Sobriety at the saloon

The most rowdy drinkers in the Last Chance Saloon may be tempted today to raise their glasses and drink the health of Virginia Bottomley, the new Heritage Secretary. After all, her recommendations for how the press might be expected to clean up its act fall far short of the lynch law some politicians so badly wanted.

Minister and civil servants could not discern a way of legislating against media infringements of privacy without badly compromising the freedom of the press. This recognition has led the Government to fall back on strengthened self-regulation.

This is the right conclusion: journalists should face the same laws as all citizens, not special ones. But it is not the end of the debate.

The suggestion that the Press Complaints Commission code of practice (to which this newspaper subscribes) should be clarified and reinforced is entirely sensible. It should, at least, be possible to arrive at a more useful definition of privacy.

Equally, the recommendation that lay representation on the PCC be bolstered will help to increase public confidence that the commission is not simply the toothless creature of cynical publishers and editors. Opening and publicising a "hot-line" between the PCC and complainants who believe that they are about to be wronged may well help to prevent some abuses taking place at all.

But potentially the most effective - and, paradoxically, most flawed - of Mrs Bottomley's suggestions is that the PCC should set up a fund from which the victims of press intrusion would be compensated. The flaw is that it would be both unjust and counter-productive if newspapers that are rarely guilty of breaches of privacy, and which do exercise self-restraint, were to pay equally into a fund to cover the excesses of others routinely less scrupulous. To put it more simply: why should readers of the Independent pay good money to subsidise the trade of the News of the World?

This suggestion has partly arisen because the PCC will find it easier to make payments from a pre-subscribed fund than to stipulate the punishment which fits each crime. If the PCC were able to fine newspapers that breached the code of practice, this might act as a significant incentive to behave better. The fines would need to be large enough to act as a deterrent, but not stupidly large, like many libel payments, which have more in common with the National Lottery than an effective system of justice.

Indeed, if the new system worked, it might even be extended in time to questions of defamation, which at the moment result in excessively large awards for the well endowed, while denying access to justice for ordinary people.

Of course, any such a proposal will meet hostility from those in the newspaper industry who see yesterday's announcement as a clear-cut victory over the politicians. But the drunks at the bar should take more water with it - it is the public, not the politicians who need to be convinced that the saloon should stay open.