In a wide-ranging interview, Andrew Doyle talks to Claire Fox about his new book, The End of Woke and why there is much still to be done to defend freedom. Andrew notes that while some things have shifted in recent months – from the Cass Review and the UK Supreme Court judgement on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act to the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term – it doesn’t mean that our problems are over. The ‘new puritans’ he identified in his previous book are still very much ...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 304
Dave Clements is a policy adviser, writer, and parent of a child diagnosed with ADHD and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite a longstanding scepticism about the claims made about the increase in these and other similar conditions, since becoming a father he has been forced to question his views. Clements describes his son’s condition as something that ‘runs through him like a stick of rock’. ASD, in particular, can have a profound effect on children and their families. And yet, as Dave tells...
May 19, 2025•22 min•Ep. 303
Claire Fox sits down with Jasleen Chaggar of Big Brother Watch and author Timandra Harkness to talk about the latest attack on our privacy. The Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill does not sound like the kind of legislation that will set your pulse racing. But one part of it in particular should be more widely known and the cause of great concern: the new eligibility verification powers for welfare recipients. Essentially, if the Bill passes, the government will be able to demand...
May 15, 2025•49 min•Ep. 302
Recording of the introductory remarks at the Academy of Ideas Economy Forum on 20 March 2025. Ever since the great financial crisis of 2008, growth in Britain – both in terms of GDP and living standards – has stagnated. While the Covid pandemic and lockdowns didn’t help, the problems of the UK economy (indeed, most Western developed economies) are longstanding. What has gone wrong? Labour has promised a return to growth, yet the new government has already announced big hikes in taxes like employ...
Mar 24, 2025•30 min•Ep. 301
Next week, the Football Governance Bill will go to Report Stage in the House of Lords. While it will then go to the House of Commons, the debates in the House of Lords are a chance to amend a piece of legislation that threatens to damage English football in ways that. as yet, are not getting enough attention. The introduction of an Independent Football Regulator (IFR) has become a controversial subject as the realities are becoming clearer, and unintended consequences are dawning on more and mor...
Mar 04, 2025•59 min•Ep. 299
Claire Fox talks to Sall Grover and Katherine Deves about their fight in Australia to reassert in law that a woman is an adult human female. Sall Grover is the founder of the female-only app, Giggle for Girls and Katherine Deves is one of her legal team. Both have been visiting the UK from Australia to get support for their appeal of an important test-case decision on the definition of ‘woman’, which Sall lost last year. It all began when then 54-year-old biological male Roxanne Tickle from New ...
Feb 20, 2025•48 min•Ep. 300
In the wake of the huge farmers' protest in London on 10 February, Rob Lyons talks to two Cumbrian farmers, John Shaw and Richard Kerr, along with their accountant Paul Benson, about the state of farming in the UK today. Why farmers are so angry about the Labour government's inheritance tax changes The existing difficulties with making a good living from farming, particularly the power of supermarkets Why it is unfair to blame sheep and cattle farmers for climate change The failure of many polit...
Feb 12, 2025•46 min•Ep. 298
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In many areas of life, an explosion of diagnostic labels seem to have expanded far beyond straightforward medical prognosis. Medicine seems to have become tangled up with fashionable identities, and a zeitgeist that stresses vulnerability and victimhood. How do such trends affect medical ethics, let alone reliable medical interventions? One such example is the jokey aphorism ‘...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 297
On the fifth anniversary of Brexit, listen to this debate recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In July, on the eve of the General Election, Keir Starmer was asked if he could foresee ‘any circumstances’ in which the UK would rejoin the EU’s single market ‘in his life’. His response was an emphatic ‘no’. Yet it is clear that Labour wants to ‘reset’ the UK’s relations with Europe. Reports in July suggested the Germ...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 296
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Smartphones have become almost ubiquitous in modern society. The rise of social-media services, which have billions of users worldwide, has gone hand in hand with the use of smartphones. Few technologies have seen such rapid adoption. With concerns about several social problems coming to the fore in recent years, a variety of commentators have pointed to this new technology as...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 295
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION With concerns growing about potential blackouts on cold winter evenings with little wind, listen to this debate on what is happening to UK energy, particularly with the arrival of the new Labour government. The Labour government has set out an ambitious goal to decarbonise the UK’s electricity supply by 2030. Labour’s plan includes prioritising renewable energy sources like wind...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 294
Recording of an Academy of Ideas debate on Tuesday 26 November 2024 via Zoom. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION With Parliament about to vote on the issue for the first time since 2015, join us for a discussion on the rights and wrongs of legalisation. The House of Commons will vote on Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on 29 November. The Bill claims to ‘allow adults who are terminally ill, subject to safeguards and protections, to request and be provided with assistance to...
