New Statesman

For other uses, see New Statesmen.

New Statesman

Type	Weekly
Format	Magazine
Owner(s)	Michael Danson (100 percent)
Publisher	Spencer Neal (from May 1997)
Editor	Jason Cowley (from September 2008)
Founded	1913
Political alignment	left-wing Democratic Socialist Progressive, left of centre
Headquarters	55-57 North Wharf Road London W2 1LA
Circulation	26,000 per week
Website	newstatesman.com

The New Statesman is a British left-wing political magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s.

In the 29 May 2006 issue, then editor John Kampfner stated that the New Statesman remained "true to its heritage of radical politics". The magazine is committed to "development, human rights and the environment, global issues the mainstream press often ignores".

The longest serving editor was Kingsley Martin (1930-60): the current editor is Jason Cowley, who assumed the post at the end of September 2008. The magazine is sometimes affectionately referred to as "The Staggers", in reference to its frequent crises in funding, ownership and circulation.

Origins

The New Statesman was founded in 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb with the support of George Bernard Shaw and other prominent members of the Fabian Society. Its first editor was Clifford Sharp, who remained editor until 1928. Desmond MacCarthy joined the paper in 1913 and became literary editor, recruiting Cyril Connolly to the staff in 1928. During Sharp's last two years in post he was debilitated by chronic alcoholism and the paper was actually edited by his deputy Charles Mostyn Lloyd. Lloyd stood in after Sharp's departure until the appointment of Kingsley Martin as editor in 1930 – a position Martin was to hold for 30 years. Although the Webbs and most Fabians were closely associated with the Labour Party, Sharp was drawn increasingly to the Asquith Liberals.

1930 - 1960: The Statesman under Kingsley Martin

In 1931 the Statesman merged with the Liberal weekly the Nation and Athenaeum, and changed its name to the New Statesman and Nation, under which title it remained until 1964. The chairman of the Nation 's board was the economist John Maynard Keynes, who came to be an important influence on the newly merged paper, which started with a circulation of just under 13,000. It also absorbed The Weekend Review in 1933 (an element of which survives in the shape of New Statesman's Weekly Competition).

During the 1930s, Martin's Statesman moved markedly to the left politically. It became strongly anti-fascist and was generally critical of the government policy of appeasement of Mussolini and Hitler (though it did not back British rearmament). It was also, notoriously, an apologist for Stalin's Soviet Union. In 1934 it ran a famously deferential interview with Stalin by H. G. Wells. In 1938 came Martin's refusal to publish George Orwell's celebrated despatches from Barcelona during the Spanish civil war because they criticised the communists for suppressing the anarchists and the left-wing POUM. "It is an unfortunate fact," Martin wrote to Orwell, "that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism."

The Statesman's circulation grew enormously under Martin's editorship, reaching 70,000 by 1945, and it became a key player in Labour politics. The paper welcomed Labour's 1945 general election victory but took a critical line on the new government's foreign policy. The young Labour MP Richard Crossman, who had been an assistant editor before the war, was Martin's chief lieutenant in this period, and the Statesman published Keep Left, the pamphlet written by Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo that most succinctly laid out the Labour left's proposals for a "third force" foreign policy rather than alliance with the United States.

During the 1950s, the Statesman remained a left critic of British foreign and defence policy and of the Labour leadership of Hugh Gaitskell (though Martin never got on personally with Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the anti-Gaitskellite Labour left). It opposed the Korean war, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament grew directly out of an article in the Statesman by J. B. Priestley.

After Kingsley

Martin retired in 1960 and was replaced as editor by John Freeman, a politician-journalist who had resigned from the Labour government in 1951 with Bevan and Harold Wilson. Freeman left in 1965 and was followed in the chair by Paul Johnson, then on the left, under whose editorship the Statesman reached its highest ever circulation of 90,000. For some, even enemies of Johnson such as Richard Ingrams, this was a strong period for the magazine editorially.

After Johnson's departure in 1970, the Statesman went into a long period of declining circulation under successive editors: Richard Crossman (1970–72), who tried to edit it at the same time as playing a major role in Labour politics; Anthony Howard (1972–78), whose recruits to the paper included Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and James Fenton (surprisingly, the arch anti-Socialist Auberon Waugh was writing for the Statesman at this time before returning to his more natural home of The Spectator); Bruce Page (1978–82), who moved the paper towards specialising in investigative journalism, sacking Arthur Marshall, who had been writing for the Statesman on and off since 1935, as a columnist, allegedly because of the latter's support for Margaret Thatcher; Hugh Stephenson (1982–86), under whom it took a strong position again for unilateral nuclear disarmament; John Lloyd (1986–87), who swung the paper's politics back to the centre; Stuart Weir (1987–90), under whose editorship the Statesman founded the Charter 88 constitutional reform pressure group; and Steve Platt (1990–96). In 1991, it absorbed Marxism Today. By 1996 it was selling 23,000 copies a week. The New Statesman was the first periodical to go online, hosted by the www.cleanroom.co.uk, in 1995.

