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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A variety of attempts to maintain control of the narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What drives attempts at narrative control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three strategies of control

We can group these tactics together under three banners

A. Strategies of control

B. Strategies of deception

C. Strategies of delegitimisation

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

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

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

Beyond controlling the narrative

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

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

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

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

Reasons for optimism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been a tough week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire

Britain’s free-speech immaturity

Rhys Laverty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026: PROGRAMME

Populism: giving people a voice?
Frank Furedi

Generation Fragile? Growing up in the culture wars
Ellie Lee

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

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

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

Academic vices and virtues
Nigel Biggar

Should we scrap the Equality Act?
Anna Loutfi

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

Island of strangers: what is a citizen?
Dolan Cummings

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

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

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

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

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

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

THINKING ALOUD: LIVING FREEDOM ALUMNI SEMINARS

Nation, national community, national interest
Phil Mullan

How to programme a debate
Ella Whelan

What is the Judeo-Christian tradition?
Dolan Cummings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

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

CURRENT PROGRAMME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUY TICKETS FOR ACADEMY 2026

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

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

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

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

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

It did not bode well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Videos from The Lords

Question on the Conversion Practices Bill, 1 July 2026

Question on disinformation and Brexit, 25 June 2026

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The Telegraph reported this week that more than a dozen Oxbridge scholarships, bursaries and financial aid schemes have been made available to students based on their ethnicity and not their socioeconomic backgrounds. The Spectator has revealed that a Numerical Reasoning Test (NRT) was removed from a graduate scheme at HM Treasury ‘due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity’. It seems that immutable characteristics are replacing merit as the way to get ahead.

As Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of Don’t Divide Us, shows below, the Equality Act is the pinnacle of this process. It’s time, she says, to consider repealing it.

The dangers of DEI and the contradictions of the Equality Act will be among the many questions we’ll be considering at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival in Westminster on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October. Early-bird tickets are now available.

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An employer fails to recognise an employee’s birthday in the expected manner and she, comparing herself to another colleague who received a celebratory email and lunch, takes her employer to an employment tribunal. She has the protected characteristics (PC) of race (non-white). Her comparator colleague was white. And so, a case of racial discrimination is pursued, and recorded for posterity, when, really, the originating incident had little or nothing to do with race.

In another case, a colleague sends a birthday card to another colleague, also with a PC of non-white race, who was off sick with work-related stress. The claimant was also contacted multiple times over a three-week period during her sick leave by employers who said they had a duty of care to check in. Presumably they also have a duty of care to their governing body or shareholders to ensure financial prudence. The claimant filed at least 20 claims of disability and race discrimination, harassment and victimisation. The first case was dismissed, the second was upheld with an award of over £20,000 for injury to feelings.

‘It’s woke gone mad!’, I hear you say. Or the Marxists or fools have taken over. In actual fact, these are not outlier cases, few and far between. Rather, as a Don’t Divide Us report last year revealed, there are many similar cases. From a sample of 5,523 cases brought on race related grounds between 2017-2024, only five per cent were upheld. Our recent report, commissioned by Prosperity Institute, offers a historical account of the creation of the Equality Act, its core political and philosophical tenets, two detailed case studies, and three pathways between repeal and partial amendment.

The cases above sound trivial. But the loss of personal responsibility for individual judgment and responsibility inculcated by the Equality Act in its form and operation, can be fatal. We saw this in the appalling footage of police officers arriving at the scene of Henry Nowak’s murder. It was not a poorly written or poorly implemented race action plan that was responsible. In fact, the officers conducted themselves in complete accordance with requirements of Equality Act: a person with a recognised protected characteristic should not have their dignity violated (part of the definition of harassment) by sceptical questions, even when establishing the truth could have serious consequences.

The Equality Act: a revolution not consolidation

Contrary to the way the Equality Act was presented at the time, and how it is superficially understood today, it was not a mere practical consolidation of prior anti-discrimination legislation on race, sex and disability. The different terminology alone should set alarms ringing because anti-discrimination is not the same thing as equality. We’ve been sold a pup!

The latest Prosperity Institute report details how the Equality Act was the achievement of a group of international human-rights lawyers and academics who had fingers in various pies including academia, charities including the Runnymede Trust, and EU committees who write directives for member states to incorporate. These are technocrats, not elected representatives accountable mainly to the British electorate. They formed the Equal Rights Trust (ERT), which published a Declaration on the Principles of Equality in 2008: 20 out of 27 principles were incorporated into the Equality Act. Few cared to scrutinise something with such a benign title, yet one of the ERT’s founders, Bob Hepple, was very open about the radical scope and nature of their aim.

Formal equality under the law was deemed insufficient to meet the aims of existing anti-discrimination laws. He offers little to substantiate his claim. We know his political outlook: he was a South African who had been involved in the Anti-Apartheid movement and had helped found the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Britain in the early 1960s. But it is worth considering the wider context that may have influenced his dismissal of formal equality.

In the period between the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the Macpherson Report published in 1999, and the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, new legal innovations were passed, including the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, forerunner of the Public Sector Equality Duty in the Equality Act, and the Police Reform Act 2002. More importantly, two radical major cultural/political beliefs began to assume the status of common sense via the work of charities, academia, NGOs and – since Britain adopted the Social Protocol under Blair’s government in 1997 – the EU. The first belief is that systemic disadvantages are a feature, not a bug, of British society. The second is that racism is primarily a psychological phenomenon, and therefore, inherently subjective. These ideologically radical presuppositions are written into the Equality Act, along with one other unique feature: Protected Characteristics (PCs).

Democratic ruination

The term Protected Characteristics seems innocuous if a bit silly. But they are deadly to democracy for the simple reason that they effect a dissolution of the demos in legal and cultural understanding. Instead of a public – a demos – comprising morally equal and autonomous individuals who, in consenting to general law, also affirm ourselves as a demos, the Equality Act re-inscribes us as PCs on legs: bearers of PCs through which we access our relative portions of justice. There is no longer a general law that applies to all. And the coup de grace of the Equality Act is that all public institutions, and increasingly private bodies, are beholden to its reach. In short, Protected Characteristics are the legal translation of core political beliefs of multiculturalism, which were already normalised culturally. The PC belief system is the substance of the Equality Act, not anti-discrimination.

The ERT wanted to change the organising socio-political principle from formal equality to transformative equality: that is, to use the law to change society and culture. It’s not so much that the law is the original source of the divisions and moral confusion we see today, but the Equality Act entrenches the anti-democratic beliefs of multicultural politics deeper and disseminates them across our institutions and public life, to the point where even the Treasury pays obeisance to diversity rather than practical competency.

Thanks in large part to the Equality Act, without discussion or consent, Britain’s traditional legal and moral paradigm of freedom to do whatever was not prohibited has, in public discourse at least, taken second place to a different model of freedom. Instead of traditional negative freedom, which has shaped Britain’s legal and cultural development, we find ourselves in a state of unfreedom associated with positive liberty: we are free to do that which is agreed by our leaders and their proxies.

A common reaction when I say I’d favour the repeal of the Equality Act is shock at the apparent radicalness of the suggestion. But this is an inversion of reality: it was the Equality Act itself that was radical. Repeal or substantive amendment would be a restoration or reorientation towards older beliefs in our innate equality and freedom given by God and/or common law; another yet to be realised ‘Brexit dividend’, if you like. It would not be the whole solution to our ills, but it is an important precondition, not least because it would require that we act as morally autonomous, generally robust, individuals rather than legally and culturally sanctioned infants. Repeal would be an important ritual marker of adulthood!

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is co-author, with Anna Loutfi, of Some More Equal Than Others: The Case Against the Equality Act, published by the Prosperity Institute. Read the report here.

