Leveson Inquiry

Lord Prescott Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prescott]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and I especially welcome the Leveson report and analysis, and the fact that he adopted many of the recommendations I made in my evidence to him. But there have been voices that disagree with his approach, basically on the argument about whether there should be a statutory underpinning. That is what is at the heart of the argument now—not only now, but, as Leveson pointed out, in a number of the seven other inquiries that have taken place over the past 70 years. It is clear that in avoiding the recommendations, the industry has used the same old trick: you delay it in discussion until you get near to an election and so avoid doing anything about it.

I have no problem with the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, saying that they should be talking to the proprietors. The trouble is that not only are they talking to them, they dine with them and they wine with them. That is where the real influence lies—not only at the level of the editors, but at the level of the proprietors. We need to look at the evidence in any debate about a statutory framework. They say, and it has been said today, that statutory underpinning would bring about state control. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, fears that if we go along this road, it will lead to more of that. I have to say to the noble Lord: think about what they are doing now and then wait for 10 years. They have not changed their habits; they have not changed the culture. It is the same creatures who are exercising their culture in a way that I believe acts against the ordinary individual, so it is nonsense to argue that.

There is also the old time trick: let us keep on talking and eventually we will talk it out. We will get near the election, when no Prime Minister of whatever political party will want to say, “I’ll have you on”, because he will want them on his side for the election, so nothing happens. It is no coincidence that we have now had the eighth inquiry.

We have heard speeches today from the noble Lords, Lord Hunt, Lord Stevens and Lord Wakeham. The noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Wakeham, have direct experience as chairs of the PCC. I have to say that the evidence is against them. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, told us before about how confident he was that he would get his plan through, but it did not happen with the Black plan. It got rejected in Leveson and nobody except the proprietors supported it. I am glad to hear him talking about confidence in this one because it is to be based on civil law, but I will wait and see.

The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, knows this because I have discussed it with him on a number of occasions. When he was the chair, he negotiated with the Labour Government in 1997 when we were changing our legislation to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. He was able to limit the statute so that the industry did not get an independent PCC, as was required under that legislation. I think he referred to Section 12. He also limited the damages payable under human rights and privacy considerations, which he was able to get into the legislation. It is not as if they are against a statutory framework; they rather like a statutory framework as long as it is working for them. The argument about a statutory framework is not a principled one. I go even further than that. These things were happening after the “last chance saloon” warning that has been referred to. They went on a pub crawl after that, because all the criminal acts that you can think of under our legislation were committed at the highest level, despite the role-playing by the press and the media in the name of press freedom. That is what every one of us has been condemning today.

You might say that if they are against a statutory framework, why are we in this House considering legislation such as the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act and the Defamation Bill, which is before us at the moment? Those two pieces of legislation are designed to reduce damages claimed against the press in cases where they have been found guilty and to reduce the possibility of people securing no-win, no-fee agreements. That has been limited by that legislation, at the request of the media, using our power of statutory enforcement to their advantage. They are not against it in principle, they are just against it for others when it might strengthen their position against them.

In recognising that, as I said before to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, we should look at what they are doing now in the light of the Leveson report. We have a situation where the editor of the Times has been dismissed—or perhaps it was settled and it went his way. James Harding was a more liberal voice, but he did not last very long when the phone call came in from New York, despite all the protection for the Times. The Sun and the Telegraph were recently involved in the plebs conspiracy, as it is now called, according to the evidence yesterday. What happened there? The Sun and the Telegraph got an exclusive on the information in the memo and then published it. I do not suppose they paid for it—they would not do such terrible things, would they?—but they got it and published it. What did they do with it? They used it as evidence against Leveson’s report, saying that whistleblowing is a justification. After two days, when it clearly looked to be a conspiracy, we had the inquiry. They had forgotten about that.

The more recent case, which does involve me, is that of the chief superintendent who was found yesterday to have been paid by the News of the World. When they ring up to say, “Will you give me a few bob because I’ll tell you Prescott’s pressuring us for an inquiry”, that is as serious as the actual payment. We in our job have to do what we think is right; and, in my case, I was pressing for a further inquiry because the conclusions of the first one were not true. I am right to do that as a parliamentarian, yet they can ring up a paper like the News of the World. She wanted to use the public interest defence but it was financial, as the courts found yesterday.

I did not want to go into the privacy issue with Prince Harry, but some photos were taken in private and all the industry agreed not to print them. The Sun must have got another call from New York, as the next day it decided to print them and break the unanimous agreement that privacy here had to be respected. All this is going on now, in the era of Leveson. They have not changed. It is all about culture, they say. I agree that it is about culture but how do you get that to change? You cannot just chat to the editor, you have to do an awful lot more than that.

