August 2020: An Alternative Music Playlist

ROCK IS DEAD. Didn't you hear? But death is not the end. This is a playlist full of great new rock music, oh and a tonne of other alternative genres including: metal, hip-hop, punk, indie etc etc etc. You might just discover your new favourite band.

"Rock Is Dead": The Ultimate Alternative Music Playlist by the Head Scratcher - part 3

Battle of Ideas 2014

Despite the economic crisis, art in Greece is booming. By 2015, new museums and cultural organisations are scheduled to open their doors to the public, many of them privately funded rather than state-run as in the past. As Greek classical orchestras and opera companies find themselves in a bleak financial situation due to government spending cuts, private funding seems to have offered a way out. At the same time, non-traditional venues such as Syntagma Square’s metro station and airplane flights have been used as opera stages, in an effort to promote it to new audiences.

Yet the question of how opera, along with other elite art forms such as classical music and theatre, can and should be made more accessible to all is a fraught one. Some argue, for example, that the key lies in demystifying some of opera’s difficulty by incorporating elements from popular culture and emphasising its contemporary socio-political relevance. Yet others warn that such an approach risks alienating current and potential audiences who are attracted to art precisely because it is so strange and diverts us from everyday concerns. They argue that the opera world – especially critics - should certainly focus their energies on inspiring and explaining opera’s virtues for the curious, while accepting that The Ring Cycle isn’t for everyone.

Can such projects – whether privately or state funded - really be justified when they bring little obvious benefit to most Greeks, especially in a period of economic crisis? What emphasis should performers and critics place on making opera more accessible versus making judgments on purely artistic grounds? Does opera, or any other ‘difficult’ art form, by definition need to be held to different standards of accessibility than popular culture?
Speakers
	Dr Eugenia Arsenis
director; dramaturg, Center for Contemporary Opera, New York

	Dolan Cummings
associate fellow, Institute of Ideas; editor, Debating Humanism; co-founder, Manifesto Club

	Dr Nikos Dontas
head, Dramaturgy Department, Greek National Opera; music critic, Kathimerini

	Dimitrios Kiousopoulos
historian; columnist, Eleftherotypia

	Ioannis Tselikas
assistant professor, Hellenic American University; music editor and performer

Chair
	Alan Miller
co-director, NY Salon; co-founder, London's Truman Brewery; partner, Argosy Pictures Film Company

Produced by
Geoff Kidder director, membership and events, Institute of Ideas; convenor, IoI Book Club; IoI’s resident expert in all sporting matters
Ira Papadopoulou director of cultural affairs, Hellenic American Union
Dr Nikos Sotirakopoulos assistant lecturer in sociology, University of Kent 

Opera: are we all invited?

Next year marks 800 years since the signing of Magna Carta. While the build-up to its anniversary has been dominated by arguments about whether it should be taught in schools as part of lessons on ‘British values’ aimed at tackling ‘Trojan Horse’ extremism, others have strongly suggested Britain needs a contemporary equivalent. Whilst the coalition’s Commission on a Bill of Rights produced ambivalent conclusions, leading Conservative politicians have pledged that it will be a key part of their general election manifesto. Yet while the original brief for the Bill of Rights was for a document ‘which incorporates and builds on Britain’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights’ such a move is widely seen as a potential replacement for the Human Rights Act with Britain leaving the ECHR altogether.

Supporters see a British Bill of Rights as an important move in regaining control over key areas of national sovereignty, threatened by increasingly activist judges based in Strasbourg. Many opponents, including leading civil-liberties campaigners, charge the proposal as being a return of Tories as ‘the nasty party’ keen on limiting individual and worker protections enshrined under the Human Rights Act. In any case, it is not clear what immediate gains a UK government would make from leaving the ECHR, given the increasing willingness of British courts to challenge government policies – for example, on workfare - and the need to meet Western standards around universal human rights.

Some see the British Bill of Rights as an opportunity to rethink our contemporary attitude to rights. Historically, many see a rights culture as standing in a British tradition dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215 and embracing the 1688 Bill of Rights. Others see sharp distinctions between the natural-rights tradition dating back to John Locke and that which culminated in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in the wake of the French Revolution and the American Bill of Rights of 1791.  Is it significant that these documents that talk the language of natural rights tend to seek freedom from the state whereas the human rights tradition embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) tend to seek the state’s protection?