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Thursday 23 June 2016 will go down as one of the most important dates in British political history. That’s not just because it is the day we voted to leave the European Union, momentous as that was. It’s also because it was the day that many millions of people discovered that they still had a political voice.

In many ways, the resignation of Keir Starmer yesterday is part of the process unleashed by the vote for Brexit. While there have been rumblings for months that Starmer was on his way out, Labour MPs sat on their hands until the local elections in May. When the results were disastrous for Labour, things moved fast. Having been handed an overwhelming majority in July 2024, voters were not going to tolerate Labour’s multiple failures. Voters now have little loyalty to the old parties, with Reform UK leading the polls.

Obviously, Brexit and its many impacts has been part of many discussions and debates that the Academy of Ideas has organised both before the vote and since. Below is a selection of recordings and articles.

Of course, the best place to continue the debate is at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival on 17 & 18 October in Westminster. We will be reflecting back and also looking forward to how we can realise the aspirations of Brexit, changing politics for good, and what taking back control really means. Get tickets using the button below. I hope to see you there.

Claire

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BREXIT: A REVOLUTION BETRAYED?

‘I think it was a democratic revolution that liberated people and gave people the confidence to recognise they could shape history. We keep writing that history. It’s not over yet.’

This Spiked film, released on the tenth anniversary of the referendum, is an excellent overview of the campaign, the aftermath and the political changes since. The film features Claire Fox (quoted above) along with Michael Gove, Richard Tice, Liam Halligan and Brian Denny. It is well worth watching.

BEFORE THE VOTE

European Referendum: what will decide the vote?
17 May 2016
Frustrated by the shallowness of much of the debate, the Institute of Ideas (as we were called then) organised a public debate at London’s Goodenough College, featuring David Davis MP, journalists Simon Nixon and Bruno Waterfield, and economist Vicky Pryce.

THE PAINFUL PROCESS OF LEAVING

Podcast of Ideas: What next for Brexit?
17 March 2017
After Parliament approved the triggering of Article 50, pro-Remain journalist Ian Dunt and legal commentator Luke Gittos debated what should happen next.
Listen via Substack

Podcast of Ideas: Brexit special
21 December 2018
With Brexit becoming stuck in Parliament, Claire Fox, Rob Lyons and Jacob Reynolds got together to discuss what might happen next.
Listen via Substack

Brexit: a revolution by or against the establishment?
Battle of Ideas festival 2019
Speakers: Lisa Mckenzie, Professor Anand Menon, Daniel Moylan, Bruno Waterfield

After Brexit: the new political faultlines
Battle of Ideas festival 2019
Speakers: Lord Maurice Glasman, Joan Hoey, Christian May, Professor Anand Menon

Reclaiming Democracy: The Left Case for Sovereignty
Claire Fox and Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen

As fellow Brexit Party MEPs elected in 2019 to push for the UK to finally leave the EU, Claire Fox and Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen produced this short booklet, comprising 10 essays by left-wing Brexit-supporting authors. It’s still available to read via Claire’s website.
Read Reclaiming Democracy

AFTER BREXIT

Letters on Liberty: The Sovereign Subjects of History
Claire Fox
February 2021

Published in the wake of both Brexit and the Covid lockdowns, Claire Fox argues that it is incumbent on all of us to reclaim the notion of sovereignty as the essential precondition of political change. She argues that one of the demands embedded in the Brexit referendum of 2016 – to ‘take back control’ – is a vital element of free, democratic life.
Read The Sovereign Subjects of History

Running back to EU? Labour, Europe and the economy
Battle of Ideas festival 2024
Speakers: Catherine McBride, Ali Miraj, Dr Thomas Sampson, Gawain Towler

Happy birthday, Brexit!
31 January 2025, Academy of Ideas Substack
Claire Fox argues that five years on from the UK’s departure from the EU, Brexit remains an enormous achievement in giving voters back their power and stopping the political class from deflecting away its failure.
Read on Substack

The Brexit Debate
17 June 2026
The Spectator live debate on the motion ‘This house believes that Brexit was a mistake’.
Dominic Grieve and Matthew Parris argued for the motion, while Claire Fox and Michael Gove argued against.

Brexit: The Facts Strike Back
Edited by Robert Tombs and Graham Gudgin

There has been a 10-year campaign, still continuing, to persuade the British public that they made the wrong decision in 2016, and that they should have listened to those politicians, intellectuals and ‘experts’ who told them to vote Remain. Yet much of what we have been told, and are still being told, has no basis in evidence, and it is often provably wrong. Resolving the biggest political issue of our time needs facts, not propaganda, and this book gives them.
Buy via Amazon

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Claire Fox is a member of the advisory board of Britain Unbound, which brings together independent thinkers from across politics and public life, united by a shared belief: that Britain needs clear thinking, a long-term vision, and the confidence to challenge the prevailing narrative. This cross-party and multi-sector endeavour gives a unique capacity to inform and to advise.

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Sunderland changed all that. It was the first city to declare its result in the EU referendum, just after midnight on 24 June – and what a result: 61.3 per cent Leave and 38.7 per cent Remain. Boom.

This was no freak result. The declarations in favour of Leave just kept on coming in. At 4.39am, David Dimbleby on the BBC announced: ‘We are absolutely clear now that there is no way that the Remain side can win… The British people have spoken – and the answer is: we’re out.’

Like many people who had voted Leave, perhaps more in hope than expectation, I was gobsmacked – and delighted. Not that the path from vote to departure was easy, with nearly four more years of shenanigans to come before we finally, formally, left. Nonetheless, the Brexit vote was seismic, announcing the arrival of the Populist Moment. Politics has never been the same since.

Below, you can watch Claire Fox’s speech defending Brexit at The Spectator’s Brexit debate last week. (You can watch the whole debate here.) Then, five writers from the North East reflect on the campaign, the vote and the aftermath.

TEN YEARS ON, I STILL LOVE BREXIT
Jon Bryan

The year is 2016…

At 04:58 on Friday 24 June, I sent my friend a simple message:

‘Morning! Historic day! J x’

I’d been up all night watching the coverage as the votes came in. Over 30million of us voted in a huge democratic exercise which had been built up to for months. The resulting ballot papers were a mass input from the public telling politicians what we thought. And most of those who voted wanted us to leave the EU. It was so good.

I still smile when I think about it. It was probably the most important political event in my lifetime and, for once, I was on the winning side. On the simple question of whether we should be part of a neoliberal and bureaucratic organisation like the EU, with all its anti-democratic structures, the UK public said an emphatic ‘No’.

It’s difficult to envisage, as it seems so long ago, but it was a hugely positive message. Against all the fearmongering being expressed by almost every mainstream politician, commentator and business leader, the electorate stuck up two fingers and refused to go along with the status quo. The Brexit vote was a decisive rejection of what we had, and I loved it for that.

It led to the immediate demise of a Tory prime minister who I had absolutely no time for, and the difficulties that established politicians grappled with after the vote showed how much we could shake things up by simply putting ‘X’ next to ‘Leave’ on a piece of paper. No UK political leader has come close to understanding what that vote meant and how they should react to it. The political instability and dealignment caused by that vote has been there for all of us to see over the past 10 years.

I have always tried to hang on to the positivity that was expressed by that vote to leave the EU. That we needed change; we needed to do something radical; and that we would not be swayed by the likes of Cameron, Clegg, Corbyn, Osborne, Obama, Sturgeon, Branson, Khan, Kinnock, Blair, Ashdown, Lucas, Jones, Campbell, O’Leary and Morgan. They were all cheerleaders for the idea that we shouldn’t tamper with what we had with, a ‘don’t rock the boat’ and a ‘better the devil you know’ type approach to political campaigning. I was so pleased that they were all on the losing side, and that I was with the majority vote.

