The New Culture Forum

The New Culture Forum Has Moved

2007-07-06T09:34:00.000+01:00

Visit us at our fabulous new website:

www.newcultureforum.org.uk

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-07-04T11:49:00.000+01:00

NCF Director Peter Whittle was joined on the sofa by social entrepreneur Simon Marcus, theatre critic Andrew Haydon and the comedienne Ayesha Hazarika. Under discussion were the The Pain and the Itch, the new Bruce Norris play at the Royal Court, and the life and times of the controversial late comic Bernard Manning.

CLICK HERE to watch the show.

It's the ideology, stupid

2007-07-01T11:12:00.000+01:00

One of the most prominent of Bloggers, Dizzy Thinks, sums up the situation as it stands on this weekend of thankfully aborted terrorist attacks:

Now though it is a battle of the Enlightenment against, as a friend once said to me, Endarkenment, and this time the other side isn't rational. It thinks nothing of its own death in achieving its ends. It's also acutely aware that the dominance of Western self-loathing is our greatest weakness. Is our way of life under threat? No. Our number is too great for that to seriously happen in any immediate sense. But does the other side want to fundamentally change our society, our way of life, and our values? Undoubtedly.

Read Dizzy's full thoughts here.

And it's the Culture, stupid...

2007-06-28T11:25:00.000+01:00

In a piece titled 'It's the Broken Society, stupid' in today's Spectator, Andrew Neil argues that 'During the Blair–Brown decade social concerns — what kind of society we have become — have gradually replaced economic worries.'

Neil suggests that the underclass is 'increasingly severed, in attitude and cultural values, from the rest of society,' which ends up affecting us all.

The cracks in Britain’s Broken Society, however, go far beyond the underclass, though that is its most serious manifestation. There is a general feeling that, across the social spectrum, Britain has become a coarser, more yobbish society, in which discourtesy has become a national habit and violence is always lurking beneath the surface. A general societal, moral and cultural collapse extends well into the comfortable middle classes and is reflected in manners, dress style, violent demeanour and foul and sloppy language, even among the supposedly educated. In a nation with too many Jade Goodys, it takes a Bollywood actress to remind us of the traditional British virtues of tolerance and courtesy.

In other words, our society needs a new - and better - culture.

Neil's point ties in importantly with what Fraser Nelson writes, also in today's Spectator, about Gordon Brown's 'Britishness agenda'. The new Prime Minister appears determined to pick up the patriotic mantle consciously dropped by Cameron's Tories. It's a smart move, for many reasons. First, it will play well electorally. Second, Brown, the Scot, is desperate to do something to glue Britain back together again after the fracturing effects of his own party's (originally self-serving) thirst for devolution - the results of which have been only to fan the flames of independence movements.

Nelson writes:

He [Brown] has made remarkable progress in a short space of time. Last summer, he rather wonderfully declared that ‘my wife comes from Middle England’, as if he were a mediaeval king who wished to make peace with a new dominion by marrying a local. Now he realises he is not engaged in battle for a territory but a cultural war, which he can win by posing as a heavyweight statesman with an instinctive grasp of ordinary Britons’ anxieties and aspirations versus decadent, faddish Mr Cameron with his hopelessly out-of-touch coterie.

Part of the new cultural war is the increasingly vital question of what it means to be British. Brown is known to be favourable to the idea of 'settling' the question in the form of a written constitution. Were he to go for this - and he might - those 'traditional British virtues' of which Neil writes would need to be enshrined. And the big question in the current political culture is: Will they?

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-06-27T10:22:00.000+01:00

NCF Director Peter Whittle was joined on the sofa to discuss the spate of new shows about becoming a tycoon. Do they show that entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Britain or is it much more about the viewers' cruel pleasure in other people's humiliation?

CLIP

How to sidestep the Thought Police

2007-06-25T16:48:00.000+01:00

In today's Telegraph, AN Wilson writes about the cycle of Corpus Christi Plays from York, 'the product of generations of human thinking and imagination about the central story of our culture' and how their performance is now being threatened by politicised box-ticking.

The NCF fully supports Wilson's call for individual patronage of the arts - the only way to free us from the suffocating grip of the thought police.

In York, these plays were performed by the town guilds from the time of Chaucer and Langland until Shakespeare's lifetime, and one of the joys of living in modern Britain is that they were revived.

First, they were put on at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Then, as often as could be afforded, they have been performed at the York Festival. There have been performances at the National Theatre in London, and in Edinburgh, and there have been inspired amateur renderings at the University of Leeds.

But enter stage left Christian Vassie, a Liberal Democrat councillor in York. He is hoping to get National Lottery money for a scheme which sounds in principle excellent: namely, to stage the York Plays in 2008, 2010 and 2012 using local students from the ages of 16 to 25.

Alas, to get the money, the council have to assure the Lottery Fund people that the event is "multicultural". Vassie is putting his mind to the question of how the event can be made "multicultural".

Those Muslims of Yorkshire who fostered the London bombers of July 2005 will rejoice at this, since they need not go through the farce of claiming to be deeply offended by the Roman soldiers in the York plays swearing, as they do, "for Mahound".

And Lord Janner won't have to bore anyone who would listen with the claim that the Jewish community is deeply hurt by the Harrowing of Hell play, in which we learn that his co-religionists were in league with Satan.

And Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens can sleep easy that their sensitive ears need not echo to the great opening of the play, declaimed originally by the Barkers' Guild: "I am gracious and great, God without beginning."

But the rest of us who inhabit a real world, where we are not constantly feeling hurt by cultures and ideas different from our own, think the York Cycle is a magnificent testimony to our shared Christian past. It also happens to contain, in the Passion Plays, some truly great writing, the only really great drama, as theatre, of the English Middle Ages.

It is the story of the Creation of the world, its near destruction by Flood (performed by the fishers' and mariners' guilds), the coming of Christ, and the redemption of the human race.

It is a proud, English thing, easily worthy to be spoken of beside the great mosaics of Monreale outside Palermo which depict the saving story from Fall to redemption of Man.

Would it really do the 16- to 25-year-olds of York such harm to be exposed to this story, to swim about in it, to experience the depth of wit, pathos, bawdry and awe that their Yorkshire forebears brought to the story?

The churches have made a poor show of presenting the tale to the past few generations. Many people have all but forgotten it. Is it now to be confined altogether to oblivion because it fails to meet the specifications of some idiotic committee in London?

If the thought police are really calling the shots in this way, should not some Yorkshire millionaire step forward and finance the York Plays with a no-strings-attached cheque?

Britain's ever-growing dependency culture

2007-06-22T14:12:00.000+01:00

Gerard Baker in today's Times:

Like millions of my fellow countrymen I found myself watching the final instalment this week on the BBC of A History of Andrew Marr by Modern Britain. I think I got that the right way around but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what the script said because the pictures were all about him.

There he was, in almost every frame, like some Zelig figure, replaying a crucial moment from our country’s past. Up there, admiring the soaring architecture of the Scottish parliament; over yonder, traipsing through the fields near where the government scientist David Kelly took his own life; long shots of him poised, Winston Churchill-like, pondering the origins of his people’s genius.

More striking for me, even than the immanent narcissism of the whole thing, was Marr’s final, dewy-eyed observation to end the series. As I said, I can’t now remember the actual words, but I think it was something to the effect that, for all our tribulations, it was still the greatest of privileges to be able to say you were born in Britain.

Well I don’t disagree with that, but of course Marr’s conclusion was a classic BBC man’s paean to his country. It capped a lengthy peroration on the great success of multiculturalism. How we could still be proud of ourselves not because of some fuddy-duddy ideas about tradition or individual freedom, but because we’re now a lovely big melting pot of a country.

I defer to the greater knowledge of modern Britain evidently garnered by standing in empty fields with camera crews, but I wonder if this is really the right conclusion. I love Britain as much as anyone, and I certainly believe it is our openness that makes it such an attractive place. But I can’t share the optimism about our multiculture, and much more importantly, my own impression is not of the triumph of the British spirit but of its steady subversion by an ever-growing dependency culture.

In its funny little way the news this week that the Advertising Standards Authority had banned reruns of the 1950s egg advertisements that featured Tony Hancock was more compelling evidence on the state of modern Britain than even Marr’s obiter dicta.

“Go to Work on an Egg” was unacceptable, we were told, because it encouraged an unhealthy lifestyle. I had no idea that we had a government body that still operated on Stalinist principles but there it is. How long will it be before it is not just the free speech of advertising that is curtailed but the evil practice it promotes, and we ban egg consumption along with smoking? Goodbye England. Welcome to Absurdistan.

At root of this nonsense is, of course, the sheer scale of government. The reason you can’t be allowed to eat an egg is that, because of the lack of real choice in healthcare provision, you’re no longer responsible for the financial consequences of your own actions. If you get heart disease from too much cholesterol, the State, collectively known as the NHS, will have to treat you; and that costs the State more and more money so the State will have to stop you from doing it in the first place.

This is the self-perpetuating logic behind the unstoppable momentum of the expanding State. The bigger it grows, the more it intrudes into our lives, and the more it intrudes into our lives, the more dependent we become on it. Education is the same. Our great universities are struggling to compete in a global market because they are hamstrung by the State. They are dependent on central government for their funding; but that funding is insufficient to meet the needs of global competition. But because they need government money for what they do, they cannot break free.

Leviathan is now so large that, outside London, half the population is dependent – either through public sector jobs or benefits – on taxes. Its power is so large that it has bent us all into submission. It has produced a culture in which no one needs to take responsibility for anything because someone else is always there to back us up.

That in the end, was what was behind another sorry spectacle of Britain’s decline this week – the Fulton inquiry into the capture of the Royal Marines and sailors in March by Iranians. It was of course, to outward appearances, magnificently Gilbertian – the first Sea Lord doing the honorable thing and shuffling off the blame on to anyone but himself. But its message was very modern.

Mistakes were made but no one made them.

Read the full article

Peter Whittle on The Moral Maze

2007-06-20T22:45:00.000+01:00

NCF Director Peter Whittle appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze tonight, to 'give evidence' on BBC bias.

Click here to launch the radio player and listen to the show any time.

Andrew Haydon reviews Taking Liberties

2007-06-20T11:23:00.000+01:00

Film-maker Chris Atkins’s first documentary, Taking Liberties, bills itself as “a shocking but hilarious polemic documentary that charts the destruction of all your Basic Liberties [sic] under 10 Years [sic] of New Labour.” However, rather than offering anything like a clear-minded argument, Atkins’s film is a scattergun attack which fails to hit its targets.

The film opens with footage of some nice Anti-War ladies on a bus trip to a demonstration being stopped, searched, and forced to turn back by police. From there we are quickly taken to a sinister animated sequence which sagely notes that following the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, Hitler introduced laws which led inexorably to Kristalnacht and beyond. The animation goes on to say that following World War II, Churchill and other European leaders laid down a basic structure of civil liberties: The right to protest, free speech, and privacy, coupled with freedom from detention without trial, extradition and torture.

This list becomes the film’s sole structuring device as Atkins combs through the list seeking examples of occasions when the Blair administration can be deemed to have destroyed each of these liberties. It does this without the slightest explanation as to why civil liberties are either necessary or desirable, and why - other than for reasons of being Evil Fascist Bastards - any government might consider removing them. A pity, since these questions are crucial when you are going to spend time attacking not only a government, but also independent institutions like The Sun newspaper, for demanding their removal in favour of specific anti-terror measures. Sadly, with barely a thought for fripperies such as explanations, the film careers off in search of examples of occasions on which these liberties can be deemed to have been removed.

Its success rate in finding illustrative examples depends largely on which civil liberty is being addressed. Much capital is made from 2005’s Serious Organised Crime Act, which proscribed ad-hoc protests from coming within a mile of the Houses of Parliament without permission. Whereas the section on torture is confined solely to Britain’s refueling of planes involved in America’s programme of “extraordinary rendition” and the government’s ongoing, deplorable use of evidence obtained through torture of terrorist suspects in other countries.

The real problem here is that anyone with even the slightest interest in the news will already be well aware of all this. Granted, the film is patently not aimed at people with the slightest interest in either politics or current affairs, but nonetheless it is galling that it has not tried harder to make its points stick. More irritatingly, the informed viewer will already know that these transgressions of civil liberties were all met with a fierce barrage of protest from the media, from Parliamentary opposition, from the public and from within the Labour Party itself. To present each violation of civil liberty as part of an ongoing, steamroller-like programme with some sort of cumulative effect is, at best, a distortion of the truth. For example, the botched police raid in Forrest Gate which resulted in the arrest of Mohammed Abdulkahar, who was shot in the shoulder, and his brother Abul Koyair has been the subject of massive media scrutiny and investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The point is that it was an error. The fact that so much material on the episode exists rather serves to confirm how un-secret our police force is. And this is the elephant in the room throughout the film – if the government was really as intent on eroding civil liberties as the film appears to imply, what on earth would possess them to allow a film such as this to be made?

Chris Atkin’s basic point is more subtle and reasonable: that erosions of Civil Liberties can take place without a programmatic approach and, in an extreme analysis, leave behind the mechanisms necessary to create a police state were one minded to do so.

However, the film does not make this point clearly. Instead, with its heady mixture of video footage, cartoon and angry pop music (Radiohead, the Stranglers etc.), Taking Liberties piles allegation on top of allegation – each more damning by the last, and each unmitigated by context or consequence – with the effect that an unwary viewer could easily conclude that he or she is living in a strangely brutal and repressive regime akin to Hitler’s Germany (always Hitler’s Germany, never Stalin’s Russia, interestingly). This impression is partially defused by the curiously jokey approach that the film takes, however. Its attitude to incidental music in particular is distractingly flippant – at one stage Franz Ferdinand’s jerky spaz-pop anthem Come on Home is used to soundtrack a segment on Mouloud Sihali who has been under “virtual house arrest” in his one-room flat for fifteen months. At the close of the film Jarvis Cocker’s amusing but politically meaningless Cunts Are Still Running the World provides Taking Liberties’s only explicit conclusion. Given the time taken reaching it, it seems a pitifully slight point to have made.

It is worth noting that the film at no point examines other factors which are also curtailing Britons’ liberties. An interesting case in point - the film’s website, when giving a tracklisting for the soundtrack CD, asterisks out all five letters of the Jarvis Cocker song title. Why? This is a document purporting to uphold freedom of speech posted on perhaps the least regulated medium which civilization has ever known, and yet it feels the need to star-out the c-word. More seriously, no consideration is given, for example, to the terrible failures in policing which led to the play Behzti being effectively banned from the British stage, firstly by rioters, and then by the death threats made by the members of the Sikh community against its author Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti.

The aim of the film appears to be to make an imagined army of apolitical, apathetic indie kids hopping mad. I daresay it will probably succeed, but when fired-up on such meagre kindling, the flames of their outrage will likely burn themselves out by the time they reach the cinema foyer.

Andrew Haydon, 2007

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-06-20T11:11:00.000+01:00

Guests Dawn Steeves of the New Criterion magazine, Andrew Haydon of CultureWars.org.uk and Marc Sidwell and Dominic Hilton of the New Culture Forum joined NCF Director Peter Whittle to discuss how we fund the arts.

Watch the full show HERE.

NCF Director Peter Whittle: Whether or not one rates Rushdie is utterly beside the point

2007-06-19T10:05:00.000+01:00

Following the reports of the disgusting statements made by members of Pakistan's government on the knighting of Salman Rushdie (read more here), there was a depressingly flaccid discussion on Newsnight last night, during which the fundamental issues at stake - the need to protect western freedom of speech and artistic freedom - were barely broached. The Labour peer Lord Ahmed displayed an astounding stupidity in suggesting that while the likes of J K Rowling should be celebrated for basically being nice and spreading 'harmony', Rushdie should not because he had been 'divisive.' The only non-Muslim on the panel, the Labour MP Anne Cryer, brought on presumably to give an opposing view, was unequal to the task, her line being that while she didn't care about honours herself, and hadn't read any of Rushdie's books, she didn't think we should take orders from the Pakistan government, thus missing the point entirely that there was a UK Labour peer there in the studio who was essentially supporting what it had said.

Whether or not one rates Rushdie is utterly beside the point. Many of us find some of the statements and speeches made by Harold Pinter pretty loathsome and divisive too, but none of us are for a moment suggesting that he should be silenced. The fact is that this is a question of standing up for the basic values of our civilisation, and should be treated deadly seriously. Unfortunately, when The Satanic Verses was published back in 1989, it was not. Then, the reaction of much of the British establishment to scenes of demonstrations and book-burning was utterly craven. Not one person who called for Rushdie to be killed - and there were many - was prosecuted for incitement to murder. Lord Dacre, the historian, went so far to say that he 'would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr Rushdie's manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.' The Labour MP Keith Vaz led a demonstration through the streets of Leicester at which banners were carried depicting the author as a dog.

Many have since concluded that this affair was a high water-mark in the internal assault on our culture. Islamic extremists realised at this point that the will of the British state to defend its values on these matters was weak, and so could be pushed further and further, which is exactly what has happened. But there is perhaps one useful aspect to this latest episode, which should be highly instructive for those who still cling to the view that extremism is born of British foreign policy and the Iraq war: how do you achieve peaceful co-existence with a culture which sees the mere giving of an honour to a prominent writer as a valid excuse for mass murder?

Men in suits clawing for youthful edginess

2007-06-19T09:58:00.000+01:00

Libby Purves in the Times on the report into BBC bias:

You get a sense of men in suits desperately clawing for youthful edginess, for membership of any hip minority rather than horrid old “Middle England”. During that week of Live 8 craziness, another huge BBC presence was down at Glastonbury straining to be cool. Meanwhile, there was the Trafalgar Fleet Review – tall ships and fireworks, a unique assembly of international vessels, a powerful message about the continuing importance of the maritime sector to everything we do. It was spectacular: it drew 750,000 people to the banks of the Solent (six times as many as Glastonbury, three times as many as Live 8). Yet the BBC would not carry it on terrestrial television, even though cameras were there for News 24. People without satellite or Freeview (who are legion, and often fond of ships) were dismayed, betrayed at a national hour by the national broadcaster.

The snub was plainly a matter of policy, not resources: it would have been possible to simulcast News 24 on BBC1 for the crucial hour, replacing (for God’s sake!) an Antiques Roadshow and a tennis recording. But no: the message was: “Ugh, ships, so retro! And ugh, imperialistic! Who cares? Everyone, like, prefers Madonna and Geldof and Primal Scream.” The evidence that plenty of people think otherwise was ignored. That, to me, showed a more potent and dangerous BBC bias problem than any self-serving grumble by a politician. That is the cultural blindness that after the Tait report must be tackled.

And it won’t be easy. The BBC hasn’t yet said sorry for 2005, or admitted it screwed up. Which is why, loyal as I am to the essential and eternal concept of the BBC, I keep on mentioning it . . .

NCF Vindicated on BBC Liberal Consensus

2007-06-18T10:32:00.000+01:00

Not to blow our own trumpet too loudly, but it is gratifying to open this morning's Times and discover we've been right all along...

June 18, 2007

BBC is urged to break free from the 'liberal concensus'
Dan Sabbagh, Media Editor

BBC bosses must break free from a straitjacket of political correctness, a highly critical report of the public broadcaster’s impartiality will conclude.

The 80-page inquiry will report today that the BBC’s drama, entertainment and factual output is dominated by a liberal consensus that frequently fails to recognise that impartial coverage is best served by espousing a diversity of views.

BBC coverage of the Live8 concert and the Make Poverty History campaign will be highlighted for criticism. It is accused of surrendering its objectivity to Bob Geldof, the campaigner and musician, and Richard Curtis, the writer of The Vicar of Dibley, during 2005.

The central criticism is that the BBC failed to highlight any alternative views to the campaign, which was highly politicised in its demands for a mass protest at the Gleneagles G8 summit and for debt relief for developing countries.

The document singles out two examples of programming that flouted BBC impartiality. It criticises, but does not name, Lorraine Heggessey, the former Controller of BBC One, for agreeing to show an episode of The Vicar of Dibley this year that featured a one-minute clip of the Make Poverty History video. BBC rules state that the corporation must not endorse campaigns other than Children in Need and Comic Relief.

There is criticism of the decision to transmit programmes about the making of Live8, towards the end of 2005, because the documentary was made by Brook Lapping, a production company owned by Ten Alps, in which Geldof is shareholder and company director. This relationship was not highlighted in the programme.

All campaigns, even those such as Make Poverty History, which was endorsed by all political parties, should be subject to critical scrutiny, the report said.

It was written by John Bridcut, an independent producer, and approved by a steering group led by Richard Tait, a BBC trustee and a former editor-in-chief of ITN. It included Mark Byford, the BBC Deputy Director-General, Helen Boaden, the head of news, and Alan Yentob, the creative director.

It is expected that the 12 conclusions will be implemented, and that the BBC will acknowledge some failings in its coverage of the Make Poverty History campaign and Live8.

The document will also emphasise the need for the BBC to commission a broader range of drama and factual output, highlighting the controversial BBC Two drama Shoot the Messenger, written by the black author Sharon Foster, as an example. The programme was described as “the most racist film in the history of the BBC” for a storyline that was, in part, unashamedly critical of problems in the black community.

The document concludes that the BBC must not confuse its internal equal opportunities policies with its editorial policies, and that it should recognise the range of opinion that exists in Britain. Impartiality has to be measured over a range of programming, not just within a single programme.

A spokeswoman for the BBC said that the report “did not conclude that the BBC was institutionally biased”.

In an article in The Observer, Mr Tait said: “The BBC cannot allow its output to be taken over by campaigning groups.”

Hugo Swire, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “We have a right to expect impartiality from a publicly funded broadcaster.”

Key points

— Impartiality is no longer primarily about news – it must be applied by the BBC to entertainment, drama and comedy

— BBC must be open to a range of views and ideas

— Output cannot be taken over by campaigning groups, as with the Make Poverty History campaign

— No excuse for insipid programming

— Room for controversial, passionate polemical arguments by contributors

Things are starting to move in the right direction. Be sure to watch this space.

Multicultural Terror

2007-06-17T20:32:00.000+01:00

Alisdair Palmer has an excellent piece in the Sunday Telegraph on the report by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion into 'the dissemination of extremist ideologies' in Britain:

You search in vain for insights into the nature and dissemination of extremist ideologies, let alone for any form of practical solution to the dangers those ideologies present. There is just a lot of blather about the definitions of integration and cohesion, the difficulty of achieving either of them in practice, and the complexity of the various government agencies supposed to be involved in promoting them.

La-la-la is about the sum of it. Some of the commissions' recommendations are almost touching in their naivete. For example, they suggest that newly arrived immigrants be given "Welcome Packs" that explain the limits of acceptable behaviour in Britain. A spokesman for the commission suggested that "the packs may say that we like to queue at the post office and we don't really like spitting in the street". There is nothing about how, in Britain, one of our "core values" is that we're not too keen on a father who, in order to protect what he believes is his family's "honour", garottes, smothers or stabs his daughter 23 times because she wants to choose her own husband; that we do not believe that a son who is homosexual should be murdered; or that Jews are pigs, Christians are cross-worshippers, and Hindus deserve death.

The commissioners decided to create a fantasy Britain, one in which there aren't any significant differences in the ways different groups believe it is acceptable to behave. Its vision of happily co-existing cultures whose problems mostly stem from the fact that they are not given the right help by Government officials, has about as much in common with the reality of community conflict in Britain as the films the Soviet Union used to make about the paradise of plenty created by communism.

In one way, you can't blame the commission for that: the fantasy has been the basis of our collective response to mass immigration for at least the past 30 years, and probably longer. So, for example, the police have expended a great deal of effort to ensure that they did not recognise "honour killings" when they came across them. Dead women murdered for daring to have a relationship not approved by their family have been categorised as "suicides" or "stranger murders", but not as what they are, which is victims of the patriarchal culture in which they were raised. La la la.

Palmer makes an insightful point about our failure to recognise the unique nature of our free culture:

The central fantasy has been that immigrants from very different cultures to our own share our commitment to tolerance, personal freedom and the separation of politics from religion that has evolved in this country over the past 300 years. There is an astonishing arrogance at the heart of that attitude: it is as if no other culture could possibly have anything like the hold over an individual that ours does, so that as soon as anyone comes into contact with our liberal, secular values, they must automatically convert to them and make preserving those values their highest priority.

