New Statesman is a British left-wing^[2] political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the socialist Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s.^[2]

The longest serving editor was Kingsley Martin (1930–60). The current editor is Jason Cowley, who assumed the post at the end of September 2008. In the 29 May 2006 issue, then-editor John Kampfner stated that the New Statesman remained "true to its heritage of radical politics". The magazine is committed to "development, human rights and the environment, global issues the mainstream press often ignores".

Historically, the magazine was sometimes affectionately referred to as "The Staggers" because of crises in funding, ownership and circulation. The nickname is now used as the title of its rolling politics blog.^[3] Its current writers and columnists include Mehdi Hasan, Will Self, David Blanchflower, John Gray and Richard Mabey. The New Statesman had a certified average circulation of 23,909 in 2011, 17,471 of which were paid copies.^[1][4] Traffic to the magazine's relaunched website recently reached a record high. In the first quarter of 2012, monthly unique visitors to newstatesman.com exceeded 800,000, an increase of 231 per cent since the fourth quarter of 2009, when the site was previously relaunched.^[5]

Origins[link]

New Statesman was founded in 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb with the support of George Bernard Shaw and other prominent members of the Fabian Society.^[6] Its first editor was Clifford Sharp, who remained editor until 1928. Desmond MacCarthy joined the paper in 1913 and became literary editor, recruiting Cyril Connolly to the staff in 1928. During Sharp's last two years in post he was debilitated by chronic alcoholism and the paper was actually edited by his deputy Charles Mostyn Lloyd. Lloyd stood in after Sharp's departure until the appointment of Kingsley Martin as editor in 1930 – a position Martin was to hold for 30 years. Although the Webbs and most Fabians were closely associated with the Labour Party, Sharp was drawn increasingly to the Asquith Liberals.

[edit] 1930–1960: The Statesman under Kingsley Martin

In 1931 the Statesman merged with the Liberal weekly the Nation and Athenaeum, and changed its name to New Statesman and Nation, under which title it remained until 1964. The chairman of Nation's board was the economist John Maynard Keynes, who came to be an important influence on the newly merged paper, which started with a circulation of just under 13,000. It also absorbed The Weekend Review in 1933 (an element of which survives in the shape of New Statesman's Weekly Competition).

During the 1930s, Martin's Statesman moved markedly to the left politically. It became strongly anti-fascist and was generally critical of the government policy of appeasement of Mussolini and Hitler (though it did not back British rearmament). It was also, notoriously, an apologist for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. In 1934 it ran a famously deferential interview with Stalin by H. G. Wells. In 1938 came Martin's refusal to publish George Orwell's celebrated despatches from Barcelona during the Spanish civil war because they criticised the communists for suppressing the anarchists and the left-wing Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). "It is an unfortunate fact," Martin wrote to Orwell, "that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism."^[7]

The Statesman's circulation grew enormously under Martin's editorship, reaching 70,000 by 1945, and it became a key player in Labour politics. The paper welcomed Labour's 1945 general election victory but took a critical line on the new government's foreign policy. The young Labour MP Richard Crossman, who had been an assistant editor before the war, was Martin's chief lieutenant in this period, and Statesman published Keep Left, the pamphlet written by Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo that most succinctly laid out the Labour left's proposals for a "third force" foreign policy rather than alliance with the United States.

During the 1950s, Statesman remained a left critic of British foreign and defence policy and of the Labour leadership of Hugh Gaitskell (though Martin never got on personally with Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the anti-Gaitskellite Labour left). It opposed the Korean War, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament grew directly out of an article in the Statesman by J. B. Priestley.

There was much less focus on a single political line in the back part of the paper, devoted to book reviews and articles on cultural topics. Indeed, with these pages managed by Janet Adam Smith, who was Literary Editor from 1952 to 1960, the paper was sometimes described as a pantomime horse: its back half was required reading even for many who disagreed with the paper's politics. This tradition would continue into the 1960s with Karl Miller as Literary Editor.

After Kingsley Martin[link]

Martin retired in 1960 and was replaced as editor by John Freeman, a politician-journalist who had resigned from the Labour government in 1951 with Bevan and Harold Wilson. Freeman left in 1965 and was followed in the chair by Paul Johnson, then on the left, under whose editorship Statesman reached its highest ever circulation of just over 100,000. For some, even enemies of Johnson such as Richard Ingrams, this was a strong period for the magazine editorially.

