Talking liberty - Boxing: don't count it out
Saturday 18th November, 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Map Room, Cherry Reds, 88-92 John Bright Street, B1 1BN
Free entry but donations welcome. Donations help us to meet speaker travel and room hire costs for our two debate Salon events.
Please book via EventBrite
In his Letter – Boxing: don’t count it out – writer and boxing enthusiast Chris Akers argues that boxing, more than any sport, has a unique way of tapping into the consciousness of the poor, the disgruntled and the forgotten. For all its flaws, he writes, boxing has been the vehicle by which people in poverty have escaped to better surroundings. From Muhammad Ali to Lovemore N’dou, boxing’s greats have often used the sport to highlight political injustices and social issues.
Join Chris to look at boxing’s contemporary challenges – with new scientific research around head injuries and ‘punch drunk’ fighters calling for greater safety measures in the ring. From rules on gloves to ever-decreasing limits on bouts, should boxing modernise to protect its heroes? Or will we lose the glory of the knockout by introducing more red tape? Does boxing ‘save lives’ – teaching ex-offenders and troubled teens discipline and strength? Or is the commercialisation of violence producing bad role models for young people? And if grown men and women want to go toe-to-toe, who are we to stop them?
Talking liberty - Escaping the Straitjacket of Mental Health
Saturday 14th October, 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Map Room, Cherry Reds, 88-92 John Bright Street, B1 1BN
Free entry but donations welcome. Donations help us to meet speaker travel and room hire costs for our two debate Salon events.
Please book via EventBrite
Inward and upward
Saturday 16th September, 1.00 pm - 5.00 pm
John Peek Room, Birmingham and Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BU
Small Expectations? Social Mobility in the 21st Century
Over the past 50 years, people in Britain who are born in to professional-managerial families are approximately 9 times as likely to enter managerial or professional careers as they are manual routine jobs. If you are from a family of unskilled workers, you have less than half the chance of accessing ‘salariat’ employment and around 4 times the chance of ending up in the most disadvantaged rountine positions.
The OECD reports that children from ethnic minority families engaged in unskilled work were much more likely to achieve long-range upward mobility than their white counterparts. The exception are men from Pakistani, Bangladeshi backgrounds who have fallen behind over the past 50 years, with a decline in their presence in the managerial or professional sector.
As economist Steffan Ball has stated "On social mobility, political debate is often focused on who climbs up the social ladder and that is critical. But it should also consider whether better off families retain their social and economic position. And on this metric too, the poorest and the richest in the U.K. are the most socially immobile. So this exacerbates social inequalities.”
The pace of social mobility has slowed but there is little consensus as to why. Factors like education, housing, and taxation have all have effects on our life chances. As does geography: a high percentage of the high paying service sector jobs are based in the South East, which creates a disadvantage for the regions.
Home ownership and a university degree have been seen as short cuts to social mobility and hence a focus of government policy in spite of both relying on increasing levels of debt. Both of these approaches look to have failed, with discouragingly higher mortgage interest rates and a much less marked salary disparity between graduates and non-graduates, with everyone’s wages squeezed.
Implied in the concept of social mobility is that, on the whole, movement is upwards. However, sociologist John Goldthorpe has pointed out "Politicians don’t want to hear the truth, which is that for people to climb the social ladder, others must move.” Where would they move to? Does this reveal there is no ceiling to mobility, or is it a hint that some must lower their expectations?
The concept of social mobility requires us to think about meritocracy, equality, family and community. What would our country look like if offered true social mobility? Does one person’s inheritance, financial or cultural, block another’s opportunity?
Speakers
Reading:
Break - 2.45 - 3.15 pm. Tea/coffee included in ticket price.
Immigration: numbers, skills, visas or values?
Immigration is one of the most divisive and emotive subjects of modern times. There are those who believe that the UK’s borders should be more open to allow those in need to enter the country. They often resort to caricaturing those who disagree with them as racist. On the other side are people who want stricter border controls who see the opposition’s only interest in immigration laws as how to help the people who break them, letting in rapists, thieves, and murderers through their misguided kindness, or carelessly allowing British working class lives to be significantly impacted.
The increase in levels of immigration to the UK comes from a mixture of official controlled routes, including new ones for people from Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan, and illegal ones. What is it that is causing concern about immigration? Is it true that the UK is mainly hostile to refugees and that if we had more legal routes to apply then so many people would not risk crossing the Channel in a small boat and immigrant numbers would be lower? Or is Britain actually on balance a success story for immigration but now unable to provide for everyone already here?
Often expressed is the idea that we just want control over our borders and that we just want to debate immigration. But what would this control look like? What effects would it have, and what is it exactly that we aren’t debating?
Perhaps it comes down to whether there is maximum number of immigrants we can accommodate in the broadest sense of the word, or add to our workforce. If so, is that merely a question of resources and need for certain skills, or of other things, like maintaining shared values?
Speakers
Reading:
Coming up at Birmingham Salon this autumn:
Small Expectations? Social Mobility in the 21st Century
Immigration: Numbers, skills, values or visas?
Saturday 16th September, 1 pm - 5 pm, Birmingham and Midland Institute
Talking Liberty - Escaping the Straitjacket of Mental Health
Saturday 14th October 1 pm - 3 pm, Cherry Reds
Talking Liberty - Social and Political Freedom by Knockout
Saturday 18th November 1pm - 3 pm, Cherry Reds
Talking liberty - Taking conscience seriously
Saturday 24th June, 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Map Room, Cherry Reds, 88-92 John Bright Street, B1 1BN
Free entry but donations welcome. Donations help us to meet speaker travel and room hire costs for our two debate Salon events.
