Anonymity (Arrested Persons) Bill

Debate between Anna Soubry and Iain Stewart

Friday 4th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes exactly the point that is most pertinent. It is the vilification. I have used the expression and I do not hesitate to use it again. What we saw in Bristol was, in effect, a feeding frenzy and vilification. Much of the coverage was not only completely irrelevant, but there was a homophobic tone to it which I found deeply offensive. The slurs on the man were out of order. All good and decent people in this country accept that. I include in that number fellow journalists.

I am grateful to all the people who have contacted me by letter or e-mail. Among them have been journalists, some of whom wanted to speak privately. Among good, sensible journalists there is a desire now for clarity. I will deal in due course with the Contempt of Court Act 1981. It as if those journalists want us, as Parliament, to help them in a way that they cannot do themselves. They cannot self-regulate because of the financial pressure that is being placed especially on our newspapers and on our broadcast media. I shall deal with that point later.

Enough is enough. We must do something about the matter and stop it. It is not just ordinary members of the public and journalists who want clarity and who want the present practice to end; it is also the police. I shall touch on that as I go through my speech. The man who was first arrested in Bristol was not the first, but I want him to be the last. There are other examples. Again, I am grateful for the e-mails that I have received and the information that I have been given from various sources to remind me of other people who have found themselves in a similar position.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

Another aspect is that people will maliciously accuse someone of a crime in the hope they will do damage to that person. The person may be entirely innocent, but the fact that they are arrested and their name possibly publicised could have a hugely detrimental effect on their lives and future career. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for introducing the Bill.

[Anna Soubry]

I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution. Of course I agree. There is a long-term effect. If we go on to the internet and put in a name, as I have done, or certain key words, we find that a host of people have been in a similar situation to that of the first man who was arrested in Bristol. It has been put to me by all sorts of people—I am grateful for the information and the comments—that once something like that has happened, because of the great power of the internet, it is there almost for ever more. If we google a name or an incident, the information that comes up might go back 10 or 20 years.

The slur on somebody will remain for a very long time, even though they have never been charged, even though they have been exonerated and even though it has been accepted that there was no substance to the allegation. That means that people who put themselves into public life—television personalities come to mind, as do soccer players, even councillors, and those who have chosen a certain profession or job, such as teachers or clergymen—are highly susceptible to false allegations. There are many examples of people who have had an allegation made against them and who have then found that their name and address, the charge and more have been published both locally and nationally.

We have to ask ourselves how all this came about. There is a growing acceptance that a cult of personality exists. The rise of the celebrity has gone into territory that none of us find acceptable any more. Somebody who might have been on television suddenly finds themselves plastered all over every newspaper and magazine. Sometimes their agent or others want that, in order to advance their career. The downside is that they then become almost a free hit—fair game—for anything salacious about them to be published at any time, particularly if they have the misfortune to be arrested for something.

As a society we increasingly have a desire to pick over the intimate and salacious details of too many people. Perhaps we have an unhealthy interest in other people’s private sex lives. We also have the declining fortunes of newspapers. Why do newspapers and magazines find themselves in a position whereby they have to print almost anything in order to keep up their circulation? One reason is the 24-hour rolling news with which all hon. Members will be familiar. The simple truth is that it is sometimes a struggle to fill 24-hour rolling news, and in the endless rolling round of that news, stories are repeated, so something new, something fresh— breaking news—is needed, and everything becomes highly sensationalised and great drama is created.

A recent example was when the congresswoman was shot in that unfortunate incident in Arizona and the BBC 24-hour news service reported that she had been killed. It was wrong on that, but it was working off two reports that it claimed to have verified. I watched with care some of the following analysis and, rightly, criticism of the coverage of the story and how that happened. The BBC said that it had checked it out and done everything that it should have done in following the various procedures. But, with respect, underlying that was a real desire to have a new headline, to break some news, to put something sensational into it, to increase its ratings and keep up with the opposition given the proliferation of channels that we have seen. In many respects it can be said that the old solid principles that I was taught when I trained as a journalist have been eroded in the endless search for higher ratings and greater circulation. I do not think that 24-hour rolling news has assisted us in making our press one of the finest in the world.

We have also seen a decline in advertising. All hon. Members in the Chamber will know their local newspaper, if they still have one. Many of them are suffering quite dramatically from declining sales, for which, as I say, there are many reasons. I have a great deal of sympathy for local and regional papers in these difficult times, but I urge them to be true to the good solid principles of journalism, including not to sensationalise.