Probity is Britain's new watchword. After filleting the bankers over their salaries and bonuses and excoriating MPs for fiddling their expenses we've now turned our attention to the antics of journalists.

The News of the World (NOTW) has frequently embarrassed politicians, vicars, footballers and celebrities, but the Sunday red-top is currently itself the target of an expose by a broadsheet.

According to a report in The Guardian, reporters at the "News of the Screws" worked with private investigators to access "two or three thousand" private mobile phones belonging to celebrities, MPs and public figures.

Those private investigators apparently intercepted voicemail messages and gained access to personal data such as itemised phone bills and bank statements.

But  police have said they have no plans to reopen a 2005 investigation that led to the jailing of two men, News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and a private investigator, for hacking into the phones of staff working for the royal family.

That raises the question as to whether that decision should be taken by an independent body rather than a policeman choosing not to rake over the coals of a fellow copper's report.

While the police ponder, the Press Complaints Commission has once again proved to a be a less than an effective regulator.

Rupert Murdoch has "nothing to say at all" on the story, while former NOTW editor Andy Coulson, who is now the Conservative Party communications chief apparently knew nothing. Funny how journalists and ex-journalists get all tongue-tied when they are being asked to give answers rather than the other way round.

The Daily Telegraph has been criticised for paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for buying information that allowed it to gain access to MPs' expenses claims, but at least the right-wing broadsheet could claim a public interest defence.

Not so the alleged NOTW fishing operation of celebrity tittle-tattle, which tells us much about the agenda of many of our national newspapers.

A committee of MPs is due to re-examine the phone-hacking scandal, but maybe Britain's newspaper reading public could take the matter into their own hands. On Merseyside, 20 years after the Hillsborough stadium disaster, nobody buys the Sun newspaper over the way the tabloid covered the death of 96 football fans.

That's probably an idiot's utopian idea, so in the meantime how should Britain regulate its press? And under what circumstances is electronic surveillance permissable?

-John Bew is Lecturer in Modern British History at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. Martyn Frampton is a Research Fellow, also at Peterhouse. Their book, co-written with Iñigo Gurruchaga, is called “Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country” and they blog at Talking to Terrorists. The opinions expressed are their own.-

One of the current fashions in British and American diplomatic circles is the idea that it is necessary to engage with our enemies, no matter how extreme they might seem. In response to the recent Iranian election results, for example, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation – a think tank with strong links to the Obama administration – suggested that “nothing at all has changed in the equation that Obama set out during the campaign: we have to deal with out enemies – we must engage”.

Equally, many observers now suggest that the same logic should be applied to non-state actors including Hamas, Hezbollah and even “moderate” Taliban in Afghanistan. Earlier this year, the British Foreign Office reanimated contacts with Hezbollah and several senior British MPs invited Hamas to participate in a video-link discussion in Westminster.

On May 17, we will discuss some of these issues in a lunchtime event run by the Henry Jackson Society in the Houses of Parliament. As we point out in our book, Talking to Terrorists, this belief in the need to “engage with the extremes” often takes the example of Northern Ireland as an inspiration, where the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ended a thirty-year campaign of violence in the late 1990s.

The assumption here is that the British government took the brave decision to talk to those who were committing terrorist violence and therefore managed to bring them within the fold of the eventual political settlement. Thus, yesterday’s gunmen became today’s politicians, so the story goes.

Yet this version of history does not accurately reflect what really happened in Northern Ireland. First, the British state had tried to talk to the IRA at various intervals throughout the conflict, starting as early as 1972. At various points, this encouraged the terrorists that momentum was on their side and coincided with a surge in expectations and in violence.

Second “hard power” also played a crucial role: the IRA only came to the negotiating table after a hugely successful campaign of intelligence and policing forced them to recognise that their military campaign was failing. They achieved barely any of the aims they had set out with and were arguably further from success than they had been thirty year before. As its star rises, does anyone expect Hamas to sue for peace with such lowered expectations?

The Spanish government’s recent success against the Basque separatist terrorists, ETA, provides an interesting contrast to the idea that talking to terrorists is a pre-requisite for peace. For years, the Spanish government tried talks with ETA but these never yielded a political breakthrough. More recently, however, the new strategy has been to asphyxiate ETA through proscription of its political wing, arrests of suspected high profile ETA members, and successful prosecution through the courts.