While there were difficult times which immediately followed the vote – when the UK parliament did their upmost to strangle the public’s voice – it was a useful exercise in finding out who really believed in democracy. It was only those who wanted to enact the logical extension of that vote – that we should leave the European Union with or without a deal – who truly believed in the rights and power of ordinary people. We all learnt a lot through that experience, and we are better for that.

For my part, I continued to argue (wherever and whenever I could) that the UK electorate had spoken and that we should make sure that we delivered on that promise and those beliefs. That didn’t make me popular with some, but I firmly believed that I was right. Not only was I on the side of democrats, but I also knew that most people agreed with me. That not only gave me comfort, but it also meant that I smile about it now, as I did at the time.

In 2019:

It helped to have friends and a partner who affirmed that belief in democracy and principle, and there were also public voices who were speaking out too. In Newcastle, Leavers of Britain (LofB) helped me to smile and remain positive, providing a forum to meet like-minded individuals.

When LofB came to the North East in 2019, spreading out from its roots in London, I made sure to be at the first meeting and became part of the organising team of Leavers of Newcastle. Like a task and finish group – it kept going until we finally left the EU in 2020.

2026: Today!

Today’s news and political commentary on Brexit can be infuriating at times, with their focus on the economy and continual linking of it back to 2016. The fact that much of the vote was for political rather than economic reasons seems to have escaped the politicians, journalists and the commentariat. They never understood the political earthquake that shattered the consensus 10 years ago, and they still don’t understand it now.

I’m still smiling about the Brexit vote, and I will do so for a while longer. Not just because I was on the winning side, but because those who tried to overturn that democratic mandate for the four years that followed also ended up on the losing side once again when we finally left the EU in 2020. I drank a glass of fizz with friends and family that night.

This month, I’ll be marking the tenth anniversary of our vote to leave the EU with close friends who stuck with both the vote and the public, against everything that was thrown at them. No doubt there will be talk of those who voted to leave who regret the way that they voted, and the media will be sure to make the most of those voices. For my part, I don’t regret anything about it. It was the one time that my vote really counted, and that it was counted along with 17million others who also thought like me makes the experience that bit better.

Ten years on, I still love Brexit, and everything that the vote represented. Cheers to that day – one that I’ll never forget!

Jon Bryan is a trade unionist and organiser of Leavers of Newcastle. Follow Jon on X.

A DECADE OF SURPRISES
Mo Lovatt

Last month, the question ‘Is Britain ungovernable?’ hit the media rounds as a range of articles and radio talk shows debated the issue. At the same time, Tony Blair’s essay criticising Labour’s lack of ideas and a ‘governing purpose’ was released.

As I reflect on 10 years of Brexit, this is what surprises me the most: that leaving the EU has so thoroughly exposed a British political class bereft of purpose, plans or ideals. Decades of outsourcing political decisions – and accountability – to the European Union has clearly left us with an out-of-touch and moribund political elite.

But that was not the only surprise to emerge from the referendum result. It’s hard to overstate how much British politics has changed over the past decade, from the collapse of the two main parties and the idea of an electoral ‘safe seat’ to the ensuing rise of populism and the range of parties seeking to represent us; from the vastly more diverse media landscape to the willingness of ‘ordinary people’ to use their voice and engage in political activity. The elites and their useful idiots may bemoan the contemporary chaos, but for true democrats this is an exciting time. We live in a far more robustly democratic country because of that vote.

The very first Brexit surprise I encountered was on the day I cast my vote. The polling station, located in the very deprived area of Winlaton, Gateshead, was humming with activity as I pulled up, with people lining the streets – right around the block and beyond – to cast their vote. We had been told that our vote counted and 33, 551, 983 of us across the country came out to ensure we had our say in an almost unprecedented turnout of 72.2 per cent. It was an historic day.

Then came the reaction to Brexit – both publicly and in my private life. I had been working in a rather elite section of the Arts and Culture sector of the North East, involved in strategic decision making and policy. When I discussed my intention to vote Leave with colleagues, there were some wry smiles and gentle teasing. Mo Lovatt, still the radical contrarian at heart! But after the vote… My Goodness! I couldn’t quite believe it as colleague after colleague, friends too, gradually dropped me from their social circles. Work dried up, Twitter followers diminished and I became persona non grata (except, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the many techies and stagehands I’d work with along the way). One well-meaning colleague said to me: ‘I do wish you’d shut up on Twitter. You do realise you’ll never work in the industry again?’ My brother assured me the fuss would die down. That turned out to be wishful thinking!

Like so many others, the attempt by our political and cultural elites to overturn the democratic vote re-politicised me in a way I hadn’t been since my student years. I began being asked to appear on a variety of news and current affairs programmes and eventually went on to work with MEPs Claire Fox and Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen in the North West.

Both historically left-wing and dedicated to democracy, Claire and Henrik were determined to represent their European Parliamentary constituents from their office base in Stockport until we eventually left the EU and their jobs would cease to exist. But soon realising that representing people from as far as Workington in the north to Cheshire in the south wasn’t easy, even with an office in the centre of the region, the MEPs began going out to the electorate, where money, distance and transport connections made it impossible for many to come to Stockport. (I often wonder how many other MEPs over the years have been as determined to reach their European electorates!)

As we toured the region in a series of ‘Town Hall’ meetings, I encountered my next major Brexit surprise. Inevitably Remain voters turned up at those meetings to argue, to heckle, and to pour scorn on anyone who had voted Leave. They were always welcomed but I was genuinely shocked at how little these people knew about the European Union! In debate after debate, they revealed their ignorance of the trading bloc in the face of the arguments of those so-called low-information voters who had done their research and knew exactly why they’d voted to leave.

The tone of that discussion hasn’t changed over the last ten years. In late 2024, I was asked to appear on Matthew Wright’s LBC show, to talk about whether I regretted my Brexit vote. As it happened my colleague, Rob Lyons, had just written an excellent piece, covering the criticism by Mario Draghi, former president of the European Bank, of the EU and warning of its potential demise. I used Rob’s article as the basis of my argument. I began the interview with a joke about Remainers not knowing what they’d voted for and the host laughed. This is going to go well, I thought. But gradually, as I began quoting Draghi and pointing out the failures of the EU, Wright became visibly more angry and frustrated as I calmly laid out my position and refuted his claims. The segment ended with Wright throwing down his pen on the desk and storming out of the studio! It was great fun! I was glad I knew my facts, wasn’t swayed by the insults and firmly held my ground.

And that is my essential message to anyone who voted Brexit when the inevitable attempt to rejoin – either overtly or covertly – raises its head (more than it has already). Remember what we have gained. Remember what potential for change our vote has unleashed. Remember how much the elites revealed their contempt for us and for democracy. And, finally, remember we deserve more from our political leaders. In the words of Tony Blair, we deserve, ‘efficacy… the ability to get big things done. To have leaders who are not problem-managers but problem-solvers.’ Well said Tony. Thanks to the Brexit you despised, we may yet reap those rewards.

Mo Lovatt is national coordinator of Debating Matters and programme coordinator, Academy of Ideas. Follow Mo on X.

BREXIT 2016: THE BEGINNING OF A POPULIST REVOLUTION
Kevin Yuill

As the Brexit referendum results unfolded on that June night, I went to bed fairly early. Though others had gathered to celebrate the results, I was pessimistic about the prospects and slept before many results came in. Before I went to sleep, though, I composed a Facebook post congratulating the other side and urging those on my side to respect the democratic result of the referendum.

How I wished I had posted it! For, once the results came in, what was striking was how few of those who had campaigned against Brexit actually accepted the results, even though they were quite clear. The immediate response from those remainers who had cheered on Bob Geldof as he castigated the ‘Leave’ flotilla on the Thames was bitterness. The pro-remain papers, perhaps in the anger stage of grief, expressed disbelief. Typical was the front page of the Independent the day after the referendum:

‘We’ve broken off with Europe, the PM has resigned, Nigel Farage is rampant, markets have crashed, Scotland wants another referendum, there are 52 trade deals to be renegotiated – and one man is favourite to be the next prime minister [Boris Johnson].’

