A regulator built to uphold standards has become a partisan censor — the right must walk away before it is too late
The stranglehold that sterile, acronymized organisations once exercised over the immigration debate has been largely breached. Net negative migration, with more migrants leaving Britain than entering, is the single most popular border policy in the country.
The forecasts of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility and the Migration Advisory Committee, instructing the British public to embrace mass migration, not to fear it, are now seen in the same vein as Michael Fish’s attempts to downplay the Great Storm of 1987 – factually wrong and downright dangerous.
However, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) remains a rancid sore on this country’s politics. It is an anachronistic organisation, initially designed to act as an independent regulator, but that has long since morphed into a Glavlit tribute act, actively preventing the public from learning the true costs of mass migration.
Earlier this month IPSO censured the Telegraph for an article, published over twelve months ago, which revealed for the first time that over one million foreigners were claiming benefits. IPSO claimed that the piece was “inaccurate” and instructed that a correction be published.
But this ruling was made with active neglect of official statistics. Department for Work and Pensions data shows that 1.3 million foreign nationals are currently claiming Universal Credit, with the ONS suggesting a further 600,000 are receiving other benefit types. The Telegraph’s only crime was publishing an article that understated the scale of the crisis.
The likes of the Beano and Guardian refuse to subject themselves to the auspices of this basket case
The likes of the Beano and Guardian refuse to subject themselves to the auspices of this basket case. It is time that centre-right media follow suit — and they must do so now, before things get much worse.
The body’s incoming Chair, Jenny Watson, taking the reins in April, will turbocharge the existing assaults on free speech currently being undertaken by this Labour government. Britain’s press regulator will now be headed by an individual who, in 2017, vice-chaired a report into “Missing Muslims”, recommending that the government create a definition of “anti-Muslim prejudice” and that IPSO produce instructions for news outlets to ensure “accurate reporting on Muslim issues”. Indeed, in 2020 this censorial desire was fulfilled as an IPSO publication into “Reporting on Muslims and Islam”, confirming that Muslims are the only religious group in the country with specific reporting guidelines.
The guidelines were introduced under the watch of the current CEO, Charlotte Dewar, who has previously met with the controversial group the Centre for Media Monitoring and is the Platonic Trump Derangement Syndrome patient. Most non-institutionalised people in the country will have identified with the President’s 2018 comments, in which he warned that mass migration had “changed the fabric of Europe” and that “it’s never going to be what it was” unless we act quickly, Dewar, however, shared posts describing this as “flat-out white nationalist rhetoric”.
On the organisation’s Complaints Committee — the body tasked with reprimanding those news outlets that dare stray too far from mushy 2010s orthodoxy – sits Carwyn Jones, the former Welsh First Minister who inflicted “Nation of Sanctuary” status on his fellow countrymen and put Welsh taxpayers on the hook for discounted bus travel and English language lessons for asylum seekers. Alongside him, with boring predictability, sits a Human Rights Lawyer and an outspoken Remainer.
The Head of Complaints, prior to exercising censorial influence on the media landscape, tried her arm as an academic. Her main research area of interest was LGBTQI refugees and the “specific plight of SOGI minority asylum seekers”. The thrust of her argument was that European countries should not require proof from asylum seekers claiming sanctuary on the grounds of their sexuality that they are, in fact, homosexual.
The body’s only Communications Officer has shared an offensive conspiracy theory, claiming that a humanitarian organisation operating in Israel is “enticing Palestinians to Southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps”.
Those who decide what is and is not acceptable to be published in Britain’s press are just not qualified for the role. The dearth of expertise amongst IPSO’s staff allows the steering wheel to be grabbed by a small cabal of motivated, and unoccupied, individuals. Complainants are more often than not angry Bluesky types or those drummed out of the civil service for successive failures, and who are now masquerading as KCL professors in empty lecture theatres.
Their unbounded self-confidence means gripes are delivered to IPSO’s mailbox with such vim and vigour that, to the untrained eye, the assertiveness can be mistaken for expertise.
The hour is late. A free press has rescued us in the past, and it can do so again once. That starts with recognising IPSO to be the enemy of the press we need.
