Announcing Battle of Ideas North 2026
We're bringing the festival's spirit of frank and open debate to Manchester on Saturday 7 March. Join us!
The Battle of Ideas festival in London has gone from strength to strength. But we always welcome the opportunity to get out of the capital and take the spirit of the festival to new places. After the success of our Buxton festivals, we’ve been itching to return to the north of England and now we have the chance.
Battle of Ideas North will be a full day of debates on Saturday 7 March in central Manchester. The venue is just 10 minutes’ walk from Piccadilly station, so we hope people from across northern England and the Midlands will join us. There’s plenty to talk about!
Sovereignty and the nation state are back in the news – from Donald Trump deposing the leader of Venezuela to his demand for control of Greenland and threats to the ayatollahs in Iran. This year also marks 10 years since the Brexit referendum, with it’s motto of ‘take back control’. Yet the current government is talking seriously of an EU ‘reset’, which seems to involve giving up control and bowing down to EU laws. Does sovereignty matter anymore?
Politicians in Westminster have long talked of ‘levelling up’ and the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ – see the announcement on transport upgrades this week. But how do we revive the UK economy, and the economy of the North in particular?
The Supreme Court judgement in the For Women Scotland case seemed to clarify once and for all what the law means by a ‘woman’. Yet almost a year on, governments in London and Edinburgh – let alone NHS trusts, educational establishments and trades unions – are dragging their feet on implementing the ruling. Do institutions now get to pick and choose which laws they have to obey?
And what about free speech in an era where artists are still cancelled for expressing the ‘wrong’ views and people are arrested for social-media posts? For all the cries about tackling ‘misinformation’, our national broadcaster can still manipulate videos to make Trump look like he instigated the January 6th attack on Congress. How can we defend free speech and demand the truth from the media?
We’ll be talking about all this and more. As ever, these debates will be as much about the audience as the speakers. They will be conversations for the public, with the public, in public.
If that sounds like your cup of tea, please join us on 7 March.
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