The Labour government’s proposed children’s social-media ban is contentious enough for those advocating for freedom. Will the ban require adults to adopt digital IDs? Will VPNs be banned, putting the UK on a worrying list of nations, such as Russia and North Korea? And what will children consume instead? We’ve already heard that the government would like to reprogram algorithms to promote the BBC.

Yet Nandy let slip that this move is only the start in a broader online-safety drive: ‘This is a staging post to what must be a very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space so that people are safe.’

What does it mean to be ‘safe’ online? Are attempts to control the digital space the inevitable endpoint of a governing class that always seeks ‘safety’, rather than trusting the demos to consume information and judge its validity for themselves? We’ve already experienced a ‘very active interventionist state’, and for those arrested over comments made online, those interventions can seem deeply hostile to the values of free speech and individual liberty.

One thing is clear: the need to understand what’s coming, and how we can push back against a number of measures designed to constrain freedom, is greater than ever. We’ll be at the Battle of Ideas to do just that. Check out our sessions below, and if you haven’t already, use the LIVING26 discount code to buy your tickets here.

ALUMNI WATCH

EMMA GILLAND ON SOCIAL MEDIA & YOUNG PEOPLE
Living Freedom alumna Emma Gilland joined Matilda Gosling, Gabrielle Grant and Ruth Wareham at the Academy of Ideas Education Forum to debate whether banning social media for under-16s will give children greater freedom to grow up – or restrict their independence, social lives and access to ideas. Watch the discussion here.

LAVINIA ROSSETTI IS A FOUNDING MEMBER OF CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY FREE-SPEECH SOCIETY
Find out more and support them here.

ALASTAIR DONALD ON THE RED LINES OF FREE SPEECH
Living Freedom’s Alastair Donald looks ahead to the Battle of Ideas keynote session: Free Speech For Me And Not For Thee: The Red Lines In Free Expression?

EMMA GILLAND ON THE FUTURE OF REPRODUCTION
Towards Individualised Reproduction: Why Are We Choosing to Change How We Have Children?

JACK KELSALL ON FREE SPEECH FOR FOOTBALL FANS
Read Free speech for football fans, too here

PODCAST BETWEEN MAEVE HALLIGAN AND CONNIE SHAW, WHO MET AT LIVING FREEDOM
Maeve Halligan on trans activism, free speech and campus censorship

EVENT WATCH

BATTLE OF IDEAS FESTIVAL: 11 DAYS TO GO
The festival is fast approaching. We have the following LIVING FREEDOM panels:

• Why are influencers so influential?

• Assisted death to sexual freedom: autonomy and its discontents

• The great sex recession: has Gen Z forgotten how to date?

• Angry young women? The rise of the Femosphere

• Quiet quitting to #LazyGirlJobs: Workshy Britain?
  One of the speakers, Joanna Williams, has written about this session – see her article on Substack.

Tickets are on sale now with big discounts for students and concessions - plus an extra 20% off if you buy here.

HOW CAN WE DEFEND FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS – KCL FREE-SPEECH SOCIETY
TONIGHT – Tuesday 6 October, 7pm-9pm, Bush House
With Serena Worley, Michelle Shipworth, Brodie Mitchell and Living Freedom alumnus Omar Loubak Mohamed. Register here.

THE NEXT GENERATION WITH CLAIRE FOX – ADAM SMITH INSTITUTE
Tuesday 13 October, 6pm · Adam Smith Institute, Westminster
Baroness Fox discusses Why Free Speech Matters, followed by drinks and networking
For under-35s only · Refreshments provided
Find out more and register here

IAN PACE: ALBÉNIZ’S IBERIA & MORE
Tuesday 13 October, 6.30pm · City St George’s, London
Pianist and Living Freedom speaker Ian Pace performs Albéniz’s complete Iberia, alongside works by Mompou, Stravinsky/Lourié and Busoni
Find out more and book here

CONFLICT ON CAMPUS – EDINBURGH
Wednesday 21 October · Edinburgh
A full-day event with speakers including Arif Ahmed, Jo Phoenix, Tommy Curry, Lindsay Paterson, Michael Spence & Alice Sullivan
Tickets £55, including lunch and refreshments
Find out more and book here

TOGETHER 5TH ANNIVERSARY EVENT
COMPLIMENTARY TICKETS FOR 18–30s
Saturday 7 November · London
Speakers include Katharine Birbalsingh, Maajid Nawaz, Professor Norman Fenton, Mike Graham, Bernie Spofforth & more. Aged 18–30? Book up to two complimentary General Admission tickets with code LF1830. See the Together tickets page.

WANNA KEEP UP WITH WESTMINSTER EVENTS? – EVENTS DEAR BOY
Join the WhatsApp group run by political communications experts Alex Gunter and Blaise Baquiche for updates on Westminster’s hottest events
Join the group here

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Battle of Ideas is THE opportunity for liberty lovers to discuss the big challenges for freedom today. At a time when university campuses and online discussions can be polarised and censorious, this is the chance for all young people to come along and to listen, think and have your say on the issues of the day.

At this year’s festival, Living Freedom will be partnering on:

Why are influencers so influential?
Assisted death to sexual freedom: autonomy and its discontents
The great sex recession: has Gen Z forgotten how to date?
Angry young women? The rise of the Femosphere
Quiet quitting to #LazyGirlJobs: Workshy Britain?

In addition to 120+ sessions including debates on themes such as tolerating intolerance, the techlash – blaming social media for everything, free-speech hypocrisy, transmania in sports and beyond, the fall of FIFA, misinformation and truth, and so much more….

With Living Freedom alumni such as: Connie Shaw, Maeve Halligan, Georgina Mumford, Sam Rubinstein, Felice Basbøll, Jack Kelsall, Sebastian Moore, Tess Ashen, Lukas Seifert, Oliver Walsh and Eloise Schultz. View all the speakers here.

STUDENT TICKETS ARE ONLY £30 WITH EARLY-BIRD – ENDS MIDNIGHT TOMORROW

OR VOLUNTEER FOR A FREE TICKET AND CHECK OUT HOW THE FESTIVAL WORKS BEHIND THE SCENES. APPLY HERE.

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The year is 2012. I’ve just turned six years old, and my team, Birmingham City, draw 2-2 with Blackpool in the second leg of a Championship play-off semi-final. And on that May night, I learn, whether I know it or not, two equally valuable lessons about life. One being that the away goals rule is incredibly cruel, and second, that it’s fun to hear thirty thousand people shout ‘WANKER!’ at one man.

And because of this, I grew up to become a loud, opinionated presence on the terraces of my football club. Much of that was thanks to the freedom football supporters had to speak their minds, however offensive, impulsive or off-the-cuff their chants, shouts and exclamations might have been. By the time I became a teenager, I had heard just about every imaginable – and often impressively creative – criticism it is possible to level at someone you don’t like. But that, of course, didn’t suddenly turn me into a loudmouth yob who went around making everyone uncomfortable the moment I left the stadium.

Going to the football offered me, and many others, the ideal outlet for pent-up frustrations and the everyday irritations of life. Football still serves that cathartic purpose for me today, and I can confidently say I’m far from the only one who sees it that way.

This, therefore, brings us to the maddening developments in the football world, in which our arena to freely express ourselves is slowly being taken away from us.

Two weeks ago, it was reported in the Daily Mail that Chelsea fans are being told that the club will ‘trace those who bought tickets for the fixture, and email them to ask them to avoid any repeat’ following the alleged chanting of ‘Fuck the Pope and the IRA’ among the away support that travelled to Fulham.

Nor is this an isolated case. In 2022, Stoke City distanced themselves from the playing of ‘Delilah’ by Tom Jones, removing it from the pre-match playlist. The reasoning appeared to be that the adaptation of the lyrics used by Stoke fans was misogynistic. A year later, the Wales Rugby Union also removed the song from its choir list, despite not having the adapted lyrics Stoke fans used. Arguably, the song’s meaning and lyrics were now beyond the pale to be used in public spaces. Likewise, Wolverhampton Wanderers concluded this summer that ‘The Liquidator’ should be banned because of offensive chanting, because supporters sang ‘Fuck West Brom’ during it.

And while Birmingham City Council applies for a High Court injunction to stop members of the public from putting flags up in the city, one has to wonder where the line will be drawn next.

It feels as if our way of life is sliding away from us at a pace we simply cannot keep up with. The days are seemingly gone when a fan could turn up to the stadium, hand a fiver to the bloke on the turnstile, stand where he pleased, say what he liked – all free from interference by the authorities.

Now, instead, buying a ticket means handing over every conceivable detail about yourself, so the club can plot how much money you’re likely to spend. You then arrive at the stadium and pass through airport-style security. From there, you’re eyed up by stewards as you make your way to your assigned seat, as you’re preached to by repetitive advertising and wrong-think LEDs, and reminded to report your fellow supporters for offensiveness. Freedom is, quite frankly, on the back foot.

In 2020, when we were in ‘peak lockdown hysteria’ and the inevitable question came up of what to do about bringing back this nation’s biggest commercial success in a time when mass gatherings were prohibited, the answer was more of a dystopian image than many of us could’ve imagined.

With the football-going masses dispensed with, in their place came piped-in, pre-approved crowd noise. Stadiums were adorned with the approved messaging of the moment, while the seats once occupied by supporters were covered with slogans and campaigns that no fan had ever been consulted on.

And to many among the elite, it seemed they rather liked it that way. Even when supporters were finally allowed back into stadiums, many of the restrictions remained. Football fans suffered their own form of ‘long Covid’: the crowds had returned, but the controls that came with the pandemic had not entirely disappeared. In December 2021, I attended a match in Blackburn where I had to present a Covid passport or proof of a negative lateral-flow test simply to gain entry.

It feels as if the attacks on football-supporting freedoms have intensified ever since. To many, the clampdown on supporter ‘behaviour’ and the language fans use is yet another battleground in the wider war on free speech in this country.

