Comment

In praise of……The Guardian

John Eldridge

Confession time. From my youth I have been a Guardian reader. This means I have seen it through several incarnations. I knew it first as the Manchester Guardian, proud of its provincial roots. In 1964, London became the editorial base of the paper and over the next decade or so the whole operation moved there. There were difficult times and a merger with the Times was seriously contemplated. The editor at the time, Alistair Hetherington, resisted the merger and so with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the paper was saved from the predatory Murdoch.

It remains in the hands of the Scott Trust, a form of ownership that keeps it out of the hands of corporate power and serves to guarantee editorial independence. The details of this arrangement can be found on the Trust's web site. There have over the last twenty years been changes in printing and design that have been innovating and impressive. Last summer heralded the advent of the Berliner format, reducing it from a broadsheet size but keeping it larger than the tabloids. This has been hailed as a publishing success, a view I share.

On this last point my thunder has been stolen. Whilst writing this piece, the announcement was made by the Society for News Design in New York that the Guardian has been judged the world's best, designed newspaper. The citation, in part, read:

'It sparkles all the way through, while the Berliner size makes it very comfortable to read. The photography is strong, the headlines are well written, smart and tie in perfectly with the images. The typography is bold, crisp, elegant and consistent though a full range of weights is used - from extra light to extra bold. The graphics and illustrations are clever and sophisticated …Brilliant. Simply brilliant'.

It is difficult to follow that.

The Guardian has a radical history of which it can be justly proud. The popular demonstration in St. Peter's Fields Manchester, in 1819, which was put down by the militia causing many deaths and injuries, came to be known as Peterloo, a mocking echo of Waterloo. In 1821 the Manchester Guardian was established to promote the liberal interest and to challenge authoritarian government. It is not evident that this agenda was always faithfully pursued but in 1872, C.P. Scott became editor, a post he held for an incredible fifty-seven years. He was a great supporter of political reform, not least the cause of Women's suffrage and reform of the House of Lords. He became a

Liberal Member of Parliament in 1897. He was on the left wing of the party, opposing the Boer War and Britain's entry into the First World War. In 1921, he celebrated the paper's centenary in an article that contained the much-quoted statement: 'Comment is free, but facts are sacred … the voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard'. The present editor, Alan Rusbridger, certainly keeps faith with that credo.

Anthologies from the paper regularly appear. I have to hand The Bedside Years, edited by Matthew Engel and covering the years 1951-2000. There, among many good things, you will find excerpts from Jill Tweedie's Letters from a faint-hearted feminist (1981); Polly Toynbee on people who visit the pawn broker in time of slump (1982); James Cameron on the Lebanese-Israeli border (1978); Richard Gott on the US Intelligence Agent, present as the body of Che Guevara was brought to a small town in Bolivia (1968); Martin Woollacott in Saigon after the Americans had left (1975); David Beresford on the release of Nelson Mandela from prison (1990) and Simon Winchester's Rattle of a broken man (1974) on the departure of the disgraced President Nixon.

At one time Guardian journalists were split when the Social Democratic Party was formed. When, in 1988, Ian Aitken wrote about the SDP's final conference, after seven years of life, there was no doubt where he was coming from. There were quotes from Browning and Shelley, he noted. This was the party, he observed, which had managed to show 'that it can combine an unrivalled capacity for political illusion with an even more impressive capacity for literary allusion. What else would you expect from the organised middle classes?' The book ends with a wonderful in-joke. The Guardian was once famous for its typographical errors. On February 2nd, 1999 it announced: 'The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than any sudden onset of accuracy'.

The newsagent said to me, when I purchased my Saturday Guardian recently: 'You're not going to read all that, are you?' The truthful answer was no but there was plenty to keep me going over the weekend. There are all those separate sections. So, in the main news section, there is a great deal of international news: an on the spot account of the British troops in Afghanistan; a foiled attack on the world's largest oil plant in Saudi Arabia; the disappearance of eight prominent Chinese human rights activists during attempts to co-ordinate nation-wide protests against the authorities; a court order in Nigeria that Shell must pay 1.5 billion dollars as damages for polluting the Niger delta; a report from Gary Younge, whose reports from New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina have been so strong, on organising the Mardi Gras out of the ruins … and so it goes. The Saturday interview has Stuart Jeffries interviewing Jacques Attali, the French banker, with a reputation for profligacy at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, who has now written a biography of Marx in which he argues that Marx was the first thinker of globalisation. No less a guru than historian Eric Hobsbawm is endorsing it, I read.

