Paywall Fight!

Mick Hume, above, is the editor-at-large at Spiked, and the author of There Is No Such Thing As a Free Press.

Last week he delivered a speech at the National Newspaper of Ireland Journalism Awards. We asked him for a copy of the speech but he didn’t have one “just had a few notes.” However, he’s kindly written the following from memory:

I have been asked to talk about the theme of my book, in defence of press freedom. Some might wonder if that is really necessary in the 21st century. After all, these days everybody in public life in the UK, Ireland, the US and the West will say that they support freedom of the press. When I debated these matters in London with His Holiness Hugh Grant, patron saint of statutory regulation, even he insisted that he supported a free press “in an ideal world”. Who exactly would want to live in Hugh Grant’s ideal world is another matter.

But the idea that everybody supports the principle of press freedom is one of the great lies and delusions of the age. In reality, press freedom is distinctly out of fashion in political and intellectual circles. The mantra of today is “I believe in a free press BUT…”. Then they go on to explain how they don’t really believe in freedom of expression at all – or at least, only for those views of which they approve. “I believe in a free press BUT…” And the “Buts” are getting bigger.

This is why, as journalists and writers, I think it is high time we started speaking up more vociferously for the freedom of the press, with no buts. Press freedom is not some woolly but impossible ideal, like Free Love, to be “butted” into submission by practicalities. Freedom of expression and of the press is the lifeblood of any free and civilised society.

And we need to defend it as an indivisible liberty. You cannot say you abolish slavery, but only for white people and Christians. You cannot say you defend press freedom, but only for the “respectable”, highbrow publications and not those “vulgar” tabloids.

These are ideas that have largely been lost sight of in Western debate, where the emphasis today is on depicting the press as a problem, as something has been “too free” and needs to be reined in somehow.

Look at our experience in the UK. For two and a half years now, since the phone-hacking scandal exploded, the British press has been on trial. The Leveson Inquiry was really a showtrial, since the popular press had been found guilty before proceedings began, and all that remained to be decided was the sentence.

Now the politicians are trying to impose a system of press regulation using the ancient anti-democratic instruments of the Royal Charter, the Crown prerogative and Her Majesty’s Honourable Privy Council. It smacks of the seventeenth century – the first attempt at state-backed regulation since the despotic system of Crown licensing of the press ended in 1695.

In the old days King Charles II had an official censor called Roger L’Estrange, who hated new fangled newspapers because they told the “Multitude” what their “Superiors” were up to, and gave the masses “an itch…to be meddling with the government”. To put a stop to such wickedness, L’Estrange published government-approved newspapers and stamped on those who sought to publish freely. As late as 1663, a printer was hanged, drawn and quartered for daring to infringe the Crown monopoly. (That was not, of course, the end of British state interference in the Irish press. As late as 1848, the publisher of the rebellious United Irishmen newspaper was sent, not to the Tower, but to Tasmania.)

Exactly 350 years after the brutal execution of that printer, today’s more civilised British rulers still share that fear and loathing of “the Multitude” and insolent publications. The difference is that they wish to use the ancient instruments of the Royal Charter, Crown Prerogative and Privy Council only to have the popular press neutered and lobotomised, rather than put to death.

The spirit of the moment was summed up by an Old Bailey judge last week, at the start of the trial of two former editors of the News of the World. M’lud told the jury not to look at the latest issue of the satirical magazine Private Eye, because its front cover was a joke involving one the accused, Rebekah Brooks, which was “in exceedingly bad taste”. That is what all of this has been about. The phone-hacking scandal, which nobody wants or needs to defend, has been used as a pretext for a wider purge of that which the elites deem to be “in exceptionally bad taste” in the popular press. We should remember that the Leveson Inquiry was not into phone-hacking at all, but was set up to probe the far wider “culture, practice and ethics” of the press. It was an exercise in what I call Ethical Cleansing.Continue reading →