So What You're Saying Is...

What type of Conservative is Boris Johnson? On this week's episode of #NCFCounterCulture we discuss the future of conservatism now that Boris Johnson has been returned as Prime Minister with a large majority following the 2019 General Election. The Tories could be in power for the next 10 years. But what kind of conservatism will steer the ship of state? Will the Thatcherites in cabinet take back control? Or will Boris Johnson find himself needing to pander to his new voters in the North of England, taken from the Labour Party in their collapsing Red Wall? Is there even such a thing as "Johnsonism"? Joining host Marc Sidwell on this week's panel to discuss this are: Douglas Chirnside, Documentary Maker and PPC for the Brexit Party in the 2019 Election Rafe Heydel-Mankoo of the New Culture Forum, Historian & Broadcaster Mark Wallace, Chief Executive of Conservative Home Jamie Whyte, Editor of Smith Magazine & past Research Director at the Institute for Economic Affairs

On this week's NCF CounterCulture, our panel look 10 years into the future and make their predictions on what Britain might look like in 2030. With 5 and possibly 10 years of Conservative government ahead, how might Boris Johnson seek to alter the nation over the next decade? What will be the threats Britain will face? Following the House of Lords' attempt to thwart Brexit, will Lords reform become inevitable? Will recent events involving the Royal Family (i.e. the departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan) have any implications for the future of the Monarchy? What impact will immigration have on Britain in 2030? Will we still be free to think and speak as much as we do today? Joining Peter Whittle on this week's panel are: Richard Bingley (Security Expert & Founder of NSA think tank) Benjamin Loughnane (Communications Consultant specialising in Migration) Rafe Heydel-Mankoo (New Culture Forum, Historian & Broadcaster specialising in British identity) Emma Webb (

As the 2020s get underway, the BBC might seem as powerful as ever; but, PM Boris Johnson's government is boycotting key current affairs programmes and threatens to decriminalise the licence fee for non-payment. This week's panel debates BBC ethos, ideology and funding models and discusses whether the BBC is a national treasure that must be preserved or a wholly biased institution ripe for reform or even abolition. HOST: Marc Sidwell, Journalist and Author THE PANEL: * DAVID COX: TV producer & former head of current affairs for LWT (London Weekend Television) * JAMES DELINGPOLE: Writer, Journalist and Columnist * RAFE HEYDEL-MANKOO: Historian, Writer and Broadcaster * SOPHIE SANDOR: Writer and Documentary Maker #NCFCounterCulture

This week on CounterCulture, the panel debate whether the political shenanigans post Brexit referendum have damaged Britain and its institutions and how they are perceived by the British public. Joining Rafe Heydel-Mankoo are journalists & political and cultural commentators: Tim Stanley Madeline Grant Tom Harwood David Oldroyd-Bolt Among the questions explored are: * Is Britain broken? If so, was it broken by Brexit or did Brexit merely reveal long-existing damage? * Peter Oborne's book "Triumph of the Political Class": Has the post-1997 political class ushered in by Blair & Mandelson and continued by Brown & Cameron brought us here? Will they triumph or collapse?. * What, if anything, has Brexit exposed/revealed about us, our elites, institutions and nation/union? * What dangers, if any, are posed by a great swathe of the British public having this "revelation". Once seen by the British public, can it be "unseen"? * What happens now? Can/Should Britain be fixed? Is it worth fixing?

The New Culture Forum is proud to present the first episode of our brand new roundtable discussion programme: CounterCulture. The sister show to our interview programme, "So What You're Saying Is...", CounterCulture will bring together 4 different guest panellists each week to discuss all the new things happening in our culture (books, films, music etc.) as well as the big philosophical and cultural issues that are defining our society and public discourse at the moment. In this episode we shall be looking at the biggest film of the moment: JOKER directed by Todd Philips and starring Joaquin Phoenix as the lead character. It's quite controversial depending on which part of the political spectrum you come from, but its arguably the best film of the year and has been a huge hit at the box office. Panellists today are: Agnieszka Kolek, co-founder of the Passion for Freedom festival Marc Sidwell, Deputy Editor of Smith magazine Rafe Heydel-Mankoo, Historian and Commentator Richard Bingley, Security Analyst

Pope Francis's disastrous record includes betraying suppressed Chinese Catholics, failure on sex abuse, and surrounding himself with disreputable characters who are causing immense damage to the Church, claims conservative commentator Charles Coloumbe on this week's #SWYSI. As for his native land, people would be shocked to discover what a controversial figure Francis is today in Argentina, argues Charles -- suggesting this might explain why he has yet to return there. These are a few of the many failings of Pope Francis according to Traditional Catholic Charles Coulombe. For Charles, the basic premise of the Netflix production "The Two Popes", namely that Pope Francis was more saintly than Benedict XVI, reversed reality. Turning to The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Charles argues that Meghan, willingly and knowingly entered a system (the Royal Family) that she neither liked nor believed in -- and proceeded to try to change it and completely transform Prince Harry. "If you don't like it, don't do it!". Ch

