THREE DAYS LEFT TO GET TICKETS WILL REFORM BE ALLOWED TO RULE? TAKING ON THE BLOB WITH @danny__kruger If Reform UK were to get elected (and it’s a big if), would they be allowed to govern? Already, the largest Civil Service Union (the Public and Commercial Services Union) has announced an increase to its financial resources in preparation to counter the election of a ‘hostile’ government. Some might comment that this shows an outrageous entrenchment of the politicalisation of public servants against the will of the people. The so-called Blob has certainly become an infamous bête noire, seen as an unelected network of senior civil servants, quangos, regulators and public bodies which faces frequent criticism for acting as a gatekeeper for the political agenda of Whitehall. Some say even new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has escaped to No10 North to break the stranglehold of ‘you can’t do that Minister’. In theory, the civil service should work for a Reform government as dutifully as for any other. But, even under the previous Conservative government, civil servants were accused of ‘waiting out the Tories’ through disengagement and aversion tactics. How can a democratically elected government act on behalf of the electorate if it must first fight the very people that are employed to serve it? Some point to other barriers, from international treaties to bureaucratic checks and balances, that hold back any can-do approach to running the country. However, unlike all others, Reform UK faces the additional problem of an all-party, indeed all-system, consensus that Farage and his team should not be allowed close to power, regardless of the electorate’s wishes. Is this all too gloomy? Yes, the barriers stack up: a civil service that can slow-walk instructions, a House of Lords with no Reform peers to carry legislation through and new bureaucratic layers that could create even more guardrails to protect the establishment from fundamental change at its core. But surely, in a democracy, the people must be allowed to decide? With such serious obstacles for Reform’s plans for radical change, are they prepared? Let’s ask them. Danny Kruger MP has been charged with Reform’s preparation for government and has started mapping out plans for ‘fixing the centre’. How will he lead such a major structural overhaul? How will Reform handle the House of Lords, where the party has zero institutional presence? What are the plans for an incoming cohort of 300-400 new Reform MPs, arriving with little to no experience of governing, navigating Whitehall or steering Reform through a resistant system? If established parties with decades of institutional knowledge have failed to deliver reforms over the last decade, can an insurgent movement really free us from the Blob? And, if they win, is Reform able to convince those who won’t vote for them of the importance of loser’s consent for democracy? DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk/session… TICKETS - battleofideas.org.uk/battle-…

