The event started out with a reflection and minute’s silence for Aldina Jahić, held by Anne Struffmann. Then the event kicked off with The IEA’s Head of Media and Linda Whetstone Scholar Reem Ibrahim. Her talk was based on the five main reasons why the new Digital ID proposal in Britain is a horrible idea, especially for freedom, and why it needs to be scrapped.
She was followed by Thomas Walker-Werth who delivered an excellent toolkit for how we can use media to better understand the ideas and principles of freedom. He said that when they are presented in science fiction contexts and abstracted away from our everyday lives, people are much more able to look at the principles presented and evaluate them. His passion and advocacy for the topic certainly spread throughout the conference. Star Wars shows us why trade barriers and high taxation are bad, while shows like Doctor Who demonstrate why superiority complexes and nationalism and top-down control ultimately collapse beneath the weight of their own Hubris.
After Thomas, we heard from Jihyun Park, a refugee from North Korea. Her speech was moving and deeply personal, as well as incredibly inspiring. You can never truly know the bravery someone like her possesses, but you get a glimpse of it from listening to her. One of the things she said that shocked me was her realisation that she lived Animal Farm and 1984 in real life. On the face of it, this comparison seems hyperbolic, but you could tell she was downplaying the similarity if anything. I was deeply ashamed and disappointed that she had escaped somewhere so oppressive, especially censoring expression, only to arrive here and start to notice and suffer strikingly similar repressions of speech. If the UK wishes to remain a free country, we cannot and should not get closer to North Korea’s speech laws nor its political repression. We already see this in current UK legislation, such as the Online Safety Act and the Communications Act, among others.
IEA’s Head of Lifestyle Economics Chris Snowdon then talked about free speech, one of the most vital freedoms and coincidentally the one most under attack in the UK. Dr Snowdon started by stating one of the most horrifying stats to come out of 2025, that more than 30 people are arrested every day for things they say on social media. He then tested the limit of what people in the audience deem to be acceptable using famous cases like what Graham Linehan, the Irish comic and writer arrested in Heathrow by five armed police. Snowdon rejected a popular solution among British Classical Liberals of a First Amendment. However, what Snowdon instead put forward was the need to cut back the activist judiciary and police as the primary reforms.
Nikos Sotirakopoulos then talked about the necessity of innovation in society and how beneficial it is. However, much innovation and entrepreneurship is strangled by the state before it wakes in its cot. Lengthy and complicated employment regulations combined with health and safety requirements are surmountable to stopping us each from having a flying car. Nikos’ presentation hinted at a recent House of Lords report called Bleeding to Death that detailed the utter disaster that will occur if we keep allowing the state to impede innovation and entrepreneurship.
The University of Lincoln then came up with its two intellectual powerhouses in Nick Cowen talking about his book Neoliberal social justice. His theory attempts to combine Rawlsian social justice with “neoliberal market reforms”. This strange approach leads to familiar conclusions, which are that the government, in its overzealousness, does more harm than good. While Nick mostly advocates for market reform due to his audiences, he focused on the argument for Rawlsian justice. He highlighted how the current housing market is the greatest example of injustice this century and is largely down to the oxymoronic “government planning” and regulation that have made housing incredibly unaffordable and out of reach for anyone younger than 40. How do we create a more just society? Nick’s answer is to implement way more market reforms and start getting the government out of the way. It’s not that he doesn’t see a role for government, but rather that it is involved in so many layers you must get rid of it to actually see where government should have a role.
Nick was followed by his colleague Aris Trantidis, who presented his novel theory of Clientelism, within the literature of rent-seeking and public choice. Aris’ analysis shows how political parties and interest groups have a client-like relationship, and these dynamics, being incredibly hard to overcome, lead public policy down a very dark path, virtually ignoring most of the major problems plaguing a country, Greece being a perfect case study where employment and wages have fallen off a cliff.
Finally, Paola Romero, guest teacher at LSE, gave an incredibly personal talk about the current state of Venezuela and its shortcomings due to socialist governance. Paola used Venezuela’s freedom fighters to highlight the fact that socialism is anything other than liberating. Those who attempt to democratically oppose the government, like María Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez, end up stuck in a foreign embassy, enduring mind games by the state with their food and water supply. Yet their spirit and search for freedom could not be extinguished as they found ways to keep their spirits high as well as their phone batteries, using lamps to charge them. Venezuela used to be one of the fastest-growing nations and the richest in Latin America, with, still, the largest oil reserves. However, Venezuela can’t feed anyone, and most burn wheelbarrows full of money because that is cheaper than using said money to buy firewood to keep warm. Paola allowed the audience to create easy connections in order to notice the warning signs that the UK is starting down a similar path of full state domination, which is anything but liberating and enriching.
We finished the day with a talk from the Head of Education at the IEA, who delivered a powerful speech and reminder why these events and others are vital to freedom and how meeting others and connecting with others who have similar ideas and missions is one small step to achieving great things and a free(r) society. He encouraged us to create our own societies and our own conferences, and that the Leviathan may be rising, but we can’t let it settle, so we need to get to work. He called for us to be ambitious with our goals, which is not normal for classical liberals who expect massive pushback, always and everywhere, a constant of the universe, like gravity, yet events like this prove that we can do a lot more than what we might think and that there are more people who agree with our ideas than we imagine. As Thomas Walker-Werth knows very keenly, sometimes packing the ideas is much more effective than finding new and better ones.
A big thank you to the Institute of Economic Affairs and their team for hosting us and making sure the event went smoothly. And a big thank you to everyone from SFL UK for organising such a great event. It was lovely seeing so many familiar faces who attended, especially Manuel Ferretti, who flew all the way from Italy for the event.
