8 Dec 2025 | News
Are you committed to defending freedom of expression and supporting impactful journalism and advocacy work? Index on Censorship is seeking a skilled Development Officer to help drive our fundraising strategy and strengthen the organisation at a pivotal moment in its history.
You will play a leading role in securing income from trusts and foundations, individual donors, corporate partners and public funders, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the organisation. Working closely with the CEO and wider team, you’ll craft compelling cases for support, build meaningful relationships with supporters and help us expand and diversify our funding base. As part of that you’ll contribute to the overall organisational strategy in what is an impact-driven, central role.
This is an exciting opportunity to make a significant contribution to an internationally recognised organisation championing free expression around the world.
About Index:
Index on Censorship is Britain’s leading organisation that campaigns for, reports on and defends free expression worldwide. We publish work by censored writers and artists, promote debate and monitor threats to free speech. Our work is varied and always rewarding. On any given day we will be publishing letters written by Belarus political prisoners and defending a cartoonist who might have caused offence – all to make the case that freedom of expression is vital for democracy and for a vibrant and creative society.
At the organisation’s heart and in circulation since 1972 is an award-winning quarterly magazine that has featured some of the world’s best-known writers. In addition to the magazine is a website, a weekly newsletter, a policy arm and an events programme. Together they make Index what it is today – the go-to for information on the global free speech landscape.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead on implementing Index’s fundraising and development strategy
- Research, plan and write funding applications to trusts, foundations and public funders
- Monitor budgets and reporting requirements, ensuring compliance and high-quality submissions, and tracking impact
- Develop individual giving and membership initiatives
- Identify and cultivate relationships with donors and partners; represent Index at events and briefings
- Support wider organisational strategy, income diversification and risk analysis
- Maintain accurate donor and funder records and track progress towards targets
- Measure impact of Index programmes
Person Specification:
Essential –
- Proven track record in successful fundraising, ideally from trusts, foundations or Arts Council England
- Experience building and managing donor relationships
- Strong written communication skills and ability to produce persuasive proposals
- Sound financial literacy and experience managing budgets/reporting
- Ability to manage multiple priorities and work independently
- Strong research, organisational and interpersonal skills
- A passion for freedom of expression as a value
Desirable –
- Knowledge of freedom of expression, media, arts or human rights sectors
- Experience developing corporate partnerships or membership schemes
- Familiarity with databases, digital communications and event organisation
Hours: Three days per week, contract.
Salary: £21,000–£22,800 for 3 days per week (equivalent to £35,000–£38,000 full-time)
Location: Remote but with occasional travel to London or elsewhere
Index is a small and ambitious organisation that values diversity. We are committed to equal opportunities and welcome all applicants regardless of ethnic origin, national origin, gender, gender identity, race, colour, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, age or marital status.
To apply please send a cover letter with your CV by Sunday 11th January 2026 to [email protected]
4 Dec 2025 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News
The line between fact and fiction often overlaps in Jafar Panahi’s films.
Take Taxi Tehran from 2015 for instance. The film takes place inside a cab with three hidden cameras. Panahi, an internationally acclaimed award-winning Iranian director, plays himself. He just so happens to be driving a taxi around the Iranian capital. What initially seems like an improv documentary eventually turns out to be a satirical conceit. Namely: the director is using the safe space of a private car to freely discuss what would ordinarily be off limits to discuss publicly in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Among the passengers that Panahi picks up is the Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh. Over the last 15 years she has been imprisoned twice in her native country. Her last stint was for defending women prosecuted for appearing in public without a hijab. Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, is also now serving a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for voicing public opposition to Iran’s compulsory hijab laws. In Taxi Tehran, Sotoudeh speaks about defending human rights and free speech in a theocratic-totalitarian-police state. “First they mount a political case,” Sotoudeh explains. “They beef it up with a morality charge, then they make your life hell.”
In that same scene, Sotoudeh notices the director looking at his back window.
“Looking for someone?” she asks.
“I heard a voice … I thought I recognised my interrogator,” Panahi replies.
Sotoudeh mentions how her clients often say this. “They want to identify people by their voices,” she says. “Advantage of blindfolds.”
“This reference in Taxi [Tehran] to prisoners hearing sounds is a communal experience shared by all prisoners of conscience,” Panahi told Index from Los Angeles, via a Farsi translator. “In my current film I wanted to talk about a [similar] experience. This time, however, the sound is coming from a disabled [prosthetic] leg, which becomes the moving engine of the film.”
