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Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you that the Guardian shifted noticeably to the right, attacking Corbin, insisting that the British left is full of antisemites, blindly supporting Israel and generally subscribing to US interventionism and a "us vs them" mentality. Now, I can imagine it's still far from being a neo-con newspaper in US terms, but for a newspaper that was considered the voice of the left, in a European context, that's more than enough.

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The Guardian has always been a newspaper with politics most closely aligned with the Lib Dems. In the past, this meant that they were left of Labour. Labour has shifted waaay to the left[1][2], past the Lib Dems and past the Guardian, so the Guardian no longer finds themselves in political alignment with Labour. I don't think the Guardian have changed their political stance substantially.

[1] https://www.politicalcompass.org/images/uk2015.png [2] https://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/uk2017

It's an interesting observation, particularly for the fact that according to those charts UK's left party has been for the past decades a right-wing party, both on the economics and the liberal/authoritarian axes.

However, I'm not British and I've never followed the politics of any British party, nor my political views have changed substantially in the past few years, so I don't think my perception of the turn to the right of the Guardian in international politics might have been influenced by the shift in Labour's position.

I feel like there should be more to right and left than pro- and anti-Israel.

It's more about easy, polemical attacks than accuracy.

> I can tell you that the Guardian shifted noticeably to the right

I don't see that at all in their reporting. The opinions section is of course a free for all of different ideologies, but in their actual bread and butter reporting I haven't seen anything like that.

Simply by covering "manufactured" diatribes in a seemingly-detached manner for a long time, a newspaper is de-facto endorsing the instigating side. The famous "let him deny it" mechanism is well-known. The amount of space the Guardian dedicates to specific topics is very telling in itself.

(This said, I personally don't see it as a "neocon paper" by any stretch. They are simply positioned in the "blairite consensus", an area that might occasionally overlap with some US neocon positions -- mostly because some neocons do move from an ideological progressive position.)

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