A dose of reality from the US President

American President Barack Obama’s comments that he believes the United Kingdom would be better off remaining in the European Union has, quite predictably, set the Brexit hares running.

Fury and outrage have spilled out led, again quite predictably, by Boris Johnson, whose conversion to Euro scepticism scarcely veils his ambition to be the next Prime Minister in Downing Street.

Mr Johnson expressed anger at being lectured by the “hypocritical” Mr Obama. “For the US to tell us in the UK that we must surrender control of so much of our democracy — it is a breathtaking example of the principle of do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do,” he wrote in the Sun newspaper.

He said Mr Obama was urging Britain to pool its sovereignty with other nations in a way the US would never countenance for itself.

One wonders who is being hypocritical here, given that Mr Johnson used the Sun to air his views, owned by Australian turned American citizen Rupert Murdoch who is doing his best, through the various media outlets he owns, to push the United Kingdom out of Europe.

Outrage also came from the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, Nigel Farage who, in his particular style of delivery, told Mr Obama to “butt out”.

“This is an unwelcome interference from the most anti-British American President there has ever been. Mercifully, he won’t be in office much longer,” Mr Farage said.

Quite what information he possesses on Mr Obama’s anti-British stance is something of a mystery, and I might suggest that George Washington, who fought the British in the War of Independence and James Madison, who had is capital burnt by them in the War of 1812, might have harboured more negative thoughts about Britain than the current holder of the office.

Mr Farage should also be aware that Mr Obama’s departure from office next January isn’t likely to change much. Every American President since Dwight Eisenhower has advocated first for the UK to join Europe and then to remain. It has been and remains State Department policy and will not alter with the new Administration.

To return to Mr Johnson’s point about the US never pooling its sovereignty. Perhaps he should look at some hard facts. The United States has a gross domestic product $US 17 trillion and a population of 316 million. The United Kingdom’s GDP is $US 2.5 trillion with a population of 64 million.

With a GDP that outstrips every other country and a huge domestic population, the US has no need to consider linking with another nation and if it did would simply overpower it. What Mr Obama is saying, as gently as possible, is that Britain is simply too small, too insignificant and with too few resources to compete alone on the world stage and still provide the standard of living its people have come to expect.

That is certainly not being anti-British — it is good advice from a concerned friend who genuinely believes Brexit would weaken the cause of Western democracy just at a time when it is being confronted with mounting terrorism, Chinese expansionism and increasingly strident and erratic  stance out of Moscow.  

President Obama is absolutely right when he says the outcome of the June 23 referendum is of deep interest to the United States — and absolutely right to restate the long-standing American position that the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union.

Unsightly scramble over EU chocolate

The campaign to persuade Britons to leave the European Union reached a new level of farce over the recent holidays when pro-Brexit supporters claimed the high price of Easter eggs as one reason to support an out vote.

At issue were the “punitive tariffs” imposed by Brussels on cocoa-based products from outside the European Union, which could be renegotiated once the United Kingdom had left the bloc.

But any pretence that this was a serious point degenerated when various Brexit spokespeople resorted to schoolboy humour, claiming the EU made Easter more “egg-spensive”; that supporters of the EU were “rabbiting on” about its virtues and that consumers would be “hopping mad” over the impost.

Even so, with less than three months to go before the referendum that will decide the UK’s fate, voters seem to be tuning in to the Brexit slogans and soundbites rather than having any interest in a serious debate over the consequences of withdrawal.

Polls which originally gave the Remain campaign a healthy lead have narrowed, with one actually suggesting Brexit had a paper-thin winning margin.

Some commentators believe the Brexit campaign is being conducted with greater passion than Remain and the country is sensing this.

However, it comes in the same week as analysts say that Prime Minister David Cameron’s strident support for staying in the EU will cost him his leadership win or lose.

They state that an out vote would certainly force his resignation and replacement by a solid Eurosceptic (read Boris Johnson) who would be better suited to manage untangling the years of European legislation before the UK could actually say goodbye.

Even a close win for Remain might leave Cameron vulnerable to a backlash from the significant number of rabid anti-Europeans on the Conservative backbenches who would want to take it out on the man they considered had cheated them of their prize. 

All this was predicted by Tory grandee Lord Heseltine months ago when he warned the Prime Minister it would be the end of his authority if he allowed himself to be dragged into a slanging match over the EU with senior members of his own party.

Something that could leave a bitter taste in Cameron’s mouth long after the sweetness of Easter has been forgotten.

The sad renaissance of the press release

Is the press release dead? Headlines are supposed to drag you into the story and this one did it for me. After all, I have handled tens of thousands of the little beauties over the years, most of the time receiving them, but more recently sometimes writing them as my job description evolved.

The head appeared over an article from an organisation calling itself the contentgroup (all one word and no capital), written by its Chief Executive, former Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist David Pembroke.

His theme is that the press release is far from dead and, in fact, has an even bigger role to play as traditional media struggles to adapt to an increasingly online world.

He quotes American entrepreneur Ryan Holiday who says editors and bloggers are increasingly in love with press releases because it does every part of their job for them.