The ability of the masses to speak their minds is undoubtedly a sign of a functioning and healthy society.

To echo Nineteen Eighty-Four and, like Stoke fans, put a spin on a classic:

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine an empty stadium with piped-in supporter noises playing forever.’

Jack Kelsall is an alumnus of Living Freedom Summer School. Read his Substack.

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We have some new initiatives planned. Read on for details of Generation Freedom – our new regular meetings for alumni. And keep an eye out next month for exciting news about the launch of Living Freedom Night School. But there are old favourites, too. Do follow the latest debates programmed at Battle of Ideas festival, where Living Freedom will be running several sessions across the course of the weekend of 17 /18 October. You can volunteer to help run the festival, which will give you access to many of the sessions, or you can buy your ticket here.

As well as this monthly newsletter, keep an eye out for our Substack articles. We’ll be kicking off next week with one of our alumni, Jack Kelsall, defending free speech for football fans.

In short: there’ll be plenty more to read, watch, attend and argue about.

Get in touch if there is something that you think we should advertise or publish. Please do share this Substack as widely as possible – and encourage friends and colleagues to subscribe. And if you can turn your free subscription into a paid one, then please do – you’ll be supporting the emergence of a new generation of freedom fighters.

Jake Weston
Living Freedom Substack editor
jake@ideasmatter.org.uk

FREEDOM WATCH

Jake Weston

The tragic death of Professor Jason Arday has sent shockwaves through academia. We will no doubt learn more about the circumstances surrounding his death in the months ahead. But the wider questions raised by the controversy – from allegations of plagiarism to concerns about how such a young academic rose so rapidly through the university system – go far beyond one individual.

For those beyond academia, some of the revelations of recent weeks may have come as a surprise. But to more observant – or perhaps more cynical – readers, especially those who have spent time in universities recently, they may have seemed rather inevitable.

Questions about standards, merit, priorities, institutional incentives and the way universities make appointments have been bubbling beneath the surface of academia for years. I’d wager that questions about the conduct of senior university figures – particularly in relation to DEI – are unlikely to disappear from debates about academia anytime soon.

For those of us lucky enough to attend Lord Biggar’s lecture at Living Freedom Summer School 2026, we’d be forgiven for wondering whether professors at Cambridge could have stopped this whole tragic episode if they’d had slightly more courage.

The response to Jason Arday’s death raises concerns over freedom in two particular respects.

First, lazy accusations of institutional racism in the media should worry readers about the extent to which the news media will pursue the truth in the future. Spiked’s Tom Slater was good on this issue on the BBC. Lord Woolley’s pronouncement that Jason Arday was ‘lynched’ is obviously ludicrous and reckless in its disregard for both the tragic context and the real-world consequences of reimagining this case as a purely racist witch hunt.

Second, some in academia are threatening to double down on DEI. One academic stated: ‘I can’t say anything on the record, or I’ll be the right’s next target. The [right] have set their sights on pushing Black people out from all these institutions.’ One can assume that some academics will push for greater ‘protections’ for black professors and more discriminatory hiring practices, moving us further away from the aim of treating people as individuals according to the content of their character and their achievements.

In short, we are at risk of learning the wrong lessons from this tragic episode.

Elsewhere in academia, Nathan Cofnas, who made the initial accusations of plagiarism against Arday, has been suspended (then unsuspended after intervention from the US government) from Ghent University for his ‘race realist’ views. Although I totally reject Cofnas’s views on race, I implore all readers to watch his interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari, who seems to forget all principles of free speech due to his obvious dislike of Cofnas, asking him with incredulity: ‘Your position is you can knowingly cause offence and distress!?’

Yes, Mr Ferrari: free speech means you’re allowed to cause ‘offence and distress’. A good lesson in how not to debate those you disagree with.

new initiative
GENERATION FREEDOM – Tuesday 8 September

Our first GENERATION FREEDOM discussion is taking place on 8 September.

Generation Freedom welcomes Living Freedom alumni to discuss the most pressing challenges to freedom today. We take the ethos of our summer school into regular seminars and forums, encouraging young people to think for themselves and confront each other in the most complex and pressing political issues of the day.

In regular meetups, we explore freedom in different forms, including alumni-led discussion groups, lectures, debates and seminars. We aim to equip young people with the ability to deal with the challenges of the day by thinking freely and innovatively, stepping back from the media headlines and the political noise to interrogate the ideas. Alumni will not just listen to interesting speakers but will be pressed to defend freedom through their own ideas – inspiring our alumni to not just think about freedom in the abstract, but to defend it in practice, and pushing them to be able to defend freedom and start their own discussions in the public sphere.

Message Emma Gilland (emma@ideasmatter.org.uk) for details if you don’t already have them.

ALUMNI IN THE NEWS / MEDIA

Plagiarism is not the only academic vice
Felice Basbøll, Substack

Suicide is a tragedy, not an argument
Samuel Rubinstein, UnHerd

The culture war on uni sports societies
Jake Weston, spiked

The Young Women Quietly Converting to Catholicism
Georgina Mumford, Compact

‘This is absolute arrogance in the face of the highest court in this land’
Maeve Halligan, now at the IEA, on GB News

Congratulations to Kirstin Brady, who will be starting work at the Centre for Government Reform in early November.

EVENT WATCH

BATTLE OF IDEAS FESTIVAL: SIX WEEKS TO GO
We’re now only six weeks away from the Battle of Ideas!

If you’d like to volunteer, we’d love to hear from you. We need a few people to help out on the Ideas Matter stall over the weekend, and on the Living Freedom sessions – so please let us know if you’re interested.

Alternatively, ‘early bird’ student tickets for the whole weekend are just £30 until 18 September.

OPTIMISTIC PICNIC AT HYDE PARK – FUTURE: UK
Saturday 5 September, 12pm · Hyde Park, London
Bring a blanket, food, drinks & a friend
Find out more and register here

THE GREENING OF ARCHITECTURE - EAST MIDLANDS SALON
Thursday 17 September, 7pm · The Brunswick Inn, Derby
Speaker: Austin Williams
Book tickets here

THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM - BATTLE OF IDEAS SATELLITE
Wednesday 23 September, 6pm · Vinson Centre, University of Buckingham
speakers: Daniel Silveira & Alistair Miller
Find out more and register here

WILL A SOCIAL-MEDIA BAN GIVE CHILDREN THE FREEDOM TO GROW UP? ACADEMY OF IDEAS EDUCATION FORUM
Monday 28 September, 7pm · Online via Zoom
Speakers include Emma Gilland & Matilda Gosling
Register here

RATIONAL ENDEAVOUR - CURIOSITY, OPTIMISM, REASON
Bi-weekly online meetings · Writing opportunities · UK 2027 conference
Find out more here

GET IN TOUCH

Write to our newsletter editor Jake Weston about anything Living Freedom related: jake@ideasmatter.org.uk.

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This essay is based on Jacob Reynolds’s speech at Living Freedom Summer School last weekend, and examines how the severe pressure the establishment is under drives ever-more expansive attempts to maintain narrative control.

Jacob is convenor of The Academy – an intellectual retreat which, like Living Freedom, is an initiative of the charity Ideas Matter. Each year, The Academy takes a major intellectual theme and interrogates it through history, philosophy and literature. This year, the theme is the idea of the ‘Hollow Leviathan’: the feeling that the contemporary state and government is degenerating, less and less able to deliver basic goods, and more desperate to maintain control.

The Academy 2026 takes place at Wyboston Lakes, Bedfordshire, on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 August. Early-bird discounts are available until Sunday 26 July. Get tickets here.

Narrative control: the collapsing authority of the state

Jacob Reynolds

Perhaps the central battleground of contemporary politics is the need of our political elites to control the narrative. Primarily, the role of establishment politicians is not to deliver changes and reforms, not to fix problems identified by people in their everyday lives, and not to change circumstances such that they can attract votes, but to maintain narrative hegemony.

Crucially, this differs from previous attempts to maintain ideological hegemony – that is, to win the societal ‘battle of ideas’ – because ideological warfare was always related to the real world. For example, Stalinism’s ideological success was demonstrated in defeating the Nazi industrial machine at its own game, capitalism defeated communism by offering unparalleled standards of living, social democracy was ideologically effective to the degree it demonstrated you could balance both the demands of organised labour with those of economic growth.

By contrast, the attempt at narrative hegemony treats the political realm purely in the domain of information management. This is a political class that has given up on shaping the world and instead looks to shape the narrative.

A variety of attempts to maintain control of the narrative

The news cycle is full of examples that demonstrate that contemporary elites are concerned, above all, with controlling the narrative. Three suffice.

First, there was the recent confirmation of a story which many people had assumed for a long time, although was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The British government has a special division, run out of Whitehall, called the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). The job of RICU is to intervene with victims of potentially ‘racially inflammatory’ crimes and make sure that they ‘calm community tensions’. You could call this the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit – its job is to make sure that government, victims and the media all stick to a story which encourages people to avoid asking difficult questions.

This unit has been involved in creating media narratives in conjunction with the press, public campaigns like plastering London in posters following the 2017 London Bridge attack, and working with victims’ families (such as the families of Henry Nowak) to write their statements to the press. In all such cases, the RICU unit serves to further the interests of state multiculturalism, force-feeding the public with the message that ‘division’ and ‘demonisation’ are the primary issues, rather than government policies on migration and multiculturalism.

Second, the Department for Media Culture and Sport released a proposal with an almost innocent-sounding name: Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media.

It proposes a ‘prominence regime’ for ‘trustworthy’ news on social media and video-sharing platforms. It would make news from public service media plus other ‘trustworthy’ providers ‘prominent and easy to find’. It gives the example of national and local news publishers appearing near the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news, especially during ‘social unrest or crisis’.

