In a discussion on one of the threads below, Wardytron asks:
Out of people who’ve done the sensible thing and stopped buying the Guardian, when did you make that decision and never look back?”
Shaun responds:
I suppose I should say that I’m a conservative voter who dabbled with the Lib Dumbs and Bliar’s NuLabour. So actually I’m a slightly rightish whore. But I’ve read the Grauniad for about 10 years, more or less, every weekday. And the Observer on Sundays, hangover permitting.
Why?
Well that’s because at school I had a wise old History teacher who always advised us to read a paper every day with which we disagreed. I spent many years reading the Telegraph for that reason. It made reading the Sun for male-bonding sports bullshit reasons easier at university. Well, at least easier to live with! And yet then, while as a Conservative Student, I started a decade long affair with the Gaurdian.
For many years I disagreed with most of it, though I always loved the Steve Bell cartoons from my childhood in the 80s! Then I started to agree with it during its opposition to the Iraq war. Having fought against radical Islam at university in the early 1990s, long before it was fashionable, I understood the folly of such an unprepared, uncomprehending strike at such a precipitous time. This is not to say that toppling Saddam should not have been done; my personal opposition was to the method and the timing and the geopolitical cost in terms of secularism versus theocracy. I am unconvinced that I was wrong to be concerned.
And yet *still* I read the Guardian. My instinct was now more to argue with it and its lazy assumptions, however. And now in 2008 when the moneyed Polly Toynbee is basically arguing that only the wealthy have aspirations, a notion that flies in the face of my own transition from council house child to house-owning adult, surviving with MS, working my way through life, that I am forced to question why I still pay for it. I mean, I can still read it online, after all, for free!
What do the rest of you think?. Do you read the Guardian? Or have you given it up?
Either way, let us know why.