THREE DAYS LEFT TO GET YOUR TICKET SESSION - IS IT ISLAM OR IS THERE A PROBLEM WITH ISLAMISM @_ConnieShaw Over recent years, many of those worried about Islamism as a political ideology associated with ISIS, Hamas, the Iranian regime, etc, have gone out of their way to distinguish this from Islam as a religion. The rise of nihilistic, theocratically justified violence – openly positing itself as the enemy of Western society, democracy and freedom – has brutally made its presence felt through murderous terror, from 9/11 to the massacres of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and pop fans at Manchester Arena. Recently, however, that distinction between a politicalised radical version of Islam and its more benign stature as a world faith has become fuzzier. It’s certainly not an easy, clear-cut issue. Some arguments used as evidence that Islam inherently leads to violence don’t seem credible. The rape-grooming gangs, whose perpetrators were largely Pakistani Muslims, were not obviously motivated by politics or religion. Those undocumented young men arriving illegally from the Middle East – who may well have been radicalised in the Islamic world and represent a security threat – are very different to the majority of British Muslims who have lived here for decades. Indeed, the data from recent polling for the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre indicates that the vast majority – 85 per cent – of British Muslims favour integration, feel at home living in a secular society and view British values positively. Only two per cent stated that they would like to live in separate Islamic areas in Britain, subject to Sharia Law. And support for full integration has risen from 38 per cent in 2024 to 45 per cent in 2026, and some interviewed even expressed nostalgia for a more cohesive past. And yet, no matter what the stats say, there’s a sense of more segregated towns and cities, with Muslim communities a distinct demographic. Islamic-related cultural assertions of difference, whether increasingly organising public prayer or the growing numbers wearing full-face burqas, is creating community tensions. But is this more a consequence of the very Western enthusiasm for identity politics rather than Islam? Yes, too many British Muslims who are not supportive of radical Islam nonetheless hold and express unpleasant anti-Jewish attitudes. But such antisemitism mirrors the position of pro-Palestinian leftist activism in universities and progressive anti-Israel Palestine Action supporters. This outlook is embedded in very British institutions, whether in parliament or the BBC. Is this really a problem we can blame on Islam? The conflation of Islam and Islamism has no doubt been compounded by those who have weaponised the term Islamophobia to silence any legitimate criticism or debate about Islam, its practices and its history, or have used it to demonise any challenge to problematic views if they are expressed by someone who happens to be Muslim. But perhaps this attitude to open discussion does suggest a real problem within Islam? The FSU’s Ben Jones argues that the ‘distinction between “Islamism” and normative Islamic beliefs is becoming totally meaningless’. He suggests that ‘there is a fundamental incompatibility between normal Islamic views and preserving a culture of free speech’, noting that 52 per cent of British Muslims think depicting Mohammed should be illegal. Nonetheless, is there a danger that in removing the distinction, core Western Values, such as religious freedom, are undermined, or that bigotry based on prejudice is fostered? Are all these finer distinctions just pedantic, distracting us from the elephant in the room? Or are there dangers for freedom, liberalism and fair treatment of all if we don’t insist on maintaining a distinction? Some argue that the real clash of civilisations is not between the West and Islam per se, but inside Islam. Is the real issue the failure of ordinary Muslims to take on and expose the political radicals, claiming to represent Islam? And as Islamism was only born in Egypt 100 years ago, with a very clear political lineage in its rejection of the authority of Enlightenment Reason, does making Islam the focus of concern miss the real ideological fights society needs to thrash out if the West is to defend its values and modernity? DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk/session… TICKETS - battleofideas.org.uk/battle-…

THREE DAYS LEFT TO BUY YOUR TICKET! ANGRY YOUNG WOMEN? THE RISE OF THE FEMOSPHERE - SPEAKER - @MaeveHalligan ‘A f*cking labrador.’ Such is the disdain with which one of the students interviewed in the New Statesman’s article ‘Meet the angry young women’ described her privately educated, straight, white boyfriend. Over the past few years, a narrative has emerged warning of the growth of the manosphere: young men and boys turning to both unsavoury sexist influencers and right-wing politicians to inform their worldview. Yet perhaps this focus on the manosphere has obscured a contrary trend: a growing hostility towards young men as epitomised by prejudices apparent in the newly emerging and increasingly commented on femosphere? Some commentators are bemused that although women in the West have arguably never had it better in terms of rights and opportunities, young women seem deeply pessimistic and angry at their plight. They report record levels of mental-health struggles – from anxiety to depression. They are much less likely to believe the economy works in their favour – despite the facts, which indicate it works better for them than for their male peers. Girls now perform better than boys in school, go to university at higher rates and women under the age of 30 earn more than men of the same age. Yet this pessimism prevails and extends beyond young women’s own prospects to their increasing negative perceptions of the opposite sex, per se, with just 35 per cent of British women under 25 holding a positive view of men. A popular social-media trend, consisting of women reiterating they would rather be alone in a forest with a bear than a man, perhaps best illustrates this sentiment. While undoubtedly real material concerns about violence against women and girls – amplified by all political parties – help explain such attitudes, they also seem partly rooted in the growing influence of a progressive worldview that interprets society through the lens of privilege, victimhood and, above all, identity. Within this framework, many young women are drawn to a politics of empathy and victimhood that divides society into oppressors and the oppressed. As a result, some who passionately advocate for tolerance and equality are willing to overlook bigotry when it is directed at those deemed privileged, and one such target are those without protected characteristics: the caricatured straight, white man. But beyond any war between the sexes, the contemporary femosphere also seems hostile to its own peers who won’t sign up to their prescriptive line on everything from trans rights to intersectionality, reserving a special ire for older women with different views on feminism – namely, the women who have rejected gender ideology, aka TERFs. Perhaps most notably, Grace Campbell described For Women Scotland as ‘ugly, ugly freaks’ with the ‘worst clothes, worst hair, worst views’. Has the concept of sisterhood been lost on the young women of the femosphere? So, is the comparison made between the femosphere and manosphere fair? Are we witnessing the emergence of new female empowerment or gendered grievance politics? Has social media created different echo chambers fomenting hostility between the sexes? And what might the long-term consequences of that divide be for relationships, family formation and social cohesion? DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk/session… TICKETS - battleofideas.org.uk/battle-…

