LONDON: The response to the Leveson inquiry, like the inquiry itself, is plagued by confusion. It was set up in emotional response to crimes, mostly of intrusion and libel, committed by journalists. Blanket coverage, in particular by the BBC, has given credence to what the British prime minister unwisely termed “the victim test”, accepted by both the Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders. The clear implication is that a new statutory press regulator would put a stop to such crimes. But it has nothing to do with them. Those accused of them are already convicted or on trial. The law has shot Leveson's fox.

The result has left Leveson worrying instead about press ethics, in general — and, specifically, about how to compensate victims of press misbehaviour where no law has been broken. It is one thing to want the balance of advantage tilted back towards victims, quite another to give them right of veto over legislation. Apply this principle to rape, child abuse or grievous bodily harm and we would be back to medieval punishments.

The past two day's debate has been depressing to those who feel it quite out of proportion to the undoubted harm it seeks to stem. Britain is in intractable recession and enmeshed in war. Its energy supply is in chaos and its mental health a scandal. Yet what brings Parliament to a halt and “clears the prime minister's diary for two days”? The answer is an emotional debate about the behaviour of a dwindling sector of mass communication known as the press.

The Leveson inquiry itself was conducted as a cross between a jury on a TV music competition and a hanging court for the Murdoch family. Leveson's report, being edifying, reasoned and mostly sound, redeems it. It is no direct menace to press freedom. There are no proposals for censorship, no prior restraint on publication, no state regulator as yet, and no government interference.

Leveson was timid in his comments on relations between the press, the police and those in power. He acknowledged that freedom is a virtue. This is welcome, since the press is already surrounded by a wall of statute and common law, facing daily action for contempt of court, libel, defamation, intrusion, surveillance, harassment, data theft and forgery. It is no foreigner to statute.

Even on extrajudicial regulation, Leveson leant over backwards to pretend an aversion to “statutory regulation”. His battery of incentives for voluntary regulation is ingenious. Only when this particular pie was opened were the ingredients seen as putrid, the so-called “statutorily regulated regulation” under some body such as Ofcom, which regulates the UK's broadcasting industry. At this point, British prime minister David Cameron's perfectly reasonable concerns come into play.

This is an arcane regulatory zone. The boundary between sensation, bad taste and truly appalling taste, where no law has been broken, can only be a fine one. It is not true that ethical self-regulation has “completely failed”, as Leveson and every politician asserts. As the media academic Tim Luckhurst has pointed out, the British press is probably better behaved now than in most of its past. The much vilified Press Complaints Commission made real advances in response to public outrage at the abuse of Princess Diana. There are curbs on photo-intrusion and on the coverage of the sick and children, and its successes are unpublicised. We do not say the burglary laws have “failed” just because burglary continues.

The nub here is redress of grievance, and this is clearly inadequate. Editors have been too involved in the process. There is no body to take a proactive role in investigating abuse and raising standards. The balance must shift towards victims. Newspapers, now appropriately on the defensive, need to sign up to contracts of compliance and, as in Ireland, suffer financially from non-signature. None of this requires statute and none has yet been tried.

Where push comes to shove is in the handful of cases where a publisher refuses to co-operate. Here Leveson's intricate web of financial incentives is as much an invitation to defiance as to obedience. What happens then? The answer is that a maverick, acting within the law, is none the less dragged through fines to possible action for contempt, arrest, bankruptcy and, in the limiting case, closure. This is just how the alternative press played with the obscenity laws. On all this, Leveson is silent, because he knows the answer is explosive.

Ultimately there is nothing to be done about wildcat publishers. Like preachers howling in the street, they are the price of freedom, however ugly and rough at the edges. Cameron was right to speak of a press statute as “crossing a Rubicon, of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land”. All experience suggests that British politicians are poor custodians of liberty. On counter-terrorism, surveillance, data collection, phone tapping and court secrecy, at the slightest twitch they trot down the road to greater intervention. This is the path down which Leveson invites us to travel.

Newspapers are now in a race against the clock. Friday’s bizarre House of Commons (the UK Parliament's elected lower house) deal saw Cameron agree to draft a press law in which he claimed not to believe. He intends the law to look awful - but he is, in effect, giving the press just months in which to convince others, if not himself, of its awfulness. It must fashion a convincing independent regime that is free of statutory underpinning. This is a huge gamble. Failure would not be the end of press freedom in Britain. But if that freedom were to end, Leveson's law would mark the beginning of that end.

By arrangement with the Guardian