Standards of Behaviour and Honesty in Political Life

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I fear we live in an age of visceral prejudice. Many of us wake up every morning, tune into the radio or television and read the news websites in the hope of having those prejudices polished, and, when they are not, of being outraged. In our hyperpartisan age, any questioning of our own political position is seen as “having a go,” so we attack the messenger when these prejudices are not reinforced and are infuriated when they are questioned or criticised. In fact, I suggest that many politicians hope every day to be infuriated by several items that they come across on their trawl through the media.

In the digital era, we are all constantly reassured by likeminded digital friends or in the echo chambers of social media. In these places, our views are bolstered and those we oppose denigrated. The resulting fractures in our society are deeper than ever and make the democratic process more scratchy and less open to compromise. I fear that the arenas for a proper discussion of policy, in which people actually listen to others’ points of view and engage with their concerns to build a national conversation, are diminishing. This conversation cannot take place if not enough people are prepared to listen to each other. Part of the problem is that many of our party politicians are rarely prepared to engage in an open discussion of policy questions and generate a true conversation in which the nation can engage.

The solution needs to come from the top of our society. We need true engagement on policies which affect us all—our own version of the ancient Greek agora. In the past, our leaders were prepared to subject themselves to lengthy questioning and explanation of policy. The audiences would agree or disagree, but at least they were part of the conversation that must be the foundation for consent in a successful democracy. Mrs Thatcher was a divisive politician, but she was a politician of the highest quality. She was on top of the details of her brief and unafraid to answer questions. She saw it as her democratic duty to subject herself to long interviews on policy with the great interviewers of her day, such as Robin Day of the BBC and Brian Walden of ITV’s “Weekend World”.

I contrast her with the paucity of true policy discussion in the public arena by our leading decision-makers today. There are some honourable exceptions: Michael Gove gave helpful and engaged answers to Tom Newton Dunn on TalkTV the other day, and Jacob Rees-Mogg was prepared to go on the new Andrew Neil show on Channel 4. Andrew Neil is no enemy of the present Government, yet I notice that no other top-level Cabinet Ministers are being booked for the show. Surely, when there is so much at stake in our national life, it would benefit democracy if the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary were to open themselves to a considered discussion about where this Government are going. Instead, we get the “Minister of the day” put up by Downing Street and condemned to tour the media outlets in the morning. Much of the audience is infuriated that the Minister will come on to talk about one specific policy area in which they are expert, and then find themselves bombarded by a range of questions outside their purview. The required omniscience demeans both them and the show on which they are appearing. Of course, they cannot know everything. Instead, they are equipped with a brief of answers which they are told to repeat, whatever the question. This is partly the fault of the broadcasters in expecting too much and being so eclectic in their questioning, but it is also a result of a lack of a true engagement with the media by the political classes.

However, it is important to continue the national discussion, even if many politicians will not engage. One of the very few places where independent thought and discussion can take place is through our public service broadcasters—television, radio and online. These are arenas for the nation to hold a mirror up to itself. We in this country, through the foresight of political predecessors and the hard work of journalists, are fortunate enough to have institutions that are the envy of the world. In the words of my noble friend the great Lord Hennessy, they are “pearls beyond price”, yet a typical trait of our country is to want to nag away at these great British institutions, despite the global admiration they attract.

Across the political spectrum, there are warm words for public service broadcasters: we hear their war reporters lauded, their jubilee coverage described as unifying, and the local public service information outlets described as crucial conduits for information during Covid. Yet these words are not met by actions; the latest BBC licence fee settlement is frozen for two years, at a time when inflation is projected to reach double digits by the end of the year. This will lead to a financial loss of £250 million for the corporation, on top of the 30% cut over the last 10 years.

Just as important is the threat to alter and shrink the programme remit of PSBs. Their universality makes them a valuable forum for the nation in a world of digital cubbyholes in which we listen only to ourselves. For all its benefits for public service broadcasting, the media Bill is an attack on Channel 4’s ability to be a British voice to discuss British values. Its present remit is to make British content that is innovative and edgy and that reflects underrepresented audiences, and its news has to be transmitted for an hour at prime time. There is a danger that the new remit required for privatisation will dilute the British and regional content and allow the news and other areas of genuine discussion about our nation to be hived off to a little-watched digital channel. How can this be allowed to happen at a time when we need open discussion across the country more than ever before?

