Regulate the people?

Andrew Mitchell deserved to be sacked. Ofsted demoralises teachers. The energy companies have the best of intentions, and if you regulate the banks they’ll just move to Geneva. The players change, but the song remains the same: people in positions of power think they should be left to carry on as before. After all, what do the politicians know?

Of course, it’s far easier to call the kettle black than it is to admit that you are the pot, which is why the proposed royal charter puts most writers in a difficult spot. So I’ll be honest with you, and myself: self-regulation of the press has been an utter disaster. The pirate’s code is observed with more regularity than the Press Complaints Commission’s code of ethics; journalists regularly intrude on private grief or demonise minorities while opinion and fact are not so much mixed as wholly integrated.

State regulation, though, has fared little better. Yes, no one worries about journalists hacking their phones in China, but the press – such as it is – is just as lurid and celebrity-obsessed as it is everywhere else. It just does a worse job of holding the government to account. Don’t forget that it was not flouting the PCC’s code, but law-breaking that led to the Leveson inquiry. Any number of ‘state regulations’, or good old-fashioned laws, could have been used to curb that law-breaking, from contempt of court to data protection.

Instead, we have a press law, and we don’t even need to go as far afield as China to see the pitfalls of regulating the press: just watch the BBC – a great organisation for producing documentaries on politicians that have left office, and a pretty substandard one for holding them to account while they are in power. Don’t believe me? Just watch the five minutes of coverage that the BBC devoted to Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms or look at Newsnight the day that the universal credit passed the House of Commons, which was dominated by the question of whether or not you could live on £50 a week. This is what government scrutiny looks like when the ones doing the scrutiny are subject to royal charter.

Previous royal charters, though, for all they might have led to a news organisation far more interested in Tory against Liberal – or, in happier times, Blairite versus Brownite – than giving any oxygen to Her Majesty’s opposition, were at least sought by the institutions they cover. At present, the royal charter is a cross-party agreement to regulate the Guardian. The question then has to be asked as to how the government would make the rest of the press sign up, and the answers are pretty ugly, and that’s before you get to the question of what happens next time the press does break its own rules.

So, yes: self-regulation has failed. State regulation doesn’t look too great either.  Perhaps we should start with the only group more interested in the personal lives of celebrities or the comings and goings of the McCanns than the writers: the readers, far more of whom couldn’t wait to read what the Sun and the Mirror had to say about Chris Jefferies than were even aware of Roy Greenslade’s thundering denunciation of the whole thing in the Guardian. You know, the British people. Why not simply regulate them?

Photo: Jon S