The European Parliament: EPP (265) S&D (184) ALDE (84) Greens – EFA (55) ECR (54) EUL-NGL (35) EFD (32) Non-Inscrits (27) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday was Europe Day, and in 364 days there will be another. Other than that, pretty much everything European is uncertain.

At various stages during the crisis, people have quoted the Gramsci line:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.

But that leaves unanswered the question of what “the new” is. There’s no guarantee that it will be better. A bad outcome to the crisis could give us a “new” that looks like sixty years ago – a loose collection of independent countries with their own currencies, raging mutual hostility, and a shattered economy. A more plausible scenario has the Europe muddling along until the new economies step forth to the rescue of the old. Not much “new” about that.

We have to choose our “new”. This means more than appealing to economic or trade logic, the technocratic fallacy of much pro-European comment, and more than assuming that Europe doesn’t matter or isn’t of popular interest. It means making a political and moral case for what you think is needed.

You won’t be surprised to learn that my “new” starts from democracy. The scale and ambition of the EU has outgrown the at-one-remove democracy of the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament has not yet stepped into its role. The Euro and Europe are political projects, and need proper politics to go with them.

This pan-European debate is starting to emerge, as was seen during the French election, when Merkel almost campaigned for Sarkozy, and when the Greeks were cheering on François Hollande. More generally, watching the political debates across Europe – for example, through the excellent Presseurop service – you see multiple common themes, about services, rights, immigration, and very few issues that are purely local.

However, much of that increasing political conversation has been focused on nations and national leaders rather than on a decision that needs to be taken across Europe. “Merkozy” and intergovernmental discussions are perhaps useful for taking decisions in the midst of the crisis, but there is deep danger in framing the discussion around “Germany” and “France”, rather than the positions that each takes – there is plenty of “France” in German political debate, and plenty of “Germany” in Britain.

Political scientist Ronny Patz has said that the 2014 European Parliament elections “will be huge”, and maybe that’s true, as they choose the sole directly-elected institution of the EU, but the role that the Parliament has played in crisis decision making has been slight, at least in terms of public profile, and people will not turn out unless they know what they are voting for – as the consistent decline in turnout for EP elections demonstrates.

Others are looking past 2014. Merkel’s party, the CDU, proposes a directly elected EU President, and proposals from Irish campaigner Declan Ganley and academic Brendan Simms call for something similar. There needs to be a discussion on whether the presidential model is right for Europe, or whether a parliamentary system that de-emphasises personalities (and hence nationalities) is better.

Whether a presidential model is right or wrong, a single new office is certainly insufficient. A new European democracy has to be one that fits the emerging social model, not a replica of systems designed for a Victorian nation state. That means participation to go alongside traditional representation – ideas such as the Pirate Party’s Liquid Democracy are an interesting step in that direction.

Many people, not just Brits, would think that this is wasting effort on an institution that should just be done away with. National democracy works now, why try any sort of scheme at European level, or democratise what has always been an elite project. Better go back to the national level of democracy, and remodel the EU as a free-trade union, with the minimum powers needed to make that happen.

I don’t think that’s an adequate solution. There are issues where Europe can act best, and most efficiently, if it acts together. Climate change and energy policy are good examples, and for all the moans about red tape, there is far more red tape in twenty-seven distinct sets of product regulations than in one. Those policies and those regulations need to be drawn up in as democratic a way as possible. What’s more, Europe has created a single currency and free movement zone that could not be easily unwound – unless abolitionists would like to tell the million Britons living abroad to pack their bags and come home.

However, the alternative approach of “steady as she goes, nothing is wrong with the model” won’t wash any more either. It reminds me of a focus group I once ran with a group of UK civil servants, who insisted that the reason people disliked their organisation was that they just weren’t taking the time to understand the reasons for the policy. That seems like a realistic position only within the SW1 postcode, and people inside the Petite Ceinture evidently feel the same way.

A UK referendum, whether Farageux or Mandelsonian, seems very likely in the next few years. It might be “status quo or out”, it might be “properly in or out”, but whatever it is the pro-side will need to do more than sit back and let the opprobrium wash over them. They need a positive vision that’s more than “bicycle theory” (keep going forward or fall over). “Full federal union” isn’t going to be on offer, but a serious reform conversation might be – the sort of conversation that Declan Ganley (formerly of Libertas) and Brendan Simms of Cambridge University started with a joint reform proposal published earlier this year.

