The McCanns: David Cameron's use of grief for political ends is shameful
The prime minister's intervention came on the day a national newspaper urged him to act
There are no words adequate to describe the pain experienced by Kate and Gerry McCann over the disappearance of their daughter, Madeleine, in 2007. The whole country has been witness to their suffering.
David Cameron, as a father, as a human being, is no more immune to their agony than anyone else. Perhaps that is why he asked Scotland Yard to review the case. But that is not the only reason. The prime minister's intervention came on the same day that a national newspaper urged him to act. Mr Cameron, remember, is a former public relations executive for a television company.
For some, the McCanns' expressions of gratitude will be enough to allay criticism of Downing Street. But Mr Cameron needs to be careful about presenting himself as some benevolent tsar, bestowing favours on petitioning subjects.
"An exceptional case" is the defence from Number 10. Indeed it is, and a tragic one, but for that very reason it is not necessarily the right context in which to set policy. And Mr Cameron's action is not without policy implications. His government is currently struggling to push legislation through Parliament that would change the structures that hold police forces accountable. The Conservatives lost a vote in the House of Lords over the establishment of popularly elected police commissioners.
Much of the debate over this issue hinges on the question of whether forces would be more or less subject to political interference. The official Tory line is that the police – and other public servants – should face less meddling from the centre. Yet it seems Mr Cameron excuses himself from that rule. The Metropolitan Police, struggling to implement huge budget cuts and facing many other heartrending, unsolved cases, must set its priorities to the prime minister's fiat. The nation is united in respect for the McCanns' grief. Shame on Mr Cameron for playing politics with it.
The press must put its own house in order
Better self-regulation than legislation to guarantee journalistic freedom to uncover the truth
Britain has a free press. Newspapers are allowed to criticise government and expose wrongdoing by public officials. They are also at liberty to publish prurient speculation about the private lives of minor celebrities.
Often, these revelations have a tenuous claim to be in the public interest, although the way they boost sales proves that they interest the public, which is a different thing entirely.
In theory, there are a only handful of prohibitions on what can be published. In practice, courts are getting increasingly aggressive in the way they use those limited powers to gag the press. One instrument that has become notorious in recent weeks is the injunction that grants anonymity to the subjects of particular stories. In some cases, mention even of the existence of a ban is forbidden. The existence of any such device should provoke suspicion in a democracy.
Many of the stories involved relate to sexual peccadilloes of people who are in the public eye but not concerned with public policy: adulterous footballers and actors. There is a strong argument that their intimate affairs should not be ransacked as spectator sport.
But there are other, less clear cases. Politicians, corporations and bankers whose actions have an impact on ordinary lives must forfeit some of their right to privacy.
There is a huge grey area in between. Many high-profile figures trade on an artificially constructed image of their private lives for profit. If there is a huge hypocrisy behind that image, perhaps the consuming public has a right to know?
The rich and powerful have always tried to silence their detractors, although the traditional mechanism in Britain has been libel law. A blanket right to privacy is a relatively recent innovation. It derives from article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which, under the 1998 Human Rights Act, was incorporated into UK law. A countervailing force is article 10 which guarantees freedom of expression.
Courts are expected to weigh these conflicting imperatives. That power of arbitration irritates journalists since it overrides their professional autonomy. But it also annoys Parliament on a point of constitutional order. If there are to be rules about privacy, mutter some MPs, they should be set by the House of Commons, not devised ad hoc by judges.
There is, for now, not much appetite in Westminster for a grand Privacy Act and rightly so. There is every danger that politicians would shape it to suit their secretive habits. Parliament has only ever embraced transparency after a fight and a scandal. Even a liberal statute might be open to authoritarian interpretation. It would give the police a hand in regulating the press, which is a grim prospect.
The key question is not whether Parliament should set new press rules, but why it is that a clamour has arisen for something to be done.
Some judges are prejudiced in favour of privacy and wary of journalists' claims to be acting as noble crusaders for freedom. Courts might be less trigger-happy with injunctions if newspapers had not so often published material based on invasions of privacy where the "public interest" defence is meretricious.
