During the Blitz, Church House, Westminster, was directly hit by a Luftwaffe bomb yet suffered little damage. So impressed by the building’s structural fortitude, Winston Churchill had Church House temporarily requisitioned for use by the two Houses of Parliament. We might sum up the events as follows: fascism had democracy in peril; the safety of the Chambers was compromised; and an alternative political home was thus required.
On the 15th-16th October, 2022, Church House again opened its doors to provide refuge to those engaged in the fight for freedom: it housed the Battle of Ideas Festival. Whilst it is not fascism which has democracy on the back foot, a tumultuous, and increasingly inept political establishment necessitates the search for an alternative domain for serious political enquiry.
At the festival, leftists and conservatives, humanists and Christians, dissident intellectuals and the politically homeless alike, came together to re-invigorate public engagement with contemporary political, cultural, and moral issues. Through good-faith arguments, some 400 speakers guided us as we attempted to shed light on matters as equally broad in scope as profound in depth. We journeyed searchingly from declining birth rates to space travel, religious freedoms to the modern merits of Ulysses, from COVID responses to sex education, and contemporary opera to the war in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, the festival is animated not by a passive listening to experts; instead, the spirit of the Battle of Ideas breathes only through mass audience participation. The encouragement, and facilitation, of bi-lateral exchanges between audience and panel speaks to the festival’s attempt to re-imagine the public square, and sits at the heart of the Battle of Ideas philosophy: freedom is not found in the unquestioning acceptance of received wisdom; rather, we must actively secure our freedoms through undertaking our own journey of rational scepticism.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that since 2005 the festival’s slogan has been “free speech allowed”. Free speech serves as a bulwark against ideology, conformity, groupthink, and tribalism, precisely because it enables one to interrogate ideas without restriction, even those which hold significant cultural purchase.
However, the festival resisted hackneyed caricatures regarding the state of free speech today. Emma Webb, director of Common Sense Society UK, who spoke on the future of the arts, did not frame the “cancel culture” debate as a partisan struggle between left and right. Rather, Webb used the prism of free thought versus compelled thinking to situate her exploration of the psychological effect of enforced morality on artists. By way of George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, she eloquently put forward the case that mindless acquiescence to ideological scripture forces us to live in the imagination of others. Never becoming so hyperbolic as to say we live under totalitarianism, Webb spoke of the instinct to make certain ideas unthinkable, which shapes the world in the intelligentsia’s image, and makes it imperative to disobey our own moral, and intellectual, inclinations.
The timing of the Battle of Ideas 2022 seems pertinent. On the cusp of what looks to be a dark and troublesome winter—facing the possibility of blackouts, economic turmoil, and a precarious energy supply—Britain, and the international community, could be entering into another Darkest Hour. But no note of pessimism could be heard in Claire Fox’s voice, as the first whip of cold winter rains forced everyone inside, and she gave her closing address.
On a step in a hallway, quite literally in arms with the thousands of attendees who spilled out of the grand rooms, and filtered through the corridors, Baroness Fox of Buckley delivered a fighting speech, pleading for the active creation of an intellectual community. Her attitude was that it is not enough to point the finger: it is not enough to whine that an illiberal poison has infected our institutions; it is not enough to merely state that the roof of our democracy has been sent flying by the squall of a technocratic elite. No. The message was that it's our house and we live here. And that means fixing the roof, even if the rains are lashing.
Brad Strotten is a founding Free Speech Champion and writer based in London.