Some optimism must have been revived in my cynical old heart yesterday, as I actually joined the Academy of Ideas — the organisation that stages these festivals. I rose early and headed off to Church House for yet another day of debate.

The first session I chose to attend today was on “Gender Ideology and Criminal Justice,” which I accept was asking for the opposite of a chilled Sunday morning. I did not expect to be reduced to tears however.

The discussion was not about criminalising mis-gendering. It was about the practical effects of trans ideology on criminals and in the prison estates in particular. The fastest growing element in the female estate comprises biological males identifying as women. Are they genuine? Gender dysphoria is a thing, right? Well consider this fact. There are no trans-men in the male prison estate. It seems safe to infer that the “trans-women” inmates at best want access to safer female prisons and at worst want access to female prisoners. 

It seems trans ideology was trialled in the prison system well before it reached wider society. Why? Kate Coleman suggested it was because no one cares what happens to prisoners (especially, in her view, female prisoners) so the ideas met less resistance than could have been expected in schools or hospitals. Once established in the Prison Service and Ministry of Justice, it was easier to roll the ideas out into other parts of the public sector.

This was shocking but not tear-inducing. It was Ceri-Lee Galvin who turned on my waterworks with her account of her tragic life. The father who abused her sexually decided in prison to transition legally and has been able to leave his history behind him on release, while retaining both his paedophile proclivities and his male genitalia. Her courage in refusing to be a victim and insisting on coming forward (under constant and vicious attack for transphobia from trans activists) to protect other young women is as inspiring as her story is terrifying.

Horrifyingly we were told that trans rights transcend child safeguarding in that one need not “deadname” oneself in a DBS report required before working with children.

In search of light relief my next session was “Why do comedians keep siding with the Establishment” featuring Miriam Elia, Dominic Frisby and Graham Linehan. 

Dominic spoke of the history of the Edinburgh Fringe from the uninvited eight to the present day when the only event selling more tickets than the Fringe is the Olympic Games. He made an interesting comparison of the main (curated) festival vs the (uncurated) fringe to today’s BBC and YouTube. Cat videos would never have been commissioned by BBC Light Entertainment!

Another interesting insight was triggered by a question from the floor about where working class comedians had gone. Dominic said they were early victims of cancel culture driven by the sneering of the likes of Ben Elton.

Miriam had a successful time at the BBB until she wrote a surreal Gardeners Question Time sketch in which militant Muslim vegetables rose up and attacked the other plants on behalf of ISIS. She was told to change it to fundamentalist Christians and refused on the grounds that it wouldn’t then be funny. She left, became independent and has succeeded. She sounded disappointed not to have been cancelled but as Peter Boghossian had advocated yesterday for academia, she’d effectively set up her own parallel institution where she couldn’t be cancelled.

I am a huge fan of Father Ted and was delighted to be in the presence of Graham Linehan. Naively, he feels that our woke censors are imaginary. I pointed out to him from the floor that the Equity Diversity and Inclusion concerns expressed by a BBC producer in rejecting his latest sitcom were not just a fad on Twitter. There were real ESG rules as discussed in the session I attended here yesterday, which could get employees of corporations and institutions fired for any satirisation of protected minorities.

I suggested comedians gave up on the established outlets and went the Boghossian/Elia route of establishing parallel spaces to work in. The chair, Andy Shaw, said that was all well and good up to a point but shows needed venues and when his comedy show featuring Graham had been cancelled at the last Fringe, no one else would offer space.

Linehan has a theory that spell checkers would end the world. It used to be that people complaining to the BBC wrote misspelled letters in green ink that made it obvious they were crazy. Now spellcheckers and Grammarly allowed them to appear serious enough to be listened to.

Miriam has found an outlet for her satirical artworks in Eastern Europe. She found it funny that a British Jew whose ancestors fled that part of the world to find liberty now had to go there to find freedom of artistic expression. As someone who lived and worked in Eastern Europe for 11 years, I could have told her they all recognise what’s happening to us from their recent experience of Communism. They are both inoculated against Soviet thinking and horrified that the West is falling back into it in a slightly different guise.

