Leveson's recipe for a happy medium?

 

With Lord Leveson’s recommendations increasingly imminent, the Prime Minister kicked off the routine rally of political pre-emptive striking with a warning against pre-judging the findings of his inquiry into the culture, practises and ethics of the press. Undaunted however, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles leapt like a salmon into the fray, swimming upstream against the Downing Street directive, and lending his weight to the anti-legislation lobby by quoting Thomas Jefferson. “For a free society to operate,” he said, “the river of a free press had to flow without restriction,” and as principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson knew a bit about freedom.

However, if Mr Pickles had looked instead to another American heavyweight, Mark Twain, he would have found the former journalist saying of his own profession; “there are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.” No doubt a sentiment with which Hugh Grant, and others on the serrated end of the hacking scandal, would concur.

On the other side of the fence from Eric Pickles, and characteristically not sitting on it, Harriet Harman said the current system of self-regulation had “failed” and advocated the establishment of a “truly independent” body to look into press complaints. After the phone hacking furore, reported payments to police officers and public figures, and the closure of the News of the World amid wider questions over editorial ethics, it is increasingly more difficult to disagree. However, hands up who is “truly independent”?  

Speaking to Andrew Marr earlier this month, David Cameron politely declined an invite to guarantee implementing the Leveson findings in full, prior to their publication, reiterating his desire to maintain a “free press”. The Prime Minister’s warning against “heavy handed state intervention” engendered echoes of the “light touch” regulation rumoured to be in the running. ‘The Australian’ newspaper reported that Lord Justice Leveson was leaning towards the system used in the Irish Republic, with legislation extending solely to the establishment of a new press council, with an ombudsman to address complaints.

Exponents of a “free press” label legislation as a last resort, but surely it’s a large and unlikely leap from press regulation to state media censorship. Self-regulation is almost an oxymoron anyway, some will behave because they feel they should do, but many just because they must. The threat of sanction is a necessary motivation for standards. A civilised society needs a free press, but not at any cost.

What differentiates us from China, apart from population, cuisine, and global economic dominance of course, is the courage of democracy to permit criticism from within. At its best, the media provides an unfettered forum that serves the population in holding its leaders and institutions to account, at its worst, a parasitic entity that regurgitates the baser actions of its consumers to feed their own voyeurism. Finding a framework to further the former whilst limiting the latter is the challenge from which the current crop of Westminster tenants must not shrink.  

Yours, grovelling Gove of Surrey.

Michael Gove’s apology to his former French teacher is relatively refreshing. Most politicians, presumably to make space for the letters ‘M’ and ‘P’ after their name, choose to abandon any apparent sense of humility.

 In an open letter, published in this week’s Radio Times, the Education Secretary describes the scene in Mr Montgomery’s classroom at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen as a maleficent melee of “pathetic showing off” and “clever-dick questions”. Perhaps not a prime study scenario, but perfect preparation for Prime Minister’s Questions.

 Acknowledging that his apology is tardy to the tune of 30 years, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath referred to himself and his classmates as “a cocksure crew of precociously assertive boys”. An appraisal as accurate as it is eloquent perhaps, and apt of a man earmarked in his early years as a “future leader of the Conservative Party”, by a teaching colleague of Mr Montgomery.

Mr Gove delivers an enthusiastic eulogy to the educative efforts of his former schoolmaster, although referring to him as ‘Danny’ could be deemed an unnecessary effort to adjust their erstwhile status gap. He concedes; “you were trying, patiently, doggedly, good-humouredly, to broaden our horizons. You were, without any pretension or pomposity, attempting to coax a group of hormonal lads to look beyond familiar horizons and venture further.”

 Depending on who you speak to, young master Gove may indeed have learnt the lesson of ‘looking beyond familiar horizons’, although apparently backwards, and he may have been absent for the without ‘pomposity’ part. Politically, his Education White Paper produced a predictably mixed reaction, and when questioning members of the profession itself, as politicians all too rarely do, the responses range from suspicious to snarling. 

