The battle over press regulation after the Leveson report is merely another tussle in a country addicted to a boisterous press
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Press freedom – members of the Hacked Off campaign reveal how many people have signed the petition for a free but accountable press. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The chorus of mostly Tory editorial writers and columnists who have been denouncing any external constraint on their right to have a good time keep claiming that Britain is facing the end of "300 years of press freedom". Stirring stuff, but not true. Why should we believe their dire predictions for the future when they can't even be bothered to get the past right?
Since newspapers started appearing in this country in the early 17th century – the earliest surviving paper dates from 1621 – there has been a running war between the press, the politicians, the courts and their agents, and the police. Sometimes one side gets the upper hand, then another. But the battle over press regulation after the Leveson report is just that, another battle in a country unusually addicted to a boisterous press.
Not the first, but not the last either. In the 1920s and 30s press lords such as Harmsworth (Times), Beaverbrook (Express) and Rothermere (Mail) openly bullied elected governments, but also connived in self-censorship. Their British readers heard nothing of the Prince of Wales's affairs until a bishop broke the dam and he – by now Edward VIII – abdicated to marry his twice-divorced squeeze in December 1936.
The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, with Mrs Wallis Simpson in France, 1937. His abdication was hastened by the hounding of Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images Mrs Simpson's divorce in Ipswich ("King's Moll Divorced in Wolsey's Home Town", cried one US tabloid) was kept out of the papers too by collusion at the top. More importantly, so was much critical reporting of the Nazi regime in Berlin because it undermined PM Neville (1937-40) Chamberlain's doomed strategy to prevent war by appeasement. Chamberlain was a pioneering media manipulator who bullied editors, tried to get correspondents sacked and generally behaved as badly as the press lords do whenever they get the upper hand – as in the Murdoch era now ending.
Back in the 17th century all printers needed a state licence to publish news and then only news from abroad, which was (rightly) deemed safer. Inevitably there was an appetite to learn of the mounting struggles between Charles I and his parliament, filled by privately-circulated subscription sheets, what the Guardian's Andrew Sparrow (in his book, Obscure Scribblers) called "Stuart samizdat". Printers were duly prosecuted.
Nothing new there then. But the idea that the abolition of licensing in 1694 – six years after the liberal "glorious revolution" – settled the issue of press freedom until Lord Justice Leveson produced his recipe for tyranny doesn't hold water.
In his final 2004 edition of his Anatomy of Britain series (to fit the popular mood he called this edition Who Runs This Place?), the late Anthony Sampson noted that the one institution in battered, post-imperial Britain whose power had actually grown since he started writing was the media.
Yet even now British libel laws remain pretty fierce (that defamation reform may be a casualty of the current standoff is one evident irony). Censorship of the theatre, much of it absurd, by someone called the Lord Chamberlain survived until 1968, with the support of more reactionary newspapers, despite decades of protest for reform. D-notices (nowadays DA Notices) are still occasionally issued to protect state security. There is sometimes dispute over it. Life goes on, as does the press.
John Milton fell foul of his own government and its revived licensing habits. Photograph: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy When king and parliament joined in civil war in 1641, the abolition of the hated star chamber court gave printers and would-be journalists the green light. It didn't last. John Milton's famous pamphlet, Areopagitica (1644) defending the freedom of conscience and speech against government censorship has been much invoked lately in newspapers generally unsympathetic to long-haired leftie poets on disability benefit. But as the Cromwell republic became less tolerant – surprise, surprise – Milton fell foul of his own government and its revived licensing habits.
And so it stayed. Charles II was personally tolerant (with his tabloid love life he had to be), but parliament insisted on repressing dissent via the 1662 Licensing Act. In 1680 MPs did agree to print the results of their votes – not the debates, let alone which way individual MPs voted.
The pro-Protestant revolution of 1688 asserted parliament's own freedom, but was only relatively liberal, a winning formula for stable oligarchy and growing prosperity, but with clear boundaries. They were challenged.