However, there are things that we can do. For example, there is the information about Ireland that we were given by the noble Lord, Lord Bew. It was very interesting to hear the differences, as the situations are not exactly the same. That is true, but if you read Leveson, there is a full statement about it. What is important is that they made changes to the legislation, which they were able to impose. Why were they able to get the British press to sign up in Ireland? Everybody asks that question, but we know why they signed up for it—because they have a system that, as the noble Lord, Lord Bew, has pointed out, is better. It is voluntary, but underpinned by statutory framework, because the man who I saw 10 years ago, the Minister of Justice, holds the power to determine what is an independent organisation. That is political accountability.

When I hear all this talk about how it takes years, I ask: why we do not amend the Defamation Bill that is before this House now, like the Irish did, and put some of the content in that? We can do that almost immediately—the Bill is coming before us and we can get on with it. In Ireland, as Leveson pointed out, they reserved the right to be able to say, “If you do not create the proper independent, voluntary body which we all say we want, we will implement this statutory one”. That is put in a Bill; it is called a sunset clause.

If the House is serious about this, it should think about a sunset clause. If they do not do what is expected and carry on with delaying tactics, we have the power to say not that we are going for legislation but to implement it in a sunset clause. That is what we can do; that is what we should do; it is built on the Irish example.

[Lord Skidelsky]

My Lords, almost everything that there is to say has already been said, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, so I will just concentrate on two points. First, there is the ingenuity of Leveson, which recognises that voluntary self-regulation via the almost toothless Press Complaints Commission has run its course. Therefore, any successor system of self-regulation needs to give confidence that it will not be toothless—hence the need for legislation to guarantee the teeth. I think that is the main thrust.

The truly ingenious feature of Leveson is his proposal to secure publishers’ participation in a toughened system of self-regulation by means of incentives rather than compulsion. These incentives are cost-shifting, exemplary damages and the opportunity for a newspaper to consult the new regulatory body when faced with a difficult decision as to whether or not to publish. All these incentives hang together; it is a very coherent structure. But that structure will not work without an arbitration scheme or the necessary statutory measures to allow exemplary damages and double cost-shifting, always at the court’s discretion.

That is the Leveson alternative to giving the victim of a damaging story the legal right of prior notification. In his evidence to Leveson, Max Mosley said:

“Once information is made public, it can never ever be made private again. Therefore the only effective remedy is to stop it becoming public”.

The Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions found that there was,

“widespread support for prior notification becoming a requirement for editors intending to run a story which compromises an individual’s private life”,

and that this should be part of the code of practice for the new regulatory body.

Leveson does not concede the right of prior notification, which is what this group of witnesses was asking for, but he suggests a way in which it will benefit proprietors to seek advice from the regulator before publishing a potentially damaging story, with an arbitration system that, in the event of publication, will make reference to the advice that has been given. A Desmond newspaper could, if it wished, remain entirely outside the system, but if it broke the law—on defamation, privacy or harassment—it would risk exemplary damages. It would also be liable to pay the costs of both sides in a court case, whether it won or lost. In a nutshell, it would be much more expensive for a newspaper to stay outside the system, even though it would be allowed to do so.

Leveson’s aim is admirable but limited. It is an attempt to apply a legal dressing to a cultural wound. I do not accept that every country gets the press it deserves—we deserve a better press, I think—but a number of broader factors explain the press that we have got. The first is the politicians. The point has been made, but I think it needs reinforcement. I speak as an historian. The politicians have built up a partly malign press for their own political purposes. That has been the main factor in the rise of Rupert Murdoch and News International. As the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, pointed out, it was Margaret Thatcher who allowed the Murdoch build-up, because she knew that his titles would support her. I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, that Murdoch was equally ardently pursued by Tony Blair for exactly the same reason.

[Lord Prescott]

Not by me.

[Lord Skidelsky]

In his memoirs, which I quote chapter and verse, Blair admits that he made a “Faustian pact” with Murdoch—could anything be more transparent than that?—but he does not reveal what Faust’s obligations were in this pact. Later he complained that the press was a “feral beast”. Did he not understand that if you dine with the devil you should use a very long spoon? Perhaps he did not care.

That is one source of the malaise that we have all been complaining about. The point there is that a proper enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation would have prevented the extensive Murdoch takeover. That is why I believe that no one company or individual should be allowed to own more than 20% of newspaper titles.

But that is not the only thing. We now live in a culture that is much more interested in the personalities of our leaders than in policies, possibly because the public have a well founded suspicion that a great deal of political debate is phoney. The demand to expose corruption in dark places has turned into an insatiable desire to know more and more about the private lives and griefs of public figures—and even non-public figures. We all enjoy a bit of prying, but we are the first civilisation to have turned enjoyment of prying into a right to know—that is, to raise it to the status of a political principle. That is the real ethical Rubicon that we have crossed. There is no easy solution to it. I do not think that there is any purely legal remedy for such ethical confusions. Leveson has done everything that he can to protect privacy, so his report deserves our strong support. We should be especially vigilant to ensure that the recommendations are carried out in their full integrity because, as I have said, they all hang together.