Leader: Self-regulation of Press guarantees free speech

IT IS hardly surprising that having employed disgraced News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his head of communications that Prime Minister David Cameron should seek to deflect attention from himself on to the broader issue of Press standards, especially as it seemed Labour leader Ed Miliband was beating him to the tape with his call for the abolition of the Press Complaints Commission.

It is true that the PCC's response to the phone hacking scandal back in 2009, when it was revealed News International had attempted to buy the silence of high-profile victims of the News of the World's eavesdropping programme, was inadequate and this week it finally withdrew the report it issued at the time. It is clear now the PCC was misled, wilfully or otherwise, when it was told hacking was the unauthorised action of a very small number of rogue individuals, but it is also clear not enough questions were asked of those in positions of responsibility and it was a mistake not to give more credence to the revelations in the Guardian newspaper.

But it is by no means clear that further questions at the time would have uncovered the scandals which have only become public in the last fortnight when the police, who had access to all the evidence from jailed private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's meticulous notes, said hacking did not extend beyond a small number of celebrities. It now transpires not even James Murdoch understood the industrial scale of the activity when he was signing off compensation agreements. How the Prime Minister or anyone else can now infer the PCC should have been able to uncover what both the police and the Murdoch family failed to reveal is puzzling to say the least.

In the politician's eagerness to turn this affair into an opportunity, the PCC is being castigated almost as much as the News of the World, as if its commissioners (amongst them the editor of this newspaper) and officers were equally culpable. It is conveniently forgotten that there can be no stronger regulation of the Press than a practice being illegal, as it was in this case, and the police claimed it had been fully investigated.

Calling for the abolition of the PCC because of phone hacking is tantamount to calling for the abolition of the police because members of the public keep stealing and killing each other. It is a gross overstatement to say self-regulation of the Press has totally failed because of this affair - hundreds of people have their complaints successfully handled every year without cost, including the same politicians now queuing up to sign its death warrant. The PCC must learn from this episode and change to reflect public demand for higher standards of journalism. But self-regulation is the natural extension of freedom of speech and its best guarantor - it must not be sacrificed as revenge for duck houses and state-funded pornography.