After lunch I listened to Peter Hitchens in conversation with Austin Williams on the topic “A Revolution Betrayed.”  He has written a book about the destruction of selective education in Britain. I can’t say there was a debate. To the evident frustration of his interlocutor, all contributions from the floor were supportive of his view that this had been a massive mistake and that British state education is a disgrace. Asked how to fix it, he said “that’s up to you, I’ll be dead soon.”  In his view it can’t be fixed without overturning the leftist cultural revolution that has transformed the country since the 1960s and given us an Establishment that rumbles leftwards regardless of how we vote.

My next session was “I dissent! Challenging the Culture of Conformism”, featuring Peter Boghossian, Jennie Bristow, Abbot Jamison, Helen Joyce and Lord Moylan. This was one of the most interesting discussions. It seems to me that the radical progressivism of what Frank Furedi calls “the pronoun elite” has done civilisation one favour. In refusing to engage with people who believe in free speech, they’ve pushed us together to have more discussions than we might have had without them. This weekend, old-style Labour, traditional Conservatives and classical liberals like me have engaged in polite but forthright discussions of the issues of the day.

My final session was chaired by Claire Fox. The title was “Against Fatalism: How can we create a new Enlightenment?” 

Professor Jonathan I. Israel set out the characteristics of the original Enlightenment.

Munira Mirza of Civic Future told a story of dining with a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who is involved with creating a new town in California. He told her that if you say to someone in the Valley you’re working on general AI they’ll assume it’s possible and will congratulate you. Tell them you’re building a new city however and they’ll say “you’re crazy! You’ll never get permission!” That illustrates the failure of our political system. Our politics are broken, our young are in despair and people are looking for scapegoats. Our universities are place of conformism and you can’t have a new enlightenment if you’re not thinking. 

She said we’re a society that gives a lot of status to the “sneering professions” who deconstruct and criticise, rather than people who build.

Frank Furedi said that the original Enlightenment was as good as it gets in terms of the progress of ideas, but was subject to a shared anti democratic idea, which favoured aristocracy.

Guest speaker Coleman Hughes (of podcast Conversations with Coleman) said when we really need to apply Enlightenment values was when the issue under discussion raised our blood pressure. When the subject makes us uncomfortable is precisely the moment to lean in and have courage.  

Coleman also said that in Pirates of the Caribbean there’s a scene where Captain Jack Sparrow sails by a gallows with pirates left swinging as a warning to others. In truth, very few pirates were caught so the warning was hollow. In a similar way, if someone is cancelled we all sail past the horror show of their punishment on Twitter or other social media. That’s meant as a warning too, to discourage us from speaking our minds. We need to remind ourselves that most people are not cancelled and steel ourselves to be brave and speak out.

That’s as good a summary of the message of the weekend as any!

Back in 2012 I attended an earlier version of this event at the Barbican. It was depressing and things have not improved on the liberty front since then. In fact our “Conservative” government has made things considerably worse. This year's festival is at Church House in Westminster. 


Ben Delo opened the keynote by commending Claire Fox of the Academy of Ideas for staging these festivals. He then depressed me by citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the beginning (rather than as seems to me more likely, the eventual end) of the right to free speech. It doesn’t help if the advocates of fundamental freedoms believe they are in the gift of governments, rather than being the inalienable natural right of every human. Where those rights are denied, it is governments that do so.

He and Claire Fox both referenced The Westminster Declaration, which may perhaps be a beginning in the fight back for free speech.  

In her keynote address, Fox spoke of the dark cloud over this event from the recent pogrom in Israel.

The first session I attended went straight to the point of my current despair by asking the question “who really rules today?”  Matt Goodwin author of “Values, Voice and Virtue” said there is a crisis of morality and authority among our ruling elites. Our old establishment was not really ideological. However from the 1970s we’ve seen its authority drain away. The new British Establishment that has replaced it is highly ideological. It is searching desperately for moral legitimacy after 40 years of failure on every front. Only 20% of the British public shares its values so we’ve now entered a post-democratic era in which voters feel both unrepresented and disrespected.

Pamela Dow, of Civic Future, an ex civil servant, said we might tolerate the elite more if they were elite. But they’re not. They’re hopeless. Her organisation was founded to change that;

Our goal is to identify and empower a wide range of talented young people with the tools to be effective in public service, in all its forms. We will host a range of events and activities to broaden and deepen the understanding and capabilities of all those in, or considering, public life. For example, we will convene informed debates on the defining political and philosophical issues of the day, and practical sessions on effective politics and government. 

