"It is by examples, not by arguments, that crowds are guided". — Gustave Le Bon
Dear Friends: we are in trouble. I think we already knew that, but I want to share an experience I had recently in Manchester.
I attended the first Battle of Ideas North in Manchester on 7 March 2026, which was a ticketed event hosting debates on various topics and encouraging free speech. There are evidently layers of naivety in me. I’m not entirely sorry about that; naivety is close to innocence. What happened was a poke in the ribs, reminding me how free speech feels on each side of the fence. How comfortable, uplifting even, it is to be in the company of others who share values with me. How alienating, even frightening, it is to be in the middle of a mass of people openly mocking or trying to silence views which I hold.
You would expect, of course, that at a festival of free speech, a value held in common by everyone there would be to listen to people and grant them the right to speak freely on any topic.
I’m not a natural free speech enthusiast because of pornography. There are all sorts of plausible and sophisticated arguments to defend pornography, but basically, I believe that when it is let out into the public realm like it has been, it is degrading to all of us. I sincerely wish that there wasn’t the appetite for pornography that there obviously is, but I understand it these days like a kind of drug more than a cultural product. It is physiologically addictive like a drug, and needing stronger and stronger hits to take effect, like a drug. Nevertheless, many people will defend its publication as a matter of free speech.
So, my personal tastes would send pornography back underground, back into the private realm. Letting it out hasn’t dulled its corrosive effects, rather the opposite, as we watch grown men in dog masks leading each other round on leashes at ‘pride’ parades also attended by children draped in rainbow flags and their smiling parents. However, much as I would prefer tighter controls on pornography, I won’t argue for that. I am a free speech absolutist because to be anything else is not to favour free speech at all. I believed the chair of the event’s invitation to speak our minds.
The opening session was incoherent to me. I couldn’t understand very many clear points in the contributions of the panellists. I haven’t got a problem with incoherence; who does really understand what is going on in the public realm today, what we should do about it, and where ‘power’ lies? I didn’t feel an urgent need to ‘understand’ why people were positioning themselves as they were; they were speaking on the subject of sovereignty in the UK. Inchoate was the word that came to me after the first session, and I believe that means something that is forming but which has as yet no clear form. I’ll come back to that. But I began to notice something else — something that blindsided me. Like I said, maybe I’m naïve.
Questions and responses from the audience were supposed to be the majority input of this session. The very first question was: how is it possible to negotiate with a religious fanatic? Everyone on the panel approvingly agreed it is impossible. The questioner meant: how is it possible to negotiate with Iran? All the panellists were endorsing her. I mentally formulated the first of many statements which I didn’t get to make: religious fanaticism is on both sides here. Pete Hegseth is a Christian Zionist. Christian Zionism is apparently seeping into the training of the American military. The attack on Iran appears to be multiply over-justified: regime change, the Greater Israel project, oil, and now we can add hastening an apocalypse which in turn will bring on the return of Jesus.
On we went. I attended a session on the Supreme Court ruling about the meaning of ‘sex’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’ in the Equality Act 2010; where were we one year on? This was where I could sit in a comfortable warm glow of a crowd who broadly were sceptical of transgenderism like me. But still, in the context of this discussion, panels kept dropping small anecdotal references which were consistently anti-Islamic. I don’t doubt that the anecdotes may have been true; someone was shouted down and attacked for showing an Israeli flag at a pro-Palestine protest, for instance — it’s just that there were no anecdotes from the other side. There was not one all day.
If you put on an event like the Battle of Ideas, you get to choose the speakers, topics, and so on. Were the free speech enthusiasts heading the day from the stage chosen because they were all on message to be pro-Israel? Or is that because being pro-Israel is really the dominant view? This is where my naivety kicks in. I simply can’t believe that in the face of the relentless bombardment and massacre of Gaza, anyone would defend the military actions of Israel. But, at this event, apparently everyone did. My blood ran cold, and this is why I say we are in trouble. It felt like Covid times to me. I felt like I was in a supermarket full of masked people.
One after another in different panels in different debates, the idea of being pro-Palestinian or sympathetic to Iran was mocked and put down. In the closing session, all present on the stage seemed to agree in worthily tut-tutting the Palestinian Action activists’ attack on warplanes. Not to punish that, one speaker said, would be like not punishing an attack on a pride parade. Yes, a pride parade is these days also a display of lethal (ideological) weaponry with the general population in its sights. So these activists in the UK for Palestine were mocked and scorned, but as my friend rightly said to me, if all of us in the UK had likewise stood up for Gaza, perhaps Israel would have been pulled up short, obstructed in its frenzy of attack and ‘clearing’ as it pursues the Greater Israel Project and domination in the region. Given the relative sizes of Israel and the rest of the Middle East, how on Earth could such ‘dominance’ come to be? Again, my blood runs cold.
