Mick Hume moves on – new editor for spiked

Having been editor since spiked began life in January 2001, I have decided it is time for a change. So I am vacating the editor’s chair. Brendan O’Neill, who has been my deputy, now becomes spiked’s new editor.

Six years is a long time in political journalism. When we launched spiked we were pioneers, producing the first online current affairs and culture publication in the UK. Now everybody says that the web is the place to publish. But by putting ideas first, spiked has stayed ahead of the pack.

Coincidentally, it is exactly 10 years since I became the launch editor of spiked’s predecessor, LM magazine. That was when the seeds of the spiked you see today were sown. In its short life LM became a living laboratory for generating ideas, and moved the discussion beyond the old terms of Left versus Right – not because we were ‘contrarian’, but because we were always open-minded about dealing with a changing world. With spiked we have taken this approach further still and sharpened its critical edge.

This change of jobs marks the start of a new chapter for me as a writer, exploring ways to meet the fresh challenges facing the cause of human emancipation. It also marks a break from 20 years as the editor of publications that, I am happy to say, have published great propaganda – in the proper sense of the word, propagating ideas. In January 1987 I became editor of the weekly revolutionary newspaper, the next step. In November 1988 I was the founding editor of the monthly magazine Living Marxism. In 1997 we relaunched that magazine as LM. Three years later, LM was forced to close when we lost an infamous libel case (because that’s what libel defendants in England do). Many thought – and more than a few hoped – that they had seen the last of ’the LM crowd’. I have been delighted to disappoint them. Six years on, spiked is thriving – although we still have far more ideas than money.

Brendan O’Neill has worked and fought those battles alongside me since 1998, and I am confident that he will be the editor to take spiked forward. Readers of spiked (and other publications) will already be familiar with his sharp writing. Brendan has also been responsible for many of the recent editorial advances on spiked.

So I am happy to be able to leave spiked in robust intellectual health. I look forward to concentrating more on my own writing, with book projects on the go as well as columns for spiked and The Times. But I shall still be working with spiked as editor-at-large (or enlarged editor some might say), helping out with everything from strategic thinking to fundraising.

For now, I would like to thank all of our readers, writers, staff and friends for the invaluable support they have given during my years as founding editor of spiked. I take great pride in all that we have done together, and have equal faith in what Brendan and his team will achieve in the future.

Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked.