Forty two Tory MPs and a couple of Lords have signed a letter to The Guardian - of all places! - expressing their desire to have a statutory control over our newspapers. They do so with the sort of logic one might expect in a remedial class for the mentally deficient! For example:
No one wants our media controlled by the government but, to be credible, any new regulator must be independent of the press as well as from politicians. We are concerned that the current proposal put forward by the newspaper industry would lack independence and risks being an unstable model destined to fail, like previous initiatives over the past sixty years. These concerns are shared by the NUJ.
For a start, the press has not, on the whole, "failed". It has from time to time made mistakes, for example, there was a time when it was too fawning and discreet towards those in power over us but happily that disappeared some time ago and we now - or at least did until the dreaded Leveson enquiry spread its sopping wet blanket over everything - have a rumbustious, irreverent, frequently irresponsible and often quite mistaken press on offer from a variety of political bases. Anyone defamed had and still has recourse to the most stringent libel laws anywhere in the world. It is true that on rare occasions there were cases where 'ordinary' people without means were the victims of press misbehaviour but that is no reason for the imposition of government statutes, and anyway, call me 'Mr. Cynical' but somehow I suspect that these 'ordinary' people are not at or anywhere near the heart of the, er, principled signatories to this letter!
Perhaps the greatest irrelevance in the letter is the 'factoid' that the concerns of the writers are shared by the National Union of Journalists! They, I suspect, represent only a section of working journalists and, like unions everywhere, that membership itself is divided. Their stance is decided by a small claque at the top of the union tree - a bit like the claque who signed this disgraceful letter. They continue with this gem:
We agree with the Prime Minister that obsessive argument about the principle of statutory regulation can cloud the debate. Instead we must do what is necessary to create a genuinely independent system.
So they start with a conclusion and neatly leap over any tiresome debates about principle, thus demonstrating the art (or craft-iness) of the politician everywhere. Similarly they write this:
The worst excesses of the press have stemmed from the fact that the public interest defence has been too elastic and, all too often, has meant whatever editors wanted it to mean. To protect both robust journalism and the public, itis now essential to establish a single standard for assessing the public interest test which can be applied independently and consistently.
I would simply wish to ask Mrs. Caroline Spelman (MP - but not for long, I hope) whether or not the following story described in the words of Guido was in the public interest?:
[Mrs. Spelman] the multimillionaire spent over £60,000 – the equivalent of one years salary as an MP – in a failed attempt to keep her drug cheat England rugby playing son out of the papers. The public interest in exposing cheating in sport was apparently second fiddle to the fact that Spelman was a politician. Any other member of the squad without a loaded, famous parent would have had to face the music.
Well, I'm a member of the public and I can tell her that I am very interested in that story because, you see, it says so much about Mrs. Spelman who wishes, desires and frantically prays nightly for, the chance to rule over me!
Here are the signatories and if any of them belong to you then you know what to do at the next election!
- Adam Afriyie
- Gavin Barwell
- Guto Bebb
- Henry Bellingham
- Andrew Bingham
- Brian Binley
- Nicola Blackwood
- Crispin Blunt
- Robert Buckland
- Rehman Chishti
- Oliver Colvile
- Geoffrey Cox
- Jackie Doyle-Price
- George Eustice
- Mark Field
- George Freeman
- Mark Garnier
- Zac Goldsmith
- Simon Hart
- Gerald Howarth
- Gareth Johnson
- Andrew Jones
- Marcus Jones
- Andrea Leadsom
- Stephen Metcalfe
- Penny Mordaunt
- David Morris
- James Morris
- Sheryll Murray
- Jesse Norman
- Neil Parish
- Claire Perry
- Sir Malcolm Rifkind
- Chris Skidmore
- Nicholas Soames
- Caroline Spelman
- Bob Stewart
- Gary Streeter
- Paul Uppal
- Angela Watkinson
- Mike Weatherly
- Nadhim Zahawi