Academy of Ideas

ECONOMY FORUM: How can we avoid the worst of a coronavirus depression? Are these lockdowns doing more harm than good? What will be the long-term economic impacts of the pandemic and the reaction to it? Joan Hoey, Phil Mullan and Jake Pugh discuss.

EDUCATION FORUM: Since the 1980s, much has been said of the educational potential of digital technologies, both within the classroom and beyond. With the coronavirus crisis, however, much of this discussion has been sidelined, as for the first time in school history nearly all England’s schools and colleges are by necessity scrambling to move their entire pedagogic operation online. What can we le...

ECONOMY FORUM: One of the biggest policy benefits from leaving the EU is the end of the ‘Brussels excuse’. No longer can British ministers blame the European Commission – often illegitimately – for tying its hands in dealing with Britain’s economic challenges. Now the buck clearly stops with a Boris Johnson-led government, which is also has the benefit of a large parliamentary majority. What do it...

PODCAST OF IDEAS: Alastair Donald, co-ordinator of our international Battle satellites, talks to friends and speakers from our annual festival: the Battle of Ideas. From Italy: Dominic Standish is a lecturer in media and a commentator on Italian affairs as well as the author of Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and reality. From Germany: Sabine Beppler-Spahl is the chair of Freiblickinstitut e....

PODCAST OF IDEAS: The current coronavirus pandemic has revealed, or heightened, many underlying political issues - from the lingering effect of the culture wars to the consequences of fearmongering in political discourse. But one issue that seems to have bucked the trend is the generation debate. Going by much of the discussion of the last 10 years, young and old people are supposed to be at odds...

BOOK CLUB: ‘It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,’ wrote Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished; its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain’s ally, led to the book being refused...

SPORTSCAST OF IDEAS: Sport, like everything else, is on lockdown. But that doesn't mean talk about sport has died down - from controversies over furloughing to accusations of virus spreading at games. But how do we move forward, are football matches and other big public sporting events on the horizon? And is our absence from sport making the heart grow fonder, or will online matches replace the be...

PODCAST OF IDEAS: Europe might be the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic at the moment, but this is a global problem. Alastair Donald, co-ordinator of our international Battle satellites, talks to friends and speakers from our annual festival: the Battle of Ideas. From Singapore: Stuart Derbyshire is the associate professor in psychology at the National University of Singapore and the Clinical...

PODCAST OF IDEAS: We're closing in on week two of lockdown in the UK, with life on pause for many of us cooped up at home. But thinking outside of our own four walls, it has often been hard to get a sense of what's happening across Europe, where cases of the virus seem to be skyrocketing. Some countries, like Italy, have forced their citizens into weeks of house arrest. Others have taken a more li...

PODCAST OF IDEAS: The coronavirus might have changed life for many of us, but at the Academy of Ideas we’e adamant that it won’t stop our ability to challenge and interrogate the cultural, political and scientific big questions of our time. With this in mind, Claire Fox, Geoff Kidder, Jacob Reynolds, Rob Lyons, Mo Lovatt, Alastair Donald and Ella Whelan discuss everything from the government's new...

Recording of a discussion at the Battle of Ideas festival 2019 (https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/resisting-wokeness-andrew-doyle-and-douglas-murray-in-conversation/) As the old saying goes, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. While social-justice activists are generally decent people, many commentators argue they exhibit all the tendencies of a cult: unshakeable certainty, a...

Recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 3 November 2019. Debate is growing about the use of a genetic/genomic approach called ‘polygenic scores’ to understand health and assess health risks. These scores are different from traditional genetic tests and can be used in relation to a vastly greater number of diseases and conditions. Advocates claim this new approach could revo...

Recording of the debate at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 3 November 2019, in partnership with City of London Corporation. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, is one of the thinkers associated with the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, ‘blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres’. Do we need a new industrial revolution – and what are t...

Recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 3 November 2019, in partnership with City of London Corporation. On both sides of the Atlantic, the idea of a Green New Deal has become a major policy focus. In the US, the idea has been put forward by left-leaning elements of the Democratic Party, while a cross-party group of MPs has called for a UK version. Proponents suggest that i...

Listen to this debate from the Battle of Ideas festival 2019 . Special thanks to the Federation of Awarding Bodies who partnered with the Academy of Ideas to produce this session. The UK has relatively low rates of youth unemployment. But as critics point out, this statistic hides a multitude of issues. Starting salaries for graduates are amongst the lowest in the EU. Despite many initiatives to p...

Listen to this debate from the Battle of Ideas festival 2019: More people now attend university in the UK than ever, but there is much less clarity about what university is for. For many, it is simply a step on the career ladder between school and work. For others, higher learning is about pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Do universities even do a good job at preparing people for jobs, or shou...

A recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2019. From the housing crisis to infrastructure projects, construction is more important than ever. Everyone seems to agree that innovation is crucial to the resurgence of the construction sector. And yet, for all the fine words and government initiatives, the construction industry continues to languish in the doldrums with very little innova...

Listen to this debate from the Battle of Ideas festival 2019. Could artificial intelligence (AI) transform education? Schools are already tentatively exploring ‘adaptive learning’ applications, which identify gaps in a student’s knowledge and build personalised quizzes. Sir Anthony Seldon, author of The Fourth Education Revolution, argues that by taking care of the mechanical aspects of education,...

Listen to the debate from the Battle of Ideas Festival 2019. From climate change to tax evasion, humanity’s biggest challenges are increasingly global. Many of those frustrated by our lack of progress on these issues argue for some form of world government. If the United Nations, or some similar body, had real power over national governments, global agreements could be made and enforced. But other...

Debate recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 2 November 2019. Critics argue that relatively little has been done since the financial crisis to fix the underlying problems that precipitated it. Have we failed to take the old advice to ‘never waste a good crisis’? Extraordinary monetary measures are still mostly in place, but there are heated debates about whether the major developed...

Listen to the debate from the Battle of Ideas Festival 2019. The result of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 seemed to put paid for the foreseeable future to the most significant threat to the Union, but the result of the EU referendum in 2016 has put the cat amongst the pigeons once more. The future of Northern Ireland has also been a constant bone of contention since the Brexit vote....

Listen to the debate from the Battle of Ideas Festival 2019. The Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled women with naturally higher levels of testosterone cannot compete in women’s sport events unless they reduce their testosterone with medication. CAS was hearing an appeal by a South African runner, Caster Semenya, against a ruling by the governing body of athletics, the IAAF, that she cannot c...

The results of yesterday's UK General Election throw up many different issues. Why did the Conservatives end up winning comfortably? Why did the Labour vote collapse, with seats that had voted Labour for decades switching to the Tories? Does the success of the SNP in Scotland mean there will be another independence referendum? What does it all mean for Brexit? Discussing these issues and more are...

Listen to the debate from the Battle of Ideas Festival 2019. Thanks to Living and Dying Well for their partnership on this debate. The question of whether assisted suicide (often known as assisted dying) is morally defensible, or should be legally permitted, is a familiar issue of medical ethics. Polls suggest that most people in Britain support a change in the law to allow it. By contrast, the Br...

A recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 3 November 2019. The angry exchanges in parliament after the Supreme Court ruled against prorogation were typical of the ill-tempered discourse around Brexit. This year it was also deemed acceptable to ‘milkshake’ those you disagree with. Looking at a world seemingly filled with slurs, angry social-media comments, inflammatory remar...