The price of everything

The outrageous cost of a free press

 

“As you walk through the front door of the Columbia School of Journalism, the first thing you see is this paragraph, cast on a bronze plaque:

“OUR REPUBLIC AND ITS PRESS WILL RISE OR FALL TOGETHER. AN ABLE, DISINTERESTED, PUBLIC-SPIRITED PRESS, WITH TRAINED INTELLIGENCE TO KNOW THE RIGHT AND COURAGE TO DO IT CAN PRESERVE THAT PUBLIC VIRTUE WITHOUT WHICH POPULAR GOVERNMENT IS A SHAM AND A MOCKERY. A CYNICAL, MERCENARY, DEMAGOGIC PRESS WILL PRODUCE IN TIME A PEOPLE AS BASE AS ITSELF. THE POWER TO MOULD THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLIC WILL BE IN THE HANDS OF THE JOURNALISTS OF FUTURE GENERATIONS.

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Failure, guaranteed

“Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if the goods are worthless.”

• Sinclair Lewis.

 

There are at least three serious impediments that prevent fund managers from doing their job – to make the best possible return for their clients – properly.

The first, and the most critical, is that the main commercial driver of fund management organisations is to generate fee income. Under conventional ad valorem fee structures, the more assets fund managers manage, the more they earn. Awkwardly for the industry, a growing library of evidence suggests that the larger fund managers become, the less likelihood they have of delivering superior investment returns. Above a certain level of assets, size is likely to correlate inversely with performance. This is unfortunate for the retail investors who are most easily won over by the power and marketing heft of well-funded brands..

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Darkest hour

“This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide.”

• Text from the UK Cabinet Office, delivered to every household in the country, 2016.

 

From Brexit Central, by Robert Tombs, Emeritus Professor of French History at the University of Cambridge and co-Chairman of Briefings for Brexit:

When historians of the future look back on Britain in our time, they will surely see our row over Brexit as extraordinary. Not because people disagree and campaign: that is normal and healthy; but because an influential section of the country, and particularly of its upper classes, are refusing to accept the will of the majority as legitimate or binding. It is no exaggeration to call this a revolt..

Its unusual nature is shown by the arguments of its hardline supporters – arguments that would undermine any democratic system, and which have rarely been heard in any advanced country since the nineteenth century. For example: that most voters do not know what they are voting for; that working-class voters are too ignorant to make a choice; that people without advanced education should have their political rights reduced; that older people’s opinions have inferior legitimacy..

Up to now, it is those who voted Leave who have been scrutinised as an oddity – poor, old, stupid, ‘left behind’, and so on. But what of those who are still scrambling to keep us, in one form or another, in the EU, despite the fact that the EU is visibly in crisis, and despite the fact that by resisting the will of the majority they are risking a political and constitutional crisis?..

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Holding out for a hero

 

From The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Alone, 1932 – 1940, by William Manchester:

The appeasers distrusted France, blamed her for the punitive Versailles clauses, felt Germany had been wronged, and were determined to make restitution. Lord Lothian declared that it was Britain’s moral obligation to support the Germans in their struggle to “escape from encirclement” (the encircling powers, presumably, being France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg) “to a position of balance.” He neglected to add that any shift in the status quo would mean the liquidation of legitimate governments. At Versailles the 1914-1918 holocaust had been blamed on the Germans. Now the fashionable scapegoat was Germany’s ancient enemy. “Lady Astor,” The Week reported, “is obsessed with a vivid personal dislike of the French.” As late as November 7, 1936, a member of the cabinet told his ministerial colleagues that Francophobia was increasing in England because the French were an obstacle to Britain “getting on terms with the dictator powers.”

 

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#Parmageddon

"My nightmare was everyone else had gone and we were still negotiating with Barnier and Tusk to leave."

• Tweet from Economist John Hearn (@jbhearn), 29 May 2018.

“One of the greatest tragedies in life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.”

• Benjamin Franklin.

 

Something rather odd is going on in the mainstream media, when the most insightful commentaries around Brexit are surfacing from publications like The New Statesman as opposed, say, from The Financial Times or The Economist. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given that the most insightful reportage of the credit crisis came from the likes of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, through the good offices of the journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Lewis respectively. John Gray has form here; again for The New Statesman he forensically examined, last October (‘The neo-Georgian Prime Minister’), the weaknesses of a Prime Minister whose sole work experience in the “real world” consisted of a brief spell in public relations..

 

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