There is an absolutist argument that says the investigative ferocity of the British press is a good in itself. The fact that it is sometimes directed at celebrities is a price worth paying, goes the argument, when it is also regularly applied to worthier targets. Footballers and their wives, in this view, are collateral damage in the wider war against lies, corruption and official secrecy.
Lies, bullying and kiss-and-tell profiteering do, sadly, go unpunished too often in newsrooms. But a lot of investigative energy is also spent unearthing serious abuses of power, not only in politics but, just as often, at the sleazier side of sport.
The newspaper industry is competitive, irreverent and tenacious in pursuit of a story. Those traits make it an effective check on arrogant, unaccountable power.
The problem is that the press itself is charged with arrogance and unaccountability.
The Press Complaints Commission (PCC), the body through which newspapers govern themselves, is not, as sometimes alleged, a feeble apologist for the trade. Editors take its adjudications seriously; reporters generally obey when it requests they leave subjects alone. The PCC code of practice demands respect for privacy in terms that hardly differ from the rights extended under the European Convention. Its successes in policing that right go unnoticed by definition, because journalists have not reported whatever it is they were asked not to report.
But no other powerful institution enjoys the privilege of self-regulation on such a scale. Journalists like it this way, but the public does not share newspapers' generous evaluation of their own integrity. The PCC is little known outside the industry. It is generally respected within it, but it should be more feared. It needs tougher powers of sanction. It should, for example, be able to force retractions of bad journalism on a scale appropriate to the offence. Since the motive for invading privacy is often commercial, there should be financial disincentives too. The PCC should levy fines for gross breaches of its code.
Much tougher self-regulation is not a threat to press freedom but a last bastion to protect it. Such regulation would help silence demands for dangerous privacy laws designed to suit politicians. It would also enhance journalists' authority, marking a useful distinction between the press, which has rules, and those sections of the blogosphere which have none.
Currently, journalists are trusted in society at around the same level as politicians and used-car salesmen. That is one reason why judges feel relaxed about gagging them. Newspapers should not crave respectability for its own sake, but they should do more to resist being seen as disreputable.
Serving up what interests the public makes good commercial sense, but it is not enough simply to entertain. A press that is admired by decent citizens and feared by crooks would easily shrug off attempts at political or judicial interference. That is how the real public interest is served.
Drug laws: 40 years on, only a complete change of approach will do
The Misuse of Drugs Act has failed utterly and there is no political consensus about the idea of trying anything new
It is 40 years since Parliament passed the Misuse of Drugs Act, establishing the framework that, with periodic tweaks, is used for controlling substance abuse today. Actual drug use has been going on a lot longer, so it is hardly surprising that one legal instrument has failed to kill the habit.
It is remarkable, however, how utterly the system has failed. Drugs are available to anyone who really wants them. The classification system of substances into degrees of harmfulness – A for the worst, C for the least bad – is ignored by users and dismissed by many scientists. Its only practical use seems to be in determining prison sentences and filling our jails with drug users has had no deterrent effect on use.
Meanwhile, the volume of new products coming to the market is growing at an alarming rate. Laboratories in the far east churn out synthetic variants of natural narcotics or make minor molecular adjustments to old drugs, turning them, from a legal point of view, into new ones. According to a report by the UK Drug Policy Commission, revealed in today's Observer, 40 new substances appeared on the streets last year.
These "legal highs" are ignored by the law until their use attracts sufficient media attention. Then they are classified, proscribed and sold, in a more toxic form, on the black market instead of over the counter. In the 40 years since this process began, patterns of actual drug use have been driven as much by fashion as policy. Heroin in the 80s, ecstasy in the 90s, cocaine today. Cannabis is a staple; levels of use vary a bit, but not in correlation to its pointless, politicised journey between classes B and C.
It is hard to think of a legal approach to any other problem that has failed so thoroughly without political consensus emerging around the idea of trying something else. The 40-year regime introduced by the Misuse of Drugs Act has been characterised by a nonstop boom in the misuse of drugs. Surely it is time to rip it up and start again.
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