ARTS CULTURE AND MEDIA

Here's where we celebrate the best of manifold British achievements in the world of the arts, entertainment and media, and look at people keen to preserve them...and those keen to destroy.

The New Culture Forum seeks to celebrate and preserve our country’s culture, to recognise and appreciate the historic roots that got us from then to now, and to defend British and indeed Western civilization against its detractors in the realms of arts and culture. You can visit it here.

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Biased BBC doesn't believe that the jewel in Britain's Twentieth Century cultural crown is the democracy-loving, truth-telling upholder of decent standards in its mission of education information and entertainment that it was in its heyday during World War Two. Take a look at the great debate here. And hold onto your hats...

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The New English Review examines society, art, media and culture and stands up for what is good and great and shows up what is squalid, mean, and destructive. There are essays each month on culture and multiculturalism, religion and fanaticism, the way we live our lives and better yet the way we lived our lives, and is one host to the great Doctor Theodore Dalrymple, of whom more soon. A cultural magazine for the Third Millennium with its feet firmly rooted in the millennia that went before. A monthly treat and hard work for the serious lover of our country and our civilisation's true virtues. Read it here.

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Freedom is a diverse value in our society and it has many uses.
One of the things that people can do with freedom is to hurt other people.
Mediawatch-UK monitors how the media go about their business and provides campaigning platforms to oppose what they consider to be harmful, indecent, or immoral uses of the media. Here they are in their own words:
Mediawatch-UK provides an independent voice for those concerned about issues of taste and decency in the media. We have an established reputation for principled protest, informed comment and reliable research. We publish newsletters, reports on the portrayal of violence, bad language and sexual conduct, briefings on film classification, content regulation and the public interest.
Visit their site and see what they are doing here.

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Geert Wilders is being prosecuted by the Dutch courts for words and film critical of Islam and Islamism. It seems he thinks that these events are neither coincidences nor the product solely of Western foreign policy.

From Wikipedia: Attempts to prosecute Wilders under Dutch anti-hate speech laws in June 2008 failed, with the public prosecutor's office stating that Wilders' comments contributed to the debate on Islam in Dutch society and also had been made outside parliament. The office released a statement reading: “That comments are hurtful and offensive for a large number of Muslims does not mean that they are punishable. Freedom of expression fulfils an essential role in public debate in a democratic society. That means that offensive comments can be made in a political debate.”

Wilders has called for the banning of Islamic books while simultaneously arguing for his own personal freedom of speech, so he’s hardly what you’d call a free speech purist. However, on 21 January 2009, a three judge court ordered prosecutors to try him. Their statement argued that "In a democratic system, hate speech is considered so serious that it is in the general interest to... draw a clear line" and that "The court also considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders". If convicted, he may get 16 months of jail time and a fine of 9866.67 Euros.

Threats made by this man have recently prevented his film Fitna being shown in the House of Lords.

Whatever you think of the man and his message he is not only being censored by over mighty government here and abroad; he is under threat of imprisonment for stating his honest opinion. And all this in the middle of a war against the West being led by co-religionists of some of his harshest critics.If freedom of speech has a motto it must surely be; ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ It’s one of the things that make our culture and our country so good. Support him or learn more here.

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Manners maketh the man.
Mediawatch-uk are running a campaign to ask the Prime Minister to influence Ofcom, the film and TV regulator to prevail on the entertainment media to take unnecessary swearing from their productions.
The great humanitarian campaigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to turn Britain’s cities from brutal, impoverished, gin-soaked, child-prostituting, slave-trading hell-holes involved a conscious effort to gentle the condition; that is to make more polite and considerate as well as safer and more comfortable, of the poor.
The reformers usually started with the powerful and the rich; in those days the peerage, gentry and the highest ranks of the middle class, and persuaded them to lead by example to such an extent that Britain became known as the politest and also one of the safest places to live on the planet.
All that has been under attack for decades as stultifying to individual spirits and as methods of class control. ‘Realistic’ language and ‘relevant’ film, drama and soap operas have helped to coarsen and dull the sense of decency of millions – and even the most progressive of teachers find it necessary to blame our nation’s educational and public order decline on loutish and ignorant parents.
From the politest nation on Earth to the terrors of tourist resorts, nightclubs, and football stadiums worldwide; that’s where progressive language codes have helped to get us, with disrespect for self, for others and for all deep and abiding morality growing amongst rich and poor alike. Now the brutality, poverty, addiction and even child prostitution are back.
It’s just not so much fun any more.
People live by symbols and words are the commonest of symbols that we encounter every day. I think our country would be better behaved and safer if more of us respected our language and our culture and our neighbours. So let’s ask today’s rich and powerful – government and the entertainments industry - to lead by example as their aristocratic predecessors did and choose to use their freedom of speech to promote a gentler, more respectful use of language. Sometimes, the great virtue of freedom is that you can choose NOT to do something.
It’s not as if the media approve of the realistic use of every single word in the dictionary, now is it?

The petition is here.

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COMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBOURHOODS

However important national institutions and customs are, we all live locally. Here's where people seek who freedom and other traditional British virtues such as tolerance and neighbourliness, try to keep it easy for us all to get along.

