Standard first, argument second
Standpoint is a British magazine of politics, ideas and the arts.
It was founded in 2008 on a proposition that sounded eccentric at the time and sounds less so now: that the achievements of Western civilisation — democracy, open argument, the freedom to say the wrong thing in public — are worth defending, and that defending them requires better prose than the people attacking them tend to use.
The first issue reached the newsstands at the end of May 2008. It was the first launch of a major current affairs magazine in Britain for more than a decade, and it arrived with a stated intention to revive the essay: pieces long enough to develop a thought, edited hard enough to be worth the reader’s evening. The founding editor, Daniel Johnson, put it bluntly at the time. The market was drowning in the journalistic equivalent of fast food. Standpoint would serve something that took longer to make and longer to read.
For twelve years it did exactly that.
Where we came from
Standpoint was founded by Daniel Johnson, Miriam Gross, Jonathan Foreman and Michael Mosbacher, and published by Social Affairs Unit Magazines. Johnson edited it for its first decade. Michael Mosbacher followed him in 2018, Edward Lucas in 2019, and Andreas Campomar took it through to the final print issue.
The launch issue set the tone by starting an argument. Michael Nazir-Ali, then Bishop of Rochester, used it to attack multiculturalism as a doctrine that had entrenched the separation of communities rather than dissolving it. The row ran for weeks in the national press. The magazine had been on sale for a fortnight.
What followed was not a house line so much as a standing invitation to disagree in public and at length. Conrad Black took several thousand words to explain how the American economy had been marched to the edge of catastrophe by politicians who sat on their hands. Walter Laqueur argued that the real question facing Europe was not Muslim immigration but Muslim integration, and that confusing the two was making both harder. Chris Woodhead told a newly appointed Michael Gove exactly which of his own promises he was about to break. Norman Lebrecht went after the fashion industry for laundering a designer’s antisemitism. David Garrow, who had won a Pulitzer for his biography of Martin Luther King, published a reading of newly released FBI surveillance files that his fellow historians spent the following year arguing with.
Some of it was right. Some of it has aged badly. All of it was written by people prepared to put their name to a position and take what came.
Alongside the polemic ran the sections readers actually kept the magazine for. Dispatches sent writers to Rome, Kiev and the Caucasus and let them file what they saw. Counterpoints was short, sharp and frequently unfair. Cosmos covered science and medicine for people who had not studied either. Civilisation — Art, Books, Critique, Drawing Board — treated criticism as a form of argument rather than a consumer guide.
Print publication wound down in 2020, and the last issue appeared the following year.
Where we are now
Standpoint is back, under new ownership, published by Briarwood International LLC.
The immediate work has been recovery. The full archive — every issue from June 2008 onward, thousands of essays, reviews, columns and dispatches — has been rebuilt, restored and made freely readable. Much of it had been effectively lost: the old site went dark, and pieces survived only as PDFs on authors’ personal websites or as citations in other people’s footnotes. Putting it back where it can be read, searched and linked to is worth doing on its own terms.
Archive material appears as it was first published. We have not gone back and quietly improved anyone’s arguments, and nothing in the archive should be read as a statement of the magazine’s current position. Where a piece is from the archive, it is labelled and dated.
Beyond that, the plan is not complicated. Commission good writers. Give them room. Publish the argument you think is strongest, then publish the person who thinks you’re wrong.
What we publish
Features — long-form essays on politics, foreign affairs, religion, education and economics.
Counterpoints — short pieces with a sharp edge.
Dispatches — reporting from somewhere, by someone who went there.
Columns — regular voices, including Westminster, Politics and Open Season.
Civilisation — art, books, music, theatre and criticism, covering Art, Books, Critique and Drawing Board.
Cosmos — science and medicine, written for the intelligent non-specialist.
What we stand for
Free expression, including for the arguments we find tiresome. Open debate conducted in public rather than settled in private. The proposition that democratic institutions are difficult to build, easy to erode, and worth the effort of maintaining. A serious interest in art, music, literature and religion as things that matter in themselves rather than as material for a culture-war column.
We are conservative with a small c and not owned by anyone’s party. Contributors write for themselves. Where a piece is commissioned, sponsored or reproduced from the archive, we say so.
We would rather publish an argument that turns out to be wrong than a piece that avoids saying anything at all.
Accuracy and complaints
We aim to get it right, and when we don’t we correct it. If you have found a factual error, or if you think something we have published falls short, write to hello@standpointmag.co.uk with the article title, the URL and what you believe the problem is. We read everything and we reply to complaints.
Corrections are made on the page, with a note explaining what changed.
Get in touch
General enquiries, corrections and permissions: hello@standpointmag.co.uk
Pitches: hello@standpointmag.co.uk — see the Contact page for what we’re looking for.
Newsletter: Subscribe for new essays and the best of the archive.
Standpoint is published by Briarwood International LLC, a limited liability company formed under the laws of Belize, registration number 000055766.
Registered Office:
3301 Chetumal Street,
Belize City, Belize.
ISSN 1757-1111.