Delivering his own separate Commons statement, Nick Clegg has just joined Ed Miliband in supporting state-backed regulation of the press, the central recommendation of the Leveson report. Clegg argued that changing the law was “the only way to give us all the assurance that the new regulator isn’t just independent for a few months or years, but is independent for good.”
The Deputy PM said that he had concerns about the proposed changes to data protection law and the suggestion that Ofcom should independently verify the new press regulator, but otherwise welcomed Leveson’s recommendations as “proportionate and workable”. He rejected the claim, made by Cameron, that state involvement would blur the line between politicians and the media, arguing that the line had already been blurred under the current system of self-regulation.
Clegg concluded:
We mustn’t now prevaricate. I – like many people – am impatient for reform. And, bluntly, nothing I have seen so far in this debate suggests to me we will find a better solution than the one which has been proposed. Nor do I draw any hope from the repeated failure of pure self-regulation that we’ve seen over the last 60 years.
This leaves Cameron as the only one of the three main party leaders opposed to statutory underpinning of the new regulatory system. Should Ed Miliband succeed in forcing a vote on the Leveson report, there is now a chance that Cameron will be defeated. In addition to most Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, more than 70 Conservative MPs have publicly declared their support for state-backed regulation.
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