After Johnson's departure in 1970, the Statesman went into a long period of declining circulation under successive editors: Richard Crossman (1970–72), who tried to edit it at the same time as playing a major role in Labour politics; Anthony Howard (1972–78), whose recruits to the paper included Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and James Fenton (surprisingly, the arch anti-Socialist Auberon Waugh was writing for Statesman at this time before returning to his more natural home of The Spectator); Bruce Page (1978–82), who moved the paper towards specialising in investigative journalism, sacking Arthur Marshall, who had been writing for Statesman on and off since 1935, as a columnist, allegedly because of the latter's support for Margaret Thatcher; Hugh Stephenson (1982–86), under whom it took a strong position again for unilateral nuclear disarmament; John Lloyd (1986–87), who swung the paper's politics back to the centre; Stuart Weir (1987–90), under whose editorship Statesman founded the Charter 88 constitutional reform pressure group; and Steve Platt (1990–96). By 1996 it was selling 23,000 copies a week. New Statesman was the first periodical to go online, hosted by the www.cleanroom.co.uk, in 1995.

Statesman acquired the weekly New Society in 1988 and merged with it, becoming New Statesman and Society for the next eight years, then reverting to the old title, having meanwhile absorbed Marxism Today in 1991. In 1993, Statesman was sued by Prime Minister John Major after it published an article that discussed rumours that Major was having an extramarital affair with a Downing Street caterer. Although the action was settled out of court for a minimal sum, the paper's legal costs came close to bankrupting it.^[8]

In 1994, KGB defector Yuri Shvets said that the KGB utilized New Statesman to spread disinformation. Shvets said that the KGB had provided disinformation, including forged documents, to the New Statesman journalist Claudia Wright which she used for anti-American and anti-Israel stories in line with the KGB's campaigns.^[9][10]

Since 1996[link]

New Statesman was rescued from this near-bankruptcy by a takeover by businessman Philip Jeffrey but in 1996, after prolonged boardroom wrangling^{[citation needed]} over Jeffrey's plans, it was sold to Geoffrey Robinson, the Labour MP and businessman.

Robinson sacked Steve Platt, and appointed as editor Ian Hargreaves, formerly editor of The Independent newspaper, on what was at the time an unprecedentedly high salary. Hargreaves in turn fired most of the left-wingers on the staff and turned Statesman into a strong supporter of Tony Blair as Labour leader.

Hargreaves was succeeded by Peter Wilby also from the Independent stable, who had previously been Statesman's books editor, in 1998. Wilby attempted to reposition the paper back 'on the left'. His stewardship was not without controversy. In 2002, for example, the periodical was accused of antisemitism when it published an investigative cover story on the power of the "Zionist lobby" in Britain, under the title "A Kosher Conspiracy?".^[11] The cover was illustrated with a gold Star of David towering over a Union Jack.^[12] Wilby responded to the criticisms in a subsequent issue.^[13] A year earlier Wilby was accused of being anti-American because of his reporting of the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}

John Kampfner, Wilby's political editor, succeeded him as editor in May 2005 following considerable internal lobbying^{[citation needed]}. Under Kampfner's editorship, a relaunch in 2006 initially saw headline circulation climb to over 30,000. However, over 5,000 of these were apparently monitored free copies,^[14] and Kampfner failed to maintain the 30,000 circulation he had pledged. In February 2008, Audit Bureau Circulation figures showed that circulation had plunged nearly 13% in 2007.^[15] Kampfner resigned on 13 February 2008, the day before the ABC figures were made public, reportedly due to conflicts with Robinson over the magazine's marketing budget (which Robinson had apparently slashed in reaction to the fall in circulation).

In April 2008 Geoffrey Robinson sold a 50% interest in the magazine to businessman Mike Danson, and the remainder a year later.^[16] The appointment of the new editor Jason Cowley was announced on 16 May 2008 but he did not take up the job until the end of September 2008.^[17]

In January 2009, the magazine refused to recognise the National Union of Journalists, the trade union to which almost of all its journalists belonged, though further discussions were promised but never materialised.^[18]

In 2009, Cowley was named current affairs editor of the year at the British Society of Magazine Editors awards.^[19] and in 2011, he was named editor of the year in the Newspaper & Current Affairs Magazine Category at the British Society of Magazine Editors awards, while Jon Bernstein, the deputy editor, gained the award for Consumer Website Editor of the Year.^[20] Cowley has been shortlisted as Editor of the Year (consumer magazines) in the 2012 PPA (Professional Publishers Association) Awards.^[21]