Please book via EventBrite
United? Kingdom?
Saturday 22nd April, 1.00 pm - 5.00 pm
The Arthur Sullivan Room, Birmingham Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BU
Tickets £15 via EventBrite
Join us for the Birmingham book launch of Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy after Brexit (Polity 2023) by Philip Cunliffe, George Hoare, Lee Jones and Peter Ramsay plus a debate on the future of Ireland and another debate on the future of the monarchy.
For the best part of a thousand years the history of Ireland has been bound up with that of England. The relationship has never been a stable one. England made many attempts to subjugate and colonise its neighbour. The plantation system which it introduced there acted as a model for later British colonial adventures. The harsh treatment of the Catholic majority was one factor in ensuring that the attempt to incorporate Ireland into the United Kingdom was never likely to succeed for long. Similarly the granting of partial independence and the partition of the island provoked violent upheaval that has never been fully resolved.
Pauline Hadaway: writer and researcher. Pauline completed her doctoral research at University of Manchester examining the cultural economy and politics of peace building in Northen Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement.
Peter Ramsay, Professor of Law, LSE. Peter also writes about politics at thenorthernstar.online
Chair:
Chrissie Daz
Reading:
The Graveyard of Euroscepticism, Peter Ramsay, Northern Star
Will the Windsor Framework get Brexit Done? Tom McTague, UnHerd
Is there no growth in support for a united Ireland? Is support shrinking instead? FactCheck NI
Don Milligan: author, The Embrace of Capital: Capitalism from the Inside (Zero books 2022. Don has been a gay activist, trade unionist, and member of the communist movement for many years.
Tessa Clarke: Tessa is a journalist, author, documentary reporter and blogs at Diary.of.a.Journalist on Instagram. She is the author of two books on free speech, privacy and the royals.
Chair:
Rosie Cuckston
Reading:
What's wrong with the monarchy? Don Milligan, Off the Cuff
The republican anti-aesthetic, Samuel Martin, The Critic
The rational case for a British republic, Mick Hume, Spiked Online
Talking liberty - The seductive power of literature
Saturday 25th March, 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Map Room, Cherry Reds, 88-92 John Bright Street, B1 1BN
Free entry but donations welcome. Donations help us to meet speaker travel costs for our two debate Salon events.
Please book via EventBrite
Talking Liberty - In defence of teaching history
Saturday 25th February
1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Map Room, Cherry Reds, 88-92 John Bright Street, B1 1BN
Free entry but donations welcome. Donations help us to meet speaker travel costs for our two debate Salon events.
Please book via EventBrite
Aspects of the Omnicrisis
Saturday 28th January, 1.00 pm - 5.00 pm
The Arthur Sullivan Room, Birmingham Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BU
Tickets £15 available at the event (cash only) or via EventBrite
National interest and global order - which comes first?
1.15 pm - 2.45 pm
The war in Ukraine has not undermined supranational institutions which still have the support of the most powerful world leaders. Going it alone doesn’t look like an attractive option. NATO seems to be stronger than ever in most of Europe where many feel threatened by Russia. When British Prime Minister Truss tried to follow a new economic policy, she was soon forced to resign after the IMF commented negatively. When her successor Sunak suggested that he had better things to do than attend the COP27 climate conference such was the criticism, he quickly changed his mind.
Dr Philip Cunliffe, Associate Professor in International Relations, University College London; author, The New Twenty Years’ Crisis 1999-2019: A critique of international relations; co-host, @Bungacast podcast
Dave Aveston
Break: tea/coffee (included in ticket price) 2.45 - 3.15 pm
Reparations, industrial revolution: how should poor nations develop in the 21st century?
3.15 pm - 4.45 pm
Clearly this dream has not been realised; if anything the trend has been in the opposite direction. The Covid pandemic and responses to it is part of the reason for this. Previous explanations for uneven development have ranged from crudely racist ones, cultural and geographical factors, naked exploitation and the exigencies of cold war politics. Behind even the most despicable of these explanations, however, there always lay an understanding that, at least in principle, the poor world ought to be allowed to catch up and that worldwide industrial development of the kind seen in the West would be in the interests of humanity as a whole. But this thinking has changed. At COP27 it was clear that the industrial revolution is now viewed as the first step on the path to the climate emergency.
Do climate change and other environmental impacts of industrial development mean we have come up against a natural barrier beyond which it is no longer possible to go? Is it now necessary to restrain growth in order to avoid destroying the planet, and what will that mean for billions of people in conditions of extreme poverty? Should they not enjoy the high standards of living modern society has shown are possible? Are Western environmentalist ideals just another form of colonialism or do they offer a different pathway, learning from previous mistakes and sparing people from catastrophe? Could loss and damage payments from the rich countries be part of a better route to development or are they tokenistic in the bigger scheme of changes that poor countries need?
Speakers:
Austin Williams, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Kingston School of Art; author China's Urban Revolution:Understanding Chinese Eco-cities
John Vogler, Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations, University of Keele; author Climate Change in World Politics
Chair:
Chrissie Daz
The global south has the power to force radical climate action, Jason Hickel, Al Jazeera