Nov 29, 2024•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 293
Criminal solicitor Luke Gittos offers an insider's view on the Telegraph columnist's case and the worrying rise of censorship. The case of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson has drawn attention to the scale of policing (quite literally) of speech in the UK today. Pearson’s lawyer in the case is Luke Gittos - a partner at Murray Hughman solicitors in London and director of Freedom Law Clinic, as well as a regular Battle of Ideas festival speaker. In this exclusive video, Luke reflects on the Pea...
Nov 22, 2024•29 min•Ep. 292
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In 2018, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) was introduced at the World Cup in Russia – and the arguments about it haven’t stopped since, with complaints that decisions are still often wrong while lengthy reviews cause confusion and frustration. Using technology to help referees get important decisions right seemed like such a good idea. For example, in 2010, England midfielder Frank ...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 291
On the eve of the US presidential election, listen to our discussion from the Battle of Ideas festival 2024: Within days of being announced as the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris went from the most unpopular vice president in 50 years – a figure whose unpopularity reportedly led to the former president, Barack Obama, scrambling to find an alternative – to a viable presidential candidate. After slumping under Biden, polling now indicates that the Democrats have a real chance of retaining the Wh...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 290
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2022 on Saturday 15 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION The Online Safety Bill is causing huge concern for those who believe in free speech. But how can we protect free expression and still deal with the many problems that arise online? The Bill has passed through the House of Commons and will now be debated in the House of Lords. There are hopes that Liz Truss’s government may amend the Bill to remove the most egregious problem with it...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 289
Media scrutiny, political scandals and electoral upsets - the Academy of Ideas team get together on the eve of the General Election for one last pre-vote discussion.
Jul 03, 2024•37 min•Ep. 288
The manifestos are in! And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the two main parties have caused the least stir. Reform UK’s ‘contract’ has been denounced by commentators and think tanks alike as ‘uncosted’, while the SDP’s manifesto was praised for standing out as an unusually comprehensive list of ideas in a sea of general obfuscation. Meanwhile, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have been battling it out for who had the most hard-done-by childhood, with rows about Sky TV and toolmakers providing some com...
Jun 18, 2024•52 min•Ep. 287
The Academy of Ideas team discuss the latest in the General Election campaign - plus a view from Europe. Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for the Conservative Party, its leader - Rishi Sunak - managed to mess up on an international scale. The prime minister’s decision to leave D-Day commemorations early - allegedly returning home for a TV interview - has upset many people, including his own colleagues. While Sunak immediately apologised for what he described as a scheduling issu...
Jun 08, 2024•51 min•Ep. 286
Listen to the first of our regular discussions with the Academy of Ideas team on the highs and lows of election campaigning. Subscribe to our Substack to keep up to date with our latest podcasts, events and comment. Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took the nation - and many of his own MPs - by surprise by calling the next General Election. On Thursday 4 July, UK citizens will join the billions around the world going to the polls this year to pick their next political leaders. While Sunak m...
May 29, 2024•44 min•Ep. 285
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 planting trees to carbon capture and storage. As a result, a timetable has been created to eliminate em...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 284
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 company ACI Worldwide to be operating on a larger scale than even in the US and China. Earlier this year,...
May 15, 2024•46 min•Ep. 283
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 in Northern Ireland want Catholic schools banned. Three years after showing pupils images of the Prop...
May 10, 2024•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 282
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-teens have never known a world without tablets and apps. The ubiquity of technology during their format...
May 08, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 281
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 and greater Welsh autonomy growing even stronger. In Scotland, for example, the pro-independence SNP...
Apr 30, 2024•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 280
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 dramatic impact on almost every profession or art form that involves static or moving images, written or...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 279
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 forcefully into public view. Accordingly, controlling ‘hate speech’ has become a major focus for critics ...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 278
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 block on democratic process. With deportations being halted on the grounds of ‘human rights’, one’s v...
Mar 26, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 277
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 decided policies, one increasingly debated issue is: who is really in charge of society? In his recent bo...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 276
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 his views’ and his presence would ‘violate their space’. The edgy spirit that used to characterise ...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 275
