Has Cameron sounded death knell for Coalition? #Leveson

I’m sorry I have no posted for a couple of days but I have been rather busy preparing  for the marriage of fellow bloggers Paul Burgin and my cousin Rachel Stalker. 

Therefore I will be probably be a little late in making this statement but I will make it anyway.

Back in July 2011 David Cameron said:

"The public want us to work together to sort this problem out, because until we do so it will not be possible to get back to the issues they care about even more"

Failure to take on the key part of the report from the Inquiry he was calling for on that day is a sham.

He went on later when being question on that day he recalled Parliament to say:

"...the last Government and the last Opposition too often put on the back burner the issue of how to regulate the media. That is the mistake that we made. We have both—all—got to be honest about it. And by the way, this is not just about the relationship with News International; it is also about the work we do trying to win over the BBC or The Independent or The Guardian. Let us be frank about this, and let us be transparent about the meetings that we have. Then we can learn the lessons and use this as a cathartic moment to sort out the relationship and put it on a better footing."

It appears in his comments about the Leveson report where he says that "writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land." would threaten freedom of speech that hold a problem. He welcomes Leveson's calls for an independent regulator of the press but does not want to regulate for it either. Therefore as Leveson and many of us know the Press Complaints Commission is a lame dog able to bite but not to punish those that have stretched the realms of what is right and decent to print in a free press.

 If David Cameron defies a vote in Parliament about giving statutory powers to an independent press watchdog or issues a lily livered bill that does not take into main thrust of Leveson's recommendation, then we reach an impasse.  I believe, should that happen, the Liberal Democrats should call for a vote of no confidence and vote for the motion. We cannot maintain an sense of integrity if our coalition partners ignore a report that they called for so urgently.

We have the word democrat in our party name for a reason and that should be adhered to. There have been any number of time that I have voted against a policy that our party has adopted but as the majority has accepted it I will defend such things. On the issues that Leveson has raised we have had debates, maybe not formally but as things have been going on, that a self-governing press has certainly failed. Added to this that the Press Complaints Commission has lacked the power to make any punitive judgement that would have any real implication.

From my brief post wedding reading of what Leveson is saying these are two key components. From what Dave ‘friend of the press barons’ Cameron is saying these are just the reasons that he is prepared to fly in the face of democracy.

Last time I checked, which I admit was Thursday lunchtime, the UK was still a democracy. Having at the end of last night had my principles tested as a sole Lib Dem in a hot bed of Labour activists and a few Tories, I know just what we as Liberal Democrats should do. When I showed the groom a treat that said that Harriet Harman had agreed with Nick’s statement that was enough to tell us that there was a consensus there as Harriet has been baying for Nick’s blood for weeks and months now. If the public wants it, Labour, Lib Dems and 70 Conservative back benchers want it, Cameron doing nothing or acting half-heartedly to bring forth legislation is a smite on the democratic principle. If he acts like this he is an affront to democracy and we as a party who support the democratic principle should have nothing to do with this despot