Why Sheffield's Festival of Debate has never been more important

How else will we be able to face the future with any degree of confidence or positivity?

So it is really good news that Sheffield’s Festival of Debate, originally scheduled to take place from April 14 to May 31, with 15,000 people expected to attend over 130 public events, is going ahead virtually this year, providing a much-needed forum online for conversations about the most urgent issues of our time.

“When we had to make the difficult decision to pull the festival due to the lockdown, we knew we wanted it to go ahead in some form,” says festival founder and programmer Joe Kriss. “But we also realised that almost overnight the festival, as planned, had become hopelessly out of date. We knew we had to view all these issues and talking points through the lens of Covid-19. So the festival has been re-programmed almost from scratch.”

“It went really well, and being online we can theoretically reach an even wider audience,” says Kriss. “We had over a thousand people watching the livestream, including some from Spain and Italy, and people will still be able to watch that event, and all the others, after the actual day, so there is a longer shelf life.”

Now in its sixth year, the festival was established in the run-up to the 2015 General Election in a bid to combat apathy and disillusion with mainstream politics and to re-engage people with political debate, avoiding the potential divisiveness of party politics and focussing instead on key topics.

The current circumstances, says Kriss, could actually present a chance for a radical rethink in how our society functions. “There was a recent survey carried out by the RSA which found that only nine percent of Britons want things to return to ‘normal’ after the lockdown. Most people accept that there really needs to be a change. That is partly driven by the fact that a lot people suddenly feel insecure and maybe are beginning to understand what a more deprived part of society has been going through for years.”

Does he feel optimistic about how this might play out? “I think we have got to be,” he says. “If we believe nothing will change, then nothing will. There are solutions out there to the problems we are facing and we need to build on empathy and goodwill to address social inequalities. There are new participative forms of democracy and opportunities for people to be active citizens.”

The festival is playing a crucial part in informing and educating, in encouraging participation and engagement. Now it’s up to us to make the world a better place – for everyone.

The Festival of Debate online festivalofdebate.com

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