25 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Next week is set to be one of the most gripping yet in the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.
Monday has been reserved for former prime minister Tony Blair, who will likely be questioned about his close relationship with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose tabloid the Sun famously switched its long-standing Conservative allegiance to back the Labour party ahead of the 1997 general election.
Business secretary Vince Cable is scheduled to appear on Wednesday. It is likely he will be quizzed about News Corp’s £8bn bid for the takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB, particularly his admission that he had “declared war” on the Murdoch-owned company, which led to his being stripped of responsibility for the bid.
But the highlight will surely come from Thursday’s sole witness, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is fighting for his political life after the revelation of a November 2010 memo he sent to David Cameron in support of News Corp’s £8bn bid for control of the satellite broadcaster one month before he was handed the task of adjudicating the bid.
In the memo Hunt emphasised to Cameron that it would be “totally wrong to cave in” to the bid’s opponents, and that Cable’s decision to refer the bid to regulator Ofcom could leave the government “on the wrong side of media policy”.
The memo has further weakened Hunt’s grip on power, already in doubt after last month’s revelations that his department gave News Corp advance feedback of the government’s scrutiny of the BSkyB bid. Evidence shown to the Inquiry yesterday during News Corp lobbyist Frédéric Michel‘s appearance showed over than 1000 text messages had been sent between the corporation and Hunt’s department, along with 191 phone calls and 158 emails.
The Labour party has since upped the volume on its calls for Hunt to resign, arguing he was not the “impartial arbiter” he was required to be.
Hunt has maintained he acted properly and within the ministerial code, while David Cameron said today he does not regret handing the bid to Hunt, stressing he acted “impartially”.
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03 Apr 12 | Uncategorized
News that the UK government is planning to grant the state new powers to monitor people’s communications has been met with a mixture of anger and confusion.
The story broke at the end of a bizarre few weeks for the ruling coalition, which managed to score a brace of spectacular own goals in reducing tax rates for the rich while increasing tax on hot food. Meanwhile, one government minister was actually encouraging people to panic buy petrol and store large quantities of it at home ahead of a potential, but by no means certain fuel lorry drivers strike.
The uncertainty over the new surveillance powers can, I think, be seen as part of this pattern. No one is quite sure why the government is doing this — or even what exactly it is they want to do. Roughly speaking, it seems to be about obliging companies to hold information on personal communications and allow government agents (from spies right down to local council workers) access at any time without a warrant.
You would think that such a controversial policy would emerge well thought out and with damned good reason. But Home Secretary Theresa May has absolutely failed to make the case, beyond muttering the usual nothing-to-fear-if-nothing-to-hide line (in itself an odd defence of increased official power from a government which has set out its stall as small-statist, even libertarian), and the utterly confusing position that previous crimes had been solved using these powers, (er, we thought they were new powers).
Writing in today’s Times, Heather Brooke points out the ease with which it is now possible to run a surveillance state through technology. Even if the UK government is sincere in its insistence that these powers will only be used to hunt criminals and terrorists, it severely undermines its power to criticise states that would use the same legislation to watch activists and dissidents. Have no doubt, this is a bad idea and Index will campaign against it should it go any further.
As so often happens with proposed web policy, there’s an element here of the technology leading the argument: it is possible to build surveillance back doors, ergo it is desirable to do so. This is not an attitude that should have any purchase with the supposed civil libertarians and conservatives that make up the government parties (indeed, the coalition agreement included a commitment to the “ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason”). But somehow here we are.
08 Jul 10 | Index Index, News and features
Home Secretary Theresa May is to halt searches of individuals without reasonable suspicion after the European Court of Human Rights rules the power unlawful. Leah Borromeo reports
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18 Jun 10 | Uncategorized
Home Secratary Theresa May has issued an exclusion order for the controversial Muslim preacher Zakir Naik.
At first glance this is similar to the ban on Dutch MP Geert WIlders imposed when he was due to show his film Fitna in the House of Lords last year. The ban on Wilders, whose film juxtaposed verses from the Koran with images of terrorist atrocities, backfired on two counts. First, it simply made him a free speech martyr and drew attention to his scare-mongering views that were freely available on the Internet. Secondly, it wasn’t sustainable — Wilders won an appeal against the ban at the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. In retrospect (and as it seemed at the time too) it would have been far better to have let Wilders have his say, and to have met his arguments with counterarguments and evidence. I made a podcast about this criticising the Government action at the time (Listen here)
Does that mean that on free speech grounds we should discourage the UK Government from imposing a ban on Naik? Here’s a possible difference between the cases: Naik has reputedly expressed sympathy for Osama Bin Laden’s terrorism and seems in some of his pronouncements to be advocating actual violence against Americans and against those who change their religion.
If that is correct, then there may be good reason for a ban. The most obvious acceptable limit to free speech is the point at which a speaker incites violence. Yet, the situation gets more complicated. Naik has issued a press release in which he “unequivocally condemns acts of violence including 9/11, 7/7 and 7/11.”
So, should we take the press release as a sincere statement of his current position? If so, is it reasonable to ban him for views that he has apparently jettisoned if indeed he ever held them? This is not an easy case to decide. Perhaps allowing him to speak in Britain while monitoring closely the content of his oratory will in the end be the least worst option.
