Comment isn't free

When The Guardian set up its “Comment is Free” bloggers’ site they wrote to some of their regular writers, including me, asking us to contribute. There was much generous talk about how the internet was democratising opinion. Ordinary people were to take over from the editors, the star columnists, the great and the good who define the parameters of respectable debate.

So I wrote a blog, and they put it up, with a nice picture of me. It was a way of getting professional writers to write for the Guardian for free, which, as a former president of the NUJ (as well as a penurious freelance writer) irritated me. But at least it freed us from the tyrrany of commissions. We could say just what we liked, and no one could stop us.

Or could we? One day my friend Nick Cohen, star columnist on the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer, inadvertently let us all into a terrible secret. It’s a gigantic, cynical confidence trick.

Cohen - once a refreshing and radical voice in the grey mulch of conventional columnists' opinions, now part of the grey mulch - used his column to sneer at the blogs turning up on Comment is Free. Apparently, when terrorost threats caused the closure of airports over the summer, some of the Guardian's bloggers took the line that the threat might have been invented or exaggerated by the government.

Precisely what these bloggers said, I do not know, for Cohen satirised them rather than quoting from them, adding his own comment: “Modern technology allows every fool with an internet connection to broadcast his or her ravings.” These bloggers, he says, were not “isolated crackpots;” there are dangerous because their lunacy goes “deep into the mainstream.”

We are back with a bump in the age before computers, when columnists used to sneer at the angry letters they got from people they used to call “the green ink brigade.” Why the use of green ink was supposed to indicate terminal idiocy, I never understood. But the point is that the writers held views which the wise people who wrote columns in newspapers considered foolish, and if they were referred to at all, it was only to mention in passing how laughable and hysterical they were.

The internet, and especially the Guardian’s blog, was going to change all that, and put power back in the hands of the people. But the harsh truth, which Cohen has understood and perhaps unwisely revealed to us, is that the power of the establishment writer is unchanged: he can caricature what they say, denying them the chance to say it to the reader in their own words, and then dismiss them as loonies, just as he used to do with the green ink brigade.

Perhaps these bloggers were as stupid as Cohen paints them. Perhaps, though, they were arguing along these lines. We have not been absolutely sure that our government tells the truth over threats ever since Tony Blair made his famous claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and could launch them in 45 minutes. We know that Blair (I am choosing my words carefully here) could not have been certain, at the time he said it, that this statement was true; and it turned out to be untrue.

If we have even a lingering suspicicion that the government would make such a thing up, or exaggerate it, for political purposes, then we are into a nightmare. And we do.

If that's what they were arguing, then their argument falls well on the right side of lunacy.

I wrote down these thoughts, and sent then to Nick. Nick wrote back that I reminded him "of a mad book which came out a couple of years ago from a Chomskyan professor at Birmingham called 'the Suppression of Dissent'. Was dissent being suppressed by secret policemen and censors? Not quite. He disagreed with arguments that Christopher Hitchens, me and others had made and said the very fact that we were criticising his positions was a suppression of his dissent." I feel pretty certain the professor isn't mad and his argument a lot more coherent than Nick allows it to appear.

Having a column is very bad for the character. It makes you think your views matter, and anyone who attacks them must be mad or bad. It turns quite decent men and women - look at Nick, Dave Aaronovitch, or poor, tense Melanie Phillips - into self-righteous establishment harpies.

That's what convinced me that my blog needed to be independent of the Guardian. Of course, doing something about it had to wait until my son Peter (blog.myspace.com/spacecadetuk) came back from Brussels and showed me how. Meanwhile I chucked another little thought at Comment is Free - something to do with Blair and Iraq, and quite ill-tempered; Nick would certainly have called it "mad." But he never needed to comment on it, because it didn't appear, because, apparently, it took no account of other arguments on the site.

So much for Comment is Free democratising opinion. Here I shall say whatever I feel like. This blog will be a poor thing, but mine own.