardly a far-right peddler of misinformation – wrote about NCHIs as an egregious example of state over-reach that did huge damage to the credibility of the police, who were disproportionately spending so much time punishing wrong-think and thought crimes online, they forgot about catching criminals offline. The popular slogan, ‘Police our streets not our tweets’, is apt.

Even now, when NCHIs have been abolished formally – in name, at least – senior police officers have been keen to reassure us they’ll still continue to focus on safeguarding the most vulnerable from abuse motivated by hate based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, sex or transgender identity. Those identity groups are assured ‘you should feel confident in reporting hate and know it will be taken seriously’.

POLICE: NEW IDENTITARIANS?
But seeing policing through the prism of identity groups is inevitably divisive and has dragged the police into some of the most toxic ideological disputes in society. For example, I checked out the police’s True Vision website, a hate-crime portal set up in 2018 to encourage the public to report hate online. Just to use one example to illustrate the political and operational mire this has led policing into. I found the definition of ‘transgender hate crime’ especially worrying.

It’s said that such a hate crime should be reported about anyone who a victim perceives has been targeted because of the ‘offender’s hostility to a transgender person or to transgender people in general’. In general? What a hostage to fortune. It could and does capture many of us who are hostile to gender ideology or refuse to be compelled to call a man who identifies as a woman, she etc.

The definition also states: ‘A transgender hate crime could target someone who is not themselves transgender and the harmed person could be for example, a child of a transgender person or someone mistaken for being transgender, so long as the offender is motivated wholly or partially by hostility to transgender people.’ Quite apart from describing someone merely accused as an ‘offender’, what on earth does partially motivated mean? There’s a hell of a lot of leeway for over-interpretation here.

But if any members of the public are unsure, True Vision invites – even incites – them to report regardless, even deploying a degree of more pressure to do so: ‘By reporting it, you may be able to prevent these incidents from happening to someone else. Reporting makes a difference… to you, your friends, your community and your life.’ No wonder there’s an explosion of hate crime statistics, especially when the police also have performance targets and internal measure to reach, to counter alleged under-reporting.

The danger here is that if hate crime is so easy to report, with such a presumption of belief in the victims’ allegations (and note True Vision use the term ‘offender’ throughout – so much for innocent until proven guilty) then hate crime can become a preferred vehicle for nefarious personal and political vendettas. Activists can use the police as useful idiots to brand opponents as bigots.

That at least partly explains the ludicrous and infamous arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police at Heathrow airport for posting a crude joke on X. He was reported by a notorious trans activist and serial complainant, who by the way happened to be an ex-police officer. And yes, all charges were dropped and Linehan received a grovelling apology, but it took a five-month internal investigation to say it was a mistake. What a waste of time and resources when it was obvious to everyone it was an over-reaction.

IDEOLOGICAL CLAPTRAP?
One explanation for the police being so over-zealous on hate in this way is the impact of the legal duty on public bodies to drive quality and diversity internally. Kemi Badenoch has rightly highlighted how this Public Sector Equality Duty as part of the 2010 Equality Act legally obliges forces to roll out police action plans and EDI training, etc. And has been widely reported, that training has been politicised. Officers are schooled in the language of unconscious bias, microaggressions, indirect hate and so on. The whole academic discourse associated with critical theory litters training modules, such as ‘intersectional victim hierarchies’ (with white people at the top). Cut-and-paste mantras are internalised, with little room for discretion, critical engagement or pushback.

This isn’t useful, practical, professional training in, for example, how to deal with someone who claims to be stabbed. If only. Hampshire’s almost £1million spend on compulsory race training promises to ‘educate the workforce on the importance of being an ally’. But an ally to who? Certainly not Henry Nowak.

Now you all seem like down-to-earth, sensible people – so why do you buy in to this ideological claptrap? One tentative explanation: the police service – as a state institution – seems to have no confidence in itself being fair. It did more than learn the lessons from the Stephen Lawrence murder over 30 years ago; it seems to have developed a guilt-ridden bending of the stick to prove it’s not institutionally racist or bigoted, and so laps up every identitarian fashionable fad on offer, so such so, that whatever its formal obligations, it’s even suspicious of impartiality.

This lack of confidence also means the service is always looking out for allies outside the force to get the line right. So, it turns to third-party advisers, (often from activist NGOs), representatives of myriad identity groups and so-called community leaders. But at what cost? The West Midlands Police force disgraced themselves by using falsehoods about Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans, having been advised by local Muslim leaders, many with Islamist sympathies, and effectively ended up banning a Jewish team and its supporters from Birmingham.

And to finish, there’s the story of Elaine (a pseudonym), the chair of Bradford’s independent policing hate-crime panel. She told the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson that she was sacked by West Yorkshire police because she said, in a meeting after the murderous Manchester Synagogue attack, that attendees were avoiding the elephant in the room: Islamist extremism aimed at Jews. Instead, the meeting focused on demands to know what the police were going to do to protect Muslims and mosques from hate speech. Elaine’s intervention allegedly led to outrage from community leaders and, indeed, Muslim officers. Cue a seemingly orchestrated pile-on of mass malicious complaints that led to this retired academic in her 60s being labelled ‘A Tommy Robinson Tribute Act’ and accused of ‘outright hate and racism’.

Her dismissal letter from a senior officer described her remarks as ‘divisive and inflammatory’, and even said consideration was given as to whether this hate-crime adviser had herself committed a hate crime. This surely illustrates where the police’s obsession with seeing hate everywhere leads – to eating its own. How else to describe being more anxious to protect the sensitivities of the Muslim community leaders shouting hate than the actual physical threat of antisemitic violence or defending a public servant just trying to do her job by speaking frankly. It’s a sorry tale. But it should act as a cautionary one, and a warning about how the focus on hate is corrupting police priorities and betraying forces’ duty to be impartial.

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It’s August, we’re in the middle of a heatwave, and the summer holidays are well underway. But it seems that even many who are still meant to be at work are getting firmly into the holiday spirit.

Predictably, civil servants are making the headlines, with hundreds seemingly allowed to ‘work from beach’ at holiday spots. They might compete for deckchairs with Bank of England colleagues spending up to 40 days a year working abroad, or German civil servants enjoying the ‘Mallorca rule’ allowing work from foreign beaches. Beware the Germans, though: those unable to secure a sun lounger have won payouts of €900. And spare a thought for Scottish colleagues, whose morale is reportedly plummeting under a crackdown enforcing two days a week in the office. And take a moment to consider those Care Quality Commission staff working from home but banned from using air conditioning – an order from the government’s Net Zero officials, who may, ironically, have issued it from the beach.

Silly season headlines aside, there’s a serious point: such developments are indicative of a seeming cultural shift that is estranging many from the workplace and, more broadly, the world of work.

Three years after going viral, the trend for quiet quitting – where the workforce does exactly what their job description requires and nothing more – has gathered pace. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report suggests employee engagement fell to 20 per cent in 2025 costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.

Of course, statistics can be made to show many things. As my colleague Jake Weston has suggested, often the problem lies with employers, workplace practices and HR departments, and the ludicrous recruitment processes that frustrate entry to the workforce and contribute to the woes of the new downwardly mobile graduate class. And when teenagers who claim benefits for ‘anxiety’ receive £100 per week more than those with a part-time job on the minimum wage, perhaps it is no surprise when young people show little inclination to work for a living.

All of which leaves Andy Burnham – currently on holiday overseas but ‘in constant contact with his office’ – in the unenviable position of addressing society’s seeming retreat from the world of work. Can policy really reverse the retreat from work? Or are there deeper cultural issues we need to address?

It’s a topic that we’ll be delving into at Battle of Ideas when we discuss these workplace trends, from quiet quitting to lazy girl jobs, and ask why we don’t want to work. See the blurb for the debate below. You can also watch video from our last festival discussion on these themes in 2022.

Our programme for this year’s festival weekend is really starting to come together (see the latest version here).

Early-bird tickets are still available for the Battle of Ideas festival, which takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster. Visit the festival tickets page.

FROM QUIET QUITTING TO LAZY GIRL JOBS: WHY DON’T WE WANT TO WORK?

For generations, tackling barriers to work meant creating jobs to move people out of unemployment or welfare, or fighting for equality so marginalised groups such as women could play a full role in the workforce. But today, a new challenge has emerged: increasingly, people appear to be choosing not to work.