Having said that, breaking what John Bangs, the former Head of Education at the National Union of Teachers, referred to as high-stakes commercialism in the GCSE exam board system must be a plus. When it came to light that some examiners were selling seminars, offering insider info on teaching to the tests, Mr Bangs said the boards were in “the last chance saloon.” Calling time on that cash cow may be widely welcomed.

In addition, Steve Sinnott, the NUT General Secretary welcomed the commitment to more personalised learning, which the union itself had previously advocated. But, his overall response to the reforms was rather less than rapturous. “The pity is,” he said, “that hidden amongst outlandish ideas, the White Paper has some genuinely good proposals.” His deputy at the NUT, Kevin Courtney, felt that Mr Gove was too quick to level unjustified criticism at the achievements of both teachers and pupils. This, he said; “serves the Education Secretary well in securing headlines,” but “alienates and demoralises the profession which strives day in and day out, often in difficult circumstances, to achieve the best for all their pupils.”

 So, riding that self-made wave of tepid togetherness and absent enthusiasm Mr Gove rallied the troops in February with a warning that the reforms risked fewer kids passing exams and more headteachers being sacked. Now that’s how to motivate the education profession.

 Whilst his epistle of apology to Mr Montgomery is admirable, if Michael Gove seeks to say sorry to every teacher he has left disgruntled and disrespected, he’s going to need a bigger pen.

 

 

Defending, the Beast of Bosnia.

 

The war crimes trial of Radovan Karadzic at The Hague was never likely to be the definition of swift justice, and judging by the opening statement of the former Bosnian Serb leader as he begins his defence, it may run for as long as he did. In a meandering monologue, the man previously dubbed the ‘Beast of Bosnia’ referred to himself as “a tolerant man with great capacity to understand others.” He now has 300 hours to prove that.

Arrested in 2008 in Belgrade, while working in alternative medicine under the alias Dragan Dabic, the former Bosnian Serb war-time president had been on the run for nearly 13 years. Karadzic stands accused of war crimes reportedly committed in the aftermath of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which include arranging the murder of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995 that left 12,000 dead from starvation and sniper fire, and taking 284 United Nations peacekeepers and military observers hostage, to be used as human shields.

Responding to multiple allegations, including the persecution and extermination of Bosnian Croats which gave rise to the term “ethnic cleansing” Mr Karadzic said; “instead of being accused, I should have been rewarded for all the good things I have done.” Such claims were greeted with cries of “he’s lying!” from the public gallery, yet Radovan Karadzic certainly appears to believe every word he says. Convincing the judges however, may prove a tougher task.

The Karadzic trial began three years ago, and that of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ended up lasting longer than he did. These length litigations may force a postponement of any potential sense of collective closure for those affected, and yet the need for justice endures.

Many families of the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster refused to collect the death certificates pertaining to their lost loved ones, unable as they were to reconcile themselves to the authenticity of the inquest they emerged from. With the announcement this week from Dominic Grieve QC that he will apply to quash the original verdicts of accidental death, those actions now feel vindicated.

John F. Kennedy said that every time a person “strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,” and when you add the ripples together, we can “build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 

Amen mate.

A parent's worst nightmare.

The Indian physician and author Deepak Chopra wrote; ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ Although you can’t fully insulate the innocent, and maybe you shouldn’t, recent events can barely fail to thrust into an ever sharper focus, the delicate balance parents face in policing those doorways.

It was a wearyingly familiar sight, hope palpably draining from the faces of the tireless ranks of volunteers and rescue professionals as the search for April Jones made its sad, semantic shift to a murder inquiry. The only suspect, Mark Bridger has now been remanded in custody, to appear on January 11^th, charged with April’s abduction, murder, and attempting to pervert the course of justice through the assumed concealment of her body. The painstaking process of evidence gathering will continue, as the world watches on, helpless but for empathy, pondering how to permit our kids the adventure of independence, whilst protecting their passage through childhood.

For me, those grainy CCTV images of little James Bulger being lead away by the hand linger long in my conflicted consciousness, making objectivity unlikely when my daughter bemoans her perceived absence of personal freedoms. I trust her, it’s everyone else that bothers me. Statistics surrounding child abduction are not absolute, however in May of this year the Sun claimed one goes missing every three minutes. These figures naturally feature runaways, and those that return home, often unreported, yet it is believed that around 150 children are taken by strangers every year in the UK. Perhaps the lasting legacy of the unimaginable limbo in which Kate and Gerry McCann now exist, is an increased awareness of abduction when navigating the daily dilemmas of family logistics. One wrong decision might be all it takes.