To compound this attack on the PSBs, a drum-beat of complaints about a lack of impartiality echoes though the corridors of this place and beyond. There has been an orthodoxy of liberal metropolitan bias in the past, but public service broadcasters are increasingly recruiting individuals from a wider background of the population, both geographically and socioeconomically. The diverse background of production staff will contribute to a change in culture.

Ofcom and the BBC have made extensive reports on the problem of a lack of impartiality. The former said that audiences had complained about the lack of impartiality that they saw in the corporation, but it admitted that its research

“illustrates the complexity of the issue”.

Ofcom found that

“different audiences reach diametrically opposing conclusions when judging the due impartiality of the same news content”.

The new Dilnot review will further assess impartiality and accuracy at the BBC, and it will ensure that a breadth of viewpoints is heard.

I fear that, in this hyper-partisan political environment, it will be impossible for any political organisation to satisfy demands for impartiality. Contrast the situation in our country with what is happening in America, where it seems that all media outlets are editorialised. There is nowhere for genuine national political discussion in the American media; in this partisan media ecosystem, there is only alternative truth and alternative facts. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, said, it is not surprising that a large proportion of the American population still believes that the election was stolen, despite repeated denials by Republican officials and even President Trump’s own daughter, Ivanka. It does not take much to realise that, in a post-truth world, the foundations of a democracy and civilization quake.

America must be a warning for all people who believe in the democratic process. Unless we have national fora for discussion and debate that can be trusted and believed, we will descend into a world of multiple truths and alternative facts that leave audiences unable to make the basic decisions that are needed for civic society. At this time of turmoil, both across the world and in this country, it has never been more important that we bolster the institutions that allow all citizens to engage in the great process of deciding in which direction to take our country and who should lead that mission.

Spyware

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con) [V]]

My Lords, again, I cannot comment on operational specifics, but I assure the noble Lord that our intelligence agencies are governed by a robust regulatory framework to ensure that any capabilities are always used in a way that is legal, necessary and proportionate—something we ask of all nations. We do not support the commoditisation of cyber capabilities. We continue promoting, with our international partners, the need for tighter export controls to ensure their use legally and responsibly.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I am as appalled as other noble Lords by the revelation about the use of NSO spyware against over 50,000 people across the world. How long have the Government known about the use of this law enforcement-grade software by authoritarian Governments in surveillance of their opponents and journalists across the world, and what have they done about it?

[Lord True (Con) [V]]

My Lords, again, I cannot comment on intelligence and operational specifics. I am obviously aware of the issues raised in the reports, which in the first instance are all with the company and Israeli authorities. But we have raised our concerns several times with the Government of Israel about NSO’s operations.

Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for being late for the beginning of the debate, but I was detained. I declare an interest as a producer at the BBC. I praise the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for his extremely impressive report and was especially pleased to read paragraph 268, which states:

“While we understand that the BBC World Service’s budget has been protected in the move to licence-fee funding, we are concerned that this protection might be more difficult to maintain in the face of future budget pressures and challenges to the principle of the licence fee”.

In their response the Government say:

“The Government remains fully committed to the BBC World Service”.

My concern is that these could remain warm words at a time when, as many other noble Lords have said, the BBC World Service has never been more important, a sentiment which is echoed in the report of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the other place.

In the 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, we saw a liberalisation of the media across the world. As the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said, Russian television channels were broadcasting brave programmes investigating the role of their own Government and military. The rise of democracy across much of Africa and Asia saw a similar opening up of the media. But in the last five years, we have seen a closing down of the free media globally. Increasingly warlords, political and religious parties are setting up or taking over television and radio stations and websites in order to pump out propaganda which supports their view of the world.

