Academy of Ideas

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 profo...

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.

Essen...

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 ne...

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...

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 beg...

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...

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 reliabl...

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’ t...

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,...

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. Labo...

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 safeguar...

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 fe...

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...

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 in...

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 governmen...

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 ch...

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 ...

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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 po...