MEDIA STUDIES
Why the Financial Times couldn't give a brass farthing for small businessmen
STEPHEN GLOVER
The attitude of some broadsheet papers towards last week's protests was not exces- sively sympathetic. Over at the Guardian, Polly Toynbee went off like a firecracker. The Independent took a notably superior line, implying that if there were to be any change in fuel tax, it had better be in an upward direction. But it was the Financial Times that excelled itself. If the protesters saw themselves as little businessmen bat- tling against the power of an overmighty state, the paper was in no doubt where its loyalties lay. With the state.
Last Friday it ran a stern leader head- lined 'Fuel crisis: the road ahead', Picture, dear reader, the hand that penned this mas- terpiece. Almost certainly its owner has just returned from a restaurant lunch in a taxi that emitted clouds of fumes into the Lon- don air. Outside the leader writer's pleas- ant London home, we may surmise, sits a gleaming company car. On his — it must be a man — noticeboard is pinned a photo- graph of a holiday home in Tuscany, towards which this same car has recently transported the leader writer's family in comfort and at considerable speed.
Does this person feel a smidgen of sym- pathy for either the protesters or the over- taxed motorist? Do not be silly. 'Tony Blair must immediately ensure,' the editorial thundered, that 'Britain will never again be at the mercy of a handful of demonstrators camping outside fuel depots.' (One can sense the leader writer wincing at that word `camping'. The very thought!) 'In future,' he went on, 'the police must arrest anyone blockading the roads without delay'. In the leader writer's opinion, 'lower petrol duties alone would be a huge mistake, a recipe guaranteeing every group with a grievance would try to halt the country'. There were several arguments against lower fuel taxes. `High fuel taxes reduce excessive driving and thus the other harmful effects of motor vehicles such as noise, accidents, other pol- lutants and congestion.' You don't say.
Even by the standards of the Financial Times, this was a remarkable leader. There was no suggestion that the government had been at fault — either in setting fuel taxes at such astronomical levels or in its reaction to the blockade — and there was a com- plete absence of sympathy for the protesters. Yet these same protesters are, if not regular readers of the Financial Times, hard-pressed small businessmen, little capi- talists if you like, for whom one might have expected a business newspaper to show some concern.
The Financial Times is, I accept, one of the wonders of the modern world. Almost alone it has not dumbed down. Its resources are vast — more specialists and foreign corre- spondents than any other Fleet Street news- paper. Every issue carries mind-boggling amounts of financial information. With unparalleled aplomb, the paper lectures busi- nessmen on how better to run their business- es and politicians on how to be better politi- cians. But the one thing it is not is a newspa- per for the ordinary businessman stuck on the M6 in his Ford Mondeo. It is the paper for executives in FUSE 100 companies and sleek fonctionnaires shuttling between Euro- pean capitals. Rather fittingly, its owner, Pearson, specialises in luxury goods.
Nor is the Financial Times any longer strictly a British newspaper. It has recently achieved impressive circulation growth in the United States, and over half its sales are now made abroad. Its heart, if it has one, is cosmopolitan. This should make us cau- tious. When the Financial Times eulogises the euro, it does not do so bearing in mind the best interests of the widget-maker in West Bromwich. It could not care less about that widget-maker, as this leader attests. It has no conception of the effect of crippling taxes on small businesses or the costs for these businesses of converting to the euro. The paper is written for an elite which is often not British and whose interests are usually very different from our own.
cotland's newspaper market has been compared to 1930s Chicago. The editor of the Daily Record is sacked and the Scottish Daily Mail gets a new editor from London. The Scotsman, after a considerable makeover, is still selling at only 20 pence, making life harder for other titles. You would not necessarily think that this was the perfect time or place to launch a new title, but that is exactly what the Swedish Bonnier Group is doing this week. The Edinburgh-based Business a.m. is a new business, financial and political daily. Its format is described as European — longer than a tabloid but not so wide as a broad- sheet. This alone makes it noteworthy.
Bonnier argue that, far from being 1930s Chicago, Scotland is not a particularly com- petitive market. The Swedes point out that small European countries like Finland and Norway support more titles than Scotland. The mistake here may be to treat Scotland as a separate country, which it isn't — at any rate not yet. But Bonnier describes itself as the eighth largest publishing house in Europe, and has launched successful titles in Latvia and Slovenia. So perhaps they will make it. Andrew Neil, publisher of the Scotsman, has reportedly vowed to see them off his turf.
Readers may remember that when the left-leaning pundit Andrew Marr was appointed political editor of the BBC, I doubted whether he could ever be wholly objective as a reporter. Within a few weeks of taking up his post he is involved in a spat with the Daily Mail, and his old newspaper, the Independent, has rushed to his defence. The Independent accuses the Mail of mis- quoting Mr Man, but actually its own ver- sion of events is quite damning. On Tuesday of last week, when most observers did not believe that things looked spectacularly good for Mr Blair, Mr Man said on BBC1's Nine O'Clock News, 'If Mr Blair has really defused his most serious domestic crisis, it's a coup for his style of management.' The Indepen- dent makes much of that 'if', which Mr Marr repeated. It's a fair point, but it was surely odd at that stage even to hypothesise that Mr Blair might have achieved a great coup tantamount to saying that if King Harold could only get that arrow out of his eye, he would be able to send William packing back to Normandy.
So my doubts about Mr Marr remain. And yet I cannot deny that I have enjoyed his performances so far. He approaches them more as a columnist than a reporter, offering intelligent insights and revealing formidable political savvy. I dare say this way of doing things may grate on us before long, and it will certainly open him to fur- ther charges of bias, but for the time being it is a breath of fresh air.
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