Tag: Rock Against Racism

It was mercilessly lampooned last summer as the “Tory Glastonbury” – a paddock of largely male Conservative supporters in red chinos who could only dream of aping the adulation Jeremy Corbyn received from young fans at the music festival months earlier. The vision behind the Big Tent Ideas festival, brainchild of the Tory MP George Freeman, was to to connect the party with young people and build a centre-right movement to propel it forward. One year on, however, the festival has returned with a new strategy. “It’s totally different. I have made it non-party political so that MPs, peers and others from the centre left can also get involved,” said Freeman. The writer Maya Goodfellow, a Labour supporter, said it also derived from a notion that politics and culture should not be separate. Goodfellow said of her experience as a speaker at Labour Live: “The thing I really enjoyed was that people came up to me afterwards and wanted to continue with the discussion after the event had officially ended, and we were able to do that. Meanwhile, “festivals of ideas” have become part of the university landscape. “People are genuinely concerned and, personally, I think that they like engaging more directly with speakers because they often just don’t feel they are listened to by political decision makers.” Freeman said events like the Big Tent Ideas festival were important because “for a generation under 40 the traditional party conference is as dead as a dodo”. The left has actually been a bit better at recognising that but we are changing that.”