Peter Wilby Quotes

Almost anybody should be thankful that the US, not the Soviet Union, won the cold war. But a dominant or imperial power, however benign or enlightened, will be resented. The violent 9/11 attacks were not right - they were a criminal atrocity - but they were hardly surprising.

My reactions to 9/11 were, from the start, different from everyone else's. As we watched on the office television, somebody said with horror, "I can't believe this is happening in Manhattan!" To which, I thought, why not? Many countries had, at some point in the previous 90 years, experienced the effects of aerial bombardment, sometimes from American forces. Why should we regard Americans as uniquely immune from such barbarity? The US, after all, had become the world's sole great power and it revelled in this status.

When I watched the murderous attacks on New York and Washington, my first reactions were of incredulity horror and sympathy for the victims and their families But when I came to write my weekly editorial for The New Statesman the following day (knowing that most readers would not see it until that Friday), I thought I should raise wider issues. I suggested that billions of poor people throughout the world would support the attacks because they blamed America for their plight and saw no alternative but to strike out in rage.

They [Jews] no longer routinely suffer gross or violent discrimination; indeed, in the US and Europe at least, Jews today are probably safer than most minorities.

[Editorial on the September 11 attacks published shortly afterwards] American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the United States often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.

As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as "damaged" and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse.

If it had been known at the time that he'd got 'previous convictions' the context of the case would have been very different.

What makes a great journalist?

Unearthing journalists' faulty predictions and poor judgements is always enjoyable. To my delight, I once discovered that the Sun, in a fawning interview in 1973, described Gary Glitter (later imprisoned for sexual offences against children) as "the rock’n’roll daddy who makes little girls ask to see more of his hairy chest". So before anybody else finds out, I will reveal that, during my editorship, the NS ran an article under the headline "Max Clifford is a nice chap shock". We reported that Clifford, who has just been convicted of sexually abusing four girls, was a man of "private modesty . . . committed to public service" whose "personal life has been a paragon of virtue". Since this was in 2000, we don't even have the excuse that it was the 1970s.

Teachers' unions advise members to avoid ever being alone with a pupil.
Only close relatives (and not always they) dare show a child physical affection. Scouts and other youth organisations struggle to recruit volunteers. And I doubt that, if I were now 17, a young, single teacher would invite me to dine alone at her home. Since I had never previously dined out, I suppose that would be my loss.
It is right that we now abhor child abuse and no longer tolerate abuse of authority for even low-level sexual gratification. But do we need to go so far? Can't we forbid the sex but still allow intimate relations between teachers and pupils, adults and children? Even as I write that sentence, I realise that "intimate relations" is itself ambiguous and that, no, we probably can't have our cake and eat it.

His vision of the Statesman was as a totally independent, and therefore fearless, mischief-maker. Sometimes this worked - the magazine's anti-Iraq war campaign was prescient and much copied; sometimes it did not - New Statesman covers could take on the wrong taboos, viz its Zionist conspiracy or its Blair as Stalin covers, or more recently the issue marking John Paul II's death, in which the late Pope's impact on Africa's Aids epidemic was compared with that of prostitutes and truck drivers.

Peter Wilby, who succeeded [Ian] Hargreaves, is a committed socialist, an old-fashioned Bennite according to some, and the passage of the Blair years has done nothing to soften his stance. On the contrary he has become ever more critical of the Government, notably with the anti-American line he took after September 11, and he has given free rein to those like his friend, Nick Cohen, who seek to use the magazine to attack the Prime Minister in person.

We (or, more precisely, I) got it wrong. The cover was not intended to be anti-Semitic; the New Statesman is vigorously opposed to racism in all its forms. But it used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation. I doubt very much that one single person was provoked into hatred of Jews by our cover. But I accept that a few anti-Semites (as some comments on our website, quickly removed, suggested) took aid and comfort when it appeared that their prejudices were shared by a magazine of authority and standing. Moreover, the cover upset very many Jews, who are right to feel that, in the fight against anti-Semitism in particular and racism in general, this magazine ought to be on their side.

[T]he US government and media (along with their British cheerleaders) themselves raise the ideological stakes when they claim that we have seen attacks on freedom and democracy. That is one way of putting it: another is to say that these attacks, using deeply symbolic targets, have hit a civilisation that has grown complacent, selfish and in some respects decadent.

Some of these thoughts, expressed more clumsily than I later wished, found their way into the New Statesman leader that, as editor, I wrote barely 24 hours after the attacks.