Although no surprise to some, the snowballing revelations surrounding the late Sir Jimmy Savile have sent further shivers down the spine of a society at pains to protect its most vulnerable. If even half what is alleged proves accurate, we face another collective failure to have missed the signals, and maybe worse.

Widespread suspicion of Savile’s sexual preferences seems evident, but as a leading establishment entity, not to mention a well-connected and commercially significant figure, this was an inconvenient truth. Many in the media would not readily bite the hand that feeds, whatever the dirt under its finger nails. Even some of Savile’s prolific charity work can now be deemed uncomfortably cynical, given that many of the victims of his alleged abuse were reportedly recruited from children’s homes.

That his own family have consigned his headstone to landfill is as close to a conviction as it comes. This posthumous punishment seems the only suitable sanction, since the called-for stripping of his knighthood is apparently not applicable. Such honours are deemed to exist solely for the duration of a person’s live, naturally expiring on death. That said, the question remains as to how the honours system conferred the knighthood, potentially dignifying the actions of an abuser, against what now appears to have been a background of serious and widespread allegations.

 If children embody hope, walking symbols of the latent potential of an unwritten future, then taking the life, or indeed the innocence of a child, is the bitter final refuge of one whose hope has gone. The final betrayal of the victims would be our collective failure to confront not only those directly responsible, but also those who turned a blind eye.

A bit of Mitchell and Terry.

Andrew Mitchell has probably never felt much like John Terry before, but he may be starting to. “I did not use the words attributed to me,” the Chief Whip has claimed, after casually disembarking from a Volkswagen Polo, shunning the usual ministerial motor in a clearly choreographed attempt at not being the sort of chap who says “plebs” to policemen.

In contrast, the former England captain has embraced the possibility that he’s burnt his bridges, and jumped. The Chelsea skipper has retired from international football on the eve of his FA hearing for alleged racist abuse, claiming the Football Association had made his position “untenable”. Having already been cleared in the law-courts, he perhaps feels there's no founding for further interference. The FA clearly do. If found guilty however, the club will likely cleave to their captain, as Liverpool over Suarez, and the spectre of racism will still follow football until purged from the peer group that supports it.

The robust ranting of Andrew Mitchell, sounding more like a character from Eastenders than a former UN peacekeeper, was reportedly in response to a police rebuke on his cycling habits. The officer was allegedly on the angry end of an aggressive appraisal of his social standing, liberally loaded with the industrial invective we might more expect in the Chelsea changing room. The police log quotes the use of “plebs”, “morons” and enough fornicatory phraseology to embarrass a rapper. The Prime Minister’s spokesman says there is no need for an investigation, or an exact explanation of what Anglo-Saxon was uttered, because Mr Mitchell has already apologised. And indeed he has, twice. Whilst denying the verbose vocabulary, he has publicly regretted his rudeness, and the stage-managed ‘sorry’ still seems odds-on to save his skin, but betting is not yet suspended.

Where I come from they taught us; “don’t sh*t on your doorstep.” For the future benefit of Mr Mitchell, that useful maxim should possibly stretch to any doorsteps with policemen standing on them.

Any 'Closer' will cost you.

As French privacy laws apparently prevent “any wilful violation of the private life”, the Prophet Mohammed might also wish they extended to those no longer living. Just as the jungle of journalists camped outside the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Nanterre were packing up their tents, in another part of Paris, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was preparing to publish images depicting the prophet in “particularly explicit poses.” 

