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IS THERE A RIGHT TO DIE: THE MORAL DILEMMAS OF ASSISTED DEATH
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/is-there-a-right-to-die-the-moral-dilemmas-of-assisted-death/

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is still being discussed in parliament. But beyond proposals for a law change, how should we tackle one of the great debates of our time: should we set up a system of assisted death and profound questions it raises about everything from whether adults have a right to assistance to end their own life to what safeguards and protections should exist between individuals and the state when death is offered as a medical option by health professionals.

Philosopher and bestselling author of Material Girls Kathleen Stock will lead a discussion raising themes in her forthcoming book Do Not Go Gentle, arguing that we should reaffirm life, rather than death and collectively, we should rage against the dying of the light.

The issue throws up many moral dilemmas worth discussing: Is the status quo a ‘cruel mess,’ to quote campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen? Is assisted death for those with a terminal illness, or suffering chronic pain or extreme mental distress, a progressive and compassionate choice as its supporters argue? Does it give a person more “freedom” or “control” over their lives, allow dignity in dying as it were? How should we square a patient’s freedom of choice with existing frameworks of medical ethics? Will having the right to take control of your death by asking a doctor to kill you, really have broader sinister outcomes for the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled, the suicidally depressed as its opponents warn? Is it ever possible to guard effectively against situations in which people are coerced to die, either by family members or by a state that is too often incapable of providing adequate palliative care? Or are such slippery slope arguments just a form of emotive scaremongering? How should we all approach our own or loved ones’ terminal illness and death?

Speakers
Dr Az Hakeem
consultant psychiatrist and medical director, Psyche Clinic; author, Trans and Detrans

Sonia Sodha
columnist and broadcaster

Dr Kathleen Stock
columnist, UnHerd; co-director, The Lesbian Project; author, Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death

Professor Kevin Yuill
emeritus professor of history, University of Sunderland; author, Assisted Suicide: the liberal, humanist case against legalization

Chair
Claire Fox
director, Academy of Ideas; independent peer, House of Lords; author, I STILL Find That Offensive!

Is there a right to die: The moral dilemmas of assisted death

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ERA OF THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE GRADUATE
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/rise-of-the-downwardly-mobile-graduate/

With nearly five million graduates now working in non-graduate roles, recent reports have warned of a new political threat: the ‘downwardly mobile graduate’. Burdened by debt, underemployed and politically disillusioned, will this new demographic turn on the parties who sold them the dream?

The Blairite mantra, ‘Education, education, education’, once signalled the ambition of creating a ‘learning society’ to overcome decades of economic woes. By expanding university places, Britain was to be transformed into ‘a high-skill society, competing in the global economy by virtue of brain power and innovation’. But while New Labour’s target of sending half of all 18- to 30-year-olds to university has been achieved, few believe this has delivered the promised transformation.

Instead, the job market is flooded with (over)qualified candidates and many graduates, especially post-pandemic, face grim prospects. Arts students have long struggled with the employment market, but now graduates in traditionally solid fields like accountancy, engineering and medicine also face challenges. Rampant grade inflation means that ‘good’ qualifications no longer stand out, with 32 per cent of students gaining first-class degrees, double the proportion of a decade earlier. AI also poses a threat, especially to white-collar jobs: job hunting site Adzuna shows entry-level and graduate vacancies have dropped by a third since the launch of ChatGPT.

Consequently, universities now struggle to explain their value. While the employer-friendly promise of developing ‘critical thinking skills’ might once have worked, today many undergraduate courses appear unable to cultivate basic intellectual competencies. And while studying a subject for its own sake can be worthwhile, many courses now demand little in terms of reading, discussion and critique, so degrees may no longer appear the most fulfilling or financially savvy way to become educated.

How can we improve the prospects of graduates? Are disaffected university leavers likely to offer a challenge to the status quo, or might they drift into disengagement, as in China, where educated youth increasingly withdraw? Can the system be reformed to serve both students and staff – or should universities cut places and reinstate selectivity? In a world of falling wages and rising automation, does doing a degree still make sense?

