I've not posted on the disgusting article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the current London Review of Books, mainly because others have taken it apart so damningly that I didn't have anything to add (here, for instance).

But there's a piece in The Observer today which prompts a couple of thoughts.

First, no one should be surprised that it appears in the LRB, the house magazine of the unthiniking knee jerk liberal left. And no one should be surprised that it appears under the editorship of Mary-Kay Wilmers, who has form. Four years ago I exposed her censorship of David Marquand, a man whose full stops she is not fit to edit:

In his LRB review [of James Naughtie's book, The Rivals]... he [Prof Marquand] turned to Blair's response to 11th September, which he summarised thus: "Blair's handling of the post-11th September crisis was impeccable."

He filed his piece in 17 January. The following day, he received the following response from Ms.Wilmers: "There's a problem. I can't square it with my conscience to praise so wholeheartedly Blair's conduct since September 11. I feel quite strongly that the US response, and ipso facto ours, has been at the very least questionable. I hope you won't think I'm being doctrinaire - or incomprehensibly convoluted".

She was, in other words, refusing to print his piece because she didn't agree with it. As Prof Marquand put it in reply to Ms Wilmers: "Frankly, I find your message outrageous. I have never before had a piece rejected on the grounds that it departed from the party line of the publication. I'm utterly shocked that the LRB should apply what amounts to censorship to its contributors...You wouldn't have been praising Blair; the praise would have come from me. If you feel really strongly that my opinions are shocking or wrong-headed, you could perfectly well publish them with an appropriate editorial disclaimer. What you are really saying, camouflaged by this talk of conscience, is that the contents of your paper have to conform to your personal prejudices, and that dissident voices need not apply. For a journal that purports to be one of opinion and debate, that is monstrous."

It's the same every week - ranting lefty drivel dressed up in long words by supposedly intelligent writers to give it a veneer of intelligence and thought. What a con. In reality it's a truly dire rag wirth nothing to commend it. What a contrast with Prospect, which manages to have a broad left-liberal outlook but which is well written, challengingly edited and always makes one think, rather than repeating one's prejudices.

But there's a second, more worrying point. The LRB is funded to the tune of £20,000 a year by you and me, through the Arts Council. So we have paid our money to allow Ms Wilmers to print her Der Sturmer-like prejudices.

If the LRB was a free standing operation which stood or fell by sales, it would of course be fully entitled to print such offensive lies. Our job would be to expose it for what it is. That is the point of free speech.

But it can't make itself pay, and relies for a significant part of its income instead on taxpayers' money. And that is where different rules should operate. Tax funding should not be placed in an organisation which propagandises for one political view - quite apart from the even more grotesque use of taxpayers' money in funding the publication of lies and smears.