Two cheers for journalism

I hope that politicians come to realise that, with the appalling massacre in Norway in July, and the riots in the UK in August, the first big news story of the summer – the phone hacking scandal – needs to now be put in some perspective.

There are, of course, aspects of modern society even more unpleasant than tabloid journalists. The focus of public attention has moved on – much to the relief of the tabloids.

As an ex-journalist (who still dabbles in the blogosphere with contributions such as this one) I have as a councillor met good people locally who have been badly treated by the media.

Two particular cases come to mind: one local family unfairly maligned as irresponsible dog-owners when a family pet unexpectedly attacked and killed another dog. The second case was the sensationalist and inaccurate reporting of the suicide of a shopkeeper, some years ago, which did little to help his family and colleagues recover from the shock.

But if there is anything more unpleasant than journalists thinking they are above the law and hacking into the phones of murder victims and their families, it is sanctimonious politicians who may try and use the outrage as a pretext to close down a free press. Clearly the useless Press Complaints Commission has to be replaced by a much tougher form of independent regulation, but it is worrying hat several senior politicians have called for statutory regulation of the press – a little like the official censorship of the London theatre by the Lord Chamberlain that persisted until the late 1960s – or a new Privacy law.

A note of caution needs to be introduced. In London boroughs like Greenwich the problem is not too much media activity but too little: there is too little reporting of (let alone misreporting of) the council and local news in general. While the Mercury remains a good paper, its resources are limited and the news-breaking is now increasingly done by local blogs of varying quality. The local community would benefit from more high-quality local journalism both digitally and in print – much of which I and other councillors would probably not like much – to report local news and hold the council and other bodies accountable.

Politicians and journalists have much more in common than they realise. Both trade in words. A very cynical Tory MP once said that being a good backbench MP (or councillor) boiled down to the ability to write a good letter. Like a good news story, a good letter has to grab the reader’s attention and have a good beginning, middle and end.

Why else would so many ex-journalists enjoy a rapid rise as politicians (Michael Gove is a case in point), and so many ex-politicians go on to be successful journalists and broadcasters (Matthew Parris, Michael Portillo and Robert Kilroy-Silk – always a better broadcaster than a politician  among them).

 At a recent debate about the matter at the London School of Economics, the dangers of both the phone-hacking scandal – and the coming backlash – were laid bare. One solicitor involved in acting on behalf of phone hacking victims, Charlotte Harris, said she had been warned some years ago that pursuing the matter would be career suicide – if hacking had taken place, the charges would never be proved.

 But the tables have now been turned. It is now clear that the Phone-hacking scandal was a spectacular own-goal by the British press, who may have only themselves to blame for the fall-out, even though it took everyone by surprise. Even a few days before its closure, no-one would have predicted the closure of The News of the World. As one speaker at the LSE argued, the NOTW was like a villainous husband – like a long-suffering wife, its readership wanted it to change, not up sticks and leave.

 I recently bought an old paperback copy of All the President’s Men – Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate scandal (I have always been fascinated by Watergate, partly because the week in October 1973 when the scandal really got going – with Nixon’s attorney general Elliot Richardson resigning and the first Oval Office tapes being released – also happens to be the week I was born in).

 Woodward and Bernstein may not have paid Deep Throat for information, let alone bugged his phone, but the only way the story was broken by Woodward, Bernstein and others was a lot of camping out on people’s doorsteps, offering them money for the story. Carl Bernstein candidly admits that he impersonated other people on the telephone and paid a contact to go through credit-card records – illegally – to stack up his story that the Watergate burglars had been paid with money from the White House.

 America is famous for its supposedly high journalistic ethics – newspapers there have fact checkers and are very careful to always correct errors, however slight. When I worked for a small-town American paper in the late 1990s, I was solemnly given a copy of its style guide, containing pages and pages of journalistic do’s and don’ts.

Did all the actions of reporters covering Watergate comply with all aspects of the Washington Post’s code of ethics? Probably not – but these journalists were unearthing the most serious criminal conspiracy in American history, in which the President was authorising the burglary and bugging of his opponents’ campaign office and then coercing other officials into covering it up.

Cutting a few journalistic corners was clearly justified, as the ends justified the means and otherwise the story may never have been broken. If there had been an absolute ban on all such journalistic methods, with no public interest defence, the story may never have been broken.

The trouble is that too many journalists think they are Woodward and Bernstein. The most arresting part of the recent LSE debate was when a victim of the 7/7 bombings spoke up from the audience, to say he had been pressurised by the press to confess to a (non-existent) criminal record, and threatened that if he did not do so it would be unearthed anyway by the journalist’s police contact, who had access to confidential Criminal Records. Even if this gentleman, who had only been thrust into the public spotlight by being on the wrong tube train at the wrong time, had a criminal record the public interest in reporting it is negligible. The use of such unpleasant and unlawful methods to expose his criminal record, even if it did exist, is indefensible.

But just as the spirit of Watergate should not be invoked by journalists too often, it is important that the rage that the phone-hacking scandal has unearthed does not lead to new legislation, or regulation, than will strangle the free press. Difficult cases really do make bad law.

The Leveson Enquiry, which has juts started examining the relationship between the press, politicians and the police, has too many sensible members sitting on it to fall into the trap of recommending privacy laws, statutory regulation of the press, or removing any public interest defence for investigative journalism. But there are lots of sanctimonious politicians, hypocritical celebrities, and powerful corporations who must be hoping and praying that they will do just that.

And it is worth remembering that many of the reasons for the decline in tabloid ethics is economic: newspapers are chasing fewer readers, and fewer advertisers, as both migrate to the Internet. Newsrooms have fewer resources, but just as many pages to fill, so journalists felt they had to employ more and more questionable methods to get the stories that will sell papers and keep the wolves from the door.

Like good public services, good journalism needs to be paid for. News International has done something right in the last year: by introducing a pay-wall for the Times, it is pioneering a way of getting revenues from online journalism that may one day save the British press from oblivion.

Why am I an ex-journalist? Partly because I caught the politics bug and preferred that to the harder slog of getting ahead in national newspaper journalism, a crowded field in which I never thought I had the talent or determination to make it. But also because print journalism is a shrinking industry.

The two media outlets I wrote for in my twenties – a weekly newspaper in the US, then a weekly trade magazine in the UK– have both since ceased publication, being thrown to the wall by competition for dwindling advertising revenues. The handful of stories that I am proud of breaking, about uncomfortably close relations between developers and small town politicians in the US, and industrial unrest and unscrupulous printers here – simply don’t get written so much nowadays. That can’t be a good thing for democracy, or for journalism.

We are all vigilantes now

There will be many feelings a week on from the start of the riots. Anger that large numbers of people feel so detached from society that they feel the need to loot and commit arson. Surprise that, for one night at least, the police appeared to have lost control of our streets. Exasperation that areas of London that are already deprived – Tottenham, Peckham, Hackney and Woolwich – will now be further stigmatised by the riots, and will now have to overcome that stigma to attract investment.

Commenting on this kind of social unrest is, as always, a minefield for politicians. For Labour, raising concerns over government policies that may encourage more people to join such rioting can be misinterpreted as sympathy for criminals.

Equally, as the Government is realising, it is difficult to take credit for resorting peace on the streets, while at the same time praising the police, and simultaneously ignoring their warnings that cutting police numbers will make future disorder more difficult to police. While both the police and politicians were recently dealt a blow by the phone hacking scandal, the police retain a bedrock of public trust which politicians have completely lost, possibly for ever.

But there are clearly some questions for the police to answer. Locally, as late as the early evening of the Monday (August 8^th) the police said that they did not expect any trouble in Woolwich – with hindsight, not a good call as a few hours later there was serious unrest in the town centre. There clearly are questions about the shooting of Mark Duggan earlier this month, and the way the police communicated with his family and friends afterwards. 

But a priest who had worked in and around Brixton in the early 80s told me yesterday that compared to the systematic prejudice many police officers showed then, today’s Met is light years away.

Preventing such trouble happening again is not just a matter of police tactics, the deterrent effects of tough sentencing, or re-opening youth clubs, and certainly not hot air from politicians.

What is needed is watchfulness – in effect a “new vigilantism”. For every young person who did riot or loot this week, there were hundreds who did not. They were being watched out for by family and friends. In many cases, those who would otherwise have joined the rioters had been kept off that path some time ago by the vigilance of their mother, father, teachers, or friends, who instilled a sense of responsibility at an early age.

 The term “vigilante” (derived from the Latin for “to be watchful for”) has a bad press, particularly on the Left, as it conjures up images of self-appointed community guardians, more interested in pursuing their own, often extremist, ideology than protecting all members of the community from harm.

It is high time that the term vigilante is re-appropriated, and its derivation remembered. The real heroes of the last week – those who have watched out for each other, and defended their neighbour’s property without taking the law in to their own hands – are kinds of “vigilantes”, even though the may not recognise or even like the term.

In Greenwich, the problems were concentrated in Woolwich and the Charlton retail area on Monday night. In Woolwich, Wilkinson’s, the Wetherspoons pub and a shop near M&S onPowis Street were all burnt out, though the fires attracted surprisingly little media coverage, other than recycled YouTube footage, as camera crews were not in Woolwich on Monday night and there has been no trouble there since.

Locally, there has been no trouble in Blackheath  and Westcombe Park thankfully, other than a few shops looted in Blackheath Village. The shops at the Royal Standard escaped trouble.

The only serious trouble in Greenwich since Monday night has been from so-called “vigilantes”, whose actions show how much that term has strayed from its proper meaning. On Tuesday, tensions were increased in Eltham by the arrival of outsiders from the odious English Defence League to “defend the community”. Shortly afterwards, people were being filmed attacking bus passengers because of the colour of their skin (with friends like these, who needs enemies?).

To term these people vigilantes – “watchful ones” – is as absurd as saying that the looters of Monday night had been vigilantes as they were “watching out” for things to steal from shop windows. Just like the looters, the EDL only seemed to be keeping a watch out for trouble to create, not calm down.

