Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 8th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Deighton, on his first-class speech; he will be an enormous asset to this House and it was very smart of the Government to snap him up.

In thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for making today’s debate possible, and in responding to the challenge implicit in the title of the debate, I would like to compare and contrast the recent Olympic and Paralympic Games with the soon-to-be-reported-upon Leveson inquiry. For me, these two seemingly disparate and contradictory events perfectly symbolise the two Britains that seem available to us.

The Leveson inquiry laid bare a country and a society being lead down the road that—far from benefitting “the many and not the few”, as politicians from all parties are fond of claiming—was principally designed to line the pockets and enhance the clout of the already entitled, at the expense of a far more deserving majority: those to whom, on occasions such as this, we in this Chamber have the opportunity to add our support.

In the past year, what has emerged is that a whole mass of the electorate has been, for some considerable time, thoroughly misrepresented in a manner that has been as divisive as it has been damaging. On what do I base that assertion? Rather like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich, I base it largely on the experience of watching and visiting our amazingly inclusive Olympic and Paralympic Games. From the moment the Olympic flame touched down on these islands, with the extraordinary and—let us admit it—quite unexpected levels of enthusiasm that it generated, it became impossible to even brush up against those thousands of Olympic volunteers without being struck by the innate politeness, consideration, efficiency and effectiveness of swathes of our countrymen and countrywomen. Can this possibly be the same nation that has, for so long, been reflected or refracted, day in and day out, in many of our sensation-seeking, voyeuristic, celebrity-obsessed tabloid newspapers to a degree that, as the columnist Simon Jenkins recently put it, “The media has gone collectively tabloid”?

When I was young, there were the daily and the Sunday newspapers and then there were weekly entertainments, such as Reveille and Tit-Bits. Nobody ever confused the two and the editor of Reveille was very unlikely ever to be offered the editorship of a genuine newspaper. Sadly, in some cases, they have now become all but indistinguishable. In effect, we have Tit-Bits opining on Europe, and Reveille telling us to get the economy back on track. If you step back for one single moment, you begin to see how absolutely daft we have allowed ourselves to become.

This is a world in which words get distorted and mangled to a point at which they lose all meaning—words such as “fair”, “respect”, “kindness”, “sacrifice” and “value”. This is a world in which, once money is involved, shame appears to have ceased to be any kind of brake on bad behaviour. Against that, did the performance of a single Olympian or Paralympian in any way shame or embarrass anybody? I would be very surprised if that were the case. At a cost of around 80 pence for each taxpayer, the British Olympic team has to rank as a remarkably good investment. Add a further £320 each for the cost of our once-in-a-lifetime Olympics and the medals, the pleasure and the pride generated represent, in my judgment, an unparalleled investment in our own future.

For anyone of my age who had begun to believe that the best of the qualities to which I have previously referred had all but died out with our parents’ generation, our Olympic summer was nothing short of a revelation. Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Games, famously said that, for him, the Olympics was all about taking part and doing the best you possibly can in fair competition with other athletes from across the world. It has been my dream to take that notion one stage further and to make it even more real. I have long believed that there should be a fourth plinth at each victory ceremony reserved for the athlete who, in each discipline, has exceeded their personal best by the greatest margin. Life does not offer any of us the opportunity to do more than our best and I can think of no better way of driving that point home than by celebrating those who have achieved exactly that. I believe they are entitled to their own medal, which might, in turn, prove an intelligent way to begin to unhook ourselves from our present slightly juvenile conception of success.

To my way of thinking, the response to the Queen’s Jubilee—that public outpouring of affection that preceded the miracle of the London Olympics—makes it very clear that we have reached a watershed in deciding the type of nation that we want to be and the type of nation that we wish to be seen to be. As I mentioned in a speech in your Lordships’ House a couple of weeks ago, I found the sense of catharsis generated by the Prime Minister’s handling of the Bloody Sunday and, more recently, the Hillsborough apologies, to be absolutely profound. Surely, the response to those announcements should be sufficient to encourage politicians of all parties to believe that there are very real alternatives to the ugly and divisive world to which we have all become accustomed. Encouraged by the spirit of the London Olympics, and buttressed by Lord Justice Leveson’s forensic investigation, I would like to believe that we are beginning the process of recovering a sense of common purpose and, with it, an altogether more optimistic vision of our future.

Nothing is likely to change without politicians and sections of the press making it clear that they, every bit as much as us, want to be part of the optimistic and responsible Britain that we caught a brief glimpse of this summer. Achieving that places an inescapable burden on the Prime Minister to show a seriousness of leadership and intent when Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations are eventually published. Will the Prime Minister hold true to his promise that we must find, in his words, an entirely new system of holding the press to account? As he made clear in giving evidence before the Leveson inquiry, we must substitute independent regulation, underpinned by statute—without which its independence cannot possibly be guaranteed—for self-regulation. I hope that on this occasion he and the entire political class will not lose their nerve and that the spirit of Britain that we were briefly privileged to enjoy in August and September could become the day-to-day reality of all our lives. That for me would be a legacy absolutely beyond price.