Any other business

Globophobia | 27 March 2004

New citizens of the United Kingdom may soon have to undergo a citizenship test, pledging their allegiance to the Queen, demonstrating their knowledge of English language and culture and quite possibly promising to cheer on the England cricket team. What they needn’t bother to do, on the other hand, is to take too much notice

Globophobia | 20 March 2004

At last, some good news for the anti-war lobby. British servicemen will not be forced — in fact will not be allowed — to do America’s dirty work for it. That is my interpretation, at any rate, of Dodd Amendment no. 2660 to the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act, passed by the US Senate last

Is Gannett poised to swoop on the Daily Telegraph?

Amid all the chatter about who may buy the Telegraph Group, the names one hears most often are those of the Daily Mail group, the Express group and Richard Desmond, and the Barclay Brothers. Occasionally various venture capitalists are also mentioned. The one company that is hardly taken seriously, though it appears on most lists

Is Mr Portillo the man to stop the BBC getting any dumber?

Who should be the next chairman of the BBC? Should it be Terry Burns, the former Treasury mandarin and chairman of Abbey National? Or Michael Grade, the former chief executive of Channel 4? Or Michael Portillo? Their names are believed to be among the 79 people who have applied for the chairmanship. A great deal

Globophobia | 7 February 2004

The great food terror is upon us again. On Friday, 23 January the EU Commission banned all imports of chickens and chicken products from Thailand in response to fears over ‘Avian flu’, which two Thais have contracted from the birds: ‘Although the risk of importing the virus in meat or meat products is probably very

Why Andrew Neil would make a better editor than chief executive

A few weeks ago BBC television news announced that the Barclay brothers were the new owners of the Daily Telegraph. It has since become plain that they may not be. They hope to acquire Conrad Black’s 30 per cent stake in Hollinger International (owner of the Telegraph newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and

Globophobia | 24 January 2004

The assortment of Snodgrasses and Ponsonbys who make up the British Committee for the Restitution of the Elgin Marbles have launched yet another chapter of their long campaign to return the fragmented statues to Greece. How very appropriate, they argue, if the arrival of the marbles were to coincide with that of the Olympic flame

Globophobia | 17 January 2004

Is your food industry being forced out of business by nasty foreign importers who insist on selling a similar product at half the price? Don’t worry: just start a health scare. It’s cheap, it’s rapid and the World Trade Organisation hasn’t yet got to grips with the possibilities for promoting protectionism via fear. Last week

Should the Telegraph go tabloid? It’s a tough call

The serious newspapers — what we used to call the broadsheets — have extracted themselves from the frying pan only to find themselves in the fire. For years they lived in a world of reduced cover prices which meant lower revenues. Rupert Murdoch started that when he slashed the price of the Times in September

Globophobia | 10 January 2004

Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of global warming, which, it asserts, is responsible for 2.4 per cent of cases of diarrhoea and 6 per cent of cases of malaria. And if we in the first world think we can feel smug, it

We have never been closer to state control of the press

I must confess that I have not watched the development of Ofcom with the care I should have. In the distance I heard the voices of colleagues muttering that the new media regulator would interfere in the freedom of the press, but I chose not to listen. I thought that Ofcom, as the successor of