From calling Sun readers ‘mugs’ to wanting to ban Daily Mail, sinister zealots behind regulators want to destroy the popular press
If new regulations get through parliament, it will mean the death of investigative journalism, as the press will not be able to finance holding public people to account
WHEN David Cameron launched his Royal Charter on Press regulation in the House of Commons in 2013, he borrowed the sage words of Winston Churchill.
A solemn Cameron told MPs: “A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize — it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.”
Now, in a staggering turn of events, the fate of 300 years of British press freedom could soon be in the hands of a state-approved watchdog known as Impress. It is backed by celebrity-supported anti-press zealots Hacked Off and almost entirely funded by motor racing tycoon Max Mosley, an orgy-loving multi-millionaire with a vendetta against newspapers.
Yet newspapers face being pressured into joining it if Culture Secretary Karen Bradley signs off the unjust Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013.
Any papers which did not join would have to pay both sides’ costs in libel cases, even if they win because they can prove they published the truth.
Mosley, son of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, was exposed in 2008 by our sister paper, the now defunct News of the World, for taking part in a German-themed, S&M orgy with five prostitutes.
He took the paper to court and won because it had wrongly described the orgies as “Nazi” and breached his right to privacy.
He is handing Impress £3.8million over four years.
It is channelled through the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, named after his son who died from a drug overdose at 39. It then passes through the Independent Press Regulation Trust.
The Chair of its board of trustees is Wilfrid Vernor-Miles, a London-based tax lawyer and trustee of the charity the Society of St Pius X. This is a breakaway Catholic sect with branches around the world — yet its ideology has raised accusations of anti-Semitism, and worse.
The SSPX was founded in 1970 by French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. He praised the “Catholic order” of WWII Vichy leader and Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain, later convicted of treason.
In 1989 Paul Touvier, a fugitive wartime secret policeman convicted of executing seven Jews, was arrested with his family at a SSPX priory in Nice, France.
The Society denied Touvier had any links with them, insisting he had been allowed to stay as an “act of charity to a homeless man”.
In 1990 Lefebvre, a supporter of France’s National Front, was fined for racially intolerant comments about Muslim immigrants. He died the following year.
In 2009 the Society’s British-born bishop Richard Williamson denied on TV that Nazis used gas chambers to kill millions of Jews.
In 2012 the SSPX’s current leader, a Swiss bishop named Bernard Fellay, described Jews as “the enemies of the Church.”
In October 2013 the Society offered to hold Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke’s funeral after he died at 100 in Rome. The former SS captain had been convicted over the massacre of hundreds of Italian civilians in 1944 and shortly before his death claimed the Holocaust was a hoax.
The Society insisted that as a Christian he was entitled to a holy Mass and funeral “no matter what his faults and sins were”. The funeral was called off only after 500 protestors gathered at its HQ.
The Impress campaign is not the first link between the Mosley and Vernor-Miles families.
In 1934, while Sir Oswald’s British Union of Fascists were parading in black-shirt uniforms, Wilfrid’s grandfather Ernest bought the Catholic Herald newspaper.
While critical of the Blackshirts for their street brawls and crude anti-Semitism, the paper at times failed to condemn outright all that the BUF stood for.
In a 1936 article on the East End, the Herald described Jewish citizens as “an alien element”.
It added: “Once again the crudities and brutalities of the Fascist campaign in East London and other Jewish quarters should not be allowed to blind us to the reality of the problem here. And it was not Fascism that created the problem but the Liberalism that allowed the Jew to become dominant in a then-Christian country.”
In February 1938, a month before Hitler annexed Austria, the Herald reported: “There was great enthusiasm when Sir Oswald Mosley addressed a meeting in Lewisham. He outlined the Blackshirt policy, many points of which are excellent.”
Referring to Nazi rallies in Germany, the paper noted Sir Oswald had said: “The National press is one long stream of lies.” It added: “And this produces such a roar of assent as one thought only to hear on some occasions at Nuremberg.”
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Impress insists there is a firewall between it and its main donor Mosley and that “there is no capacity for any donor to exert influence.”
Two months ago Impress was rubber-stamped as a watchdog by a Government quango costing taxpayers £3million over three years.
But no major national or local newspaper group joined. Some, such as the Guardian, London’s Evening Standard and Financial Times, chose instead to regulate themselves.
Most including The Sun, Daily Mail, The Times and Telegraph, signed up to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. It is funded by member publications and can force them to issue front page apologies and levy fines of up to £1million.
Its chairman Sir Alan Moses insisted Britain’s press would be “doomed” if it signed up to state-backed regulation. Churchill’s unsleeping guardians of every right that free men prize could soon be put to sleep for good.
They want to wreck, not regulate
IMPRESS has recruited lawyers, academics and journalists to its board and code committee, some of whom appear to loathe the popular press — but would be the ones to sit in judgment.
Gavin Phillipson
THE Durham University law professor, a code committee member, is a qualified solicitor specialising in human rights law.
His Twitter biography lists an interest in free speech but he wants to ban the Daily Mail because its readers have an “abnormal perception of reality”.
Jonathan Heawood
THE CEO of Impress is the former deputy literary editor of The Observer.
He has retweeted a number of posts from the campaign group Stop Funding Hate which aims to get big business to pull advertising from The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express.
Emma Jones
BOARD member Emma, a former Smash Hits editor who was sacked by The Sun, also supports Stop Funding Hate.
Her partner Graham Johnson got a two-month suspended jail sentence in 2014 after admitting phone hacking while at the Sunday Mirror.
Maire Messenger Davies
THE Ulster University media studies professor slammed The Sun’s readers as “mugs” for supporting Brexit.
The board member also joined other academics in condemning “unwarranted attacks” on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by an “unelected media”.
Paul Wragg
THE code committee member, associate professor of law at the University of Leeds, is hostile to right-wing newspapers.
In 2013 he re-tweeted: “I don’t know whether I exactly ‘love’ Britain but I do know that I hate the Daily Mail”. Dr Wragg added: “Couldn’t agree more.”