Could a British Bill of Rights represent a more democratic alternative to the ECHR, or simply greater powers for unelected judges in Britain rather than their counterparts in Strasbourg? Does it represent an opportunity to safeguard civil liberties and national security, as various supporters hope, or risk sacrificing hard-won rights to contemporary opportunist politicians? What advantages would it hold over the existing framework provided by the Human Rights Act? Would its introduction be a triumph for democracy or populism? Who should we trust to make our laws?
Speakers
Jon Holbrook
barrister and writer on legal issues for spiked and the New Law Journal

Martin Howe QC
barrister; member, Commission on A Bill of Rights

Helen Mountfield QC
barrister, Matrix Chambers, London; trustee, Equal Rights Trust

Rupert Myers
barrister and writer

Adam Wagner
barrister, 1 Crown Office Row 

Chair:
Claire Fox
Director of the Institute of Ideas

From Magna Carta To ECHR Do We Need A British Bill Of Rights?

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Cultural policy is seen as essential in helping to regenerate previously unfashionable areas of east London and right across the capital. Every neighbourhood seems keen to emphasise its credentials as a creative, artist-friendly hub and no urban space is complete without short-let ‘pop-up’ shops and restaurants, temporary cinemas or urban beaches. Supporters argue that such playful, small-scale interventions can help ‘citizens take ownership of their city’ and engender a community spirit seen as sorely diminished after the 2011 riots.

Yet others are more sceptical about the merits of such schemes, seeing them as invariably corporate-sponsored examples of ‘hipster gentrification’, which undermines rather than bolsters civic engagement, with even the creatives of east London’s Tech City complaining development of the area will change its ‘unique character’.
While many artists claim to be committed to being friendly with residents and helping to improve neighbourhoods, the sceptics argue that they are, knowingly or unwittingly, helping gentrification. CityLab magazine recently called it ‘Artwashing’: getting an area cleaned up before properties are bought up cheap, with existing residents removed and flats sold for the highest price possible.

Some hail the rise of artist-led cultural initiatives as a radical challenge to both the problems of austerity and the perceived stifling sanitisation of contemporary public life. Are playful, small-scale interventions and urban explorations a challenge to the sanitised city, or merely part of it? To what extent do they provide a means to nurture the urban realm and engender community spirit? In any case, is gentrification inevitable?
Speakers
Emma Dent-Coad
leader, Labour Group, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council; design and architecture journalist

Alan Miller
co-director, NY Salon; co-founder, London's Truman Brewery; partner, Argosy Pictures Film Company

Feargus O’Sullivan
Europe correspondent, CityLab

James Stevens
strategic planner, Home Builders Federation

Chair
David Bowden
coordinator, UK Battle Satellites; columnist, spiked

Cultural regeneration or gentrification?

After surging forward through the latter part of the twentieth century after the defeat of fascism, decolonisation and the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy appears to be in something of a retreat. According to the Economist, even though 45 per cent of the world’s population live in countries that ‘hold free and fair elections’, there is now widespread recognition that ‘democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have gone into reverse’. After many years of trying to spread democracy abroad, the US and other Western powers seem to have lowered their sights following the tragic, contemporary debacle in Iraq. Elsewhere, the ‘Arab Spring’ has fared little better. Even in the established democracies of the West, democracy appears to have lost its enduring appeal, with declining voter turnout and a hollowing-out of once mass-membership political parties. It was once claimed that only democracies could develop economically; now, democracy is blamed for gridlock. The contrast between the failure of the US Congress to agree a budget and the ability of China to get things done is much remarked upon.

Very few in the developed world openly discount democracy as an ideal, but nearly everyone agrees the reality is flawed. Some would reform it in various ways: lowering the voting age, using more new technology, etc. Occupy activists oppose ‘representative democracy’ altogether, preferring ‘direct democracy’. Some argue for limits on democracy in favour of the considered opinion of experts. Elected governments in Greece and Italy have even been replaced by interim technocratic administrations during the European economic crisis, and democratic mandates can be annulled when people vote the ‘wrong way’, as when the Irish voted ‘No’ to the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 or when the Muslim Brotherhood was voted into power in Egypt. And far from being cheered as a historic democratic exercise that ousted an entrenched Gandhi dynasty, this year’s election in India provoked fears that 815million voters were expressing atavistic religious prejudice.

