Mick Hartley

2 responses to “Right-Thinking”

1. 

   IanCroydon

   January 19, 2007

   I’m a long-term subscriber to Private Eye, and, to be fair, although it frequently conforms to, what you can only call, an anti-war stance, from a satirical point of view, the whole “Bush-Blair-as-war-criminals” has not been a part of that satire, at least, not that I’ve seen.
   I’d suppose it is quite difficult to assume a pro-war satirical stance, so in a straight anti- and pro- balance any satire is going to come down hard on the anti- side, but that’s humour for you.
   In fact, it is rather surprising, considering how Private Eye has been infiltrated with RESPECT party members over the last few years, that the magazine hasn’t yet wholly gone over to just being a satirical version of The Guardian stuffed with Bush Chimp cartoons.
   When Paul Foot (re-)started writing for Private Eye after emerging from the ass crack of Robert Maxwell’s floating corpse with a nice brown tongue, the editors decided to revise his own section, called “In The Back”, which quickly evolved into a SWP/RESPECT political propaganda sheet supporting Foot’s own political agenda and ambitions, and it remains so today staffed by Footie’s fawning Stoppers he left behind.
   Wheen and co have been responsible for keeping “dead duck” campaigns like James Hanratty, Pan Am 103 and MMR, in this section. I suspect it is to preserve “balance”, and as such, any of the typical “Blair war criminal” jibes never escapes into the satirical part of the magazine.
   Private Eye does manage to steer the fine line of critical and satirical politics without headlong plunging into being another Stop The War mouthpiece, and credit for that goes to the editorial team including Wheen.

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2. 

   Mick H

   January 19, 2007

   I think there’s more to it than just taking an anti-war stance. I certainly wouldn’t expect Private Eye to have been pro-war, or to reign in their attacks on Blair. It’s just that their attitude seems to me to be entirely in line with this conformity that Francis Wheen claims to deplore, ie Bush as moron, Blair as simpering lickspittle, the Hutton Report as whitewash etc. etc.. Their covers in particular seem to me recently to have been lazy and obvious.

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