Should we leave the European Convention on Human Rights?
1h 29m
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Academy of Ideas
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Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Sunday 29 October at Church House, London.
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
Most people acknowledge that there is an issue with Britain’s borders. The question is: who or what is to blame? For many, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and its courts in Strasbourg, has become the focus – either as the bulwark against anti-refugee sentiment, or the block on democratic process. With deportations being halted on the grounds of ‘human rights’, one’s view on membership of the ECHR has become shorthand for where you stand on the issue of refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.
Rows over the ECHR have been brewing for some time. In 2000, the Human Rights Act made the Convention an integral part of domestic law, that individuals could enforce in British courts. Since then, many, particularly on the Right, have questioned the wisdom of what they increasingly refer to as Labour’s Human Rights Act. In recent years, the Conservative Party has been committed to reforming human rights by replacing the HRA with a British Bill of Rights. But no such legislation is forthcoming – and many have pointed out that, as long as Britain remains signed-up to the ECHR, a British Bill of Rights would be superfluous. Much like the European Union, the ECHR seems to have split the Tories. Some MPs hope to cut ties completely – nearly 70 Tory MPs, many from Red Wall seats, backed quitting the ECHR in a vote on a Private Member’s Bill last year. Others – like Tom Tugendhat’s Tory Reform Group – remain concerned about what a Brexit-style exit might do to the UK’s international reputation.
In the aftermath of the Second World War the European Convention on Human Rights was seen as a protection against the tyranny and oppression that some European nations had recently endured. Nowadays, those who support it stress the importance of human rights as setting a minimum standard which democracies should guarantee. Is the problem therefore simply one of European judicial overreach, or is it essentially about the very notion of ‘human rights’ themselves? Are human rights and democratic, collective action doomed to forever be at loggerheads? With courts in Strasbourg and London ruling to impede government plans to stop small boats crossing the Channel, are human rights making popular government impossible? Or is the ECHR being scapegoated for inadequacies in our own backyard?
SPEAKERS Steven Barrett barrister, Radcliffe Chambers; writer on law, Spectator
Jamie Burton founder and chair, Just Fair; barrister (KC), Doughty Street Chambers; author Three Times Failed: why we need enforceable socio-economic rights
Luke Gittos criminal lawyer; author, Human Rights – Illusory Freedom; director, Freedom Law Clinic
John Oxley writer, New Statesman, Spectator,and UnHerd; consultant; barrister
Angelica Walker-Werth writer, editor and programmes manager, Objective Standard Institute
CHAIR Jon Holbrook barrister; writer, spiked, Critic, Conservative Woman
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Understanding Modi's India
Battle of Ideas festival 2023, Sunday 29 October, Church House, London
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
In August, India made world news by being the first nation to land near the Moon’s South Pole. Prime Minister Narendra Modi described it as a historic moment for humanity and ‘the dawn of the new India’. Meanwhile, India’s digital transformation of its financial system is reported by payments systems company ACI Worldwide to be operating on a larger scale than even in the US and China. Earlier this year, UN population estimates suggested India has overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, with over 1.4 billion people.
As America’s rivalry with China heats up, the western world has warmed to India. A month before the Moon landing, President Joe Biden had rolled out the red carpet for Modi’s state visit to America. The US wants a more meaningful, closer and stronger relationship with India. The German government is discussing a possible submarine deal. French President Emmanuel Macron invited Modi to celebrate Bastille Day, calling India a strategic partner and friend. But there have also been tensions over India’s neutral stance over the war in Ukraine. Are these signs of India’s arrival on the international top table? Can India rise to this challenge?
India has a huge population, but the vast majority are still poor – the country is ranked 139th in the world for nominal GDP per capita – and faces massive inequalities. While India receives much adulation from the Western elites, its undermining of the freedom of the press and its clampdown on the judiciary have been heavily criticised. The Economist Intelligence Unit‘s Democracy Index showed India falling from 27th position in 2014 to 46th in 2022. But the White House is calling India a ‘vibrant democracy’. Which is it: a faltering democracy or a vibrant one?
India is also facing much internal disquiet within its population. Most recently, ethnic tensions have flared up between the majority Hindus and the Muslim minority just 20 miles outside of New Delhi. Ethnic strife between Hindus and Christians also continues especially in the North-east state of Manipur.
With this backdrop of domestic instability, can Modi and his BJP party retain control in the 2024 elections? What will India’s future role be on the world stage – both politically and economically?
SPEAKERS Lord Meghnad Desai crossbench peer; chair, Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust; emeritus professor of Economics, LSE
Dr Zareer Masani historian, author, journalist, broadcaster
Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert director, Don’t Divide Us; author, What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth
CHAIR Para Mullan former operations director, EY-Seren; fellow, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Religion in schools: protecting or neglecting the faithful?
Recording of the Academy of Ideas Education Forum discussion on 25 April 2024 in central London.