As my noble friend Lord Hannay pointed out, along with the report, the Russian and Chinese Governments have dramatically increased their communications budgets to spread their views across the world. It is easy for us sitting here in the West to imagine that audiences are sophisticated enough to ignore such propaganda, but even here in the west, “Russia Today”, which has already been mentioned, a well funded global propaganda arm of the Russian Government, is the second most watched foreign news channel in America, and in this country it claims a quarterly audience of 2.5 million people. Noble Lords can imagine the power of these channels in the less sophisticated Russian-speaking areas of the former Soviet Union. Daily we hear of the fears of the Baltic states and parts of the former USSR of the power of President Putin’s state media to foster anger and resentment among the Russian-speaking populations. It is not surprising that in the ghastly battle for control of eastern Ukraine, the BBC’s Ukrainian and Russian language services have become a crucial source of impartial information.

I talked to one of my colleagues on the Russian service, who gave me a rather good example. Last month, LifeNews, the Russian state media outlet in the region, reported unequivocally that a hospital in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine had been hit and people killed by shells fired by Ukrainian forces stationed to the north-west of the city. The BBC Russian Service reporter arrived shortly afterwards and reported the shelling, but said that it was not clear from which direction it had come—whether from the Ukrainians or the Russian separatists. The BBC reporter added that each side blamed the other. In fact, shortly afterwards, the OSCE observers visited the damaged hospital and decided that the shells had come from the separatist troops in the south-east. The findings were reported by the BBC, but not by Russian LifeNews. It is no wonder that the online traffic for the BBC’s Russian service has increased by 8% during the course of 2014. By giving the world a source of impartial news, we are presenting across the globe British values of truth, justice and democracy, portraying our country in the finest possible light.

Furthermore, the soft power of the World Service has another crucial role: it actively helps to stabilise fragile states. We are seeing hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from their own failing states for the political and economic security of Europe. The values of the BBC can encourage democracy and nurture civil institutions in the countries from which they are fleeing.

The report mentions the work of the wonderful BBC Media Action, which uses both the World Service and local media partners to build democratic institutions and encourage populations to engage with them. Media Action is a charity, not part of the World Service, and is well supported by DfID and international donors. It draws on the expertise of the staff of the BBC world services and transmits programmes jointly on its language services and with local partners.

In Afghanistan, we have seen a wholesale takeover of the airwaves by political groupings and warlords wanting to pump out their own propaganda. One of the very few places where Afghans can receive balanced information is on the “Open Jirga” programme, supported by BBC Media Action and based on BBC1’s “Question Time”. Afghan Ministers and Opposition leaders sit side by side answering questions from an eclectic audience representing a carefully selected range of Afghan society, including 50% women, who ask half the questions. Media Action is expanding and introducing similar programmes in the countries of the Arab spring and in Iraq. I hope that your Lordships will draw from the success of Media Action that it deploys the inspiration and values of the BBC World Service.

In April last year, the BBC World Service was folded into the licence fee. At the time, the head of news, James Harding, announced an increase in funding for the service of £5 million, so that next year its funding will be £250 million. However, he warned that there would have to be savings as part of the three-year investment plan. This is against a background of a 26% cut in BBC funding over the five years of the licence fee settlement.

We are now beginning to focus on the future funding of the BBC, with the negotiations for charter renewal due to start in a matter of months. This will be the first time that the funding of the BBC World Service has been dependent on the licence fee. I am concerned that commercial and political forces are gathering to ensure that the BBC’s severely reduced funding will affect the World Service. The Government’s response to the committee’s report points out that it is up to the BBC Trust to manage the funding and operation of the World Service within the wider BBC family. Indeed, the World Service’s operating licence states that the BBC Trust must ensure that the content and distribution budget are protected, while also ensuring that operational efficiencies can be achieved. However, it also says that the trust has to be consulted only if there is a 10% or greater cut in its budget. At the moment, that could mean £25 million, or the budget for several language services.

The International Broadcasting Trust has already warned us of its concern that, while the BBC licence fee is paid for by a British audience, the World Service is aimed at a global audience. I fear that the people of Britain, who pay for the BBC, might wonder why their money is being spent on a service which is not aimed at them.

The committee’s report urges that future commercial sources of income be studied, and suggests support from central taxation for the World Service. The Government, in reply, said that they would support the BBC World Service’s global role and ensure that it remained the best international broadcaster, but they did not respond to the idea of support from taxation. Will the Minister say whether there is any possibility of taxation support for the World Service, and if not, what are the Government going to do to ensure that the World Service’s funding is not cut after 2016?

