Blog
The Truth Shall Make You
THE POLITICIAN, THE PAEDOPHILES, THE POLICE & PRESS
THE LONG STRANGE, SAGA OF LEON BRITTAN
Over recent months two separate police forces have been carrying out enquiries into a snippet of 30-year-old gossip about a dead man. The Met and North Yorkshire Police have been interviewing people who, in the early to mid 1980s, heard a rumour that the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan had molested a young boy at a weekend retreat. I am one of them.
There are a number of oddities to this story, and, together with the rest of the strange saga of Leon Brittan, they shine a light on the frustratingly opaque progress of historic child sex abuse investigations. They also provide a litmus test for Lord Justice Goddard’s Independent panel Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
The rumour first. In the early 1980s I was a researcher on Roger Cook’s BBC Radio 4 investigative programme, “Checkpoint”. The editor of the series had a source inside 10 Downing Street who was in the habit of passing on juicy titbits of scurrilous gossip about members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet.
Why he did this was something of a mystery: “Checkpoint” was a fine programme, but it rarely strayed into political investigations. I never met the source, but according to our editor, he simply enjoyed gossiping over drinks at a private club both belonged to. To my knowledge, nothing had ever been done with the tittle-tattle he related.
The Brittan story, though, was different. According to the source, Brittan had been attending a weekend house party somewhere in North Yorkshire (he was initially MP for Cleveland & Whitby, then Richmond, N. Yorks): at some point he was supposed to have molested a young boy. Local police allegedly attended, but very quickly were ordered off the case by Special Branch officers. There were no details of where exactly this happened, nor what exactly Brittan was supposed to have done.
Despite the sketchy nature of the rumour – and perhaps because I still lived in Yorkshire and had some relevant police contacts – I was instructed by my editor and the BBC’s (then) assistant director-general, Alan Protheroe, to make some discreet enquiries.
Over several weeks I spoke to a succession of contacts within the police. All said they knew nothing. Finally, I approached an officer in the neighbouring West Yorkshire Police Special Branch with whom I had an occasional, if slightly uneasy, working relationship. He agreed – reluctantly – to make some enquiries: very quickly thereafter he told me he was not going to pursue them.
And there our own investigations stopped. We told Alan Protheroe that we could find no evidence to support the rumour and I went back to work on more regular “Checkpoint” stories.
We were not, of course, alone in hearing this rumour. Private Eye had also picked it up and subsequently ran a short piece suggesting that members of the security service were trying to smear Brittan with false child abuse allegations.
Over the next decades I made a succession of films and wrote a number of books, investigating child sexual abuse and paedophile networks. But I rarely gave any thought to the Brittan allegations until claims about paedophile parties at the Elm Guest House in south-west London surfaced in late 2013.
A report on the Exaro news website, repeated in national newspapers and over the internet, claimed a video tape had been seized by Operation Fairbank (later known as Fernbridge),the Metropolitan Police’s unit investigating allegations of historic “VIP” child sexual abuse. According to Exaro the tape showed a senior former Tory minister – plainly Brittan, though since he was still alive he was not named – in compromising circumstances at the guest house.
I had a contact in Operation Fernbridge, Immediately after the story appeared, I met up with him: he denied absolutely – and vehemently – that any such tape had been seized. But because no official denial was issued by New Scotland Yard, the story fed into the growing public rumour-mill about ‘paedophile politicians’.
Two further issues quickly emerged which further inflamed the mood. The first was the mystery over what had happened to a dossier given in 1984 to Leon Brittan (while he was Home Secretary) by a back-bench Conservative MP, Geoffrey Dickens. Newspapers at the time had reported that this dossier – which stemmed from Dickens’ earlier attempts to have the Paedophile Information Exchange proscribed – named a number of high-profile active child abusers.
In dealing with enquiries (in 2013) about what had happened to the Dickens material The Home Office did not exactly cover itself in glory: it initially claimed that it could not find 11 files, some of which included the dossier; then was forced (after a succession of Freedom of Information Act requests and demands by the Home Affairs Select Committee) to disclose that it had discovered the remnants of not 11, but 114 files relating to correspondence from Dickens or other MPs about alleged paedophiles and the prosecution of child sexual abuse.
