British Thought Leaders

Andy Shaw is the co-founder and organiser of London’s free-speech comedy club, Comedy Unleashed. The Times described it as ‘the comedy night that takes the PC out of the stand-up elite’.

The club has hosted 100s of comedians who challenge conventional thinking and it has gained a reputation for hosting comics that have been cancelled or banned.

Andy also writes spoofs for the Spectator magazine, including ‘A Handy Guide to Vaccine Passports’ and ‘The new CofE: Church of Extinction’. He hosts the occasional Spectator podcast, ‘That’s Life'.

Follow Andy on Twitter: @AndyShaw1

David Kurten is the Leader and one of the founding members of the Heritage Party. The Heritage Party stands for free speech and liberty, traditional family values, national sovereignty, and financial responsibility. ​

David was a member of the London Assembly from May 2016 to May 2021, and sat on the Education, Environment, Fire & Emergency, Housing and Transport committees at City Hall.

Ben Pile is an independent climate researcher, commentator and blogger. He runs the Climate Resistance website, which challenges mainstream views on environmentalism. He also writes for publications such as Spiked Online.

@ClimateDebateUK | http://benpile.substack.com | http://youtube.com/@ClimateResistance | UKclimatedebate.co.uk

Giles William Udy is an English writer and historian of the Soviet Gulag system, Soviet influence on British politics 1917-56 & how history repeats itself.

He is a member of the council of the Keston Institute and holds an MBA from the Cass Business School. He is a regular contributor to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the i, UnHerd and the magazine Standpoint.

Udy has made a long-term study of the history of the gulag camps of Norilsk, his collection of photographs of which is in the Hoover Institution Archives. His book 'Labour and the Gulag' (2017) examines the response of the British labour movement to conditions under Stalinism and developed from his earlier Gulag studies after he discovered that the British labour movement had suppressed criticism of conditions in the camps.

Rahima Mahmut is a Uyghur singer, human rights activist, and award-winning translator of the poignant prison memoir The Land Drenched in Tears by Soyungul Chanishe.

Currently, she is the U.K. Director for the World Uyghur Congress and Executive Director at Stop Uyghur Genocide. @MahmutRahima | @uyghurcongress | @UyghurStop

Dennis Hayes is professor of education at the University of Derby in England. He is the founder and director of the campaign group Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF).

AFAF was founded in late 2006, initially to promote its Statement of Academic Freedom but has subsequently undertaken the defence of many academics who have been threatened with disciplinary action or censored for their beliefs or ideas (see AFAF's The Banned List).

Hayes is an author (with Kathryn Ecclestone) of the best-selling and controversial book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. A defender of knowledge-based education he is an advocate of the teaching of Latin and Greek in British state schools.

Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is an educator, academic, author and campaigner who believes passionately in the essential importance of impartiality both in education and as a prerequisite for the civilised conversations necessary for democracy to flourish. Alka became director of Don’t Divide Us following two years as its founder lead on education, a campaign which she felt impelled to join as a counter to the fractious and one-sided discussions about race relations in the UK which have dominated since 2020.

Alka began her career teaching English Literature in inner-city London and went on to become a member of the Ofsted Advisory Panel on English. Until recently, she was still practising on the front line as an English teacher with the Civitas Education Charity supplementary schools project. She is a prolific author of specialist texts on education including the 2017 What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth (IoE UCL Press). She has spoken at numerous prestigious conferences and gave evidence to the 2016 All-Party Parliamentary Group Inquiry (APPGI) on Knowledge and Skills in Education.

Alka made a characteristically bold entrance into politics in 2017, standing for the Brexit Party as a protest against the potential democratic deficit that would have followed had the popular vote not been enacted. Alka is a wife and mother of two adult children. She enjoys cooking, opera and travelling to visit family in India, when time allows.

Follow Alka on Twitter: @ASCphiled

On this episode of British Thought Leaders, we speak with Harry Miller, a retired police officer from Humberside. Harry was investigated by his own local force over posts he made on Twitter and ended up challenging the police in court.

In a landmark ruling, the Court of Appeal said that Harry’s rights to freedom of expression had been violated and that his treatment could have a “chilling effect on public debate”.

Harry is now the CEO of Fair Cop, an organisation representing individuals who are concerned about police attempts to criminalise people for expressing opinions that don’t contravene any laws.

https://twitter.com/HarryTheOwl101 https://www.faircop.org.uk/

On this episode of BTL, we interview Leilani Dowding a former glamour model, television celebrity, and the UK representative at Miss Universe 1998. After finishing modelling Leilani was involved with the TV programmes such as “Real housewives of Cheshire” but became considerably more vocal about social issues.

Since the lockdown she has been very active in the media talking about issues such as lockdown, trans issues, freedom and big tech etc. She has over 50k Twitter followers.

She used to have 67k Instagram followers but was de-platformed for discussing vaccine injuries. She regularly appears on GB News and co hosts a show with David Icke’s son talking about alternative news.

Professor Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law at Swansea University, talks to us about the loss of free speech in British universities and the forces behind these changes, what rising numbers of foreign students mean for these institutions, how foreign powers seek to influence British university education, and his own personal run-in with the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party.