A new settlement won’t give a final answer on the balance of growth and austerity, or member-state and federal – just look at the US after two hundred years of federalism if you think it might – but it could give us a quicker, modern, democratic system in which we can make those decisions.

Does the Telegraph credit Simon’s clever spot? No. Does it mention his blog or organisation at all? No.

Instead, it goes to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Elton, Pritt or Coughlin of public spending, for a thought-free quote on how evil spending money is:

Robert Oxley, Campaign Manager of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Only civil servants could think that simplifying government means flashy new logos for every department.

“Rather than worrying about team colours, bureaucrats should focus on ending the culture of waste that still prevails in Whitehall. The time and endless meetings involved in this pet project could surely have been used more wisely on practical measures to save taxpayers’ money.”

And yet… having a single logo saves money. The design is so simple it could have been done (and was done, according to the Cabinet Office) in-house. The purpose of the work was to save multiple redesigns. The TaxPayers’ Alliance should be delighted – but of course, they never are.

It’s disappointing but not surprising that the Telegraph doesn’t give Simon the credit he deserves. Perhaps it’s also unsurprising that it doesn’t give public debate the credit it deserves, by rushing for a lazy outrage quote, rather than taking the time to make a fair assessment of what’s been done. That’s our “quality press” for you.

The Daily Mail clock, just off Kensington High Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been publishing a series of posts from contributors on the topic of media regulation and democracy. On 25 April, the contributors and others gathered at the RSA to discuss their pieces and the issues that were raised, and this is a rough record of the discussion. These are multiple contributors’ views rather than Demsoc’s, and we haven’t attributed them, but the authors will be revising their contributions following this discussion for publication in a pamphlet early next month. Thanks as ever to our partners the Carnegie UK Trust for the sponsorship for this work.

We started off by asking this question: More regulation for the media appears to be the direction that is favoured by the Leveson Inquiry. What should the reformed media regulatory environment be like?

Should newspapers be regulated at all? Should it not just be left to the law as with other commercial organisations? Should we stop claiming they are guarantors of democracy and should be fair and representative (which they aren’t) and just see them as businesses like any other?

Yet industries like the food industry are not left totally without regulation. Newspapers are capable of great harm, and the powerless, in particular, need help with redress and protection from that harm. They also sometimes break the law ‘in the public interest’ and with this comes some responsibility – and regulation. What would a media regulation regime look that that provides protection primarily to those without power and redresses the harm caused to ordinary citizens? Different models were discussed but something similar to the Local Government Ombudsman is a useful model.

The concentration of media power, rather than the nature of the media, has led to the problems that we have seen. This should be dealt with under competition law. But there has been a lack of checks and balances and that has allowed the breaches of the law that we have seen. Media power has been collected in the hands of a few and the citizen’s voice has been lost. It has also led to a lack of diversity in the coverage that we see. The media is unable to provide an effective challenge to power on crucial issues. It was for example hard to hear the voices challenging neoliberal economics before the current economic crisis. The media misdescribed this situation with disastrous consequences. Reports such as this one produced by Chatham House, show how the Icelandic ash cloud story was dominated by certain stories such as the disruption to travel rather than others such as the difficulties with transporting organs for transplant. But how do we hear minority views and choose which minority views to listen to? The MMR vaccination scare is an example where one view was informed by a body of validated research and the other (minority view) was factually wrong.

It is important to protect the truth and accuracy but it is not always clear what the truth is. There is some very poor coverage of factual issues, highlighted here by Ben Goldarcre in the Guardian, but a large grey area. We also need to protect the right of people to have an opinion. What mechanisms can we bring in to protect truth and protect freedom of expression? How do we know who is harmed by inaccurate reporting? The current Press Complaints Commission code does state that newspapers should take care not to publish inaccurate information (including pictures.) Maybe these guidelines should be made statutory, as it is with broadcast media?