Economic inactivity has risen sharply, with 21 per cent of working-age adults neither employed nor seeking work. Amongst younger people, the trend is particularly pronounced, with almost three million neither actively looking for nor available to start a job. Those within the workplace also seem estranged from work. New expressions such as ‘bullshit jobs’, ‘burnout’, ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘lazy girl jobs’ capture current disenchantment with the demands of working life.

Some blame a failing labour market. Flatlining wages and insecure jobs at a time of spiralling living costs hardly incentivise work, while the decline of apprenticeships, training and clear career paths make it harder for young people to see work as a route to a better future. Meanwhile, rising minimum wages and National Insurance contributions have squeezed out entry-level jobs in retail and hospitality that once taught young people the habits and discipline of working life.

Others say the main problem is not so much getting a job, but that work today is often futile or intolerable. Target-driven bureaucracy, pointless box-ticking and ‘bullshit jobs’ can leave workers alienated or burned out. Post-Covid working from home has weakened workplace culture and made ‘quiet quitting’ easier. With workplaces now deemed ‘toxic’ and allegedly dominated by abusive bosses and cliquey co-workers – rather than valued colleagues and potential allies and friends – the clamour for a better work-life balance will mean even less time in the office. Have employers themselves created the very disaffection they now complain about?

Or does work suffer from a deeper cultural shift? When schools and universities encourage ordinary difficulties to be seen as mental-health problems, young people may see work as inherently stressful or harmful. If they see themselves as fragile rather than resilient, and assume their personal whims or individual identities must be flattered and indulged, then assuming responsibility and adapting to hierarchies and shared goals can seem unreasonable. Working hard, carrying out orders from the boss or simply enduring boring tasks seems less attractive than ‘lazy girl jobs’ promising minimal effort and maximum lifestyle.

Workers have always faced insecurity and tedious jobs while young people have long craved a life beyond work. So, has anything fundamental changed? Is economic inactivity a rational response to a dysfunctional economy, or a symptom of declining expectations and a weakening work ethic? The Burnham-led government hopes apprenticeships, training and voluntary work can coax people back. But can policy reverse the retreat from work? More fundamentally, why should we want to work at all?

WORK SHY AND RETIRING: HAVE WE FALLEN OUT OF LOVE WITH WORK?

Debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2022, with Brian Denny, Linda Murdoch, Angelica Walker-Werth and Dr Glynne Williams.

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Wildfires continue to rage across Europe, even if the worst may have passed – for now. France has been hit relatively hard, with the burned area for the year to date already (between 91,000 and 116,000 hectares) easily surpassing the previous full-year record (66,337 hectares) set in 2022. Spain, too, seems to be having a record-breaking year, with 200,000 hectares burned. Portugal, Italy, Greece and others are also having unusually bad seasons. In the UK, there have been major fires from the Cairngorms in Scotland to Dunwich in Suffolk.

Naturally, the blame has been put on man-made climate change. Persistently high temperatures have dried out the landscapes across Europe, turning them into a tinderbox. Looking at the forecast for today, London faces yet another day well above 30 degrees Celsius. Yes, it’s summer and you expect it to be hot. On the other hand, London has apparently had more days above 30 degrees this year (25 and counting) than in the whole of the Eighties (21 days in total).

It’s hot, it’s dry, it’s uncomfortable to live with when you’re not used to it. What was once extreme weather seems to be becoming the norm. But what is to be done?

One side of this debate is crystal clear: fossil fuels are the root cause, so we need to accelerate the decarbonisation of the economy. In a much-discussed article for the Telegraph last week, Tim Stanley argued that tackling climate change should not be an issue left to left-leaning eco-warriors. It’s time, he said, for the political right to get serious about the problem, too, rather than reject the Net Zero policies that were, after all, introduced by a Conservative government.

The transformation of a tangible ecological crisis into a culture-war abstraction can be pinned on the Left. They framed it as a divine chastisement; they wallowed in its penance, imposing arbitrary deadlines and contrary measures that, in an act of pure self-flagellation, took nuclear off the table.

But the Right reacted with misplaced sympathy for the devil, telling itself that fossil-fuel giants are the good guys, renewables a joke, and decarbonisation rooted in a misreading of human nature.

The article created a heated debate (pun intended). In response, also in the pages of the Telegraph, David Frost pushed back. Whether you think temperature rises in the future will be mild or catastrophic, we need to think to think seriously about the costs and benefits of decarbonising the UK economy. Offering ‘global leadership’ on climate means nothing if the rest of the world is following a different path. It simply means impoverishing ourselves for nothing.

In China, one-sixth of the global economy on its own, carbon emissions have gone up by more than 250 per cent since 2000. China’s energy consumption is around four times as much as in 2000 and electricity consumption has gone up even faster. Both are powered by coal, which China is using at its highest-ever levels. Coal is now about 70 per cent of China’s domestic energy production: solar and wind are just over 5 per cent. It’s not difficult to list similar figures for the other major developing economies.

Moreover, maybe those wildfires are not, in fact, a harbinger of disaster ahead but a failure of land management. For example, as Matt Ridley notes, for Europe as a whole, it’s actually been a relatively quiet year for wildfires. In fact, because there have been fewer fires in recent years – and, in particular, a rejection of controlled burning to reduce the amount of vegetation that becomes the fuel for bigger fires – the fires that eventually do come are bigger and harder to control.

The current discussion about wildfires is symptomatic of a wider, often either/or, debate. Should we (A) devote maximum resources to completely remodelling our society around low-carbon power, low-meat diets, public transport over private transport, and all the rest, to avoid the worst excesses of climate change? Or should we (B) invest in tackling the second-order problems caused by climate change: uncomfortable temperatures (air conditioning), storing water to combat drought (reservoirs), flood defences and water-flow management to tackle heavy rain, and so on.

The ramifications are huge. If the answer is A, then, for example, we must stop issuing licences to drill in the North Sea, even if that means huge job losses in Scotland. If the answer is B, we should go ahead, enjoy the tax revenues and extra jobs, and spend some of the cash on adapting to a warmer world.

I know what I think – that adaptation offers a better path than radically mitigating emissions – but there is clearly a debate to be had. For example, maybe A v B is too black-and-white. Is there an Option C? Is the alarm over climate change overblown in any event? Let us know what you think in the comments.

After years when we were told ‘the debate is over, climate change is real, there is no alternative to decarbonisation’ – for example, the BBC made a policy choice essentially to ban critics of climate change alarmism – we should grasp the opportunity to think about these questions seriously.

We’ll certainly be doing that at the Battle of Ideas festival on 17 & 18 October in London and I hope to see you there. Tickets are available here.

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America’s war with Iran seems to be back in full swing. The memorandum of understanding that created a 60-day ceasefire for negotiations has fallen apart. Missiles are being exchanged and oil prices are rising again.

Indeed, things are even worse now than before the ceasefire. Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have started attacking ships heading for the Red Sea. The group is also looking to copy Iran’s demand for tolls to transit the Strait of Hormuz by demanding tolls for the Bab el-Mandeb strait, which links the Gulf of Aden with the Red Sea – an enormously important route, not just for oil and gas, but for kinds of goods travelling between Asia and Europe.

The attempt by America and Israel to go beyond previous attacks, targeting nuclear infrastructure, to decapitate the Iranian regime and bring about a popular uprising seem to have backfired. Unless America is willing to put boots on the ground, which it won’t, it appears to have got into a conflict without any positive resolution.

It seems like Groundhog Day. Time and again, America – and Western countries in general – have got involved in wars that end badly. We’ll be discussing the problem at the Battle of Ideas festival in October. Below is the introductory blurb for the debate. You can also watch the debate from last year’s festival on the future of the Middle East.

Tickets for the Battle of Ideas festival – on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster – are on sale now at the Battle of Ideas website.

From Vietnam to Iran, why can’t the West win wars?

Lyndon Baines Johnson was reportedly determined not to become the first US president to lose a war – despite realising the folly of Vietnam well before his term was up. Yet in the decades since, the United States has accumulated a litany of military disappointments, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. Asymmetric warfare offers one explanation, as does the effectiveness of guerrilla tactics against conventionally superior armies. But does the West’s repeated failure to defeat militarily weaker opponents point to a deeper malaise? Why can’t the West win wars?