But since then, those elite politicians, policymakers and celebrities who opposed leaving the EU have thrown everything in the path of the democratic will of the people. Nigel Farage captured the reaction over the past 10 years since the vote: ‘We used to protest against the establishment, now the establishment protests against us’.

Such a momentous day had reverberations across the world. Brexit was a massive rejection of the rabble of politicians and powerbrokers who gather at Davos every January to plan out the path they think the world should take. Brexit was not only off their agenda, but the explosion of populist sentiment threatened them. World leaders almost unanimously condemned the British for having the temerity to question their leaders.

As an academic, I was shocked by the vitriol heaped on those few of us who admitted that we had voted Brexit. After I came out publicly in support of the referendum result, many privately expressed their agreement but noted that public espousal of Brexit would be the death of their careers.

Today, the Brexit vote remains the clearest test of democracy. Very few took the view that I had initially when I thought we had lost and Remain had triumphed. Instead of accepting that the people had spoken, we were told that the gullible majority had been lied to by right-wing politicians and media, that the majority of the population of this country were racist and therefore their vote should not count, and, perhaps most bizarrely, that Russian bots had spread disinformation. Anything but admit that the people hated the establishment and longed for change.

Perhaps most disconcerting to me was the betrayal of the working class by the left – or what calls itself the left today. The left in Britain had a deep commitment to democracy expressed, in the past, in hostility to joining the EU. Tony Benn, who, having died in 2014, must be turning in his grave today, asked five questions about power:

• What power have you got?

• Where did you get it from?

• In whose interests do you exercise it?

• To whom are you accountable?

• How can we get rid of you?

The EU failed to satisfactorily answer any of these questions, but the rump of the left today has thrown its lot in with the Establishment.

After 2016, it became obvious that the left is no longer the left. I first became politically active after I began working on the hog-kill line in an abattoir at the age of 17 and remained on the left ever since. However, much as many of my left-wing principles – freedom of speech, siding with workers, autonomy and national sovereignty – remain, none of these appear to be respected by those who call themselves the left today. In fact, it is those on the right, perhaps similarly bemused by the nastiness of attacks on them from those who regard themselves as upstanding liberals, who appear the most open to change. Brexit further exacerbated the 30-year trend whereby the definitions of left and right collapsed.

In the years that followed the referendum, the betrayal of this second-largest vote in British history continues. Irritated by the attacks on Brexit and encouraged by others willing to put themselves forward, I stood in 2019 for the Brexit Party, formed by Nigel Farage and several others in response to the threat to renege on the decision to leave the EU and the failure of mainstream parties to defend the referendum in the Sunderland South and Houghton constituency.

I remember several things in particular about this campaign. First, I knocked on close to a thousand doors and spoke to myriad people on our street stalls. On one such stall, a white van screeched up and a fairly large man jumped out and asked me, are you Kevin Yuill? Somewhat nervously, remembering the violence I faced as an anti-racist campaigner in the East End of London in the 1980s, I answered yes. ‘I’m voting for you and I support your articles on assisted suicide, but I disagree with some of the others.’ He was an electrician, but had done plentiful research on all of the candidates, including reading articles I had written for Spiked, belying the ‘low-information voter’ image propagated by the Remain camp.

Second, many people told me that in all the years they had lived in the area – many as long as 30 years – I was the first political candidate they had spoken to. The Labour Party existed not as representatives of these people but as a group of apparatchiks and party managers who ignored those people who voted for them out of loyalty to the party of their parents and grandparents.

Third, it was sheer frustration with mainstream parties that drove people to vote for Brexit and for either the Brexit or Conservative Parties in this election. The writing was on the (red) wall for the Labour Party. Though my candidacy was not successful and the failure of the Conservative Party meant that Labour was again returned in 2024, the most recent election results indicate that the old system - and the Labour Party - is on its last legs.

It was difficult, in 2016, to see whether this vote was simply a spasm, a one-off kicking of the establishment that would not be repeated. Certainly, many centrist figures hoped that it was a moment of madness after which politics as usual would re-establish itself. But from our vantage point in 2026, populism is alive and well. Reform UK took control of Gateshead, Sunderland and South Tyneside from Labour and became the official opposition in North Tyneside. Newcastle council was left without a majority and all the seats up for grabs in Hartlepool went to Reform.

The revolution launched in 2016 continues.

Kevin Yuill is emeritus professor of history, University of Sunderland and a former Brexit Party candidate. Follow Kevin on X.

KEEP CALM AND KEEP VOTING
Dave O’Toole

I have always seen myself as political and I am an active trade unionist, yet I rarely vote. Put simply, there is seldom much worth voting for. The Brexit campaign, by contrast, was the most exciting example of democracy in action I had ever seen. At last, here was a clear, binary issue that I naively believed would be carried through. So, I did more than vote: I campaigned, leafleted, knocked on doors, wrote, debated and organised Leave groups and social events.

As a lecturer and branch secretary, my constituency was there. If I wanted to organise a meeting or communicate with others, I had only to leave my staffroom to encounter them. When I later became a trade-union organiser, my networks were similarly accessible and organised.

But my trade union contacts - largely academics - were firmly Remain, as were the local Labour Party and the Trades Council. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were pro-Leave and ran a Lexit campaign, but they would not align or work with the largely conservative-led Vote Leave or the Farage-aligned Grassroots Out campaign. The Socialist Party took a similar stance and remained aloof from the national campaign. So, many of my contacts on the Left were either solidly Remain or too concerned with political purity to work with others.

My own view was that if you have a vision for the political direction of the UK you need the power to make this happen. You need sovereignty. It was this principle on which we were being asked to vote. To that end, I was prepared to work with anyone who had the same vision, regardless of their political affiliation, and I was not prepared to engage in the distraction of arguing the different visions. Once we were ‘Out’ we would have a chance to shape those visions.

So, I started by discussing Brexit with everyone I met. I had conversations at the bus stop, at the dentist, in the pub – and eventually, I found fellow travellers. Several times a week we leafletted, ran stalls, attended talks or door knocked estates and tower blocks. None of those I worked with were what I’d call ‘Left’, yet I never heard a motive I disagreed with. Despite the slurs being levelled against Leave voters, I never heard a racist remark.

The energy was extraordinary. Looking back, it’s hard to believe the official campaign lasted only 10 weeks, it was a time of real enthusiasm and a desire for change.

But something else became clear: within the official campaigns, each side spoke a different language. Leave emphasised democracy and sovereignty; Remain focused on economics and what felt to me like trivialities, such as ease of travel – and ultimately, they failed to inspire the electorate.

On 23 June, the Leave vote won – decisively. Turnout was 72.2 per cent, outstripping even the 1997 General Election turnout. Over 33million people voted: 52 per cent for Leave, 48 for Remain. I assumed the democratic result would be enacted, but instead, the atmosphere intensified. The Remain campaign, previously lacklustre, re mobilised to overturn the result. Leave voters were mocked as ‘gammon’, ‘racist’, ‘uneducated’ or ‘deceived’. Some even suggested a second referendum would favour Remain as older Brexit voters died off.

This quickly turned into an assessment that the Leave vote was peopled by the great unwashed: council-estate dwellers, the uneducated, the xenophobe and the racist. I was accused of ‘enabling fascism’ by people I had worked with on trade-union campaigns. I was criticised on social media by the same trade unionists in a manner which was publicly polite and reasonable, but privately they expressed the most violent and unhinged attacks on working-class voters. People commented on the phenomenon of the ‘shy voter’ as it became increasingly common for Leave voters not to admit to having the temerity to vote.

