Exiting the European Union (Sanctions)

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. One of the general problems has been that we were so pleased to see some reform in the country that we were not tough enough and sharp enough about what was going on.

On Venezuela, too, we agree that it is right to roll over the EU sanctions. The record of the Maduro Government since the collapse of the oil price has been one of significant and serious human rights abuses. As the Minister said, the fact that 3.6 million people have left the country and that we have starvation and medicine shortages is extremely serious. It is shocking to see that food aid has been blocked at the Colombian border. The first speech that I made when I was given this portfolio was in September 2017, and I condemned then the closing down of the legitimate National Assembly and the setting up of the fake constitutional Assembly. The elections in May 2018 were not free or fair. Political opponents have been jailed. There are reports that people who are in prison are being tortured. The National Assembly leader, Juan Guaidó, has been stripped of political immunity. We believe that 40 people have been killed in protests since the beginning of this year. All of that is unacceptable and reasonable justification for the continuation of sanctions.

[Chris Bryant]

I agree with everything that my hon. Friend just said. Is there not a further reason why this is not just a matter of Venezuela putting its own house in order? The truth is that the Colombian peace process will manage to move forward only if it does not have 1.5 million or 2 million people crossing the border and destabilising a process on which it was already difficult to get traction.

[Helen Goodman]

That is true as well. I was going to go on to say what, more positively, we would like to see. We would like to see free elections. We support the position of the Lima group of neighbouring countries, and we want to see dialogue between the parties who are in conflict in the country.

Colombia Peace Process

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The issue of land ownership, which I will come to, is a really important part of trying to resolve the long-term issues from the conflict, because where the space is theoretically owned by nobody, it is almost certain that somebody, usually with criminal or paramilitary intent, or both, will step in to fill the vacuum.

Let me give just some characteristics of the conflict. Obviously, there has been the murder of human rights defenders and trade union activists, which has already been referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), and I have referred to the stand-off with Venezuela. The corruption of judges has meant that it has been very difficult to secure convictions of those who have been involved in all this. I am enormously grateful to the British Government for all the work that they have done to try to restore, or help to restore, the criminal justice system in Colombia to a more secure form of justice. I very much hope that will continue. If more money needs to be put into it, it should be. I note that the European Union is putting in €35 million for a fund to help Venezuelans acting as refugees in Colombia. It would be good to know whether the UK will be contributing anything towards that. I hope that the Minister will be able to answer that question later.

The single biggest element of the conflict, which makes it so different from others, is the massive consolidation of land ownership that has occurred. It is not just that, as a result of the colonial past, lots of people have big farms—far from it. Some 1% of the largest farms have 81% of the land, and the 0.1% of farms that are over 2,000 hectares have 60% of the land. That is a phenomenal consolidation. It is considerably worse now than it was even in the 1960s. In 1960, 29% of farms were over 500 hectares; in 2002, 46% were over 500 hectares; and in 2017, 66% of farms were over 500 hectares. One factor behind that extraordinary consolidation is that British-funded agribusinesses want to plant vast acres of oil palms, which often leads to significant deforestation and the taking of lands that had previously been used by campesino and indigenous peoples.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am very impressed by my hon. Friend’s speech. Does he know which British corporations are doing this? It would be extremely helpful to the House if he could name them.

[Chris Bryant]

I might need a bit more notice to answer that question, if that is all right. There is a point here for all of us, whether we run a big industry or not. If we want to rely on palm oil, and if there is an enormous demand for palm oil in British supermarkets, the temptation will be to cover all of Colombia with oil palms. It is good that some supermarkets have said they will not use palm oil products at all. I hope we move further down that route.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North and I flew over large chunks of Colombia. At one point we were in a heavy thunderstorm, which was quite frightening—the aeroplane, which was only a six-seater, was wobbling all over the place. I was quite nervous, until I looked at the pilot, who was on WhatsApp on his phone throughout the whole flight, which sort of reassured me. The most extraordinary thing, having flown over Colombia and seen all the acres devoted to palm oil, was to learn that Colombia can no longer feed itself, yet it has some of the richest agricultural lands in South America. We think that we know what an avocado is, but there are 50 different types of avocado in Colombia. In the past, people grew to eat, but increasingly they grow to provide for an external market. I understand why Colombia wants to earn a living in the world, but it is crazy that such a country is unable to feed itself. Of the 43 million hectares devoted to agriculture in Colombia, 34.4 million are devoted to cows and only 8.6 million to crops. That means that 1 million campesino families have less land to live on than a single cow.