Although there was broad consensus that Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran were a military blunder – leaving the Iranian regime strategically stronger than before – the conflict was not criticised solely on strategic grounds. Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, condemned the strikes as a ‘mistake’ because they risked damaging living standards, while IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned that wider escalation could undermine investor confidence. Of course, economics matter. But wars have always disrupted markets, driven up prices and imposed hardship. If temporary economic pain – and even stock market trends – become a constraint on military action, what happens to our willingness to defend ourselves when we are genuinely threatened?

This speaks to a broader criticism of the modern Western psyche: that we have lost our tolerance for the sacrifices war demands. Civilian and military casualties, rising energy prices, higher taxes and cuts to public spending to fund defence are all politically toxic. Could modern Western societies imagine rationing fuel and food as their forebears did during the Second World War? Is Vladimir Putin not betting that he need not defeat a Western-backed Ukraine militarily, but merely outlast the West’s willingness to support it? Equally, in Ukraine and in other conflicts, have Western governments failed to define clear, realistic and achievable political objectives from the outset?

Of course, sceptics would offer a persuasive rebuttal. The US and UK, with their allies, spent more than 20 years in Afghanistan, which hardly implies short-termism or an unwillingness to fight. Trump’s failure to reckon with the potential economic costs of the Iran war has been widely criticised. After all, economic strength is itself a pillar of strategic capabilities. A nation that bankrupts itself through endless wars is scarcely in a stronger strategic position to defend itself. As the saying goes, we need to pick our battles.

Further, are we not living through a period of asymmetric warfare? It’s not just the West who cannot defeat inferior opponents. Russia has found it impossible to break through a stalemate in Ukraine. Cheap drones have kept the Russian fleet in its docks, they’ve downed an American helicopter in the Strait of Hormuz and have allowed the Houthis to hit flats in Tel Aviv. The First World War did not drag on because of a lack of will, but due to superior defensive capabilities that prevented either side from making serious progress for years.

Has the West lost the political will to win wars, or has the nature of warfare fundamentally changed? Are economic constraints and public intolerance of casualties now strategic weaknesses? Is Ukraine evidence that resolve still matters, or proof that asymmetric warfare has made decisive victory increasingly elusive? And in an age of drones, cyber warfare and proxy conflicts, what does ‘winning’ a war even mean?

Watch the debate

WHO WILL DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF THE MIDDLE EAST?
Battle of Ideas festival 2025

Speakers: Chris Bayliss, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Nick Busvine and
Ralph Schoelhammer

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‘Football belongs to the fans. It always has, and it always will.’ Andy Burnham’s response to a proposal from Gianni Infantino – president of football’s governing body, FIFA – to spin off the organisation’s commercial operations has been widely praised – and echoed by figures across the political aisle. The politics makes sense: football is our national game, and greater commercialisation of international football would seemingly only serve the super-rich. It’s an unpopular proposal. But unfortunately, it is often not the fans who get to decide what happens in the beautiful game.

After a successful World Cup across the US, Mexico and Canada, FIFA is keen to attract even more investment to its tournaments. It has announced plans to create a new commercial subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprises (FFE), which would assume responsibility for the organisation’s commercial operations, including the World Cup. Under the proposal, FIFA would be able to sell a minority stake of up to 21 per cent in the new company to private investors, raising around $4.2 billion.

For the first time, outside investors would acquire a direct financial stake in the commercial revenues generated by football’s governing body, creating not only an incentive but arguably an obligation for the World Cup to become even more beholden to commercial interests. Who is really benefiting from this plan: the fans, the players, the game in general – or the administrators, big companies and financial advisers? The members of UEFA, European football’s governing body, have responded by voting to boycott the World Cup if the plans remain in place.

All that said, does football really ‘belong to the fans’? Legally, not metaphorically, the answer is: it doesn’t. FIFA is a private association incorporated under Swiss law. It is owned by neither fans nor governments. Its members are the 211 national football associations, which elect the FIFA president and Congress. Fans have no formal governance rights.

Across the world, we’re living through a total collapse of civic virtue. In reality, football has never formally ‘belonged to the fans’ because few ever thought it needed to. We assumed those governing the game would represent us because we assumed they understood that sport is something greater than a business – it has a higher purpose. It’s why we often refer to those who govern professional football as the ‘stewards of the game’. Intrinsically, at least, it isn’t theirs. They do not own it. They are stewards of something greater than themselves, something that existed before them and will exist after them. But in a hugely popular sport like football, the administrators have not always lived up to their duty.

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If you believe that widespread condemnation means this plan is certain to fail, let me introduce you to a cricket fan. English cricket has already been bastardised in the name of commercialisation, despite fans’ pleas to stop. Soon, the Mumbai Indians London will face the Manchester Super Giants in a competition called The Hundred. Confused why the London team is called Mumbai Indians? Or what ‘Super Giants’ has to do with Manchester? Or what The Hundred even is? That’s soulless commercialisation for you: the game you love, sold to the highest bidder to do with as they please.

Let me introduce you to this third-generation Chelsea supporter. My club was sold to the highest private equity-backed American bidder. Our young players are sold in the name of financial engineering to make way for faceless recruits who are themselves moved on a year later. Goal music now intrudes upon the most precious moment in football. Our chairman, Todd Boehly, owns a ticket resale business while season ticket holders are penalised for transferring tickets to friends. Parts of club football are now scrambling to regulate practices that never previously required regulation – we weren’t prepared for, nor did we anticipate, private equity coming for our football clubs.

As football fans, we have a sentimental attachment to our teams, whether it is the clubs playing every week or our national teams. An unfavourable outcome after 90 minutes of 22 men kicking a ball around can ruin our weekends. We can just about tolerate rising ticket prices and TV subscriptions because clubs buy better players and standards rise. The English Premier League is the most popular in the world as a result.

But our tolerance is limited when our clubs are used and abused by big-money owners and our international competitions are undermined by administrators who seem suspiciously like they’re on the make.

This is one of the topics we’ll be discussing at the Battle of Ideas festival at Church House in Westminster on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October. Tickets are available here.

The commercialisation of the World Cup (and much more) was covered in our World Cup Podcast of Ideas. Listen here: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4

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Each year, The Academy – an intellectual retreat which is an initiative of the charity Ideas Matter – takes a major intellectual theme and interrogates it through history, philosophy and literature. This year, we look at the idea of the ‘Hollow Leviathan’: the feeling that the contemporary state and government is degenerating, less and less able to deliver basic goods, and more desperate to maintain control.

This essay, originally delivered as a speech at Living Freedom Summer School last weekend, examines how the severe pressure the establishment is under drives ever-more expansive attempts to maintain narrative control.

The Academy 2026 takes place at Wyboston Lakes, Bedfordshire, on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 August. Early-bird discounts are available until Sunday 26 July. Get tickets here.

Perhaps the central battleground of contemporary politics is the need of our political elites to control the narrative. Primarily, the role of establishment politicians is not to deliver changes and reforms, not to fix problems identified by people in their everyday lives, and not to change circumstances such that they can attract votes, but to maintain narrative hegemony.

Crucially, this differs from previous attempts to maintain ideological hegemony – that is, to win the societal ‘battle of ideas’ – because ideological warfare was always related to the real world. For example, Stalinism’s ideological success was demonstrated in defeating the Nazi industrial machine at its own game, capitalism defeated communism by offering unparalleled standards of living, social democracy was ideologically effective to the degree it demonstrated you could balance both the demands of organised labour with those of economic growth.

By contrast, the attempt at narrative hegemony treats the political realm purely in the domain of information management. This is a political class that has given up on shaping the world and instead looks to shape the narrative.

A variety of attempts to maintain control of the narrative

The news cycle is full of examples that demonstrate that contemporary elites are concerned, above all, with controlling the narrative. Three suffice.

First, there was the recent confirmation of a story which many people had assumed for a long time, although was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The British government has a special division, run out of Whitehall, called the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). The job of RICU is to intervene with victims of potentially ‘racially inflammatory’ crimes and make sure that they ‘calm community tensions’. You could call this the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit – its job is to make sure that government, victims and the media all stick to a story which encourages people to avoid asking difficult questions.

