John Bercow has insisted that admitting he backed ‘Remain’ in the EU referendum doesn’t compromise his politically neutrality. Some MPs, like Tom Watson – who hailed Bercow as one of the ‘great Speakers’ – have stepped in to defend him. But after his intervention on Trump and his willingness to air his thoughts on Brexit, the Speaker is under mounting pressure. He faces a vote of no confidence tabled by Conservative MP James Duddridge. And the newspapers continue to voice their anger at Bercow in today’s editorials. ‘What an embarrassment’ Bercow has become, says the Daily Mail. The paper suggests the boast he made to students about backing ‘Remain’ is the final straw. After all, ‘overtly taking sides on such a divisive issue shatters the most sacred principle of the Speaker’s office – scrupulous political neutrality.’ His close friendship with Keith Vaz is also the subject of discussion in the Mail. But most of all, Bercow’s overweening arrogance and baleful lack of judgment’ make one thing clear for the Mail: he is now ‘unfit’ for office.
This assessment of Bercow’s future is echoed in the Sun which suggests Bercow should step down. The paper says that a Speaker relies on being respected to properly do their job. For the Sun, ‘Bercow seems to be going out of his way to prove the point’ that, without any respect, a Speaker is left with little. His ‘loudmouth’ comments about Trump and his attempts to ‘impress a crowd of students’ by telling them which way he cast his vote in the EU referendum seems to suggest Bercow is confused about exactly what his job entails. ‘Does he understand that as Speaker he’s supposed to be impartial?,’ the Sun concludes by asking.
In the Times, it’s the state of Britain’s prisons which is the talking point. The paper summaries jails in the UK as ‘violent, overcrowded, understaffed’ places, as it looks ahead to Justice Secretary Liz Truss’s speech on prison and sentencing reforms which she is due to deliver later today. Given just how bad things are, what can Truss say to try and foster some stability in our crumbling justice system? Tougher community sentencing is one policy touted – a ‘sound idea’, says the Times, but ‘not a panacea’. What is desperately needed though is an admission that the prison population is too high – and that without more Government funding it is ‘doomed to fail’. Staff cuts now mean ‘inmates spend more time locked up and less doing work or training to equip them for the outside world,’ says the Times. If we want to address this crisis once and for all, the Times says tackling overcrowding must be ‘a goal of her reforms, not an optional by- product’.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph criticises a proposed law change which could mean journalists are jailed for revealing – or even getting their hands on – leaked documents. Obviously, the paper says, its vital that ‘legitimate state secrets’ must be protected. But the Law Commission, which reviewed the current law and suggested the reforms, is doing another thing altogether: ‘criminalising journalism’. It’s not ‘fanciful speculation’ to claim that reporters could be locked up ‘just for doing this job’, says the Telegraph, which points out the way in which the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – originally intended as a way of tracking terrorists – has come back to bite journalists. Alongside worries about whether the Government will enact Section 40 of the 2013 Crime and Courts Act – which would compel newspapers to join a state-backed regulator – one thing is obvious: ‘The threats to serious journalism in Britain have rarely been greater’.
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