The DCMS worries that online news is now heavily shaped by algorithms, that misinformation and echo chambers can worsen ‘polarisation, conflict and division’. The government will explore legislative options for a news-specific prominence regime on social media. The proposals explicitly raise whether this should be ‘ongoing and always on’ or only active in periods of crisis, and whether users should be allowed to switch it off.

A third example, which although I take from America is extremely relevant here, is the reaction to the brutal murder last year of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr, a 14-time offender who was repeatedly set free by authorities under the influence of defund-the-police style racial-justice policing policies. Despite the case being an enormous sensation on social media, it took 18 days for the New York Times to comment. When it finally did, the article was a monstrosity of moral evasiveness. ‘A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right’, ran the headline, with the piece engaging in a bizarre detour to talk about the ‘egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality’ in the Jim Crow era.

The NYT was not alone in preferring to talk about the reaction to the attack rather than the attack itself. Elite barometer Politico went with ‘Ukrainian refugee killed in North Carolina gets dragged into political messaging war’, while Axios complained of ‘MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime’. CNN, not to be outdone, produced this horrific example of the shiftiness of the passive voice: ‘How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing.’

Clearly, the regime media was concerned above all with ensuring that no one draw any political consequences from the stabbing, which had been going viral on social media for almost a whole week. The issue for these outlets, when it became impossible to simply ignore the issue, was to ensure that widespread concerns about urban criminality, ineffective justice policies and the withdrawal of law and order prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement did not get a hearing. Such concerns are merely ‘right-wing firestorms’ and part of a regrettable ‘political messaging war’.

A very similar logic was seen in the days following the murder of the French student Quentin Deranque earlier this year by Antifa thugs. He had been attending a demonstration organised by a group of young women, and had come along lest they face any trouble. This man was simply murdered in cold blood by a premediated attack of Antifa militants, who picked him out, followed him home, and ambushed him 12-to-1 before kicking him in the head until he was dead. The mainstream French media reported that a far-right activist had died after inciting a confrontation.

In these examples, I don’t even have to mention the explicit censorship systems which now rule the Western world, such as the Online Safety Act or the EU’s Digital Services Act.

What drives attempts at narrative control

What is driving this? Why such a desperate need to exercise total narrative control?

The key to this issue, is, in essence, the following schematic: the established political class are unable to reckon with the sources of their unpopularity, and must employ ever more comprehensive attempts to provide a foundation for their deeply unpopular rule, because they face total destruction. The stakes are existential for them.

One of the fundamental driving facts of contemporary politics is that the ideology of the ruling class is thoroughly discredited. The political pressure on the ruling class is, across the West, extreme. They face, if not electoral annihilation, then electoral defeats to populist forces who, until recently, would have been totally marginal.

But the response of the political mainstream does not include the possibility of introspection. While they might be capable of asking the question why they are unpopular, they are incapable of answering it with a hard look at themselves.

At the same time, this ruling class certainly feels itself under sustained pressure. To invoke the language of Marxism, they feel threatened not just as a government, but as a class. Their class position – their position as the dominant political and economic group in society – is under threat.

These two facts – the inability to look in the mirror and the dread they feel at the approach of a new order – give rise to a response which at the same time focuses their efforts on political messaging and licenses extreme measures. Put together, this sets the stage for some of the most profound and most desperate attempts to control speech that we know in mature democracies.

Because they cannot avail themselves of introspection, they must come up with a particular explanation to understand their unpopularity. They need, to borrow a term from philosophy, an ‘error theory’ – that is, a theory for why it is that their programme, policies and worldview face such opposition. If they are on all issues fundamentally correct, why do people not agree with them? What explains the errors that the populist masses make?

The explanation is, in the time-honoured fashion of anti-democrats since Plato, that the voting masses are not just wrong, but also misled. The masses do not really disagree with the experts, they just lack the skills and knowledge to perceive what the experts have already decided is the truth. The masses have been tricked – tricked by sophists, by propagandists, by the internet, by Elon Musk, by Russians, by populist charlatans. They have been fed a diet of propaganda, hoodwinked by adversarial algorithms, fallen prey to foreign misinformation.

Therefore, the most important task for the ruling class, anxious to solve the problem of the erroneous masses, is to ‘fix’ the narrative imbalance. The problem of political disagreement becomes a problem of political messaging. If the truth has already been decided, but people still don’t see the light, then we need special techniques for bringing the masses to see the truth. Controlling the narrative – arranging what can be seen, heard and said – becomes not an alternative to democracy but the better substantiation of its essence.

At the same time, the class interest of the establishment is keenly felt by them all. This is not merely a possible change of government afoot but a change of regime. We are not talking about different shades of the postwar consensus, but a desire to overturn it entirely. Given how much the stakes have been raised, the available tools have become proportionally more powerful. Things that would have never been conceivable before in democratic peacetime – dawn raids over private messages, the use of the world’s most powerful technologies to change the debate in real time, gagging orders on the press so powerful their existence cannot even be mentioned – have become fair game in the contemporary political contest.

These two features come together to mean that the establishment classes are thus both psychologically and personally motivated to establish ever more elaborate and intrusive schemes for controlling the narrative.

Three strategies of control

We can group these tactics together under three banners

A. Strategies of control

B. Strategies of deception

C. Strategies of delegitimisation

The strategies of control are perhaps the most obvious – the various forms of soft and hard censorship, regulation of the internet and other communications.

The strategies of deception are also quite straightforward to spot. We have already mentioned the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit, but we should also note the government supply of industrial-grade misinformation. One examples is the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) modelling the impact of migration by using info on migration from 20 years ago, ignoring, for example, care workers who bring 15 dependents. Another is the refusal to publish crime statistics broken down by nationality and migration status. NGOs are also part of these strategies of deception.

But so far we have said less about the strategies of delegitimisation. The most obvious example here is the hysterical moral panic around ‘foreign disinformation’ and the attempt to turn all critics of the establishment into various versions of stooges of Vladimir Putin (or, more recently, of Donald Trump). It literally does not compute for the establishment to see mass discontent as the logical response to their despotic and failed policies, and so the possibility that this as all manipulated by Russia or funded by shady Trump-aligned forces is the only logical step.

Beyond controlling the narrative

This story – a story of a political class engaged in what is effectively an all-out war for survival – seems bleak enough. But it looks increasingly likely that as the narrative control efforts fail, they will intensify their work in more radical directions.

Indeed, the past few days gives us an indication into how Andy Burhnam – who is said to have a more ‘mature’ understanding of the problems of establishment politics – plans to deal with mass discontent. Burnham’s solution is to re-orient the Civil Service away from London. But the small print reveals this is less about devolution than a desire to make the Civil Service less responsive to any future Reform government: Politico reveals he aims to ‘rewire’ the Civil Service to head off Farage.

This is just one part of a playbook now well-established in continental Europe. Macron has led the continent in ‘future-proofing’ the state against populist adversaries: key political allies of President Macron are being appointed to the top of major French institutions like the courts, the national bank and the armed forces.

But in addition, British bureaucrats will be considering adopting the whole continental package: mobilisation of paid Antifa to attack political opponents, the use of lawfare against opponents such as banning and financial investigations, and the solidifying of the deep state.

Reasons for optimism

Despite this dark picture, we actually have reasons to be far more optimistic about what the future holds. Ultimately, the reason for all of the efforts at narrative control is that the establishment have already lost the ideological battle, and their desperate attempts stem from the anticipation that they are about to lose the political battle as well.

The reason they lost is twofold. On the one hand, the impact of their policies have become unavoidable. On the other hand, a tremendous rebellion has taken place among ordinary people, fuelled by the tenacious work of an insurgent ideological counterweight.

Their fear is the justified fear of the losing party. They are terrified because of the enormous cumulative work of the great populist revolt. Just as the night is darkest before dawn or the cornered animal is capable of great violence, the established order is, I think, on its last legs. This means we should be both watchful but also cautiously optimistic.

Ultimately, the reason for elite panic is the mass of popular discontent. It is this desire for something profoundly different that is the condition for all our efforts to overturn the narrative hegemony that we would otherwise be subject to.

Jacob Reynolds is convenor of The Academy, taking place on 22 & 23 August. Tickets and more here.

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This evening in the simmering heat of London’s Westminster, the latest edition of Living Freedom Summer School will spark into life. Organised by the educational charity Ideas Matter, this year’s school is the largest ever, bringing together just shy of 100 people, most from around the UK, some from Europe and North America. They will engage in a wide-ranging series of talks, panel debates, seminars and workshops, each designed to delve deeply into the ideas, ideals and challenges related to freedom in the twenty-first century.

There is certainly much to discuss. Ongoing cultural conflicts and the febrile character of contemporary politics mean that barely a day passes without pronouncements, interventions or confrontations that highlight the challenges faced by those of making the case for a free, democratic society.

The headline news this week is the decision by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to trigger a by-election, arguing that ‘the people’ should be the judge of their political representatives - rather than cloistered political and media elites. The snooty refusal of mainstream parties to take part in the election only adds to the sense of a ‘uniparty’ desperate to place opponents in political quarantine and thwart their participation in a full democratic process. How apt then that the summer school kicks off with a lecture on the prospects for the populist insurgency to give people a voice.

This year’s school comes hot on the heels of the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The earthshaking events of the American founding created a beacon for advancing bold, daring ideas of liberty, equality and the centrality of ‘The People’. Yet 250 years on, this historic moment has generated, at best, muted celebrations – and more often incomprehension or even outright hostility. Re-energising the causes of freedom and free speech has never been more important.

One major challenge is an activist state that now regularly intervenes to ‘control the narrative’. Clearly politicians and allies in the legacy media have social-media platforms in their sights. DCMS minister Lisa Nandy is boycotting Elon Musk’s X, and threatening to compel social-media channels and video-sharing platforms to prioritise ‘trusted’ content creators. Lucy Powell, buddy of our prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, is threatening impose legal duties on online platforms during general elections, similar to impartiality rules for broadcasters. The challenge for our summer school participants is to work out the ideas needed to combat new restrictions and how to breathe life back into freedom.

