Hadley Freeman: Guardian obsessed with ‘right side of history’

Author and journalist Hadley Freeman has pinpointed a change at her former newspaper, the Guardian, as “being no longer about disagreement, but being on the right side of history”.

Freeman, who left the paper in 2022 and now writes for the Sunday Times, charted a dispiriting embrace of antisemitism and misogyny which eventually led to her leaving the paper, in discussion with Prof David Hirsh, chief executive of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. (Hirsh has been newly promoted to professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he lectures in sociology.) The centre was staging a packed one-day conference at the University of Westminster.

To the surprise of some, Freeman said that one of her editors on the Guardian had been Seumus Milne, who later became Jeremy Corbyn’s close associate and media director of the Labour Party. Milne, she said, had been the person who took her from the fashion pages to the Comment section of the paper and though they profoundly disagreed about many things, she said that they got on well personally.

But things changed as Corbyn became Labour leader, she said. “I don’t expect to be loved in my workplace, but it suddenly became a workplace where there was one point of view.” She spoke about a column she had written in which she compared Trump to Corbyn, describing them both as cult leaders. “People went ballistic, saying how dare you say that about Corbyn?”

She also spoke about the “public vilification” of Guardian writer Jonathan Freedland, and her concern that there had not been more defence of him by journalists on the left.

Perceptions had moved, she said, from “denial — that thing [antisemitism] is not happening, to things are not as bad as you say it is, to ok, that thing is happening — and it’s fine”. Those who did not adhere to such beliefs were accused of being “LINO — Labour in Name Only”.

Eventually, Freeman was told by Guardian editors that she was “not allowed to write about Corbyn and antisemitism any more” — and that, and an ensuing and deeply unpleasant row about gender identity, finally led to her departure from the paper.

Both she and Hirsh agreed that anti-Americanism and antisemitism frequently went hand in hand, with Jews all too often the target of attacks in each case.

The audience was welcomed by the University of Westminster’s Prof Dibyesh Anand, who described antisemitism as “a real problem in academia”. He is deputy vice-chancellor of the university but had himself run into trouble and accused of “both-sides-ism”, when he had opposed BDS [boycott divestment and sanctions directed at Israel]. He regretted that “the only option for a Jewish person [in an academic setting] to express themself is as an anti-Zionist Jew.” For his part, Professor Anand said, “the moment you exceptionalise a country, it is a sign of bigotry and prejudice”.

Two awards were made at the event, the LCSCA book prize going to Prof Shalom Lappin for his book The New Antisemitism; and the Pete Newbon award to Brighton’s Heidi Bachram for making the greatest contribution to the public understanding of antisemitism.

Karin Stogner, sociology professor at Germany’s Passau University, gave a lecture in memory of Robert Fine, a leading scholar in contemporary antisemitism and the Holocaust.