Anand Manon was not convinced. He said talk about "elites" is an excuse for the incompetence of a very powerful government that prefers to do "soundbite politics" rather than govern competently. 

Harry Lambert of New Statesman said the problem wasn’t the cultural left but the economic right. He trotted out the old Labour line on redistribution of wealth by taxation as if it was just after the war. To listen to his naive nonsense, you'd never have believed that our oppressed productive minority is already taxed so heavily to fund a massive state that many are shrugging their shoulders and giving up. The poorest US State is now richer per capita than the UK.

My later question from the floor was to ask him where the time machine was parked that had brought him from 1948. Claire Fox, in the chair, accidentally revealed her idea of what taxes are for when she responded to my observation that I’d been taxed to death and my money given to people I detest by saying “I was with you until you said that - I’ve been on the dole a few times.” Of course it’s not benefit claimants I resent my earnings being given to, but such parasites as woke civil servants and state-funded social science  professors intent on destroying our civilisation!

Frank Furedi challenged Lambert's daft idea that the economic world was unaffected by the elites' culture wars by referring to the Harvard Business Review, which these days reads like it was written by a Marxist sociology lecturer. The “pronoun elite” is completely in charge. They seek cultural hegemony by demoting us from citizens to passive "stakeholders" in various neat categories, which (rather than reason or intellect) govern our every thought. The real question, he said, is how do we get our voice back so we can decide the future of our society.

All I really gained from the first session was that I need to read Matt Goodwin’s book.

There was some degree of agreement (except from the young idiot from the New Statesman) that we’d gone too far in suppressing speech. Even he, in fairness, said he didn’t defend the radical progressive extremists (though I suspect he just wanted to change the subject back to his pet theme of increased redistribution of wealth from "the rich" who will of course just sit still as the percentage of their earnings taken from them by state force is even further increased). I really wished I could introduce him to my many friends from Poland with whom I worked on reconstruction of their nation's economy after growing up under state socialism. Not that I think Lambert would learn anything from them, but just because they would find him hilarious!

The second session was about privacy. It was interesting but, as always, there was no clear plan as to how to solve the various problems. My impression was simply that I trusted no one on the panel to “solve” anything on this subject without creating much worse problems in terms of increased state power. We don't need government, from whom we really need privacy, to "protect" us from corporations who merely want to target us more accurately with advertisements for stuff we might (unlike most state "services") actually want.

After lunch, I changed to the economy strand to listen to discussion about ESG and whether it’s bad for business. I was able to offer an anecdote from my own business life on the subject. This was a more heartening discussion. Only one of the panelists made any attempt to justify ESG as a way to help business make better decisions. Most accepted (as did every questioner from the floor) that it was a burden on business, which tended to make everything more expensive to no measurable good effect. The general view seemed to be that ESG investing was a luxury that had thrived while money was cheap. As the cost of capital is now rising faster than at any time in history, it seems likely that this nonsense on stilts will be cut down. There is pressure on government to reform it. 

I was a business lawyer for decades and I literally don’t care what’s “good for business.” Businesses only exist to serve their customers well in order to deliver a return to shareholders on their investment. History shows us what’s best for those customers is for business to have as much competition (and therefore as many difficulties) as possible. What customers don't need is government adding to that burden by creating bullshit rules to make it look as though they're helping. That's what ESG is.

Just as most HR employees are, in truth, enforcement officials for labour laws and most Finance Department employees are tax collectors for VAT and PAYE income tax, ESG staff are – whether employees or consultants – state officials that companies are forced to pay for. If this hidden cadre of employees who do not serve businesses' customers, employees or owners in any productive way and exist only to exert control on behalf of the state was counted as part of the civil service, the true scope of state power would be horrifyingly apparent. 

I observed in this discussion that governments seem mostly to have given up on the traditional socialist goal of owning the means of production. They're happy to leave businesses in private hands as long as they are entirely directed towards the state's goals. There's a name for that corporatist approach and it's "fascism".

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching a recording of "Free Speech Nation" for GB News, presented by Andrew Doyle of Titiana McGrath fame. That will be televised this Sunday at 7pm apparently. It included a shocking interview with Australian MP Moira Deeming about her experience of being expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party there, after being denounced by the party leadership as a Nazi. She plans to sue them for defamation and I hope she wins. 

