Public Order Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Deben

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

The Committee will imagine the daunting privilege of attempting to follow that speech from one of the most senior journalists—and indeed one of the greatest environmentalists—in the Committee and your Lordships’ House. I want to speak briefly to explain why we have Amendments 117 and 127A. The reason is my poor draftsmanship when we conceived Amendment 117, for which I apologise. Amendment 127A is an improvement on Amendment 117 because of a defect that was pointed out to me by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. Amendment 117 had protected journalists who were covering the policing of protests only, and, of course, we need to protect journalists who are covering protests as well as the policing thereof.

I would also like to take this opportunity to reassure the Minister that, notwithstanding my fundamental concerns about the Bill as a whole, and significant provisions within it, this journalistic protection in Amendment 127A—I am grateful to the other co-signatories and supporters across the House for understanding this too—notwithstanding our fundamental objections to various provisions that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred to, would not in any way wreck those provisions, objectionable though they may be for my part. All Amendment 127A would do is protect journalists where any police power, not just the police powers in this Bill but police powers more generally, are being used for the principal purpose of preventing their reporting.

I know that it is very hard in Committee to persuade a Minister to think again, but this is not a request to think again about the Bill in sum or in part; this is requesting a protection for journalists that is required in relation to even the police powers that currently stand. In the case of Charlotte Lynch, and other cases to which the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred, journalists were arrested and detained under public order powers as they currently stand—not even the broader, blank-cheque powers to come.

So I hope that, in this Committee, those in the Box, and noble Lords and Ministers, will take pause for thought and think about whether we need a protection against current public order powers, and any to come, to ensure that the police are not using them to arrest journalists because they think that the reporting of protests per se gives the oxygen of publicity to protest and so on. Day after day, at Question Time in particular, Foreign Office Ministers stand at the Dispatch Box and—rightly and sincerely, in my view—criticise attacks on journalistic freedom across the globe. I think something like Amendment 127A would be a very important statement, putting that sincerity of Foreign Office Ministers into law in the home department.

So, I hope that noble Lords, Ministers, and Members of the whole Committee will really reflect on the noble Baroness’s speech.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee. I want to ask the Government to listen very carefully to this discussion. We have a very real issue when really serious matters, which threaten all of us, do not appear to some of us to be properly addressed. That is a very serious matter for any democracy, and those of us who are democrats do have to stand up for the rule of law and do have to say that extreme actions cannot be accepted.

But it has a second effect too, and that is that we have to be extremely careful about the way in which we deal with those extreme actions. I do beg the Government to take very seriously the fact that these extreme actions will continue, because people are more and more worried about the existential threat of climate change. The Climate Change Committee spends a great deal of its time trying to ensure that there is a democratic and sensible programme to reach an end that will protect us from the immediate effects of climate change, which we cannot change, and, in the longer term, begin to turn the tables on what we as human beings have caused.

It is not always easy to do that in the light of others who are desperate that we should move faster and that we should do more; who are desperate because they are seriously frightened and are not sure that those who are in charge have really got the urgency of the situation.

It is very difficult to imagine that we are not going to have to cope with the uprising of real anger on this subject. As a democrat, I want us to cope. As a parliamentarian, I want us to be able to deal with these issues and ensure that the public are not threatened. I echo the Deputy Chancellor of Germany, a Green Member of Parliament, who makes it absolutely clear that the kinds of actions we have seen in this country from Extinction Rebellion and similar things in Germany are not acceptable in a democracy.

The other side of that argument is that we have got to be extremely careful about the way in which we enforce the law and how we deal with this issue. Journalists play the key part in this. They must be there to report on what happens. It is in our interest as democrats that that happens. If they are not there and cannot say what needs to be said without fear or favour, none of us can stand up and deal with the arguments of those who argue that democracy does not work and that somehow they have to impose their will.

I want the Government to recognise the importance of this. In this country, a journalist must have access without fear or favour. The police must not treat them in a way that has happened again and again, and which must stop happening. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, it is not happening because of what is in this Bill, which in general I do not have an objection to; it is what happens in any case. The fact that the police could hold a journalist for five hours knowing that they were a journalist is utterly unacceptable. You cannot do that in a democracy—and nor can we talk to other countries about these things if that happens here and we do not do something to enshrine in law the fact that it should not.

Earlier, I had to deal with the question of not opening coal mines in order to be able to stand up in the world and show that we too will carry out what we ask other countries to do. This is another, even more serious, case of that. We cannot talk about repression if we in this country can be shown not to have protected journalists in these circumstances.

It is a terribly simple matter. We must put on the face of the Bill, referring to all actions, that journalists should be in the position that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, suggests. It may be that her amendments could be better done; it may be that the Government have a different way of doing it. The only thing that I ask, in order to protect democracy and ourselves—those of us who are moderates and believe in the rule of law—is that we need to have this assertion.