Paul Anderson journalist: March 2006

Friday, 17 March 2006

THE BEST BLOGS ARE AGAINST THE GRAIN

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 March 2006

The big media news in my world this week wasn’t the white paper on the future of the BBC but the launch by the Guardian of its group blog, Comment is Free, where writers from the paper’s comment pages and assorted others sound off about whatever takes their (or the blog editor’s) fancy.

Comment is Free is a novel idea that shows yet again how seriously the Guardian takes online. The paper has been a consistent pioneer in web publishing. It was one of the first newspapers to go online and its website, Guardian Unlimited, has for several years been one of the biggest, best and most visited newspaper websites in the world.

Unlike many of its rivals, it carries everything from the print edition of the paper for free, and it doesn’t limit access to a few days. Guardian Unlimited was a pioneer in offering email alerts and text message services to readers and one of the first newspaper websites to experiment with blogging.

But Comment is Free – it gets its name from the dictum of C. P. Scott, editor of the Guardian from 1871 to 1929, that “comment is free but facts are sacred” – is a big step into the unknown. For the first time, a newspaper has gone for the current affairs bloggers’ natural territory, the instant publication of opinion on events as they happen. Here I should declare a couple of small interests. I work on the Guardian comment pages as a sub-editor and have no desire to lose the gig – and I have a blog of my own, Gauche, at www.libsoc.blogspot.com.

The Guardian has several big advantages over most current affairs bloggers. It has dozens of professional journalists who are paid to write on every topic under the sun. It has a team of sub-editors to correct their factual errors and stylistic infelicities. And it can pay freelance contributors – which makes commissioning easy.

But will it work? It is, of course, too early to tell. As I write, Comment is Free has been up and running a little more than 24 hours. My first impression is that it’s rather good – but that it doesn’t quite do what the best current affairs blogs do.

Most current affairs blogs are run by individuals or small groups with a bee (or several bees) in their bonnets. They are the work of enthusiasts who feel – rightly or wrongly – that their views are not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream press and on the airwaves. In Britain, for example, some of the best current affairs blogs have come from left-wingers at odds with the left consensus that it was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein: Normblog (normblog.typepad.com), Harry’s Place (hurryupharry.bloghouse.net), Oliver Kamm (oliverkamm.typepad.com).

Whether you agree with them or not, what makes them worth reading is precisely their iconoclasm, the fact that they are against the grain. The problem with Comment is Free is that the Guardian regulars who are the mainstay of the site, the columnists from the comment pages, are in this context not against the grain but the grain itself – and regular readers already have a pretty good idea of what they think about most of the key issues of the day. I’m not sure that reading them rehearsing their lines on the blog will become quite as addictive a habit as Harry’s Place or indeed the main Guardian Unlimited website. But we shall see.

* * *

On a different matter entirely, for a couple of days this week it felt as if the “Who killed Princess Di?” conspiracy theorists had met their match at last in loons asking: “Who killed Slobbo?” Even the BBC joined in for several hours, its website’s lead story headlined “Milosevic poisoned, says doctor” and then “Mystery over Milosevic death”.

Yet the only evidence that the death of Slobodan Milosevic was in any way suspicious is the discovery in a blood sample of traces of an antibiotic, the effects of which would have been to counter those of the heart disease medication he had been prescribed. This is odd, but the most plausible explanation for it is not that Milosevic was done away with by the forces of imperialism (or whatever) but that he was administering the antibiotic to himself in an attempt to persuade the authorities in The Hague that the treatment he was receiving for heart disease wasn’t working and that he would have to be sent to Moscow for treatment. A younger, fitter man might just have got away with it – but Slobbo the 62-year-old lard-arse could not.

Whatever, Milosevic will be mourned by no one at Tribune. Thanks to Mark Thompson, who started filing from Yugoslavia long before anyone else took serious notice of what was happening there, this paper had a head start on the story when Milosevic sent the tanks rolling. We were the first paper to denounce the appeasement of Milosevic by the then Tory government (which was supported by the Labour front bench, to its shame) and the first to demand military intervention by the US and Britain to stop him.

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I was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Ipswich and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford (1978-81) and journalism at the London College of Printing (1982-83).

I spent the 1980s and 1990s working for various radical publications, starting with Solidarity and City Limits.

