EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

     

 

Public service reform: A bungled police operation

The voters do deserve more of a say over the reforms, but the checks and balances must be got right

Rarely have two letters made such a big difference. By striking the e and r out of "commissioners" on Wednesday night, the House of Lords voted to do away with all talk of elected sheriffs, and to hand back the reins of policing to collective commissions, which is of course what the existing police authorities are. The assault was led by the redoubtable Lady Harris, ordinarily a most loyal Lib Dem.

The most immediate questions, therefore, were for Nick Clegg. Had the newly muscular liberalism he is proclaiming stirred a mutinous spirit which will not merely smooth harsh Conservative edges, but scupper the government programme? Injecting direct democracy into the force was, after all, the centrepiece of the whole police reform bill, and an idea David Cameron has pushed ever since it was dreamed up by his favourite thinktank. Moreover, quite unlike those troubled health service reforms, this was all clearly flagged in the coalition agreement.

The truth, however, is that the defeat had less to do with big picture politics, than the specific proposal at hand. Lady Harris rallied an ermine-trimmed army of former police chiefs and bishops to her cause, and moved some Tories to sit on their hands. All of them fear the proposed form of elections could sacrifice the venerable tradition of keeping the uniformed arm of the law clear of the partisan fray.

Experience in the US is littered with cautionary tales, such as the resignation of the highly rated New York police chief Bill Bratton after he appeared a little too successful for the taste of his mayor on the cover of Time magazine. And in London, where city hall exerts a distinctive governance role, Boris Johnson's shunting aside of the Metropolitan commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was a scarcely happier affair. If individuals with the right to hire and fire top cops were voted on strict partisan lines all over the country, then we could be set on a road where would-be commissioners would end up flashing party membership cards around.

To acknowledge this danger is not to deny that there is an accountability problem. The Home Office might have fared better in the Lords if it had acknowledged the progress that has been made both through neighbourhood policing and the growing role of independents on the authorities. Even so there is some justice in the caricature of the last great unreformed public service. The Labour proposal to elect authority chairs grapples with the exact same problems as the jeopardised Home Office plans, which may now take years to implement.

The voters do deserve more of a say, but the checks and balances must be got right. The government treated them as an afterthought, and it is paying a heavy political price.

The media and the state: be careful what you wish for

If the press would rather people used self-regulation than the courts then it has to make sure that the PCC is a credible regulator

Parliament is currently, for the first time in 15 years, debating proposals to reform the libel laws. These laws, to our shame, have made London the forum of choice for the laundering of reputations, and in repudiation of them the American Congress has passed its own. You would never guess this from monitoring the British media, which is presently obsessed with a different threat altogether – the torrent of superinjunctions gagging journalists' ability to report on matters of high public interest.

This is a curious state of affairs, not least because it's not clear that a single superinjunction has been ordered against the media so far this year. A superinjunction is one whose existence cannot be reported – as happened when the oil traders, Trafigura, succeeded in gagging the Guardian in 2009 over the existence of a confidential report about toxic waste. It is easy to deplore those. The current bone of contention is actually anonymised privacy injunctions, in which the bare bones of the cases are published – but not the identities of those involved. This is a more difficult area.

The courts are doing what parliament asked them to do in passing the Human Rights Act. Judges balance article 8 (respect for privacy) with article 10 (free expression), paying special reference to the British media's codes of practice. The Press Complaints Commission code on privacy is virtually identical to the wording of the HRA, though it allows exceptions in cases of strong public interest, such as the exposing of crime. These cases often involve very difficult balancing acts. In a recent case, OPQ v BJM and CJM, the media dropped objections to a privacy order after hearing: a) that the parties involved had all agreed to one; b) that it involved "straightforward and blatant blackmail"; and c) that there was "solid medical evidence" about the dangers to the health of family members of the claimant that might result from publication. Few people would argue that making some sort of privacy order in these circumstances was totally irrational.

Some alleged details of some of these privacy orders surfaced this week on Twitter, which led to a startling dawn chorus of demands for urgent action. Some argued for a privacy law; others simply urged parliament to discuss privacy (in reality, hoping for an anti-privacy law); others wanted the regulation of Twitter; another variant was to urge "parliament, not judges" to decide the issues; others wanted to see a statutory regulator for the press.

Some of these are absurd. Who on earth, for instance, believes the British courts or parliament could regulate Twitter? What could a parliament-endorsed privacy law possibly say that would be more permissive than the PCC's own code while also being compatible with the balancing act required by the European convention on human rights? Can we really imagining renouncing the ECHR (and thus leaving the EU itself) over the right to spill the bedroom secrets of celebrities and sportsmen? Why do we imagine that parliament would wish to pass such a measure given the ongoing criminal and civil inquiries into the mass hacking of phones by elements of the press, and the feeble response to date of the industry's own regulator? By all means clamour for MPs to consider privacy, but be careful what you wish for.

Whatever the law, someone – either judges or the PCC, but not parliament – will end up making decisions on a case-by-case basis. If the press would rather people used self-regulation than the courts then it has to make sure that the PCC is a credible regulator. Failing that, it's difficult to object to the courts continuing to making case law on the basis of the facts and of the law as it stands. Editors can certainly object to the secrecy: if so, they must then play their part in demonstrating how to reconcile openness with privacy. Meanwhile there is rather more urgency about lobbying to improve the current proposals to reform our discredited libel laws.

In praise of … Peter Hyman

Hyman does not support all aspects of free schools, but he is not retreating from the challenge of making one work

"At least Thatcher was attempting to change things," Peter Hyman told the Guardian a couple of years ago, defending the radical cause against the frequent conservatism of party politics. "It angers me that political debate is so constrained that no adult dialogue can really happen." He knows about that, as a former Downing Street aide to Tony Blair, who unlike many people on the political inside decided not to search for the predictable winnable Labour seat and subsequent frontbench job but instead trained as a teacher. Hyman hasn't ducked out of politics entirely: he turns up on Newsnight and he has written a book about his experiences. But his immersion in a world beyond Westminster has been sustained. He's risen from teaching assistant in a London comprehensive to a deputy head. This week, he's announced plans for a new free school, to open in Newham, east London, using powers established by the coalition government. No doubt some will see this as a Blairite sell-out, a breach of the defences some teachers want to erect against Michael Gove's plans. This would be to make the very mistake Hyman identified in that Guardian interview: to put rigid, uncreative partisanship against the needs of radical policy. If free schools are to exist, it is right that they do more than allow middle-class parents in smart areas to escape the state system. Hyman does not support all aspects of free schools. But to his credit he is not retreating from the challenge of making one work.