Something rotten...

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.

Gerard Baker has an excellent piece in today’s Times

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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

Stephan Shakespeare talks to The New Culture Forum

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.

Anna Politkovskaya murdered

Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken Putin critic, has been found shot dead at her apartment block in Moscow. (Sat 8/10/06)

"The most important thing is not to show any weakness. The path of resistance is the only way open to us at the moment. If we now go off into the shadows and keep our heads down until there are better times, we will end up going back to the ideological sort of journalism we had in Soviet times."

Anna Politskovskaya, Freedom Forum on World Press Freedom Day, May 2 2001 after her 21st trip to Chechnya.

She published two books on Chechnya, The Dirty War and A Small Corner Of Hell, based on her reports from the war zone, edgy and intense studies printed in Novayagazeta. She vividly described the atrocities and abuses of the war, whether it is the corruption at the heart of post-Communist Russia or the equally spurious arguments and abominable behaviour of the Chechens. Very much a woman's view of the conflict, Politkovskaya excorited male stupidity and brutality on both sides.
Soon to be published in paperback, Putin's Russia : Life in a Failing Democracy. The title says it all... Life and Death.

Anna Politkovskaya on Amazon

Addio and Grazie Oriana!

Under this title, the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera paid tribute to the Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci who died, aged 77, last week.

The New York Times, with many other papers around the Western world, chose to focus their obituaries on her last two books, The Rage and Pride and The Force of Reason, in which she courageously denounced the danger of a radical interpretation of Islam and foresaw the rise of a new totalitarianism, Islamo-fascism. They've labelled her a racist, an Islamophobe and implied she was in some way psychologically unbalanced.

In paying tribute to Oriana, we should remember her as one of the most brilliant journalists, and most talented interviewers - of her generation. 'No one can refuse an interview with her', wrote the LA Times when her Interview with History was published.

She was a remarkable writer, gifted with a rare ability to share and interact with her readers.
She gave us Letter to an Unborn Child, where she evoked, so elegantly and without a hint of self-pity, her difficulties in coming to terms with the absence of a child in her life.

But also, she gave us Un Uomo - A Man, Un Homme - which, as one of the most personal accounts of the interaction between love and political involvement, is a true masterpiece: the story of her love for a young Greek man, Alekos Panagoulis, and their political fight with the fascistic greek military dictatorship of the 60s.

Oriana probably never got over Alekos's assassination. She honored his memory by standing firmly against any extremism, whether it was from the left or the right, which threatened to endanger Western values.

Farewell and thank you, Oriana!

Franck Guillory

PRESS RELEASE – WEDNESDAY 13TH SEPTEMBER 2006

‘WE NEED A BRITISH FOX’ – says ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken

Robin Aitken, author of the forthcoming book Can We Trust the BBC? told a meeting of the The New Culture Forum on Monday night that, given the institutional leftism’ of the BBC, news coverage in the UK would benefit from the existence of its own version of America’s Fox News.

‘If we did have a British Fox it would be tailored to the expectations of a British audience and so quite different from the American version,’ he said. ‘I do think an explicitly right of centre broadcasting organisation in the UK is long overdue.’

Aitken, who was a BBC reporter for twenty-five years and covered such issues as Northern Ireland, the Chernobyl disaster and the Monica Lewinsky affair, made the call during a talk to the recently formed New Culture Forum about his experiences of left-wing bias at the corporation.

Although he asserted that there was little deliberate intention to slant the news agenda, and that most reporters acted in good faith, it was nevertheless true that the whole culture of the BBC took a certain world view for granted, and anything which challenged the collective political assumptions and instincts was either ignored or treated as suspect.

‘Early on, the left grasped the importance of the so-called cultural battle in a way the right simply did not,’ he said. ‘If the BBC does start to debate political values they’ve previously held to be sacrosanct, it is usually only because figures on the left have started to raise concerns about those issues, and in the BBC’s eyes, that has made the debate valid.

‘We’ve seen this recently with multiculturalism. It’s only because figures such as Ruth Kelly and Trevor Phillips have expressed misgivings about it in public that the BBC has allowed the topic to be openly discussed.’

Think tanks and speakers from the political right were always flagged up as such, he said, whereas there was no corresponding identification when it came to left-wing opinion-formers.

On Peter Morgan

Amid the current trend for dramatic portrayals of real events, writer Peter Morgan would seem to be the man of the moment. The author of The Deal (which was shown to such acclaim on Channel 4) currently has a play on at the Donmar, Frost/Nixon, as well as a soon-to-be-released feature film, The Queen. And next up will be a project based around the odd relationship of Lord Longford and Myra Hindley.

Such has been the praise for Frost/Nixon, it looks set to transfer to a bigger West End venue, and The Queen will almost certainly win Helen Mirren an Oscar nomination.

Morgan’s approach to the events he depicts is extraordinarily even-handed, crisp and believable. In many respects, this is far harder to pull off successfully than one which has a strong point-of-view. Frost/Nixon is as much about the struggle between two egos, a fight for the supremacy awarded by fame, as about politics or TV journalism. Similarly The Queen deals with the collision between two types of cultures in one country, as personified by Diana and the monarch. In each case, whatever Morgan’s own political views, there’s no preaching, and we’re left to draw our own conclusions.

Most importantly perhaps, these productions make the recent efforts of our supposed giants of political theatre look outmoded and cumbersome. David Edgar’s Playing with Fire, and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, both of which were at the National, seemed by comparison mealy-mouthed, predictable and, most crucially, un-dramatic.