The Centre for Social Cohesion studies our society and seeks ways to make it easier for us all to live peaceably and under the law in this country. It looks especially at religious and ethnic communities with special emphasis on 'the human rights issues surrounding extremism, radicalisation and religious separatism.'

Here's where it is: Ground Zero for those who want to move forward and away from the radical violence of recent years. Read about it here.

Civitas. The Institute for the Study of Civil Society. They provide solutions for social problems, especially in educational excellence in a wide range of academic studies and through offering educational advice, speakers and materials for schools, particularly about the European Union, and provide factual information, advice, analysis and debate. They also help rescue schools and have established a model school of their own. Welfare and moral reformers: they seek and provide answers to problems that beset our society today. Real spirit of Wilberforce stuff.
Read about them here.

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Some people seem to think that political Islam poses some kind of cultural and security threat to our country and the West in general.
The Anti-Islamist Coalition publicises the political, military and cultural effects which the religion of Peace is having on our civilisation. Read about their work here.

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MARRIAGE AND FAMILY

Pretty much the same pattern of family life has prevailed amongst the common people of Britain from the mediaeval period onward: the nuclear family of two married parents and their shared children and only occasionally other permanently cohabiting relatives. It’s a very successful institution which produces and protects children and offers companionship and security for adults.

So it’s obvious that those who seek to change our way of life have to attack marriage and family with all their strength.

Even if a marriage is broken, why should a childhood be shattered?

Families Need Fathers campaigns for the rights of children to have proper contact with both parents after separation and divorce.

They campaign on behalf of the children of broken marriages and make representations to government to reform law and legal practice to help children stay in touch with their families.

FNF also supplies materials and other support to absent parents to help them continue to be active and involved parent. These are leading participants in the struggle to keep childrens’ family lives as good as can be achieved.

Read about them here.

The Families and Social Services Information Team.
"Fassit was founded in 2005. A non-governmental voluntary organisation independent of Local Authority Social Services Departments. Fassit provides a website containing information and advice for families with children experiencing frustration in working with Social Services in Child protection Proceedings."
It campaigns to keep children at home with their families whenever possible despite what they see as the false disapproval or victimization of the Social Services. Read it here.


No 2 Abuse covers genuine cases of abuse, but also campaigns against that zealotry in the State's child welfare bureaucracy, including forced adoption.
Read it here.

FORCED ADOPTION concentrates wholly on the one aspect of Social Services excesses and the secrecy of the family courts that sometimes nurture them.
A personal crusade by a lone campaigner, it brings together the political, legislative, ideological and human mess that our government seem to be failing to mend. Read it here.

Here's our post on the Edinburgh 'gay adoption' row - which has very serious implications for the family in this country and seems to be a prime facia case of the over-mighty state attacking on of our most important institutions.

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SELF OWNERSHIP

To do as one wants – whilst acting within rules which protect the rights of others – is a defining condition of freedom. Over-mighty government, however, has long looked on the bodies and consciousness of the governed as a kind of threat on the one hand and as a battlefield in its warped war against morality on the other. Medical and recreational needs and desires are often in conflict and third-party harm questions continue to divide freedom-lovers and patriots into opposing camps.

It’s a knotty subject and raises all sorts of problems and divisions amongst and those who cherish our way of life, but here goes…

How well does our envy-of-the-world National Health Service do to look after your weak and feeble flesh?
There's a blog called National Death Service which features, and I quote "Examples of death and injury caused by bureaucratic rationing."
Nigel Lawson said that the National Health Service has the status of ‘the national religion.'
Read the words and discover the facts from some of Britain's leading unbelievers here.

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Here, Angus Dei tell the horrifying story of the death of Mrs Angus - at the hands of our beloved National Health Service: The Envy Of The World And What All Good Americans Deserve. He urges us to join this Bloggers Unite page dedicated to exposing "all the horror stories of relatives and partners suffering injustice at the hands of the NHS, the Healthcare Commission and the GMC."

I suppose that that must include me, then.

Going back to the mid-1970s when my father visited a GP to complain about stomach pains. He prescribed indigestion tablets for Dad: a man with a history of high blood pressure and shortness of breath and possessing the distinctive club fingers of those prone to heart disease. The doctor never took his pulse or checked Dad's blood pressure. And away came Dad, and off we went to the chemist's for the useless pills. He was having his first heart attack there and then in the clinic.
He lived through a year's convalescence until he went out for a heathy stoll and never came back.

Oddly enough, that self-same surgery prescribed tranquillizers for the insomniac and grieving new widow, and so mum was given Temazepam, which is "for the short-term treatment of sleeplessness in patients who have difficulty maintaining sleep...
Temazepam is officially indicated for severe insomnia and other severe or disabling sleep disorders. The prescribing guidelines limit prescribing of hypnotics to two-four weeks due to concerns of tolerance and physical dependence."