2010 saw sales of the magazine decline further but in 2011 paid circulation rose by 824 copies, the first rise for many years.^[1]

Guest editors[link]

In March 2009 the magazine had its first guest editor, Alastair Campbell, the former head of communications for Tony Blair. Campbell chose to feature his partner Fiona Millar, Tony Blair (in an article "Why we must all do God"), football manager Alex Ferguson, and Sarah Brown, the wife of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. This editorship was condemned by Suzanne Moore, a contributor to the magazine for twenty years. She wrote in a Mail on Sunday article: "New Statesman fiercely opposed the Iraq war and yet now hands over the reins to someone key in orchestrating that conflict".^[22] Campbell responded: "I had no idea she worked for the New Statesman. I don't read the Mail on Sunday. But professing commitment to leftwing values in that rightwing rag lends a somewhat weakened credibility to anything she says."^[23]

In September 2009 the magazine was guest-edited by Labour politician Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London.^[24]

In October 2010 the magazine was guest-edited by the British author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. The issue included a previously unpublished poem^[25] by Ted Hughes, "Last letter", describing what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Its first line is: "What happened that night? Your final night." -- and the poem ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his wife's death.

In April 2011 the magazine was guest-edited by the human rights activist Jemima Khan. The issue featured a series of exclusives including the actor Hugh Grant's secret recording^[26] of former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan, and a much-commented^[27] on interview^[28] with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, in which Clegg admitted that he "cries regularly to music" and that his nine-year-old son asked him, "'Why are the students angry with you, Papa?'"

In June 2011 Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury created a furor as guest editor by claiming that the Coalition government had introduced 'radical, long term policies for which no one had voted' and in doing so had created 'anxiety and anger' among many in the country. He was accused of being highly partisan, notwithstanding his having invited Ian Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary to write an article and having interviewed the Foreign Secretary William Hague in the same edition. He also noted that the Labour Party had failed to offer an alternative to what he called 'associational socialism'. The Statesman promoted the edition on the basis of Williams' alleged attack on the government, whereas Williams himself had ended his article by asking for "a democracy capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity".

In December 2011 the magazine was guest-edited by Richard Dawkins. The issue included the writer Christopher Hitchens's final interview^[29], conducted by Dawkins in Texas, and pieces by Bill Gates, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Philip Pullman.

List of editors[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Howe, Stephen (ed.). Lines of Dissent: writing from the New Statesman 1913 to 1988, Verso, 1988, ISBN 0-86091-207-8
• Hyams, Edward. The New Statesman: the history of the first fifty years 1913–63, Longman, 1963.
• Rolph, C. H. (ed.). Kingsley: the life, letters and diaries of Kingsley Martin, Victor Gollancz, 1973, ISBN 0-575-01636-1
• Smith, Adrian The New Statesman: portrait of a political weekly, Frank Cass, 1996, ISBN 0-7146-4645-8

External links[link]

• New Statesman
• The Spirit of Che Guevara by I F Stone, New Statesman 20 October 1967

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2011)

Mehdi Hasan is a British journalist who has worked in television current affairs and the national press.

Television career[link]

After graduating from Christ Church, Oxford in 2000, with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), he began his working life answering the phones on the ITN newsdesk, before working as a researcher and then producer on LWT's Jonathan Dimbleby programme, with a brief period in between on BBC1's The Politics Show. He then became deputy executive producer on Sky's breakfast show Sunrise before moving to Channel 4 in June 2007 as their editor of news and current affairs.^[1]

He has appeared four times on the BBC Question Time: on 13 May 2010, 23 September 2010, 10 February 2011 and 8 December 2011. He also makes frequent appearances on the Sunday morning programme The Big Questions.

He has been appointed as a new presenter on Al Jazeera's English News Channel and will be presenting the new series of "The Cafe" starting in July 2012. ^[2]

Journalist career[link]

He was appointed senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman in the late spring of 2009,^[3] but left the post in May 2012 to take up a post as political director at The Huffington Post website.^[4] Political Correspondent Rafael Behr replaced him at the Statesman, although Hasan will continue to write a weekly column.

