Happy birthday, spiked!

The best political magazine in the world turns 25 today. A birthday gift would be well deserved, says Rob Lyons.

On 27 February 2000, a new company was registered at Companies House. It just had a placeholder name to start with while plans were made. A new publication was on the cards, with no name settled on but with the aim of providing insightful analysis and a general puncturing of contemporary orthodoxies. It might have ended up as a print publication, but the opportunities afforded by the relatively new-fangled ‘world wide web’ suggested it could at least start out online.

While there were already a handful of online-only magazines based in America, like Slate and Salon, publishing just on the web was still in its infancy in the UK and was often assumed to be, well, not proper. What exactly this new publication would be and how it would work was the subject of considerable debate.

I got involved in October 2000, arriving from Scotland mainly to ‘help out with the computers in the office’ – but I soon elbowed my way into helping in the creation of the site itself. By this time, the new publication had a name, suggested by the wife of founding editor Mick Hume and inspired by the way newspapers would ditch stories by shoving them on to a metal spike on the editor’s desk. This new magazine would cover the world in ways that other magazines would not – and so spiked was born.

Unfortunately, unlike well-funded American publications, spiked has always had to punch above its weight when it comes to financial muscle. And that showed in one or two teething troubles for the noisy newborn. For those of you accustomed to good data connections and easy website hosting, believe me – the year 2000 was a different country.

Unlike most other magazines, spiked wasn’t just trying to be interesting – though it always has been. An early ‘about’ line declared that this would be ‘a website for those who want to see some change in the real world as well as the virtual one. If you think that the power of the internet could be used for something more than shopping and sex, get spiked.’ Karl Marx’s famous line, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’, was a defining principle for spiked.

With inspiration from Marx (among others), but not stuck with the useless nostrums of latter-day Marxists, spiked refused to be pigeon-holed. The best that Wired magazine could manage was to call us ‘neo-contrarians’ – whatever the hell that means. For example, a very early article by Mick Hume was titled ‘For fewer laws, not more’, with the hope that Tony Blair’s government could learn to ‘trust people to live sensibly and freely, without the need for constant supervision and re-education’. Fat chance of that as both Labour and Conservative governments have made meddling in our lives their raison d'être – but an early statement that freedom was central to spiked’s outlook.

Libertarian by instinct and with no truck for Bush and Blair’s warmongering, it was Brendan O’Neill who christened Blair’s Iraq War justification report the ‘dodgy dossier’ in 2002. I even got into the writing game, mainly calling ‘bullshit’ about a variety of health and environmental panics. I stopped being a member of staff in 2014, when I moved to the Academy of Ideas, but I’ve continued to write for spiked and, of course, it remains my go-to resource for understanding what’s going on in the world.

Under the stewardship of three hugely talented editors (Mick Hume, Brendan O’Neill and Tom Slater), along with its great network of writers, spiked has developed a global reputation for holding the political class’s feet to the fire on all sorts of issues, from the economy to the environment, along with the biggest political debates of our time, from Brexit to Gaza. Most importantly, spiked has always been a staunch and unflinching advocate for free speech, creating the UK’s first Free Speech University Rankings and calling out censorship wherever it exists. It has also remained fiercely independent and has never been the play-thing of any squillionaire ‘sugar daddy’.

That independence has been enabled by the support of spiked’s many readers, chipping in with whatever they can afford to keep spiked free to read for everyone. As spiked celebrates its quarter century, why not send a birthday gift? A donation to support its continued and invaluable work would be much deserved – you can find out how here.