Britain's Labour party should not be muzzling free speech

Some comments below by a Labour Party politician, who dislikes moves underway to set up a press censorship body under a "Royal Charter".  Much will depend on the final composition of the body, as yet unknown

For most people in the Labour Party, journalists, especially those working for Murdoch and the other press barons, are The Enemy.

Which is why there is near unanimity in my party in favour of state regulation. Before Lord Justice Leveson presented his conclusions, I spoke to colleagues and tried to share my reservations about what the inquiry might recommend. I was discouraged by the responses of some I would normally consider to be on the sensible wing of the party, who airily decreed that politicians had been the media’s victims for long enough. The boot was on the other foot. Payback time.

 The British press is intrusive, arrogant, vicious, unfair, unbalanced and generally infuriating. What a relief! That is as it should be. Politicians and those in positions of power should be wary of journalists. We should worry about what will be reported about us and our actions. We should shudder on a Friday night when a reporter from a Sunday tabloid calls us at home to ask for “your side of the story”.

There are millions of people living in parts of this planet who would die for the experience of living in a country where the press is unafraid of the government, where journalists make their own decisions about what to publish without having to look over their shoulder at a regulator comprised of (shudder) “lay persons”.

There was a time when the Left would have been first in line to defend press freedom, with all its imperfections. Freedom of expression is the first thing to go when dictatorship looms. Labour has a proud tradition of showing solidarity with oppressed peoples throughout the world, and part of that solidarity is support for a press unencumbered by state supervision.

By supporting Parliament’s Royal Charter for press regulation, to be agreed by the Privy Council at the end of this month, my party is turning its back on a core tenet of progressive politics: that a genuinely free press, however infuriating, is an indispensable foundation stone of democracy.

 Yes, at first glance the proposals in the Royal Charter seem reasonable enough. But once politicians take even an arm’s-length role in regulating anything, it’s a braver man than I who would stake his shirt on that arm not becoming shorter over time, the grip tighter. After all, who would have most to gain?

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