Other activities[link]

He has given talks at several conferences and universities in the past. He also spoke at a "Next Steps for Labour" event organised by the Tribune magazine on 17 May 2010 at the TUC Congress House, arguing that the Labour Party should take time to elect its new Leader, and that it had to rethink its approach to certain issues such as civil liberties and the Iraq war.^{[citation needed]}

A regular contributor to The Guardian,^[5] Hasan argued in November 2011 that "it be [would be] rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?" Hasan himself advocated diplomacy and the reduction of American rhetoric.^[6]

Views on Islam and Muslims[link]

Hasan, a Muslim,^[7] has written various articles about Islam and Muslims for the New Statesman and various newspapers.

In April 2009, Hasan argued against the concept and idea of an Islamic state.^[8] He argues that "Today it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify a Muslim-majority nation that could plausibly be identified as a modern, viable and legitimate “Islamic state” and that "contrary to popular Muslim opinion, there is not a shred of theological, historical or empirical evidence to support the existence of such an entity."

Hasan has been the subject of criticism for remarks made on religion.^[9][10] During a speech in 2009, posted on YouTube, he compared non-Muslims to "animals", saying: “We know that keeping the moral high-ground is key. Once we lose the moral high-ground we are no different from the rest of the non-Muslims; from the rest of those human beings who live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfil any desire.”^[11]

At a separate event in 2009,^[12] quoting the Quran, Hasan told an audience atheists were akin to "cattle".^[13] He said: “The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Quran; they are described in the Quran as, quote, 'a people of no intelligence', Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of 'no intelligence' – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as 'cattle', as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.”^[14]

In response to criticism over the use of the term "cattle" to describe non-believers, Hasan wrote in his New Statesman blog: "The Quranic phrase 'people of no intelligence' simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient."^[15] The Islamophobia Watch website argued Hasan was the victim of a "witch-hunt", writing that these allegations of extremism were "aimed at getting him dismissed from his job".^[16]

In November 2009, Hasan wrote a column denouncing suicide bombing from an Islamic perspective.^[17] Hasan argues that "There is, in fact, nothing Islamic about so-called Islamic terrorism… So why are many Muslims so reluctant to condemn such cold-blooded tactics of terror?"

In April 2010, Hasan wrote a piece condemning the orthodox and controversial Islamic position on apostasy and the death penalty in the New Statesman.^[18] He states that "The sharia (or Islamic law), it is claimed, sanctions the death penalty for any adult Muslim who chooses to leave the faith, or apostatise. This is an intellectually, morally and, perhaps above all, theologically unsustainable position."

He also wrote an article in The Guardian in September 2011 condemning the Iranian regime for its proposed execution of an "apostate."^[19] "The death sentence given to Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran is an affront to universal moral values and a disservice to Muslims."

In July 2010, Hasan wrote an article supporting the concept of secularism. ^[20] "Ultimately, a diverse polity such as India can prosper only if it has faith in the inclusive and religiously neutral model of governance established by its founders in 1947."

In April 2012, Hasan wrote an article criticising British Muslims for being obsessed with foreign affairs and the antiwar movement.^[21] He criticised British Muslims apparent apathy towards national issues, "why is it that most British Muslims get so excited and aroused by foreign affairs, yet seem so bored by and uninterested in domestic politics and the economy?"

Bibliography[link]

• With James Macintyre. ED: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader, London, Biteback Publishing, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84954-102-2
• Summer of Unrest: The Debt Delusion: Exposing ten Tory myths about debts, deficits and spending cuts, Vintage Digital, July 28, 2011.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Hasan's New Statesman blog.

A black sheep stands out from the flock

The Black Sheep, from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose by William Wallace Denslow.

A black sheep (Hebridean)

In the English language, black sheep is an idiom used to describe an odd or disreputable member of a group, especially within a family. The term has typically been given negative implications, implying waywardness.^[1] It derived from the atypical and unwanted presence of other black individuals in flocks of white sheep.

