Leveson Inquiry

Lord Soley Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

Freedom of the press has never been, and should never be, allowed to become the power of rich, powerful organisations to trash the lives of individuals and, as my noble friend Lord Morris has said, minority groups. In fact, in its origins, the press did exactly the opposite. I will make a few points about the report itself and then, if I have time, I will talk a little on the relationships between politicians and the press, an issue on which we need to spend much more time.

First, let us put to bed another issue. The press deviously and dishonestly, during the course of the inquiry and immediately after the report, tried to lead people to believe that Leveson was introducing a statutory system. As has been said, it is not. Leveson calls for an organisation that would verify the strength, independence and fairness of the body set up by the press itself. That is what we are all talking about here. In this context, I remind noble Lords of the importance of the code. In my long years of dealing with the relationship with the press, the code has been crucial. It was drawn up by and, in my view, for the editors. Much of it, if you read it in a simple way, seemed good until you looked at the small print; we all look at the small print. Here, you have quite a good description of the “public interest”, and then there is an exception:

“There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself”.

That is the get-out clause. The other one, of course, is:

“The PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the public domain, or will become so”.

So all you had to do was to get one of your friends or colleagues to put something on the internet, zap it around a bit, and the press would start reporting the fact that it was on the internet and, finally, report the thing itself. Frankly, that is why you need something to oversee a body: to say, “That is not fair. It is not strong”. That is the case for the body that Leveson is proposing.

Also in that context, Leveson was not asked to look at the internet. Nor is it important, because the difference is in the nature of a large, corporate organisation trashing someone and individuals putting comments on the internet. There is a problem emerging about internet coverage of people’s private lives, but it would not get in the way of what we are discussing today.

In respect of those who do not sign up for the new system, I would suggest not only that court proceedings would be more heavily against those newspapers, but we should also look at the option of tax breaks of various types, precisely because the press is a declining industry. While I agree with other comments that have been made about this, it will not die out: it will change. Giving them tax breaks would not be a bad idea in recognising that they have signed up to a quality code.

I do not want the body concerned to be Ofcom; I think that would be the least good option. Neither do I think there should be a royal charter. I do not have time to go into it in detail, but my personal preference is still very much for an independent body. There is an issue about how we set that up which requires quite a bit of thought and discussion, but it is not beyond our ability to do it. As my noble friend Lord Lipsey said, there are already models available showing how to set up independent bodies, both in the public and private sectors and in the joint public-private sector. We have to examine how we do that and then set it up, but it is not impossible to do it.

I turn to the history of the relationship between politicians and the press because when I introduced my Bill on freedom and responsibility of the press in 1991, I conducted hearings in the same way as Leveson. The response was interesting: I was attacked from all sides. I have no problem with that: I am a politician and am not exactly unused to it. The interesting thing to me, however, was the number of people who said to me that I was putting myself at risk. My own partner actually said to me at the time, “I am more worried about you taking the press on than I was when you were doing Northern Ireland from the Front Bench”. I thought, “By God, I didn’t think it was that bad”. That, however, was the view.

When I wrote the book on this issue together with Professor O’Malley, it was described as an attempt to gag the press. There was a problem in my Bill—I acknowledge that—and it was that I had not cracked the issue of how to set up the independent body. However, Peter Preston said in a recent article that Leveson had picked up my Bill and applied it. I do not think that is quite right, but that was Preston’s view. My own view is that, if the press had taken on board what we were talking about 20 years ago, we would not be where we are now. I say this to the previous chairs of the PPC and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt: I know you have tried individually, but I have been saying for many years—and I was not alone in saying it—that you presided over a weak and ineffectual body that had major failings within it. The case for proceeding with it was very poor indeed; there was actually a case for simply resigning from it and saying, “It is not working”. It would have helped if we had had that.

I had an alarm, which grew in the 1970s and 1980s, about the nature of the relationship between the press and politicians. The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, might want to think about this. When Tony Blair decided to go to see Murdoch, I approved of that, though the late Ian Mikardo MP said to a group of us together, “If you are going to sup with the devil, sup with a long spoon”. My view was that we had to do it because the press were increasingly seeing themselves as holding not just the Government to account, but politicians as well. It devalued Parliament, so parliamentarians stopped having their speeches and comments reported. One of the first things I did in the 1970s was to recognise that I was not going to get speeches in the press anymore; I had to form relationships with members of the media in order to get stories in. Tony Blair and other party leaders had to make an approach to those leaders of the press. My noble friend Lady Liddell is absolutely right: this was a massive failure of management within the media industry, and particularly in the press. We should bear in mind that the News of the World was, until relatively recently, a good newspaper that did good journalism. It went off the rails, and the newspaper was closed down, but Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch stayed in post. What sort of responsibility is that?

I ask the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, please to recognise his own responsibility in this. There were stories, and I used stories, in the press about the failure of media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch, who were refusing to take responsibility for the bullying, sexual harassment and racism that were going on at the Sun. His paper, the Daily Express, was one of those which refused to publish it. The only newspapers that used it were the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC. Then the story was killed. That was happening over and over again.

If the press had been good at holding the owners, editors and some journalists to account, not only would they not be in the mess that they are in today, at least we would not be able to say that it is grossly hypocritical for them to turn around and say, “Oh, it is the politicians or these other people in the public eye—footballers, actors and so on”. No, it is not: it is the nature of the way in which the press has been operating with unaccountable power for a long time. I believe that Leveson is right. Broadly, we should go down that road and, fairly soon, we should discuss in rather more detail the relationship between politicians and the press.