A new year for freedom
Kick off our anniversary year with some liberty-loving resolutions from some of our favourite Battle speakers.
Happy New Year! And what a year it is - 2025 is a big one for our team. The Academy of Ideas is 25 this year, and the Battle of Ideas festival is 20, so we’ve got a lot to celebrate. Over the past two decades we’ve held public debates on almost every aspect of life, and we’ve taken the fight for free speech all over the world and established our annual Battle of Ideas festival as the home of free speech and public conversation. We’ve published books and pamphlets and have audio-archived all the myriad panel debates we’ve hosted over decades, reflected now in our revamped YouTube channel. And while creating alternative media platforms is essential, we also remain committed as a team to bringing a different view and challenge to orthodoxies on all mainstream news channels with our commentary.
But as dissenters, we have also encountered the challenges of our age. We have struggled to survive financially as a small organisation, that punches above its weight but refuses to pull punches to curry favour. We have been cancelled, have lost venues and sponsors because of our forthright views, been demonised and vilified. But we have survived. So, we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved in the last 25 years, and there’s no stopping us now.
Building on the success of last year’s Battle, we aim to make 2025 our biggest and boldest year yet. With that in mind, we’ve asked some of our favourite speakers from Battle years gone by to give us their new year’s resolutions. But instead of the usual give-up-chocolate, lay-off-the-booze promises, our resolutions are related to freedom in the year ahead. In order to capitalise on the gains for liberty in the last year, we need to keep fighting. We may face the new year with renewed vigour and determination, but that is as much because both domestically and internationally, the world faces huge problems of instability and threats to freedom and democracy. It is hard to witness the horrors being imposed on women and girls in Afghanistan or acknowledge the resounding cowardice of our politicians in failing to constantly fight to bring home the hostages from Hamas terror tunnels in Gaza, or to hear recent detailed revelations about the now acknowledged unspeakable abuse that victims of grooming gangs suffered here in the UK, without succumbing to despair.
But we need to stand firm and hold our nerve and the Academy of Ideas intends to do all it can to shine light on those dark recesses - to ensure we use our free speech to make each and every verboten topic part of public, democratic discussion. Join us now, and let’s make some real, lasting change in 2025. We hope you’re inspired by the freedom resolutions below. Share your own and join the fight.
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CLAIRE FOX
director, Academy of Ideas; independent peer, House of Lords; author, I STILL Find That Offensive!
‘Although the day job involves law-making, my new year’s resolution is to keep reminding myself (and the House of Lords) that real change involves bottom-up culture change. Having some space over Christmas to read more widely than the tomes of legalese and complex laws I usually have to plough through, is a useful reminder that legislation and legal wrangles over interpretations of the law can sap so much time and energy. What we need to focus our energies on is building a movement that moves the dial in terms of popular support for living freely. Hopefully the Academy of Ideas can do its bit in facilitating such a grassroots fightback and creating a public square in which those important cultural questions can be debated and discussed. One key issue is ensuring new generations are involved in that fight; that those of us who are older pass on the baton of the best that's known and thought, to allow them to take the helm in the struggle for liberty. In the meantime, I will do what I can to halt unfair laws, such as those targeting family farmers or the onward march of government assaults on free speech with more hate-speech laws. Sadly, as Labour's imagination is limited to technocratic shenanigans, we can anticipate a slew of laws designed to afford more power to those who run society, while stripping power from the millions of voters who elected them in the first place. We should aim to make 2025 the year in which Take Back Control really has some bite.’
ROSEMARY JENKINSON
award-winning playwright; poet; novelist; commentator; author, The Memorisers (forthcoming 2025)
‘My new year’s wish is for freedom from boycotts. I’d love artists to stop shunning the cultural institutions of countries they disapprove of. Weaponising the arts won’t end the weapons, so it’s time to boycott boycotts. To me, writers should promote an open exchange of ideas, instead of silencing other writers or using boycotts as opportunities to speechify. So, to offset this trend, let’s kick off 2025 by starting a new movement - Artists Against Boycotts.’