If we could see how many transgressions of the truth there are, and the biases that a newspaper was showing then there would be transparency. The Daily Show in the United States does this in an accessible, interesting way. There could be an index, like the Cook Index in the US with newspapers given a rolling average of truthfulness or bias, perhaps with a system of ‘notices to improve’, ‘special measures’ and issue ‘accuracy display certificates’. But who would rule on this? Perhaps crowdsourcing – there are people who would do this for a greater societal good and bringing the public in is a powerful methodology.

We can bring citizens into the media to create a more challenging and disputatious public sphere. If we have citizens in possession of power and with the information that they need then they can start and join debates. Citizens’ panels would allow people to come together and their views would be heard. Currently the only relationship between readers and journalists is a financial one, the only power is to buy or not. Currently the readers’ view of what they consider news and what is in ‘the public interest’ is not heard. And readers can’t reach and discuss thing with each other. Is it possible that readers’ juries could form part of any new regulatory regime, to help inform news editors?

But is a stakeholder or citizen space possible or desirable? Currently we have a public space where people can come together to debate around certain principles. Papers such as the Guardian and Daily Mail are not as far apart as their brands suggest. A national public sphere is important to prevent us having rock pools of opinion but citizens need to be in control of it, rather than oligarchs. Individuals could control the means of media production as media now has lower barriers to entry and the public could be commissioners of stories and investigations. Everyone could have a cash value that they could put towards investigations and the communication of results – a ‘citizen’s journalism voucher’. There is already a version of this running in the United States called Spotus with match funding for investigations.

But how would we get a wide group of people involved in media regulation? To ensure that it was not leaving the media to be run by the same group of people and that power would remain in the same hands? Many of those who are currently marginalised don’t have the confidence to engage. If we leave it to self-selection it we will just have people with loud voices and axes to grind. But if we make it representative then it is expensive. And the question of how to fund media regulation is a difficult one. The Leveson Inquiry seems to be arguing for stronger, and therefore more expensive regulation but would the public pay for this? And if it funded by the papers then what incentive is there to enter into it?

We are getting information now from a much wider selection of sources. More primary sources than ever are available to us than ever before. We don’t need the print media, we can go directly to the source. The role of print media is to get access to hard to get information or to interpret or comment on that information.

The print media is an antiquated and dying model and we are looking at the wrong problem. The media is an essential part of democracy, giving voters the information they need to hold politicians in check. But newspapers have been the same for generations. The format has been the same; the content has been the same and they have served the same vested interests. Rather than regulate this dying model, let’s ask the questions of what do we want our media to be? We need something that is owned by people to keep democracy in check. We need practical solutions and something that is commercially viable. Are we may be reaching today for a regulation solution for yesterday’s problem?

1. The model which has guided many people’s thinking in this area, the 1/9/90 rule, is outmoded. The number of people participating online is significantly higher than 10%.
2. Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
3. This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
4. Despite participation becoming relatively ‘easy’, almost a quarter of people (23%) remain passive – they do not participate at all.
5. Passivity is not as rooted in digital literacy as traditional wisdom may have suggested. 11% of the people who are passive online today are early adopters. They have the access and the ability but are choosing not to participate.
6. Digital participation now is best characterised through the lens of choice. These are the decisions we take about whether, when, with whom and around what, we will participate. Because participation is now much more about who we are, than what we have, or our digital skill.

Read more, including a helpful graphic, on their site.

Officials have rejected a freedom of information request by the Financial Times, saying that the relevant information was produced “solely” for the joint committee on Lords reform. “A decision was taken by them not to publish it as part of their report,” they said in their response.

Several anti-reform peers are quoted in the rest of piece, clearly regretful that they’ll be (temporarily) denied the opportunity to tell us how awfully expensive a democratic Parliament would be.

Let’s hope that this sort of “how much for your principles?” argumentation is doomed to failure in any case.

Guess whose manifesto begins: “There is nothing more beautiful in a democracy than the love of one’s country, to which every vote that slides into the ballot box on election day bears witness.”

I’m sure you guessed it’s not Boris Johnson, or Ken Livingstone, or your local district councillor. It’s Nicolas Sarkozy , and the Olympian rhetoric is typical of a French presidential candidate. Le peuple français are not electing a bureaucrat-in-chief, they are electing their “republican King” .

“Republican monarchy” might seem very foreign to British voters, but it is the choice they have today in the mayoral elections and referendums. Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone would shy away from the phrase (particularly the word “republican” in Boris’s case), but the role of elected mayor gives the same personal mandate, and promotes the same elevation of personality over policy.

The London mayor race is an extreme example, as both candidates are standing for the second time, and the election plays into the political media’s twin obsessions of London and potential governing party splits. Nonetheless, the candidates are universally “Ken” and “Boris”. We can Back Boris, Sack Boris, be Better Off with Ken or Stop Ken. There’s little mention of the parties – Ken Livingstone’s manifesto mentions the word “Labour” only 23 times in 100 pages, but he looks like a party hack compared to Boris Johnson, whose six manifesto chapters mention the Conservative Party exactly once – in the logo on the front cover.

Downplaying party identity and focusing on individual character  is exactly how the elected mayor system is meant to work. It is intended to give an individual mandate to an individual – with party machinery a benefit, not a requirement for winning.

Voters are asked to judge the character of the candidate, not their policies – could they handle the 3 a.m. phone call? In return, they get a leader who has a far stronger personal mandate than the leader of the council, and needs to focus less on internal council politics.

The benefit of this personal power is that the mayor can become “the leader of the place, not the leader of the council” in the words of Sir Steve Bullock , first council leader then mayor of Lewisham. An elected mayor can give a stronger lead in partnerships and subregional bodies. They can use their profile to be a personal focus to the whole area. As Simon Jenkins has said, this is a particularly important role outside London, where the great provincial cities need a well-known figurehead.

Personalised campaigning also gives a boost to prominent independent candidates. Ken Livingstone and Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets  both led insurgent campaigns against their own parties. H’Angus the monkey mascot of Hartlepool FC became Stuart Drummond , the town’s three-time mayor . The results show that mayors can take the lift to power, rather than the stairs – fewer than one in ten councillors is an independent, but four of the fourteen serving mayors are.

The Government believes that single leaders can achieve more, and wants to give them more powers. They have proposed City Deals, containing new powers, borrowing rights and autonomy, stored in a box marked “do not open until after the referendums”. On the back of that, business leaders are promising voters  “£1bn funding jackpots” if they say yes to mayors. It’s a bold promise, but given the reality of the mayor’s powers, disappointment is almost guaranteed.

Mayors can’t change the fact that local government has to handle some very difficult issues, and they are still bound – a little borrowing aside – by the same financial constraints that tie down every council.

The hard times, and the general mood of anger against politics, increase the risks of the personal mandate in the mayoral model. The powers and profile that mean Sir Steve Bullock can push Lewisham forward are the same powers and profile that Peter Davies, the English Democrat Mayor of Doncaster  has been using for the last three years. Mayor Davies’s administration is perhaps the clearest example of the problems that personalised local government power brings, particularly when facing an oppositional council.

Mayor Davies has been described by the Audit Commission  as not having “the capacity to make the necessary improvements in governance”. His approach to running the authority, they say, has “tended to make existing problems worse”. At the same time, senior councillors, working with officers, have tried to undermine the office and its holder by setting their own budgets and policies.

The clash of mayor and council in Doncaster – which a different elected mayor model also produced in Stoke  - is one of the risks of elected mayors. The bigger risk is that elected mayors change the public face of the authority, but have no impact on the wider democratic deficit.

Mayor Drummond in Hartlepool won his third term on a turnout of thirty-one percent, only a slight improvement on turnout in council elections before the mayoralty was introduced. Mayor Davies was elected on a turnout of just thirty-five percent, much the same turnout as for the council elections of the year before.

Such ordinary turnouts, also seen in London  , suggest that the personal profile of mayors has not re-energised civic and democratic spirit in their localities.

Elected mayors can provide personal leadership and representation of a place to Government in a way a council leader cannot. For many places they will be a positive change, but without deeper work to develop democratic governance and participation, they won’t be much of a change.