Our sessions will tackle an array of similarly challenging issues. How should we respond to generational divisions and estrangement, and political issues that are routinely framed – and experienced – as cultural conflicts? When freedom is assumed to compete with other priorities and rights – like security, safety and wellbeing - how can we stop it being curbed or traded away? Do we need a US-style First Amendment to secure free speech through legal protections? And with the destructive influence of identity politics running rife, can we still make the case for tolerating speech and behaviour we find abhorrent?

Rather than create our own echo chamber, we think of this summer school as free speech in action. Yes, participants will hear from subject experts and critics. But they are also encouraged to express their own views and join in the debate on every issue. As we know, many on the side of freedom have radically different outlooks and ideas as to how it should be pursued. It is only by critically engaging with ideas that we can start to rise to the challenge of creating the contemporary arguments required to reinvigorate freedom.

WE STILL NEED YOUR SUPPORT FOR SCHOLARSHIPS
Participants are the recipients of Living Freedom scholarships which cover 90 per cent of the £500 cost of each place at the school, thereby ensuring that all participants can be selected on the basis of merit.

We are very grateful to the Ian Mactaggart Fund at Free Speech Union, Edinburgh Enlightenment Network, Alumni for Free Speech, Take Me Home podcast and Moynitrust for their support, and to all those valued individuals who sponsored a scholar.

We are still seeking donations to cover the shortfall. If you can help out, then please visit our Donorbox page: Living Freedom: Support a Scholar 2026

LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026: PROGRAMME

Populism: giving people a voice?
Frank Furedi

Generation Fragile? Growing up in the culture wars
Ellie Lee

The Classics: short talks
Tim Black on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth,
Oliver Rudland on Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes

Women’s freedom: safety versus liberation
Zoe Strimpel and Ella Whelan

Should social media be banned for under-16s?
Timandra Harkness, Matilda Gosling and Maya Thomas

Academic vices and virtues
Nigel Biggar

Should we scrap the Equality Act?
Anna Loutfi

Controlling the narrative? The politics of truth and misinformation
Jacob Reynolds

Island of strangers: what is a citizen?
Dolan Cummings

Artistic freedom: can art ever be free of politics?
Rosie Kay, Ella Nixon and Maren Thom

Is anti-Zionism really antisemitism?
Mark Birbeck and Sam Rubinstein

The De-Population Bomb: solving the fertility crisis
Emma Gilland and Georgina Kiss-Kozma

Does the UK need a US-style First Amendment act?
Michael Reiners

Should society be intolerant of intolerance?
Chris Bayliss and Ada Akpala, with Sebastian Moore and Jacob Reynolds

‘What the papers say’ workshops
Ada Akpala, Chris Bayliss, Lino Buckingham, Odhran Gallagher, Maeve Halligan, Rob Lyons, Anna McGovern, Georgina Mumford and Jake Weston

THINKING ALOUD: LIVING FREEDOM ALUMNI SEMINARS

Nation, national community, national interest
Phil Mullan

How to programme a debate
Ella Whelan

What is the Judeo-Christian tradition?
Dolan Cummings

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It’s the final weekend for applications to Living Freedom Summer School, the annual residential event organised by Ideas Matter. The deadline for applications is next Tuesday, 26 May. If you doubted the importance of participating in this event – or need an incentive to forward this Substack and spread the word to as many young people as possible – then a snapshot of the state of freedom over the past week should be persuasive.

Take the gathering of thousands from around the UK who descended on London last weekend to demand their voices be heard and express concerns over broken borders and a loss of cultural identity. Whatever one’s view of the organisers or their politics at the Unite the Kingdom rally, Keir Starmer’s decision to label attendees as ‘peddling hatred and division, plain and simple’ goes way beyond expressing political disagreement and amounts to yet another attempt to silence the people’s views by labelling them bigots.

Meanwhile, the rally and attendees were subject to extraordinary levels of political scrutiny and policing designed to restrict freedom in several new ways. Eleven foreign speakers – including democratically elected or prospective politicians such Flemish MP Filip Dewinter, Polish MEP Dominik Tarczyński and Republican candidate Valentina Gomez – were barred from entering the UK to address the crowds. Moreover, live facial-recognition technology was deployed on a march for the first time, scanning attendees across central London under the justification of preventing disorder and identifying extremists.

Under the radar, another dangerous new development became clear. Police warned that both the Unite the Kingdom and the Nakba marches, taking place on the same day, would be subject to a condition that ‘the responsibility [rests] on the organiser as well as the speaker to stay within the law (on hate speech)’. Since when did we legislate for guilt by association on public demonstrations? Further, phrases such as ‘death to the IDF’ or ‘globalise the intifada’ could reportedly trigger charges arising from the Nakba march. The police even warned that photographs shared online from the demonstrations could potentially constitute hate speech, depending on the hashtags used or the placards visible in the background. On that basis, should we ban photographs in textbooks about pre-war Germany because vile messages might be on show?

The fact that so many Britons are now looking to Donald Trump’s America as a defender of free speech is itself a sign of how demoralised some people are about the possibilities of changing our own political culture. The Trump administration’s forthcoming freedom.gov anti-censorship portal is reportedly being flooded with British users, who make up the clear majority of visitors to the holding page. That should embarrass Britain’s political class.

The answer cannot simply be outsourcing the defence of our liberty to America. If freedom is to flourish here, Britons themselves will have to rebuild the culture and institutions capable of defending it.

At Living Freedom, we operate under the banner that ‘every generation must renew freedom for its own times’. There is no better place to start than by engaging in the brilliant programme of discussion and debate at this year’s Living Freedom Summer School. Get your application in NOW!

About Living Freedom Summer School

Join us from 9-11 July in central London for lectures, panel debates and workshops led by a brilliant line-up of thinkers, authors, critics and campaigners – including Frank Furedi, Ella Whelan, Nigel Biggar, Rosie Kay and Timandra Harkness. Topics range widely across contemporary issues related to freedom and free speech – from ‘What is a citizen?’ to ‘How to cultivate intellectual virtue?’, from narrative control to women’s freedom, from banning social media for under-16s to how far we should tolerate the intolerant.

Our heavily subsidised tickets cost just £50 (a saving of £450) and include meals and accommodation.

Apply now for Living Freedom Summer School 2026 using the button below.

APPLY FOR LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL

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On Sunday 10 May, thousands of people headed to the Extinguish Antisemitism rally at the gates of Downing Street. As Jewish Chronicle columnist Stephen Pollard said, this was ‘the moment for the silent majority to find its voice’ in response to recent hatred, intimidation and violence against the Jewish community.

The best of the speeches clarified the challenges – and cheered the crowd. And yet a nagging feeling remained: this gathering could – and should – have been much bigger. The fact it wasn’t reflects, to some extent, the ongoing confusion over the Israel–Palestine conflict, not least over the fateful terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 at the Nova Music Festival. On that day, 411 young people lost their lives – the starting point of this latest chapter of territorial and sectarian conflict.

Thankfully, a major new exhibition is opening, giving a brilliant opportunity to demystify the events of 7 October. Having received lots of media coverage on its tour of major cities – including New York, LA, Buenos Aires and Berlin – the Nova Music Festival Exhibition opens in London this month. This is less about the wider conflict than a human story of young people, of varying nationalities, coming together through music. Via sound, visuals and personal testimony, it reveals the stories behind the headlines. Designed as a space for open discussion and thinking critically, it doesn’t shy away from issues such as extremism, resilience, media literacy and community cohesion.

With the help of Nova’s exhibition team, Living Freedom has organised a special gallery tour to take place on Tuesday 26 May at 6pm. The tour will be followed by short talks on the experience of the Nova festival and how to respond by building solidarity against antisemitism.

WE HAVE ARRANGED FREE ENTRY FOR ALL PARTICIPANTS ON THIS TOUR. To come on the tour, you must register in advance via the Living Freedom event page. Details of the Central London venue will be given out after registration.

This private tour is open to everyone aged 18 to 30 and to all alumni of Living Freedom Summer School.

In addition, we are delighted to welcome along paid subscribers to our Substack (sign up or upgrade below) and all our generous supporters who have given financial support to the scholarships programme for Living Freedom Summer School.

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The boundary between public and private life has become increasingly blurred – or, in fact, completely eroded. From the hyper-fixation on the private affairs of government officials and royals to the expansion of laws affecting our most personal relationships in the home, have we have seen the death of private life?

Concerns around privacy are often related to the power of tech-giants and social media, gaining and selling personal data. Many of the concerns over TikTok were originally rooted in the company’s selling of data to China. Now the Irish government is preparing to roll out comprehensive digital wallets for its citizens that ‘have digital versions of their birth cert, driving license, European health card, and other official documents’. These digital wallets are stored on their phones and used for age verification. With this, concern around government access to private data is growing, and free-speech advocates are pushing back on the ability of the state to track both public and private comments online.

But privacy has a much deeper meaning and higher value than online data. The ability to separate our public and private lives has historically been fundamental to the development of the self and intimacy. Privacy allows us to have a guarded space to openly air opinions and make mistakes, without the social judgement of wider society. This enables us to clarify our thoughts before putting them in the public realm, allowing us to be guided by our own consciences in public life.

Tiffany Jenkins argues that the establishment of privacy was foundational to the development of individual conscience and public autonomy. She explains that privacy is a protean concept, which shifts depending on its historical and cultural context. The origins of modern privacy can be traced as a consequence of the Reformation - when it was decreed that individuals were free to worship how they wish in private. The curation of an individual relationship with God led to open private reflection on dictated morals and social norms, and the ability for the self to decipher what was right or wrong.

In her lecture and her book, Strangers and Intimates, Tiffany highlights how the erosion of the private sphere has redefined the relationship between civil society and the state. Yet, the protected spheres, away from the tentacles of public institutions, are quickly eroding, as regulation by technocrats and law has attempted to manage relationships between individuals. Perhaps, most notably, this has expanded into the relationship between parents and children, as the politicised teachings of well-being and gender have weakened the authority of parents within the family home.