Then there are the sub-sections of the paper. Work: this week it leads on age discrimination at work. Two weeks back it was a sizeable extract from Richard Sennett's new book The Culture of the New Capitalism. Travel: there is a reflective, self-critical piece by Simon Mills on Eco-tourism. Money: there is an analytical look at price increases in gas, electricity, transport, water and council tax and their effects on pensioners and others on fixed incomes. Family: there we have a new perspective on mothers and sons, when the mothers are 90+ and the sons are in their seventies. Sport: here there are literate treatments of football, rugby and racing. But most important for me, the veteran chess columnist, Leonard Barden continues to present and annotate games from all over the world. Even in these post-Kasparov days there is still plenty to savour.

Finally there is Review. This is catch-up-with-culture time. I never miss it. A couple of weeks ago the formidable Robert Hughes was writing on 'The real Rembrandt' with a full-page picture of 'The return of the prodigal son'. The piece is both provocative and authoritative. The latest offering has an extract from Jay McInerney's new novel, After the fall, set in New York, in the shadow of 9/11. This somehow meshes in with a review of Jim Wallis's book, God's Politics: why the American Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Here is an American radical evangelical critiquing the Bush administration and the religious right, most particularly in relation to the war in Iraq.

So much for the weekend. The week is punctuated by regular supplements. Monday is for Media Guardian. It resists the temptation to be parochial. On January 30th David Adam's 'Crisis of communications' discussed a report by Carma International, which claimed that the western media took little or no interest in disasters in the developing world. On February 20th Jonathan Watts reported from Beijing on the Chinese government's attempts at censorship and the activities of journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are fighting it. Suzanne Goldberg reported from Washington on a Congress investigation into the compromises, which Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had to make with the Chinese government in order to operate there. John Gittings reported on his experience of the relations between government and media in China, stretching back to the Cultural Revolution. An annotated list of Chinese journalists known to be in prison is appended.

Tuesday brings the Education Guardian. Until his death in November 2005, Ted Wragg, Emeritus Professor of Education at Exeter University was the doyen of commentators in those pages. He was a true champion of social equality, a knowledgeable advocate of comprehensive education and a formidable critic of Tory and Labour education policies and practice. And here he is in 2004 on a subject dear to his heart and mine:

'Under huge pressure to be labelled a highly starred international researcher, a professor is expected to produce top-quality books and papers, while buried under a ferocious bureaucracy of business plans, mission statements, forecasts, audits of every kind, endless meetings, paperwork, quality inspections, performance assessments and interim reviews. It is no way to treat talented and creative people on whom the next generation of scholars, and indeed our society, depends'.

Wednesday we have Society Guardian. We can now read it with more confidence since David Cameron has assured us that there is such a thing as society; but what kind of society? On February 15th, the documentary filmmaker Roger Graef reflected on the impact of the play Cathy Come Home, which television broadcasted some forty years ago, with its realistic portrayal of the problems of homelessness in the so-called 'swinging sixties'. It led to the formation of the charity Shelter and Alison Benjamin reported on how it was seeking new ways to deal with housing problems today. Ken Loach directed Cathy Come Home and he explained how the experience turned him to a socialist analysis: 'It pushed me to thinking that only common ownership and not profit would really be the long term solution'.

So the week rolls on. Thursday is Technology Guardian with a great emphasis on IT and blogging. Friday anticipates the weekend with its Film and Music, where I can have the pleasure of reading Armando Ianucci's tribute to the incomparable Buster Keaton and rave reviews of Thelonious Monk and Stan Tracy CDs.

Each day is accompanied by g2. This can consist of a miscellany of longer and shorter pieces with good and sometimes amusing columnists like Catherine Bennett and Maureen Lipmann. From time to time, however there will be a searching report. On December 28th, 2005, Bob Geldof asked 'What did 2005 achieve for Africa?' This, as one might expect, was a trenchant and realistic account and a robust reply to his critics. On February 6th-7th, Chris McGreal presented a two-day special report, including graphic photography, 'Worlds Apart', comparing present day Israel with South Africa under apartheid. For anyone concerned with human rights it is deeply disturbing.

copyright ©Steve Bell 2004/All Rights Reserved

The Guardian, with its honourable radical history is still very much a going concern. It is prepared to put hard questions to the government of the day. It is capable of good investigative journalism, which has led in some cases to significant court victories. Among its regular writers I would cite the environmental campaigner George Monbiot. Recent contributions have included the privatisation of the British government's defence research service, Qinetiq, which he described as 'greed of the highest order and the worst privatisation since rail' (February 14th); a well researched piece on the secret corporate funding behind health research (February 7th); and a fact filled discussion of the problems of solving the energy crisis (November 29th, 2005).

No piece in praise of the Guardian could conclude without mention of the extraordinary and long-lasting cartoonist, Steve Bell. I cannot say the editor has let him off the leash because he has never been on it. He must have sustained many readers through politically dark times. He is outrageous, anarchic, the lord of, misrule. Long may he reign!

The author of this comment and the editors at fifth estate online would like to thank Steve Bell for giving us his permission to publish his cartoon .