Defamation Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I support the Bill. At this late stage, I do not wish to repeat many of the points that have been made so excellently in the House this afternoon, except in one respect. I want to repeat the thanks to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for the letter that he sent earlier this week, for his introduction to the Bill and for his interest in this subject throughout. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, who chaired 18 meetings of the Joint Committee with great skill and brought us to a set of very important and useful conclusions. I thank, too, the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, who has campaigned with such great subtlety on this matter for some years. On that point, recalling the debate that the noble Lord introduced in June 2010, it is very pleasant to note how we have moved on. Listening to the debates in the other place, it is clear that there is considerable cross-party consensus. I think that on an issue such as libel tourism there is now a consensus which did not exist in the summer of 2010.

The noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, was kind enough to recall that in the Joint Committee I was very concerned about academic freedom, which is dealt with in Clause 6. I want to say how happy I am that we have faced up to this important matter in the Bill. The most important point is that within academe—the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, touched on this—there is not the freedom that many people outside academe believe exists. There are challenges to free speech. Those who edit academic journals and run university presses do so on a shoestring, so the possibility of any type of libel action immediately, quite understandably, produces a massive chilling effect, and we all suffer from the fact that in the current climate academics cannot say things which their research has driven them to believe to be true.

The noble Lord, Lord Sugar, made a very good point when he talked about the popular press being driven by money. I understand why he makes that point but it does not apply to academics—they are driven by many things, but not by money. It is very important for the health of our democratic society that we have freedom of expression and a zone of protection for research and the reaching of conclusions which may indeed be unpalatable to others. None the less, when we discussed this matter in the Joint Committee, we were often worried—this point was frequently raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris—about unintentionally creating cottage industries by advocating something which seemed to us banal at the time but which might open up a whole set of other legal problems down the road. I think that the drafting of Clause 6 is rather fine in principle because it avoids that issue. Although in general academics believe in the desirability of qualified privilege for statements in peer-reviewed journals, they also know that not all academic journals are as rigorously and well run as others. One possible way out of this problem is to have a list of the ones that are considered to be the well run academic journals. However, the method adopted in Clause 6 is better than that. It emphasises the correct procedures for running an academic journal and a peer review. That is the right way to go and it is a very happy piece of drafting.

Perhaps I may add one thing, and it is a minor caveat. I hope that the words “academic matter” in Clause 6 are not used in the way that sports commentators use them. When a team is losing 5-0 and somebody scores a goal two minutes from the end, the commentator always announces, “Well, they’ve just scored but that’s an academic matter”. I hope it is assumed in Clause 6 that an academic matter can sometimes be very serious. Assuming that the use of the term “academic matter” is not that of the sports commentator, I am very happy to endorse Clause 6.

I repeat my fundamental point: there needs to be a zone of qualified privilege because the quality of our democratic life suffers if academics driven by a research conclusion feel unable to state that conclusion.