Intelligence Squared

At the 2019 Cliveden Literary Festival, Intelligence Squared brought together historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and novelist Kate Mosse to discuss some of the speeches and letters in Sebag’s latest books Voices of History and Written in History. Bringing it all to life on our stage were the actors Jade Anouka, Alex Macqueen and Natascha McElhone.

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In this week's episode we were joined by Richard Seymour, the Marxist intellectual and author of The Twittering Machine, a book which uses psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, and security experts to examine the dystopian consequences of our relationship with social media. He was interviewed by the journalist and tech expert Jamie Bartlett.

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They are the crimes for which no one has ever made amends. The transatlantic slave trade enslaved between 10 and 12 million Africans. Historians estimate that 15 to 25% of the men and women packed into the slave ships died before they reached the Americas. The only people ever to be compensated? Slave owners and traders, to make up for their lost earnings when slavery ended. Today, generations later, the white majorities in the US and former colonial powers including the UK continue to benefit from the wealth generated by slavery. The descendants of enslaved Africans continue to suffer poverty and prejudice. Millions still face discrimination and limited access to education and jobs. Some say that only a broad programme of reparations – not just financial compensation, but acknowledgement of the crimes committed and the lasting damage caused – can begin to make up for the atrocity of slavery and bring an end to the systemic injustice millions of people still face.

That would be a disaster, critics of reparations say. The whole idea is flawed. These were crimes committed by and to people long since gone. The costs would cripple economies and hurt the people reparations would supposedly help. Tensions between community groups would only worsen and some on the Right would use reparations as a rallying point to criticise already vulnerable and economically weak minority groups and countries. And good luck finding consensus on constructing a system to decide who gets what; no one would be happy and social tensions would only worsen. Instead of looking backwards, we should all focus on fighting racism now. We have enough pressing problems with discrimination in 2019. Let’s not make them worse by opening old wounds.

CHAIR: Emma Dabiri - Social historian and presenter

SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION: Kehinde Andrews - Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University and author of The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World and Esther Stanford-Xosei - Reparations activist and lawyer

AGAINST THE MOTION: Katharine Birbalsingh - Headmistress and co-founder of Michaela Community School in London and Tony Sewell - Educational consultant and CEO of the charity Generating Genius

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In this week’s episode of the Intelligence Squared podcast we were joined by the acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan. He was interviewed by the BBC’s Razia Iqbal to discuss his new satirical novella The Cockroach, in which a man wakes up one morning having been transformed into a giant creature who happens to be the most powerful man in Britain. 

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With tensions running high this week in the U.K. Houses of Parliament over Brexit and allegations about PM Boris Johnson's use of inflammatory language, Intelligence Squared staged an event with Labour MP Rachel Reeves, Conservative member of the House of Lords Sandip Verma, celebrated classicist Mary Beard and journalist Helen Lewis. They discussed the divisions in Parliament and around the country, and how women can negotiate political power in what remains in many ways a man’s world. 

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This is an episode from a new podcast strand launched by Intelligence Squared called How I Found My Voice. Presented by the prominent BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, the podcast explores how some of the world's greatest artists and thinkers became such compelling – and unique – communicators. In this episode Samira Ahmed speaks to poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah. From racist attacks and police brutality to receiving a letter from Bob Marley telling him that Britain needs him, Zephaniah talks about the moments that shaped and inspired his voice. To hear more episodes of How I Found My Voice go to https://play.acast.com/s/howifoundmyvoice. 

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Mindfulness – the psychological practice of bringing one's attention to the present moment through meditation – has gone mainstream. It has been enthusiastically co-opted by Silicon Valley and other large corporations as well as schools, governments and even the U.S. military. But what if, instead of changing the world, mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the status quo? That's the view of Ronald Purser, Professor of Management at San Francisco State University, Buddhist practitioner and author of McMindfulness. In this episode of the Intelligence Squared podcast, he was interviewed by Helen Lewis of The Atlantic on his radical critique of the mindfulness industry. 

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This is an episode from a new podcast strand launched by Intelligence Squared called How I Found My Voice. Presented by the prominent BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, the podcast explores how some of the world's greatest artists and thinkers became such compelling – and unique – communicators. Samira Ahmed speaks to bestselling Turkish novelist Elif Shafak. From keeping a childhood diary and learning different languages to being taken to court on charges of 'insulting Turkishness' through the words of her fictional characters, Shafak talks about the moments that shaped and inspired her voice. To hear more episodes of How I Found My Voice go to https://play.acast.com/s/howifoundmyvoice. 

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Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s greatest storytellers. He came to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss his career, his life and his new novel Quichotte with the BBC’s Razia Iqbal. The book is a wild ride through modern America — a society on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse — and examines racism, father–son relationships, the opioid crisis, cyber-spies and the end of the world.

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This is an episode from a new podcast strand launched by Intelligence Squared called How I Found My Voice. Presented by the prominent BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, the podcast explores how some of the world's greatest artists and thinkers became such compelling – and unique – communicators. In this episode Samira speaks to the BBC's Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet. Renowned as a foreign correspondent in some of the toughest war zones in the past thirty years, Doucet speaks about the moments that shaped her voice from growing up in a small Canadian town to reporting from the front lines in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. To hear more episodes of How I Found My Voice go to https://play.acast.com/s/howifoundmyvoice. 

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