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Listen to the first of our regular discussions with the Academy of Ideas team on the highs and lows of election campaigning.
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Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took the nation - and many of his own MPs - by surprise by calling the next General Election. On Thursday 4 July, UK citizens will join the billions around the world going to the polls this year to pick their next political leaders. While Sunak might have been able to blame his wet start on the weather, the early stages of the campaign haven’t been bright and breezy. Faced with anger and confusion from his fellow party members - including threats of a no-confidence vote - Sunak’s charm offensive across the country is marred by the fact that most people believe this election has already been won.
And yet, the bookies’ favourites - the Labour Party - have their own problems. From a lacklustre speech to concerns about splitting voters over issues like women-only spaces or support for a ceasefire in Gaza, Labour leader Keir Starmer hasn’t yet made hay while the sun refuses to shine on his rivals.
The announcement of the General Election also took the outliers in the competition by surprise. Reform UK’s tough talk about taking on the Tories was somewhat marred by Nigel Farage finally admitting that he wouldn’t stand for election. And yet, Mr Brexit remains the most discussed man of this election campaign so far, thanks to his comments both about the higher status of the US and questioning whether young people - and Muslims - ‘loathed’ British culture beyond persuasion.
But it’s still early days for challengers, with new political hopefuls standing as independents and as members of parties like the SDP, Greens and the Lib Dems hoping to break the monopoly of the two big parties.
To discuss all of this - the big announcements of the first few days of campaigning, from National Service to votes for 16-year-olds - the Academy of Ideas team got together in the first of our regular Podcast of Ideas specials. 

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
Climate change has become the great overarching mission of our times for politicians and business leaders. With the UN secretary general declaring that we are now in an era of ‘global boiling’, every leading politician talks about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to ‘net zero’ – with the few emissions the economy does produce balanced by some method to soak them up, from planting trees to carbon capture and storage. As a result, a timetable has been created to eliminate emissions, step by step, between now and 2050.
Proponents of Net Zero argue that the process could be a creative one, leading to the development of new technologies and millions of well-paid ‘green’ jobs. Moreover, they point to opinion polls which suggest that the idea is popular with the public.
But the price to be paid for Net Zero is becoming ever clearer and is no longer a distant prospect. As soon as 2026, new oil-powered boilers will be banned and all new housing must have heat pumps installed. Gas boilers, petrol and diesel cars and cheap flights are all in the firing line.
But the impact of Net Zero goes way beyond these measures, with major impacts on jobs and livelihoods. For example, farmers in the Netherlands and Ireland have been angered by EU emissions targets that mean the number of animals that can be reared must be drastically reduced. Energy for industry is becoming more expensive, too, with many high energy users already looking at much lower costs in the US, where the exploitation of shale gas through fracking has kept prices low.
Opinion polls suggest that while Net Zero is popular in the abstract, the policies designed to make it happen are much less so. Moreover, with unanimity among the major parties in the UK that Net Zero is an inviolable policy, there is no electoral route to push back against such policies, except to vote for smaller parties with little hope of winning seats in the near future. Indeed, for some environmentalists, there can be no choice in the matter: if necessary, democracy must be sacrificed to the need to cut emissions.
That said, the Uxbridge by-election – which became something of a referendum on Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ policy – seems to have caused consternation among the major parties. Even though Net Zero itself wasn’t in question, a major environmental initiative seemed to be resoundingly rejected at the ballot box.
Is Net Zero an unpleasant necessity or, more positively, the start of a new industrial revolution? Or is it a policy that is being pursued without the technical means of achieving it in an affordable fashion? Will the backlash against Net Zero increase – and will it matter if governments are determined to pursue it, whether we like it or not?
SPEAKERSLord David Frostmember of the House of Lords
Rob Lyonsscience and technology director, Academy of Ideas; convenor, AoI Economy Forum
Scarlett Maguiredirector, J.L. Partners; former producer in media
John McTernanpolitical strategist, BCW; former director of political operations, Blair government; writer, Financial Times and UnHerd
CHAIRPhil Mullanwriter, lecturer and business manager; author, Beyond Confrontation: globalists, nationalists and their discontents

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?
SPEAKERSLord Meghnad Desaicrossbench peer; chair, Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust; emeritus professor of Economics, LSE
Dr Zareer Masanihistorian, author, journalist, broadcaster
Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbertdirector, Don’t Divide Us; author, What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth
CHAIRPara Mullanformer operations director, EY-Seren; fellow, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

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? 
SPEAKERSKhadija Khanjournalist and commentator
Adam Eljadi Media Studies teacher, NEU workplace representative and British Muslim. He speaks here in a personal capacity.
Gareth Sturdyformer teacher and religious affairs journalist
CHAIR
Kevin Rooneyteacher and Education Forum convenor

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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?
SPEAKERSElliot Bewickproducer, TRIGGERnometry
Josephine Husseyschool teacher, AoI Education Forum
Molly Kingsleyco-founder, UsForThem; co-author, The Children’s Inquiry
Joe Nuttinternational educational consultant; author, The Point of Poetry, An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Late Plays and A Guidebook to Paradise Lost
Professor Sir Simon Wesselyinterim dean, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences; regius professor of psychiatry, King’s College London
CHAIRGareth Sturdyphysics adviser, Up Learn; education and science writer

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?
SPEAKERSDr Richard Johnsonwriter; 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 Lewislecturer, University of Dundee; author, Architecture and