A year ago, we unexpectedly faced the introduction of mandatory Digital ID for those that want to work and sudden changes were announced to existing inheritance tax rules for farmers, posing an existential threat to British family agricultural businesses. The Assisted Dying (aka Suicide) Bill was looking like it was gaining traction. You could have concluded that not much could be done to stop all this, as it seemed that the state and those holding political power were going to drive through their measures, by hook or by crook. This was happening with very little debate and, as in the cases above, not appearing in any party manifesto.

What a difference a year makes! When people work together to defend privacy, freedom and shared values, you can bring about significant change. Campaigning and public involvement across the UK led Keir Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory Digital ID. His successor, Andy Burnham, confirmed that Digital ID would not be introduced in that form. The government also U-turned on farmers’ inheritance tax (IHT), marking a major victory for campaigners. These outcomes showed that public pressure can influence policy and we can reshape the political landscape.

These are two enormous victories, and we need to be clear that had we not all fought back, things would be very different today. However, that is not to say that these wins are sufficient. There are still extremely serious issues facing our farmers. While the IHT threshold was raised to £2.5million per farmer with spouse (if married), it was only kicking the problem into the long grass.

Digital ID has not ‘gone away’ either. The recent announcement by Lisa Nandy that Britain would have a social-media ban for ‘under 16s’, in reality this means that all adults will need to digitally verify their ID to ‘prove who they are’ in order to join the digital town square. Alongside this, One Login is being forced onto eight million company directors without any debate.

The government is using the GOV.UK App as part of a concerted drive to get everyone onto digital platforms concerning tax, with no serious response to the public’s concerns about surveillance, tracking and data security.

We have seen an incredible 43 per cent of UK businesses experience cyber breaches in the past 12 months, with millions of people being negatively affected. Yet the government’s preoccupation is to push as many people onto their various digital platforms as possible, with as little debate and discussion as they can get away with.

Five years ago, we launched the Together Declaration, in response to Boris Johnson’s announcement on so called Freedom Day that we would need to show vaccine passports. We stated we would not accept a ‘papers please’ society. We won that battle. We remain as committed to this position now, as we were when we first set up.

The empty buzzwords of ‘safety’ and ‘protection’ are wheeled out by this government when attempting to bring in measures that would change the relationship between the citizen and state forever. Fortunately, through successful collaboration with other campaign groups, Together was able to help convince MPs voting on the Assisted Dying Bill to stop it from becoming law. This was done via emails, letters and phone calls to MPs and members of the House of Lords, with rallies, petitions, protests and events helping to shine a light on the enormous problems and concerns with this issue.

Despite these victories, we are still facing extremely serious issues in the UK. It is in that context that we’ve convened the Together Association’s Fifth Anniversary event, on Saturday 7 November, in London. We are bringing together fantastic speakers and successful campaigners to address some of the most pressing issues we are facing as a nation.

To kick off, our opening plenary will cover how we might understand the rapidly shifting State of the Nation: our institutions and identity.

Katharine Birbalsingh will be discussing diversity and education from her new book, Diversity is Not Our Strength. Maajid Nawaz will be speaking about identity and technocrats, Bernie Spofforth will outline what is happening to our institutions, Professor Norman Fenton will speak on universities and Covid, and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert on why the Equality Act needs to go.

Throughout the day, we will have sessions covering a range of topics, including Jennie Bristow on intergenerational relationships and the culture wars, in discussion with Connie Shaw, Maeve Halligan, Ada Akpala and Ellie Hodges. We’ll also be considering the impact of pursuing Net Zero on vehicle owners and the continual impositions on car drivers across the UK.

We will reveal why we believe the Covid Inquiry was not fit for purpose and what we should be demanding to ensure what happened in 2020 cannot happen again, with Molly Kingsley, Clare Craig, Lesley Katon and Francis Hoar. There will be a special session on new media (and what next) with Mike Graham, Winston Marshall, Based and Bougie, Colin Brazier and Rafe Heydel-Mankoo – and a final surprise session!

Many of our speakers have written books which will be available to purchase on the day. I have also written a book, We Are Stronger Together: Inside the Movement that Changed the World demonstrating how, when the public get stuck in, we can have a direct and positive impact on the world around us. It will be available on the day. More on that soon.

There are still some tickets available, offered at a special discount to Academy of Ideas readers. Use the code BATTLE2026, which gives £4 off per ticket.

Furthermore, if you are under 30 years old, we offer the opportunity to attend free of charge thanks to the generosity of some of our members. Simply quote ACAD1830 (strictly subject to availability).

We look forward to seeing you there as we continue building a grassroots community to defend our hard-won rights, freedoms and values, Together.

Alan Miller is one of the founders of Together.

Together 5th Anniversary Event takes place on Saturday 7 November in London. For more details and tickets, click here.

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Little wonder the mainstream media’s reputation is at a low ebb and the British public is losing faith in the impartiality of the Corporation. A survey by Demos showed that the net proportion of people expressing pride in the BBC has fallen since 2011 from 48 per cent to -11 per cent.

At the Battle of Ideas festival, we explored questions of media bias, whether the new New Media will finally kill off the MSM and asked What has the BBC ever done for us? In the latter, as reported by the Telegraph, an important point of discussion was the BBC’s pro-Palestine bias. One of the speakers, Phil Craig, a BBC graduate trainee who built his career working for iconic British TV series World in Action and Panorama, revealed how his faith in the BBC ‘ebbed away’ as he watched coverage of the Gaza conflict.

Here we publish an extended version of his speech on the issue, and on groupthink at the Corporation and in the media more generally.

I worked at Brook Lapping, a production company, for many years and became joint head of programme there alongside the brilliant Norma Percy. We made many hugely acclaimed series for the BBC and were known for rigour, objectivity and fair mindedness as we tackled the really big stories: the break up of Yugoslavia, the peace process in Northern Ireland, the hostage crisis in Beirut, etc. Norma’s astonishing series, The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs, from 1998 (it is still on BBC iPlayer) had all the key players from 1948 onwards and was shown across the Arab world and in Israel, rare in itself.

I thought about this series a lot during the Gaza war, and the super-high standards of balance that the BBC asked of us back then, and I came to lose a career-long faith in the BBC’s fairness. There are numerous examples we all know, but all the mistakes of tone, hiring and ‘rushing to judgment’ all went in the same direction. Friends inside the organisation still speak of groupthink and the power of the activist younger staff.

I thought about this, too, when Hannah Barnes struggles to get attention for her reporting of the Tavistock gender clinic for children, incredible work that she told me was treated with real suspicion inside the organisation. Former current affairs grandee Fran Unsworth’s recent interview with Rob Burley was important, too, again highlighting the effective veto that an activist class had over the reporting of a very important story. In this case, it was the Tavistock, but there was also a wider friction between the trans movement and women’s rights.

I felt the same pressure toward the end of my TV career in the various industry talking shops and markets I attended or organised. (I was on the board of the Science and Documentary Congress for some years.) Until quite recently (about 2015, I’d say), there was open and vigorous debate about the biggest subjects out there. But suddenly there was a dull conformity and a sense that some opinions should not be shared. To this day, I believe that the Congress has never debated the origins of Covid (a rather important science story) or the many issues connected to the trans movement. Meanwhile, to express any enthusiasm for Brexit is to invite instant personal and professional isolation, and I strongly suspect the same is true inside the BBC now. All of this cannot be healthy, but it all can be remedied by a return to core values and some tough leadership.

A ‘canary in the coal mine’ moment for me was talking to my old Panorama boss - and patron - Mark Thompson at a BBC party a few years after 9/11. I said that I was uncomfortable with aspects of Adam Curtis’s famous Power of Nightmares film because it seemed wrong to equate neo-conservatism in the US with the jihadist movement quite strongly. Mark looked at me as if I’d stepped in something nasty, quickly caught the eye of someone else and that was that. He, of course, went on to scale the heights in London and New York, first as director general of the BBC and later CEO of the New York Times and CNN. And maybe knowing which opinions count and which fall outside the groupthink helped him do just that.

From 2012 to 2015, I ran factual TV for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - very much a mini BBC on the other side of the world - and, from what insiders there tell me now, I sense a similar change in mood after I left. I was especially shocked to see so many of my friends and old colleagues marching during the Gaza war, on one occasion behind a pro-Iranian banner and images of the Ayatollahs. I’m not sure you can do that and then go back to your office the next day at a publicly funded broadcaster committed by its charter to balance and fair-minded reporting.

It was interesting to me to hear a ‘hot mic’ with the ABC’s lead science correspondent last year admitting he had dismissed the Covid lab-leak theory largely because Trump had supported it. I mean, Trump said some astonishingly crazy things about Covid. But if your job is to inform a whole nation about the biggest medical story of your lifetime, you really should be more open minded. And that ‘closing of the media mind’ is something that should worry us all.

Phil Craig is a bestselling author and multiple-award-winning film-maker. He is author most recently of 1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World.

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A week ago, thousands of us crammed into Church House for the Battle of Ideas festival. What a great weekend! The enormous goodwill offered by our speakers, partners and attendees helped us demonstrate, in real time, the immense value of the public square and the virtue of open-ended debate and free speech. The festival was a hugely stimulating exchange of ideas – often passionate, but with civility and a willingness to listen to those we disagreed with.

Our motto – ‘Conversations for the public, with the public, in public’ – really came alive, with the audience making sharp points and incisive questions from the floor. But we have had one consistent complaint, summed up by one attendee: ‘There were so many panels to choose from, and I keep hearing – “You should have come to this session” – so now I feel I have missed out on loads of brilliant speeches.’ Luckily, large parts of the festival have been filmed – do sign up to our YouTube channel to watch what you missed. But also, thanks to Substack and other outlets, many contributors have published their speeches, and I include a selection below.

Also check out both the remaining UK Satellite events and international Battle of Ideas Europe 2026 events. I am off to Helsinki next week for our first-ever event in Finland, and then there are Battle satellites in Berlin on 28 November and Paris on 5 December. Closer to home there’s still lots more to debate, starting on next Wednesday, 28 October, in Leeds with Vibe Shift with Brendan O’Neill and including two fabulous Comedy Unleashed gigs in London and Knaresborough.

But for now, no more FOMO – enjoy reading SOME of what you missed here and sign up to the Substacks of those speakers who were so insightful at this year’s Battle of Ideas.

Claire

My Opening Remarks at Two Sessions of the Battle of Ideas 2026
‘Lies, damned lies… let’s talk about stats’ and ‘Techlash’
Professor Abhishek Saha 18 October 2026

#Battlefest 2026 - Conversion Practices Bill
Great panel, energised audience - this Bill must not become law.
Sarah Phillimore 18 October 2026

Why I oppose the puberty blocker trial
An expanded version of the paper I gave at the Battle of Ideas.
Marcus Evans 19 October 2026

Motherhood is unappealing
The culture around parenting is putting women off becoming mums.
Dr Rebecca Steinfeld 19 October 2026

Why is policing Britain so difficult?
My contribution to the above topic at the Battle of Ideas 2026.
Paul Birch 19 October 2026

“State-Sanctioned Child Abuse” – My Speech at the Battle of Ideas
James Esses 19 October 2026

My Statement for ‘From Boycotts to Renaissance: Threats and Opportunities in the Arts’
Debate on Saturday 17 October 2026, Battle of Ideas, London
Professor Ian Pace 19 October 2026

The Battle of Ideas vs The Battle for Europe
While I spent the weekend at the Battle of Ideas, France spent it on fire.
Gill Levy The Ultracrepidarian, 19 October 2026

The arts establishment does not own culture
The transcript of my speech at Battle of Ideas panel, ‘From boycotts to renaissance: threats and opportunities in the arts’.
Rosie Kay 19 October 2026

A note on the ‘War on Women’ panel
Marnie Riches 19 October 2026

Power to Every Postcode, Terms Apply
Speech - sort of delivered to the Battle of Ideas: From metro mayors to Manchesterism: a devolution revolution?
Gawain Towler 19 October 2026

The Battle of Ideas
It’s not enough to get the ‘right’ people elected, though that is needed. We also need to win the battle of ideas – that’s why we went to last weekend’s Festival, not the party conferences.
Rt Hon Steve Baker Fighting for a Free Future, 20 October 2026

Artistic License
Arts First at Battle of Ideas 2026: Wendy Earle’s introductory remarks on the importance of defending artistic license.
Arts First 20 October 2026

After the wildfires and floods: should we reassess climate change?
Net Zero is stupid, but we can do *something* about climate change: adapt to changing weather and decarbonise where it makes wider economic or strategic sense.
Rob Lyons 21 October 2026

Is it Islamism – or is there a problem with Islam?
My opening remarks at the Battle of Ideas 2026.
Connie Shaw 21 October 2026

MAGA, Israel, and the Vegan-Chicken Farmer Alliance
Some ideas are controversial. Others are downright outrageous and I found plenty of both in London.
Phelim McAleer 21 October 2026

Audio: Meet the author of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Toby Marshall Toby’s Jug, 21 October 2026

When Saturn eats his children: the case against the triple lock
A pay-as-you-go pension, an ageing population and stagnant productivity add up to a growing bill for the young
Maxwell Marlow Institute of Economic Affairs, 22 October 2026

Debating Diagnosis at the Battle of Ideas
ADHD to Autism: Negotiating the special needs crisis
Carrie Clark 22 October 2026

A civilised battle at the Battle of Ideas
War on Women: publishing those who refused to be cancelled,
Louise Guinness 22 October 2026

Beyond narrative control
How the British government is increasingly applying a model designed in the EU to control opposition to the contemporary regime.
Jacob Reynolds 23 October 2026

At the Battle of Ideas, Gender is Part of the Greater Challenge
A monster revealed: a sobering but inspiring Battle of Ideas in London.
Nancy McDermott Genspect, 23 October 2026

From Vietnam to Iran, Why Can’t the West Win Wars?
The military historian, John Keegan, defined war as ‘collective killing for a purpose’. Contemporary society has a problem with all three of these elements.
Professor Bill Durodié FSI Europe, 24 October 2026

Early-bird tickets for the Battle of Ideas festival 2027 are now on sale at 2026 prices. Buy via Eventbrite.

