This week, media headlines focused on a report from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) that argued that people diagnosed with conditions such as anxiety, mild depression or ADHD should not be eligible for cash benefits. The report proposed that government should introduce an ‘emergency handbrake’ to cut the number of people who are receiving health and disability benefits. It argues such conditions should be classed as ‘non-work limiting’ - with people offered support rather than money.

Such policy proposals often lead to a backlash and, on cue, charities such as Mencap condemned the proposals, calling them ‘deeply unhelpful and ill-informed’. I am more sympathetic to TBI than those refusing to contemplate any challenge to orthodoxies around the huge numbers now self-describing or being diagnosed through the prism of neurodiversity or mental ill health. But I do agree, we all need to be better informed about this issue beyond headline-grabbing soundbites.

So, the Academy of Ideas was delighted to co-host the book launch of The Crisis in the Classroom: How the special needs explosion is destroying education, a new book by Dave Clements, published by Luath Press. We reproduce Dave’s speech from the launch below. This is an important book because it both passionately argues a viewpoint, but swerves away from an overly simplistic, black-and-white approach. It asks urgent questions on rising levels of diagnosed needs and behavioural difficulties in schools.

Combining personal accounts, cultural analysis and policy research, Dave’s book questions common explanations for where we are and instead calls for a more honest and critical conversation about how best to support young learners, while also calling for a radical rethink of policies and systems that are struggling to respond to a growing crisis in education today.

Dave – a regular speaker at the Battle of Ideas - probes difficult areas, unafraid to take on some sacred cows, querying why there is a surge in children requiring special educational support. Is there a problem of over-diagnosis? Is the explosion of those claiming the label a fashion or a genuine public-health crisis? What’s it really like for children and families living with neurodiversity?

As writer and broadcaster Dr Tiffany Jenkins, author of Strangers and Intimates notes, the book is ‘An urgent wake-up call to the harm the needs explosion is doing to school and our children, from someone with personal experience who can see the bigger picture.’ So, I urge you all to read it. You can order a copy of the book direct from Luath Press here. Further down the page, you can find links to audio from our related Battle of Ideas debates last year.

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The Crisis in the Classroom: opening remarks at book launch in Westminster

Dave Clements

I first presented the ideas contained in my new book, The Crisis in the Classroom: How the special educational needs explosion is destroying education, a year ago at a meeting of the Academy of Ideas Education Forum. I think that was when I first really understood how controversial it might be. Not because I was saying anything intrinsically shocking. Not because they disagreed. But because the teachers among them knew the things that I was saying, and the things that they were saying, could not be said in the staffroom.

And these were the brave teachers, the ones willing to question orthodoxies in education. I spoke to a few of those willing to speak publicly in the book. Indeed, the credit for my writing it at all lies with another teacher, Kevin Rooney. Having read a series of pieces I’d written on my Substack on the subjects of neurodiversity and special educational needs (SENs), he phoned me up and told me I should write a book about it.

We were coming at the subject from different perspectives: Kevin as a teacher troubled by the challenges associated with SEN; me as a parent struggling with the SEN system, and with schools, to get my son the support he needs. That dynamic, I hope, was a productive one – and led to a more nuanced take on the subject than it might have otherwise been.

So, what is it all about?

It’s not about my ‘lived experience’ – others have done that and done it well. At the same time, I think part of the problem we have – and part of the reason that we have what I describe as a ‘needs explosion’ at all – is a consequence of an unhealthy obsession with ourselves and our personal struggles. It isn’t always helpful.

What I do say in the book is that my son has autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and was also diagnosed with ADHD – both in his early school years. Both conditions feature strongly in the needs explosion. There are 1.2million people, children and adults, with autism and 2.2million with ADHD in England.

But I also talk about a whole host of other needs and behaviours that have spiked recently, where they might have come from, and the impact they are having in the classroom.

The book asks more questions than it answers. But they are, it seems to me, important questions and they aren’t really being asked. So that is what I do – I ask awkward questions. The first is the one that most of us are thinking when we read about this stuff, even those of us with kids with SENs.

‘Are they making it up?’
I talk about celebrities with ADHD and autism and those making a career of their conditions online. Are they spreading awareness, or are they just cashing in, or perhaps trying to stay in the public eye, or just making excuses for their dodgy behaviour? There is understandable cynicism about some of the claims being made about what are sometimes called ‘invisible disabilities’, about a culture of entitlement and the growing need for mitigations.

But also, it has to be said that it’s not always that simple. My lived experience of raising a child with a demand-avoidant profile - or what is sometimes called pathological demand-avoidance (PDA) - at least tells me that much. Demand avoidance sounds made-up, and maybe sometimes it is, but believe me it’s also very real and difficult to handle.

So, it’s not just a media or online phenomenon. It is both real for some and a wider cultural problem with real-world impact for others. The trouble is, knowing which is which can be very hard to disentangle.

Do we know what normal is?
The expansion of diagnostic categories can be a good thing - such as the recognition of what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. But it can also be a bad thing, as autism specialist Uta Frith recently, and controversially, explained. The autism spectrum is now so inclusive, she said, it has effectively ‘collapsed’. It has become meaningless.

It’s striking how much of this change, this particular expansion of a category of needs, can be traced back to the 1990s. Judy Singer coins the word ‘neurodiversity’. ADHD begins to be diagnosed in the UK. The term Asperger’s syndrome is popularised (until, that is, Hans Asperger’s Nazi links are uncovered). Each time expanding recognised needs still further.

In the postscript, I bring the book up to date with other examples of how this process of needs identification and expansion is playing out now: Mattel releases an autistic Barbie complete with noise-cancelling headphones and fidget-spinner; Alton Towers rows back on its decision not to allow those who say they struggle with crowds (in other words, kids with autism) to skip the queue.

But it’s the crisis in the classroom that I keep coming back to. I ask what’s so special about special educational needs if every child seems to have one? There are 1.7million children in England with SEND, half a million of them with an Education, Health and Care Plan (or EHCP) intended for children with the highest or most complex needs. Some of this is a consequence of more children presenting with ASD and ADHD – placing huge pressure on local authorities, with talk of bankruptcy and bailouts.

That would be challenging enough, but I also talk more broadly about the needy classroom – with rising numbers of exclusions, attendance issues and behaviour problems. It’s an explosion where everything is hitting at once, and in the classroom, in particular.

Where are all these needs coming from?
While schools are not blameless, there are problems affecting young people whose causes lie elsewhere. In a chapter called ‘Beyond the school gates’, I look at the wider context: at the mental-health crisis, the impact of lockdown, the growing welfare crisis, the panic over online influencers, social media and mobile phones, and the debate over boys’ education. I also look at how, despite all the concern and even hysteria, other problems – in communities and in families – go largely ignored.

There are real needs out there, but some of them are misattributed. The rise of identity politics, it seems to me, is a big part of the cause of escalating needs. But so, too, is the collapse of adult authority and any sense that we, as adults, are in this together, and have a collective responsibility for raising and educating our young people. This new politics of self-indulgence, and this failing authority and lack of solidarity among adults, has allowed the explosion to happen and are now getting in the way of containing it and clearing up the damage.

Schools aren’t blameless and neither are local authorities. I talk, as a parent and as a former school governor, about the SEND experience of a constant struggle for support and dealing with placement breakdown; about reduced timetables, school exclusions, and how many parents and children are often left to their own devices (often literally for the kids).

At the time of writing, parents and teachers alike were awaiting publication of a much-anticipated White Paper, and the launch of a consultation on SEND reforms. Their publication brought some good news. The restricting of EHCPs to those who really need them is controversial but a good thing in my view. However, the introduction of so-called inclusion bases (special provision in mainstream schools) is unlikely to meet the variety and volume of needs that kids are presenting with.

I talk in the book about the disruption that the needs explosion inevitably brings for all concerned, and the impossibility of meeting every child’s particular needs in the classroom. I am critical of the failure to tackle the ongoing mismatch of needs with support and provision – and how the ‘inclusion’ and ‘whole school’ ideologies are getting in the way of both children’s learning and of meeting genuine needs.

There are no easy answers to the questions I raise, but as I say in the concluding chapter – we can’t go on like this. The human and financial cost of both failed support and too much labelling are enormous. We need to get to grips with the underlying causes of the needs explosion. And that has to start by acknowledging that we have a problem. Too many are avoiding the issue or pretending that we can just throw more resources at it.

In the course of preparing for and writing The Crisis in the Classroom, I spoke to teachers who understood how bad things have got. But many are too nervous to speak out. They know it is taboo to ask questions. Others are admirably eager to appear autism-friendly, to go on the training, to accommodate fidgety ADHD kids, and attend to each and every ‘difference’ the kids in their classroom present with. There’s nothing wrong with this up to a point. But I think we’ve reached that point.

BUY THE CRISIS IN THE CLASSROOM

Listen to related debates

Battle Book Club: No More Normal – Mental Health in an Age of Over-Diagnosis
Battle of Ideas festival 2025

Should there be a mental-health professional in every school?
Battle of Ideas festival 2025

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An urgent question for the Labour government: does your left hand know what the right is doing?

Yesterday, the Guardian reported that: ‘Rachel Reeves is considering imposing a one-year rent freeze on private sector homes amid growing alarm in government about the impact of the Iran war on voters’ budgets.’ Under pressure from the Greens, who have been banging the drum for rent freezes, is the government using this as a last resort to shore up support, particularly with younger voters who are flocking to the Greens en masse? As recent polling from YouGov shows, that 36 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds intend to vote for the Greens, compared to 24 per cent who intend to vote Labour.

Yet Labour briefings about a rent freeze seem rather odd considering that just last week, the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, told parliament that there were no such plans. ‘The government does not support the introduction of rent controls, which we believe could make life more difficult for renters. There is sufficient international evidence from countries such as Sweden and Germany, and from individual cities such as San Francisco, as well as the recent Scottish experience, to attest to the potential detrimental impacts of rent controls on tenants.’

Indeed, just yesterday morning, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, told Times Radio: ‘That isn’t something that we are actively considering, just to be completely clear, that is not the approach we will be taking.’ But the chancellor is concerned, as we all are, about the impact of the conflict in the Middle East on family finances and is looking at what more might be required to help get through this.’ By the afternoon, the ‘kite-flying’ exercise was being disowned by Downing Street.

Whatever is going on with rent controls, the government is doing its level best to make rental accommodation more expensive and less available, thanks to the Renters’ Rights Act. The law will make it harder for landlords to evict tenants, unless they are selling the property or moving into it. The idea of signing a fixed-term contract to rent your house out is now dead. And whatever the plans for rent freezes turn out to be, an independent tribunal will now decide if a rent rise is beyond the ‘market price’.

Along with other measures, these changes will certainly encourage many landlords to sell up, leaving renters fighting over a smaller pool of properties.

Pennycook is quite right to point to the voluminous evidence showing that rent controls aren’t in the best interest of renters – and that the Green Party’s housing policy – which seems to go beyond rent controls to abolishing private landlords altogether – is, frankly, boneheaded. The best way to reduce the price of something is to increase the supply. If we want to cut the cost of housing, we need to build more homes – yet another thing the Labour government has failed to do.

Yet all this talk of rent freezes isn’t the daftest announcement of a price control of late. The SNP’s manifesto for the Scottish Parliament elections next month promises to cap prices for essential foods: ‘The system would require large supermarkets to make one example line of the listed essential food items available at the capped price and would not require them to make every variation of that type of food they stock available at that price.’

Hmmm… price controls don’t seem to be within the Scottish government’s remit. Never mind, it will be pushed through, the SNP says, as a public-health measure like minimum unit pricing for alcohol. But even if this ruse were to succeed, the groceries sector is probably the most competitive market sector in the UK, so the idea that prices can be significantly lowered by government diktat seems to be for the birds.

If the Scottish government attempts to push prices down below cost, supply will dry up or other prices will be increased to compensate. And if the UK government tells the SNP that they are acting beyond their powers? Well, it’s another excuse for the SNP to blame Westminster for something. One thing is for sure: Scots won’t be benefiting from lower grocery bills.

Meanwhile the Greens have another big idea: to regulate the price of labour. They want to impose a maximum differential on company pay, so the best-paid staff can’t be paid more than 10 times what the lowest-paid staff get. As many have pointed out, this would destroy football’s Premier League in a stroke. A top player can earn 10 times in a week what an average person earns in a year. Big corporations would struggle to recruit the best staff for their top jobs.

As Dominic Lawson pointed out in The Sunday Times on Sunday, price controls have been around since the Emperor Diocletian in 310 AD. Like a turd from a blocked sewage pipe, the idea floats up from time to time – and every time it is a failure. When prices are set too low, suppliers stop supplying. Rather than benefiting ordinary people, price controls end up hurting them. Pay less, queue more for the limited supplies.

Politicians should know this. But when the economy is moribund, with GDP per person currently flatlining – substantially because of other stupid government policies, like planning restrictions on building, higher employment taxes or Net Zero targets for climate change – then Something Must Be Done. That ‘something’ all too often makes things even worse. Rather than sticking one Band Aid on top of another, perhaps it would be better for governments to promise to get out of the way and let the market get on with it.

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But look closer and the picture is less settled. The same forces reshaping politics in England and Wales – the decay of incumbent parties and the rise of anti-establishment sentiment – are present north of the border.

Our podcast guest Dean Thomson’s new book Scotland Undone: Nationalism, Dogma, and Decline in the Devolution Era casts light on these changes. His argument is blunt: there is a yawning gap between SNP rhetoric and reality. Scotland is sold by some as a story of renewal, bringing power closer to the people. But in practice it resembles a cautionary tale – less an exception to Westminster decay and more a laboratory for the institutional sclerosis and state dysfunction now spreading south. In many ways, the ‘Scottish Question’ - as I have put it in our Letter on Liberty - is both a long way from being settled and an encapsulation of the many issues facing the UK more broadly.

Labour’s woes

Labour has long been marginalised in Holyrood, out of office since 2007 and, by 2021, reduced to winning less than one in seven voter. Yet just two years ago, when Labour regained power in Westminster, hopes were high that Labour could also recapture Holyrood.

Certainly, Labour’s plight in Scotland is likely to be less eye-catching than elsewhere. In England, voters are set to eject 2,000 councillors amid near-total collapse of the Red Wall and even some of its urban heartlands. In Wales, one survey suggests that, after a century dominating the political map, Labour will become a small island in a sea of green and blue. Yet Labour’s Westminster catastrophe – a string of policy disasters and mounting public anger – seems to be feeding their Holyrood angst. Scots Labour leader Anas Sarwar even called for Keir Starmer’s head in an attempt to staunch a haemorrhaging Labour vote.

The beneficiaries of Labour’s woes – at least in the short-term – are the SNP, which continues to benefit from the exhaustion of traditional parties. But another term in office should not be interpreted as renewed strength. Indeed, while the SNP may win broadly similar seat numbers to 2021, they are being abandoned by supporters, with up to a third of voters expected to drift away.

That is hardly surprising. After years in office, the SNP presides over an anaemic economy, a collapse in public services such as health, education and policing, and infrastructure failures from ferries to roads. Controversial – and unpopular – policies on hate crime and gender have generated hostility; independence seems to be off the agenda; and simple appeals to anti-Westminster grievance no longer seems to suffice. Meanwhile, those committed to ‘progressive’ causes head to the Greens and their increasingly outlandish proposals, from prison abolition to colonial reparations.

Are Reform UK rising in Scotland?

Yet it’s the rise of Reform UK that does most to undermine the idea that Scotland is exceptional in the Union. Instead, it is clear that Scotland reflects the wider political divides in the UK and Europe. Despite having no presence in Scotland just five years ago, Reform are attracting levels of support that mean it may even form the main opposition in Holyrood.

