Manchester’s People’s History Museum is in the running to win the £100,000 Arts Fund Prize and you can help by voting for the museum and telling the judges why the People’s History Museum should enjoy their support.

I reckon you should vote People’s History Museum because the history we are familiar with is often the history of the elites; the kings, emperors, politicians and dictators who made the big decisions that have shaped our world. Important those people were, and while we feel their influence still, the lives of the people who lived as we might have lived are often even more fascinating. Few of us can easily identify with ancient royalty; those who did ordinary jobs were more like us and closer to who we might have been. And it is wrong to underestimate more everyday people’s influence on the world. So many trends have not been dictated by elites, but set by more anonymous, more ordinary people, who rose up. These are the lives captured by the People’s History Museum.

So vote People’s History Museum.

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In the aftermath of the News of the World’s apology to phone hacking victims lawyer Mark Lewis has written Baroness ‘Bungler’ Buscombe, chair of the Press Complaints Commission, demanding that she apologise to the Guardian newspaper, journalist Nick Davies and withdraw the PCC’s report into phone hacking published in November 2009. The PCC had previously dismissed allegations of widespread phone hacking and criticised the Guardian’s reporting of the scandal (led by Davies), concluding they ‘did not quite live up to the dramatic billing they were initially given’.

Now that the News International is reported to have set aside £20m to cover compensation claims and, not so long ago, the prime minister’s communications director, Andy Coulson, was forced to resign.

The last time Lewis crossed swords with Baroness ‘Bungler’ Buscombe and the PCC, the PCC was forced to pay out £20,000 in libel damages. Yet remarkably Bungler used an interview on Radio 4’s Media Show to deny the apology that had been forced out of her (about 22mins in) and, apparently, that damages had been paid. This remarkable denial of reality may yet see her dragged before the courts again. Mark Lewis says he’s reserving his position on that one; readers of this blog will know that he has his hands full suing the Metropolitan Police over the same incident.

While Mark Lewis doesn’t quite call for Baroness ‘Bungler’ Buscombe to resign, it is hard to see how the battered Press Complaints Commission can afford to leave the Tory peer in charge. Being headed up by a bungling chair so closely associated not just with excusing illegal activities at the News of the World, but with attacking those who have exposed those activities, can only help those who would replace the PCC with an effective regulator.
Download Mark Lewis’s letter to Baroness Buscombe

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