Daily Mail Shilling For Dictatorship

When Stephen “Miserable Git” Glover penned his latest intemperate rant, “Owned by the Japs, loved by the Eurocrats - is this why the pompous Pink ‘Un so poisonously trashes Britain?”, which was an attack on the FT and its editor Lionel Barber, he might have been thought to be merely sounding off against one of the few titles to advocate a vote for Britain to remain in the EU in June’s referendum.

What do you mean, am I receiving any of my f***ing bonus in Renminbi, c***?!? Er, with the greatest of respect, Mr Jay

Indeed, there was the usual sour and sneering tone as Glover told “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”.

Ah, areas where the remit of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre does not run. But there was also the matter of Barber having been awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French Government. “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’” carped Mr Happy.

But then Glover lets slip the real reason for his attack: “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”. Er, hang on a minute.

As Roy Greenslade has pointed out, since the takeover “there is no convincing evidence that it has since become anti-British, as Glover contended. Nor has there been a scintilla of evidence of Nikkei influencing the paper’s content”. Not only that, Nikkei’s chairman “said there was no possibility of his company interfering in the paper’s editorial”.

So what is the Mail on about? Is this a merely routine slice of hypocrisy, given the Mail is controlled by a company in Bermuda? The deeply subversive Guardian has shed some light on the potential motive. “Mail Online has gone into partnership with The People’s Daily, the official organ of the Chinese communist party”, they have reported.

There was more. “An article about an embarrassing Chinese hospital mistake was published on the Mail group’s Australian website with the tag, ‘This story was produced in partnership with The People’s Daily’”. That, as is helpfully explained, is “the official organ of the Chinese communist party”. Well, well.

The Daily Mail is slagging off business leaders in democratic Japan, while cosying up to the totalitarian dictatorship that runs The People’s Republic Of China. No wonder Mail pundits keep ranting on about how terrible all those Yuman Rights are.

But it figures that the Mail is making common cause with a brutal dictatorship. After all, Paul Dacre has been running the paper like that for the past 25 years.