Here's a question. Since the invention of Gutenberg's infernal machine, who has ruined more lives, "the press" or government?
This week I've found myself at odds with a number of friends and colleagues on the subject of press regulation, with the majority of my lefty acquaintances being in favour of Lord Justice Leveson's plan for an "independent regulator" underpinned by statute. The lines, as Iain Dale suggests, appear at first glance to have been drawn roughly along party lines, but it's not so. Mehdi Hasan is probably closer to the truth in suggesting that it's more of a case of whether or not people trust the press. But shouldn't the argument be about who you trust more, the press or the government?
The word "independent" is being thrown around a lot in this debate, and with increasing inaccuracy. First of all, we must decide from whom the suggested regulator should be independent. Certainly the proposed body would be independent of the press - nobody's arguing against that, surely? But would it be independent enough of government? If, as Leveson suggests, the body is backstopped, reviewed and effectively super-regulated by, of all people, Ofcom - whose chair and board are appointed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport - that doesn't sound particularly independent. More of a "Quasi-Autonomous" regulatory body. Or perhaps a QuARB.
You can have that one for free, Dave.
As a rule, legislation designed to deal with edge cases in society tends to be bad legislation. Welfare reform targetting the handful of families who recieve excessive amounts of housing benefit, or refusing to give prisoners the vote for example. While it may have a desirable effect on the element for whom it is designed, the design is rarely thought out to its logical conclusion. Caps on housing benefit solve the problem of professional moochers, but is it worth tearing up a system that makes absolutely sure people can afford a place to live in the process? And is it worth denying prisoners the vote because it makes you physically sick, even if the result is that China think it's fine to ignore the rule of law? The only clear benefit of edge case law is that whoever is proposing it, is usually rewarded for it at the ballot box.
Distressing as the stories of the McCann family and Christopher Jeffries are, in a media world which prints millions of words a week, they are abberatons. Edge cases. And more pertinently - and despite the apparent failure of self regulation - they are edge cases who were able to obtain substantial redress through the courts. The system, at least in their cases, worked. Horrendous though their treatment has been, these cases are too rare to make it worth even the tiniest risk that future governments could make further demands on press freedom.
That access to the courts will be impeded through the abolition of conditional fee agreements is extremely unfortunate - but to be frank, that's not a problem the press can or should solve. There's a perfectly decent argument in favour of legal aid being made available for defamation cases. It's just that nobody's having that argument this week.
One or two commentators, not least Harriet Harman on this week's Sunday Politics, have even suggested that we shouldn't be concerned that statutory regulation will have an adverse effect on press freedoms, because Ireland has statutory underpinning, and they're higher up the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index than us. In a supreme feat of circuitous logic, Jemima Khan began to argue that introducing a statutory backed regulator would actually improve press freedom in this country. She's since deleted that particular tweet - let's explore some of the reasons why she might have done that.
The RWB press freedom index is based upon a questionnaire which you can read here. It was almost forgivable when Ed Miliband declared his total support for the entirety of a 2,000 page report he hadn't read, but the RWB questionnaire is barely nine pages long, and I guarantee that nobody who has argued that the Leveson proposals will have a positive effect on our standing in that league table has read it. We're 28th on that list because we have an Official Secrets Act, a rubbish Freedom of Information Act, and because, in our shining democracy there is:
"…serious difficulty in accessing state-held or official information (such as a refusal by officials to provide information, information being provided selectively, according to the media's editorial position, imposition of intermediaries or request for payment in return for the information)"(Question 13)
So anyway, back to my original question. It's a stupid question, for which it is easy to come up with a stupid answer - of course government ruins more lives than the press. Governments have power to affect lives that the press can only dream of, and weild that power with all the finesse and delicacy of a caber toss champion who really, really wants to get re-elected.
Never mind going back to the invention of the printing press, just this year we have the sick and disabled being forced into unpaid work, the working poor being forced to move miles out of their communities and support networks because their housing benefit has been capped and children being forced to rethink their entire futures because they don't think they can afford the level of education their parents got for free.
You read about it in the papers every day.
A more pertinent question would be, is there a greater need for an independent regulator of government than for an independent regulator of the press?