Media Regulation

Debate between Chris Bryant and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

From the sublime to the corrupt. First, I draw the attention of hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I believe that a free press, a free Parliament and a free society are intrinsic to one another. Investigative journalism, campaigning journalism and, yes, even on occasion mischievous journalism are absolutely vital. They are the best medication for our political sanity, both in the Palace of Westminster and in society generally. Of course, the press and the media entertain, but they also shine a light into the darker caves of modern life. We should never be naive—if we shine a light into the darker caves, we sometimes get wrapped up in the darkness ourselves.

Many people have told me in the past two years that I have become a bit obsessed with News International and that surely this cannot possibly have gone on only at News International. I am absolutely sure that the problems that we have seen at The Sun and the News of the World may well have been replicated at the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror—all the national newspapers, in particular those trying to pursue what I call celebrity gossip, which was often where this kind of journalism was going on.

There are three distinctive things about News International’s contribution. First, there is hard evidence of what went on at News International. If there were to be hard evidence on any of the other newspapers, I hope the police would investigate with the full thoroughness with which they are now investigating News International. Secondly, there was a major cover-up at News International, which stretched right up to the very highest levels of the company—as we know, even up to James Murdoch. In the end, I suspect that that will prove to have been the biggest crime. Thirdly, News International is owned by News Corporation, which has the largest holding in BSkyB. That makes it quantifiably and qualitatively different from any of the other newspaper holdings in this country.

It is important to remember some of the background to the debate. Some 10 journalists at The Sun, and, as I understand it, 24 employees of the News of the World, have been arrested. They are all on police bail. Police and other public servants have also been arrested. The culture of mass corruption was intrinsic to The Sun’s modus operandi. One public employee received bribes of more than £80,000. One journalist at The Sun had more than £150,000 to disburse in illegal cash payments. So far as we have been told, they were not for grand projects of investigative journalism, but to pursue salacious gossip. A series of private investigators were used, probably not as private investigators, but as paid informants. For example, Philip Campbell Smith was sent to jail yesterday for obtaining private information for cash—another person caught up in this saga.

For a long time, News International maintained that there was one rogue reporter at the News of the World. We now know that that was a lie told on several occasions to Parliament. In an attempt to protect Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, News International said that the hacking started in 2004 and not before then. However, Charlotte Church’s phone was hacked in 2002, as were many others—another lie repeatedly told to Parliament.

News International also maintained that the contagion was just about one newspaper. It had to keep on maintaining that, because otherwise there was a danger that the whole thing would collapse around its ears. Now we know that it was not. The Sun on Monday, The Sun on Tuesday, The Sun on Wednesday, The Sun on Thursday, The Sun on Friday and The Sun on Saturday were in it up to their necks just as much as the News of the World, now renamed The Sun on Sunday.

There is then the illegal cover-up. We know for sure that senior figures at News International ordered the mass destruction of evidence—the clear, incontrovertible evidence of corrupt payments to police that News International garnered together, gave to lawyers and squirreled away, and revealed to the public only very recently. The authorities in the US should be investigating that, because I do not believe that a single member of the board of directors of News Corp took their responsibilities in this regard seriously enough to prevent the payment of corrupt officials.

Yesterday, it was revealed, though I have known for some time, that some of the people who were targeted by the News of the World were on the witness protection scheme—people absolutely vital to securing convictions against very dangerous people in society. They rely absolutely on the state to protect them, so that they can deliver justice for others. The only people who could have given those names and telephone numbers to the News of the World are the Metropolitan police, who are meant to be the there to defend us. That single fact—it is not helpful to know the names—is one of the most destructive of all.

We know from yesterday that Tom Crone, the News of the World’s head of legal affairs, wrote to the then News of the World editor Andy Coulson on 15 September 2006 outlining what Rebekah Wade, now Brooks, told him about the information relayed to her by the cops. That is like the FBI going to Don Corleone and telling him that it has a bit of information on what his family has been up to—an extraordinary thing for us to witness. I suspect that people are so punch drunk with all the different stories in the past two years that they almost fail recognise its significance. The e-mail states:

“They suggested that they were not widening the case to include other NoW people, but would do so if they got direct evidence, say NoW journos directly accessing the voicemails (this is what did for Clive).”