Panahi’s latest movie, It was Just an Accident, won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and opens in UK cinemas this coming Friday, 5 December. The story begins in a mechanics’ workshop, where a man named Vahid is convinced he has just encountered Eghbal – a prison inspector who once caused him great pain and suffering. Vahid hears Eghbal before he sees him. He can never forget the eerie squeaking sound Eghbal’s prosthetic leg makes in motion. He remembers it from prison, where “Peg Leg” was known as a sadistic torturer. The traumatised Iranian mechanic later kidnaps Eghbal and even considers killing him. But has he got the right man? To tease out his doubts, Vahid rounds up a group of former prisoners to seek their advice.
What follows is a brilliant farcical black comedy-road trip movie. Despite the light-hearted banter, the film poses two serious ethical questions. One, how far will an individual – or a group – go to seek revenge on former enemy? Two, at what point does revenge violence make the victim the victimiser?
It was Just an Accident has been selected by France as its official nomination for the Academy Awards this coming March. It may be Panahi’s most overtly political film to date. But the 65-year-old Iranian moviemaker disagrees.
“I don’t make political films, which typically tend to divide people into good and bad,” he insists. “I make social films, where everyone is a human being.”
The film’s script was inspired from several conversations Panahi had with inmates he befriended while serving time in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. In March 2010, Panahi was convicted by a Revolutionary Court in Iran of propaganda for his film-making and political activism. He subsequently spent 86 days behind bars, he explained: “For the first 15 to 20 days I was in a small cell in solitary confinement, where I was interrogated.”
That same year, the Iranian regime handed Panahi a 20-year ban that forbade him from directing films or writing screenplays. “This [censorship] I experience presents many challenges to keep making films, but a social filmmaker is inspired by the circumstances in which they live,” said Panahi. “If I lived in a freer society what would inspire me? I don’t know.”
Despite the ban, Panahi is a prolific filmmaker who never stops creating. Many of his films have focused on the complications of making films with a state-imposed censorship hanging over his head. They include the ironically titled, This Is Not a Film (2011), which was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick concealed inside a birthday cake, and No Bears (2022).
No Bears has two stories in it. The first is about migrants heading off to Europe and the second is about Panahi, who is stuck back in Iran, as his film crew attempt to complete the film they are shooting just across the border in Turkey. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Panahi was unable to collect the prize. He was then back in Evin prison, after a Tehran court ruled he must serve the six-year sentence he was handed more than a decade before for supporting anti-government demonstrations.
“According to the law [in Iran] if a sentence is issued but not gone into effect for ten years, it should not be executed,” said Panahi. “However, [the regime] said that this is not true about political prisoners. They were lying though.”
During this second prison term Panahi was in a public ward with 300 or so prisoners, of whom roughly 40 were prisoners of conscience, he said: “On that occasion I did not face interrogations or solitary confinement, which meant I could speak and listen to the prisoners’ stories.”
Panahi remained in prison until the following February. After his release, he noticed many changes in Iranian society. The previous September, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, was beaten to death in Tehran by Iran’s so-called morality police after being accused of defying the country’s hijab rule. The state sanctioned homicide inspired the Woman Life Freedom uprising, which saw an estimated two million take to the streets across Iran. Many ripped and burnt posters of their political leaders, while others openly chanted, “Death to the Islamic Republic!” Iranian security forces, meanwhile, responded by killing hundreds of protesters.
“The history of the Islamic Republic [will eventually] be divided into before and after the timeline of this movement,” said Panahi. “The impact has been enormous and even made its way into cinema.”
Specifically, Panahi was referring to the fact that many women who appear in It Was Just an Accident – including actors and extras – are not wearing the hijab. “Much of what you see in the background of the film is people being filmed as they are in daily life in Iran today,” said Panahi. “For example, one woman who agreed to be in the film as an extra said to me: ‘If you are going to force me to wear the hijab, I am not going to do that.’ I told her: ‘You appear as you wish’.”
It’s not a view the authorities in the Islamic Republic endorse. Just days after Index spoke to the Iranian director, he was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a travel ban over “propaganda activities” against Iran. The news was broken via the French news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP), who cited Panahi’s lawyer, Mostafa Nili, as a source.
At the time of writing, Panahi remains outside Iran. Prior to news of his new prison sentence being issued, Panahi told Index he could not imagine living somewhere in which he has only a touristy outlook and superficial understanding of the people and culture: “I have lived in Iran for 65 years and I make films about Iranians. I don’t want to stop making films because life without cinema has no meaning to me.”
“[In Iran] when you work you will have problems as a filmmaker there and anywhere in the world the Iranian authorities can get their hands on you,” Panahi concluded. “But you accept this is the price to be paid, and you get through what you have to in order to make the film you want to make.”
3 Dec 2025 | Americas, News, United States
A year ago, I asked whether academic freedom could survive Donald Trump’s plans for thought control. We now have the answer. Trump’s most effective weapon to this end has been the financial mechanisms linking state and academia. In the first week of his presidency, Trump ordered a “temporary pause” on billions of dollars in funding for education and scientific research already approved by Congress. This was followed by a wave of 30 Executive Orders and legislation relating to higher education in the first 75 days of the new administration. Collectively, these have had a devastating impact on independent research, threatening to engineer compliant instruction in America’s universities.
The trend toward limiting academic freedom is not limited to the United States. In the United Kingdom, research intensive universities have begun to prepare for the worst. As reported in The Times of London this week, Cambridge University have been “cosying up” to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, amid fears that it will copy Trump’s approach to academic freedom if they form the next UK government. During the electoral campaign last year, Reform promised to “cut funding to universities that undermine free speech [sic]”; with this threat in mind, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice warned the university’s governing council that “what the US example reminds you is you have to worry about what’s coming next.”
A mapping of the impact of the Trump administration’s cull by the Center for American Progress documented that it had targeted the termination of more than 4,000 grants across over 600 universities and colleges across the country, alongside funding cuts of between $3.3 billion and $3.7 billion. In the resulting fallout, clinical trials for cancer, covid and minority health have been stopped, satellite missions halted, and climate centres closed.
Funding freezes have been justified on the pretext of allegations of antisemitism in America’s universities, alongside claims that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices constitute “discrimination” against some students. According to a memo dispatched by the Executive Office of the President in January 2025, “[t]he use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”
This dual framing produces contradictory and uneven demands: universities are under pressure to suppress some forms of free expression while tolerating others. In March, Trump warned institutions that a failure to crack down on “illegal protests” could jeopardise their eligibility for federal funding. DEI was cast as evidence of thought policing; professors have lost funding for researching “woke” subjects, and even been fired for allegedly teaching “gender ideology”. All this reinforces a climate in which activities or speech seen as “liberal” are punished, while opinions aligned with the administration are protected. This perception was reinforced by the firing of up to 40 educators for comments made on social media following the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, leaving many professors unsure what they can say online.
The first casualty was Columbia University – $400m in grants were pulled over campus protests – the university settled, as did Brown. The Trump administration also dramatically ramped up enforcement of university reporting of large foreign gifts or contracts from countries like China and the Middle East. Several top institutions including Berkeley and Harvard are under active investigation. While donations can be an important vector for foreign influence, this escalation has unfolded within a broader pattern of punitive oversight including an Executive Order in January to resulted in a wave of foreign students being deported due to their involvement in Gaza protests. A District Judge recently ruled that targeting noncitizen students and faculty for deportation based on speech violated the First Amendment. Seen as a whole, the real function of these acts is making the university sector’s financial survival contingent on political alignment with the administration.
An article in Inside Higher Ed provides a vivid account from a PhD student of the impact of this squeeze on higher education in the United States. “Our institution is just scrambling to figure out what DEI is and what programs will be affected,” the doctoral researcher said. “I study the development of disease, which tends to affect populations of certain ethnic and cultural backgrounds more than others. Is that DEI?”
According to a poll of 1600 scientists conducted by Nature, three-quarters of respondents were considering leaving the United States following the Trump upheaval, with Europe and Canada cited as the most favoured destinations for relocation. This is hardly surprising, given the uncertainty of the moment. But is the grass truly greener on the other side? The events of the last year have sent tremors internationally, largely because of the influential status and respect accorded to US academia. As Rob Quinn, executive director of US body Scholars At Risk, told The Guardian, “We are witnessing an unprecedented situation – really as far as I can tell in history – where a global leader of education and research is voluntarily dismantling that which gave it an advantage.”
