Timothy Garton Ash talks to Chris Patten

Contemporary historian and Europe expert Professor Timothy Garton Ash discusses his desire for more and better freedom of expression in the first of a new series of annual festival lectures in which a leading figure is invited by Lord Chris Patten to discuss freedom of speech.

Garton Ash has written widely about contemporary Europe including the activities of dictators and dissidents. He also leads the Free Speech Debate project. It recognises that in today’s connected world there has never been such an opportunity to express opinion. Yet, this connectedness has also given opportunities to paedophiles and for threats of violence and gross intrusions into privacy. Garton Ash has argued for a set of principles to govern free speech across the world, set out in his book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. He also co-wrote the University of Oxford’s freedom of speech statement, which identifies free speech as the lifeblood of a university.

Garton Ash is Professor of European studies at the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He writes regularly for The Guardian and is author of 11 books including Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name and Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. He is a winner of the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the Charlemagne Prize.

Here he talks to Patten, a former chairman of the Conservative Party, former European commissioner, former governor of Hong Kong and former chancellor of the University of Oxford. Patten will invite a new guest each year to talk about freedom of speech. The festival has drawn up its own statement in support of freedom of speech, which commits it to ‘freedom of speech, debate and diversity, maintaining a tradition of courteous dialogue, allowing for contentious and difficult subjects to be publicly discussed and examined’.