Leveson Inquiry

Lord Morris of Handsworth Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morris of Handsworth]

My Lords, many adjectives have preceded the Leveson inquiry, which we are debating today. We have heard that,

“the whole country has been shocked by the revelations of the phone hacking scandal”.

We have heard it described as,

“an episode that is … disgraceful”,

and that there has been,

“the failure of our political system over many, many years to tackle a problem that has been getting worse”.

We have heard descriptions of the victims:

“Relatives of those who died at the hands of terrorism, war heroes and murder victims—people who have already suffered in a way that we can barely imagine—have been made to suffer all over again”.

Those were the words of our Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he made a Statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday 13 July 2011 about the phone-hacking scandal and the upcoming inquiry. Naturally, the entire nation found empathy with the Prime Minister’s sentiment. He spoke for all of us.

Over the following months, as the inquiry progressed, millions of us watched in disbelief as individuals described their harrowing experiences with journalists. We all know who the victims are and we all know what they experienced, as we have been reminded today by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. We saw the misery in their faces, and they surely hoped that something positive would come from them telling their stories to millions through the inquiry.

However, we did not hear from the silent victims of the press, those without power or a voice—benefit claimants, single parents, immigrants, people with disabilities, rape victims, the unemployed, Gypsies and black and Asian people. They have been abused, insulted and ridiculed by the media, sometimes even encouraged by the debate that politicians are engaged in. One example is the current debate about welfare reform. If you have your curtains drawn at 8 am, you are a benefit scrounger living off welfare. You could not possibly be a night worker who has just completed a 10-hour shift driving a bus, cleaning the streets or emptying our dustbins—oh no.

Now, though, we have an inquiry and a promise from the Prime Minister, made on the “Andrew Marr Show” in October, that Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals would likely be adopted unless they were too “heavy-handed” or “bonkers”. In the light of his response today, I will leave the House to choose between bonkers or heavy-handed. I think neither.

In his report, Lord Justice Leveson said that newspapers in Britain have been guilty of years of malpractice that has,

“wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people”,

and ultimately must be regulated to prevent further wrongdoing. In a Statement to the House of Commons in November last year, the Prime Minister reminded us why the inquiry had been necessary. He said:

“We should remember how the parents of Milly Dowler, at their most vulnerable moment, had their daughter’s phone hacked and were followed and photographed, how Christopher Jefferies’ reputation was destroyed by false accusations, how the mother of Madeleine McCann … had her private diary printed without her permission and how she and her husband were falsely accused of keeping their daughter’s body in their freezer”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/11/12; col. 446.]

Lest we forget, all these were stories—and “stories” is the appropriate word—that the media thought that they had the freedom to publish, and which they thought it was essential for the British public to know. But somewhere on the road to Wapping, with the sun behind him, the Prime Minister had a conversion and announced that while changes were urgently needed, he would reject the judge’s recommendation for a statutory body to oversee the new independent press regulator. The Prime Minister went on to say:

“We should be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/11/2012; col. 449.]

Have we asked the victims what they think? At the Leveson inquiry, JK Rowling described her experience at the hands of the press as,

“under siege or like a hostage”,

in her own home. She was not the only victim wondering why the Prime Minister has spent public money setting up an inquiry, and why so many people have been asked to relive extremely painful episodes in the context of an inquiry watched by millions, if its recommendations were merely to be ignored. Clearly, JK Rowling and other victims who gave evidence to the inquiry had a right to feel disappointed, duped or even angry. And for what?

We are told by most parts of the media that their intrusion into our private lives and their taunts to minority groups are about freedom of the press. But where is the freedom for us, our friends and family, to live our lives without being hounded by the press? For more than 60 years, the press had insisted that it can regulate itself, but history tells us that, on every occasion that a self-regulatory body was established by the press, it has been told that this was its last chance. Clearly, some sections of the press have failed consistently to police themselves.

The challenge for us is simple. We cannot allow this process to be repeated again and again. Why? Because we want, and the British people deserve, a press of which and about which they can be proud: one which has the freedom to inform, but not the freedom to destroy.