Ultimately, there is a crucial difference in talking to terrorists who are on the crest of a wave and believe they have momentum on their side and talking to those who have been made to realise – by hard power as well as a soft power – that their aims are unattainable through violence.

The message of our book is not to reject the idea of talking to terrorists outright. But it is to provide a reminder that it is unlikely to provide a magic solution and runs the risk of making the situation immeasurably worse. The U.S. and the UK are likely to travel further down this road in the near future; they should take care to proceed with extreme caution.

- Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School and a co-author of “Verdict on the Crash” published by the Institute of Economic Affairs. The opinions expressed are his own. -

We could see it coming, couldn’t we? Those gigantic over-leveraged hedge funds were bound to come crashing down, as their massive bets turned sour, forcing them to default on their bank loans and bringing the banking system to its knees.

Except that it never happened. Instead, the system was destroyed by the greed and incompetence of the insiders, including some of the most blue-blooded investment and commercial banks in the world. Highly regulated as they were said to be, they were allowed in every country except Spain simply to move their riskiest investments off balance sheet, where they were free to bet the bank on investments in the notoriously toxic mortgage-backed securities.

Note the absence of hedge funds and private equity - Alternative Investment Funds or AIF’s - from this story.

Nonetheless, with proposals to impose new reporting requirements and controls on management, the EU is concentrating its regulatory fire on the dog that didn’t bark, with the clear intention of reducing the competitiveness of AIF’s and tying the hands of their managers (with a side swipe at the offshore financial centres where many are legally domiciled).

Since the only investors in this type of fund are high net worth individuals and institutions like pension funds, insurance companies and mutual funds who ought to be capable of looking after their own interests, official concern can only be justified if there is a potential threat to the banking system – something which you might have thought would have been best left to the banks to monitor. The fact that the EU feels the need to make these proposals amounts to a vote of no confidence in bank managements.

Now confidence in bankers may, understandably, be as low these days as in MPs. But are there any better grounds for trusting regulators who allowed the crisis to occur under their very noses? If regulators have indeed now learned the lessons of the crisis, should they not concentrate on applying them to the banks in their charge?

Ironically, hedge funds do remain problematic. First, pre-crisis academic research had already shown hedge fund managers to be incapable on average of earning high enough returns, even in a bull market, to justify their high fees. The crisis offered them a golden opportunity – which they have mostly missed - to show that they could make good on their promise to shield investors from losses in a bear market.

Second, AIF’s should carry some of the blame for the crisis, but their sin was one of omission, not commission. As major players, they could have done far more to rein in empire-building bank managements. For example, instead of short selling RBS to prevent its catastrophic purchase of ABN AMRO, they sold too little and too late – when RBS was already beyond recall. Moreover, they could have used their voting power far earlier to insist on remuneration packages for executives that were properly aligned with shareholders’ interests. Instead, by their inaction they endorsed management decisions either explicitly or by default.

But then this last is an accusation which could have been directed at any of the traditional investment vehicles – mutual funds, insurance companies, pension funds etc – though this fact is apparently of no concern to EU Commissioners, fixated as they are on their vendetta against the “locusts”.

- Mark Wickham-Jones is an expert on the history of Labour over the last twenty-five years. His particular area of interest is the evolution of the party’s policy commitments since 1983, the changes to its organisational structure and the nature of its electoral outlook. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Labour’s failure to get rid of Gordon Brown is indicative of one of the taboos governing the politics of the party. This week’s decision to stick with Brown does not reflect the preferences of Labour MPs, most of whom clearly regard the prime minister as a massive electoral liability.

Far from it, the outcome is indicative of the extent to which choices within the Labour Party are determined by traditions, norms, and established practices, ones that are made regardless of what might be desirable in the prevailing circumstances.

Throughout its hundred year history, Labour has demonstrated an overwhelming loyalty to whoever has held the post of party leader, no matter how unpopular the incumbent might be either among members or voters. Such unswerving devotion is an indication of how Labour is governed by informal traditions as opposed to the formal procedures laid out in its complex rulebook.

It represents an example of what the late Henry Drucker termed Labour’s ethos: the idea that Labour politics have been dominated by established practices rather than by more rational calculations or efficient decisions.

The Conservatives, by contrast, have been far more ruthless in their attitude to the leader. Incumbents, no longer serving the best interests of the party, have been unceremoniously ejected from the post. In the Labour party, the notion that a sitting leader might actually be removed against his or her will, has been utterly taboo.

