Time brings moderation to all things....

Back in August last year after the riots, views on the motives and causes were hot and mostly ill-considered. It is interesting now to hear men such as Iain Duncan Smith beginning to acknowledge that the causes are much deeper rooted and less easy to fix than some of his government fellows have thought.

And good to hear it - like Heseltine before him familiarity with reality leads to a dawning realisation that in politics black and white are not the only colours. I repeat here some of what I wrote back then. There had been articles locally as well as nationally that argued the riots and looting were just plain old criminality, greed, immorality and lack of respect. They were compared to historic events in Brixton and Toxteth.

I asked then and still do:

"Why now exactly? Why in so many places? If those riots were the same then you must agree that a red-neck Tory's solution for Toxteth would commend itself surely? Michael Heseltine no less saw the immediate need to rescue a lost generation from poverty, inertia and rejection. And a fairly blue if liberal tinged Judge after Brixton saw much the same need."

But the local paper started to balance things which led me to write:

"These lead on to a more considered assessment; one which I believe includes some here and now possibilities that are new and very worrying. The riots began for a fairly traditional reason in Tottenham, much as they had in the same borough years earlier and for an amazingly similar reason - possible police over-action in the line of duty. But then come the new factors:

• Social networking spread the news faster than had ever been possible before and to a much wider audience that was blogged into awareness of what was happening.
• Gangs, and they are pretty new in the modern form, also use these vectors to communicate along with encrypted BlackBerry messaging.
  
• Youngsters (that's up to about 25 these days) now routinely attend events of all sorts at the drop of a tweet, email or text. They are alerted to something 'going down' and they want to be 'in it'.
• Today's economic woes mean that many of these younger people are unemployed, under-privileged, unmotivated but they are also subject to the same massive aspirational pressures of modern marketing and consumer goods as the haves. So when the news of looting spread they were all too ready to join in; even the unwise hangers on got their noses in this trough. We should note that the goods taken were very largely fashion clothes, sports good and electronics and the riots in the usual places for such lawlessness.
  
• New factor three is that the institutions of this country have ruined their own right to respect by their own greed and avarice. The criminal risk-taking of the bankers and financial institutions got us here and that has been well publicised and especially by bloggers and tweeters. The criminal greed and avarice of our politicians feeding furiously at the gravy train of MPs allowances eliminated their right to respect. The police, especially in London, have been shown to have taken their part in the disgraceful activities of (at least) the Murdoch media. They too have done too much of late to deserve much respect.
  
• All this has filled the blogosphere and twitterland with ranting and raving fit to inflame even the calmest, coolest teen or twenty.."
  

I ended by asking:

"So when the hyped up, aggravated, aspirational gangs and their hangers on were called to 'rave 'n' riot' they spared no one, respected no one and behaved as charged - like feral animals. (It is correct) that we need to set a new moral compass for our age. But we won't do that by being in denial that all this is our own fault. We need to work and pay if we want a new tomorrow - the emperor won't get a new suit of clothes by cutting back on the cloth."

My views have not changed much - but I am very glad to see that reality has given Duncan Smith a similar enlightenment as that enjoyed by the blond mace waver of the 80s!

Technology to blame for the street of shame?

When I finally put pixel to plastiscreen over the Leveson inquiry I took the view that maybe things are different today. But I have thought longer and harder and now take a different view. . I still weep and cringe with shame; still ponder what on earth has happened to what we charmingly thought of as a profession. But then I wondered; is it really so different?

Maybe it is just the technology that has changed our behaviour. We can do now what we would have done then, so we do?

Back when I started out as a journalist in 1959 in a dusty old office in Hornsey, north London struggling to master a decrepit Royal upright, horizontal strike typewriter there was a one-liner doing the rounds. "To the average journalist ethics is a county north of Kent..." Not funny really, now I think about it.

Journalists were already pretty low in public esteem. My school howled with anguish at my career choice. My father - a London copper - was seriously concerned. And I was the second of his sons to take the devil's silver. When my later-to-be-wife told her head teacher her plans to join her local paper she said to her mother: "Mrs Smith, you might as well let her go on the street!"

