by Brian CathcartIt is no surprise that the big press companies have found themselves a judge who will chair IPSO, their PCC clone. Sir Alan Moses, currently of the Court of Appeal, is only the latest retired or retiring judge to agree to assist in this act of defiance against Parliament and the public will.But let us set aside for today the discussion of who he is, of the dodgy process by which he was chosen and of why he might have taken such a job – because they don’t matter very much.The brutal truth is that even if the prophet Moses himself had taken this job he could not have made much difference.Sir Alan may have the best of intentions but he must work within an IPSO constitution which ensures that real power resides with the big newspaper companies. This means that, whoever is in charge, IPSO will continue to put the interests of those companies before those of ordinary members of the public who are victims of inaccurate, intrusive and unfair press conduct.Sir Alan would do well to read the evidence given to the Leveson Inquiry by Baroness Peta Buscombe, who became PCC chair after doing a similar job at the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). When she was appointed in 2009 she thought everything looked fine, but soon she began to see the constraints on her powers and those of the PCC.

‘My view changed . . . in that I realised fairly soon after I arrived that of course I was in a very different world in terms of the self-regulatory system as it applies within the press and magazine industry than as it applies within the ASA ... In the ASA environment, there was no micro-managing. The role of the equivalent to PressBoF was very much hands off, except for being a funding mechanism and being there to be supportive of the ASA system.’

In other words PressBoF (now renamed the Regulatory Funding Company, or RFC) was ‘hands-on’ and it micro-managed the affairs of the PCC over the shoulder of the PCC chair. Buscombe said she did not give up:

‘It was terribly important for us to demonstrate ... that actually this Commission [was] an entirely separate part of the industry. But I also found in practice it was difficult to be independent when I realised that in order to improve our credibility, to continue what Christopher Meyer [her predecessor] I know has called an evolution – I wanted a bit more of a permanent revolution . . . to really improve the governance and structures of the organisation and to try to put pressure, if I could, with the permission and blessing of the Commission, on the industry to accept that we needed to up our game in terms of our remit, our sanctions and very much our funding. This is where my view of independence changed.’

She was asked:

‘So is the gist of your evidence this, Lady Buscombe: that you were keen for revolutionary change but you were facing resistance from the industry against such change?’

She replied:

‘Yes, and that was not at the outset. My issue was with those who were in charge of giving us permission, as it were, where we sought it, to try and improve our funding, improve our resource overall so we could do a better job.’ (See pages 1538-9 of the Leveson Report)

Sir Alan, if he tries to assert some independence, will find the same problems. IPSO is set up, as the PCC was, to serve the industry and not the public. The Murdoch papers, the Mail papers and their chums will not allow anything else.Just have a look at the powers of the RFC. This shadowy committee of exclusively white, male newspaper and magazine company executives can veto any changes to IPSO regulations and to the Code of Practice. It decides whether to fund investigations and it determines what sanctions IPSO can impose. It also has a veto over any arbitration service.And those are just some of the overt powers, for like PressBoF before it, the RFC will have clout in less visible ways. It can micro-manage too, and it can be 'hands-on'. And as Professor Roy Greenslade put it, in the old PCC world the supposed ‘regulators’ were dauntingly aware, because of the lowering presence of PressBoF, that ‘they were regulating, or seeming to regulate, the people on whose very existence theydepended’. (Report, p1521)It is a murky world, and the sorry thing is that there is a clear, viable alternative that has the endorsement of the Leveson Inquiry, every party in Parliament, the mass of public opinion and many leading victims of press abuse.If the big newspaper companies would only redesign IPSO so it meets the standards of effectiveness and independence set out in the Royal Charter, based on the Leveson recommendations, then we could have a healthy, above-board system of press self-regulation.