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Fresh from last weekend’s Battle of Ideas in London, the festival now takes its unique brand of ‘public conversations’ on a European tour. We begin on Saturday 31 October in Helsinki. (See the full programme below.)

There’s certainly no shortage of issues to debate, with Finland facing a looming national reckoning: navigating challenges of integration within an economically and socially stagnant European Union, alongside rising geopolitical tensions to the east, and a restless public heading to the polls in April.

One issue is how to pursue Finland’s interests first in the face of international pressures. Economic, energy, defence and immigration challenges increasingly bring domestic priorities into conflict with European Union rules or international treaty obligations. A plan to deploy stringent immigration controls, including asylum processing outside the EU, is just one example of where protecting the national interest is a recurring popular concern. Elsewhere, domestic security concerns dictating the need for new anti-personnel mines led to Finland’s recent withdrawal from the UN-sponsored Ottawa Convention that bans them. Our debate on national sovereignty could not be more timely.

Further controversial plans on immigration are reigniting debate over cultural traditions and citizenship. New proposals demand that all applicants for citizenship pass tests in either Finnish or Swedish and have a good grasp of Finnish history; the proposals also restrict educational support for teaching immigrant pupils their native language. In a country where languages have frequently been the focus of impassioned public debates, including long-running struggles between the dominant Finnish and historically privileged Swedish languages, we’ll look at the re-emergence of linguistic conflicts and the culture wars in the debate on the battles over language.

Finland, like its Nordic neighbours, has been widely praised for free speech – but many now worry about a sharp pivot away from that openness. For example, there’s the now-notorious prosecution (currently being appealed) of Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen for ‘agitation against a minority group’ over expressing traditional biblical views on marriage and sexuality. Our panel of international experts will ask 'should we have the right to be offensive?’ and we also bring together organisations, activists and public intellectuals to assess how best to pioneer a Europe-wide fight for free speech and open debate.

A series of seemingly disparate national crises – from the cost of living to welfare costs, economic modernisation to the role of the state – is calling into question not just the future of the coalition government that includes the populist Finns Party, but prospects for an entire younger generation. According to the Youth Barometer, young people’s life satisfaction is currently at a record low. Young representatives from parties across the political spectrum – including Christian Democratic Party, Social Democratic Youth, Finns Party Youth, National Coalition Party and The Left Youth – will debate whether Gen Z is becoming a lost generation.

One significant issue is that the technological innovations that might boost the economy are proving controversial, including the decision by Google to invest at least €13 billion in Finland over 2027 and 2028 as it expands infrastructure for artificial intelligence and other core services. Yet Google is running up against demonstrations against forest clearances linked to planned data centres in Muhos and Kajaani. More broadly, many worry that too little thought has been given to the long-term social and philosophical problems caused by the arrival of AI. Our panel of experts will debate the dystopian and utopian visions for these new technologies, asking if AI is changing everything.

All these pressure points seem to feed an appetite for political change, with the governing coalition seeing its support erode. After a disappointing result in the 2024 European Parliament elections, many wonder whether the populist Finns Party has had its day or whether it can continue to draw support in the face of anxieties over national identity and security. With populism often blamed for everything that is wrong with politics and society, and used as a weapon to dismiss movements and demands that challenge accepted views or unsettle those in power, our panel of UK and Finnish experts takes a step back to consider whether populism is democracy’s enemy or if it expresses something central to the democratic spirit?

With so much to discuss, the inaugural Battle of Ideas Helsinki is timely. Spread the word and make sure to join this full day of panel discussions featuring a diverse line-up of speakers from Finland and across Europe who tackle the most important political, social and cultural issues of our times.

BATTLE OF IDEAS HELSINKI / AATOSTEN TAISTO

Saturday 31 October · 11:30 – 19:30
Balderin sali, Aleksanterinkatu 12, 00170 Helsinki

PROGRAMME

Populism: giving the people a voice?

War on words? The battles over language
Dystopia versus Utopia: is AI changing everything?

Meet the authors: Eric Kaufmann and Frank Furedi on cultural renewal
Europe’s free-speech crisis: launching the fightback

GenZ: the lost generation?
Independence: does the nation state still matter?

Free speech: should we have the right to be offensive?

TICKETS

Full Price: €12.50
To buy a ticket, please click here.

FIND OUT MORE

Visit the Battle of Ideas Helsinki page for full details of sessions and speakers.

Battle of Ideas Helsinki is organised by Academy of Ideas
in association with Suomalaisuuden Liitto

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In just a few hours, thousands of you will be joining us at Church House in Westminster for a weekend of free speech and open debate at the Battle of Ideas festival.

Thank you to everyone who has booked their ticket – there are still tickets available to buy on the door. That’s due to the fact that we’ve expanded, with sessions on Saturday also taking place at The Abbey Centre, across the road from Church House on Great Smith Street. You can check out our programme here, and read our festival brochure with the full timetable and information on special events.

There are tickets to suit everyone, with substantial discounts for students, school pupils and concessions.

There is so much to talk about – from the state of Britain’s politics to the looming threat of a debt crisis, from chaos in France to what (or who) comes after Trump, plus debates on what’s going on in schools, the arts, technology, science and more.

Come along, say hello and get stuck in. A reminder: the festival’s unique selling point is that we hand over half the time of every session to attendees: to ask questions, voice their concerns or raise issues. And it’s a chance to meet others who are open-minded enough to engage with ideas. Even when we don’t all agree on specifics, we can agree that debating issues face to face is crucial, and more satisfying than shouting at the telly or posting angry memes.

You can learn more about the philosophy behind this year’s festival by reading my article for spiked: Why the Battle of Ideas matters in our age of censorship.

We are proud to be the home for freedom fighters, with conversations for the public, with the public, in public. See you in the morning.

Claire

The Battle of Ideas festival has 400 speakers on 100+ debates over two days, with 3,000+ attendees.

Check out our Keynote debates that tackle many of the biggest issues of our time:

Controlling the narrative? The politics of misinformation and truth · Will Reform be allowed to rule? Taking on The Blob with Danny Kruger · We don’t ‘do God’: have we lost faith in secular liberalism? · Should we tolerate the intolerant? · Is the Social Contract broken? The fight for the soul of democracy · Free speech for me and not for thee? The red lines in free expression · Do we know our enemy? Untangling terrorism and extremism · Suicidal empathy: is the West killing itself with kindness?

Explore the debates in our numerous festival strands, including:

Battle for the Economy · International Affairs · The State of Welfare · (Un)Free Society · Lifestyle Matters · Tech Futures · Ideological Capture? · The State of Britain · Ethical Dilemmas · Culture Wars · Go on, Convince Me · Future Britain

We also have a host of Podcasts Live

VIEW THE FULL PROGRAMME

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The Battle of Ideas festival takes place this weekend, on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster. Tickets are still available with substantial discounts for students and concessions.

We’re back in parliament and back inside the Lords. The atmosphere is interesting: the parties have just had their conferences and both Conservatives and Labour are convinced that they’ve pulled off some good speeches, meaning things just might go back to normal. But do they really think that politics can simply settle down, that there isn’t a major political realignment happening?

Perhaps a sign of that naivety – the idea that we can just turn back the clock and forget all the change that’s taking place – was the fact that Andy Burnham has used questions in the House of Commons and his appearance on Remaniac podcast The Rest is Politics to reopen the Brexit wars. Talk about rewinding time. Burnham admitted that one of the first things he asked about when he reached No.10 was whether or not there was Russian influence in the Brexit vote. Really? A country in major crisis and that’s his priority? The only solution that the Labour Party has to everything – from our economic woes to immigration to the physical defence of the realm – is to rejoin the EU in some shape or form. Never mind dealing with the huge waste in the welfare system or investing in industry and confronting the barriers that Net Zero politics has put in place…

But what is perhaps worse than Burnham’s ‘Russia did it’ ideas is the fact that a few days after his pronouncements in the chamber and with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, he tried to pretend that he hadn’t said any of that at all – or, at least, he didn’t mean it like that. Ministers were falling over themselves to brief the press that their boss hadn’t just unleashed conspiracy theories about the most important vote in recent British political history. But he did. Burnham has gone back on his Makerfield promise: to not reopen the Brexit issue.

All of this made a mockery of what we were doing in the Lords this week which was discussing the ‘Hillsborough Law’ – the Public Office (Accountability) Bill – a piece of legislation which seeks to compel government bodies, authorities and officials to have a duty of candour – to tell the truth, in essence. That government thinks you need to legislate to compel public officials to be honest – well you couldn’t make it up. Up the corridor you had people doing anything but telling the truth about what the country’s leader thinks about Brexit and the EU, while we were demanding that people in the public sphere should be straight and honest with the public.

Lots of people have criticised Burnham for ‘shooting from the hip’ or ‘speaking off the cuff’ on issues like Manchester City or Brexit. But I don’t mind him speaking freely – in fact, I welcome it. Burnham can be as loose lipped as he likes and we should judge him for it. We need to know what politicians actually think, not just what their speech writers deem to be acceptable. We have been given a real insight with this Brexit chat and clarity on suspicions many of us had about the Labour Party’s desire to reverse the Brexit vote. Now we can discuss what to do about that.

And where should you discuss this? With me and thousands of others at the Battle of Ideas festival, which is taking place this weekend on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster. We’ll be discussing everything from the EU to the rights and wrongs of surrogacy, censorship and free speech to the hype around the Bayeux Tapestry, angry young women and why they’re voting Green to what China is up to in the Middle East… and so much more. Come along and emulate Burnham – speak your mind, try ideas out and join us for two days of public debate and discussion.

Speaking of trying ideas out, I was on Cross Question with Iain Dale the other night and we ended up having an exchange about Reform’s plans to halt asylum claims. After I suggested that it was an idea to at least consider, two of my panel members jumped on me as though even taking the proposal seriously was ‘beyond the pale’. But the thing about politics is that you’ve got to let yourself think the unthinkable, to experiment and to consider all angles so that when you come to your position, you know you’ve got a strong sense of why you think what you think. Our festival is a place to do this in person, in the flesh: conversations for the public, with the public, in public. See you there.

Claire

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On Saturday 17 October, Joanna Williams will be speaking in two sessions at the Battle of Ideas festival in London looking at the contemporary workplace: From quiet quitting to #lazygirljobs: workshy Britain? and Podcast Live: This Isn’t Working – are women to blame for ‘woke’ workplaces? She is also speaking in the debates We don’t need no indoctrination: the politicisation of education and Middlesbrough: what just happened?

Tickets for the festival are available via the Battle of Ideas website.

This essay is republished from Joanna’s Substack.

From quiet quitting to #lazygirljobs: why isn’t Britain working?

‘Why would anybody set up a business in this country right now?’ This was the question Jeremy Clarkson posed at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this week, in a swipe at Labour’s punitive tax rises. But if it’s not worth setting up your own business, is it worth having a job at all? Do people even want to work anymore?

