An Independent Voice

Following Alexander Lebedev's Guardian interview, what is he actually doing to give a voice to 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? A voice to the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base?

What is he actually doing to give a voice to 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?

What is he actually doing to give a voice to 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?

Such a paper might have 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. Following the same format at the weekends in between, another supplement might feature that many columnists from as many different countries as possible other than the United States, not out of anti-Americanism, but only for the sake of a more balanced view.

And such a balanced view would today have involved a front page which mirrored the lead story on Russia Today: the inclusion of at least one person illegally rendered by and on behalf of the United Kingdom to the torture chambers of George Waterboarding Bush among those who have filed suit against Alberto Gonzales. On many another day, the front page could be given over to the Murdoch phone-tapping scandal, at least until the Chilcot Inquiry sets off its dynamite.

No one would buy it? Even if that were true, what if they didn't have to? What if it were distributed for free? You know, like the London Evening Standard.

Alexander Lebedev, over to you.