The Statesman acquired the weekly New Society in 1988 and merged with it, becoming New Statesman and Society for the next eight years, then reverting to the old title. In 1993, the Statesman was sued by the prime minister, John Major, after it published an article that discussed rumours that Major was having an extramarital affair with a Downing Street caterer. Although the action was settled out of court for a minimal sum, the paper's legal costs came close to bankrupting it.

Since 1996

The New Statesman was rescued from this near-bankruptcy by a takeover from the businessman Philip Jeffrey but in 1996, after prolonged boardroom wrangling over Jeffrey's plans, it was sold to Geoffrey Robinson, the Labour MP and businessman.

Robinson sacked Steve Platt, and appointed Ian Hargreaves, formerly editor The Independent newspaper, as editor, on an (until then) unprecedentedly high salary, who in turn fired most of the left-wingers on the staff and turned the Statesman into a strong supporter of Tony Blair as Labour leader.

Hargreaves was succeeded by Peter Wilby also from the Independent stable, who had previously been the Statesman's books editor, in 1998. Wilby attempted to reposition the paper back 'on the left', but Wilby's initiatives created controversy. In 2002, for example, the Statesman was accused of anti-Semitism when it published an investigative cover story on the power of the "Zionist lobby" in Britain, under the title "A Kosher Conspiracy?". The cover was illustrated with a gold Star of David towering over a Union Jack. A year ealier Wilby was accused of being anti-American because of his reporting of the 11th September attacks on New York and Washington.

John Kampfner, Wilby's political editor, succeeded him as editor in May 2005 following considerable internal lobbying. Under Kampfner's editorship, a relaunch in 2006 initially saw headline circulation climb to over 30,000. However, over 5,000 of these were apparently monitored free copies [3], and Kampfner failed to maintain the 30,000 circulation he had pledged. In February 2008, Audit Bureau Circulation figures showed that circulation had plunged nearly 13% in 2007. [4] Kampfner resigned on February 13, 2008, the day before the ABC figures were made public, reportedly due to conflicts with Robinson over the magazine's marketing budget (which Robinson had apparently slashed in reaction to the fall in circulation).

In April 2008 Geoffrey Robinson sold 50% of the business to Michael Danson, and the remainder a year later. The appointment of the new editor Jason Cowley was announced on 16 May 2008 but he did not take up the job until the end of September 2008.

In January 2009, the magazine refused to recognise the National Union of Journalists, the trade union to which almost of all its journalists belonged, though further discussions were promised.

Alastair Campbell as guest editor

In March 2009 the magazine had its second guest editor (the first being Estelle Morris during her time as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the British Government), Alastair Campbell, the former head of communications for Tony Blair. Campbell chose to feature Fiona Millar (his own partner), Tony Blair (in an article "Why we must all do God"), football manager Alex Ferguson, and Sarah Brown (Gordon Brown's wife). This editorship was condemned by Suzanne Moore, a contributor to the magazine for twenty years. She wrote in a Mail on Sunday article: "the New Statesman fiercely opposed the Iraq war and yet now hands over the reins to someone key in orchestrating that conflict". Campbell responded: "I had no idea she worked for the New Statesman. I don't read the Mail on Sunday. But professing commitment to leftwing values in that rightwing rag lends a somewhat weakened credibility to anything she says."

Mehdi Hasan "Kaffar" controversy

Mehdi Hasan was appointed the New Statesman's Senior Editor (Politics) in June 2009 and began a blog entitled "Dissident Voice".[5]

On July 24th 2009, the blog Harry's Place published an extract of a speech Mr Hasan gave to the Al Khoei Islamic Centre in February 2009 entitled "From Jahiliya to Jahiliya". In the context of demonstrating problems in the forty Muslim countries (low levels of literacy, no major universities, a low number of Muslim scientists in refereed journals, etc), a call on the Muslim community of the UK to embrace the pursuit of knowledge, including non-Muslim knowledge, he made the following statement:

“The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Quran; they are described in the Quran as, quote, “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief - people of “no intelligence” - because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.”

References

• Hyams, Edward. The New Statesman: the history of the first fifty years 1913-63, Longman, 1963.
• Rolph, C. H (ed) Kingsley: the life, letters and diaries of Kingsley Martin Victor Gollancz, 1973, ISBN 0-575-01636-1
• Howe, Stephen (ed) Lines of Dissent: writing from the New Statesman 1913 to 1988, Verso, 1988, ISBN 0860912078
• Smith, Adrian The New Statesman: portrait of a political weekly, Frank Cass, 1996, ISBN 0-7146-4645-8

List of editors

Clifford Sharp (1913–1928) Charles Mostyn Lloyd (1928–1930) Kingsley Martin (1930–1960) John Freeman (1960–65) Paul Johnson (1965–70) Richard Crossman (1970–72) Anthony Howard (1972–78) Bruce Page (1978–82)

Hugh Stephenson (1982–86) John Lloyd (1986–87) Stuart Weir (1987–91) Steve Platt (1991–96) Ian Hargreaves (1996–98) Peter Wilby (1998–2005) John Kampfner (2005–2008) Sue Matthias (acting editor 2008) Jason Cowley (2008-)

External links

• New Statesman
• The Spirit of Che Guevara by I F Stone, New Statesman October 20 1967