Only in the 1920s did Labour appoint a leader in the sense the term is conventionally used. Even then, the post still included the title of chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party as well as leader and only in the late 1970s did the party formally have a leader at all.

If Margaret Beckett’s brief interregnum following John Smith’s death is included, Gordon Brown is Labour’s thirteenth leader. Only once – George Lansbury in 1935 - has a sitting Labour leader stood down abruptly under pressure to go. Like Gordon Brown, Lansbury had initially been elected to the job without a contest, succeeding Arthur Henderson when the latter lost his parliamentary seat in the debacle of the 1931 general election and was unable to find a constituency thereafter.

The sole member of the Cabinet to survive that eletoral rout, Lansbury found himself in the post by default. A veteran left-winger and profound pacifist, he was spectacularly ill-suited to the post of leading a political party competing for office and making the necessary compromises. His removal was result of the machinations neither of the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party nor of its backbench members.

Indeed, Labour MPs tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay when he finally went following a withering assault by Ernest Bevin, then leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union at the party’s 1935 conference.

Labour has been remarkably indulgent of its leaders’ failures. Clement Attlee lost seats at three general elections in a row before finally retiring. Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 and Neil Kinnock in 1987 suffered landslide defeats at the polls. Both continued in office. To be sure, both were challenged subsequently. But until the 1980s, the Labour rulebook made such challenges easy to organise: the leader was re-elected annually and any contender needed few nominations.

Neither of the challenges to Gaitskell (in 1960 and 1961) nor that to Kinnock (in 1988) came close to unseating the leader. Indeed, the incumbent won crushing victories as many of those participating took the opportunity to demonstrate their overpowering and quite likely unthinking support for the existing leadership. Such occasions were much more about raising policy issues and stirring up debate than serious attempts to force a change at the top.

The most obvious example of the loyalty and deference that Labour tradition demands be extended to the leader is Michael Foot, incumbent in the post for nearly three years between 1980 and 1983. Like Lansbury, a veteran of left-wing causes including unilateralism, few saw Foot as a potential prime minister. Elected during the civil war that had engulfed Labour, he attempted to hold the party together with limited success as his authority steadily diminished.

As the party suffered disastrous by-election results, Foot’s opinion poll rating fell steadily such that a mere 15 per cent of voters thought he was doing a good job. Yet, extraordinarily the party took no steps to replace him with a more credible figure though there was some public debate about the possibility. At around the same time, the Australian Labour party replaced its leader with Bob Hawke, reaping immediate electoral success. The British party could not contemplate such a move.

Tony Blair, too, benefited from the respect that Labour offers to its leaders as of right. As his premiership continued and as the euphoria of the 1997 general election landslide wore off so his ratings fell while his policy initiatives at home and abroad generated massive discontent within the party.

Despite such clear dissatisfaction within Labour concerning his leadership at critical junctures after 2001, no significant plots to unseat him ever materialised. Far from it, those who desperately wanted to remove him from the party leadership, including his greatest rival, Gordon Brown, found themselves inhibited by the informal practices of the party. So constrained, in fact that no one proved able to wield the fatal blow.

Consider by contrast the Conservative party: Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher were successively removed as leader following challenges (something that has never happened in Labour). In 1995 John Major faced a contest that was not easily brushed aside. More recently the tenure of the party leadership has proved a short-lived affair for William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

Brown’s survival in the extraordinary circumstances of the last week does not signify a genuine degree of support amongst MPs: it represents the importance of tradition within the Labour party. To be sure since 1994 New Labour has recast the party in dramatic terms with regard to programmatic commitments and ideological outlook. In terms of changing the norms that determine behaviour towards the party leadership, it appears to have had no impact at all.

- Gavin MacFadyen is Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, a non-profit training charity, who advance education for, and public understanding of investigative journalism. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Whether the press, or even the police (if Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin has his way) succeed in unmasking the person who leaked MPs’ expense details to the Daily Telegraph, one thing which remains troubling in this story is the alleged exchange of money for those 1.2 million-or-so damning documents.

Journalist Heather Brooke, whose five-year struggle to obtain details on MPs’ expenses set this story running in the first place, described last week a “black market” created by the parliamentary culture of secrecy around this topic.

Disclosure of these documents has been delayed and delayed under Freedom of Information legislation, and was due for publication in late summer (albeit in redacted, and it is argued, selective form), before the Telegraph swooped.

There has been some speculation about how much (if anything) a story like this might have cost the newspaper but in any case, this story isn’t taking place in a vacuum.

Across the Web there are no shortage of Websites soliciting material from those who would blow the whistle on wrongdoing – who offer to line the pockets handsomely, should an exclusive be considered sufficiently newsworthy.

Regardless of the ethical rights and wrongs of “cheque-book journalism”, the existence of a black market in public interest information is a function of the lack of adequate legal protection for whistleblowers in the UK. And this in turn does violence to our civic life, and the fundamental principals of our democracy.

Most people would argue that doing your duty in the public interest should be reward enough. While this is a laudable notion, the truth of the matter is that often whistleblowers in the UK suffer career-threatening and life-changing consequences as a result of disclosure.

While we have legislation in this area, in the form of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, there is no obligation within this legislation, upon employers (or professional bodies) to implement an internal whistle-blowing procedure. Moreover, the provisions of the Act are complicated, with some restraints on external disclosure.

So what happens in practice when people blow the whistle on issues of serious public interest?

Last month, Margaret Haywood, a nurse who filmed abuse of patients at a Sussex hospital for a BBC Panorama documentary (broadcast in 2005), was struck off the Nursing and Midwifery Council. It was argued that she had breached the confidentiality of the patients whose interests she was serving, by filming without consent.

Likewise, back in 2007, David Keogh and Leo O’Connor were convicted, having tried to blow the whistle on conversations between former Prime Minister Tony Blair and president George W. Bush concerning the battle of Falluja in Iraq – information which the prosecution admitted at the time contained no “actual damage” to national security.

Present legislation is clearly insufficient to deal with the realities of whistle blowing in practice, as is evident in the lack of support available to many who seek to serve wider society by their disclosures.

Yet whistleblowers are a fundamental element in the protection of the public interest.

Without adequate support, abuse of power (from the fiddling of expenses, to the manufacture of reasons for waging war), threatens to constrain our freedoms yet further.

Nicholas Jones is the author of Trading Information: Leaks, Lies and Tip-offs (Politico’s, 2006). He is a member of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.

Whatever reservations there might be over the way the leaked information was obtained, the publication of hitherto secret details about the endemic abuse of MPs’ expenses was without doubt in the public interest.

I have voiced my concerns in the past about cheque-book journalism and the practice of some newspapers in using dubious methods to influence the news agenda, but the Daily Telegraph deserves to be congratulated for seizing the moment and exposing the greed and double-standards of our elected representatives.

What strengthens the public interest justification for buying a purloined copy of the details being processed by the House of Commons fees office was the fact that MPs had collectively done all they could to try to thwart the release of the data.

Their attempt to frustrate the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act was a stain on Britain’s great democratic traditions and the sight now of MPs across the political spectrum tumbling over each other to pay back their ill gotten gains is proof if any were needed of the importance of investigative journalism.

As Police investigations are now in hand to identify the individual who was hawking the information around the offices of the national press, journalists face a dilemma. Should we stand by our colleagues at the Daily Telegraph who are adamant in their refusal to even discuss the source of the information? Or should we join the hue and cry which Speaker Michael Martin seems to favour in order to unmask the leaker who had the audacity to hold MPs to account?

My sense is that we should show some collective solidarity with the journalists of the Daily Telegraph. While there does seem to be every indication that money changed hands and that an individual or individuals have profited from these unprecedented disclosures, I think we should be cautious.

The last unseemly witch hunt by journalists against one of their own – the despicable Downing Street-backed operation to identify Andrew Gilligan’s source – ended with the tragic death of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, a salutary reminder perhaps of the need occasionally for journalists to let events take their course rather than turn in on themselves.

- Justin Fisher is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Magna Carta Institute at Brunel University. The opinions expressed are his own. -

The expenses crisis is well and truly engulfing Westminster, with equal anticipation and dread about future revelations. Labour was quite reasonably aggrieved that the initial stories all seemed to be about their MPs.

Perhaps this was naive – governing parties are obviously more interesting than their rivals – but the fear was that this crisis would be indelibly linked with Labour and Labour alone. Yet perhaps they needn’t have worried – the Telegraph was keeping its powder dry and today’s stories about some Conservative MPs are possibly even more damaging.

Claiming for a bathplug may raise a titter and seem petty – claiming for repairs to a swimming pool is of a wholly different order – at least as far as the public is concerned.

But before we rush to condemn all MPs, or insist that they must live like paupers in future, let’s step back a little. It is clear that some MPs have made extortionate claims. These claims were apparently within the rules, but they do appear to any reasonable person to have gone beyond the bounds of moral acceptability. Equally, the apparent practice of “flipping” second homes to maximise allowances is unacceptable and should not have been permitted.

But those examples should not be used to damn all MPs. The level of expenses claimed by most MPs may well seem extraordinary to the general public. But the job of an MP is itself extraordinary. MPs are expected to work both at Westminster and in their constituencies, which for many MPs is beyond a reasonable commute.

In fact, MPs are much better these days at serving constituents’ needs – they deal with far more issues in their constituencies than was previously the case. All of that costs money and we are better served for it. MPs who live beyond a reasonable commute to Westminster require a second home, and it is not unreasonable that they should be given some financial support. And, of course, second homes need things like bathplugs – just like first homes do.

But this is a crisis nevertheless, and Labour is worried. But it doesn’t, I think, necessarily mark the death knell for New Labour, though there may be some casualties. First, Labour is likely to perform poorly in next month’s elections. But it was going to do badly anyway. Second, the difference between these sleaze allegations and those of the 1990s is that they affect both main parties, not just the one.

However unfairly, the most recent revelations may lead voters to think that “they’re all as bad as each other”. That’s bad news for the Conservatives, but better news (at least temporarily) for the smaller parties. Third, with a general election now a year away, there are signs that the worst of the recession may be over (and more importantly, there are signs that people perceive things to be getting better). That’s good news for the government.

But things are looking far less good for Gordon Brown. There are some very public stirrings of revolt against his leadership, which will be amplified after the June elections if Labour performs as badly as expected. So, the irony is that Labour could be led into the next election in reasonable position following an upturn in perceptions of the economy. But it may not be led by the man who feels he deserves the credit, but by another key figure in the New Labour project.

- John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship and former editor of the New Statesman. His new book, “Freedom for Sale”, will be published by Simon and Schuster in September. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Squalid is the adjective that best describes the approach of our not-so-honourable members of parliament to their own expenses. But what about the journalism that has helped to all but destroy what remaining trust the public had in its elected representatives?

Some legitimate questions have been raised about the tactics deployed by the Daily Telegraph in buying in the information, apparently a CD from a mole inside parliament which had been touted around newspapers for months.

Cheque-book journalism is a time-honoured tactic of British newspapers, often revealing tawdry stories about celebrities that have little to do with free expression and more to do with prying into people’s private lives.

But in this instance, the Telegraph has surely acted in the public interest. Indeed, all the facts surrounding the case suggest that the newspaper has – far from undermining our democracy – helped to enhance it.

MPs, it should be remembered, fought tooth and nail to try to exempt themselves and the details of their 88-pence bath plugs and black glittered toilet seats from the public gaze. When they forced to publish the information, they sought to time the release to coincide with the summer holidays. Then, instead of dealing with the issues in hand, the stock response of some parliamentary authorities was to call in the police to investigate wrongdoing and to attempt to change the rules by ensuring the expenses will not be published in future.

My critique of the British press is somewhat different to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s who, in one of his valedictory speeches as prime minister, described the British media as “feral”. Certainly there are many valid concerns around standards, around accountability (journalists’ expenses chits would also make for amusing reading), and around attention spans in the 24-hour news culture.
But by far the worst trait of the modern-day profession is a lack of fearless investigation.

One former reporter turned government press officer once told me how shocked he was, when moving across into the state sector, how little the public actually knew about what was being done in their name. Editors are frightened by the UK’s draconian libel laws; they are concerned about their day-to-day budgets, and they are interested mainly in “quick hits” rather than difficult holding the powerful to account.

And what of the media’s purported role as an “advocate of democracy”? I have heard this one thrown around in recent days. This school of thought argues that journalism has a “responsibility” to “promote” our democratic norms.

No it does not. It must act professionally, but one of its main preoccupations should be putting into the public domain information that the authorities would rather people do not know. It is then for readers or viewers to draw their own conclusions about the quality of our public representatives. Respect is not an entitlement. It is a reward for principle, duty – and good behaviour.