09 February 2004

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

Those WMDs - The blame game

John Kampfner reveals the inside story of how Blair agreed to a second inquiry on the run-up to the Iraq war and how the security services will resist his attempts to pin the responsibility for misjudgements on them

By John Kampfner

Features

After Hutton - Dyke and Campbell: spot the difference

By George Walden

The BBC director general and his chief enemy in Downing Street were both part of the vulgarisation of our culture. We should be glad they're gone

Let women save the BBC

By David Cox

Behind the scenes, female executives warned that machismo would get the corporation in trouble. With the charter up for renewal, will the boys now listen to them?

Why we politicians are jealous of journalists

By Austin Mitchell

Hacks know what's going on, MPs don't, writes Austin Mitchell MP

Social enterprise - Hearts before pockets

By David Puttnam

Big business is starting to realise that if it is to adapt to a new world, it needs the help of social entrepreneurs. By David Puttnam

Social enterprise - In whose interest?

By Gideon Burrows

A new type of company which can make profits that don't go to fat cats is on its way. Gideon Burrows reports

Essay

NS Essay - The best hope for animal liberation is that humans kill each other in wars

By John Gray

The big threat to the welfare of other species is the unchecked expansion of "homo rapiens". Those who object to vivisection are missing the big picture, argues John Gray

Regulars

New Statesman Leader

Astrologers would be as good as the spooks

Darcus Howe - sticks up for the BBC

By Darcus Howe

If the BBC is in trouble, it will undermine the rest of British broadcasting

John Pilger argues that Gilligan was an exception

By John Pilger

The war correspondent James Cameron was smeared as a "dupe of communism". "When they call you a dupe," he told me, "they're really complaining that you are not their dupe"

Competition

Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store

Culture

Arabian nights

By Frank Tallis

As a culture we are obsessed with love, but it is not the western variety we might like to believe. This Valentine's Day, we would do well to remember that Islam's most successful export is not fundamentalism but romance. By Frank Tallis

Pop art

By John Harris

Music - John Harris on the Stone Roses guitarist who is making a splash as a painter

Figure heads

By Richard Cork

Art - Richard Cork marvels at the great simplifier of 20th-century sculpture

Commentary - Remembering the Indian poet Nissim Ezekial

By Salil Tripathi

Salil Tripathi remembers Nissim Ezekiel, the gentle Indian poet whose pioneering work in English inspired later generations of writers

Theatre

The wrong track

By Michael Portillo

Theatre - Michael Portillo takes an uncomfortable return trip to his days as transport minister

Film

More sex please, we're adults

By Mark Kermode

Film - Mark Kermode on a week in which both young and old get it together

Television

Casualties of war

By Andrew Billen

Television - Andrew Billen on why, post-Hutton, we need a gutsy BBC more urgently than ever

Books

Writers in prison - Amir Abbas Fakhravar

By Moris Farhi

Larger than life. Fidel Castro is a liberal utopian of the 19th century rather than a 20th-century totalitarian. He has moved with the times and, thanks to him, Cuba has been spared the neo-liberal chaos that engulfed the former Soviet bloc

By Richard Gott

The Real Fidel Castro Leycester Coltman Yale University Press, 335pp, £25 ISBN 0300101880 Fidel Castro: a biography Volker Skierka (translated by Patrick Camiller) Polity Press, 440pp, £25