A funny thing happened on the way from the Forum

When is a Crusader a censor?

 

Some interesting research from the Poll of Polls website on Sunday pointed to the fact that the phone-hacking scandal has really taken root in the public consciousness.

85% of Britons think widespread illegality has taken place, and 60% think that ‘this an important issue the police should spend time investigating’. That may not sound like hysteria, but it’s as worked up as Brits get about anything these days. (It is, for example, far more people than want action about the EU mess).

The media are also fairly sure-footed about this sort of thing. After a slow start, the revelations about who’s been hacked and why have become daily events – today’s new wannabe sympathy recipient being Bob Crowe, although I’m not sure there are that many people feeling sorry for him.

So it struck me as a bit odd that, having posted an interesting story about how the Mailmen who flooded over to the Telegraph last year had probably been at it too, thirty-six hours later the piece has had just 23 referrals from the Telegraph. And guess what? My comment threads relating to that particular story have all been taken down from the forums concerned.

Now this didn’t happen when I first posted about Cameron’s stupidity in hiring Coulson last September. It didn’t happen when I said Coulson was a liability in December, and that the illegal activity was endemic within Newscorp during January.

“What did you expect?” so many will say. And the truth is, I don’t know. But I now feel sure that the piece got home inside the Temple of Barclays. The incoming links and odd addresses crawling all over the site yesterday suggest that – and the subsequent censorship confirms it.

This is a scandal so huge,  widespread and up there at the top, everyone who writes about it can expect the standard lies, line by line in the sand retreats, grubby attempts to shut us up, and smears about everything from political views to mental health. It’s no consolation that New Labour during the Brownonpills saga and Ed Balls during the Secret Courts marathon were every bit as bad.

And this is the worrying part. Because the political and police Establishment will now try and reshape Hackgate as symptoms of a press pack out of control. They’ll be right, of course: but the signs are that they have colluded in this business. And I never trust any governmental class looking for an excuse to bash the media.

For The Slog, the issue remains exactly the same as it’s always been. This country is riddled with unwarranted privilege at all levels of society, in all walks of life, and in all areas of government. Islamists, bankers, civil servants, footballers, senior policemen, judges and media moguls….it makes no difference who or where: they wield more gratuitous power than they should, and it is the job of citizens everywhere to cut them back down to size.

What ties the News of the World and Daily Telegraph case histories together is the existence behind them of unscrupulous men who believe they have the right, without being UK taxpaying residents, to decide – entirely unelected – who we should elect, and what those elected representatives should do.

Equality before the law, freedom of speech and thought, empiricism and self-control are the sworn enemies of controlling Stateists, power-freaks in the media, illiberal polemicists, religious fanatics, bad science and ambitious policemen. It has always been like this, and it always will be.

Footnote: Last night, Financial Times editor Lionel Barber used the Hugh Cudlipp Memorial Lecture to criticise the way Telegraph journalists taped Vince Cable, and the News of the World hacked into VIP phones.

Related: The cesspool in which Cameron fishes