The editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, has been offered the prestigious Legion d’Honneur by France’s socialist government.
But why?
Before the referendum, the FT campaigned with every sinew for Britain to remain in the EU, and following the result it has relentlessly prophesied economic doom and disaster for Britain. All this has delighted the French government, which is passionately Europhile.
Yet the Pink 'Un - so-called because it's printed on pink paper - loves nothing better than to trash Britain and to talk her down...
STEPHEN GLOVER: Owned by the Japanese, loved by the Eurocrats - is this why the pompous Pink 'Un so poisonously trashes Britain?
By Stephen Glover for the Daily Mail
11 August 2016
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber has been offered the prestigious Legion d’Honneur by France’s socialist government
On the face of it, the news that the low-profile editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, has been offered the prestigious Legion d’Honneur by France’s socialist government is not of huge importance.
After all, the Financial Times is for most of us a peripheral newspaper which is seldom mentioned on radio or television. This rather austere and sometimes self-important publication is read by very few people in Britain, and appears to have little impact on our national life.
But it is, in fact, extremely influential for two reasons. It is practically the only British paper read by senior bureaucrats in Brussels. And it wields enormous power in the City and the financial markets.
Mr Barber’s embrace by the French government is therefore highly significant. A singularly elitist group of people has chosen to honour him not only because he has been a successful journalist but also — one might say especially — because of (to quote from the French ambassador’s letter) ‘the Financial Times’s positive role in the European debate’.
Properly translated, this means that before the referendum, the FT campaigned with every sinew for Britain to remain in the EU, and following the result it has relentlessly prophesied economic doom and disaster for Britain. All this has delighted the French government, which is passionately Europhile.
There is, of course, no reason why the FT shouldn’t believe this country’s interests were best served by staying in the EU. Other newspapers such as The Times and the Guardian have taken this view.
What is so striking is the one-sided and almost hysterical manner in which the supposedly august Financial Times has pursued its argument and, in the process, consistently talked down the British economy. It’s almost as if the paper wants there to be a recession, to punish the unruly peasants who dared to defy it in the referendum.
Significantly, the FT is no longer really a British newspaper, not only because about three-quarters of its readership is abroad, but because since last summer it has been owned by Nikkei, a Japanese conglomerate which has no loyalties to this country.
Let me give a few examples of how extraordinarily biased the newspaper’s treatment of the EU has been. Before the June 23 vote, it gave wall-to-wall coverage to every scare story dreamt up by the Remain camp, and its leader column forecast Armageddon if this country voted to leave.
The day before the vote, the paper warned that ‘leaving the EU would be a grievous act of self-harm that would damage not only the UK but Europe and the West’. Unfortunately for the FT, the British people weren’t listening.
The Financial Times is for most of us a peripheral newspaper which is seldom mentioned on radio or television
After the vote, the paper’s leader column was inconsolable. Britain had ‘cut itself adrift’ and faced a ‘new diminished place in the world’.
A recession was inevitable and business confidence would be ‘battered’. The paper’s columnists (some of whom are normally very good) uniformly took up a similar cry.
Even more arresting, in a paper which likes to think of itself as objective and balanced, has been the prominence given to negative post-Brexit stories, and the way in which periodic good news is often either underplayed or ignored.
For example, the giant insurer Aviva made the momentous announcement in early July that Britain’s vote to leave the EU would have ‘no significant operational impact on the company’. The FT deigned to run only the briefest of items about this piece of positive news.
At the beginning of this month, the respected National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicted only a ‘temporary’ downturn and foresaw ‘growth prospects ameliorating in 2018 and beyond’. The FT spun the think-tank’s balanced report by homing in on its prediction that there was a 50 per cent chance of a recession between now and the end of next year.
Headlines of the FT: Voice of doom
Earlier this week, the very good news that retail sales grew by 1.1 per cent in July from a year previously was relegated to the bottom of page two. Who can doubt that, if sales had fallen (as the FT probably expected, and even hoped, they would), the story would have been all over the front page?
And so on. Brexit is a blow to savers, to property values, to car sales, even to the market for fine wine. Of course, it may be some or even all of these things, but a circumspect and even-handed financial newspaper would realise that it is too early to be categorical, and avoid talking this country down.
Several of my FT-reading friends, by no means all of them Brexiteers, are aghast. Their views were reflected in a letter sent to the paper by Johnnie Boden, founder of the immensely successful catalogue clothing company, in July.
Though a Remainer, Mr Boden is prepared to live with the result. ‘You lost the Brexit argument. I voted “In” but lost, too. We must accept the verdict. Your constant talking down of the economy sounds like very sour grapes. And, dare I say it, irresponsible.’