“The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy, and since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong,” says Holiday, who has written a book called Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.

“Media releases make the job of the journalist easier. You are helping them find stories, quotes and material. In marketing terms you are ‘optimising the top of the funnel’."

Sadly, Holiday’s words hold a great deal of truth. A media release has a better chance of appearing verbatim on newspapers’ websites or in print these days than at any other time in history. The reason is not lazy journalism, but journalists harassed and desperate as they do the job that was once done by three or four workers.

The situation is particularly acute in the United Kingdom where literally thousands of reporters, sub-editors and photographers have been laid off in the past five years. The result has been a depressing race to the bottom as remaining workers struggle to fill pages while unable to even think of leaving their desks to engage in traditional news-gathering.

The situation has been recognised by the Pew Research Centre Project for Excellence in Journalism, whose director, Tom Rosenstiel, says the balance of power is shifting from those who collect and process the news to those who make it.

“What we’ve seen in some of our studies is that the press release that’s authored by the news-making agency, the government agency or whoever, is often adapted very briefly, or very hastily and re-posted by a news organisation as a kind of quick story,” Rosenstiel says.

And of course with the newsmakers in charge of the news, the public gets to hear only what they want them to hear and the overworked journalists simply have to go along with it.

Half a century ago, when I began in this craft, I was told to treat the press release with distain. “Follow it up, check every fact, find your own quotes and get the angle that’s actually news, rather than the one they want us to use,” was a distillation of my instructions.

There was a time when experienced Western news people were sent to journalism schools in what was then the third world to show young journalists how to write. Now some of the most aggressive journalism is conducted in parts of Asia.

I cannot help a touch of nostalgia when I see the media chasing stories around Delhi these days. Sure it’s a bit like the Wild West at times, but so preferable to meekly accepting government and corporate propaganda at face value.         

The first of the Brexit red herrings

The Brexit lobby has raised the first of what I expect will be many red herrings in the lead-up to the June referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain or leave the European Union.

It is crying foul over the decision by the head of the UK Civil Service, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to ban his workers from providing support to the Ministers seeking the country’s UK withdrawal.

There have been howls of anger from the United Kingdom Independence Party, with a European Parliament Member, Nathan Gill, saying it was a “stitch-up”, denying senior Eurosceptic figures the “significant bodies of work” that Civil Servants must already have done on the impact of a Brexit victory in the referendum.

Sir Jeremy is completely right in his decision. Keeping Britain in the European Union on the terms negotiated by Prime Minister David Cameron in Brussels is official Government policy and Civil Servants work for the Government — end of story.

Mr Cameron is perfectly entitled to rely on the resources of the Civil Service to promote his policies as he would in any other Government campaign, for example to warn of the dangers of smoking.

The Brexit campaign is simply a lobby group putting a contrary view. Like any other lobby group it must employ its own experts, researchers and propagandists to deliver its message.

What makes this a little different is that some Ministers in Mr Cameron’s Government have been given leave to campaign against his policy and promote Brexit. This is unprecedented and a huge concession on the part of the Prime Minister.

Ordinarily Ministers would have been forced to resign their office and campaign as ordinary Members of Parliament. They might even have faced the withdrawal of the whip in the House of Commons — in effect suspension from the party.

The fact that Mr Cameron has not taken this course is partly pragmatic — he does not want to split the Conservative Party — but also because he understands the deeply held conviction of some Ministers and MPs that the UK has no place in the European experiment. He has been extraordinarily generous.

But of course the Brexit lobby group wants more — and will continue to shout discrimination through the campaign in order to promote the fiction that it is the gallant, patriotic underdog fighting against the dead hand of the Brussels and Whitehall bureaucracies.

It balks at a frontal attack on Mr Cameron. Instead it savages Sir Jeremy, a thoroughly decent but defenceless Civil Servant, for doing his job.

Sadly a preview of what is almost certain to come.

Boris scents Cameron's blood

The decision by Boris Johnson to support the campaign for a British exit from the European Union has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the issue, which will be thrashed out over the next few weeks, and everything to do with Johnson’s political ambitions.

The Mayor of London, who also sits on the back-benches of the ruling Conservative Party at Westminster, has long been looked upon as a potential successor to Prime Minister David Cameron. That might have happened had Cameron lost last year’s United Kingdom General Election.

Cameron won and until now has looked unassailable, but he has staked his political fortunes on a deal he has negotiated with Brussels which he says is good enough for Britain to remain an EU member.

Of course it will not satisfy the most rabid anti-Europeans such as UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage — if Brussels had voted to give every man, woman and child in Britain a free flat on the Costa Brava, he would still have wanted out — but Farage and his skinhead acolytes could never have led a successful exit campaign.

Nor could the political figures that have rallied to the so-called Brexit — Minister for Justice Michael Gove, Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith,  Leader of the House of Commons Chris Grayling and Employment Minister Priti Patel — all low profile technicians short on charm and charisma.

But Boris Johnson changes all that.

A vote to leave the EU means the end of Cameron’s career. It will have been a stinging rebuff and he will have no choice other than to resign.