He goes on to enlighten us about the history of Shiv Malik's article in this month's Prospect magazine:

it is an indication of our collective reluctance to face up to the facts Mr Malik so clearly articulates, that his article has been published only in the relatively obscure Prospect. His research was commissioned by the BBC, but the BBC didn't want it, and did not commission a film based on it. Mr Malik was told that his conclusions were "anti-Muslim", a perfect example of the attitude which guarantees that the root causes of home grown terrorism are never addressed.
...
The conflict between our culture and one that insists a father is obliged to kill his daughter if she marries outside her tribe, or which says that democracy should be forcibly replaced by theocracy, is a conflict for which there cannot be a compromise solution. In that sense, the jihadists are right: our secular, tolerant, individualist society is irrevocably opposed to their values. We will not prevail in the struggle until we, too, recognise that fact, and do everything we can to confront and expose the cultures that deny the individual's right to pursue his or her own conception of happiness. That, however, is precisely what we are not doing. Government policy still seems based on the myth of multiculturalism: denying that the conflict is real. The Government has not even found the heart to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that openly recruits Muslims to violent jihad. It may even be on the receiving end of a government grant.

The BBC's Roneo Mentality

2007-06-17T11:00:00.000+01:00

From today's Sunday Times:

THE BBC is institutionally biased, an official report will conclude this week. The year-long investigation, commissioned by the BBC, has found the corporation particularly partial in its treatment of single-issue politics such as climate change, poverty, race and religion.

It concludes that the bias has extended across drama, comedy and entertainment, with the corporation pandering to politically motivated celebrities and trendy causes.

Singled out is the coverage of Bob Geldof’s Live 8 concert and the Make Poverty History campaign. The report says there was no rounded debate of the issues.

The report also raises serious concerns about accompanying programmes, including a drama by the writer Richard Curtis and the finale of his Vicar of Dibley where Dawn French shows a minute-long clip of the Make Poverty History video.

The report points to the danger of BBC programmes being undermined by the liberal culture of its staff, who need to challenge their own assumptions more. “There is a tendency to ‘group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone,” says the report.

It goes on to highlight a “Roneo mentality” where staff ape each other’s common liberal values.

FULL STORY

Peter Whittle Reviews Grow Your Own

2007-06-17T10:45:00.000+01:00

Click here to listen to NCF Director Peter Whittle review Grow Your Own, the new movie (funded by the BBC, National Lottery and the EU) about allotments and asylum seekers (really). Peter is a regular film reviewer for Matthew Wright's The Weekender Show on BBC Radio 2. Unimpressed, he says Grow Your Own is nothing short of propaganda, paid for by our taxes. His review begins at 19:18. Skip through using the buttons.

Challenging the Orthodoxy

2007-06-14T11:43:00.000+01:00

NCF Director Peter Whittle shares the sofa with Chris Atkins, Director of the new film Taking Liberties, and presenter Iain Dale:

Watch the full programme here

Future Dates for Your Diary

2007-06-13T14:44:00.000+01:00

11 July: NCF 1st anniversary party and launch of our superduper new website

25 July: Impartiality in Peril? An NCF panel event on the future of broadcasting

Details for both events to be confirmed

Reclaiming the Summer of Love

2007-06-13T14:27:00.000+01:00

In a fascinating piece in today's Times, Daniel Finkelstein cites Brink Lindsey's new book The Age of Abundance and discusses the cultural meaning of the Summer of Love, suggesting that the counterculture was born of capitalism's very success, the possibilities for greater personal license having arisen from the greater freedom brought by greater wealth.

Finkelstein offers an intriguing new angle on a decade we feel we know only too well, and offers some food for thought for the Right. There is much we could be celebrating in both the inevitable failures that the hippy movement suffered in reality and in the economic policies that made such self-indulgence possible by giving people greater liberty.

At the same time, as we face the counterculture's mainstream legacy today in reflexively leftist media and universities, we cannot just suppose as Finkelstein seems to, that economic success was the only force at work. Leave that sort of thinking to the Marxists. Liberty is only an empty space -- and it was the Left who chose to fill it with murderously bad ideas. Above all, we must avoid the fashionable desire to suggest that this increase in liberty was a mistake.

No decent person can want to move the clock back to some monstrous Golden Age of 'decent poverty', or support imposing its ersatz New Labour equivalent, where the burden of government regulation replaces the old financial burdens, keeping the mass moving along approved lines.

Singing the praises of mediaeval living is what the Left are for. Rather, we must make the case for moving forward, for building a rich culture better adapted to its own sudden prosperity, a free nation better conditioned to the shock of financial liberty. We need a culture that educates individuals into self-control, able to make their own choices as they move through today's magnificent maze of personal opportunity, not one limited by financial shackles or government diktat. That is a real message of love to dream of this summer.

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-06-13T10:58:00.000+01:00

Guests Austin Williams of the Future Cities Project, author and journalist Carol Gould and critic Andrew Haydon joined NCF Director Peter Whittle to discuss the new political documentaries Taking Liberties and The War on Democracy.

See the whole show here.

Educating Our Children in Fashionable Political Correctness

2007-06-11T11:39:00.000+01:00

Fashionable political correctness is ruining education, according to a new Civitas report into the state of British schools. The Daily Telegraph takes up the issue on today's front page:

No major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference, according to the report published by Civitas.

"The traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the Government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students," it says.
...
Civitas casts doubt on the value of much of what children are now "taught". History has become so divorced from facts and chronology that pupils might learn the new "skills and perspectives" through a work of fiction, such as Lord of the Rings, it says.

Teenagers studying for GCSEs are being asked to write about the September 11 atrocities using Arab media reports and speeches from Osama bin Laden as sources without balancing material from America, it reveals.

In English, the drive for gender and race equality has led an exam board to produce a list of modern poems from around the world without a single poet from England or Wales being represented.

The new 21st-century science curriculum introduced last September substitutes debates on abortion, genetic engineering and the use of nuclear power for lab work and scientific inquiry, it says.

The gap between independent and state sector education is ever-growing, in great part due to political interference in the latter. Ironically, this 'educational apartheid' is all in the name of social engineering, which in the last decade has infected everything from science to the arts. This ugly new apartheid which Civitas warns against is now as much about political causes as about standards. It is increasingly hard for a state sector pupil to graduate from Britain's schools system without carrying a litany of fashionable leftist grievances in their back pocket, let alone to have received a decent education.

The long-term implications are serious indeed. One immediate question, though: Can a pupil who doesn't hold fashionable leftist opinions on climate change, abortion, multiculturalism, or even 9/11 expect to pass their exams?

This Is Spinal Cord

2007-06-11T11:37:00.000+01:00

In the Sunday Times, NCF Director Peter Whittle interviewed Eli Roth, director of the Hostel horror movies:

Roth can certainly talk the talk. He insists that his films work on many levels - that they should be purely entertaining date movies, with lots of blood and splatter, but that there is far more there if you want to see it. “Le Monde picked Hostel as one of their top movies of the year. They saw it as a commentary on American capitalism gone too far,” he says. “Americans buying things is no longer enough for them. They’re not getting that thrill, they want something more.”

Oh, dear, here we go. “Art Forum magazine said this was a political comment on American imperialism, and on Americans going into other cultures and thinking they can buy and sell them. People saw different things in the movie.”

And Roth? What did he see in it? He made it, after all. “I like having my disgust with the Bush administration, and my feelings of upset about Iraq, and my fears for that - I like putting that all into the movie, and it’s there if you want to see it,” he says. He wants to start a discussion about the fear that he sees enveloping Americans, as well as simply entertain people. “You can get people talking about these taboo subjects.”

As self-justification goes, this is almost beyond parody - a kind of This Is Spinal Cord. Yet, as Roth continues to dump on his fellow countrymen, I start to wonder whether this is all for the European media’s benefit. The clichés pour forth. Americans are ignorant. Only 12% have passports. They don’t travel, they don’t know about other cultures, and so on.

If this is Roth’s sincere view, then why are the Europeans also shown as a pretty appalling bunch? Hostel depicted gangs of feral, murderous kids roaming the Slovakian streets. Other natives were portrayed as positively antediluvian. In the films, the Europeans are stereotypes, he says, and the Americans are also stereotypes of certain US travellers. “The film taps into fear of other cultures. It’s like a horror Borat.”

Of course, Sasha Baron Cohen was ultimately aiming his fire at Americans. There would have been no question of Borat reporting from Saudi Arabia. I ask Roth whether, for all his alleged concerns about Bush and imperialism, he wouldn’t be better taking on the all-too-real kidnappers and decapitators out there, and making a film about them? He seems fleetingly nonplussed. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t,” he says, “but this particular story is about this particular fear of mine.”

Read the full article.

Liddle on the Olympic Logo

2007-06-07T11:29:00.000+01:00

In a terrific piece in today's Spectator, Rod Liddle argues we've got the Olympic logo we deserve and picks apart the meaningless, 'inclusive' branded nonsense that blights our political and social discourse:

If I’m honest, I don’t object hugely to the 2012 logo, or at least no more than I had expected to. It has been argued that the design tells you nothing about London, that it fails to capture the spirit of our capital city. But the same was true of Athens in 2004: if the Greeks had wished to capture the spirit of their capital city they’d have depicted an asthmatic kebab-shop owner choking to death on traffic fumes against a backdrop of the Acropolis, but they didn’t. And similarly Peking next year — never mind this androgynous bloke dancing in ecstasy, what’s wrong with the interior view of a prison cell, maybe with a subtle rice-paper overlay?

But delve a little deeper and you will find that our design, our little logo, gives you a pretty good flavour of Britain and its delusions and confusions. Not that harmless little image itself, but the fatuous rubbish which lies behind it. Read again, for example, that meaningless, self-aggrandising, unintentionally hilarious guff from Wolff-Olins which precedes this article. Who would think, reading that, that the company’s primary employment was in scribbling the kind of thing you knock off idly on a sodden beermat while trying to remember what work you have to do? Or, better still, check out their website, enter the Wolff-Olins house of cards, where there’s much, much more of this pretentious, chest-beating drivel. They offer companies ‘potential platforms for action’. And then — God only knows what this means — ‘We think brands need to be less controlling, more generous.’ How precisely will they do this? ‘We help you invent new ways that move the world forward.’ Oh, good, many thanks for that, gentlemen. And then a rare moment of truth, or the truth as they have it: ‘Brand isn’t marketing. It’s everything.’

Brand is everything; that old advertising shibboleth that you can’t sell a thing if the product is rubbish is here turned on its head. As far as Wolff-Olins is concerned, you don’t even need a product in the first place, just a brand — a fiction, an idea, a notion to flog in the marketplace.

We should have become used to this vapid, ugly, empty verbiage by now — it is the currency of corporate management-speak, of the local governments and the quangos and NGOs — and increasingly it pervades our national political discourse, too. Sentence after sentence which seem to promise so much (‘We help you invent new ways that move the world forward’!) but deliver absolutely nothing. A mode of communication which somehow manages to be simultaneously disingenuous and sincere.

In the case of the 2012 Olympic Games both Wolff-Olins and the Prime Minister are trying desperately to tell you that the whole event is really nothing to do with athletics; that’s why that bloody word ‘inclusive’ crops up so often. (If the Olympics is truly inclusive, then would it be OK if I ran in one of the 400 metres heats? I’ve always rather fancied my chances.) Tony Blair has already said that he believes the Games should inspire people to change their lives. The Wolff-Olins film (which you can see on their benighted website) does not show wonderful athletes running and jumping and throwing things, it depicts instead browbeaten members of our ethnic minority and disabled communities struggling, in a very real sense, to come to terms with their daily struggle for existence, uplifted a little (not too much, obviously) by the Olympic Ideal, whatever that might be.

The notion that the Games might be a chance for us all to see brilliant sportsmen in action and thrill to the achievement of dedicated and talented individuals is here utterly subverted; the Olympics isn’t about any of that. It’s about ordinary people — quite miserable ordinary people, come to that — doing ordinary things, like riding a bicycle for a few hours every day. In other words, Wolff-Olins has rebranded the Olympics to mean exactly the opposite of what it was intended to mean. Not bad for £400,000, I suppose, all things considered.

Read the full piece here.

Arts Council Latest

2007-06-06T14:18:00.000+01:00

As the fallout continues surrounding the appalling £400,000 Olympic logo, Howard Barker describes in the Guardian how his theatre company is a victim of Olympic fever.

Baker's suggestion that his not receiving Arts Council funding amounts to 'censorship' is curious. Still, he makes some illuminating points about the nature of arts funding in Britain:

This execution of a thriving and innovative company was judged to be legitimate by the officers of the Arts Council. That their operating criteria for providing funds are now entirely unrelated to artistic excellence is still not widely understood in the theatre world. Sociological, therapeutic, essentially political objectives entirely dominate the decision-making process. The Wrestling School has only its reputation, its creative will, and its achievement to recommend it in this withering climate.
...
Political interference is now seen to be the standard practice of the funding system. We live with the washed-out remains of a Stalinist bureaucracy obsessed not with art but social welfare projects, points-systems and 'public benefit' scrutiny, which annihilates (or rather, in the context, "liquidates") thriving and ambitious companies and artists. Any arts ministers who valued their estate should have vigorously opposed both the cuts and the criteria by which the cuts were imposed; instead they submitted to the athletics hysteria.

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-06-06T13:42:00.000+01:00

Guests Hermione Eyre, Michael Attwell and Emma French joined NCF Director Peter Whittle to discuss the BBC's 'Victoria's Empire', Andrew Marr's 'History of Britain', children's television and tonight's controversial Channel 4 documentary on the death of Diana.

Click here to watch the full programme.

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-05-30T10:53:00.000+01:00

NCF Director Peter Whittle was joined by Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph, journalist and author Angela Levin, and NCF Research Fellow, Dominic Hilton. Under discussion were Ed Husain's The Islamist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edward Elgar. Here's an opening clip:

Click here to watch the full half-hour show.

Western Culture: Scruton's Rallying Cry

2007-05-28T14:03:00.000+01:00

Roger Scruton has an excellent piece in the Sunday Times titled 'The glory of the West is that life is an open book'.

"Only cultural decline can explain the eagerness with which [Edward] Said’s argument has been accepted in our universities," writes Scruton.

We who enjoy the fruits of western culture ought to be rallying to its defence, now that it is under attack both from internal critics and from external enemies. It is time to ask what we learn from this culture and why it matters. We lament the decline of university science, since it presages a widespread loss of knowledge. We would lament it less if this loss of scientific knowledge were offset by a gain in knowledge of other kinds. But if students of the humanities learn only to repudiate their culture while putting nothing in its place, then it cannot be said that they acquire any real knowledge from their studies.

Although it was probably no part of Said’s intention, the combined effect of his attack on western “orientalism”, Foucault’s attack on bourgeois “discourse”, Derrida’s “deconstruction” and the general crushing of the old curriculum under a weight of inquisitorial “theory” has led to an orthodoxy of nihilism in the western academy ...

To counter this culture of nothingness, I suggest that we begin from the very certainties that Said put in question: the certainties contained in the art, literature and music that we were once encouraged to regard as precious personal possessions. Such works are not empty ciphers on which to try out our analytical skills. They show us what we are and what we are capable of. They also teach us how to judge. From culture we acquire a sense of what is intrinsically worthwhile in the human condition and a recognition that our lives are not consumed in the pursuit of power and profit, but devoted to intrinsic values.

Read the full article.

Funding the Arts, Without the Box-Ticking

2007-05-27T11:43:00.000+01:00

Alongside his position at home as England's most popular composer, Edward Elgar has in recent decades been critically re-evaluated, and is now rightly treated as being amongst the first rank internationally.

Yet, as the Telegraph reports today, the Arts Council is giving no money towards the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of his birth.

This is not so surprising. Central public funding of the arts is now firmly tied to social policy targets, and to the promotion of a politically-based social agenda. That, and of course a cultural disdain for any artist too easily identified with the nation's sense of itself.

However, it is no longer enough to simply turn to private corporate sources as an alternative.

Many companies are now just as eager to tick boxes in an attempt to appear 'progressive' as any government quango.

A good example of what happens as a result of this can be seen in the excellent new English Music Festival's struggle to keep going; organisers found that companies were reluctant to support an event which they considered did not chime adequately with their politically and socially 'relevant' image-building.

The answer lies in by-passing both of these sources, and cultivating instead a culture of individual giving not tied to the needs of box-ticking.

The New Culture Forum will return to this vital issue in the future.

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-05-23T10:44:00.000+01:00

Guests Andrew Haydon, Susan Shaw and the New Culture Forum's Marc Sidwell joined Peter Whittle to discuss the rise of a "vicarious emotionalism industry" surrounding the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann.

Watch the full show HERE.

Edward Elgar: self-made giant of our culture

2007-05-23T10:34:00.000+01:00

Simon Heffer in today's Telegraph:

The politics of the context in which Elgar wrote, insofar as they ever mattered, matter now not at all. He is a true landmark of our culture, a life-enhancer, but also, as all great men must be, a towering example.

Read the full article HERE.

The British Media's anti-Israel Bias

2007-05-21T12:01:00.000+01:00

Once again a British television programme has taken the complex and tragic story of Israel and turned it into a polemic about the endlessly victimised Palestinians and those brutal, hate-filled, despicable Jews.

Carol Gould has written a review of Paddy Ashdown's Channel 4 documentary 'Battle for the Holy Land: Jerusalem’ for current viewpoint. "Israel is far from angelic," she writes, "but the distorted and deeply unjust image projected in the British media of this tiny but vibrant nation makes me sick to the core of my being."

What is so infuriating about the iniquitous way the history of the Jewish State is depicted in every media form in the United Kingdom is the lack of context and the constant mantra of the millions of hostile Arabs being entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.

Read the full article here.

'A Hammer to crack some nuts? - A.A. Gill on Panorama in today's Sunday Times

2007-05-20T11:59:00.000+01:00

What on earth came over Panorama (Monday, BBC1)? For as long as anyone under 30 can remember, it’s been choosing the dullest, worthiest subjects – malfeasance in northern planning departments, bad grammar on multilingual NHS brochures. But all of a sudden this week it chose to take on the Scientologists, the most ornery, touchy, vindictive spiritual movement since the Spanish Inquisition. Scientologists bear grudges. They hate it when people use the c-word, so when John Sweeney called them a c**t (I’m not going to write it – I don’t want them after me; they can all be huge c**ts, for all I care), they went spare. It was their overreaction that made the programme, which is a lesson for anyone who wants to retaliate on screen. You will always come off looking worse. For all their media sophistication, the Scientologists don’t understand the first thing about appearing in front of a camera. If they’d said and done nothing, this programme would have been just another Panorama, a liberal-agnostic sneer.

Scientology is no more bonkers than believing in thousands of gods, some of whom have eight arms or elephants’ heads. In fact, it’s no dafter than the metaphysics of anyone’s spiritual belief. They’re not suicide bombers; they’re not circumcising women; they’re not burning nonbelievers out of their houses. The reason Panorama was so fired up about Scientology is that it’s rich and American and attracts celebrities. If its followers were poor, black and anonymous, they’d never have shot a foot of film.

FULL ARTICLE

A Bastion of Liberal Education

2007-05-20T11:49:00.001+01:00

The New Culture Forum's Marc Sidwell writes in the Catholic Herald about Thomas Aquinas College in southern California, where "students engage directly with the profound thinkers that define Western civilisation".

[W]hat Thomas Aquinas College rejects is the easy relativism that Pope Benedict XVI has so roundly denounced. Assured of the existence of truth, the mind is freed to engage with the great conversation of the Western mind.
Thomas Aquinas College is a modern exemplar of a great tradition. Liberal education stretches back to the birth of our civilisation – a golden thread of intellectual freedom. It begins in 5th-century Athens, as the education due to a free man. Faith and reason intertwined in the Catholic Church, carrying our civilisation forward after the fall of Rome. Now men spoke of universal freedom and therefore a universal education. Preserved in the Benedictine orders, transmitted by schoolmaster-priests, it was the Christian liberal educators who kept the life of the mind alive through centuries of uncertainty and civil strife.

Read Marc's full article HERE.

Notes on BBC interviewing tactics from a former insider

2007-05-17T11:15:00.000+01:00

Rod Liddle in this week's Spectator:

[T]here are certain sorts of people whom the BBC thinks it’s all well and good to be fairly nasty to, and Scientologists are among them. Indeed, there are certain groups of people whom the BBC feels that its personnel must roundly abuse or even phy-sically chastise if it is going to give them airtime, such as, for example, the British National Party, or members of Islamic groups that are not on the ever-shifting list of politically OK Islamic groups. These people all come under category one in the BBC producer guidelines. In each case, the presenter is required to shout at these people because they are plainly, obviously, horrible — you will remember the Newsnight interview, for example, in which BNP leader, Nick Griffin, was denied the chance to answer a single question. And any BBC interview with a Muslim mullah who has hooks instead of hands. The Scientologists do not quite fall into this special category; under those aforementioned guidelines, they come in category two — people towards whom the presenter should display contempt, quiet hostility and open dislike, but should not actually punch or scream at. Members of the Conservative party and Ukip, all Israelis other than those who are activists within ‘peace’ groups, evangelistic Christians, supporters of the Countryside Alliance, Roman Catholics, paedophiles and chairmen of multinational corporations are similarly covered by the category two requirements. Category three, meanwhile, demands that the presenter affect an attitude of studied indifference and mild disdain and applies to interviews with most members of the present government, unless they were against the war in Iraq, in which case they get the category four treatment, which is also handed out to pop stars who wish for the African debt burden to be written off, all disabled people, ‘ordinary’ members of ethnic minorities and especially ‘moderate’ Muslims, all charity spokeswomen and bearded scientists in spectacles who insist that the earth is going to turn into a cinder by the year 2012. Category four requires the presenter to fawn in a sickening manner and, on occasion, proffer sexual favours.

Read the full article HERE.

Last Night's Culture Clash

2007-05-16T11:31:00.000+01:00

Guests Hermione Eyre, Andrew Haydon, Dawn Steeves, and Dominic Hilton and Marc Sidwell of the New Culture Forum joined Peter Whittle to discuss the Channel 4 drama 'Saddam's Tribe' and the legacy, if any, of Tony Blair. Things got a little heated.

To see the whole show, CLICK HERE

A theatre full of 'impeccably liberal gents'

2007-05-15T11:09:00.000+01:00

'Most of our male newspaper theatre reviewers are impeccably liberal gents who regard sexism, Tories, the evils of capitalism and the wickedness of foxhunting with unbridled horror.'

In today's Telegraph, the paper's excellent theatre critic Charles Spencer delivers a great riposte to National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner's ridiculous and petulant attack on theatre reviewers as being 'dead white men' who especially dislike the work of female directors - an attack which was obviously meant to distract from the terrible reviews for Emma Rice's staging of 'A Matter of Life and Death.'

Quite right that Hytner should be condemned for using such PC and frankly offensive language to discredit a whole profession (it brings to mind Greg Dyke's disgusting comment on the BBC as being 'hideously white.') But then, in his last paragraph, Spencer lets slip a truth (which we've quoted above) which the NCF couldn't have put better itself. Straight from the horse's mouth...

2007-05-07T11:24:00.000+01:00

THE NEW CULTURE FORUM

You are invited to hear:

SIR ANDREW GREEN

Chairman of Migrationwatch UK

On

The immigration debate: driven by events, or by the media?

Wednesday, 23rd May at 7.30pm

Committee Room 10, House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1 (nearest tube Westminster)

For several years immigration has been one of the top four issues of public concern, indeed recently at the very top. Yet until seven years ago it hardly registered in the public opinion polls.

How has this transformation occurred? Migration watch has played a key role in getting this subject onto the national agenda. In this talk, the founder Sir Andrew Green considers what underlies this remarkable development – the force of events, or the power of ‘spin’ ?

Do join us for what promises to be an important and fascinating talk. It will be followed by a Q & A session.

Sir Andrew will be introduced by Douglas Carswell, MP for Harwich and Clacton.

Please RSVP to Peter Whittle at prwhittle@btopenworld.com

Given the security procedures at the House of Commons, it is advisable to arrive in good time.

IN YOUR DIARY -Michel Onfray at the French Institute - Thursday, May 10th

2007-05-01T10:09:00.000+01:00

In the twenty-first century, religion is making a comeback, bringing in its wake extremism of all kinds. From Christian anti-abortion campaigns to suicide bombers claiming the righteousness of Islam, we are witnessing a resurgence of fundamentalism. Michel Onfray's response to the threat of a post-modern theocracy is to lay down the principles of an authentic atheism. 'A wonderful, invigorating blast of sanity delivered against the fog of high-toned mumbo-jumbo we have to endure everywhere today' (William Boyd).

Born in 1959 in Normandy, French philosopher Michel Onfray is the author of twenty books which map out a theory of hedonism.

He will discuss his best-selling essay, In Defense of Atheism (translated by Jeremy Leggatt, Serpent's Tail, 2007) with British philosopher Anthony C Grayling. Early reservation recommended thu 10 may at the Institut français In French & English £3, conc. £2

Where’s the Conflict in this Deadly War of Words?

2007-05-01T08:57:00.000+01:00

Marc Sidwell reviews ‘Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq – a Hearing’ at the Tricycle.

Peter Brook once wrote that a man walking across a bare stage is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. But what if he just sits there?