Deregulation Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

I rise to give my wholehearted support to this amendment and very much endorse the views that have been expressed so far. We had a pretty good debate on this in Committee, where there was a universal feeling from all sides of the House that this change had to take place. We were held up because the Minister said that there was going to be a review. Looking at what the Minister said on that occasion and at the wording of this amendment, I would have thought that this amendment very closely reflects what the Minister had in mind when he spoke to us. That was certainly the intention in the drafting of this amendment. I do not know what the Minister is going to say, but I would have thought that he would have a job not to accept it. All we have done is save him and his officials a lot of work in drafting an amendment. He has it there on a plate, and all he has to do is to say, “Yes, that’s good”. That might happen. It has happened before, if not very often. It is a challenge to him.

Of course, we all want to support our creative industries. Although times have been bad for television, and television advertising has gone through a difficult phase, at the moment it is doing a little better—ITV and Channel 4 have certainly been doing better, I believe. However, that is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs, and it is very likely, with increased competition, the new electronic media and so on, that companies such as ITV will find it tough. It is even tougher if they have to compete where there is no level playing field. To put it this way, they are not able to negotiate or compete at all; they simply have constraints imposed upon them. We have a situation where the commercial public service broadcasters subsidise the pay TV platforms. It is absolutely preposterous. Although it is alleged that the Labour Party is not in favour of business and competition, we are, and this is one example of how we are. It is very clear that this is a constraint on competition, and an outdated constraint as well—one, as the noble Lord, Lord Black, said, appropriate to a “bygone age”. We have all moved forward a great deal.

The Government have sort of announced a review, which I very much hope will be fully compatible with the amendment that we have put forward. After all, it has taken nearly six months from the Minister saying there was going to be a review to getting here today, and we still have not had much sign of it, so it is a fairly slow process. We are anxious to make progress and do not want the general election to be an excuse for delaying things. We believe that an amendment such as the one we have down would enable progress to be made in the review, so that the election does not delay things and so that, whichever party or combination of parties triumphs in the election, there will be a seamless move forward.

In moving the amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, asked a number of questions, which I do not want to repeat. However, it would be useful to learn a little more about the timing of the review: when it will start and how long it is likely to take. What we do not want is for this issue to be put into the long grass. There is always a fear that when Ministers announce a review, it is a way of saying, “Let’s get this out of the way. We can deal with it some time in the future”. Let us not look at it that way. The benefit of this amendment is that there is no need for further primary legislation—it can just happen.

It is very unusual for Back-Benchers in either House of Parliament to say, “Don’t worry about legislation, just take the powers and do it”, but here is a case where we are doing it, because we believe there is widespread agreement on the anomaly that we want to deal with and that waiting for further primary legislation would simply delay things. We do not want to delay things. We think we should move forward, and move forward quickly.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I rise to support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and declare an interest as a producer at the BBC. The pay TV platforms already pay to transmit the digital channels from ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, so what can their objection be to adding the main channels of ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5? They say that the transmission fees would represent a double tax for consumers, but in the case of the commercial PSBs at least this is obviously untrue. Viewers do not pay to watch the commercial PSBs, but they have a news and current affairs obligation, which costs ITV, for example, at least £100 million a year. All that could benefit from the extra revenue provided by the new fees, which is what we have seen happen to channels in America.

There have also been scare stories from Virgin Media saying that full-blooded commercial negotiation could led to blackouts, with PSBs removing their channels from the platforms. This may have happened in the US, but it is not being threatened by the PSBs in this country, and it is clearly an absurd allegation as the commercial PSBs are legally committed to put their main channels on the digital platforms as part of their licence agreements. I agree, of course, with noble Lords who want the Minister to elucidate the timeframe and the terms of the review. When it is completed, the recommendations should not be put on the back burner.

The introduction of retransmission fees will allow PSBs to maximise investment in UK-produced programmes, so that we can build on the world-beating programmes that we all enjoy so very much.

