For centuries men and women fought and died for freedom of expression. Who are Miliband and Clegg to throw it away?

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Today our MPs will vote on one of the most vital issues to have come before this Parliament — the future of our free Press.

By now there can be few people in Britain who do not know the background to the phone-hacking scandal, and few who do not share the widespread revulsion at the shameful wrongdoing of a handful of newspapers.

But what is at stake today transcends the entirely justifiable outrage of the victims of phone-hacking.

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If Ed Miliband (left) and Nick Clegg (right) should prevail, the Press will be regulated by statute for the first time since the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688

Tragically, the victims’ cause has been hijacked by a group of activists who do not have our democracy’s best interests at heart.

The Hacked Off campaigners, who demand statutory regulation of the Press, deny that they are would-be censors. But these self-appointed crusaders miss the crucial point that once we move towards statutory regulation, something precious will have been lost for ever.

For more than 300 years, Britain has taken pride in its tradition of a free Press, independent from the authority of the State, holding the powerful to account and uncovering the secrets that our political masters would prefer to keep hidden.

A free press is one of the central pillars of our democracy

Yet, if Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and their allies in the Hacked Off campaign should prevail, the Press will be regulated by statute for the first time since the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

To anyone who cares about Britain’s tradition of political and intellectual liberty, this is a deeply disturbing prospect. For the principle of a free Press is not merely an airy abstraction. It is one of the central pillars of our democracy.

One of the most extraordinary things about the rush towards statutory regulation is that our politicians seem so oblivious to our history. Indeed, Ed Miliband even believes it is time for Britain to ‘break with the past’. 

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He is, of course, quite wrong. We should honour the past, not break with it. For centuries, men and women fought and died for the principle of free speech. Who is Mr Miliband — or Mr Clegg  for that matter — to throw it away?

In many ways, those clamouring for state regulation of the Press remind me of the similarly prickly and self-righteous Charles I, who used the much-loathed Star Chamber — a secret court with no witnesses that became synonymous with his abuse of power — to prosecute dissenters and outlaw criticism.

The Prime Minister pulled the plug on cross-party talks over the Leveson proposals for media regulation saying that they had 'concluded without agreement'

Under a more repressive regime would the Mail, for example, have been able to name the racist murderers of the teenage Stephen Lawrence, as it so bravely did in 1997?

In 1632, for example, Charles banned all ‘news books’ — the papers of the day — after the Spanish, of whom he was afraid, took objection to England’s coverage of the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War.

Five years later, after the Puritan preacher William Prynne had published anonymous pamphlets criticising the king and his bishops, the implications of regulation became chillingly clear. Prynne was thrown into prison, his ears were cut off and the letters SL (for ‘seditious libeller’) were branded on his face. 

Would the Daily Telegraph have been able to run its expose of the MPs' expenses scandal if it had been answerable, ultimately, to those MPs themselves?

When Parliament turned against the tyrannical Charles at the beginning of the Civil War, it seemed as if censorship of the Press would be scrapped. Yet, the Parliamentarians were just as ruthless and authoritarian as their opponents.

In 1643, Parliament passed a Licensing Order which meant that all printed works had to be approved before publication. It was now impossible, in other words, to write anything criticising the Parliamentarian regime.

The freedom of the Press from government intervention must be a central principle of our democracy. Our papers must be free to ask difficult questions, to make trouble, to say the unsayable. 

It did have one useful consequence, though. It prompted the poet John Milton, one of the greatest advocates of liberty in our history, to write his classic polemic Areopagitica — which, of course, had to be published in secret.

Truth, wrote Milton, should be allowed to speak freely, unshackled by government regulation. To ‘kill a good book’, he thought, was even worse than killing a man, for ‘he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself’.

Our MPs would do well to heed Milton’s words. ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience,’ he wrote, ‘above all liberties.’

His book Areopagitica is little known here today. Yet it inspired the First Amendment to the American Constitution, which prohibits Congress from ‘abridging the freedom of speech, or of the Press’. 

Little wonder, then, that so many American observers, who take pride in their debt to Britain’s traditions of liberty and free speech, are appalled by the prospect of state regulation of the Press.

Yet Milton was only one of a succession of brilliant writers who fought for the principle of free expression. Licensing was effectively abolished after the Glorious Revolution, in which Britain kicked out the Catholic reactionary tyrant James II.

Would the Sunday Times's celebrated Insight team have pulled off its great coups of the Sixties, when it uncovered the story of Kim Philby, the Communist mole inside MI6 under a system of statutory regulation?

The Leveson proposals would make it easier for the rich and powerful to muzzle the Press and allow criminals to get away with murder

In principle at least, Britain now had a free Press. Yet since governments still tried to prosecute their critics, journalists needed guts to take them on.

Take, for example, the maverick journalist and MP John Wilkes, whose intemperate broadsides against George III and his ministers led to his expulsion from Parliament in 1764.

In many ways, Wilkes was a thoroughly unlikeable man. He was famously ugly, and caused consternation in Georgian society by bringing a baboon, dressed in a cape and horns, into the hard-drinking Hellfire Club.

Yet in his commitment to free expression — including the right to report on Parliament itself — Wilkes was a genuinely heroic figure. In speaking out for liberty, he ran a tremendous risk, and when he fled to France after being accused of seditious libel, he was officially declared an outlaw.

It is little wonder that so many American observers, who take pride in their debt to Britain’s traditions of liberty and free speech, are appalled by the prospect of state regulation of the Press.

