22 October 2025

On the front line in the Battle of Ideas

At the free speech festival, people were prophesying a race-fuelled civil war

“I’m gorging on ideas,” said a young man in a long black leather coat, throwing his arms wide open. “I’m excited about ideas and I’m very autistic.” It was the first day of the 20th Battle of Ideas festival and the atmosphere, people kept saying, was more febrile than ever.

In a small room in Church House in Westminster, a panel of women were debating whether or not it was OK to smack your children. Answers ranged from definitely yes to, on balance, probably not. It was generally agreed smacking ought to be legal and shouldn’t be conflated with violence. The debate was inspired by the New Statesman’s August cover story about gentle parenting, but most panellists did not like the idea. Refusing to set boundaries means indifference, which is “worse than hate” said Nancy McDermott, author of The Problem with Parenting. She was pro-smack.

Most of the audience had either smacked their kids or been smacked, and they were relieved to learn that was all right. A woman told a long story about subduing an aggressive 14-year-old. “I had him on the floor, rained a few gentle blows and called the police.” Sympathetic tuts. A woman with nose, tongue and lip piercings testified next. She had five kids and had tried smacking all of them to mixed results. Ella Whelan, who co-convened the festival, argued that there was a crucial distinction between a smack from a loving parent and an unloving one. I tried to picture a loving smack. “There’s a bizarre view of kids that they’re like Ming vases,” she explained, “one shake and they’ll crack forever.” A woman in a pink hoodie complained about the panel being all women. “The masculine energy is more authoritative than the feminine in general,” she said. “A father’s presence will negate the need for a female to have to shout or use force.” Lots of nods.

The Battle of Ideas festival was founded in 2005 by the Academy of Ideas, Claire Fox’s think tank. Fox was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1980s and 1990s, but, along with other former members, has since swung to the right on social issues. She set up the libertarian Spiked magazine alongside other former revolutionary communists including the academic Frank Furedi. For seven months in 2019, Fox was a Brexit Party MEP. In 2020 Boris Johnson made her a baroness.

In a floral dress and a necklace of multicoloured discs, Fox was discussing the possibility of a populist revolt on a panel with Furedi, the Labour MP Graham Stringer and James Orr, the Cambridge theologian and pal of JD Vance’s, who recently announced that he was joining Reform as Nigel Farage’s senior adviser.

“Populism,” Orr drawled, “is Latin for democracy.” (It’s not.) He leaned back in his chair. “The ancien régime is in a state of desperation and panic.” Orr, who lives in a sprawling Victorian homestead on the banks of the River Cam, hadn’t gone on Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march, but he’d heard there was “a sense of celebration in the air. A celebration of nation, of country. There was no sense of vitriol, of anger, of violence.” Some 25 people were arrested and 26 officers injured at the rally. Orr put this down to “some mischievous and puzzling policing”.

We moved on to international politics. Stringer was concerned about Nazis in Germany’s AfD party. Orr frowned. “As far as I know, it’s a group of egghead economists,” he said. “No doubt along the way they picked up some unsavoury types, but look how they’ve been treated.” Furedi agreed solemnly: “They’re entirely being censored and quarantined.”

A young man put up his hand. “I have a question for Mr Orr,” he said. He told a story about confronting Unite the Kingdom protesters and being attacked. “I didn’t get an answer. So I’ll ask you: I’m an immigrant. Do you want me out?” He sat down, looking flushed. “I’m thrilled you’re here,” Orr told him.

I was sitting between an elderly man and woman. “You can say anything here!” the man told me happily. The woman on my other side wasn’t really sure why she’d come. “I suppose I was bored.”

The average attendee was of a certain age and a little eccentric looking, but excitable young people in tweed suits and with wispy moustaches concentrated at particular events. At a panel debating “What’s next for the young right?”, Charlie Downes, campaign director for Restore Britain, was taking a lofty tone. “It’s my deeply held belief,” he said, “that, just as there are a set of unchanging eternal principles that govern the physical world, so too there is a set of unchanging principles that govern the metaphysical world – the realm of morality and truth and beauty and so on.” Downes claimed he wasn’t really interested in contesting these ideas with opponents any more. He had ascended to the metaphysical plane.

In place of free debate, Downes had some suggestions: the leftist American podcaster Hasan Piker, for instance, could be imprisoned; the “progress” pride flag – “the flag of the regime” – banned. “It’s disgusting,” he said. “It’s anti-truth, anti-morality, anti-beauty.” A blue-haired woman behind me muttered, “I don’t think we should ban that.” Downes then started talking about the tribes that formed England under King Alfred and Æthelstan. He was starting to lose the room. “It is simply the case,” he concluded, “that ancestry has to be a component of national identity. And religion.”

The panel host asked who counted as more British: Bob Marley or Rishi Sunak? Downes sighed. “It brings me no joy to live in a time and feel called to do a job where I have to talk about these really dicey topics,” he said. He grudgingly concluded it was Marley, “by virtue of having an ethnically British ancestor”.

Coming out of the panel, I spoke to a blond man in his early twenties who said he was ethnonationalist. “Deport foreign criminals, unproductive foreigners, politically subversive foreigners,” he said. “I don’t think all non-British people need to leave the country.” His friend, who said he was of Indian heritage, smiled; “It’s a comforting thought,” he said. The pair thought Downes was “retarded”. They resented his suggestion that young people had a moral duty to get married. “I can barely shag in this city because it takes me 50 minutes to get home. I’m living in Zone 4 with my parents,” one said. “We need a government that’s going to give nice, sensitive young men loads of money.”

I asked what he meant by sensitive young men. “You’re disposed towards poetry and philosophy and lofty gestures of true love,” he said. He then began describing the ethnic heritage of his exes. “I would want to marry a woman who has at least 50 per cent European ancestry,” he mused, like a Nazi Romeo.

At the closing drinks on Sunday evening, a lot of people were worked up about an upcoming race-fuelled civil war. “That’s the elephant in the room.” A man told me it would be a clash between Islamists and non-Islamists. “I don’t think the non-Islamist side will fight back,” he said. “They’ll concede.” His friend disagreed. “Some will push back.” Someone else told me the revolt would look like a cross between the breakdown of the Balkan states and Latin America-style guerilla warfare. I said I wasn’t sure. “Maybe that’s because you’re in the elite,” he said. I hadn’t considered that.

I asked Fox if the conference had felt different this year. “People are angrier,” she said. “They feel like no one is listening.” That was why so many went on the Unite the Kingdom demonstration, she said. “One thing people going on that march said was, ‘I didn’t have to apologise for who I am.’ That really struck me. I thought, ‘God, if you can create an atmosphere where people don’t have to apologise for who they are…’”

A security guard asked us to leave Church House. The embattled masses were all heading to the pub. Civil war would have to wait.

[Further reading: Does Reform already have more members than Labour?]