An interview with journalist Nick Cohen from Black Flag #218, 1999.
It is worth noting that Nick Cohen's initial scepticism about the New Labour project did not prevent him supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and signing the Euston Manifesto in 2006.
Blimey, that's a name you don't see featured in anarcho publications very often nowadays. I think I was more than 50% expecting this to be a pisstake when I clicked on it.
Black Flag sometimes showed a terrible or opportunist lack of judgement in who they interviewed around this time. I had an argument with one of them after they did an interview with PKK activists - Kurdish/Turkish stalinists. This was not long after PKK actvists had attacked Turkish anarchists - simply for reasons of political rivalry - on a London demo. The BF guy was totally unrepentant and smug about it; he said "Well how many papers do you sell?". Meaning; the PKK had an actual local popular political constituency that BF could only dream of, so they were therefore going to opportunistically cosy up to them rather than show solidarity with fellow anarchists. This was only one BF person but there must have been some general agreement to publish the article.
I think interviewing non-anarchists that the general reader may have heard of is probably a good idea for a populist mag, but there are obviously limits. Cohen’s anti- New Labour positions here and his pro-working class writers stuff is interesting.
The bits about voter turnout are a bit WTF for Black Flag though.
It was that populism though that led them to opportunistically suppress their critique of stalinism and interview a group who'd recently attacked anarchists.
Absolutely and I guess that’s the point where your drive to be popular takes priority over your politics. So it needs reining in.