The closing session really rammed it home. The organisers of this format of event choose not only the speakers, but by choosing the chairs, also control who speaks from the audience. And there would be nothing easier than to have obvious plants in the audience whose views are known. I’m sorry if this sounds conspiratorial. I can’t prove this happened, but I can state that given the range of views that were expressed during the day from the platform and the floor, I didn’t see much evidence that it didn’t happen. So one of the final questions was from an elderly gentleman, possibly Jewish, or at least not sympathetic to a pro-Palestine demonstration. He had to fight his way through such a demonstration to get to a railway station. He felt unsafe after being attacked and had to be dragged away. This was a story he had every right to tell, it just happened to be a story reflecting many other stories, mentions in passing, etc. that had run through the whole day.
And then something very revealing happened. I’m proud to say that I had a hand in it. I can’t remember what particular pro-Israel remark prompted me. My friend and I put our hands up and left them there until the microphone finally came our way. I passed it to my friend. There were several hundred people in the room. This is what she said:
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was an 86-year-old man. He was a spiritual leader. He had pronounced a fatwa on nukes. The Iranians are defending themselves. There is terrible slaughter going on in Gaza. A genocide. Palestine Action were attacking warplanes.
My friend is mild-mannered and softly spoken. She needed the microphone to pick up and carry her voice, and it did. But while she was speaking, the audience starting responding as it had not done to any other contribution, in a sort of panto style. There were low murmurings of disapproval. One voice shouted, “There is no genocide in Gaza”. Claire Fox, The Baroness Fox of Buckley, then shouted, to her credit, “Let her speak”. Fox had a natural authority in that event, as the chair of the opening session, and so people went silent.
But then it went on, from the panel up on the stage. Connie Shaw, the GB News presenter, made it explicit when she said if she were in power, she personally would have proscribed Palestine Action. Several people again condemned the idea of attacking warplanes — to apparent general approval. One of the panellists said, “The UN estimate of the population of Gaza at the beginning of the war was 2.3 million, and that’s still what it is”.
Someone had to explain to me later that this figure was given because of the birth rate. Apparently, although you’ve killed some Palestinians, some more have been born, so what is the problem? This was one of the most dehumanising pronouncements I have heard in a public debate — again nodded through approvingly by the panellists and the audience. Are Palestinians so much less than human that we only count them? If you kill some, but others are born, that’s equivalent? Imagine giving birth in the midst of the current Gaza situation with a tiny newborn infant.
I don’t know what the manner of speech is called which begins to discuss certain human beings as though they are less than human casually, but it is alive and surfacing in Britain now. It was the same sort of speech that I heard in a video of an Israeli who spoke about the necessity of creating a ‘sterile zone’ which is ‘completely clean’ of certain humans.
The word apocalypse means ‘removing the covering; unveiling’. The free speech event, by the skin of its teeth, did what it was supposed to do. A remark, made in defence of suffering people being attacked and slaughtered, unveiled a current of thinking in the group. But the mass groupthink-like, anti-Arabic response of the audience came as a shock to me. Perhaps it was just the instinct for self-preservation in the crowd. People know what side their bread is buttered on, and it’s Israeli. Israel is our ally, and always will be, or should that be the other way around? We’ve signed The 2030 Roadmap, outlining our entanglement with Israel, and it is Britain that created this particular manifestation of Israel in Palestine, through the Balfour agreement. Palantir, an Israeli company, has rights to our NHS data. The Israeli state, which is not backed and approved of by its whole population any more than our state is, expresses limitless violence. It is our ally. We are its ally. And if the fire spreads in the Middle East, it is going to get harder and harder to speak the truth about Israel.
Unless? Unless the group of people who attend the Battle of Ideas are not typical, are just certain types, like me, who like to dispute and think and talk, but are not necessarily representative of all of us. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope that a silent majority can see slaughter for what it is and condemn it wherever it occurs.
A final thought: one of the speakers went out of his way to encourage us all to participate in demonstrations. He wouldn’t do it usually, he said, but he thought it was vital now. I have had the opposite thought; namely, this: nothing is easier to manipulate than a crowd. The regime change or revolution-creating agent provocateurs employed overseas can be used here too. If you go to a demonstration in the coming years, be very clear about why you’re there. You will be recorded, and your mobile phone number will be stored by tracking devices. You may be standing among agent provocateurs, and you will not necessarily know who these people are. When they want to, they can try to provoke violence, lead chanting, and try to lead the direction of marches — the lot. All the manipulation techniques used on foreign populations to manipulate and siphon off and use genuine political angers can be employed in the UK because the veil is coming off. If you go to a demonstration, keep your wits about you.
Can free speech clear our way? There is something in humans that longs to speak freely and to attempt to speak the truth about reality, but only as long as we know that, currently, the political scene in these islands is inchoate. Things may be forming, but we cannot yet see what they are.
However, as we left the building, we brushed up against the unspoken murmurings that had hovered just beneath the outward event. Several people came to thank my friend for speaking out, and one young couple said to her, “It just shows them up for who they really are [the organisers of the event]; they’re not really interested in free speech at all”.
Treasure those to whom you can truly speak your heart. That will be a real currency which can only rise in value going forward.