The Home Office had also maintained in 2013 that the files themselves had been destroyed in line with “applicable document retention policies” at the time. Yet a year later it was forced to admit in response to my FOI request that it didn’t actually have a copy of this policy: it did not explain the apparent conflict between the absence of this policy and its previous assurance that the child abuse documents had been properly destroyed.
29875-Tate letter 28 Aug 2014 Final-1
Leon Brittan, for his part, was initially unable to recall the Dickens’ dossier before later remembering that he had passed it on to his officials who had in turn discussed it with the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The second incident was a story in the Express and on the Exaro News website alleging that in 1982 a Customs Office called Maganlal Solanki had seized child pornography films or videotapes sent or brought to the UK by Russell Tricker, a convicted British paedophile living in Amsterdam: one of these allegedly showed a former Tory cabinet minister sexually abusing children. Once again, Brittan was not named, but there were clear hints in the stories that he was the politician in question (in 1982 he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury).
Mr Solanki had unquestionably seized the tapes and films referred to. An official 1982 notice in the London Gazette recorded the seizure and his name was shown as the Customs officer responsible.
This did not specify the exact nature of the material – child pornography was then not legally defined, nor indeed was simple possession of it specifically illegal: the notice simply stated that the films and tape were indecent. Crucially, though, it listed the title of the video as “LB”. [Note: in the 1980s there was a commercially-produced series of child pornography films entitled “Loverboys”.]
The coincidence of these initials with those of Leon Brittan led the Express reporter to doorstep Mr Solanki at his home in Leicester. The reporter recorded the conversation. The Express and Exaro claimed that during the interview the now-retired Customs officer confirmed clearly that the seized material showed the politician sexually abusing children.
I obtained a copy of the recording and transcribed it. Far from confirming the Express/Exaro claims, this clearly showed that Mr Solanki had repeatedly refused to confirm the reporter’s allegations that Leon Brittan was shown on the tapes. The most he appeared to concede was that the ex-minister was “involved” somehow with a tape: but he made clear that he was not at liberty to talk and told the reporter to speak to H.M. Customs.
However, the story had another twist in it. In April 2014 I met with the senior Operation Fernbridge detective with whom I had previously spoken. Over the course of a two hour, off the record interview he told me that his officers had also interviewed Mr Solanki. The former Customs officer had, according to the detective, insisted that he couldn’t remember anything about the 1982 Tricker seizure – much less having viewed the tape and films. (Mr Solanki is in his 80s and somewhat infirm).
But what he said next was even more potentially explosive. He told the officers that he clearly remembered stopping Leon Brittan on another occasion – he could not recall the year, but it was at some point in the 1980s – when the politician came into the port of Dover from Europe. Mr Solanki recalled that he was on normal duty, working in a two-person team with another officer. Mr Solanki observed the driver of a car behaving suspiciously: he pulled it over and the two officers discovered video tapes inside. Mr Solanki told the Fernbridge detectives that he took the tapes away to his office, viewed them and saw that they were child pornography. The detectives asked what exactly was on the tapes: Mr Solanki was embarrassed, but said they depicted boys and girls, clearly under 12, having sex with each other.
How, the detectives asked, did he know the man he stopped was Leon Brittan ? Mr Solanki explained that he had asked to see the man’s passport. Additionally, Brittan had described himself as “an MEP”.
This posed a problem. Leon Brittan was never an MEP. He went from being a government minister to the backbenches following the Westland Affair, before being knighted and appointed European Commissioner For Competition in 1989. The detectives eventually decided that Mr Solanki was telling the truth as he recalled it, but that he had most likely misheard (or misremembered) the phrase “MEP”, when in fact Brittan had said “MP”.
Mr Solanki also told the detectives that he had seized the tapes, sent Brittan on his way and referred the incident to his superiors. He indicated that the videotape seizure would have been recorded in the log book kept by Customs officers at Dover. The senior Fernbridge detective was making plans to look for these when we spoke. He was also trying to locate the date on which – according to vaguely remembered details – late one evening in the 1980s the Westminster press lobby gathered, at short notice, outside Downing Street, apparently having been briefed to expect an announcement concerning Leon Brittan.
