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Join the Intelligence2 debate

Join us in the great Intelligence2 debate

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 12th September 2007

The Spectator’s new partnership with the debating forum

If you don’t know about it already — and the chances are that you do — Intelligence2 is one of the intellectual phenomena of the age. Founded in 2002, it stages debates that address the most stimulating, provocative and topical issues of our times, events that fill the capacious Royal Geographical Society in London with ease.

There is plenty of philosophical fudge around these days: ‘round table discussions’, consensus politics and vapid chat shows. But Intelligence2 relishes its adversarial character and celebrates the gladiatorial force of the human intellect: the participants want to win the argument, and the votes of the audience. In the course of a debate, the advantage see-saws from one side to the other, and back again, as facts are marshalled, Ciceronian rhetoric deployed and wit turned to the combatants’ advantage.

And the quality of its speakers has been consistently awesome: in the past few months alone, such luminaries as Bernard-Henri Levy, Stephen Bayley, Howard Jacobson, Charles Murray and Lord Woolf. The themes, meanwhile, are hard-edged and contemporary: already this year, Intelligence2 has asked whether we should thank God for Brussels; if Nato’s mission in Afghanistan is doomed; and whether democracy is really for everyone.

So what more natural partner for The Spectator? From next Wednesday, 19 September, we shall be podcasting live from IQ2 debates at www.spectator.co.uk. Next week’s motion addresses the thorny issue of our nation’s legacy in Africa and invites the house to vote on the proposition: ‘Britain has failed Zimbabwe’. On this occasion, the line-up of experts will include R.W. Johnson, Peter Godwin, David Coltart MP, and John Makumbe. Next, on Tuesday 9 October, Douglas Murray, David Aaronovitch, Ibn Warraq, Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple and Charles Glass will go into battle over the motion: ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’.

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