The voice of liberal England

I think Steve Bell's cartoon was the Guardian's Hillsborough moment: the point at which a paper lost a core section of its natural demographic, for ever. I have bought the Guardian for 30 years, through the miners' strike, the Falklands War, the Lawson boom, Blair, Mandelson and the rest. I remember telling a friend in Ealing who took the Telegraph that I didn't know anyone who read it and her saying the same about me and the Guardian.  It's all genuinely upsetting, like realising someone you thought an old friend never liked you that much. The wisest words I have yet read about the sorry affair:

"If I think it would be against your interests to break a failing relationship with me, would I succeed by telling you to ‘go fuck yourself’? If I did, would you take it as a ‘joke’ or even a ‘commentary’? You might, rather, take it as further proof about the state of our relationship.

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We don’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we cannot laugh at ourselves or are beyond satire. But this is satire so broad and so ugly that it sails across the line into offensiveness. Why would The Guardian ‘satirise’ a country simply wanting to make its own decisions anyway? The aims of the Scottish independence movement – social justice, protection of public services, opposition to Conservatism – are the same ones which The Guardian themselves espouse. Can we imagine a mainstream Scottish newspaper, or even a website such as this one, running a slogan which says, ‘England Should Go Fuck Itself’? Can we imagine The Guardian saying such a thing about India, China or France?"