Isn’t that the point? Because the FT is the bible of many in the City and the financial markets, its remorseless and exaggerated pessimism, and its reluctance to countenance any evidence that the economy may not be in freefall, are apt to undermine confidence, and possibly make things worse than they otherwise would be.
And the Euro-elite in Brussels, who misguidedly believe that the paper reflects what the British are thinking, are no doubt cock-a-hoop to see all this self-flagellation and despair which may lead (so they secretly hope) to a second referendum. Imagine the glee with which the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, picks up his FT every morning!
The fascinating question is whether the paper’s Japanese owners are actively encouraging what is going on. It is not easy to say. Although a handful of Nikkei journalists and executives have a presence on the FT’s editorial floor, I am told they are only there to learn how their newly acquired paper runs.
The FT idiotically wanted Labour’s Neil Kinnock to be elected Prime Minister in 1992
But these are early days. Nikkei owns several newspapers in Japan, where journalists are far more deferential, and much less liable to question authority, than they are in Britain. Is it really likely, in the longer term, that this very conservative company will allow the FT (which has uncovered a number of financial scandals in the past) to do as it pleases?
I doubt, in fact, that Nikkei is behind the FT’s post-Brexit flight from sanity. The editor, Lionel Barber, to whom I am told the company has given editorial carte blanche until he departs in two years’ time, is surely making the running.
But it nevertheless seems to me outrageous that Pearson, which had owned the FT since 1957, should ever have been allowed to sell the paper to the Japanese. (It trousered £844 million, considered by many to be more than the paper was worth.)
For although it may be Left-leaning (the paper idiotically wanted Labour’s Neil Kinnock to be elected prime minister in 1992), somewhat pompous and occasionally arrogant, the Financial Times was once a great British institution which served the City and thus, inevitably, contributed to the wellbeing of this country.
Over the years, as its sales abroad increasingly outstripped those in the UK, it became progressively less British and long ago lost any interest it ever had in ordinary British businessmen toiling away in, for example, Scun thorpe or Nuneaton.
Now that it has fallen into the hands of a Japanese company, it has almost completed its journey away from our shores. I don’t accuse Mr Barber of being unpatriotic. But I do think the FT feels a decreasing sense of allegiance to this country.
I hope I’m wrong. In that case, the paper’s editor would politely decline this bauble proffered by a foreign government for services to an institution which the British people in their wisdom have rejected. The pity is I don’t expect he will.
But why?
Before the referendum, the FT campaigned with every sinew for Britain to remain in the EU, and following the result it has relentlessly prophesied economic doom and disaster for Britain. All this has delighted the French government, which is passionately Europhile.
Yet the Pink 'Un - so-called because it's printed on pink paper - loves nothing better than to trash Britain and to talk her down...
STEPHEN GLOVER: Owned by the Japanese, loved by the Eurocrats - is this why the pompous Pink 'Un so poisonously trashes Britain?
By Stephen Glover for the Daily Mail
11 August 2016
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber has been offered the prestigious Legion d’Honneur by France’s socialist government
On the face of it, the news that the low-profile editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, has been offered the prestigious Legion d’Honneur by France’s socialist government is not of huge importance.
After all, the Financial Times is for most of us a peripheral newspaper which is seldom mentioned on radio or television. This rather austere and sometimes self-important publication is read by very few people in Britain, and appears to have little impact on our national life.
But it is, in fact, extremely influential for two reasons. It is practically the only British paper read by senior bureaucrats in Brussels. And it wields enormous power in the City and the financial markets.
Mr Barber’s embrace by the French government is therefore highly significant. A singularly elitist group of people has chosen to honour him not only because he has been a successful journalist but also — one might say especially — because of (to quote from the French ambassador’s letter) ‘the Financial Times’s positive role in the European debate’.
Properly translated, this means that before the referendum, the FT campaigned with every sinew for Britain to remain in the EU, and following the result it has relentlessly prophesied economic doom and disaster for Britain. All this has delighted the French government, which is passionately Europhile.
There is, of course, no reason why the FT shouldn’t believe this country’s interests were best served by staying in the EU. Other newspapers such as The Times and the Guardian have taken this view.
What is so striking is the one-sided and almost hysterical manner in which the supposedly august Financial Times has pursued its argument and, in the process, consistently talked down the British economy. It’s almost as if the paper wants there to be a recession, to punish the unruly peasants who dared to defy it in the referendum.
Significantly, the FT is no longer really a British newspaper, not only because about three-quarters of its readership is abroad, but because since last summer it has been owned by Nikkei, a Japanese conglomerate which has no loyalties to this country.
