Claire is regularly invited to comment on developments in culture, education and the media on TV and radio. She writes regularly for national newspapers and a range of specialist journals. She has a monthly column in the MJ.

Moral Maze, Is idleness good for us? BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Is idleness good for us?

Nicola Sturgeon has argued for a wider debate on teenagers' rights, as she defended plans to allow 16-year-olds to change their legal gender in Scotland. Each society settles on its own thresholds to determine when a person is old enough to make informed decisions about matters including voting, having sex or drinking alcohol. This is a collective agreement about the legal point at which human beings reach maturity. But what is human maturity in moral terms? Michael joined the BBC in 1970. During his subsequent years as a foreign correspondent, which included a four-year posting to South Africa, he reported from 53 countries. He has won numerous awards including Radio Broadcaster of the Year, the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year and the BAFTA News Award. Michael Buerk chairs a special Moral Maze debate recorded at 'HowTheLightGetsIn' festival of philosophy and music. For a number of years he was a research psychologist at the Centre for Research into Perception and Cognition (CRPC) at the University of Sussex. For the past decade, he has been an independent writer, lecturer, researcher and broadcaster. His books include The Meaning of Race (1996) and Man, Beast and Zombie (2000). His latest book Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate will be published in June 2008. Melanie Phillips

The Evidence Toolkit

A distinction is often made between positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is the absence of constraints (‘freedom from’) – while positive freedom is the possibility of acting in such a way as to take control of one’s life (‘freedom to’). Libertarians often see individual freedom - the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods, free from interference – as the most fundamental value that any society should pursue and protect. This view is challenged by those who believe wealth, health and educational inequalities inevitably mean some people are more free than others, and seek instead to promote the collective freedom of society as a whole. But where should the limits be? The police and armed forces can’t go on strike but doctors and nurses can, as well as other essential workers. Is a strike still morally acceptable if it causes widespread misery or severely damages the economy, or if lives are lost as a result? Aristotle warned against trusting the judgments of the young, saying, “they have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations”. Meanwhile, psychological studies suggest that the period of adolescence among Gen Z has extended – ‘25 is the new 18’ – which means that ‘adult’ roles and responsibilities now occur later than in they once did. All this is evidence, according to some, that teenagers’ judgments are less likely to be sound than their elders, and rather than expecting them to be political beings, we should allow them to be kids. Conversely, there are those who argue that younger generations have been failed by a system that is rigged to favour the interests of older people; that they should play more of an active role in our democracy because their concerns are the concerns of the future; and that they are more likely to make better judgements about society because they are far more connected to the world and aware of their own values than previous generations. David has won the What The Papers Say 1998 award for a writer about broadcasting, the 2000 Orwell prize for journalism and the What The Papers Say 2003 Columnist of the Year award.

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Happiness BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Happiness

Michael was re-elected to Parliament in a by-election in Kensington and Chelsea in November 1999 and was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer February 2000 - September 2001. Following the Conservatives' election defeat in 2001, Michael unsuccessfully contested the leadership of the party. In 2005 Michael left the House of Commons. Is it morally acceptable to go on strike, disrupting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people who are uninvolved in a dispute? This week’s rail strike is expected to be the biggest in 30 years with only a fraction of services running and widespread disruption. But whatever the arguments behind the dispute, what’s the moral case for a strike? The changing media landscape has brought new challenges to the principle of impartiality. The media regulator Ofcom has recently investigated GB News. Among their alleged breaches of impartiality was an item in which the Conservative Chancellor was interviewed by two other Conservative MPs.He is the author of two books " Paddling to Jerusalem", which won the Madoc prize for travel journalism, and Voodoo Histories - a modern history of conspiracy theories - published in early May 2009. Michael Buerk The first programme on Monday 20 August 1990, was forty minutes long from 11 am, and followed by Poetry Please. It was made by the Factual Unit of Religious Programmes (later called Factual Programmes Religion) at BBC North in Manchester. It was hoped that the programme format would involve the panellists' views being revised during the course of a programme, but this rarely happened. Matthew was appointed to the Labour Party in 1994 to establish Labour's rebuttal operation. During the 1997 General Election he was Labour's Director of Policy. Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas, an agenda-setting organisation committed to forging a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint. Claire initiated the Institute of Ideas whilst co-publisher of the controversial and ground-breaking current affairs journal LM magazine.