In the end, after a blazing row that divided the nation, Wilkes was able to return to London and stand again for Parliament. But his actions had set a fire that would never go out; for generations afterwards, friends of liberty saw themselves as Wilkes’s heirs.

A good example was the pamphleteer William Hone, whose political parodies — one of which, in homage to his predecessor, was entitled The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member — caused a tremendous stir in 1817. Like Wilkes, Hone was hauled before the courts. The government was determined to silence his criticisms, and the prosecution argued that his pamphlets had debased public morals.

But after three days of gruelling argument — with Hone speaking for seven hours a day — he was acquitted on every count. As he delightedly wrote afterwards, the ‘bigotry’ of his accusers, notably the repressive Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, had been ‘laughed out of court’.

Hone’s victory established the vital principle of free speech. A generation later, the great Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill even argued that ‘there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered’.

It was a crucial democratic tenet, Mill thought, that people have ‘absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects’.

The Guardian helped expose MP Jonathon Aitken for perjury, for which he received an 18 month sentence in 1999

The press was central in gaining justice in the case of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence

(As it happens, Mill is reportedly a great favourite of the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, one of the keenest champions of state regulation of the Press. Perhaps Mr Clegg has been reading a different Mill from the rest of us.)

By the time Mill died in 1873, the British Press was beginning to look more like its modern counterpart. 

It was often raucous, rambunctious, sensationalist, even vulgar. Yet more than any other newspaper industry in the world, Fleet Street held the mighty to account and shone a bright light into dark places.

When Press freedom has been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, and when courage has given way to caution, who will expose the wrongdoing of our politicians?

By the 1880s, its emblematic figure was the roguish editor W.T. Stead, whose groundbreaking Pall Mall Gazette campaigned against the poverty of the London slums and the appalling scandal of Victorian child prostitution.

By any standards, Stead’s methods were pretty hair-raising. In 1885, he infamously ‘bought’ the 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong from her alcoholic mother for £5 so that he could prove that children and teenagers were being bought and sold for prostitution on the capital’s streets.

It was the sort of journalistic stunt that would make Lord Leveson shudder, Ed Miliband blanch and Nick Clegg weep. And it earned Stead a three-month spell in prison, from where he carried on editing his paper.

But it worked. Stead’s articles on the case struck a cord; his paper sold out overnight and Parliament promptly passed legislation to raise the age of consent and crack down on child prostitution.

For more than 300 years, Britain has taken pride in its tradition of a free Press, independent from the authority of the State, holding the powerful to account and uncovering the secrets that our political masters would prefer to keep hidden

Even by modern standards, Stead was a swashbuckling risk-taker. But he remains a hero to many people in today’s media, not just because he dared to provoke received opinion, but because he took the kind of gambles that might well be impossible under a system of statutory regulation.

Of course, the Press often gets things wrong. Even Stead himself made his fair share of mistakes, yet he forced his readers to confront the dark underbelly of their own society. 

Britain’s newspapers may sometimes be outrageous, sensationalist or even plain wrong. But the critics of the Press are too quick to forget the times our papers have uncovered scandals that our politicians would have preferred to keep quiet.

During World War I, it was the Daily Mail and The Times, for example, that drew public attention to the shocking shortage of shells for Britain’s troops on the Western Front in 1915, forcing the government to take firmer control of munitions production.

The proposals - backed by both Ed Miliband and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg - would give the new regulator ultimate control over the Editor's Code of Conduct, which sets the rules for Press conduct

Under a more repressive regime, such criticism would never have been possible. Yet this freedom was one of the things Britain fought for — and one of the things that separated us from our adversaries.

Indeed, I wonder how many of the great newspaper campaigns of the past century would have gone ahead under a system of statutory regulation. Would the Mail, for example, have been able to name the racist murderers of the teenage Stephen Lawrence, as it so bravely did in 1997?

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Would the Sunday Times’s celebrated Insight team have pulled off its great coups of the Sixties, when it uncovered the story of Kim Philby, the Communist mole inside MI6, or the scandal of Britain’s tragic Thalidomide victims?

And would the Daily Telegraph have been able to run its expose of the MPs’ expenses scandal if it had been answerable, ultimately, to those MPs themselves?

All these campaigns took courage. But that courage was born of freedom — the freedom to write whatever you want, without the grim shadow of the government censor over your shoulder.

Of course, the phone hackers deserve to pay a heavy price for their wrongdoing, as do their protectors in the Metropolitan Police. But they should be prosecuted under the existing criminal laws. 

What is intolerable is that their misdemeanours have handed a weapon to a group of politicians who, for their own partisan purposes, want to muzzle Britain’s traditions of free speech.

Yet when Press freedom has been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, and when courage has given way to caution, who will expose the wrongdoing of our politicians? 

Who will uncover corruption in the banks, the police or the courts? Who will unmask the Jimmy Saviles of the future? Who will write about scandals such as Mid-Staffs?

The freedom of the Press from government intervention must be a central principle of our democracy. Our papers must be free to ask difficult questions, to make trouble, to say the unsayable. 

It was this principle for which William Prynne submitted to the torturer. It was this principle for which John Wilkes risked his life and William Hone his liberty.

If our MPs deny it today, they will not merely be turning their backs on centuries of history. They will leave our democracy wounded, compromised and impoverished. 

The powerful will sleep more easily in their beds. And Britain, unforgivably, will have lost one of its oldest and greatest political traditions.