The One Year Anniversary Post

Happy new year to our readers and welcome to 2023. It was one year ago today that, after discussions over Christmas dinner, Dad and I started Comment is Freed (I take full responsibility for the pun). The idea was to have somewhere to write longer pieces on topics that wouldn’t get commissioned, at least not at that length. To our surprise it has taken off to the extent that it’s become a regular, and fun, commitment for both of us. Between us we’ve written 114 pieces, with in total around 5 million views, and attracted over 23,000 subscribers (free and paid). We thank all of you who have supported us.

We have both found writing for the site particularly enjoyable. I think this is for two reasons. First it's freeing – there are no word limits, no restrictions on topics, nothing we can write that is too nerdy or obscure to meet an editor’s approval. We do edit each other’s pieces, and it is valuable to have someone else reading posts before sending them out, but this is largely for sense and syntax rather than content. Our sub-editing has improved somewhat through the year, though I still don’t think we’ve managed a piece without any typos.

The second reason is that it allows you to build up themes and ideas over time and keep returning to them. A newspaper column needs to be self-contained, the person picking it up on the tube will probably have no idea who you are or have read anything else you’ve written. With a newsletter you build a relationship with readers over time and can anticipate a growing level of shared understanding. This, I think, is why Substack has grown so fast – while (good) newspapers provide a level of information and reporting that no newsletter writer has the resources to produce, for opinion and comment we have the major advantage of familiarity. To this basic idea Substack have added powerful network effects, evidenced by the number of our readers who’ve found us via other newsletters they subscribe to.

We’ve also been lucky to start up in a year when there has been no shortage of things to write about. It was in our mind, when we talked it over last Christmas, that 2022 promised to be an interesting year both for British politics, with Boris Johnson in trouble over Partygate, and international relations, with Putin massing troops on the Ukrainian border. Neither of us anticipated quite how dramatic things would get in our different areas of expertise.  

Unsurprisingly many of our most read pieces have been in the aftermath of major news coming from Ukraine or Westminster. The piece with the highest number of views all year was Dad’s immediate reaction to the Russian invasion (275k). And we will, of course, both keep doing reactive pieces. But we’re also hoping that 2023 is a bit calmer, allowing us to explore a wider range of topics, particularly around policy. Similar to my recent pieces on immigration and Brexit, or Dad’s on AUKUS.

I’ve said several times before that I want to write more about the NHS but have so far failed to do so. It turns out health is quite a complicated policy area, but I am going to be doing a bigger think-tank project on the NHS over the next few months which will give me a proper chunk of time to work on the topic. Some other issues I want to take on over the year include: the future of UK universities; the inequities of the welfare system; and more generally the underlying structural problems of the UK state that are the true cause of so many of our problems.

On the more political side I have a piece I’ve been working on about the changing role of class and “aspiration” in rhetoric and voter identity. And I’ll also be looking at why Rishi Sunak is more popular than his party and what that means for (what I expect will be) the 2024 election.

Dad will obviously continue to write about ongoing events in Ukraine as the defenders continue to try and push the Russians out and Putin continues to fight a war he can neither win nor afford to lose. But he will also look more widely at British and American defence and foreign policy, and will be doing some more historical pieces, looking back at issues such as humanitarian intervention and the Iraq War, with which he engaged at the time. This coming March sees the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

As subscriber numbers have grown over the year we have tried to add a bit of variety to the content by commissioning a monthly piece on a topic we don’t have the expertise to do justice to. I hope you agree that we’ve got this series off to a very strong start with Ali Ansari’s piece on the demonstrations in Iran and Rana Mitter’s on what’s going on in China. We will continue with this over 2023, and include a few on the UK too. I will also be doing more exclusive polling with focaldata as I did for my Brexit piece. And we will continue with the occasional Q+As once I’ve figured out how to use the chat function (do download the app because you can only access it through there).

Beyond that I don’t think we’ll make many more changes at least for the time being, as this format seems to be working. Unlike some other substackers we have no desire to build an empire or become, in effect, newspaper editors. We both have plenty of other commitments and projects that we want to keep going. (In Dad’s case this includes nominal retirement, though there have been no signs of this happening in practice so far).   

Which means we are going to keep the price the same for 2023. We always wanted to set it as low as Substack will allow so that as many people could subscribe as possible. We also don’t write as much as some others on here – and don’t really want to feel pressured into doing so which we probably would if we charged a lot more. Hopefully the price of a cup of coffee a month feels reasonable for what subscribers are getting. One thing I would ask if that if you are able to put the subscription on expenses (or happen to be extremely rich) then upgrading to founder status would help us keep the price low for everyone else.

For those of you who aren’t in this category I’d just ask that if you find a piece valuable you share it as widely as possible. We don’t spend any money on marketing or promotion so are entirely dependent on reader sharing and recommendations in order to build an audience. And keep commenting and emailing us with your thoughts both on the pieces, what you think we’re doing well and poorly, and what you’d like to see more of in the future.