To no-one’s surprise, detractors allege that Reform are playing the race card. But critics fail to recognise the growing tensions in Scotland over the UK’s porous borders. Glasgow is now Britain’s asylum seeker capital and asylum hotels also affect life in smaller centres like Falkirk and Perth. But this is far from the whole story.

Reform want to reduce Scotland’s eye-wateringly high taxes, tear apart the ‘quangocracy’, create opportunities for business, push back against Net Zero, and back Scotland’s oil and gas industry (the latter policy eventually helping shame the SNP into expressing mild support for continued drilling of oil).

Yet, just as Scotland mirrors political divides elsewhere in Britain, many political and cultural changes incubated over 25-plus years of devolution are now bleeding into the wider UK.

Deep-rooted failures in Scottish government

At the heart of Scotland’s malaise is a chronic failure of governance which actively degrades the economic and institutional foundations required for success. The so-called ‘wellbeing economy’ prioritises happiness metrics and environmental targets over growth. Predictably, this invites costly misadventures. Self-inflicted catastrophes like the Deposit Return Scheme have collapsed – but not before businesses had sunk £300 million into compliance. Likewise, the rush to decommission oil and gas in favour of wind – now echoed at UK level – risks long-term economic damage for the sake of virtue signalling.

The deeper problem is institutional. Devolution has weakened democratic accountability while empowering a managerial class more attuned to ideology than any outcomes rooted in public aspirations. Scotland has, in effect, pioneered the rise of the ‘lanyard class’ – credentialled professionals embedded within public bodies and quasi-state institutions, largely insulated from meaningful scrutiny.

These networks were not accidental. The devolved architecture set up by New Labour dispersed power into arms-length bodies, reducing accountability while giving activists free rein. The result is a politics that is detached from public priorities. High-profile controversies – such as health boards expending vast sums defending ideological causes such men’s access to women’s changing rooms, all while thousands join NHS waiting lists – illustrate the problem. We should all worry that Labour plans to roll out further devolution right across the rest of the UK.

As Thomson notes, political life once rested on ‘collateral organisations’ – local associations, trade unions, churches – which anchored power and enforced a degree of accountability. As that that ecosystem withered, it has been replaced by a pseudo civil society of state-funded NGOs and charities, while real decision-making drifts upwards to remote, unaccountable officials. The result is that Scottish politics has become increasingly detached from public priorities – and even from common sense – leaving the wider public bewildered.

Look across the UK and a similar pattern is hard to miss. Failures of the state to protect citizens or reflect their concerns – from the rape gangs to the failures revealed in the Nottingham or Southport inquiries – point to the same institutional drift. The dynamics first embedded in devolution-era Scotland now look less like an anomaly and more like the template quietly exported across Britain.

If the outcome of the 7 May elections is that Scottish voters have taken the opportunity to strike an anti-establishment blow against the current political class, then we should all raise a glass.

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If you enjoyed this, or the video with Dean, please check out his work:

• You can find him on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/deanmthomson

• And you should read his book: Scotland Undone: Nationalism, Dogma, and Decline in the Devolution Era

You can read and purchase Alastair Donald’s Letter on Liberty ‘The Scottish Question’ on our website here:

• Letters on Liberty, The Scottish Question

Currently, there is a mad dash to shove through as many laws as possible before parliament is prorogued. Seeing the amount of horse trading and backroom deals involved – all resulting in worse laws being passed – would be enough to disillusion even the most earnest legislator. If only the public knew, I keep reflecting (while trying to reveal what I can).

But this corruption of law-making pales into insignificance compared to the never-ending scandal created by the Prime Minister’s appointment of Peter Mandelson. It really reveals not just the shadiness of the SW1 machine, but at the same time the total emptiness of the politics of Keir Starmer. Even discounting what Starmer knew and when, one really thinks he brought this whole thing on himself; the arch technocrat undone by the most technocratic of scandals.

What an unedifying and dispiriting backdrop to the local elections. This important democratic exercise – which, to remind ourselves, the government tried to cancel a large part of – puts the power to shape politics in the hands of voters. Sir Keir’s sanctimonious managerialism – lashing out and blaming anyone but himself for the mess – seems to represent the antithesis of this kind of democratically accountable power. Indeed, Starmer’s evasiveness calls into question the very purpose of Government: the responsibility to steer and shape society, look out for its security, and ensure its public services are well-provisioned.

It is easy to become preoccupied with internal regime change. Calls for Keir Starmer to resign, demands for no-confidence votes and so on, were reinforced by the incompetence and cowardice on display in that excruciating two-hour Starmer-grilling in the Commons. The more we hear about the internal workings of Number 10, the worse it gets. There was the mind-boggling revelation that someone in Number 10 thought any comms guy (let alone a dodgy Comms guy like Matthew Doyle, recently suspended from Labour over links to ANOTHER paedophile) could be shoehorned into a senior diplomatic post. And let us not forget the utterly stupid decision to summarily sack Olly Robbins (rather ironic coming from a political party that has hectored employers about the importance of employment rights). The examples all point to a mammoth lack of judgement by Starmer.

Apart from anything else, this has turned a leading member of ‘The Blob’, into a martyred, hard-done-by victim. It has also lifted a lid on the intricacies of procedure: watching the forensic questioning of Sir Olly by (to her credit) Emily Thornberry MP, one might believe that all we need is to become better informed about the minutiae of vetting procedures.

But let us not get drawn into the technocratic weeds. In the first place, it risks painting the civil service (who we know are all-too-often a brake on democratic decision-making) as the victims of a political psychodrama.

But more fundamentally, a ‘Starmer-is-the-problem’ narrative misses the point of a deeper crisis of the state. How telling that ministers are so indignantly furious at the leak to The Guardian – the only reason the public now know that the Prince of Darkness failed a security vetting procedure – that they’ve set up an urgent Inquiry.

These are the same Ministers who endlessly and disgracefully prevaricated before setting up the rape grooming gangs inquiry in relation to one of the greatest state cover-ups of sexual abuse in modern history. The same Ministers who glibly tell us ‘Lessons will be learned’ in response to the shocking confirmation by the Southport Inquiry that the massacre of those three little girls by Axel Rudakabana was “PREVENTABLE” but state agencies ignored the evil hiding in plain sight.

And if you want a vivid, horrifying example of the state’s contempt and indifference to citizens’ safety, follow the Nottingham Inquiry into Valdo Calocane’s brutal murder of 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and caretaker Ian Coates. Also preventable. And as Labour peer Lord George Robertson framed it, calling out his own Government over their failure to rearm the UK at speed in the face of growing threats (while welfare spending rises exponentially), we have a political elite dominated by“corrosive complacency” about the state of the state. Something must be done.

Such examples – and there are so many more – remind us that while the state’s legitimacy can only be conferred by the people – the demos – it often appears the contemporary state is set explicitly against ordinary people, who are seen as a problem to be managed, a source of danger, as something for the state to be protected from. That’s one reason that I will be attending Ideas Matter’s Academy this year, aptly titled HOLLOW LEVIATHAN: THE STATE AGAINST THE DEMOS (August 22-23). Tickets and more here: Hollow Leviathan: the state against the demos - The Academy 2026 - Ideas Matter

And, as ever, some of my recent speeches below:

On the social media ban for young people

On the Southport Inquiry

On GB News discussing our zombie parliament:

Thinking through the issue of assisted dying at a deeper and more philosophical level than sound-bites is so important. It’s a morally charged, often emotional topic and can be polarising. But it’s also cuts to foundational values like autonomy, attitudes to death, how society views its most vulnerable citizens, and how the state should relate to its citizen’s end-of-life needs.

This Battle of Ideas panel gives a taster of what is at stake.

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This is an issue close to my heart as from many months now I have been entangled in debating the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill in the House of Lords. Indeed, next Friday will be the last scheduled debate on the Bill in the Lords. The legislation will not have been completed before prorogation the following week (we are due to ‘break up’ on 30 April or the start of May), so the Bill will fall – for now, at least.

For those who support assisted dying – many for understandable reasons because they have watched loved ones suffer at the end of life or because they themselves want the right to choose when they die having received a terminal diagnosis – this will be a disappointment. After all they were assured that having passed through the House of Commons, the House of Lords scrutiny of the Bill would be a formality. However, once we all read the proposed law change, many of us felt there were just too many dangers in a poorly drafted Bill to allow it to be nodded through without proper and detailed scrutiny, which is – after all – the whole point of a second chamber.

This led to a scurrilous campaign to discredit those who tabled the most amendments. There have been unjust accusations of filibustering, and unpleasant media briefing against a range of peers, not least two heroines of this story: Baroness Ilora Findley of Llandaff and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson. Together with a cross-party and cross-bench group of peers, they have tirelessly raised profound, well-evidenced, thought-provoking amendments.

I made a modest contribution – have spoken every week, read around all the issues and then tried to raise genuine issues and areas of concern. All of this was done in good faith and as a few of my speeches show below, were not slick, PR-driven, cynical attempts at stopping the Bill. Rather, we were tentatively pushing the sponsors of the Bill, led by Lord (Charlie) Falconer, to explain where there were safeguarding gaps or asking for clarification about exactly how a state-run / NHS assisted-death service would operate in practice, how it would be paid for, and what other provisions – such as palliative care or hospices – could be sacrificed to allow the government to cover the costs of this new provision.

So yes, I am glad to see the back of this particular Bill for now. And as a private members’ bill, it has been given far more time than any equivalent. We know that Keir Starmer promised a new law to Esther Rantzen. But law-making and legislative priorities should not be determined by keeping promises to the prime minister’s celebrity friends. If the government really believes we need this Bill, they should have the courage to table it themselves and put it in their manifesto, etc.

Claire Fox speeches on assisted dying

Question on assisted dying - 19 September 2025

Question on eligibility for assisted dying - 20 March 2026

Question on doctors raising assisted suicide - 13 March 2026

Question on assisted suicide/dying commissioner - 27 February 2026

Invitation to next week’s Bookshop Barnie

You are cordially invited to the next free Bookshop Barnie with Kathleen Stock to discuss her new book Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death.

The discussion will be on ZOOM on Monday 20 April, from 7pm – 8:30pm UK-time. (Please pass this on to interested friends and colleagues.)

Please register here on EVENTBRITE

INTRODUCTION
Is the right to die a meaningful right? Lord Glasman has said that this is merely a ‘fetish of choice’, but is it compassionate to keep people alive against their will? What powers might this give the state – and what freedom might it give an individual?

This is an important and timely debate. While the Guardian says Stock’s book is ‘admirably clear and cogent’, David Aaronovitch in the FT is less complimentary, saying that she ‘knows what you really need better than you do’. The New Statesman says that it is ‘simplistic’, but the Telegraph says that it’s ‘intellectually powerful’. This is clearly a polarised discussion.

SPEAKER
Professor Kathleen Stock is a columnist at UnHerd and a co-director of The Lesbian Project. Until 2021, she was a professor of Philosophy at Sussex University and was awarded an OBE for services to higher education in 2020.

ABOUT BOOKSHOP BARNIES
Bookshop Barnies are ‘alternative book launches’ in that they ask authors to present the core ideas of their book in just FIVE minutes... and then we have a bit of a barnie before coming out for questions and comments from the audience.

NB: You DO NOT have to read this book in advance. Kathleen’s job is to convince you that it’d be a good idea. That said, the book is available via Amazon.

This event is FREE & ONLINE but please register on EVENTBRITE. We will send the Zoom link to registrants nearer the day.

DATE: Monday 20 April 2026

TIME: 7:00pm-8:30pm (UK-time)

I look forward to seeing you there.

Austin Williams
convenor, Bookshop Barnies

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Whenever I come across ideas from classical philosophy within contemporary social and political contexts, I try to make a point of highlighting them and explaining the link to Ancient Greece, especially in discussions on Plato’s work. Recently, the government’s announcement of plans to reduce the number of trials by jury, alongside the recent lecture named ‘Why I hate Classical Civilisation’ by Sir Grayson Perry at Kings College London, have highlighted the continued tilt away from Greek civilisational ideas in modern politics.

This leads me to a series of questions posed in the next session in our Plato’s Republic series at the Classical Philosophy Reading Group. (You can watch our previous sessions on YouTube.) These questions relate to the state of civilisational values today. What is the nature of justice in the abstract? How can you live a moral life? What kind of legal and political framework guides you in living a moral life?

Taking it back to Ancient Greece, Plato was not the first to engage with the problem of laws and morality in Athens. In The Republic, Glaucon recalls the tale of the Ring of Gyges, in which a shepherd finds a ring of invisibility and uses it to kill the king and seduce his wife. The challenge put to Socrates is how can he say the moral life is the better and more rewarding life? Would he refuse temptations put before him? [1] This had already provoked questions about the nature of justice in ancient Athens. Historically, how did the system of laws arise?

The realisation of a need for clear laws seemed to start with Drako’s laws. These were ‘draconian’, to say the least. Most minor infringements were to be met with the death penalty. Thus, they were later reformed to be more humane and, to some extent, equitable.

The Athenian statesman Solon tried to re-draft these laws so that they could, to some extent, be accepted by the entire community. Solon, who was recognised as one of the ‘seven sages of Athens’, left little behind, but his story is to be found in Plutarch’s Greek Lives. [2] His laws were formulated to bring about social peace and prevent social unrest between the elite and the lower castes. His most famous reform was to abolish the enslavement of farmers who went into debt, attempting to give everyone a stake in society and to challenge the highly rigid social hierarchy of the time.

More lastingly, Solon enshrined in the constitution the right to trial by a jury of your peers, albeit that his jury would consist of between 200 and 6,000 citizens. Socrates himself was tried before such a jury. According to Aristotle, Solon’s laws were the whole basis of Athenian democracy. [3] So, trial by jury was a foundation stone of democracy. Perhaps David Lammy, the justice secretary, should be reminded of this as he attempts to reduce the number of trials by jury. It would seem our government has a thing or two to learn from the ancient Athenians in this regard if they want to continue to call themselves democrats.

On the theme of the erosion of respect for the democratic principles of which Western civilization was founded, the second thing that struck me recently was the notice I received of the Kings College London (KCL) Classics department’s annual Rumble Fund lecture, This year’s lecture on 12 March was given by Sir Grayson Perry (the 2003 Turner Prize winner). The lecture was entitled ‘Why I hate Classical Civilisation’ and was devoted to illuminating Perry’s ‘grievance’ with the classics.

There seems to be a clear mismatch between Perry’s thoughts and the purpose of the Rumble Fund and KCL’s Classics department, but apparently not. KCL treated its audience to the insights of Perry who said: ‘There’s a ghost of classical civilisation that is haunting me in the back of my mind.’ He could hardly have been more explicit:

My dislike of ancient Greece and Rome is not necessarily aligned to any fashionable ideological causes. The classics are often used to bolster or lend credibility to a right-wing, authoritarian, patriarchal, Eurocentric, white-supremacist view of the world, but that is not principally why I dislike them. For me, it is more personal, more irrational, more enjoyable. I love a good grievance.

Surely this should have been seen as an affront to the KCL Classics department, as what was supposed to be a ‘thoughtful, provocative and personal lecture’, according to Will Wootton, professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Kings, was actually more akin to a two-hour struggle session.

Perhaps this is not surprising, it feels like just the same trite messaging as Perry’s own art. I remember seeing Perry’s pottery in the run up to his winning the Turner Prize. His pottery looks beautiful from a distance (and undoubtedly has artistic merit). But when you get up close, the pots are emblazoned in ‘shocking’ images and slogans like ‘Never have kids’ and ‘All men are bastards’. [4] Being hectored by his ‘political’ art is not very illuminating at all, except for promoting explicitly arguably anti-civilisational messages.