That leaves Johnson as the face of the Brexit triumph and a shoo-in as Cameron’s replacement.

Then comes the hard work of disengaging the United Kingdom from the EU: A pound in free-fall, recession, flights of capital and a possible second Scottish independence referendum — Boris will take it all in his stride, won’t he?         

BOOK REVIEW

A woman’s journey of discovery

Latika Bourke always hated it when people asked her where she came from. As far as she was concerned she was Australian with a brown skin. The first eight months of her life in an Indian orphanage was something to be put aside as she made her way in the world, becoming a successful broadcaster and journalist.

The reawakening began when she realised one of the characters in the Indian movie Slumdog Millionaire had her name, and with the support of her partner, decided it was time to discover something of her origins in the country of her birth.

What follows is a story of discovery. Not so much of herself because Latika is Australian to the core and nothing will change that, but of a country like no other, whose fascination has captured and engulfed people (including this writer) down the ages.

She also discovers how incredibly lucky she has been, first to survive at all in a nation where childbirth remains a dangerous exercise among the very poor and then to have been one of the infinitesimal number of babies adopted into the relative wealth and safety of Western countries.

I enjoyed her description of travel in Bihar, a State off the tourist route but embedded deep in the Indian consciousness, as anyone who has had experience of the recent election there could testify.

If I have one quibble, it is that Latika spends too long ‘setting the scene’ dwelling on her average childhood and adolescence in regional New South Wales, but it is her story and autobiographies should please the writer first and then hope to please the reader second.

It pleased this reader. I note that Latika is now visiting India regularly and hopes at some stage to live there. This should be sufficient to spawn another book about the country she has come to love. 

  

Nothing decided; a long way to go

Watching the progress of the New Hampshire Primary election, it was hard not to feel some sympathy for the harassed media contingent as it desperately sought to churn out instant analysis and comments on the result.

‘Trump and Sanders a step nearer the White House’ was one headline that swam across the television screen. ‘Rebuff for the establishment candidates’ was another.

Apart from the fact that Trump and Sanders couldn’t both be nearing the White House as there can be only one occupant, comments such as these, so far back from the nominating convention, let along the actual election, are utterly pointless.

The 24/7 news cycle is to blame: The requirement is for an outcome; never mind that the outcome could be quite different the following week. ‘New Hampshire – nothing decided; long way still to go’ just doesn’t hack it.

But what has really happened so far? Well, we have had Iowa where on the Republican side Ted Cruz won handily from Donald Trump and Marco Rubio did better than expected. For the Democrats Hillary Clinton sneaked past Bernie Sanders by three tenths of a percentage point.

Then came New Hampshire and in the GOP camp Trump won by a mile, Cruz got beaten into third place by John Kasich, and Rubio was back with the also rans. For the Democrats, Sanders stormed home with 60 per cent of the vote, leaving Clinton struggling.

Clear who the eventual winners are going to be? I thought not.  

So now we go on to South Carolina and Nevada, the latter holding its Democratic caucus-style election on Tuesday and Republicans the week after — yes it gets really complicated.

Amid all this confusion, trying to look ahead to how things work out is not easy, but here goes.

First the Democrats: At present it’s a two-horse race (another candidate could enter the fray late if both Sanders and Clinton look vulnerable, but that’s unlikely).  As time goes on Sanders’ age will become a factor. He’s 74 and should he win the presidency he will be nearing 80 by the end of his first term.

Would he stand for a second term in 2020? If not, the Democrats would be giving up the huge advantage gained by a sitting president running again. They mostly succeed unless circumstances conspire against them (Jimmy Carter) or they lose the plot (George Bush Senior). Party strategists want someone who can hold the White House for eight years, not four.

But Clinton, at 68, is no spring chicken. — and she sufferers from what could be called the Hubert Humphrey Syndrome (really mature readers might also like to call it the Adlai Stevenson Syndrome).

Humphrey — a presidential candidate in 1960, 1968 and 1972 and Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President from 1964-68 — was a decent man, and in the opinion of this writer, would have made a better president than many of the other big names of the time, but he suffered from being around too long, his face became too familiar; Democrats prefer someone, anyone, who is new and different and that led to the George McGovern debacle.

(Interestingly Republicans are not so concerned about recycled candidates, reference Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan).

Moving to the Republican side, there is obvious opposition to Trump among the party establishment, but if the candidate continues to poll well and roll up States in the primaries, that will change, because nothing matters more to the GOP than being in power and if Trump can do it the establishment will grit their teeth and get on his bandwagon.

However, if it transpires that Trump could win the party’s nomination but lose against Clinton/Sanders then watch for a concerted effort among the other Republican hopefuls to form an ‘Anybody but Trump’ coalition through deals done and promises made that could extend to the floor of the nominating convention.

Then there is the possibility of a third party candidate with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg not ruling out the possibility of running as a moderate conservative if Trump is the Republican choice.

On the face of it, this is the Republicans’ election to lose. The two major parties mostly alternate in the White House after eight-year spells. However, the situation is far too volatile for a prediction to be made at this early stage — and certainly not after just two primaries.