City AM’s weekly debate feature takes the fiercest water-cooler debates and pits two candidates head to head before delivering The Judge’s ultimate verdict. From the assisted dying bill to the unstoppable rise of Lime, here are seven of our most thought-provoking from 2025.
1. Has Britain lost its work ethic?
“It seems like nobody wants to work these days,” so said Kim K to widespread derision in 2022. But in 2025, public opinion caught up. From Brewdog CEO James Watt (who called Britain the “least work-oriented” country in the world) to shadow minister Chris Philp (who denounced the UK’s lost work ethic), the British worker got a beating this year. But did they deserve it? Gallup’s Jeremie Brecheisen and Netcompany’s Rich Davies battled it out.
Only 10 per cent of UK employees are engaged at work, compared with 23 per cent globally.
2. Should we turn empty City office blocks into nightlife venues?
“By day, the city bustles with suits and stocks. By night, it’s reborn as a pulsating rave arena” – such was the vision of creative studio Bompas and Parr in 2025, who called for deserted office blocks to be repurposed as nightlife venues at evenings and weekends. Madness or genius? Night -time industry aficionado Michael Kill took on property boss Harry Fenner.
Crucially, this is not about replacing financial services with fun, it’s about adaptive reuse, economic diversification and cultural resilience
3. Should MPs pass the assisted dying bill?
The assisted dying bill will likely be one of the most significant bills any current MP ever votes on and, due to its emotive nature, MPs had a free vote, meaning they voted according to their conscience rather than along party lines. For this debate, we got campaigners from both sides to lay out their cases.
73 per cent of Britons believe that, in principle, assisted dying should be legal in the UK
4. Should we ban smartphones in schools?
The success of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation combined with hit Netflix show Adolescence this year set the stage for a national conversation about the harms of smartphone use, especially for children. But do calls for smartphone bans reek of a nanny state? Edtech CEO Josh Blackburn went up against smartphone ban petitioner Sarah Pettitt in this debate.
Banning smartphones ignores a fundamental responsibility: to teach young people how to use technology responsibly
5. Lime: a friend or foe to Londoners?
Ridden into the year triumphantly by Timothee Chalamet and named by Vogue as “the most coveted accessory” at London Fashion Week, it’s been quite the year for Lime bikes. But where there is love, there is hate – and there are few topics that elicited quite as much division as our debate on the green-wheeled monster. For this debate, Lime-biker Ed Jones-Davies went head to head with impassioned pedestrian Samuel Barnett.
Hell isn’t other people. Hell is a patch outside your flat being designated a Lime bike parking station
6. Should we go back to buying gold?
Every cloud has a silver lining – but 2025’s was gold. Amid economic instability, the yellow metal reached record highs as investors flocked to the safe haven asset. But, though economically astute, hoarding gold can also be seen as unproductive. Read the case for and against stashing gold from bullion dealer Peter Walden and businesswoman Gina Miller.
Unlike stocks, bonds or property, gold generates no income – no dividends, no interest and no contribution to economic growth
7. Should we abolish daylight saving time?
Twice a year we change the clocks – and twice a year we ask why. In putting together this debate, it quickly became clear that advocates for clock-changing are nowadays few and far between, but there are reasons why we persist. Sleep expert Dr Megan Crawford and writer Chloe Bennet did the time warp in this seasonable debate.
The science falls firmly on the abolitionists’ side: biannual time warping is not good for our health.