Ballots & Bullets

TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING!

AND WHEREAS most people on Monday were interested in press regulation, we were interested in Conservative rebellions on press regulation.

AND WHEREAS the vote would have been very tight anyway, the chances of a Conservative victory in the division lobbies had become impossible once a half-decent number of Conservative MPs declared …

Do we need statutory regulation of the press?  Perhaps the press should be regulated, but in a non-statutory way?  Or maybe we need statutory under-pinning of any regulation?  As the row about Lord Justice Leveson’s report has raged, I’ve wondered about another question: do the public even know what ‘statutory’ means? Let alone statutory under-pinning, which, as Matthew Parris noted, …

What does not touch the heart, or come home to the feelings, goes comparatively for little or nothing.

So wrote William Hazlitt in his 1826 essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’.

Hazlitt’s remarks capture the prevailing attitudes towards press freedom surrounding the Leveson inquiry.

Yes Leveson affirms press freedom in his press regulation …