The Queen is in essence a sequel to The Deal, and one can’t help but suspect that Morgan is planning a trilogy – one which might finish with The War, perhaps, or The President. It would be interesting to see how this chronicler of the Blair years handled the world after 9/11.

REMINDER - The New Culture Forum event on September 11th

You are invited to hear

ROBIN AITKEN
on
BIAS AND THE BBC

Monday, 11th September, 6.30 for 7pmThe Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1

RSVP at prwhittle@btopenworld.com

The answer is in the question

On Friday the Edinburgh TV Festival held a debate, hosted by Kirsty Wark, entitled Is British TV Too Right Wing?

The premise under discussion was, apparently, that now television is stuffed with right wing columnists, historians and journalists, contrary to the popular view of it being a liberal left stronghold.

Quite how they got together even the flimsiest bits of evidence on which to base this is truly baffling. And the whole question is put into nice relief when one considers that a debate at the festival on whether TV was too left wing would be more or less inconceivable.

Anybody who'd like to discuss the question with reference to the real world is invited to our event on September 11th (please see below).

The Franz Kafka Big Banned

The Times reports today that a comedy show, The Franz Kafka Big Band, has been pulled from BBC radio schedules for being too controversial.

Jokes about Israel and Palestine have been deemed 'inappropriate' - that weasel word which is now generally used to by-pass any real consideration or judgement of the issues - but the main cause for concern would seem to have been a joke about Rolf Harris drawing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.

It's worth reflecting on the poor state of satirical comedy in the UK right now. It's fair to say, as we've noted here before, that an informal aspect of sharia law already effectively exists, in that Muhammad will almost certainly never again be depicted in a creative, artistic or even journalistic setting. But on a more fundamental level it's interesting that, at a time when the sources are so rich, never has satire been so absent.

A few years back there was talk of Spitting Image returning to television. The absurdities surrounding political correctness, for example, would alone have surely filled a whole series, but many commentators said that the show could not work anymore because, essentially, we were a) not angry enough with our politicians and b) the targets of monarchy, lords, church and establishment had been done to death. This later point is probably true, but it was also revealing. Generally the targets of satire have been on the Right. We accept this as natural, but there's actually nothing natural about it. When Blair and Labour are mocked now, it too is from a left-wing perspective. Your average Spitting Image writer or BBC satirist would find it difficult to bring him/herself to mock, say, multiculturalism, or excessive liberalism in the law, or the Black and Red alliance of the Left and Islam - all things just waiting to be satirised. Instead, they'd avoid these things out of cultural inhibition, but also increasingly out of good old-fashioned fear that the arrows might actually hit their targets. Such fear would be, unfortunately, increasingly understandable.

Satire had a mini golden age in the 80s and early 90s. Now, at a time when huge social problems and real political threats face us, it pulls its punches. And its radio shows.

Invitation to our September Event

You are invited to hear:

ROBIN AITKEN

on

BIAS AND THE BBC

Monday, 11th September, 6.30 for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1

During his 25 years as a highly respected BBC correspondent, Robin Aitken covered such issues as terrorism in Northern Ireland, the Chernobyl disaster and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. During the Iraq crisis, he was a specialist economics correspondent for the Today programme.

Now, he was written a book, provisionally entitled CAN WE TRUST THE BBC? which promises to blow the lid off what he claims is the institutional Leftism of the BBC. It will be the first book dealing with bias within BBC to be written by one who was an insider. It promises to be highly controversial.

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

‘Aitken believes that the BBC is the most powerful cultural force in the country – and therefore that its bias has a profound and sometimes malign effect on public life’ Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph

‘He is a BBC man through and through. So when someone like this lifts the lid on newsroom culture, it carries weight.’ Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail

Please RSVP to Peter at prwhittle@btopenworld.com

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

How long will the blast of reality last?

Some of the commentary pieces in today’s broadsheets certainly confirm the gathering sense of the past week that, after the foiled terrorist attacks, the kid gloves have finally come off. Falling to Confront the Enemy Within, the leading article in The Business, is mirrored with only slightly less force by that of the Sunday Times (The Enemy Within), but both are superb in their clear-headed analysis of the situation. Indeed there is an air of exasperation in both, a sense that the time has come to speak a truth that most of us in our heart of hearts know to be true, that we should stop making pathetic excuses and face hard reality.

We can only hope that this is a real sea-change. For increasing numbers of us, a terrorist atrocity brings with it a double horror - first, of the appalling act itself, and second, of the supine, self-hating appeasement with which it is inevitably dealt with by our media and cultural elites.

It’s instructive to read in conjunction with these pieces the cover article by Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times News Review – Wimmin at War. In looking back at the Greenham Common protests in which she took part, she bemoans the current failure of the Feminist movement to speak out on Islamist fundamentalism, and condemns the way in which much of the left have found it so easy to walk side-by-side with Islamofacists, Hezbollah and other assorted virulent anti-Semites. But in there too is a retrospective admission that much of the ‘Peace’ movement during the Cold War was unbelievably credulous, indeed soft, on the then Soviet Union, and all too ready to see the fault as being with the West.

This is something which of course seemed obvious to so many of us at the time, and it’s gratifying to hear the truth told by one who was involved in the movement. But there are exact parallels with our current situation. The response of our elites to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism shows all too clearly the part that Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ continue to play in the attack on the West. Now if anything there is even more at stake.

PW


Sunday Times's Leading article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2310296,00.html
Sarah Baxter's article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2309812,00.html
The Business http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?Failing%20to%20confront%20the%20enemy%20within&StoryID=7F974379-D91B-4780-A410-775F06D95B04&SectionID=803597D7-4BD5-45D5-BF88-E1AC85BF7FDF