In other words, people right at the top of the News of the World knew in 2006 exactly what had gone on, and everything that they have said since has been a pack of lies. In total, I believe—my poor old researcher has had to count them—there have been 486 lies to Parliament between News International, the police and other organisations. The police effectively became a partly owned subsidiary of News International, with some people working at News International then going on to work for the Met and some people working at the Met then going on to work for News International.

We know also that the Met, in its strategy to deal with victims of Glenn Mulcaire’s activities, bizarrely got in contact with The Mail on Sunday to tell it that its journalists’ phones had been hacked—an irony there; clearly, there is no honour among thieves. However, the Met did not contact all the other victims, including the then Deputy Prime Minister. The Met was saying, right up until February last year, that his phone had not been hacked. We now know that Metropolitan police officers knew for certain that his phone had been hacked in 2007.

This is a problem for politicians, because every element of the regulatory regime failed. The directors of the company did not exercise their fiduciary responsibility, either in the UK or in the US. The Press Complaints Commission failed completely in its duty. The Metropolitan police were suborned. The courts provided justice only very slowly and at great expense and financial risk to those involved. Parliament failed to do its full duty. Let me start with the PCC.

The PCC, throughout all this, has proved to be a toothless gaggle of incompetent crones. At every turn, it has tried to defend the idea of self-regulation. Sir Christopher Meyer, whose period in charge of the PCC was probably one of the most dismal records of public service yet seen, has defended what went on during his time. He has even defended the PCC against the accusations relating to what the press did regarding Christopher Jefferies. Why the PCC did not intervene to say, “I’m sorry folks, it is quite clear what you are doing; you are compromising the course of justice. You must desist,” I cannot understand.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. As weak, appalling and hopeless as the PCC has been, does he acknowledge that the PCC only applies to those newspapers that voluntarily opt in? Other newspapers do not opt in, which puts a big question mark over the self-regulation process.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman, whom I count as a friend in these matters, is right. That issue needs to be addressed and is one reason why the answer that the PCC is coming up with at the moment—a contractual arrangement—will not do the trick, because by definition a contract can only be entered into by two willing volunteers. I do not see how we can proceed in that way.

Let us not forget that Baroness Buscombe, when she was PCC chair, was so fatally compromised by having been appointed by her cronies in the newspapers and by the editors of the major newspapers that she far too readily leapt to the defence of the News of the World and News International, condemned The Guardian and ended up having to pay damages to a Guardian journalist and a lawyer because of how she conducted herself. I do not think that she did due diligence. She is now blaming the News of the World, saying that it lied to her. I do not think that she ever asked the serious questions that needed to be asked.

The new PCC chairman regularly criticises politicians for being politicians. I merely say to him that he is a politician. He is in the legislature and was a Minister and a Member of Parliament; he takes the Conservative Whip. He was questioned at the Leveson inquiry:

“Do you think that Parliament might seek to use any form of legislation, however it was cast, as a way of controlling the press?”

He said:

“Yes, and they have told me so, many of them in both houses.”

His comments are untrue. I do not believe that Members of either House of Parliament want to control the press. That should never be our business. He is making that up and should withdraw the comment. I note that he has gone native, because he is already using unattributed comments, which is of course what most newspaper articles these days seem to consist of.

I say to the PCC chairman that I have no desire to control, muzzle, undermine or enfeeble the press. I want a robust, even scabrous, press to hold the powerful to account and to probe and bring the truth to light with courage and determination, within the bounds of the law and common decency and without hubris. It is hubris, in the end, that has done for News International.

