Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Eric Joyce Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will be very brief and make just one or two points. I can either speak very quickly or stick to the quality.

I want to speak about social media and the issues that have arisen in the past couple of days. Yesterday, the Attorney-General general said in answer to a question from my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Justice that he would create a Committee. I presume that that would be a Committee of both Houses involving cross-party membership, but I am not yet sure how it is going to be put together. So far, the debate has had two primary variables at its heart. On the one hand, there has been the legal side, with much discussion among the usual lawyers. In fact, as far as I can see, there are only three or four lawyers in England, because they keep appearing on Channel 4 News, Newsnight and every other news programme. I will not name them, because that is not in vogue at the moment. I do not dispute that the law is a very important dimension. The other dimension is privacy, which people feel variously about. I know that some of my right hon. and hon. Friends are concerned about issues relating to a certain newspaper empire. To be honest, I have lesser, or different, concerns.

Both aspects are important, but what has not been aired is the issue of technology. At the moment, the court and legal system—and, indeed, Parliament—is finding itself in a tricky position over privacy, injunctions and so forth because of the way technology is racing ahead through social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook and many other platforms; I will not run through an advertisement for all the rivals. The fact is that they exist and that there is the potential for information to circulate with astonishing speed. As the Attorney-General and my right hon. Friend the shadow Justice Secretary said yesterday, it would be wrong for us in this place to say, “That’s the law, it can’t be enforced, so we just ignore it.”

Lord Neuberger’s report, which seemed a pretty reasonable effort, revealed some of the difficulties. Post that report, in the past couple of days, the Lord Chief Justice has tried to create some balance and reflected on the fact that some of the stuff that is said on the social media is taken pretty lightly. People gossip on the high street and at work, and that can sometimes have implications. Although I am not a lawyer, I understand that such gossip can have a legal status so that someone who took part could technically be taken to the civil courts for slander or, if they wrote it down, for libel. Social media merely—I say “merely”, but I know that there are significant implications—transfer that to the internet. One thing that the Lord Chief Justice said—I like to call him Judge Judge, because it is a great name, like the one in “Catch-22”—was that it is a simple fact that people do not give as much weight to information that they see on Twitter or wherever, because often it is wrong. It is patently obvious from recent cases in the media that some of the names that have come out have been wrong.

We might be tempted to say that one just has to accept that this is gossip on the internet, that that is life, and that there is nothing that the law can do about it. However, as the Attorney-General said yesterday, we cannot do that. There are many instances in which we could say that one should just accept that because we cannot implement a particular law in every case, it is not worth having. However, that is not a general position that we accept. We know that we cannot prosecute everyone who ever commits a crime. Nevertheless, it is important that the principle is there.

The argument about emerging technologies and what will come next is terribly important. I sat on the Standing Committee that considered the Communications Act 2003, which was the original Ofcom legislation. More recently, I took part in the debate in the House on the Digital Economy Act 2010. It is clear that it is difficult to legislate for new and emerging technologies, because one does not have the foggiest idea what will come next. Twitter is only two or three years old. We have no idea what there will be two or three years down the line. It is difficult to legislate for, or to take into account in the current debate, what will happen two or three years down the line. I want to emphasise that point, I hope it will be taken up by the Joint Committee when it comes into being and considers its position.

When I and other people say that we have to reflect on what is possible, we are not negating the actuality that there have to be laws under which people can be pursued if there is a particularly bad breach of an injunction, or whatever. The fact is that it is enormously difficult to close the stable door once the horse has bolted. That is not a statement of hopelessness. We have to think not just about Twitter, although that is what most of the debate has been about, but about the emerging technologies just down the road—there are many and I could bang on about them at great length, but I will not because my time is almost up—and they will inevitably impact on the deliberations of the Joint Committee and on the further discussions that will no doubt take place in this House.