Ten years on, it is difficult to believe how much the political landscape of the UK has altered. Both the Labour Party and the Conservatives are likely finished as serious political players. The present Labour government is besieged by criticism and has largely been abandoned by its working-class base. Attempts to create new movements on the Left which have retained a pro-EU stance, such as Your Party and Momentum, have not been successful. New media channels are being created and watched by those who’ve rejected the legacy media – pushing even mainstream channels to discuss issues that were previously rarely heard. There is a definite populist mood in the country – one which is completely at odds with the views of the Establishment.

The electorate are transformed. There is far less shyness by the voter now. Being at variance to the Establishment and legacy media holds little fear for them, and fear-mongering and accusations of racism are tactics which have lost their potency. Grassroots campaigns and single-issue groups are springing up everywhere as people engage in political activity. There is a renewed belief that voters can shape the society they live in and anger over liberal elite ideas and luxury beliefs. Rejoining the EU is not even on their radar.

Dave O’Toole is a retired trade unionist and organiser of Leavers of Devon.

REFLECTIONS OF AN ACADEMIC, 10 YEARS ON FROM THE BREXIT REFERENDUM
Caspar Hewett

It is hard to believe that the Brexit referendum was 10 years ago.

The surprise outcome which changed so much has also changed so little. We still have politicians angling to undo the result. We still have a political class who are totally out of touch with what the rest of us think. We still consistently hear how ignorant and stupid we, ‘the masses’, are. This is particularly prevalent in academia, where I work, where everything from climate change to gender is politicised and ‘ordinary people’ – which I assume is code for the working class – are viewed as, you guessed it, stupid and ignorant.

But it isn’t all bad. I sense a growing confidence in rejecting the dominant narrative. Yes, this sometimes comes out as (well-earned) distrust of politicians and in the form of conspiracy theories, but it has also had a positive side. It has opened up a space for debate across traditional political divides that I had not seen before. People with a wide spectrum of views voted for Brexit, and in the many discussions I have been involved in over the past decade, the pro-democracy element of Brexit comes to the fore again and again.

Brexit unexpectedly brought people together around the issues of free speech, democracy and the recognition of the disdain the political class has for us all. In stark contrast to what many in the Remain camp maintained, I see the Leave vote as a clear indication that ‘ordinary people’ don’t believe what they are told and are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves. It underlined for me, more than ever, the importance of public discussion, something that has been central to my activity for decades.

Although I have been organising public debates in the North East since 1998 through The Great Debate, it was in the wake of the Brexit vote that more opportunities arose to partner with diverse bodies to explore these issues. This included the Institution of Civil Engineers, the North-East Humanists and Newcastle Philosophy Society. The links I formed through the Brexit campaign and Politics in Pubs Newcastle have led to over 30 public events over the past three years.

This was refreshingly different from anything I had done before. The regular group of people who came were from very different political backgrounds – from ex-Marxists and Labour party supporters to people active in Reform and the SDP. To get such a diverse people in a room month after month having open conversations in which you are allowed to say anything is quite something! This would not have happened without Brexit.

Going back to when this all began, almost exactly a decade ago, I published a short opinion piece on The Great Debate website entitled ‘Why I Want Out of the European Union.’ I did not expect it to be particularly influential, but I wanted to make some key points in a public forum before the referendum, particularly about the sense of disenfranchisement people felt and the way that the general population were being portrayed as racist, ignorant and stupid during the campaign. Little did I know how amplified this would become once the vote was in! I did not expect us to win, but we did, and I was very pleased that I had stuck my neck out and written that piece.

Working in academia was not comfortable in the wake of the vote. People were angry, and there was little appetite to engage with what had happened and why. Ten years on, I think that most academics still don’t get it and, if anything, that unhealthy disdain for the working class has grown in universities.

More interestingly, conversations I had with colleagues in EU countries were much better than any I had in the UK. They were simply more receptive to hearing why I had voted to leave and I had some great discussions about the undemocratic nature of the EU and its history of keeping the developing world out of markets.

Academics in the UK seemed more concerned about the lack of access to EU funding than anything more principled. Many attempted, and failed, to make me feel like I was in a minority when it was quite clear from the vote itself that it was one of the only times I can remember when I most demonstrably wasn’t!

Sadly, little has changed in academia in the past 10 years. If anything, it has got worse. The prevailing view in the university sector has hardened in its disdain for the working class, alongside the so-called ‘left’ of today, who long ago gave up on a vision for transforming society in favour of a politics of telling people what to think. No doubt they would like to see society ruled by ‘those that know better’, rather like the nineteenth-century philosopher, Auguste Comte, who rejected democracy and argued for a new society governed by an intellectual elite. Comte’s grand vision was famously described by Karl Marx as Scheisspositivismus (‘crappy Positivism’). I think we should be equally contemptuous of their contempt.

The thing that gives me hope going forwards is that so many people reject being told what to think and are willing to engage with ideas. Much of the momentum of Brexit was lost thanks to the pandemic, but that sense of not accepting what the establishment is pushing has grown despite that, which is something to be celebrated. The job for those of us who do believe in a better future is to keep talking and play a part in creating a better narrative – a more democratic one based on dialogue that puts some trust in people’s ability to think.

Caspar Hewett is director of The Great Debate. Follow Caspar on X.

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So the ‘King of the North’ has cleared the first step in his quest to be prime minister of the UK. Andy Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election was certainly impressive and it looks clear that Labour will be in the midst of a leadership contest very soon. Yet Burnham rarely stuck his neck out to offer any policy alternative to Keir Starmer, merely offering a change of personnel at the top. What does that mean for his party and the country?

Meanwhile, the Conservatives pulled off a victory in Aberdeen South that was almost as impressive, campaigning against shutting down North Sea oil and gas production. Clearly, there is a constituency for defending jobs and livelihoods against Net Zero policies. But will it bring any wider benefit to Kemi Badenoch and co?

While Reform have, for a while, realised they wouldn’t win, but they will still feel deflated that it wasn’t even close, especially having done so well in the local council elections in the area. What does the result mean for the party’s future and what do they need to do to win hearts and minds?

The AoI’s Claire Fox, Alastair Donald, Geoff Kidder and Rob Lyons got together on Friday afternoon to discuss all this and more. Listen by clicking on ‘Listen Now’ below or, if that doesn’t work, listen on Podbean.

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We’ve had a full week of action now and every team has made its first appearance. In this episode, the regular team of Rob Lyons, Geoff Kidder and Jake Weston are joined by special guest Denis Russell to offer a viewpoint from Ireland.

The team offer their impressions of the tournament so far. Who has impressed and who has disappointed? With England winning a seemingly tricky opening match against Croatia 4-2, can the Three Lions go deep into the tournament again? As for Scotland, does a scrappy win over Haiti offer much hope for tougher matches against Morocco and Brazil?

Along the way, they discuss the cost of the World Cup for fans, but also how those fans have made a real impression on the host countries. Did America know what was going to hit it? We also return to the thorny issue of VAR and the controversy over the innovation of hydration breaks, effectively turning a game of two halves into a game of four quarters.

What has Ireland’s reaction been after failing to qualify for the tournament? Are the Football Association of Ireland – and the Irish elites in general – more concerned with the upcoming game against Israel than with getting the national team back to qualifying for major tournaments, as they did so often in the past?

Listen to this episode using the player above. You can also listen on Podbean, Spotify and Apple Podcasts or search for ‘Academy of Ideas’ on your favourite podcast app.

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The World Cup is back – and so is the World Cup Podcast of Ideas. With the biggest-ever tournament kicking off on Thursday 11 June across the US, Mexico and Canada, we’ve got the team together to discuss some of the burning issues.

