Public Order Bill

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a series producer making a television series on Ukraine.

I was very moved by the speech of my noble friend Lady Boycott and the dedication to journalism that she has shown. I support both Amendment 117 and Amendment 127A. As a television journalist who has reported on protests across the country and the world, I have experienced protesters being suspicious of journalists for fear that their footage would be used by the police to identify and arrest people at a later date. As a result, I have been attacked by protesters and my cameramen have had their cameras grabbed and attempts made to take the tapes or cards.

In many of these cases, particularly in this country, the police have been there to protect us journalists and allow us to do our work reporting on demonstrations, so I am appalled and surprised to hear from my noble friend Lady Boycott that, in recent years, the police in this country have been arresting journalists for doing their job: filming protests. I thought that ECHR Article 10 on the right to freedom of speech would be incentive enough for the police to leave them alone, but clearly not.

This amendment therefore seems necessary to protect journalists going about their business, reporting on protests and the disruptions that they may cause. The problem is that the powers in Clause 2 on locking on seem to be so broadly drawn. It is one thing to arrest people for locking on, but to arrest someone for carrying an object

“with the intention that it may be used”

in connection with that offence seems to give the police power that cannot be right in a democracy. I fear that the words will give them leeway to stop a journalist who is carrying a camera to film the lock-on. Surely even the threat of this happening cannot be allowed. It will have a chilling effect on free speech.

I understand that the police want to be able to arrest protesters who are locking on and filming themselves while doing it, but the wording in this amendment, that

“A constable may not exercise any police power for the principal purpose of preventing … reporting”,


may be an important protection for camera people and journalists covering protests. It protects bona fide journalists.

Clause 11, allowing

“stop and search without suspicion”

in an area near a protest seems to stand against everything I thought Conservatives represented. I always thought it was a driving force behind Conservatism that they wanted to take the state off the backs of individuals. This clause does the opposite. When I talk to people about the possibility of their being stopped without suspicion just because they unwittingly wandered near to a protest, they are aghast. When this possibility is extended to journalists being stopped for going about their business, the threat against free speech posed by this Bill is compounded.

The Government are usually eager to protect journalists and journalism. I suggest to the Minister that, by accepting this amendment he will be striking an important blow for freedom of speech, which is so sorely missing in much of the Bill.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, I had no intention of speaking on this amendment, but I feel I must, because my late husband, Philip Bassett, was an industrial journalist who covered many strikes, most significantly, I suppose, given what we are discussing, the miners’ strike, which the whole team of industrial journalists on the Financial Times covered. If this legislation stands the way the Government have drafted it, people like my late husband, and indeed the team with whom he worked, which included the very eminent journalist, John Lloyd, would have been open to prosecution. As it is, for their coverage of the miners’ strike they won journalist of the year.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, really was excellent, and I hope it gets a wide hearing beyond this place and the numbers here.

When I have discussed this, I always hear the argument from people who are opposed to Just Stop Oil that the people we are talking about are not real journalists. There is something about the concentration on Charlotte Lynch from LBC that somehow says that the other people who were arrested on the same day did not really count, and I want to address that briefly.

There is no doubt that, when the protests that we are seeing at the moment are so performative, activists may well film what is going on, often because they want records of what they are doing to put out on social media. It is tempting, therefore, to treat them differently from journalists. However, I would urge against that and have argued against that. In the end, who decides who is the journalist and who is not? As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said, the whole act of bearing witness and truth has nothing to do with views on the protest. Whether you are enthusiastic about the protest or hostile about it is irrelevant to those of us who want to know what has happened on the protest. Sometimes, even activists with a film camera are valuable for truth. The argument that it will incite more protest is misguided, because it treats those who are viewing these films as though they are just automatons who will see them and immediately rush out and protest. You might well see the film intended to illicit your support and think what idiots they are. That is not the point. The truth is what we should be concerned with.

I just say to the Government that I am concerned in particular about the serious disruption prevention orders. I have said throughout the discussions on the Bill that there are so many unintended consequences. I have no doubt that the Government are not intending to use serious disruption prevention orders to stop journalism in its tracks. I think the orders are a terrible blight, by the way, and should be removed from the Bill, but that is not the point I am making. The consequences of them could well be that they thwart journalism. That is the point. I urge the Government to consider that they can support their own Bill and accept these amendments in good faith—I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, explained this well—because they are trying to ensure that what they do not intend to happen, which is that journalistic freedom is compromised, will not happen and that journalists will not get caught up in this. We know that they will. That is the reality. It is a danger and a threat that the Government should get rid of.