This unit has been involved in creating media narratives in conjunction with the press, public campaigns like plastering London in posters following the 2017 London Bridge attack, and working with victims’ families (such as the families of Henry Nowak) to write their statements to the press. In all such cases, the RICU unit serves to further the interests of state multiculturalism, force-feeding the public with the message that ‘division’ and ‘demonisation’ are the primary issues, rather than government policies on migration and multiculturalism.

Second, the Department for Media Culture and Sport released a proposal with an almost innocent-sounding name: Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media.

It proposes a ‘prominence regime’ for ‘trustworthy’ news on social media and video-sharing platforms. It would make news from public service media plus other ‘trustworthy’ providers ‘prominent and easy to find’. It gives the example of national and local news publishers appearing near the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news, especially during ‘social unrest or crisis’.

The DCMS worries that online news is now heavily shaped by algorithms, that misinformation and echo chambers can worsen ‘polarisation, conflict and division’. The government will explore legislative options for a news-specific prominence regime on social media. The proposals explicitly raise whether this should be ‘ongoing and always on’ or only active in periods of crisis, and whether users should be allowed to switch it off.

A third example, which although I take from America is extremely relevant here, is the reaction to the brutal murder last year of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr, a 14-time offender who was repeatedly set free by authorities under the influence of defund-the-police style racial-justice policing policies. Despite the case being an enormous sensation on social media, it took 18 days for the New York Times to comment. When it finally did, the article was a monstrosity of moral evasiveness. ‘A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right’, ran the headline, with the piece engaging in a bizarre detour to talk about the ‘egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality’ in the Jim Crow era.

The NYT was not alone in preferring to talk about the reaction to the attack rather than the attack itself. Elite barometer Politico went with ‘Ukrainian refugee killed in North Carolina gets dragged into political messaging war’, while Axios complained of ‘MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime’. CNN, not to be outdone, produced this horrific example of the shiftiness of the passive voice: ‘How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing.’

Clearly, the regime media was concerned above all with ensuring that no one draw any political consequences from the stabbing, which had been going viral on social media for almost a whole week. The issue for these outlets, when it became impossible to simply ignore the issue, was to ensure that widespread concerns about urban criminality, ineffective justice policies and the withdrawal of law and order prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement did not get a hearing. Such concerns are merely ‘right-wing firestorms’ and part of a regrettable ‘political messaging war’.

A very similar logic was seen in the days following the murder of the French student Quentin Deranque earlier this year by Antifa thugs. He had been attending a demonstration organised by a group of young women, and had come along lest they face any trouble. This man was simply murdered in cold blood by a premediated attack of Antifa militants, who picked him out, followed him home, and ambushed him 12-to-1 before kicking him in the head until he was dead. The mainstream French media reported that a far-right activist had died after inciting a confrontation.

In these examples, I don’t even have to mention the explicit censorship systems which now rule the Western world, such as the Online Safety Act or the EU’s Digital Services Act.

What drives attempts at narrative control

What is driving this? Why such a desperate need to exercise total narrative control?

The key to this issue, is, in essence, the following schematic: the established political class are unable to reckon with the sources of their unpopularity, and must employ ever more comprehensive attempts to provide a foundation for their deeply unpopular rule, because they face total destruction. The stakes are existential for them.

One of the fundamental driving facts of contemporary politics is that the ideology of the ruling class is thoroughly discredited. The political pressure on the ruling class is, across the West, extreme. They face, if not electoral annihilation, then electoral defeats to populist forces who, until recently, would have been totally marginal.

But the response of the political mainstream does not include the possibility of introspection. While they might be capable of asking the question why they are unpopular, they are incapable of answering it with a hard look at themselves.

At the same time, this ruling class certainly feels itself under sustained pressure. To invoke the language of Marxism, they feel threatened not just as a government, but as a class. Their class position – their position as the dominant political and economic group in society – is under threat.

These two facts – the inability to look in the mirror and the dread they feel at the approach of a new order – give rise to a response which at the same time focuses their efforts on political messaging and licenses extreme measures. Put together, this sets the stage for some of the most profound and most desperate attempts to control speech that we know in mature democracies.

Because they cannot avail themselves of introspection, they must come up with a particular explanation to understand their unpopularity. They need, to borrow a term from philosophy, an ‘error theory’ – that is, a theory for why it is that their programme, policies and worldview face such opposition. If they are on all issues fundamentally correct, why do people not agree with them? What explains the errors that the populist masses make?

The explanation is, in the time-honoured fashion of anti-democrats since Plato, that the voting masses are not just wrong, but also misled. The masses do not really disagree with the experts, they just lack the skills and knowledge to perceive what the experts have already decided is the truth. The masses have been tricked – tricked by sophists, by propagandists, by the internet, by Elon Musk, by Russians, by populist charlatans. They have been fed a diet of propaganda, hoodwinked by adversarial algorithms, fallen prey to foreign misinformation.

Therefore, the most important task for the ruling class, anxious to solve the problem of the erroneous masses, is to ‘fix’ the narrative imbalance. The problem of political disagreement becomes a problem of political messaging. If the truth has already been decided, but people still don’t see the light, then we need special techniques for bringing the masses to see the truth. Controlling the narrative – arranging what can be seen, heard and said – becomes not an alternative to democracy but the better substantiation of its essence.

At the same time, the class interest of the establishment is keenly felt by them all. This is not merely a possible change of government afoot but a change of regime. We are not talking about different shades of the postwar consensus, but a desire to overturn it entirely. Given how much the stakes have been raised, the available tools have become proportionally more powerful. Things that would have never been conceivable before in democratic peacetime – dawn raids over private messages, the use of the world’s most powerful technologies to change the debate in real time, gagging orders on the press so powerful their existence cannot even be mentioned – have become fair game in the contemporary political contest.

These two features come together to mean that the establishment classes are thus both psychologically and personally motivated to establish ever more elaborate and intrusive schemes for controlling the narrative.

Three strategies of control

We can group these tactics together under three banners

A. Strategies of control

B. Strategies of deception

C. Strategies of delegitimisation

The strategies of control are perhaps the most obvious – the various forms of soft and hard censorship, regulation of the internet and other communications.

The strategies of deception are also quite straightforward to spot. We have already mentioned the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit, but we should also note the government supply of industrial-grade misinformation. One examples is the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) modelling the impact of migration by using info on migration from 20 years ago, ignoring, for example, care workers who bring 15 dependents. Another is the refusal to publish crime statistics broken down by nationality and migration status. NGOs are also part of these strategies of deception.

But so far we have said less about the strategies of delegitimisation. The most obvious example here is the hysterical moral panic around ‘foreign disinformation’ and the attempt to turn all critics of the establishment into various versions of stooges of Vladimir Putin (or, more recently, of Donald Trump). It literally does not compute for the establishment to see mass discontent as the logical response to their despotic and failed policies, and so the possibility that this as all manipulated by Russia or funded by shady Trump-aligned forces is the only logical step.

Beyond controlling the narrative

This story – a story of a political class engaged in what is effectively an all-out war for survival – seems bleak enough. But it looks increasingly likely that as the narrative control efforts fail, they will intensify their work in more radical directions.

Indeed, the past few days gives us an indication into how Andy Burhnam – who is said to have a more ‘mature’ understanding of the problems of establishment politics – plans to deal with mass discontent. Burnham’s solution is to re-orient the Civil Service away from London. But the small print reveals this is less about devolution than a desire to make the Civil Service less responsive to any future Reform government: Politico reveals he aims to ‘rewire’ the Civil Service to head off Farage.

This is just one part of a playbook now well-established in continental Europe. Macron has led the continent in ‘future-proofing’ the state against populist adversaries: key political allies of President Macron are being appointed to the top of major French institutions like the courts, the national bank and the armed forces.

But in addition, British bureaucrats will be considering adopting the whole continental package: mobilisation of paid Antifa to attack political opponents, the use of lawfare against opponents such as banning and financial investigations, and the solidifying of the deep state.

Reasons for optimism

Despite this dark picture, we actually have reasons to be far more optimistic about what the future holds. Ultimately, the reason for all of the efforts at narrative control is that the establishment have already lost the ideological battle, and their desperate attempts stem from the anticipation that they are about to lose the political battle as well.

The reason they lost is twofold. On the one hand, the impact of their policies have become unavoidable. On the other hand, a tremendous rebellion has taken place among ordinary people, fuelled by the tenacious work of an insurgent ideological counterweight.