Culturally, the value of privacy has been hijacked; it is now seen as something only needed for those who are up to no good. But as social norms and collective values are weakening, it is increasingly difficult to come to collective consensus on the line between right and wrong. And as social norms have collapsed, we have become dependent on legal frameworks to manage behaviour, because we no longer trust our judgement. Yet, by sacrificing our privacy, are we surrendering our ability to develop our individual autonomy and decide matters of individual conscience for ourselves?

Watch Tiffany’s lecture from Living Freedom 2025 here:

Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to apply for this year’s summer school! Find out more about the event and how to apply on our Summer School 2026 page.

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On Wednesday, the High Court upheld the University of Sussex’s appeal against the Office for Students (OfS), which had issued a record fine over the University’s failure to protect the freedom of Kathleen Stock to express gender-critical views.

The arduous story of campus cancel culture – and culture is the key term – began in 2021 after Stock resigned amid death threats and warnings from the police to not leave her home. Over three years later, the OfS fined Sussex £585,000 under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech Act) 2023, arguing Sussex’s EDI policy was flawed for potentially restricting lawful gender-critical speech. Yet the High Court held this alone was insufficient, claiming universities may limit lawful speech if the restriction is justified and proportionate.

Sussex have argued that they themselves did not fire Stock for her views – she resigned under the stress of cancellation, ostracism and reputational damage. This raises a key question we’ll explore at Living Freedom’s Summer School: are legal protections enough to defend freedom of speech? We’ll be asking whether the UK needs an equivalent of America’s First Amendment – and whether changing the law can counter a culture of ‘you can’t say that’ and ‘speech is violence’.

This acts as a timely reminder for why Living Freedom is so important: it’s not enough to ask government to intervene when free speech is violated. As Stock herself writes: ‘It is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there.’ We must build a culture in which free speech is actively championed, especially among young people, so that environments shaped by caution, complaint and self-censorship give way to ones grounded in confidence, openness and genuine intellectual freedom.

If you can’t wait until this year’s Summer School, watch Lorcán Price’s lecture on hate speech from our 2025 Summer School below. The lecture is particularly relevant as he describes how culture altered the application of law regarding free speech in the European courts.

Another important lecture from the Living Freedom archive is ‘A Lecture Concerning Toleration’ by Arif Ahmed from 2022, which addresses the importance of culture.

Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas, was on Talk this week with Ian Collins discussing the Sussex case and why we need a culture of free expression and a defence of academic freedom.

We’ve also linked to relevant articles below on the moral dilemmas facing free-speech advocates.

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Read on

The rewriting of campus history
Kathleen Stock, UnHerd, 1 May 2026

The High Court has rewarded Kathleen Stock’s persecutors
Freddie Attenborough, spiked, 30 April 2026

Reflections on the University of Sussex v Office for Students judgment
Ian Pace, Substack, 29 April 2026

Levi Pay (@soppystem), X, 1 May 2026

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Last week, Brodie Mitchell was paid compensation by Royal Holloway University after being suspended for ‘alleged conduct that could be considered hate speech’. The suspension followed Mitchell comparing a pro-Palestine activist’s headscarf to a tea towel. In turn, Mitchell argued his university had behaved unlawfully after it subjected him to ‘unfair’ disciplinary measures over the petty ‘spat’.

We should be pleased Mitchell is now free to continue his studies. And we should also welcome the recent news that non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) have been scrapped after the government suffered repeated embarrassments in several high-profile arrests for speech deemed off-limits. The most notable case was that of writer and activist Graham Linehan, who was arrested last September by several armed police just after he touched down at Heathrow airport. His ‘offence’ was a social-media post: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’ The Metropolitan Police announced the following month that no further action would be taken against him.

Yet we should be very wary of thinking that the use of hate-speech controls to constrain free expression is about to end anytime soon. Legislation entrenching ‘hate speech’ as an illegal practice is a relatively recent but still growing phenomenon globally, and raises many issues for those of us concerned to defend free speech.

Australia, for example, has introduced more new hate-speech laws after the Bondi Beach attack, defining offences based on ‘intent’ to cause hatred and whether conduct would lead a ‘reasonable’ person from that targeted group to fear harassment, intimidation, violence or for their safety. But who determines what a reasonable person might think? How does one define intimidation? Does stepping in against ‘hate’ toward targeted groups, rather than applying the law equally, lead to issues of ‘two tier’ justice?

It’s exactly these ‘two-tier’ fears that worry free-speech advocates in the UK in relation to the government’s official definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. Will this effectively reintroduce blasphemy laws in the UK specifically for those who criticise Islam?

Looked at in this light, the decision to back down from pursuing Brodie Mitchell further bucks the wider trend for growing speech restrictions. Many stem from the 1986 Public Order Act, which prohibits threatening or abusive speech aimed at inciting hatred based on race, religion or sexual orientation.

The most recent legislation, the Crime and Policing Bill, requires further scrutiny still as it goes even further. The new law would empower police to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can prohibit someone from doing ‘anything described in the order’ as long as the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’.

Last year at our Summer School, Lorcán Price, legal counsel for ADF UK, delivered a fascinating lecture titled: ‘History of hate: origins and evolution of hate-speech laws’. Watch it on our YouTube channel. And hopefully you’ll be inspired to apply for this year’s summer school! Find out more about the event and how to apply on our Summer School 2026 page.

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In the UK, this week MPs voted against a social-media ban for under-16s for a second time. Nevertheless, prime minister Keir Starmer has demanded tougher action on internet safety by tech bosses. Digital curfews and time limits on apps are set to be trialled by 300 teenagers across the country. And the government is pushing ahead with a consultation into an under-16s ban, meaning there’s still a real possibility that restrictions on social-media platforms will be introduced in the UK.

Not surprisingly, experts, campaigners, parents and the public are divided on whether bans should be rolled out. So at Living Freedom Summer School we will debate ‘Should social media be banned for under 16s?’ (See details below for how to attend.)

On the one hand, social media is regularly blamed for causing harm to individuals, social fragmentation and political polarisation. With people aged between 18 and 24 now spending an average of six hours a day on social media, many worry about adverse impacts.

In the US, Kaley, a 20-year-old woman (known only by her first name to protect her privacy), won a lawsuit against Google’s YouTube and Meta by arguing that her childhood social-media use led to an addiction that damaged her mental health. With increased rates of anxiety and depression in teenagers, many are convinced time spent on screens must be controlled to curtail potential harms.

Others argue correlation is not the same as causation, and that other factors are at play. Not only is the evidence mixed on the causes of harms, but there are also considerbale benefits to using social media. What’s more, does relying on a blanket social-media ban risk shirking adult responsibility to socialise children - guiding young people to use social media in positive ways that help propel them forward rather than to hold them back?

The damage caused by lockdowns suggest that when we only think in terms of risk and safety, then we risk denying activities that contribute positively to resilience in the long run. And what of the danger of bringing in legislation which allows governments greater control of the information we can access and which opens the door to the state to manage our private conversations and even regulate children’s free time? Are parents right to worry this reduces parental autonomy, and also their authority to shape the teenage years of their own children?

Below, in the article ‘Social Media doesn’t have to undermine human agency’ written for Cutting Takes, Living Freedom coordinator Emma Gilland argues that to blame social media for young people’s alienation and mental health issues is an all too easy way to blame social problems on Big Tech.

FURTHER READING
Why I’ve changed my mind about banning social media for teenagers by Claire Fox and Stella O’Malley

Most Young Australians Successfully Evade the Country’s Social Media Ban by J.D. Tuccille

LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026
Date: 9 - 11 July
Location: Westminster, London
Eligibility Criteria: open to anyone aged 18 to 30
Programme, information and to apply: click here.

Amplifying harm: are we run by algorithms?

Emma Gilland

There is no doubt that social media is a powerful tool. Freya India, a 26-year-old journalist from the UK who has just published her first book, GIRLS®, argues that internet platforms ‘prey on the insecurities’ of young girls, commodifying their misery, trapping them in endless cycles of comparison and immediate attention or gratification. And with the government launching a public consultation on social media bans for under-16s, these arguments have clearly taken hold across the UK.

Even though it is clear that social media platforms are designed to capture attention and exacerbate vulnerability, insecurity and isolation, to treat these as determinative to individual behaviour denies human agency, stripping individuals of the ability to overcome these challenges through regulation and self-control. The move to clamp down on social media, through bans and mass regulation by tech companies and external regulators, is setting a dangerous precedent. One that doesn’t trust people to harness the power of technology and the opportunities it gives us for knowledge, growth and time. Instead, it grants that power to the state.

Not only is the discourse of protection from big tech and technological developments being used to infantilise children, suggesting that they are incapable of managing the rapidly changing nature of information and communication; they are now being used to undermine the agency of adults too. The psychological ‘harms’ of social media, and the power of algorithms, are increasingly being used to account for the falling standard of political communication.

Social media has proliferated to amplify division. But it has proliferated in an already fragmenting society, where common values, social norms and communities were already disintegrating. Individuals who have long been desperate to belong to a group, or some collective endeavour, have moved to echo chambers to fill this void.

‘It has proliferated in an already fragmenting society, where common values, social norms and communities were already disintegrating. Individuals who have long been desperate to belong to a group, or some collective endeavour, have moved to echo chambers to fill this void.’

To read the full article go to Cutting Takes.

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Ahead of Easter weekend, we are featuring one of the highlights from our YouTube archive of summer school talks. Sociologist and social commentator Frank Furedi delves into the meaning of freedom of conscience, exploring how this vital concept emerged and has evolved, and why it remains so important.

Many will recognise freedom of conscience as integral to ensuring every individual’s ability to act on their religious or faith-based beliefs. Just last week, a decision by the Finnish Supreme Court to convict Päivi Räsänen – a parliamentarian and former minister of the interior – for expressing her Christian views on homosexuality shows how fragile conscience-based freedoms have become.

