Nasty Party Pulls the plug Cross Party on Leveson Agreement Before Conservative Spring Conference

My thoughts on Leveson Report

I fully believe that the Leveson Report should be implemented and stop pussyfooting around as we all aware that the Conservatives Spring Conference is due to begin today and their donors are impatient with Cameron.

I’m not surprised or shock that the Nasty Party pulled out the crossed party over Leveson Report on the grounds that they never had any intention of implement any of the recommendation of the report with the support of their coalition partner or Labour.

Let us all be clear if phones were not hacked this problem would not have happened in the first place. I have more time for the Hack Off Campaign group than this coalition. I believe that all campaigns hold members of parliament (MP) to account as they are voters just like you and me. My message to coalition is “Pick sense of nonsense”.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Conservatives donors are pulling the buttons of David Cameron to water down Leveson Report and they have to play the blame game on Labour again by accusing the Hack off campaign having a hold on Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg.

If there has been any hijacking, it was by the powerful interests whose publications conspired to breach citizens’ privacy in pursuit of higher circulation and profits and are now intent on promoting the mirage of regulation rather than its essence.

These mouthpieces for the rich and powerful are trying to pull the wool over their readers’ eyes by affecting to stand up against statutory regulation of the press.

Statutory underpinning of media self-regulation is far from statutory regulation of the press, but the media moguls propagate this myth to paint themselves as guardians of press freedom against “Stalinist” enforcers of uniformity led by the Hacked Off campaign and National Union of Journalists leader Michelle Stanistreet.

It beggars belief that these smug panjandrums can describe the media in Britain as “free of political control for 300 years,” when most of our newspapers offer a severely restricted right-wing viewpoint.

Absence of direct state control does not equate to freedom, as Rupert Murdoch’s dictatorial prescription of what is acceptable in his stable of newspapers illustrates clearly.

It would require the most abject betrayal of political principle by Nick Clegg for Liberal Democrat MPs to troop into the division lobbies next Monday behind David Cameron’s attempt to bury Leveson.

While such a possibility can never be discounted, Cameron’s decision to simply pull the plug on joint talks with Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband was sufficiently contemptuous to have forced even the Liberal Democrat leader to declare that this worm is finally for turning.

His party, in common with Labour, has insisted that Cameron’s Royal Charter without statutory underpinning is inadequate and an insult to the Leveson inquiry and the witnesses who testified.

To the surprise of no-one at all, Cameron has secured backing from major media transnational corporations including the Daily Mail Group, the Telegraph Media Group and Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

The executives of these capitalist conglomerates share Cameron’s misrepresentation of talks on regulation as having been “hijacked” by those demanding legislation.

If there has been any hijacking, it was by the powerful interests whose publications conspired to breach citizens’ privacy in pursuit of higher circulation and profits and are now intent on promoting the mirage of regulation rather than its essence.

These mouthpieces for the rich and powerful are trying to pull the wool over their readers’ eyes by affecting to stand up against statutory regulation of the press.

Statutory underpinning of media self-regulation is far from statutory regulation of the press, but the media moguls propagate this myth to paint themselves as guardians of press freedom against “Stalinist” enforcers of uniformity led by the Hacked Off campaign and National Union of Journalists leader Michelle Stanistreet.

It beggars belief that these smug panjandrums can describe the media in Britain as “free of political control for 300 years,” when most of our newspapers offer a severely restricted right-wing viewpoint.

Absence of direct state control does not equate to freedom, as Rupert Murdoch’s dictatorial prescription of what is acceptable in his stable of newspapers illustrates clearly.

His slippery “I remember nothing” performance before Leveson, together with his son’s “no-one told me anything” act, should caution acceptance of Cameron’s cosmetic variation of the discredited model of voluntary self-regulation that has served media proprietors so well.

However, it has not served the public interest, as the shameless treatment of countless individuals has revealed, most disgracefully and heartlessly in the case of Millie Dowler’s family.

Leveson’s proceedings provided a window on the misdeeds of sections of the media that believed themselves invulnerable because of wealth and political connections.

How that media operates in future is too important to be left to the rich and powerful and their parliamentary pawns on the Tory Party front bench.

This Cameron-supporting claque does not speak for all the media. Apart from the Morning Star, the Financial Times, Independent and Guardian groups all accept the need for statutory underpinning.

This is despite not having indulged in any of the illegal practices brought to light by Leveson, which have tainted the entire media in the eyes of the public.

Politicians who resist the tidal wave of propaganda in support of Cameron’s bid to circumvent Leveson can expect to be monstered as enemies of press freedom by the usual suspects.

So MPs will require political backbone and a thick skin to vote down the Prime Minister’s Royal Charter charade on Monday.

In regards to the Cockroach Party (Liberal Democrats) they have a history of being a turn coats when it suit them. Remember the 1970s coalition agreement see link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lib%E2%80%93Lab_pact

See article below:

A day of talks over implementing the Leveson report on press reform, including a joint meeting between the Hacked Off campaign and the Labour and Liberal Democrat leaderships, failed to achieve a breakthrough on Tuesday.

Hacked Off, which represents victims of press intrusion such as Kate and Gerry McCann, met with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband to see if fresh proposals from the Conservatives took the complex negotiations to a conclusion that could satisfy all those involved.

There had been hopes that all three leaders, Clegg, Miliband and David Cameron, would meet to seal a deal on Tuesday evening, but in the end too many disagreements remained for them to come together.

A Hacked Off source said they were “still far apart on vital issues”, including whether the press would be able to write its own code of practice, and whether the industry would be able to veto appointments to a revamped Press Complaints Commission. However, the PM’s spokesman said progress was being made.

Talks on Monday night between Oliver Letwin, Cameron’s policy fixer, the culture secretary, Maria Miller, Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Harriet Harman, and Lord Wallace for the Liberal Democrats, led to fresh proposals on how a body enshrined in a royal charter to oversee the work of the PCC would be implemented.

Various ideas have been advanced to make the royal charter permanent, including the suggestion that a law could be introduced that does not refer to the oversight body specifically but says that any royal charter that a future government wants to change cannot be amended by the privy council alone.

“This would not be sector-specific,” the source said, but would be a statute about royal charters. The idea has been advanced by the barrister Hugh Tomlinson, one of the lawyers informally advising Hacked Off and an expert on press regulation.

The Conservatives had previously proposed a royal charter as a way of ensuring a permanent body is set up to oversee and verify the new press regulatory body proposed by Leveson. Cameron had resisted Leveson’s recommendation that a revamped PCC should be underpinned by a law.

Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been concerned the royal charter and the verifying body could be abolished in the future at the whim of a minister, unless they are backed by statute. There has also been disagreement over the extent to which the regulatory body should be chaired by an independent figure not employed by the press.

Cameron is caught between a need to satisfy a divided press industry and a desire to stick to his commitment to implement the principles behind the Leveson report.

The sticking points on Friday were that Conservatives were siding with newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, who wanted a veto over appointments to the new body, control over the code of practice, and restrictions on third-party complaints.