Academy of Ideas

Debate recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2026 at Church House, London. ORIGINAL FESTIVAL INTRODUCTION The Labour government has published a draft Conversion Practices Bill that, it claims, ‘will deliver a landmark ban on abusive conversion practices in England and Wales’ and will protect LGBTQ+ people ‘from abhorrent… physical and psychological abuse to change who they are’. But what exactl...

Battle of Ideas festival 2026 takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster. View the full programme here . Early-bird tickets are available until 17 September here . This debate was recorded at Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION The process of globalisation was supposed to make the world a more uniform place. But that prospe...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner made housing a central pillar of their domestic agenda when they were elected. Yet from two disgraced housing ministers to younger generations’ desperation about astronomical rents and unaffordable property prices, housing controversies are rarely fa...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Risk is everywhere. Taking the bus, crossing the street, swimming in the ocean, going somewhere alone. Everything is risky – and we are, in many ways, more concerned about life’s riskiness than ever before. In Running the Risk: From Shark Attacks to Nuclear...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION After a year of a Labour government, the UK is heading for a ‘debt-crisis cliff edge’, if it is not already in a ‘debt doom-loop’. Things are in many ways worse even than the moribund economy that the Conservatives bequeathed. Government borrowing, inflation and unemployment are g...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In December last year, critic Dean Kissick, in an article for Harper’s Magazine, caused controversy in the contemporary art world. He complained that the ‘fascination with identity’ was lending to a ‘nostalgic turn to history’. The ‘socially conscious turn’ of the early 2010s, he...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Netflix’s hit series Adolescence seemed to capture the current anxiety surrounding young men and what they might be getting up to online. The show tells the story of a teenage boy who, seemingly out of the blue, stabs and kills his female classmate after she calls him an ‘incel’ o...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION From accusations of ‘two-tier’ justice to an inability to tackle everyday criminality, the disarray enveloping British institutions is nowhere more evident than with the police. In recent times, intervening to stop widespread crime such as shoplifting, and solving – or even invest...

‘The populists, nationalists, stupid nationalists, they are in love with their own countries’, declared Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission, in May 2019. This familiar retort of a leading figure in the globalised elite exemplifies the recent fashion for regarding any manifestation of national pride with contempt. But what was intended as a snide insult about love o...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION National ID cards have been a hotly debated issue for decades in Britain. Being able to unambiguously prove who you are can be extremely useful for us all as individuals – but that facility also comes with concerns about our liberties. Historically, the British public have not bee...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Marketing with purpose, rather than solely for profit, hit the mainstream 20 years ago with the launch by Unilever of the ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ for Dove. This was a well-meaning attempt to link selling soap with a broader social theme: female body positivity. With the rise of...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION The past 20 years have seen astonishing advances in science, technology and medicine. Building upon the completion of the Human Genome Project at the turn of the century, scientists have developed ever more powerful ways to sequence and study DNA, enabling us to better understand...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION TERF Island is the story of the brave and determined women who led the charge against demands that undermined their rights and jeopardised the physical and mental health of children. They dragged shadowy campaigns into the daylight, exposing the harm that would result – and the ha...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Plato wrote The Republic around 375 BC, making it 2,400 years old. Yet it has continued to reverberate throughout the entire subsequent history of Western philosophy. Any serious philosopher since has had to reference their ideas to the framework Plato originally set down in ancie...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Hinge, Feeld – whatever your dating preference, there’s an app for it. Gone are the days of hitting the town in the hopes of catching someone’s eye in a busy bar. People moan about their problems, and some want to leave digital dating behind, but for today’...

The Academy of Ideas team of Alastair Donald, Geoff Kidder and Rob Lyons are joined by Sebastian Moore from the Take Me Home podcast to discuss why England lost that semi-final, what they thought about the performances of England and Scotland in the tournament, why 64 teams isn't as mad as it sounds, and who they think between Argentina and Spain will walk away with the trophy on Sunday.

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION After Labour’s election last year, the new defence secretary, John Healey, wrote a memo to Cabinet colleagues in relation to the scandalous Afghan data leak and the subsequent cover-up of relocations. Healey stressed the need to ‘maintain control of the narr...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In February 2025, the then deputy prime minister and communities secretary, Angela Rayner, established an independent government working group, chaired by former Conservative MP and Attorney General Dominic Grieve KC, to advise on a definition of ‘anti-Musli...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION There is no doubt that far too many of our children and young people are not thriving mentally or emotionally in the way that they should be. In 2024, almost 20 per cent of school-aged children in the UK had been diagnosed with a mental-health condition, up...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION When US Vice President JD Vance warned in a Fox News interview this summer that Europe risked ‘committing civilisational suicide’, he was chiefly concerned with Germany, which he says is in danger of bringing about its own demise. While Vance’s fire was dire...

The AoI team of Geoff Kidder, Rob Lyons and Jake Weston are joined by Donald Clark, author, speaker and CEO of Wildfire Learning, to discuss the start of the knockout phase of the tournament. They reflect on Scotland's exit, England's struggles, the rise of the diaspora teams like DR Congo and Morocco, and how multiculturalism may be affecting the way fans in England enjoy the tournament.

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION ‘I have the feeling that this competition is going to be as important, if not more important, than the Champions League’, said Chelsea manager, Enzo Maresca, after his team had won the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup. This summer’s competition was intended to showcase club football...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Jane Austen turns 250 this year, prompting the question: is one of the world’s greatest female novelists still relevant? With too many BBC and Netflix adaptations to count, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Colonel Brandon, George Knightley and Austen’s other love interest...

Lots of people are converting to Christianity and, across the country, church attendance is increasing. While the numbers vary, one survey shows the number of people attending church at least once a month is up from eight per cent in 2018 to 12 per cent in 2024. Perhaps most notably, the survey shows a quadrupling of attendance among Gen Zers, aged 18 to 24, from four per cent to 16 per cent. The...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Saturday 18 October at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Genocide, Holocaust, Never Again. Phrases that once conjured up only one image: the Nazis’ systematic attempt to eliminate the entire Jewish people and eradicate Jewish culture, identity and future generations of Jews from the face of the earth. It was once...