Are the media racist asks New Statesman report

An investigation by the New Statesman magazine reveals that ethnic minorities are still largely absent from opinion pages, senior roles and staff jobs in UK press.

The report is part of the magazine's special report on race in the British media.

Columnist Mehdi Hasan writes in an essay for the special report:

 What have the following five individuals got in common: Gary Younge, Hugh Muir, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Amol Rajan and India Knight? They are part of a small group of non-white newspaper columnists who appear regularly on the comment pages of our national newspapers. Well, OK, not quite. They are the small group of non-white newspaper columnists who appear on those comment pages. That's it. There's just five of them - the Guardian's Younge and Muir (both black), the Independent/i's Alibhai-Brown and Rajan (both Asian) and the Sunday Times's Knight (mixed race).It is a deeply depressing state of affairs.

The magazine surveyed surveyed the main comment pages of selected newspapers in the week between Monday 5 December and Sunday 11 December to count the number of non-white writers who appeared finding that 3 newspapers did not have a single non-white writer on the comment pages and only 5 non-white writers have a regular weekly fixed column in the British broadsheet press .

Hodges,Ed,Guido, and the New Statesman

There has been a great deal of controversy over the fate of New Statesman journalist and blogger Dan Hodges mainly from the website of Guido Fawkes who alleges that an article by the said journalist upset the Labour leader Ed Miliband.

The said article dealt with the issue of the booing of Tony Blair as Ed referenced him in his conference speech forcing the New Statesman to spike the piece.

You can read the full article entitled "Tony Blair is the Scar the Labour Party Cannot Help Scratching" on Iain Dale's site

The magazine has reiterated its version of events that he has simply resigned stating

For the record it says:

Dan Hodges resigned as one of our freelance bloggers, he was not sacked. Moreover, we asked him to stay and to continue blogging.

He wasn't being "rested" from the magazine for the simple reason that he is not a regular contributor to it. Like all other would-be contributors to the magazine he was invited to pitch ideas directly to the editor.

No article or column intended for the magazine was "spiked" because no piece was commissioned for the magazine.

The magazine adds that the article was not spiked saying that they did not run the piece as Hodges had already contributed four blog posts that week (as agreed, and double his usual output).

A fifth post that went over much of the same ground as the previous posts,they say was deemed redundant.

As with all other magazines and newspapers we have occasion to "spike" pieces. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last.

Tony on why we should all do God

This week's New Statesman is guest edited by Alistair Campbell and features a very special columnist by the name of T Blair on why we should do God

He recognised that in office

it was best, in my view, not to shout that too loudly from the rooftops

but

Out of office, seeking to make a contribution to important public and policy debates in a different way, I feel no such restraints. Indeed, as the years of my premiership passed, one fact struck me with increasing force: that failure to understand the power of religion meant failure to understand the modern world.

and according to the former PM

Religious faith and how it develops could be of the same significance to the 21st century as political ideology was to the 20th.

It was 20 years ago today

That is the theme of the special edition of New Statesman which reminds us what a very different world it was then.

It was the year that saw the crumbling of the Iron curtain.At the time it seemed almost a fairytale.Events were running out of control and it was all over in a flash with the Christmas day executions of the Ceausescu's the culmination of two months of intense focus on the communist block.

But the year had other defining moments too in world events.The death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Tiannaman square massacre.

And in Britain things were changing two.1989 saw the first rumblings of discontent over the Thatcher government that was to culminate in Poll tax riots and her resignation a year later.

Football would never be the same again after the Hillsbro disaster and would be reborn at a multi billion pound leisure industry a few years later.

Editor Jason Cowley sums it up

And yet nothing was certain; this feeling of being in suspension, of not knowing what would happen next, of living at the end of one world-historic era while waiting for another to begin – this sense, more personally, of having graduated and now to be on the cusp of adulthood at just this moment of quickening change: the feeling was heady. It felt as if the world was indeed in motion, not quite spinning out of control but in new and strange ways; a world turning, breaking apart and re-forming, a world in flux.

Campbell wants your help

Want to get some input into an edition of the New Statesman?

Alastair Campbell is guest editing and over at Labour List is asking for your help.

The former spin doctor it turns out has not always been a fan of the magazine

when I was in frontline politics, I found it sometimes interesting, occasionally irritating, often irrelevant.

Nevertheless he is taking on the job and it seems will use the addition to re launch a Labour manifesto.Just for starters he is proposing

compulsory voting for general and local elections. And an end to charitable status for private schools.

Election off the agenda but may open the door for Blunkett's return

it is now strongly presumed by those closest to Gordon Brown that - against the wishes of an anxious and increasingly bellicose David Cameron, who on 9 December called for an early election as the Tories dropped below 40 per cent in one poll for the first time since April - the next election will take place in 2010.

says James Macintyre over at New Statesman.

Does this insight spell the end of June 2009 speculation?

According to James so much so that any talk of ballot papers is

the "new taboo" in Downing Street, where to discuss or even mention a date for the next general election has become strictly forbidden.

However as one door closes,it will mean that there is time for one more reshuffle next summer and the speculation is for the return of David Blunkett

One senior Downing Street source predicted that Blunkett - whose socially conservative but economically radical politics fit the new mood at large in the government and the country - would make a return to the front line next year, either in a summer reshuffle or earlier, if an opportunity arises. "He'll get a job the next time there is any movement," said the source, who indicated the role may not be in the cabinet but would be operational, with Blunkett helping to revive Labour on the ground in the north of England, industrial towns and white working-class areas that need to be won back.

