Peter Wilby Quotes

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.

Even the belief that the Daily Express is a hopeless newspaper that couldn't tell you the time of day - one of the few certainties in a turbulent world - took a knock.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

Eight opinion articles he wrote that addressed British media coverage of sex offenders have been removed from the Guardian's digital platforms following his conviction in August 2023 for possession of child abuse imagery.

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.

The New Statesman has now completed an internal review of all articles related to child sexual abuse that were published during Wilby’s editorship, or subsequently contributed by Wilby as a writer.
Approximately 19,000 articles were published during Wilby's seven years as editor, of which 126 have a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 126 articles, 12 contain comments or arguments that could reasonably be interpreted as either minimising the seriousness of child sexual abuse, or as questioning the integrity of victims, whistle-blowers, police or journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse of children. Four of the 12 remained available on newstatesman.com as of 18 August, and they have now been taken down.
Subsequent to his time as editor, Wilby contributed 659 columns or pieces to the New Statesman from 2006 to 2022, of which 37 contain a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 37 articles, four contain arguments that the degree of public concern around child sexual abuse is out of proportion to the actual scope and scale of the horrendous crime. Those four articles have been taken down.

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?

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 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.

When I read last week that the Press Complaints Commission had censured FHM magazine for printing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old girl, I looked to the press for coverage and comment. Surely, I thought, newspapers that are so determined to root out "evil" paedophiles and to denounce "pervs" who view child pornography would have something to say. ... There was not a word, for example, in the Sun, whose editor, Rebekah Wade, has always been such a sturdy opponent of paedophilia. That wouldn't be - would it? - because the red-tops fear they might themselves be caught out one day.