I reminded readers earlier this week of the New Statesman's editorial after 9/11:

“American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.”

I thought that was as bad as it gets. I was wrong.

This week's New Statesman has a picture of a rucksack on the front, with two words in large font:

Blair's bombs.

I used to write book reviews for the Statesman, but stopped when I could no longer stomach being associated with its views. The final straw was an issue which argued that:

[T]here appears to be something worryingly adrift in the mind of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a man who doesn't really know who or what he is. More technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath capable of reinventing himself with remarkable dexterity, like an actor. What most people call 'spin', the routine lubricant of all political gearboxes, is, in Blair's case, eloquent self-delusion on a heroic scale.

The issue was devoted to the idea that Blair is deranged.

It now has a new editor, John Kampfner, whom I like a lot. I thought that, under him, the magazine night grow up and stop sounding like the worst kind of extremist left agitator. Clearly not.

Blair's Bombs.

Think about that. There's not even a question mark there, just the bald statement that they were 'Blair's bombs'. This goes beyond even the 'let's understand' nonsense of the Guardian. It asserts that Tony Blair is the culprit behind last week's murders. Not the men who blew themselves up. Not their puppet masters. Tony Blair.

This is not merely moral bankruptcy. It is moral degeneracy.

If I was a newsagent, I would refuse to stock a magazine which peddles such a sickening cover.