I was deputy editor of European Nuclear Disarmament Journal (1984-87), reviews editor (1986-91) and then editor (1991-93) of Tribune, deputy editor of New Statesman & Society (1993-96), news editor of Red Pepper (1997-99) and deputy editor of New Times (1999-2000).

From 2000 to 2012 I was a journalism lecturer at City University London. I have worked as a sub-editor on the Guardian since 1999. I wrote a column for Tribune from 1998 to 2014. I now teach at the University of Essex and University Campus Suffolk.

I was editor (with Mary Kaldor) of Mad Dogs: The US raid on Libya (Pluto, 1986), co-author (with Nyta Mann) of Safety First: The making of New Labour (Granta, 1997) and editor of Orwell in Tribune: 'As I Please' and other writings (Politico's/Methuen, 2006). In 2013 Aaaargh! Press published Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey as an e-book; it came out as a paperback (with index and footnotes) in autumn 2014.

This archive of my published articles is far from complete, but the gaps are being filled when I have the time to scan in material from the pre-digital age.

WHAT'S HERE

I’ve written for various left and radical publications for a long time. This website is here partly to prove that I existed before the internet, partly to provide a comprehensive CV online, partly to show I was always right all along. (If only.)

What’s here is as it was published in print for the most part, though there are a few pieces that appear as they were before subediting (some of them with suggested headlines that were summarily dismissed). The only things I have edited before posting, very inadequately, are spelling and grammar (though I’ll be sorting everything out into Economist house style as soon as I have time) and a few duff headlines and standfirsts.

So far, I’ve posted nearly everything I can find that I’ve had published since the beginning of 1990, apart from news stories and news features that have no resonance today. So it's largely opinion journalism of one kind or another. There are some pieces still to scan and some missing because I don't have them in any form, but I'll be trying to find them. The record before 1990 is much more fragmentary: there are dozens of pieces still to scan and I've not had a chance to think about what's missing from the vast pile of fading clippings.

Pre-1991 is a mix of features, interviews, leaders and book and theatre reviews, mainly from Solidarity, END Journal, Tribune and Sanity. Most of 1991-93 is Tribune leaders, interviews and features; 1993-96 is mainly New Statesman leaders, interviews and features; 1996-2003 is a mix of columns and features for New Times, Red Pepper, Tribune and Chartist. I was teaching full-time from 2003 to 2011, so nearly everything from that period is a Tribune column.

For copyright reasons, there's nothing here from books apart from one excerpt...

WHAT THEY SAID

This revelatory collection shows how the different sides of Orwell’s imagination interacted… The fascination here is reading Orwell as a working journalist on a single paper. He attended editorial conferences with Nye Bevan (someone should write a play about the encounter), commissioned reviews and made a doomed attempt to publish short stories by organising a competition… Week by week, column by column, his inspirations take shape… His swipes against propaganda, the manipulation of crowds, the squalor of wartime and postwar London life, the absurdities of bureaucracy and the growth of the Great Powers formed the raw material of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sean French, Independent

This collection is remarkable, not because it contains any of Orwell's greater or more famous essays, but because, 60 years on, his articles are still wonderfully readable… Even when Orwell is using the column to settle one of his many scores with some foe now otherwise totally forgotten, Anderson's thorough footnotes will tell you all you need to know to appreciate Orwell's invective.

Martin Rowson, Tribune

Anderson's informative introduction includes a long digression into the left-wing politics of the period, which some may find heavy going but which supplies the wider context. The footnotes constitute a veritable Who Was Who of British politics and literature in the first half of the last century. Who was Barbara Castle's husband and who her lover? Who were Vernon Bartlett, the Duchess of Atholl, Leonard Merrick? Answers sit conveniently at the foot of the page.

Gordon Bowker, Observer

Anderson's compilation usefully picks out (and edits superbly) a particular thread in Orwell's huge output. Unlike his broadcast commentaries to India, “As I Please” was not concerned with day-to-day events but with broader political thinking: half-inside, half-outside the whale. Warning against the political control of discourse, blanket praise for the Soviet Union and anti-German hysteria, Orwell worked out in plain language the great themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he abandoned his early hopes that the war would effect a socialist revolution, he never doubted that people would act properly if they only understood.

Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 ... is compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, a former Tribune editor whose special insights into Orwell's genius make this particular volume the very best on the subject.

