Moral Maze

A record one in seven people in England were prescribed antidepressants in the last year, according to NHS figures. More than nine million patients now take the drugs, and while they may be essential in many cases, the prevalence of mental ill-health – stress, anxiety, burnout – is a moral issue as well as a medical one. Why are more people, including under-18s, presenting to their GP with these conditions, and what should we do about it?
Many clinicians believe anti-depressants serve an important function, including in milder cases, particularly where access to talking therapies is limited. This, they say, is both a practical and compassionate response to suffering, and a respect for patient autonomy. However, there is disagreement among psychiatrists, some of whom argue that everyday stress is being patholigised. They see drugs as morally hazardous in certain cases, since they alter mental sates, blunt emotions and create dependence on the drugs themselves, reducing people’s long-term capacity to cope.
Beyond the clinical response, there are deeper questions to consider about our society and culture. NHS figures suggest patients in the most deprived areas were prescribed antidepressants 44% more than in the least deprived areas. Many mental health campaigners see the crisis as a social harm, caused by poverty, inequality and insecurity. They believe that rather than simply treating the symptoms of distress, we have a social responsibility to fix the structural causes: better housing, secure working conditions, and a fairer distribution of the resources people need to live dignified lives. For others, the crisis represents something even more fundamental: a loss of meaning, purpose, connection, and resilience.
How should we respond to rising mental distress?
Chair: Michael Buerk
Panel: Ash Sarkar, Giles Fraser, Anne McElvoy and Carmody Grey
Witnesses: Ellie Cannon, Joanna Moncrieff, Polly Mackenzie and Mark Vernon
Producer: Dan Tierney
Assistant producer: Peter Everett
Editor: Tim Pemberton

AI data centres are expanding across the UK and around the world. Tech giants and governments see them as essential infrastructure for future prosperity; the engines of economic growth, scientific innovation, improved healthcare and national security. Advocates believe they will bring about the next technological leap forward for humanity.
But there are always trade-offs. Critics point to the immediate environmental costs; the demand for electricity, water and land. They question whether the promised rewards justify the sacrifices, particularly for local populations who face the disruption of new developments while the economic benefits go elsewhere.
Are we, as a society, being swept along by an AI 'arms race' we didn’t consent to? Are we right to put faith in tech billionaires who prophesy a future of progress and human flourishing, or are we simply enabling more consumption? (Every video of Elon Musk as Austin Powers drinks around 4 litres of water). And even if AI promises to solve climate change and eradicate disease, how much are we willing to place on that bet today?
Chair: Michael Buerk
Panel: Giles Fraser, Mona Siddiqui, Andrew Copson and Ella Whelan.
Witnesses: Owen Espley, Michael Tobin, Carissa Véliz, Carlo Cordasco.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Assistant producer: Peter Everett
Editor: Tim Pemberton

Michael Buerk chairs a special debate from the Hay Festival examining the morality of networks.
The release of the Epstein files has been a reminder that power often flows not just through formal institutions, but through webs of connection: political friendships, old school ties, and professional circles. There's been focused attention on how influential networks operate, and how access, opportunity and protection can follow. Critics say such cases expose a world where success depends less on merit than on who you know.
But networks are not confined to the wealthy or the powerful. From journalism and politics to business, academia and religion, informal relationships shape how institutions actually work. People rely on contacts for jobs, introductions and advice. Trust is built through familiarity. Sociologists call this “social capital”, the networks of relationships that allow communities and organisations to function. Anthropologists go further: humans are a networked species, whose survival has long depended on cooperation, loyalty and mutual obligation.
The moral tension is that the same instincts that create trust also draw boundaries. Networks build solidarity, but they also decide who is inside and who is left outside. Opportunity, influence and sometimes harm can circulate within closed circles. What looks like loyalty from the inside can look like exclusion from the outside.
So when does social capital become social injustice? Are networks the glue of society, or the architecture of privilege?
Chair: Michael Buerk;
Panel: Anne McElvoy, Matthew Taylor, Mona Siddiqui and Ella Whelan;
Witnesses: Aaron Reeves, George Pitcher, Andrew Graystone, Julia Hobsbawm;
Producer: Dan Tierney;
Editor: Tim Pemberton.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. During his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 620 slaves. As America marks 250 years since the Declaration, that contradiction is impossible to look past: a document of universal liberty, written by men who denied it to the women in their households, the people they enslaved, and the nations whose land they were settling.
One reading says this was hypocrisy - that "all men" never meant all men, that the rhetoric of equality was cover for the interests of rich, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and that the centuries of struggle since have been a slow correction of a lie dressed up as a promise. Another reading says something genuinely radical was set loose that day - a principle larger than its authors, one that would eventually demand Abolition, Enfranchisement and the end of Segregation, precisely because the words of the Declaration meant more than the men who put their names to it could envisage. On this account, the Founding Fathers endorsed an ideal and left their descendants to grow into it.
That same split runs through America today. The current presidency has departed from constitutional norms everyone had assumed were solid - over courts, elections, the press and the limits of executive power. One view says this is a crisis the Republic will survive: a serious one, but a blip in the two and a half centuries during which American institutions have weathered civil war, economic depression, and social upheaval, and during which the founding ideals have always held firm. The soul of America gets shaken, but it holds. The other view says the Republic was never held together by Constitutional Law - it was held together by a myth - a shared belief, perhaps deluded, that Americans would behave decently and that the norms would prevail. Once a leader has tested every one of those boundaries and paid no price, the myth shatters, and there is nothing to stop the next leader from going further. On this view, the current administration is a distorted reflection of what America truly is.
Chair: Michael Buerk
Panel: Giles Fraser, Carmody Grey, Matthew Taylor and Tim Stanley.
Witnesses: Richard Carwardine, Aziz Rana, Adam White and Claire Ainsley.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Assistant Producer: Pater Everett
Editor: Tim Pemberton

If Andy Burnham has a four-word philosophy, it is 'the politics of place', a phrase he uses often. Burnham argues that politics must concentrate on meeting local needs, on the devolution of power and on 'levelling up' the places that have been doing badly.
While he was winning in Makerfield, the Scottish Conservatives were winning in Aberdeen South, on a promise to revive the North Sea oil and gas industry. That too was the politics of place.
Burnham’s philosophical opponents say that 'the politics of place' is wrong-headed. What really matters is the destiny of the United Kingdom as a whole. Localism, they argue, undermines national cohesion and elevates nimbyism. It rewards failure and punishes success. The Americans call it pork-barrel politics.
The battle between localists and UK nationalists engages all politicians. Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party are by definition on one side of the line; the DUP in Northern Ireland is on the other. At Westminster, MPs go cross-eyed trying to watch over their constituencies and their careers at the same time. Boris Johnson created a Department for Levelling-Up. Angela Rayner called it ‘government by gimmick’ and abolished it in 2024.
If localism is the answer for Makerfield, is it also the answer for Sparkbrook, where voters might like different licensing laws? Or for Adlington, where locals hate the idea of a new housing estate? Or for Harmondsworth, which doesn’t want a Heathrow third runway at the bottom of the garden?
The politics of place; it looks good. But will Burnham, like Pandora, open this tempting box, only to release all the troubles of the world? In his victory speech he promised us ‘hope’. In the Greek myth, the gift of hope was merely a consolation prize.
Chair: Michael Buerk
Panel: Anne McElvoy, Ash Sarkar, Giles Fraser, and Sonia Sodha
Witnesses: Paul Vallely, Maxwell Marlow, Sir Paul Collier and David Goodhart.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Assistant Producer: Peter Everett
Editor: Tim Pemberton