Their fear is the justified fear of the losing party. They are terrified because of the enormous cumulative work of the great populist revolt. Just as the night is darkest before dawn or the cornered animal is capable of great violence, the established order is, I think, on its last legs. This means we should be both watchful but also cautiously optimistic.

Ultimately, the reason for elite panic is the mass of popular discontent. It is this desire for something profoundly different that is the condition for all our efforts to overturn the narrative hegemony that we would otherwise be subject to.

Jacob Reynolds is convenor of The Academy, taking place on 22 & 23 August. Tickets and more here.

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Each year, The Academy – an intellectual retreat which is an initiative of the charity Ideas Matter – takes a major intellectual theme and interrogates it through history, philosophy and literature. This year, we look at the idea of the ‘Hollow Leviathan’: the feeling that the contemporary state and government is degenerating, less and less able to deliver basic goods, and more desperate to maintain control.

Early-bird discounts are available until Sunday 26 July. Get tickets here.

The Academy 2026 takes place at Wyboston Lakes, Bedfordshire, on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 August. Early-bird discounts are available until Sunday 26 July. Get tickets here.

It’s been a tough week.

While England’s loss in the World Cup semi-final has received wall-to-wall coverage (and you can listen to the views of the AoI’s football fans about it here) many of us have suffered a loss that is much more profound: the death of Ann Widdecombe in horrendous circumstances has shaken many of us. It’s been devastating. It has also revealed an ugly underbelly in politics today: we’ve witnessed some sectarian nastiness aimed at Reform UK because, apparently, laying wreathes in memory of a friend and colleague is an example of opportunistically politicising her murder and/or distracting from talking about that £5million. Wherever you stand on Reform, this mean-spirited cynicism leaves a sour taste.

Meantime, it’s been disturbing that a fringe group of despicable #bekind progressive activists decided to either caricature Ann unkindly as some sort of batty spinster/battle-axe – or worse, celebrate her death, denouncing her as a bigot, along with ‘she had it coming’ vibes. This echo of the monstrous reaction of some to Charlie Kirk’s assassination expresses a new type of visceral hatred of political opponents that is a real problem for those of us committed to political debate. The shameful lack of empathy and just sheer unpleasantness is sadly far too commonplace in today’s polarised society. It’s a mood that the Battle of Ideas festival hopes to be an antidote to.

And there is hope: Ironically, to Ann Widdecombe’s credit, we can get a glimpse of how political disagreements can be played out in an ideal way: you can stand firm, be robust and uncompromising, and still inspire an outpouring of grief, love, admiration and respect from all sides of the political divide.

I was asked to write my own tribute by spiked, in which I stressed her ability to work with people despite political differences and without betraying her principles. You can read it here: Ann Widdecombe was formidable, generous and wonderful company. I also noted our shared commitment to free speech, which is why we should resist those calling for yet more clampdowns on social media in response to even the most brutal offline violence. Lucy Powell, deputy leader of the Labour Party – yes, she who characterised discussing rape grooming gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ – led the pack in parliament called for more civility in political debate (oh the irony) and for further action ‘to tackle hate propagated online’. I took this on in a brief House of Lords discussion on Ann.

On Talk TV earlier in the week, I discussed the whole issue of security for politicians and warned that we need to consider unintended consequences. Of course, we need reasonable measures for those assessed to be at greatest risk. Those sneering at Nigel Farage for taking the issue seriously should pause and take a reality check. However, in general, politicians are public servants, and the public need access to them, so I worry more broadly about a retreat from the public sphere driven by fear.

You’ll gather from the clip why Ann Widdecombe was far more complicated than any caricature. One issue that I never dreamt Ann and I would agree on was prison policy. As a former Conservative Party prisons minister, she was notoriously hardline. No early releases for Ann. My liberal attitude means I am more a prison-reform type, so I assumed we’d clash on that.

However, I was surprised when we discussed the issue just how committed she was to prison education and purposeful activity for prisoners, even if she believed more people should be locked up in the name of law and order. She was firmly supportive of rehabilitation, redemption and human dignity. She wanted a justice system that worked but that was humane not cruel. But that meant that she was also scrupulously fair and agreed with me that those imprisoned on the now discredited and abolished IPP sentence should be reprieved by the state. For those unfamiliar with the IPP scandal, this Substack has covered it a number of times. Here’s an explainer: Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners.

I spoke to families of IPP prisoners at a protest at the Ministry of Justice earlier this week:

I followed up the protest with a question on IPP to Lord Timpson, in which I managed to utter the statement ‘ANDY BURNHAM IS PERFECT’ – hardly! Burnham has just appointed Matthew McGregor as his new head of political strategy in No.10, a former head of one-sided Hope Not Hate, an organisation whose main aim seems to be to promiscuously label anyone critical of Labour or EDI-style identity politics as hate-mongers. That bodes badly for free speech. But here’s hoping Burnham may – just may – take on the cause of justice for IPPers at least:

More Inside The Lords next week. I’m hoping ‘Things can only get better…’

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What a time to be alive. In the UK, members of the public can be intimidated into not feeling able to speak their minds – and if they do, become victims of cancellation, denunciation, social shunning and sackings. What’s more, ‘speech crimes’ mean you can be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned – all simply for things you’ve said. It sometimes feels as though ‘Britain’s free speech recession’ is a recent phenomenon and we lash out at the latest political party in power for their censorious prejudices. Or we blame the judiciary, even though judges do not make the law, they apply it.

Which is why I was delighted to endorse a new Prosperity Institute report by Battle of Ideas regular speaker Jon Holbrook on the free-speech crisis, that usefully reminds us that there’s more to it. Jon names and shames the long tail of legislation that led us here. As he says, ‘Society reaps what statute sows’.

This is a constructive intervention as it proposes ways of stripping back legislation to ensure more freedom to speak. Holbrook’s proposed Free Speech law is the second we’ve featured here – see our Substack on the Adam Smith Institute’s Freedom of Speech Bill, inspired by America’s First Amendment. It is so good to see great legal minds addressing this issue and we will be sure to debate these issues at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival (you can buy tickets here). So, a warm welcome to guest writer Prosperity Institute’s Rhys Laverty to introduce the theme.

Claire

Britain’s free-speech immaturity

Rhys Laverty

There are many pejoratives hurled at Britain these days: broken, divided, declining. I hate to add insult to injury, but there’s another that often comes to mind for me: immature.

A strange thing to say about our nation, given that this past weekend England celebrated its 1,099th birthday. On 12 July 927AD, King Æthelstan secured control over the last Viking kingdom of Northumbria and united the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Our country has an institutional history stretching back more than a millennium. In that time, it developed one of the most humane, just and effective political and legal systems the world had ever seen by means of parliamentary sovereignty and the common law. Over the centuries, we matured from warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into a cohesive, high-trust society with immense political liberty.

A mature country is one in which its citizens can govern themselves informally with civility in the midst of disagreement and in which its political rulers deliberate thoughtfully and responsibly over the best laws as they listen to the voice of the people. Strict rules are generally meant as a schoolmaster for the young; mature adults can look after themselves. As with the individual, so too with the nation.

This once characterised Britain. But it does so no longer.

We have become an immature country and nowhere is that more evident than when it comes to free speech. Increasingly, our political rulers do not deliberate responsibly with their ears open to the people; instead, they outsource deliberation to other bodies and seek to silence the voice of the people when they think the people have said the wrong thing. Accordingly, British citizens no longer govern themselves with civility but, when disagreements arise, swiftly seek the intervention of the punitive hand of the state or the lawyer to shut down views they find offensive or alarming.

The latest paper from the Prosperity Institute, authored by Jon Holbrook, describes the need of the hour: Reversing Britain’s Free Speech Recession. Jon places the origins of Britain’s free-speech woes not in the recent rise of cancel culture, but as far back as the Race Relations Act 1965. Although that Act sought to outlaw genuine racial discrimination, it also introduced restrictions on the nebulous act of ‘stirring up racial hatred’.

By beginning with that Act, the paper illuminates a central point in the free-speech debate: Britain’s speech restrictions don’t come out of thin air but have appeared as successive governments have sought to stifle criticism in order to contain the ill-effects of other poor policy decisions.