Another interesting interview was with Melissa Chen and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar of Ideas Beyond Borders an organisation "founded by two immigrants to the United States from Iraq and Singapore who made their life mission to make critical thinking, liberty and science accessible to people worldwide". Apparently more books are translated into Spanish every year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years and in Iraq (where Faisal was born) there are more books banned than are read. They seek to translate key censored texts to make them available to readers in countries where they are forbidden. Even in somewhere like Iran, people are able to use VPN to get around tech restrictions to access forbidden information.

Faisal offered the interesting perspective that he preferred to deal with open, strict censorship where he knew what ideas would get him into trouble than with the current cancel culture in the West where the boundaries are constantly shifting. 

My favourite part of the day was the interview with US philosopher (and cancelled academic) Peter Boghossian. In September 2021, he resigned from Portland State University, citing harassment and a lack of intellectual freedom. He explained to us that the university had simply made it impossible for him to do his job. He gave a harrowing account of process as punishment, explaining that repeated "investigations" into his alleged breaches had wasted huge chunks of his life. He didn't believe (though Governor DeSantis in Florida, among others, is trying) that it would be possible to regain control of the old universities in the States from radical "progressives". He thought it was going to be necessary to establish new institutions in parallel.

The lady sitting next to me had left her seat just before shooting began saying she'd be back in a moment and asking me to look after her bag. She seemed innocent enough but when she failed to return, I became concerned. Reluctantly, as I didn't want to disrupt the event, I spoke quietly to one of the GB News staff. I must say I was very impressed with how the matter was then handled. A few minutes later, two security guys showed up and discreetly asked me to identify the package I was concerned about. They then thanked me for my vigilance and quietly took it away. I don't think even the people immediately around me were aware that there'd been any kind of security problem. I stayed right to the end and the lady never did return. If I was mistaken about her, I hope she got her bag and coat back!

The tedious process of shooting and re-shooting the segments of the show caused a time over-run of more than an hour so I was late home tonight and exhausted. Still I managed to finish this blog– although it was after midnight before I posted it.

I plan to return for the second day and report my experience. 

Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? - On Demand - All 4.

Rob Riemen, Nexus Institute

I attended three sessions on the second day of the Battle of Ideas 2012. The event helped me understand how Britain has changed during the twenty years I was away. My classical liberal views, as held by most enlightened people since, well, the Enlightenment are now considered to be not merely out of step but wicked. Today I heard them bracketed in all seriousness, with fascism. And not by some foaming-at-the-mouth student Trot, but by this eminent intellectual (photo, above)

I also heard him claim that Geert Wilders had attacked his right of free expression by trying to close down his institute. When I asked him later what Wilders had actually done, he explained that he had lobbied (unsuccessfully) for the institute's state funding to be withdrawn. Whatever you think of Wilders' views (and I hold no brief for him) he is a man who is in such danger for speaking freely that he has to sleep at a different location every night under armed guard. It is extremely dishonest to equate an attempt to stop money being extorted from taxpayers to finance the expression of a particular view to the suppression of free speech.

I also disliked Riemen's dishonest hijacking of the language of spirituality to argue that we must submit to a higher good. We don't need more wealth, he said (tell that to the Chinese and Indians) we need "true education" (i.e. indoctrination in his way of thinking) and "arts, culture, knowledge, wisdom, love". Those things are desirable, of course, but all except love need money to pursue. As someone who lived his working life as part of the engine of society, I get tired of hearing the wing mirrors and the pine-scented air freshener (however much I might like to have both) tell me snootily that they are more important.

Professor Frank Furedi

The only encouraging words I heard in the session at which Riemen spoke on The 21st Century Case for Freedom were from Frank Furedi, late leader of the the Revolutionary Communist Party and now emeritus professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. He told us Stalinists had said freedom was less important than poverty because how could you be free if you were hungry and that George W. Bush had said it was less important than security because how could you be free if you were afraid of terrorists. Both Right and Left used the same arguments to subvert freedom and he thought they were mere excuses. We needed to reassert that freedom was a primary good, not one to be subordinated to others at every turn. As he put it,

We need an unqualified endorsement of freedom. No ifs and no buts.