In the UK today, almost 21 per cent of all working-age adults are out of work and not currently looking for a job. Close to a million, or one in eight young people, are not in education, employment or training (NEET). Clearly, these statistics mask many different, individual stories: some people might want to work but can’t because they cannot find a suitable job, or their personal circumstances make it impossible. But the fact is that, in Britain right now, a sizeable chunk of the population is not engaged with the labour market.

This marks a significant shift from the experience of previous generations. In the first three decades after the Second World War, unemployment was consistently below three per cent, long before statistics were massaged by high numbers of school-leavers going to university or people being placed on sickness benefits with no obligation to look for work. For most of the twentieth century, except perhaps for middle-class mothers, going to work each day was central to most people’s lives.

Clearly, the nature of work itself has changed. Recent decades have seen not just the collapse of heavy industry, but also a significant decline in manufacturing. Alongside this, the impact of mass migration as well as AI means that jobs that are available are harder to get, not just for people without qualifications but for graduates, too. High levels of taxation, an increase in the minimum wage, and a more risk-averse culture have made the Saturday job, once a crucial first step into work, largely a thing of the past.

But none of this explains the growing number of people who are either unemployed and not looking for work, or employed but disengaged and determined to do as little as possible. It seems that in Britain today, many of us have taken to heart the old mantra that you should work to live, rather than live to work. And if it is possible to live without working, then so much the better.

We see this attitude playing out in the higher proportion of employees who work from home in the UK than in any other European country. Globally, we are outdone only by Canada. Recent TikTok trends highlight the popularity of ‘quiet quitting’ (doing only the minimum expected and nothing more) or having a ‘lazy girl job’ with little stress or responsibility.

In the past, for many people employment most fundamentally meant being able to provide for yourself and your family. But it also forged solidarity between colleagues – creating the working class – and allowed individuals to develop a strong sense of purpose or identity as they took pride not just in earning a wage but in contributing towards society.

It is not just the number and type of jobs available that has changed then, but the place of work within our culture. Rather than being validated as important in its own right, it is diminished as ‘just a job’. People deemed to work too hard, or to take their job too seriously, are not admired but considered to have a problem, to be ‘workaholics’ in need of therapy.

Here, I point to four things that have contributed to this change.

A crisis of purpose

Many public institutions and private corporations seem to have lost all sense of their main purpose. The thing they are supposed to do is no longer their main concern. Universities focus on student satisfaction, ‘belonging’ and employability; education is squeezed to the edges. Museum curators detail the sins of the past; preserving artefacts is a begrudging necessity. Police record hate incidents rather than apprehending thieves. The film industry has given up on entertainment; the art establishment has rejected beauty. Energy companies purport to care more about the environment than generating power, and even big business shouts about ethics rather than making profit.

Woke values and DEI initiatives disguise the moral vacuum at the heart of many workplaces, but they fail to give most employees a meaningful sense of purpose. As a result, even professional careers become just a job. Following process becomes all-consuming. Employees might put in the hours and pick up a pay cheque, but they come to abandon any sense that what they do is important in itself. I have written previously about the problems that ensue when all jobs become bullshit jobs.

Perhaps most significantly, when a job is robbed of meaning and reduced to following processes, no one is expected to assume responsibility for anything or anyone. Exercising responsibility requires believing that what you are doing is important and that your role is not just about following instructions, but that what you do really matters. Instead, today, the rise of bureaucracy and managerialism means responsibility is forever deferred, as in some bizarre hall of mirrors.

Worse, risk-averse institutions actively discourage staff from taking personal responsibility by framing it as unnecessary. A sense that it is safer to follow procedures, rather than step out of line, is reinforced by senior figures being rewarded for failure.

Perhaps the most shocking example of this reward for failure is found in Nottingham. In 2023, Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley Kumar and Ian Coates were murdered at the hands of paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane. The subsequent inquiry into their deaths has exposed a litany of institutional failures. Police officers, psychiatrists, medical professionals, and university staff all failed to secure and treat Calocane and keep the public safe. Senior figures within these institutions sought to protect themselves and avoided making crucial decisions. Yet some, such as the senior police officer who led the investigation into the killings, have since been promoted.

Sadly, Nottingham is not an isolated case. Major scandals have rocked the Post Office and maternity wards, and daily failures plague healthcare and social work. Yet people are rarely held to account; instead, they are promoted.

Mental health

According to the mental health charity Mind, in England, one in four people will experience a mental-health problem of some kind in any given year, while one in five people report experiencing a common mental-health problem (like anxiety and depression) in any given week. It claims that about one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 have a probable mental health problem. On top of this, NHS England estimates that almost 2.5million people suffer from ADHD.

What lies behind these figures is a complex mixture of a small number of people suffering from very serious illnesses (Valdo Calocane in the previous example) and a much larger cohort who have been led to believe that routine emotions – feeling worried or sad – are mental-health problems in need of professional intervention. Belief in a mental illness easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those who see themselves as suffering from anxiety (as opposed to the more transient state of being worried) might change their behaviour and avoid situations that push them out of their comfort zone, thereby reinforcing a sense that they cannot cope.

We are not born less resilient than previous generations. But we live in a therapeutic culture that locates every problem we experience within our individual psychological makeup. From childhood, today’s young adults are bombarded with the message that they are mentally vulnerable and must avoid unnecessary risks to their mental health.

In this context, events such as starting a new job, hitting a deadline or meeting with colleagues – things that were met as routine occurrences by previous generations – come to be perceived as insurmountable challenges. A cohort of young people raised to believe they are too vulnerable to cope with stress, and that protecting their mental health is their utmost priority, will, if they can bring themselves to work at all, seek out a lazy girl job.

This prioritising of mental health feeds into the crisis of purpose within our institutions. Following the tragic suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry in 2022, the impact of Ofsted inspections upon school staff came under scrutiny. Teachers and trade union leaders successfully argued that passing judgement on schools in just one word created stress and anxiety. They argued instead for a colour-coded report card that would provide more nuance and highlight strengths as well as weaknesses. Having won this argument, headteachers have now decided that the new system is also stressful and are calling for inspections to be diluted further. This risks taking Ofsted and schools away from their core purpose. Rather than holding teachers to account, inspectors are asked to consider their mental health, and rather than educating children being the primary goal of schools, safeguarding teachers’ mental health becomes the priority.

Perhaps more worrying is when these same messages about personal vulnerability and mental health are internalised by children. School leavers convinced they can’t work may find they are rewarded with sickness benefits and relieved of all pressure to find a job. While they may initially appreciate this paid idleness, they soon find that the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get a job. Sadly, it is not impossible to imagine this rapidly becoming a vicious circle. Being disengaged and isolated is not a recipe for good mental health.

Lack of solidarity

One reason people show up for work each day and take responsibility for various tasks is to avoid letting down their colleagues. If your absence, or your failure, creates more work for other people, particularly those you feel a close bond with, then you will do your best to be part of a team. But in many workplaces, this sense of solidarity between colleagues is no longer there.

The rise of working from home has certainly contributed to this sense of atomisation. Sharing an office and staff canteen means people are more likely to know their colleagues’ names and interests. After-work socialising further fosters bonds. It is much harder to develop these relationships when work involves sitting at the kitchen table, and meetings happen over Zoom. Since Covid lockdowns, there has been a huge increase in the number of people who spend part or all of the working week at home.

It is difficult to know whether continued WFH is driven by employers looking to save costs or employees insisting on a perk. Large corporations offer flexible working to retain and recruit senior staff. It seems that WFH is more prevalent among older workers in professional occupations. Data show that staff on salaries above £50,000 are more than twice as likely to favour remote working as lower-paid staff and ‘hybrid working’ (mixing days in the office with days at home) is most common among ‘managers, directors and senior officials’. According to the ONS, less than a fifth of 16- to 29-year-olds are hybrid workers compared with well over a third of 30 to 49-year-olds. This is hardly surprising. WFH is far nicer when you have a big house and a family for company than when you live alone or in an overcrowded flat share.

Working from home contributes to a breakdown in solidarity among employees because strong connections are never forged in the first place. The workplace continues to function, but people act as individuals, protecting their own interests, rather than as part of a collective. Yet, the demand to WFH is also itself a symptom of a more atomised society. Just like the headteachers in revolt against Ofsted, it speaks to an assumption that work is to meet the needs of employees – whether that’s to protect their mental health or pick their children up from school – rather than any greater purpose that may be worthy of some sacrifice.

A lack of solidarity in the workplace is not only driven by the fashion for WFH. Divisive policies, often introduced by Human Resource managers, can end up pitting workers against each other if people are viewed as members of distinct identity groups rather than one group of colleagues. Attempts, such as the take-up of ‘unconscious bias training’ in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, to present some groups as particularly privileged or oppressed only add to the breakdown in solidarity. Similarly, dictating how people should relate to one another, for example, compelling the use of pronoun badges in email signatures, rather than trusting adults to communicate with one another without instruction, can also add to a reluctance to forge relationships in the workplace.

Breakdown in socialisation

Ultimately, we do not learn our attitudes to work through formal instruction, whether from school teachers in the classroom or HR managers in the office. How we dress and act in the workplace, and how we approach our job, is shaped by the broader culture we inhabit. In other words, the attitudes of our family and friends, the views we see reflected on social media and in popular discourse, and, most notably, the attitudes and values of older colleagues shape our own habits and practices.

In this way, work plays a socialisation role in transforming young people into citizens, prepared to assume responsibility for their own role and stand in solidarity with their colleagues. This is an informal, intergenerational process; it depends upon older colleagues taking new recruits under their wing and showing them the ropes. It requires older colleagues to be present in the workplace and not sitting in front of a laptop at home. When older adults leave the office, younger workers are left to create their own behavioural codes and set their own (low) standards and expectations.

But it is not just the rise of WFH that means older colleagues no longer play a role in passing on skills and wisdom to young adults. Long before Covid, major companies and institutions were experimenting with ‘reverse mentoring’, where older (often male) colleagues were expected to meet with and learn from junior (often female) colleagues. The assumption, from the outset, was that rather than older colleagues having wisdom to impart, their attitudes were outdated and their language and values were all wrong. They had to learn how to speak and behave correctly from the new recruits.

Such schemes sent a message that extended far beyond those who participated. They challenged the informal socialisation process that used to take place in the workplace by telling young staff that older colleagues were behind the times and not worthy of respect. Unfortunately, this message is often reinforced in wider society. It means that, over the course of a few years, traditional workplace habits and values – the importance of being punctual, present, working hard, assuming responsibility – are lost. And new values – such as avoiding stress, complying with processes, deference to identity groups – take their place.

To conclude, our underperforming economy, stalled productivity and failing public services reveal a major problem with how we approach work today. There is no need to romanticise the past or attempt to bring back a time when work could be physically dangerous. But people giving up on work creates a vicious spiral of social and economic problems. It must be dealt with seriously. The problems I have outlined here – the crisis of purpose, the prioritising of mental health, the collapse of solidarity and the breakdown of socialisation – have not been caused by workshy young people, but by an older generation who have abandoned the workplace and left young people to their fate.

Joanna Williams is currently a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Budapest. She is the author of How Woke Won (2022); Women vs Feminism (2017); Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (2016) and Consuming Higher Education, Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (2012). She is a columnist for the online magazine Spiked and writes regularly for The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph.

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One of the best innovations at the Battle of Ideas festival in recent years has been our Podcasts Live strand. Podcasts are a great place to listen to interesting and engaging discussions and debate. But bringing these podcasts to the festival gives the producers something a bit different: a live and very engaged ‘studio’ audience.

Take a look at our lineup for this year:

Arts First – myth, religion and national identity
Last Orders – the latest nanny state news
Planet Normal – News and views from beyond the bubble
Spectator’s Coffee House Shots
Take Me Home – Growing up in the Culture Wars
The Booking Club with Jack Aldane – The Catcher in the Rye, 75 years on
The Brink – Islam in Britain after October 7
The Free Speech Union – on the free speech frontline
The Life Sci Fantastic – weight-loss jabs: the end of willpower?
The spiked podcast – Live – latest in politics, free speech and the culture war
The State of It – reports from the coalface of British politics
This Isn’t Working – are women to blame for ‘woke’ workplaces?

More details of each podcast below.

If this rich banquet of ‘food for thought’ is your cup of tea (apologies for mixed metaphors!) then grab a ticket and join us on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster.

