Hello and welcome to the Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on this week's episode,

we'll be discussing how the tyranny of the safe space is spreading beyond university campuses.

We'll also be looking at Donald Trump's military strategy, and finally we'll be considering

the legacy of Indian independence 70 years on.

The safe spaces are spreading.

Like B-movie blobs, these controversy-free zones on university campuses dreamt up by students' allergic to challenging debate,

a breaking free of the academy and now threatened to swallow up public life, says Brendan O'Neill in this week's issue of The Spectator.

Brendan joins me now, along with Justin Kennedy,

women's officer for the UCL Students' Union, and Madeline Kern, an intern at The Spectator,

and a current master's student at NYU studying journalism.

So, Brendan, three years ago, you described the phenomenon of the

Stepford student in The Spectator, and now you are telling us that they are taking over.

Do we really need to be that worried?

I think so, yeah.

I think what's happened is that student activity, which we used to just treat as funny or irritating,

and certainly, in my view, as illiberal, is actually now becoming something far more worrying. I think the safe

space ideology is spreading from the campus into more and more areas of public life. You really

see that in the way in which poll after poll shows that people aged 18 to 21 have a very low

opinion of freedom of speech and are much more down on democracy than

older generations are.

So they're losing faith in basically the two building blocks of modern enlightened civilization

because I think they've been educated and trained in a system, in a university system that

...