Relief was palpable on the faces of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge yesterday, as they enjoyed a convivial cavort with smiling locals on the island of Tuvalu, on the last leg of their tour to the Far East and South Pacific. The injunction granted to prevent further publication of topless shots of the Duchess by French Closer cannot erase the images from public consciousness, or computers, but can confirm that a line has been drawn over which the long of lens may only peer at their peril. Few in France frankly see the sense in penalising the publication of pictures already made public. However, a refusal to lunge at every legal avenue available would be teetering on a tacit acceptance of such an intrusion as an unavoidable side-effect of celebrity. With the spectre of the shameful shenanigans with which the paparazzi pestered Princess Diana no doubt present in their peripheral vision, the royal couple have drawn a necessary distinction. Whilst a pact persists between dodgy D-listers and less scrupulous snappers, in which dignity is a collateral casualty in their mutual pursuit of front page pictures, William and Kate are cut from classier cloth. They are a professional pairing, as ably displayed by the ease with which they worked the crowds on the Solomon Islands, barely betraying their understandable anguish as they grinned in grass skirts and sipped coconut cocktails. 

While the royal couple have been pressing the flesh in the Far East, and preventing its further exposure from the courtrooms of Paris, outrage at “Innocence of the Muslims” continues. The American made short film has ignited indignant protests across the Muslim world. Reuters report riot police deployed to control crowds marching on the US consulate in Karachi, with similar scenes duplicated in Jakarta, Kabul, and Beirut. After the US Ambassador to Libya was among four Americans killed amid violent protests in Benghazi, President Obama typically tip-toed the tightrope of Anglo-Arab diplomacy. Whilst condemning any attempt “to denigrate the religious beliefs of others”, he took pains to maintain that there could be “no justification for this type of senseless violence.”

The whole furore is more about freedom than film. The picture itself has all the accumulated poise and potency of a clumsy GCSE drama project. From a purely personal perspective, I’d be challenged to summon up any murderous zeal from such a laughable and pointless pantomime. Unless of course, I was very angry anyway.  

Bigot-Gate II

228,000 people have responded to the government consultation on same-sex marriage, and 50,000 to that regarding HS2, so from a population of 62,641,000, the overwhelming majority did not respond at all. It’s not that folk don’t care about spending £32.7 billion knocking 40 minutes off a trip to Birmingham, or if civil partnerships need a nudge in the nuptial direction, it’s just that most of us are rather busy.

Some however, may not be busy enough. Such was the clamour when Nick Clegg’s office released details of last night’s speech, in which opponents of the ‘equalities agenda’ were allegedly about to be branded as ‘bigots’, that the wording was withdrawn within an hour and a half. The Deputy PM said it was a mistake, just a rogue draft that slipped out, possibly under a door, and that bigot is “not the kind of word that I would use.” Ok, why not?

Bigotry is intolerance to others opinions, and referring to bigots is an opinion in itself. If we have reached the stage where it is not tolerated to discuss intolerance, then free speech is really only free for those who agree.

Clinking glasses to the coalition’s consultation on gay marriage, Mr Clegg was apparently due to declare that “continued trouble in the economy gives the bigots a stick to beat us with…” Hardly incendiary, even in a dry summer, and yet his aides duly dashed out a denial, such was the size of the stick they in turn were hit with. No-one was to be directly accused of bigotry, and neither has the Lib Dem leader been, he is merely guilty just of almost uttering the word. None-the-less, Conservative MP Peter Bone said he should really resign, to a chorus of others tut-tutting on Twitter. Whether you agree with same sex marriage or not, surely the reaction is ridiculous.  

Of course, the speed with which this semantic scandal was sanctioned owes much to the memory of Gordon Brown’s brush with one Mrs Duffy of Rochdale. The former PM famously failed to field her questions on the economy, or politely pick her up on her reference to “flocking Eastern Europeans” for that matter, before mumbling “bigoted woman” into the smouldering ashes of his election chances. 

It was Brown’s predecessor, Tony Blair, who championed the Civil Partnerships Act, affording same sex couples equal rights under law. In seeking to secure his own liberal legacy with same-sex marriages, David Cameron has no harder sell than to the barracking benches behind him. There may be ‘bigots’ abiding on both sides of the debate, but surely the strength of our democracy is in the tolerance of others opinions. In an ideal world, our collective task is to ensure that even attitudes from extreme ends of the spectrum have the right to a voice, but within that, taking individual responsibility, so that no voice disrupts the harmony of another. We don’t live in an ideal world of course, but that is not an excuse to stop trying to.