PODCASTS LIVE

Saturday 17 October 10:15 — 11:45
THE LIFE SCI FANTASTIC: WEIGHT-LOSS JABS: THE END OF WILLPOWER? Hosted by Professor Eliot Forster with guest Dr Federica Amati
The Life Sci Fantastic is the podcast pulling back the curtain on the scientific breakthroughs changing our lives, hosted by Eliot Forster – scientist, entrepreneur and 30-year veteran of biotech. Each episode dives into the science of the innovations reshaping modern medicine. With leading experts as his guests, Eliot makes complex discoveries clear, relatable and inspiring – showing how today’s research is transforming tomorrow’s treatments.

If medication can quieten hunger, what does that mean for our ideas about willpower and personal responsibility? In this live recording, Eliot Forster is joined by nutrition scientist Dr Federica Amati to explore her new book, The Appetite Reset. From gut signals and modern diets to the promise and limits of weight-loss jabs, they ask what really shapes our appetite – and whether the pursuit of a slimmer body is distracting us from better health.

Saturday 17 October 12:15 — 13:30
THE SPIKED PODCAST: LATEST IN POLITICS, FREE SPEECH AND THE CULTURE WAR
Hosted by Fraser Myers and Tom Slater with guests Poppy Coburn, Francis Foster and Andrew Gold
Don’t miss this special live recording of the spiked podcast, your weekly round-up of politics and controversy from the spiked magazine team. This is a show all about making sense of a world gone mad – and sticking up for freedom and democracy in an increasingly illiberal and identitarian age.

Saturday 17 October 13:45 — 14:30
ARTS FIRST: MYTH, RELIGION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
Hosted by Niall Crowley with guest Dolan Cummings
The ArtsFirst podcast is dedicated to defending freedom of expression in the arts and celebrating art for art’s sake and covers an eclectic range of arts-related topics. In this special live edition, host Niall Crowley is joined by Dolan Cummings, author of The Sacred Virgin and the Spurned Bride, an historical novella following two single mothers each seek a place in a world caught between the old ways and the new.

Set in Dark Age Britain – or what historians now call ‘the early medieval insular region’ – Cummings draws on myth and imaginative speculation as well as historical sources to conjure a world both like and unlike our own. This is an invitation to consider the ever-changing role of religion, the meaning of national identity, and the power of reading itself to reshape and transform our lives.

Saturday 17 October 13:45 — 14:30
THIS ISN’T WORKING: ARE WOMEN TO BLAME FOR ‘WOKE’ WORKPLACES?
Hosted by Tanya de Grunwald with guest Dr Joanna Williams
This Isn’t Working investigates what is wrong with today’s workplace culture, through interviews with HR directors and special guests such as Helen Joyce, Eric Kaufmann, Brendan O’Neill, Pamela Dow and Alex Edmans. Host Tanya de Grunwald explores how good intentions and bad ideas have created legal, commercial and reputational risk for organisations, and now threaten their future.

For this special live recording, Joanna Williams – author of How Woke Won – joins Tanya to assess whether women might be to blame for ‘woke’ workplaces. Female employees are often the most vocal champions of extreme workplace ‘inclusion’ – but how much power have they really held? Do we risk letting men off the hook for allowing bad ideas to infect organisations? And are we in danger of erasing the vital role played by all the women who have risked everything to push back on ‘woke’ at work?

Saturday 17 October 14:45 — 16:15
THE FREE SPEECH UNION: ON THE FREE SPEECH FRONTLINE
Hosted by Connie Shaw with guests Dr Ben Jones, Dr Jan Macvarish and David Rose
The Free Speech Union podcast features weekly episodes with great guests speaking about the cornerstone of our democracy which is under attack. The Free Speech Union is a non-partisan, mass-membership public interest body that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely.

How does FSU defend individuals from cancel culture and even the police? Can it help fend off attacks on free speech in the devolved parliaments, such as the Conversion Practices (Criminalisation) Bill in Northern Ireland and proposed anti-misogyny legislation in Scotland? What has the FSU’s in-house investigative researcher uncovered about the government’s misinformation about ‘misinformation’? How do FSU staff understand the deeper trends that have made the defence of free speech the frontline in the battle for democracy and civilisational values?

Saturday 17 October 16:45 — 18:15
THE BRINK: ISLAM IN BRITAIN AFTER OCTOBER 7
Hosted by Andrew Fox and Dr Jake Wallis Simons with guest Fiyaz Mughal
Your much-needed antidote to centrist dad podcasts. Presented by Daily Telegraph columnist and foreign correspondent Jake Wallis Simons and former parachute regiment officer and geopolitical analyst Andrew Fox, The Brink brings their wealth of real-life experience to bear upon the most important topics of the day, from Israel to immigration, Ukraine to Islamism, asylum hotels to the rise of Reform UK. With a host of stellar guests and an emphasis on common sense, Jake and Andrew explore what it will take to bring the West back from the brink. A podcast from the edge of what’s coming.

In this special live episode, Jake Wallis Simons and Andrew Fox will be joined by Fiyaz Mughal OBE, founder of Faith Matters and Tell MAMA. They will be discussing extremism, assimilation and the reality of life in British Muslim communities.

Sunday 18 October 11:00 — 12:30
PLANET NORMAL: NEWS AND VIEWS FROM BEYOND THE BUBBLE
Hosted by Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson with guests Lucy Connolly and Professor Robert Tombs
The podcast that speaks your language. News and views from beyond the bubble with Telegraph columnists Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan.

For this live recording of the podcast, Allison and Liam will be joined by special guests Lucy Connolly and Robert Tombs. Lucy will be talking about her book, A Tweet Too Far, and her experience as ‘Keir Starmer’s political prisoner’. Robert will reflect on free speech in universities and history lessons in schools – are we teaching kids to hate Britain?

Sunday 18 October 11:00 — 12:30
THE BOOKING CLUB: THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, 75 YEARS ON
Hosted by Jack Aldane with guests Tim Black, JJ Charlesworth and Georgina Mumford
The Booking Club is a podcast where leading authors and commentators discuss their latest books and breakthroughs at their favourite places to eat and drink. Guest authors on the series so far have included David Baddiel, Geoff Norcott, Michael Rosen, Rory Sutherland, Tom Holland, Helen Lewis, Will Self, Louise Perry and James Marriott.

JD Salinger’s classic coming-of-age novel has long been popular with its themes of angst and alienation, of teenage rebellion and being an outsider. Is the social nature of adolescence changing, and will this prevent the novel from enduring throughout the present century? Is it at the very least a novel firmly rooted in male anger and alienation, or do we miss its true power by looking at it this way?

Sunday 18 October 12:45 — 13:30
THE SPECTATOR: COFFEE HOUSE SHOTS
Hosted by James Heale and with guest Scarlett Maguire
Political analysis from The Spectator’s top team of writers.

Sunday 18 October 13:45 — 15:15
THE STATE OF IT: REPORTS FROM THE COALFACE OF BRITISH POLITICS Hosted by Steven Swinford with guests Patrick Maguire and Lara Spirit
Real reporting from the coalface of British politics. Join The Times and The Sunday Times’s political heavyweights Patrick Maguire, Steven Swinford and Lara Spirit as they dig deep into the latest tea room tip-offs, reveal insider conversations and bring analysis, authority and insight. No party loyalty. No spin. Not hosted by some old politicians. Taking you into the real business of politics, from those who live it daily.

Sunday 18 October 15:45 — 17:00
LAST ORDERS: THE LATEST NANNY STATE NEWS
Hosted by Tom Slater and Christopher Snowdon with guests Tony Lapidus and Gawain Towler
Don’t miss this special live recording of Last Orders, the spiked podcast all about freedom and the nanny state.

This is the show where Christopher Snowdon, from the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Tom Slater, editor of spiked, discuss the latest in modern-day puritanism – from killjoy attempts to clamp down on smoking, drinking, ‘junk food’ and assorted other vices to the never-ending campaign to cleanse speech and culture of anything the least bit offensive.

Sunday 18 October 17:15 — 18:30
TAKE ME HOME: GROWING UP IN THE CULTURE WARS
Hosted by Sebastian Moore and Hilary Salt with guests Dr Jennie Bristow and Professor Ellie Lee
At a time when politics feels so divisive, and people seem to be operating on an alternative set of facts, the left and right are no longer capable of providing answers to Britain’s problems. Hilary Salt and Sebastian Moore attempt to rebuild the political by making sense of what’s happening in Britain and exploring if there is a place once more for the politically homeless.

Along with guests Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee, authors of Growing Up in the Culture Wars, they explore fraying generational bonds and the factors such as work, sex and politics that shape young people’s transition into adulthood. What lies behind the cultural obsession with identity that incites teenagers and emerging adults to prize fashionable badges of personal validation? Is there a viable route to restoring generational health in society?

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At this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, we’ll be looking at the resurrection of the idea of a ‘national interest’. After decades of globalism, putting the needs of the British people centre stage is becoming a loud demand from voters across the country. That session includes Hilary Salt and Sebastian Moore of the SDP, who are also discussing similar ideas in a separate event in Manchester this weekend – introduced by Hilary below. It will be well worth attending.

How Can We Rebuild a Nation in Britain? takes place on Saturday 10 October at the Pendulum Hotel, Manchester from 4.00pm to 6.00pm. Tickets are free, but please register via Eventbrite.

As British politics more generally has had something of a tilt towards Manchester, thanks to the installation of our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, you may also be interested in our Battle of Ideas festival debates WTF is Manchesterism… and can it save the economy?, From metro mayors to Manchesterism: a devolution revolution? and TikTok Andy and No.10 North: performance over substance?

Tickets for Battle of Ideas festival 2026 – which takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster – are available now from the Battle of Ideas tickets page.

HOW CAN WE REBUILD A NATION IN BRITAIN?

Hilary Salt

Last year, we were part of a team that organised the inaugural Battle of Ideas North in Manchester. It was well attended, with lots of audience participation. It’s always interesting to note the difference between Battle of Ideas events in London and those in the North. The latter tend to produce rather more blunt discussions, with most of the contributions coming from ordinary men and women who are not ‘on the Clapham omnibus’ but on the Greater Manchester Bee bus. The discussion can develop very differently to those between the political commentariat and the London metropolitans.

That’s why at the start of that conference, I warned attendees not to come over all faint if the discussion was forthright. We are again inviting straight-talking discussion on Saturday 10 October, when we host a discussion in central Manchester on ‘How Can We Rebuild a Nation in Britain?’ (see below for fuller details).

Often the task of rebuilding is presented in purely materialistic terms. But while building houses and infrastructure, fixing potholes and tackling the cost of living is essential, there’s still a more difficult project: rebuilding communities, re-integrating identity groups, regions, generations and social classes into a single political culture. All of this together is nation-building.

One barrier is that there’s an ahistorical presentist outlook that means people don’t appreciate the ways in which societies have changed fundamentally in the past. This leads to people feeling trapped in the present and unable to imagine themselves as able to do anything to change the future.

We want to tackle these issues by looking at nation-building in the past and the present with Emily Jones and Philip Cunliffe.

Today, amid growing concern about energy costs, broken supply chains, failing defence and industrial capacity, politicians are once again invoking the idea of the nation and the national interest. But what does this mean, and who gets to define the nation and its interests? After decades of decline, is there still a ‘British people’ with the solidarity and sense of common interests needed to assert shared priorities?

Britain has faced such questions before. In 1945, a Labour government set out to build a ‘New Jerusalem’ from the rubble of six years of total war. A century earlier, Disraeli, later mythologised as the founder of One Nation Conservatism, famously described a country divided into ‘two nations’, rich and poor. Both traditions emphasised national unity and obligations across class divisions.

Can these national stories and traditions offer inspiration today, or is it the responsibility of every generation to imagine the nation anew?

Philip Cunliffe and Emily Jones explore the national interest from contemporary and historical perspectives, asking what it might mean for British people to think and act as a nation once again.

Philip Cunliffe is an author, academic and podcaster known for his work in international relations, particularly in the areas of sovereignty, international order, conflict management and global politics. He is an associate professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London. He is the author of The National Interest: Politics After Globalization (Polity, 2025) and Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (Polity, 2023, co-authored with George Hoare, Lee Jones and Peter Ramsay).

Emily Jones is an author and academic at the University of Manchester who has written and reviewed for the Financial Times, New Statesman and History Today, and provided a variety of radio commentary, including for BBC Radio 4, ABC Australia and ORF Austria. Her book, The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition, provides an authoritative account of the afterlives of Benjamin Disraeli and the highly significant construction of a socially minded brand of Conservatism following his death in 1881.

