First things first, The Independent is really expensive. I'd normally put this near the end, but The Independent is 56 pages + 20 pages for the 'Budget 2009' supplement + 20 pages for the 'Independent Life' supplement + 8 pages for the 'Nursing' supplement + 8 pages for the 'Education & Careers' supplement. This is 112 pages in total (though the 'Budget 2009' supplement is likely a special for today only), but The Independent is also the most expensive newspaper I've seen so far in this experiment at £1. So it's 10p more than The Times, but also has about 10p more content than The Times. That meants a lot to read through, but only if you have the time.
To start with, the banner headline today is "That’s Rich!" (yep, still on the budget, and away from ALL CAPS today) with a sub-headline of "PM tears up New Labour script with 50p tax rate for highest earners". This is a story I was actually pleased to see (not raising the 40p top tax rate has been a New Labour promise since 1997, now they've broken it and not even the Tories plan to reverse the policy) and I think the story was handled well. You had the Labour proposal, and attack on it from the Tories, Lib Dems, and others. The typical rhetoric was present too, along with a good comment from Peter Mandelson that this is very similar to what Barack Obama has done in American, which I spotted too.
Further on is criticism of the Chancellor's overly optimistic growth predictions, and a story noting how excessive government borrowing is something that was going back during the 'boom years' of New Labour that we're being punished for now. There's also further coverage of Dr. Panayiotis Zavos and his claims about human cloning. I have no idea how plausible his claims are, but the story is definitely an interesting one, and I'm liking The Independent's coverage of it. Also of interest were articles about the growth of far-right groups on Facebook and how little Facebook themselves are doing about it, and a recent showing in Spain of Viridiana, an anti-Catholic film banned under Francisco Franco and only legally shown in 1977 (sixteen years after the film was released).
What I'm most interested in is the Opinion & Debate section though. There are two opinions on the budget, both cautiously positive about it, though one more so than the other. But what caught my eye was the 'As the world sees it...' section, showing how an Iranian paper covered Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech (with a reference to the 'Western media', which I see to be as much a phantom enemy as the 'terrorists' referred to by the Republicans in America), how an Australian paper is covering terrorism and the media, and how a newspaper in Miami viewed Susan Boyle, the new internet sensation who was on Britain's Got Talent. Quite enlightening.
Further into the section the earlier snippet from the Iranian paper looks even more foolish when an opinion piece criticises the walkout on Ahmadinejad's speech as 'childish' and says his speech was not nearly as controversial and divisive as it was made out to be. There's also the best letter I've seen all week so far, with a reader attacking the 'dire prospect of a Tory government' by pointing out that the New Labour government of the last 12 years practically is a Tory government, leaving former Labour supporters with nowhere to do (unless we go to the Lib Dems, who no one really seems to think will ever have a chance of forming a government).
The Budget 2009 supplement has a lot of discussion about the economy (most of which I couldn't get through) but also had interviews with several voters and who they intended to vote for. Myself, I went for the Lib Dems in 2005, now wavering between them and Labour. The puzzles are present but look rather brief, and the paper otherwise feels quite like a more liberal version of The Times, being informative but rather lengthy and humourless.
Overall, I think I liked The Independent slightly more than The Times, but have ended up liking both of them. There could be something of a competition between papers to see which will be my regular read once I'm done with this experiment, but we're not finished yet.
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