IEA Podcast

Acting Academic and Research Director Syed Kamall welcomes Dr Onkar Ghate to discuss the life and work of the great 20th century philosopher Ayn Rand. Onkar is Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and has taught philosophy for over ten years at the Institute’s Objectivist Academic Centre. 

‘School of Thought’ is the IEA discussion series based on the book ‘101 Great Liberal Thinkers’ by Dr Eamonn Butler. 

'101 Great Liberal Thinkers' is available to download for free on the IEA website here.

Dr Stephen Davies, Head of Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs sits down with Imran Ahmad Khan, Member of Parliament for Wakefield, to discuss the future of British foreign policy, free trade and international development.

This episode is part of the IEA’s Foreign Affairs series.

IEA Acting Academic and Research Director Syed Kamall discussed the future of UK competition policy with John Penrose MP and the IEA's Head of Regulatory Affairs Victoria Hewson.

The episode largely focused on John Penrose's recent independent review of the UK’s competition framework called Power to the People.

John and Victoria analyse the new challenges facing UK competition policy, including the UK's exit from the EU and new technology. They also look at ways the UK could improve regulation to retain UK businesses and debate whether the digital economy needs more or less regulation. 

The Northern Ireland Protocol is a protocol of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement that covers the special situation in the island of Ireland. Its terms were negotiated in 2019 and concluded in December 2020. The Protocol has been a thorn in the side of UK-EU relations ever since the UK left the transition period and entered a new trading relationship with the EU on 31st December 2020.

Trade disruption between Northern Ireland and Great Britain and threats of invoking Article 16 of the Protocol by the EU over Covid vaccine supplies have soured relations and brought the protocol under scrutiny on both sides of the channel.

Syed Kamall, Acting Academic and Research Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, sits down with Victoria Hewson, IEA Head of Regulatory Affairs, and journalist Owen Polley to explain the Protocol and discuss its implications.

On the 3rd March the Chancellor delivered a much anticipated and important Spring Budget. Days before the Chancellors statement, Policy Advisor to the IEA Director General Sam Collins and IEA Policy Analyst Alexander Hammond produced a new research paper called 20 taxes to scrap: How to grow the UK economy by simplifying the tax system.

Unfortunately, the Chancellor failed to embrace Sam and Alex’s pro-growth policies and instead decided to spend and tax his way out of the economic crisis.

Emma Revell, Head of Public Affairs at the IEA, discussed the Budget and tax reform with Sam and Alex in another original IEA podcast. 

Professor Len Shackleton, Editorial and Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, discusses his new research paper, Back to School – and After, with Acting Academic and Research Director Syed Kamall.

In his paper, Professor Shackleton looks at some of the immediate issues facing pupils as the government begins to re-open schools, such as the disparities in the quality of education received by children from different socio-economic backgrounds during lockdown and whether teacher-based assessment is the most appropriate way to examine pupils if exams are postponed or cancelled.

The paper also addresses longer-term issues in our education system, which have been exposed by the Covid pandemic. In particular, focusing on how children from disadvantaged backgrounds lose out in our current system.

He argues that now is the time to change education for the better, learning from the pandemic by: adapting teaching practices,  changing the structure of the school year and giving parents more power over their child's education.  

In this episode, Dr Kristian Niemietz, Head of Political Economy at the IEA, discusses his explosive new paper Viral Myths: Why we risk learning the wrong lessons from the pandemic with Communications and Marketing Assistant Kieran Neild-Ali. 

The paper dismantles three commonly held assumptions about the pandemic. Firstly, that austerity made the UK unprepared for the virus; secondly that the virus was a crisis of globalisation and finally that the NHS has been the star performer of the pandemic and is beyond reproach.  

Instead, the evidence from Kristian’s paper suggests that nations with lower public spending, open global economies and healthcare systems that do not resemble the NHS did better than the UK in Covid performance indicators.  

Following Twitter's decision to suspend Donald Trump from their platform, and the subsequent removal of "free speech" alternative Parler from the Google and Apple app stores, the debate over Big Tech and free speech has intensified.

Should private companies be free to censor users as they wish, or have the Silicon Valley tech giants abused their power? Would it be helpful to reconceptualise social media as a public utility? And how can we ensure free speech and open political discourse survives?

IEA Head of Media Emily Carver is joined by Sam Bowman, Director of Competition Policy at the International Centre for Law and Economics, Tom Slater, Deputy Editor of Spiked Online and Marc Glendening, the IEA’s new Head of Cultural Affairs.