There was great, if muted, rejoicing around editors’ offices as the Tory manifesto scrapped any more episodes of Leveson – and saw the hated section 40, honed to enforce joining a royal charter, bite the dust. Magnificent May backs press freedom, etc. Now only Messrs Corbyn and Farron want to put newspapers in the stocks.
Theresa says “enough is enough”. That leaves the print-created Independent Press Standards Organisation in command of the field, and the charter-sanctified Impress out in the cold, spending Max Mosley’s trust millions and hoping that, next election round, the Tories will lose (and, therefore, so will Ipso).
Victory for one definition of freedom, then? Perhaps. But victory only in yet another round between politicians and a permanently embattled press, this time with some particularly dangerous strands left hanging loose. One is the fact that the press is more, not less, divided about regulation than in the dead days of the Press Complaints Commission. The Guardian, Observer and FT are doing their own thing now. Ipso is weaker for their absence.
Remember, too, that Impress is an approved regulator via that lugubrious charter endorsed by all sides in parliament. The sword of Damocles hasn’t turned into a ploughshare. It’s waiting on the peg for a new set of politicians to take it down again.
Moreover, there’s the vexed question of arbitration – raised as a defining issue by Karen Bradley, the relevant secretary of state, before the last election. Leveson wanted arbitration. Ipso has its own trial version, little explored. Impress has a cheaper alternative, again in its earliest stages.
Question: with five years to work something out, assuming the Tories win, shouldn’t there be real efforts to produce a single arbitration system for the press? Put those early building blocks in place and who knows? That victory might be a permanent one.
