Leveson: Was It Worth It?

It may have been the most eagerly anticipated public inquiry report since Hutton beheaded the BBC, but in the end the publication of Lord Justice Leveson’s verdict on the state of the British press – and what to do about it – brought few surprises and little certainty about what happens next. But you wouldn’t have thought it, judging by the response from those in the crossfire.

Almost every major British newspaper today united in rejection, even condemnation, of Lord Leveson’s conviction that creating a structure that can be relied upon to deliver firm and fair regulation of the print media industry requires legislation that initiates and underpins it.

Only the Guardian – the paper that did most to expose the appalling culture and practices at the News of the World, revelations that marked the issue’s arrival on the front pages – broke ranks, declaring that “the press should treat [the report] with respect and… humility”.

This aside, the broad support of newspapers across the political and ownership spectrum will – worryingly – give the Prime Minister great confidence in adopting a position that is in fact verging on a betrayal of those whose side he appeared to be on when he commissioned the inquiry and pledged to honour its recommendations.

Leveson may – at David Cameron’s behest – have spent several months overseeing countless interviews with interested parties from all sides of the debate and writing a 2,000-page report, but it seems the Conservative leader had already made his own mind up about what was an acceptable course of action when it comes to keeping tabs on the press.

True, the judge’s vision of a regulatory body independent of Parliament yet established by it is somewhat confused, and he can have no-one to blame but himself for how little heed has been paid to his assertion that this “is not and cannot be characterised as” state regulation.

But the exaggerations and caricatures of where this supposed precedent could lead are frankly ridiculous, and advocated out of nothing more than self-interest and desperation among editors who fear the removal of more of the power and influence they wield, in addition to the dilution already being delivered by dwindling circulation.

The last several years has shown only too starkly the extent to which newspaper owners cannot be trusted to govern themselves in a meaningful, accountable way. Previous watchdogs have been consistently and systematically deconstructed and undermined to a point where the public can have no faith in the industry’s ability to retain its essential integrity.

Something has to change, and if it takes Parliament to lay down the law about how any such body should be structured, constituted and operated – as Leveson has argued – so be it.

Having said that, there is one major area that Leveson has utterly failed to address in his report, much to the disappointment of the Sage; it is the role of the unregulated internet, in particular social media.

Although he acknowledges that sites like Twitter may display “information that would not be able to be published by a newspaper in conformity with… self-regulation”, he utterly fails to address the extent to which this renders any constraints on print media futile; Lord McAlpine, among others, would testify to that.

In an historic moment yesterday, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister demonstrated, at the despatch box, their very different views on how Lord Justice Leveson’s findings should be followed up; it emerged last night that steps are being taken in Whitehall to draw up a draft bill, but this seems more likely to be an exercise in spitefulness – demonstrating the practical challenges in legislating for the ungovernable – than the dutiful following of one man’s orders.

Leveson has staked his position; the papers are ranged against him, and the politicians have each shown their hand. After all the fuss, the arguments will rage on and on.

Obama and the No-Change Election

It was several months of hard campaigning, hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure and countless hours of television adverts and arguments in the making, but Barack Obama’s triumph on Tuesday – together with a largely unchanged Congress – means the 2012 election has actually brought very little change to America’s politics. So why all the fuss?

The margin of the President’s victory, as according the electoral college, is deceptively wide. In the end, he won every state that had been considered marginal in the lead-up to polling day, thus giving him a similar score to that which he accumulated in 2008 (only Indiana and North Carolina – unexpected successes last time round – were reversed).

However, his mandate as measured by the national popular vote is the smallest ever for a re-elected incumbent. More significantly, give or take a handful of gains in each house – which only partially re-balance the swing achieved by the Republicans in 2010 – Obama will, for the next two years at least, continue to face the challenges posed by a bitterly divided Congress.

After wasting a honeymoon period (in which the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives) forcing through radical healthcare legislation that was the subject of heated debate throughout the campaign, the past 24 months have been defined by stalemate between two differing ideologies of deficit reduction – one by tax rises mainly on the rich, and the other by spending cuts that could disproportionately affect the poor.

The two presidential candidates each stood by and spearheaded their respective party’s agenda – but the arguments were constantly bogged down in petty sniping rather than scaling the philosophical heights of a debate about the federal government’s role in American society.

Such vastly differing political visions should have made it impossible for anyone to declare themselves ‘undecided’ by the end of the campaign; instead the candidates were still criss-crossing the country until the very last moment, in the hope of winning a few vital extra votes.

However, the fundamental flaws that ultimately did for Mitt Romney had been exposed long before November 6th. The nature of the Republican Party is such that he spent the entire primary campaign trying to convince his party’s base that he was sufficiently conservative, before telling the increasingly liberal electorate that he was reassuringly moderate.

In the end, voters could be forgiven for being unsure about exactly who they would electing in Obama’s place. It will be interesting to see how the Republican Party behaves in the three years or so until the next primary campaign gets underway, and indeed the extent to which the Democrats’ candidate for 2016 is hamstrung in this way.

But presidential elections are often decided as much by statesmanship as by pure politics – partly because the winner’ policymaking power is so constrained by Congress; incumbents thus inevitably have a head-start here too, because Americans don’t have to imagine how he would ‘look’ as President – delivering television addresses, meeting world leaders, and so on.

It therefore takes either a particularly disappointing tenure or an exceptional new candidate for a President to be turfed out after one term. All of which makes the stakes for the Republicans in four years’ time incredibly high. If they cannot take to victory a candidate with both political and business experience, who boasts wealth and charisma, in an economy marked by near-8% unemployment and trillion-dollar deficits… when and with whom can they win?

Meanwhile, the vote-winning challenge becomes ever more daunting. The Republicans’ core demographic – white, wealthy, Christian, middle-aged men – are a declining force among the American electorate. Minorities now account for around 3 out of 10 voters – and Obama scored between 60 and 90 percent of each non-white ethnic background, as well as healthy majorities among the under-45s, those earning less than $50,000 per year and all non-Christian faiths.

But it’s the exit poll data about personality traits that is most revealing. While 60% of people who said a President’s key attribute is strong leadership, a clear vision or shared values voted for Romney, four out of every five who looked for a leader who cared about people like them went for Obama.

It’s fair to say this probably includes the 47% whom Romney so damagingly wrote off at that ill-fated fundraising dinner. Amid all the critics’ caricatures that this statement seemed to confirm, it’s a wonder that the contest was even close – decided as it was by a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states, with the rest written off as foregone.

In this, America is not unique; in Britain the very same electoral principles allow us to identify ‘safe seats’ and ‘marginal constituencies’. But it demonstrates how sharply divided American political society still is – in stark contrast to the President’s rousing victory-speech claims about the irrelevance of “red states and blue states”.

To win over those who still revile him (and there are many), he needs to achieve something he has so far utterly failed to do – to deliver on the promise of an era of hope and change that swept him into the White House in the first place. This election offers a blueprint for neither.