Meanwhile, he was simultaneously following another two lines of investigation concerning Brittan and child sexual abuse. The first was the old rumour about him molesting a boy at the weekend house party. In the intervening years, the incident now had two separate alleged locations: North Yorkshire and London. But Operation Fernbridge had been unable to trace anyone who had any first hand knowledge: most importantly no alleged victim could be found in either place, and the detective now believed that the story was something of an urban myth which had probably arisen out of the mysterious late-night gathering of press in Downing Street.
The second lead was very much firmer – and very much more disturbing. It involved Elm Guest House in south-west London. In 1982 the Metropolitan Police had raided the guest house believing – correctly – that it was being used for (adult) male prostitution. The officer in charge of the raid had alerted the local social services department that there was a possibility at least one child might be on the premises and that, if so, a social worker and a temporary place of safety would be needed.
The police did indeed find one child – a boy of around eight years old – in the guest house. He was taken to a local children’s home and, according to a document the Fernbridge detective found in the council archives, was jointly interviewed by a detective constable and a social worker.
Fernbridge tracked down the (now-retired) officer in question. He was interviewed and described the boy as being the most sexualised child he had ever seen. He also said that the boy described being sodomised by nine adult men at the guest house, but seemed somewhat surprised that the police were concerned. He told his interviewers that “Uncle Leon” would take care of the problem, and that “Uncle Leon” worked up at “the big house”. The former officer said he had understood this to be a reference to Parliament and had realised that Uncle Leon was probably Leon Brittan.
All of this should have been recorded in a statement. But the Fernbridge team was surprised to discover that although a statement of sorts did exist, it was not signed by the boy; nor did it make any mention of “Uncle Leon”. They questioned the retired constable: he explained that it was late at night when the boy was questioned and he had taken a joint decision with the social worker that the statement could be signed after the boy had got some sleep. But next morning the boy had “acted out” and refused to sign.
The Fernbridge officers also questioned the retired officer about why he hadn’t recorded the “Uncle Leon” information in the (unsigned) statement: he then apparently became uncooperative, giving the distinct impression that he was concerned about either disciplinary proceedings or a potential threat to his police pension.
Fernbridge went on to track down the boy – now a man in his early 40s and living in America. A US Marshall, previously on secondment to the Metropolitan Police, went to see him. Although the man initially seemed willing to speak, he later refused to do so.
Shortly after the Fernbridge detective gave me the above information, he left the unit. I have not spoken with him since and do not know whether he was ever able to progress the investigations into Leon Brittan.
What I do know is that he was absolutely convinced that there was prime facie evidence that Brittan had a sexual interest in children; and that – unless he was lying to me (which I doubt) – Operation Fernbridge holds documentary evidence suggesting that Brittan was involved in either the attempted importation of child pornography, or the sexual abuse of a young boy. Or both.
In November 2014 a separate Metropolitan Police investigation – Operation Midland – was established to examine claims of historical child sex abuse and murder at the Dolphin Square apartment block near Westminster. Exaro News claimed the credit for this, alleging that its reporting of allegations by two men it called “Nick” and “Darren” had forced the Met to open the inquiry. The men claimed that their abusers had included two former Conservative MPs, one of them a former Cabinet Minister.
Leon Brittan (who had been ennobled as Baron Brittan of Spennithorne in 2000) died in January this year. Within a week Exaro named him as the former Cabinet Minister being investigated by Operation Midland.
In February, the Sunday Times columnist Dominic Lawson (son of former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson) defended his father’s former Cabinet colleague. He attacked the Exaro allegations as part of what he saw as a long-standing campaign by “foil-hatted conspiracy theorists who see the Palace of Westminster as nothing other than a cover for satanic rituals”.
The thrust of Lawson’s attack – that irresponsible reporting of anonymous allegations was tarnishing the names of dead men whom he simply presumed to be honourable – was given more life than it deserved by Exaro’s involvement in an Australian television programme in July. Whilst it unquestionably raised the profile of the story internationally, the 60 Minutes Special presented the claims by Exaro’s stable of complainants as established facts rather than allegations under police investigation. It named Leon Brittan as an abuser.