Wary though I am of the man himself, I could not agree with him more on this point. Furedi and the leader of the Institute of Ideas, Claire Fox (another RCP graduate) are denounced by the likes of George Monbiot as defectors from the left to the libertarian right for their defences of free speech and liberty. I am not sure whether they, or we true libertarians, should be more insulted. They both still claim to be leftists, and I believe them, but they are fulfilling a useful role. They are beaters who flush out the undoubted enemies of freedom from cover for us to shoot them down.

Natalie Bennett, Green Party leader, reacts to the notion that Freedom is a primary good

Furedi certainly fulfilled that function in the session I attended. Both Riemen and Green Party leader Natalie Bennett were visibly disturbed by the notion of freedom as a primary good.

While advocating the execrable policy of a citizen's basic income whereby the productive are required to support anyone who decides to be idle (which she jokingly predicted will lead to lots of bad poetry) Bennett was laudably hostile to the coalition government's plans to hold more secret trials (euphemistically called closed material procedures) when the interests of the State are at stake. That was it though from her as far as civil liberties are concerned.

Like so many at the event, Bennett claimed to be concerned about the state's freedom of operation in the face of powerful corporate interests. She cited the SuperPACs in the US elections, corporate lobbying and advertising as evidence that the state, God help us, is weak in the face of the business world.

I wanted to tell her that everyone in the room was several trillion pounds richer than the UK government, but that doesn't mean they are a threat. The idea that a state with a total monopoly on the use of force, control over the national curriculum, control through state funding of a huge proportion of academic research, the ability to propagandise constantly at taxpayer expense etc. is weak in the face of companies only interested in selling goods and services is too ludicrous for words. Nonetheless, it was a constant theme at the event and I cannot tell if those arguing it are genuinely stupid or dishonestly justifying more state control. I suspect the latter. I know Orwell's point that some things are so stupid only intellectuals can believe them, but this just goes too far.

As did Bennett's complaint that the people of Totnes are getting a branch of Costa Coffee they don't want because the planning system is too weak to protect their "freedom". If the people of Totnes don't want their new coffee shop, it will be gone in months. Opening it is a bet the company is making that they do want it. All the residents have to do is not show up. The idea that planning control promotes freedom, when it actually limits the use by an owner of his own property, destroying value in the process, is again, too ridiculous to be anything but sinister. 

Freedom had to be constrained, she said predictably, by the physical limits on the Earth's resources. Uncontroversial enough, but however pessimistic you are about the environmental limits of economic development, there are traditional approaches to making people pay for their externalities, rather than demanding centralised control of production and, as Bennett did, rationing of carbon outputs. Those approaches are consistent with both free markets and the exercise of personal choice. Even without getting into the debate about whether, in Furedi's terms, Anthropogenic Global Warming is another moral panic/excuse to limit freedom, environmental factors need not make freedom an unaffordable luxury.

The second session I attended was called Risk, regulation and red tape. I am sorry to tell you it was even more depressing. Professor Nick Butler of Kings College and more relevantly the Fabian Society actually said from a public platform with a straight face;

All the regulations of the last 50 years were necessary and are effective.

I noted it carefully because I could not believe my ears. There was a good discussion in the session of the costs of over- or mis-regulation. I strongly argued that the greatest cost of all was in the businesses that never begin. The costs of entry of compliance with regulations prepared for (and sometimes lobbied for by) big business prevent many startups. Simon Nixon of the Wall Street journal laid the blame for increasing regulation at the door of citizens who are simply not prepared to accept risk as their fathers and grandfathers did. If we demand the government insure us against all harm, then it's inevitable, he argued, that government must regulate fiercely to limit its own liability. 

This sounds like a good excuse, but does not apply to regulations sponsored by big business to block competition. There is no pressure from the people for government to rig the market, surely? Submitting to such pressure is criminally corrupt and the people are more likely to relish Ministers going to gaol for it, than applaud them. The only point on which Professor Butler and I agreed was that all regulations (I suggested all statutes too) should have a "sunset clause" so that they expire automatically unless renewed after, say, 10 years. I don't think one generation has a right to bind the next and time-limited laws would have the benefit of preventing archaic rules from silting up the legal system. They would have the subsidiary benefit of keeping politicians busy ensuring their favourite laws stayed in force, rather than justifying their existence by constantly creating new ones. The devil has found lots of work for those idle hands.

