Family values at Freedom

The paper started to regularly come out late shortly after I took over. I make no bones about this, and have apologised fulsomely in both the paper and on occasion in person to whoever got pissed off. However, an issue has also never been missed, so while consistency has been poor, reliability has not.

To start with, we had very few writers, and of these a couple dropped off when John left. Among the best stalwarts were Iain Mackay, Mark Barnsley, Svartfrosk, Louis Further (who is back after months of painful recuperation from an operation) and Richard Griffin, and J was always reliable. My brother, (Sorry. On the libcom forums) came in and helped out every so often with international news. All of them, as far as I’m concerned, deserve some sort of reward in the equivalent of anarchist heaven (so a pint at the bookfair, probably ;)).

But the largest proportion was written by me, particularly the news, to start with between factory shifts, and later when off work at my current job. I was originally supported by my parents – one a liberal, one a Tory – which I simply couldn’t have managed without. Although their politics differed from mine, they did as much as anyone else to keep the paper working, by allowing me to focus entirely on that rather than on things like food, washing clothes etc. Admittedly this made Freedom a paper founded on anarchism yet largely run by one middle class man who was exploiting blood ties to do so – but for a press which sits underneath a KFC sign and relies on the goodwill of a bourgeois art institution (and very nice people they are too), this seemed to be nothing new.

To start with, this limit to resources, time and reliability meant that the articles were mostly pretty unoriginal, and lacking in decent sourcing. After complaints that the paper had become a bit too much like Guardian lite (although I have never had a guardian subscription), I had to get organised.

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NOTE: This is a short one due to work constraints…