Holbrook argues that this impulse has its origin in the Race Relations Act, which he notes was ‘the first time in the UK’s history Parliament had enacted laws that could criminalise people on account of their particular beliefs’ rather than outlawing speech on public-order grounds.

The Act was driven not just by the existence of racism in society, but also by the increasing concerns that elites had about the consequences of the explosion in postwar immigration from the Commonwealth. Commonwealth immigration had become a serious point of concern: by the 1960s, the Labour government was forced to introduce immigration restrictions. The Race Relations Act sought to deal with these concerns by using the power of the state to outlaw discrimination. The Act began a process which is recognisable today: rather than winning the argument in society, the law would be used to regulate disagreement and speech.

This dynamic continued with subsequent pieces of legislation singled out in the Prosperity Institute report, notably the Public Order Act 1986, passed in the wake of various riots, include those in Southall and Brixton, which resulted from racial tensions. The Act outlawed speech merely because it might cause ‘harassment, alarm or distress’. This is a profound break with previous legislation, which was only concerned with speech that caused a breach of the peace.

Alongside these major laws, communications offences were created in the era before the internet became ubiquitous, such as the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Communications Act 2003. In the Blair years, numerous ‘hate speech’ laws (which are really just speech laws) made their way onto the statute book, as well. Meanwhile, in the civil realm, New Labour’s Equality Act 2010 instituted a sea change in anti-discrimination law, which turbocharged the ability of aggrieved minorities to assert themselves unjustly at the expense of the majority of British citizens.

In the 2010s, this suite of laws collided with two major shifts, one material and one cultural. First, the rise of social media, driven by smartphones post-2012, gave everyone a public voice via their posts online. Second, the cultural dominance of ‘wokeness’ from around 2016 has entrenched a particularly aggressive kind of political progressivism as our default cultural milieu.

There is something of a chicken-and-egg relationship between these laws, technological innovation, and our current free-speech crisis in the era of cancel culture. But our laws have certainly shaped culture to a significant extent. We have now regressed from being a mature, high-trust nation with a robust civic realm and social fabric to an immature, increasingly zero-sum network of interest groups who either exert immense social pressure on one another amidst disagreement or call in the increasingly well-armed apparatus of the state to police speech. We have become like petulant children constantly running to parents to sort out our conflicts.

The Prosperity Institute’s new paper provides a way back to free-speech maturity for Britain.

• First, it recommends the repeal of Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 and its outlawing of speech that merely causes ‘harassment, alarm or distress’.

• Second, it recommends repealing a raft of outdated and onerous communications offences, replacing them with a single offence for communications speech that is intentionally menacing and targeted.

• Third, it recommends abolishing all so-called ‘hate speech laws’.

• Fourth, it recommends removing religion and belief protections from the Equality Act and replacing them with a simple tort of unlawful interference with free speech.

• Finally, it recommends a costs regime for legal cases to deter spurious allegations and to protect those unjustly accused.

Britain is not Peter Pan: we did grow up – into one of the most gloriously mature nations the world has ever seen. But we have become like Benjamin Button, aging into infancy with every passing day as we lose the capacity to govern and disagree amongst ourselves.

Our politicians cannot continue to use speech laws to avoid scrutiny of their failed policies. If we want to grow out of our free-speech immaturity in the long term, they must listen when voters tell them unsavoury truths about the failures of things such as immigration policy. But we must begin by restoring the right of Britons to voice their criticisms without fear of censure.

Rhys Laverty is editorial and research director at the Prosperity Institute. You can read Jon Holbrook’s report, Reversing Britain’s Free Speech Recession, via the Prosperity Institute website.

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Cancel culture nearly ended my legal career, but I fought back
Jon Holbrook, Daily Telegraph, 13 July 2026

Watch Rhys Laverty and Jon Holbrook outline the main points of the report

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This evening in the simmering heat of London’s Westminster, the latest edition of Living Freedom Summer School will spark into life. Organised by the educational charity Ideas Matter, this year’s school is the largest ever, bringing together just shy of 100 people, most from around the UK, some from Europe and North America. They will engage in a wide-ranging series of talks, panel debates, seminars and workshops, each designed to delve deeply into the ideas, ideals and challenges related to freedom in the twenty-first century.

There is certainly much to discuss. Ongoing cultural conflicts and the febrile character of contemporary politics mean that barely a day passes without pronouncements, interventions or confrontations that highlight the challenges faced by those of making the case for a free, democratic society.

The headline news this week is the decision by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to trigger a by-election, arguing that ‘the people’ should be the judge of their political representatives - rather than cloistered political and media elites. The snooty refusal of mainstream parties to take part in the election only adds to the sense of a ‘uniparty’ desperate to place opponents in political quarantine and thwart their participation in a full democratic process. How apt then that the summer school kicks off with a lecture on the prospects for the populist insurgency to give people a voice.

This year’s school comes hot on the heels of the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The earthshaking events of the American founding created a beacon for advancing bold, daring ideas of liberty, equality and the centrality of ‘The People’. Yet 250 years on, this historic moment has generated, at best, muted celebrations – and more often incomprehension or even outright hostility. Re-energising the causes of freedom and free speech has never been more important.

One major challenge is an activist state that now regularly intervenes to ‘control the narrative’. Clearly politicians and allies in the legacy media have social-media platforms in their sights. DCMS minister Lisa Nandy is boycotting Elon Musk’s X, and threatening to compel social-media channels and video-sharing platforms to prioritise ‘trusted’ content creators. Lucy Powell, buddy of our prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, is threatening impose legal duties on online platforms during general elections, similar to impartiality rules for broadcasters. The challenge for our summer school participants is to work out the ideas needed to combat new restrictions and how to breathe life back into freedom.

Our sessions will tackle an array of similarly challenging issues. How should we respond to generational divisions and estrangement, and political issues that are routinely framed – and experienced – as cultural conflicts? When freedom is assumed to compete with other priorities and rights – like security, safety and wellbeing - how can we stop it being curbed or traded away? Do we need a US-style First Amendment to secure free speech through legal protections? And with the destructive influence of identity politics running rife, can we still make the case for tolerating speech and behaviour we find abhorrent?

Rather than create our own echo chamber, we think of this summer school as free speech in action. Yes, participants will hear from subject experts and critics. But they are also encouraged to express their own views and join in the debate on every issue. As we know, many on the side of freedom have radically different outlooks and ideas as to how it should be pursued. It is only by critically engaging with ideas that we can start to rise to the challenge of creating the contemporary arguments required to reinvigorate freedom.

WE STILL NEED YOUR SUPPORT FOR SCHOLARSHIPS
Participants are the recipients of Living Freedom scholarships which cover 90 per cent of the £500 cost of each place at the school, thereby ensuring that all participants can be selected on the basis of merit.

We are very grateful to the Ian Mactaggart Fund at Free Speech Union, Edinburgh Enlightenment Network, Alumni for Free Speech, Take Me Home podcast and Moynitrust for their support, and to all those valued individuals who sponsored a scholar.

We are still seeking donations to cover the shortfall. If you can help out, then please visit our Donorbox page: Living Freedom: Support a Scholar 2026

LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026: PROGRAMME

Populism: giving people a voice?
Frank Furedi

Generation Fragile? Growing up in the culture wars
Ellie Lee

The Classics: short talks
Tim Black on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth,
Oliver Rudland on Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes

Women’s freedom: safety versus liberation
Zoe Strimpel and Ella Whelan

Should social media be banned for under-16s?
Timandra Harkness, Matilda Gosling and Maya Thomas

Academic vices and virtues
Nigel Biggar

Should we scrap the Equality Act?
Anna Loutfi

Controlling the narrative? The politics of truth and misinformation
Jacob Reynolds

Island of strangers: what is a citizen?
Dolan Cummings

Artistic freedom: can art ever be free of politics?
Rosie Kay, Ella Nixon and Maren Thom

Is anti-Zionism really antisemitism?
Mark Birbeck and Sam Rubinstein

The De-Population Bomb: solving the fertility crisis
Emma Gilland and Georgina Kiss-Kozma

Does the UK need a US-style First Amendment act?
Michael Reiners

Should society be intolerant of intolerance?
Chris Bayliss and Ada Akpala, with Sebastian Moore and Jacob Reynolds

‘What the papers say’ workshops
Ada Akpala, Chris Bayliss, Lino Buckingham, Odhran Gallagher, Maeve Halligan, Rob Lyons, Anna McGovern, Georgina Mumford and Jake Weston

THINKING ALOUD: LIVING FREEDOM ALUMNI SEMINARS

Nation, national community, national interest
Phil Mullan

How to programme a debate
Ella Whelan

What is the Judeo-Christian tradition?
Dolan Cummings

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In this essay, Ella Whelan offers a case study in one particularly tragic arena, NHS maternity services, which have seen far too many unnecessary deaths of mothers and babies in recent years.

