Rob Lyons speaks to architect Austin Williams. In this week’s Podcast of Ideas architect Austin Williams speaks to Rob Lyons about China’s remarkably rapid urbanisation in recent years, and the tension between individual freedom and progress.
Few texts have sustained such extensive reference and quotation in Anglo-American politics as JS Mill’s classic. Mill’s famous ‘Harm Principle’ – that government power may only be justifiably used to prevent harm to others, not to improve one’s own good – still provides the ground on which numerous debates around civil liberties, lifestyle choices, and more recently ‘nudge theory’ are fought. Moreover, Mill’s rousing defence of the liberty of the press never ceases to be relevant. Yet it is impe...
Listen to this week's public event in London. Seventeen million people voted to leave the EU last Thursday, an historically important democratic moment. Yet there are already attempts to thwart or row back from this decision. Many have signed a petition urging a second referendum so that voters can give the ‘right answer’; others threaten the vote with lawyers and bureaucratic challenges. There is contempt for voters who effectively revolted against an establishment that told them they should vo...
Rob Lyons, Claire Fox and David Bowden discuss the fallout from the Brexit vote. In a historic week where the British public voted to leave the European Union, sparking one of the most tumultuous political upheavals in living memory and causing hysteria across the political establishment and the media, Rob Lyons, Claire Fox and David Bowden offer some much needed sane analysis and give their visions of where we should go from here to ensure we build a more democratic, more prosperous and freer B...
From controversial law cases such as that of the footballer Ched Evans through to intense bursts of outrage at offensive jokes or unpopular opinions, the Twitterstorm seems to have replaced the mob in twenty-first-century imagination. While some defend the use of such tactics as a (mostly) harmless letting off of steam, others have become increasingly uncomfortable about what such tactics mean for the state of public debate more widely. In his much-discussed book, So You’ve Been Publically Shame...
Claire Fox, David Bowden and Rob Lyons discuss the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, its implications for the EU referendum campaign and the parallels with the Orlando night-club massacre.
Recorded at the Batle of Ideas 2015 In a week where opprobrium has been heaped on the parents of a four-year-old child who had to be rescued from a gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo, while the parents of a Japanese seven-year-old boy face charges after abandoning him to wander in the woods for a week, listen to this session from the Battle of Ideas 2015 where Lenore Skenazy argues that far from being obsessed with what our kids might be up to, we must give them the freedom to roam and explore ...
Claire Fox, David Bowden and Rob Lyons discuss the week's news. In this week’s Podcast of Ideas the team discuss whether the left’s mealy-mouthed support for the Remain campaign belies contempt for the demos and a fear of right-wing populism, why we should all be celebrating the decision to frack in Yorkshire, the public health lobby’s loss of credibility, the ban on legal highs and a patronising new campaign to protect women on social media.
Recorded at this week's Institute of Ideas event at Goodenough College. On 23 June, the UK will vote in a referendum on whether or not to remain a member of the European Union. The decision is a momentous one, the first time British voters will have had a direct vote on membership since 1975. Yet the public debate about the pros and cons of Brexit has been frustratingly shallow. The aim of this event was to offer a panel of high-profile speakers an opportunity to set out the case for Remain and ...
In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, the team chews over Sadiq Khan's election as London mayor and the implications of the different election results across the country for the major parties - particularly the way old assumptions about political strongholds have been called into question. With BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg being targeted over her coverage by Corbynistas, how should accusations of media bias be handled? The team also discusses the claim that Brexit might lead to war i...
In her 1969 essay, ‘The personal is political’, feminist Carol Hanisch defended consciousness-raising groups against the charge they brought ‘personal problems’ into the public arena. She argued that most difficulties women experienced in private were rooted in political inequality, so personal problems could spur women to political action in public life. Today, consciousness-raising groups are less common. Yet the idea that ‘the personal is political’ has survived, albeit giving way to an incre...
Recorded at the Battle of ideas 2015. While the UK economy has recovered from the economic crisis, few would argue that the recovery is built on strong foundations. Wages are only just starting to rise in real terms after a number of years of decline. Economic output remains weak compared to previous recoveries, and the state is still spending almost £90 billion a year more than it receives in tax. A particular concern for economists is low productivity – the amount of wealth produced by each wo...
Claire Fox, David Bowden and Rob Lyons discuss the week's news In this week’s edition of the Podcast of Ideas the team discuss whether, on the Queen’s 90th birthday, the monarchy has any place today. There’s analysis of the latest in the Brexit referendum, what’s behind the prosecution of a German comedian for composing an insulting poem about Turkish President Erdoğan and why Dolmio has made the strange move of encouraging the public to eat less of its pasta sauce.
Podcast: listen to this debate from our Battle of Ideas archive. Recorded at the Battle of Ideas 2015 We all love the NHS, don’t we? Despite the ubiquity of platitudes about defending ‘our’ NHS, though, exactly what we are defending and why? The NHS has undergone significant changes since its inception in 1948. Shifts within patient demographics, combined with increased patient demands and advances in technology and medical care, have resulted in a system at breaking point. One million patients ...
Claire Fox, David Bowden and Rob Lyons discuss the week's news In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas the team ask whether, with Tata Steel’s operations in Britain haemorrhaging £1million a day, renationalisation is really the answer. Instead, should we be demanding investment in new and dynamic industries rather than propping up zombie sectors of the economy? With the release of the Panama Papers making the not-so-startling revelation that the super rich sometimes avoid paying tax, the team as...