Our guest this week on #SWYSI is long-standing BBC Journalist Robin Aitken MBE. Robin is the author of "Can We Trust the BBC?" And "The Noble Liar", in which he examines why and how the BBC is biased against conservatism. Robin was the first guest on #SWYSI in January 2019 and so it is a great pleasure to welcome him back just over a year later to reflect on the scenario we now face: a conservative government with a strong majority unwilling to play the BBC game and a clear desire to shake up the institution.

This week on "So What You're Saying Is...", Peter Whittle interviews Harry Miller, 1 week after his High Court victory against Humberside Police. The High Court ruled that the police response to the ex-officer's allegedly transphobic tweets was unlawful. Harry Miller was visited by Humberside Police at work in January last year after a complaint about his tweets. He was told he had not committed a crime, but it would be recorded as a non-crime "hate incident". The court found the force's actions were a "disproportionate interference" with his right to freedom of expression. Officers visited Mr Miller's workplace and then spoke with him on the phone, and he was left with the impression "that he might be prosecuted if he continued to tweet", according to a judge. Speaking after the ruling, Mr Miller, from Lincolnshire, said: "This is a watershed moment for liberty - the police were wrong to visit my workplace, wrong to 'check my thinking'." His solicitor Paul Conrathe added: "It is a strong warning to local

This week's guest on "So What You're Saying Is...", is journalist and education campaigner Toby Young. Toby is one of Britain's best-known journalists. Now writing for The Spectator and Quilette, he founded a magazine called The Modern Review and also wrote for Vanity Fair. His best--selling book, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", was later made into a film. He's also a champion for free schools and has founded 4 of them. His latest project is the Free Speech Union, a mass membership organisation dedicated to protecting free speech, which is increasingly under threat. The F.S.U. will be a mass membership organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members and aims to create a more tolerant atmosphere on social media and other platforms. So if a member is targetted by a social media outrage mob for the inadvertent use of certain language, a taboo word or for dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy, the FSU will mobilise on social media and its members will come to their defence on soc

Zuby, the self-styled "Jordan Peterson of rap", is this week's guest on "So What You're Saying Is...". The weight-lifting hip hop artist became an unlikely feminist icon for demonstrating that athletes who are genetically male should not be competing alongside women. In 2019 he was filmed smashing the British women’s deadlift record, in which the weights are raised from the ground to thigh level, while he said he was “identifying as a woman”. The video went viral on the Internet. The Oxford University graduate beat the UK women’s bench press record too, joking that his work was “strong, stunning and brave”.

With free speech increasingly under threat on our university campuses, it is encouraging to note the start of a resistance movement amongst the student populations. James Oliver is a Ph.D. student who co-founded a Free Speech Society at the University of Buckingham in 2019 after learning that conservative writer Peter Hitchens had been "no platformed" at the University of Portsmouth by that university's student union. Given Mr. Hitchens' long commitment to free speech and academic freedom, Mr. Oliver thought the time had come to take a stand in defence of universities' age-old position as the pre-eminent forum for exposure to all manner of ideas and opinions. Peter Hitchens was the keynote speaker at their inaugural event.

The UK's most quoted sociologist, Frank Furedi is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, and specialises on the sociology of fear, education, therapy culture and paranoid parenting. As explained in his 2018 book, "How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century", fear has now assumed the commanding moral position in society. Over the past 20 years as society's basic values, beliefs and ideologies have declined or disappeared from public life, so increasingly fear is used to legitimize their arguments and causes. Virtually every moral, political or economic position is justified in terms of scaremongering. And this transcends the ideological divide as both the left and the right put forward a message of fear rather than hope. As our children grow, instead of teaching them about good, positive values like prudence, courage or loyalty we instill fear in them as well as teaching them tricks to avoid dealing with their fears. Children must be constantly validated and cannot be critici

On 9 Dec. 2019, Dr. David Starkey delivered the New Culture Forum's annual Smith Lecture to a sold-out audience in central London. The theme was "Brexit & Our Constitutional Crisis: History's Lesson & Its Historical Patterns"

