Independent Voices

The Editorship of The Independent is now available. Alas, Rod Liddle is not in the running after all.

So, where now to read the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with Russia? Where now to read the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base?

Where now to read those who recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level? Where now to read those who refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich?

For that matter, where now for a fortnightly supplement distributed with one of the Saturday or Sunday papers and featuring columnists from local and regional papers in as many different corners of the country as possible: County Durham as well as Newcastle, the Marches as well Birmingham, Dorset as well as Bristol, and so on, including the less fashionable parts of London? Where now, following the same format at the weekends in between, for a supplement featuring that many columnists from as many different countries as possible other than America, not out of anti-Americanism, but only for the sake of a more balanced view?

Over to Alexander Lebedev.