In the years between 2012 and 2025, at least 156 babies and six mothers died in the care of maternity staff at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH). Donna Ockenden’s long awaited Independent Review – out late last month – heard from over 2,500 families who had suffered the tragedies of poor care at the trust. Despite these staggering figures, just four of the 14 senior leaders and 35 of the 66 senior managers at Nottingham agreed to speak to Ockenden’s review.

This is not just a scandal, it’s a nightmare. Otherwise healthy babies died because they were not given the most basic levels of care, from monitoring of heart rates and movement to ignored signs of distress. Excited pregnant women and new mothers were left to die because they were ignored when they complained about pain or bleeding. Hundreds more were wounded or negatively affected by disastrously poor levels of care both before, during and after birth.

Anyone who has had a baby in the UK knows how it goes with the NHS - you’re given your blue book and filled with promises of how ‘bespoke’ and ‘personal’ your birth is and how much ‘control’ you have over what takes place. You’re invited to peruse the options of pool, home birth or the various suites at the hospital, asked what playlist you might like to listen to, and made to believe that your every whim and fancy will be accommodated on that special day. Anyone who has had a baby also knows that this is a fantasy – a lie, even. Once the baby arrives, the blue book becomes a joke book, and you are at the mercy of whoever is on duty. At Nottingham University Hospital, women didn’t just have their musical choices disregarded, but were ignored by staff when they reported a dip in foetal movement or were showing signs of increased blood pressure and distress – all potentially fatal signals.

Ockenden’s review is a success in some ways – not least because it was forced and fought for by immensely brave women and families who, while still suffering through their grief, have demanded answers to why their children and loved ones died. It lays out clearly the scale of poor care and the attempted cover-ups by senior staff in Nottingham who knew that there were serious issues in maternity care for decades. The government has promised to review Ockenden’s findings and come up with a plan, and has ordered rapid reviews of other trusts. More scrutiny and investigation of these matters is a good thing – there are families all across the UK who cannot find peace until those responsible for their losses are held accountable.

But the review also has its limits. Some maternity safety campaigners, like Emily Barley – whose daughter Beatrice died at Barnsley Hospital in May 2022 – are calling for a judge-led statutory inquiry which would force reluctant staff in Nottingham and other trusts to come forward.

Emily Barley was a panelist on our 2024 Battle of Ideas festival debate: The politicisation of maternity. You can also listen to this session on the Battle of Ideas Audio Archive here.

Despite the reviews, investigations and reports, we seem to be no closer to understanding why so many staff at so many hospitals across the country failed to deliver babies safely, despite working in a modern, Western nation which has had the medical and scientific means to reduce infant mortality in birth for many years. Ockenden’s report pointed to staff shortages, high turnover, bullying within the management team and other familiar NHS complaints. None of this provides a meaningful explanation as to why so many women are reporting either negative or fatal consequences when it comes to having babies in UK hospitals.

It’s also true that it is becoming harder to trust any conclusions made by investigations or reviews, when a cover-up culture seems so prevalent in many NHS trusts and in government. Baroness Amos was instructed by the government to undertake a rapid review into maternity services, published as the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation on 30 June. But what made the headlines wasn’t the unsurprising levels of bad care that Amos underlines, but the fact that the final report had erased any mention of ‘natural birth’ from its findings. Dr Bill Kirkup, one of Amos’s expert advisers, even stepped down from his role in protest of the removal, arguing that there were significant concerns about natural-birth ideology in maternity services, and the removal of the words ‘natural birth’ from the report betrayed that fact. Never mind the usual NHS staffing issues – this is where so much of the problem with maternity services lies, in a dogged denial that a fashion for ‘nature knows best’ is encouraging midwives to play a hands-off role in maternity care.

If it’s taboo to criticise NHS staff, who are used to applause and charity campaigns, it’s really taboo to criticise midwives. And yet, I think it’s time to go there. There are too many cases to ignore featuring poor or biased decision-making by midwives who seem to be committed to the singular goal of preventing medical intervention in birth. In her review, Ockenden points to the fact that NICE guidelines have long told midwives to ‘encourage her [mother in labour] to remain at or return home’ and that ‘delaying admission until active labour could reduce the likelihood of medical intervention’. Is it any wonder, then, that at Nottingham University Hospital, midwives used the acronym ‘FOH’ to send women in labour away – to “f*ck off home” – a directive that inevitably put women at risk of giving birth without the presence of a doctor or midwife?

We’ve been discussing maternity care for well over a decade - watch this film from our Battle Archive of 2014 Battle of Ideas festival debate: Baby on board: the battle over pregnancy.

There is ample evidence to suggest that midwifery has undergone something of a ‘woo woo’ transformation, with interference from charities like UNICEF guiding staff to encourage knackered mothers to exclusively breastfeed. If you thought Stonewall had an unhealthy foothold in the NHS, you would be shocked about the influence organisations like the National Childbirth Trust have in healthcare decisions, often based on little or no scientific evidence. There is also a clear dislike of caesarean sections and a celebration of women labouring and birthing vaginally with no pain relief. Some midwives even favour water injections and aromatherapy to help with the discomfort of contractions. Midwifery is turning from cold, hard scientific fact towards a different, earth-mothering trend. We’ve been here before. Mothers of the past were forced to rely on women waving bags of herbs and magical assurances – many of them died.

If we are to get some real answers as to why things have become so bad with maternity care, there can be no sacred cows. Even those of us who left the hospital with our babies alive have stories to tell. I remember coming to after an emergency c-section with my first child, listening to my midwife arguing with my anaesthetist that I didn’t need any morphine. Being hooked up to a machine would have meant more faff for the staff overnight. Thankfully, he put his foot down and, if I hadn’t been half comatose, I would have leapt up and kissed him.

We have modern tools and methods to make childbirth (fairly) painless and safe. So, why are we turning away from them? Why is the idea of women labouring, struggling and risking their wellbeing become the norm? C-sections are on the rise, women are voting with their feet. Most of us don’t want to leave things up to chance or nature when it comes to the arrival of our precious children. For the sake of all the women and babies we’ve lost and all the ones yet to come, the cult of natural birth needs to be investigated, understood and eradicated. Maternity care needs to get back to basics if it is to be fit to care for women in the twenty-first century.

Ella Whelan is a co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas festival and a columnist for the Telegraph.

THE ACADEMY 2026:
HOLLOW LEVIATHAN – THE STATE AGAINST THE DEMOS

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Frank Furedi ● Chris Bayliss ● Lola Salem ● Andrew Fox ● Tim Black ● Paul Lay ● Nicholas Tate ● Jacob Reynolds

CURRENT PROGRAMME

• WHAT IS THE NATIONAL INTEREST?
  Frank Furedi executive director, MCC Brussels; author, In Defence of Populism

• COMING APART: AUTHORITARIAN STRATEGIES FOR
  A FRACTURED SOCIETY
  Chris Bayliss contributing editor, The Critic

• HOLLOW MILITARIES AND REAL SECURITY
  Andrew Fox writer, commentator, former paratrooper; co-host The Brink podcast; author, Andrew Fox Substack

• WHAT REMAINS? ART AND MEMORY IN THE POST-CULTURAL STATE
  Lola Salem Oriel College, Oxford; author, Artless (Polity, forthcoming); contributor, The Critic, Engelsberg Ideas, Telegraph

• ISLAMO-LEFTISM AND THE ROOTS OF
  CONTEMPORARY THIRD-WORLDISM
  Tim Black books and essays editor, Spiked

• ECHOES OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR?
  Paul Lay senior editor, Engelsberg Ideas; author, Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate; co-host, 1666 and All That

• THE BOOKS THE ELITE NO LONGER READ – BUT SHOULD
  Nicholas Tate educationalist, commentator, author, What is Education For? (2014) & The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current (2017)

Today’s state is a sprawling leviathan. It reaches into our lives to an historically unprecedented degree. Yet it is, at the same time, fragmenting, incompetent and unable to maintain control of safety and security, internally or externally.