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
A High Court judgement hangs over Michaela Community School for banning ritual prayer. A Wakefield school suspended pupils for damaging a copy of the Quran. Two recent studies claim that faith schools select against poor and SEN children. Two thirds of the liberal Alliance Party in Northern Ireland want Catholic schools banned. Three years after showing pupils images of the Prophet Muhammad, a teacher in the north of England remains in hiding.
It seems undeniable that schools are a new crucible for religious and social conflict. How do we navigate between tolerance and intolerance in these disputations?
How does the right of faith communities to exercise their beliefs reconcile with established wider freedoms? Should the right to pray be available to all – even in non-religious schools? Should we defend a parent’s right to send their child to a faith school? Or is that tantamount to a defence of privilege? Have we lost sight of whether faith-based liberties impinge on secular freedoms or vice versa? Who are the liberals and illiberals here?
‘What kind of school environment could so easily be destroyed by one group of students publicly expressing their religion for a mere few minutes a day?’, asks author and teacher Nadeine Asbali. She describes the ban on Muslims praying in school as ‘a dystopian, sinister vision of multiculturalism’. Yet commentator Tim Black thinks, ‘we are witnessing not quiet displays of faith, but loud all-too-visible assertions of Muslim identitarianism … with little to do with Islam’.
Has tolerance become too abstract and impoverished to deal with concrete forms of cultural and religious difference? What do you think: are our schools fighting an age-old battle between sacred and secular visions of society, or are they on the front line of a new culture war?
SPEAKERS Khadija Khan journalist and commentator
Adam Eljadi Media Studies teacher, NEU workplace representative and British Muslim. He speaks here in a personal capacity.
Gareth Sturdy former teacher and religious affairs journalist
CHAIR
Kevin Rooney teacher and Education Forum convenor
Square-eyed screenagers: are phones corrupting our kids?
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SQUARE-EYED SCREENAGERS: ARE PHONES CORRUPTING OUR KIDS? Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London.
Digital devices are so omnipresent that sociologists call today’s children ‘Generation Glass’. Our pre-teens have never known a world without tablets and apps. The ubiquity of technology during their formative years risks turning them into ‘screenagers’ with high digital literacy but low socialisation and focus.
In education, devices are routinely distributed to pupils and the gamification of learning is well-established. Yet pushback is mounting. The controversial Online Safety Bill proposes reams of radical measures drafted specifically to quell fears over children’s internet safety. Meanwhile increasing numbers of schools are adopting mobile-phone bans, claiming they improve concentration and mental health while reducing cheating and cyberbullying.
Parents’ lobby group UsForThem is even pressing for a total ban on phones for all under-16s and grim tobacco-style health warnings on devices. The campaign is endorsed by Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher and former social mobility tsar, who has equated the threat to youth of mobile phones to that of heroin addiction.
But is this all merely a re-heat of the ‘square eyes’ moral panic which once beset television? The BBC thinks so: its high-profile Square-Eyed Boy campaign seeks to reassure parents that screens can be a force for good for children. After all, isn’t greater literacy, be it via screens or paper pages, something to be encouraged? Some teachers argue that phones can enhance schoolwork while others insist banning them is draconian, impractical and futile.
Should we take phones away from kids for their own good, or should the very idea be dismissed as screen-shaming?
SPEAKERS Elliot Bewick producer, TRIGGERnometry
Josephine Hussey school teacher, AoI Education Forum
Molly Kingsley co-founder, UsForThem; co-author, The Children’s Inquiry
Joe Nutt international educational consultant; author, The Point of Poetry, An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Late Plays and A Guidebook to Paradise Lost
Professor Sir Simon Wessely interim dean, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences; regius professor of psychiatry, King’s College London
CHAIR Gareth Sturdy physics adviser, Up Learn; education and science writer
Disunited Kingdom: the rebirth of nations?
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2021 on Sunday 10 October at Church House, London.
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
According to many political commentators, the break-up of the UK is becoming inevitable. When devolution was implemented in the 1990s, one of the aims of its supporters was to head off rising support for separation. But the opposite has happened, with support for Scottish independence and greater Welsh autonomy growing even stronger. In Scotland, for example, the pro-independence SNP has now won four elections on the trot and has renewed calls for another referendum. Some commentators now believe that a politicised sense of Englishness is on the rise, too.
One factor is the differential impact of the Brexit referendum. People in England and Wales voted to leave the EU while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. The situation is full of contradictions and complications. For example, people emphasising a British national identity were more likely to vote Leave in Scotland and Wales but Remain in England. Those supporting the cause of ‘independence’ in Scotland and Wales want to remain within the EU, proclaiming the importance of free movement, yet their borders were imposed during the Covid crisis. The devolved government in Scotland favours rejoining the EU, yet others wonder how that fits with the desire for self-government.
On all sides, there has been a problem of legitimacy. Those who favour keeping the Union have struggled to espouse a convincing sense of what it means to be British. The result has often been a crude attempt to manufacture a sense of Britishness. For example, the Westminster government recently announced plans are being drawn up to protect ‘distinctively British’ television programming and asked Ofcom to provide a definition of Britishness for public-service broadcasters.
