Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Welcome to the Spiked Podcast, I'm Ella Wheeling,

Welcome to the Spiked Podcast.

I'm Ella Wheeling, assistant editor at Spiked, and today we have a Battle of Ideas special,

with Claire Fox introducing the hot topics of this year's festival, Andrew Doyle on satire,

and Nick Gillespie on what's really going on in the Barbican.

Spiked writers will be there joining world

known speakers and members of the public to discuss and debate current affairs and

political trends. And what a year for it. We've had sexual harassment scandals,

the Grenfell Tower fire, terrorist attacks,

elections. All of this will be up for discussion at this year's battle, along with conversations

about art and culture, tech, education, immigration, automation, you name it.

To kick us off and to introduce the key themes of this year's festival, I caught up with Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas.

So Claire, it's an exciting time of the year this weekend,

the IUI hosts its annual Battle of Ideas,

a weekend of public discussion and debate where free speech is allowed.

So do you think with the growing trend for censorship having a space for free speech has become

contentious?

It's so ironic, isn't it, when we first started the festival 13 years ago,

having a slogan free speech allowed caused some be amusement.

Now people say, wow, that's so unusual. And you realize that free speech is genuinely

felt to be under pressure by people and they understand that just having a strap line of

free speech allowed is quite a radical position who'd have thought it.

...