How Can We Rebuild a Nation in Britain? takes place on Saturday 10 October at the Pendulum Hotel, Manchester from 4.00pm to 6.00pm. Tickets are free, but please register via Eventbrite.

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Jeffrey Archer was something of a ‘Marmite’ figure. Nonetheless, he sold more than 300million books across his career, including best sellers like Kane and Abel, and enjoyed a massive fanbase. The passing of an author of his acclaim deserves a proper tribute and below you can read one by his friend, the actor David Weston.

A good book is a wonderful thing, and discussing them is an important part of the Battle of Ideas festival. This year, we’ll be reflecting on To Kill A Mockingbird, a hundred years on from the birth of Harper Lee. Is it still inspiring or is it now outdated? We’ll also discuss children’s literature and the culture wars – should politics stay out of bedtime stories? We’ll also discuss new books, such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as well as having many sessions featuring authors of important new books on a wide range of topics.

Tickets for the festival, on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster, are still available, with generous discounts for students and concessions. Check out the Battle of Ideas tickets page for more information.

My friend, Jeffrey

David Weston

Jeffrey Archer wrote 31 novels, seven short story collections, three prison diaries, 11 children’s books and three plays. I was in two of the plays, which, as far as I know, was an achievement unequalled by any other thespian. I knew him for 39 years, attended countless Krug Christmas parties at his amazing apartment hanging over the Thames with Big Ben as a backdrop, and summer garden parties at his Vicarage at Grantchester. In the words of Mark Antony: ‘He was my friend, faithful and just to me.’

I first met him in 1987 at the auditions for his first play, Beyond Reasonable Doubt. I can remember that sharp voice coming out of the darkness of the stalls: ‘I like his voice. I want him in my play!’ It was a courtroom drama, and I was cast as the police witness. It was not a good play, only made watchable by the fine acting of the two leads, Frank Finlay and Wendy Craig – and by David Gilmore, the director, reversing the playing of the acts. The second act was played first. Jeffrey was always open to advice from people who knew more about a subject than he did, and he accepted the changes without demur.

We opened at the Theatre Royal in Bath on 19 August. the night of the Hungerford massacre and at the height of the IRA bombing campaign. Just as the curtain was about to rise, a bomb threat came in, and the cast, including Andrew Cruikshank in his judge’s robes, were evacuated to the nearby Francis Hotel. By the time the theatre had been cleared and fully checked, the play ended well after 11.

The renowned Royal Crescent Hotel was offering special rates to actors playing at the theatre. Never one to turn down a special offer, having booked our room, my wife and I arrived at the hotel entrance just after midnight to find it locked and in darkness. I rang the bell but no one came. I rang again and again, shaking the door in my increasing anger. Eventually a window opened on an upper floor and a head popped out.

‘Do you mind, people are trying to sleep. What’s the matter?’

‘The door’s locked. We can’t get in.’

‘Well, ring the bell.’

‘I’ve been ringing the bell, but no one bloody comes!’

‘Hang on. I’ll come down and open it.’

We watched lights being turned on and then a rattling behind the door. By this time, I was really angry, thinking it was some employee. ‘This is supposed to be one of the best hotels in England, and you haven’t even got a night porter on duty.’ The door opened to reveal Jeffrey Archer in a white hotel dressing gown.

Next morning, the local press notices were dreadful, but when I got to the theatre, Jeffrey was his normal ebullient self. ‘I liked your line about one of the best hotels in England.’

Despite the critics, the audiences appeared to enjoy the play, and we performed it at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue for 18 months.

Jeffrey’s second play, Exclusive, starred Paul Scofield, at the time considered one of the very finest actors in England, notorious for turning down work, even Hollywood, preferring his simple country life in Sussex. It was a mystery that he accepted. Despite Scofield and Dame Eileen Atkins and the fine actor, Alec McCowen, in support, the play was a disaster and closed in a few months.

In 2000, Jeffrey rang me out of the blue and asked if I would like to be in his new play, The Accused. It was more or less another version of his first play, I was yet another witness (the caretaker), but this time Jeffrey would appear in it himself, making his acting debut as the accused and the audience would vote at the end of the play if he was guilty or not. In the middle of rehearsals, rumours began about a possible perjury trial, but Jeffrey in his usual optimistic manner seemed not to worry about it. The rehearsals did not go well, one of the leading actors seemed to think that acting in a Jeffrey Archer play was beneath him. One wondered why he had accepted it in the first place.

The day we opened at Windsor, the streets around the theatre were crammed with television news vans – Sky, ITV, CNN, et al. When it came to voting whether Jeffrey’s character was innocent or guilty, the Windsor audience voted overwhelming in his favour. It would be the reverse the following week at Manchester. Throughout all this, Jeffrey remained remarkably calm. I don’t know how he managed it, facing unknown years in prison, bereft of his luxurious life.

We opened just before Christmas at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the most prestigious theatre in the West End, but that cut no ice with the critics. It looked as if we wouldn’t last until Twelfth Night. The witnesses did not appear in the second half of the play and Jeffrey invited us to spend the time in his spacious dressing room. Although Jeffrey did not drink, his faithful chauffeur would bring bottles of Jeffrey’s vintage wines for us to enjoy. I noticed that, despite his wealth, Jeffrey’s socks were in a sorry state. I went to Marks and Spencer and bought him a set of six for Christmas. He was genuinely surprised how good it felt to wear new socks. I found that rather touching.

Jeffrey was duly found guilty and sentenced to six years. His chauffeur always proclaimed his innocence. A few months later, I was on tour with another play and realised I would be close to the prison where Jeffrey was languishing. I got in touch with his secretary and she arranged a visit for me.

I was close to tears when I saw him. He put on a brave face. We talked about the theatre that he loved and I said I would write to him regularly to keep him informed of the gossip. On leaving he handed me a big paper envelope and asked me to give it to his secretary. I believe it was the first draft of his Prison Diary, which many have said was the best thing he had ever written. I visited him a couple of more times at different prisons. Once I was supposed to share a visit with Barry Humphries, but Dame Edna’s train broke down and she didn’t make it.

On his release, we gave him a welcome out party at our humble flat in Pimlico. There were no more plays, but plenty more parties.

David Weston is an English actor, director and author.

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Comedian Geoff Norcott put it well on X last week, in response to Andy Burnham’s misguided comments about Manchester City: ‘Some of the commentariat don’t understand the scale of football’s social media reach. If Liverpool changed managers tomorrow the engagement would dwarf a prime ministerial resignation. This is bigger than some people realise – not a threat to his job obviously, but something millions of people will have strong opinions on.’

That’s why football is a topic we come back to, year after year, at the Battle of Ideas festival. Football is central to our cultural – and sometimes, political – life in the UK. But is the beautiful game being ruined by money? Are the fans being taken for granted, or taken for a ride? We’ll talk about this and more at the session FIFA, Manchester City and the future of football.

There are over 100 debates taking place at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster. Tickets for the festival are still available, with big discounts for students and concessions, from the festival website.

The news that the Premier League has found Manchester City guilty of 114 charges of breaching financial fair-play rules and obstructing investigators has leapt from the sports pages to the main headlines. The most successful team in English football over the past 15 years, and one of the richest in the world, has been found guilty of cheating (subject to appeal). As soon as the ruling was leaked last week, speculation kicked off about what kind of punishment would be appropriate: being kicked out of the Premier League, having points deductions for previous season or having trophy victories declared null and void have all been discussed. After years of investigations, the ruling has sent shock waves through football.

But comments by the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, have added political fuel to the fire. Asked about the club’s owners, Abu Dhabi United Group, Burnham said: ‘I would be really concerned to lose them. They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester, and the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is.’ To many he seemed to suggest that the money spent on developing the club and surrounding area meant more than the scandal of cheating other clubs and their fans out of success on the pitch. No.10 quickly sought to clarify Burnham’s position: ‘Wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.’ Nonetheless, many viewed his statement a big mistake.

The role of Abu Dhabi money in Burnham’s Manchester economic miracle is attracting more and more attention, with allegations of ‘sweetheart’ property deals from Manchester City Council. Is this just the latest example of Gulf oil money being ‘sportswashed’?

The shenanigans at the Etihad are just the latest blow for the credibility of football. In July, FIFA caused uproar by announcing plans to create a new entity, FIFA Forward Enterprises (FFE), to take over all its commercial operations, including the World Cup. The plan controversially included the idea of selling a minority stake, up to 21 per cent, to private investors, with the aim to raise $4.2 billion. Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, claimed that this would provide millions of dollars in additional development funding for poorer national associations.

However, other national and regional football authorities decried the scheme. The governing body in Europe, UEFA – an organisation which itself is hardly a fan favourite – for once seemed to read the room: ‘This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross… The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.’ Capturing a generalised antipathy over recent changes in the game, one journalist wrote, caustically: ‘Football is perhaps reaching the end of its natural existence as a genuine competitive sport and continues to morph into a television-led entertainment business.’

Yet the commercialisation of football has been progressing for decades, from the Sky Sports moneymen dictating to the English Premier League to the razzmatazz of the World Cup in North America, complete with a half-time show in the final itself. Super leagues – a means for the biggest clubs to grab more of the cash – have been attempted and abandoned (and, perhaps, quietly being resurrected). And FIFA itself has been accused of allowing World Cup hosting to be bought, whether it is in Russia, Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

So, the idea that this is the Rubicon football shouldn’t cross dismisses the hundreds of changes that have already pushed the game away from the interests of the fan. For example, early and late kick-offs, scheduled for television’s convenience, cause immense annoyance for travelling fans. The fact that the Crystal Palace supporters group, the Holmesdale Fanatics – for years, the heart and soul of the club – have now given up on organised activity due to obstruction from the club board and the police is a depressing sign of the times.

Are events in Manchester and at FIFA really something new, or symbolic of a wider crusade against the average fan?

Football is the most popular sport on Earth – so is it wrong to exploit that popularity to develop the game internationally? Or does all that money ultimately come out of the pockets of fans? Is the real problem commercialisation or corruption? Few now remember the controversies around the formation of the Premier League or Champions League, but would anyone want to go back?

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The Battle of Ideas festival is a great opportunity to get to grips with developments in contemporary society. But it is also a chance to take a step back, to understand how we might think about the world, too. Nothing exemplifies that better than our session with the co-authors of a new book, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel is a giant of philosophy – but he is not an easy read. In their new commentary, James Heartfield and Cronain O’Kelly seek to understand him and make him accessible more generally, but without being simplistic or lazily trying to make him ‘relevant’.

In this edited version of his introduction to the recent launch of the book, James Heartfield explains how the book came about and how Hegel’s writing has informed the work of many thinkers since.

James and Cronain will the introducing the book in the session Meet the authors: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit on Sunday 18 October. James will also be speaking at Visas for all? Britain’s immigration scandal and Who is council housing for? at the festival.

To find out more about the full programme and to buy tickets (with big discounts for students and concessions) visit the Battle of Ideas festival website.

Claire

Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

James Heartfield

Cronain O’Kelly and I wrote this commentary on the German philosopher Georg Hegel’s book, which is called The Phenomenology of Spirit. This book is not just our work. Toby Marshall and Marco Santucci started the Old Hegelians reading group, from which we collected the introductions and edited them into a book.

Hegel’s work is quite hard. It is full of elliptical sentences making excessively particular distinctions, which are hard to keep a hold of. Schopenhauer called it a colossal piece of mystification, and Kierkegaard said it was a magnificent palace built by a man who lived in a nearby guard house.

Hegel joked about the way that the very word ‘philosophy’ had bad connotations as unworldly and trivial. So, there is a lot to put you off. I hope that in this book we have succeeded in letting Hegel’s meaning come out clear without dumbing it down.

One thing a lot of people do when trying to make Hegel more accessible is to emphasise how close his thought is to ours, to make him more palatable. There is a lot of good ground for doing so – for the reason that Hegel is responsible for a lot of the ideas that are around today.

Whether it is ‘reality is a social construct’, Simone de Beauvoir saying one is not born but becomes a woman, or Frantz Fanon saying the wretched of the earth will rise up and remake it, or Edward Said talking about ‘the Other’, or Bruno Latour arguing that the laboratory creates natural laws, or existentialism and phenomenology – all of these have at least part of their origins in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Most celebrated of all, of course, is Marxism, which owes a great deal to the Phenomenology of Spirit.

But here I would like to caution against the temptation to assimilate Hegel to us. I think it helps us to understand him better to see how different he is from contemporary thought, the better to see what is special about him.

One thing, in particular, really makes him very different from us, which is that he believes in God. Not incidentally, but fundamentally.