I have no means of knowing whether the claims by “Nick”, “Darren” and the other complainants whose cause Exaro has promoted are accurate. They are very serious allegations and are rightly being examined by the Met. But in so far as they relate to Leon Brittan, this police investigation poses a problem.
Because Brittan passed away in January this year, there can be no criminal proceedings. Therefore none of the evidence being collected by Operation Midland – nor the documentary evidence already held by Operation Fernbridge (let alone the enquiries still being made by North Yorkshire and Scotland Yard detectives into the mysterious house party rumour) – will ever be produced in court.
There is only one forum now in which the allegations about Leon Brittan can publicly be examined: Lord Justice Goddard’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
This week I formally asked the Inquiry’s press office the following questions:
- Has the Inquiry yet established direct contact with Operation Fernbridge ?
- Will the Inquiry be examining documentary evidence held by Operation Fernbridge concerning its investigations into the late Baron Brittan ?
- Specifically, will the Inquiry secure from Operation Fernbridge copies of all such documents including, but not limited to, formal statements made under caution, officers’ notebooks, internal memoranda and historical documents acquired during its investigation into the late Baron Brittan ?
- Does the Inquiry plan to require public testimony from the current head of Operation Fernbridge, AND its former senior investigating officer, [NAME REDACTED HERE] concerning the late Baron Brittan?
- Does the Inquiry plan to require public testimony from the former Customs and Excise officer Maganlal Solanki who gave evidence to Operation Fernbridge concerning the alleged seizure of child pornography from the late Baron Brittan ?
- Does the Inquiry plan to take evidence from the US Marshall formerly attached to Operation Fernbridge in connection with a visit he made at the request of Operation Fernbridge to a suspected victim of Baron Brittan ?
- Does the Inquiry plan to publish the documents acquired and/or generated by Operation Fernbridge during the course of its investigation into Baron Brittan ?
The Inquiry has yet to provide a response.
The long, strange saga of Leon Brittan is a litmus test of how rigorous and open Lord Justice Godard’s enquiry intends be. The enquiry must summons – as it has the power to do – Mr. Solanki and the officers from operation Fernbridge to give evidence on oath. It must also obtain all the statements taken by Fernbridge which relate to Brittan.
Leon Brittan was no obscure politician or ordinary Cabinet Minister. For more than two years he occupied one of the three great offices of state: Home Secretary. Unquestionably, he should have been subjected to positive vetting by MI5 before being appointed: Goddard must insist on seeing those vetting reports. She must also discover what, if any, subsequent vetting took place before David Cameron appointed Brittan as a trade advisor in 2010.
And, just as crucially, she must reveal all of this evidence to the public which is, after all, paying for the Inquiry.
There remain, too, legitimate and unanswered questions about Brittan’s opposition to proscribing the Paedophile Information Exchange (and indeed about PIE’s alleged involvement with the Home Office itself while he was a Minister Of State there between 1979 and 1981).
The announcement last week that further (and previously undisclosed) Cabinet papers from the era had been located and in some unspecified way referred to Brittan, make it even more vital for the Inquiry to examine – publicly – the claims that the former Home Secretary was involved in the sexual abuse of children.
If it does not, then the public will have every right to doubt the integrity of the Goddard enquiry – and to question why substantial sums of public money are being devoted to a series of police investigations which will never see the light of day.
And rightly or wrongly the as yet unproven allegations of an overarching Westminster plot to protect a powerful paedophile politician will become entrenched in the public mind as unchallenged fact.
Posted on
The Myth of The Happy Hooker
Next week delegates to Amnesty International’s (International) Council Meeting will be asked to endorse a policy aimed at protecting the human rights of sex workers.
Amnesty is a great and important organisation (declaration of interest: I am a past recipient of one of its press awards) and I fully support its demand for the safeguarding of those adult men and women who choose to work as prostitutes. As AI’s carefully worded draft policy makes clear, those who rent out their bodies for sex face risks – of disease, persecution and violence – and should have the same protection as any other worker.
But one part of the solution proposed by Amnesty is wrong – and dangerously so. It calls for the legalisation of (adult) prostitution.
I spent a year investigating modern slavery for an Al Jazeera documentary series: one programme examined sex slavery. The best estimates from the most rigorous campaigning organisation – “Free The Slaves” – suggests that there are approximately 1.4 million sex slaves in the world today.
This is not statistically the largest group of 21st century slaves – there is an estimated total of 27 million of these – but it is nonetheless a vast pool of people denied their unquestionable human right not to be forced into slavery.
But the research for that series – and for two books I have written on the subject – also showed clearly and unequivocally that one of the biggest causes of sex slavery is legalised prostitution.
Countries where legalisation has been introduced – most notably Holland and Germany – have done so precisely because they believed it would reduce the trade in sex slaves. The facts show that it has had the precise opposite effect.
Holland, for example, legalised prostitution in 2000. Any woman or man, over the age of 18 and holding a European Union passport, was given the right to set him or herself up as a sole trader selling sex. He or she could rent premises in which to work, could open a bank account for the business and would be required to pay taxes. Pimping, however, was not permitted: it was – and remains – a criminal offence.
Eleven years later, how had this worked out ? Badly.
There are at least 8,000 prostitutes working in Amsterdam alone. Not all work in the most visible sector of the city’s sex trade – the ‘tourist attraction’ of the Red Light District- but even that supposedly-policed shop window for legalised prostitution is shocking evidence of the failure of the Dutch policy.
For s start many of the women (and men and transgendered) on display in the windows come from outside the EU: Africa, South America, and states like Moldova – on the borders of the European Union and probably the nation most plundered by sex traffickers on the continent – are the home countries of a statistically large number of Amsterdam’s sex workers. No-one asks how they came here, nor how they are permitted to continue working: many don’t speak any European language. Amsterdam’s police force simply turns a blind eye.
They are similarly myopic about the gangs of organised criminals – major pimps and their enforcers – who control the Red Light District. In fact, they are more than myopic: they openly admit that these notionally illegal gangs are in charge – the city warns television crews and journalists that violent thugs prevent anyone from filming the streets they control, for example – but do nothing to stop them.
So who are these human beings behind the neon-lit glass ? Did they choose – willingly and happily – to rent their bodies to an average of 15-20 customers every day ?
Solid, careful, non-partisan studies show that on average 800 – 1,000 women are trafficked into Holland’s legalised prostitution industry every year. Not willing, not free, not happy: trafficked and enslaved. Other research shows that more than half experience violence or the threat of violence as part of their daily working lives.
When I interviewed him in 2011, the head prosecutor in the Dutch Anti-Trafficking unit – a good and concerned lawyer called Werner Ten Kate – admitted the failure of the legalisation policy.
We thought in 2000 that the more liberal view to prostitution would stamp out trafficking, but that proved to be wrong. Everyone thought that, [it would prevent trafficking] but it worked out the other way round.
Werner Ten Kate is not alone in (now) accepting this. In 2012 a study by researchers at universities in Germany and Britain analysed data from 116 countries to discover the effect of the legalisation of prostitution on trafficking. It showed that countries with legalized prostitution suffer from higher levels of human trafficking than countries where prostitution is illegal.
Those researchers don’t support the criminalisation of prostitutes – for the very good reason that to do so puts the sex workers at risk and reduces the availability of the protections (health and legal) which Amnesty International seeks.
But there is a smarter alternative to prosecuting prostitutes: it is – as Sweden has shown – to criminalise the men (and it is almost exclusively men) who buy sex.
Prostitution is one of those ‘hot button’ topics which largely attracts fierce argument based on little more than opinion. And in turn those opinions are often the result of soley anecdotal ‘evidence” – the stories of (variously) sex trafficking victims or self-proclaimed happy hookers.
There’s nothing wrong with anecdotal evidence: my books and my films are packed with individual stories. But they are not a solid foundation for policy because they can’t be proven to represent the full picture.
The best and most carefully-researched evidence suggests that in western countries at least, the majority of sex workers have not made free or willing choices to sell their bodies. There are, to be sure, some women and men who are happy to sell their bodies – but they are not the majority.
