THE GROUND continues to slip under the feet of the British politico-media establishment as the scandal of tabloid misconduct and phone-hacking deepens.

In the latest development, David Cameron's coalition government—forced to choose between an embarrassing public u-turn and being seen to back Rupert Murdoch—plumped for the humiliating about-face.

Mr Cameron has been neatly cornered by Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, who has tabled a non-binding motion to be voted on by the House of Commons tomorrow, saying: "This House believes it is in the public interest for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation to withdraw its bid for BSkyB."

A Downing Street spokesman confirmed earlier this afternoon that the government will vote in favour of this Labour motion, with the exception of the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who has a quasi-judicial role in taking a final decision on whether News Corp should be allowed to bid for ownership of the whole of the BSkyB satellite television network (in which Mr Murdoch's firm currently has a controlling stake).

The Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the Conservative-led coalition, had already signalled that their MPs would vote in favour of the Labour motion.

Mr Miliband has been greatly energised by the phone-hacking scandal, which allows him (a) to take opportunistic potshots of the government of the day, safe in the knowledge that as opposition leader he is not bound by irritating details like due legal process and (b) to indulge his inner lefty by taking potshots at Mr Murdoch, exorcising years of Labour guilt at sucking up to the press tycoon and his newspaper empire. But fair's fair, Mr Miliband has played his cards skilfully, and as opposition leader, his job is not to be helpful in such moments, but to oppose.

The Guardian's Andrew Sparrow makes the point that this decision to take a symbolic swipe at Mr Murdoch is especially striking given the prime minister's response a week ago when the Labour MP and former culture secretary Ben Bradshaw asked him whether wrongdoing at Murdoch papers had any bearing on News Corp's fitness to own the whole of BSkyB. Mr Sparrow writes:

Last week, at PMQs, Ben Bradshaw suggested that Cameron should block the takeover on the grounds that News Corporation's assurances could not be trusted. Using a phrase that was seen by some as a jibe at Bradshaw's homosexuality, Cameron mocked the idea. "If you do not follow the correct legal processes, you will be judicially reviewed, and all the decisions that you would like to make from a political point of view will be struck down in the courts. You would look pretty for a day, but useless for a week." This week Cameron's stance is very different.

Rupert Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International (parent company of the Murdoch newspapers in Britain) have been invited to appear before the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee next Tuesday. The same committee gave serving and retired Metropolitan Police bosses a roasting earlier today (while they accused News International of trying to thwart their investigations), and the initial assumption was that the News Corp bosses would decline to appear before MPs, citing the need to deal with police questions and possible court cases first. However, in the latest startling development of the day, the Conservative chairman of the committee, John Whittingdale, told the BBC that he had been informed that Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants would attend next week's parliamentary hearing.

To understand just how far we have come in a short few weeks, I took another look at a speech given by James Murdoch to the 2009 Edinburgh Television Festival. At the time, Mr Murdoch's speech attracted attention for the passion with which the younger Mr Murdoch attacked the BBC's dominant, state-funded position in the broadcast and internet market, saying the scale and scope of the BBC's current activities and future ambitions was "chilling".

But with hindsight, the remarkable aspect of the speech was the passion with which Mr Murdoch attacked regulation of the broadcast media, as practised in Britain today. He really meant it, suggesting that the authorities had no business policing things such as political impartiality in television news (ie, the thing that makes Sky News in Britain so different from Fox News in America). Regulators, he said, should step in only when there was "evidence of actual and serious harm to the interests of consumers".

In essence, his argument boiled down to two big points. First, that even supposedly impartial news is always biased (because of things like the editorial choice of stories) so even aspiring to neutrality is nonsense. Second, that regulators like Ofcom (the British regulator of commercial broadcasting) are unaccountable, because true accountability is earned by selling your product commercially to lots and lots of people.

Or in Mr Murdoch's own words:

the system is concerned with imposing what it calls impartiality in broadcast news. It should hardly be necessary to point out that the mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality. The effect of the system is not to curb bias – bias is present in all news media - but simply to disguise it. We should be honest about this: it is an impingement on freedom of speech and on the right of people to choose what kind of news to watch. How in an all-media marketplace can we justify this degree of control in one place and not in others?... ...Other areas of the media have been able to get by without it. There is a strong alternative tradition with at least four centuries behind it – first of pamphlets and books, later of magazines and newspapers. From the broadsides of the Levellers, to the thundering 19th century Times, to The Sun fighting for the rights of veterans today – it is a tradition of free comment, of investigative reporting, of satirizing and exposing the behaviour of one's betters. Yes, the free press is fairly near the knuckle on occasion – it is noisy, disrespectful, raucous and quite capable of affronting people – it is frequently the despair of judges and it gets up the noses of politicians on a regular basis. But it is driven by the daily demand and choices of millions of people. It has had the profits to enable it to be fearless and independent. Great journalism does not get enough credit in our society, but it holds the powerful to account and plays a vital part in a functioning democracy. Would we welcome a world in which The Times was told by the government how much religious coverage it had to carry? In which there were a state newspaper with more money than the rest of the sector put together and 50% of the market? In which cinemas were instructed how many ads they were allowed to put before the main feature? In which Bloomsbury had to publish an equal number of pro-capitalist and pro-socialist books?... ... Above all we must have genuine independence in news media. Genuine independence is a rare thing. No amount of governance in the form of committees, regulators, trusts or advisory bodies is truly sufficient as a guarantor of independence. In fact, they curb speech. On the contrary, independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political.

Independence of subsidy, gift, or patronage. Independence is sustained by true accountability – the accountability owed to customers. People who buy the newspapers, open the application, decide to take out the television subscription – people who deliberately and willingly choose a service which they value. And people value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus. There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.

Mr Murdoch is right that the state-funded BBC, especially in its online operations, needs to be exceedingly careful not to smother commercial rivals and start-ups. He is right to challenge the idea of statutory regulation of the press, and right that the printed press would wither if subjected to the kind of political impartiality rules upheld in British broadcasting. Only last night, Bagehot was alarmed when a Tory MP and former press secretary for David Cameron, George Eustice, suggested on BBC 2's Newsnight that a future model of regulation for the British printed press should be based on the rules now used to police the broadcast media (11 minutes into video).

But it is a mark of how far Mr Murdoch's proud, profitable, innovative company has fallen that his 2009 speech—including his claim that commercial success equals democratic accountability—now sounds hollow and hubristic. A company that has done more than most to promote a great social good—reporting the news in a way that is commercially sustainable—is currently close to giving for-profit news a bad name. It is hard to imagine that was the Murdoch family's intention.