Whether Christian street-preachers, controversies over praying in the vicinity of abortion services providers or public prayer gatherings such as the recent Open Iftar in Trafalgar Square, the extent to which expressing religious beliefs in public should be tolerated is much debated in many different contexts.

As this lecture explains, however, questions of conscience go far beyond the issue of expressing religious beliefs. For centuries, in religious and secular times alike, societies have wrestled with conflicts between inner life and external authority - and dilemmas as to how we should live in accordance with our inner-most thoughts and beliefs.

In recent decades, as boundaries between personal and political spheres have eroded, new threats to conscience-based freedoms have emerged. Public authorities increasingly colonise internal life, extinguishing the space for individuals to exercise moral reasoning and make judgements based on deeply held moral beliefs.

Ultimately, as this lecture argues, ‘tolerance creates the conditions for the free expressions of opinions, beliefs and behaviours associated with the exercise of individual conscience’. Today, however, debate rages over the extent to which we should tolerate what many judge to be intolerant ideas.

Along with many other tricky dilemmas, this is a topic that will be central to this year’s summer school, on 9-11 July in central London. So do make sure and apply now.

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LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026
Date: 9 - 11 July
Location: Westminster, London
Eligibility Criteria: open to anyone aged 18 to 30
Programme, information and to apply: click here.

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Extremism on campus is back in the headlines. In the long shadow of October 7, one recent survey found half of students had heard slogans glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah or other proscribed groups, while 65 per cent reported teaching disrupted by protests. Some students describe threats and abuse, and referrals to the Prevent counter-extremism programme have gone up by 50 per cent in two years. After the recent revelation that one in five students refuse to live with a Jewish peer, one parliamentarian argued that anti-Semitism in universities has been ‘normalised’.

The Henry Jackson Society has identified dozens of universities hosting events mourning the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and campuses are ‘now used as platforms to spread extremist narratives’. Meanwhile, the government plans tighter oversight – including clamping down on ‘divisive content’ and plans to ‘strengthen monitoring’ of non-violent extremism. A Campus Cohesion Charter will help manage external speakers and events, and will risk-check free speech for signs of crossing into unlawful activity or support for terrorism.

Yet such moves pose real moral dilemmas for those who believe in free speech. After all, setting clearer expectations around conduct, respect and shared values across university life can easily spill over into wider restrictions on speech. How should we define extremism and should we be open to new constraints? Where do the boundaries lie between resisting intolerance and tolerating all views and ideas? Is ‘extremism’ being weaponised to undermine our freedoms?

To help us navigate our way through the issues, we’ll be joined by Michael Ben-Gad – professor of economics at City St George’s, University of London – who himself faced protests by students, calling him a Nazi, threatening violence and demanding his dismissal. Join us to work out how we defend liberty in an age increasingly inclined to police ideas.

Doors open at 6.15pm, with the discussion running from 6.30pm-8.30pm.

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SPEAKER
Michael Ben-Gad
professor of economics; co-convenor, Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF) at City St George’s, University of London

CHAIR
Alastair Donald
convenor, Living Freedom

READINGS
The targeting of Israeli Professor Michael Ben-Gad: Britain’s academic freedom crisis
Professor Ian Pace, Jewish Chronicle, 21 November 2025

Students given stronger protections against extremism on campus
Department for Education and Bridget Phillipson MP, 8 March 2026

What the government’s Social Cohesion Action Plan means for universities and students
Jim Dickinson, WONKHE, 9 March 2026

REGISTRATION
This event is free. Please register here. Venue details will be sent on registration.

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Some fear that a label once reserved for describing a genuine fringe is being casually applied to almost any dissenting view. As the government claims new powers to monitor and restrict ‘extremism’ – from tighter speech controls to deeper oversight of universities – a central question emerges for this year’s Living Freedom Summer School: in trying to stamp out ‘extremism’, do we risk eroding the very freedoms that a confident society is meant to defend?

Recently, Living Freedom events coordinator Jake Weston was joined by several participants from last year’s summer school for the Battle of Ideas North debate, ‘Disaffected youth: are young people becoming more extreme?’ Below, Jake reflects on the discussion – and you can watch the full debate on YouTube.

Finally, a reminder. Get your applications in NOW to attend the summer school this year.

LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026
Date: 9 - 11 July
Location: Westminster, London
Eligibility Criteria: open to anyone aged 18 to 30
Programme, information and to apply: click here.

Alastair Donald
convenor, Living Freedom

What does it mean to be extreme? In our polarised age, ‘extreme’ is a term used freely. As Maeve Halligan, co-founder of the Cambridge University Society of Women, explained, in certain circles it can be considered ‘extreme’ to hold gender-critical views, be sceptical about mass migration or be pro-Israel. Conversely, in other circles, identity politics, climate activism and calling to defund the police may likewise be understood as extreme.

Extremism has always been relative. But what’s perhaps new about today is the practice of moralising your opponents’ views. They aren’t just wrong, they’re bad – perhaps even potentially dangerous. Yet when politics is debated through a lens of moral righteousness, what happens to the ability to persuade and to be persuaded?

One question we discussed is why today’s youth may appear to be ‘more extreme’, with the conversation inevitably touching on the influence of universities. Is progressive campus culture self-radicalising? Is there moral one-upmanship at work, with students competing to signal virtue and pushing each other further? Could this explain the ratchet effect – from death threats against Reform UK society founders to one in five students saying they’d feel uncomfortable living with a Jewish peer.

Many claims of extremism rest on headline-grabbing polls. But here, too, we might be sceptical. Does aligning with the Greens necessarily equate to rising extreme views? And do 25 per cent of young women truly believe in the legalisation of drugs and prostitution? Maybe we are more Generation Conform than Generation Extreme. As universities preach a monolithic progressive line, then perhaps the problem is a less intellectually rich and stimulating environment. The erstwhile diaspora of viewpoints found across society – in churches, the workplace or local communities – need new ways of articulating themselves and new space to breathe. Notably, this is one of the tasks of Living Freedom Summer School.

Sebastian Moore, North West chair of the Social Democratic Party, flipped the question: are young people extreme enough? For young people today, life may be easier technologically, but much harder materially. In the 1980s, homes cost around three times average earnings; today, comparable access demands salaries above £100,000. Saddled with debt and facing a bleak jobs market, today’s ‘Generation Rent’ arguably has ample reason for disaffection.

One of the most common explanations for youth radicalisation is being susceptible to misinformation. However, as I pointed out, studies show young people are fairly deft at identifying misinformation and sceptical of what they read, whether online or from traditionally reliable sources. Consequently, current calls to restrict access to social media are unlikely to be tackle the underlying causes of youth extremism, but will certainly badly impact on our ability to access information and engage in debate.

For Georgina Mumford, content producer and writer at spiked, the problem may be better located in how we are raised. She identified an odd dichotomy: constantly asking for affirmation of our feelings whilst being steered away from difficult challenges and independence – effectively leaving young people devoid of resilience. We were taught to ‘be yourself’ and that the world would deeply care about us, only to find out that that the ‘real world’ is quite a difficult and challenging place. That world is not organised around our own feelings, but it is one we need to engage with and shape.

A final question is what has happened to any common national identity – a factor that often provided some common ground for how we grow and develop. Over 80 per cent of young people in 2004 were proud to be British – less than 50 per cent are today. Within one generation, a positive national story has dissipated. So, too, has shared faith and, in extreme cases, shared language. How can young people develop a common sense of attachment when there’s nothing positive to belong to? Do we need to reinvent our national story so people can feel a part of it?

Perhaps this provides some of the explanation as to why some young people gravitate to more extreme views. While Palestine or climate activism are causes largely beyond our control, perhaps we would be better to refocus on the tangible pressures faced by our generation at home: graduate taxes or rising youth unemployment, never mind asserting both our right to speak freely and our moral autonomy. We have real cause for disaffection – and for action. A sensible starting point is Living Freedom: a forum to test ideas seriously and speak for ourselves, rather than be ventriloquised by the loudest fringes of our generation.

Jake Weston is Living Freedom event coordinator.

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Living Freedom Summer School is our flagship event, offering a fantastic opportunity to explore ideas and debate ideals as they relate to the past, present and future of freedom. The three-day residential school takes place in central London on 9-11 July and is open to anyone aged 18 to 30, based in the UK or beyond.

Successful applicants will be receive a Living Freedom Scholarship award that covers 90 per cent of fees. (Scholars will pay just £50, reduced from the full cost of £500.) The deadline for applications is 26 May 2026. A review panel will award 50 scholarships.

OVERVIEW

‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Published 250 years ago, Common Sense by Thomas Paine was more than a rabble-rousing pamphlet designed to stiffen American spines and hasten a revolutionary break with Britain. In lucid, often incendiary prose, Paine distilled his demand for sovereignty and equality into a popular, democratic call to arms. Many arguments unleashed then – over liberty, authority and rights – still reverberate today.

Anniversaries force us not merely to revisit history but to take stock of our own febrile age, where liberty is again up for grabs. Living Freedom summer school carves out space for serious argument on the defining questions of our time – a forum to think boldly, debate openly and test ideas.

250 years on from independence, much has changed, but some fault-lines look strangely familiar. The cry ‘All men are created equal’ once ignited a revolution. Today, critics argue that EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) orthodoxies and equality law chill speech and corrode equal treatment. Juries once protected dissenters from politicised charges of seditious libel. Yet, when juries acquit activists from groups such as Palestine Action, they are denounced as going rogue, even as governments curtail jury trials in the name of improving justice. What is the principled response?

Free speech remains the frontline. The printing press and pamphlet wars have given way to smartphones and social media – a new public square that elites itch to regulate. How should defenders of liberty respond to initiatives aimed at ‘controlling the narrative’ such as the so-called European Democracy Shield? Is Washington truly a champion of digital freedom when its state agencies regularly lean on companies like Google, Meta and Discord?

