Stephen Pollard - Biography

right Stephen Pollard (born ca. 1965) is a British author and journalist, currently editor of The Jewish Chronicle. He is a former Chairman of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and a former president of the Centre for the New Europe, a free-market think tank based in Brussels. He has written columns for several publications, including The Times and the Daily Mail, and also maintains a blog.

Pollard is an alumnus of John Lyon School and Mansfield College, Oxford.

He is an advocate of market-based public service reforms. He is also a frequent commentator on Israel, and a critic of Jihadist movements.

Career

Formerly a journalist and leader-writer on the Daily Express, Stephen Pollard left that paper in 2001 soon after it was taken over by Richard Desmond, a publisher of pornographic magazines, who began implementing radical cutbacks. Pollard's last leader for the paper, on the problems of the British farming industry, turned out to contain the words "Fuck you, Desmond" spelt out with the first letter of each sentence. A standing job offer at The Times was withdrawn as they considered the acrostic in the article to be "unacceptable" and "insulting".

After early articles for the Fabian Review in 1993 (e.g. "More Southern Discomfort", discussing ways by which the Labour Party could reform itself sufficiently to regain power), Stephen Pollard's career has seen a fair degree of political movement from Left to Right; he was formerly an advisor to anti-EU Labour politician Peter Shore.

Pollard was one of the signatory founders, in 2005, of the Henry Jackson Society, which advocates a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world.

By 2006, Pollard held the view that, in the "battle to save western civilisation", the "Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy". His biography of Labour Party politician David Blunkett, with the subject's involvement, was published in 2004.

In November 2008, Pollard became editor of The Jewish Chronicle. In his 2009 New York Times review of a book by Bruce Bawer, Pollard endorsed the notion that "liberal appeasement" is paving the way for a "replacement" of European civilization by radical Islamist ideology. Pollard has argued that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has tipped over to antisemitism and the defence of attacks on Jews. Writing about the disruption of an appearance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra on 1 September 2011 at the BBC Proms he asserted that the actions of pro-Palestinian activists had a "chilling air" reminiscent of "the way Nazi party members broke up meetings" in Weimar Germany.

External links

• European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism