What follows below is a brief description of the way our legislators look into wrongdoing in the UK….when they know that simply ignoring it (or giving the perpetrators a fair trial and banging them up) isn’t on.

This particular approach applies when dealing with bankers, trade unions , media owners, policemen, politicians, lawyers, or those employed by any of the forgoing.

First of all there will be an Enquiry, and then a Committee. After this, we may decide to enter a grey area called Another Enquiry. Then – if that Enquiry is called into question – its head will be required to appear before Another Committee. Sometimes this second committee is called a Committee of Enquiry. At others, it is called a Standing Committee.The most salient point of a Standing Committee is that it takes most things lying down, and doesn’t enquire about anything terribly important.

The general hope of those in charge is that, well before the end of these committees and enquiries, most people will have forgotten WTF anyone was enquiring about anyway.

However, the Culture, Media & Sport (CM&S) Committee’s vague sort of Enquiry into the Leveson Enquiry has been rather hgher-profile, and is based fairly reasonably on the obvious conclusion that nothing much seems to have come out of the Enquiry subject into which Leveson was, as it were, enquiring. So we shouldn’t be surprised that (if only to save face) it asked one or two searching questions of the original Enquirer General, Lord Leveson.

In response to those questions, Lord Leveson’s response was to say that it was “naive” to hope that his recommendations would meet with approval. I don’t know about you, but putting up suggestions to which you expect very little approval sounds to me like a job involving lots of fun, huge fees, and no accountability. But that’s probably just me and my knee-jerk cynicism coming into play. Well, that and my desire to be the man whose Enquiry recommended 250 years in a penal colony for Rupert Murdoch and all of his spawn.

At any rate, the half-arsed and chicken-hearted ideas about media industry self-regulation put forward earlier this week aren’t convincing anyone…least of all our criticism-averse legislators. Peter Oborne wrote a good piece in the Maily Telegraph about this last night, although for me it didn’t go far enough.

It seems to me that what we need is not so much snoopy 1984-style censors poring over media content, but rather a simple law being passed to ban all but UK-domiciled non-tax avoiding citizens from owning any medium with a UK share of more than 5% of the market. And then nothing more radical than asking policemen to do their duty and move/shove/kick tabloid hacks and snappers off private property.

The French have had a law in place forever about foreign media ownership and press trespass. Apart from decimating the power of Newscorp, what harm could it do to the UK? Answers on a postcard please.

Earlier at The Slog: Coop’s very odd £50,000 payment to Ed Balls’s office