Podcast: listen to this debate from our Battle of Ideas archive. With the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, having recently announced a sugary drinks tax and the Lancet publishing new figures claiming that 38 per cent of UK adults will be obese by 2025, what is the truth about obesity? This archive debate was recorded at the Battle of Ideas 2013. According to ‘Reducing Obesity and Improving Diet’, a policy document produced by the Department of Health in March 2013, most people in Eng...
Claire Fox and Ian Dunt discuss the Rhodes Must Fall movement In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, David Bowden talks to Claire Fox and journalist Ian Dunt about the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which has swept campuses from Cape Town to Oxford demanding that vestiges of colonialism be removed from colleges, notably statues of Cecil Rhodes. Does the movement represent young people boldly trying to shape the world around them? Or, is it a misguided attempt by privileged students to rewrite the ...
Claire Fox and David Bowden join Rob Lyons to discuss the debate about Brexit so far. What does it reveal about attitudes to democracy today and the snobbery of many calling for the UK to stay in the EU? Is the media too obsessed with Westminster politics rather than the serious issues involved? What will really change if Britain votes to leave? The team also discussed the new public health campaign, 'One You' - why are government lecturing people to change their bad habits?
A keynote from the Battle of Ideas 2016 ‘If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all.’ Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784) When One Direction announced they were splitting up, child psychologists offered parents of grieving tweenies advice on how to console their offspring. In the same month, parents were also told by researchers how long they should read to their ch...
Student Elrica Degirmen on her fight for free speech on campus In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas Rob Lyons speaks to Elrica Degirmen who is leading the fight for free speech at the University of Manchester, and is currently running for election to the Student Union on a free speech platform.
The polemical filmmaker talks about his crowdfunded documentary making the case for leaving the EU. With the date for the UK’s referendum on membership of the EU now set for 23 June, Rob Lyons speaks to filmmaker Martin Durkin about his forthcoming feature-length documentary, Brexit The Movie, which sets out the case for leaving the European Union and it’s anti-democratic technocracy behind. You can find out more about Brexit The Movie and contribute to the Kickstarter fund here . Donations clos...
Physics teacher and communicator Gareth Sturdy discusses a major scientific discovery. Earlier this month, scientists confirmed the detection of gravitational waves, confirming an important conclusion from Albert Einstein’s work. But what are gravitational waves and what does their detection mean for our understanding of the universe? In this podcast, Gareth Sturdy from The Physics Factory talks to Rob Lyons about space-time, the Big Bang and the on-going debates in physics between quantum mecha...
Podcast: Frank Furedi discusses his new book in conversation with Russell Celyn Jones. Have we forgotten how to read well? Is there a tendency to reduce reading to a minimalist set of functional skills? Or is reading over-fetishised as a signifier of civil and enlightened society? In The Power of Reading, Frank Furedi addresses twenty-first-century anxieties about the future of reading. He takes a wide-ranging historical approach to examining the changing meanings attributed to the act of readin...
Listen to the team discuss Brexit, the US presidential election and public-health naggers. In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, Rob Lyons, Claire Fox and David Bowden discuss the lacklustre start to the EU referendum debate and how the lack of cohesion in the pro-Brexit camp doesn’t bode well for the campaign ahead. In the US, politics is also in disarray, with anti-establishment candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both narrowly missing out on winning their respective caucuses in Iowa...
From the Battle of Ideas 2015 When Roland Barthes infamously declared ‘the death of the author’ in 1967, he also intended it as a celebration of ‘the birth of the reader’. And while literacy campaigners continue to fight the Reading Wars over literacy rates, by most measures reading is in a healthier state than ever. Polls indicate the number of Americans reading books has doubled since the 1950s, and reading is increasing among under-30s, while sales of printed books are proving remarkably robu...
Tom Slater, deputy editor of spiked, on this year's spiked Free Speech University Rankings. A year ago, spiked‘s groundbreaking Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) revealed that there was active suppression of speech and expression at 80 per cent of UK universities. Tom Slater, deputy editor of spiked and coordinator of the FSUR project, talks to Rob Lyons about the FSUR 2016 and why, if anything, censorship on UK campuses is getting worse....
From the Battle of Ideas 2015 Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley, through which academics and students successfully overturned the censorious policies of university management. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the FSM ushered in a new era of student activism across the US and Europe, with free speech at its heart. So it is striking that today, student radicals appear to be at the forefront of cal...
From Big Data to the driverless car, we seem to live in an age of dizzying technological progress, which many hail as a ‘new industrial revolution’. Robotic intelligence is becoming so advanced that many warn machines could take white-collar jobs within a generation, while computers are moving ever closer to passing the Turing Test. Meanwhile, smart technology is increasingly marketed as desirable for reducing the capacity for human error: Google’s developers note that most accidents had by thei...
Charlie Hebdo one year on, Corbyn's reshuffle, debating Brexit and more In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, Rob Lyons, Claire Fox and David Bowden discuss the state of free speech one year on from the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Labour’s seemingly interminable shadow cabinet reshuffle, David Cameron’s decision to allow his ministers to campaign for Brexit and the way the debate is shaping up, the latest absurd campaign in the war on sugar and Simon Danczuk’s texting shenanigans.