The challenges of localism – planning and providing services closer to citizens, and taking decisions in in neighbourhoods – push decision-making down below the public, prominent mayor into communities where supporting democratic infrastructure is underfunded or missing. In Liverpool, Sheffield, Bristol and elsewhere, good neighbourhood governance is the reform that is needed most urgently, whoever is running the council.

We Live Here is a response to a feeling shared by Anthony, Catherine and others that we need to make goverments fit better with the way the world is moving. He said government is lagging behind in the changes that are happening to society as a result of the internet and the networking that it is enabling. For government to respond it needs to refocus on the people it serves.

“People are getting much better service from Amazon than they are getting from governments and that’s not just because Amazon are cold, hard capitalists,” he said. “It’s because they have a vision of their customer service that’s very focused and government doesn’t have a vision of its services that’s citizen focused.”

Anthony said We Live Here is the start of a process to “both understand and map social networks in an area and provide the democratic infrastructure for them to have repetitive democratic conversations, rather than a one-off consultation”.

Read more on the Public-i Blog.

It’s not perfect, but a good start. My main complaint at this stage of development is that it’s rather Eurojargony – “initiate action” rather than “do something” is a typical example, and I’m not interested in the legal basis of particular actions, just what I can actually do.

Such quibbles aside, it’s much easier than getting information out of Europa.eu. Although mining diamonds with a plastic fork is also easier than getting information out of Europa.eu.

Society of Professional Journalists (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kevin Charman-Anderson considers how regulation can address culture. This is the last of our posts on media regulation in advance of our discussion event on Wednesday. 

The main and most pressing question in the wake of the massive corruption scandal in the British press is how to clean up the mess.

Will it be sufficient to address the problems in British press culture by simply making sure that those who broke the law are brought to book? Is new regulation required? If so, should the regulation simply be a stronger form of voluntary regulation or is some form of statutory regulation required? Would either jail time or regulation alone bring about the needed cultural change?

Finally, after years of delay and repeated denials, allegations of phone hacking, email and computer hacking and bribery are being taken seriously and investigated.

Beyond investigation into wrongdoing, it is also clear that journalists need help understanding what is and isn’t legal in the UK. Whilst libel law is well understood by most journalists, there seems to be little knowledge of other relevant legislation.

For example, with respect to the alleged computer and email hacking, journalists and even legal staff seem to have been clueless about the Computer Misuse Act, citing a public interest defence that doesn’t exist. Even more shocking, testimony given to the Leveson Inquiry shows that some journalists believed that rather flimsy public interest considerations placed them above the law.

As computer and internet research becomes more important to journalistic investigations, it’s critical that journalists understand which uses of technology are illegal, although how anyone would think breaking into someone’s email account is legal is beyond me.

But will additional legal training for journalists be enough to change the culture of corruption that clearly exists at some publications?

And let’s be honest, this goes far beyond News International. Operation Motorman showed the use of private investigators to gather information to be so wide-spread that hardly any publication is left blameless.

The top of the league table by not only a significant margin, but a significant multiple, are the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and yet we are told that all of those requests are legal and above board. Whether all of these requests are legal is for the police and the legal system to decide, not for the press to assert. Further investigation is necessary; the public deserves to know exactly how far the rot has spread and justice must be seen to be done in those cases where the law was broken.

Given that these dubious behaviours were so widespread, it is doubtful whether legal training alone could fully address the problem. While some of the practices were clearly illegal, other practices were legal but deeply unethical, not just in my opinion but also by general professional journalism guidelines such as those of the National Union of Journalists or the Society of Professional Journalists in the US.

So how could press regulation take on such a deep cultural issue?

The Press Complaints Commission system of voluntary regulation is obviously discredited, and simply changing the name and a few faces won’t rehabilitate its image. Resistance to statutory regulation is high both inside and outside the press, with Jeremy Hunt advising against any new form of press regulation that would be a “back door imposition of broadcast-style statutory regulation”.

It’s difficult to find any advocate of statutory regulation from within the press, but their vociferous push-back against statutory regulation should be met with some scepticism.

As someone who has worked both for the BBC and for The Guardian, it’s always struck me as a hypocritical in the extreme that the British press, chiefly the tabloids, delight in taking the BBC to the whipping shed over scandals both real and imagined, holding the BBC to standards that they would never dream of holding themselves.

