Where Now For Independent Voices?

Although I don't think that it really had anything to do with the anti-Rod campaign by the pseudo-Left, Tim Luckhurst writes:

Rod Liddle will not be editor of the Independent. The screechingly intolerant campaign of hostility directed against him by metropolitan critics has done its job. They call themselves liberals. If they are right then the word has come to have as little meaning as its common counterpart "progressive". Sincere liberals do not censor opinion, still less should they caricature it in order to intensify hostility. True liberals oppose arguments they despise by demonstrating the greater value of better ones.

Liddle provokes to the brink of apoplexy, but he rarely conceals his views in insidious campaigns of rumour and scurrility. He publishes them under his own byline for the world to read and dispute. He is a defender of what he considers to be "beleaguer'd truth" in the British tradition of John Milton, John Wilkes and John Stuart Mill.

His critics imagine that they know a purer truth. Not for them the Press Complaints Commission's assertion that, in the publication of sincerely held opinion, freedom of expression must take precedence over distaste and even distress. Liddle has been trashed mercilessly for daring to advance arguments his enemies would ban.

A national newspaper edited by an iconoclast determined to challenge the tyranny of the liberal metropolitan elite would have been a real addition to the national conversation, not least because Liddle's challenge would have come from the left.
In a declining market for newsprint it might, perhaps, have grabbed a little new attention. It would certainly have been stimulating. But it will not now exist. No newspaper proprietor will find the courage to hire as editor a man whose reputation has been so reprehensibly trashed.

What next for the Independent? My understanding is that Alexander Lebedev still intends to acquire it and that Independent News & Media remains willing to sell. But the process has descended into farce. The newspaper's excellent incumbent editor, Roger Alton, has worked for months under the threat of dismissal. It would be generous of him to continue working for a new owner who has had his intention to appoint another made so public.

I understand why Lebedev wants the Independent. It is a prestige title. It has a kernel of superb reporters, correspondents and columnists who give it charisma beyond what should be expected for the budget at their disposal. With care, investment and innovation it might just thrive in the new media economy, particularly if a free distribution model covering all of Britain's major cities can be achieved.

Rod Liddle might have given a new Independent impetus. Now, if Lebedev gets his prize, he should make every effort to retain Alton. He might start by expressing regret for permitting his representatives to advertise the prospect of a Liddle editorship before the deal was done. An apology should be offered to Liddle as well. He did not ruin his own chances of editing the Independent. That was done by the people behind a viciously intolerant campaign of liberal bigotry.

Those who know him praise Alexander Lebedev for his commitment to fourth estate principles. The people he has allowed to negotiate, brief and spin on his behalf honour less elevated principles. This is no way to buy a national newspaper.

Well, whatever the reason, 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, not least with Alexander Lebedev as proprietor, 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?

Where now (although Rod never promised to implement this or the next idea, but he would at least have been open to them) 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?