Steel: too edgy for the Indy?

Has the Independent fallen a little bit out of love with Mark Steel? The socialist, columnist, author and comedian has revealed, via his blog, that the paper has twice not run his columns in recent months. "No column in the Independent again this morning, as they weren't overly keen on the issue I was writing about, which is connected to the Viva Palestina convoy of trucks, that left London on 14 February to deliver food and medicine to Gaza," Steel told readers last month. In January, in a plaintive post titled "Where's my column gone?", Steel revealed that he was bumped due to an unexpected death. "Given that it takes me several months to collect together the documents needed to get my car tax, I'm amazed that anyone manages to assemble the hundreds of bits required to produce a newspaper every single day. Then something happens, such as John Updike dies, and the newspaper gets someone to write something about him, and right in the space where my own column was destined to appear. Couldn't he have hung on for a few more hours and buggered up someone the following day?" That column was about the BBC not running the Gaza charity appeal. Thankfully, Steel is in today's paper, writing on the safer topic of why Karl Marx was right. Meanwhile, about 200 members of the National Union of Journalists at the Independent and Independent on Sunday will hold a mandatory chapel meeting on Friday between 5pm and 7pm, sure to disrupt production for the all-important Saturday paper.