Is the New Statesman in crisis? The departure of its editor John Kampfner means that the political weekly has had seven editors in just over 20 years and its circulation is still hovering close to 23,000—the figure in 1996 when Geoffrey Robinson bought the magazine. Perhaps most serious of all, the Statesman has ceased to matter. When was the last time you heard someone discussing an article they had read, or the magazine itself?
This may seem severe. After all, since its redesign in 2006, the magazine looks more inviting than it has for years. More than 60 pages, full of colour, with a lively arts section, it boasts some excellent contributors. Hunter Davies, a long-time columnist, is one of the best sports writers around. Andrew Billen, now writing on "performance," is a fine television critic. A recent issue included book reviews by Hanif Kureishi, John Sweeney and Alex Brummer and arts pieces by Colin McCabe and top-rate music writer, Simon Broughton. There is a polemical piece by William Dalrymple on Pakistan and a solid article by David Marquand calling for a new progressive alliance. The magazine is an easy and informed read.
So why isn't this enough? Why can't the magazine hang on to editors or readers? In a long piece in the Media supplement of the Guardian, Peter Wilby (a former editor and still a contributor) argued that the magazine's problems are largely to do with its fusty image of a dry magazine founded by Fabians and still smacking of an old agenda: all nationalisation, Hampstead socialists and CND marches. He makes it sound as if you're about to see Beatrice Webb poking out of the op-ed pages.
This is hardly fair. Under Anthony Howard in the 1970s, the Statesman team included young tyros Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Christopher Hitchens, all barely out of university. Thirty years ago, you could find pieces by AJP Taylor and JK Galbraith, the young Alexander Cockburn and Neal Ascherson, book reviews by John Bayley and Christopher Hill, Craig Raine, Tom Paulin and Hermione Lee, the sort of contributors today's Guardian Review would be happy to offer any time. Ten years on, under John Lloyd and then Stuart Weir, the magazine could boast pieces by Paul Foot on the Birmingham six, Chomsky on US foreign policy, Susan George on third world debt, a tribute by Stuart Hall to Raymond Williams, regular columns by Ben Pimlott and Francis Wheen and even a piece by Jean Baudrillard on Heidegger's flirtation with Nazism. This is surely the kind of agenda you would expect from a serious left-wing magazine and the sort of names you would expect to find there.
What has changed is not so much the magazine as the world around it, especially the culture of the British left. Marxism Today under Martin Jacques seemed far more in tune with the culture of the 1980s and set a more distinctive agenda. In particular, it dominated three debates: the future of Labour, which started with Eric Hobsbawm's article "The Forward March of Labour Halted?" (September 1978); the nature of Thatcherism, with a series of incisive articles by Jacques and Stuart Hall, starting with Hall's "The Great Moving Right Show," in January 1979, in which he coined the term "Thatcherism"; and what Jacques called "New Times"—that mix of post-Fordism, globalisation and postmodernism. Marxism Today stopped in 1991, but it did a lot to change people's expectations of a left-wing magazine. The Statesman never seemed to have its finger on the pulse in the same way, either politically or culturally. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, everyone could tell old Labour was in trouble and that a new form of Conservatism was on the move. But Jacques, Hall, Hobsbawm and others offered an analysis which made sense of other issues of the moment (race, law and order and so on).
Far more troubling for the Statesman, though, has been the changing nature of the broadsheet. The rise of the Saturday multi-section newspaper, thick with book and arts reviews as well as cultural and political analysis, and the rise of the pullout inside section have challenged the very idea of a weekly magazine. And now the internet offers more up-to-date news and analysis than even a daily newspaper can cope with, never mind a weekly with tight deadlines.
Yet the Spectator still manages to pull in more readers than the Statesman. Yes, it's better funded, but isn't it also a better read? It still seems to remain relevant in a way the Statesman has not for some time. Wilby says the problems at the Statesman are a symptom of a larger problem of the British left, but doesn't really go on to develop the point—and for a very good reason, because his kind of leftism is itself a key part of the problem.
First, there is the way the British left split in response to Thatcherism and the changes in Britain over the past 25 to 30 years. If we look again at the Statesman in the 1960s and 1970s, what is immediately noticeable is what a broad church it was. In February 1968, exactly 40 years ago, we find Leonard Woolf on Lytton Strachey, VS Pritchett and Kingsley Amis, Clive James and AS Byatt, all cheek by jowl with old leftists like James Cameron, AJP Taylor and Claud Cockburn. There were Clause IV socialists, anti-bomb pacifists, but also writers concerned about capital punishment, Vietnam and apartheid. Today that kind of coalition is harder to sustain. Yes, there's Hunter Davies and Andrew Billen, but the political core of the magazine is dominated by writers like John Pilger, Darcus Howe and Peter Wilby (on why "democracy at work ought to be a human right").
Iraq, Islam and Blair's foreign policy were the faultlines that split the old left coalition of the post-Callaghan years. On the one side you have writers like Pilger and Howe, on the other Ignatieff, Hitchens, Rushdie and Amis. Or if we take the personalities and names out of it, on the one hand we have the anti-Blair left at the New Left Review, London Review of Books, the Statesman, the Independent, parts of the Guardian (especially the opinion pages under Seamus Milne). On the other side, you have the Observer under Roger Alton, or those leftists who write for Prospect.
There are symptoms of this fallout everywhere. In the crazier reviews of Amis's new book of essays, The Second Plane, and his strange spat with Terry Eagleton; in the debate about Flat Earth News, Nick Davies's book on the state of journalism (which is as much about the battle between Rusbridger's Guardian and Alton's Observer over Iraq); or in the different way people responded to Adam Curtis's documentary series The Power of Nightmares. If you want to know on which side someone stands, just say Amis, Guantánamo, multiculturalism or comprehensive education. You will know in approximately 0.03 seconds. At a recent party, made up largely of foreign journalists, I started talking to one news producer about Iraq. "Are you for the war?" she asked, as if I had come out in favour of eating small children. Other clues are more subtle. Does someone mention Joseph Conrad approvingly (Amis and McEwan do in recent books)? Or what do they think of Salman Rushdie?
These are deep divisions and are not likely to be healed any time soon. So, to get back to the Statesman, how can a magazine bridge them? Once you are committed to Pilger, Wilby and Howe, you are either politically correct or you are barking. There is no middle way. If a magazine asks you to pay £2.95 to read such journalists, they are not just asking you to make a small financial transaction. They are asking you whether you consider yourself sane or mad, and you will pay up (or not) accordingly. Clearly, there is a solid core of just over 20,000 leftist readers who are happy with this political line. Others, however many brilliant columns you have by Hunter Davies, however glossy the pictures, will not touch the magazine for fear it might be infectious.
The difficult problem Geoffrey Robinson faces is whether he wants to reach out to a larger audience or whether he can face jettisoning some of the key voices of the British left. There is only one alternative: to find an editor who is prepared to redefine the left and force it to move to a less dogmatic and predictable agenda. Someone who wants to reach out to other people and concerns, to offer something to readers who don't wish to be defined by one word or name. Otherwise, this is one crisis the Statesman will not recover from.
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