Final few days to apply for Living Freedom Summer School

The past week has certainly proved that this year’s event, which takes place on 29 June to 1 July in central London, cannot come round quick enough.

From the arrest of republicans intending to protest the coronation to the damaging consequences of the Online Safety Bill, we live in times where constraints on freedom grow by the day. The ongoing struggles to show the films Adult Human Female and Birthgap at universities in Edinburgh and Cambridge reveal that the standard response to views we disagree with or find objectionable is increasingly to close them down, not open those views to scrutiny and debate. Worryingly, as the deplatforming of an elected politician - the SNP MP Joanna Cherry - by The Stand comedy club in Edinburgh shows, the debate-denying behaviour that was once largely confined to the university campus is now increasingly common in the wider public sphere.

The arrest of the coronation protesters serves to highlight many of the tricky questions and issues that supporters of freedom need to get to grips with today. Recent anti-protest laws were nodded through parliament as the necessary means to prevent disruptive Just Stop Oil protests. Yet this hot-off-the-press legislation was used against republican protests during the coronation, even though the police admitted they had no proof the protesters were going to use banned tactics. Indeed, as Laura Dodsworth points out in her excellent Substack on the issue, these were arrests for what was effectively a form of ‘pre-crime’. To compound matters, the police both defended their actions in the same breath as announcing nothing that occurred merited charges and then apologised to those arrested.

Luckily, the Manifesto Club’s Josie Appleton will be at the summer school to explore the nature of the modern state which appears to be both dystopian and dysfunctional. With some commentators defending the arrests by invoking JS Mill’s famous ‘harm principle’ to argue that ‘freedom from protest is a public right, too’, we’ll also be looking at how to make the case for freedom in a ‘safety first’ age, where potential of harm is now utilised not to limit encroachments on liberty to a few cases where harm may occur, but rather weaponised to justify ever more restrictions.

The question of harm and safety is just one instance where we desperately need to get to grips with the history and philosophy of freedom. At the summer school, we’ll attempt to understand not only the origins of age-old ideals such as freedom of conscience and free will, but how they fare today, too. Where do we need to develop our thinking given contemporary developments. How do we respond to cultural changes, in the form of the now-dominant identity politics? Or social and technological matters, where artificial intelligence raises new questions about what it means to be human and where a kickback against the virtue of material progress calls into question the idea that liberty and progress go hand in hand?

And this is just a small sample of the talks and debates in a jam-packed programme!

If you’re aged 18 to 30 and think freedom is worth arguing for, then Living Freedom Summer School is for you. You’ll spend two nights in London, meet dozens of other like-minded people from the UK and beyond, and enjoy a deep dive into a host of important ideas and contemporary debates. As Monica Schroeder, an attendee in 2022, said: ‘This was such an uplifting and intellectually stimulating event. It was encouraging to see so many people with different views united by their desire for open debate.’

Applications close next Monday at 9am – so don’t delay, apply today! And please spread the word to anyone you know might be interested in joining us by forwarding this Substack to them.