This week's guest on "So What You're Saying Is..." is actor, singer & songwriter Laurence Fox, who made newspaper headlines several times last month for various comments criticizing "leftisim" at R.A.D.A., identity politics in the arts, and the hypocrisy of "woke" celebrities who support MeToo and ExtinctionRebellion movements whilst wearing revealing dresses and travelling on private jets. Mr. Fox, part of the famous Fox dynasty of actors (which includes his father, James, and uncle, Edward), is perhaps best known for playing the leading role of DS James Hathaway in the Inspector Morse spin-off TV series "Lewis" (2006-2015) and from his roles in films such as Gosford Park and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. More recently, however, (in 2018), Mr. Fox joined the ITV series Victoria, playing the role of Lord Palmerston for its third series, which first aired in 2019. A singer and songwriter, Laurence Fox's latest album includes a song ("Dead in the Eye") that targets politically correct woke culture, whic

Simon Heffer is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator. He has published several biographies and a series of books on the social history of Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the First World War. He was appointed professorial research fellow at the University of Buckingham in 2017. He worked as a columnist for the Daily Mail and since 2015 has had a weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph. As a political commentator, Heffer takes a socially and constitutionally conservative position. Heffer's most recent book is "Staring at God: Britain in the Great War"

This week's guest on "So What You're Saying Is..." is Theodore Dalrymple, the English writer, doctor and psychiatrist. Dalrymple is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, New English Review, and Axess magasin. He is the author of a number of books, including Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass; Our Culture, What's Left of It; and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. In his writing, Dalrymple frequently argues that the socially liberal and progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality

On this week's episode of So What You're Saying Is, Peter Whittle interviews Andrew, Lord Green -- founder and chairman of the independent think tank Migration Watch. He was for 12 years a board member of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (a human rights organisation which speaks for Christians and others around the world who are suffering persecution for their religious beliefs). Lord Green was a career civil servant prior to founding Migration Watch in 2001. Joining the Diplomatic Service in 1965, he spent half his career in the Middle East where he served in six posts. The remainder of his service was divided between London, Paris, and Washington DC. He was HM Ambassador in Syria (1991–94) and then Director for the Middle East at the Foreign Office, before serving for four and a half years as ambassador in Saudi Arabia. He retired in 2000. He was appointed to the Order of St Michael and St George as a Companion (CMG) in the 1991 Birthday Honours and was promoted as a Knight Commander (KCMG) in the 1998 Bir

In this full-legnth interview, Thatcher's Official Biographer reveals for the first time some remarkable facts from his new biography, including: * Sir John Major's role in Thatcher's overthrow, * Thatcher's early commitment to climate change * Thatcher's desire whilst in office for the British public to decide on Britain's place in EC through both a general election and a referendum * secret channels opened up between the British government and South Africa's ANC * remarkable exchanges between Nelson Mandela and the British Prime Minister The Three decades after Thatcher left office, why does Britain's most successful Prime Minister remain such a divisive figure? What will history deem her greatest achievement, failure and legacy? Ultimately, was she a radical or a traditionalist? This week's guest on "So What You're Saying Is..." is Charles Moore, Official Biographer of Margaret Thatcher and former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and The Sunday Telegraph. Charles joins Peter Whittle to d

Melanie Phillips is one of Britain's leading political journalists and cultural commentators, and as a champion of traditional Judeo-Christian culture and values, she is famed across the Anglosphere for her trenchant views. The first person to ever address the New Culture Forum upon its foundation in 2006, Ms. Phillips has written at various times for The Mail, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Times, The Jerusalem Post and The Jewish Chronicle. She is familiar to many in the UK from her appearances on BBC's "Moral Maze", "Question Time" and "Politics Live" and in the wider world as the author of numerous best-selling books, including "Londonistan" and most recently "Guardian Angel". In this interview with Peter Whittle she explains how Brexit has seen Parliament attempt a coup against the people. She comments on the defeatisim and lack of resolve in the west, which for too long has failed to stand up for itself. Brexit and some of the more palatable forms of populism she believes are a backlash against t

In November 2018 the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, chaired by Anna Soubry MP, published its report, Islamophobia Defined, to establish a working definition of Islamophobia. Subsequently the definition has been adopted by local councils and political parties, even before the Home Affairs Select Committee concluded their assessment of the proposed definition. In the wake of this our guest, Emma Webb, produced an anthology that brought together concerns about the APPG definition of Islamophobia from a variety of perspectives. It included atheist, secularist, religious and academic assessments of why the Islamophobia definition is not only unfit for purpose, but also poses a danger to civil liberties in the United Kingdom, particularly freedom of expression, and journalistic and academic freedom. It may be downloaded here: http://www.civitas.org.uk/content/fil... Emma Webb is director of the Forum on Integration, Democracy and Extremism (FIDE), a project of Civitas. She was formerly