I took pleasure in making in public my oft-repeated point here that the state's workforce is bigger than it appears because so many people in the private sector are engaged in tax collection (VAT and PAYE) and compliance, which is of no benefit to the customers or owners of the business. I pointed out that the HR department of the large law firm I retired from was bigger than the whole medium-sized firm I trained in - most of them engaged on ensuring compliance with employment law. When these secret civil servants are counted, I strongly suspect the proportion of people engaged on the state's business in Britain today is higher than it was in Poland or Czechoslovakia immediately before the fall of Communism.

The panel on the "Risk, Regulation and Red Tape" session. L-R Littlewood, Nixon, Fox, Appleton, Amitrano and Professor "No bad regulations" Butler

As so often the most alarming views came from the floor. One shrill lady took exception to the ridiculing of Health & Safety, darkly assuring us that employers were ready, if we dropped our guard, to start inflicting pain, injury and death on their workers. In thirty years in commercial law, I can't say I ever met a business person with such aspirations, but perhaps I was just lucky?

The final session I attended yesterday was called Drink, Smoke, Eat; Prohibition Today. This was by far the liveliest, but also the least satisfactory. The health fascists on the panel refused to engage, saying there was no plan for prohibition, while declining to set any limits on future restrictions on the sale, marketing and use of legal products such as tobacco. Pressed, the One Show Doctor, Sarah Jarvis said that there was a difference between tobacco and alcohol because there was a safe limit to which alcohol could be used, while any smoking was dangerous. She was a personable lady whom I would be happy to have as my GP and whose advice I would try to take. She simply didn't grasp, in her backed-by-state-force arrogance, that there was a difference between being an advisor and a boss.

When we nationalised medical services in Britain (a mistake in my view, but that's for another time) we did not give the medical profession a promotion. We still expect them to serve us, not direct us. Nor do we expect them to describe us as a "cost" to the NHS, when the NHS is a cost to us. It may sound a bit Downton Abbey (the sneering leftists at the Barbican and their overt contempt for the plebs - though of course they would never use the word - may perhaps have infected me) but this woman simply does not know her place.

On the cost point, the excellent Chris Snowden (author of The Spirit Level Delusion for which contribution to society I was delighted to have chance to buy him a thank you pint later) pointed out that, if the Health Lobby's arguments were true, the smokers, drinkers and over-eaters were saving the NHS a fortune by dying before they became a burden. The laugh this got from the health fascists rather gave the lie to their "caring" stance.

The winner of my "worst person at the Battle of Ideas" award, Dr Michael "Fun" Nelson

Which brings me my award for the all-round worst person at the Battle of Ideas. This is a great honour for someone from the dark side of statism, given the hundreds of Marxists, busybodies and all-out fascists present. My choice is Dr Michael Nelson, director of research and nutrition at the Children's Food Trust (a "social business" working with the "charity" the Schools Food Trust).

Again, it wasn't the advice he would give parents as to what their children should eat but his contempt for their ability to make choices and their right to do so that was the problem. He gave this post its title when he complained that parents (as witness the contents of packed lunches they sent with their children to school) could not be trusted to make good choices for their childrens health. Government attempts to improve nutrition by requiring catering contractors to offer healthy choices had failed because those choices were simply not taken up. If we care about "our children" he said (oddly as he and I have no children together) then we must help parents who; 

...we know from experience do not themselves have the the power of executive decision when it comes to their own diet...

I asked myself (but did not dare to articulate the suggestion unless it gave him ideas) why he stopped short of taking all British children into care. After all, their parents are too stupid to raise them properly and are jeopardising their health irresponsibly.

I don't doubt the good doctor's sincere desire to make children healthier, but fear he lacks understanding of the consequences of what he says. Yes "compulsion works", just as when soldiers are taught to accept orders without question. But people trained to obedience find it hard to fit back into society as autonomous individuals. Since returning to Britain I find my fellow-citizens, on average, rather irritating. I have realised in the last couple of days it's because they don't behave as adults any more. They are spoiled children assuming that mummy and daddy (the state) will make any problem they face go away. They are resistant to the idea they are responsible for their own lives and simply demand that the productive minority - through the agency of the state's monopoly of force - be compelled to pay for whatever the hell they want.

Conversely, when Dr Sarah complains that the "same few names" cropped up as causing drunken trouble in her Shepherd's Bush surgery on a Friday afternoon, it never occurs to her to suggest action against those problematic individuals. No, she sees it as a reason to impose restrictions on us all, even though most of us will never (however much her thoughtless authoritarianism might infuriate us) rampage through her waiting room.

