Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Martin of Springburn and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Monday 30th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I listened with interest to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and his comments about the rich and famous being able to take cases to court. This is what worries me about the lack of no-win no-fee. I am not concerned about the rich and famous, I am concerned about ordinary men and women, who maybe only once in their life have been defamed by a newspaper. At the Leveson inquiry one former editor said, “If it sounds good or if it sounds like the truth, just lob it in”—just to lob it in for a woman or a man who is living a quiet life is very cruel and hard.

For those of us who have approached newspapers and said, “What you have said about me is wrong”, their first reaction is, “If you don’t like it, write a letter and we will print it in the readers’ column”. How insulting is that, that I or anyone else should then make a contribution to a newspaper—which is usually a nasty newspaper that you would not even have in your home—by putting a letter into their column? That is even the line that they take with the Press Complaints Commission. Everyone knows that when anyone takes up a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission, they are not even looking for money, they are looking for some redress, and that is the first course of action that they take.

Years ago, perhaps in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, it used to be the case that if a newspaper printed something that was wrong about you, it was a matter between you and the newspaper. This is not the case nowadays, because when a newspaper prints an allegation, there is a press preview on Sky News or the BBC, where they get some talking heads to chew over what has been said about you that day. That means that even when you are deeply embarrassed about what has gone out, and you have not even had a chance to redress the balance, within hours of that newspaper being published hundreds of thousands of viewers are able to get a look at that newspaper because they are invited to do so by another press organisation.

I note the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has made about local newspapers. When is it that people take offence at a local newspaper? There is maybe the odd individual. But a local newspaper says to itself, “We do not have the resources to involve ourselves in a law suit, so we had better be careful before we go to print”. My local newspaper is the Springburn Evening Times. While there have obviously been people who have taken exception to what it has had to say, I have never known anyone to take it to court, because as an organisation it is careful about what it does.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

Has the noble Lord read the evidence that was given to the Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill by various NGOs and regional newspapers, indicating the ways in which the existing law of libel has a very similar chilling effect on their ability to report and comment on matters of public interest?

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I have not read the document, but now that the noble Lord has drawn it to my attention, I will. What I am talking about is the experiences that I have had of local newspapers. Of course, they are careful that they do not get involved in any litigation, in the same way as we—as people who have privilege in this Chamber—will be very careful about what we say out in the street, because we know that we would be subject to litigation.

However, the national newspapers are not concerned about being subject to litigation. Some of them are very rich organisations indeed. They know full well, when someone comes along—well, we have covered the rich and famous. Let us take a different situation. We, as a House, encourage people to go into public life. Once you get into public life, you are under the microscope. It may well be that Members of Parliament down the corridor are paid a better salary than your average journeyman or journeywoman—a blue-collar worker, I take it—but they are not paid so well that they can take on some of the people in the media who are vicious and nasty, and are willing to have a go not only at them, but also at their wives and families.

I know that this is about an amendment and therefore I had better not go on for too long about the whole thing. I will say, however, that ordinary men and women should be able to go and, if necessary, take their case to court. I take the noble Lord’s point that if there is a lower court that can handle it, that might be all the better. I will end by saying this: how ordinary can this situation be? An unemployed man in Liverpool, who was a pass-keeper in his local church—the person who does the collection plates and opens the church ready for the service—was accused in a publication of taking money from the collection plate that he put around. His difficulties were so great that he had to get the cheapest bus ticket from Liverpool to London to see a no-win no-fee lawyer to make sure that the balance was redressed. He won. Are we going to say of a man like that, who is unemployed, who was doing his duty in his church—someone who is respected not only by the congregation but by the whole community—and who has an accusation like that made against him, that we cannot allow him to get to court and put his case?