Michael Foot, Observer

It is a tribute to the publishers and to Tribune itself that Paul Anderson has been able to edit such a superb compendium of Orwell’s writings at a crucial stage in his life.

Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

The book gathers together all the pieces Orwell wrote for Tribune... Published as a whole, and in sequence, you can see what Anthony Burgess meant when he wrote of him: "Everything Orwell said had such a stamp of honest sincerity..." As Anderson also points out in his introduction, the collection shows off "one of the greatest practitioners ... of the craft of turning out 800-2,000 words a week". He was Tribune's William Hazlitt, and Orwell in Tribune does much more than re-affirm that fact as well as his genius.

Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post

Neatly edited by Paul Anderson, and good on the contemporary left-wing background, this deserves to sit on the same shelf as Peter Davison's monumental George Orwell: The Complete Works.

D J Taylor, Sunday Times

This book is a collection of all the columns [Orwell] produced between 1943 and 1947... It comes with a lucid and thoughtful account of Tribune and Orwell by former Tribune editor Paul Anderson. It … shows Orwell to have been the best sort of newspaper columnist.

Francis Beckett, Guardian

Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in this attractively presented and well edited collection… Paul Anderson’s notes are not only copious but informative, the work of someone who knows the subject and the period…

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator

To read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local. The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson's intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer… Yet Orwell's talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers... Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life.

Nick Cohen, Democratiya

Evidently Orwell was well equipped, in 1943, to take on the literary editorship of Tribune. He could write interestingly about pretty much anything, and had often appeared in its pages already… The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book.

Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books

WHAT THEY SAID

‘Safety First does the government the courtesy of examining its origins and ideas seriously. That inevitably involves criticism. But grown-ups’ respect for Blair and Blairism is much more likely to be encouraged by real analysis than by facile praise. Safety First is not the last word on New Labour, but it is the best so far.’

Roy Hattersley, Guardian

‘Paul Anderson is a former editor of Tribune and a former deputy editor of the New Statesman. Nyta Mann is a former NS assistant editor. The tone and the standpoint is Tribune at its best: rude, factual, lively and down-to-earth English, always provocative, always selective, but crammed full of useful information . . . They remind the triumphalists that the Conservatives killed themselves. Labour could almost certainly have won on bolder policies.’

Bernard Crick, New Statesman

‘The best of the many books now out on Labour. The authors have the ideal background to explain the Labour government, its personalities and policies to the reader . . . Safety First is clearly written and cleverly constructed.’

Nick Cohen, Observer

‘Anybody looking for a primer on Blairism would do well to start here . . . The fact that the authors are on the left, but are sceptical of the Blairite project, gives them distinct advantages in comparing old Labour with the new sort. It means that, although they understand what Mr Blair is about, they are immune from the tendency to gush in awe.’

Economist

‘A well-written and incisive portrait of the key players in the Labour Party and British government . . . a worthwhile, witty and engrossing book.’

Fabian Review

‘Anderson and Mann know a formidable amount about the development of Labour’s policies . . . Safety First is very useful as a reference book . . . a good corrective to the notion that Labour began to modernise when Blair became leader.’

John Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement

‘Written from a critical libertarian left perspective, Safety First will not, I suspect, get Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann invited to many Downing Street cocktail parties. Theirs is a voice from outside the conventional Labour spectrum, and in this stimulating and informative account they treat the official version of the party’s recent history with healthy scepticism . . . They show that serious heterodox thinking — the legacy of independently minded radicals such as George Orwell and Raymond Williams — has survived the left's disintegration.’

Tom Phillips, Contemporary Review

‘A rather intelligent tome . . . In its narrative breadth, it is a useful guide to the politics and personalities of the British government.’

Sion Simon, Spectator

'Safety First is a must.’

Mark Seddon, Tribune

‘Anderson and Mann are well-qualified to analyse the politics of the contemporary Labour Party . . . a highly informative guide book.’

Gillian Peele, Times Educational Supplement

‘A valuable study of the making of the Labour government.’

New Times

‘An intelligent guide to the development of key Labour policies and the intellectual trends that back or oppose them.’

Fortnight

‘Highly informative . . . the most detailed and accessible guide to New Labour yet.’

Labour Left Briefing

‘Safety First does not share Socialist Worker’s political analysis, but the authors have done a great job. It is stunningly up to date. Everyone will benefit from reading it.’

Socialist Worker