Catholics and dissenters still excluded from office until the 19th century (the throne to this day) and there was no mention of a free press, despite philosopher John Locke's eloquent attacks on the licensing laws which duly lapsed. Prosecution of troublemakers continued just as the spread of unlicensed newspapers continued – in defiance of the 1712 Stamp Act, which tried to keep them out of the hands of the unwashed British public by imposing a heavy 1p tax on every copy – at least doubling the price.
The free press was more important than a free government, declared Thomas Jefferson. Photograph: Wkimedia Commons By the time stamp duty was abolished in 1855 against the widespread opposition of fearful MPs, it was 4p per copy, making an eight page paper cost 7p or a third of many a worker's daily wage. Publishers did not pass on all the profits generated by the tax's removal – another recurring theme – though it did allow the new Daily Telegraph (not so elitist as the Times had become) to build what would be the biggest selling daily until Harmsworth invented the mass circulation Daily Mail in 1896.
Long before then Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels (1865-80) had created in Quintus Slide of the People's Banner, a muck-raking, blackmailing rascal of an editor who would be easily recognisable as a species of red-top or blogging operator today. Modern rotary printing presses and the 19th century railway network to distribute copies made modern Fleet Street, just as technological innovation today – the internet and beyond – now threatens to be its undoing.
Despite repression the 18th century had nonetheless been a more glorious era for rumbustious journalism, not least in the growth and popularity of savage cartoons to entertain all classes at the expense of the government of the day. Robert Walpole, Britain's first de facto PM (1721-42) bribed a talented hack called Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe fame) to write supportive pieces that ostensibly opposed him. Prosecutions were routine.
If stamp duty (an advertising tax came later) was one weapon of the governing classes, a charge of seditious libel was another, regularly deployed against journalists and publishers for undermining the key pillars of authority – the crown, the king's government and religion.
As amazed foreigners noted – they still do – the London press, much of it technically illegal (no stamp), remained a running riot of sedition compared with autocracies governing most of Europe. The American colonists would soon entrench the right of free speech in their constitution. A free press was more important than a free government, declared Thomas Jefferson (though President Jefferson later changed his mind).
The Leveson report is not the first battle over press freedom – and it's unlikely to be the last. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images The greatest showdown of the century occurred in 1763, when the infant government of George III tried to prosecute everyone – it issued a "general warrant" – connected with publication of the 45th edition of the North Briton, which had been savaging Lord Bute's administration with high-level aristo-funding by opposition peers. The brains behind the paper was the radical and rake, John Wilkes who (just to complicate things) was MP for Middlesex at the time.
Convicted of seditious libel and outlawed, Wilkes was expelled as an MP, twice re-elected (shades of Tony Benn's battle to disclaim his peerage in the 1960s) and twice more expelled before he prevailed, winning important battles for liberty – not least the informal right to report parliament, previously harassed by officialdom.
The French revolution, attacks on religion and domestic radicalism prompted more repression, including the 1792 Libel Act, at least it gave those charged the benefit of jury trial. But in 1803 Speaker Abbott reserved a few places in the public gallery for reporters to report proceedings. Before he went on to better things, young Charles Dickens was a gallery reporter. The author of Sketches by Boz took with him a lifelong disdain for politicians, and John Stuart Mill – himself a liberal politician – enshrined his utilitarian right to express it.
The awkward fact is that, like great ages of politics – football or economic progress too – great phases of press reporting and opinion ebb and flow too. The scandal-rich Crimean war (1854-56) made the brilliant William Howard Russell of the Times the first modern war reporter, but decades of imperial military ineptitude made officialdom reach for repression again by the time the second world war broke out.
Heavily censored and patriotic war correspondency became the order of the day as the carnage continued. When the media helped break the American public's support for the Vietnam war in the 60s, a similar pattern of military control over reporters movements and copy would later reassert itself; in the Falklands (1982) and other operations up to the "embedded" era of Iraq (2003).
