WITH Lord Justice Leveson due to publish his recommendations about future regulation of the press soon, Oxford West and Abingdon MP Nicola Blackwood writes about why she believes Parliament needs to be involved, but in a dispassionate and non-political way:

On November 8, I along with 43 colleagues published a letter in The Guardian calling for independent regulation of the press.

As the deadline for Lord Leveson’s report fast approaches, the debate around press regulation has reached such a febrile pitch that venturing any opinion risks bringing the wrath of certain sections of the print media down on you like Hurricane Sandy.

You only need to look at the personal attacks in the Daily Telegraph’s reception of the letter to see what I mean.

One might reasonably ask, what on earth possessed me? In a marginal seat like mine, do I really need to go around making enemies like that?

Well, I did it because I sat on the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into the hacking scandal. An inquiry that revealed such significant failures at the Met that it led to the resignations of the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, the officer who was responsible for investigating the allegations of criminal activity at News International, John Yates, and later, the Met Director of Communications, Dick Ferdorcio.

During that inquiry, I heard directly from witnesses about the lack of accountability, the failure to prosecute and the lack of redress for victims of News International.

Not celebrity victims, but normal people like the family of murder victim Milly Dowler and the families of Afghan veterans who, often when they’re at their most vulnerable, became unlucky enough to make a good headline.

Much of what I heard involved criminal offences which should have been dealt with by the police in the first place, and I am glad we are now seeing that slowly put right.

But below the threshold of criminal behaviour it was evident that too often there was no consequence for irresponsible reporting, that in some publications the ‘public interest test’ was not functioning effectively and that the appalling, high profile behaviour of a few journalists was risking undermining public confidence in the entire print press.

At the moment, I believe that all journalists feel like they are being tarred with the same brush, treated as guilty of underhand professional conduct until proven otherwise. This is what happens when scandals on this scale break – a whole profession is tainted. Journalists who have always acted with complete integrity feel like they’re in the middle of a witch hunt and the closer we get to Leveson reporting the worse the atmosphere is getting.

Now I’m an MP, I’m used to being told all politicians are liars and thieves because some of my colleagues cheated on their expenses.

I know the damage that bad behaviour by some can do to a whole profession.

In politics it has brought public confidence in our democracy to an all-time low.

I vehemently believe that just as much as we need demonstrably honest politicians, we also need a strong, free press that is able to hold power to account if we are to have a thriving democracy.

But if the last few years have proved anything it’s that if you want to be in a position of public trust, as the print media do, then transparency, accountability and integrity are part of deal.

Self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission has not delivered that and any search for a replacement should be for a model of regulation that does.

Unfortunately, the current proposal put forward by the newspaper industry is not independent and, along with the National Union of Journalists, I fear this would undermine its credibility given the need to restore public confidence.

I have no ideological preference for statutory regulation (in fact it goes against every instinct in my Conservative body) but I do believe trying to come up with a solution from a purist position that it’s either freedom of the press or statutory regulation is simplistic and flawed and, worst of all, that it is being used to turn the print media into a party political football.

The decision about how to regulate the print media going forward is of constitutional significance and should not be tossed about the Commons, yaboo style, to try to gain a few points in the opinion polls.

I am tired of listening to this debate reduced to a vitriolic ‘who texted what to whom’ spat while more measured voices are drowned out. That’s why I signed this letter. I do think any future regulation of the press should be independent of press and of politicians.

I don’t think light-touch statutory regulation necessarily inhibits freedom of speech – the Today programme seems to cope with Ofcom. And I do think that the public interest test needs to be more reliable.

But most of all, I don’t want us to make the wrong decision about something as important and fundamental to our democracy as regulation of the print media because the debate is all about party political positioning, pressure from the very media in question, and a failure to take a step back and look calmly at the evidence.