Leveson Inquiry

Debate between Gerald Kaufman and Jim Dowd

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I was a staff journalist for 10 years. For nine of those years, I worked for the Daily Mirror, which at its zenith sold 5 million copies a day. I reported directly to the editorial director, Hugh Cudlipp, this country’s greatest ever popular journalist. Cudlipp was obsessive about factual accuracy and fair reporting. The excesses that led to the Leveson inquiry could never have happened in Cudlipp’s bailiwick. I was proud to be a journalist and remain a member of the National Union of Journalists to this day.

It would be difficult to retain that pride if I were a working journalist in the newspaper industry today. Respect for fact has almost vanished. When I was Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, a newspaper printed a big story about our Committee going to Los Angeles. I rang up the journalist who wrote the story and said, “It isn’t Los Angeles—it’s Scarborough.” The journalist replied, “Oh, it’s all the same thing.” Fair reporting: tell me another joke! The dictum in 1926 of C. P. Scott, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, is dead and buried. He said of the newspaper:

“Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”

Twenty years ago, the National Heritage Committee, of which I was Chairman, conducted an inquiry into privacy and media intrusion. What it said in its report, published in March 1993, might just as well have been written today:

“There cannot be a free society without a free press…a free society requires the freedom to say or print things that are inconvenient to those in authority…While continual antagonism between the press and persons in authority is unnecessary, critical tension between them is an essential ingredient of a democratic society and far preferable to collusion between the press and public figures…At the same time, in a democratic society there must be a right to privacy as well…it must not be ignored by those who claim that everything that everybody does is fair game, so long as it provides a saucy story to be published in the diary column of a broadsheet newspaper or across the front page of a tabloid…The Committee’s concern, in conducting this inquiry, has been mainly with the ordinary citizen who in the normal course of his or her life will never come into contact with the broadcast or written media except as a viewer, listener or reader; but who suddenly becomes of interest to the media, due often to circumstances beyond his or her control, such as becoming a crime victim or being related to the victim of a crime or terrorist act. Such people, as a result of injudicious, thoughtless or malicious reporting, can suffer additional distress at what is already a time of trauma and shock. Their family relationships, their jobs, their businesses and their careers can all be seriously damaged. The Committee does not believe that anyone has the right to inflict such harm on innocent persons.”

The Committee went on to say:

“A balance is needed between the right of free speech and the right to privacy. The Committee’s view is that at present that necessary balance does not exist, and in this Report it recommends action to achieve it. The Committee does not believe that this balance can or should be achieved by legislation which imprisons the press in a cage of legal restraint…The Committee would be deeply reluctant to see the creation of any system of legal restraints aimed solely and specifically at the press or the broadcast media. It believes that self-restraint or, as the Committee prefers to call it, voluntary restraint, is by far the better way.”

It recommended the enhancement of

“voluntary regulation by the press through the strengthening of the Press Commission (which the Committee recommends should succeed the Press Complaints Commission) and its Code, and expansion of the Commission’s scope”,

and the

“creation of a statutory Press Ombudsman, as a back-up to the Commission’s role.”

[Jim Dowd]

Do not my right hon. Friend’s experience and knowledge and the facts he has just regaled demonstrate how circular this argument has become and that we really ought to do something different, rather than simply repeat the inactivity and mistakes of the past?

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

My hon. Friend intervened just as I was about to go on to that very point. Twenty years ago, the National Heritage Committee made those recommendations. We analysed the disease and proposed a remedy. During the four remaining years of the then Conservative Government, nothing whatever was done. I am sorry to say that, during the 13 years of the Labour Government who followed, nothing at all was done either. We have known about this disease for very many years. The Leveson inquiry was founded because of new and horrific revelations about what the press did. What the press was doing 20 years ago should have been remedied then, but neither party did so. We face the same problems with the press that we faced in 1993, except that we now know far more about the malpractices of the press than we did then.

We can wait no longer. Even before our 1993 report, in 1989 David Mellor warned the press that they were drinking in the last-chance saloon. In the 23 years since then, the press have been on a prolonged pub crawl. Now this House must say, “Time gentlemen, please.”

I am as firmly opposed to statutory control of the press as I have ever been. That is the ethic of a free press in any country. We went to the United States and saw the way in which it could regulate the excesses of the press through privacy Acts protected by the fifth amendment. We could have had the same thing here. We could have had a privacy Act that applied not only to the press and that was protected by a public interest defence. It would have been valid, because when Clive Ponting was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for revelations about the sinking of the Belgrano, he pleaded the public interest and the jury acquitted him. We therefore had a functioning system for protection, but what happened then is that my good old friend, Douglas Hurd, brought a Bill before Parliament to abolish the public interest defence under the Official Secrets Act.

As I have said, I am as opposed to statutory control of the press as I have ever been, but the press cannot go on pretending to regulate itself while not doing so. Although the Leveson report’s recommendations are not perfect—the gaps in the way in which the body is to operate are clear to anybody who reads the report and will cause problems in implementation—they are incomparably better than what exists now and the alleged improvements proposed by the press.

As someone who would be exceptionally reluctant to vote in this House for statutory backing of a voluntary press regime, I say firmly to the press proprietors, “Either you establish the Leveson regulation regime on a voluntary basis fast, without dragging your feet, and ensure that all proprietors, including Richard Desmond, participate, or you will be responsible for statute entering into press regulation.” It is up to the press. There is a short time for them to make that decision. They will be responsible if statute enters into press regulation. It is important for them to bear that in mind in the short period that remains before decisions are made.

Sittings of the House

Debate between Gerald Kaufman and Jim Dowd

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I do not understand my hon. Friend’s approach to this. When I first came here we had a five-day week, and Government business alternated with private Members’ Bills on Fridays. I do not want to be arrogant or patronising, but I think I look after my constituency as well as any Member, and I can do it in the hours that we used to have, let alone the current ones. I can get to my constituency and do my jobs. I had eight engagements last weekend, and I managed to fulfil them without having family-friendly hours at the House of Commons.

I have a duty to be in my constituency, but I was elected to come here and represent my constituents. I am a Member of Parliament, not partly a Member of Parliament and partly for hanging around.

[Jim Dowd]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the House has spent the whole of this week discussing things that do not matter to our constituents at all?

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I agree totally. I have surgeries every weekend, and I have people coming to see me who have hardly any money to live on. I have just had letters from constituents in the same situation. It is my job to try to help them against a Government who do not care about them. The very idea that we should spend two days in this House of Commons talking utter and total rubbish about reforming the House of Lords, when people are anxious about their jobs, their NHS and their pensions is absolutely sickening. Now we are spending a whole day debating the House and hon. Members are absorbed by it, offering all kinds of different useful formulae to make this place more attractive to Members. When my father worked at Montague Burton’s tailoring factory in Leeds making suits and clothes, he was not given a chance to make his work more attractive for him. He was bloody lucky to have a job at all.

We are lucky to be here and to have this marvellous opportunity to speak for our constituents, and we are paid very well indeed. Millions of people cannot believe how much hon. Members are paid when they are paid so little—assuming they are not on benefits. It is therefore about time the House stopped this navel gazing. Our job is to hold the Government to account; it is not to say, “I want a tidier and more useful day. I want to be able to get home on a Thursday afternoon.” If hon. Members want that, I suggest they find another career.