But while an eccentric artist may be free to have his opinion on the ‘outdated’ ideas of classical philosophy, it was KCL’s decision to highlight this position over a more nuanced discussion – which suggests that even those seemingly most invested in promoting ancient philosophy seem to be retreating from some of its core ideas and principles.

Shockingly, not only was Perry’s invitation a potential intellectual betrayal, but it was also the last of the annual lectures put on by the Rumble Fund. This was the sign off. That’s the last word on the subject. In a context of broader focus in relation to the teaching of the classics – that they should be decolonised and deconstructed – KCL’s decision to put Perry’s hatred of classical civilisation centre stage, along with banal political messages from the elite’s playbook, seems like yet another insidious, passive-aggressive attempt at undermining Western culture, sweeping it under the carpet to be forgotten, driven by a self-loathing war on the classics.

Luckily, the Academy of Ideas, amongst others, will resist.

David Perks is convenor of the Classical Philosophy Reading Group. The next discussion is Plato’s Republic Session 4 - Stephanus number 376 to 412 – on Sunday 17 May, 18:00 to 19:30 (UK) via Zoom. Find out more and book via Eventbrite. David will be speaking at Leeds Salon on Saturday 6 June on the topic ‘Why Read Plato’s Republic Today?’, part of Leeds Lit Fest 2026. Find out more here.

Notes

[1] Plato, Republic, p47, translated by Robin Waterfield, 2008, Oxford World’s Classics

[2] Plutarch, Solon in Greek Lives, p47-77, translated by Robin Waterfield, 2008, Oxford World’s Classics

[3] Constitution of Athens, Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1995, Princeton University Books

[4] Grayson Perry, We’ve Found the Body of Your Child, 2000, glazed earthenware

Exactly a year ago, I wrote this to celebrate the amazing victory at the Supreme Court. We all hoped this would clarify, once and for all, that a woman is indeed an adult human female, and that single-sex provision would never be challenged again.

However, the magnificent For Women Scotland trio – and all those grassroots organisations that had fought so hard for that win, suffering the indignity of cancelation, demonisation and threats to livelihoods and sometimes their lives for daring to change trans ideology – were not able to retire and bask in victory. Because on the first birthday of that triumph, it’s been a case of two steps forward, one (and a half) steps back. The fight is still on.

I discussed this with Penny Dee on her excellent podcast:

We also discussed this issue at Battle of Ideas North recently – listen here:

LISTEN TO THE DEBATE

On Saturday, I attended and spoke at one of the many ‘#One Year Later – we’re back’ protests organised by #199 Days Later. With its apt slogan ‘#TickTock’, it was an inspiring show of solidarity and determination to thousands of us who are furious that the Labour Government - which parrots compliance with the clarification of the equality law – continues to scandalously drag its feet on issuing and implementing Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance.

The minister for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson, has used every ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuse going. The former chair of the EHRC, Baroness Falkner, believes Phillipson’s tardiness in publishing the guidance is because she is scared of trans rights activists (TRAs) in her party and in the unions. Disgracefully, in response, a ‘Labour source’ responded with Labour’s go-to accusation of stoking up ‘culture wars’ to close down criticism. Yesterday, we were told that Phillipson has asked the EHRC to ‘tone down’ the guidance to make it ‘more inclusive’, with a commitment to publish once parliament resumes after prorogation in May. Critics think this is just more delaying tactics and undue political interference.

Smears about tone and culture wars won’t distract us from the facts. The consequence of the government letting the Code of Practice gather dust has been a belligerent institutional refusal to change policies to comply with the law. Instead, NGOs, HR departments, public-sector organisations from the NHS to universities, charities, trade unions, private-sector EDI managers, etc, have boasted of their continued commitment to trans inclusion, at the expense of women.

This was the theme of many of the short, three-minute speeches at the Manchester #OneYearLater protest. One very striking example was given by a former police detective and co-founder of Police SEEN UK, Charlotte Cadden, and she has kindly given us permission to reproduce her speech below. You can watch my speech on the film below as well. In the meantime, despite all these challenges, let’s acknowledge that the reason the UK is dubbed TERF ISLAND is precisely because bottom-up activism has changed the conversation on sex and gender, and I have no doubt that the sheer dogged and dedication of campaigners will prevail in the end.

Happy Supreme Court Ruling anniversary!

Claire

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Speech on policing at 199 Days Later event, Manchester

Charlotte Cadden

Thanks to the 199 Days Later grassroots collective for organising these incredible events across the UK and Europe.

I am not speaking on behalf of any organisation today.

Thanks to For Women Scotland for taking the fight for women’s rights to the Supreme Court and winning.

As a former police officer in Greater Manchester Police and the Met, I am here to tell you what went wrong in policing and why chief constables refused to welcome the Supreme Court judgement in April 2025.

The judgement confirmed what we knew all along: that a woman is an adult human female.

What did go wrong?
In short – it was the combined efforts of Stonewall & the national Police LGBTQIA+ Network, now led by Chief Constable Vanessa Jardine of Northumbria Police.

Let’s take a look at Exhibit Reference CC1: Trans Guidance for the Policing Sector, published in 2018. This was the beginning of the prioritisation of gender identity over sex by policing. Here’s an example from that guidance: individuals who identify as gender-fluid may require two warrant cards to reflect their gender on different days.

So who endorsed it? The National Police Chiefs Council, the National LGBT Police Network, the Police Federation and Unison.

Trans Guidance for the Policing Sector is a safeguarding failure for women, children and LGB people. One of Chief Constable Jardine’s first priorities as national LGBTQ lead was to enable male Police Officers who identified as women & lesbians, to strip search vulnerable women in custody.

So let’s take a look at exhibit reference CC2: Chief Constables’ Council Minutes, December 2021

Chief Constable Jardine attended the National Police Chiefs Council in Dec 2021 to ask all the other chief constables to allow policemen who say they are women, to be permitted to strip search vulnerable women in custody, which is against Police and Criminal Evidence Act rules.

Q: How many of the 46 chief constables agreed?
A: All of them!

When this policy was agreed, the Women’s Rights Network challenged it because they knew it was unlawful. Respect to Cathy Larkman for raising the red flag on this safeguarding failure!

What needs to happen now?

• Chief Constables should apologise to women (instead of to Peter Tatchell) for not applying the Equality Act correctly over the past 10 years

• The College of Policing to buy-in unbiased training on the Equality Act 2010, the Gender Recognition Act, and Workplace Health & Safety Regulations 1992

• For anyone in the Police worried about unlawful workplace policies or wanting to have their gender-critical beliefs upheld, consider joining @PoliceSEENUK

• For any LGB police employees worried about their rights to be same-sex attracted, consider joining LGB Alliance. I can highly recommend!

• Finally, a massive thanks to FairCop, Harry Miller, Sarah Philimore, Linzi Smith, the FSU, WRN and LGB Alliance for continuing to hold the police to account.

Charlotte Cadden is the co-founder of Police SEEN UK.

Claire Fox speech in Manchester

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I hope you had a happy Easter. Someone who perhaps didn’t was security guard Walker Smith, who was controversially sacked by Waitrose, after 17 years of employment, for tackling a repeat-offending shoplifter trying to pilfer Lindt Gold Bunny Easter eggs. This came hot on the heels of high-profile shoplifting mobbing incidents that caused chaos in both London and Birmingham as the Easter holidays kicked off. Inspired by online ‘link-ups’ on TikTok and Snapchat, the marauding teens boasted of their successful lawlessness and posted videos of their antics on social media.

So the whole nation watched on aghast as swarming youth seemed to act with impunity, without police intervention. And oh, what an irony that our 54-year-old heroic thief-tackler worked in Waitrose in Clapham Junction branch in south London. It was elsewhere in Clapham that only days before witnessed youths terrifying shoppers by storming into Marks & Spencer on Clapham High Street – for two nights running – at one stage leading to families being locked in a shop to keep them safe.

This has all led to a debate over Easter about whether the corporate norm of ordering shop-staff not to intervene to tackle shoplifters, despite increasing numbers of retail thefts, is ridiculous and demoralising. How can this not equate to an open invitation to every thief in town? Doesn’t this teach the young the lesson that stealing from shops can happen without retribution?

One positive outcome is the number of people putting Waitrose under growing pressure to reinstate Walker Smith. The broadcaster Iain Dale said on his LBC radio show: ‘If any member of my staff had tackled a shoplifter like he [Smith] did, I would have wanted to give them a pay rise, not sack them… To me, he’s a hero, but to them he’s just nothing.’ The shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, called on Waitrose to reinstate Smith, accusing the supermarket of acting ‘disgracefully’ and suggested that Smith should be paid a bonus ‘for his bravery and initiative… store staff and the public should be supported and encouraged to intervene… Otherwise, shoplifting will continue to surge unchecked.’ This article by Brendan O’Neill on spiked is worth a read on the topic.

These incidents come amid a rise in shoplifting, with offences increasing by five per cent in the year to September 2025, according to the latest figures. Research by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) found 59 per cent of high-street small firms in London say increasing crime or anti-social behaviour poses a big risk to the high street, with some shopkeepers saying they are being targeted by thieves on a daily basis.

The government’s response has been suitably technocratic. Of course, it’s a no-brainer that Labour is repealing that daft immunity granted to shop theft of goods worth £200 or less. But how effective will this be if policing doesn’t respond accordingly or if security guards are prevented from intervening as the thefts take place?

I am more bemused than impressed by the much-vaunted law change that will create a standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker. However, as I argued in the Lords, it’s already a crime to assault ANYONE. How will this specific offence guarantee protection for retail staff, if policing is already inconsistent in how it deals with assault more generally?

But maybe a deeper question is what leads to such lawlessness, with so many citizens – especially younger generations – behaving with such contempt for law and order and so indifferent to a more pro-social attitude to communities. We discussed these issues at the past two Battle of Ideas festivals – both debates are worth listening to (see below).

Moreover, the attitude of political activists seems to have added to the erosion of respect for social norms. The Telegraph has revealed that ‘Tax the rich’ activists are planning to steal ‘essential items’ from luxury grocery stores and to ‘occupy’ shop floors of high-end supermarkets as part of a shoplifting crime spree between 20 April and 10 May. In preparation, Take Back Power has been running ‘non-violent direct action’ and ‘demystifying arrest’ training sessions at sites across the country, to recruit and prepare for its new campaign of shop thefts.

This politicised apologism for crime is well described by Austin Williams in his article for The Future Cities Project, which we reproduce with his permission below.

Listen to the debates

Lawless Britain?
Battle of Ideas festival 2025

LISTEN HERE

From riots to shoplifting: dealing with lawlessness
Battle of Ideas festival 2024

LISTEN HERE

Can Pay, Won’t Pay

Austin Williams

There is an interesting debate raging about the recent youth unrest in Clapham and Solihull, where gangs of teenagers – some masked – raided supermarkets, attacked staff and rampaged through the city streets in broad daylight.

In some instances, shoppers were allegedly locked in the premises for their own safety as hundreds of young people looted Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and McDonalds, seemingly with impunity. These and other stores in the vicinity were forced to close early to avoid being gutted. At the time of writing there have only been a few arrests, most notably six teenage girls, including two aged 13, who have been taken into custody for theft and assaulting an emergency worker.

Apparently, the trouble started at Clapham Common in south London, when around 300 young people raced across to the town centre and attempted to ransack the Marks & Spencer food hall. In-store and camera phone footage shows two or three police attempting to break things up. Later that day in Clapham, around 100 officers were called in to control the crowds.

The police issued a 36-hour dispersal order over large swathes of Solihull town centre to break up the possibility of a repeat of the actions of recent nights. The primary condition for being caught in the dispersal net is that the police might ‘suspect’ that a person ‘is likely to contribute’ to causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’. These orders, explicitly draconian in content, give the authorities the right to ban anyone from certain public areas at a stroke. While it might seem that this is necessary in this instance, the extension of banning orders – shunting people to other parts of the town – is taking the place of policing.

The Metropolitan police say that specialist officers are going through CCTV to identify offenders in a post-hoc exercise. It seems that stopping crime is less important than picking up some of the perpetrators afterwards, preferably using camera footage and ID-monitoring. The message is that you can wantonly pillage, rob and vandalise, but at least a few of you ought to be nervous about being arrested sometime in the future.

The common response to criminality seems to be more facial-recognition technology to catch people after the event. Sir Robert Peel’s policing principles began with the claim: ‘The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals. If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights.’ Sadly, nowadays, this often gives free rein for pre-crime supporters to demand that authorities pick people up without explanation.

What was the cause of this rampage? The Times’s journalists blamed parents, the Guardian newspaper and the BBC blamed social media and ‘online trends’, GB News blamed the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, while the Daily Mirror blamed ‘Easter holiday madness’. Journalist Fraser Nelson blamed truancy, while a chicken-shop owner on Clapham High Street reputedly said, ‘this is just what kids do; I’m not worried about it‘.

The cause is partly due to the collapse of law and order, where shoplifting is sometimes considered too petty to be worthy of police time. Admittedly, the Crime and Policing Bill 2026 aims to ‘remove the perceived immunity granted to shop theft of goods to the value of £200 or less’, but no one seems to have told the youth of Clapham and Solihull. But everyone knows that while Parliament spends its time inventing ever more crimes, that the odds of being caught are slim, and the lack of prison spaces means that sentencing is a mere slap on the wrist.

The other side of the coin is that any distinction between anti-social behaviour and criminality has become blurred. Notwithstanding petty rule-breaking – where people increasingly cycle on pavements and disrespect civic authorities, for example – there is now a pervasive cultural trend that has legitimated, almost glorified, criminality.

When Mizzy, the young black irritant, uploaded videos to TikTok a few years ago showing him entering strangers’ homes, these were called ‘pranks‘ by the mainstream media. He was a lovable rogue to those people who would never have to encounter him. But his wayward disregard for public conventions and personal privacy, and his general amorality, were also symptomatic of our times.

For many years, Extinction Rebellion (ER) has taught society that it is okay to flaunt the highway code, block traffic and cause delay, costs and frustration to road users. The ER website explains how ‘we can turn the criminal justice process (from arrest to prosecution) into an opportunity to advance our strategic objectives’. But this was just the start of a crime trend that paid no heed to criminal law. And vice versa, much of the criminal law refused to see it as criminal.

The Palestine Action supporter who slashed a painting of Lord Balfour – part of Trinity College, Cambridge’s private collection – was never found and prosecuted, even though the attack was filmed and widely distributed. Indeed, the police called off their enquiries after 12 months. Other emboldened pro-Palestinian activists felt that they had carte blanche – indeed felt that they were morally justified – in smashing up a Scottish aerospace factory causing £1million of damage yet found not guilty of violent disorder.

A coffee shop in north London had graffiti daubed over its walls and its windows broken by antisemitic activists. Just Stop Oil smashed petrol pumps, and sprayed Stonehenge with orange paint. A protest group called Take Back Power has carried out several thefts – which it describes as ‘liberating boxes of food’ from supermarkets to supply local food banks. It operates in Exeter and Truro, hardly the urban badlands. The marginal rights group called ‘Animal Rising’ were given mere community orders after causing thousands of pounds worth of damage to foodstuffs in Fortnum & Mason and Selfridges. A number of environmentalists from Insulate Britain graffitied a magistrate’s court, while others poured paint over the road.

What message does all this send?

These are the normalisers of the crimewave. These are the people who think vandalism is okay, that it is almost a duty. These are the people that would imagine that civil disobedience trumps the democratic process. It overrides the legal process. These are the middle-class activists that have no financial worries about paying for things yet are happy to steal for thrills. They legitimate robbery as morally righteous, and yet are the first to cry foul when the oiks do it.

