In the new edition of Standpoint, Nick Cohen writes about Radio 4's love affair with the alumni of the Revolutionary Communist Party:
In the 1990s, the party's leaders decided to give up on socialism and move into the media. And like good Leninists, the rank and file obeyed their superiors' orders and abandoned their previous convictions on demand. The Moral Maze is now its base at the BBC and is on the radio as I write. Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, which the party's cadres founded when they decided that Trotsky was wrong after all, is on the panel and one of the witnesses is a contributor to Spiked, the institute's online journal. When I last appeared on the programme, one of the witnesses was Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked, and half the panel — the author Kenan Malik and James Panton, an Oxford academic — were Spiked regulars. I waited for Michael Buerk, the presenter, to tell listeners that a fair proportion of his guests came from this cosy coterie. He never did.
Nor do his colleagues. If you come across a new voice on a Radio 4 talk show, talking with loudmouthed conviction, the odds are that he or she will be from the RCP/Institute of Ideas. Indeed, if you want to become a talking head on Radio 4, the best advice I can give you is to join the RCP crowd...
Read the whole piece here . In the same edition, Peter Whittle is disappointed the new movie Whatever Works, Woody Allen's latest attempt to 'return to form':
Whatever Works: now there's a title that suggests the throwing in of towels. Woody Allen, having done his tour of London and Europe and produced a string of mostly critically mauled duds, has for his latest movie returned to Manhattan, to his own turf and people. That is, to the world of sophisticated liberal intellectual types who find it hard to use two words where 20 will do, who kvetch about love and God and what it all means and whether it's all worth it in the first place. And what has he come up with? A comedy, which, even while it goes through the motions, feels like an exhausted postscript to years of analysis. Can relationships really work? Who is the right person for us? How does the can-opener work? Well now, just relax: whatever gets you through the night....
Read the review here