It is David Cameron’s sad fate to be to One Direction what Harold Wilson was to the Undertones, and of all of his sad covers of Wilson-era hits, the Leveson inquiry was the worst of all. Wilson wasn’t amiss to the odd inquiry or commission to kick a problem upstream, and setting up a judge-led inquiry into the phonehacking scandal was Cameron’s own weak echo. The crucial difference, of course, is that Wilson deferred his problems until after he had a workable parliamentary majority and a reasonably happy party. Cameron deferred his until he had a disintegrating coalition and an increasingly feral backbench.
But the biggest problem with covers is that they produce soulless clones, and, amid the furore over cross-party talks, we’ve forgotten what the phonehacking scandal was about. Reading the latest releases from Hacked Off, I’m put in mind of Oliver Cromwell, that first disciple of mission creep. A full decade after the outbreak of the civil war, Cromwell claimed that that while religion was ‘not the thing first contested for, at all, but God brought it to the issue at last’. But he was wrong: the civil war was about illegal behaviour on the part of the king, not an insufficiency of piety from the early Stuart church.
It is easy to forget, but the Leveson Inquiry wasn’t set up because of a failure of self-regulation or because progressive-minded people don’t like the Sun and the Mail. It was set up because of illegal activity. If you hack someone’s phone, you are breaking the law. If you bribe the police, you are breaking the law. If you obtain someone’s medical records without their consent, guess what? You’re breaking the law.
That these excesses went unpunished isn’t cause for soul-searching in Fleet Street, it’s cause for sackings in Scotland Yard, who, it appears, had time to fit up Andrew Mitchell and shoot Mark Duggan, but no time at all to investigate the press. It is the police, not the hacks, that should be the target of reformist zeal. Instead, Labour risks inaugurating an era in which the media is muzzled and quiescent, and, for all it is the progressive side that is cheering a great victory, we will look back on the establishment of a press law as a triumph for the right, not the left.
I’ve long been a believer that people who use the word ‘Orwellian’ are all adjective and no argument, but we don’t need to study postwar literature to see how a press law will be used to curb investigative journalism. We simply need to look a few months into the past, when the Daily Telegraph, investigating Maria Miller’s expenses, was reminded by her special adviser that the secretary of state has ‘obviously been having quite a lot of editors’ meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am just going to kind of flag up that connection for you to think about.’ That’s not a nightmare scenario some way down the road. That’s history.
Progressives are engaging in a dangerous brand of doublethink: the same people who complained that broadcast media was too quiet on the universal credit or the bedroom tax or cuts to legal aid, the same people who thought that Jeremy Hunt had too much control over Ofcom, are now celebrating the extension of those controls to the written word.
More worrying still in the rush to an agreement is just how much we don’t know about how it will be implemented. How will it apply to individual bloggers, or to Twitter? We just don’t know. What we do know is that this government of the reactionary right has already proved that it is willing to use even the threat of a statutory response to crush dissent: and that it has been given greater powers to do so not by its own allies but by the progressive left.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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As someone who has been ‘campaigning’ for reform for over a decade, which includes the way some of the Police work because of the consequence to victims, I do hope anyone of note will not listen to a single word of the above.
” the progressive side that is cheering a great victory, we will look back on the establishment of a press law as a triumph for the right, not the left.”
Let me see if I’ve got this right, as it were. If the measures are the result of lefties in a lefty frenzy demanding lefty controls against a predominantly right-wing media mogul – somehow the ensuing disaster is the fault of the right. Because of course it is.
You should have thought through all this during the gigantic anti-Murdoch frenzy.
I don’t think the controls are ‘lefty’, Hugo. Nor are they imposed on a predominantly right-wing press. The exemplary damages unless you sign up to a state body stuff is edging towards authoritarian. Lots of left-wingers are liberal minded and opposed to these reforms. Lots of journalists are on the left, and they are as opposed to these reforms as the journalists on the right.
I do think Maria Miller’s SPAD should be aware of the potential implications of her comments. Maria Miller has a duty to act neutrally and objectively when considering press regulation.
Freedpm of the press – such as remains – is now dependent on the unelected House of Lords, and specifically on the cross-benchers. “reform’ of the second chamber would sound the knell on this feeble hope. Only they are likely to be able to get together a blocking one-third to stop any government expanding the remit of the new regulators indefinitely. The current unanimous (well, nearly nem con) agreement in the current feeding frenzy shows how fragile the blocking one-third in the Commons would be, when it really counts. Some half-wit defenders of censorship (the likes of Norman Fowler or George Eustice, in las week’s Grauniad) have claimed that No politicians would ever intend to interfere with the content of a journalist’s writing. Patently false, given the opportunity; and irrelevant since chilling freedom is largely a matter of possible sanctions. Do we yet even know whether ‘third parties’ – aka politically correct fanatics – will be allowed to interfere in disputes between press and victims such as the Dowler, Jeffrey, the McCanns etc? Indeed, all of these have every right to ample redress through the civil and criminal law – most of which has already been achieved – but no right to a privileged say on how press freedom should be maintained – or abolished…..As for ‘progress’, for once the old imperialist Churchill was right in 1945 to predict a Gestapo -” very polite at first no doubt”. The police have been far from polite in their harassment of anyone who could be tarred with the notion of a ‘hate crime’, including an MP who described a constituent who systematically harassed his House and Constituency staff as ‘unkempt’.
Stephen Bush has got the Old Bill bang to rights. Was it ever a good idea to promise – and to boast of promising – the police all they wanted by way of extra powers?
>>’We simply need to look a few months into the past, when the Daily
Telegraph, investigating Maria Miller’s expenses, was reminded by her
special adviser that the secretary of state has ‘obviously been having
quite a lot of editors’ meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am
just going to kind of flag up that connection for you to think about.’ <<
Why do you believe this sort of threat doesn't happen every day? I though that's what SPAD;s were for.
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No much for the freedom of the reader
Why Leveson was set up is irrelevant, its remit is what counts. But don’t expect a fading Blairite to allow an inconvenient verity to get into the way of a good sucking up to the press.