I pay tribute to a succession of wonderful Colombian ambassadors to the United Kingdom, who have sometimes had to pick their way through very difficult subjects. In my experience, they have all been impeccable. I am not sure whether Néstor is leaving soon, but if he is I hope that anybody here who knows him will send him our best regards.

If I could say one thing to the Colombian Government, it would be that we in the United Kingdom want to do everything we can to help in the process of land reform, because that is the essential element of the peace accord. It is good that everyone sits around the table and all the rest of it, but clause 1 of the peace accord refers to land reform. In La Primavera and El Porvenir we met a variety of different communities, including the Sikuani indigenous people, and we met campesino families in Cajamarca. Their biggest concern is that they do not have land to live on. If they do not get secure title, they will simply move in ever greater numbers into the big cities, which will exacerbate all the problems of poverty.

We visited the Sikuani, who were wonderful. I think they trained themselves in Spanish to be able to talk to us better, as it was not their first language. They were thrown off the lands they used to occupy by the FARC and then by other paramilitaries. They have tried to get the land back, but they need legal title to feel secure on that land. Only a few months ago, some people—it is difficult to know exactly who they were—accompanied by Colombian police officers, who were photographed, came to try to throw them off their lands again and destroyed some of their sacred grounds.

Clearly, across Colombia, but particularly in the more remote areas, there is a deliberate intention, sometimes sponsored by members of the police and the armed forces, to try to intimidate campesino and indigenous people off their lands. That can be changed only through the much faster acceleration of the process of restitution of land, the declaration of title and the granting of baldios. The word “baldio” in Spanish usually means wasteland, but it also refers to the large amount of land in Colombia that does not have proper legal title, which the Government theoretically own. The peace process was meant to deliver to every campesino family enough baldio land to live off, and that is the most secure path towards peace. That has been limited to certain areas of Colombia, and I hope the Colombian Government will consider looking at other areas as well in the next phase of the peace process. They have tried to put a time limit on the process, which I think is a mistake. The process is still remarkably slow, and many indigenous and campesino people simply do not have access to their land.

There has been a peace accord with the FARC, as I mentioned. We met some members of the FARC, who have handed in their guns and turned to peace. They are desperate to ensure that the peace process is fulfilled. It was a difficult process to arrive at. One element of the peace process is incomplete: a deal with the ELN. The Spanish President was trying to encourage the new Government of President Iván Duque to sit around the table with the ELN. The ELN is not as co-ordinated, structured or—some might say—principled as the FARC. There is not a single organisational structure in the ELN. Thus far, it has not been part of the peace accord. I note that the day by which Duque said that the ELN had to surrender its last 17 hostages has now passed. I do not know whether anything has happened today, but yesterday Colombian Government Ministers were saying that they will not sit down at the table until those hostages have been surrendered, and the ELN was saying that it cannot surrender those hostages, because of Government military activity in the areas where they are.

We all know from our experience in Northern Ireland that politicians sometimes have to say one thing in public and scurry away into the background to do something completely different. Mrs Thatcher—or the British Government at the time—was having conversations with terrorist organisations, just as John Major did long before it was publicly known. In the same way, a former Colombian ambassador to this country, Mauricio Rodríguez, was deployed by President Santos to have initially secret conversations with the ELN. I hope that the same is happening at the moment. Some of the attacks on human rights defenders and others in Chocó and other parts of the country are undoubtedly being committed by dissident groups alongside the ELN. If there is to be peace, in the end, everybody will have to sit round the table.

On the issue of human rights defenders, we had a productive meeting, as the hon. Member for Glasgow North will agree, with the people from the National Protection Unit. They genuinely want to protect everybody who comes under threat and intimidation, but I still do not think that they have the resources to do the job properly. We heard about one woman who had full protection measures up to the point she got out of the car and walked half a mile down the drive to her house, which was obviously the most dangerous place. Those issues are really important. Women, in particular, are being attacked and need much greater protection.

