Hello and also associate professor of the philosophy of religion over at University of Cambridge,

James or thanks very much for coming in today.

Good to be with you both.

Yeah, appreciate it.

I thought I'd kick this off because we have just concluded about a six hour debate

series on liberalism which ended with Carl shouting the liberal ideal must die something which

It does have to expand on that length

but I won't at the moment

Something we both agree with but the reason I wanted to pull you in on this is quite

fortuitous that you wrote a recent critic piece about it. As my opening

salvo was something to do with the dual ideas of liberalism being freedom

and equality and they exist in tandem but also in antagonism.

And you wrote a piece of the critic and if I might just read a quote, I quite liked it.

Liberalism was beset from the outset by a tectonic tension between two moral ideals,

because bestowing freedom on individuals to pursue their private conceptions of human flourishing,

must always issue in the kind of unequal outcomes that will strike the unreflective observer as morally objectionable.

So given that there was always this liberatory dynamism within liberalism, as you said in your recent trigonometry debate.

Has a mutant strain of liberalism brought us to the decline that we're seeing around us now?

Was it always meant to be this way or is it just some kind of aberration?

Well I take the view and I've always taken the view that what we're seeing today is a feature of liberalism and not a bug that it was always going to end

like this.

There are certain catalysts that I think have been accelerating it.

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