The Politics of the Law in Parliament

I am inclined to agree that there are some inquiries and it may be that Sabran Levison's inquiry was one of them. To my mind, it is such an intensely political question how far you regulate the press. That it would seem to me that it's a matter on which members of parliament and ministers should make their own mind up. But there are clearly many other inquiries where you need a substantial amount of information in order to make a sensible judgment. There are also of course inquiries into what one can loosely call scandals, so matrix Churchill for instance, where nothing short of an inquiry independent of government would have performed the essential function of reassuring the public this had been properly looked into.