I must now seriously consider if it's worth wasting my life supporting ideas that are, as far as our ruling class is concerned, dead. Hearing our public intellectuals expound the new orthodoxy, it's clear that nothing short of economic collapse or armed revolution will change their minds. As I desire neither and will certainly do nothing to promote them, perhaps I should just shut up? God knows a weekend spent listening to them discuss how best to command and control a population they despise for its stupidity and ignorance was not my idea of fun. Given their creepy authoritarianism, it may also be unwise to provide them with an online public archive of my "wicked" views.

I have taken the event at face value and applaud what it attempted. While I am fully aware of the shady background of the Institute of Ideas and its founders, I think they genuinely attempted to assemble the full range of British intellectual opinion. That range is simply neither very wide, nor very intellectual.

I was left with the impression that the British Establishment, and particularly academia, is so thoughtlessly leftist that our public intellectuals have descended into lazy complacency. They face no challenge to their stale ideas. As someone who spent two decades in post-Communist countries trying to build on economic, social and political ruins wrought by indistinguishable ideas, I find that incredible. Not to mention rather disgusting.

To hear them talk, state control of public commerce and private behaviour for the greater good of "society" (as defined by an authoritarian elite) is a radical new idea that has never been tried. The global suffering of Marxism's 20th Century guinea pigs is forgotten and they are looking to fill their lab's cages with new ones.

Our nation is already run on their principles under their guidance. What they would call in other contexts "hate speech" against the business people who generate the wealth to sustain them in their parasitical existence is the common currency of the political class, whether Labour, LibDem or "Conservative". Yet still they rail against unnamed "elites" who plunder our "collective assets" for private gain. I wanted to cry out "When will you bloody tyrants stop playing the victim?" As a fellow-libertarian who did rather lose it in one of the sessions found out, it would have earned only uncomprehending looks.

Their view of corporations is as nuanced as the portrayal of super-villains in a comic book or Bond film. Frankly the Joker or Blofeld are more fully-developed characters, with more believable motivations than their image of a business man or woman. They wield the state's monopoly of violence to shape our everyday lives. Yet they expect us to fear those whose only motivation is to make money by selling us things we want.

Our children come home indoctrinated from schools where they have shaped the curriculum. They go to universities where a leftist professor setting an essay on Plato can announce "Anyone who quotes Popper with approval will be marked down". A professor I shocked in conversation during the weekend accepted that British academia is riddled with Marxists. Yet still the left expect us to believe that commercial advertising is so powerful as to make a nonsense of free will.

I understand the motivations of the business people they despise, whereas theirs strike me as pathological. My mistakes have given me the humility to understand that it's really hard to get one's own life right. To believe you have the wisdom to shape the lives of your fellow-citizens better than they could themselves is, to my mind, insane. What is the point of engaging lunatics in discussion?

To be honest, the event today was better than the first session had augured. I guess it's just what you have to expect if you go to a debate about "equality" in Britain, but if I had heard just one more person say that "obviously" we were all in favour of it, I think I would have needed a sick bag. Most of the time (except, notably, for equality before the law and - as far as can be engineered - equality of educational opportunity) equality is not merely undesirable but unjust. Lots of different economic, social and judicial outcomes are appropriate according to an individual's talent, effort and compliance with relevant law.

Even one of the leftist speakers,  Professor Thomas Eriksen from Norway, suggested that the Left might have overplayed its hand with category discrimination. Too right, professor. Not least because the social categories at least, far from being fixed forever by destiny, are fluid. As Sir Keith Joseph said to me at university when I told him (recent ex-Marxist as I then was) that I still had a problem with inherited wealth;

Clogs to clogs in three generations.