In this two hour fantasy tribunal, the Tricycle theatre takes its pacifist politics even more seriously than normal, choosing to eliminate any suspicion of conflict from the script itself. Instead, two men in suits take turns to put their jackets on and off while questioning bureaucrats. In a rare moment of tension, a secretary fumbles as she tries to slip her shoes back on before it is her turn to stand up and sit down again. And I made the tension part up. Her feet slip in and out of her heels just as smoothly as I slipped in and out of consciousness throughout the second half.

It would be easy to dismiss this as cheap criticism. But a cheap play deserves nothing better. The reason this play lacks any spark is not just that the devising team have purged it of all normal sources of theatrical diversion and variety, but that the tawdry subject matter wastes our time. We’d all have been better off with our heads down.

The real tribunal plays at the Tricycle, edited from actual, existing transcripts, provided a startling new kind of dramatic realism, dragging onstage characters from the very eyries of contemporary power, their words for once inescapably exact. The action moved towards a real verdict, on which justice and truth hinged. ‘Called to Account’ does nothing of the kind, because it never happened. The writers have fabricated a “tribunal” with the C- and D-listers who suited their agenda and were willing to take part in a phoney exercise, only Richard Perle adding a serious counterweight to Bob Marshall-Andrews and Clare Short (the latter admittedly well-played). It all ends with a sputter, as the fake inquiry fails even to reach a fake verdict.

Yet who cares? With a title like this one, the chatteriat were out in (peacekeeping) force for the press night: from Menzies Campbell to the Guardian’s top-ranking commissars, all revelling in the fantasy that they matter. On Newsnight Review, one critic was so deep into false consciousness she was reduced to praising the play’s bold use of tedium. You don’t realise how hard it is to act dull, she gushed, not remembering it is even harder to watch.

For those of us who haven’t been looking for a voodoo doll of Blair to stick pins in, much better stay home and get some shuteye. This is a fantasy play, a distraction in dangerous times. As David Aaronovitch protested to the blinkered audience in a post-show discussion, where was the play detailing abuses in Darfur and calling for action? That would be to blend investigative journalism with the tribunal play format in a fresh and engaging manner. Where was the reconstruction of a terror trial, as has just ended today? Why not gather a collection of soldiers, journalists and foreign policy advisers and make the case for sticking with the Iraqis, whatever one’s thoughts about the invasion, in the interests of fighting off the murderous fascist gang of thugs now trying to steal their country? A play where we don’t know what we think, or that sharpens our appreciation of moral horrors we could do something to mitigate would be worth watching.

Instead, the Tricycle is sitting still, speaking words that don’t matter to an audience who already agrees about something that is never going to happen. Peter Brook would have understood where their theatrical experiment has ended up. “To make matters worse there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment… who emerges from routine performances… reciting his favourite lines under his breath… he lends the weight of his authority to dullness and so the Deadly Theatre goes on its way.”

Culture Clash tonight at 8.30 on 18 Doughty Street

2007-05-01T08:51:00.000+01:00

Tonight we’re going to be looking at two films in which politics of one sort or another play a major role. The Lives of Others, the German winner of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, explores the workings of the Stasi amongst the cultural community in 1980s East Germany. And Fast Food Nation, which is released this week, is a fictionalised adaptation of the expose of the fast food industry which bestseller for author Eric Schlosser.

With me to discuss these are the journalist and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Social Affairs author Adam Smyth.

The debut feature by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarsk, THE LIVES OF OTHERS centres on the surveillance of a George Dreyman, a playwright who, although apparently supportive of the socialist regime, is suspected of Western sympathies. He is watched round the clock by a seemingly robotic Stasi agent, who is aware too that a government minister has his eye on Dreyman’s girlfriend. Things become complicated when, moved by the suicide of a colleague, Dreyman writes an article criticising the state.

Now FAST FOOD NATION was a hit in the bestseller’s list for author Eric Schlosser when it was published a few years ago. Now, following on from the success of Morgan Spurlock’s SUPER SIZE ME, Hollywood has come up with an adaptation of Schlosser’s book– not, as you might expect, another Michael-Moore type documentary feature, but a fictionalised re-working by director Richard Linklater, centring on a group of Mexican immigrants working illegally in a meat-processing factory north of the border.

Peter's guests are Ruth Dudley Edwards, author and historian, Sean O'Callaghan, author and terrorism expert, Adam Smyth, writer, and journalist Franck Guillory.

Watch the show HERE

BBC Newsnight Review - Friday, April 27th

2007-04-28T12:48:00.000+01:00

Peter Whittle, Director of The New Culture Forum, joins the panel on Newsnight Review at 11.00pm last night.
Watch the show HERE
and read Peter's profile on the programme's website HERE

DECIVILISATION

2007-04-24T09:19:00.000+01:00

David Cameron yesterday called for a challenge to the increasing acceptance of anti-social behaviour as the norm.

"We all have experience of road rage, Tube rage, never mind what is said if you ask someone not to drop litter or cycle on the pavement," Mr Cameron told the Royal Society of Arts in London. "All these are sad signs of a culture that is becoming de-civilised."

He should be applauded for talking about a subject which, on a day-to-day level, concerns people perhaps more than any other. The cultural and lesiure worlds are also far from immune from increasingly selfish public behaviour - to the extent that many are increasingly taking the option to 'go private', stay at home and avoid the public arena altogether.

Here's a piece which NCF director Peter Whittle wrote for The Spectator back in 2005 on this particular aspect of a hugely important issue:

SLURPS, BURPS AND BLEEPS

Peter Whittle on the misery of being surrounded by slobs in theatres and cinemas.

A few weeks ago I left a performance of Vera Drake emotionally drained. As the lights came up I felt a mixture of indignation, suppressed anger and loathing for the injustices human beings inflict on each other. It took a couple of stiff glasses to settle me down.

Unfortunately it wasn't the abortion theme in Mike Leigh's drama which had brought this on, or Imelda Staunton's quivering performance. It was rather that I had just endured two hours of sitting next to a slob who'd loudly munched his way through two bags of popcorn. With legs sprawled and eyes fixed emotionlessly on the screen, he could have been channel surfing in a hotel room. His hand went robotically from bag to mouth, the motion unaffected by any of the movie's highs or lows. Caught in the corner of my eye, this monotonous action was like an irritating eyelash obscuring my vision. Discrete attempts at registering disapproval – subtle coughs and sideways glances - failed to have the desired impact. He was utterly, noisily oblivious to my discomfort, and he ruined the film for me.

As anti-social behaviour goes, this was hardly Asbo material. But then neither is queue jumping, or the use of train seats as foot rests. They're widespread habits which fly well under the radar of arrestable offence but which in their ugliness impoverish everyday life. And, whether it is brain-dead grazing and incessant chattering in cinemas, or the ringing of mobile phones and group coughing in theatres, or mindless American-style whooping at the end of a ballet, the cultural world is not immune. 'You should get out more' might be one of today's mantras, but maybe the cool option really is to stay in with your books, CDs and DVDs. Either that, or risk feeling genuinely homicidal by the end of what should have been an uplifting, thought-provoking or even just mildly diverting evening out.

Last year Kevin Spacey, just installed as artistic director of the Old Vic, railed against the ever-growing chorus of sweet sucking and ring tones during theatre performances. 'My feeling is if people don't know how to behave, they shouldn't come,' he declared courageously. He'd already shown the strength of his feeling on this by snapping 'Tell them we're busy!' when a phone went off while he was on stage during The Iceman Cometh. Similarly the actor Richard Griffiths went so far as to stop a recent performance of The History Boys at the National Theatre, exasperated by the persistent beeping of a pager. 'I'm sorry, but I can't compete with your electronic device,' he declared to the mortification of the culprit, receiving an enthusiastic round of applause from the rest of the house.

Of course when actors speak up they risk being mocked as typically precious luvvies. And some theatre people, aware of charges of elitism and endlessly straining to appear modishly accessible, play down disruptive behaviour. It was ever thus, they say, and quote the tired old comparisons with the unruliness of Shakespearean audiences. Or they see it as the theatre's responsibility. David Lan, artistic director of the Young Vic, asserts that if people aren't paying attention, the theatre isn't doing its job. 'You cannot blame an audience if it isn't engaged with what you're doing,' he says.

Well, up to a point. But what if large sections of the audience are indeed engaged but are having their enjoyment of a play or film sabotaged by the growing yob tendency, those people from all parts of the social spectrum who do what they want, when they want, and bugger the rest? It can make one feel murderous. Watching The Nutcracker at the ENO at Christmas, we had a family in front of us who, attention span presumably stretched to breaking point, had obviously grown restless. They fidgeted, chatted, and sat dangling their trainer-clad feet over the empty row in front of them. As the mother dozed, the two teenage daughters got up and wandered about from seat to seat, indifferent to both what was happening on stage and the obvious irritation of those of us square enough to be sitting quietly.

For many, the experience of live performance is probably to be approached in the same solipsistic way as watching a DVD at home. So they dress appropriately too. You really don't have to be a reactionary old fogy to find demoralising the sight of ropey tracksuit bottoms amid splendid architecture built to celebrate the highs of the artistic spirit. Such torpid lack of effort goes along with inconsiderate behaviour; it suggests at the very least no sense of occasion, at the worst a general cultural enervation. What's the big deal?

No, in the narcissistic spirit of our age, it's all about letting others be damned. Even in expressing your appreciation of a performance, you have to be saying something about yourself. Those who've shown every sign of utter boredom (such as sleeping), rally themselves enough to whoop like demented hyenas on a TV game show when the curtain comes down. This imported practise makes the self-centred feel part of the artistic process – you've had your moment, they're saying, now I'll have mine. 'Is it another mark of the Me generation?' wrote Arlene Croce in the New Yorker when it was first heard on the American scene years ago. 'All the traditional audience vocables – Bravos, oles - say You were wonderful; they're directed to the performer. These wordless woofs say, I'm wiped out.'

Perhaps old-fashioned clapping is just too, well, altruistic. But what about making equally quaint requests of others to desist from talking, playing with sweet wrappings or dumping partners by mobile? This can be hazardous; much of our interaction with strangers now carries a bat squeak of underlying violence, and the friends I canvassed for their cinema experiences said roughly the same thing: it's not worth the aggro. Civil codes have been up-ended to the extent that now you're considered the rude one for protesting, however gently you do it. You wait, shoulders taut, for the stream of foul-mouthed abuse, or the kick in the back of the chair. It's easier to move, and let them win.

In the theatre however, you're stuck in the same seat. Jonathan, a TV producer friend, witnessed an incident at a West End matinee which resulted in the police being called. "Two teenagers had been making so much noise during the performance that a middle-aged lady had to turn round and ask them to be quiet, a heroic act in the minds of most of us,' he says. 'For this, she was rewarded with a slap across the back of the head and all sorts of unpleasant threats for the rest of the play. From the point of view of these kids, some stupid middle-aged stiff had shown them a colossal disrespect by daring to ask them to be quiet.'

An extreme example perhaps, and on the general scale of social breakdown, bad audience behaviour remains low priority. It's not going to make Panorama. But ignored it becomes just another little incentive for us to abandon the public arena in favour of an increasingly private existence. We could follow the lead of the French, who have recently installed phone signal blocking in their cinemas, theatres and concert halls; if we can't rely on personal restraint, then maybe Nanny will have to intervene. In the meantime, there's nothing for it but to continue suffering in silence - albeit one punctuated by slurps, burps and bleeps.

Spiderman 3 - A review by Dominic Hilton

2007-04-22T12:47:00.000+01:00

If you can get beyond the cheesy opening, the improbable hot scientist chicks with clipboards chewing their pens in the radiation lab, the inexplicably English airhead TV reporter who won’t stop barking the bleedin’ obvious into her mike all through the denouement, the snaggletoothed Kirsten Dunst singing flat, and, most of all, the deeply disturbing idea of making out in the sticky goo of a giant spider’s web (and, let’s face it, lots of otherwise horny arachnophobes will never get beyond this), there’s a lot to be said for Spiderman 3, and even more to be read into, geopolitically speaking.

First, let’s get the obligatory review stuff out of the way. Spiderman 3 is a terrific spectacle, great entertainment, and scary enough to guarantee your kids will soil their Spidey costumes. The visual effects are a knockout, the soundtrack is top-notch, Tobey Maguire is tremendous – this is a hugely 21st Century film. It’s also very funny in parts, as if the producers brought in comics for three scenes then dumped them back onto their barstools for the allegorical stuff.

The plot is a smidge disjointed – multiple villains, united only in their frustration with Spidey’s maddening habit of pooping their various parties, keep reappearing about fifteen minutes and several scenes after a seemingly fatal confrontation with the hero – but this matters not a jot. The storyline relentlessly flashes back to Spiderman I and II, which can get repetitive, if you’re looking for something to complain about. Mary Jane (Dunst) is still unbelievably annoying, and now jealous of Spiderman’s success (as I said, very 21st Century). Peter Parker’s best pal, the slightly slow rich kid Harry, still can’t stop whinging about the death of Willem Defoe, his father – and has now taken to therapeutic Cézanne copying. And the death of Peter’s maddeningly honest uncle Ben remains the thread that holds the franchise together.

Which is where it gets weird. At risk of adding a spoiler warning, it turns out that Spidey’s uncle was shot and killed because America has no socialist healthcare system. Uncle Ben’s sandy killer – whose identity has conveniently shifted to keep things ticking over – explains why he bumps people off and tears up Manhattan:

"My daughter was dying. I needed the money. I was scared."

One man’s hospital bills are killing New Yorkers. We are shown Flint Marko’s (aka Sandman’s) cute daughter with breathing apparatus lodged up her nostrils. All he wants is to get his kid the treatment she needs – and the only way he can do this is to knock off cash-loaded security vans and slaughter whoever is in his path. A world where a muscleman refuses to get a job needs a superhero.

Meanwhile, a meteorite oozing with some evil black stuff lands in the Big Apple and hunts after Spidey. It catches up with him, and turns him bad. Spidey’s suit turns black. So does his hair. It’s the same plot as Superman III, though less silly. The scene in which a stubble-covered, dirty-caped Superman perches on a barstool, shooting whisky, is, unintentionally, one of the funniest in movie history.

Spiderman 3 never quite plumbs such depths. The point about Spidey’s dark turn is explained by an online poll on the official website:

Can a man confront the forces of darkness without giving in to them? Yes/No

When I looked, 77% of visitors had voted ‘Yes’, which means only 23% of people would join Al Qaeda if they were forced to confront the evildoers. Hmmm…

Anyway, that, in a spider’s eggshell, is what this film is about: Can America defeat the forces of terror without building nude pyramids in Abu Ghraib? … No, sorry, that’s another issue. Spiderman 3 is far more explicit. Auntie May tells Peter that “revenge is like a poison” and insists Uncle Ben “wouldn’t want us living for one second with revenge in our hearts” (he’d want them dead?). As office workers fall from Manhattan’s crumbling skyscrapers and Peter fails to comprehend the French maître d’s “bon chance!”, the reference to the War on Terror will hardly be missed by your kid in his baggy-in-the-seat Spidey costume.

So what, then, is Spiderman’s strategy for the War on Terror? I’m not entirely sure of my ground here, but I think it involves a good sprinkling of forgiveness and a large spoonful of capitulation. The original Spiderman movie, an eager friend of mine insists, was infused with the spirit of the Aeneid (or Adenoid, as my computer spellchecker would have it). The message of the first two instalments was “with great power comes great responsibility”. This was not to suggest that Peter Parker need use his powers ‘proportionately’; it just meant he had to use his powers in whatever way necessary, and so quit hanging out at the mall with teenage girls in low-cut tops. But that was then. Spidey III is war-weary. Three major lessons are drawn in the finale:

First, never humiliate your enemy, for he will quickly humiliate you back, and then we’ll all get caught in a vicious cycle of humiliation (etc.). Peter/Spidey makes this mistake with Eddie Brock, a singularly obnoxious squirt who nicks Parker’s photography job at the newspaper by photoshopping some snaps of Spidey knocking off a bank. Peter exposes him, rightly gets him fired, steals his big-chested girlfriend, shoves him up against a wall and tells him, “If you want forgiveness, get a religion.” The result of this ‘error’ is that, weirdly, Brock heads to the local church, kneels in front of Christ, and says, “I want you to kill Peter Parker.” Christ doesn’t deliver, but Brock gets gunged by Spidey’s evil black stuff and turns into Venom, a nasty little screaming shit of a villain who can’t bear the sound of church bells (you’ll just have to go see it), and sets about slaying Pete himself.

Second, not even America… sorry, not even Spiderman can act unilaterally against multiple enemies. We are treated to a multilateral finale, in which Spidey saves the day (in front of a crisp Stars and Stripes) thanks to the support of an ally, who is meant to represent… Who knows? In the real world nobody but America and the terrorists is serious about arming themselves.

Finally, and this is the big one, America must make more of an effort to understand its enemy. The concluding confrontation between Spidey and his uncle’s killer goes like this:

Uncle Killer: “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just want you to understand.”
Spiderman: “I’ve done terrible things too. I forgive you.”

As a consequence of Spidey’s forgiveness, the baddy evaporates and becomes good. The lesson is obvious: Forgive Al Qaeda and they will just evaporate into thin air. Easy.

Not to read too much into it all, of course… There is quite a lot of the earthy, crunchy thing, though not enough to make it unbearable: Dunst disapprovingly refers to a blonde hottie’s “polished fingernails”; the silver-haired Auntie May revels in her lack of make-up and pathetically small diamond engagement ring; Peter uses a payphone in the hallway of his immigrant landlord’s slumhouse and in a moment of ‘badness’ complains about paying rent given how the door to his hovel never opens.

Indeed, Dunst’s MJ is a real moody cow and Peter/Spidey should dump her asap. She spends the whole film screwing up our superhero’s life and behaving like she’s on Oprah’s sofa. You know the form: “Try and understand how I feel. I look at these words [an honest review of her pitiful singing voice] and it’s like my father wrote them.”

Please don’t go there! The woman proceeds to cheat on Peter only minutes after breaking up with him, then triggers Harry’s (thankfully lost) memories and aids and abets Spidey’s enemy by luring Peter into a trap. Plus, this time there’s no wet t-shirt scene. Spidey can, and almost does, do better than this frump.

Ultimately, the film relies on you being the type of moviegoer who worries about American power and arrogance. If, like me, you have a crush on America’s cockey swagger, something strange happens: You end up preferring Spiderman when he is supposed to be ‘bad’ and feel disappointed when he returns to being a humble, unpaid do-gooder. The scenes when Spidey ‘turns to the dark side’ are the best fun of all, and hilariously played by Maguire. He becomes a dude, strutting and moonwalking down the sidewalk, letting his hair go floppy, picking up babes, playing jazz piano, beating up bouncers, and hanging out with blacks in jazz clubs! We are supposed to frown on his fun-time behaviour (and in the real world war, of course, the enemy certainly wouldn’t drink with curvy blondes in decadent jazz clubs…). But if this is supposed to represent America showing off to the world, reserve me a table at that gin joint. After all, what is the FX-laden blockbusting Spiderman III if not America showing off to the world? We love it, and Hollywood really must stop pretending it is something it is not.

© Dominic Hilton, 2007

IN THE PAPERS - In The Times today, the Barbican chief John Tusa expresses his anger against 'ignorant bureaucrats and posturing barbarians'.

2007-04-17T11:16:00.000+01:00

I’m sick to death of meddling philistines

Government arts policy is forged by ignorant bureaucrats and posturing barbarians, writes the furious Barbican chief John Tusa

I will put it simply and perhaps too directly. After more than a decade of direct involvement in the arts and the debate about them, there are many things of which I am sick to death. This is not just a spasm of impatience but represents my deep belief that if the attitudes behind the policies I describe did not exist, the arts would be better run, healthier, more effective, more varied and more enjoyable even than they are today. Does arts policymaking, in short, get in the way of creating the arts themselves?

In recent weeks there have been specific criticisms of government attitudes to the arts by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music, and Charles Saumarez Smith, the outgoing director of the National Gallery. “Max” said that the Government’s attitude was “utterly philistine”, while Saumarez Smith criticised the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, for being “completely deaf” to the importance of saving major works of art for the nation.

I am as — or even more — concerned with the way that arts policy has become so heavily bureaucratised. It should not be necessary for a senior civil servant to spend weeks trying to persuade the Treasury that an additional £22 million will prevent the museums and galleries from spiralling into deficit, as has happened recently. It is a waste of time because £22 million in a national budget of some £560 billion is ignored as the big numbers are added up. The sum of £22 million is just rounded off. It’s loose change.

This is not a special plea for a privileged place for the arts. It is a plea for the application of common sense. Let’s be clear. If the Treasury holds on to that £22 million, it will not make any difference to its room for manoeuvre on any major item of government policy — not health, not education, not welfare, not defence. If it gives it to the museums and galleries, it heads off a looming crisis. What does common sense suggest is the wiser course, the more effective approach? Time spent in meetings arguing over such numbers as if they were life or death issues has wasted hours of time, for arts directors as well as policymakers.

Mine is also a plea for a serious approach to funding the arts. As Tony Blair made clear in his Tate Modern speech on March 6, new Labour is very proud of funding free access to museums and galleries, transforming attendances and hugely increasing audiences for museums and galleries. But we also know that this came about not because of a reasoned belief in the policy, still less from conviction in the values of free admission, but because the Treasury found a significant lump of money lying loose shortly before the Budget was finalised.

Funding free admission was judged to make a good political headline. The arts deserve better than this, a serious debate about arts funding rather than this mix of opportunism, point-scoring and gameplaying.
I’m sick to death, too, with justifying the arts as if there was something specially problematical about doing so, as if funding the arts is irrational or even unnatural. Thinking about the arts, judging their value, explaining particular trends in the arts — this is an essential part of a human activity that takes itself seriously. What is a waste of time is being required to justify the arts as if millennia of arts activity required justifying anew, as if a failure to justify them could — or should — lead to the end of the activity altogether.
This demand for an incontrovertible justification for the arts goes hand in hand with the further cry: “Yes, these reasons are familiar enough, but you cannot demonstrate that they add up numerically or financially.” No one has ever funded the arts because they have convinced the sceptical about their essential utility. Making the demand is an act of posturing only. I am sick to death of senior policymakers having to spend time presenting the record of the arts in detail to Treasury officials and being asked, almost incredulously: “So you’re saying the arts are a success story?” I’m certainly sick to death of being asked by friendly lobbying groups, such as the National Campaign for the Arts — it’s not their fault — to give them real instances of the arts making a difference to people or their society so that they, too, can try to persuade the Treasury. The cost of producing these papers is real.

I do want the Treasury and all politicians to know what the arts achieve. There is plenty to suggest that the mountains of evidence produced through this process are of scant value in the final decision-making process. Is this a policy of attrition? Of obstruction? Of postpone-ment? Probably all three.

Come to that, why is the demand for justification of the arts so often accompanied by the implied slur that those in the arts are engaged in a selfish activity — which they want others to pay for — by representing them as some kind of personal indulgence, constituting a private play-thing? All the evidence points to widespread use made of the arts, the overwhelming support for their funding and the enjoyment that they bring. Why is so much overt public debate founded apparently on such wilfully false assumptions?

I’m sick to death, too, that the arts play such a small part in the activities of local authorities. There are statutory responsibilities on local authorities to provide key services such as education, housing and the police. There is no equivalent statutory responsibility to provide for the arts. Perhaps inevitably, when local authorities do produce a cultural strategy — and more and more of them feel obliged to do so — there is no mention of anything truly recognisable as arts provision. Can you be surprised when the very word “culture” in local authority speak has been debased to include swimming, walking and enjoying parks almost to the deliberate exclusion of the visual and performing arts.

Why are we so supine in not rebutting the accusation that the market’s provision of entertainment makes subsidy of the arts unnecessary and probably unjustifiable? Why do we not challenge the sneer that there are the popular arts and then — wait for it — the unpopular arts? Why are we so weak in ramming home the fact that public subsidy and private funding are partners in creating a broad spectrum, from the most esoteric to the most banal, that actually unites us in the world of arts and entertainment?

The market benefits hugely from the actors, directors, designers, playwrights, nurtured, trained and developed by the subsidised sector. Has anyone ever suggested that the private entertainment sector should pay the state a return on the fruits of this investment in talent and creativity from which it benefits so hugely?
Arguably, this binary approach — state-subsidised arts bad, privately funded arts good — is one of the most damaging and destructive aspects of the public arts debate. It is untrue, it obfuscates, it is intended to damage, and it distracts attention from the fact that however we are funded, basically we are all in the same business.

Arts policymakers judge the education and outreach programme of a major arts institution not by whether it is of high quality and raises the creative awareness of the children it is aimed at, but only whether it is directed at socially targeted groups such as refugees or the socially marginalised.

