The Battle of Ideas festival is an annual event organised by the libertarian think tank the Academy of Ideas. Led by Baroness Claire Fox, the Academy of Ideas grew out of an anti-statist political network that started life in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and the Living Marxism journal.
Since the closure of Living Marxism in 2000, the RCP network has followed the classic Trotskyist strategy of ‘entryism’ by becoming a major influence on the policies of the Conservative party, particularly in the areas of education and culture.
The Battle of Ideas has become an important forum for right-wing figures to rehearse the culture war arguments that have become a permanent feature of political discourse since the Brexit referendum. The festival’s motto ‘Free Speech Allowed!’ crudely sets it against so-called ‘cancel culture’ that the reactionary right argues has become endemic in British politics, media, and educational institutions.
What interests me, a theatre academic, is the extent to which this stance of being ‘cancelled’ taken by the reactionary right in public debate has all the aspects of being a performance.
I attended the last festival in October 2022, where I saw this in action, with speakers ‘casting’ themselves as representatives of the common-sense majority fighting against the tyranny of progressive politics. In this upside-down world ‘setting’, the essence of liberalism was represented by the freedom to ‘perform’ transphobic, racist and classist arguments.
Identifying how theatrical devices are used in the Battle of Ideas to fight the war on woke enables a deeper understanding of how right-wing defences of free speech perform a story of democracy that seeks to erase all forms of ideological contestation from establishment and marginalised voices in its narrative of progress.
Playing to the gallery
Phrases like ‘the war on woke’ are frequently used by Conservative MPs and right-wing journalists on outlets such as GB News and talkRADIO to describe a general revulsion to ideas and behaviours thought to represent an attack on ‘British values’ and ‘our way of life’. Shock jocks and culture war grifters endlessly perform this narrative to people who can identify themselves as the common-sense majority by excessively expressing non-woke political views.
The increasingly authoritarian character of the Conservative government has created an atmosphere where anyone considered other (especially trans and non-binary people) and anyone who dissents against their policies a target for vilification. The Battle of Ideas acts as an incubator to create a community – a receptive ‘audience’ – of ‘normal people’ who are ‘under siege’ from the three pillars of woke culture: environmentalism, critical race theory and trans ideology.
The festival’s supposed independence from the major political parties gives it a gloss of intellectual freedom, but the subjects of all the talks were exactly those close to the heart of provocateurs like Lee Anderson and Kemi Badenoch. The endless claims of left-wing censorship and creeping liberal authoritarianism espoused by these figures derive their power from presenting themselves as subjects under imminent threat from an alien political culture. To be normal in the culture war means that one’s ideas will be under attack by voices classified by the reactionary right as illegitimate interlopers who have no business voicing their demands for radical societal change.
The theme: free speech needs protecting (though not all kinds of free speech)
Claire Fox and secretary of the Free Speech Union Toby Young set the tone during the opening of the festival by stating that free speech had never been under greater threat. The evidence they cited to support this claim was very partial, revealing a partisan view as to what sort of speech should be protected. For example, Young spent some time denouncing PayPal for closing the Free Speech Union’s accounts (a decision they subsequently revoked); but nowhere did they mention the government’s anti-protest legislation, or the threats made by former culture secretary Oliver Dowden to suspend funding to arts and heritage institutions for engaging with debates about British colonialism, or the ‘gagging orders’ placed on charities.
A new script for ‘normal’ people
Instead, the focus was on what the public felt they were not allowed to say. Fox claimed that people felt pressure to voice opinions they felt they should hold rather than those they really believed. The festival was effectively presented as a safe space to articulate ideas considered elsewhere as taboo.
This argument frames mainstream political discourse as a scripted unreality that citizens are compelled to perform in for the entertainment of the hated liberal elite, where hard-won rights by women and minorities are obliged to be celebrated and the fact that language has profound effects on social relations in all spheres of life is recognised.
The audience – instantly elevated to the status of independent thinkers, revolutionaries even – were encouraged to see this as a way to repress their freedom of speech; their very attendance signalled a commitment to writing a new script for ‘normal’ people to live within, or in the words of the festival ‘Shaping the Future Through Debate’. But this goal can only be achieved by endlessly performing the culture war as a debate where the opposing side has no voice.
Leading actors play out their roles
GB News presenter Andrew Doyle filmed an episode of his show Free Speech Nation during the festival. The mood in the crowd was convivial. Doyle’s performance of the host invoked the hybrid of chat show host and stand-up comedian popular in the US, such as Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert. Affecting the persona of a popular entertainer consciously invites nostalgia for a brand of light entertainment synonymous with a comforting quotidian Britishness which has been rebranded as anti-woke comedy in the cultural milieu of Brexit.
Doyle’s opening monologue concerned the threats to ‘edgy’ comedy from the left. Creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd Graham Linehan claimed no theatre producer in London would commission his Father Ted musical because of his anti-trans campaigning. Doyle never challenged this conspiracy-based assertion. It was presented to the audience as an undisputed fact, with Linehan playing the role of a cancelled writer whose comedy for normal people was being censored by the authoritarian left.
On a panel titled ‘Is Cancel Culture Killing the Arts?’, the director of the Common Sense Society Emma Webb described cancel culture as a form of ‘menticide’ designed to solidify social control over the majority. She described her organisation as a ‘refuge’ for humanity and western civilisation. Anything that doesn’t fit into its vision of acceptable identity is emphatically anti-western and therefore risks mutating the body of the British character. Hard-right politician Peter Whittle picked up on this theme in the panel ‘Identity Politics: Just Skin Deep?’ when he described identity politics as the ‘enemy of beauty’ and an attack on ‘working class people and their values.’
Playing their roles as guardians of Britain’s cultural and historical repertoire enabled the speakers to label what counts as authentic or, in their terms, non-western, and therefore inferior, forms of artistic expression and political activism. Any perceived act of censorship in this argument becomes a refutation of democracy.
An unserious and cynical event
Democratic life was theatricalised at the festival in the form of public talks which performed a narrative of a democracy that was at risk from alternative kinds of discourse and self-expression at the margins of the mainstream (Drag Queen Story Time, for example). Participating in the performance was a means of practising the purest form of democracy.
But beneath all the culture war bluster and bombast, I was left with the impression that many of the speakers and the audience shared a deep fear of modernity. Endless references to the vaguely defined values of the Enlightenment and ahistorical assertions of liberal tolerance for persecuted minorities created a profoundly unserious and cynical event that acted as a cypher for resentments and prejudices against any novel ideas or beliefs.
The Battle of Ideas relies on a gloss of intellectualism to conceal the chauvinist, parochial, and thuggish attitudes the organisers revel in celebrating as the voice of the so-called common-sense majority. The left should not be fooled by the superficial performance of free speech and independent thought when such a performance exists to exclude voices who truly transgress against conservative orthodoxy.