Christine Keeler, a key figure in the 1963 Profumo scandal, which rocked the government and changed relations with the press. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty On the back of a German spy scare the Official Secrets Act of 1889 had already been beefed up (in a single afternoon) in 1911 to become a scourge of serious investigative journalism until modified in 1989 after decades of fights between Fleet Street and Westminster. A naval officer was convicted under it only last year.
Sometimes the press got it right, sometimes wrong, as in the 1962 John Vassall spy affair (1963) when two journalists were jailed for not revealing sources which (many suspected) did not exist. Fleet Street did not protest hard. But its excesses in reporting Vassall prompted fatal establishment complacency when the five-star Profumo sex scandal broke in 1963. It proved a Fleet Street's annus mirabilis and brought down the Macmillian government.
In The Abuse of Power, his unexpectedly candid memoirs (1978), James Margach, for decades a highly discreet political correspondent – latterly for the Sunday Times – described what he called "the war between Downing St and the media" since Lloyd George. Of four crises he identifies as ones where newspapers excesses "connived in effect at turning the press's own flank", Vassall was one.
The first of Margach's four came in the 30s, when Beaverbrook and Rothermere (of later Blackshirt sympathies) actually formed their own political party to try and overthrow Stanley Baldwin. "Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot," was Baldwin's famous riposte – which any PM today could use if he/she had the guts. Tony Blair's "feral beasts" speech bravely picked on the Indy, the weakest in the pack.
Baldwin cowed the press lords then – in time for Chamberlain to bully them over Hitler – but their attacks on the Attlee government (1945-51) prompted Nye Bevan's "most prostituted press in the world" (though Beaverbrook provided him and his wife, Jenny Lee MP, with their country cottage, as he did Michael Foot) and the first of many Leveson-style inquiries. It led to the original Press Council.
Margaret Thatcher quickly adopted Lloyd George’s maxim “square ’em or squash ’em”. Photograph: Malcolm Gilson/Rex Features Vassall was the third, and the fourth (there have been many since) was the Daily Mail's strident allegations of bribery and corruption at state-owned-and-flagging British Leyland in 1977, though (as with the "Zinoviev letter" election smear against Labour in 1924) the crucial document printed on page one was easily shown to be a forgery.
No government was strong enough to do much about it in the 70s, and when a strong one came along under Margaret Thatcher she adopted Lloyd George's maxim "square 'em or squash 'em". It was mostly squaring, though the Guardian was forced to hand over leaked defence documents which identified the leaker as Sarah Tisdall. It had lost a court battle to plead protection under the 1981 Contempt of Court Act – and faced the threat of recurring cash fines.
When a jury got its chance to pronounce on another civil service leaker, Clive Ponting in 1985 it acquitted him. As the Guardian found fighting the police and politicians in the 90s, juries can be good allies.
Lord Justice Leveson. Fleet Street is right to protest that there is still much wrong with the cross-party proposals over his report. Photograph: Graeme Robertson It is not that right is usually on one side or the other, or that the public interest – and the readers interests – are better protected in Whitehall or Fleet Street. Neither side has a monopoly of virtue. Fleet Street is right to protest that there is still much wrong with the cross-party proposals over Leveson, but wrong to say 300 years of press freedom are at stake. It just isn't true.
A system of self-regulation with a flick of external monitoring – not as tough as what the tabloids seek for the NHS this week – will just provide a new battleground with no permanent winner. The real threat to newspapers in 2013 is commercial viability in the internet age, not government censorship at a time when censorship looks ever more difficult in free societies.
Forget about Hacked Off's posturing. Just read Alan Rusbridger's account of Fleet Street's backstairs manoeuvres and note in passing that his predecessor, Peter Preston, regularly takes a different view on Leveson (and much else) in his Observer media column, as does Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, who calls Leveson mere revenge.
Not much pluralism visible in the choir of Tory pundits agreeing with their tax-efficient owner's view on Leveson. It is a U-turn on their initial positive response, except newspapers never do U-turns, only politicians do. The war goes on – as usual.