Valuable as such activity may be, it is far from clear why an education programme dedicated to developing creative understanding in the broadest sense should be limited and defined in this way. Such may well be the priorities of social welfare departments. Why are they the priorities of arts policy-makers? The only possible answer can be that the arts policymakers themselves do not believe in the value of excellence of the arts as such and on their own.

Why do we allow the language of the arts to be bogged down in the impenetrable cant of social science? Why must every document be laden with words and phrases such as “pathways”, “entry points”, “direction of travel” and dozens of such like. If the language is vague, obscure, woolly, impenetrable, then the ideas lurking behind it will be equally vague and woolly.

The principle that those who spend publicly given money should be open about how they spend it is unquestionable. But the manner in which accountability is operated is crucial. Too often the cry of “accountability” is used as a none-too-transparent cloak for interference. The proliferating forms in which accountability is demanded only get in the way of the creation of the arts for which the money is given in the first place. This is not an accident, a byproduct of a bureaucratic tic for tidiness. It is usually a deliberate — and nontransparent — way of exerting control that would not be tolerated in other circumstances.
These attitudes get in the way, they make life more difficult for the artists, the real creators. They do not — to use a management cant phrase — “add value”.

What I love about the best arts organisations that help artists to flourish is the energy and curiosity with which ideas are turned into art. The best of these organisations are alert, intense, questing, dynamic and effective.

What value do the policymakers and their myriad questions truly add to the hard work of creating the new? Incoming governments have often trumpeted a policy of a “bonfire of regulations”. Perhaps a true coda to Tony Blair’s speech at Tate Modern would be for him to free the arts from so many of the supervisory bodies that restrict activity rather than freeing it. Or perhaps the new Gordon Brown Government can ask arts bureaucrats to really justify what they contribute to the health of the arts in the United Kingdom?
Sir John Tusa is the managing director of the Barbican Centre.

From The Times

ON THE WEB - Marc Sidwell's review of Mark Steyn's America Alone for the Social Affairs Unit

2007-04-17T11:03:00.000+01:00

Mark Steyn should not write off Europe just because she has a nasty temperature - Marc Sidwell explains why: America Alone - Mark Steyn

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
by Mark Steyn
Pp. 224. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006Hardback, $27.95

Is demography destiny? Mark Steyn, columnist to the world, certainly thinks so. In America Alone, he lays out a bleak future for European dhimmitude - fortunately brightened by Steyn's trademark wit. He points out our collapsing birth-rates, despite (and perhaps because of) generous welfare systems that rely on a successor generation to pick up the tab. He sets this alongside comparatively high birth-rates among Muslims and increased Muslim immigration to Europe as our politicians attempt to make up the welfare deficit. Shake it together with multiculti paralysis before twenty-first century Islamism and, suggests Steyn, you have a cocktail mixed by Molotov, the kind already being tossed around in the French banlieues.

However, Steyn's argument seems to have been given a remarkably easy ride up the bestseller charts. As his book starts to attract attention in the UK, where its predictions are a matter of vital interest rather a wry joke on a distant and reluctant ally, Steyn can expect a more searching reception. Johann Hari has already attempted a takedown of the book's thesis for the New Statesman, one of the few occasions I recall a critic engaging with Steyn on the data.

So how seriously should British conservatives take America Alone? Is it time to buy a one-way ticket to Colorado, or will Europe, the western motherland, refuse to be bundled into a burqa?

Read the whole article on the Social Affairs Unit's website, here
Also remember the interview Mark Steyn gave to The New Culture Forum last november,
Mark Steyn talks to The New Culture Forum

IN THE PAPERS / The first of two major exhibitions celebrates Blake, the anti-slavery artist. But was he really? asks Laura Cumming in The Guardian

2007-04-16T07:44:00.000+01:00

Of human bondage

Mind-Forg'd Madness: William Blake and Slavery
Ferens Gallery, Hull; until 20 May, then Glasgow and Manchester

Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom from orthodox religion, the right to roam, the right to go without clothes - William Blake, who represents them all, is art's original free spirit. He is against mind-forg'd manacles and the tyranny of Reason. He is against dark, satanic mills and conventional marriage. He may be a libertarian or he may be a hippy, but even those who can't summon one of his proverbial images to mind - God in his chariot of fire, Newton doing his maths at the bottom of the ink-blue sea - know that Blake, in life as in art, is a freedom-loving idealist.

Laura Cumming's article continues here

Did you see it? What did you think?

British Academy Television Awards 2007 nominations

2007-04-16T07:32:00.000+01:00

ACTOR

Jim Broadbent, Longford, Channel 4
Andy Serkis, Longford, Channel 4
Michael Sheen, Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, BBC4
John Simm, Life On Mars, BBC1

ACTRESS

Anne-Marie Duff, The Virgin Queen, BBC1
Samantha Morton, Longford, Channel 4
Ruth Wilson, Jane Eyre, BBC1
Victoria Wood, Housewife 49, ITV1

SINGLE DRAMA

Housewife 49, ITV1
Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, BBC4
Longford, Channel 4
Road To Guantanamo, Channel 4

SPECIALIST FACTUAL

Munich: Mossad’s Revenge, Channel 4
Nuremberg: Goering’s Last Stand, Channel 4
Planet Earth, BBC1
Simon Schama’s Power Of Art, BBC2

SINGLE DOCUMENTARY

Breaking Up With The Joneses, Channel 4
Evicted, BBC1
9/11: The Falling Man, Channel 4
Rain In My Heart, BBC2

NEWS COVERAGE

BBC Ten O’Clock News - Terrorism Plot At
Heathrow, BBC1
Channel 4 News - News From Iran, Channel 4
Granada Reports: Morecambe Bay, ITV
ITV Evening News - The Israel/Lebanon Crisis, ITV1

The complete list on the BAFTA's site

IN THE PAPERS / The Lives of Others - A chilly and controversial study of a Stasi snoop for James Christopher in The Times

2007-04-16T07:13:00.000+01:00

The Lives of Others has caused the most delicious trouble since winning Best Foreign Language film at this year’s Oscars. Few critics expected this modest thriller about the East German Stasi to lift such a glamorous award.

No one anticipated the film’s extraordinary reach. Not least, the young — aged 34 — first-time director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. His Oscar triumph should have earned him a firework display, a team of nubile cheerleaders and a nifty title (Count, perhaps) to add to his preposterous name.
But The Lives of Others has put the fear of God into the German cultural establishment. It rips the stitches from memories that are still fresh and deep.
The film opens in East Berlin, in a Stasi cell in the Hohenschönhausen detention centre in 1984. Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) tapes the interrogation of a hapless dissident for the benefit of his latest dull class of aspiring secret policemen. He is quite brilliant at his job. He is as dispassionate as Sherlock Holmes while crushing Watson, and as giving as a cement wall. The purity of Wiesler’s logic is actually hypnotic. There is a mad science about his methods that makes shocking playground sense.
The plot is as simple as an opera charge sheet. A plump and seedy minister for the arts falls for a famous actress with a drug habit. He orders his lieutenant to bug the flat she shares with her fashionable playwright boyfriend. Wiesler is duly charged to drag up the necessary dirt. Under “Operation Lazlo”, he litters their apartment with secret microphones and moves into the attic to spy on their every twitch.
Against every trained fibre of his highly tuned mind he starts falling in love with Martina Gedeck’s voluptuous actress, and sympathising with Sebastian Koch’s idealistic writer. The mission to nail this pair of errant artists turns into a desperate soap to save them.
This is where most East German survivors and commentators parted company with von Donnersmarck’s melodrama. The idea of a Stasi officer with the wit to dream up this kind of redeeming scenario is apparently beyond the pale. For my money it doesn’t lessen the power of the film one jot.
An alarming sense of guilt has been hoisted on to The Lives of Others. Almost because it touches truths that every other East German film in recent years has been desperate to avoid, or treats with rough-and-tumble irony. This has resulted in a slew of films called “Ostalgie” (a pun for which the literal meaning is “nostalgia for the East”).
What distinguishes von Donnersmarck is that he clearly has the courage of youth on his side. He remembers growing up in Berlin (though he is in fact from Cologne) with family on both sides of Checkpoint Charlie.
The provincial pluck of his script is the refusal to dilute the paranoia that he witnessed as a child crossing the border to visit relatives in the East. It’s a bravery singularly lacking in German directors who ought to know better.
The eerie pleasure of Mühe’s performance is how much we empathise with his drab and hollow spy. We are unwittingly captivated. The entire grubby history of Cold War surveillance is etched on his face. The eyes are ancient. The mouth is tight and unsmiling. The creases haven’t been oiled in decades. Wiesler’s most intimate moments are spent with his head mournfully buried between the breasts of a clock-watching prostitute.
Yet the taboo drama is how skilfully the film gets under his skin. He is a man whose entire life has been distilled into details: the endless typewritten reports; the “odour jars” used to capture a suspect’s scent; the metal steamers that can open 600 letters an hour; the warehouses full of well-thumbed files.
The disillusion is perfect when he discovers that Operation Lazlo is simply a means to satisfy a Central Committee member’s sexual urges.The plot chimes queasily with the broadsheet frenzy about our new surveillance society, and the ubiquitous evils of coast-to-coast CCTV.
What doesn’t ring entirely true is a Stasi officer who undergoes an angelic change of heart. This is a harsh leap, and arguments still rage about whether or not unsuspecting audiences should be allowed to take it. But the atmosphere of the film is exquisitely 1980s. The cruel backdrops are marvellous shades of grey. There is a bruising beauty about the relationship between Gedeck’s doomed actress and Koch’s unselfish writer. And a savage cynicism. Few films have dared paint East Germany and its legions of demons in such honest and unsparing detail. Von Donnersmarck puts a pickaxe into the past.

From The Times

If you've seen The Life of Others, please share your thoughts with us.

Military matters on Culture Clash

2007-04-10T21:46:00.000+01:00

With military matters dominating the news, tonight we’re going to be discussing the media coverage surrounding the release last week of the fifteen Royal Navy hostages, from their capture right through to Faye Turney’s television interview last night with Trevor MacDonald. And we’re also going to be asking whether Channel 4 should postpone indefinitely it’s already once delayed, controversial drama about British troops in Iraq, The Mark of Cain.

With me to tonight are Damian Thompson, editor in chief of the Catholic Herald and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph, Petroc Trelawny, journalist and Radio 3 presenter, Marc Sidwell of the New Culture Forum, and Andrew Haydon, critic for Culturewars.

But first, we’re going to look at a new film which recalls a past military controversy. Days of Glory, which looks at the role played by the Arab and African colonies in the French Army during World War II, centres around four soldiers who, in fighting for a country they have never even seen, encounter prejudice and unfair treatment from the French military hierarchy. The film, which won the four actors a shared Best Actor award at Cannes last year, prompted President Chirac to make a change in the law, under which, previously, pensions to such soldiers had been stopped once their countries were granted independence.

Watch it on18 Doughty Street Talk TV at anytime

Something rotten...

2007-04-09T13:10:00.000+01:00

According to some reports, 'fears are growing' that the behaviour of the MOD and the fifteen released navel personnel in selling their stories to the media might result in a lessening in public sympathy for them.

Whether there was much there to begin with is highly questionable. This past week, it's not been necessary to be a hard-beaked hawk to have been made utterly despondent first by the remarkable level of public indifference to the crisis, and then by the utter lack of decorum and supine self-justification which characterised the actions and pronouncements of the fifteen, and the soft-ball indulgence with which they have been treated by the broadcast media. A few streets away from me, a house is festooned in banners and balloons in a welcome home to one of the seamen. But so far, neighbourly interest seems to have been rather scant. Indeed I would in other circumstances have been moved to add my congratulations, but on this occasion, when our failings have been so cruelly exposed, I have found it impossible.

Why has television been so craven? This must be because this story fitted perfectly the dumbed-down Diana-fication of the news reporting agenda. It wanted a blubfest, and it's been doing its best to get it. Doubtless this will continue tonight when Faye Turney is interviewed by Trevor McDonald on ITV. Television would have liked this to have been The People's Hostages.

But from Friday's press conference on, only the most hysterically sentimental (who unfortunately, in our society today, make up a large number) would not have had serious doubts and reservations niggling away at the backs of their minds. Most people may not be able to readily articulate it, but they sense that this whole episode says something disturbing about what has happened to us.

The print media, thank goodness, have in its various colours been more restrained, and have either conspicuously kept their council or have been describing the qualms and unease many have felt as the whole episode has unfolded. Interestingly it was a piece in the Guardian by Marina Hyde which summed up, albeit flippantly, what many of us have been thinking.

The West is facing a decades-long struggle. Many people don't get this, which is of course a help to those in the West itself who want so desperately to see it fail. It's up to us to continue to make the case, to do everything we can to get Europe to wake up. In the meantime, it would be helpful if we didn't have to listen to tales of our military sobbing themselves to sleep at night.

Yet more preaching to the converted...

2007-04-09T11:32:00.000+01:00

The Sunday Times's Christopher Hart makes the important points about so-called 'political theatre' in his review of Landscape with Weapon, a new play by Joe Penhall at the National. Rather like David Hare's Playing with Fire, this one ( a debate about arms and war between two brothers) affects to bring in a convincing opposing view at one point, only to abandon it outside the comfort zone. This way, of course, theatre-goers are allowed to flatter themselves by their 'open-mindedness.' Perhaps we're seeing a mini-trend here.

Read the whole review in Sunday Times Culture

300—the most civilised film in decades, writes Marc Sidwell

2007-04-09T10:44:00.000+01:00

Frank Miller’s bold and bloody reinvention of the Battle of Thermopylae hits British cinema screens this week, fresh from two record-breaking weekends at the American box office. Certificate 15 (‘R’-rated in America) this is a violent and at times sexy film aimed at a youth market. From its takings, the producers did not mistake their fan base.

The film is an unrelenting, two hour epic remythologising the historical record. Frank Miller’s graphic style is brought to vivid life thanks to groundbreaking use of blue screen technology, supplemented by influences from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those whose stance is instinctively ironic and cynical, the straightforward heroism celebrated here will be disconcerting. For those who know the value of sacrifice and the price of freedom, the experience is thrilling. This is a modern film that reconnects with the essence of Western civilisation.

For what makes this film exceptional are the classical foundations upon which it draws – the American scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, was a consultant – and the resonance they evidently have with a fresh generation of westerners, officially unschooled in Herodotus and Homer. If our education system has given up on the value of a classical education, the runaway success of 300 proves that the values of the mass of the West remain those of Ancient Greece, even in the Age of Barbie. Freedom, Beauty, Excellence and Reason are all celebrated here—four exceptional touchstones of the West that come to us from tiny Greece, thanks to the resistance of the Spartans.

One of Miller’s sources was an essay by William Golding, ‘The Hot Gates’ – a literal translation of Thermopylae. Golding reminds us of simple historical fact: ‘A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like’. When the freedoms to write what we like and go where we like are once more under threat, it is no surprise that Thermopylae should return to inspire us. The West, for all our forgetfulness, is one civilisation, stretching back two and a half thousand years to the shining example of Greece. The last time the Spartan epic was re-enacted, it served to stiffen sinews in the Cold War.

300 reminds us too that for all the current misperception of America as global bully, the West is in truth the eternal underdog. In a world always ready to fall back into tyranny and superstition, only the Greeks and their inheritors know the value and the power of individual human beings. When we are set free, we can bring down giants, but we always play David to the world’s Goliath. Refusing to kneel before the Persian horde, Gerard Butler’s Leonidas and his buffed-up men are an army of Michelangelo’s Davids. They are simultaneously the progenitors and inheritors of the best of the West. Their reception in 2007 is proof that ordinary westerners retain a sense of their civilisation and its essential values. Our elite gatekeepers may find the unofficial western motto—freedom or death; war is not the worst of evils—hard to grasp. 300 shows that everyone else gets it. There is hope for us yet.

Culture Clash tonight at 8.30pm on 18 Doughty Street Talk TV

2007-04-03T10:02:00.000+01:00

Last week on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, journalist and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens ripped into David Cameron, claiming that his leadership of the Conservatives spelt the end of parliamentary politics as we have known it, and that as a politician he was not only not a real conservative, but was without conviction of any kind.

However much of the programme was given over to an examination of Cameron’s upper class background, and the attempts he’s made, in Hitchens eyes, to cover it up. Tonight, we’ll be discussing quite what Hitchens was trying to get at, and more broadly, the part which class plays, if any at all, in our society today.

My guests tonight are Anthony Browne, chief political correspondent of The Times, author and columnist James Delingpole, Susan Shaw senior producer of The South Bank Show, and Dominic Hilton of the New Culture Forum.

Yet more self-hate posing as creative freedom

2007-04-03T09:54:00.000+01:00

In today’s Times, Michael Gove criticises Channel 4 as it prepares to broadcast a drama depicting British troops as cowards and sadists. Doubtless the broadcaster thinks it is being ‘courageous.’

You could call it the whistle-blower’s dilemma. Is loyalty to the tribe, solidarity with your mates, a higher virtue than fidelity to the truth? Is the moral courage required to speak out when you know something is wrong a more admirable trait than the respect for those who have looked out for you in the past, which might incline you to keep your trap shut when they’re under suspicion? It’s that basic moral question that lies at the heart of a superb Channel 4 drama to be broadcast on Thursday. The Mark of Cain is a searing, wrenching, disorientating account of British troops under the most extreme pressure. Set in the months immediately after the liberation of Iraq, it grips from the first frame to the last. It lays out in brutally arresting terms the difficult moral choice between loyalty and honesty. And yet I would never have commissioned it.

The tribe to which I belong, the profession with which I’ve shown solidarity throughout my career, is journalism. And the basic principle of journalism is a belief in free speech; indeed, more than that, a desire to drag into the open those things the powerful would rather keep hidden, and a natural affinity with all those who push the boundaries of expression, even unto the point of giving offence. Faced with the question of whether it was right to publish, for example, Danish cartoons that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, my view has always been, let them be seen. And the more vehemently that fundamentalist obscurantists demand that they be censored, the more powerful the obligation on the rest of us to ensure that we are not intimidated into censoring ourselves because of their threats.

So, if I can defend the widespread publication of some cartoons, which are certainly offensive, and may be of only indifferent artistic merit – indeed, if I can not just sympathise with their publication but insist upon it – how on earth can I defend my negative attitude towards a drama that I freely acknowledge is superbly made? Because the moral questions that the drama discusses are as nothing next to the moral problems that its screening will raise. The Mark of Cain is marketed as a fictional drama, but it has been filmed with documentary verisimilitude. It depicts, over two hours, horrific scenes of prisoner abuse in which British troops visit disgusting punishments on innocent Iraqi detainees. British soldiers are shown bullying their juniors, with NCOs looking on benignly. The treatment of Iraqis is characterised by a gleeful sadism laced with casual racism. Faced with the threat of exposure, ranks close but it’s the other ranks who are left to take the heat. While officers and NCOs scuttle out of danger, two private soldiers are court-martialled and it’s then that they have to weigh up loyalty to the guys who have covered their backs in the past with the need to speak truth to power.

I have no problem with that dilemma being posed in dramatic form. But I do take issue with Channel 4’s decision to screen a drama, its only dramatic depiction of our troops at war in Iraq, which portrays them all as bullies, sadists, moral vacuums or cowards. And I worry profoundly what effect it will have on British forces in the Gulf when one of our state-backed broadcasters screens appalling footage of them abusing Iraqis which, while taken from a drama, has all the vérité power of a documentary.

Channel 4 must ask itself what greater risk British soldiers will be put to as a result of this screening, and what justifies that greater risk. I know that its spin-doctors will talk about its historic responsibility to raise difficult issues but, frankly, no one buys that tosh any more. This is the channel that justified the psychological bullying of Big Brother on the basis that it was sparking a debate on racism (you might as well sponsor a BNP march down Brick Lane on the same principle). And this is the channel that fights its rating war from the gutter, with shows such as Something for the Weekend and Sex in Court sitting a little uncomfortably alongside its public service broadcasting obligations. Channel 4 coming over all evangelical about the need to grapple with the big moral issues is as convincing as a crack addict managing the Priory.

The real moral issue that Channel 4 needs to tackle – indeed, that the broadcast media as a whole must consider – is not so much the need for moral courage on the part of our troops. The men and women in the Gulf show the sort of bravery every day of their professional lives that should leave the rest of us speechless with admiration. No, the real issue is the disturbing moral relativism of our media and their lack of moral clarity at a time of trial for freedom. How can it be right that the only drama yet screened about our troops in Iraq, who are risking everything to help to build a democracy, is one in which they are depicted as sadists and cowards? Why do the people who commission this sort of stuff seem to hate our country, and our values, so much that their first impulse is to see what they can do to blacken the reputation of those who fight in our name? And what does it say about the moral courage of our broadcasters that the broader context of the war our soldiers are fighting, the struggle against militant Islamism, just doesn’t get a look-in? It’s time that the whistle was blown on the broadcasters’ abuse of our soldiers’ mission.

Tuesday, it is Culture Clash day - 8.30 pm on 18 Doughty Street Talk TV

2007-03-27T16:39:00.000+01:00

Tonight, we’re going to be taking a retrospective look at two successful British films, now out on DVD which, in their different ways, provided much discussion about the very different political and cultural issues they explored, when they were released in cinemas last year: THE QUEEN, which even the Martians must know won Helen Mirren an Oscar last month, and CHILDREN OF MEN, an adaptation of the PG James novel, which starred Clive Owen in a tale of a dystopian Britain set in the year 2027.

With me to talk about these are FT and Jewish Chronicle journalist Francesca Segal, Adam Smyth, who’s currently writing a book about the Mohammad cartoons, the South Bank Show producer Susan Shaw, and social entrepreneur Simon Marcus.

First off, Stephen Frears’s THE QUEEN deals with the relationship between the monarch and Tony Blair, played by Michael Sheen, during the week following the death of Diana Princess of Wales, and focuses on the attempts of the new, highly popular Prime minister to reconnect the Queen with the public at a time when the monarchy appeared to have seriously misjudged the national mood.

Watch here

Charlie Hebdo : Yesterday's crucial verdict

2007-03-23T07:19:00.000Z

Yesterday in Paris, a court’s decision cleared Philippe Val, the editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” when it published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. The case was brought by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) and the World Islamic League.

The judges were right in finding that the limits of free expression were not exceeded in this case. Their verdict accords with the French Republic’s values and is important for French society as a whole. Hopefully it will set a judicial precedent. Their ruling is in no way a defeat for one single community, rather it is a victory for press freedom, for the general principle of freedom of speech and furthermore for all those who remain determined not to appease Islamo-fascists and all religious fundamentalists in France and around the World.

The Paris Grand Mosque said it would not appeal, although not surprisingly the more radical UOIF announced that it would.

When he left the court yesterday, Philippe Val, who was facing a possible sentence of six months in prison and a fine of 22,500 euros, expressed his satisfaction and confidence in the French judicial system, commenting: “We have been vindicated by the court.”

It is also important to note that this verdict comes at a crucial time for France, just one month before the Presidential election. It was encouraging to see that many politicians, including UDF presidential candidate François Bayrou and French Socialist Party leader François Hollande, voiced their support for the magazine during the two-day trial on 7 and 8 February, and that Nicolas Sarkozy, the UMP presidential candidate, also indicated his support, commenting that he preferred “an excess of cartoons to a lack of cartoons.” At the same, it is unfortunate that, during this Presidential campaign, these same candidates have been so cautious in not mentioning the rise of communities who increasingly aim to separate themselves, and the risks that this represents to France, the French Republic and its core idealistic values.

Franck Guillory

Postscript

The outcome of this key trial for the defence of press freedom follows a similar decision by Danish judges acquitting the editors of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the first newspaper to publish controversial cartoons of Mohammed.

The lawsuit concerned three of the six Mohammed cartoons which the weekly published on 8 February 2006. Two of the three had appeared in Jyllands-Posten in 2005. One of them showed Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb about to explode. The other showed him saying: “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.” The third, which was on the cover, was by French cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut. It showed Mohammed with his head in his hands saying: “It is hard to be loved by idiots.”

'300' reviewed on Culture Clash

2007-03-22T07:33:00.000Z

Based on Frank Millar’s graphic novel, which was itself inspired by the film The 300 Spartans, 300 tells the story of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which King Leonidas, played by Gerard Butler, leads his men in a stand for freedom against Xerxes and the mighty Persian army. The film, which like Millar’s Sin City, is shot as a kind of hybrid between real action and animation, has been accused by expatriate Iranians of being ‘irresponsible’, a distortion, and ‘an assault on its culture and tradition.’

With Peter Whittle to discuss these are Dolan Cummings of Spiked Online, Dawn French of the New Criterion magazine, Andrew Haydon, critic for Culturewars, and Marc Sidwell of the Henry Jackson Society.