As noted above, there are fears of a similar attack on higher education in the United Kingdom. Universities are already facing similar dilemmas concerning contradictory interpretations of the right to free speech. The Office of Students has threatened to sanction universities if campus protests over Palestine and the war in Gaza are deemed to constitute “harassment and discrimination” – while in parallel rolling out similar sanctions against universities for actions taken to prevent transphobic abuse and harassment. Countries around the world are watching developments with apprehension and Scholars At Risk have warned that the Trump administration’s assault on universities is turning the US into a “model for how to dismantle” academic freedom.
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, has argued that the Trump administration’s actions are not in accordance with the law. “They don’t have any statutory or regulatory authority to suspend research on the basis of accusations.” Fansmith sees the freezes as a way “to force a negotiation so they can claim victory when they lack any sort of authority or any sort of evidence that would allow them to do it in the appropriate way.”
In October, dealmaker-in-chief Trump offered a “compact” to nine universities, offering them preferential funding arrangements if they acceded to a list of demands. These, PEN America reported, included a prohibition on employees “making statements on social or political matters on behalf of the university”, and screening international students for “anti-American values.” Other requirements included an enforcement of a binary definition of gender, a freeze on tuition rates charged to American students for five years, and the removal of diversity as a factor for consideration in admissions decisions. Seven of the nine targeted institutions declined the offer and no major research universities agreed to sign; it seems clear that entering into such a compact would, in effect end academic independence and institutional autonomy.
The Trump administration’s tactic of extracting concessions by manufacturing crises that it then offers to resolve has had some wins though, with some universities “obeying in advance” as Timothy Snyder might say. Under significant pressure – by way of a $790 million funding freeze and a Title VI civil rights investigation – Northwestern University recently reached a $75 million settlement (albeit without conceding liability) with the Trump administration. As part of the settlement agreeement, Northwestern agreed to investigate claims of antisemitism and make statements on transgender issues that reflected Trump’s Executive Order on the issue, and promised that admissions procedures will no longer take into account “race, color, or national origin”.
Beyond funding, accreditation has become another pressure point, with professional bodies being pushed by authorities to eliminate requirements relating to diversity or social justice. The American Bar Association, for example, is reviewing its accreditation standards and has suspended enforcement of its DEI standard for law schools – an indication of the federal government’s success in pushing accreditation bodies into shifting existing norms.
All this said: in the face of potentially dire outcomes, a number of states, universities and grantees have challenged the Trump imperative in court, offering to the academic community examples of principled resistance and coalition building. Even as UCLA continued to negotiate a $1 billion fine levied on it by the administration, its frustrated faculty launched a suit to defend the institution, successfully securing a preliminary injunction preventing Government from using funding threats to override the First Amendment.
Mechanisms like regulatory friction, funding conditions, and culture war mobilisation do not need to eliminate dissent for their effect to be felt. They only need to make dissent administratively burdensome and financially risky. Academic freedom in a democracy dies not through troops taking direct control of campus, but in thousands of bureaucratic changes and risk-averse decisions – each justified as temporary, each rationalised as necessary. University administrations tend to see a clear strategic trade-off between short-term compliance and securing resources for the longer term. But the cost of this trade-off is sacrificing the freedom to think and speak that would be impossible to reverse: turning independent research, in effect, into a theatre of political compliance. When the world’s most powerful research sector is pressured into ideological alignment, it also sends a powerful message to far right political movements in the United Kingdom and everywhere else: independent scholarship can be subordinated, teachers tamed, compliance secured, if you simply follow the Trump model. The stakes could not be higher, and American universities must unite in support of their faculty to both defeat the current assault and win the larger war.
3 Dec 2025 | Belgium, Europe and Central Asia, European Union, Hungary, News, United Kingdom
The conference, the Battle for the Soul of Europe, opens in the Belgian capital on Wednesday (3 December). Below is an interview with Frank Furedi, director of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels, which has organised the event.
Furedi, one time professor of sociology at the University of Kent (and still an emeritus professor), has lined up a list of mostly conservative and right-wing figures to speak. A central theme of the conference is free speech, including one panel entitled Against the language police: Why we must reclaim speech.
Speakers include British journalist Melanie Phillips and political scientist Matt Goodwin; US author Patrick Deneen and right-wing figures in Europe including Giorgia Meloni ally, Francesco Giubilei, and the French right-wing feminist Alice Cordier.
The MCC is a Hungarian think-tank and educational institute based in Budapest (with a Brussels outpost run by Furedi). Its board chairman is Balázs Orbán, who is also the political director for Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán (no relative).
