Peter Whittle: Less Woman's Hour, more Moral Maze - the Radio 4 that I would create

One theme of ConservativeHome's Agenda2008 is support for the draft proposal from Jeremy Hunt MP that a small portion of the BBC licence fee be allocated to the establishment of a new broadcaster.  In this Platform article, Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum suggests what that new broadcaster might look like.

Robin Aitken should be congratulated that the proposal he made in his book Can We Trust the BBC? has been taken on board by Jeremy Hunt. Hiving off a meagre 2% of BBC revenues would give a new radio channel around £60 million a year. A genuinely exciting prospect; but what would - and should - it sound like?

Well, as much like Radio 4 as possible would be my hope - or should I say, with the same structure and variety of content, but minus the smug, predictable and increasingly alienating mindset. Radio 4 symbolises the dilemma many of us have when regarding the future of the BBC. We are genuinely torn, not wanting to throw babies out with bathwater, not wanting to loose Start the Week or Book at Bedtime while at the same time being utterly exasperated by that other political universe which comes at us every week in Any Questions, Woman's Hour, panel shows populated by uniformly left-wing comedians and dire so-called satirical comedy which preaches solidly to the choir,

Like many others, I've found that however much I might like the station in principle, I'm actually tuning in less and less. Life is stressful enough, especially when you're listening while sitting in a traffic jam on the south circular. I don't want to turn into Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

Peter Whittle: The Left have won the culture wars and it's time to fight back

Peter Whittle writes regularly for the Sunday Times, and has also contributed to the Spectator, The Times and the Los Angeles Times. He formed the New Culture Forum in June this year.

During an interview earlier this year, the National Theatre’s director Nicholas Hytner said that one thing he would really like to see there in the future would be a ‘good, mischievous, right-wing play.’

The underlying implication in Hytner’s statement - that such a production would be an unusual occurrence, a naughty aberration, a guilty pleasure - would certainly have confirmed those of us on the political right in our conviction that the cultural establishment in general stands firmly behind enemy lines.

But where are the alternative voices? Do not conservatives - or indeed those others opposed to the increasingly stifling liberal/ left orthodoxy - do these kinds of things? There is the rather complacent view, still cleaved to in the cultural establishment, that broadly speaking the right conserves, and the left creates, and that the most enduring art tends to be subversive. However where that leaves such giant figures as Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, Graham Green or Edward Elgar, to name a few from this country alone, becomes a matter for debate.   

It’s undeniable that if there are right-of-centre artists or writers out there now, they’re certainly keeping a low profile. It isn’t hard to see why. The Right may well have decisively won the economic battles, but in the Culture Wars in Britain, the Left has been victorious. In the past decade, the triumph of political correctness and cultural relativism in the arts, academia and large sections of the serious print and broadcasting media has meant that this orthodoxy has become even more entrenched. It sets the terms of debate, and has a massively disproportionate influence on what might be called the narrative of our times.