First things first: are we actually looking forward to it? With 48 teams taking part for the first time, there will be many more games than in previous tournaments. Is there a danger of football fatigue with so many matches or is it a historic opportunity for smaller nations to get their moment in the spotlight?

Given that the bulk of the tournament is happening in America, the usual accusations of over-commercialisation are more prevalent than ever. There’s even a half-time show for the final, an idea borrowed from the Super Bowl. Does stopping for 45 minutes to listen to Coldplay and K-Pop really have a place in the beautiful game? And why are why is FIFA mucking about with the rules - again?

And what of the experience for fans, particularly with huge ticket prices and big distances between matches? What will that do for the World Cup atmosphere, inside and outside stadiums?

Most importantly: who will win, and who are the ‘dark horses’ for glory beyond the usual suspects that might be worth a punt? Can England finally win it after ‘60 years of hurt’? Can Scotland break out of the group stage for the first time?

And for those who love to get a bit of World Cup merch: who will be sporting the best kit – and the worst?

You can listen by clicking on the button below, or on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. You can also listen on your favourite podcast player – just search for Academy of Ideas.

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Battle of Ideas festival is the UK’s premier annual festival of debate on the biggest issues of our times. And wow, there are a lot of issues to discuss. In the wake of revelations about the police’s inhumane treatment of stabbing victim Henry Nowak, which has shocked the nation and had international coverage, those at the heart of the British government attempted to tone-police the way it was discussed in public. Use of the phrase ‘pure, cold rage’ was dubbed incitement, the accurate debate about ‘two-tier policing’ was condemned as divisive. Policy discussion about whether a faux anti-racism, imbibed by every police force via EDI training, was itself described as stirring up racial tensions. The mood of ‘you can’t say that’ is too often a feature of social and cultural exchanges. Not, however, at the Battle of Ideas festival.

Because, unlike so many other festivals, the Battle of Ideas has the motto Free Speech Allowed. It’s not just a talking shop for the great and the good. Attendees are as much a part of our festival as the speakers. Indeed, we think that the audience is the festival. From the ongoing crises in British politics and society to tectonic shifts in world affairs, there is a lot to debate and think about.

The UK has plenty of problems to face at the moment, from a flatlining economy to frequent controversies about immigration, social cohesion and the lack of consensus about the past, the present and the future. Instead, we are offered endless shenanigans about who should lead the government, while the various contenders offer little or nothing in the way of an inspiring vision of the future.

Worse, the internal civil war in the Labour Party has imposed an unnecessary by-election on one local area, local voters reduced to being mere devices to affect a prime ministerial job swap, with no discernible big ideas to merit such manoeuvres. As one X poster noted wryly about professional Northerner Andy Burnham: ‘He’s Keir Starmer with more emotion, and a Paul Smith t-shirt.’ Of course, the rise of Reform and the Greens indicate an ever-growing disenchantment with politics as usual. Whether these parties are fit for purpose will no doubt be hotly contested at the festival.

Whoever is crowned Labour prime minister, one trend that is guaranteed to continue is the tendency to substitute ever-greater regulation and prohibition in place of social and economic progress. Attacks on free speech are so common in the UK that they’ve drawn international attention and condemnation. But at every level, right down to the minutiae of everyday life, politicians seem keen to ban things, from social media for under-16s to smoking cigarettes for anyone born after 2009. Far from living in a ‘free market’ society, government wants to regulate the price of energy, rent and even food. All this while the traditional institutions of the state, from policing to healthcare and beyond, increasingly let us down. Why is this happening and how can we fix it?

Meanwhile, geopolitics is in flux and feels dangerously out of control. Conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon have now been joined by the war in Iran. The choking of the Strait of Hormuz has thrown the world economy into turmoil – hot on the heels of events around Venezuela and Greenland. America – like Russia in Ukraine – is discovering that overwhelming firepower can be made meaningless by drones and other cheap weapons that give weaker countries the capability to stay in the fight. What does that mean for the future of warfare?

The ‘Western alliance’ has never been under such strain since the Second World War. Is this just the impulsiveness of Donald Trump or has he simply brought longstanding tensions into the open? And is the UK even fit to defend itself, let alone intervene more broadly, when one of Labour’s own grandees, Lord George Robertson, described the stasis on defence spending and security as an example of ‘corrosive complacency’. Hardly reassuring.

The world economy was creaking even before events in Iran. The UK government is not alone in facing an enormous debt burden – America, France, Italy and Japan are in the same boat. Are we facing a global sovereign debt crisis? Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken off, but does the new technology offer the economic benefits of industrial revolutions of the past or is it a threat to our futures – and will we even have the energy supplies to power it? What will be the impacts in wider society, from education to culture?

With all this going on, the need for open and honest debate has never been greater. Yet many people seem stuck in intellectual silos and political tribes, unable to engage with those who disagree with them. Social divides – between young and old, men and women – seem to be entrenched. The role of the media – whether it is the mainstream broadcasters and outlets, the rising tide of ‘new’ media or the flurry of information and debate on X, TikTok and Facebook and the rest – needs some critical interrogation. Do we need to relearn the fine art of disagreement?

We’ll be discussing all this and much more over the course of the festival weekend in London and in our various events before and after, taking place across the UK and Europe. Come along, listen to the arguments and have your say. If you’re interested in what is going on in the world, have an opinion and want to challenge others – and be challenged yourself – then Battle of Ideas festival is a fantastic experience. Join us on 17 & 18 October at Church House in Westminster. There is nothing like being there.

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‘We’ve just been attacked racially by some white person.’ Vickrum Digwa’s brother instinctively knew which buttons to press to mobilise the British state. The ideology behind the treatment of Henry Nowak, and sadly now a growing list of state failure in the name of anti-racism, is – of course - a political one.

It is now widely accepted that police and local authorities failed to pursue the participants in grooming gangs in part because of fears over community tensions and accusations of racism. Yet the comparison with Nowak’s case becomes clearest when viewed through individual examples. A father arrested twice for trying to rescue his 14-year-old daughter from a gang of Asian men. A Labour councillor dismissing victims as ‘poor white trash’. Girls, plied with alcohol and drugs by their abusers, routinely picked up for drunken and disorderly behaviour. Time and again, the machinery of the state seemed more willing to suspect the victims than their assailants.

The most uncomfortable thing about the police footage of Henry Nowak’s arrest is the apparent disregard for his life. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, an officer replies after Henry tells him he has been stabbed. It reflects the immediate profiling of a likely drunk, white racist who, in the eyes of the police, had abused a respectable Sikh family and therefore was not worth listening to. You can see the prejudice of the police operating in real time.

Of course, the officers in question have not yet been dismissed, pending an investigation. The Independent Office of Police Conduct says they are currently being treated solely as witnesses. In recent years, it seems that the most egregious crime an officer can commit is not the facilitation of the death of an 18-year-old university student, but making racist remarks. For example, who could forget the BBC’s brave, courageous and desperately needed Panorama film in which an officer was plied with nine pints of Guinness before making off-colour remarks about Arabs and Algerians being the ‘worst’ criminals to deal with?

The ideas of ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’ have been drilled into a generation of workers thanks to the EDI-ification of society. After the Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 people were murdered, security personnel admitted they had not approached the suspicious perpetrator because ‘I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble’. Risks identified by teachers regarding Axel Rudakubana, who later murdered three young girls in Southport, reportedly went unreported because of concerns about stereotyping a ‘black boy with a knife’. Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in Nottingham, was discharged from care amid concerns about the over-representation of young black men in detention.