The Spirit of which he writes in his Phenomenology is God. His argument is that God manifests himself in the shapes that consciousness assumes.

In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel writes:

The stages in the evolution of the idea seem to follow each other by accident … but it is not so. For these thousands of years, the same Architect has driven the work: and that Architect is the one living mind whose nature is to think…

Hegel is Ecumenical, or Encyclopedic, or perhaps Promiscuous. All thought is part of his theory.

Not just philosophy. But psychological attitudes, like hedonism or stoicism, also commerce, government, romanticism, family ties, the science, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and also religion – ancient religion in Greece, the Old Testament and the Gospels, too.

It is a very democratic approach. Everything is included. Higher thought and everyday prejudice. They are all thought.

There are philosophers, like Wittgenstein or Ayer, who think their job is to exclude error. They act like gatekeepers. They think that truth is like a stockade that must be defended.

But as Hegel said, when they do so they abandon all the territory beyond the stockade to error. And even within the stockade, the truth is limited, diminished and hardens into falsehood.

I might be giving you the impression that Hegel is a relativistic hippy who passes no judgment. Leopold von Ranke thought that every age was equally close to God.

But Hegel is not like that. He is not like a gatekeeper, but more like a slave driver. He sets out to capture all the other philosophers and put them to work on his plantation. Clashing ideas are not chased out, but rather integrated. Rival, contradictory schools of thought are reduced to the status of sub clauses in his larger argument. Just as nobody is wholly wrong, nobody is wholly right, either, just one-sidedly telling a part of the story.

The glue that holds all of these contradictory ideas together is Spirit – like God – so that each stated position, or shape of thought, or school of philosophy becomes a facet of the Spirit.

Maybe ‘glue’ is wrong. It is more like a great river carrying these ideas along. The different ideas are stages on the road that Spirit takes. ‘Phenomenology’ means something like morphology, the shapes that a thing takes – or in this case, the shapes that Spirit takes.

The way that this spirit proceeds is by making itself real, by manifesting itself in these different shapes of consciousness, or schools of thought, and human institutions.

As it perfects these Shapes of Consciousness, pushing them to their limit point, Spirit recognises itself, and also recognises the limitations of each developed idea, and how it must move beyond the settled view, even how these limits themselves suggest what ought to be changed.

So, he writes about how empiricism, which starts with a very passive picture of consciousness receiving the impressions of the outside world, cannot really work unless consciousness is active, however much empiricism denies that. That is how idealism arises out of the limitations of empiricism.

So, too, Hegel explains that the separation of Man and God in the Old Testament suggests the intermediation of Christ that happens in the New Testament. Or that the way that the extremism of the French Revolution, as it eats itself, suggests a more moderate, constitutional reform.

Hegel’s case for God is hard for people to believe in today. Most Hegel scholars and fans like the reinterpretation of Hegel that was first proposed by Feuerbach and taken up by Karl Marx. That interpretation is that when Hegel writes Spirit (Geist, in German) we should not read ‘God’ but ‘Man’.

This anthropological reading of Hegel’s work says that the passage through history is mankind’s. That it is man that who makes these different ideas and institutions. And it is man who looking at what he has achieved, comes into self-knowledge. Man sees the limits of what he has done, and the route through to what he should do next.

The anthropological reading of Hegel is good. I share it.

But we should be careful. You cannot, I think, pretend that Hegel meant Man, when he wrote Spirit. He really did mean God. If we want to understand what he meant, we have to see him clearly and not just assimilate his ideas to ours.

And more than that, something is lost when you anthropomorphise Spirit, and make it mean Man. Marx warned us about this when he said that the Young Hegelians, while they were busy taking the Spirit out of Hegel’s Phenomenology, forgot that Spirit was the active part of Hegel’s theory.

It is Spirit that stops all the different shapes that Spirit takes - Self and Other, Master and Slave, Subject and Object, Freedom and Realism – from hardening into absolute and insurmountable oppositions. Because each is a facet of Spirit, we can move on from one to another. But without that common substance they become rigid oppositions.

In the 1930s, in Paris, Alexandre Kojeve taught an anthropomorphised version of the Phenomenology of Spirit in lectures that were attended by those who would go on to be leading intellectuals, like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, sociologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Through them, they influenced others, like the Martinican-Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon.

But many of those thinkers tended to get stuck in the oppositions between Self and Other. Sartre thought there was a ‘reef of Solipsism’ that made it impossible for one person to see another’s point of view. Fanon thought that it was absurd that colonised people could ever make peace with their former masters, that the overcoming of the positions of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ was a Hegelian fairy story. Here, though, it is Fanon who is being sentimental, not Hegel. Decolonisation happened. And we should not, like Sartre, or Edward Said after him, make the Other into a permanent status.

There is something to be said for Spirit as Hegel meant it, for the transcendental power that refuses to be bound to one position but always strives to take the next step.

Karl Marx, I think, understood that. His version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit looks forward even to Hegel being de-throned, but in a Hegelian way. This is what he writes in the Communist Manifesto.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

James Heartfield is a lecturer and writer. He is author of numerous books, including Britain’s Empires 1600-2020 and co-author of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (with Cronain O’Kelly).

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As ever, discussing the arts will be a central feature of the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster. Among the debates are From boycotts to renaissance: threats and opportunities in the arts, Podcast Extra: Arts First: myth, religion and national identity, Once upon a time: children’s literature and the culture wars, When activism meets the arts and Benjamin Britten, 50 years on: still the nation’s composer?

Tickets for the festival are still available via the Battle of Ideas festival website, with big discounts for students and concesssions, and free tickets for school pupils.

Below is an essay by one of this year’s speakers, Professor Ian Pace, adapted from a speech he delivered at The Exeter Union last month. It is an intelligent and learned riposte to the idea that we should reject art because its creator(s) have behaved badly or have the ‘wrong’ views.

Ian is one of almost 400 speakers at the festival, all bringing considered thought to an enormous range of issues. If you want serious, well-informed debate, the Battle of Ideas festival is the place to find it.

Claire

INTRODUCTION
On Friday 25 September, I spoke at The Exeter Union in support of the motion ‘This House Would Separate Art from the Artist’, alongside Denise Fahmy of Freedom in the Arts. The two opponents were Rachel Krengel and Lucas Chapman, the latter vice-president of the Union. The opponents won the debate by a considerable margin – a poll is taken at the beginning and then another at the end, and the key element is how many votes change sides – though it was possible to vote ‘undecided’ at the beginning but not at the end. I had mixed feelings about the debate: too little actual art was discussed, exemplifying the problem I was trying to diagnose, and there did not seem to be much interest in it. During audience questions, one person brought up the subject of JK Rowling, leading to angry denunciations which had an almost Maoist quality to them. This was when I knew the debate was lost for our side.

I came away from the debate disappointed to find how tenacious a particular conception of art remains: the artwork is essentially an expression of its maker, a window onto a personality or moral character, and therefore something whose value and meaning can largely be determined by what we know about the person who produced it. This seems all the more remarkable after well over a century of challenges to such assumptions: Mallarmé and Wilde, Aestheticism and Decadence, Proust’s attack on Sainte-Beuve, the Russian Formalists, IA Richards and the New Critics, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘intentional fallacy’, structuralism and poststructuralism, Barthes’s ‘death of the author’, and a huge body of modernist and experimental artistic practice. All of these movements or arguments are somewhat different from the others, and I would certainly not subscribe without qualification to all of them. But collectively they have served to render very problematic a view of art as self-expression or biography in another medium.

One exchange during the cross-examination crystallised the problem for me. A speaker opposing the motion claimed that nobody buys a book without knowing who its author is. I asked about works such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl; about the uncertainty over whether the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of a single identifiable individual; and, more simply, about folk tales or folk music. The reply was, in effect, that it would be wonderful if we knew who had originally written the folk tale or song. But this seems to me a fundamental category error. A folk song or tale does not really have a single author in anything like the modern sense of the concept: songs and tales are and have been transmitted, modified, combined with others and collectively reshaped across generations and have moved between geographically distant cultures. To identify an individual author is to impose precisely the model of authorship that such objects call most fundamentally into question.

More broadly, I find surprising and dispiriting the persistence of what might be categorised as a neo-Victorian moral-biographical model of criticism. The irony is that Aestheticism – in the work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and others – issued a direct challenge to this conservative moralisation of art in the nineteenth century itself, insisting that artistic value could not be reduced to moral instruction or to the character of the artist.

The argument here connects with several issues about which I have written previously: the distinction between representations of reality and reality itself in my essays on cultural realism; the history and value of formalist approaches to art; and, more recently, the question of how we distinguish judgments of works, performances and arguments from judgments of persons – and the extent to which some mechanisms of judgment operate across these different domains. What follows is an expanded version of my Exeter statement, developing some of those connections further.

FURTHER READING

The Problem with Cultural Realism, Part 1 and Part 2 (2025).

The Persecution of the Soviet “Formalists”, Part 1 and Part 2 (2025).

Why Cancel Tchaikovsky? (2022)

How could anyone serious think that Wagner’s politics haven’t been discussed enough? (2025)

The Art of Judgment Part 1 and Part 2 (2026).

This House Would Separate Art from the Artist

Debate at The Exeter Union, 25 September 2026
Statement in support of the motion by Professor Ian Pace

‘Separate the art from the artist’ can sound as though we are being asked to build a wall between the two. I don’t mean that; I do think we should know as much as we can about artists, including the unpleasant things. But we should also ask what follows from that knowledge – and what does not. Keep distinct four things: the artist’s conduct; the artist’s persona; the work’s moral or political character; and the work’s aesthetic value. Connections between them may be strong, but they have to be demonstrated rather than assumed. To separate things maintains distinctions, but does not deny the continuing presence of connections.

The danger today is not that we know too little about artists, but that we sometimes know too much. As a result, the work often disappears behind the biography, or at best becomes a footnote to it.

That is striking almost 60 years after Roland Barthes declared ‘the death of the author’. He complained that the image of literature in ‘contemporary culture’ was ‘tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions’. Baudelaire’s work was explained through ‘the failure of the man Baudelaire’, Van Gogh’s through his madness, Chaikovsky’s through his ‘vice’. But Barthes believed the author had ‘died’ because writing was always constructed from pre-existing languages, codes and quotations, rather than having a single sovereign consciousness as its origin; the meaning of a text came instead at the point of reading so that ‘the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author’.

Barthes himself saw Stéphane Mallarmé as ‘doubtless the first’ in France ‘to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it’. This was not an isolated move on the part of Mallarmé: Russian Formalists shifted their focus away from biography towards the role of literary devices and narrative processes; structuralists explored signs, systems and codes obsessively; while poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida further challenged and unsettled the very nature of meaning, let alone the notion that it could be securely traced back to a single authorial origin. One need not accept all of these views to recognise how thoroughly a whole tradition of criticism had rendered problematic a simple equation of work with maker. Today, the author has returned – not so much as sovereign figure determining meaning as one put on trial, the outcome of which becomes the determinant.

Modern celebrity culture has intensified this focus on the person. The sociologist Chris Rojek argues that celebrity involves a split between a private self and a staged public face. Cary Grant joked that even he would like to be Cary Grant. Drawing upon Donald Horton and Richard Wohl’s concept of parasocial interaction, Rojek shows how media enables audiences to feel a false sense of intimacy with people who remain strangers. Then, when a celebrity scandal erupts, some members of the public imagine that in the process they have finally gained access to the ‘real’ person beneath the public persona. But familiarity with a persona, or with stories about the private person, can both be mistaken for actual knowledge of a person – and judgment of the person can then determine judgment of the work.

Biography can exert a similar hold on audiences. Reading about a life frequently delivers sex, money, betrayal and scandal and, as a result, biographers can appeal to readers who would never buy books featuring specialist criticism of harmony, prosody or pictorial composition. James Shapiro observes that biographies can even act as a substitute for the works they were meant to illuminate. Once we know the life, we may think that this has explained the meaning of the art. But this is a fundamental error. It is much easier to tell an audience whom somebody slept with than to explain to them how a poem, score or painting actually works. Sometimes biography is not deeper criticism, but actually an escape from the greater difficulty of undertaking criticism at all.

Marcel Proust made essentially this objection to the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve had sought to interpret writers’ works through study of their lives, habits, friendships and social personalities. For Proust, this confused the social and creative selves, and the method had failed its most obvious test: Sainte-Beuve fundamentally misjudged Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Gérard de Nerval. Proust instead wrote that a book is produced by ‘a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices’. The person who exists in a social arena is not the same as the person who creates the work.