My late wife and I would have qualified for positive discrimination on access to university according to current thinking. Our admissions tutor should have moved our grades up to account for the poor performance of our bog-standard comprehensive school and the social deprivation of its pupils. Our daughters however should have been discriminated against on such logic as the privileged, private-school educated children of a then partner in a City of London law firm. As I listened to speaker Joyce McMillan dismiss all such students as my daughters as drunken yahoos who only made it to university because they were "coached to the nth degree", I wept inwardly for her. Such pathetic hate-warped ignorance and prejudice is more to be pitied than feared. Come on Alex Salmond. Take these archaic class warrior despisers of excellence off our hands forever.
The highlight of that first session for me however was provided by that oxygen thief Trevor Phillips, a lifelong shallow-witted student politician who has learned nothing since I first knew of him in his NUS days. He expressed puzzlement as to why, when he researched educational attainment in Britain's schools, he found that children of Chinese ethnic origin outperformed all other groups. I asked him from the audience if that didn't prove that the logic of the Left had been at fault for twenty or more years. After all, whatever precise mechanism explained their performance, it proved that they were not doomed to fail by racism or social deprivation. it was clearly within the power of any group in society to change educational outcomes if its members chose to do so. Unsurprisingly, he didn't reply to that. The Chinese community in Britain has proved that race has bugger all to do with educational attainment. Nor of course have any of the other "protected characteristics" in the ridiculous Equalities Acts. The true racists, sexists and classists are those who pronounce a false doom on victims who need never be victims at all.

The session on "Social Media: good or bad?" tended rather to the latter alas. Dr Norman Lewis suggested that they were replacing - for the West's cosseted children - the opportunities they used to have for spending unsupervised time with friends. Andrew Keen, digital entrepreneur and author, advised potential investors in social media to forget about open platforms and to focus instead on closed, subscription-model privacy. "Darkness is the new sexy", apparently, and "the internet needs to be taught to forget", if necessary by government diktat.

Dr Lewis said we should be focussing on the positive applications of social media in business, rather than worrying constantly about the threat to privacy. When I suggested that we needn't worry much about the anonymised information collected by social sites as the price for their "free" services, but that the State was the real threat, Keen was dismissive. The State, he opined, is not the threat it was. Big Brother has become "lots of little brothers." He has a way with a soundbite, I have to confess, but I am damned if I can extract any actual meaning from that one.

The session on "Capitalism: kill or cure" however was so relentlessly sensible that some time traveler from the 1970s was moved to cry,

But you are all in favour of it and no-one has uttered the 's' word... Socialism!

As even the anti-capitalists in the audience were not offering any alternative, but rather proposing to 'improve' it by forcing companies to ignore all market signals (e.g. a desire for Prada handbags) that contradicted their views, his outburst was duly ignored.

Had I been called upon to speak from the floor in that session, I would have pointed out that the "global crisis" they kept mentioning was actually only a crisis of the West. The Chinese Communist Party's (highly tentative) unleashing of market forces has already raised 100 million people from poverty. When their peoples' average income passes that of India (as it will in the next decade) we can expect a similar unleashing in that corrupt nation. We can then hope for perhaps a half billion people a decade to escape poverty in the East while the West pays the price, not for capitalism, but for an imprudent affection for public and private debt. Of course, the typical Guardian-reading attendee of the Battle of Ideas would probably then pity the newly unimpoverished Easterners for their resulting "enslavement to materialism." The rest of us, however, will duly note the arrival of more customers for our businesses and rejoice.

I enjoyed my final session today on "Can the Law make us Equal". The speakers were mainly lawyers and even the Leftist on the panel, blogger Jack of Kent, expressed the sensible (and to leftists in the audience, surprising) view that we need to be aware of the law's limitations. There is nothing like the practice of law, no doubt, to educate one about those. He did not quite adhere to the wisdom of Montesquieu that;

Quand il n'est pas nécessaire de faire une loi, il est nécessaire de ne pas en faire

but he came closer than any leftist of my recent acquaintance. I wanted, but did not get the chance, to observe that the "magic" of law is much undermined by its use to impose unpopular views on the people. The trick is to secure compliance with minimal violence and this requires those bound by the laws, in general, to consent to them. The more we accustom people to being in conflict with the law, the less they will respect it in general.

In fairness, the panelists generally were skeptical about the the Law's usefulness as an educational tool. Sometimes it gets ahead of public opinion, they thought, but generally it should reflect it. As for the audience members, there were some sensible ideas expressed but - again - they seemed to be in a forlorn minority. The Battle of Ideas may continue, fitfully, but in England the War seems lost. I sat open-mouthed, for example, as a speaker from the audience said to liberal-minded panel member Alex Deane;

We don't want freedom any more Alex. We want regulation. We want control

I waited for the laughter as I first assumed he was joking. Then I realised he was serious and waited for the jeers. Reaction was there none. This sentiment, in modern London, was completely uncontroversial. Ouch.