Staggering
Through all his tribulations on foreign policy and 'cash-for-honours', Tony Blair maintains a sense a proportion and a consistent desire: that my own views be printed in the national press. He is fortunate in that a particular press magnate is willing to meet this requirement.
No, I don't believe this vainglorious nonsense either, but one columnist does. He is Peter Wilby, former editor of The New Statesman. Wilby writes in that magazine this week about pro-Blair columnists, and notes the apparent defection of my friend Stephen Pollard from that cause:
Tony Blair's troubles get worse. The Blairite apologist Stephen Pollard has joined the deserters. Pollard is one of those mysterious commentators - Oliver Kamm is another - who claim to be left-wing but hold no discernible left-wing views. Such writers are particularly favoured by the Times, presumably because they allow Rupert Murdoch to have his cake and eat it: he stays onside with the party in power by giving space to its alleged supporters, but keeps his papers ideologically on the right.
I am not privy to the commissioning policies of The Times, but the spread of opinion published in the newspaper appears to me to be wider than that of any other national daily. More to the point, while Stephen is well able to speak for himself, I'm not aware that he even claims to be left-wing. I'm well informed on the subject too, as we exchange denunciatory emails most days.
I, on the other hand, do claim to be left-wing, for the straightforward reason that it's true. My views will be of largely autobiographical interest to me and scant interest to anyone else, but here they are. I support economic redistribution (though on grounds of autonomy, not equality), progressive taxation and a welfare state of very roughly its current scope and size. If you compare Stephen's views and mine on the NHS, a flat tax (which I criticised when it emerged as a Conservative Treasury proposal last autumn), education vouchers, arts subsidies, public-service broadcasting and the licence fee, Europe, immigration or capital punishment, you'll find little common ground. (On the financing of higher education, which I don't count as properly a public good, our views are a lot closer.) I'm also highly critical of the deferential way that New Labour has treated the business lobby, which often presumptuously calls itself 'Britain plc'. Businessmen are no more disinterested promoters of the public good than any other sectional interest. On social issues, I believe the cultural changes of the 1960s have been a civilising influence, and I support permissive abortion legislation and gay marriage. Philosophically, I am a secular humanist; I respect the religious imagination, but have no respect at all for, and militant opposition towards, those who know the mind of God and seek to introduce that revelation into public policy. Ironically, in treating Stephen and me as comparable, Wilby gets the one verifiable fact in his discussion wrong. While I wanted a Labour victory at the last general election, and Stephen did vote Labour, I withheld support from my local Labour candidate (fruitlessly, and probably to her benefit) and voted against her owing to her opposition to the Government's interventionist foreign policy. (My argument was this.)
Under Wilby's editorship, The New Statesman distinguished itself by publishing an editorial immediately after 9/11 holding the bond traders in the World Trade Center partly to blame for provoking their own murder. The following year the magazine speculated on the existence in Britain of a 'Kosher conspiracy', with a cover that, in the words of the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, "was a virtual crash course in antisemitic iconography". In 2003, it published a signed article calling the Prime Minister insane.
When the last of those incidents happened, I recalled this entry, dated 1 March 1984, from the diaries of Tony Benn:
The Sun had an article, 'Benn on the Couch – a top psychiatrist's view of Britain's leading Leftie', in which they said they had fed my personal and political details to a psychiatrist in America who had concluded that I was power-hungry, would do anything to satisfy my hunger, was prone to periods of fantasy and so on.
The Sun's personal attack on Benn was disgraceful. In the 22 years since, it has become a much more responsible newspaper (consider the change in the way it portrays homosexuals in public life). Meanwhile The New Statesman has gone from the editorship of John Lloyd, a voice of reason when the British Left was immune to it, to the editorships of Wilby and John Kampfner ("Blair's Bombs"). Or to put it another way, if it's informed and progressive commentary you want, these days you put The Sun well ahead of the Statesman.
