Academy Of Ideas

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION ‘Take back control’, the central demand from the Leave campaign’s case for Brexit, posed the question: who should rule? However, today, when frontpage headlines frequently ask why nothing works in ‘Broken Britain’ and politicians blame myriad forces for thwarting democratically decided policies, one increasingly debated issue is: who is really in charge of society? In his recent book, Values, Voice and Virtue, British political scientist Matthew Goodwin argues that the ‘people who really run Britain’ are ‘a new dominant class’, that imposes its ‘radically progressive cultural values’ on the rest of the nation. The Spectator magazine recently devoted its cover to this ‘new elite’ and how ‘the woke aristocracy’ is on a ‘march through the institutions’. Former government equality tsar Trevor Phillips has written that ‘the political and media elite’ have achieved ‘institutional capture’ across swath