What the weeklies are saying

The Economist looks at Jack Straw's white paper on constitutional reform,

tinkering with its ancient and inscrutable constitution might not strike outsiders as a particular priority.

the bill is described as

Timid. A proposal that Parliament must vote on whether troops are committed to war is hardly radical: Mr Blair held a vote before the Iraq war and it would be politically difficult to go to war without one in future. Mr Straw held out the prospect of giving MPs greater say over public appointments and the date of general elections, but details are yet to emerge. Other ideas, such as restoring the right to protest outside Parliament and allowing the Union flag to be flown on government buildings at any time, are mostly symbolic.

Over at the Spectator,Alan Milburn gives his first interview since Gordon Brown moved into No 10

I thought the most helpful thing would be for me to keep quiet,’ ‘But now, I feel I’ve earned my passage. Let’s face it, there have been plenty of opportunities to rock the boat during the last few months

He agrees that Brown,although maybe too late has become a Blairite but

What Gordon needs to do when he talks about this “new politics” that places power in the hands of people, is to announce a policy that gives that huge symbolic lift.’

and his answer

by dramatically cutting the size of Whitehall. I would slash it over and above what is being done by a quarter.’

The New Statesman asks is Boris a fake?.Brian Cathcart tells us

a man with a lurid history of verbal incontinence is playing the 21st-century election game, with all its gaffe-traps and correctness tripwires - and he is winning.

Meanwhile at the Spectator David Selbourne writes

Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

In a must read article he says

A lot of this is owed to ‘Blairism’ and its corruptions of the body politic; much, too, to the previous Conservative period in office. The main parties, reduced in organisation and membership and with their inherited principles in dissolution, have themselves paid a high price in public recoil for what they have done to the country. Yet, compounding their misjudgments, each seeks the same chimerical ‘centre ground’ where stand the idols of Empowerment, Opportunity, Aspiration, Competition, Modernisation, Choice and so forth. It is the ground not of a Normandy beach but of a quagmire in Notting Hill.

What the weeklies are saying about politics

In this week's spectator Irwin Stelzer writes of a flaw in the government's energy policy.Specifically the building of new nuclear power stations

ignores the billion-dollar question: will the private sector provide the capital to finance this replacement-and-then-some of the nation’s nuclear plants?

and adds

there is the small matter of whether these massive, capital-intensive stations will be economic, without government subsidies

. given that

if we know anything about nuclear power plants, it is that their cost always exceeds estimates.

The Economist is rather scathing of the Chancellor

IT TAKES special ineptitude to cheapen a principle without getting anything much in return. But this week, in a do-nothing budget devoted to plastic bags and cavity-wall insulation (see article), Alistair Darling, Britain's hapless chancellor of the exchequer, showed he is equal to the task

And he fares no better in the Spectator,Fraser Nelson saying

for all the Chancellor’s advertised dullness, he has adopted a strategy of deception which his predecessor would be proud of (and probably authored). It can best be compared to the technique of professional magicians. Before any trick, they perform what is called ‘the pledge’ — whereby the audience is shown something normal: a pack of cards, which someone will inspect to check it’s normal. Of course, it is not. Once a fake backdrop is established, a magic trick is fairly easy to engineer.

In the New Statesman, Donald Hirsch asks For ten years, Labour has been shifting resources to the least well off. Why are the poor still with us?

Ten Budgets, one Chancellor and three New Statesman editors later, I am still writing about Labour's efforts to divert resources to poor families. The continuity of this underlying theme is remarkable, backed by a main delivery method introduced in 1998. This is to give tax credits to selected low-income groups, at a favourable rate compared to money spent on benefits.

Bagehot in the Economist says

Three different kinds of inequality have survived or arisen under Labour; more than fiscal abstractions, these three inequalities are shaping public perceptions of the government's economic record.

Finally the New Statesman's leader believes that Europe could give Labour a new sense of purpose

Britain has to reassert its position within Europe, embracing the benefits it could win for British people - from protection of workers to the upholding of universal human rights. Such a purpose could provide the bold and optimistic vision that Labour so desperately needs

Kampfer quits New Statesman

So what has been happening at the New Statesman?

Its Editor,John Kampfner resigned yesterday with immediate effect,literally putting this week's magazine to bed and then telling the rest of the staff that he was leaving.

The rumour mills are out with some saying that his long term relationship with the magazine owners Geoffrey Robinson was not a good one

According to Guardian media

One source with knowledge of the magazine said the departure had been on the cards since Christmas, after the relationship between Robinson and Kampfner broke down.
"Geoffrey thinks too much money has been spent on redesign and marketing for too little return," the source said.

Iain Dale says

Reading between the lines it seems perfectly clear that he has had a big fallout with the NS owner, Geoffrey Robinson MP.

and believes it may be to do with tht fact that

Kampfner has been notably lukewarm in his opinion of Robinson's hero Gordon Brown (who he funded to a lavish extent when in opposition).

Whatever the reasons,Kampfner has been a great asset to the weekly magazine and I fr one will miss his input.I wish him well with whatever venture he follows