These are the people who believe they have an ethical duty to broadcast criminality through their cavalier contempt for society, business and public safety, but they will join the chorus of condemnation against the ordinary youngsters who are merely following in their footsteps. Mizzy was immoral. Greta Thunberg is moral.

If we want to clamp down on anti-social behaviour, the first thing to do would be to recognise it, stop glamourising it, and then penalise those with privilege carrying it out. They do not deserve immunity while we merely crack down on some inner-city yobs (although, they also deserve our contempt).

But the general disdain for social norms did not start on the streets of Clapham; it is a corrosive sentiment that has been pandered to by the establishment for many years. If we can start to deal with that, maybe then we can start to recreate a society that remembers where the acceptable boundaries of a civilised society are set.

Austin Williams is director of the Future Cities Project.

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Jon Moynihan on removing criminalisation of some ‘hate’ speech.

Jon Moynihan on removing criminalisation of elements of hate crime itself.

So it is exciting to see this new initiative from The Adam Smith Institute: a proposed new rigorously drafted and legally sound Freedom of Speech Bill. The Bill has been jointly authored by a radical lawyer based in the US, Preston Byrne, the ASI’s legal fellow and partner at Byrne & Storm LLP, alongside Cambridge-educated English lawyer Michael Reiners, who writes on UK constitutional and political issues, and Elijah Granet, who has dual English and American legal training with professional experience consulting in legislative drafting and analysis.

The proposed law announces itself as: ‘A BILL to recognise and restore the ancient liberty of free speech; to protect expression by the public, subject only to narrow and objective exceptions; to restrict the power of public authorities and essential services to interfere with lawful expression; to repeal or amend enactments which criminalise expression by reference to offence or distress; and for connected purposes.’

You can read the proposed Bill here.

In a joint essay on why they feel this US-proposed UK Free Speech Act is needed, its authors write: ‘This Bill, if enacted, would have a similar effect as the First Amendment in the United States of America, protecting British citizens from government censorship. However, in addition to its protections, the Bill would also prohibit the state from withholding information (other than that which could compromise national security)... There is rarely a liberty more important than that of speech - Thomas Paine, the great contemporary of Adam Smith, wrote “he who dares not offend, cannot be honest”.’ (See the full essay at the Adam Smith Institute website.

Preston Byrne’s Freedom of Speech Bill is a fantastic contribution to this discussion and has already created a lively debate that hopefully adds to re-energising the growing campaign to make speech less strangled by law. But can we really emulate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1791, that provides that ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech or of the press’?

In 2025 Britain, is the spirit that informed the American’s revolutionary First Amendment feasible? And is changing the law the key arena for change? We debated that very question at the Battle of Ideas festival in 2024 – a discussion I really enjoyed chairing because I kept changing my mind. It featured Nico Perrino, executive vice president, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Tom Slater, editor, spiked, Thomas Walker-Werth associate editor, The Objective Standard, and Toby Young general secretary, Free Speech Union.

Use this button to listen to the debate on the Battle of Ideas Audio Archive:

LISTEN TO THE DEBATE

Is law change enough?
Law change, and parliament’s role in repealing laws, are definitely desirable, but absolutely not sufficient to tackle the retreat from belief in free speech as a cornerstone of democratic values. For example, parliament recently passed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. but campus life for students and academics continues to be a minefield of EDI and censorious regulatory trip-wires that curtail open discussion. The fight for free speech always needs the dynamism of grassroots, bottom-up pressure.

Also, this week the Home Office has announced that at long last it has dumped its invidious non-crime hate incidents. Brilliant news. Those of us who have constantly tried to bring in amendments and force successive governments to act, may well be pleased that at last – via the current Crime and Policing Bill – Labour has succumbed. But we also need to recognise that the real force for change came from outside of parliament.

Credit must go to many people: from former police officer Harry Miller, co-founder of the campaign group Fair Cop (whose LONG fight is summed up here), to journalists such as Allison Pearson (whose writing about her personal experience of NCHIs gained international attention). And credit, too, to all those individuals who fought back (and spoke out), often by taking their cases to the Free Speech Union, which admirably amplified just how far-reaching and unjust these mechanisms for police intimation of citizens for everything from their online posts to ‘wrongthink’ opinions, often expressed privately.

The fear now is that while non-crime hate incidents have been dispatched formally, the culture behind them remains undisturbed. Their ideological premise is still deeply embedded, both in the labyrinth of hate-crime legislation on the statute books but more broadly in policing, HR departments across public- and private-sector workplace. This culture has been especially damaging for younger generations socialised into believing that words, attitudes and beliefs are harmful, and can be interpreted as ‘hate’ subjectively by the alleged victim or a third party and assumed to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with protected characteristics – not proven, but presumed.

That is why some free-speech campaigners are concerned that non-crime hate incidents may well be rebranded (and already the Labour government is talking about using anti-social behaviour regulations such as respect orders, that will be used to surveil, silence and punish those accused of having hateful attitudes.

Building a culture of free speech
So, while we at the Academy of Ideas welcome any law change that rolls back censorship, we feel lots more needs to be done to take on the culture of associating speech with harm. We believe this is essential to counter today’s culture that actively undermines the habit of exercising free speech and has weakened our collective capacity to tolerate disagreement, risk offence and argue ideas in public. I discuss this in depth in a filmed interview with Swiss magazine Schweizer Monat below.

We aim to restore a confident and resilient culture of free expression, and one way we do that is by creating practical opportunities – events, forums and networks – where people come together and can speak freely, exercise the neglected muscle of arguing openly without taking offence and test ideas in public.

If this appeals, please join us and support our work using this button:

SUPPORT THE ACADEMY OF IDEAS

Alternatively, become a paid subscriber to this Substack using the button below:

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

In the meantime, HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to Preston Byrne, Michael Reiners, Elijah Granet and the Adam Smith Institute for its Freedom of Speech Bill. That’s the sort of ‘special relationship’ we need with colleagues in the US. Let’s hope it gets a proper hearing in parliament and amongst the public, so that it becomes part of the anti-censorship culture we so desperately need.

Claire

Related video

Claire Fox question on free speech: 16 January 2026

Claire Fox question on hate-crime law and free speech: 15 January 2026

Claire Fox question on non-crime hate incidents: 20 January 2026

Claire Fox question on non-crime hate incidents: 9 March 2026

Filmed podcast interview ‘Free Speech on Life Support’ in Schweizer Monat.

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Ahead of Ideas Matter’s annual residential weekend – The Academy 2026: Hollow Leviathan: the state against the demos - on 22 & 23 August at Wyboston Lakes (full details below), Jacob Reynolds reflects on recent events and how they illustrate the themes of the conference.

It is increasingly hard to shake the feeling that the contemporary state – every aspect of government, every major institution, every aspect of the functioning of public authority – is becoming more like a stage set. While the reach of government into every aspect of our lives is mighty, the state is at the same time somehow hollow, empty, unable to really offer any solutions to the problems of our time. We have instead a series of hollowed-out institutions that have retained their titles and their budgets while losing any claim to authority and any ability to deliver the goods.

This is not merely a matter of ‘government incompetence’, a phrase far too mild for the current moment. It is the emergence of a state that has fundamentally broken its contract with the demos, moving from a protector of the people to a manager of their decline.

The Anarchy of the Soft State
Look at the streets of Clapham this week, with teenagers running amok and stealing from shops. Amid a rather tame (by historical standards) mob of looting and disorder, the police seem totally paralysed. The same police that waste no effort in knocking on doors for wrongthink appear powerless to deal with genuine public disorder. Of course, the lawlessness implicates a wider culture as well - a depressing ‘hood aesthetic’, which seems to thrive in our social collapse and the absence of broader public solidarity.

The seemingly light-touch approach to policing the street appears to be a systematic strategy by the public authorities, who implicitly understand that they are not capable of enforcing order. The decline of what is always derisively called ‘old fashioned’ (read: visible) policing, the growth of administration and virtual speech-crime enforcement, and the broader breakdown of authority that all adult figures including the police face – the police respond to all this with a retroactive approach of promising to check the CCTV a few days later. In other words, when the state loses its moral authority and its physical confidence, the vacuum is filled by the most chaotic elements of the street.

This breakdown of order is not an isolated riot; it is a systemic rot. We see its most tragic manifestation in the failures surrounding Valdo Calocane and the Nottingham killings in March 2023. Here, the machinery of the state - the NHS, the mental-health services, the police oversight - all clicked through their bureaucratic gears, yet produced nothing but a lethal vacuum. The ‘systemic failures’ reported were not a lack of rules, but a surplus of them that served only to obscure responsibility. The state knew Calocane was a danger; but it seemed capable of inventing any myriad number of reasons why nothing should be done. This is more than just the outrageous fact that ‘health officials declined to section him because of the “over-representation of young black men in prison”’.

The most telling part of the whole scandal is that the default response of public authorities was not just evasiveness about their own failing, but a seemingly deliberate strategy to treat the victims and their families as the real problem. The authorities seem to view each tragedy as just another public-relations disaster that requires the careful choreography of state power to avoid turning into a scandal.

This is the ‘Anarchy’ in Anarcho-Tyranny: a state that cannot or will not perform the most basic, Hobbesian duty of keeping its citizens safe from violent lunatics and street mobs.

The Tyranny of the Rationed State
But as the state retreats from its public duties, it becomes increasingly brazen in its hostility toward the individual. Consider the latest news from the NHS: a plan to ‘ration’ referrals, effectively telling people who need specialist care to, quite literally, f-off.

We are told we must ‘protect the NHS’, yet the NHS now views the sick as a ‘demand’ to be managed out of existence. It is a staggering inversion. We pay record-high taxes into a system that then treats our request for medical care as an inconvenience. The state is no longer a tool used by the public to achieve common ends; it is a self-serving entity that views the public as a ‘risk factor’. Whether it is rationing your healthcare or ‘nudging’ your behaviour through ULEZ cameras and speech codes, the message is clear: you are the problem.

The Hostile State
Why can the state police your tweets, but not your streets? Why can it tell you which doctor you can’t see, but not how it lost track of a triple-killer?

The answer lies in the nature of the contemporary ruling class. They have retreated into the ‘soft tasks’ - the policing of language, the management of ‘misinformation’, the ritualistic enforcement of petty regulations - because the ‘hard tasks’ are beyond them. But more than that, there is a palpable sense of malice. The state has become ‘hostile’. It treats the aspirations of ordinary people - for safety, for healthcare, for a say in their own lives - with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. The demos is seen as a volatile mass that must be restrained, taxed and lectured, while the state itself undergoes a process of internal collapse.

THE ACADEMY 2026

HOLLOW LEVIATHAN:
THE STATE AGAINST THE DEMOS

Saturday 22 & Sunday 23 August
Wyboston Lakes, Bedfordshire, MK44 3AL

BOOK YOUR TICKET HERE

This inversion of the social contract cannot be sustained. A state that breaks its promise to protect and serve, while simultaneously demanding total control over our private lives and public thoughts, is a state in crisis. It is a Leviathan that has lost its legitimacy.

The upcoming Academy 2026 – the annual residential weekend organised by Ideas Matter – is dedicated to unpicking this paradox. We will ask the uncomfortable questions: Why has the state become so incapable of delivering the basics? Why is it increasingly set against the very people it claims to represent? And how do we reclaim a sense of agency in an era of ‘hollowed out’ institutions?

About the event

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?

Lectures include

What is the National Interest?
Professor Frank Furedi
executive director, MCC Brussels

Islamo-Leftism and the roots of contemporary Third-Worldism
Dr Tim Black
books and essays editor, spiked

Coming apart: authoritarian strategies for a fractured society
Chris Bayliss
contributing editor, The Critic

What remains? Art and memory in the Post-Cultural State
Lola Salem
Marshal Research Fellow and music lecturer, Oriel College, Oxford; author, Artless (Polity, forthcoming); contributor, The Critic, Engelsberg Ideas, Telegraph

Recommended reading

• Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan (1651)

• Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America (1835-1840)

• James Burnham – The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943)

• Peter Turchin – End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023)

Tickets

You can choose to buy day tickets without accommodation, or tickets that include accommodation at Wyboston Lakes Resort. Day tickets only include lunch

Tickets with accommodation include:

• Brilliant food: a quality breakfast (including continental and cooked options), an extensive lunch, and a three-course dinner
• Excellent facilities: access to the Wyboston Lakes gym, swimming pool and other amenities during your stay
• Social opportunities: staying the night means you’ll experience the full, collegiate atmosphere of the event and get the chance to carry on discussions over dinner and in the bar.

Have a friend who is also interested? You can save up to £65 each by doubling up with a friend. Select ‘double occupancy’ and let us know you’d like a twin room.

Click on the links below to purchase:

Two nights, two people – £610

One night, two people – £450

Two nights, one person – £370

One night, one person – £265

If you have your own accommodation and would just like to join us for the conference sessions, use the links below:

Saturday and Sunday – £150

Saturday only – £80

Sunday only – £80

If you would like to pay a concession rate (for full time students, senior citizens and unwaged), or pay in instalments, please email geoff@ideasmatter.org.uk for further details.

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Does politics really count if your non-politically engaged friends don’t care? Exactly what breaks into the public consciousness often confuses the greatest political strategists. So, when group chats – that are normally full of weekend plans, sporting fixtures and failed dates – suddenly erupt into political discussion, it’s hard not to take notice.

Living in London, the weekend hate marches have become a depressing fixture of big city life: regular, expected, but subdued since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in October last year. But interestingly, these marches seemed to make little impact on my friends. The build-up to the Together Alliance (a march including the Greens, trade unions, the worst kind of Labour MP and the Muslim Council of Britain) was slightly different. There were posters on my commute for weeks before it, a cluster of middle-aged men in Lycra guarding the entrance to my local park recruiting for it, and a visible group of middle-class Londoners draped in the aesthetics of extremism heading toward it.

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Yet, and to my quiet pleasure in an ironic sort of way, this time the march was noticed.

At 10:42 on Sunday morning (the accuracy of WhatsApp groups) a friend sent this beautiful video of Zack Polanski and his merry band of nutcases dancing on stage with the words, ‘I mean, holy f*ck’. Another left-leaning friend who had just returned from travelling responded with ‘Only just clocked how f*cked the Greens are… and how they seem to have a large support’. Another closed with ‘I think the Greens would genuinely make me pack the bags and leave’.

Understandably, increasing numbers of Jewish people, alongside those on the illiberal right, would like to ban or limit pro-Palestinian protests with their antisemitic views and slogans. I’m aware the Together Alliance wasn’t necessarily about Palestine (although why organisers allowed pro-Iranian regime and Palestine activists to dominate it is anyone’s guess). No, this was against hate, racism and the (alleged) far-right, dude. But the same actors were behind it, and the same people were marching on it. Yet the reaction amongst my friends to the march highlights the virtues of free speech: good arguments in the marketplace of free ideas will prevail. When contradictions are laid bare in their ugly nakedness, people notice.

The best example of contradiction was this video doing the rounds on social media. Men waving flags linked to Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas underneath the rainbow + BLM + circle in yellow triangle bunting on the stage of a historic London high street. Two ideologies diametrically opposed except in their hatred for Western civilisation (and Jews) – marching on a jewel of London. The real far-right – people who are against the emancipation of women, gay rights and free speech – were marching with the far left, on the streets that afford them the rights to do so.

How it came to this is a question for another time. But for those who want to destroy this movement led by Zack Polanski, you must show it to people – or better, let them do it for you. Banning marches such as these will allow dangerous ideas to fester beneath party structures. If the Greens are a ‘Trojan horse’ for Islamism, the horse is bolting before it’s been built. Restrictions on the right to protest will only allow for a more deceptive Green-Islamist alliance.