I have been in Woolwich several times since the riots and a better kind of watchfulness – or vigilantism if you like – is very apparent. The streets were all cleaned up the morning after the trouble, and buses and traffic running normally (only Wellington Street remains closed).

The hoardings outside the burnt-out Wetherspoons have become a kind of community message board, whose messages are ones of hope. There is a good spirit in the town, which will not let a few mindless idiots threaten its future.

Police say there have been more than 40 arrests in the borough so far and most of those charged are over 18. So this was clearly not a rebellion by young people objecting to the abolition of EMA, or high youth unemployment. Many people are angry about these things, but they had the good sense to realise that looting and arson is not the right way to make their point. They watched in despair, and did not join in.

Nor is race a factor – not only were those arrested from a range of backgrounds, but many of the victims are people – often from ethnic minorities – who run small businesses that have been looted or burnt.

Self-appointed “Vigilantes” like the English defence League see the recent trouble as an opportunity to peddle their own agenda, and hold one ethnic group responsible for the trouble. They are anything but vigilant.

We should all be vigilantes now: watching out for each other, our friends and neighbours, and vigilant against both the rioters and those who wish to provoke more trouble.

Why we’re marching

On Saturday, people from across Britain will come to London to tell the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government how their cuts are damaging our communities. The coalition claims there is no alternative to massive cuts in the public services we all rely on – in the police, in help for those forced out of work by the recession, in the health service, in school teaching assistants, in childcare – and many many other vital public services.

The Tories and LibDems claim the cuts are necessary to get Britain’s public finances back on track. We do need to cut the deficit – but what they’re doing is too fast and in the wrong place. The cuts will damage the local institutions we all rely on to live in a decent society. Cutting so many jobs will slow down the economic recovery, and restrict economic growth in the private sector – George Osborne had to reduce the forecast for economic growth from 2.1% to 1.7% in today’s budget because of the effects his cuts will have on the economy. Meanwhile, prices are rising, and it’s getting harder for everyone to make ends meet.

We in Blackheath Westcombe Labour Party believe there is an alternative. The City of London needs to be governed properly and pay its fair share in taxes – banks need to properly start paying back the billions which taxpayers used to bail them out. The government needs to clamp down on tax evasion, treating the rich in the same way they treat the very poorest. And they need to slow down the rate at which the national debt is paid back. It’s only the Tories’ blinkered, out-date economic ideology which stops them and their LibDem colleagues from not seeing that the cuts will harm us all. It’s time the people who got us into this mess were made accountable to the democratic power of people in this country.

That’s why we’ve been out on the streets encouraging local residents to come on Saturday. And that’s we’ll be marching in central London to tell the government that the cuts are unnecessary and very very damaging. We’ll meet at Temple tube at 12.00 – but all get the 11.17 train from Westcombe Park beforehand. Join us – and get involved in Labour’s campaign to protect our livelihoods.

For more information on the march, see www.marchforthealternative.org.uk

Our local campaign against budget cuts

We’re launching our campaign against the impact that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat budget of 22 June will have on our community.

We are worried that the coalition’s massive cuts will seriously affect our way of life in the Westcombe Park area.

Cuts of 25% in the education budget will affect the quality of the education in local schools, with fewer teachers and dilapidated buildings. We’re particularly concerned that proposals to rebuild John Roan School will be shelved. We’re worried that facilities at Sure Start centres at Robert Owen, Sherington and Invicta will be cut.

The Liberal Democrats have said they’ve ensured this a fair budget, with the poor protected. But the budget passes the burden of tax from business onto the least well off, and from big business to small enterprises.

The increase in VAT will affect the less well off in our community the most. The government’s own statistics show that the poorest pay a much higher proportion of their income in VAT than the richest, so an increase in VAT hits them the most.

The coalition has cut corporation tax, abandoned plans to clamp down on City bonuses and reduced the levy on banks. Local manufacturing firms in Greenwich are hit by the reduction in tax allowances for capital investment. Many shops at Blackheath Standard will find it hard to survive the 20% VAT rate.

Fair???

This will drive our area back into recession, and lead to big cuts in local jobs. By reducing investment in the education of our young people and cutting support for business it will damage the productivity of our local economy. And by slashing support for the less well off it will make ours a less decent society.

We believe the deficit does need to be tackled. But the Tories are stoking panic to pursue an agenda that will make Britain a poorer, less productive and less decent society. In the long run, the social costs of their cuts will outweigh the money they will save.

Over the coming months, before the details of local cuts are announced, the Labour party in the Westcombe Park area will be fighting to protect local public services. We’d like to know what you think about the budget – and which local services we should be fighting to protect the most. Please email us at bwlabour@googlemail.com, or write to Blackheath Westcombe Labour at 32 Woolwich Road, London SE10 0JU with your thoughts, or to tell us if you’d like to get more involved.
Nick Raynsford MP and local Labour activists will be holding a street stall outside Marks & Spencer’s at Blackheath Standard from 11am on Saturday 3rd July to talk to residents about our campaign . Please join us if you can.

Cllr Alex Grant (Labour Councillor for Blackheath Westcombe ward)
Nick Raynsford (MP for Greenwich and Woolwich)
Blackheath Westcombe Labour campaign group