We need a new body—not the PCC dressed up in a new fur coat—imbued with different principles and on a different standing. It is clear that it must be independent of the Government, but it must also be independent of the newspapers, because otherwise it will not command the respect of the British people. It must have statutory teeth provided to it in statute law, so that it can enforce its decisions. It must have an independent chairman, not a member of the legislature and certainly not a journalist or someone who takes a party political Whip. It must have the power to enforce redress and, if necessary, to fine. For instance, it should be able to say, “If you’ve published a story on the front page attacking somebody and it proves completely libellous, the response—the retraction—must be on the front page, if the victim of that libel wants.” The new body, whatever it is called, needs to have that power. Ofcom is not that bad a model for us to pursue.

The Minister said on “Question Time” last week that a new body still had to be self-regulating. He slipped that in rather quietly. It is not the view of the Prime Minister, who has made it clear that the body needs to be independent of the Government and the press. The Minister is obviously on the edge of his political career at the moment in respect of that disagreement. Self-regulation is long past the last chance saloon; it has had its last gin and tonic. It is time for a new body that is completely independent.

I have some suggestions on how to deal with the problem in other areas. For me, the biggest problem relates to ownership. At one point, News International had nearly 40% of the newspaper share and the largest part of the single biggest broadcaster in this country. BSkyB is often not referred to as a broadcaster these days, because in most people’s minds it is the platform on which broadcasts are provided. The Communications Act 2003 needs radical surgery in this regard and must be amended to catch up and include platforms, which are often the most anti-competitive element of the business, in the ownership structure.

At the moment, the only restriction on ownership is that if someone owns 20% of the newspaper share they are not allowed to have more than 20% of ITV. We need to be far more radical and say, first, that there is a cap on the amount of the whole of the media world that people can have and, secondly, if they are to own newspapers and broadcasters there has to be a lower cap on how much of that they can enjoy. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has asked Ofcom to consider this matter in relation to news only. We need to consider that market, but we also need to consider the whole. We need to reform the language on the fit and proper person, on which Ofcom has to adjudicate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Zac Goldsmith]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that no matter what regulation or self-regulation emerges from the Leveson process, as long as individuals and individual corporations control such a large percentage of the news, it is inevitable—unavoidable—that Parliament and the democratic process itself will always bend beneath those interests?

[Chris Bryant]

Absolutely spot on. I agree. In addition, it is inevitable that political parties, craven as we are, will seek to influence somebody with so much concentration of media ownership and the relationship will become too close. Tidying this up is for the good of us all. It is not just for those of us who take a particular view about News International; it is about any potential conglomeration in future.

In relation to the fit and proper person test, one danger is that because so many members of the BSkyB board have been there for way in excess of the eight years that is now considered to be the maximum time that people can be considered as an independent director, to all intents and purposes none of that board’s members is now an independent director. That is bad for BSkyB. I could go on at great length about why BSkyB operates on a monopolistic basis. It uses its application programming interface, its operating system and its hoovering up of rights, in a way, to crowd out any new entrants to the market. Broadcasting is always intrinsically prone to monopoly, because it costs a lot to make a programme and relatively little to give it to 1,000 people, rather than to 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000. That is why statutory intervention is needed.

We need reform in relation to seeking redress. I have already mentioned the powers that a new body might have, but we also need legal redress through the courts that is cheaper than the present arrangements. Let me give figures in relation to myself. I was awarded £30,000 in a settlement. My legal costs came to some £300,000 and are being paid by News International because of the settlement. That is the normal proportion in such situations. The maximum that has ever been awarded in a privacy case by the courts is £60,000, yet if people go to court in a privacy case their costs will be between £300,000 and £500,000 and they may have to meet the costs of the other side as well, which might be in excess of that.

For the sake of both newspapers and ordinary members of the public, we need a cheaper way of doing this. We should set up some form of small claims court, perhaps limiting awards to £20,000 or £25,000. Such a process would not be heavy on lawyers—people would not need legal representation—and cases would be fairly simply and straightforwardly adjudicated, but they would go through the court system, which has true independence built into it.