If anything sums up the contemporary concern with democracy, it is the word ‘populism’. In Europe, it is the fear of people voting for the wrong sort of political party: the Front National in France, the PVV in the Netherlands, UKIP in the UK. In America, it is the fear of what used to be called the ‘moral majority’: conservative voters out of step with the liberal consensus on social issues.

Are populist political movements simply throwbacks, appealing to the bigotry of greying voters? Or do they give voice to the frustrations of citizens who feel increasingly cut off from an aloof and deracinated political class? Will the twenty-first century see the demise of democracy in favour of technocratic governance? What has so tarnished our view of what used to be the foundational principle of Western civilisation?
Speakers

Professor Ivan Krastev
Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia; permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna

Professor Chantal Mouffe
Professor of political theory, University of Westminster; author, Agonistics: thinking the world politically

Brendan O'Neill
editor, spiked; columnist, Big Issue; contributor, Spectator

Dr David Runciman
professor of politics, Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Cambridge University; author, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War 1 to the Present

Should we fear democracy?

Immigration is a fraught political issue. Those opposing immigration – and especially the EU policy of granting freedom of movement to all EU citizens – argue that low-skilled workers from the relatively impoverished East are now driving down wages in the West. Then there is the spectre of the overseas benefits claimant, taking out without ever giving anything in return. The pro-immigration side counters that immigration is actually good for the economy. Migrants in the UK pay more in tax than they consume in public services, not least because inward migrants are more likely to be working age than the population in general. So does immigration help or hinder the UK economy?

Or does that question miss the point? While the much prophesised rush of immigrants taking advantage of the exhaustion of the seven-year ban on immigration from Romania and Bulgaria at the start of the year may not have come to pass, there are still plenty who claim that immigration is a big problem. To respond to public disquiet, the government has concentrated its efforts on non-EU immigrants. But for all its talk of caps and limits, the government seems incapable of enforcing anything of the sort. And for some, that is exactly the problem. EU rules effectively mean the UK government does not control its own borders, rendering the debate about whether immigration is a bane or a boon somewhat moot.

Moreover, it sometimes seems that what drives the nominally pro-immigration side is not so much freedom of movement, but the unsavoury associations of anti-immigration arguments. It is claimed that anti-immigration parties like UKIP will prompt ‘kneejerk xenophobia’, or exacerbate people’s ‘ill-informed prejudices’. Is this a pro-immigration position or anti-masses sentiment? Where are those willing to defend immigration on the grounds that everyone should be entitled to freedom of movement regardless of their passport or their skill-set? Is there a case for giving up on controlling borders altogether? Conversely, are arguments against immigration too defensive? Are secure borders essential to maintaining national sovereignty? Is it time for a different kind of debate?
Speakers
David Goodhart
chair, Demos' Advisory Group; author, The British Dream

Philippe Legrain
visiting senior fellow, LSE’s European Institute; author, Immigrants: your country needs them and European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right; former economic adviser to the President of the European Commission

Bruno Waterfield
Brussels correspondent, Daily Telegraph; co-author, No Means No

Steven Woolfe
UKIP Frontbench Spokesman on Migration and Financial Affairs Co-ordinator EFDD Group, EU ECON Committee

Chair
Claire Fox
director, Institute of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze

Immigration Who Should Control Our Borders

Debate at the Battle of Ideas 2014, with 	Vanessa Pupavac (senior lecturer, University of Nottingham), Karl Sharro (writer; Middle East commentator), Nadim Shehadi (Chatham House)

ISIS: damned if we do, damned if we don’t?

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Listen to recordings of our discussions and debates. Our aim is to expand the boundaries of public debate, to break out of today's echo chambers and challenge orthodoxies.

ISIS: damned if we do, damned if we don’t?

Academy of Ideas