The argument against statutory regulation made by the British press is that it would undermine press independence, is a step closer to government censorship, and would ‘send the wrong message’ to oppressive regimes where the press is not free. But having worked for the BBC, I know that is possible to world class journalism under the rigorous editorial standards that broadcasters have been working with for years.

The BBC has a rigorous two-step procedure for reviewing and allowing procedures such as surreptitious filming, reviewing the request before filming begins and content before it is broadcast.

Even with these editorial checks, the BBC has still been able to break major stories in the public interest, including uncovering abuse last year at a residential home that treated people with learning disabilities and autism. More recently, Panorama used secret filming during an investigation into alleged facilitation of pay TV hacking by a News Corporation subsidiary.

The truth is that independent, high-quality investigations can still be done under statutory regulation.

Revelations of press corruption continue to be made, and for anyone outside of the tabloid press, it is clear that the culture of the British press needs to change.

I would argue that the press need to a period of close scrutiny by an independent body with real enforcement and powers of sanction. Allegations of illegal activity should quickly be turned over the police instead of ineptly investigated up by a toothless self-regulatory body. If the press can’t get its act together, then it should face statutory regulation. The press and its owners must be motivated to root out corrupt and illegal behaviour, otherwise, we will have missed a golden opportunity to end the serious corruption and illegality in the British press.

Not happy about this letter from OFCOM. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Damian Radcliffe is the author of “Here and Now – UK hyperlocal media today”. In this post he argues that at a time when media and digital regulation is under review, hyperlocal media should be left alone. This is a contribution to our media regulation discussion event on Wednesday afternoon.

The recent announcement of £1m in funding for new hyperlocal ventures is a welcome shot in the arm for this nascent media industry. The UK is full of great examples of hyperlocal activity. However issues of trust, scalability and sustainability are all key challenges for large parts of the sector as it moves forward.

The NESTA and TSB funding may offer some solutions to these challenges, but as the sector grows, so issues of regulation may start to loom slightly larger on the policy agenda. In my view, where possible, regulation of online hyperlocal media should be avoided. That might seem a strange thing for a former regulator to say, so let offer five reasons why the sector should be unregulated, and why I think attempts at regulation would ultimately prove unsuccessful.

1. Online Philosophy

My starting point is a simple one. If you are a believer in the open internet, then the web should be a predominantly unregulated space. Clearly there are exceptions, such as the need to protect the exploitation of minors, but most of these concerns are not applicable to hyperlocal websites. Provided that the law of the land is not being broken, then websites should generally be left alone.

2. The historic rules of regulation do not apply

In a broadcast world, regulation was used to create a framework for licensees. In return for abiding by the rules, which included signing up to a code of conduct and agreeing terms of trade (e.g. what type of service you are, or specific obligations such as the amount of local news you produce), then license holders got access to a precious commodity: spectrum, and with it the right to broadcast direct to people in their homes. This two way contract has been a key tool in making broadcast regulation work, but it is not a framework which logically transfers to the online space.

3. Practicalities

Anyone can set up a hyperlocal website or channel using tools like Facebook, WordPress or Twitter. These tools are often free, and fairly easy to use, with the result that you can set up your website in minutes. And it also means that if your website gets into trouble, you can dismantle and remove traces of it pretty quickly too. The net result of this is that not only is it impossible to comprehensively capture what hyperlocal sites exist, it will be equally impossible to monitor them effectively.

In contrast, launching a newspaper, TV or Radio Station which has often required specific licenses, equipment and training, as well as clear monitoring requirements. Broadcasters, for example, have a legal requirement to keep a record of what they have transmitted, whilst newspaper owners see their physical product in the public’s hands, making it rather hard to hide any potential crimes and misdemeanors.

4. Citizen Smith

Whilst commercial hyperlocal outlets and networks do exist, the majority of hyperlocal content in the UK is produced by citizens, often for free, or certainly very small sums of money. This in itself is no bad thing, indeed I have previously suggested that the best sites stem from local need, by people steeped in their communities. In many cases, but not always, this means active citizens investigating and reporting on what matters to them.