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Of course, pleas to ‘not politicise’ these tragedies – driven by an ideology that nobody voted for – are selectively applied dependent on the victim. The murder of George Floyd, thousands of miles away, prompted calls for political reform here in the UK. The House of Commons and the House of Lords held a minute’s silence for Floyd – but that seems unlikely for Nowak. The police shooting of career criminal Chris Kaba sparked calls for justice, institutional reform and the vilification of firearms officers by Sadiq Khan, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn. Yet when the full facts were laid out at trial, the officer in question was acquitted by a jury in just three hours.

Going by the testimony heard at the Nottingham Inquiry – where bereaved families said institutions closed ‘ranks to try to keep us quiet’ – there is a fair chance that Henry Nowak’s parents could face similar pressures as they seek answers about their son’s death. How Henry’s parents grieve, and what they choose to do, is entirely up to them. Yet the Nottingham Inquiry, and the determination of the victims’ families, has demonstrated the importance of persistently challenging rotting public bodies and demanding transparency. As Emma Webber – mother of one of Calocane’s victims, Barnaby Webber – told the hearing: ‘We have faced evasion, self-protection, avoidance and downright lies so many times.’ That observation could apply to every tragedy mentioned above. Depoliticising these events only serves the government and the institutions that fail us.

Why was Henry Nowak’s killer not arrested at the time? Why did officers search Henry’s phone for evidence of racist abuse? While Digwa’s father and brother have been charged with weapons offences, why have they not been charged as accessories after the fact? (His mother awaits sentencing after being convicted of hiding the murder weapon.) As Dr Sanjoy Kumar told the Nottingham Inquiry, ‘there wasn’t a single institution involved in our case that didn’t fail’.

Until those questions – and others – are answered, we must not ‘move on’. Accountability is not hatred. Perhaps Farage is correct and on this – ‘we should be angry’. Because if a young man’s death, a catalogue of institutional failures, and a political ideology that repeatedly seems to blind public bodies to reality, cannot justify our anger, then what can?

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On 16 May, Pope Leo XIV published a new encyclical – a letter to all Catholic bishops and directed to the wider church – on the question of artificial intelligence. Usually, grand statements from the Vatican on social issues are scarcely worthy of comment, with a tendency to echo the latest liberal orthodoxies that is second only to the Church of England – but this one has some merit.

First, the title: Magnifica Humanitas: of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence. At a time when humanity is definitely not widely regarded as ‘magnificent’, this is a welcome cheer for the human race. Only a couple of weeks ago, we were celebrating the hundredth birthday of Sir David Attenborough. It is a sign of the times that a ‘national treasure’ can also believe humanity is a ‘plague on the Earth’.

Second, this is a serious attempt to prompt an ethical discussion about what we should do about AI. There are lots of practical problems with AI, such as its capacity to ‘hallucinate’ facts and references (or to simply get things wrong) and the problems of plundering the copyrighted works of writers and artists to train on and regurgitate in different form.

There is also the question of what happens to source websites that rely on advertising when your search engine (looking at you, Google) jumps in with AI-powered answers culled from these sites. What is the business model if advertising is no longer a viable funding source because these sites get far fewer visitors? Will AI ultimately diminish the very sources it relies upon?

Nonetheless, the potential for AI to make our lives easier is there. We need to figure out what it is good or bad at and how best to use it. Given the energy demands that data centres place on electricity grids now and in the future – apparently, nearly a quarter of Ireland’s electricity is already used to power data centres – what does that mean for the future of energy production?

But beyond these practical questions, few world leaders are in a position to step back and approach an ethical discussion of AI. On that point at least, the encyclical could prove to be a useful focus for debate – especially as a human-centred view.

In one of the most quoted passages, the encyclical says:

Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.

Now, I handed in my membership card for The God Squad a long time ago, so I don’t really worry that we’re not building AI ‘in the presence of God’. But making sure that AI doesn’t lay waste to everything in its path, that it actually serves people, seems like a worthwhile aim.

For example, it seems reasonable to wonder about a future in which war is conducted using autonomous weapons. As Ukraine has shown, getting good at drone warfare can be enormously useful for those countries that can’t put millions of soldiers and thousands of tanks and aircraft on to the battlefield. But if autonomous drones and other weapons can slaughter at will, who’s in charge? What’s left of the moral element of the decision to kill or not to kill? You don’t have to envisage a Terminator-style takeover by the machines to have some concerns about all this.

Some kind of regulation of what AI does and how it handles data seems appropriate. On the other hand, since we’re still fumbling around figuring out what AI is and what it can or can’t do, premature and heavy-handed regulation could make it harder for startups to exploit the power of the technology, leaving the field to massive companies with well-funded compliance departments. There is a risk that in wanting AI companies to ‘play fair’, the massive incumbents are allowed to rule the roost when a powerful restraint on them – competition – is held back.

There is much to talk about around these issues and the Battle of Ideas festival on 17 & 18 October in Westminster will be a great place to have these conversations. The AoI team has just had a big Battle of Ideas programming meeting and AI will be one of the major topics up for discussion, along with the big issues in politics – both domestic and international – economics, the arts and culture, science, the media and, above all, free speech. Early-bird tickets are still available so please buy yours now and join the conversation!

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‘Let me tell you about who I was before.’ That’s how Or Levy – an Israeli who spent 491 days as a hostage in Gaza – softly began to speak. I hope that, for those of us who heard him, we hold onto those words in some small way. For when you immerse yourself in such trauma, you are surely meant to walk away somewhat burdened by it.

The Nova Exhibition in London is a deliberately disorienting mess. Belongings recovered from the music festival are strewn across the floor for you to examine. I looked through a notebook filled with the most mundane customer-service surveys, admired a typically found festival ukulele, and noticed a pillow embroidered with the words ‘oh my gawd’. I hadn’t even realised that spelling carried a distinctly Jewish cadence, despite hearing my own Jewish grandmother say it all my life.

I’ve visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial. In each of those places, I immersed myself in suffering silently, but at the Nova Exhibition you are harried by noise. In every corner there’s a phone, a TV screen and a tablet replaying footage from October 7th. Some are quiet, some loud. Panic meets gunfire. ‘Allahu Akbar’ is the one constant. It creates a terrifying approximation of what those final moments must have felt like for the victims.

The loudest video is that of Shani Louk. Her broken, partially naked body is twisted in the back of a pickup truck, with men crouched over her as though guarding a prize. It is impossible not to confront the obscenity of it: how can someone so young, so visibly full of life only hours earlier, be reduced to this? What terrible hatred must exist to drag this pacifist from happiness and laughter to an end met with humiliation and celebration?

I had to rewatch the video a handful of times to confirm what I thought I saw – a boy leaning over her body to spit on her. I found myself asking: would the 18-year-old in Whitechapel who was recently arrested after allegedly shouting, ‘You Jews are gonna get beheaded one by one, you dirty Jews’ have reacted differently if placed in that crowd?

‘Normal’ is how you would describe much of the display at the Nova Exhibition. The dusty chairs and tents reminded me of the same exhausted disorder I experienced on my last day at Reading Festival when I was 16. The men pouring over the border separating Gaza and Israel were dressed in hoodies and trainers, not military garb. Even the ‘Econova Project’ – an initiative to ban single-use plastics at the festival – echoed the fashionable environmental causes that drift through equivalent British festivals.

However, the most devastatingly ‘normal’ part of the Nova Festival was the way it resonated with the Jewish experience. One of the selected quotes read: ‘They shot at us in the car. They turned my brother into a sieve; they left nothing of him. I have nothing to bury… I have nothing to bury.’ One of the great horrors of the Holocaust was not simply that millions of Jews were murdered, but that so many were denied dignity even in death. Entire families vanished into gas chambers and crematoria, leaving behind no grave to visit, no body to mourn over, nothing to bury.

Or Levy described how, during the 491 days he was held hostage, he had no idea if his wife was alive. I thought of my grandmother’s family – trapped in a ghetto in Bulgaria, no idea if my great-grandfather lived after he was taken by soldiers to a concentration camp.

