Academy of Ideas

Mar 04 2025 381 ep. 67 mins 1.5k

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The Academy of Ideas has been organising public debates to challenge contemporary knee-jerk orthodoxies since 2000. Subscribe to our channel for recordings of our live conferences, discussions and salons, and find out more at www.academyofideas.org.uk

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Podcast of Ideas: does England need a football regulator?

Mar 04 2025 59 mins

Next week, the Football Governance Bill will go to Report Stage in the House of Lords. While it will then go to the House of Commons, the debates in the House of Lords are a chance to amend a piece of legislation that threatens to damage English football in ways that. as yet, are not getting enough attention. The introduction of an Independent Football Regulator (IFR) has become a

Girls only: Sall Grover and the fight for women's rights

Feb 20 2025 48 mins

Claire Fox talks to Sall Grover and Katherine Deves about their fight in Australia to reassert in law that a woman is an adult human female. Sall Grover is the founder of the female-only app, Giggle for Girls and Katherine Deves is one of her legal team. Both have been visiting the UK from Australia to get support for their appeal of an important test-case decision on the definitio

'Why do we do it? This is the best job in the world.'

Feb 12 2025 46 mins

In the wake of the huge farmers' protest in London on 10 February, Rob Lyons talks to two Cumbrian farmers, John Shaw and Richard Kerr, along with their accountant Paul Benson, about the state of farming in the UK today. Why farmers are so angry about the Labour government's inheritance tax changes The existing difficulties with making a good living from farming, particularly the

Neurodiversity to gender dysphoria: a problem of over-diagnosis?

Feb 04 2025 91 mins

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In many areas of life, an explosion of diagnostic labels seem to have expanded far beyond straightforward medical prognosis. Medicine seems to have become tangled up with fashionable identities, and a zeitgeist that stresses vulnerability and victimhood. How do s

Running back to EU? Labour, Europe and the economy

Jan 31 2025 86 mins

On the fifth anniversary of Brexit, listen to this debate recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In July, on the eve of the General Election, Keir Starmer was asked if he could foresee ‘any circumstances’ in which the UK would rejoin the EU’s single market ‘in his life’. His response was an

From social media to AI: a tech moral panic?

Jan 29 2025 78 mins

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION Smartphones have become almost ubiquitous in modern society. The rise of social-media services, which have billions of users worldwide, has gone hand in hand with the use of smartphones. Few technologies have seen such rapid adoption. With concerns about several

The Great British Energy crisis

Jan 20 2025 94 mins

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTIONWith concerns growing about potential blackouts on cold winter evenings with little wind, listen to this debate on what is happening to UK energy, particularly with the arrival of the new Labour government. The Labour government has set out an ambitious goal to deca

Assisted dying bill: for or against?

Nov 29 2024 110 mins

Recording of an Academy of Ideas debate on Tuesday 26 November 2024 via Zoom. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION With Parliament about to vote on the issue for the first time since 2015, join us for a discussion on the rights and wrongs of legalisation. The House of Commons will vote on Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on 29 November. The Bill claims to ‘a

Allison Pearson's lawyer on free speech, hate crime and the law

Nov 22 2024 28 mins

Criminal solicitor Luke Gittos offers an insider's view on the Telegraph columnist's case and the worrying rise of censorship. The case of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson has drawn attention to the scale of policing (quite literally) of speech in the UK today. Pearson’s lawyer in the case is Luke Gittos - a partner at Murray Hughman solicitors in London and director of Freedo

Is it time to kick VAR out of football?

Nov 14 2024 71 mins

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTIONIn 2018, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) was introduced at the World Cup in Russia – and the arguments about it haven’t stopped since, with complaints that decisions are still often wrong while lengthy reviews cause confusion and frustration. Using technology to he