Londonophobia
And the historical ignorance of the New Right
As is well known, only liberals “sneer”. It’s what we do when, as I did the other day, I disagreed with a Conservative MP on his plan to remove university loans from certain students (incidentally more likely to be from poorer backgrounds). First he taxed me with having once been a Eurocommunist and then accused me of being part of a “metropolitan elite” who was “sneering” at his proposal. It’s become the standard New Right argumentative declension: I represent the people, she agrees, you sneer.
So I have no doubt that I will be accused of sneering at the documentary efforts of Mr Peter Whittle, founder and director of the New Culture Forum, whose YouTube film on London was promoted on Talk TV last week. The NCF is an outfit headquartered alongside the Taxpayer’s Alliance, the Civitas think-tank and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (main policy: to deny manmade global warming) at 55 Tufton Street, Westminster.
Mr Whittle, a former deputy leader of UKIP and former member of the London Assembly, set up his organisation in the noughties to “contest left/liberal groupthink” in the field of culture. The Forum was initially mildly heterodox, seeking to engage a range of people on its discussions. Owen Jones spoke at one of its events. However its orientation in recent years can be illustrated by the choice of speakers to give the Forum’s annual Smith Lecture, established in 2017:
2017: Douglas Murray
2018: Nigel Farage.
2019: David Starkey
2021: Neil Oliver (the GBNEWS presenter and conspiracy theorist).
2022: Rod Liddle. Who spoke on the theme of “The Feminist Roots of Woke”.
This line-up is, frankly, homogeneous in more ways than one. And there is an essay to be written one day on the contribution of gay men to the cause of cultural reaction, something Catholics and high church Anglicans have known for years.
At the 2023 conference of the Forum this spring the guest speaker list was topped by a Tom and Hayley Bowen “founders of The King Alfred School”, a new private nursery and primary school whose mission begins with the words “like King Alfred in his day, we would like to see a revival of Christian education in England.” Mr Bowen coincidentally must be the only Director of Theology at a primary school in Britain, though I am ready to be corrected. The other main speakers were two leaders of fringe right-wing parties (William Clouston of the Social Democratic Party and Laurence Fox of Reclaim), the semi-inevitable Baroness Fox (no relation) and the absolutely inevitable Professor Matthew Goodwin.
Readers with arcane interests may like to study the range of short videos published by Mr Whittle and the NCF:
https://www.youtube.com/@NewCultureForum/videos
Those who don’t have the time can take it from me that London is something of a preoccupation for the vid-makers, with titles such as “Sadiq Khan sucking lifeblood out of London”, “London mayor Sadiq Khan is racist”, “Does Sadiq Khan hate white people?” and “Sadiq Khan attacks white men again”.