Speakers
Poppy Coburn
acting deputy comment editor, Daily Telegraph

Tom Collyer
senior executive, Pagefield; writer; alumnus, Debating Matters

Nick Hillman
director, Higher Education Policy Institute

Dr Linda Murdoch
former director of careers, University of Glasgow; researcher on wellbeing and work ethic

Tallulah Sutton
sociology and politics researcher; University of Cambridge; author, Labour Heartlands in Brexit Britain

Chair
Toby Marshall
film studies teacher; member, AoI Education Forum

Era of the downwardly mobile graduate

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BOOKSHOP BARNIE: BIJAN OMRANI ON GOD IS AN ENGLISHMAN
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/meet-the-author-bijan-omrani-on-god-is-an-englishman/

Bijan Omrani’s latest book, God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England, is an exploration of how religion has been part of our island story for almost 2,000 years. Amongst other things, he explores the foundational impact of the church on the language, laws, education, government and morality of England. He contrasts this with the contemporary decline of Christianity in England, and asks what this means for government, civil society and established mechanisms of authority, as well as for our understanding of history, creativity, belief and truth.

Historian Simon Heffer lays the blame for the collapse of Christianity squarely on the shoulders of twenty-first-century abuses by the Church of England. Omrani identifies the 1960s as the source of the decline. Author John Milbank argues that the rot set in with the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

The Critic magazine review says: ‘The purpose of Omrani’s book is not so much to uncover anything new but rather, at a time when it is desperately needed, to reassert things which were once self-evident.’

With the prime minister an avowed atheist, the leader of the opposition declaring her agnosticism and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, expressing doubts about the existence of God, is it time to hang up the cassock? Is Christianity’s time over? Or is a faith in God essential to renewing our faith in humanity?

Speaker
Dr Bijan Omrani
historian, University of Exeter; columnist; author, God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England

Host
Austin Williams
director, Future Cities Project; honorary research fellow, XJTLU, Suzhou, China; author, China’s Urban Revolution

Bookshop Barnie: Bijan Omrani on God is an Englishman

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RAPE GANGS, POST OFFICE AND SCOTTISH SELF-ID: AN ANATOMY OF THREE SCANDALS
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/rape-gangs-post-office-and-scottish-self-id-an-anatomy-of-three-scandals/

In recent years, Britain has been rocked by several scandals where the public has been kept in the dark. Politicians and the authorities have indulged in obfuscation, denial, cover-ups and even possible collusion – all to avoid accountability or admit responsibility.  As with previous scandals, it’s often been grassroots campaigners, victims’ groups and courageous journalists who have brought these issues to public attention.

What was it like being a key player on the frontline of history in three of these recent scandals: rape gangs, the Post Office miscarriages of justice and gender self-ID in Scotland?  Journalists Charlie Peters and Nick Wallis, and Susan Smith from campaign group For Women Scotland, tell their stories of activism, investigation and holding truth to power.

GB News reporter Charlie Peters, presenter of the 2023 documentary, Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame, has called it ‘the worst race-hate scandal and abuse scandal since the Second World War’.  Meanwhile, Conservative MP Nick Timothy, writing in response to Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he would – at last – commission a national inquiry on the back of recommendations in Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (2025), stated: ‘Rape gangs are the biggest scandal of our generation.’

The Post Office Horizon IT scandal stands out as another one of the UK’s most significant miscarriages of justice. Faulty accounting software developed by Fujitsu led to the Post Office prosecuting over 900 subpostmasters for theft, fraud or false accounting, resulting in wrongful convictions, bankruptcies, imprisonments and even suicides. Nick Wallis, a freelance journalist, broadcaster and author, has been one of the leading figures in exposing and chronicling the scandal.

For Women Scotland (FWS) is a women’s rights advocacy group that was set up in 2018 to oppose the SNP’s attempts to force gender self-identification through Holyrood. Even when the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was blocked by the Tory UK government, the then first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, continued to defend the policy.  In a car-crash press conference, she famously refused to say whether double-rapist Adam Graham/Isla Bryson, who was initially sent to a female jail, was a man or a woman. The scandal caused a huge public outcry and has been partially blamed for Sturgeon’s sudden resignation a few months later. The furore also forged For Women Scotland into a formidable campaign group that eventually won a famous victory in clarifying equality law at the Supreme Court.

These scandals are only three of the many that have shocked our nation, alongside the Grenfell Tower fire, the Hillsborough tragedy, the infected-blood scandal and more.  Are such scandals simply a feature of modern Britain? Do they, as many argue, implicate the state itself as negligent, incompetent and mired in the tendency to cover-up and collude? What can we learn from these brave journalists and campaigners who have stood at the frontline, challenged politicians and the authorities, and held them to account?