We talked to Furedi about free speech, his relationship with the leader of Europe’s biggest “illiberal democracy”, Viktor Orbán, and being funded by MOL, Hungary’s largest oil company through which Hungary imports its oil from Russia with an EU exemption.
Index: How would you define your politics?
Furedi: I cannot put a clear label on it. I think in many ways, political labels at the moment are fairly confusing, given the shift that has occurred. I would say that when it comes to certain issues to do with history, tradition, families, I would call myself fairly on the conservative side. When it comes to individual matters to do with free speech, tolerance, autonomy, I would see myself as fairly liberal, classical liberal. But when it comes to issues to do with economics welfare, I would say that I’m fairly sympathetic to redistributionist approaches, or what I would call classical left-wing approaches in terms of provision of health and education.
So it’s three, where it’s kind of mixed together. And, yes, that’s how I would describe myself. But if anybody asked me, you know, where are you? I would never use a label just because it wouldn’t capture it. The sort of labels that comes closest to us is what they used to call, in the old days, democratic republicans, sort of republican, not in the party-political sense, but republican in the way that it was classically understood. We’re basically seen … and are probably, on the right spectrum. I suppose the main reason why I came here, I set the whole thing up, was to act as a counterpoint to the dominant political culture. We see ourselves as being like Gramsci in reverse, where we’re challenging the cultural norms that are promoted by the European Commission, and that are fairly hegemonic in most of Western Europe.
Index: I think that’s quite intriguing, because in a sense, you’re using the language of the kind of classical left-wing tradition against the European liberal tradition. Would that be a fair?
Furedi: Yes, which is why I’m very sympathetic. We have some people that work with us that I would call old-school left, as opposed to identity-politics left, who I’m fairly sympathetic to, in terms of my own origins and my own instincts. So, yes, that’s the way I would say it.
Index: You have this quite dramatic-sounding conference… looking at some of the invitees, you might describe them as pretty classically right-wing. The term that is sometimes used is National Conservative (NatCon). What do you feel about that term?
Furedi: Yes, I can see why people would characterise some of the speakers as NatCon… I cannot really help that… We had a meeting the other week… and we had a person like that, and then we had a left-wing speaker from Germany, so I do try to mix it all up. At the moment, it’s quite difficult to get people from different traditions who are roughly interested in the kind of themes that I want to pursue. So that’s why you get the balance that you do. And so, yes, I think I would say that probably the majority of the people there, not all of them, would be conservative… They are, amongst themselves, fairly heterogeneous.
Index: Where do your loyalties lie? Are they to Hungary? Are they to the opposition to the Brussels elite? Are you hostile to Britain? Where do you put yourselves? It’s quite hard to work out.
Furedi: Yes. it is hard to work out, but that’s because you’re lucky, because you grew up in a place where you were born. You probably see yourself as having a very clear identity rooted in a particular cultural milieu. I was born in Hungary, I grew up in North America, I lived almost all my adult life in Britain, and now I’m here involved in creating a kind of a cultural political opposition to the [European] Commission. My loyalty is… I don’t know. I mean, I love Britain… All my close friends and my family are, I suppose, English or they live in Britain. I’ve got a very strong kind of affection, even though I don’t feel British, I don’t feel English. So, the way that I explain, if England is playing Hungary in a football match, I would probably support Hungary because of the underdog status. If England plays against any other team in the world, I would support England in a football match,
Index: A sort of football version of the cricket test.
Furedi: Exactly. And that’s not because I’m disloyal or whatever. It’s just, I always think of English as being my intellectual language and Hungarian, my emotional language. I don’t know if that makes any sense. When I get angry, I swear in Hungarian when I think it’s in English. I don’t feel any affinity to what’s happening here in Brussels, or I have no commitment to any abstract Europeanism, except for the fact that I would like to see a stronger, more cohesive, all-European intellectual alternative to the dominant paradigm.
Index: Clearly there are concerns about Viktor Orbán and Orbán’s government. You have been a vocal champion of free speech and free expression. This would seem somewhat contradictory to some of the things that Orbán’s been doing in terms of attacks on free media.