Let’s hope for another march this weekend – sunlight remains the best disinfectant.

Jake Weston works on comms and press at the Academy of Ideas.

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Over recent weeks, the idea of legally banning social media for under 16s has become a real possibility. In parliament, it’s been voted on overwhelmingly TWICE, with the Commons voting for a delay while the government consults on the issue and the Lords voting for an immediate ban. If the government’s proposal does go ahead eventually, it will mean that ministers will have huge delegated powers to decide (without any chance for scrutiny) when and which parts of internet access and types of content that should be banned for teenagers in the future. All the plans would require age verification that would impact adults’ ability to access information online freely without surveillance.

Meanwhile in the US, a 20-year-old woman Kaley (whose full name has not been made public) won a lawsuit arguing that her childhood social media use led to an addiction that damaged her mental health. She blamed Big Tech companies and convinced a Los Angeles court jury, which awarded her damages of $6 million against Google’s YouTube and Meta. Following on from the Australian government’s social-media ban for children, this has led to a major debate about everything from the nature of addiction and the impact on digital ID to the pros and cons of social media for children, whether this is a moral panic or adults correcting the egregious excesses of Big Tech companies.

I was very isolated in arguing against a ban in the Lords (you can see my speeches below). But in America, many free-speech organisations have reacted against Kaley’s court case victory, raising serious First Amendment concerns. I will be arguing my case again at a debate hosted by The Prosperity Institute in central London, Should children be banned from social media?, on Thursday 16 April, 6:00pm - 9:00pm.

Wherever you stand, this is a difficult and important issue, so we are delighted to be re-publishing this article from psychotherapist and director of Genspect Stella O’Malley who has changed her mind and explains why below.

A few other articles on this topic have caught my eye recently:

Teens and social media: it’s complicated
Matilda Gosling, 27 March 2026

No one is ‘addicted’ to Instagram or YouTube
Frank Furedi, spiked, 28 March 2026

The social media moral panic
Lara Brown, Spectator, 11 March 2026

The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth
Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff, Wall Street Journal, 27 March 2026

Claire

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Why I’ve changed my mind about banning social media for teenagers

Stella O’Malley

My recent UnHerd article explains why I once supported banning social media for teenagers because of the damage it can do to vulnerable young people. Many parents I meet, especially those with trans-identified children, share that concern. But the wider debate has raised a deeper question for me: Who watches the watchers? Who decides what is harmful and who gets to enforce it?

I’m not a banning person. At heart, I’m a classical liberal* and would prefer to live in a society where as few things as possible are banned. That instinct makes me wary of handing more power to the state, even in the face of real harm. The question is no longer whether social media can damage young people, but who should have the authority to respond.

The normalisation of government control over our access to information feels increasingly troubling. I don’t really want state authorities deciding what is harmful and I’m uneasy about governmental policies shaping the narrative for the good of the people.

I sometimes wonder how far off the day is when a person loses their temper in an online argument that goes against government policy and suddenly cannot access their bank account as a consequence of their views. They might then be unable to drive to a friend’s house because their electric car has been disabled as part of the sanctions. Inevitably, the hot-tempered person will then be forced to see the light, apologise, and espouse the accepted narrative on trans issues or Covid or whatever the issue du jour is.

This might seem far-fetched, but so did what happened to the Canadian truckers. In early 2022, thousands of truckers and supporters formed a convoy to protest Covid mandates. The Canadian government responded by invoking emergency powers and freezing bank accounts linked to some participants and their donors.

What happens if something worse than the current trans phenomenon comes along? Yes, that really could happen. In this context, would you really want your children only having access to government-approved narratives?

We should be wary of solutions that place that power in the wrong hands. Once we accept that the state can decide what is harmful and restrict access accordingly, the boundary will not hold. It never does. The question is not whether power will be used, but how far it will reach and who it will reach next.

I wrote about the erosion of parental authority in my first book, Cotton Wool Kids, back in 2015. Even then, it was clear that parents were being steadily edged out of their rightful role as guardians and protectors of their children. I did not anticipate how quickly that erosion would accelerate. Eleven years on, I’ve seen parents repeatedly recast as bystanders, overridden by so-called experts and dismissed by teachers who have never heard of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria yet still presume to know better than the parents of a trans-identified teenager.

If we are serious about protecting young people, we need to respect the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit. Of course, when parents are genuinely harmful, the authorities should intervene. Otherwise, they should be left to it. Families are idiosyncratic. We all have our own ways of doing things.

Disagreeing with your teenager is not abuse. Neither is it abuse to explain to your child that they were born in their own body, that there were no alternatives - you know this because you were there at the time - and that the name you gave them was chosen with love and it should not be cast aside lightly. Using sex-based pronouns for your child is the appropriate response of a loving parent. It is not abuse - it is parental guidance.

Parents must be given more authority, not less. Surrendering that authority to the state or to tech companies whose interests are not aligned with the wellbeing of children is a risk we should not take. Children should not be treated as autonomous digital citizens.

The question is not whether teenagers need limits. They do. The question is who sets them. If we get that wrong, no policy, however well intentioned, will protect the next generation.

You can read my piece in UnHerd here.

*Classical liberalism is associated with individual liberty, personal responsibility and minimal state intervention, whereas a twenty-first-century liberal supports more active state intervention – particularly in welfare, regulation and social justice.

Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist, bestselling author, public speaker and parent with extensive experience in counselling and psychotherapy. Originally from Dublin, she now lives in rural Ireland, with her husband, her two children, her dog and her cat. Read her Substack here.

Watch Claire’s speeches on social-media bans

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The Crimes and Policing Bill is in its very final stages in Parliament. There is not much to celebrate for those interested in freedom and civil liberties, as it contains a swathe of measures that will curtail protest and free speech. So it is refreshing to report some good news – one amendment against the use and abuse of on-the-spot fines for alleged anti-social behaviour passed, to the surprise of the government.

So, it’s a pleasure to hear from Josie Appleton, director of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life why this issue and victory matters. Labour ministers will want to push back, and use parliamentary ‘ping pong’ to drop the amendment, but may be dissuaded if lobbied. Josie explains below how you can help. We’ve also included my speech in the Lords on 25 February about the issue.

Claire

Council ‘busybody’ powers like public spaces protection orders (PSPOs) and community protection notices (CPNs) have led to new bans on everyday activities such as feeding the birds, standing in groups or having a messy garden. These offences can be punished by on-the-spot fines.

Penalties are currently issued at a rate of over 20,000 a year. Around 75 per cent of PSPO penalties are issued by private enforcement companies who are paid per fine.

Generally, the companies receive around 80-90 per cent of penalty income, which means that they have a direct incentive to issue as many fines as possible. (They need to issue a certain number of fines merely to cover costs, and more to make a profit.)

Now peers have passed an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to ban fining for profit.

The amendment states that companies ‘must not receive, directly or indirectly, any financial benefit that is contingent upon the (a) issuing of a fixed penalty notice, or (b) the number or value of fixed penalty notices issued’.

This would mean that ‘payment per fine’ contracts – under which over 14,000 ‘busybody’ penalties are issued each year – would be declared invalid.

Those fined under these corrupt arrangements include:

• In 2023, Hillingdon Council issued most of its PSPO penalties for the offence of ‘idling’ (leaving a car engine running for more than two minutes). The 2,335 people punished included a man waiting to pick up his wife from the doctor’s and another man trying to keep cool on a hot day.

• Large numbers of fines are also issued to cyclists, including an 82-year-old many, Barrie Enderby, cycling through Grimsby town centre.

In one six-month period, 1,472 penalties were issued to people cycling in Grimsby, while in Colchester a cyclist was fined for locking his bike to a bike rack. Others fined included busker David Fisher for playing outside a Bruce Springsteen concert.

The Crime and Policing Bill will dramatically increase penalties for PSPO and CPN offences from £100 to £500 (Clause 4). Lord Clement Jones’ amendment to Clause 4 would prevent private enforcement from profiting from the price hike.

Introducing the amendment, Lord Tim Clement Jones said:

Environmental and ASB enforcement is increasingly seen as a business. Local authorities are entering into contracts with private companies, boasting of ‘zero financial risk’ while sharing the ‘surplus revenue’ generated by fines. This creates a direct perverse financial incentive to issue as many tickets as possible for innocuous actions.

Supporting the amendment, independent peer Baroness Claire Fox said:

There are concerns that antisocial behaviour orders have been corrupted for income generation and commercial purposes. Such scam-like behaviour of taking fines for profit discredits and trivialises a serious approach to tackling anti-social behaviour.

The amendment passed with Liberal Democrat and Conservative support, 205 votes to 188.

We are calling on the government to preserve and support the amendment when the bill returns to the Commons.

It was strange to see Labour peers alone in voting against a change that would protect ordinary people from being unfairly slapped with fines by profiteering private companies, especially when these companies have wreaked such havoc in traditional Labour areas.

It is also strange to see Home Office ministers opposing a measure that has been promoted by Defra, which is currently passing statutory guidance to ban incentivised enforcement for environmental offences.

We are urging the Home Office to think again.

Write to your MP

The Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life is asking everyone to write to their local MP asking that they support the Lords amendment when the Crime and Policing Bill returns to the Commons. The Campaign has produced a model letter to help you do that, which you can view here.

Josie Appleton is the director of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life, the new name for the Manifesto Club.

Claire Fox speech on respect orders

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Cultural historian Dr Tiffany Jenkins’s highly acclaimed book, Strangers and Intimates: the rise and fall of private life provides the focus for this episode. It is a thoughtful, well-researched, nuanced, very readable account of how the right to privacy for the individual and family emerged over the past 500 years or so, as a central social value and something to aspire to and defend, and how that right is gradually being eroded by cultural changes.

Although the book is not about art, making only occasional references to artworks, as I read it I could see that art, in its historic course, might reflect the changes in ideas about privacy that Tiffany explores.

Johannes Vermeer, ‘Girl Reading a Letter’

For example, I recently watched the recent film Hamnet (Dir. Chloé Zhao, 2025), which suggested that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was inspired by his son’s early death. Towards the end of the film, it struck me that Shakespeare, by giving public expression to a deeply private sense of loss and grief, provided an early theatrical example of what Tiffany’s book examines.

So I asked Tiffany if she’d be interested in identifying works of art that illustrate her thesis… and thus an idea was born. And I was very excited by the list of works Tiffany wanted to talk about because I knew they would provide a fascinating way of exploring the motifs within her excellent book.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

The BBC Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs, inspired the structure of the episode although it is shaped by the narrative in Strangers and Intimates, instead of Tiffany’s biography. Her chosen works are:

Johannes Vermeer, ‘Girl Reading a Letter’, exemplifying interiority and the inner life, which became increasingly important emerging from the Reformation in the seventeenth century onwards.

Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740) and Dr Samuel Johnson’s Diaries in the mid-eighteenth century, reflecting the emergence of the public and private as separate spheres of life.

Mary Cassatt, ‘The Child’s Bath’

In the nineteenth century, Mary Cassatt, ‘The Child’s Bath’ (1893) reflected the growing importance of privacy as a sphere of warmth and intimacy while Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), revealed the tensions and dangers that such a high valuation of privacy might pose to women.

Egon Schiele’s self-portraits in the early twentieth century revealed a growing preoccupation with psychology and a desire to reveal or externalise the ‘authentic self’, the psychological man – expression of angst.

Later in the century, Nan Goldin’s, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1973 & 1986), in its performative self-examination through candid photographic documentary, reveals important shifts in how private life is displayed and consumed.

Rembrandt, ‘Isaac and Rebecca’ (or ‘The Jewish Bride’, 1665-69)

Sophie Calle (b.1953) created works that highlighted the undermining and loss of privacy as the twentieth century proceeded, with the blurring of voyeurism with artistic practice. See Frieze magazine here.

Vincenzo Latronico’s novella, Perfection (2022) seems to reflect a sense that privacy can no longer exist nor is it desirable.

The episode ends by contrasting the depiction of intimacy in Rembrandt’s ‘Isaac and Rebecca’ (or ‘The Jewish Bride’, 1665-69) with Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018).

Listen to the podcast

Arts First

Tiffany Jenkins on art and the evolution of private life.

Cultural historian, Dr Tiffany Jenkins’ new and highly acclaimed book, Strangers and Intimates: the rise and fall of private life provides the focus for this episode. It is a thoughtful, well-researched, nuanced, very readable account of how the right to privacy for the individual and family emerged over the past 500 yrs or so, as a central social value…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Arts First

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The spiked summit: a one-day conference in London
SATURDAY 27 JUNE
Emmanuel Centre, Westminster

In these times, when every day seems to throw up new political challenges and cultural conflicts, there’s no better place to turn for incisive analysis than spiked.

Whether punchy commentary, insightful essays or a growing roster of podcasts and videos, spiked always offers intelligent, though-provoking commentary on the important issues of the day. And of course, spiked writers and podcasts have long been mainstays of Battle of Ideas festival.

Now the spiked summit – a one-day conference taking place at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster on Saturday 27 June – gives you the chance to hear from leading writers and thinkers – including Konstantin Kisin, Lionel Shriver, Katharine Birbalsingh, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Brendan O’Neill and Tom Slater.

What’s more, all Academy of Ideas associate members and paid Substack subscribers can get a discount of 20% off the full price of a spiked summit ticket.

If you are not yet a paid subscriber, there’s no better time to rectify that (see below).

As well as this offer, you’ll receive discounted tickets to Battle of Ideas festival and many of our other events, subscriber-only posts (including behind-the-scenes commentary), the chance to attend quarterly online meetings with the Academy of Ideas team and paper copies of our renowned Letters on Liberty pamphlets.

To become a paid subscriber now, click here.

To take advantage of the spiked summit discount, see the link below (paid subscribers). If you sign up to become a paid subscriber, you can find the discount link in the online version of this post on Substack. We will also send the discount link to all our new paid subscribers in the next few days.

Hope to see you there.

Claire

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With the Police Crime and Sentencing Bill being further debated this week in the Lords – with the prospect of passionate debate about the proposal to decriminalise women who obtain abortion beyond the legal limit – women’s reproductive rights and freedoms are increasingly being questioned. The reaction to the first baby born via a womb transplant earlier this month showed a growing resistance to reproductive technology, as a fear of progress is leading some to seek comfort in the natural order.

The birth of Hugo Powell, the first baby in the UK to be born via a donated womb transplant, has been criticised by conservative feminists, seeing it not as progress but further evidence that motherhood is being undermined by science. Grace Bell (with Steve Powell) was the first woman in the UK to give birth to a baby born from a womb transplanted from an organ donor, a woman who had recently passed away and donated her reproductive organs. Grace was born without a womb, as a result of Absolute Uterine/Womb Factor Infertility, and is one of 15,000 women in the UK with a similar condition.

This surgery was a huge step forward in reproductive technology, as alongside rounds of IVF, it allowed Grace to carry her own child, despite the fact she was told at 16 that she would never be able to do so. But it was heavily criticised by conservative feminists who are digging their heels into the sanctity of undisrupted, natural motherhood rather than embracing the fact that women, like Grace, are driven so strongly by the desire to become a mother, that they are willing to undertake complex and risky surgeries to overcome unimaginable medical challenges.

In 2020, Louise Perry made her case against reproductive technology. She argued that the expansion of scientific research into matters of fertility was ‘removing the body from the process of human reproduction’, drawing from the case of a lamb born via a bio-bag to prove her point. Perry argued that ‘no one has the right’ to have a baby, or to be a mother, as it should be left as a process to be defined by natural causes, beyond human control. Yet issues of fertility have never been beyond human control. Not only does it involve active human interaction, but prenatal and maternal care has transformed childbirth and massively reduced mortality rates. Without these developments, having children would be a much more tortuous and dangerous task, so despite resistance to medical ‘disruption’, women would be much worse off without it.

