06 October 2003
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From the Editor…
Welcome to the New Statesman website. Whether you are a new reader or an existing one - online or via the magazine - I hope you'll enjoy the great writing, fresh ideas and provocative debate that make the New Statesman Britain's award-winning current affairs weekly
Cover story
Who the hell are you?
Fly to America and your most intimate details will be filed and passed to the intelligence services. And the US plans even more alarming threats to liberty
Features
The syndrome that became an epidemic
David Boyle asks whether autism, diagnosed 1,000 per cent more than a decade ago, has become a new term for naughty children and wonders if the drugs companies are behind it all
Bring back that Tory sleaze
No orators, no sex scandals and "dancing as it used to be" - Quentin Letts fears he will die of boredom at Blackpool
Essay
NS Essay - Labour can renew itself only by recognising that Blair has become a dangerous liability
Though the PM likes to compare himself with Thatcher, he looks like ending up as another Major. He, too, may cling to power, but it will be downhill all the way
Interview
NS Interview - Paddy Ashdown
At last, the high representative for Bosnia Herzegovina delivers his verdict on Blair: a good, but not a great, prime minister. Paddy Ashdown interviewed
Regulars
New Statesman Leader
Better Brown's obsessions than Blair's
Blair's lack of mission and focus echoed a characteristically English mood but then he went to war with Iraq
The Politics Column
Politics - John Kampfner sees Blair miss Ceausescu's fate
There was only a tiny chance that Blair could have met a "Ceausescu moment" of public denunciation, but his apparatchiks were not prepared to risk it
Darcus Howe won't celebrate a black chief constable
Why do they say it's brave to appoint a black chief constable? He's been a good boy
Mark Thomas gives a baroness an ultimatum
Baroness Amos has a choice: she can approve public money for the Baku oil pipeline, or she can behave like she might just give a damn about people blighted by poverty and conflict
Paul Routledge
Hoon blows his top, Straw fears for his seat, and a Press Gallery plan to reveal all (maybe)
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
Portrait of a nation
Do we really want Joshua Reynolds's Omai to stay in London? Although treasured as a singularly British painting, this masterpiece hints at seamier aspects of our imperial past, writes Patricia Fara
Britannia rules no more
Identity - Britpop, Britart, Britlit and Britflix have all failed to generate enduring cultural myths. We should be celebrating plurality not homogeneity
The people's judge
Music - John Suchet on the discord provoked by his place on the Gramophone Awards panel
Not waving but drowning
Art - Richard Cork admires Isaac Julien's haunting exploration of identity and eroticism
Commentary
The cult of the children's author as a celebrity continues to grow. Please let's have more books read and shared with children, and fewer "favourite foods" and hurried signatures
Film
Murder most foul
Film - Philip Kerr is horrified by two butchered attempts to imitate Tobe Hooper
Television
The Lion and the Unicorn
Television - Andrew Billen enjoys an all-too-plausible dramatisation of the Blair-Brown relationship
The Fan
The fan - Hunter Davies sees Becks as the first touchy-feely manager
Could Beckham be the first sentimental, soppy, touchy-feely manager?
Books
The natural diplomat. Patient, courteous and highly respected, Douglas Hurd was a moderating influence throughout his years in government. But he was considered too much of a toff to be prime minister. Malcolm Rifkind remembers life at the Foreign Office
Memoirs Douglas Hurd Little, Brown, 534pp, £20 ISBN 0316861472
The power of fear. Jazz was a capitalist plot, abstract expressionism a communist one. Art was always a victim in the cold war. By Frances Stonor Saunders
The Dancer Defects: the struggle for cultural supremacy during the cold war David Caute Oxford University Press, 780pp, £30 ISBN 0199249083
Ghost required
Tomorrow's People: how 21st- century technology is changing the way we think and feel Susan Greenfield Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 284pp, £20 ISBN 0713996315
Smooth operator
The Murdoch Archipelago Bruce Page Simon & Schuster, 580pp, £20 ISBN 0743239369
Fiction - Massacre of the innocents
A Question of Blood Ian Rankin Orion, 360pp, £17.99 ISBN 0752851101
Been and Goon
Spike Milligan: the biography Humphrey Carpenter Hodder & Stoughton, 435pp, £20 ISBN 0340826118
