Local Newspapers

Debate between Austin Mitchell and Debbie Abrahams

Thursday 19th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to stand here as the chair of the NUJ parliamentary group, but to crack a Ken Dodd joke, it is a pleasure to be standing anywhere at my age. I am delighted to support the secretary of the group, my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), in his efforts today. He has given us a litany of decline that is striking in its impact. It has hit journalists particularly hard. Journalists are central to this institution. We want to encourage good journalism and good local journalism and we want to raise standards. Instead, it is all being cut back. We have had a 10% fall in the paid sales of local newspapers in the past year and a 20% reduction in the number of local papers over the past 10 years. We have a situation where a fifth of local government units have no local paper to carry on a critique of the local authority and its activities. That is tragic when we consider that all politics is local politics. Everything is local, in fact. Our roots are local, and we need local discussion and active journalism to keep us on our toes and to provide proper effective scrutiny of local government.

There are cheering parts in the story. I was talking to the editor of the Grimsby Telegraph just this morning. He pointed out that it is a recession and everyone has had to cut back and look at new ways of working. I accept that, but a recession will lift. According to the Chancellor, it has lifted already and we are walking towards a glowing future, but that glowing future is based on promises that are mainly specious, as far as I can see. I do not attach all that much hope to the prospect of recovery and the turning around of the newspaper situation. We have a dynamic of cuts to increase dividends, and the executives are rewarded with high pay.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I have a number of excellent local media outlets in Oldham and Saddleworth. The Oldham Evening Chronicle in particular is keen to promote the importance of local media in helping accountability and democracy. What is my hon. Friend’s take on what the Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee proposed on public sector reporting and the BBC contributing by commissioning some of that support?

[Austin Mitchell]

I shall be coming to my comments on the BBC very shortly. I apologise for not responding immediately to my hon. Friend’s question. I have to have a translator, not to translate things from English into Yorkshire dialect, but because I am stone deaf.

I was going to argue that there are more cheering points. Grimsby and north-east Lincolnshire, because it is a real community—unlike most places, which are just slices of somewhere else—has a great interest in its history and politics and has been more supportive. The Grimsby Telegraph has had one of the lowest falls in circulation of any paper. It is making a profit from selling its own past in the form of “Bygones”, which sells well and helps to support the newspaper. The number of people who see the newspaper—the number of eyeballs that read it, whether in digital or print form—has actually increased over the past 20 years.

The hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) has an outstanding example of enterprise in his constituency in the form of the Cleethorpes Chronicle, a local success story that was started from scratch. That is cheering, and the hope of recovery as the economy recovers, very slowly, will keep us going, but we have a real problem that affects the quality of debate and politics and the sense of community in our societies: the decline of journalism—the decline in the number of journalists and their training—caused by newspapers’ financial problems.

I have envisaged the forthcoming election having to be covered by Members sending in reports of our own speeches—they will not be published as they were previously —and taking selfies. That is how David Montgomery’s vision of a digital future will end up: idiots writing rubbish for electronic forums and sending in photographs of themselves as the authors of this gibberish—[Laughter.] But not me.

Think what our communities would be like without trenchant and active local journalism to cover community and council events, court proceedings and local functions, as opposed to asking people to send in their own photographs, as is increasingly the case. Think of Bradford, where the Poulson scandal was exposed by Ray Fitzwalter at Bradford’s Telegraph and Argus, who later went on to work for Granada. Think of the various problems unearthed by that paper’s competitors in the northern region. Think of the ability to discover who is getting what out of council deals, and any scandals that emerge. All that would go.

National journalists’ training is based on the local papers—they are the training grounds for quality journalism. That is where journalists learn their craft. If the functions are to be shifted from the local paper to a hub somewhere else in the country, the all-round experience of producing a newspaper, producing and editing news and developing the argument is going to be gone, and gone from a diminished number of journalists. There was a well-beaten track from local journalism to Fleet street. It provided the training ground for the quality journalism in Fleet street, but that is going to be undercut and will disappear.

This morning, the editor of the Grimsby Telegraph argued with me that at least her journalists are now more multi-skilled. Well, they can take photographs, deal with websites and upload news—that is certainly true. That could not have been done by my generation of journalists. I was at the glamour end of the profession, not the literate, intelligent end. Nevertheless, although they are more multi-skilled, there are fewer of them and they have less ability to inquire into what is really going on behind the scenes.

All that is easy to describe, and I have just done so, but in a debate such as this we must ask: what is the alternative? What do we do about it? That is the singular deficiency of all the debates on this issue that I have heard, read or seen over the years. That is why we want, and the National Union of Journalists is demanding, a short, sharp, quick and strong inquiry to discover the roots of the problem and offer solutions. We cannot develop them here and now, although the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) has tried to offer some, but we must have an inquiry into the whole issue.

That brings me to the BBC. I do not and cannot support, and I do not think we should support, any proposal for top-slicing the BBC. Everyone wants to top-slice the BBC: ITV wants a bit, local media want a bit and local television stations want a bit. The BBC licence fee must be there to support quality production in this country. That is its purpose and that is what it should be devoted to.