EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

            

 

The Manchester Guardian, born 5 May 1821: 190 years – work in progress

The paper has essentially changed neither its ownership nor its character during its long life

The Manchester Guardian first appeared 190 years ago today. It was a weekly comprising just four pages and priced at a steep 7d (seven old pence), of which 4d went to the government in stamp duty. This was the severest of paywalls, and the initial circulation was just 1,000, soaring to 3,000 by the mid-1820s. Its appearance coincided with the death of Napoleon on Saint Helena, but his passing wasn't mentioned in the paper for several weeks, so slowly did news then travel.

The Guardian was founded by a young cotton merchant called John Edward Taylor in the wake of the Peterloo massacre of 1819, in which soldiers had killed 11 people at a public meeting in Manchester. Taylor was a reformer and religious nonconformist, and he wanted a paper committed to political change but even more wedded to truthful reporting. His prospectus for the paper promised to "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious liberty, warmly advocate the cause of reform, endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of political economy, and support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures".

A newspaper, wrote CP Scott on the Guardian's centenary, has a "moral as well as a material existence". The paper has essentially changed neither its ownership nor its character during its long life. Taylor's eager embrace of political reform in 1832; Scott's early advocacy of Irish home rule and opposition to the Boer war; the attempt to warn the world of the threat posed by Hitler; the immediate realisation in 1956 that Suez was a catastrophe; the pursuit of sleazy politicians in the 1990s; the partnership with WikiLeaks to draw back the curtain from the murky world of international diplomacy; and the commitment to opening up journalism in the digital age; they are all much of a piece. The Taylors and Scotts who dominated the first century of the Guardian's life would surely recognise the same ends now being pursued, even if they might be a little surprised by the means.

In March the Guardian was read by the largest audience in its history – more than 49 million unique users, as Scott didn't call his readers. He thought of his paper as a pulpit. Readers today are less taken with sermons. Technology has revolutionised the way news is distributed – but also the ability to amplify, celebrate and harness other voices. The next 10 years – between now and our bicentenary – will see even more rapid and radical changes in the media. It is good to pause and reflect that the things that matter most – truthfulness, free thought, honest reporting, a plurality of opinion, a belief in fairness, justice and, most crucially, independence – do not change.

Fatah-Hamas accord: All eyes on Cairo

It is easy to miss the one event with the capacity to change the scenery in a way more profound than Osama bin Laden's death

Mayhem has become a daily ritual. Rocket launchers pound one town in Libya as a rescue ship relieves the wounded from another; the international criminal court is preparing to issue three warrants for war crimes to Colonel Gaddafi's regime; tanks are deploying in Syria; a president refuses to stand down in Yemen; a clampdown is in full swing in Bahrain; and dissent is welling just below the surface in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. All this now passes for another day in the life of the Middle East. And it is easy in this 24/7 drama to miss the one event with the capacity to change the scenery in a way more profound than Bin Laden's death.

Such an event took place in Cairo yesterday. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, two men who dedicated much of their time in the last four years to undermining each other, met in Cairo to sign an agreement to form a national unity government. The Palestinian president announced the two were turning forever the black page of division. We shall see. The ceremony was delayed over whether the two leaders would appear on the podium together. (In the end they agreed to speak consecutively.) And as for the promise to release each other's prisoners, four more Hamas activists had been arrested in the West Bank only the day before.

The potential of such an accord should not be minimised. It does not lie in what it would do or not do to the peace process. This was killed in inaction long ago – and not by one Israeli government, but by several. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier, may plead the collapse of the talks was not his fault, and he was presented with a free gift from Hamas, when its leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, mourned the death of Bin Laden as an Arab holy warrior. But even if you argue, as Mr Netanyahu does, that recognition of Israel's existence as a Jewish state is the core of the conflict, and not territory or settlements, what sunk the peace process has become an argument for historians, not politicians. There is no plan B, no realistic path of getting such talks back on track. Israel had the most moderate Palestinian leader in Mahmoud Abbas it was ever likely to meet over a negotiating table in several generations and blew it. He left empty handed. Had Mahmoud Abbas been given a serious and imminent possibility of signing an agreement that established a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in Jerusalem, and one in which the Palestinian right of return had not been erased unilaterally from the reckoning, Mr Netanyahu might have had a case when he accused his counterpart of walking away from peace. In the end, there was no peace to walk away from. There was the status quo or as Mahmoud Abbas himself put it, the cheapest occupation in Israel's history. Israel's reaction to the Cairo agreement, the holding up of a $89m cash transfer to the Palestinian Authority only rubbed the point home that this status quo is unacceptable. This is, after all, their cash, not Israel's. The degree of dependency may vary, but every Palestinian ultimately lives as hostage to Israel's fiat. This is untenable and has been the daily reality of the so-called peace process. The only path left for Palestinians of all affiliations is to unite, reform and strengthen their leadership. This is what started to happen yesterday.

The Cairo accord could well turn out to be as fragile as the one signed in Mecca four years ago. It can still be undermined in a myriad of ways. But the clock itself cannot be so easily put back. The new factor which will not be changed is Egypt's re-emergence as a major player in the Middle East. No one expected a foreign policy to emerge before a domestic one, least of all before the government itself had been formed. But if Egypt succeeds in projecting its will as Turkey has done, it has the numbers to change the balance of power. It is wholly in the interests of the US and the EU to have a government in Cairo that will keep a peace accord with Israel but not be servile to its interests.

In praise of … the essay

Michel de Montaigne crafted a personal and conversational genre which has been the preferred literary mode of free spirits

With their exams looming, Britain's school and university students are probably more likely to curse the essay than to celebrate it. And with academic tomes getting ever longer while tweets gets ever pithier, the essay may seem like a bit of a relic to many others too – a bit like county cricket squeezed between tests and Twenty 20. Yet it is hard to think of a more modern mentality than that of the man who practically invented the essay nearly half a millennium ago and whose popularity today has rarely been greater, thanks not least to the recent bestseller by Sarah Bakewell. Michel de Montaigne established the essay as a form into which the provisional and the questioning were written from the start. He wrote about the momentary and the accidental, even the banal, rather than the all-encompassing. In doing so he crafted an intensely personal and conversational genre which has been the preferred literary mode of free spirits from Addison to Žižek and Hazlitt to Hitchens. The best essays, like George Orwell's, are tough but not fanatical, delight in the commonplace and ambiguous and can see the world as easily in a ham sandwich as a morning rose. The imminent launch of a new publishing imprint, Notting Hill Editions, specifically devoted to reviving the essay, may be a sign of unmet demand for wise and witty individual voices amid the modern Babel. Exam candidates may long to see the end of the essay. Many others of us, less immediately pressured, would be happy for more of them.