The New Culture Forum

The New Culture Forum Has Moved

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:34:00 +0000

Visit us at our fabulous new website:

www.newcultureforum.org.uk

Last Night's Culture Clash

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 10:12:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:25:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:12:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:45:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:23:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:11:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 08:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 09:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 10:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:45:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:43:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:44:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:39:00 +0000

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.
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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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 10:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 13:18:00 +0000

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.
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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

noreply@blogger.com (Franck Guillory) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:42:00 +0000

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.