Shakespeare is a useful case, because the lack of personal or confessional material is almost a blessing. There are no diaries explaining Hamlet, nor interviews about King Lear. Shapiro shows that biographical reading of literature is historically contingent: it emerged in the late eighteenth century with Edmond Malone, who assumed that Shakespeare could only write convincingly about what he had lived, not what he had read, heard, borrowed or imagined. The Romantics took this a stage further, so that gaps in Shakespeare’s known experience could become used as evidence against his authorship. Shapiro says that this diminishes what makes Shakespeare exceptional: his imagination.

Shakespeare did not have to be a king to create Lear, to murder anyone to create Macbeth, or be a young woman to create Rosalind. Nor did Quentin Tarantino need personal experience of murderous bank robbers in order to make Reservoir Dogs. He drew upon inherited cinematic genres, character and plot archetypes, visual languages and other products of cinematic history, transforming them into something new. Anthony Hopkins’s performance of Hannibal Lecter did not demonstrate he had an appetite for human brains. We see the absurdity with actors, yet criticism makes the same mistake in a subtler way with characters or personae.

David Scott, Queen Elizabeth Viewing the Performance of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ at the Globe Theatre (1840). 185 × 275 cm, oil on canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The biographical model is even more problematic in the context of collaborative artistic work. Whose inner life is represented by The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola’s, Mario Puzo’s, Marlon Brando’s or Nino Rota’s? A Beatles record involves not merely Lennon or McCartney, but the other Beatles, George Martin, engineers and inherited musical traditions. Sometimes ‘What does this work reveal about the artist?’ first has to answer ‘which artist?’ Rejecting a collaborative work because of one contributor means rejecting the work of the others as well.

These examples point to a much more significant consideration. Art is not simply evidence that has been left behind by an artist. On the contrary, creating art allows human beings to escape the confines of what they already are or have already experienced. The Greek word poiesis means making. Artists take inherited materials – language, genres, tonal systems, myths, images, conventions – and make from them something new. Their work may bear traces of the world in which it was created and of the artist who made it, but a trace is not the same thing as an identity.

In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, TS Eliot distinguished ‘the man who suffers’ from ‘the mind which creates’, in which feelings, phrases and images combine into ‘a new compound’. Susan Sontag made the larger point simply in her essay ‘On Style’: ‘Art is not only about something; it is something.’

So criticism has to ask not only ‘Where did this come from?’ but equally ‘What has been made?’ Knowing that Caravaggio killed a man does not tell us about the role of light, gesture and space in The Beheading of St John the Baptist. Nor does biography explain a cadence or rhythmic pattern, axial space in architecture, or choreographic counterpoint in dance. At some point, we have to pay proper, concentrated attention to the work.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Beheading of St John the Baptist (c. 1608). 360 x 520 cm, oil on canvas. Oratory of St John the Baptist, St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta.

Nor does the maker’s own intention settle what it is that has been made. WK Wimsatt and Monroe C Beardsley called that assumption ‘the intentional fallacy’. Their argument was part of a wider critical turn, anticipated by IA Richards’s experiments in anonymous practical criticism and developed by the American New Critics, who sought to judge works independently of the author’s biography or prestige. This would, at least in principle, bracket out consideration of gender, ethnicity or social identity. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s stronger claim – that intention is neither possible nor desirable as a critical standard – has been hotly contested since they first made it. But a more modest argument has survived: that the maker of a work does not have permanent sovereignty over its possible meanings. Once released, the work becomes publicly circulated, and encounters performance, interpretation and reception, which the maker cannot entirely control. A work encountered two centuries after its creation, under political or cultural circumstances which could never have been imagined by the artist, can acquire new meanings that no statement or knowledge of original intention could exhaust.

Separating the work from its maker does not mean treating it as morally innocent - quite the reverse. Oscar Wilde wrote in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that ‘vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art’. Wilde’s point was not that morality is absent from art, but that moral material is transformed by the ways in which the artist uses the medium. From Baudelaire to Huysmans, Wilde and Rachilde, Decadent artists made work out of corruption, artificiality and moral unease. In 1895, Edward Carson read passages from Dorian Gray when cross-examining Wilde about his own morality: the work was literally turned into evidence against its maker.

A culture incapable of distinguishing depiction from endorsement would lose not merely Decadence, but tragedy, satire, horror, the grotesque – all huge realms of artistic experience. Art must be allowed to go where respectable conduct cannot. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò pushes this possibility to an extreme. In all such cases, the moral character of the material does not predetermine the aesthetic – or even the moral – significance of what is made from it.

I am not suggesting biography is irrelevant. Some artists’ life, public persona and work were quite deliberately entangled, though this did not make them identical. Lord Byron is an obvious case: his travels around Europe fed so deeply into Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, while the public figure of ‘Byron’ shaped the poem’s reception from its first appearance. A century and a half later, David Bowie made such self-fashioning still more explicit: David Jones, David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and the narrator of a Bowie song are related, but they are not interchangeable.

Ezra Pound’s fascism and antisemitism cannot be ignored when they actually enter The Cantos. The wider conduct of artists raises further questions: Simone de Beauvoir’s sexual relationships with young female pupils, one of whom later described the relationship as exploitative, rightly affect our judgment of Beauvoir as a person; Roman Polanski’s guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old plainly affects our judgment of him. Those facts matter, but their implications for the work are a further question.

Richard Westall, Lord Byron (1813). 91.4 × 71.1 cm, oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London.

The cases of Patricia Highsmith and Philip Larkin are especially vivid. Highsmith’s posthumously published diaries made clear her ugly antisemitic and misogynistic prejudices, while Larkin’s letters and biography dramatically altered his public reputation. But The Talented Mr Ripley did not in the process acquire new sentences, nor did Larkin’s poems acquire new words. What changed was our knowledge of the authors as people.

Such knowledge may make us reread the works and notice things in them we had previously missed. But if we want to argue that racism, antisemitism or misogyny inform a particular work, we still have to demonstrate that in the work itself. Biography should serve as evidence rather than act as a master-key.

We should know about artists’ lives, and criticise their conduct where warranted. We should also take the politics and morality of artworks seriously. But we should resist reducing the artwork to evidence for the prosecution or defence of the person who made it. There is a further question of whether we should also fund or honour artists who have done harm, which is very real, but separate.

The capacity to imagine people quite unlike their authors, to transform knowledge and experiences, to make beauty or terror from morally questionable material, and to create things whose meanings exceed artists’ own lives – none of these are defects in art, but among the reasons it matters so much. Art does not merely reflect the world or the artist, but adds something to that world. And if we reduce that something back to the biography of its maker, we have not understood it better, but have made it into something markedly smaller.

Ian Pace is professor of Music, Culture and Society, City St George’s, University of London. He is speaking in two Battle of Ideas sessions: From boycotts to renaissance: threats and opportunities in the arts and Benjamin Britten, 50 years on: still the nation’s composer? You can follow him on Substack, where an earlier version of this essay was first published.

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Amid the hope-drenched rhetoric of our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is an acknowledgment: for far too many, Britain isn’t working. We need to debate if government can fix it – or can we?

‘Shattered’, ‘broken’, ‘in managed decline’. Whatever the term used, the exasperating everyday experience of millions is of a country that fails to function as expected. This is not simply about failing to build homes, airports or reservoirs, tackle crime or get to grips with an out-of-control welfare system. More fundamentally, patience is wearing paper thin with a political class that appears to be not just incompetent but positively indifferent to the needs and aspirations of its citizens. Consequently, a core question running through this festival is the future of the social contract: what becomes of that foundational relationship between state and citizen when the reciprocal obligations that bind society together seem on the point of collapse?

THE STATE VS THE PEOPLE?
When Andy Burnham entered No.10 promising to ‘do politics differently’, many worried about accepting such assurances on trust. So at the festival, we can – and will – debate what ‘Manchesterism’ actually means, and whether it extends beyond TikTok vibes. But on many thornier issues, the state seems implicated in the problems we face. It has been revealed that a former Hamas leader was granted UK citizenship before allegedly plotting a major terror attack against Jews in Europe. Then, just a day later, the home secretary announced plans to prioritise asylum for Palestinians. It is hardly surprising that many question whether the public’s real grievances are being heard. After years of scandals and tragedies involving failing public agencies – from the police to the NHS – how should citizens respond to a state seemingly in breach of its obligations?

We are living through a period of political realignment, although what that means is a matter for us to debate. Certainly, changing times have generated a plethora of new terms, from ‘grievance culture’ and ‘FAFO’ to ‘doom loops’. ‘Suicidal empathy’ captures a growing concern that, in the name of compassion and fairness, misguided progressive causes can end up elevating favoured groups over others – criminals over victims, immigrants or even terrorists over local communities and ordinary citizens. Is Elon Musk right that empathy has become the ‘fundamental weakness of Western civilisation’? Others worry that in the rush to criticise progressive ‘hyperliberalism’ we risk sacrificing the very secular Enlightenment values that formed the fundamental building blocks of modern societies, from moral autonomy to toleration. Can we – should we – make the case for liberalism anew?

DEFENDING DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST
For many, the biggest challenge is now democracy itself. Those in power seem increasingly determined to keep the lid on controversial issues and challenges to their authority. The announcement of a National Centre for Information Defence does little to dispel concerns about ‘narrative control’, whereby major questions become subject to prescriptions from established guardians of truth. Favoured mainstream media are promoted, while controversial opinions face algorithmic suppression.

Perhaps part of the problem is confusion about the nation state – the basis of any functioning democracy – and how to articulate the national interest. Where the Brexit vote demanded we ‘take back control’, failure to deliver opens the door to those keen to return to the EU. Meanwhile, fragmentation within the UK continues: from Manchesterism to metro mayors, the government trumpets its flagship policy of devolution. But what happens when devolved leaders challenge the future of the Union? Many took heart from the Piddington independence referendum as kicking back. But what of the Green Party leaders of Lewisham Council asserting their right to act alone – in this case, withholding demographic data from the Home Office? Is this really ‘power to the people’, or an acknowledgement that the centre can no longer hold out against accelerating fragmentation?

We need to be honest: resistance can raise difficult questions. Are new forms of action – from attempts to repel small boats to pro-Palestinian direct action – themselves corrosive of democratic consent? Or do they represent a civic response from sections of society that feel ignored by established politics? What forms of dissent remain legitimate?

TIME FOR NEW THINKING
Whatever the problem, too often politics favours technical fixes or harping back to old models – nationalisation, constitutional tinkering, electoral reform, institutional re-engineering and endless new laws, many aimed at restricting freedoms. What is missing in these debates is us – the demos. Genuine democracy means more than putting an X in a box. It should mean the fullest discussion of all issues that matter. That’s why this festival’s programme ranges widely, from cultural boycotts to womb transplants, the rise of the femosphere to the trashing of valued rural traditions.

The Battle of Ideas is democracy in action: a place where political conflicts, cultural clashes and moral dilemmas are debated rather than simply managed. Too often, contemporary societies shy away from difficult questions, while the answers are assumed in advance – or imposed from above. Not here.

At this, the original free-speech festival, the mottos FREE SPEECH ALLOWED and FREE THINKERS WELCOME apply. Here, speaking your mind and arguing freely are treated not as dangerous indulgences, but as essential. Look through the programme and you will find topics deemed off-limits elsewhere, but presented here as opportunities for people to have their say.

So use the festival to escape any intellectual silos or political tribes. Engage with the issues – and with those who disagree with you. Relearn the fine art of disagreement… and perhaps some worthwhile consensus on tricky issues will follow.

Let the Battle commence.

Alastair Donald and Ella Whelan
co–convenors, Battle of Ideas festival

FOR FULL DETAILS OF OUR PROGRAMME, SPEAKERS AND TICKETS, VISIT THE BATTLE OF IDEAS FESTIVAL WEBSITE.

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

SPECTATOR EVENT: THE FREE SPEECH DEBATE

Emmanuel Centre, London · Monday 12 October • 7.00 PM - 8:30 PM

Join The Spectator for another instalment in its popular debate series where the debaters will tackle the question: does Britain still have free speech?

Our Substack subscribers can get 10% off using promo code AOI10.
Book now via Eventbrite.

Britain has been a bastion for freedom of expression for centuries – but can the country still claim that title today?

There are now countless examples of free speech being suppressed: from arrests for social media posts and the ‘shadow banning’ of online accounts, to sackings for expressing opinions at work and the shutting down of public protests. Police arrest around 22 people a day for speech offences, but a mere 16 people for fraud.

Many argue that there are legitimate boundaries to free speech that must be enforced to prevent ‘harm’ – but where should the line be drawn?

