The New Culture Forum - So What You’re Saying Is

The New Culture Forum - a conservative thinktank run by Peter Whittle AM, publishes regular in-depth interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our times. Among an illustrious list is Sir Roger Scruton, see video below, who sadly died in January 2020. The long line of interesting and thought-provoking guests include Douglas Murray, Melanie Philips, Peter Hitchens, Nigel Farage and more recently, Anne Widdecombe. The series is wittily titled So What You’re Saying Is - which was, of course, the favourite phrase of Channel 4 journalist Cathy Newman as she desperately thrashed around trying to catch out the great Canadian philosopher and psychologist, Dr Jordan Peterson. The New Culture Forum is a superb, intelligent channel and well worth subscribing to.

Cathy Newman v Professor Jordan B Peterson, Channel 4 News

We wouldn’t normally recommend Channel 4 News - especially not for anyone suffering from high blood pressure - their persistently woke agenda is enough to make anyone’s blood boil. But the now-notorious tussle mentioned above between Cathy Newman and Jordan B Peterson has become an an internet classic. Watch how she desperately tries to speak his words for him and tell him what he thinks - and more worryingly, how incredulous she is that anyone would question the cherished sacred cows of the Left, such as the actual reasons for the apparent gender pay gap which occurs due to a whole host of complex reasons. “I’m not saying why [the pay gap] exists but it exists,” rants Newman. “But you have to say why it exists,’” calmly replies Dr Peterson. How he stayed so cool and unruffled for a whole half an hour is anyone’s guess - it probably helps being a clinical psychologist. Maybe he was quietly enjoying the TV exposure which was to quickly propel him to worldwide fame.

Helen Lewis of GQ magazine v Professor Jordan B Peterson

The long-suffering Doctor Peterson is back in the hot seat facing an intensive interrogation from Helen Lewis, journalist with GQ magazine. Now, Ms Lewis (as we should probably call her) is a reasonably smart cookie in her own right but, in close proximity to Jordan Peterson’s sheer brilliance, can’t help but come across as a borderline obtuse, dogmatic, ideologically-driven leftie feminist. Irritatingly, she finds herself and her own take on the world at least as interesting if not more so, than that of the great man whom she is interviewing and spends quite some time telling him (and us) all about her own world view. He turns on her in the end, pointing out that she was just aping the views of her ideology and that she could easily be replaced by any similar ideologue who would spout the same thing. She didn’t seem to like that much. Helen Lewis probably learnt a lot from this interview. JP probably learnt that he was right all along about journalists.

Sir Roger Scruton - Beauty in a World of Ugliness

It came as a huge shock to learn in January, 2020, that Sir Roger Scruton had died only in his mid-70s. He was a towering conservative intellectual of the modern age and if the Conservative Party had lived up to its name, they would have had him working round the clock for them. Instead, belatedly in 2018, Tory Communities Secretary, the aptly-named James Brokenshire, appointed him chairman of the Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, established to produce better-designed homes. As the lecture highlighted in this video demonstrates, Sir Roger had much to say about aesthetic appeal and the huge effect it has on our mood. He saw beauty in the world around him as intrinsic to our quality of life and if anyone could raise the bar in terms of high-quality design of new-build homes was concerned, few would be better qualified. You’d think that even the Left would be with him on this. But no. They cherry-picked certain controversial remarks of his and he was quickly fired. A great shame. Sir Roger Scruton’s wisdom does, at least, live on in numerous fascinating videos freely available on YouTube as well as in his published works.

This is London - as it looked in 1950, from British Pathé News

Often, it’s only when we look back at old photos and video footage that we realise how much life has changed. The Left love to claim that conservatives see the past through rose-tinted spectacles when, in fact, life was far grimmer in days of yore than today. As always with their arguments, there’s usually a grain of truth in it. There is a lot from the past that one wouldn’t much like to return to and yet somehow, we remember it as a more decent, friendly, safer, more pleasant and civilised place to live. And we’d be right. Just take a look at this video of London in 1950 - five years after the end of the Second World War. What do you see? A bustling city with pavements you wouldn’t fear to walk down, and people look respectable and well-mannered. Even workmen digging up the roads would wear a shirt and tie! There are other, similar videos on YouTube and after you’ve watched them, you might care to scroll down to the comments below where viewer after viewer laments the capital city that we’ve lost and the modern one which has risen up in its place.

Lord Green of Migration Watch on the impact of immigration

The Left love to try to discredit MigrationWatch UK by claiming that their statistics are alarmist nonsense, yet in fact the thinktank takes great care to ensure that the data it uses is well-sourced and accurate. In this video, Lord Green tells Peter Whittle AM of New Culture Forum, that our population is going up by nearly a million every three years - the size of the population of Birmingham - 80% of the increase directly caused by immigration. “What we face is a huge increase in our population which is optional,” Lord Green says. “I don’t know anyone who thinks that an extra million every three years is a good idea. Skilled migrants, yes of course, None of us are opposed to immigration in principle, quite the opposite but it is the scale of it which is our problem.” Lord Green goes on to point out that we are the fifth most crowded country in the world - nearly twice as crowded as Germany, three-and-a-half times as crowded as France. Peter Whittle points out in the video that this wholesale demographic transformation of our society is taking place with almost no public debate.