Two hundred years ago, when the transatlantic slave trade was still a stain on the world, the social reformer and jurist Jeremy Bentham neatly summed up what should be the basis for laws based on morality:
It is the greatest good for the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.
On that admirably straightforward principle, Amnesty’s call for the legalisation of prostitution is wrong and dangerous.
Posted on
The Curious Case of The Mandarin’s Memory
At the conclusion of his career Sir Robert Armstrong was described as “the most public civil servant since Cardinal Wolsey”.
The same largely favourable profile reported the view from Whitehall insiders that “Robert produces so much affection that everyone works well for him. He’s a sympathetic figure”.
Sir Robert served Margaret Thatcher as her Cabinet Secretary from 1979 to 1987. For his troubles he was subsequently given a life peerage: for the past 27 years he has warmed the crossbenches in the House of Lords as Baron Armstrong of Ilminster. He is now 88 years old.
Cabinet Secretary is an enormously powerful and sensitive position. Not only is he (and it’s always a ‘he’) privy to the innermost secrets of government, he also sees reports prepared by the intelligence services and provided to the Cabinet via the Joint Intelligence Committee.
All of which explains why, in late 1986, Sir Robert received a letter from Sir Anthony Duff, Director-General of MI5 informing him of allegations that a Conservative MP, Peter (later Sir Peter) Morrison had “a penchant for small boys”. The spymaster reassured the mandarin that Morrison had denied the claims and that the security service accepted his word and there was no real danger to [national] security.
Nonetheless, Sir Anthony advised, the matter did pose a risk “of political embarrassment to the Government”.
Indeed it did. Morrison was no mere backbencher. He had been a Minister in the Department of Employment and in the same year as MI5 investigated his alleged predilection for children, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. A year later he was appointed as a Minister in the Department of Energy, with responsibility for Britain’s oil policy. Four years later he would go on to run Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to keep hold of the leadership.
When the Duff letter emerged on Thursday last week, I e-mailed Lord Armstrong to ask five fairly straightforward questions. They were:-
- Whether you recall receiving this letter ?
- What you did with the information ?
- Whether you passed on the allegations concerning this MP in question to the Prime Minister and/or the Chief Whip ?
- Whether you made any attempt to speak with MP yourself about the allegations ?
- Whether, in more recent times, you informed the Home Office and/or its recent internal enquiries about the existence of this letter ?
He did not reply immediately, but was apparently willing to give some kind of statement to the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. He told the Telegraph:
My official business was the protection of national security. I have to stress that there was nothing like evidence in this case. There was just a shadow of a rumour. It’s impossible to take investigative action on shadows of rumours. . . If there is some reason to think a crime has been committed, then people like the cabinet secretary are not to start poking their noses into it. It’s for the police to do that.
And he told the Mail:
I thought MI5’s actions were correct at the time. I think they were right to report the rumour, they were right to make what inquiries they could and they were right to come to the conclusion they did. I think if there was evidence it would have been properly examined at the time. I don’t think this is a matter of important people being protected. You can’t pursue inquiries unless you have evidence on which you can base the enquiry. A shadow of a rumour is not enough.
This afternoon, Lord Armstrong finally sent a response (from his House of Lords email account) to my five questions. It appeared that in the three days since he had spoken to the Telegraph and Mail, his memory had suffered a catastrophic failure. He wrote:-
I am afraid that I do not remember receiving Sir Antony Duff’s letter, or what I did when I received it. It is now a long time ago, and there were a lot of other things going on at the time.
Yours sincerely,
Armstrong of Ilminster
Sir Robert famously brought into public usage the concept of being (as he put it during the 1986 Spycatcher trial) “economical with the truth”. But the question of what actions the second most powerful civil servant in the country took about allegations that one of the most senior Tory politicians was a paedophile is too important to be left to this sort of evasive nonsense.
Lord Armstrong thus joins the lengthening list of the great and good who must be summonsed to testify at Lord Justice Goddard’s Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. A little robust cross-examination might do wonders to help the noble Lord recover his powers of recollection.
Posted on
The Age of Stupid
We live in The Age Of Stupid.