But the concerns around de-naturalising motherhood don’t really apply in the case of a womb transplant. The womb (which has been donated, not bought) is transplanted within the biological mother, thus there is very little disruption of the ‘natural bonds’ that form between the mother and child during the period of gestation. The womb transplant surgery is as close to ‘natural’ that women born with these difficult infertility conditions can get. Thus, to oppose it reveals unnecessary biological elitism and essentialist ideas about motherhood.

There are further concerns that the womb transplant will damage and degrade the value of motherhood, by expanding the possibilities for its commercialisation. Helen Gibson, the founder of Surrogacy Concern, has complained that this will ‘lead to further casualisation and detachment from the realities of our sexed bodies and experiences’. And Jo Bartosch in The Critic took issue with womb transplants, seeing the technique as merely an ‘extension of the consumer mindset’.

This treatment is said to show the increasing demand that we have control over our reproduction, at whatever cost. But to me, the use of science, technology and research to enable women who desperately desire children to have them, is one of the best uses of time and resources that we can give.

The charity Womb Transplant UK, which provided the funding and research for Grace’s care, has stated their goal is specifically ‘developing a practical and safe operation and procedure which will allow women, who were either born without a womb or have lost their womb as a result of illness, to have their own child’, and that the charity does not intend to be ‘involved in research for those not assigned female at birth’.

Still, concerns are being raised that womb transplants could be used to give transgender women the opportunity to carry children. But if you read the charity policies, this idea is not within the realm of their work. These operations are rare, expensive, difficult and have been limited to the use of extreme cases for women who have been diagnosed with medical infertility. To deny the opportunity for these women to have children, on the basis of a ‘slippery slope’ – which would require vastly more and different medical research before it could become even technically feasible – does nothing to affirm the essential qualities of motherhood, but makes these mothers seem cruel and unfeeling.

There is a tension growing within the conservative movement’s revaluation of the family. On the one hand, many conservatives criticise those who don’t have children. The much (over-quoted) comment concerning the ‘childless cat ladies’ from US Vice President JD Vance in 2024 showed that the reprioritisation of the family within conservative political movements is increasingly implying that childless women have no stake in the nation’s future and are deemed as less committed to the country. Conservatives are appealing to many voters on the Christian right through the re-essentialisation of womanhood as being defined by maternity; motherhood, rather than womanhood, has become central to conservative arguments.

But while re-locating the value of women in motherhood, they are resisting the attempts of science and technology to extend this opportunity to those who face medical challenges. It seems contradictory to deny the chance for infertile women to try to be mothers when this science and technology exists.

President Trump has recognised the need to expand access to infertility treatment in a pro-family political environment, announcing last October that he was urging employers to create a new fertility benefit, and was actively working to lower the cost of IVF drugs, specifically through TrumpRx. While there may be legitimate concerns around the inequality of access and the commercialisation of the reproductive processes, the fact that modern medicine has disrupted some of the challenges of infertility and family formation is a huge stride forward.

If conservatives truly believe in the value of children and parenthood, then they should encourage the use of science and medicine to give motherhood to otherwise infertile women, rather than gatekeeping it. As Ella Whelan states in her article in the Telegraph, ‘Those concerned with falling birth rates should surely be celebrating every breakthrough that creates a happy, healthy family.’ And while it is not unlikely that at some point more advanced reproductive surgeries will become available, for women like Grace who, as teenagers, were told they had no hope of becoming mothers, the expansion of reproductive care is priceless. These medical advances should not be restricted to protect the feelings of conservative women who have rooted their identity narrowly in a particular version of biological motherhood.

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This week, the Labour government published its social-cohesion strategy, Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive, and resilient United Kingdom.

Whatever the merits of the social-cohesion strategy – there are worrying potential issues around free speech, for example – the mere fact that social cohesion, belonging, community and more are major political issues reveals about contemporary British society. At Battle of Ideas North last Saturday in Manchester, we discussed these issues in the session Island of strangers: is Britain broken? with a panel of Dr Remi Adekoya, Ada Akpala, Lisa McKenzie and Graham Stringer MP.

You can listen to the audio by clicking below or as a podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.

We also admired the essay below by Academy of Ideas associate fellow Dolan Cummings when it was published last November. We’re delighted that Dolan has allowed us to republish it here. Dolan will be speaking at Living Freedom Summer School 2026 in London on 9-11 July. The summer school is open to anyone aged 18-30. Find out more here.

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Strangers and strangers

Integration and belonging in liberal, modern Britain
Dolan Cummings

First published on L’esprit de l’escalier Substack, 14 November 2025

When Keir Starmer made his notorious and instantly-regretted ‘island of strangers’ speech in May this year, I happened to be reading Roger Scruton’s book, England: An Elegy (published in 2000). I was particularly struck by a passage in which Scruton described England, approvingly, ‘as a society of strangers’.

Clearly, he meant ‘strangers’ in a different sense from that intended by Starmer. He wasn’t referring to separate communities leading parallel lives, but celebrating the traditional aloofness of the English character. The way Englishmen and women, ‘keep each other at a distance, while acknowledging each other’s right to belong’. In contrast, Starmer was alluding to something like a crisis of belonging arising from advanced multiculturalism. Nevertheless, I think we can shed light on this issue by exploring the difference between these two senses of ‘stranger’.

In describing England as a society of strangers, Scruton was, in part, drawing attention to what English society was not: ‘Strangers do not live together by affection, by family sentiment, by swearing bonds of blood brotherhood in the manner of the Arabian tribes. They live together by law, convention and a silent appeal to precedent.’ In other words, English society is not clannish (and at least for the past couple of hundred years, neither is Scottish society). British society is not held together by particular obligations or kinship ties, but by implicit respect for anonymous fellow citizens – strangers.

Even when we talk about family values, we mean ‘the family’, not ‘my family’. It is not considered British to put your own family before the rule of law or reasonable concern for other people’s families. Neither is it British to offer bribes at an election, or to use public office for private gain. The fact that those who would be adversely affected by those things are strangers is no reason to disregard their interests.

The thing is, it is not particularly French or Danish to do those things either. The reason politicians so often tie themselves in knots trying to define ‘British values’ is that many of our most important values are not peculiarly British, even if they sometimes take a peculiarly British or English or Scottish or Welsh form. Fundamentally, they are civilised values. More specifically, we could say they are the values of Western liberal modernity, but that is not the property of any particular nation, or indeed of the West.

A home, not a creed

For that reason, when we speak about national belonging, we would do well to leave values to one side. This is in part what the Raise the Colours movement is doing. When people hang national flags from lampposts or paint them on roundabouts, they are not expressing their commitment to a set of values or ideas. They are claiming their streets and neighbourhoods as their home.

The movement has been condemned as divisive, and in a way it is, but not in the way critics suggest. As I read it, the purpose is not to exclude anyone in particular, so much as to insist that there is something here to be included in or excluded from. It is to say, ‘This is England’, ‘This is Britain’, ‘Isn’t it?’ If there is an edge to this, it is an implicit challenge: ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

(It should be noted that the same edge is there when businesses and public institutions display the ‘progress pride’ flag. And a similar ambiguity: does it mean ‘live and let live’, or signal conformity with a much more dubious ideology? Why does it so often feel like a challenge? Certainly, it seems unfair to treat rainbow flags as utterly unobjectionable while reading racist and even fascist motives into the flying of national flags.)

The Raise the Colours movement rejects the very idea – often expressed by critics – that it is reasonable for anyone to feel intimidated by the flag of the country they live in. Of course, there is a history of the flag being coopted by racists: ‘there ain’t no black in the Union Jack’. But today’s ‘flaggers’ are typically at pains to insist they have no problem with their non-white fellow Britons. The idea that national flags are racist is part of what they are protesting against. Above all, what they object to is the disdain for the flag shown by Britain’s (mostly white) cultural elite, the kinds of people who decry the flag as ‘racist’ when what they really mean is ‘ugh’.

That phrase, ‘fellow Britons’, is at the crux of the matter. We can argue about immigration – and about whether or how immigrants can be integrated – but the deeper question is whether British citizens have any special status at all. Those who fly the flags are proud to be British, English or Scottish, and of the rights and privileges that come as part of the package. Those who disdain them are uncomfortable with the idea that an accident of birth should confer rights on someone that are denied to anyone else. They prefer to talk about human rights, despite the impossibility of any nation state treating all human beings as citizens.

If citizenship is broached, it has to be distanced from ethnicity, and indeed it can be. While Britain does not technically have birthright citizenship (you need at least one legally settled parent), there is a commonsense, moral case that people who are born and brought up here belong, regardless of their ethnic background. It’s the ‘brought up’ part that is crucial, though, because it implies a slow, steady induction into a British way of life.

It does, at least, if the children of migrants grow up in neighbourhoods, attend schools and participate in forms of life that are recognisably British. If they learn to show that implicit respect for fellow citizens – although strangers in Scruton’s sense – and develop an understanding of and affection for the particular forms it takes in Britain. That is precisely what can no longer be taken for granted in significant pockets of the country. And that is why politicians find themselves trying to define Britishness, and floundering.

Again, we can grasp for ‘values’, preferably values that anyone can subscribe to. Modern, progressive values. But – aside from failing, laughably, to describe the character of immigrant communities – this only takes us further from any intuitive sense of what it is to love Britain as a home. Arch-reactionary Enoch Powell once said he would fight for Britain even if it had a communist government. He did not try to rationalise his patriotism.

Civilisational achievement and national character

So much for values. It can be just as unhelpful to speak in terms of culture, because that too often implies something like a mere preference. As if British people like fair play and the rule of law because that is our culture, while Iraqis, for example, prefer nepotism and corruption, because that is their culture. And that’s why British-style democracy has failed to take hold there. Well, maybe, but quite a lot of Iraqis would quite like fair play and the rule of law, given the chance, and the fact that those things cannot be successfully imposed through military occupation does not necessarily mean there are insurmountable cultural barriers.

It’s easy to forget that Britain’s national character is the product of centuries of history in particular conditions. When Scruton wrote about law, convention and precedent, what he was describing was not a cultural preference or national genius, but a civilisational achievement. That achievement cannot be taken for granted; it has to be nurtured and protected. That’s where we have gone badly wrong over the past 30 or 40 years.

The prevailing idea seems to have been that liberal civilisational norms are a function of modernity itself – almost in a blunt, chronological sense – and, indeed, fully realised only when they float free of the particular historical, cultural and religious inheritance from which they emerged. So, immigrants to a modern country like Britain – what Tony Blair bizarrely called ‘a young country’ – will naturally embrace ‘secular values’ even as they retain their own cultural identities.

When it comes to immigration policy, then, preserving the national character of the country is simply not a legitimate consideration. Indeed, to anyone shaped by what we might call ‘ideological anti-racism’ – which includes anyone educated in Britain over the past 20 or 30 years – ‘preserving the character of the country’ will sound like a dog whistle for ‘keeping the country white’. But colour is only the most superficial aspect of national character. Non-white Britons can and do share a deeper sense of Britishness. Even if you insist, as some do, on reserving Englishness as an ethnic identity, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is clearly British in a way Donald Trump, let alone Emmanuel Macron, is not. (Their national character, or lack of it, is distinctively American and French respectively.)

At the same time, to some degree, immigrants have always altered the character of the countries they adopt as home. That’s true even in countries like Britain and France that are emphatically not ‘nations of immigrants’, as the US to a limited extent is. Whole neighbourhoods can take on a non-native ethnic character – Chinatowns, Curry Miles, even ethnic districts without culinary attractions – without undermining the identity of the country as a whole. But there is surely a limit to this. In terms of sheer numbers, yes, but also the national imagination.

Certain particular waves of immigrants are part of Britain’s national story. The Windrush scandal was a scandal because everyone knew those affected had arrived legally and lived and worked in Britain for decades. Their children and grandchildren are unequivocally British. In fact, for historical reasons, British Jamaicans – like British Indians, for example – can have a kind of double belonging. Their Jamaicanness or Indianness can be part of their Britishness in a way that, say, a British German’s Germanness or a British Thai’s Thainess is not.

A place in the national mythology helps, but that’s not to say those without such a place cannot integrate as individuals. Indeed, a society of strangers in Scruton’s sense is much more accommodating than a clannish society of different kinds and degrees of belonging. A man’s funny name is his own business, after all, and no reason to exclude him from the arm’s-length community of mutual respect. Moreover, a society of strangers is also better able to accommodate those who do not belong at all. And it is a feature of all modern, liberal societies that, in addition to absorbing newcomers, they play host to others who have no particular desire to belong.

A digression on not belonging

It sounds very harsh to say anyone doesn’t belong. But when we talk about belonging to somewhere as much as in it, that’s also, necessarily, exclusive. If a sense of belonging doesn’t exclude anyone, then it doesn’t mean anything. The thing is, being excluded in this sense is not the end of the world.

Tourists, by definition, do not ‘belong’ in the deeper sense, but they are very welcome to visit. The same goes for business travellers, visiting academics and diplomats, foreign footballers and ballerinas. Nobody would say they belong in or to Britain, but nor do we want them cast into outer darkness. They are welcome to be here and to do their thing; that thing just doesn’t include voting in elections, using free health services or drawing a pension. I don’t suppose Mo Salah is offended by this.

Of course, there are grey areas. I didn’t include international students in that list, not because they are not welcome, but because we know that route is widely abused. The same goes for care workers and various other jobs where desperate demand has created easily abused loopholes. But the abuses are a superficial problem compared to the systemic one that we have an economic model that depends on importing large numbers of foreign workers.

When Britain was still part of the European Union, citizens of other EU states were almost archetypal ‘non-belonging residents’. These were people who, perfectly reasonably, took advantage of their right to live and work in Britain without seeking citizenship or (until Brexit came up) taking much of an interest in British domestic politics. And I doubt anyone voted for Brexit because they felt there were too many French bankers in London, let alone Austrian art professors in Edinburgh. The enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 made immigration a much hotter issue because it allowed people from much poorer countries to work in Britain. This created something like a ‘non-belonging working class’.

If many people did object to the numbers of Poles and Romanians in places like eastern England, that reflected the different kinds of work they did. Bankers expect to compete in a global job market; those looking for a decent, working-class job in their home town generally do not. It also reflected the disproportionate effect of migration on smaller cities and towns.

More fundamentally, those waves of Poles and Romanians had no particular connection to Britain’s national story. Their newly-acquired right to work in Britain came with a new chapter in the story of the EU, and one not written with the British national interest in mind. Notoriously, the Labour government of the time massively underestimated the numbers of people who would show up. And – again, perfectly reasonably from their perspective – the great majority of those people showed up looking for work, not for a new home.

The normalisation of not belonging

This brings us back to the earlier ‘imported working class’ that was supposed to come to belong. Namely the Commonwealth immigrants who arrived from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent between the 1950s and the 1970s. In many places, they did come to belong. I grew up in Glasgow in the 1980s with many Pakistani Muslim classmates whose families were well integrated into Scottish society. There are now millions of black and brown Britons who give credence to the happy story of successful multiculturalism so beloved of our cultural establishment. But, of course, that is not the whole story.

As early as 2001, the Cantle Report – commissioned in response to race riots in northern English towns – identified different communities living ‘parallel lives’. Especially in the post-industrial north of England, economic decline combined with official multiculturalism had seen various Asian and white communities pitted against one another in competition for resources and respect. There was little or no sense of belonging to a wider, national community.

