NO CENSORSHIP BOARD NEEDED
The press: Paul Johnson
thinks the Calcutt proposals should be shelved
THE reactions to the Calcutt Report on the press convince me that what it proposes is unlikely to come to pass. The public is not interested in what it says. The press, indeed the media as a whole, is generally hostile. Many have already pointed to a flaw in the argument: that a misdemeanour by the Sunday Sport can lead to such papers as the Times, Telegraph and Guar- dian being subjected to statutory post- publication censorship. This makes no sense at all. The Sport may be a newspaper in format and in a technical legal sense but in fact, as everyone knows, it is a soft-porn comic. You might just as well hold the press responsible for the contents of Play- boy.
Then again, it makes no sense to replace the Press Council, failure though it is, by a toothless quango. It would be more honest to go straight to censorship. The Calcutt people may not like the word, but that is what they propose — editors hauled before a non-elected judge, who punishes them for what they have written, without any kind of jury and according to principles hitherto unknown to the law. At least in the days when criminal libel was used to curb press criticism of government, jour- nalists had a chance to appeal to the good sense of their ordinary fellow-countrymen: in the period 1808-21, for instance, about half the government's 101 criminal libel prosecutions against publications failed, as juries simply would not convict, often despite much judicial bullying. Calcutt proposes to put the clock back before Fox's Libel Act of 1792. Until then all juries were allowed to decide on was the fact of publication. Fox gave them the duty to determine whether the matter was libellous or not. Now Calcutt proposes to eliminate the jury altogether in favour of quango law.
I foresee all kinds of problems if Parlia- ment actually gets down to the legislative nuts-and-bolts of a post-publication cen- sorship system. No doubt Labour will be keen — they hate freedom of the press anyway — but there will be a lot of trouble on Tory benches and, I suspect, still more in the Lords. In any case, Parliament is no longer sovereign, especially on matters affecting basic freedoms. What makes any- one think that such a censor board, even if Parliament can be persuaded to bring one into existence, will be acceptable under Community Law? No such body is in operation anywhere in Western Europe. Some EEC members, such as Spain and Portugal, got rid of censorship compara- tively recently and will be aghast at another member, especially one with such disting- uished libertarian traditions as Britain, returning to it. Again, in the next few years we will be welcoming into the fold such countries as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, who shed censorship even more recently. They will be still more hostile. The whole spirit of European union, as expressed in its courts and parliament, is against the idea. How will Mrs Thatcher enjoy the spectacle of a British editor appealing to the European Court of Hu- man Rights against what will be presented as `Thatcherite authoritarianism'?
Oddly enough, it was precisely to avoid political trouble that Mrs Thatcher took the step, unusual for her, of appointing a committee in the first place. She rightly believes that it is the job of government to take decisions. Passing the buck to a bunch of busybodies is an evasion she normally dismisses as worthy only of Harold Wilson. In this case however she was caught between rising Commons anger against tabloid behaviour on the one hand, and her own unwillingness to antagonise the press this side of the election, on the other. Hence Calcutt. As I predicted, it has not got her out of her difficulties but if any- thing made them worse. The enthusiasm with which David Waddington — who, with the disaster of Strangeways already under his belt, is shaping up as a spectacu- larly bad Home Secretary — accepted Calcutt's ideas gives substance, for the first time, to the Left's allegation, widely be- lieved abroad, that the Thatcher govern- ment hates freedom of speech. Harold Macmillan's once-excellent PR never reco- vered from the jailing of a journalist and I fear that Mrs Thatcher in turn is heading for a Donnybrook with the press long before polling-day.
The tragedy is that it is all so unneces- sary. The public, so far as I can see, has no desire for a press-quango let alone a censorship board. All it wants is to stop outrageous press intrusion into people's privacy. That is an entirely reasonable demand. For a thousand years common law and statutory law have been providing redress for such grievances. That is what the courts and Parliament are for.
Experience has shown that the common law is inadequate to protect individual privacy against media intrusion. So Parlia- ment must step in. Whether a Privacy Bill, making intrusion a tort, is a government effort or a Private Member's with govern- ment assistance, makes no matter. The essential thing is to have a universal law, applicable to all, with a defence of public interest, cases being settled in the ordinary civil courts and according to time-tested procedures. If both parties agree to have a judge decide, so be it; but as a rule the public interest defence will be weighed against the facts of intrusion by a jury, and there is no better body to decide such matters. Nor should it be hard to square such a law with Europe. Several European states have it already in one form or another. So to hell with quangos!
The lawyers say framing a privacy law is impossible. They would, wouldn't they? Lawyers are idle fellows when it comes to original thinking about knotty problems. Remember the meal they made of reform- ing the Official Secrets law? But lawyers, as Churchill said, should be on tap not on top. They should be told to get on with it and, if they can't, sacked and others hired. I trust Tory backbenchers will return to the privacy issue and stop the Government hanging itself with Calcutt's rope of sand.
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