Watch a clip

and the full programme here

James Delingpole tells us How to be Right

2007-03-20T12:06:00.000Z

On Monday evening, author and journalist James Delingpole gave the NCF the benefit of his wisdom when he talked about his new book How to be Right: a Guide to making Lefty Liberals History. The event was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, and drew a good crowd who put James’s A to Z guide to the test after he’d been interviewed by director Peter Whittle.

James and Anthony Browne, chief political correspondent of the Times

To order How to be Right on Amazon, press here

Gerard Baker has an excellent piece in today’s Times

2007-03-16T11:09:00.000Z

Although it’s mostly concerned with the BBC, Baker's general point about the opinion-setting powers of a metropolitan elite, and their attitudes to the rest of the country, hits the target. As anybody who has worked in television will know, there is in fact little to choose in this respect between those who work in the BBC and most other areas of broadcasting now, but the crucial difference is that, as a public service, the BBC is paid for by us whether we like it on not.

Great City. Shame about the BBC

For someone who has not lived in the city for more than a decade, the occasional trip to London is a reminder of how richly it deserves its new reputation as the world’s capital.

As my colleague James Harding wrote in times2 this week, there’s a vibrancy about London these days that easily eclipses New York or Paris or Tokyo. To many residents, perhaps, life in London may be a struggle against rising crime and a crowded Tube and overpriced housing, but from an international perspective, it is truly the world’s preeminent urban locale.

In fact, in anything other than the most literal, geographic expression of the term, London is really no longer an English city at all. Its great economic dynamo, the City, powers corporations from Shanghai to Seattle. Its labour force, drawn to it by the opportunities of its free markets, is much more polyglot and multinational than any other urban concentration in the world.

But there’s salt to this strawberry. London’s political culture has been uprooted from its English heritage. It is run — if you can call it that — by a sort of postmodern communist Mayor, whose political voice — minus the annoying nasal whine — would sound right at home in Paris, Bologna or San Francisco. It hosts a metropolitan elite that loftily gazes three ways: outward, at the supposed superiority of anything not British; inward, at its own ineffable genius; and down its elegantly pampered nose, at the provincial trivialities that consume the dreary lives of the rest of the population.

But worst of all; much more, much more baleful than any of these irritations, is the political, cultural and intellectual hegemony exercised by the ultimate self-serving metropolitan monopoly, the BBC. Much worse because, unlike mayors and snobs, its domination of the rest of the country is so complete and so permanent.
On a recent trip back to Britain, I happened to hear on the BBC an interview with Helen Mirren, shortly before her Oscars triumph. Amid the usual probing sort of questioning that is the currency of celebrity journalism (“How do you manage to look so young? Is there anyone since Shakespeare who has come close to matching your talent?”) one particular gem caught my attention.

Dame Helen was asked how difficult it had been to play such an “unsympathetic character” as the Queen, the eponymous heroine of her recent film. She replied, quite tartly, that she didn’t find the Queen unsympathetic at all and launched into her now familiar riff about how she thought Elizabeth II really, surprisingly, quite agreeable.

It was a little incident, a small crystal in the battering hailstorm of drivel that pours daily through the airwaves. And yet to my mind it signified something so large. It had nothing to do with politics or Iraq or America. It was so telling in its revelation of prejudices and presumptions precisely because it was on such a slight matter as the sensibilities of an actress.

It betrayed an absolutely rock-solid assumption that the Queen is fundamentally unsympathetic, and that anyone who might still harbour some respect for the monarch — or indeed for that matter, the military or the Church, or the countryside or the joint stock company or any of the great English bequests to the world — must be some reactionary old buffer out in the sticks who has not had the benefit of the London media’s cultural enlightenment.

More than that, the question — all fawning and fraternal and friendly — contained within it an assumption that, of course, every thoughtful person shares the same view.

You really do have to leave the country to appreciate fully how pernicious the BBC’s grasp of the nation’s cultural and political soul has become. The groupthink and assumptions implicit in almost everything broadcast by BBC News, and even less explicitly by much else of the corporation’s output, lie like a suffocating blanket over the national consciousness.

This is the mindset that sees the effortless superiority, at every turn, of benign collectivism over selfish individualism, exploited worker over unscrupulous capitalist, enlightened European over brutish American, thoughtful atheist over dumb believer, persecuted Arab over callous Israeli; and that believes the West is the perpetrator of just about every ill that has ever befallen the world — from colonialism to global warming.

I’m often told, when I take on like this, that I’m ignoring the quality of BBC output. But I spent almost a decade in the employ of the BBC and I can say, without demeaning my gifted colleagues at The Times, that it has probably one of the highest concentrations of talent of any institution in the world. But that, of course, is the problem. It perpetuates its power by attracting and retaining an educated elite that is distinguished by its unstinting devotion to collectivist values. I’ve no doubt it does what it does very well. It is what it does I object to.

A necessary word here about our sponsor. Anything critical of the BBC written by an employee of Rupert Murdoch is instantly dismissed. It’s not an unreasonable instinct. Outside Murdochland it is solemnly assumed that each morning the drones of News Corporation are given their marching orders on how to interpret every event so that it conforms precisely to the commercial and political instincts of the proprietor.

In the real world, not only does the Murdoch media have only a fraction of the reach of the BBC, but a casual glance at its output demonstrates it is far less monolithic in its outlook than is the BBC.

Fortunately, in the US this week, I was struck by an article on the oped pages of The New York Times, the very citadel of leftish political correctness. Written by an apparently completely sane professor at a prestigious US university and entitled “Biased Broadcasting Corporation”, it assailed the BBC’s Middle Eastern services for their consistently antiWestern tone and content.

When the editorial pages of The New York Times accuse the BBC of anti-Western bias it is worth taking notice. It is a little like Osama bin Laden accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of being a bit harsh on the Jews. It suggests that in other, even pretty unlikely, parts of the world, people are waking up to the menace to our values represented by the BBC. The British sadly, seem curiously content to remain in thrall to it.

In the Times today

2007-03-15T08:09:00.000Z

University is accused of censoring anti-Semitic Islam lecture, by Sean O'Neill

The University of Leeds was accused of infringing free speech last night when it cancelled a lecture on “Islamic anti-Semitism” by a German academic.

Matthias Köntzel arrived at the university yesterday morning to begin a three-day programme of lectures and seminars, but was told that it had been called off on “security grounds”.

Dr Köntzel, a political scientist who has lectured around the world on the antiSemitic ideology of Islamist groups, told The Times there were concerns that he would be attacked. He said that he was “outraged” that his meetings had been cancelled and had yet to receive an explanation.

The university, which acted after complaints from Muslim students, denied that it was interfering with the academic freedom of Dr Köntzel, and said that proper arrangements for stewarding the meeting had not been made.

The lecture, entitled “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic antiSemitism in the Middle East”, was organised by the university’s German department and publicised three weeks ago. A large attendance had been expected.

Dr Köntzel, a former adviser to the German Green Party, said: “I have been told that it has had to be cancelled for security reasons. It seems there were concerns that there could be violence against my person.

“I have lectured in lots of countries on this subject. I gave the same talk at Yale University recently, and this is the first time I have been invited to lecture in the UK. Nothing like this has ever happened before – this is censorship.

“It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here. This is a very important subject and if you cannot address it on university property, then what is a university for?”

Dr Köntzel, a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that he had been shown two e-mails that had been received, which objected to his lecture.

One, apparently written by a student, said: “As a Muslim and an Arab this has come to me as a great shock. The only intention that you have for doing this is to increase hatred as I clearly regard it as an open racist attack.”

Ahmed Sawalem, president of the university’s student Islamic Society, confirmed that he had contacted the office of Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor, to register an official complaint.

“The title of the talk is provocative and I have searched the internet to read his writings and they are not very pleasant,” Mr Sawalem said. “We are not opposed to freedom of expression. We just sent a complaint, we did not ask for the talk to be cancelled.”

The university authorities contacted the German department on Tuesday and asked for a change in the title. The department agreed to relabel the talk as “The Nazi Legacy: the export of antiSemitism to the Middle East”.

Yesterday morning, the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, was called to a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor’s staff and the head of security. After the meeting, Dr Köntzel’s lecture and workshops were cancelled.

Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: “This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.” A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue.

“The decision to cancel the meeting has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, antiSemitism or Islam-ophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief,” she said.

Culture Clash on 18 Doughty Street Talk TV

2007-03-14T07:27:00.000Z

This week – everything you always wanted to ask about being conservative, but were too afraid to ask. We’ll be looking at the new book by journalist and author James Delingpole – How to be Right : The Essential Guide to making Lefty Liberals History. James – a regular and much valued guest on this programme – has written an A to B of all things right-wing – and left for that matter – from Edward Heath to Hunting, and smoking to sexism.

But first, we’ll be discussing a controversial new film about a group of urban vigilantes which has had many critics grinding their teeth in outrage. Director Nick Love, whose previous films include The Football Factory and The Business, was inspired by the true story of a random, violent attack on a Cambridge student, and here follows a group of frustrated and demoralised men who decide that when the forces of law and order break down, the time has come to take matters into their own hands.

With me tonight are the Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny, Damian Thompson, leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, and TV producer Michael Attwell.

Watch it Tonight – everything you always wanted to ask about being conservative, but were too afraid to ask. We’ll be looking at the new book by journalist and author James Delingpole – How to be Right : The Essential Guide to making Lefty Liberals History. James – a regular and much valued guest on this programme – has written an A to B of all things right-wing – and left for that matter – from Edward Heath to Hunting, and smoking to sexism.

But first, we’ll be discussing a controversial new film about a group of urban vigilantes which has had many critics grinding their teeth in outrage. Director Nick Love, whose previous films include The Football Factory and The Business, was inspired by the true story of a random, violent attack on a Cambridge student, and here follows a group of frustrated and demoralised men who decide that when the forces of law and order break down, the time has come to take matters into their own hands.

With me tonight are the Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny, Damian Thompson, leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, and TV producer Michael Attwell.

Watch it there

18 Doughty Street interviews Mark Steyn

2007-03-07T23:38:00.000Z

From over the pond, in Washington, 18 Doughty Street talks to Mark Steyn. Fascinating watch. That's here

And remember too the interview Mark gave us last november about his last book America Alone. (Re) read it here

Culture Clash asks: Do you trust the BBC?

2007-03-07T23:33:00.000Z

Can We Trust the BBC?, the much anticipated book by the former BBC reporter Robin Aitkin, has finally been published, and, despite being predictably ignored by the BBC itself, it has once again brought under the public spotlight the ongoing debate about liberal left-wing bias at the corporation.

Aitken was a news reporter for 25 years, and the book deals solely with the BBC’s news and current affairs output and his experience of working in it, but at the same time, he makes the point that the outlook of the whole corporation is influenced by the culture which exists there.

In the chapter ‘Blowing the Whistle’, one of Aitken’s anonymous interviewees sets out what he says are the core beliefs at the centre of this culture. They are: anti-racist, pro-abortion, pro-union and anti-big business, pro-United Nations, pro-government spending, pro-multiculturalism and ethnic minorities in general, anti-Monarchist, anti-American and anti-private education and healthcare.

If this is true, then what, if anything, should we do about the BBC? To discuss this I’m glad to have with me writer and commentator Douglas Murray, TV producer and journalist Carol Gould, Social Affairs Unit author Adam Smyth and journalist Tessa Mayes.

Watch it on 18 Doughty Street

Politics and the Theatre: What's Left - Watch the video

2007-03-05T16:04:00.000Z

On Tuesday February 27th at The New Culture Forum, Chris Campbell, Shelley Silas, Minette Marrin and Richard Bean discussed 'Politics and the Theatre' with Peter Whittle. We're very grateful to our friend Alex Story who brings us the following videos of the event.

Watch Part II & Part III & Part IV & Part V

More on the event

South Bank Show on Mark Wallinger

2007-03-02T09:16:00.000Z

The artist Mark Wallinger, whose installation paying tribute to Brian Haw’s anti-war protest is currently on show at Tate Britain, is the subject of this coming Sunday’s South Bank Show. The programme goes out at 11.10pm on ITV 1. We talked to the programme’s producer and director, Susan Shaw.

Susan, why did you decide to do a programme about Mark Wallinger, and why at this time?

To be honest, the Mark Wallinger film was not my idea. As I am known to be connected in the art world, Melvyn Bragg wanted me to make the film. I had a long and chaotic relationship with the art critic Matthew Collings in the 90s and witnessed the birth of the so called YBA movement of which Mark Wallinger was a part. It was felt that Mark's huge and controversial new installation at Tate Britain (a very prestigious commission) would provide an excellent focal point for the film. The work is called "State Britain" suggesting an Orwellian, paranoid view of contemporary British politics.

Mark's installation is a forensic remaking of Brian Haw's peace protest at Parliament Square before it was disassembled and seized by the police in 2006 - they were able to do this under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which created a one kilometer exclusion zone around Parliament Square, forbidding spontaneous protest. Under the Act, permission has to be obtained in advance of any protest from the head of the Metropolitan Police.

The Tate Britain installation is, for want of a better expression, political art. When art and politics collide, does it make a difference to how you approach the making of a programme?

Yes, absolutely. As broadcasters we are legally required by OffCom to present a balanced view of political issues although I would say this requirement is unevenly applied. Mark's new work at the Tate is a passionate, quasi religious protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This presented a challenge which I relished. In order to present a strong counter argument to Mark's anti war anti Blairite stance, I brought in the brilliant young writer and commentator Douglas Murray. He makes a political critique of Mark's new work, saying that Brian Haw is a totally inappropriate icon of freedom of speech, as a) he continues to protest at Parliament Square although his display was reduced from 45 to 3 metres and b) the greatest threat to freedom of speech in this country comes from Islamism, and not from Blair's legislation or the police. Douglas also makes a very powerful point when he says that strategy and serious conversation about our contemporary political dilemmas have been replaced by emotion in works like Mark's "State Britain". Of course, I also had to give voice to Brian Haw and Mark Wallinger's views - even if I disagreed with them.

Would you say that the art establishment is largely at one with Wallinger’s message?

I would say that there was an awkward assumption by the artist that my own political orientation would be Soft Left, Anti-war and Anti-Blairite. Ironic, as I am employed by a Labour Peer who voted for the war. I think it is fair to say that Mark was taken aback by Melvyn's line of questioning on "State Britain", which was challenging. The YBA movement as a whole was produced by Thatcherism in interestingly contrary directions. While not a single artist that I know of in that movement could be described as expressly Thatcherite or Conservative, and many of the works they produced were direct attacks on Conservative policy, they also epitomised the entrepreneurship that was encouraged by Thatcher, famously organising their own shows in the late 80s and early 90s without the assistance of commercial galleries. Moreover, the sponsor that enabled the explosion of success in their careers was the man who orchestrated Thatcher's electoral victories; Charles Saatchi. Damien Hirst, the leading light in the YBA movement is a famously good businessman and is now one of the richest men in England. The YBA's have enthusiastically embraced their new wealth and are not known for involvement in charity or for political activism at a grass roots level, although Mark Wallinger is perhaps an exception - as a sincerely committed socialist who still makes his political convictions explicit in his work, and unlike Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, has not embraced what can loosely be described as celebrity culture. Although my political views radically differ from Mark's, I do respect him for this. He was also one of the finest painters of his generation but interestingly, he has given painting up in favour of works produced by teams of assistants according to his ideas (as with State Britain) - which is now the norm, for artists like Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin. They have effectively rejected hand crafted works in favour of industrial production which generates huge earnings for themselves and much, much lower incomes for the artists and technicians that actually make their work. We touch on these issues in my Mark Wallinger film but there simply wasn't time for a thorough going discussion of the economics of the art world now (a television hour is now 48mins 30secs after commercial breaks). I wanted to leave space for a thorough going discussion of the issues surrounding freedom of speech, raised by "State Britain".

You’ve worked in arts programming for a long time. How, in your view, are the arts and arts broadcasting in general handling the Iraq war, and the issues thrown up by the growth in radical Islam?

Personally, as a feminist, I am profoundly disappointed by the quality of discussion surrounding radical Islam in the media. It staggers me that the majority of the chattering classes who are happy to grandstand on the Iraq War and Islam, remain ignorant of the basic tenets of Islam and in particular, the fact that the life of a woman is considered under Sharia Law to be worth half that of a man. It seems to me that while the British Media is very happy to give voice to radicalised Muslim women, those fighting for the right to wear the veil even if teaching in our schools, for example, there has been an absolute failure to represent the views of feminists like myself who regard the veil as a symbol of the undeniable second class status of women under Islam (in all its permutations, sorry) and I have a queasy feeling, echoed by Minnette Marrin at this week’s New Culture Forum event on the theatre, that this is due to fear, after Theo Van Gogh's execution and decapitation for daring to explore these issues in "Submission".

I encountered an intense sensitivity about references to Islam in my Mark Wallinger film. I had to fight to keep references to Van Gogh and the reaction to the Danish cartoons in the film in the context of a discussion of freedom of speech. All of these ironies are summed up for me in one of the favoured slogans of protestors against the Danish cartoons (99.9% male of course): Freedom of Speech = Freedom to Insult. Yes, it does, and the freedom to insult is part of our cultural tradition and heritage in Britain as it also enshrines our freedom of speech. As a woman I have to endure what I see as the insults of radical Islam and yet negotiate what is now an institutionalised paranoia around offending Muslims. In Britain the Suffragettes secured the vote for women through immense personal sacrifice; Emily Davison threw herself under the hooves of the King's horse in 1913 and died for the rights currently enjoyed by women in Britain, including Muslim women, whom I would suggest, would certainly prefer to have divorces and sexual offences considered under British Law rather than Sharia, which deprives them of so many of the human rights we take for granted.

I am also deeply disappointed by the response of the art world to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been few works even addressing the issue - in this sense Mark Wallinger's new work is significant, even if one disagrees with it. Too many of our visual artists are too busy making obscene amounts of money and too enthusiastically embracing the cults of personality and celebrity to bother sticking their necks out in any particular direction, except in the expression of an unpleasant and arrogant contempt for the patrons and collectors who have made them wealthy and famous. These are strange and troubling times.

END.

Our next event - Monday, March 19th

2007-03-01T13:43:00.000Z

You are invited to hear:

JAMES DELINGPOLE

on his new book

HOW TO BE RIGHT

The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History

Monday, 19th March, 6.30pm for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square)

If you think modern Britain has gone mad, then James Delingpole’s How to be Right will confirm your view. Part polemic, part amusing opinion, but mostly hilarious rant, this is a journey into everything that’s wrong with our politically correct society.
As a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, James Delingpole has expressed his thoughts - articulately and amusingly - on everything from politics to popular music, from school sports days to spliffs. If you’ve thought about it, he’s written about it. In this A-Z collection of brief essays he turns his lively mind to modern society gone mad. And what he discovers is that the older you get, the more mad it seems.Can’t understand why Coldplay are the biggest band in the world? Don’t see why there was such a fuss over Pete Burns’s `gorilla` coat? Wondering what ever happened to good, old-fashioned universities? Well, join James’s club. Pouring scorn on the state of Britain after a decade of Blair and Brown, How to be Right couldn’t have come along at a more appropriate time.

Come and join us, prepare to foam and splutter, and to be seriously entertained.

Please RSVP to events@newcultureforum.org.uk

We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening.

Politics and the Theatre: What's Left?

2007-03-01T10:15:00.000Z

The NCF's discussion on the state of political theatre was a big success - an extremely lively and energised audience got thoroughly involved in a debate about the issues which had been raised by the panel of four guests, seen here with NCF director Peter Whittle, - who were (from left to right) Chris Campbell of the National Theatre's Literary Department, the playwright Shelley Silas, Sunday Times columnist Minnette Marrin and playwright Richard Bean. Thanks to the producer Alex Storey, there will be a video of the discussion coming here shortly.

This week on Culture Clash

2007-02-26T14:21:00.000Z

Tuesday at 8.30pm

We are all body fascists now. Or so it would seem, when you consider some of the news stories which have been preoccupying the media over the past few weeks. According to one survey, over 50% of women and 25% of men would consider plastic surgery to improve their appearance, and well over a million of us are on diets of one form or another. For women, it might only be a matter of time before being a Size Zero – equivalent to a UK size 4 – is no longer just the preferred size for catwalk models. Men too are waxing and popping protein pills in a way which would have been unimaginable twenty years ago.

When did this obsession start? What does it say about us? Is it too easy just to blame models, movies and media images? Or is having the perfect body simply a preoccupation of the new urban professional classes? And what effect does it all have on politics? Julie Burchill once said that politics is show-business for ugly people. Is this still true, or is the increasing importance of appearance distorting our electoral preferences?

With me to discuss these questions are Simon Marcus, a one-time personal trainer turned social entrepreneur, Susan Shaw, producer of the South Bank Show, Franck Guillory of the New Culture Forum, and Dawn Steeves of the New Criterion.

Watch it on 18 Doughty Street

Enlightening Transcript

2007-02-21T16:37:00.000Z

The New English Review has a transcript from Channel 4's Dispatches - Undercover Mosque.

A Dispatches reporter attends mosques run by organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and finds preachers condemning integration into British society, condemning democracy and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.

N: Kuffaar is an Arabic word meaning: non-believer, an infidel (generic
meaning: non-Muslim) –
AU: “Those kuffaar, they do whatever they want
to do.”

N: It’s a term our reporter was to hear being repeatedly
used in a derogatory way –

AU: “They are liars, they are terrorists
themselves. They will come before the people and talk and they are lying, you
can’t believe them … These are pathological liars.”

N: Green Lane Mosque calls itself a centre for inter-faith communications
welcoming people of all religions, but our reporter filmed there over four
months and found this speaker, Abu Usama, was their main English language
speaker. He says Christians and Jews are enemies to Muslims.

AU: “It has come to pass that the Christians and the Jews, America, the UK, France,
Germany, they have come against the religion of Islam. Why give up your religion
and your long legacy of Islam to please someone who is an enemy to you?”

The full text is there
This film was discussed on Culture Clash by Peter Whittle and his comrades on January 16th along with the US documentary Iraq in Fragments.

Does Hollywood propagate a Liberal agenda? Culture Clash tonight at 8.30 on 18 Doughty Street

2007-02-20T16:07:00.000Z

With the Oscars coming up, and Al Gore hotly tipped to walk away with a statuette for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, tonight we’ll be looking at the broader picture and asking whether Hollywood and the film industry in general promotes a liberal, anti-republican, anti-conservative message.

This is not a new topic of course; more than a decade ago, the critic Michael Medved got many liberals hot under the collar with his book Hollywood vs America. In that he accused tinsletown of being anti-religion, anti-family and anti-patriotism – a case rigorously opposed by those who see cinema as the most right-wing of the arts. But are those who see Hollywood as being one of the main components in US cultural imperialism confusing the fact that Hollywood is the most commercial art form with the kind of messages it carries?

We’ve got used to the fact that whenever a President is portrayed in a movie, and he’s a sympathetic character, it’s invariably implied that he’s a Democrat. Corporations are usually villains too – in the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate for example, communist brainwashers were replaced by the titans of big business. But what are we to make of the subtler social messages and political subtexts carried by Hollywood movies?

With me to discuss this are the producer and writer Carol Gould, Dr Steven King of Policy Exchange, Susan Shaw, producer of the South Bank Show, and 18 Doughty Street’s own Tim Montgomerie.

Watch it here

Answers on a postcard please

2007-02-18T15:18:00.000Z

The New Culture Forum’s old friend, ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken - who spoke at one of our meetings in September last year – has a piece in the Mail on Sunday today to coincide with the much-anticipated publication of his book, Can We Trust the BBC? It should be read by anybody who thinks that criticism of the corporation’s political coverage is the product of loony right-wing paranoia.

Remember Robin Aitken at the NCF

Watch Robin Aitken at the NCF on 18 Doughty Street
Read Daily Mail's piece

... and buy Robin's book here

Politics and the Theatre: What's Left? Tuesday, February 27th 6.30 for 7.00pm

2007-02-13T21:03:00.000Z

You are invited to

‘POLITICS AND THE THEATRE: WHAT’S LEFT?’

A discussion with playwright Richard Bean, Associate Director of the Royal Court Ramin Gray, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin and playwright Shelley Silas

Tuesday, 27th February, 6.30 for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square)

Last year, the National Theatre’s director Nicholas Hytner said that one thing he would really like to see there in the future would be a ‘good, mischievous, right-wing play.’

The implication in Hytner’s statement - that such a production would be an unusual occurrence, a naughty aberration, a guilty pleasure - would certainly have confirmed many in their conviction that when it comes to politics, the theatre stands firmly behind left-liberal lines. Recent productions in both the subsidised sector and the West End would seem to bare this out. My Name is Rachel Corrie, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Guantanamo, Stuff Happens, Playing with Fire…the political approach in these plays remains unvarying. And when there is criticism of the prevailing orthodoxy, it comes firmly from the Left.

