Leveson Inquiry

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Alun Cairns

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

It gives me great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) and I commend him for his wise and courageous speech. I suspect that his views, like mine, have been influenced by the evidence he heard as a member of the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions.

I shall confine my remarks to politics—it might sound like a novel idea, but we are politicians and there is a political context to this question—not least because the merits of Lord Leveson’s report have been well expressed by other hon. Members on both sides of the House. In that context, I was pleased to hear the Secretary of State say in response to a question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) that the Government would legislate if she and the Government felt that the press were dragging their feet and not implementing Leveson. That poses the question of whether that would include the underpinning—that is, whether she would be satisfied if the press were implementing Leveson even without the underpinning—and it might be helpful if the Minister who responds could clarify that as well as the time frame the Government are imagining. The hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth mentioned six weeks and that sounds to me like a very sensible time frame, but it would be helpful for all Members if the Government could provide some clarification about the speed with which they expect the press to move and, failing that, when they would expect to introduce legislation.

I think it is assumed that as a politician I carry with me a fair degree of cynicism, but I admit to having felt surprised and disappointed by the Prime Minister’s response last Thursday to Lord Justice Leveson’s report when the ink was hardly dry on it. I was one of many Members who applauded the Prime Minister when he established the Leveson inquiry. I felt reassured by him when he looked into the eyes of the victims and promised to implement it if it was not bonkers. Four days on from publication of the report, I have not heard any explanation from the Prime Minister or the Secretary of State of what it is about the report that they think is bonkers. That can only lead me to question why the Prime Minister set up the inquiry in the first place, only to reject its central recommendation.

[Alun Cairns]

That criticism surely also applies to the Leader of the Opposition, who after just three or four hours accepted the almost 2,000-page document in its entirety. Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that that was somewhat political?

[Mr Bradshaw]

No, what my right hon. Friend accepted was the central tenet of Lord Leveson’s recommendations, which was that it was essential that whatever happened had statutory underpinning.

There are only two possible explanations for the Prime Minister’s cursory dismissal of Lord Leveson’s recommendations, having set up that inquiry. One is that he never thought that some sort of statutory underpinning would form part of the learned judge’s recommendations. If that was the case, may I suggest that the Prime Minister was naive, ill-informed or both? It was perfectly clear to anybody following the evidence of the inquiry, particularly that of the victims and expert witnesses, and from the questions that Lord Leveson posed to the industry, that some sort of statutory underwriting, underpinning or oversight—whatever one wants to call it—of a new independent regulatory body was the very likely outcome.

The only other explanation and, I am afraid, in my view the more probable one is that the Prime Minister has been persuaded by representatives of the press—in another example of the very problem that the Leveson report also addresses—that there should be no statutory underpinning, and that the Prime Minister has taken the view that he would rather put up with a few short-lived howls of dismay from the victims and others than with the daily and unforgiving hostility of the newspapers from now until polling day. If that is the case, it is very depressing and exactly what happened after all the previous inquiries into press standards and regulation.

The press have appealed time and again for one more chance, for more time to put their own house in order. They have strung out the process. Most of the politicians and most of the public have lost interest. If this is the calculation made by the Prime Minister and Lord Leveson’s opponents in the press, I believe they are profoundly wrong. First, this time the victims are not going to go away. They are not toe-sucking Ministers, but completely ordinary members of the public—yes, and some celebrities too—whose lives have been trashed. They are numerous, organised and angry, and they enjoy widespread public support.

Secondly, whatever the press do now—we all know that for the next year or so they will behave reasonably well, exactly as they have done after previous inquiries, only to revert sooner or later to their bad old ways—the issue of press standards and regulation is not going to fade from the public eye, because from next year and probably right up until the general election, some of those allegedly responsible for the most egregious abuse will be on criminal trial. Day in and day out we will be reminded by the courts of the behaviour that caused the Prime Minister to establish the inquiry in the first place, and we will be reminded of the repeated failure of the political class to do anything about it. Do the Prime Minister and the Government really want to find themselves in a position where they stand accused by the victims and others of having failed to implement the recommendations of the very inquiry they set up to address these problems?

The Prime Minister may feel that he has had a few supportive headlines and columns in the newspapers since Thursday, but the context may be very different in a year or so. He may think he has been clever now, but he may not look so clever in a year or so. I hope the Secretary of State can persuade the Prime Minister and her sceptical colleagues in the Government to rejoin the consensus. She said that she wanted political consensus, but does she not realise that it was the Prime Minister’s response to Leveson on Thursday that broke the political consensus in the House in support of Leveson’s recommendation of statutory underpinning? I hope she will use her powers of persuasion to bring the Prime Minister back into that political consensus so that we can implement Leveson, and soon.