A man who fails to listen is blind

There's been a lot of comment in the last day or so about how the David Cameron walked out of discussions on how to implement the recommendations of the Leveson enquiry when it become clear that both Labour and the Liberal Democrats were all in favour of statutory regulation of the press and weren't prepared to discuss other alternatives. In the face of this Cameron very wisely decided that he didn't much want to go down in history as the fellow who ended the free press in Britain and suggested that if his opponents really want to go down that route, well, they're going to have to make a fight of it.

Cameron, in this instance, is unquestionably right. Churchill, who in idle moments between putting down villains seems to have spent his time coming up with a quote for every occasion, observed that "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny… Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish… But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate" or, as Peter Lilley put it the other day, "A free press is vile, but the alternative is worse."

If I can make it out correctly, the arguments in favour of statutory regulation of the press are as follows:
1) I don't like Rupert Murdoch and this will show him so ner,
2) A bunch of wealthy, famous people courted the press for their career, and then found to their surprise there was a price, and
3) A bunch of reporters did things which are already illegal and that didn't stop them, so clearly more laws are needed.

The thing is, all these are actually lousy reasons for making laws. Current legislation could be enforced as opposed to otherwise, for example, rather than ending a centuries-old right of freedom which has, for all its faults, done more to keep the British people free of tyranny than, say, any of the Liberal Democrats have ever done in their lives.
What's more worrying is that this change is being couched in the same language - "Just a minor change", "Rarely-used powers", "only for extreme situations" - which was used when that anti-terrorism legislation was brought in. Remember that? The legislation which, twenty minutes after its introduction for "Extreme situations" was being used to check if people were putting stuff in the right bin and whether their kids were going to the right school? Yeah, rarely-used powers.

There's also the inexplicable idea that despite people not obeying the current set of laws, they will suddenly sit up and take notice and start obeying a whole new set. As a radical thought; rather than wasting your time demanding new legislation, try demanding the legislation we've already got be enforced. A point I've made before is that if you pass laws which you cannot or will not enforce, they undermine the whole edifice of law and justice. When some laws are not enforced, they start giving people all kinds of ideas about all the other laws as well, rather like an army officer being taught that you never give an order which you aren't reasonably sure will be obeyed because once you've lost your authority you're screwed.

So. Today, I'd like you all to drop a note to your MP observing that state regulation of the press is an horrific, illiberal and authoritarian idea which is abhorrent to a free society.

Or alternatively, you can justify to yourself that state regulation is a good idea because it doesn't really effect you and will only punish bad people and stuff, and suppress the understanding that you are, in fact, an illiberal and authoritarian person.

The choice is yours, I guess.