Academy of Ideas

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Climate change has become the great overarching mission of our times for politicians and business leaders. With the UN secretary general declaring that we are now in an era of ‘global boiling’, every leading politician talks about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to ‘net zero’ – with the few emissions the economy does produce balanced by some method to soak them up, from pla...

Battle of Ideas festival 2023, Sunday 29 October, Church House, London ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In August, India made world news by being the first nation to land near the Moon’s South Pole. Prime Minister Narendra Modi described it as a historic moment for humanity and ‘the dawn of the new India’. Meanwhile, India’s digital transformation of its financial system is reported by payments systems compa...

Recording of the Academy of Ideas Education Forum discussion on 25 April 2024 in central London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION A High Court judgement hangs over Michaela Community School for banning ritual prayer. A Wakefield school suspended pupils for damaging a copy of the Quran. Two recent studies claim that faith schools select against poor and SEN children. Two thirds of the liberal Alliance Party i...

Subscribe to the Academy of Ideas Substack for more information on the next Battle and future events: https://clairefox.substack.com/subscribe SQUARE-EYED SCREENAGERS: ARE PHONES CORRUPTING OUR KIDS? Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. Digital devices are so omnipresent that sociologists call today’s children ‘Generation Glass’. Our pre-tee...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2021 on Sunday 10 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION According to many political commentators, the break-up of the UK is becoming inevitable. When devolution was implemented in the 1990s, one of the aims of its supporters was to head off rising support for separation. But the opposite has happened, with support for Scottish independence...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION The worlds of art and entertainment are wrestling with, and reeling from, the opportunities and challenges posed by ‘generative’ AI – tools that can generate seemingly unique, bespoke creations in response to ‘prompts’ submitted in plain language. Such technology is now having a dram...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION The self-image of Western societies as cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant has collapsed of late, with a darker view taking hold of people as extreme, hate-filled and hurtful. For example, in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel, anti-Semitism – ‘the oldest hatred’ – has come force...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Sunday 29 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Most people acknowledge that there is an issue with Britain’s borders. The question is: who or what is to blame? For many, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and its courts in Strasbourg, has become the focus – either as the bulwark against anti-refugee sentiment, or the b...

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION ‘Take back control’, the central demand from the Leave campaign’s case for Brexit, posed the question: who should rule? However, today, when frontpage headlines frequently ask why nothing works in ‘Broken Britain’ and politicians blame myriad forces for thwarting democratically decid...

Recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Sunday 29 October, at Church House, London. Subscribe to the Academy of Ideas Substack for more information on the next Battle and future events: https://clairefox.substack.com/subscribe INTRODUCTION At the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Comedy Unleashed’s show, featuring Graham Linehan, was cancelled because the venue did not ‘support...

In our latest Podcast of Ideas discussion, Ella Whelan is joined by regulars Claire Fox, Alastair Donald and Geoff Kidder, plus guest Mark Birkbeck from the campaign group Our Fight. They discuss events in the House of Commons this week as an SNP-led debate on the Israel-Hamas conflict descended into farce, leading for calls for the speaker of the house, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to resign. They also tak...

With the UK officially in recession, what should governments be doing? This debate was recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION With the Conservatives doing badly in the polls and Labour riding high, the UK could have a new party in government in the next year or so. How will this change the relationship between the state a...

Recording of the debate at Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Being ‘diverse’ is no longer simply about shaking things up. Today, diversity is considered a core value of any civilised society and its institutions. Diversity strategies are a must for businesses, small or big – diversity is good for the planet, good for politics, good...

Subscribe to the Academy of Ideas Substack for more information on the next Battle of Ideas festival and future events: https://clairefox.substack.com/subscribe WHAT WOULD A LABOUR GOVERNMENT LOOK LIKE? Recording of the debate at Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION After Labour’s catastrophic haemorrhaging of Red Wall voters in 2019, and widespread disillusi...

From the furore over PMQs and jibes about gender ideology to surveillance of football fans, international farming protests and Labour's latest U-turn, tune in to the latest Podcast of Ideas. Featuring the AOI team: Claire Fox, Rob Lyons, Geoff Kidder, Jacob Reynolds and Ella Whelan. Subscribe to the Academy of Ideas Substack here: https://clairefox.substack.com/subscribe

With Nicola Sturgeon the latest politician to be lambasted over WhatsApp messages - or the lack of them - listen to this debate from the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House in London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION From intimate selfies to leaking of personal messages, the digital age seems to relentlessly blur the boundaries between private and public. Not only are we enco...

Recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Sunday 29 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Too often, talking about race feels fraught with difficulty, leaving us walking on eggshells to avoid offence. However, this can mean that important questions and queries go unanswered, and grievances can fester. Luckily, more and more authors are taking up the challenge –...

Recording of the debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Sunday 29 October. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Trump is perhaps the most widely vilified political leader of modern times – yet he retains a huge measure of support. So seemingly assured of securing the Republican nomination that he can forgo the candidates’ televised debates, he also transformed his arrest for interfering with the 2020 ele...

Recording of the debate at Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 29 October 2023. The wildfire in Hawaii in August is just one example of extreme weather and natural disasters in recent months. Southern Europe has baked in record temperatures. Indeed, July was reportedly the hottest month globally since records began. Earlier this year, wildfires in Canada covered much of the north-eastern US with sm...

Was the UK government's Rwanda scheme for asylum seekers doomed to fail? Why has it taken 20 years for the young girls who were victims of Rochdale's grooming gangs to get justice? And why are they cheering the Houthis in New York?

Former US president and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has been in the news constantly in recent weeks. Listen to this debate from the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 29 October 2023 which examines his popularity and trends in US politics. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Trump is perhaps the most widely vilified political leader of modern times – yet he retains a huge measure of support. So seemingl...

On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the UK's National Health Service, listen to this debate from the Battle of Ideas festival, recorded on Sunday 16 October 2022. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In the wake of the pandemic, many people have expressed frustration about waiting times and the lack of face-to-face appointments with GPs. At the same time, doctors have threatened strike action over new con...

This is a recording from the Academy of Ideas' Arts and Society Forum , held on Wednesday 17 May 2023. English singer-songwriter Jack Hues discusses his varied musical career, key influences, inspirations and motivations – and shares his insights on how music is faring in our fast changing world and the culture war. Hues’ musical career and influences straddle popular and classical genres, from th...

In this episode of the Podcast of Ideas, Jacob Reynolds talks to one of the students who was at the centre of the controversy surrounding Claire Fox's cancellation at Royal Holloway University, Omar Loubak. Omar was an organiser at the Debating Society, and has a unique insight into how these kinds of cancellations proceed on campus. Listen for an episode of Podcast of Ideas where he and Jacob dis...

On 13 March 2023, the Arts & Society Forum invited Miriam Elia and Manick Govinda to discuss how Miriam develops her ideas as an artist and how she has managed to make a success of her art, in a competitive and sometimes hostile world. They covered broader issues, including what it means to challenge contemporary orthodoxies and ‘groupthink’, and how artists can survive the culture wars. Miriam is...