We need to change some elements of the law. First, in relation to interception, it is clear in the law that if people listen to a voicemail message after the person for whom it was intended they are still intercepting it. Some believe that this matter is not quite as clear as crystal. Perhaps we should clarify that position. That is not to resile from the existing state of the law, which is perfectly adequate, but for the sake of clarity.

Similarly, we should take away the public interest defence for blagging. If someone is obtaining private information about someone else by deception, there should be no public interest. The corollary is that, just as the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service always have to decide, first, whether they are likely to obtain a conviction and, secondly, whether it would be in the public interest to prosecute, so we should give a specific power to the DPP to decide not to prosecute in media cases.

There will be times when a journalist will rightly break the law because there is greater criminality to be detected. I suspect that the journalists in the United States of America who revealed Watergate broke the law on many occasions, but no one prosecuted—wisely, because they were revealing greater criminality and levels of corruption. Such an option should, manifestly, be available to the DPP and CPS.

Let me say something about the public interest test. The PCC has its own test:

“The public interest includes, but is not confined to…Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety…Protecting public health and safety…Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation”,

and, secondly:

“There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself.”

That test, frankly, is riddled with holes. To say that there is a public interest in freedom of expression itself is a circular argument—that, basically, it is better to reveal whatever it is even if there is no other public interest at all. That idea is mistaken; we should not look at the public interest but at the public good. Many people—many editors—confuse the public interest with what the public are interested in, but the public can be made to be interested in absolutely anything.

One of the ironies of the past 20 years is that the tabloid newspapers in particular, seeing the collapse of their circulation, have ended up pursuing titillating, salacious stories about who is sleeping with whom and all the rest of it, thinking that celebrity would maintain their circulation. They have tended to do that in a pejorative, condemnatory and judgmental way, but we cannot have prurience and judgmentalism together—they just do not fit. If we are going to be prurient, we have to give up on the judgmentalism, which in practice is what has happened.

Procedure Committee Reports

Debate between Chris Bryant and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Thursday 13th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I understand that this proposal does not require the Government or anyone tabling an amendment to provide an explanation, but merely allows them to do so.

[Chris Bryant]

The Government have to.

[Zac Goldsmith]

So it requires the Government to— I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention on my intervention.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Right, but he is not yet listed on any publicly available list of PPSs. [Interruption.] Well, I am sure that the country is grateful and that people will welcome the hon. Gentleman with acclaim and instantly start putting up red and white bunting in honour of his historical associations with Poland.

My point is that the payroll vote has increased. It has increased because of the dramatic increase in the number of PPSs, which partly happened under our rule but I think is happening again at the moment. The increased payroll vote is not just because of that, though. It is also because of unpaid Ministers. I was an unpaid Minister for a while and sympathise with the Deputy Leader of the House, who is one now. We now also have a particularly interesting concept, which is a Liberal Democrat Whip who is not even an unpaid Minister but an organiser of the Liberal Democrats, but who is sort of on the payroll as part of the ministerial team. Clearly, because their job has the word “Whip” in it, they are expected to vote with the Government at all times.

In addition, a vast extent of patronage is still available to Prime Ministers. They can make Members chair an ad hoc committee or ask them to be a delegate to some conference here or there. The whole business of patronage can be profoundly dangerous to how we do our business. I have already referred to how that applies to Opposition parties.

I will be warm towards the Government briefly and say that they have made some moves to remove one element of that patronage, which we had suggested before and for which I remember fighting when Robin Cook was Leader of the House. They have done that through the election of Select Committee Chairs. That has been entirely beneficial and I support it fully. I can see at least one Committee Chair in his place, and he is a splendid chap. He might not have become Chair of that Committee if it had been a matter of patronage, or if he had become Chair by virtue of patronage, he might not have felt so free to use his voice in these debates over the past few days. He has pointed in the direction of the new politics, but we can still go much further.