Furedi: I don’t have a selective approach towards free speech, that it’s good in some places, not good in others. I do think the attacks on Orbán’s government and Hungary over the free media are misconceived… You have a situation where there are TV channels in Hungary that are anti-government and have a very large viewership [Editor’s note: the RSF describes Viktor Orbán as a predator of press freedom with 80% of the media controlled through Orbán’s Fidesz party and their supporters]. You have a situation where the opposition has got a far greater presence on the social media, in social media platforms, than the government has. You go to Budapest, and you go to newspaper shops, you’ll find that there are plenty of newspapers, not one, two or three, but a lot of newspapers hostile and critical to government, so I don’t see it the way it’s represented. I don’t think is unusual… You look at Germany and the way that free speech is being encroached upon fairly systematically, the kind of laws that they have there. You look at France, you look at even Britain, just the way in which people get done for their social media posts. So unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any government, there’s any European country that I can think of that comes out as white knights in relation to the whole area of free speech. I don’t think Hungary is any worse than many of the other countries, but it gets criticised as unique in that respect, a kind of a double standard, which I think misses the point about what’s going on there.
Index: I don’t speak Hungarian. But you know, in the reports that I read Orbán himself does describe himself in semi-authoritarian terms.
Furedi: Illiberal democracy.
Index: Now, obviously part of that is teasing liberals, right? But again, please help me understand what you understand by that, because it sounds quite sinister to me.
Furedi: Well, if you actually look at the speech where he used the term “illiberal democracy”, what he is really saying is that he, he sees democracy as being logically prior to liberalism. As you know, there’s always a big debate between freedom and democracy in all kinds of different environments… He basically argues that his illiberal thing is part of his critique of what he sees liberalism as being. But he doesn’t mean that that freedoms are taken away, or freedoms are encroached in a way that you might imagine. It’s his attempt to be provocative, very successfully, as it happens, in relation to the kind of prevailing consensus. Hungary, and Orbán, is invariably accused of democratic backsliding time and again – I just don’t see that. If there was democratic backsliding, then the opposition wouldn’t win the election in Budapest last time we had local elections…
Index: You are largely funded by the Hungarian government?
Furedi: We are funded by two companies, the oil company, MOL, and Gedeon Richter, the pharmaceutical company. Now you could argue that MCC Hungary has got a close association with the government and it empathises with the government’s politics. Our particular organisation is entirely autonomous. That was the condition on which I took the job or set it up… We decide what issues are important and what issues are not important… Obviously, on many issues, we are very sympathetic to what they’re doing. But we don’t just simply, like in the Soviet Union or in any kind of dictatorial system, tick the boxes. We’re not asked to tick the boxes, but even if we were, [we] wouldn’t tick the boxes unless we agree with it.
Index: So why is it in the interest of the oil company and the pharmaceutical company to back you?
Furedi: Well, that’s an interesting question. I think that these companies, like anywhere else, when you have funders, either for philanthropic or for political reasons, do it for our idea. I think it’s their way of demonstrating their social connection or responsibility. I’ve never met anybody from either one of these two companies, so I don’t really know. But I would imagine it’s because they think that what MCC is doing is really important, because we do a lot of educational work. Part of our job is to, is to raise the intellectual game that Hungary plays. And I think that what we also do through hopefully the interesting and inspirational work that we do, we give Hungary a good name, even though we’re not a Hungarian thinktank. Because most people that work for MCC Brussels are not Hungarian. They come from Europe. But that’s probably the reason why. But you’d have to ask them. I’ve never actually met any of them.
Index: That would seem strange to me, but that’s, I don’t know whether you made a conscious decision not to meet them. But if I were in your position, I would want to meet them and find out what their motivations were.
Furedi: Why? The point is that you’re assuming that he who pays the piper… that we’re somehow kind of internally corrupt, and if somebody sort of gives us money, then we just simply sing from their song sheet. But that’s never happened. If it did, I think not only me, but almost all the key people here would leave, because the whole buzz about doing what we’re doing is we got this real capacity to be independent, and we’re not accountable. We don’t have to play somebody else’s game.
Index: There have been suggestions of a Russian connection. What do you say to the allegations that you are Russian funded?
Furedi: It’s not true. But also, if anybody cared to read a book I wrote a few years ago on the Ukraine War, which has been published by a legitimate Western publisher, I’m totally critical of Russia, and I support Ukraine’s struggle for national independence 120 percent. I stood up at the time against pro-Russian speakers, and I debated them. So I think it’s a weird fantasy to suggest that there is anything to do with a Russian connection. Plus, given my family’s background in ‘56, we are not exactly going to the defense of Russia, given our historical connections.
The interview was conducted by our editor at large Martin Bright
Battle for the Soul of Europe is taking place on 3 and 4 December. Click here for more information