In psychology, the black sheep effect refers to the tendency of group members to judge likeable ingroup members more positively and deviant ingroup member more negatively than comparable outgroup members.^[2]

Idiomatic usage[link]

The term originated from the occasional black sheep which are born into a flock of white sheep due to a genetic process of recessive traits. Black wool was considered commercially undesirable because it could not be dyed.^[1] In 18th and 19th century England, the black color of the sheep was seen as the mark of the devil.^[3] In modern usage, the expression has lost some of its negative connotations, though the term is usually given to the member of a group who has certain characteristics or lack thereof deemed undesirable by that group.^[4]

The idiom is also found in other languages, e.g., French, Serbian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Bosnian, Greek, Turkish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian and Polish. The same concept is illustrated in some other languages by the phrase "white crow": for example belaya vorona (белая ворона) in Russian and kalag-e sefid (کلاغ سفید) in Persian. A variant form of black sheep, "the red sheep of the family", was used by Jessica Mitford to describe herself, a communist in a family of aristocratic fascists.^[5]

Biological origin[link]

In sheep, a white fleece is not albinism but a dominant gene that actively switches color production off, thus obscuring any other color that may be present.^{[citation needed]} As a result, a black fleece in most sheep is recessive, so if a white ram and a white ewe are each heterozygous for black, in about 25% of cases they will produce a black lamb. In fact in most white sheep breeds only a few white sheep are heterozygous for black, so black lambs are usually much rarer than this. Some breeds of sheep (such as the Hebridean, Ouessant, Black Welsh Mountain and Karakul) are normally black.

Black sheep effect (Psychology)[link]

Overview[link]

In 1988, Marques, Yzerbyt and Leyens^[2] conducted an experiment where Belgian students rated the following groups according to trait-descriptors (e.g., sociable, polite, violent, cold): unlikeable Belgian students, unlikeable North African students, likeable Belgian students, and likeable North African students. The results provided support that the favourability is the highest for likeable ingroup members and the lowest for unlikeable ingroup members, whereas the favourability of unlikeable and likeable outgroup members is between the both former ones. These extreme judgements of likeable and unlikeable (i.e., deviant) ingroup members, relatively to comparable outgroup members is called “black sheep effect”. This effect has been shown in various intergroup contexts and under a variety of conditions, and in many experiments manipulating likeability and norm deviance (e.g., Branscombe, Wann, Noel, & Coleman, 1993;^[6] Coull, Yzerbyt, Castano, Paladino, & Leemans, 2001;^[7] Khan & Lambert, 1998;^[8] Pinto, Marques, Levine, & Abrams, 2010).^[9]

Explanations[link]

A prominent explanation of the black sheep effect derives from the social identity approach (see social identity theory, Tajfel & Turner, 1979;^[10] and self-categorization theory, Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987).^[11] Group members are motivated to sustain a positive and distinctice social identity and, as a consequence, group members emphasize likeable members and evaluate them more positve than outgroup members, bolstering the positive image of their ingroup (see ingroup bias). Furthermore, the positive social identity may be threatened by group members who deviate from a relevant group norm. To protect the positive group image, ingroup members derogate ingroup deviants more harshly than deviants of an outgroup (Marques, Abrams, Páez, & Hogg, 2001).^[12] In addition, Eidelman and Biernat (2003)^[13] have shown that personal identities are also threatened through deviant ingroup members. They argue that devaluation of deviant members is an individual response of interpersonal differentiation. Khan and Lambert (1998)^[8] suggest that cognitive processes like assimilation and contrast, which may underline the effect, should be examined.

Limitations[link]

Even though there is widely support for the black sheep effect, the opposite pattern has been found, for example, that White participants judge unqualified Black targets more negative than comparable White targets (e.g., Feldman, 1972;^[14] Linville & Jones, 1980).^[15] Consequentely, there are several factors which influence the black sheep effect. For instance, the higher the identification with the ingroup, and the higher the entitativity of the ingroup, the more the black sheep effect emerges (e.g., Castano, Paladino, Coull, & Yzerbyt, 2002;^[16] Lewis & Sherman, 2010).^[17] Even situational factors explaining the deviance have an influence whether the black sheep effect occurs (De Cremer & Vanbeselaere, 1999).^[18]

See also[link]

Look up black sheep in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Black swan theory
• Glossary of sheep husbandry: see entry for "black wool".
• Scapegoat
• The Ugly Duckling

References[link]

External links[link]

• Exploration of the etymology of the phrase "black sheep of the family"
• "The black sheep effect: Judgmental extremity towards ingroup members in inter-and intra-group situations". European Journal of Social Psychology (Science Direct) 18 (3): 287–292. DOI:10.1002/ejsp.2420180308. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00221031. Retrieved 2008-01-04.