Look what’s landed @ #BattleFest HQ… Get your ticket now - eventbrite.co.uk/e/battle-of…

Are women to blame for ‘woke’ workplaces? 5/14🧵 Tanya de Grunwald’s @IsntWorkingPod welcomes @jowilliams293 to debate workplace culture, who holds the power and who is pushing back. Sat 17 Oct | 13:45–14:30 battleofideas.org.uk/session…

FROM PRIDE TO PALESTINE: WHO ARE TODAY'S GREENS?🚨 W/ @ShahrarAli, @bindelj, @SimonFMNash & Mark Hill With reports that Mothin Ali is seeking to challenge Zack Polanski for the leadership, what will the Green Party look like in a year's time? DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk/session… TICKETS - battleofideas.org.uk/battle-…

What will you be doing this time next week? Attendees @ #BattleFest 2026 will have just made the difficult decision over which morning session to attend... - (How) can the UK survive the debt crisis? - Controlling the narrative? The politics of misinformation and truth - Podcast Live: The Life Sci Fantastic – weight-loss jabs: the end of willpower? - Should we put Britain first? The ‘national interest’ question - After the wildfires and floods: should we reassess climate change? - From quiet quitting to #lazygirljobs: workshy Britain? - Let me convince you: We should not ban the burqa - Why are influencers so influential? - Letting abusers out early: solving the prisons crisis - Surrogacy: buying a baby or building a family? - The corruption of the university? - From boycotts to renaissance: threats and opportunities in the arts DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk

THE REPARATIONS DEBATE Are reparations a necessary moral response when dealing with past ‘crimes’ or are they too easy an attempt to buy absolution for historic wrongdoings – another ‘white saviour’ project, driven by guilt? Should Britain’s role in abolishing slavery and creating a universal standard of human equality in the political realm be a consideration? Or do critics of reparations fail to take seriously the legacy of the slave trade, and the link between the oppression of black people in centuries gone by and the negative impact on Caribbean countries or the discrimination suffered by some here in Britain today? W/ @ada_akpala, @PiersBenn, @RafHM, @ASCphiled

We're honoured that @MrsEmmaWebber, along with @MaggieOliverUK & @Furedibyte will be joining us for an incredibly important session... GROOMING GANGS TO THE NOTTINGHAM INQUIRY: UNTANGLING ACCOUNTABILITY How can we go from apologies and inquiries to JUSTICE? Watch Emma's video for a preview and a discount code 👀 DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk/session…

WHY COME TO THE BATTLE OF IDEAS? AOI Director @Fox_Claire - "It will change your life" Don't be a passive observer - get in the room and have your say @ #BattleFest 2026 & meet like-minded people! DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk

"If we don't kick back against stifling conformity...if we stick to our slogans and don't go deeper than that - then its the end of democracy" Important words from AOI Director @Fox_Claire on why the Battle of Ideas Get your tickets now - battleofideas.org.uk

This one will kick off @bindelj! 👇 battleofideas.org.uk/session…

From quiet quitting to #lazygirljobs: why isn’t Britain working? Ahead of speaking #BattleFest on topic of Workshy Britain, brilliant overview from @jowilliams293 on *crisis of purpose *mental health issues *lack of solidarity *breakdown in socialisation Link in reply...

CONVERSION PRACTICES BILL: CRIMINALISING PARENTS, TEACHERS AND PRIESTS? If the Bill becomes law, will the courts be inundated with subjective, even malicious prosecutions or by children prosecuting their parents for refusing to fund binders, puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones? W/ Lucy Beney, @el_nagashi, @HJoyceGender, @SVPhillimore, @JNHanvey DETAILS - battleofideas.org.uk/session…