Let me give a few examples of how extraordinarily biased the newspaper’s treatment of the EU has been. Before the June 23 vote, it gave wall-to-wall coverage to every scare story dreamt up by the Remain camp, and its leader column forecast Armageddon if this country voted to leave.
The day before the vote, the paper warned that ‘leaving the EU would be a grievous act of self-harm that would damage not only the UK but Europe and the West’. Unfortunately for the FT, the British people weren’t listening.
The Financial Times is for most of us a peripheral newspaper which is seldom mentioned on radio or television
After the vote, the paper’s leader column was inconsolable. Britain had ‘cut itself adrift’ and faced a ‘new diminished place in the world’.
A recession was inevitable and business confidence would be ‘battered’. The paper’s columnists (some of whom are normally very good) uniformly took up a similar cry.
Even more arresting, in a paper which likes to think of itself as objective and balanced, has been the prominence given to negative post-Brexit stories, and the way in which periodic good news is often either underplayed or ignored.
For example, the giant insurer Aviva made the momentous announcement in early July that Britain’s vote to leave the EU would have ‘no significant operational impact on the company’. The FT deigned to run only the briefest of items about this piece of positive news.
At the beginning of this month, the respected National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicted only a ‘temporary’ downturn and foresaw ‘growth prospects ameliorating in 2018 and beyond’. The FT spun the think-tank’s balanced report by homing in on its prediction that there was a 50 per cent chance of a recession between now and the end of next year.
Headlines of the FT: Voice of doom
Earlier this week, the very good news that retail sales grew by 1.1 per cent in July from a year previously was relegated to the bottom of page two. Who can doubt that, if sales had fallen (as the FT probably expected, and even hoped, they would), the story would have been all over the front page?
And so on. Brexit is a blow to savers, to property values, to car sales, even to the market for fine wine. Of course, it may be some or even all of these things, but a circumspect and even-handed financial newspaper would realise that it is too early to be categorical, and avoid talking this country down.
Several of my FT-reading friends, by no means all of them Brexiteers, are aghast. Their views were reflected in a letter sent to the paper by Johnnie Boden, founder of the immensely successful catalogue clothing company, in July.
Though a Remainer, Mr Boden is prepared to live with the result. ‘You lost the Brexit argument. I voted “In” but lost, too. We must accept the verdict. Your constant talking down of the economy sounds like very sour grapes. And, dare I say it, irresponsible.’
Isn’t that the point? Because the FT is the bible of many in the City and the financial markets, its remorseless and exaggerated pessimism, and its reluctance to countenance any evidence that the economy may not be in freefall, are apt to undermine confidence, and possibly make things worse than they otherwise would be.
And the Euro-elite in Brussels, who misguidedly believe that the paper reflects what the British are thinking, are no doubt cock-a-hoop to see all this self-flagellation and despair which may lead (so they secretly hope) to a second referendum. Imagine the glee with which the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, picks up his FT every morning!
The fascinating question is whether the paper’s Japanese owners are actively encouraging what is going on. It is not easy to say. Although a handful of Nikkei journalists and executives have a presence on the FT’s editorial floor, I am told they are only there to learn how their newly acquired paper runs.
The FT idiotically wanted Labour’s Neil Kinnock to be elected Prime Minister in 1992
But these are early days. Nikkei owns several newspapers in Japan, where journalists are far more deferential, and much less liable to question authority, than they are in Britain. Is it really likely, in the longer term, that this very conservative company will allow the FT (which has uncovered a number of financial scandals in the past) to do as it pleases?
I doubt, in fact, that Nikkei is behind the FT’s post-Brexit flight from sanity. The editor, Lionel Barber, to whom I am told the company has given editorial carte blanche until he departs in two years’ time, is surely making the running.
But it nevertheless seems to me outrageous that Pearson, which had owned the FT since 1957, should ever have been allowed to sell the paper to the Japanese. (It trousered £844 million, considered by many to be more than the paper was worth.)
For although it may be Left-leaning (the paper idiotically wanted Labour’s Neil Kinnock to be elected prime minister in 1992), somewhat pompous and occasionally arrogant, the Financial Times was once a great British institution which served the City and thus, inevitably, contributed to the wellbeing of this country.
Over the years, as its sales abroad increasingly outstripped those in the UK, it became progressively less British and long ago lost any interest it ever had in ordinary British businessmen toiling away in, for example, Scun thorpe or Nuneaton.
Now that it has fallen into the hands of a Japanese company, it has almost completed its journey away from our shores. I don’t accuse Mr Barber of being unpatriotic. But I do think the FT feels a decreasing sense of allegiance to this country.
I hope I’m wrong. In that case, the paper’s editor would politely decline this bauble proffered by a foreign government for services to an institution which the British people in their wisdom have rejected. The pity is I don’t expect he will.
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