RALPH LEONARD
author, Unshackling Intimacy: Letters on Liberty; contributor, UnHerd, Quillette, New Statesman and Sublation Magazine
‘Being that 2025 will be a decade after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it would be a good opportunity to reiterate the value of having the freedom to satirise and mock religion. Ever since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, an insidious taboo has been attempted to be introduced into the culture, on occasion enforced by the gun or the blade, that tries to cordons off religion, specifically Islam in this case, from the scrutiny of humour and satire lest it gives 'offence'. That in the past few months alone a back bench MP has openly demanded blasphemy laws be revived in Britain to protect Islam shows how far this menace has spread. This has to be resisted as if you do not have the freedom to mock religion then you cannot mock anything.’
GREG LUKIANOFF
president and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)
‘I guess the closest I would come to a New Year's resolution for 2025 is to not only advocate for freedom of speech, but to think of ways to make freedom of speech more useful by thoroughly examining everything we've done wrong with our knowledge-creating institutions, whether it's journalism or higher education, and to think of better systems for producing a more trustworthy universe of shared facts.’
KHADIJA KHAN
journalist and broadcaster; editor, A Further Inquiry; co-host, A Further Inquiry podcast
‘The already precarious rights of freedom of speech are further threatened by the utopian notion of multiculturalism, that implies that all religions and cultures deserve respect and shuts down all venues and efforts to discuss the perils posed by archaic discriminatory and misogynistic religious and cultural beliefs. This grim situation makes battle in 2025 a sanctuary for free thinkers and heretics - determined to stand at the vanguard of the battle of ideas.’
ALASTAIR DONALD
co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; convenor, Living Freedom; author, Letter on Liberty: The Scottish Question
‘My hope for 2025 is that we can successfully go on the offensive against use of 'harm' as a pretext to restrict freedoms. In 2024, the new 'harm principle' became even more embedded, whether in new regulations for online safety, justifying vast numbers of non-crime hate incidents or as a new government's excuse to retreat from the universities free-speech act. We need to fightback against regulations and restrictions. But perhaps more importantly, we should aim to support the next generation to develop a new public culture that celebrates and revels in conflictual ideas and disagreement, and that embraces uncertainty, ambiguity and intellectual risk taking, and demands freedom for all speech. Hopefully, Living Freedom will be to the fore in that project.’
MO LOVATT
national coordinator, Debating Matters; programme coordinator, Academy of Ideas
‘My resolution for the new year is to read more fiction, good fiction. To pick up a book that transports me to another world, where I connect to the characters on a human level regardless of their background or place in society. A story where the narrative gently unfolds because those characters find themselves in those circumstances, not because the author wants to deliver a political sermon. In 2025, my wish is for an end to sensitivity readers, to activist publishing, and a return to literature which transcends the everyday, delights in the vagaries of the human heart and believes in authors who simply want to tell a good story.’
ELI VIEIRA
journalist; editor, Gazeta do Povo; writer, Twitter Files - Brazil
‘For Brazilians who dream of a freer country, 2025 will be a year of anticipation and preparation. We look forward to the end of more than five years of an illegal and unconstitutional inquiry by the Federal Supreme Court, though even that would hardly satisfy our yearning for justice and the restoration of our rights. We also hope the new administration in the US will address the violations committed by our now internationally infamous tyrant judge, Alexandre de Moraes, who banned Twitter (X) in Brazil for 40 days. But we cannot depend solely on foreign powers. We aspire to renew our Senate in the 2026 elections, bringing in braver, bolder senators who respect freedom and will finally hold him to account. No more imprisoning people for political lipstick graffiti on the Lady Justice statue. No more harvesting the personal data of Brazilians for posting political hashtags on social media. No more judicial activism. Fellow Brazilians, let us cast off the fear of speaking out in 2025 and prepare our path to liberty.’
FRANK FUREDI
sociologist and social commentator; executive director, MCC Brussels
‘I hope that 2025 will be the year when populism grows up and takes itself seriously as a counter-cultural movement capable of gaining influence over the conduct of public life. To become an effective force, it will have to develop its intellectual resources and capacity for forging an outlook that can inspire millions to become active political citizens. For me, the future of democracy in 2025 is populist.’