But if this is all true, why are there no alternative voices? Is there, or should there be, such a thing as a right-of-centre play? Are there untouchable subjects in the theatre? Would different political approaches bring in new audiences? And why are voices on the Left apparently silent about important issues thrown up by radical Islam and the growing debate about multiculturalism?

Shelley Silas’s theatre plays include Calcutta Kosher and Falling. She has also written extensively for Radio Four - her plays include a co-adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet (with John Harvey.) She compiled and edited an anthology of short stories, 12 Days. Her new play, Made in Glasgow, will be produced by Tamasha Theatre in 2008.

Richard Bean has had four plays produced at The Royal Court as well as plays at the National, Bush, Newcastle Live! and at Hull Truck. He was awarded the Critics' Circle Award for Best Play for "Harvest" last year. His political sex farce which looks at the accession of Turkey into the European Union will be produced by Hampstead Theatre in July this year.

Ramin Gray is Associate director of the Royal Court. He is director of Alastair Beaton’s King of Hearts, which opens this week at the Hampstead Theatre

Please RSVP at events@newcultureforum.org.uk
We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening towards drinks.

London Rally for Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer - Thursday, February 15th

2007-02-13T20:03:00.000Z

Who is Kareem? And why will we demonstrate?

Kareem is a 22 year old Egyptian law student and blogger who was arrested last November in Alexandria for criticizing the Egyptian government on his weblog. This is not the first time he has been arrested. His writings also led to him being expelled from Islamic University of Al-Azhar earlier in 2006. Since his arrest in November, he has been kept in solitary confinement and has been denied access to his lawyer and to his family. Several Middle Eastern human rights organizations have expressed concern for his life. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders have all condemned his arrest. Two US congressmen (Republican Trent Franks and Democrat Barney Frank) have written a letter to the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington, pleading for Kareem's release. His trial has been postponed several times, most recently to February 22.

A group of concerned citizens from various nations has organized a global demonstration on Thursday, Feb. 15th, asking the Egyptian authorities to free Kareem immediately and drop all charges against him. Respectful and dignified rallies have been confirmed in New York City, London, Rome, Washington, Ottawa and Bucharest. Efforts are being made to find volunteers in other cities who would be willing to take the lead and plan more rallies. Since this is a worldwide demonstration, it doesn't matter if an individual rally is relatively small. The goal is to send a clear signal that people across the world are aware of this flagrant assault on liberty in Egypt, and that as friends of the Egyptian people, we wish to see their government right this wrong.

When?

The London Rally for Kareem

Thursday, 15 February. 3pm to 6pm.

Where?

The Egyptian Embassy, located at 26 South Street, London W1K 1DW.

The Embassy is just a short walk from either Marble Arch (Central Line) or Green Park (Piccadilly, Victoria, or Jubilee Lines). See a map of the area.

If you're at LSE, you can walk over with a group that will leave from the Peacock Theatre at 2pm.

Contact for more information on the London Rally: Andrew Perraut's Rally for Kareem

More on the worldwide campaign - Freekareem.org

And of course Kareem's blog

Culture Clash on 18DoughtyStreet tonight at 9pm

2007-02-13T17:10:00.000Z

Is Islamic Fundamentalism a threat to the Arts?

The issue of how the arts should respond to the problems posed by Islamic belief and Islamic fundamentalism, and whether or not they should fear censorship, or in fact exercise pre-emptive self-censorship, is something which is now exercising the minds of many in the cultural arena.
Arguably the biggest cultural issue facing us is also one which could be the most dangerous. Two years ago Theo Van Gogh was murdered because of his film ‘Submission’. Last year, the Berlin Opera was threatened because a production of Idomeneo featured a depiction of Mohammed. Here, a crucial part of Tamburlaine at the Barbican was cut. Filming of Monica Ali’s book was moved from Brick Lane due to protests.
Should the arts ignore protest from Muslims?
Or it is purely a question of exercising tact?
Furthermore, nowhere, it would seem, are the arts dealing with such issues as, say, Muslim treatment of women, or the position of gays. There is a deafening silence. Why is this?
Is it fair to say that, while Madonna provokes her usual faux outrage by getting up onto a crucifix in the full knowledge that they’ll be no consequences, it’s unlikely that we will ever again see a depiction of Mohammed in a cultural context? With me to discuss these issues are journalist and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, award-winning author and playwright Shelley Silas, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin, and producer and former BAFTA chairman Michael Attwell.

Watch it HERE

Is Party Animals an accurate portrayal of Westminster lives?

2007-02-07T22:10:00.000Z

New BBC Drama Party Animals aims to bring to the small screen all the fun, glamour and occasional misdeeds of the researchers, lobbyists, journalists and politicians operating in the Westminster Village. Is it an accurate in its portrayal and is it any good? Guests include Culture Clash regulars Dominic Hilton and Dawn Steeves, Robert Stuart Nemeth, researcher to Michael Gove MP and Damian Thompson from the Daily Telegraph. Hosted as ever by Peter Whittle.

To watch Culture Clash, click here

And more on the subject on Party Animals homepage

Introduction to the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace

2007-02-07T13:47:00.000Z

Founded in 1998, the CMIP (Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace) examines the content of school textbooks used in the Middle East, to determine whether children are being taught to accept and recognize the right of the “other” to exist. They believe that education should be utilized to encourage an attitude of tolerance, pluralism, and democracy, and to promote peaceful means of solving conflicts.

As a non-profit, non-political organization, their purpose is to identify what is being taught in the schools with regard to recognition and acceptance of the “other” by drawing on the text itself, rather than the interpretation of it. Pioneers in the field of textbook analysis, CMIP endeavors to present a clear picture of how different countries instruct and educate their youth with regard to different religions, societies, cultures, democratic values and the “other”.

After Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, their latest report focuses on Iran and looks at the Attitude to the 'Other' and to Peace in Iranian School Textbooks and Teacher's Guides.

Overview

War Curriculum

The Iranian school system prepares its students for a global war against the West in the name of Islam. This is the main finding arrived at, following an overall research
conducted on 115 Iranian school textbooks and teacher's guides of all grades. Although all the books and the vast majority of the teacher's guides were published under the apparently moderate former president Mohammad Khatami, they all reflect the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of Revolutionary Iran.

In Khomeini's vision, Iran is destined to lead that global struggle against the
oppressors in the name of Islam. This role is part and parcel of the Islamic Revolution, and the victory over the oppressors will also be Islam's victory in this world. Hence, Iranian education should be aimed at preparing the students for participation in that war.

The Attitude to America and the West

Numerous "others" are referred to in Iranian school textbooks – religious and ethnic,
inside and outside Iran, in historical and contemporary contexts. Yet, two specific
"others" – the United States and the West in general, and the Jewish-Zionist-Israeli
"other" – attract special attention.

America is the "Great Satan", the "World Devourer", the "Arrogant One", in short – a
target for hatred indoctrination. America is the arch-oppressor worldwide, leader and partner of other oppressive powers such as Britain and France.
The West, including Czarist Russia and the former Soviet Union, is responsible for
much suffering: Colonialism, exploitation and impoverishment of Third World nations,
encroachment on the world of Islam – including Iran – in history and at present,
cultural attack against Muslims and others, world hegemony, environmental abuse, etc.

The Attitude to Israel and the Jews

The Jews are mostly referred to in the context of their relations with the Prophet of
Islam in Arabia, where they are negatively portrayed: "…After some time, the Jews'
pretext-seeking, hostility and treachery were exposed…" (History of Iran and the
World, Grade 10 (2004) p. 109). Zionism is described as an idea "that is based on the
establishment of the Jews' greater homeland, and on this ethnic group's dominance over the world" (Social Studies [Humanities], Grade 12 (2004) p. 41) – which reminds us of anti-Semitic texts, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Israel, which is not recognized in any way and whose name does not appear on any of the maps, is portrayed as a danger to the whole world of Islam and as a tool in the
hands of its enemy – America.

To read the full report or earlier reports, http://www.edume.org

Full support for French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on the day of trial for publishing Mohammed cartoons

2007-02-07T09:01:00.000Z

We ought to support the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo , which goes on trial in Paris today in a civil lawsuit by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France. This is an inconditional support for this leftist publication as it is accused of deliberately trying to hurt Muslims “in their collective attachment to their beliefs” by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a special issue a year ago.

Most of the cartoons were the ones which the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published in September 2005, sparking protests in many Muslim countries. The front page one was by French cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut.

Charlie Hebdo is committed to free expression and to the right to satire and we condemn the many different kinds of intimidation that have been targeted at this weekly. The public area must remain open not only to dialogue but also to controversy.

Charlie Hebdo’s decision to reprint the Danish cartoons was taken at an especially fraught moment. Some 10 news media had been banned or suspended in countries such as Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia for reproducing the cartoons. Journalists has been arrested in countries such as Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.

By publishing the cartoons, Charlie Hebdo chose to resist the attempt to impose silence by means of threats. This is what counts. The public arena must remain free.

The trial that opens today is a test of freedom of expression in France and we hope that the courts will protect this principle, as the Danish judges did on 26 October 2006 when they acquitted Jyllands-Posten’s editors and ruled that its Mohammed cartoons were not offensive to Muslims.

Ever since the cartoons first appeared in Jyllands-Posten, there has been a never-ending debate as to whether it is permissible to publish opinion pieces or cartoons that could offend the religious sensibilities of part of the population. After the publication of Robert Redeker’s op-ed piece in Le Figaro last September, the French courts are now having to take a position on this issue.

In today’s trial, the plaintiffs are requesting 30,000 euros in damages and the publication of key passages from the court’s ruling. Charlie Hebdo published its special issue on the cartoons one week after they were published by the French daily France Soir on 1 February 2006, in a decision that led to the dismissal France Soir’s editor, Jacques Lefranc.

PS: One could imagine that this trial would give an opportunity for the French Presidential candidates to air their views on Islamo-fascism and religious fundamentalism. They don't and they won't - 'Leave Islam out of the Presidential campaign', requested Dalil Boubakeur, Head of the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman - the national Muslim council. Amen.

UPDATE: THIS AFTERNOON, NICOLAS SARKOZY EXPRESSED HIS SUPPORT TO CHARLIE HEBDO.

Tonight on Culture Clash

2007-01-30T14:52:00.000Z

Tonight on 18 Doughty Street we’re going to be looking at an art installation at Tate Britain which has certainly caught the eye of the media – artist Mark Wallinger’s recreation of Brian Haw’s so-called ‘peace protest’ which has been a permanent feature of Parliament Square for the past few years. A much-needed retort to a warmongering government, or a ghastly eyesore and the work of a misguided eccentric, depending on your point of view, the protest has been copied lock stock and barrel by Wallinger and stuck in a gallery with the aim of saying – well, what exactly?

But first we’re going to discuss an event which, oddly, received virtually no press coverage at all. A couple of Saturdays ago, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone sponsored a one-day conference at the QE2 Conference Centre which asked the question World Civilization of Clash of Civilizations? 5,000 people came to attend seminars and meetings, and to listen to a debate between Livingstone and Respect party member Salma Yaqoob on the one hand, and Middle eastern expert Daniel Pipes and writer and Culture Clash regular Douglas Murray on the other, on whether the West and Islam were set on a collision course. No prizes for guessing who was arguing what – but the event certainly acted as a valuable barometer of the state of mind of the rainbow coalition which surrounds Red Ken.

Watch Michael Gove's speech to The New Culture Forum

2007-01-26T12:07:00.000Z

Alex Story produced a four-part film on Michael Gove's speech to The New Culture Forum - 'Are we seeing the emergence of an anti-Islamist intelligentsia?'

Watch Part I here

then go to YouTube for Part II, Part III and Part IV.

Michael Gove's New Culture Forum speech in The Spectator

2007-01-25T09:03:00.000Z

In The Spectator this week, an edited extract from Michael Gove’s talk ‘Are we seeing the emergence of a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia?’ given to the New Culture Forum last monday.

The new anti-Islamist intelligentsia
Michael Gove

The durability of Conservatism has depended, to a great extent, on it being a disposition rather than a philosophy. What marks Conservatives out, across the generations, and whatever the environment they operate in, is an attitude of mind rather than an adherence to dogma. And that disposition — sceptical, cautious, pragmatic, sensitive to the local and the particular — has been politically successful because it has been in tune with human nature.
But Conservatism, as a disposition, has its limitations. British Conservatism in particular, even though it has been one of the most electorally successful varieties ever, has its own particular flaws. British, particularly English, conservatives tend to
be especially suspicious of intellectuals. Only in the British Conservative party could the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ be construed, however affectionately, as a put-down. And British Conservatives have, with honourable exceptions, tended to a particularly pessimistic view of human nature and the potential for progress. From Lord Salisbury to Iain Gilmour and even Chris Patten, the sense that the barbarians were at the gate has imbued thoughtful Tories with a gloomy view of
the future.
Both those Conservative characteristics, distrust of intellectualism and spiritual pessimism, may have led many Conservatives to miss one of the most significant trends of the past five years — the emergence of a new intellectual movement which gives grounds for optimism in one of the most difficult battles of our times.
Scarcely noticed by most on the Right, a new coalition of thinkers has been emerging from within the Left deliberately to challenge the Left’s greatest contemporary failure. It is perhaps understandable why many on the left might wish to belittle, or
drive to the margins, this new movement. But for those of us who are not tribally tied to the Left, this new turn in intellectual thinking deserves to be welcomed.
A distinguished array of thinkers and writers who have grown up attached to left-wing principles of equality, secularism, respect for universal human rights, opposition to religious obscurantism and support for liberal democracy have been finding their
voices in the last five years. Since the atrocities of 9/11 have focused the world’s attention on the murderous tactics and mediaeval ideology of Islamist terrorists, a number of figures on the left have felt moved to denounce what they see as the, at best, equivocal and, at worst, morally complicit treatment of extremism by many of their former comrades.
This week sees the publication of one of the most powerful denunciations of the manner in which the Left has lost its way. Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? scrupulously anatomises the way in which anti-Americanism, and the doctrine that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, has driven people whose political inspiration was a belief in progress to make excuses for forces that are trying to use murder to propel us back into the Dark Ages. As he argues,
Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal Left is against come from the liberal Left? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-Right?
Cohen’s is a brave voice, but not a lone one. In the upper reaches of the British press, Cohen’s outlook is shared, to a significant extent, by writers such as David Aaronovitch and John Lloyd as well as everyone’s favourite drink-soaked Trotskyist popinjay, Christopher Hitchens. Few writers have been as fiercely effective as Hitchens in skewering the moral frailty of those who marched to keep a torturer in power:
In the past decade or so had this ‘anti-war’ rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by ‘Greater’ Serbia and the Taleban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.
The positions taken by Hitchens, Cohen and others in the press have, more
recently, been reinforced by the bravery of other writers who have risked
placing themselves outside literary London’s comfort zone by being brave enough
to reject the moral relativism of so many on the left. Ian McEwan, Martin Amis
and, of course, Salman Rushdie have all argued, in different ways, that
Islamism is a totalitarian ideology, like fascism and communism before it,
which seeks to deny human freedom. McEwan has denounced the way in which the
Left is ‘morally selective’ in its outrage, denouncing America with greater
fervour than it can ever muster for criticising the record of Saddam or the
Taleban. Amis has been typically fearless in attacking those ‘people of
liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, who have become the apologists
for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist and
genocidal’.
What marks all these writers out, apart from their courage and their literary stature, is their heritage as authors of the broad Left. They are figures of intellectual weight
whom the Left cannot plausibly paint as blinkered reactionaries, and whose
critique, therefore, demands to be taken seriously.
But will it be? There are signs that the intellectual challenge to left-liberal appeasement of Islamism is gathering growing support. The range of voices who have signed up to the muscularly liberal Euston Manifesto is one indication that the
Pilger/Chomsky/Guardian comment pages consensus is much less representative of
progressive opinion than it pretends. And, more recently, both Gordon Brown and
Ed Balls have called for an intellectual response to the challenge of Islamism
which stands comparison with the cultural resistance to communism developed by
Western intellectuals during the Cold War.
But victory in the Cold War depended not just on the voices of Western intellectuals, crucially it depended on Western governments giving support to those dissident voices which were struggling to be heard in the Eastern bloc. Where are the political leaders now who will defend liberal and progressive voices in the Islamic world in
the way in which Reagan and Thatcher championed the Sharanskys and
Sakharovs? The real heroes of the anti-Islamist intelligentsia are Arab
thinkers like Shaker al-Nabulsi who are challenging totalitarianism within
the Islamic world. If the West is really serious about winning hearts and
minds in this generational struggle, then it needs to show its support for
those who, in the least propitious circumstances, still have the bravery to
cry freedom.

from The Spectator, January 25th 2007

Daniel Johnson reports on Michael Gove's speech

2007-01-24T07:32:00.000Z

Extracts from Daniel Johnson's comments in Contention, the COMMENTARY's blog.

The New Anti-Islamist Intelligentsia by Daniel Johnson

Yesterday Michael Gove, a Tory member of Parliament and the author of Celsius 7/7, a hard-hitting study of the London subway
bombers, asked an audience of the New Culture Forum a highly pertinent question: “Are we seeing
the emergence of a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia?”
Gove answered his own
question emphatically in the affirmative, and provided chapter and verse, too.
What adds lustre to his thesis is the remarkable fact that the most prominent
voices now being heard in protest against the scandalous alliance of the Left
with Islamo-fascism are themselves for the most part intellectuals with
impeccable Left-liberal credentials. Gove singled out the journalists Nick Cohen
(whose book What’s Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way chronicles the
Left’s great self-betrayal), David Aaronovich (who defected from the Guardian to
the Times of London), and Christopher Hitchens, who needs no introduction for
American readers. Nick Cohen is also a leading light among the group of liberal
academics and writers who last year signed the Euston Manifesto,
distancing themselves from the Leftist consensus.
Most remarkable of all,
three of the most celebrated British novelists—Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and
Martin Amis—have all come out strongly against Islamism. Amis even describes himself as an “Islamismophobe,” but the real objects
of his hatred are the “middle-class white demonstrators last August waddling
around under placards saying ‘We Are All Hizbollah Now.’” As he observes,
“People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the
apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic,
imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those
that want them dead.”
All of these prodigal sons are more than welcome in
their return to what those who have always defended it fondly persist in calling
Western civilization. Like many others, I have not forgotten Martin Amis’s essay
“Fear and Loathing,” published in the Guardian a week after
9/11, in which he wrote: “The message of September 11 ran as follows: America,
it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. . . . We would hope that
the response will be, above all, non-escalatory.” He and his intellectual
compatriots have come a long way since then—at least on seeing the threat of
radical Islam for what it is.

COMMENTARY is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal
voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and
increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s,
the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated
questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened
by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the
future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States,
and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of
political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.

Culture Clash, it's tonight at 8.30

2007-01-23T16:46:00.000Z

Watch it on 18 Doughty Street talk TV

A media discussion about what is or isn’t racism, who should rightly be accused of it, and what, if anything, should be done about it, has dominated the news agenda over the past few weeks. The issue briefly broke out of the domestic arena last week when the events on Channel 4’s Big Brother threatened, surreally, to become an international diplomatic incident, before settling down into the perhaps more parochial issue of the future of the board at Channel 4.

During the furore, which seemed to take on an increasingly hysterical tone, the broadcaster Janet Street Porter had to answer accusations of racism by a neighbour, and while all this was going on Simone Clarke, the so-called BNP ballerina, continued to dance away at the English National Ballet. And just yesterday, Channel 4 was again faced with a possible racism problem after complaints were made about comments made on one of its other reality shows, Shipwrecked.

Should Channel 4 axe Big Brother? Or is it, as its apologists would claim, actually performing a public service? Perhaps, as somebody once said, human beings cannot stand too much reality. Or has the cry of racist – always a way of simply closing down debate in the political arena – now become something to be so feared that it can sweep away all reason? Should Jade Goody be systematically destroyed? Or are we in the middle of a McCarthyite type of witch-hunt?

Here to talk about these questions today are Michael Attwell, who has been a commissioning editor at the BBC, Channel 4 and Channel Five, Damian Thompson, leader writer for the Telegraph and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, Marc Sidwell of the Henry Jackson Society and columnist Clive Davis.

Michael Gove at The New Culture Forum

2007-01-23T13:25:00.000Z

Michael Gove was the speaker last night at the New Culture Forum on the question of whether we are witnessing the emergence of an anti-Islamist intelligentsia. Held at Portcullis House, the event attracted over a hundred people; guests included Lord Trimble, Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin, Ramin Gray, Assoc. director of the Royal Court Theatre, Spectator TV critic and author James Delingpole, Conservative A-Lister Sayeeda Varsi, the National Theatre’s Chris Campbell, writer and commentator Douglas Murray, the distinguished Egyptian academic Bat Ye’or, and the editor of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie.

Gove’s speech was filmed by 18doughtystreet Talk TV, and ConservativeHome and The Croydonian today carry a detailed account of the evening. We’ll be returning to the event later in the week here at the NCF website.

Michael Gove, Sayeeda Varsi and Sir Andrew Green, Tim Montgomerie - 18doughtystreet Talk TV and ConservativeHome, Claire Fox - Institute of Ideas - and James Delingpole, Peter Whittle - director of The New Culture Forum.

On Culture Clash tonight at 8.30

2007-01-16T12:50:00.000Z

On Culture Clash on www.18doughtystreet.com tonight at 8.30, the New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle will be joined by guests Susan Shaw, producer of the South Bank Show, journalist Franck Guillory, social entrepreneur Simon Marcus and the NCF’s David Taylor. They’ll be discussing the new feature documentary IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme UNDERCOVER MOSQUE, and more4’s THE TRIAL OF TONY BLAIR.

‘Culture Clash is a bit like Newsnight Review would be if you took away the pseudery, the left-liberal cant and Ekow Eshun.’ - The Spectator

Balls

2007-01-16T10:11:00.000Z

David Aaronovitch in the Times today:

At the weekend the Chancellor’s main man, Ed Balls, was talking about the struggle against Islamist ideology. He drew a parallel between today and the Cold War. During the Cold War, he said, we’d fought against totalitarianism (what do you mean “we”, paleface?) with the weapons of culture. We’d used publications, books, films, everything we could, to join ideological battle with Soviet-style Communism. Had we done the same thing, he asked, in the fight against Islamism and authoritarianism?

The answer is no, we haven’t. We’ve been too busy complaining about the trains.

Many thanks to Marc Sidwell for pointing out to us this end paragraph from Aaronovitch’s piece in the paper today. But what films, books and cultural weaponry is Ed Balls referring to exactly? Which anti-marxist, anti-soviet movies did I miss? What books extolling the cultural and moral supremacy of the values of liberal capitalist societies did I not read? Which plays, novels, and BBC series dealing with the slaughter of 40 million Russians and maybe 70 million Chinese under communism did I not get to see?

The historian Robert Conquest is excellent on the cultural self-laceration of the West during the Cold War period (see, for example, The Dragons of Expectation).

But if you're with Ed, then please do send us your memories and cultural highlights of the great struggle carried on by the western cultural elites in the war against Left-wing totalitarianism. Now think hard!

Same ol' Same ol'

2007-01-16T08:26:00.000Z

‘But is it original? No, it’s a copy. Does it ask new questions or challenge our preconceptions? No, it merely confirms the liberal consensus. A pro-war, pro-Blair work of art…now that would be radical.’

