This blog is FOUR! (and one month)
In all the excitement over the Euston Declaration, my YouGOV account, and whatever else has been exciting us recently, I missed out the most important - this blog is now Four Years Old, and one Month*.Looking at those early posts one would never have believed it was going to be the start of something big. Nevertheless ever year since then we've had exponential readership growth - at first there was Me, then I think in the first year there was Nick and Peter, year two saw two or three Chrises and another Nick, then in year three eight names of which none were called Chris or Nick. At this rate we will have more readers than the News of the World in 2024 though I'll never know as I forgot to put the readers counter into the new look design.
*I've just lost the game of course, as I was going to add that I believe the Stoa is at least a year or more older, and that reminded me I once gave a b'day present of a Mad Mel quote.
Update: Checking the Stoa I find it is FIVE years old on the 27th May. And what makes it all the better is it began its life with this Nick Cohen quote, which seems rather more than five years old.
If you vote for Blair you will also be lending your good name to the curtailment of the right to trial by jury, the turning of demonstrators into 'terrorists', the persecution of asylum-seekers, the imposition of tuition fees, the incessant manipulation of the media, the rigging of elections, the refusal to renationalise the railways, the abasement before corporate interests. I thought myself pretty cynical on 1 May 1997, but if a stranger had told me that this would be the record New Labour would be defending at the next election, I would have dismissed him as a raving fantasist.
Nick of course is not a raving fantasist. Incidentally two years (December 1999) before that he also attacked David Aaronovitch for "betraying an "honourable" tradition of journalism which has existed only fitfully in this country" because he "implied that he was "a man who could be relied on to write as No 10 required"" - an allegation Aaronovitch called "a spiteful crime".
posted by Matthew @ 5/07/2006 12:48:00 PM
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