The text below is the Manifesto we issued to accompany the launch of The Voice of the Turtle into cyberspace in the Summer of 1998.

Welcome to the new incarnation of The Voice of the Turtle!

The original Voice of the Turtle came in pamphlet format, with a distinctive red cover. Founded in 1993 by Ben Fender, the Turtle was subsequently co-edited by Ben and by Chris Brooke, then organisers of the Oxford University Fabian Society and the Balliol Left Caucus respectively. The six issues -- each around thirty to forty pages long, with a print run of between fifty and a hundred, and sold for about a pound -- were written haphazardly by our friends and colleagues, assembled with the PageMaker program in the basement computer room at Balliol College, printed (well, photo-copied and stapled, really) by the helpful staff at the Oxford Print Centre on Holywell Street, and distributed around the university. The first magazine came out in the summer of 1993; the final copy appeared just over two years later. Vague intentions to carry on publishing the Turtle after graduation were never acted upon, and time passed.

Plans to relaunch the journal in an electronic format were laid in March 1998, over a great deal of beer in Ithaca, New York. People were contacted; articles were solicited; and HTML code was hastily learned. Organisational work continued through the summer, fitfully at times when one of us was without an internet connection for weeks at a stretch, the editors communicating electronically while travelling around between both coasts of the United States, England, Switzerland and Poland. With enough coherence achieved and enough content in place, we're now officially launching our organ into cyberspace.

The revived Turtle aims to carry on the traditions of its predecessor. It will therefore remain progressive, non-sectarian, ecumenical, left-wing, free-thinking, totally optimistic and occasionally frivolous, with its content not dictated by any party line beyond the arbitrary whim of the democratically centralised editorial collective. Ben Fender is currently solving problems in the People's Republic of China; for the present, editorial responsibilies are being shared by Chris Brooke and Raj Patel.

We're delighted that several of the original contributors and regular readers have agreed to write for the web-based version, and that so many old Comrades Turtle have expressed an interest in continuing to contribute, and we look forward to reading your articles. We also hope that as time goes by more and more writers can join our tank (being the place where one keeps turtles), as the Chelonian Pleasure Machine soars onwards and upwards.

The Turtle will no longer be published in separate issues. Following the lead of John Birt and Karl Marx, two of the presiding godfathers of our age, the Turtle will synthesize the concept of "rolling news" and of the "permanent revolution" and remain in a state of continual dialectical flux, being adjusted and expanded as new content is made available. This means, for all our would-be contributors, that we no longer have any deadlines: send us your material as soon as you've written it.

What are we interested in publishing? The Turtle is, above all, a political animal, with a set of surprisingly diverse interests. We want commentary and analysis of British politics and society, of course, but the sun never sets over the empire of our curiosity and we also hope to be able to discuss European politics, as well as ruminate on the Americas, South Asia, Southern Africa and, especially, the former Soviet Bloc. Book reviews, cultural criticism, original poetry, historical research notes, cartoons, polemics, archaeological field reports and more or less sophisticated attempts to come to grips with the global political economy are all welcome. And we never have enough jokes...

Avanti Popolo! Traditional values in a modern setting!

The Editors