Tim Teeman in The Times gives his verdict on artists Mark Wallinger’s recreation of anti-war protester Brian Haw’s mini peace camp, which has just opened at Tate Britain. Read the full piece here

A Hawk on Cameron's Shoulder - Jasper Gerard interviews Michael Gove for today's Observer

2007-01-14T21:55:00.000Z

Journalist and author Michael Gove's hardline views on Islamic terrorism ignited fierce debate. Now he has unlikely allies, he tells Jasper Gerard

Sunday January 14, 2007 The Observer

Suddenly he touches my knee, leans forward and whispers: 'Look!' Michael Gove quivers, as if he has just seen through the mist one of the seven wonders of the world: he has sighted Baroness Thatcher gliding towards us.
But lately it has been Labour grandees beating a path to the Conservative frontbencher, following publication of his uncompromising book on Islamic terror, Celsius 7/7. Among them was Gordon Brown, who stopped to congratulate this key David Cameron adviser on his hawkish work - which will alarm Labour MPs hoping for a gentler foreign policy from Prime Minister Brown.
Gove's was the book that cabinet ministers read during Christmas. Even the Home Office, he discloses, has 'invited me in for a little chat' after he attacked ministers for funding Islamicist groups, which according to Gove merely legitimises terrorism. 'For a long time the Home Office has thought it has to work with these organisations, but I hope it has thought again as a result of this book.' Yet this rigorous intellectual - adopted and raised modestly in Scotland, prior to a stellar journalistic career - confesses the book has gone down less well with Conservative colleagues desperate to appear more 'huggable', including, he hints, Cameron.
Gove's contention is that a small but determined brigade of Muslims has developed 'transnational' loyalties superseding any attachment to Britain. Gove, tipped for high office in a Tory administration, argues that some have been breathtakingly frank; it is just that the government turned a deaf ear.
Understandably the extremist dream of ensnaring everywhere from Catford to California in a caliphate makes this politest of men bristle in his Savile Row suit; but equally striking is Gove's determination to impose a Western way of life on the Middle East. Isn't that hypocritical? 'I am not a relativist,' Gove, a Radio 4 Moral Maze regular, answers firmly. 'I believe multi-party democracy is a superior way to live.' Some Muslims might argue that of Sharia law. 'But then we are lost in a moral desert. We must be clear about what is worth defending.'
He points out that democracies are far less likely to go to war than totalitarian countries, which is what he thinks many Islamic states amount to. But how can we be sure our civilisation is the ideal? Even Western philosophers such as Soren Kierkegaard have argued that civic society of the type Gove extols is merely a staging post to a higher, religious life. Is it right to 'force people to be free'?
'I accept, given some states' history, we cannot give them the American Declaration of Independence and a British parliament and expect them to have it running by Tuesday,' he concedes. 'Nevertheless, I say "these values are better". Rather than the Foreign Office idea of siding with the local sheikh, I am more in the tradition of Palmerston, who supported smaller countries breaking away from feudal empires. My views are closer to some on the left than to, say, Henry Kissinger.' Such are the curious bedfellows of the war on terror.
So his book hasn't gone down too well on the Tory benches? 'Some colleagues disagree, some more than others,' he smiles. 'David Cameron did say "I'm not a neo-con", whereas,' he pauses, 'I am.' He rattles off policies on which he and Cameron agree, but he has the grace to admit the Tory leader also criticised 'the Bush White House in terms of patience and humility'.
Will Gove endorse his leader's criticism? Gove is a sharp debater - he could convince you global warming is great or Coldplay cool - but for once he looks anxious. To buy time, he puts down his teacup and stoops to tie his lace. Eventually he says: 'I have a slightly warmer view of Tony Blair than other Conservatives. The vehemence of the criticism of Blair is so strong and misguided I thought I should defend him - not that it will do him any good.' When Gove sighs 'There are people who want Bush to fail, Iraq to fail,' you wonder if he means the Tory party, perhaps the Tory leader.
Some find Gove too strident; as housing spokesman he has had Tories hopping in their green wellies by suggesting that the market should be allowed to let rip and that houses should be built on farms. He is called, glibly, a 'moderniser'; but while he is liberal on issues such as gay rights, he is largely engaged in finding clever new ways to defend traditional values.
While most in the British establishment emphasise the importance of the Middle East road map, Gove makes only the most perfunctory admission that the failure to find a solution contributes to terrorism. Don't you, I ask, accept that, while Osama bin Laden would not be bought off with an Israel-Palestine peace accord, the situation might draw anger from many Arabs tempted towards violence?
'I see the logic,' he says, which is Gove-speak for 'no'; charm is his weapon, and his deadliest tactic is to sound sympathetic while tearing your argument to shreds. 'When Islamicists talk about occupation they are not referring to the West Bank or Gaza - they object to Israel per se, and any American soldiers on any Arab lands.' A nice point, but this is not the view of many Arabs. 'Indeed, but Islamicists will say, "The West is weakening: one more heave".'
If Islamism is engaged in a to-the-death struggle with the West, how does Gove answer bin Laden's point that al-Qaeda isn't giving a terribly hard time to Sweden? 'France was vocal in its opposition [to the Iraq war], but has uncovered a lot of terrorist plots. So has Spain after withdrawing from Iraq.'
Critics accuse Gove of finding facts to fit his preoccupations. As well as being massively pro-Israel, he is stridently opposed to the Good Friday agreement, which he claims Islamists have taken as Western weakness. Can he really claim that in the caves of Tora Bora they sagely study how Blair caved in on the Royal Ulster Constabulary? 'I think,' he says 'you underestimate their sophistication.'
Does he exaggerate the threat from Islamic forces? Perhaps, but that might be better than underestimating it. His heroine had a phrase for it: the resolute approach.

We're gonna need a bigger mantelpiece - Sunday Times

2007-01-14T14:44:00.000Z

A new year, a new round of gongs. But if it's raining prizes, who are the real winners, asks PETER WHITTLE

‘Everybody has won’, said the Dodo at the end of the race in Alice in Wonderland, ‘and all must have prizes.’ So what’s yours? If you’re reading this, probably not McDonald’s Employee of the Year, but you might well be the winner of an advertising industry gong, or be hairdresser or marketing man of the year. You might even be the recipient of one of the world’s hundreds of literary awards which now bubble away anonymously under the Goncourt and Booker; as Gore Vidal pointed out, there are now more American book awards than writers. And if you’re an independent film director, you should count yourself a slouch if, having done the rounds of the ever-increasing festival circuit, you find you still cannot start the new year with the words ‘award-winning’ preceding either your name or your latest labour of love; there are now more American film awards than there are movies to go round.

We are about to enter what used to be called the awards season. This week sees the announcement of the nominations for the BAFTAs, with the ceremony following next month, and, as it is their sixtieth anniversary this year, we’re promised a brand new host and venue. In a couple of weeks there are the South Bank Show Awards, mere babies by comparison, and at the end of February, the grand-daddy of them all, the Christmas of the awards kingdom, the Oscars. But such has been the proliferation of awards ceremonies in the past couple of decades that the very concept of a season – just like the morning rush-hour - is obsolete: the traffic keeps coming all year round.

The giving of prizes dates back to the Greek drama and arts competitions of the 6th century BC, but it was during the last century that ‘creative’ awards moved onto sports territory and became such a dominant feature of mainstream culture, with the first Nobel Prize for Literature appearing in 1901, the Goncourt a couple of years later, and the Pulitzers, the Oscars and Emmys all well in place by mid-century. But it’s since the 1970s that awards – always aping the fake grandeur, suspense and trappings of the Oscars ceremony - have sprung up to reward ‘the best’ in virtually every branch of human creativity and industry. The phenomenon has even been the subject of academic inquiry: in his study The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value, the American academic James English wrote that we are witnessing ‘a kind of cultural frenzy, with scarcely a day passing without the announcement of yet another newly founded prize.’

We feign a world-weary cynicism about awards. Half the time we think they’re fixed. The actual achievement being celebrated might not match the razzle-dazzle pyrotechnics of a televised ceremony – such as with the recent, absurdly grandiose BBC Sports Personality of the Year show. Yet we watch in our millions. Why are we so obsessed with giving, receiving and speculating about who wins what?

Much of it comes down to money. Certainly founding an award can offer an instant PR solution in an increasingly crowded commercial landscape, whether you are Costa Coffee, which now sponsors what was formerly the Whitbread prize, or Orange, which started the woman’s challenge to the supposed domination by men of the Booker prize. And it can supply a gravitas which maybe wasn’t there before, such as with the Empire magazine film awards. ‘With information overload, and with the increasing fragmentation of commercialism, awards are all about standing out,’ says Amir Amirani, who made a BBC documentary about the awards phenomena. ‘It’s all about visibility. Prizes are increasingly about the giver rather than the receiver – the giver can draw cultural capital from the receiver. Very rarely is it altruistic.’

There can be little doubt too that in the case of the winner, there can be huge financial benefits, although this depends on where your award falls in the hierarchy of prizes. BAFTAs might be good for prestige and can certainly be useful in your movie’s PR campaign, but their effect on box office is minimal. The Oscars are a different matter. A win can massively increase your box office, so much so that film distributors increasingly market their best products around the time when nominations are announced. Winning Best film makes little difference to a blockbuster like Titanic, but can dramatically improve the take for more esoteric fare; American Beauty for example saw its $80 million total increase by a further $50 million after it won its Oscars.

John Fletcher, Managing Director of film distributors Pathe, offers another example of how smaller films benefit. ‘One of our films, The Pianist, made £1.5 million in the UK when it was released two months before the Oscars in 2003. After Adrian Brody’s win, it doubled its box office.’ Fletcher’s big hope this year, Stephen Frears’s much praised The Queen, has already made nearly £8 million in the UK, but will certainly be reappearing in cinemas should the expected gongs materialise.

The less grubby arts have taken Hollywood’s ethos on board. In the era of the critically acclaimed but unread novel, a big literary prize means far greater sales – Alan Hollinghurst saw his increase tenfold (along with a highly publicised TV adaptation) after he won the Booker two years ago for The Line of Beauty. And even when money is less of an issue, winning can mean elevation to the ranks of a certain sort of celebrity for individuals once only familiar to the cognoscenti. Grayson Perry was unknown before the Turner Prize; now he has a column in the Times, his opinion is sought on Newsnight review and he is snapped in his frock by paparazzi at, yes, award ceremonies, for the benefit of readers who’ve never clapped eyes on his vases.

The importance of the commercial imperative in prize-giving is underlined by the gradual disappearance of theatre award ceremonies from mainstream broadcasting. After years of TV coverage, the Oliviers are now nowhere to be seen on the terrestrial channels – plays cannot, after all, be bought on DVD, and the guests and nominees likely to attend are probably deemed not to be sufficiently of the ratings-pulling Hello variety, unlike those at the British Comedy Awards or the spurious-sounding National TV Awards.

But the proliferation of awards is not all about the bottom-line. It can’t just be a coincidence that they have become so dominant during an era which has seen an odd alliance between the populism of the marketplace on the one hand and the effects of cultural relativism on the other. The claim that creativity cannot and should not be judged like the 100 metres is arguably harder to sustain when the received wisdom of the past thirty years has been so resolutely ‘anti-elitist’. If you demolish one set of yardsticks, new ones - however superficial - have to emerge if the whole thing isn’t to collapse. This need for some kind of order in the information age, together with the marginalisation of traditional criticism, might explain the attraction of awards for those of us who watch and wait for the opening of the envelope, just as it might account for TV’s love affair with endless list programmes, which in their own way amount to kind of prize-giving.

Not that the trophies themselves are the last word. In the US, an outfit called The Award Recognition Association gives out gongs at its yearly convention for Best Award. Best Audience is surely only a vote away.

From The Sunday Times

Minette Marrin on Simone Clarke

2007-01-14T11:11:00.000Z

Minette Marin has a good piece in the Sunday Times today about Simone Clarke, the so-called BNP ballerina, Sugar Plum Fairy vs forces of Darkness, in which she calls on the arts to protect all freedom of speech. She makes the point, quite rightly, that many creative figures have been apologists for disgusting regimes, such as Mao’s Communist China and the former Soviet Union. Nobody however would suggest that such names should have lost their jobs because of their views. You either have freedom of speech or you do not. However much one might disagree with somebody’s politics, it is an extremely dangerous situation to have arrived at when people with unpalatable views can be forced out of their livelihoods. The reason usually given – that the person’s political position could adversely affect the job they do – is often spurious, and is especially absurd in the case of Clarke, a classical dancer. Overall however, this case is yet another example of the totalitarian tendency which exists on the Left, which seeks to silence all dissenting voices.

Minette Marrin's piece in The Sunday Times, Sugar plum fairy v the forces of darkness
Also, Simone Clarke and Yat-Sen Chang's website

What we want to read...

2007-01-12T07:51:00.000Z

This week in The Spectator, two of our favourite most recent reads get very interesting reviews. Graham Stewart on George Walden's Time to Emigrate and Michael Gove on Mark Steyn's America Alone - THE dream ticket for NCF's Team members.

Our Best of:

I know that for many of my fellow panty-waisted, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys being harangued about our propensity for cultural suicide by cheerleaders for Bush can grate a little. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the author of America Alone as simply a jester at the court of King George W.(...)

That many of Steyn's conclusions will be unpalatable to the European consensus only underlines how much a failure to face harsh truths has characterised the European response to the scale of the terrorist threat we face.(...)

One of the biggest questions in contemporary European politics is how our societies manage relations between Muslim citizens and others, and that’s been reflected in the debate over the veil, the agonised questioning which followed the death of Theo van Gogh, and the controversy over the Danish cartoons.(...)

Steyn’s specific contention is that the problem is not so much multiculturalism as biculturalism. The danger as he sees it is the inherent tension between an increasingly liberal and hedonistic, yet diffident and uncertain, de-Christianised civilisation and an increasingly religiously zealous and culturally assertive Islamist movement. (...)

And a mention to Melanie Phillips in Michael's conclusion, what a treat!

But Steyn, like Melanie Phillips in her very different way, has done us all a service by ensuring that questions some would prefer to pass over are posed in a way it is impossible to ignore.

The full text is available here

And of course, you can still register to hear Michael Gove at The New Culture Forum on January 22nd - Are we seeing the emergence of an Anti-islamist Intelligentsia?

FG

Mark Steyn on Oriana Fallaci in Atlantic Monthly

2007-01-10T17:51:00.000Z

Thanks to Douglas Murray for passing this along. A beautiful piece - as usual. Please don't miss any opportunity to read Oriana's book of interviews from the 70's - Intervista con la Storia (Interview with History, the English version, is only available used - 115 GBP min. on Amazon)

SHE SAID WHAT SHE THOUGHT

Oriana Fallaci, 1929-2006

“You go fuck yourself,” said Oriana Fallaci to no one in particular in a recent New Yorker profile. “I say what I want.”

And she did. Latterly, she said what she wanted about Islam, on which subject most of us feel constrained to be more, ah, circumspect. And what she wanted to say to Islam boiled down pretty much to: go fuck yourself. She scorned Muslims for their habits of reproduction, of evacuation, of female genital mutilation. She developed obsessions both arcane – who really invented sherbet (the ancient Romans, not the “sons of Allah”) – and unhealthy, if not psychologically then certainly actuarially: what’s the deal with Mohammed’s nine-year old wife? who sodomized whom at Mehmet II’s big knees-up to mark the fall of Constantinople in 1453? These are areas in which more discreet scholars prefer to draw a veil if not the full burqa. In The Rage And The Pride she dwelt upon the hitherto neglected topic of micturition among Somali immigrants in Florence’s Cathedral Square, whom she accused of leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery”: “Good Heavens! They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?”
Rendered in what she called “the oddities of Fallaci’s English”, this is splendidly offensive and gloriously rude. But it is also, as my colleague Christopher Hitchens dismissed Signora Fallaci in these pages, “a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam”. One sees his point. Long before the first Muslim convenience store opened in a British city, the “gents” in every rural pub had a streaked wall over the
urinals boasting unfeasibly high-tide marks crayoned on the plaster, at
impressive distance from the “urinary apparatus”. A few years back, during a
long bus trip for major-league baseball owners, the driver was obliged to make a
roadside stop for Gene Autry to relieve himself: as he reboarded, George W Bush
congratulated the old singing cowboy on his “great spray”. If anything, Muslim
men seem to be somewhat more fastidious in this area than your average beery
Brit or Frenchman: In his will, Mohammed Atta left instructions for any woman
examining his corpse in that particular neighborhood to wear gloves because he
didn’t want the old twig-and-berries to have been contaminated by unclean
infidel-whore morticians when he got to paradise and hit the old virgin jackpot.
The “long shots” of the sons of Allah is not the firmest ground on which to
defend western civilization.

Nevertheless, and with respect to Mr Hitchens, if there is a primer in how to write about Islam, that doesn’t seem to be getting us very far either. Who ya gonna believe? The President’s sappy “religion of peace” speeches or your lyin’ eyes? La Fallaci (as she styled herself) disdained what the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut calls the west’s “penitential narcissism” and, in an age of absurd abasement, found many takers for her bravura rejection thereof. After all, if Muslims are so ready to take offence, you might as well give ’em some. The problem, after all, is not that the sons of Allah are “long shots” but that they’re certainties: every Continental under the age of 40 – okay, make that 60, if not 75 – is all but guaranteed to end his days living in an Islamified Eurabia. That being so, why not have some gleeful sport along the road to servitude?

Oriana Fallaci was, on the one hand, an unlikely Crusader. Petite physically if in no other sense, she was a feminist, a secularist, a leftist. On the other hand, who has most to lose? At a time when uncovered women are jeered at and intimidated when
they walk through certain suburbs of Continental cities, La Fallaci might have
expected the other divas to rally to the cause. Instead, such feminist warhorses
as Germaine Greer managed to give the impression they found Islam a bit of a
turn-on: here’s the patriarchal society they’ve been pining for all along. As
for the secular elites of the west, insofar as there is a theocratic menace,
it’s not the Wahhabis but Bush and the evangelicals with a bit of help from (as
Harold Pinter put it) “Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug”. So the lioness in
winter roused herself and sallied forth to save post-Christian Europe from
itself.

She was, like the book title says, full of rage and passion.
“Passion” is a diminished word these days, routinely appended by politicians to
dreary boilerplate about prescription drugs for seniors or some such. But La
Fallaci was bursting with it. Fiercely beautiful well into her cancer-ravaged
old age, she had that careless sensuality that anglophone womanhood can rarely
carry off. She didn’t subscribe to the old aphrodisiac-of-power clichés: on the
contrary, she often found alpha males one big zzzzzzzz, and great men had the
vague sensation their “apparatus” was withering under her gaze. Castro was
smelly and Arafat was a blowsy old queen – “a massive trunk, huge hips… red and
fleshy lips”. Still, she regarded an interview as “coitus”, and she didn’t
always mean it metaphorically. Two days after interviewing Alekos Panagoulis, a
briefly fashionable revolutionary who’d attempted to assassinate the Greek
leader Papadopoulos, Oriana became his lover. When their turbulent relationship
ended with his death in a car crash, rumored to have been politically
engineered, Oriana wrote a book – Un uomo (A man) – that few other credible
journalists could have gotten away with.

One would have been only mildly surprised had her interview with Ayatollah Khomeini followed the same trajectory. After traveling to Qom and kicking her heels for ten days waiting for him to agree to see her, she was ushered – barefoot and wearing a chador - into his presence and found what she subsequently described as the most handsome old man she’d ever met. In his own way, he must have dug the crazy Italian chick: The meeting was terminated when she tore off “this stupid medieval rag” and hurled her chador to the floor. But he agreed to return a day or two later to finish the interview.

It seems a fantastical encounter now: a man who’d just shoveled every female in supposedly the most modernized of Middle Eastern nations back into “medieval rags” versus the apotheosis of the ballbusting western career woman. The phrase “personality interviewer” is grossly devalued these days: look at Mike Wallace’s cringe-making oleaginous encounter with today’s Iranian must-get, President Ahmadinejad. Indeed, Wallace seems to have found Ahmadinejad more attractive (“very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way”) than Fallaci found Khomeini. She was by that stage “the greatest political interviewer of modern times” (Rolling Stone), and yet unlike so many of the bland bigshots jetting from foreign ministry to presidential palace she gravitated to power mainly for the
opportunities it afforded to knee it in the crotch. She asked the Ayatollah
indignant questions about the executions of prostitutes and homosexuals and he
sneered at women like her for going around uncovered “dragging behind them a
tail of men”. It wasn’t all rage and passion; she did brusque and off-hand
pretty lethally, too: “Don’t you find,” she asked Henry Kissinger during
Vietnam, fighting vainly the old ennui, “that it’s been a useless war?” “On
this, I can agree,” said the Secretary of State.

Her interviews and war reporting made her a wealthy woman, with homes in Florence, the Tuscan countryside and Manhattan. Not bad for a girl from a working-class family, a child of anti-Mussolini Communist partisans who turned to journalism at 16 only as a means of paying her way to medical school. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, the chain-smoking dynamo had done everything her profession could
offer. Then came September 11th. And Corriere Della Sera very deftly tempted her
out of semi-official retirement to unburden herself of her thoughts on the, er,
unfortunate events. Even then, even in those first weeks, the “cicadas” (as she
called them) of cultural relativism were chirruping their pneumatic songs of
eternal evasion. In her bestselling post-9/11 improvised aria, La Fallaci was
certainly shrill but perhaps not as shrill as those who in the face of a
mountain of evidence insist from every university, every interior ministry,
every Anglican pulpit that there’s nothing to see here, nothing to ask, nothing
to ponder, no great questions over Europe’s future.

She had never lacked bravery. Indeed, she was almost insanely brave. But this wasn’t like flipping the bird to some strutting generalissimo. She must have been surprised by how organized the Muslim opposition was: the Islamic Centre of Berne, the Somali Association of Geneva, the SOS Racism of Lausanne, and a group of Muslim immigrants in Neuchatel, just to name a random sampling of Swiss plaintiffs.
What would not have surprised her was the weirdly masochistic pleasure the
European judiciary derived from facilitating their attempts to silence her. The
Federal Office of Justice in Berne asked the Italian government to extradite her
so she could be charged under Article 261b of the Swiss Criminal Code – or, as
she called it, the “He-didn’t-chase-me-because-I’m-a-thief-but-because-I’m-a-Muslim” clause. She was sued in France, where suits against writers are routine now. An Italian magistrate indicted her and, because of the European Arrest Warrant, which includes charges of “xenophobia” as grounds for extradition from one EU nation to another, most of the Continent became unsafe for her to set foot in. Only in
the last ten days, when she knew she would not live to make her first court
date, did she return from political exile to die in a home town defiled less by
immigrant urine than by the watery emissions of incontinent fainthearts and
appeasers.

I never really thought cancer would get Oriana Fallaci. She seemed so full of fire in the last few years that one felt certain any tumor would shrivel to ash inside her. But the legal harassment from her enemies and their appeasers must have taken their toll. The books were huge sellers but old friends kept their distance. As for those on the left who acknowledged the threat, she parted company there, too. This year, a dozen intellectuals, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, published a manifesto against Islamism and in defense of “secular values for all”. All are doughty warriors and important allies in Europe’s present struggle. But La Fallaci, a lifelong atheist, had come to the conclusion that secular humanism was an insufficient rallying cry, that it had in some sense led to the gaping nullity of contemporary European identity which Islam had simply steamrollered. By the end, she was if not a Christian then, as she formulated it, a “Christian atheist”. In 2005 she was granted a private audience with Pope Benedict on the understanding that she would never divulge what was discussed. It would be interesting to know, but it’s safe to say that for once it wasn’t “Go fuck yourself. I say what I want.”

At the height of her fame thirty years ago Oriana Fallaci seemed to embody the triumph of the post-Christian west. The apotheosis of the independent emancipated woman, she lived long enough to understand that its hyper-rationalism was, in point of fact, wholly irrational, and she was big enough to change her mind on that without changing her glorious voice. She was a beautiful writer. If her sin is that she went too far, in a craven culture that recoils even from first steps that is not the worst. Brava, la Fallaci.

The Atlantic Monthly, December 2006

Obsession

2007-01-10T09:46:00.000Z

In his blog, Dizzy Thinks kindly alerted us to a story, featured in the New York Post, concerning the documentary film Obsession. Apparently a Jewish student group at the city’s Pace University has been warned by the college authorities not to show the critically-acclaimed film about radical Islam; if they do, they could implicate themselves as suspects in two recent hate crimes at the college involving the desecration of the Koran. The authorities have also told the group that if they go ahead and screen it, they will be reported to the police.

This sort of action is very worrying – although, given the make-up of most American campus authorities, regrettably hardly a surprise. The film was actually shown on Fox TV last November, but remains unseen in Britain. The New Culture Forum hopes to put that right this year.

PW.

Update on French Philosopher Robert Redeker

2007-01-10T08:02:00.000Z

Four months ago, we mentioned here Robert Redeker, the French philosopher forced to go into hiding after Le Figaro published a column by him, labelled by the usual suspects as very islamically incorrect.

Adil al Hyanne was deported to Morocco from Libya, where he was hoping to join the Jihad in Iraq. This young man in his early twenties, who could very reasonably be described as an aspiring islamist, if not an islamist, has admitted to calling for Robert Redeker to be murdered. He posted on the Internet pictures of the philosopher, as well as his personal and professional addresses in Toulouse, including all his contact details, email addresses and phone numbers.

Adil al Hyanne was calling for the 'French Lions' to follow the example of the 'Dutch Lion', Mohammed al-Bouyeri, who butchered director Théo Van Gogh in November 2005.

Many websites had his incitement to murder republished, and so Robert Redeker will stay in hiding.

One reader left a comment on the website of the French daily newspaper Libération, saying that, actually, it had not been a Fatwa and that Robert Redeker was probably disappointed not to have become a French Salman Rushdie.

Perhaps it was not technically speaking a Fatwa, but what counts is the result. Some are already trying to reduce the responsibility of Adil al Hyanne; they are implying that it was some kind of joke and that he was not really an islamist. If this is true, then we don't share his sense of humour.

This Tuesday on Culture Clash…

2007-01-06T11:04:00.000Z

18 Doughty Street’s alternative to Newsnight Review, hosted by The New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle, starts the new year at 8.30 on Tuesday with a discussion on the forthcoming film about Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, the recent This Life reunion programme and the BBC’s latest attempt to revive Cathy Come Home, Born Equal. Chewing the cud will be Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph, James Delingpole of The Spectator, Susan Shaw of the South Bank Show and writer and commentator Douglas Murray.