We live in the age of 24-hour rolling noise, masquerading as “news”; a world of sideshow sensation and ersatz outrage. Global media conglomerates bring us “the world in one minute” – events and incidents, instantly bitesized and pre-digested for easy consumption.
We are presented with the “what” – but rarely, if ever, enough facts to understand the “why”. To borrow a quote from a fine and angry song:
“Everywhere I go, I hear what’s going on
And the more I hear, the less I know”
(“Everywhere I Go”: Oysterband, 1995)
This is a blog about the practice of journalism and why it matters. I have been engaged in this trade for almost four decades. I began in 1978, a year before the Thatcher government began dismantling the post-war consensus which honoured the ideal of public service and recognised the importance of strong journalism to the public interest.
I have worked in newspapers, radio and television, in addition to writing a succession of non-fiction books. And now this. Why a blog ? Why now ?
Because, more than any other factor, it is my trade which is turning the world stupid.
The years since 1978 have witnessed a media revolution. Back then there were only three television channels, the Independent had yet to emerge on Fleet Street, and the world wide web was the stuff of science fiction. Pictures – still and moving – were recorded on film and sometimes took days to get back to base. A toxic combination of poor management and cynical print unions held the newspaper industry in a corrupt and choking grip.
Advances in technology have steadily made our trade easier, quicker and cheaper to pursue. First video, then digital imaging replaced expensive film; ancient hot metal presses were chased out by clean, quick and less expensive methods; the internet and smart phones have now made instant publication possible (and sometimes mandatory). All of this should – logically – have led to a new golden age of serious journalism in which enabled the Fourth Estate to fulfil its traditional – and vital – role as a public-interest watchdog, exposing corruption, injustice and oppression the world over.
Instead, a strange thing happened. The amount of good, serious public interest journalism declined in almost exact correlation to the advances in technology which should have freed it. Which is how (note: ‘how’, not ‘why’) we live today in an age where we know almost instantly whether a Z-list celebrity has engaged in a Twitter spat with another equally vacuous nonentity, or that a fading model has flashed a ‘side boob’ at a red carpet premiere.
It is also the reason that we are endlessly blasted with ‘factoids’ about the vast size of Greek debt and the plight of its impoverished population, while learning nothing about how this debt arose in the first place. Or why we see horrific images of ISIL atrocities without being given the facts which would enable us to understand how – and with whose backing – it emerged in the first place.
Instead we pick over the sterile bones of a synthetic argument about whether broadcasters should use the term “Islamic State”. If, as Lord Reith once envisioned, the value of the BBC was that “nation should speak unto nation” today it – and the rest of the media – delivers little more meaningful than a shallow parade of grotesques and lip-flap: newspapers and television infantilise their audiences and readerships. To the point of stupidity.
And here’s the “why”.
There has been one constant in this age of media revolution: one unending and unchallenged thread running through all the changes. We have stopped regulating my trade.
If anything is guaranteed to unite most journalists (a process usually akin to herding cats) it’s the idea that journalism and journalists should be regulated. The very idea of any state control of the media is anathema to British hackdom. Our constant demand is for red tape to be resisted (or, better still, cut) and for regulation to be rejected.
And here’s the truth my colleagues in this trade don’t want you to know. We were always regulated – at least until recently. And it was entirely A Good Thing.
In television it led to – and guaranteed – the serious journalism of World In Action, Panorama and Dispatches in their trouble-making heydays. In print it ensured that non-dom newspaper moguls could not control an over-sized slice of the market. The only people to lose out from media regulation were those in power, be that government or corporate: a free – but regulated press – snapped at their heels and shone unwelcome light on their sins.
Which may well explain why, since Thatcher, successive governments have first weakened, then abolished almost all media regulation. Turkeys, after all, would prefer Christmas to be a vegetarian event.
We live in The Age of Stupid. And it will become ever more so until we understand the paradox that strong, free and revelatory journalism needs the safe harbour of rigorous regulation to protect both it and the public whose interests it should serve.
Journalism – muscular, serious, difficult journalism – maters: it is vital in keeping a free society free. Hence this blog. Hence this attempt to tell at least some truth.
It may not make you free: it should make you fret.
Posted on