Peter Wilby Quotes

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.

[W]hat shocked me was the creeping realisation that he had used his position as an editor and columnist to create what the writer Beatrix Campbell has called a "hostile environment" for victims of abuse.
It dawned on me that he had applied that "hostile environment" to me at the outset of my career when I was a freelance reporter at the Independent on Sunday, and he was its news editor.

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.

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.

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.

For our issue dated 14 January, the New Statesman published a cover showing the Star of David standing on a Union Jack, with the words: "A kosher conspiracy?

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.

Wilby argued for "nuance" in these matters, while denigrating those who dared complain of abuse. There was nothing nuanced in the material Wilby collected and created over his career – they were crime scene photographs of our most vulnerable children being raped for his pleasure.

[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.

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.

[Y]ou may be sure that, if the Soviet Union were still a reality and a threat, the debt crisis, which now affects some 50 countries and has reached previously unimagined levels (some countries have to use a quarter of their export earnings to service debt), would not exist.

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.

[Nick] Cohen assures me that he has no intention of following [Paul] Johnson's long political journey. Since he is a personal friend, whose journalism I admire (I hired him twice, once on the Independent on Sunday, once on the NS), I believe him. But I don't underestimate the sense of betrayal on the left. When the rest of the press was cheering on [Tony] Blair, particularly in new Labour's early days, Cohen was his most virulent critic and almost the only coherent voice asserting "real left" values. Now, in some eyes, he has deserted the cause when it needs him most.

To wide indignation on Fleet Street, Sir Ian suggested newspapers' blanket and emotive coverage of such cases, compared with the cursory treatment of black children who go missing in the inner cities, betrayed institutional racism. Was he right? Perhaps it's not racism exactly but, if we are honest, the story is enhanced if the child is blonde, blue-eyed and nicely dressed, though no paper would dare to spell out the awful subtext: that a child who looks attractive to readers will also attract a potential abuser.

Some "victims" will make false allegations, often prompted by lawyers, in the hope of substantial payments.