Join The Spectator to debate the motion: This house believes Britain no longer has free speech. Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun, and Kellie-Jay Keen, the women’s rights campaigner, will propose the motion, with Jonathan Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice, and Ed Vaizey, politician and commentator, opposing. Who will persuade you? Come along and find out.

The Next Generation with Baroness Fox of Buckley

Tuesday 13 October · 23 Great Smith Street, London

Join Claire Fox at the Adam Smith Institute Next Generation drinks. ​Claire will be discussing Why Free Speech Matters. She’ll explore the increasingly stifling atmosphere of modern political discourse and unpack why the right to challenge ideas without constraint is essential for a democratic society. Her talk will explore how Westminster can resist institutional conformism and foster a culture of genuine, robust debate.

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One of the debates at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival asks Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe? It seems like someone intervening to stop shoplifting is more likely to be arrested than the thief. Mobs of young people can gather in high streets, like Clapham earlier this year, seemingly without intervention from the authorities. Anti-social behaviour, from playing loud music to harassing pedestrians on e-bikes, seems rife. Yet many commentators claim this is all mere perception – the crime figures are down, so the fear of crime must be overstated.

Here, festival speaker Rory Geoghegan – a former police officer who is founder of SafetyScore and The Public Safety Foundation – argues that those who rely on the crime figures are missing the point.

Rory is speaking in the Battle of Ideas debates Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe? and Middlesbrough: what just happened? – looking at the aftermath to the deaths of two police officers in a crash caused by a car driven the wrong way on the A66, revealing a town living in the shadow of a gangland siege.

Tickets for this year’s festival, which takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster.

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There’s more to crime and disorder in Britain than the latest crime statistics

RORY GEOGHEGAN

A familiar debate plays out in Britain. Someone says their town feels less safe, that shoplifting seems routine, that people openly take drugs in the street, or that anti-social behaviour has become part of everyday background noise.

They are told that, in fact, crime is down.

The Policy Institute at King’s College London recently doubled down on that position, publishing research as part of a new ‘Mistaken Britain’ series.

It alleges the public routinely gets crime wrong - we’re ‘mistaken’ and hold ‘incorrect beliefs’. The research argues we overestimate our likelihood of becoming victims, assume some offences are rising when they’re falling, and imagine others are more fearful than they really are.

One group of voters is even described as ‘consistently most wrong’.

But being told we’re mistaken isn’t an effective answer to legitimate concerns about the state of local neighbourhoods, town centres, or cities. Are the voters so very wrong?

Towns and neighbourhoods have been described as ‘consequence-free zones’ and the ‘wild west’. Even the beautiful and much-loved Lake District is having to confront rising anti-social behaviour, and social media is awash with clips of violence, theft, and poor behaviour.

Theft from shops has exploded, prompting stores to resemble Fort Knox more than local supermarkets – aisles wrapped in security mesh, staff wearing body cameras, some separated from customers by reinforced floor-to-ceiling barricades.

Meanwhile charge rates - the odds of being caught and prosecuted – have plummeted for years, and detection rates matter for preventing crime, so a feeling of lawlessness is unsurprising.

Then there’s conduct that damages quality of life without often registering on the radar of authorities. Dog fouling is a classic example: a menace to everyone, especially those with a pushchair or wheelchair, often caused by one or two prolific offenders, yet it never appears in crime statistics.

This points to a bigger problem. After a decade of real-terms cuts to policing and the criminal justice system, authorities retreated behind assessments of threat, risk and harm when deciding what to tackle. The result has been a widespread stepping away from so-called ‘low level’ crime and disorder – without truly appreciating the harm embedded within it.

This has opened a chasm between public expectations of a response and what authorities actually deliver – a chasm that has proven corrosive to people’s willingness to report crime at all.

Why report illegal trading or drug use if authorities seem uninterested, or if reporting leads nowhere?

This demoralisation of the law-abiding is particularly damaging: it discourages people from reporting issues, acting as witnesses or intervening – which, in turn, feeds an increasingly incomplete statistical picture of crime and disorder.

It’s true the public might misjudge their statistical risk of victimisation while still accurately sensing that a place’s atmosphere has changed. People can live somewhere where serious violence is rare, yet still contend with street drinking, open drug use, vandalism, threatening behaviour, reckless e-bike riding, harassment, shoplifting, or groups making public spaces unpleasant.

None of this may properly show up as a recorded crime or in the Crime Survey for England and Wales, but it still alters how a neighbourhood feels.

That distinction matters, because public safety is about more than the probability of becoming a victim of a serious offence. It’s also about whether you can use a park, high street, bus stop or station without having to calculate who’s around you and whether anyone would intervene if things went wrong.

Tellingly, even the King’s research found that while the public overestimates how many people feel unsafe after dark, the real figure is far from trivial: 39 per cent say they don’t feel safe walking alone in their area after dark.

We can correct people for guessing too high, but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that nearly four in ten people feeling unsafe in their own neighbourhood is a serious problem.

There’s a further issue with the phrase ‘crime is down’: crime is not one thing.

A national trend can mask huge differences between offences, places and people’s experience – and conceal the cumulative effect of behaviour that falls below the threshold of a recorded crime.

One smashed window, one person shouting abuse outside a shop, one abandoned vehicle, one patch of graffiti, one person repeatedly letting their dog foul the same street – each can look minor in isolation. But the effect is cumulative.

When such things happen again and again unchecked, people draw a rational conclusion: the rules are no longer enforced here.

That conclusion matters well beyond the immediate nuisance. Disorder changes behaviour. People avoid places; our economy suffers – research commissioned by policing’s chief scientific adviser found the cost to business of anti-social behaviour rivals that of violent crime.

Parents restrict where children can go. Older people stay home. Those who can afford to leave, do. Public space risks becoming the territory of whoever is most willing to make it unpleasant for everyone else.

Perhaps we’d understand public anxiety better if we stopped treating it as a statistical error to be corrected and started treating it as information to process, rather than dismiss.

The condition of our shared spaces tells us something real: whether rules are understood, whether authorities respond, whether citizens will step in, and whether society can maintain basic standards of behaviour.

That is why tackling anti-social behaviour and visible disorder matters – and why we should be wary of calling the public ‘mistaken’ simply because their perception and experience doesn’t mirror the official statistics.

Rory Geoghegan is a former police officer, government advisor, and creator of FixASB, an online platform to help tackle persistent anti-social behaviour in shared public spaces.

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CONVERSATIONS FOR THE PUBLIC,
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UNLIKE SO MANY PUBLIC DISCUSSIONS AND DEBATES, THE BATTLE OF IDEAS FESTIVAL MAKES THE AUDIENCE A CENTRAL PART OF THE CONVERSATION. COME AND HAVE YOUR SAY!

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Among the 120 sessions taking place at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, we’ll be asking: Can the Socratic dialogues help us navigate ethics today? After all, while the living conditions of the ancient Greeks were different to those we experience today, some questions about ‘doing the right thing’ have an eternal quality.

Here, session speaker David Perks examines the question of piety and, whatever it is, could we do with a little more of it at a time when everyone seems to want to display their moral virtue?

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What could reading Plato’s dialogue, the Euthyphro, have to do with debates about virtue signalling on social media?

When I first read Euthyphro, I had no idea that there was any connection. I was just trying to work out what Socrates was doing. His ethical enquiry into how to live a good life was still slowly revealing itself.

But this dialogue gave me a jolt. Morality isn’t something we are comfortable discussing. I am far more used to expressing opinions on politics – the cut and thrust of arguments about who should rule us and what they are arguing for. But Socrates is asking questions about things we hardly know the meaning of today, like piety.

I’ll be honest, until I read Euthyphro, I don’t think I had ever given piety much thought. I was only vaguely aware of what it meant to be pious. I thought it referred to being devoutly religious – not something I bothered about much as an atheist.

However, Socrates used it in another sense. He was questioning Euthyphro’s attempt to prosecute his own father for the alledged murder of a slave. It was in the sense of turning on his own family that Socrates challenged Euthyphro. Piety was, in this sense, honouring your family. Socrates challenged Euthyphro to explain piety as he must know what it was if he was bringing his father to court for a crime so heinous that he was prepared to destroy him.

And so the dialogue was an inquiry into the meaning of piety. They arrived at the idea that piety must be what ‘all’ the gods love – remembering that Greek gods had a propensity to argue with each other. However, Socrates was not completely satisfied with this.

Socrates added another question. Is being pious what all the gods love or do the gods love what is pious? Have we really discovered what piety is? This is Euthyphro’s dilemma. Both Euthyphro and Socrates seemed stumped to know how to resolve the dilemma. Neither could say what piety really is. This is the famous Socratic ignorance or aporia. Socrates did not resolve the meaning of piety, but he made it plain that Euthyphro’s certainty of his own belief in the meaning of piety was unfounded.

Socrates was really asking whether Euthyphro knew what he was doing trying to prosecute his father when his crime was not at all clear. Euthyphro made his excuses and left to presumably pursue his court case, although we don’t know how that ended.

So, there is another negative sense of being pious. That of publicly expressing insincere virtue. Being seen to do the ‘right’ thing, as Euthyphro might say it before the ‘gods’. Euthyphro’s public demonstration of his virtue in bringing a case against his own father is a pretty extreme case of such a pious act. If his case succeeded, it would almost certainly result in his father’s death.

So, does this have echoes within our society? Can we learn anything from Socrates’s questioning of Euthyphro’s moral certainty about his belief of his own piety?

We seem to be all too eager to demonstrate that we believe in the ‘right’ thing and show this off publicly. In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the reaction to his brutal killing by the police in the US, public demonstrations of opposition to racism became almost a mandatory act – from the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag on the social-media accounts of major brands to witnessing everyone from Keir Starmer to Premier League football clubs bending the knee.

But did this mass virtue signalling amount to anything more than demonstrations of insincere virtue? Were we demonstrating to our ‘gods’, our moral virtue? But now time has passed and we don’t seem to be as keen to profess our moral purity by calling for the police to be defunded. Instead, we seem to be constantly searching for new causes and ribbons to wear. Is this modern piety displayed on social media any different to Euthyphro’s demonstration in the agora before the ‘gods’ of ancient Athens?

David Perks is retired head teacher who now runs the Classical Philosophy Reading Group. You can watch videos of the group’s previous discussions on YouTube. He will also be speaking in the session The Odyssey: cinematic sensation or sin against the Greeks?

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BATTLE OF IDEAS FESTIVAL

Conversations for the public, with the public, in public

SATURDAY 17 & SUNDAY 18 OCTOBER
Church House, Westminster

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Join us for an unmissable weekend of debate and discussion on the most important political, economic, scientific and cultural issues of our time.

EARLY-BIRD RATES END MIDNIGHT TOMORROW,
THURSDAY 17 SEPTEMBER

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SESSIONS INCLUDE

Suicidal empathy: is the West killing itself with kindness? • Women betrayed: should we smash the unions and start again? • NHS to the police: the politicisation of public services • Controlling the narrative? The politics of misinformation and truth • WTF is Manchesterism and can it save the economy? • Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe? • Puberty-blockers scandal: the ethics of clinical trials • Should we scrap the Equality Act? • Is it Islamism or is there a problem with Islam? • What’s the BBC ever done for us? • Can insurgents free us from The Blob? In conversation with Danny Kruger • Finally Trumped: who’s the heir to MAGA? • Visas for all? Britain’s immigration scandal • We don’t need no indoctrination: the politicisation of education • Brexit: the facts strike back • The rise of the femosphere • Grooming gangs to the Nottingham Inquiry: untangling accountability • Does AI change everything?

And so much more - see the full programme HERE

SPEAKERS INCLUDE

Claire Fox • Lord David Frost • Poppy Coburn • Maeve Halligan • Danny Kruger MP • Jacob Mchangama • Frank Furedi • Rosie Duffield MP • Emma Trimble • Lord Maurice Glasman • Andrew Fox • Stella Tsantekidou • Remi Adekoya • Ben Jones • Liam Halligan • Timandra Harkness • Tiffany Jenkins • Richard Johnson • Helen Joyce • Julie Bindel • Rosie Kay • Baroness Kate Hoey • Eric Kaufmann • Laila Cunningham • Catherine McBride • Munira Mirza • Lord Jack McConnell • Tom Slater • Mark Seddon • Josh Howie • Alan Miller • Steve Baker • Allison Pearson • Adam Wren • Kathleen Stock • Ameer Kotecha • Jake Wallis Simons • AND MANY MORE

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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.

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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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