Meanwhile, contrary to the tradition that the push for statehood means demanding more democracy and freedom, the devolved assemblies appear to have amplified the illiberal impulses of twenty-first-century politics. In Scotland, for example, the government has devoted much of its energy to devising new ways to monitor, control and restrict people’s day-to-day lives: criminalising football supporters, attempting to impose a ‘named person’ to monitor children’s upbringing and passing a Hate Crime Bill that opponents regard as an attack on free speech.
Forty years ago, writer Tom Nairn said that the break-up of Britain would come, not because of the strength of the independence cause in any particular part of Britain, but because of a more general fading of support for the Union. Has Nairn been proved correct? Is the real issue not a democratic surge to independence but gradual separation by attrition? That said, there are signs that perhaps the break-up of the Union is not a foregone conclusion. In recent months, for example, opinion polls have suggested that support for Scottish independence has weakened.
Perhaps the real nail in the coffin is if the English lose interest in the Union. In his book How Britain Ends, journalist Gavin Esler argues that the UK could survive Scottish and Welsh nationalism, but English nationalism is the force that will break up the Union. Is he right?
With Brexit divisions and the impact of Covid, are we witnessing the fragmentation of the Union and a new sovereignty by stealth? How substantial are the differences between the UK and devolved governments’ approaches? Do those arguing for independence or more devolution offer the genuine possibility of a democratic future? Or does this trajectory risk creating a Union based on anomalies and a patchwork of competencies, in the process undermining the viability of UK democracy?
SPEAKERS Dr Richard Johnson writer; lecturer in US politics, Queen Mary, University of London; author, The End of the Second Reconstruction: Obama, Trump, and the crisis of civil rights
Penny Lewis lecturer, University of Dundee; author, Architecture and Collective Life
Alex Salmond leader, ALBA Party; former leader, Scottish National Party; author, The Dream Shall Never Die
Christopher Snowdon head of lifestyle economics, Institute of Economic Affairs; editor, Nanny State Index; author, Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism
Max Wind-Cowie co-author, A Place for Pride; former head, Progressive Conservatism Project, Demos; commentator
CHAIR Alastair Donald co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; convenor, Living Freedom; author, Letter on Liberty: The Scottish Question
Is AI the end of art?
Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London.
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
The worlds of art and entertainment are wrestling with, and reeling from, the opportunities and challenges posed by ‘generative’ AI – tools that can generate seemingly unique, bespoke creations in response to ‘prompts’ submitted in plain language. Such technology is now having a dramatic impact on almost every profession or art form that involves static or moving images, written or spoken words, sound, music or programming code.
Everything from the fantastical to the photorealistic is affected. AI can generate convincing ‘photos’ of people who have never actually existed, and can create ‘deepfakes’ so good that public figures – whether living or long deceased – can now be ‘filmed’ saying and doing completely invented things. Indeed, a key concern behind this year’s high-profile Hollywood strikes is actors fearing that they will be imitated and replaced by AI creations – losing control of their likenesses not just during their lifetimes, but also after their deaths.
Otherworldly images are no less affected by AI. Polish illustrator Greg Rutkowski – who has made a career out of depicting dragons and fantastical battles – recently found himself demoted (or promoted, depending on one’s perspective) from popular artist to one of the world’s most popular AI prompts, beating Michelangelo and Picasso. The internet is now swamped with AI recreations of Rutkowski’s once distinctive style, while the artist’s own livelihood – and recognition for work that is genuinely his – are in jeopardy.
There are many such examples, spanning different forms of creativity. Some are trying to take a stand against these trends, but solidarity between professions is wanting. Major publishers, including Bloomsbury Books, have recently issued apologies, when it was discovered that they were using AI-generated art on their book covers. Some soundtrack composers – who were already complaining about being reduced to poorly paid, interchangeable and uncredited ‘ghost composers’ in the content-hungry age of streaming – now fear being replaced by machines altogether.
Some creators insist that their consent should have been sought before their work was included in the vast datasets on which AI has been trained. Some are seeking the removal of their work from such datasets even now, although the path from machine learning to AI creations is so intricate that this may be the practical equivalent of trying to unbake a cake. Others, by contrast, revel in the new creative possibilities arising from AI, and approach the technology as an enormous and exciting artistic toolkit.
Who will prevail? And what will be the consequences?
SPEAKERS Dr JJ Charlesworth art critic; editor, ArtReview
Vivek Haria composer, London Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Piatti Quartet; writer on art, technology and culture
Rosie Kay dancer; choreographer; CEO and artistic director, K2CO LTD; founder, Freedom in the Arts
Dr Hamish Todd mathematician; videogame programmer; creator, Virus, the Beauty of the Beast
CHAIR Sandy Starr deputy director, Progress Educational Trust; author, AI: Separating Man from Machine