[Baroness Ford (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I also rise to support the amendment, and in so doing declare a very particular interest as chairman of a public service broadcaster, STV. We are on Report and had a very full debate on this issue in Committee where, as the noble Lord, Lord Black, said, there was very little between any of us in understanding and appreciating the issues in front of us. I do not think there is any issue with saying that the original legislation is very out of date. It is not just the pay TV platforms that are benefiting from this; every day, new online content creators and online aggregators also benefit hugely from public service investment in all this. There is no doubt or dispute that the regulations are massively out of date, and the debate on the iniquitous nature of the investment in public service broadcasting has been very well rehearsed.

My concern really is that the Government have a complete open goal here and have had it for quite some time. The Deregulation Bill, as we said in Committee, is a perfect vehicle for dealing with this as removing “unnecessary and outdated regulation” is exactly what it was set up to do. This is outdated and unnecessary regulation. However, the Government have chosen to go down the route of a consultation instead of taking the open goal in front of them. This consultation has now been very widely trailed over many months. At the Royal Television Society conference in early September, the Secretary of State said that now is the time to reconsider all the regulation around broadcasting. He signalled very strongly to the audience that day that the consultation was pretty imminent. That was September. We have managed to have a consultation—the Smith commission—on new powers for Scotland. We have managed to negotiate all that in that time, yet we have not managed to even get out of the blocks on a consultation on deregulation of this section. It is pathetic, quite frankly.

The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, is excellent. It is simply belt and braces. There is no reason why the Government cannot accept it. But if for some reason the Minister is going to tell us that he cannot accept it and that there are sensible reasons for that, I would really like the House and the whole industry to hear, on the record, the timescale for this, because, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, there is a strong whiff of kicking this into the long grass.

The question of the general election is a complete red herring. This ought not to be a party-political matter. Losing hundreds of millions of pounds of income out of this country every single year instead of retaining that investment in the country and reinvesting it into the creative industries ought not to be an issue between any of the political parties. It should be a no-brainer. I do not understand why the general election should even be a feature in thinking about the timescale for this. I would really like the Minister to give us some very clear assurances about the Government’s intention and the timescale that they are going to adopt here.

Standards in Public Life

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Bew for putting together this report. I declare an interest as a producer at the BBC. As a journalist, I want to concentrate on what the report tells us about the public trust in the media and their ability to hold those in public office to account. In Chapter 5, the noble Lord, Lord Bew, reports on the decline in public confidence in the media to do this. It seems a small fall from 80% 10 years ago to 70% in 2012, but the decline reflects a public awareness of the ability of the media to investigate and check public figures.

Local media in particular have been devastated by the move of advertisers to alternative providers on the internet. My noble friend Lord Martin mentioned local authorities; across the country, the work of local authorities is being ignored by journalists and receives little public attention, as local newspapers close down or become freesheets. We see the same process in our national newspapers, as newsrooms are pared to the bone. Of course, there are still investigations, like the exposure by the Telegraph of the MPs’ expenses scandal, but increasingly news is filled with PR, as product placement and unchecked political spin become more prominent. The internet is an extraordinary source of news stories, as the new tools of social media make us all citizen journalists. But when there are so many voices out there and so many with hidden positions and private axes to grind, it is hard to know which voices to trust.

That brings me to the findings of Chapter 2 of the report, showing a surprising increase in trust in journalists across the board; I wonder whether that would still hold up, after the last year of phone-hacking revelations. As my noble friend Lady O’Neill of Bengarve pointed out in her TED talk, the generic question of whether we trust a particular group is flawed. We do not ask whether we trust fishmongers; we trust some fishmongers and not others. Likewise, we trust some politicians and not others, and some journalists and not others. There are some journalists and some media outlets, such as the BBC and ITN, which we do trust.

It has never been more important for us to have professional journalists whom we trust to sift through evidence, painstakingly check its reliability and present us with a report that we can believe. They need to be supported by editors, prepared to take on an investigation even when it might fail. I cite the sterling work of my former colleague, Michael Crick, on “Channel 4 News”, in getting to the bottom of the “Plebgate” scandal, as he tenaciously investigated the two competing versions of the truth offered by competing holders of public office. Eventually, he discovered the lies in the police story and the flaws in the Cabinet Office’s investigation of that story. Television, the internet and newspapers need to foster those journalists, so that audiences continue to have faith in their ability to hold those in public life to account. It is important to support the work of investigative journalists that is exercised with integrity, so that authorities can be held to account as part of a healthy democratic process.