Our January Event

2007-01-04T16:30:00.000Z

You are invited to hear:

MICHAEL GOVE MP

Are We Seeing the Emergence of a New Anti-Islamist Intelligentsia?

Monday, 22nd January, 7 for 7.30pm

The Attlee Suite, Portcullis House, Westminster, London SW1A 2LW

(next to Westminster Tube)

The British intelligentsia has traditionally been characterised by its adherence to the doctrines of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and internationalism.

But as Western values face an onslaught from a hostile and increasingly emboldened Islam, and established political allegiances either fracture or make disturbing new alliances, are we witnessing a major new intellectual shift?

Some of the foremost literary figures of our time - Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie - have spoken about the threat which Islamism poses to Western culture. Prominent left-of-centre journalists and academics, disturbed by much of the left’s unthinking anti-Americanism and seeming fondness for dictators, have formed the Euston Manifesto Group. And amongst the left/liberal-leaning cultural and media establishment, attitudes are hardening as issues of cultural ‘sensitivity’ and self-censorship in relation to Islam come increasingly to the fore. Is a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia emerging?

Michael Gove, Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath and Shadow Minister for Housing, is one of Britain’s leading writers and thinkers on terrorism and foreign affairs. Michael was founding chairman of Policy Exchange, and is a founder member of the Henry Jackson Society. As well as being a columnist for The Times, he has been a frequent panellist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and BBC2’s Newsnight Review. His most recent book, Celsius 7/7, was published last year.

Do join us for what promises to be an important and fascinating talk. It will be followed by a Q & A session.

Please RSVP at events@newcultureforum.org.uk
We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening towards drinks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR READERS!

2007-01-04T16:24:00.000Z

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL

2006-12-24T18:44:00.000Z

Wishful Thoughts for 2007

2006-12-13T15:20:00.000Z

The New Culture Forum brings you the cultural news and events you can (not) expect to hear about in 2007, as brought to you by our contributors on the ground.

Let’s kick off with Christmas…

DEBENHAM ADMITS: WE DID NOT DESIGN CHRISTMAS”.

The retail giant Debenhams has retracted its “Christmas: Designed by Debenhams” television advert, after it decided it might be offensive to Christians. In the advert, a slim, sexy, modern-styled ‘DJ Santa’ glides and break-dances his way through rooms in his hi-tech grotto lined with robotic toys, perfumes, handbags, and other fashion accessories, before attractive women in stockings help send him out to deliver presents in a flying, high-powered snow ski. A company spokesman told reporters: “As soon as our executives viewed the ad, they realized that we had become so caught up in all the commercial opportunities of the festive season that we had lost sight of the true Christian message of charity and compassion. … We also recognized that some Christians might find our transformation of their beloved Saint Nicholas into a sex-crazed fashion victim, and our claim to have been the true originators of their historic religious festival, offensive.” The spokesman confirmed, however, that an equivalent advert,
“Eid: Designed by Debenhams”, with a similarly sexy, break-dancing ‘MC Muhammad’, would still go ahead in their stores in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia: “The Islamic world is famed for its sense of gentle good-humour, and we foresee no problems there.”

[View ad here: http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=39607]

(from David Brescia)

JANUARY

BBC News press release

Head of BBC News Peter Horrocks today banned the use of three key terms on BBC global news output - ‘suicide bombers’ ‘martyrs’ and ‘freedom fighters’. Horrocks made this unusual statement at the inaugural BBC Friends of Israel fundraising dinner. As well as raising thousands of shekels for Israel to spend on reinforcing the controversial security fence, Horrocks said in his after dinner speech ‘it is time the BBC recognises that homicide bombers in the middle east have the same motives as homicide bombers in the west’ and ‘are nothing but barbaric murderous scumbags acting under a veil of pseudo religious nonsense’. Horrocks then sang the Israeli national anthem as a solo before inviting Baroness Jenny Tongue onto the dance floor for the first Chassidic dancing number ‘We want moshiach now!’.

(from Jonathan Levi)

To celebrate the West's abolition of slavery 200 years earlier, Islam decides to join in, apologising for enslaving more people than the West ever managed and for perpetuating slavery into the present day in countries such as Mauritania. 'This one's been on the books a bit too long,' laugh Ayatollah Khamenei and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi at a joint press conference.

(from Mark Sidwell)

FEBRUARY

BBC, CHANNEL 4 ANNOUNCE FACTUAL PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS

BBC Panorama, tonight, 'teaching sex to kids': how a half-century of UK sex-education has pushed us to the top of Europe's teen pregnancy tables. We ask the Department of Education why it thinks more of the same will now produce different results?

- C4 'Unreported world', 'Castro's Gulag': We get unique access to Cuban dissident groups inside Cuba who show us the true extent of the dictator's repression of writers, thinkers and journalists.

Also 'A Bolivarian blunder', Is Chavez driving Venezuela to ruin and isolation?

- Dispatches: 'A Comprehensive failure': with childhood illiteracy increasing - and entry of poorer students to top universities at a post-War low - we ask whether it's now time to 'permanently exclude' Britain's greatest educational mistake - the comprehensive school.

- C4 News special, 'The Bush tax miracle': how American economic growth has been powered by tax cuts.

- BBC File on four, 'The end of the road for the Human Rights Act?': In order to cope with the terrorist threat, is it time to admit the damage caused by the Human Rights Act, scrap it and re-introduce effective national treason laws?

(from Alan Smithee)

MARCH

THOUSANDS CONVERGE ON WEMBLEY AS ROCK STARS RAIL AGAINST CHINA

Madonna last night led a glittering array of stars from the world of rock and pop in a massive protest concert at the continuing of human rights violations in China. She told the crowd: ‘Chairman Mao caused the deaths of 70 million of his own people. Well Communism is dead but the torture goes on! Make torture history! Rock against China!

(from PW)

APRIL

In an astonishing new play at the National about multiculturalism which looks set to draw angry protests from Muslim groups, a white couple in a largely Asian town see their gay son sacked from his job as a teacher because Islamic fundamentalist parents do not want him teaching their children. Terrified of causing offence, the local council fails to intervene, leaving the angry and frustrated family to deal with a media firestorm. The play, which opened this week, has already sold out, and the theatre has also been encouraged by the proportion of so-called ‘first-time’ ticket buyers. ‘This play is bringing in a whole new audience to the National’, said a spokesman. ‘We’ve been trying to widen our audience over the years with the £10 ticket scheme, and that’s been a real success especially with students, but for some reason the subject of this production has really struck a chord with people who would not otherwise go to the theatre.’

(from PW)

MAY

Leading figures from the arts and media address huge London rally
A massive crowd of moderate Muslims, estimated at nearly half a million, yesterday heard stars of stage, screen and the literary world call for an end to the subjugation of woman and gay men under fundamentalist Islam. Carrying banners declaring ‘Not in Our Name!’, thousands of protesters listened peacefully in the capital’s Hyde Park as figures including feminist Germaine Greer, National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and Oscar-winning actor Sir Ian McKellen made impassioned speeches condemning the wearing of the burkha, the execution of thousands of gay men in Iran and the increasing tolerance in Britain of what Sir Ian dubbed in his speech ‘vicious attacks on our liberty’.
Interviewed after the event, Germaine Greer underlined how important it was that women in the West stood up to such reactionary forces. ‘It’s the duty of feminists everywhere to speak out in support of women who live lives of total subservience – women whose voices will never otherwise be heard.’

(from PW)

JUNE

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown admits that juvenile relocation to Mayfair, and its attendant reduced knowledge of traditional Malawian songs, dances and agricultural techniques, may be preferable to dying alone, disease-riddled and abandoned in an African orphanage.

(from Emma French)

JULY

Carbon neutral is a load of hippie bollocks," announced Chris Martin, last night, to a stunned audience of Coldplay fans.
"Sorry guys, but the fact is I got it all wrong. This save the planet stuff I've been preaching at you for the last five years - it was just hot air. Al Gore is a mendacious loser twat. Michael Moore is a fat, lying, treacherous c***. An Inconvenient Truth is the worst film ever, worse even than Love Actually or that other terrible Richard Curtis one about the Scottish girl at the G8 summit who converts everyone to eco-fascism. The Rainbow Warrior had it coming. Greenpeace are tossers. Global warming is due primarily to solar activity, perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. Wind turbines are crap. Nuclear is our only hope."
After a climactic performance of Yellow, Martin further shocked fans by urinating on a copy of Kyoto agreement, before driving off in a 4 x 4 with wife Gwyneth Paltrow chic in pure sable fur) and chums Thom Yorke and Michael Stipe (both engrossed in Douglas Murray's Neo-Conservatism: Why We Need It?)

(from James Delingpole)

AUGUST

Gwyneth Paltrow abandons her ‘macrobiotic diet’ in favour of a new diet dependant exclusively on conventionally grown Genetically Modified Organisms.

(from Dawn Steeves)

SEPTEMBER

Ekow Eshun says something cogent and to the point on Newsnight Review

Male character on advert/in sitcom shown not to be a bumbling fool; female character revealed to be something other than a long-suffering omnicompetent.

(from James Delingpole)

OCTOBER

Spooks finally broadcasts an episode in which it really is the Islamists who are baddies and not Christians/Big Business/Jews masquerading as Islamists so as to give these peace-loving people a warlike reputation they SO do not deserve.

Bono admits: "What do I know? I'm just a rock star."

(from James Delingpole)

NOVEMBER

‘We are a waste of taxpayer’s money’, declares Disability Rights Commission

‘There’s a lot to be said for the occasional slap’, NSPCC counsels parents

Muslim Council of Britain condemns suicide bombers

Arts Council launches new fund for middle class whites

(from Nick Seddon).

DECEMBER

Channel 4 announces that it’s Alternative Christmas Message this year will be given by Dr John Sentamu, the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York known for his outspoken support of Christianity and the celebration of British Culture. When questioned about this unusual choice, a Channel 4 spokesman said candidly: ‘We always aim to be provocative, and so we thought it would be really daring to use the Archbishop. Frankly, all the old counter-culture ‘alternatives’ are pretty much mainstream culture now, and rather than just be known as one of Oriana Fallaci’s ‘phoney revolutionaries’, we thought we’d really try to stir things up.’

Stephan Shakespeare talks to The New Culture Forum

2006-12-12T08:21:00.000Z

Stephan Shakespeare, founder of YouGov, is the man behind the creation of 18 Doughty Street Talk TV, the first British TV channel on the Internet.

18 Doughty Street was launched in October this year. Unencumbered by the traditional requirements of so-called 'balance', it promised to offer something completely new. So has it?

Peter Whittle (who hosts the channel's Culture Clash programme) talked to Stephan about the first months 'on air.'

NCF: Stephan, on its launch literature 18 Doughty Street had the following quote from Orwell: ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ Do you think that 18 Doughty Street is telling the truth?

S: I don’t think that anybody can know that they are telling the truth in that way, but I think that people being able to speak without constraint will get us closer to it. I think the nearest we can get to the truth is if people with different points of view, and different experience, can discuss things in a context where they feel really they can say whatever they like, where they don’t have to play up to an audience, or play up to a regulator, where they don’t have to worry who they please and who they don’t please. I don’t think anybody can pronounce on what’s true and what’s not true. I think any consensus is going to be right 70% of the time and wrong 30% of the time. The best way you can counteract that is to have lots of voices, and lots of people choosing which voices they want to hear, which voices they want to balance, and how, and you have this collective wisdom of crowds that determines the best guess. Doughty Street is just another place where people can talk and discuss, but what can be different is that they don’t have a false concept of balance and boundaries.

P: So do you think it is being different?

S: We are at the very early days of 18 Doughty Street. When we started this, we had some ideas about how we wanted it to be. Then we came up against the constraints of production teams, and so on, saying this is possible, that is not possible, and they’ve come from their own background in TV production and they put constraints on us of a different kind, which we are just learning how to go beyond. When we started this, I always had the view that you can spend six months or a year planning how this would be, and then launch, or you can just launch without any idea how it’s going to work and then look at it after six months and do it again, as it were. And that second route is very much what we’ve gone down. We just said ‘Let’s get started, we don’t really know how this is going to work’. It’s actually unknowable how it is going to work, because people are not used at watching TV on the Internet. Let’s just get started, and as we go along, we will make some mistakes. It will become more obvious in the doing that it would ever have been planning in the abstract.

P: 18 Doughty Street was mooted as ‘anti-establishment television’, and I think my immediate reaction when I looked at this was that it would be against the kind of vaguely left/ liberal orthodoxy which dominates. Is that how you see it?

S: I think that is how I see it. I think an establishment orthodoxy certainly does exist. I don’t think it’s all powerful, and I don’t pretend we live in a world where there are no platforms for alternative voices. But there is such a magnetic pole to the mainstream, and that mainstream is dominated by, as you say, a sort of leftist liberal outlook. I don’t mean leftist as in socialist, but I would say it is a set of attitudes. I would say there’s a need for something which is outside of that, and that plays against that.

What I find extraordinary is the degree to which there has been outside interest in this, and favourable reviews of it. The output at the moment is terrific, as far as it goes, but it is early days, and the most notable thing about it is how generous everybody else has been prepared to be about it. Probably it’s because they do perceive a striking need for this.

P: Have you any idea of how many people are actually watching it?

S: I don’t think the audience on any particular night breaks beyond a thousand. It’s a small audience - very much the sort of political media world - but we’re not going to push it, or market it until we are ready, until we’ve found our feet, so that’s exactly what we would expect, and what we would have assumed. At the moment, the website, for example, is an embarrassment, it is not only a not very good website, it is a terrible website – you can’t do the basic things, blogging alongside watching and having links to all the things you can download in a clear, simple way. To be fair to the people who designed it, we probably gave conflicting messages as to what we wanted, and it’s resulted in this. On the 8th of January, all that will be re-launched, it will now be designed on the basis of what we know about what we want to do, and at that point, we will be able to market this out beyond the niche audience we have at the moment, and that is very clear in our minds, that in a way we don’t want to drive lots of people to it at the moment, when the look of the studio is changing, the websites are changing, and the schedule is going to be changing. We are treating this as a sort of Beta phase, and then on the 8th March we are going to be much clearer about what the whole thing looks like, and how it functions, and at that point, we can push it out and go for a wider audience.

P: Will it be markedly different in term of the presentation, apart from the website?

S: I don’t think it’ll be markedly different in term of what you see. There will just be a lot more, and a lot of different things, in addition. That’s to say, I don’t think that anything that we’ve done hasn’t worked. I think the pre-recorded programmes (ie those in the 8.30 slot such as World View and Culture Clash) have all been terrific discussions, bar none. Any one of those discussions, if you heard them on Radio 4 in the afternoon would have been at the very least as good as anything you hear there, and at the most, markedly different. For example, the discussion on Culture Clash on what was described as cowardice in the face of Islamic fundamentalism had a passion and yet a rationality, a fairness about it, that really attacked a certain attitude that’s prevalent in the media, and you wouldn’t have heard that anywhere else in the media because there, even if you had had one person advocating that point of view, you would have had to have a balance with two or three people saying what a lot of nonsense. I think it’s terrific if you have a discussion if people take different points of view and challenge each others points of view – but if that challenge is always coming from a predictable ‘bring it back to the safe area’ position, you are never going to get a proper discussion, because what happens, and we see it on Newsnight, night after night, is that everybody involved entrenches very quickly to their predetermined positions, because that is what happens with all human beings when you challenge their position. You know, you make a point and I immediately say ‘That’s completely wrong, it should be this’. Instead of going to a next point and exploring those ideas, you are going to start justifying what you’ve said, trying to make the viewer think that you are right, and the other person is wrong. Now if you don’t need to do that, if the rest of the people in the discussion perhaps disagree with you but actually do so in a way which you welcome because you want to develop your idea, that discussion becomes more exploratory, discursive, and ends up in a different place. You really feel you’ve been around the subject, rather than watching two or three people who are intent on pushing each other into their original corners.

P: I’ve stopped watching Question Time because there’s this kind of monolithic, predictable viewpoint which come across from the whole panel. I wonder, with 18 Doughty Street, would there be views that you wouldn’t have on? How free do you want to be? We’ve heard this week that the BBC was thinking of putting on extreme voices – they mentioned the Taliban, and the BNP as examples. Would you do that?

S: Number One, I wouldn’t design it that way, and I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that design where what you’re saying is ‘yes, we do have a narrow channel of conventional discussions, and to balance that we’re going to have two outriders to have a go at each other.’ That doesn’t work, so I wouldn’t begin with that design.

I have to say in practical terms, if somebody said we would like to invite the leader of the BNP, I would say ‘Let’s not’. Somebody else can do that, it’s not a voice that I think I would want to give a platform to. What Doughty Street isn’t doing is saying, this is a place for all other voices. We are free to make our choice, and we are free to say actually I don’t want to hear from a certain position, and that goes back to my first point, about lots of different platforms among which you can make your choice about. Somebody else can start their own Internet TV – and they will – and if they want to have the BNP on it that is up to them, but I don’t feel that I need to do that. It is not something I would feel comfortable with. The beauty is we don’t have a responsibility to something else, we don’t have a responsibility to say ‘the BBC doesn’t do that, so therefore we will do all the things that the BBC doesn’t do.’ We only have a responsibility to do the things that we want to do, because it pleases us.

P: 18 Doughty Street made it clear it didn’t want to be Tory TV. But – not that you should care – do you know how the Tory party views it?

S: It can’t be Tory TV for the simple reason that not all of us there are card carrying Tories, and even if we were, we wouldn’t necessary want to add to this centralization of power that is already existing in politics. I am a Conservative Party member, and I would much rather see a Conservative government than a Labour government, but I wouldn’t want to add to the disproportionate strength of party hierarchies. I think that is part of the problem. It’s completely reasonable – I am not making an attack on that in this sense and I wouldn’t expect them to do anything different from what they are doing, because that is why they are leading a party. But it is up to the rest of us to make sure that there are other platforms, other voices, other strands of discussion that people can join.

P: If you’re talking about anti-establishment TV, especially from right of centre viewpoint, it would seem to imply that it is sort of against, or looking at a another kind of conservatism that is not necessarily Cameroonist if you like. Do you think that this is a voice for dissent for conservatives?

S: In as much as it is a voice for any kind of dissent, yes. In as much as it is, as what you’re suggesting, an anti-Cameron thing, absolutely not. We have lots of people on who are 100% loyal to David Cameron, or indeed to Menzies Campbell or Brown or Blair. And we have people who are not. That seems to me the right thing that a discussion platform, a media platform would seek to do. I hope it will never be a home for discontent with any particular leader or politician or whatever and I don’t think when you view it, it is that at all. The vast majority of people who come on to the programme do wish David Cameron every success, they probably just wish he would be successful in slightly different ways or in slightly different areas. We hear a lot about what a modern political party is now, and a modern political party, it seems to me, would, yes, try to provide leadership and some discipline but also accept that they’re functioning in a world in which the audience, the public, is distrustful of politicians, and feels patronised and manipulated. Therefore they should welcome other voices. And to be fair, they have done exactly that. ConservativeHome which is related to 18 Doughty Street has had a huge amount of, I won’t say support, but cooperation from the Party, which doesn’t seek to make it change its views, nor does it do the opposite, of accepting it as being part of themselves. They see it exactly for what it is, which is another voice, broadly supportive but there to widen the discussion.

P: Going right back to the beginning, can you just explain how you first came up with the idea for 18 Doughty?

S: A number of things I was watching came together at the same time. I was in America flicking around channels as one does, and came across some very obscure channel - I have no memory of what it is or what they were talking about – but what struck me was the way it was done. It was in fact a radio station, in which they set up a single camera in the corner of the room to beam as it were as a TV station permanently what was going on in the studio. So you listened to it as a radio station but you could look up and see who the people were who were talking, you could have a bit of the behind-the-scenes feel. And I thought this was terrific, it really worked, because if I wanted to be sitting for an evening television, I would not watch a single camera on a radio station, but if I was moving around the room doing stuff, it is almost a different way of watching radio – and I thought that must be very low cost, and it works really well. So that was one thing which was in my mind. I had been interested for some time in Big Brother obviously, and my conception of Doughty Street would be a little bit like a Big Brother house – I’m exaggerating the comparison massively - but what I mean by that is that you would be watching in and be able to interact with people in the room having a discussion, and I think as time goes on we are going to increase the sort of coverage of what goes on in the house - not just increase programme as such.

P: So the house at 18 Doughty Street will be more than a TV station?

S: I think that is what is going to happen. We are looking at putting a camera in the kitchen, a camera in the green room, as it were, to be able to switch to a discussion that is going on there. I think if you were to have a conventional editorial meeting that ought to be beamed live to whoever’s there. People could be watching and come in with suggestions as well.

P; what are the other things you are planning to do?

S: We are looking to increase audience participation greatly by bringing in the creativity and the critical intelligence of our audience in the designing and making of products for Doughty Street. It will be, this is what we are thinking of doing, we would love suggestions from you, then we will discuss the suggestions, have input on the discussion, come to some sort of agreement about what this new format should look like, start doing it, get feedback on it, change it, so that in other words the audience is absolutely a part of making the programme, not just through interacting with the programme once it exists, but actually from the conception through to the final product.

P: 18 Doughty is the first of his kind in this country, isn’t it?

S: I think it is the first of its kind, anywhere, in this way. Clearly it picks up on strands that have existed on the Internet, but I can’t think of anything that is like Doughty Street – or that is like what Doughty Street intends to be. We are nowhere near the place that we will be, I think, within six months.

P: The US still has a culture war, with its shock jocks, but here there’s been something of a rout. Is 18 Doughty a first shot across the bow?

S: Certainly quite of few of us at Doughty are big admirers of Fox News, big admirers precisely because of what you’ve just described, of someone coming along and saying actually we don’t need to accept ABC, CBS and NBC news as the only way of doing this. It is a cultural monopoly that needs to be challenged and, obviously, they have been big winners in that cultural war. What we are doing is not unrelated to that, but it is not the same. You talk about America. We will be looking, certainly, as we develop, to be facing America quite a bit more as well – if we are to be going out after midnight, we can actually quite explicitly face an American audience in the small hours. And we already of course had Fox News do an experimental programme from Doughty Street. It is an interesting thread.

P: Compared to the US, there are so few alternative voices here and in Europe, there seems to be nothing.

S: I wouldn’t quite say nothing. I was really on the edge of my seat the other day in the back of a cab. The driver had on I think it was Talk Sport in the middle of the morning and there was this guy, obviously the presenter, who was in a five minute diatribe about everything that was happening in London. There was a bit of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ cliché but actually it was beyond that, there was a raw anger in it, and a willingness to say exactly what was on his mind as it came into his mind. But I thought, that actually is an authentic voice, which fits in with the American Shock Jock thing. And one of the things we want to do with Doughty is to get much more involvement from the students – we are right next door to UCL, and there are lots of young people around there. When we feel that we are more established in our production, we will be really sending a big invitation to anyone out there who wants to come on and have a go. I see a revolving door with lots of people coming in and getting a chance to do their bit – and some of those turning out to be new stars. Some of those will be ‘thank you very much and see you next year’ of course, but we hope that from it will emerge people who will just suddenly take to the camera, take to the sofa if you like, and knock our socks off. We have this fantastic opportunity to be that open.

P. Stephan, thanks very much.

Tonight on Culture Clash

2006-12-12T08:14:00.000Z

Hello and welcome to Culture Clash.

The only shock delivered by the Turner Prize this year was that it was won by a painter. Tooma Abts, a 34-year-old German artist of contemporary abstract paintings won against competition from sculptural installations consisting of displays of found objects, a ‘live’ exhibit of a TV production office complete with live workers, a computer designed billboard and a film installation of former participants in reality TV.
When the winner was announced last week, art critics commented that the competition had inspired only indifference, and had failed to get people talking. Well we’re going to fill that gap today and ask whether this annual artistic bunfest means anything to anybody outside the art world.

It was 1993 when Channel 4 launched its so-called Alternative Christmas message, and since then Sharon Osbourne, Jesse Jackson and Ali G are among those you’ve gone head to head with Her Majesty. Often its been played simply for laughs, but this year the channel has chosen Khadija Ravat, a Muslim woman in a niqab, that’s a full veil, to deliver her perspective on the events of the past year. Ravat, a part time primary school teacher in Leicester, was born in Zimbabwe, is a convert to Islam and says that her 6 minute broadcast would celebrate British values and the multi-cultural society. We’ll be asking whether this is a timely celebration of our vibrant diversity, or whether it’s a simply a stunt too far.

My guest today are Michael Attwell, producer and former chairman of BAFTA, Dawn Steeves of The New Criterion Magazine, James Delingpole, TV critic of the Spectator, and journalist Franck Guillory.