20 October 2003

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

Jason Cowley, Editor, New Statesman

Cover story

The battle for childhood

We all love children; even politicians do. Yet we are in danger of taking from them everything that is most precious: freedom, health and happiness

By Richard Reeves

Features

Child obesity - an epidemic of inequality

By Courtney Van de Weyer

Why don't they get their act together?

By John Kampfner

Cook, Hain and Short are all members of what is loosely called the "sensible" left. Alas, they never seem to bury their old differences

Move Labour leftwards

By Stephen Byers

The government needs to define what it is for, instead of just telling us what it is against, argues Stephen Byers

Bravado in Bolivia

By Simon Hooper

The nation Che failed to lead to socialism finally seems to have caught the revolutionary bug

The tortoise pulls a hamstring

By Quentin Letts

IDS was gaining on the Labour hare. But a "dossier" then undermined his only political asset. By Quentin Letts

Why France is tied in knots over girls who wear the scarf

By David Lawday

The French shed blood to overthrow clerical power and establish republican values. They still believe that religion should be kept out of schools

The man who would be Duce

By Hilary Clarke

The leader of Italy's authoritarian right has turned liberal. A new ally for Blair? By Hilary Clarke

Iraq will be Blair's Northern Ireland

By Kevin Toolis

The Prime Minister took Britain out of a futile 30-year war against a tiny but determined terrorist resistance. Why, then, lead us straight back into another?

Regulars

New Statesman Leader

Who are the real yobs?

Mark Thomas advises indebted Iraq to do a runner

By Mark Thomas

Iraq has debts of at least $200bn. Its best bet is to promise to pay up and then do a runner, taking all the fixtures and fittings with it and leaving not a light bulb or socket behind

Darcus Howe is proved absolutely right on black Tories

By Darcus Howe

The Tories select a black candidate - and immediately the press does a hatchet job

Competition

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Culture

Rock and read

By Nicholas Blincoe

The fashionable American quarterly McSweeney's has attracted some of our most successful writers - including Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby (left). Now it is staging literary and musical extravaganzas. Novelists are finally having fun, discovers Nicholas Blincoe