Leveson: Don’t be frightened by the state

If David Cameron had any sense, he would stand up in the Commons and say

“I am withdrawing the Royal Charter. The law officers have assured me that Lord Justice Leveson, though a fine judge in many respects, did not understand the Human Rights Act. He failed to see that the courts would almost certainly find that his plans to force newspapers and websites to join his regulator by hitting them with punitive fines were unlawful in practice. My problem is that too many in Parliament cannot see it either.

“There is a madness here in Westminster; a fanaticism which I, as a traditional Tory, find distasteful. I do not like officials in the Department of Culture Media and Sport drawing up lists of who must submit to censorship – the Angling Times, no, Hello! Magazine, yes, student newspapers, no, local newspapers, yes, “small-scale blogs,” no, medium-or-above-scale blogs,” yes. It’s not just that these pronouncements may have no legal force, it will be up to the courts to decide how interpret the legislation, I am worried that British civil servants are sounding like officials in a banana republic producing a list of targets that the regime must monitor and those it can safely ignore.