At the Battle of Ideas

In The Impact of Labour, Maurice Cowling wrote that politics in the 1920s was ‘fifty or sixty people’ in tension with one another. The Battle of Ideas, which packed out Church House for a weekend in October, is like that but for political contrarians: everyone who is anyone in British counter-suggestibility is here, and they all know each other.

Or at least, most of them do. When Jenny Turner wrote about the fifth iteration of the Battle of Ideas in 2010, she focused on the people who came out of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Trotskyist sect active in the 1980s and 1990s. The former RCPists, Turner wrote, hadn’t lost their ‘habit of sitting on panels together, pretending they don’t already know each other’. Fifteen years on, the likes of Claire (now Baroness) Fox and the sociologist Frank Furedi are still front and centre, and the programme is still littered with what Turner called ‘dispiritingly either/or questions’. Sadly I missed both ‘Net Zero or ”Drill, Baby, Drill”? The Future of UK Energy’ and ‘Jane Austen: Spinster, Feminist or Just a Good Writer?’

Around the edge of the RCP inner circle you find the attendees I think of as the ‘true battlers’. There are people in certain parts of liberal and left politics who are so obsessed with process (citizens’ assemblies, voting systems, devolution projects) that you begin to wonder whether they care about outcomes much at all. The true battler is their dark twin: very possibly a former RCP member or a long-time network associate, they are in it for the love of discourse, for the high of the either/or question and the joy of its most offensive answer.

Once you’ve been around the block a few times – this was my third year – you notice other types of attendee. There are the teens and undergraduates, psychotically confident in whatever they think, often there as volunteers or through Debating Matters, a linked organisation for sixth-formers. When the youth stand to make points about the personal battles of ideas they’ve been waging against their classmates, the older battlers tilt their faces to look on them with pride. Then there is a layer of misfits and fedora-wearers (in the crowd I spotted a man notorious for defending incest on GB News).

Some things, however, have changed. The sheer size of this year’s event was striking: up to twelve panels to choose from in any given time slot, with five slots a day across two days. Stalls lined the corridors: the continuity SDP was there, as was the Free Speech Union, along with countless anti-trans organisations. It was all possible in part thanks to the largesse of the Ben Delo Foundation, and Delo himself – who made a lot of money in crypto exchanges before falling foul of the US Bank Secrecy Act, only to be pardoned by President Trump earlier this year – kicked off proceedings.

One of the ‘keynote controversies’ was ‘Who’s Afraid of the Populist Revolt?’ The speakers were Furedi, the Labour MP Graham Stringer (a frequent Battle speaker, who shares the RCP network’s interest in science policy) and the Reform adviser James Orr, with Fox in the chair. At one point she remarked: ‘This wasn’t intended as a Reform rally.’

When it was time for questions from the floor, at least two audience members asked about Tommy Robinson. The second speaker suggested that people don’t actually read Robinson’s statements, but instead take in ‘regurgitated versions and interpretations of … him in the news, and I think,’ she said, ‘that’s part of the misconception of Tommy Robinson and what he has to say.’ Fox tried to steer the debate away, suggesting they didn’t want to get bogged down talking about ‘individuals’. The audience, from where I was sitting, was not with her: no one goes to the Battle of Ideas because they want the conversation to be moved away from controversy. The whole idea is to keep it there.

The Battle of Ideas was established in the New Labour years, and came up kicking against the perceived overreaches of the neoliberal nanny state, perfected over countless appearances on The Moral Maze. Times are different now, and hard to navigate for people who profess to think that debate for its own sake is more important than any particular principles. It can’t be easy when the other tendencies you’ve nominally grouped yourselves with become something like a viable political vehicle, perhaps a more radical one than you’re altogether comfortable with. Not that Furedi, Fox et al are strangers to extreme positions: the RCP’s magazine, Living Marxism, folded in 2000 after a losing a libel case over an article that was found to have falsely accused ITN of fabricating evidence of war crimes in Bosnia.

Stringer, however, was certainly left looking uneasy next to a smirking Orr, while suggestions that the AfD might be anything other than a great bunch of lads went down badly. The whole affair has something of the dog that caught the car about it: from here, it isn’t difficult to imagine the once distinctive culture of the RCP diaspora merging wholesale into the right-wing omnicause. What do you do when you’ve freed speech but all anyone wants to talk about is Tommy Robinson?