I worked my way to Fleet Street (before I left the job) and I did indeed learn some dodgy ways to operate.

I learned how to blag information. Direct lies were rarely necessary; an innocent voice and a modicum of charm was enough. Hey presto, an ex-directory phone number.

I learned to doorstep. A charming sympathy, some soothing words and you were in. You left with a treasured picture of the deceased/victim/alleged perpetrator.

I knew ho to block a call box line so my copy got to the office ahead of the competition. I learned to read upside down and back to front so I could get what it actually said in the police Occurrences Book, court register etc. I learned to write in my pocket so the victim did not know they were on the record. And more.

Along the way I knew that direct bribery was rare but it did happen and the Soho police scandals among others proved the media was not above bribery and corruption. Yet even so it was mainly either between rogues either side of the tracks or in the search for corruption in public office.

Back at the ranch, even in Fleet Street, if a picture came in showing an unfortunate pose of an innocent person, however famous, it would be binned or at worst filed against stormier times. And only politicians stood the risk of facial postures that matched their words. Even then some degree of compassion was usually shown.

We did use some pretty hard-bitten agencies - the famous or infamous FSNA among them (those who know, will know). And, true at Heathrow, agency hacks would trail stars and wannabes through the terminal (just the one terminal and mostly just the one hack). But mostly they were at least able to walk steadily, not dodge and dash for the exits with hounds in hot pursuit.

And editors did set standards. We were expected to have decent notes and be able to back them, to check vital facts and, if we did not know but it was a reasonable guess we were expected to say so.

You could never have got away with a strange and unusually large item on your expenses - no managing editor would sign it without his boss's OK! The diarist who worked 300 yards off Fleet Street and got away for a while charging a taxi back from the Wig and Pen IN Fleet Street was found out (we reckoned that after lunch at the Wig a taxi was his only certain way of getting back to the ranch!).

So, by the mid 70s I was looking for different way to use my limited talent as a writer and crossed the tracks to Public Relations. Still not what my mum would have called 'a real job' but strangely more honest. After all, everyone knew now what my agenda really was.

Today I begin to wonder whether technology has more to do with what we see at Leveson than a worsening of moral standards.

Back in the day of no motor-drive the snappers task was to get a GOOD picture and not waste valuable film that would waste time being devved. The motor drive gave the chance to take the shot between the good ones.

Then came digital and wasting film was a thing of the past. A brief survey of the multitide of frames and the embarrassing knicker moment was on page three.

Couple this with motor bikes and you can chase you quarry to a kill; literally sometimes.

Then comes the computer, the internet, web sites, mobile phones. Anything is possible. The move from simple blagging to wholesale hacking is but a step. The change from good taste to indecent intrusion a mere millisecond. No need to doorstep; with a bit of real hacking you can be inside their voice mails, their hard drives - everywhere.

And the vast array of opportunities to be 'seen', to be 'famous' to be a 'celebrity' means there are ever more candidates to be intruded upon, scandalised scandalously. A slip of a tweet, a chump on a facebook, a nude on a tube - so much to compete with the paparazzi and the hack that they have to be really inventive now.

So here we are today with the reality that merely being famous is enough to unleash the dogs of war on you. Speaking out of turn when your are famous will get you hunted down and pilloried. And even become the victim of actual lies and invention. Never mind the hacking, utterly illegal anyway. This goes far deeper.

So shame on them and shame on me and shame on all of us. They do it, we buy it.

Hate to say it but it is time for legally backed self-regulation. Yes, I do not want a regulated media; not in a world where special interest groups already have too much power. But newspaper and periodicals are already licensed.

So let's turn the editor's code into the articles of agreement to get a license. And make breaches punishable by removing that licence.

And then make it that only licensed publications will be VAT free or in anyway protected by the newspaper libel laws. Hit them in the pocket whatever other penalty they may face. One strike and you are out even?

Meanwhile, I still say there are a few senior hacks starring at Leveson who are looking good for a while at her majesty's pleasure - and I don't mean the theatre in Haymarket but the one down Pentonville way.