Perhaps the biggest challenge is getting to grips with a shifting political landscape of freedom. The decline of ideologically motivated parties means that culture and the pre-political realm are where politics plays out and where many arguments around freedom arise – debates over community, traditions and identity, flag, family and faith. In an era of culture wars, sectarianism and insurgent populism, how do we restate the case for freedom – clearly, confidently and without apology?

SCHOLARSHIPS

The cost of providing a place at the summer school is £500. This includes accommodation in central London and attending the annual Living Freedom dinner.

However, attendees will pay just £50, a massive reduction of £450.

This is because Living Freedom uses a targeted scholarships programme funded by our donors and partners, which will ensure that we can select attendees on merit, irrespective of their financial circumstances.

If you would like to make a donation to support a scholar, find out more here.

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

PLENARY LECTURES

• Island of strangers: what is a citizen?

• Women’s freedom: safety versus liberation

• Populism: threat to liberty or demand for freedom?

• Generation Fragile? Growing up in the Culture Wars

• Expert-led parenting to fertility support: should the state intervene in family life?

• Controlling the narrative: European Democracy Shield case study

• America: great bulwark of liberty?

TALKS, DEBATES AND WORKSHOPS

• Should social media be banned for under 16s?

• Woke galleries to diversity casting: disentangling art and politics

• Antisemitism to anti-Zionism: new challenges to free speech on campus

• Restricting jury trials: an assault on liberty?

• Activist staff to office speech police: EDI in the workplace

• Should we scrap the Equality Act?

• Nation, national community, national interests

• What the papers say – reviews workshops

LITERATURE AND LIBERTY: TALKS AND SEMINARS

• Aristotle: The Politics

• David Szalay: Flesh

SPEAKERS INCLUDE

Dolan Cummings writer and novelist; co-director, Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life
Frank Furedi sociologist and social commentator
Timandra Harkness author, Technology is Not the Problem
Ellie Lee co-author, Growing up in the Culture Wars
Phil Mullan author, Beyond Confrontation: globalists, nationalists and their discontents
Ella Nixon curator, writer and art historian
Jacob Reynolds head of policy, MCC Brussels
Zoe Strimpel author, Good Slut: how money, sex and power set women free
Maren Thom co-host, Performance Anxiety podcast
Maya Thomas legal and policy officer, Big Brother Watch
Ella Whelan journalist; co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival

HOW TO APPLY

Visit the Living Freedom Summer School 2026 page on our website to fill in the application form.

SUPPORTED BY

ENQUIRIES

Should you need further information, please email the Living Freedom convenor, Alastair Donald, at alastair@ideasmatter.org.uk or call +44 (0)20 7269 9234.

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Here, Jake Weston reflects on the discussion.

Building on our session at the Battle of Ideas festival, ‘Right-wing boys and progressive girls: war of the sexes?’ (see video links at bottom), Living Freedom hosted, ‘Battle of the sexes: the new political divide’ to further explore the issue.

We started with Nicholas Stephenson – the author of Onward’s report, Ballot of the Sexes – who reminded both the panel and the audience that the divide is international. In fact, he argued, it is even more intense in Germany, the US and South Korea.

Much of the data cited by Nicholas supported conclusions made at our previous event: that social media allows for groups to disengage from one and another, as they increasingly occupy their own political spaces. Engagement between the two is limited, as not only do women and men have differing opinions on key issues, but they also differ on what is considered a key issue.

Yet, similarity between the sexes is found in a shared dissatisfaction with the status quo, a conclusion which I agreed was rational in the context of the ever-worsening economic prospectives of Gen Z. I tried to diagnose the gender divide by drawing from my own experience at university. I argued that academia overwhelmingly leans to the left, creating a culture in which certain political beliefs are normalised whilst others are marginalised. Voting Green then reflects conformity, whereas voting Reform is rebellious.

As evidence, one only needs to look to recent campus controversies, where extreme progressive positions were openly celebrated, whereas conservative groups often meet in secret.

Finally, I returned to why, explaining that as women make up a greater share of university students - particularly in the humanities - and score higher on agreeableness, they are more likely to align with dominant campus values rather than dissent from the status quo. If we can restore universities to genuine intellectual openness, then I believe we can go a long way in healing the gendered political divide.

Poppy Coburn, although wary of how often social media is used to explain political phenomena, thought that in this case, it may be a key source of tension exacerbating the divide. She reflected on the social context, as women have not historically been more left-wing than men. So, the gender divide can only be explained by something new.

Politics now operates in different spaces, making ideological segregation easy. Individuals can control what information they consume and protect themselves from dissenting views. As women and men now even use different platforms to consume political content, they consume alternate media from each other, widening what may have been marginal differences in opinion.

To heal the divide, Poppy raised whether marriage would bring people together – as the sexes will have to compromise politically to find a partner. Audience members agreed with this sentiment to some extent, but voiced concern with finding a partner themselves in a polarised dating ‘market’.

Emma Gilland introduced a wider sociological lens, drawing attention to the economic, cultural and relational shifts reshaping how men and women interact. She pointed to the decline in relationship and marriage rates – first observed dramatically in South Korea and now echoed across the West – as evidence of a broader transformation in the relationship between men and women.

Changes in the labour market, alongside rising individualism, have altered the foundations of partnership. With women no longer economically dependent on men, expectations around communication, emotional labour and the quality of relationships have increased. What sociologists call the search for ‘pure love’ has made modern relationships feel more precarious, more demanding and ultimately more difficult to form.

In this climate of insecurity – and with young people increasingly focused on financial stability and self-development – fewer Gen Z men and women are entering long-term relationships. With intimate connection breaking down, opportunities for genuine dialogue between the sexes are declining, deepening political misunderstandings and further fuelling the divide.

Other strong audience contributions throughout the evening centred around female dissatisfaction, how the return of Christianity could impact men and women differently, and questioned how much of an impact politics really has in a dating pool which is much less political than those who attend Living Freedom events.

VIDEOS

At the Battle of Ideas, our Living Freedom panel – ‘Right-wing boys and progressive girls: war of the sexes?’ - featured three other speakers with their own diagnoses. Watch clips using the links below.

Elliot Bewick, host of The Next Generation:

Georgina Mumford, a writer at spiked:

Chloe Combi, author of Generation Z, a speaker and columnist:

LIVING FREEDOM XMAS BASH BALLOON DEBATE 2025

Thursday 11 December, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm, Westminster

All under 30s are invited to our annual Christmas party – a balloon debate posing the question: ‘What is the best cultural representation of freedom?’

We are delighted to be joined by…

· Ada Akpala, writer and commentator; head of content, The Equiano Project
defending nudity in art and beyond.

· Freddie Attenborough, research manager, Committee for Academic Freedom
defending the work of playwright and writer Joe Orton.

· Sonia Gallego, reporter, Al Jazeera English
defending tbc

· Reem Ibrahim, communications officer, Institute of Economic Affairs
defending Hamilton: An American Musical

· Jasper Robbins, writer; alumnus, Living Freedom; history and politics student
defending Top Gear (2002-2015)

· Kevin Rooney, religion, philosophy and ethics teacher; editor, irishborderpoll.com
defending Alan Bennett’s The History Boys

· Jake Weston, project assistant, Academy of Ideas
defending gambling culture

HOST
Alastair Donald, convenor, Living Freedom

The event is free, but you need to register in advance. Sign up here.

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spiked has released a blockbuster documentary, on the rise of the British speech police.

Featuring Free Speech Union general secretary Toby Young and Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, it tells the stories of three Brits who were investigated, arrested and even prosecuted for posting ‘offensive’ things on social media. For more details see Think Before You Post.

The premiere will take place at the Rich Mix cinema in London (near Liverpool Street) on Tuesday 25 November. There will be a screening at 7pm, followed by a Q&A with cast and crew.

spiked have kindly donated 15 free tickets to Living Freedom alumni for those who can commit to attending. Offer closes Tuesday 18 November. Tickets will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. Anyone who has attended our summer schools or forum events (including having registered for our up and coming forums) is welcome to apply.

Please email jake@ideasmatter.org.uk to reserve your place.

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London Freedom Forum, Monday 24 November, 6.30pm, Westminster

Today, over half a century on from the radical emergence of equality movements in 1960s, the growth of an ideological and social splintering between the sexes is frequently making headlines.

A recent report by Onward notes that, in line with international trends, the divide between men and women in the UK is growing, most evident amongst Gen Z. In the 2024 General Election, young women moved leftwards while young men drifted significantly to the right, with the former almost twice as likely to vote Green as young men, who in turn were twice as likely to vote Reform as young women. With Gen Z opting for more radical parties, political polarisation is deepening – and following gendered lines.

Perhaps the problem is social media, with young women tending to use TikTok and Instagram while young men tend towards X and podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience. Socially, Gen Z men and women are also said to be drifting apart. Women now outperform men in education, being more likely to attend university and get higher-paying jobs in their twenties. However, young women are also reportedly more stressed, more lonely and less satisfied with life, while fears over the ‘manosphere’ and toxic masculinity go hand-in-hand with a hardening sense of cultural antagonism and alienation between the sexes.

Some say lower levels of intimacy and sexual activity in Gen Z reflect a loss of emotional connection and long-term commitment. Others point to young men increasingly viewing themselves as ‘left behind’ and more resentful of feminism, equal rights and woke policies that they perceive as discriminating against them. Are political divisions ruining young people’s love lives, too?

Is this divide as alarming or deep-rooted as it seems? Could Gen Z’s polarisation be a passing phase? Or is the growing divide around the sexes now an issue to take seriously – perhaps in ways that class or racial divides might once have been addressed in the past? And when previously ideology or shared social experiences were used to overcome these divisions, what is the route forwards to find common ground between the sexes today?

