SMALL-MINDED EMBITTERED POLITICIANS AND A MONSTROUS INVERSION OF JUSTICE

DESPITE the shameful phone hacking by red-top tabloids over a decade ago and despite the financial hardship suffered by all newspapers as a result of the internet, the irony is that the last few years have been a golden period for Britain’s free Press.

Major investigations into child abuse in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, exposés of how charity workers were demanding sex for aid and the Mail’s great campaign against plastic pollution have made Britain a better country to live in.

Indeed, this paper is proud of its record. We have campaigned passionately to improve awareness of sepsis and prostate cancer — increasing Government funding for both. We exposed the way charities amorally target the old and vulnerable. And we were at the forefront of the fight to achieve justice for the Windrush generation.

Our battle to save GKN from City spivs ensured the engineering giant’s new owners can’t sell off vital defence assets without ministerial approval. And we saw two men finally convicted for the murder of Stephen Lawrence — a gratifying end to our longest and most high-profile campaign.

We exposed the disgraceful hounding of British soldiers in Iraq by unscrupulous lawyers, helped secure the freedom of jailed Marine Sgt Alexander Blackman and fought to allow Afghan translators — facing death in their own country for having worked for our military — to settle in Britain.

We revealed how terrorists load their vile propaganda and bomb-making manuals onto the internet with impunity. And, more than anyone, the Mail has uncovered the antiSemitism and thuggery prevalent in Labour’s ranks.

In short, we and the rest of the Press have been doing our job — rooting out injustice and holding the powerful to account.

Yet instead of celebrating the vital work of the Fourth Estate, the smallminded, venal and frankly second-rate individuals who too often form our political class are determined to destroy Britain’s commercially viable free Press. The Commons votes today on two amendments to the Data Protection Bill which would not only bring the Press under State control but could drive many smaller regional papers — already in steep decline — out of business.

The first mirrors the notorious Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, which Culture Secretary Matt Hancock wisely refused to implement. It would force papers not signed up to the State-backed regulator Impress (ie every national and nearly every local paper) to pay the legal costs of both sides in any data protection case — even if they win. Sleazy celebrities, corrupt politicians and dishonest businessmen would be given a licence to persecute papers that expose their wrongdoing AND make them foot the bill. In any fair and decent society, this is a monstrous inversion of justice.

The second amendment calls for yet another inquiry into the conduct of the Press — as if the original eightmonth Leveson inquiry and subsequent string of failed criminal trials (estimated cost £49 million) weren’t more than enough.

And how interesting that the men behind these proposals are invariably embittered failures. One is Labour’s Tom Watson, who shamelessly whipped up the VIP paedophile hoax against Lords Bramall and Brittan and whose office received £540,000 in donations from Max Mosley, devotee of German- themed orgies and bankroller of Impress, whose dark racist past this paper recently exposed, raising the disturbing question of whether he had perjured himself during the News of the World ‘orgy’ trial.

The other is Ed Miliband, the most inept Labour leader in living memory and a man whose lack of selfknowledge and judgment is matched only by his hatred of the Press. He is being cheered on by an ex-editor of the Guardian (which — surprise, surprise — Mr Watson has exempted from his Section 40 amendment). Having virtually destroyed his own newspaper, Alan Rusbridger is now trying to do the same to the rest of the Press.

And how ironic that a man whose awesome business incompetence lost his newspaper group hundreds of millions of pounds is now responsible for the financial health of an Oxford college.

No, the truth is there is no need or public appetite for another inquiry. Phone hacking is history. It was dealt with under existing laws and the journalists responsible jailed.

With almost all major papers now signed up to the tough new independent regulator IPSO, stricter privacy and data protection laws and punishing libel damages, the Press is more accountable than ever before.

By contrast, internet social media sites ( which, in a monumental misjudgment, Leveson all but ignored) drip with fake news, pornography and terrorist propaganda, for which their billionaire, tax-avoiding owners are allowed to escape responsibility.

Meanwhile newspapers have to deal with massive legal and regulatory constraints that already inhibit their freedom to expose and investigate.

Today’s amendments pose a still greater threat to their ability to do that. The tragedy is, we have a diminished political class that, by and large, just can’t see this.