You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.

Good evening. Were you of a pessimistic turn of mind, 2017 would have been a vintage year

for thinking your glass is considerably more than half empty. Old certainties attacked,

the great and the good produced, the past condemned and the future frightened of its own shadow.

As the year comes to an end,

a special one-off moral maze in which each of our panelists will pick the issue that most

angered or worried them in 2017 and argue it out with a notable proponent of the opposite

point of view. Four at first sight separate debates, which may well turn out to have a common

theme, we'll see.

So, Brexit, of course, a political process that's created or maybe just exposed divisions in our society that are more than political, they're almost tribal.

So a year of trashing the reputations of public figures, some of whom no doubt deserved it,

but what are the moral

consequences of attacking those that don't? Living and dead, it's been a year of judging

the past through the prism of currently fashionable moral sensibilities, tearing down,

sometimes literally, old heroes like Cecil Rhodes. Is this the right way to reconcile history

with identity? And another kind of

censorship, perhaps? The students that need protecting from views they don't agree with. Glorious,

recently reported example where the inaugural guest at Sussex University's Free Speech Society

was ordered to submit his talk in advance to ensure that it didn't offend anybody.

Four issues, four panellists, Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, the former Conservative

Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, and Shiv Malik,

co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation. Michael Portillo, what got you most worked up in 2017?

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