ROB LYONS
science and technology director, Academy of Ideas; convenor, AoI Economy Forum; author, Panic on a Plate
‘My aim for 2025 is to write more. I read almost constantly, ploughing through my feed on X/Twitter for nuggets of interesting content. (Personally, I think it's a great tool for finding worthwhile, sometimes challenging things to read.) But there is nothing to match the process of thinking about a piece of writing, of whatever form, reading with purpose and marshalling your arguments. The Academy of Ideas is rightly celebrating 25 years of promoting public debate, but the first stage of any debate needs to be in your own head. Putting your (sometimes tentative) conclusions out there in written form is a great discipline.’
ANDREW DOYLE
writer and comedian; author, The New Puritans and Free Speech and Why It Matters
‘For those of us who still care about freedom and liberal values, a fitting resolution would be to be less complacent when it comes to the threats to liberty coming from unexpected sources. We are all accustomed to those who claim to be on the Left demanding censorship, cheering on enhanced ‘hate-speech laws’ and indulging in cancel culture, but there are disturbing signs of an ‘anti-woke’ backlash. We have seen a decrease in support for gay marriage, demands that protests be banned, and a growing perception that liberalism has failed. In 2025, let's remember that authoritarianism can emerge from all sides and - as the saying has it - the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’
MAEVE HALLIGAN
student; musician; member, The Hooligans; student representative, Academic for Academic Freedom (AFAF)
‘In 2025, I'd like to go to more live music events. That isn't to say that I plan on attending huge, overpriced concerts in large arenas - I mean small gigs at intimate, independent venues that promote new artists and use ticket proceedings to sustain themselves and provide our towns and cities with much needed spaces for musicians to share their artform. As a musician myself, I know live music to be a great way to connect with people and enjoy sharing a common love for listening, as well as an opportunity to find new interests. And, whether I am performing or being an audience member, I find that it can also be a healthy and refreshing form of escapism from a world that can sometimes seem pretty loud! So, that's my resolution, and I look forward to sticking to it.’
JOSH HOWIE
presenter, Free Speech Nation; comedian; writer and star, Josh Howie’s Losing It, BBC Radio 4; actor, Hapless; columnist, Jewish Chronicle
‘Next year is all about perseverance. 2024 has seen some incredible victories for those in the battle of information over ideology, facts over feelings. The landscape has so changed, when you glance back, it’s difficult to visualise the swamps of ignorance and fear hidden just over the hills; living in a time of big arguments being won, it’s easy to forget how we barely escaped a place where you weren’t even allowed to debate. Yet the next part of the journey requires just as much, if not more resolve. The rot is decades old, and buried deep within our institutions. Academia is almost completely subsumed. To those organisations and individuals now getting on their knees and pulling out the weeds I salute you. On my end, I’m going to work hard to provide more metaphors.’
ELLA WHELAN
co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; journalist; author, What Women Want
‘In 2025, I think freedom from the boob should be a rallying cry for women. Having just had my second baby, the tyranny of the breast-is-best brigade feels closer than ever, and the freedom to feed how you choose – bottle, breast or both – is more than just an issue of hungry babies. It reveals the change in how women are valued once they become mothers. We might outstrip men in school or at work in our early twenties, but once that baby arrives, it becomes acceptable to sideline women’s freedom of choice in the name of mother nature. The current obsession with ‘natural’ processes in the realm of maternity is in danger of setting women back centuries. So for me, freedom lies in the bottle in 2025.’
JACOB REYNOLDS
head of policy, MCC Brussels; associate fellow, Academy of Ideas
‘This year, I will be posting more. This will sound strange when we hear so much about the evils of social media and talking about how you are spending less time on social media has become as trendy as taking part in dry January. But, I find X a great place for sorting out a first draft of my thoughts, and hope for the courage to leave fewer posts in drafts for fear of annoying fellow travellers or political allies. With all the chattering classes migrating to alternatives, free from those who point out their hypocrisies, I will be doubling down on the platform which Elon Musk has managed to somehow both save and ruin. It’s a madhouse mix of free speech and AI slop, but there is still nothing else like it. This year, I will commit to being a more regular, ruthless and insightful poster. No, this is not an extended advert to boost my stubbornly low follower count, but if you want to hold me to account you can follow me @jacobreynolds.’