King’s Speech

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and I congratulate all those who made their maiden speeches. It reminds us all for a moment of our own maiden speeches. Mine was three minutes long, as I did not know I was allowed extra time.

I am worried about the state of our democracy for many reasons, but today I want to focus on the damage being done by the Government’s creeping control of what they permit we the people to be told, and who they will permit to tell it to us. A 2019 Freedom House report, entitled Media Freedom: A Downward Spiral, said:

“The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, and part of the assault has come from an unexpected source. Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favourable coverage. The trend is linked to a global decline in democracy itself: The erosion of press freedom is both a symptom of and a contributor to the breakdown of other democratic institutions and principles, a fact that makes it especially alarming”.


It is happening to us and it is happening right now, under our noses.

According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World data, media freedom has been deteriorating around the world over the past decade, with new forms of repression taking hold in open societies such as ours, and in authoritarian states. Who would think that we would be on the way to being an authoritarian state?

The trend is most acute in Europe—and despite Brexit, we are still in Europe—which was previously a bastion of well-established freedoms. The guidelines for the Government Communication Service, for example, say that dealings with journalists

“should be objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical”,

and

“should not be—and not liable to being misrepresented as—party political”.

The guidelines also state:

“To work effectively, media officers must establish their impartiality and neutrality with the news media, and ensure that they deal with all news media even-handedly.”


I am sure that your Lordships remember when Suella Braverman—now the ex-Home Secretary and author of a love letter today to Rishi Sunak—went to Rwanda to showboat her care for refugees coming to this country. She excluded the Guardian, the Mirror, the i, the Independent and the BBC, albeit in the end BBC Africa-based journalists did manage to get a look in. Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner condemned it as a “chilling” pattern of behaviour from the Government. The editor-in-chief of the Mirror, Alison Phillips, also warned of “really damaging” consequences from the way press places were handled on the visit. She wrote:

“A single instance of the government excluding journalists from newspapers and broadcasters would be chilling enough, but this is not a one off. Rather, it is becoming a pattern of behaviour whereby this government excludes journalists and selectively chooses reporters from sympathetic papers to cover ministerial trips and visits.”


Martin Bright, then editor-at-large at Index on Censorship, which works to defend freedom of expression, said:

“We are concerned to hear that journalists from organisations judged to be critical of the government’s immigration policy have not been invited to accompany the Home Secretary on her trip to Rwanda. Democracy depends on an open and transparent relationship between government and the media, where all journalists are able to scrutinise the government. Index on Censorship believes that access to government ministers, both domestically and as part of international visits, should not be treated as a reward for favourable coverage”.


It was not a single occurrence, because this actually happened less than a year after journalists from the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Mirror were blocked from joining the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, on her trip to Rwanda to sign the original asylum deal. And it is not just trips, because in 2020 political journalists, including the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and ITV’s Robert Peston, staged a walkout after Downing Street communications staff attempted to brief some journalists but not others— presumably the ones they did not like. Those excluded by former Mirror and Sun journalist Lee Cain included journalists from PA, the Mirror, the i, Huffpost UK, PoliticsHome and the Independent.

One of the Guardian journalists who would have been on the Rwanda flight was Rajeev Syal. He told me yesterday that, on both occasions, the Guardian made representations to the Society of Editors and complained to the Home Office, and that the exclusions came from the Home Secretary’s office on both occasions, not from civil servants. Following the most recent exclusion, the Guardian, the Mirror and others were invited to a meeting at the Home Office by members of the Home Office press and media operation to discuss differences. While this resulted in a thawing of relations, there have been no written commitments or guarantees that exclusions would not take place in the future.

The guidelines are insufficient; in fact, they are totally useless. We need legislation, and sadly there was nothing in the gracious Speech to ensure that this practice and the consequent threat to our democracy was halted in perpetuity. I just want a simple Bill introduced: a media inclusivity Bill that prohibits the Government, whatever Government, whether Labour, Conservative or Lib Dem—I wish—from excluding broadcasters or journalists whom they feel may not be on their side, or who may write what they do not want to hear; and that will prohibit them from excluding specific media from covering them on foreign visits they are making, from speeches they are delivering or from briefings they are giving, or any other occasion to which media are invited. There must be no exclusion of particular media because the Government of the day wish to eliminate potential criticism: our democracy literally depends on it.