Speakers
Charlie Peters
GB News national reporter

Susan Smith
co-director, For Women Scotland; director, Beira’s Place; contributor, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht

Nick Wallis
journalist, presenter, BBC Radio 4 series The Great Post Office Trial

Chair
Claire Fox
director, Academy of Ideas; independent peer, House of Lords; author, I STILL Find That Offensive!

Rape gangs, post office and Scottish self-ID: an anatomy of three scandals

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DESPISED: WHY THE MODERN LEFT LOATHES THE WORKING CLASS
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/despised-why-the-modern-left-loathes-the-working-class/

Drawing on his background as a firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham, in his book, Despised, Paul Embery examines the disconnect between the left political establishment and the working class. He argues the left establishment swallowed a poisonous brew of economic and social liberalism and has come to despise traditional working-class values of patriotism, family and faith. Instead, it has embraced globalisation, rapid demographic change and a toxic, divisive brand of identity politics.

Embery contends that the left can only revive if it speaks once again to the priorities of working-class people by combining socialist economics with the cultural politics of belonging, place and community.

In the five years since Embery wrote Despised these trends have arguably developed further. We now have a Labour government mired in controversy over everything from asylum hotels to flags and women’s rights. Can the left fix these problems or are the divisions too deep? What does the future hold?

Speaker
Paul Embery
firefighter; trade unionist; author, Despised: why the modern Left loathes the working class; broadcaster

Jane Sandeman
founder, AoI Parents Forum; former director of finance

Chair
Geoff Kidder
director, membership and events, Academy of Ideas; convenor, AoI Book Club

Despised: why the modern Left loathes the working class

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INCITEMENT LAW: A TOOL FOR CENSORSHIP?
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/incitement-law-a-tool-of-censorship/

After riots that followed three fatal stabbings in Southport last year, over 30 people were arrested for social-media posts, and many subsequently convicted. Most prominently, Lucy Connolly was jailed 31 months for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ after tweeting ‘set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care’. Andrew McIntyre received seven and a half years for posting on his Telegram channel a call for attacks on mosques and including maps. But since then, Labour councillor Ricky Jones has been acquitted of encouraging violent disorder when urging attendees at a London rally to cut the throats of far-right protesters. And punk duo Bob Vylan escaped police charges for chanting ‘death, death to the IDF’ to Glastonbury crowds and BBC viewers.

Such cases have reignited debate over the definition and purpose of the charge of ‘incitement’. Sitting at the murky intersection between speech and actions, even firm free-speech advocates draw differing conclusions. In respect of Lucy Connolly, Lord Sumption defended the conviction as consistent with the law. Others, such as Andrew Doyle and the Free Speech Union, said that Connolly’s words either fall short of true incitement or her punishment was disproportionate to the crime. What factors determine an offence of incitement, placing what is said beyond the realm of free speech within the law?

While liberal democracies traditionally drew a clear line between speech and action, this line is blurring. In Britain, ‘hate speech’ legislation can mean that emotional impact is conflated with intent, subjective offence with objective threat, and expressions deemed likely to incite hatred can be punished regardless of whether violence follows.

In the US, incitement is strictly defined by the Brandenburg test: speech must be intended to incite ‘imminent lawless action’ and likely to produce such action. Few cases have ever met this threshold. But growing criticism of a lack of regulations on ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’, and disapproval of Trump’s actions on free speech, mean that constitutional protections are being tested. Will incitement become an issue in America, too?

How should incitement be defined?  When does robust speech become criminal incitement and how should free speech be balanced with public order? Do we need a Brandenburg test in Britain, or is America’s approach dangerously lax? Is there a danger that protecting public safety is a pretext for silencing people, and that law becomes a tool of political policing, weaponising incitement law for ideological ends? And what counts – or should count – as free speech, even if it’s offensive to many?

Speakers
Albie Amankona
broadcaster; financial analyst; executive member, 2022 Group; champion, Next Gen Tories; general council, LGBT+ Conservatives; co-founder, Conservatives Against Racism.

Steven Barrett
barrister; broadcaster; writer on law, Spectator

Bryn Harris
Chief Legal Counsel, Free Speech Union

Dr Joanna Williams
academic; author, How Woke Won and Women vs Feminism

Chair
Luke Gittos
criminal lawyer; author, Human Rights – Illusory Freedom; director, Freedom Law Clinic

Incitement law: a tool of censorship?

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Is there a right to die: The moral dilemmas of assisted death

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