Instead of Scruton’s society of strangers respecting one another as equals, certain areas became more like Starmer’s island of strangers. Or rather, a figurative archipelago, with each island occupied by an inward-looking community for whom those on the other islands were suspicious and hostile strangers. Given this analysis, the worst possible thing that could have happened was a continuing stream of immigration into these areas from places like Pakistan. Yet that is exactly what happened. The worst consequences are well documented.

How and why did it happen? Part of the answer has to be that even before the steady rise in immigration that began in the late 1990s, Britain’s political landscape was being transformed. Most significant was the peeling off of a distinct political class with little connection to or affection for other classes, and especially for the working class. That class governed Britain according to the set of assumptions described above: liberal social norms could be taken for granted as part of modernity; immigration policy should be guided purely by economic considerations.

Most importantly, this class did not see anything in the British way of life that was particularly worth anyone integrating into. Rather than seeing ‘non-belonging residency’ as the exception, they were happy to see more and more people, including those in established immigrant communities, lead parallel lives. They celebrated it as multiculturalism, not in the sense that people from different ethnic backgrounds can still belong, but effectively in the sense that there is nothing in particular to belong to. Or, as they would more likely put it, everyone belongs!

This is not how most British people think, even after decades of official multiculturalism. While some fear a resurgence of nativism, however, this is unlikely for the simple reason that there is no tradition of nativism in Britain. When liberal critics of Raise the Colours protest that all this flag-waving is positively un-British, they have a point. But only up to a point. Whether we warm to the flags movement or not, most British people – like most people in other liberal, modern societies – want a national home. Even as we keep our distance from our fellow citizens, we believe there is such a thing as a fellow citizen, and that not everyone belongs to that category. There is nothing strange about that.

* I’ve discussed Scruton’s book at more length in Three kinds of belonging.

† For more on ‘faith, flag and family’, see Liberal modernity and the three Fs.

Dolan Cummings is a writer and author. Read his Substack, L’esprit de l’escalier. He is also co-director of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life.

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Ideas Matter has just launched the open call for applications for its Living Freedom Summer School 2026. This year’s three-day residential summer school takes place from Thursday 9 July to Saturday 11 July in central London. The summer school is open to anyone aged 18 to 30, from the UK and beyond. Find out more about the programme and how to apply here.

A love story can tell you a lot about the society in which it was written. Jane Austen had her commitment to socially appropriate marriage in Pride and Prejudice, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover explored the boundaries of lust and Stephenie Meyer’s stories of vampiric love in the Twilight series encapsulated the modern teen experience so successfully that it sold over 100million copies worldwide in 37 languages. The basics might be the same – boy meets girl, hurdles abound, will they won’t they? – but the telling of the stories reveal their readers’ attitudes towards sex, relationships and even their belief in love itself.

Perhaps even more interesting is when old love stories are remade for a modern audience, as happened recently with Emerald Fennell’s screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The tale of two people so entwined and yet so doomed has shaken teenage hearts for centuries, and Fennell’s interpretation promised to be a high-drama dive into the passion, lust and wind-beaten pining hinted at in much of the book - at least in the trailers. In these prudish times of fearmongering about sexual freedom, Fennell’s sexy, glossy reimagining of one of literature’s greatest loves promised to deliver.

You should never believe a trailer. In fact, the film was so sexless, joyless and cruel that many cinema goers in my screening laughed their way through its key emotional highpoints. Yes, Brontë’s main characters, Cathy and Heathcliffe - two foster siblings who fall in love and try to ruin each other with revenge when the possibility of their union is thwarted by mistake and subterfuge - are cruel and immature, but Fennell’s adaptation depicted them as all pouting and no poignancy. I have yet to meet anyone who truly believed that the actors Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie looked like they were in love, despite sticking their tongues down each other’s throats at every opportunity.

How could such a passionate love story fall so flat? Perhaps it’s not just Fennell’s fault (although she is to blame for terrible costumes and butchering the storyline) but a sign that our own commitment to love, risk, passion and the true vulnerability that comes with the concept of sharing a life with someone seems too much in a modern world where ‘self care’ trumps all. Wuthering Heights show’s love’s darker side - the horror and misery that can come from infatuation, longing and the loss of a soulmate. Perhaps we are too scared of the prospect of what a leap into the unknown falling in love really is, and so Fennell’s Wuthering Heights decided to play it safe, relying on innuendos and good-looking actors.

Whether or not you loved the film, Fennell’s adaptation and the disagreements it has posed an interesting question - is our understanding of love and what it should look like changed over the generations? Today’s youngsters are allegedly less sexually active - or romantically interested - than their parents. Is this true? And, if so, why are fewer of us falling head over heels? Are we more scared of love because we’re more scared of each other?

At last year’s Living Freedom Summer School - the annual residential event for freedom-loving 18- to 30-year-olds run by Ideas Matter - I explored this idea of our loss of faith in love while looking at two of my favourite depictions: Jane Eyre and Normal People. What follows is an edited version of my speech. You can also watch me deliver the speech using the video link below.

Your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you - and you may mark my words - you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current.

What is Rochester talking about here in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre? Love. Love is a challenge to life - it requires struggle and pain. His description is fatalistic - you will be dashed or you will be saved. It is Jane who teaches him that she has a third option: to swim against the current and save herself.

1847 was a good year for romance, and a good year for the Brontë sisters. Two of the greatest love stories ever written were published: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by Charlotte’s younger sister Emily. Anne, the youngest Brontë, published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848, arguably the first feminist novel. Raised by an Irish clergyman, sent to filthy schools where their sisters died, and eventually dying young themselves - Emily and Anne of tuberculosis, Charlotte of something similar along with pregnancy complications - for short and tragic lives, the Brontë’s wild romances marked a shift in literary depictions of love, away from the neat and tidy portrayals in Austen’s early 1800 works like Pride and Prejudice. Jane Eyre is a poor orphan who goes to work as a governess, where she falls in love with the master of the house. Complications - and already existing wives - get in the way, but Jane’s challenge to prove herself not only the equal but the stronger of the couple explores the balance between passion and desire and what it means to live freely and live truly.

Fast forward 171 years later, and love in literature reads like this:

Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colours, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact, he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.

That’s Connell Waldron considering his relationship with Marianne Sheridan in Sally Rooney’s hit novel Normal People. About the same age as the Brontës when she published her first novel, Rooney grew up in rural Ireland in County Mayo to a normal, lower-middle-class family, leaving for the big city, much like her characters, to attend Trinity College where she became a top scholar and a debater. Normal People, her second book, is an international bestseller - it manages to perfectly encapsulate what contemporary love is like. Full of emails, texts, awkward silences and fumbling moments at house parties, the book captures the zeitgeist of anxiety-ridden modern, young love. The two main characters - Marianne and Connell - follow the longstanding ‘will they, won’t they?’ narrative arc of romance fiction, but with a twist. Rather than the external barriers that usually hinder love stories - recalcitrant relatives, clashing backgrounds, wars or literal mad women in the attic - the barriers to Rooney’s modern love are all internal. The worst enemy of this story of love is the people in it, and what’s going on in their own heads.

Jane Eyre and Normal People are almost too perfect to compare. Both written by women about oddball women - plain Jane and social outcast Marianne. Both women are ‘damaged’ but understand and deal with that fact in very different ways. Both seem, at times, completely incapacitated by the love they feel for the men in their lives. The context for these two women’s lives is almost mirrored, albeit in different societal contexts. Jane’s brutalisation at the hands of her extended family is a little more severe than Marianne’s (who, as far as we’re aware, never had to wake up next to a dead best friend), but they are both women who have suffered and find themselves on the fringes.

And yet, while Rooney’s heroine is irrevocably damaged, controlled and seemingly unable to do anything about the difficulties life has dealt her, Brontë’s heroine - written at a time when Jane’s experience would have reflected real life for great numbers of women - proves herself stronger than that which would make her weak. Indeed, Lowood school is based on the school experience that Brontë suffered herself.

Brontë never uses the word ‘damaged’ about Jane, but Rooney uses it all over the place. Connell describes Marianne as having ‘a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.’ The damage is not something to overcome, but part of Marianne’s identity. Connell is also damaged - anxiety-ridden to the point of suicide later in the book.

To be able to love you need resilience, courage, strength. The differences in power balance within the love interests of Jane Eyre and Normal people are striking. While Jane cannot allow herself to marry Rochester until she is master - he blinded and at her mercy - Marianne finds freedom in a kind of surrender to Connell. ‘She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed… How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary.’

Again, the two books are almost too easy to compare. Let’s look at how the characters view their relationships. First, Jane talking to Rochester:

You are no ruin, sir--no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.

And now Connell thinking about Marianne:

All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.

In Jane Eyre, love conquers all. In Normal People, all seems to conquer love. What is the difference? While Jane’s barrier is flesh and blood - Bertha Mason, who has stolen her dream by already existing as a wife - Marianne and Connell’s barrier is their own heads. Yes, Connell is poorer than Marianne; yes, Marianne’s family is awful. But everything else is easy for them. Jane had to crawl along the rain-soaked moors to hear Rochester calling her name - that was communication in the nineteenth century. Marianne and Connell can’t seem to hold it together despite living in an era of mobile phones, emails and endless, instant communication.

Love stories often provide insights into the lives and relationships of their original audiences. Madness in Jane Eyre is a raving lunatic in the attic - in Normal People, it’s a multiple-choice form Connell ticks at the therapist’s office asking how suicidal he is. Yes, the Georgians and the Victorians’ view of mental health was cruder than ours, but Rooney’s story about two people trapped by their own anxieties, unable to open up and love each other as they want to, reveals the central difference between these two love stories.

While Jane is one of literature’s greatest defenders of agency - ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you’ she tells Rochester. Marianne and Connell constantly voice their feeling of powerlessness. During her particularly upsetting interaction with Lukas - an abusive photographer - during her year abroad, Marianne ‘experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter’.

Rooney’s woman is the product of the bad things that have happened to her, and, in the face of it, she is without power or agency. Brontë’s woman, on the contrary, when she thinks the worst has happened - that Rochester is going to marry Miss Ingram - responds like this:

Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.

I loved Normal People. I still love it. But the more I re-read and re-watch it (the BBC’s sweaty adaptation with Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones set sofas alight throughout the pandemic), the more today’s obsession with mental health and anxiety overpowers what could be a classic and well-written love story. Today, surveys of young people constantly return results that are grim - they’re allegedly not having sex, not taking risks and not really interested in love. What does seem apparent is that the very nature of love - to return to Rochester’s description, one that is terrifying, deep and rocky - seems an impossible challenge to a generation who have been told to understand adversity as something insurmountable for their mental health.

Love is, after all, at least half to do with someone who isn’t you. It takes two to tango and all that. Contemporary romance is full of damaged women and anxiety-ridden men. We live in the era of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’, ‘I need to work on myself’ and ‘I need some time to be me’. I wonder what the Brontës, conjuring up powerful men and even more powerful women with their pens on the Yorkshire Moors, would have made of such weakness.

Ella Whelan is a journalist and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism. Ella is also the author of The Case for Women’s Freedom, a Letter on Liberty published by the Academy of Ideas.

There’s just a few days to go before Battle of Ideas North, our one-day festival of debate in Manchester. The opening plenary session is titled Iran, Greenland, Brexit Britain… does sovereignty still matter? Those who know me will be unsurprised to find that my answer to that question is ‘yes’.

But recent events – the shock and awe of Operation Epic Fury in Iran, the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump’s demands on Greenland and the UK government ignoring the rights of Chagossians – have called sovereignty into question all over again.

With that in mind, we are republishing my Letter on Liberty (see them all here) on the question of sovereignty written in the aftermath of the UK finally leaving the EU – after a referendum, seemingly endless parliamentary shenanigans and a general election that became another referendum on Brexit. Despite all that has changed since then, the right of people and nations to determine their own futures remains, in my view, fundamental.

How our audience and speakers answer the question… well, you’ll have to be at Battle of Ideas North to find out! The festival is now sold out, but you can visit our website to find out about the full programme and speakers. You can also put your name down for our waiting list, via Eventbrite, so if we get any ticket returns, we can let you know. We hope to get recordings of the sessions out as soon as possible after the event.

Claire

THE SOVEREIGN SUBJECTS OF HISTORY
Claire Fox

First published: February 2021

A year ago, on 29 February 2020, hundreds of people piled into Stockport County Football Club for Changing Politics For Good (#CP4G). This town-hall gathering that I organised alongside my colleague Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen was the fulfilment of a promise we made when elected as Brexit Party MEPs - that we’d debate the future of politics after leaving the European Parliament. Despite Covid-19 being discussed in newspapers, we had no presentiment of its shattering impact on our physical or public life. The mood was vibrant, with attendees full of optimism and fizzing with ideas, everyone newly confident having forced the UK Parliament to at last honour the 2016 referendum result.

The atmosphere reminded me of how historian Christopher Hill, in his seminal book The World Turned Upside Down: radical ideas during the English Revolution, described the reaction to that period’s upheaval of authority: ‘glorious flux and intellectual excitement’, an ‘overturning, questioning, revaluing of everything’. (i)

Mid-seventeenth century, the streets, taverns, coffee shops and workplaces were alive with arguments generated by an explosion of popular pamphlets. That historic flowering of the public sphere inspired this very modern 2021 series of Letters on Liberty. And it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the struggle for Brexit had a similar impact on British politics. There, in Stockport, was an embodiment: people who, through the turbulence of fighting to be heard as voters, had found their political voice as citizens. They had discovered that their personal sovereignty meant that they had power to shape the future. They had become radicalised not simply by voting to leave the EU but by the shock of witnessing the lengths that sections of the establishment would go to thwart their democratic sovereign wishes. ‘Never again’ was the pledge of the day. ‘What Next?’ was the burning question.

A year later and Brexit is done. On 31 December 2020, the UK finally departed from the rules and regulations of the European Union. In the context of lockdown, there were no #CP4G-style gatherings, street parties or mass celebrations. How ironic - you vote to take back control from unelected technocrats in Brussels and history throws a curveball like Covid- 19 at you. The response to the pandemic has been characterised by top-down policies designed by domestic, unelected public-health technocrats - surely this makes a mockery of the Brexit demand to ‘take back control’. To add insult to injury, after four and a half years of a bitter struggle, a less-than-perfect trade agreement with the EU was steamrolled through during the Christmas period with little or no time for parliamentary scrutiny. The small print - the sell-out of the fishing industry and the wholly avoidable damage done to the union by the Northern Ireland Protocol - might suggest that Brexit was, at best, over-claimed for.

Any regrets? Not one. Brexit was never a destination, but the beginning of a new democratic settlement. And at its heart remains a key historical moment that placed the issue of sovereignty back on the agenda. Making the most of that sovereignty is the task ahead.

Sovereignty and its discontents
Proclaiming that sovereignty is the Brexit prize is not sufficient. The s-word is bandied around and often derided as being little more than a hollowed-out slogan, too abstract to be a useful measure of political progress. That dwindling section of Remain supporters who never accepted the referendum result continue to demand that those who supported a Leave vote ‘show me one positive gain from Brexit’. When leavers reply ‘sovereignty’, they are often met by mocking guffaws. ‘You can’t eat sovereignty’ has become a popular refrain.

What sneering critics don’t get is that however abstract a concept, voters sensed instinctively that sovereignty’s rich history had something positive to add to today’s democratic life. More than a word, it stands on the shoulders of centuries of philosophical and political struggles that breathed life into an ideal that has shaped and reshaped the modern world.

But it is not a concept without challenges. It is true that the government now regularly gives itself the power to bypass parliament by using Henry VIII clauses - deriving their name from a time that predates modern parliamentary sovereignty.

It is also true that every day before ‘question time’ in the House of Lords, an unelected bishop leads prayers for ‘our sovereign’, Queen Elizabeth, in a legislative chamber that still contains hereditary peers, Law Lords and a wide variety of political appointees who are not answerable to anyone. Despite this, they can act as a break on democratic decision-making.

