Why press freedom and the RIPA matter

It may be galling to many people hacked off at news of journalists playing fast-and-loose with personal mobile phone data, but the recent news of the police playing fast-and-loose with the freedom of the press in Britain should be no comfort either.

If it will help provide a sense of perspective, try for a moment to look past the abuse of press freedoms by certain denizens of the UK media who should have known better (widely reported, by the way, as a result of freedom-of-the-press being long taken for granted in the UK). Instead, consider the diametrically opposed motivations of the media and the police – as reported in recent news pages – and their likely outcomes. One seeks to bury information through abuse of the RIPA ( Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act), while the other seeks to bring it into the light. While you ponder that, consider too the wider implications of the Google right to be forgotten issue and establishment cover-up of how the child welfare system in Rotherham institutionally let down children for a generation with impunity.

But wider even than these concentric circles of what should rightly be held in public domain, are ample warnings from recent history. There is one glaring commonality linking oppressive regimes, dictatorships and police states since time began, and that is control of the media and the flow of information.

As the Weimar Republic collapsed in the 1920s, what was the key to the empowerment of the National Socialists under Hitler, and what allowed them to plant the seeds of incontrovertible conviction in the minds of an educated and civilized population that world Jewry, communism, and the victorious allies of The Great War were to blame for all Germany’s ills and deserved retribution?

How has the putrefying regime in Zimbabwe retained power for so long and acquired such obscene wealth when they are so few in control of a population of millions of starving – but mobile and ‘self-determining – people? It’s via controlling internal news to convince the people this is simply the status quo, there is no kleptocracy and there is no alternative to the ongoing freedom struggle against now remote former colonial rulers.

Why is it that for three generations the rule-by-dictatorship of North Korea has been allowed to flourish through inhuman repression and state-controlled murder? It’s through complete isolation from world media and discourse that allows Pythonesque tales of derring-do by Un, Il and Il-sung that include 13 holes-in-one during a round of golf, supernatural birth and a global cult of adoration for the dynasty.

If you remove the means whereby populations are empowered to receive, filter, appraise and process freely-distributed information you precipitate intellectual and moral decline, as well as the abrogation of taking responsibility for individual action. And if we’re concerned about the press themselves being out of control and of erratic moral standing, take comfort at least that the modern-day mechanics of dissemination typified by the web and proliferation of data are working well to see us inured to spin, hyperbole and outright lies.

There is no excuse now for any of us to shirk responsibility for being our own IPCC or PCC or arbiter of good taste. But if the police are left in charge of the flow of information, what next… Would you like to see The Daily Mail in charge of law and order?