One of the videos explained how a group of festivalgoers hid in the home of a Holocaust survivor. It breaks my heart that those survivors have still never truly been allowed to separate themselves from such suffering – they have instead been reminded of their pain generations later.

It makes me ashamed to be British that Holocaust survivors in the UK no longer wish to live here. What does it tell us when British Jews may visit an exhibition detailing the deaths of hundreds of people in Israel for simply being Jewish, yet travel to the same land, seeking refuge, months later?

This interview with a pro-Palestinian activist on GB News’s Free Speech Nation shows the impact the Nova Exhibition can have. I’d urge everyone, whatever your views on the conflict in Gaza, to visit it with an open mind.

Nova Exhibition London is now open until 5 July. Find out more here.

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The next Academy of Ideas Battle Book Club will be discussing A Better Life by Lionel Shriver on Tuesday 30 June from 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm (via Zoom). The discussion is free to join and offers an opportunity to unpick questions of immigration and integration, home and community, responsibility and ambition. Find out more and register here.

Meanwhile, an Academy of Ideas member and political activist, who writes as J.R. Turner, has written a political thriller, State of Exception. Here, he explains why he wrote it and its themes below.

Claire

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How I accidentally wrote a political thriller

J.R. Turner

I did not set out to write a novel. I set out to get through a period of my life when my own mind would not switch off.

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I needed somewhere to put my thoughts that was not the diagnosis itself. I started writing – not with a plan, not with a publisher in mind, not even with a clear sense of what the story was. Just a character, a situation, and a political world that felt uncomfortably close to the one outside my window.

That was the beginning of State of Exception.

I wrote it chapter by chapter, mostly during the hours when sleep would not come. The story kept growing. Characters became real to me in the way fictional people sometimes do – not as constructs, but as people with pressures and histories and things they were trying to protect. The political world sharpened. The stakes got higher. By the time I put it all together, it was nearly a quarter of a million words, and had to become a duology.

I never thought of myself as a novelist. I am still not entirely sure I do. Which is perhaps why I write fiction as J. R. Turner – a small but necessary distance between the person who has to answer questions in public life and the one who gets to ask them on the page.

State of Exception follows a British prime minister navigating a series of crises that arrive, not one at a time, as they might in a more orderly world, but simultaneously and in ways that make each one harder to manage because of the others. A security threat. A constitutional rupture. An international situation that refuses to stay contained. A parliament that senses weakness and begins to move.

The prime minister at the centre of it is not a hero in any clean sense. He is competent, principled, and genuinely trying to do the right thing – but the novel is less interested in whether he succeeds than in what the effort costs him, and what it reveals about the system he is trying to hold together. His family are present throughout. So are his closest advisers, his Cabinet, his political opponents and the international figures applying pressure from the outside. The cast is large because the situation demands it. A crisis of this scale does not resolve in one room.

What interested me most in writing it was not the drama of the events themselves – though I hope the drama is there – but the machinery underneath. The way decisions actually get made in government. The way information moves, or fails to move. The way institutions that look solid from the outside can be revealed, under pressure, to be held together largely by convention and the willingness of people inside them to keep behaving as though the rules still apply – and what happens when that willingness starts to erode.

I work in politics. I have spent a long time paying close attention to the gap between what it looks like from the outside – the statements, the briefings, the performances – and what it actually feels like from inside the room where the real choices get made. That gap is where the novel lives. Fiction gave me the freedom to explore it in ways that a political speech, or a policy document, never could.

The themes that run through it are not ones I chose deliberately. They emerged from the story as I wrote it. Power and how it changes people. Loyalty and where its limits are. The difference between defending an institution and hiding behind it. The cost of leadership when the situation is genuinely hard and the easy options have already run out.

And underneath all of it, a question the book keeps returning to without ever quite answering directly: when a democratic system comes under serious pressure, what actually holds it together – the rules, or the people?

Book One is out now. Book Two is almost ready, and picks up directly where the first left off – the crises are not resolved so much as transformed. And somewhere in the insomnia that started all of this, an outline for a third novel, entirely unrelated to this one, has already begun to take shape.

I did not expect any of this. I started writing to get through something difficult. What I found, somewhere along the way, was that the story had more in it than I had put there – and that finishing it felt like it mattered, in a way I had not anticipated when I began.

Some distractions, it turns out, have more life in them than you expect. If a political thriller by a new writer is your cup of tea, you can buy State of Exception: Book 1 via Amazon.

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It’s the final weekend for applications to Living Freedom Summer School, the annual residential event organised by Ideas Matter. The deadline for applications is next Tuesday, 26 May. If you doubted the importance of participating in this event – or need an incentive to forward this Substack and spread the word to as many young people as possible – then a snapshot of the state of freedom over the past week should be persuasive.

Take the gathering of thousands from around the UK who descended on London last weekend to demand their voices be heard and express concerns over broken borders and a loss of cultural identity. Whatever one’s view of the organisers or their politics at the Unite the Kingdom rally, Keir Starmer’s decision to label attendees as ‘peddling hatred and division, plain and simple’ goes way beyond expressing political disagreement and amounts to yet another attempt to silence the people’s views by labelling them bigots.

Meanwhile, the rally and attendees were subject to extraordinary levels of political scrutiny and policing designed to restrict freedom in several new ways. Eleven foreign speakers – including democratically elected or prospective politicians such Flemish MP Filip Dewinter, Polish MEP Dominik Tarczyński and Republican candidate Valentina Gomez – were barred from entering the UK to address the crowds. Moreover, live facial-recognition technology was deployed on a march for the first time, scanning attendees across central London under the justification of preventing disorder and identifying extremists.

Under the radar, another dangerous new development became clear. Police warned that both the Unite the Kingdom and the Nakba marches, taking place on the same day, would be subject to a condition that ‘the responsibility [rests] on the organiser as well as the speaker to stay within the law (on hate speech)’. Since when did we legislate for guilt by association on public demonstrations? Further, phrases such as ‘death to the IDF’ or ‘globalise the intifada’ could reportedly trigger charges arising from the Nakba march. The police even warned that photographs shared online from the demonstrations could potentially constitute hate speech, depending on the hashtags used or the placards visible in the background. On that basis, should we ban photographs in textbooks about pre-war Germany because vile messages might be on show?

The fact that so many Britons are now looking to Donald Trump’s America as a defender of free speech is itself a sign of how demoralised some people are about the possibilities of changing our own political culture. The Trump administration’s forthcoming freedom.gov anti-censorship portal is reportedly being flooded with British users, who make up the clear majority of visitors to the holding page. That should embarrass Britain’s political class.

The answer cannot simply be outsourcing the defence of our liberty to America. If freedom is to flourish here, Britons themselves will have to rebuild the culture and institutions capable of defending it.

At Living Freedom, we operate under the banner that ‘every generation must renew freedom for its own times’. There is no better place to start than by engaging in the brilliant programme of discussion and debate at this year’s Living Freedom Summer School. Get your application in NOW!

About Living Freedom Summer School

Join us from 9-11 July in central London for lectures, panel debates and workshops led by a brilliant line-up of thinkers, authors, critics and campaigners – including Frank Furedi, Ella Whelan, Nigel Biggar, Rosie Kay and Timandra Harkness. Topics range widely across contemporary issues related to freedom and free speech – from ‘What is a citizen?’ to ‘How to cultivate intellectual virtue?’, from narrative control to women’s freedom, from banning social media for under-16s to how far we should tolerate the intolerant.

Our heavily subsidised tickets cost just £50 (a saving of £450) and include meals and accommodation.

Apply now for Living Freedom Summer School 2026 using the button below. For more context to this year’s event, see Living Freedom Substack.

APPLY FOR LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL

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