Beyond this, something is missing: any sense of legitimacy. Political legitimacy in the modern era is conferred by the people – the demos – yet the contemporary state often appears to be set explicitly against them. Ordinary people are seen as a problem to be managed, a source of danger, as something for the state to be protected from.

The Academy 2026 will explore the origins and development of the contemporary state. Why is the state, which seems to be growing inexorably, apparently incapable of delivering? Is it increasingly set against the people – and if so, why?

Discounted early-bird tickets are available until Monday 20 July. For full details and ticket options, click the button below.

BUY TICKETS FOR ACADEMY 2026

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I am a natural Green: a committed environmentalist concerned about climate change, and for 15 years I was a Green Party member until I was expelled for saying that men are not women. I wasn’t having that, so I am taking the Party to court, where I am confident I will win.

Prior to 2018, I paid little attention to party policies beyond environmental ones. But then I discovered the party enthusiastically embraced gender ideology. I was shocked. I couldn’t grasp how a party rooted in science and nature could champion the notion that a woman is anyone who identifies as one. I knew voters would not buy it.

Green Party Women is the party’s official group representing women’s interests, but after the party adopted a ‘Trans Women are Women’ policy, the Green Party Women committee, despite the efforts of some stalwart members, was pummelled into silence. So, in 2019 a small group of quietly gender-critical women decided to stand for election to the committee. We succeeded, and began building up the Green Party Women membership. Then we made posts on Facebook objecting to the demonisation of ‘TERFs’ and expressing solidarity with JK Rowling, who was being vilified in the media. This put a target on our backs.

Green Party Women soon became a battleground. High-profile figures including Sian Berry (then Green co-leader) and Carla Denyer (later co-leader) attempted to have the whole committee removed.

The next Green Party Women committee election was fiercely contested, and trans activists gained most of the seats. I was re-elected co-chair alongside a trans woman who insisted he was female.

It did not bode well.

I asked: ‘Party policy states trans women are women, but if sex and gender are different, do I have to agree a trans woman is female?’ The Green Party Regional Council refused to answer.

In March 2021, I brought a motion to the Green Party Spring Conference on ‘Ensuring Sex and Gender are not Conflated’. It proposed that when collecting data to make policies, it should be established whether that data was based on sex or on gender identity. Sian Berry and LGBTIQA+ Greens denounced it as transphobic and harmful. The motion was on the conference agenda, but minutes before it was due to be debated, the session chair announced it would not be heard, and simply expunged it from the agenda.

Two days after conference, I was placed on a ‘No-fault suspension’ following a complaint from two trans activists on the Green Party Women committee, who claimed I was creating a ‘hostile, intimidating, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment’ for trans members.

No-fault suspensions are meant for cases of ‘immediate risk to the party or to individuals’, but what risk I posed was never explained. In July 2021, I sent the Party the ruling from Maya Forstater’s case confirming gender-critical views are a protected belief under the Equality Act. I suggested the party might be breaking the law. My membership was reinstated, but the Green Party Women trans activists went on strike and refused to work with me. Mediation was suggested, but my trans woman co-chair said he’d only consider it if I first agreed he was ‘a woman and not male’. The Green Party Regional Council responded to his demand by reassuring him he was a woman, and ordering me to delete a tweet implying he was male, threatening re-suspension if I didn’t comply.

At the next Green Party Women election, I was again elected co-chair. The first committee meeting was held on 3 February 2022; I was hit with three no-fault suspensions the very next day for various complaints including that I had read out the Party’s ‘Trans Women are Women’ policy in a sarcastic tone at a Let Women Speak event.

One complaint came from Amelia Womack (deputy co-leader), who cited part of my hustings speech given during the committee election campaign where I said:

‘I have been clear that I am proud to stand up for women’s rights, I do not believe that males can ever be females, and single-sex spaces are necessary for the safety and dignity of women.’

Amelia claimed this was ‘belittling, derogatory, insulting, offensive and discriminatory’.

I was suspended for most of 2022 and, after a brief return, the disciplinary panel heard a further complaint from Sian Berry and Hannah Allbrooke (then deputy leader of Brighton & Hove Council), which included claims like: ‘Emma questions whether there is a difference between men and a trans woman, therefore denying trans people’s right to self-identify.’

I was expelled over that complaint in January 2023, but appealed, because during the hearing Sian admitted she’d made the complaint in order to get me suspended to prevent me from attending conference. I argued this made the complaint vexatious. The complaint was ruled ‘unreasonable’. but was allowed to proceed anyway. The appeal was dragged out for two years, but in January 2025 I was expelled again.

This is how the Green Party operates. ‘Trans’ is treated as a sacred caste, and questioning the gender orthodoxy is heresy. And it isn’t just a ‘me’ problem: between 2019 and 2024, six gender-critical co-chairs of Green Party Women, alongside numerous gender-critical members, were suspended or expelled. The party has become a safe space for misogynists of every stripe, traditional and progressive alike, and of both sexes.

Please watch and share the two-minute film below about my case, which features my solicitor Elizabeth McGlone and Baroness Claire Fox, who knows a thing or two about the necessity of democratic debate. This case matters, because when a political party flagrantly disregards its own rules and actively discriminates against members, it is not fit to govern.

Accountability isn’t optional, but whilst the party has members’ money to splash on lawyers, I have only my savings and the generosity of strangers. Please support my crowdfunder if you can, because political parties must be made to accept that they are not above the law.

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This the first Inside the Lords for a while. The reason is that there is nobody running the country. Most of us are delighted to see the back of Keir Starmer, but the fact is that ministers simply don’t know what is going to happen next. So, we have a weird interregnum until the seemingly inevitable coronation of Andy Burnham. While Labour politicians in Parliament seem terribly excited about replacing Starmer with Burnham, there is a worrying lack of detail on what he would do differently or what he even believes in.

Burnham’s big idea is more devolution. But I’m extremely sceptical about whether this is really taking power from Whitehall and handing it over to local people. The claims about Manchesterism are overblown, so how it could solve the fundamental problems of the economy and everything else is beyond me.

Moreover, ‘local’ is not a synonym for ‘better’. This week, we’ve had the report on the Nottingham maternity scandal, hearing about how women and babies are dying in childbirth because of the failure to listen to them, imposing the ideology of ‘natural’ birth over the best that medical science can offer. From the horrifying death of toddler Preston Davey to the grooming gangs, some of the worst scandals of recent years have been because of the failures and corruption of local government and services.

You also have to ask whether Burnham will be quite so keen on handing over power to councils run by Reform, the Green Party or the Islamist-leaning so-called ‘Independents’. And as power moves to local areas, the ability of Parliament to scrutinise will be reduced. So much for democracy.

The failings of the state are the central theme of this year’s edition of The Academy, the residential summer school run by Ideas Matter. It’s taking place on 22 & 23 August at Wyboston Lakes in Bedfordshire and I would everyone to come along. Find out more here.

In better news, I’ve won a ballot to have a debate of my choice in the House of Lords soon. I’ve chosen artistic boycotts as my theme: the way that the arts establishment closes ranks against anyone who is, for example, gender critical or in any way supportive of Israel. I will be delighted to highlight the report by Rosie Kay and Denise Fahmy.

Below, you can watch two of my recent speeches. One is on the Conversion Practices Bill, which has sadly turned up again like a bad penny. A ban would only act to prevent people caring for trans-leaning young people from helping them to explore why they feel a desire to transition, making affirmation the only show in town. The other speech looks at Brexit and disinformation, something often used as an excuse for our vote to leave – rather than voters coming to a rational judgement on the issues.

On this issue, one of Starmer’s legacies will be to foist mainstream media outlets like the BBC on to social-media companies as ‘trusted sources’, we need more questioning of official attempts to ‘control the narrative’. We’re now programming the Battle of Ideas festival on 17 & 18 October in Westminster and it’s the best place to be if you feel like doing some serious questioning, too. Get your tickets here.

Videos from The Lords

Question on the Conversion Practices Bill, 1 July 2026

Question on disinformation and Brexit, 25 June 2026

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