Last weekend’s Battle of Ideas Festival was outstanding. Just look at the packed programme. I spoke on “Can the state run the market?” to advance a fundamentally Austrian School “no”, then on “Should we tolerate the intolerant?” I insisted on free speech, a narrowly drawn law against incitement and a general culture of insisting on the principles of a free society.
When I lost my seat, a supporter told me, “You should have a think tank.” After a day’s consideration, I replied, “I’m not Tony Blair. I can’t have the Steve Baker Institute. And anyway, we have plenty of great freedom-oriented think tanks. Why don’t I set something up to amplify them all using what I learned in Parliament?”
He provided some help and the Fighting for a Free Future project was born, named after a slogan on a Big Brother Watch t-shirt. Today, we encompass a collaborating community of voices for freedom, educational programmes, events, this Substack and our podcast plus of course our outstanding merch, which you should buy.
We maintain a relatively light presence online because this project is not about us: it is about the voices for the principles of a free society who we support. We are inspired by Leonard Read’s How to Advance Liberty and Hayek’s The Intellectuals and Socialism: we need to make the philosophy of freedom attractive so that it becomes fashionable for those who set the terms of public debate and public policy to advocate for a free society over the managerialism which is now failing.
Ideas and action
If the hon. Gentleman uses the word “ideological” to accuse me of having thought about how society works and what the law ought to be, of course I plead guilty.
It is only by changing the terms of debate that we can avoid the fiscal, economic, social and political disaster which looms before us, and which is perhaps unfolding even now as riots over the cost of living sweep France and Europe. Brexit taught us a few lessons: one is that a small band of determined and effective political operators can only force a choice on the governing elite for so long. The elite will work to reassert themselves relentlessly when they are overridden.
A lasting change requires those who set the terms of debate and policy to believe, on the whole, in the new paradigm. That is what this project is about.
Britain's Fiscal Reckoning: The Inevitability of Spending Cuts
This week, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) became the latest institute to attempt to deliver a wake-up call to the Government about the UK’s dire fiscal situation, warning that Chancellor Rachel Reeves faces an "impossible trilemma" as she attempts to square the circle between her fiscal rules, Government spending commitments, manifesto promises not to raise taxes on working people, and most significantly, a large contingent of Labour MPs who will oppose any form of spending cut in Parliament.
We are working in the short, medium and long term to create the conditions for a free society. Because if you think taxes have been too low, that we have not borrowed enough, that money has been too tight and that regulation has been altogether too laissez-faire, I hope you will look at the data…
In other words, we are upstream of and independent from party politics. There’s a reason Conservatives and, yes, for five years, liberals in government did not do enough to rebalance public spending and the rights of the individual after the Global Financial Crisis: the Blairite settlement – “The Third Way” – of endless intervention in the market is the paradigm in which officials, politicians, journalists, academics and lawyers operate.
We need to change their minds. That’s why we are Fighting for a Free Future, and that is why we were at the Battle of Ideas.