Freedom must not bend to blackmail
NEXT week an obscure quango will take a decision which could – at a stroke – undo 300 proud years of Press freedom in Britain.
You may never have heard of the Press Recognition Panel (PRP), but it has spent the last two years – and £2million of taxpayers’ money – preparing to give official recognition to a self-appointed organisation called Impress, which claims to be a regulator of the Press, but is not supported by a single mainstream British newspaper.
What Impress does have, apart from the backing of a few minuscule publishers, is money – £3.8million of it, from multimillionaire motor-racing tycoon Max Mosley, who has been on a mission to ‘reform’ the British press ever since the revelation of his involvement in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes.
And if, as Mr Mosley and the zealots of Hacked Off hope, Impress does gain recognition, it will set in place a system of State licensing which would be condemned without reservation by liberals in Britain were it imposed by a totalitarian regime.
The origins of all this are murky. In 2013, after the Leveson report, a deal was stitched up by those failed politicians Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, and Hacked Off. The result was the Royal Charter for Press regulation, under which the Press Recognition Panel operates – and an appalling piece of legislation called the Crime and Courts Act.
Once Impress is recognised by the PRP, any newspaper which does not sign up faces being punished by exemplary damages in libel actions. Far more insidiously, it can be forced to pay the other side’s legal costs – which can run into millions – even if it WINS its case.
This would hand a blank cheque to anyone to sue any newspaper, however risible their case, knowing it won’t cost them a penny. For many local newspapers, already under immense financial pressure, having to face such court actions will be the final straw.
Put simply, this is blackmail: sign up to the phoney State-endorsed regulator or face obliteration in the courts.
The great irony is that this onslaught comes when the Press has never been more tightly regulated.
The industry responded vigorously to Leveson, setting up a powerful watchdog, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, whose board has a majority of independent members, and which regularly requires newspapers to make front page corrections, most notably on behalf of the Queen. It has not applied for Royal Charter recognition because its members believe, quite rightly, that it is the back door to control by politicians.
Ipso’s chairman, the eminent former Court of Appeal judge Sir Alan Moses, warned this week that the ‘essence of our Press is that it cannot and should not be forced into doing anything it does not choose to do. If it acts under compulsion it is indeed doomed.’
It is not too late for that doom to be averted.
The board of the PRP could pause, and ask themselves whether recognition of a regulator bankrolled by the egregious Max Mosley was really what Leveson intended. The punitive costs regime can only be activated by Culture Secretary Karen Bradley, who has yet to make a decision.
If this were happening in any other nation the panjandrums of liberal opinion would be in uproar. But far from it, they are plotting, in the House of Lords and elsewhere, to hijack Government legislation to force through the punitive costs regime.
Two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson said: ‘Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.’
Today that danger is perilously close. The Press cannot be free if it is forced – by an immoral piece of judicial blackmail – into a system of regulation devised and imposed by politicians.