The NHS was so thoughtful and caring that the original diagnosis was never reviewed and for 10 years this habit-forming drug was repeat-prescriptioned on the nod by a succession of incurious State-employed physicians with no interest in changing her treatment or even in questioning the growing illness and depression in an increasingly sickly and sleepless woman. In the end, someone noticed that it was doing her no good, but by the time she had signed herself into a mental hospital and been taken off Temazepam she was so sick and dispirited and messed-up by the drug and still a grieving widow that she decided that the bottom of the local river would be the quickest and best route to sleep, peace, and maybe to my father.

So do visit Justice for bereaved patients partners and relatives and read what it has to say - and use it, if you wish, to use Angus's angry grieving page send the Health Secretary your heartfelt wishes...

The NHS got both my parents. Nuke from orbit.

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PROPERTY RIGHTS AND TAXATION

Freedom and a happy life in general require material things to be meaningful and money is the oil that greases the wheels of our life. Property rights are the most fundamental of human rights because they are the rules by which we know how we can relate to the physical world. Under attack for all of human history by freedom’s deadliest enemies, property rights have been central to the cultural wars that threaten our home and way of life.
Property rights have their defenders, too.

Consultation here to encourage local government to show how much of our taxes are paid to top public officials.

Didn't like the 2009 Budget? The Libertarian Party has a campaign to help you get shirty with the Chancellor and tell him why not.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Is it a charity? Is it a quango? Is it HM Government in disguise? Does it promote party interests above national interests? Does your money go to fund its work without bothering to ask you first?
Read Fake charities.

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NATIONALITY AND IMMIGRATION

Britain has long been a place of refuge for the persecuted of Europe and elsewhere; much to the profit of natives and newcomers alike as unfamiliar skills, crafts and culture were imported onto our islands to flourish and improve many areas of life.
Nothing is perfect and something - it is argued - has gone wrong with the way we deal with newcomers. A touchy subject for many given the bad name that nationhood was given after the evil events during the Second World War. But here we all are living in these islands. The very concepts of patriotism and nationhood are under constant attack, and this issue above all others is the one that the enemies of freedom use to close down debate and to deflect criticism of their activities by defamation.

Here we link to campaigns about nationhood and immigration.

The Centre for Social Cohesion studies our society and seeks ways to make it easier for us all to live peaceably and under the law in this country. It looks especially at religious and ethnic communities with special emphasis on 'the human rights issues surrounding extremism, radicalisation and religious separatism.'

Migration Watch UK watches migration, and makes recommendations about it.

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Does our government treat Britain’s friends and neighbours well? Are our interests as British subjects being upheld as our diplomats negotiate with the outside world? Does the financial help offered on our behalf to other countries do the job it’s intended to and are we helping the right people in the right ways?
Here’s what some people think.

It gets worse.
The heirs of Churchill and Atlee have decided that the legally elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders may not enter our country for fear that 'his words' will cause violence.
Something tells me it won't be any Dutchman causing violence when Fitna is shown.
It gets better.
There is a central blog for those who would support him, support freedom of speech, and freedom in general against the Islamist intimidation here.

The Irish people held a referendum on whether to agree to the Lisbon Treaty. They voted against it. Someone else thinks that they got it wrong, and they're going to give them a chance to get it right. If you feel strongly enough about it, there's a petition to ask their President to treat a second vote as unconstitutional or undemocratic. The petition is here.
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Someone thinks that Hamas is in the wrong using children and women as shields to hide behind, and is acting in a criminal manner in fighting in civilian clothing and Israeli uniforms. They also object to the widespread theft of civilian property and resources to wage war. Someone is petitioning the UN Secretary General to pronounce Hamas' leaders as war criminals. The petition is here.
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Some people seem to think that political Islam poses some kind of cultural and security threat to our country and the West in general.
The Anti-Islamist Coalition publicises the political, military and cultural effects which the religion of Peace is having on our civilisation. Read about their work here.
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GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS

International institutions and their activities and supporters at home and abroad are not always favourable to our way of life and are often downright hostile to freedom and the very concept of nationhood. Here we look at those who study overseas critics of Britain’s freedoms and way of life and the country’s antagonists both open and secret.

Someone thinks that Hamas is in the wrong using children and women as shields to hide behind, and is acting in a criminal manner in fighting in civilian clothing and Israeli uniforms. They also object to the widespread theft of civilian property and resources to wage war. Someone is petitioning the UN Secretary General to pronounce Hamas' leaders as war criminals. The petition is here.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Freedom of speech and expression is one of most valuable rights – and a right that over-mighty government seems keenest to erode, constrain, weaken and replace with propaganda or silence.
Here we look at the people and institutions that threaten freedom of expression by direct interference or by subtler subversion, and the people who protect this, perhaps our finest national treasure.


Big Brother and Freedom of Speech petition: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop the proposed legislation requiring Facebook to monitor users' contacts."

Does political Islam pose some kind of cultural and security threat to our country? Read the Anti-Islamist Coalition.

Index on Censorship. Left-leaning anti-censorship campaigning site.

Geert Wilders - freedom of speech hero, victim, and villain?

Defend Geert Wilders. Support the world's second most prescribed living human being, after Salman Rushdie.

Mediawatch UK wants restraint in the use freedom of expression and some censorship on the grounds of morality.
They have an anti-swearing petition right here.

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