Like Labour, the Observer must change if it is to speak to our modern lives

By Societarian

As a wee nipper, this Societarian had a job as a paper delivery boy, and I will always recall how those customers who had the Guardian delivered from Monday-Saturday would rarely ask for the Observer on a Sunday, but instead take either no paper at all or another, altogether different, Sunday paper.

The Observer has always seemed to me to be a rather more to the right than the Guardian, at least in the living memory of this twenty something; a rather more centre-right-leaning spiel permeates the comment pages and general editorial guidelines. Even if you ignore the paper’s position during the build up to the Iraq war, you still find it perforating Islamist scaremongers in its columnists… cough cough. And I’ve always imagined it more likely that I would discover a youthful Andrew Rawnsley in a YouTube clip singing along to Peter Lilly’s “I have a little list” rather than The Red Flag. So whenever I read the paper now – mainly online – I normally look for Will Hutton and others.

There is a campaign afoot to save the Observer, with people like Sunder Katwala at the Fabian Society asking if we would rather the right wing News of the World, Mail, Telegraph and Times moved in and filled the Observer’s share of the Sunday newspaper market. But that just seems rather nostalgic from a former Observer journalist like Sunder, perhaps looking back with rose tinted glasses to his days before the Fabians. It fails to recognise the fact that the Observer is buckling under itself, rather than being crushed.

The bigger problem should the Observer collapse is: where can the left go to on a Sunday for a newspaper? The Independent is struggling and the Morning Star has no Sunday edition.

The Observer’s problem is similar to Labour’s: times are changing, technologically as well as socially, and neither has adapted for a modern left wing audience; neither “says anything about our lives” anymore.

Address that problem and the rest will follow.