SPEAKERS
Poppy Coburn
acting deputy comment editor, Daily Telegraph

Emma Gilland
project assistant, Ideas Matter; author, The Corona Generation

Nicholas Stephenson
researcher and data analyst, Onward

Jake Weston
project assistant, Academy of Ideas

REGISTER
This event is free, but please register using the form on our event page.

Living Freedom Xmas Bash Balloon Debate 2025

Thursday 11 December 2025, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm, Westminster

We would like to invite you to join us for a drink, some good company and a fun Xmas balloon debate.

What is the greatest representation of freedom in culture?

A panel of valiant freedom lovers will seek to convince you of their choice, whether a work of art or literature, a film, opera, play or song.

Each contestant will have just three minutes to present their case, followed by a round of questions from the audience. Then there is a vote, and the top three will be given an additional one minute to convince you to back their choice.

Which cultural representation of freedom – and its defender – deserves to stay in the balloon? You decide!

HOST
Alastair Donald
convenor, Living Freedom

This invitation-only gathering will take place in Westminster. We’ll send the venue details after you register.

What: Living Freedom Xmas Balloon Debate
When: Thursday 11 December 2025, 7:00pm-9.00pm
Where: Westminster
Entrance: Free
Register: use the form on our event page.

Panellists to be announced soon.

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There are also a series of events in the next few weeks hosted by Living Freedom fellows.

Battle Book Club: John Boyne’s Water

Wednesday 12 November, 7pm, via Zoom

John Boyne’s Elements quartet—Water, Earth, Fire, and Air—was released as one volume but controversy over his gender-critical views led to backlash and the suspension of the Polari Prize. Our Book Club invites discussion on his writing instead, focusing on Water, where Vanessa Carvin, hiding from her past and her husband’s crimes, wrestles with guilt, morality, and whether it’s possible to wash away complicity and begin again, simply by changing your name.

The event will be hosted online from 7.00pm-8.30pm on Zoom. Hosted by Emma Gilland with an introduction from Ella Whelan. The event is free but please register via Eventbrite.

Together’s 4^th Anniversary event

Sunday 16 November, Novotel London West, Hammersmith

Together is celebrating four years of fighting to take back democracy and advocating for a better future through freedom, free speech, public and accountability.

Speakers include: Baron Maurice Glasman, Lisa McKenzie, Laila Cunningham, Lord Tony Sewell CBE, Allison Pearson.

Under 25s get a free ticket with code: LIVINGFREEDOM

Book tickets here.

The Covid Lockdowns: Challenges, Dilemmas, and Trade-offs – free event 

Wednesday 19 November

Our friends at the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) are hosting a free public seminar at Worcester College, Oxford, on Wednesday 19 November, examining the trade-offs that defined Britain’s response to the biggest public health crisis in modern history.

The discussion will bring together Professor Sunetra Gupta (Oxford University), Professor Hugh Montgomery (UCL), historian Toby Green (King’s College London) and medical historian Mark Honigsbaum (City, University of London), with molecular biologist Dr Güneş Taylor (Francis Crick Institute) as the chair.

Book your free ticket here.

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Battle of Ideas, the FREE SPEECH festival that takes place this coming weekend – 18 & 19 October in Westminster – is THE opportunity for liberty lovers to discuss the big challenges for freedom today. At a time when university campuses and online discussions can be polarised and censorious, this is the chance for all young people to come along and to listen, think and have your say on many topical, challenging issues of the day.

This year, the festival celebrates its 20^th anniversary. With 400 speakers speaking on over 100 panels, this is the space to discuss all the pressing issues of our time, whether in politics, science, the arts, women’s freedom or the culture wars. As my fellow convenor Ella Whelan and I note in Why we need Battle of Ideas festival 2025: ‘It’s a space of solidarity – but it’s not a safe space, free from argument. We welcome everyone who agrees we are grown up enough to disagree, who believes that hearing conflicting ideas is the lifeblood of real democracy and political change.’

Living Freedom will be at the heart of the action having produced debates on a wide range of topics – from the war of the sexes to burqa bans, the tyranny of campus wellbeing to online dating, the rise of snitch culture to downwardly mobile graduates. And many of our supporters and alumni are directly involved. So come along and debate. And don’t forget to come and find our stall at the Ideas Market.

Tickets are still available, with big discounts for students and those under 30 working in STEM fields – just £30 for an entire weekend. You can find all the details and secure your place on the Battle of Ideas tickets page.

See you there!

Alastair Donald
convenor, Living Freedom

BUY TICKETS NOW

LIVING FREEDOM AT BATTLE OF IDEAS 2025

Saturday 18 October, 10:15—11:45
FREE SPEECH IN TRUMP’S AMERICA
Speaking at this year’s Munich Security Conference, the US vice president, JD Vance, declared: ‘Free speech, I fear, is in retreat’, vowing that the Trump Administration would ‘fight to defend it’. Is the Trump Administration fulfilling this promise? Or is it riddled with hypocrisy?

SPEAKERS:
Simon Hankinson, Dr Cheryl Hudson, Dr James Orr, Tom Slater, Nadine Strossen
CHAIR:
Alastair Donald

Saturday 18 October, 12:15—13:30
FACE TIME? THE PROS AND CONS OF BURQA BANS
When Sarah Pochin used her first parliamentary question as a new Reform Party MP to ask about banning the burqa, she reignited a longstanding, smouldering issue. The principle of freedom is at stake – especially women’s freedom – to choose their dress, faith and identity.

SPEAKERS:
Josie Appleton, Faika El-Nagashi, Khadija Khan, Ralph Leonard
CHAIR:
Dr James Panton

Saturday 18 October, 12:15—13:30
LETTERS ON LIBERTY: THE TYRANNY OF CAMPUS WELLBEING  
Since 2020, Letters on Liberty has reimagined freedom through bold debate. In The Tyranny of Campus Wellbeing, Felice Basbøll argues that prioritising wellbeing risks censoring disagreement and avoiding life’s hardships – leaving young people ill-equipped for adversity. Has mental-health awareness gone too far?

SPEAKERS:
Felice Basbøll, Dr Jennifer Cunningham, Maeve Halligan, Ed Rennie, Eloise Schultz
CHAIR:
Dr Ruth Mieschbuehler

Sunday 19 October, 10:00—10:45
ONLINE DATING: THE END OF ROMANCE?
Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Hinge, Feeld – whatever your dating preference, there’s an app for it. Gone are the days of hitting the town in hopes of catching someone’s eyes in a busy bar. Is love just a tap away – or slipping through our fingers?

SPEAKERS:
Elliot Bewick, Ella Dorn, Ralph Leonard
CHAIR:
Beverley Marshall

Sunday 19 October, 11:00—12:30
FROM HARVARD TO SUSSEX: SHOULD THE STATE PUNISH UNIVERSITIES?
Long the epicentre of ‘woke ideology’, the university sector has not been a stranger to censorship over the past couple of years. Are government interventions into universities a necessary measure, or do they risk threatening institutional independence and academic freedom?

SPEAKERS:
Felice Basbøll, Dennis Hayes, John Maier, Prof Jo Phoenix, Prof Abhishek Saha
CHAIR:
Alastair Donald

Sunday 19 October, 12:45—13:30
RIGHT-WING BOYS AND PROGRESSIVE GIRLS: WAR OF THE SEXES?
Has progressive politics, which took a vigilant stance fighting against misogyny and sexual harassment, left young men feeling left behind? And is this trend set to stick or, as recent polling suggests, will Reform gain support from women? With political polarisation looming large, can Gen Z build relationships across the gendered divide? Can young women and men be compatible if they have lost their shared morals and values?

SPEAKERS:
Elliot Bewick, Chloe Combi, Georgina Mumford
CHAIR:
Emma Gilland

Sunday 19 October, 15:45—17:00
SHOULD WE ‘DOGE’ UNIVERSITY RESEARCH?
With the rise of ideologically skewed or frivolous research, some argue that an intellectual rot is dominating some university research fields. Others are more worried about the increasing political oversight and distortion of research by ideology. Has academic research lost public trust by prioritising ideological conformity over intellectual rigour?

SPEAKERS:
Dr Jennie Bristow, Ella Dorn, Dr Pamela Paresky, Edward Skidelsky
CHAIR:
Timandra Harkness

Sunday 19 October, 13:45—15:15
THE RISE OF SNITCH CULTURE
In an era of WhatsApp groups, screenshots and the potential for things to go ‘viral’ breaching someone’s privacy is no longer seen as an immoral act. Social media has broken the trust that some things will be kept private. In a world where people’s intimate lives and thoughts can be shared worldwide at the touch of a button, is it possible to maintain both public and private lives? Can we encourage the young to trust each other if snitch culture is normalised?

SPEAKERS:
Sabrina Esses, Stani Huepfl, Rosie Kay, Fraser Myers, Connie Shaw
CHAIR:
Dr Tiffany Jenkins

Sunday 19 October, 17:15—18:30
EUROPE’S FREE-SPEECH CRISIS: HYPE OR REALITY?
Earlier this year, JD Vance warned that European failings on free speech and democracy are not down to Russia, China or any other external actors but a product of ‘the threat from within’. Have Europeans given up on the idea that bad ideas can be defeated by better ideas, rather than bans? Can Europe rediscover the values of tolerance and free speech as the foundation of a democratic society?

SPEAKERS:
Dr Norman Lewis, John McGuirk, Jacob Mchangama, Dr Lola Salem
CHAIR:
Alastair Donald

Sunday 19 October, 17:15—18:30
ERA OF THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE GRADUATE?
As graduate students are finding it increasingly difficult to find jobs in an over-saturated market, concern arises at the new political threat of the ‘downwardly mobile graduate’. Burdened by debt, underemployed and politically disillusioned, will this new demographic turn on the parties who sold them the dream?

SPEAKERS:
Poppy Coburn, Tom Collyer, Nick Hillman, Dr Linda Murdoch, Tallulah Sutton
CHAIR:
Toby Marshall

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