Analysis Ever wondered what a British coup d'état might look like? You'll have to bring your own visuals, but the soundtrack would probably go like this ...
"Other than an Index of Censorship press release, where is your evidence for '300 years' of freedom?" demands one Reg comment-poster after your correspondent suggested MPs had ended three centuries of freedom from political interference of the published word - brought about by giving the nod to a new, powerful press regulator.
Another reader proclaims:
"Given a choice between the government and the press, I'd trust the government's honesty and integrity more than the press."
A newspaper cartoonist advises us to wipe away the tears: 300 years is a good innings for anything.
<SNIP> There's 3 pages of this...go read the original at thelink
A Whingers' Charter
The history is relevant here because the regulation reflects it, and encodes it. Leveson makes no attempt to weigh the role of the press in exposing malpractice and annoying the wealthy. There's no attempt at examining official enquiries from Motorman on, to see what worked and what didn't. It would put the police and the politicians and their relationships in the spotlight, where they belong.
But Leveson was all about payback, and Hacked Off's charter reflects Hacked Off's specific prejudices. (MPs are delighted to help, naturally enough.)
So the Charter is vague on fundamental definitions – such as what is news, and who is a publisher – yet produces an incredibly complex and specific grievance procedure. State funding is available to anyone with a whinge, or a chip on their shoulder. As our own Chris Williams has already pointed out here, any publisher must now think twice before doing anything that might annoy a public-relations operative, such as calling DCMS the "Ministry of Fun" or the intelligence services "spooks" (both of these have genuinely elicited complaints from government PR staff in recent memory).
The last time I wrote a story which upset a PR, she rang us up.
"Can you take it down please?" she asked, repeatedly.
"No, it's based on multiple confidential sources, but we'll add your view to the story that you dispute it," we said.
In future, that PR might well drag us into the mire of an unaccountable government grievance process. It will cost her nothing to do so, and will offer an excellent chance of getting the annoying report or headline erased or altered to her requirements - and perhaps of extracting a punishing fine from the Register's none-too-capacious coffers.
The "Ministry of Truth" is not an exaggeration or a bogeyman any more, then. It's a precise description of the new state media-regulator's function. The quango would not only fund my PR's complaint, but also decide what is the truth, and impose fines if it thought that was required – all outside the judicial system. (The mind-boggling complexity of the quango doesn't make it "judicial".) Dare to step outside the quango and the publisher faces crippling fines – up to £1m.
This is truly a Whinger's Charter, designed for the intolerant, the special interest and the plain barmy. It doesn't usher in Big Brother overnight, probably, but simply nitpicks it to death. The newspaper industry has been spectacularly inept at reminding people what it does, and why it doesn't need any more punitive regulation.
"The cheering across town this week is from the rich, the celebrated and the powerful, with parliamentarians in the van," notes one former editor. The powerful need to be held to account as much as ever, but Parliament is to give them even more power to intimidate and silence their critics.
So it's a very British coup – British, in the sense of stealthy and bureaucratic rather than noisy and free-wheeling. The Whingers' Charter, designed by bullying millionaires and tinfoil-hatted Murdoch conspiracy theorists, looks unworkable at best, sinister at worst.
But strangely, I think there may be a silver lining. I expect people will begin to value English and Scottish Common Law. Americans learn the constitution, and ideas such as the separation of powers, from a very early age. Here it isn't taught, or is rapidly forgotten. We may even see a revival for that most discredited word "freedom", the unwritten basis for our common law. We prefer to allow people to be wallies, and take the consequences, rather than define every instance of wallydom - as other countries do. So the British approach to law isn't romantic, it's practical.
It's a shame it takes an inept and illiberal intervention to demonstrate it. Until this finally collapses, though, it'll probably be the best media organisations which will pay the highest cost. ®
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