Even the assertion that the EU encroached on national sovereignty deserves caveats. While some Eurosceptics argued that the EU was a foreign imposition, the enthusiasm of so many British establishment figures for remaining in the EU made it clear that many UK politicians were only too willing to let the EU take the flak for decisions they themselves were happy with. Indeed, much EU legislation was drawn up by UK representatives. They were happier to sell this to Eurocrats in Brussels, rather than face the inconvenience of having to persuade their own pesky and fickle electorate of the merits or demerits on any given legislation.

When those same cut-and-paste versions of EU laws were imposed on UK citizens, popular opposition was futile as politicians complained they were forced to comply to be part of the club. In the whole process, the electorate were reduced to passive observers, effectively disenfranchised of any meaningful control over the future direction of swathes of policy that affected their daily lives.

Will Brexit change all that? Sir David Frost, the British lead negotiator in recent Brexit trade talks, argued that one of the gains of exercising sovereignty would be that: ‘Britain’s “good institutions and good politics” would make sure the country would make better decisions than would emerge from the Byzantine processes of Brussels.’ (ii) Having recently encountered the civil service and House of Lords committees up close and personal, I beg to differ. There is no guarantee that sovereign law-making will automatically result in nirvana.

Simply because decisions will now be made domestically rather than in Brussels doesn’t guarantee that they will be progressive. For example, the shoddy quotas allocated to the UK fishing industry can no longer be blamed on the EU’s fishing rules. They were negotiated - freely - by a sovereign UK government. Boris Johnson must own that sell-out.

The recent vaccine debacle in the EU may well expose that supranational institution as a hyper-regulatory, centralising barrier to flexible, swift action that would give their own citizens access to life-saving medical intervention. At the same time, Britain’s illiberal, bureaucratic and draconian emergency powers enacted in the name of fighting the pandemic are the result of sovereign politicians making decisions at home. For those of us who believe that lockdown regulations have often been disproportionate and flouted democratic scrutiny by bypassing parliament, Brexit sovereignty might appear a hollow concept.

A historical detour
Sovereignty is not democratic per se - myriad authorities have held sovereignty, including kings, dictators, juntas, theocracies, nation states and the people (usually via parliament or constitutions). For centuries, who holds supreme authority within a specific territory has been the basis of wars, dethronings, regicides, coups and revolutions. History is made up of continual disputes over what or who the holder of sovereignty derives their authority from.

When republics and democracies replaced absolute monarchs, the state and its government were said to be sovereign, and these forms were successively forced to cede more power to the people.

It was in the late-sixteenth century, in reaction to the chaos of internal national wars (most notably the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil War) that sovereignty emerged as a concept to justify monarchs gaining the authority to centralise power at the expense of the feudal nobility. The early theorists associated with developing the idea were Jean Bodin in France and the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Both presented variations on the theme of sovereignty as residing in a single individual or body of people that would have the ultimate authority to declare the law. Philosophy developed when John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reacting against these models (whether absolute monarchy or the Leviathan), viewed the people within a state as sovereign - ruling through their general will. In different ways, their theories popularised the idea that the state should be based upon a social contract between citizens, through which they entrusted powers to a government for protection.

These ideas led to modern democracies, forged through struggles over who held sovereignty - but not without a fight. The revolutionary notion of parliamentary sovereignty led to bloodshed and mayhem for many years before being (somewhat) resolved. The English Civil War between parliamentarian Roundheads and royalist Cavaliers ultimately culminated in the 1688 invasion of England by William of Orange, who ruled under severe limits on royal power. The conclusion: only a parliament with the consent of its electors could govern and determine the politics of that nation. (iii)

Every historic societal progression has illustrated that the ideals of sovereignty can transform political life. During the famous Putney debates in 1647, members of the New Model Army and radicals such as the Levellers spent 15 days thrashing out recommendations for parliament’s constitution, airing arguments for one man, one vote and suffrage for all men, including the poorest. The power of that kite- flying notion, that all voters would be equal (even if not fully realised at that time) inspired everyone from the Chartists through to the Suffragettes, culminating eventually in universal suffrage.

In almost all examples of sovereignty, one key feature is that it is defined territorially - within borders. And yet national sovereignty is loathed by today’s globalism advocates, who neglect the progressive roots and possibilities of the nation state. In today’s world, politicians, international relations theorists and global NGOs can only see these borders and their heritage as responsible for ugly nationalism and xenophobia. One described the UK’s departure from the EU as a ‘deeply reactionary Brexit [that] has created a fantasy of kings in castles with absolute power, addicted to the notion of territory, nation and ownership’. (iv) Putting aside the reality of transnational institutions deploying territorial protectionist measures such as bans on vaccine exports or the EU’s Fortress Europe approach to non-EU migration, history tells a richer story.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 may be long forgotten. However, its development of a system of sovereign states in Europe brought an end to a long era of warring interventions, often fought in the name of religion, and curbed the excessive powers of the Holy Roman Empire and Papal power. This opened up future democratic possibilities and important ideals to take inspiration from: elected national parliaments accountable to citizens in a specific territory; self-rule free from external oppression; barriers to illegitimate interference and aggressive military invasion in internal affairs of other territories. (v) Today’s theorists of postcolonialism might note that movements for self-determination against imperialist empires did so under the banner of fighting for their own national sovereignty.

What next for sovereignty?
Such historical gains of sovereignty are often dismissed as backward-looking nostalgia. But such prejudices are revelatory, as we can see in plain sight the relationship between the contemporary elite’s oh- so-modern disillusion with sovereignty and a deep- seated hostility to treating all citizens as equals.

Through the vociferous attacks on Brexit voters as ill- informed, easily duped, poorly educated ‘gammons’, we now know there are many in positions of authority who are contemptuous of the capacity of domestic voters to make decisions freely. Membership of the EU itself had been a means to marginalise the influence of popular opinion on the work of policymakers. Regrettably, leaving the EU has not dented this preference for privileging unelected

bodies, now homegrown, such as experts with specialised knowledge or the judiciary, over and above the capability of citizens to weigh up important questions about the direction of society. To resist these trends, a new battleground has opened up: individual sovereignty.

Taking back control - for the individual
Today’s challenge is to ensure that voters are taken seriously as equals, that their moral autonomy and intellectual capacity are held as sovereign. In fighting to govern our own thoughts and beliefs, we face novel foes and new sources of authority. Inauspicious trends in the so-called culture wars threaten to undermine self-governance. Unconscious-bias training and hate- speech laws, to name but two examples, give authority to third parties to interpret one’s words and actions, divorced from intention.

It’s easy to sound conspiratorial, but contemporary reliance on ‘nudge’ tactics is evidence of a longer-term official disillusion with individuals’ capacity to make reasoned, sovereign decisions. The doctrine of ‘libertarian paternalism’ that promotes the use of behaviour-management techniques to ensure that the public make the correct choices, while avoiding the difficult task of persuading them, originates in the work of American academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. It was adopted under David Cameron in 2010 as ‘the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy’.

Long before Covid-19 or Brexit, policy advisers frequently complained that citizens refused to take the advice of experts. This was especially true in public- health initiatives such as the self-styled wars on obesity, smoking, alcohol consumption and sugar intake. The failure of the public to follow ‘scientific’ best practice led to the conclusion that people were just too irrational to be influenced by reasoned argument. Instead, advocates of nudge opted for ‘low- cost, low-pain ways of “nudging” citizens… into new ways of acting’. (vi) The then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, boasted that his government’s Nudge Unit believed it could ‘change the way citizens think’ - without the bother of persuasion.

Advocates of nudge describe themselves as ‘choice architects’ whose policies merely help people make the right choices. But as one of their own key papers acknowledges, psychological manipulation to change behaviour ‘has implications for consent and freedom of choice’ and offers people ‘little opportunity to opt out’. (vii)

This has serious implications for personal freedom and individual sovereignty.

When people cease to be free to make choices, whether due to behind-the-scenes psychological manipulation or the spiraling numbers of lockdown regulations that dictate every social interaction, moral independence becomes compromised. It is far too easy to be infantilised and dependent, the very opposite of taking back control or self-determining sovereignty. In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Immanuel Kant warned of how tempting it can be to allow our autonomy to be undermined when choices are removed:

It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.’ (viii)

Lockdown policies have chipped away at adults’ confidence. We have been deprived of an important habit: calculating risks and making independent decisions about how to live. We need to ensure that we don’t get rusty when it comes to taking responsibility for our choices. Even in a pandemic, where physical restrictions might be necessary, we must not succumb to handing over our conscious capacity to make judgments to behavioural scientists, virologists and forecasters.

In Stockport a year ago, many acknowledged that the hopes about realising Brexit’s promise of sovereignty were never dependent on politicians handing down gains. Brexit was a wake-up call that created a DIY attitude to democracy that now - a year on - needs to be rekindled. Reminding ourselves of why sovereignty had such a strong appeal for Leave voters (and still repels so many elites) helps to clarify important questions. Where does power lie? Who, or what, is sovereign and by what kind of consent? Post pandemic, for the sovereign gains of Brexit to be realised, we need an energetic cultivation of our own exercise of judgement, personal responsibility and freedom. The fight for Brexit ensured that the electorate’s will was realised; achieving that, against the odds, proved that people derive their own sovereignty from their status as the subjects of history, not the objects of it. It’s a start - now let’s make some history.

References

(i) Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: radical ideas during the English Revolution, Penguin, 1972

(ii) Fidler, Stephen, ‘With Brexit, the UK Finds Sovereignty Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Getting Its Way’ Wall Street Journal, 25 December 2020

(iii) O’Neill, Brendan, ‘In Defence Of The Poorest He’, spiked, 29 November 2016

(iv) Lis, Jonathan, ‘In Its Search for Sovereignty, Britain has Defaulted to a Dangerous Sovereign’, Byline Times, 5 January 2021

(v) Charter of the United Nations, in which Article 2(4) prohibits attacks on ‘political independence and territorial integrity’ and Article 2(7) sharply restricts intervention.

(vi) Dolan, Paul et al, ‘MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy’, Institute for Government, Cabinet Office, 2010

(vii) Ibid pp66-67

(viii) Kant, Immanuel, ‘What is Enlightenment’, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings, eds. Kleingeld, Pauline, trans, Colclasure, David L, Yale University Press, 2006

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Congratulations to Hannah ‘The Plumber’ Spencer. The Green Party victory was certainly impressive, beating Labour into third place in electoral territory that has been solidly Labour for a century. Indeed, the Greens won 60 per cent more votes than Labour. And the new kid on the block – for the Green Party, it was a first-ever by-election victory - has also gained kudos for dispatching every progressive’s favourite bête noire, Reform UK, into second place, with a considerable gap between itself and its populist rival.

But credit to Matt Goodwin and team – despite being the focus of a united front of hate and sanctimonious demonisation, Reform’s very creditable performance was in defiance of those who doggedly hope the party’s popularity, especially with Britain’s working class, is a flash in the pan. And in the meantime, the anti-Reform campaigners are happy to deploy dirty tricks to try and stem its steadily growing support throughout the UK.

But while the results of the by-election have been described as seismic, as the new reality sets in, it’s worth taking time to ask: what does it really mean? At the Academy of Ideas, we are all voraciously reading various commentaries and weighing up the pros and cons of the emerging political landscape. (You can read a selection of them below.) And our Battle of Ideas North event in Manchester next Saturday, 7 March, will be a chance to properly discuss it all.

What we do know now: the trend towards the implosion of the two-party system now has momentum, and insurgent parties are the new disruptors.

The stranglehold of the Labour/Tory axis is being bashed from all sides. Former police detective Charlotte Cadden, who stood as the Conservative candidate, is a genuinely impressive (gender-critical) woman. However, as a candidate, she barely made a dent. And Kemi Badenoch’s tone-deaf, breezy response to the by-election result has not helped create an impression of a party changing its ways anytime soon.

The big story, of course, is the humiliation of Labour, who won 50.8 per cent of the vote in this seat just a year and a half ago. The story of why there was a by-election at all tells its own story. The previous Labour MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned on the grounds of ill health having been suspended for writing in a local MPs WhatsApp group: ‘Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you.’ However nice Angeliki Stogia is, Labour’s candidate this time round inherited Labour’s local reputation for treating the working class with total contempt.

Even Andy Burnham would have struggled to win, looking at the figures. The one universal truth that emerged from commentators visiting the area was just how loathed this Labour government are by voters across the political spectrum, but especially amongst its own traditional voter base. The despised now despise and express their venom at the ballot box.

Like Badenoch, Keir Starmer’s post by-election statement had rubbed salt in the open wound. The prime minister’s capacity to both blame anyone but himself and to gaslight voters with his blatantly ironic bad takes have made matters worse. Targeting George Galloway as a specific target of his ire just sounds unhinged – but it is also full of irony. Listening to the Labour leader accusing the Greens of ‘sectarian politics’ is a gross example of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’. Labour has cynically used clan-kinship networks and ethno-religious blocs for its own political purposes for decades, all under the guise of ‘multiculturalism’. Labour figures continue to shout DIVISIVE and RACIST at any criticisms of its courting of the most regressive aspects of identity politics.

It’s hard to call out the likes of the family-voting scandal when such ‘cultural practices’ have been indulged for years. And now that the toxic tactics used by Labour in terms of Asian bloc votes are now being deployed by another party against Labour, it’s difficult to have sympathy with high-handed finger pointing.

Regardless of Starmer’s hypocrisy, I also feel queasy about the Green’s opportunist and dangerous courtship of religious and ethnic sectarianism. The Gazan and Pakistani flags, that Urdu leaflet stirring up anti-Hindu and vicious anti-Israel hate, just exacerbate the Balkanisation of British politics. And it’s hard to see this as a positive new political movement when it is based on the most unstable political foundations. Will Hannah Spencer retain her new voter base once the Green’s identitarian, wacky policies – the embrace of LGBTQ+ ideology, legalising drugs and prostitution, and so on – come into real-world conflict with the social conservatism that has propelled them to win this time? Chanting genocide and hating Israel hardly seems enough to build a new, positive, sustainable political movement in Gorton and Denton, or anywhere.

At Battle North next Saturday, we will be exploring such themes. For example, one panel will be debating our increasingly fractured communities. Yes, the Gorton and Denton constituency might well be a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, as Professor Rob Ford has described it, based on vastly different demographic bases (the Gorton wards are close to majority Muslim; the Denton wards are over 80 per cent white). But the Greens and Labour’s stoking of difference makes solidarity more difficult; the task of creating a politics capable of transcending competing identities is made even harder. Does that mean we are stuck with this depressing status quo?

Working out the shape of British politics is one task; a more challenging task is to shape the future in a period of febrile flux. We hope to make a contribution to that task at Battle North – come and join us for a day of vibrant, no-holds-barred public conversations. Full details and tickets here.

Around the web

Battle North speaker Graham Stringer MP commenting on the Greens encouragement of sectarian voting.

Battle North speaker Richard Johnson for UnHerd: Gorton and Denton will break Labour’s fragile coalition

Battle North speaker Charlie Winstanley for UnHerd: The revenge of Gorton’s chavs

The politics of the ‘Muslim vote’, Paul Stott, Spectator

Gorton and Denton: welcome to Balkanised Britain, Tom Slater, spiked

Hannah Spencer’s extremist victory pushes Britain one step closer to the abyss, Jake Wallis Simons, Telegraph

Quick thoughts on the result, Luke Tryl, X

Gorton and Denton by-election: Observers ordered to show ‘sensitivity’ to different ‘cultures and customs’ as family voting row erupts, GB News

All in the family?, Chris Bayliss, The Critic

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