Of course we must consider the financial costs of ministerial office that can be saved, although I do not want to go too far down the populist route attached to that. Sometimes it is valuable to have Ministers who are properly supported and can do their job well. When I was in the Foreign Office it had only three Ministers in the House of Commons, which made it very difficult for foreign delegations to be met by a Minister from the Foreign Office. I do not know whether that did the United Kingdom any favours. I do not wish to adopt every populist measure that is thrown in front of us, or to kick it in the net, but I do want to ensure that the House has sufficient Members with Back-Bench independence to be able to hold the Executive to account.

Many of those who have made the most significant contributions to the House over the centuries have not only never sought ministerial office but actively declined it, from Andrew Marvell, who turned down office on five or six occasions, to Plimsoll, Bradlaugh and a series of others. They made dramatic changes to the lives of many ordinary people in this country, and they did not need ministerial office to do it. They were able to do it from the Back Benches.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I wish to speak very briefly in favour of the new clause. There is a long history in this House of Members challenging the ever-increasing power of the Executive. We heard recently from the Leader of the House, who is not in his place:

“The terms of the trade between Government and Parliament have shifted too far in the executive’s favour. That is not good for Parliament; but neither does it lead to better government.”

The Prime Minister also highlighted those concerns in February, saying:

“We’d want to reduce the power of the executive and increase the power of Parliament even if politics hadn’t fallen into disrepute.”

We also heard from the Deputy Prime Minister before the election, which he described as

“an opportunity to turn the page on decades of relentless centralisation within government.”

He argued for a dispersal of power away from the centre and a cut in the number of Ministers and Government Whips, saying:

“The rules of the game at Westminster are stacked in favour of the ruling party; parliament is rendered largely impotent to hold ministers to account.”

We have heard over the past few days and weeks very strong arguments for equalising the size of constituencies and reducing the number of MPs, but to do that without also reducing the number of Ministers would profoundly undermine the authority of Parliament. The proposal is not radical, or even a solution to the problem that so many hon. Members have identified. It would neither minimise the power of the Executive nor increase that of the legislature. It merely calls for a reduction in the size of Government in line with the planned cuts to the number of Members of Parliament. In effect, it will do no more than prevent trends from getting worse.

If the Government are truly committed to decentralisation, they can demonstrate that today by backing the new clause. I strongly urge them to do that.

[Mark Durkan]

I support the new clause, to which my name, along with those of so many others from different parties, is attached in the unpublished list.

When considering the new clause, the Committee should bear in mind not only the experiences of the parties that form the Government and occupy the Government Benches, but those of the rest of us who come to the Chamber and the Committees of the House and are confronted with the realities of the Government Whip system and Parliamentary Private Secretaries—part of the peculiar ecosystem here—who can represent their constituents but are at times bound not to represent their consciences. The idea that someone can represent their constituents but never their conscience is a peculiar political creation, from which the House should try to get away. It brings politics into some disrepute if we appear effectively to neuter ourselves. The straits into which PPSs are cast are unnecessary; they should be allowed more freedom than they generally exercise or are encouraged or permitted to exercise.

New clause 7 led me to that issue by way of making a general observation about the dominance of the Executive in the House. In recent years there have been attempts to reduce the Executive’s absolute control of the agenda and the timetable, and changes have been made from appointing Chairs of Select Committees to electing them. That is all to the good, but new clause 7 is the reality check. As the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) said, it is the genuine test of whether the new politics means anything.

I have no argument with reducing the number of Members of Parliament. I did not vote for 650 the other night; I am happy if there is a reduction. However, alongside that, we need a reduction in the size and voting dominance of the Executive in the Chamber.

Of course the answer to the problem of the over-supply of Ministers in this House is not to over-supply them in another place. In the previous Parliament not only many Ministers, but Cabinet Ministers—Secretaries of State—sat in another place. I joined others in criticising that lack of accountability. For me, the answer was not to bring Ministers from the Lords into this House—the last thing I wanted was to bring Peter Mandelson back anywhere, not least to the Dispatch Box, given our experiences of the man. On that famous occasion in Hartlepool, he said that he was not a quitter but a fighter. I always believed that his theme tune should have been the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer”—not for the lyrics of the verses but for the chorus, which is simply “Lie la lie” throughout.