Colombia is a great country of phenomenal riches. In Cajamarca, we saw La Colosa, which is a mountain that a British-registered company wants to turn into a gold mine. The people of Cajamarca, some 18,000 of them, organised a plebiscite—a public consultation, as they call it—under state provision, and more than 93% of people came out against the mine. As a representative of a former mining constituency, I am not opposed to all extractive industries—I am quite in favour of mining—but for people to get a chunk of gold out of the place they are talking about, they would have to take half the mountain away. It is right at the top of a series of valleys, and two wetlands come together at the top, so all the water for large numbers of communities down the river could be damaged and become impossible to drink. I am not an expert, but it seemed to the hon. Member for Glasgow North and me that whoever came up with the idea of taking away a mountain and the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of Colombians did not have any real idea of how to go about business.

I very much hope that we have an opportunity to meet the company, AngloGold Ashanti, and say that that mine is not going to happen. The people of Cajamarca have a right to have their consultation honoured. I am not a fan of referendums—they can go terribly wrong—but when the people have spoken with a definitive result of 93%, that has to be honoured.

Over the last 200 years, our country has been closely related to Colombia, and we want to continue to do an enormous amount of trade in the future. For many politicians in this country, it would be a joy to see the proper fulfilment of the whole peace accord in Colombia. There is a famous book, “Open Veins of Latin America”, and this feels like one of the last remaining open veins in Latin America. It would be good to sew up that wound.

Diplomatic Service and Resources

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman]

I will come to the soft power aspects and the institutions that contribute to that in a moment. First, I want to look at the numbers and the reductions that the Foreign Office budget has had since 2010 and is projected to have.

[Chris Bryant]

I slightly disagree with the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames). I do not know whether my hon. Friend noticed, but Emmanuel Macron went to India the other day and said, notwithstanding our historic relationship with India, as part of the former empire and all the rest of it, that he intends France to be India’s prime access point to the European Union in the future. We have to be very careful about not relying on the past.

[Helen Goodman]

If we leave the European Union, we obviously cannot be the prime access point to the European Union. That stands to reason.

I will come to the soft power assets in a moment, but I just want to say something about the numbers. The Foreign Office budget reduction is slightly unclear. Is it 16%, 30% or 40% over the 10-year period? Whatever it is, it is quite a significant amount of resource. I realise that some of the Foreign Office budget has gone into the Department for International Trade and some into the Department for Exiting the European Union, but the smallest cut that one can glean from looking at the numbers is about 16%, which is none the less extremely large. It seems to me that it is difficult for the Government to project the global Britain role while at the same time reducing resources in the Foreign Office.

Turning to our soft power assets, we are all very proud of the World Service and pleased with the British Council, and we all think that the Commonwealth is a fantastic network. There is another soft power asset, which I think we should look at alongside those assets. I am talking about our universities and higher education. We have soft power assets in this country as well as overseas.

Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Monday 20th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is my very great pleasure, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Opposition, to support the Measure to enable the Church of England to consecrate women as bishops. I congratulate all those who have brought us to this place: the Synod, which voted for the change; Archbishop Justin and his staff, who reinvigorated the process; the women in the Church who have ministered and campaigned for change; and those who did not wish to see women consecrated but who have accepted the overriding need for reconciliation.

To some of us, this decision seemed a long time coming. When we are waiting for something and uncertain of the outcome, it feels like an eternity, but when it is done, it feels as though it happened in the twinkling of an eye. I am not sure whether the story began in 1976 when the Movement for the Ordination of Women was set up, or in the 1550s with the Elizabethan settlement for the Church of England. Perhaps it began with those women we read about in the New Testament: Phoebe, the deacon; Priscilla, the teacher; and Lydia, whose house became a home for the Church. Perhaps it began with the Genesis story, which is open to different interpretations.

My mother once stood up in church to give the address, only to be blessed by a priest who prayed to God that women be forgiven, as sin was brought into the world by a woman. I am never quite sure where prejudice ends and firm conviction begins. I prefer to focus on these words:

“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them…God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good.”

The right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), who has fulfilled his role as Second Church Estates Commissioner excellently and whom we will all miss when he leaves the House in May, has laid out with admirable clarity the contents of the Measure. I will not repeat all that he has said, although I do have some questions. Obviously, it is not for Parliament or politicians, or even the Government, to lay down the theological grounding of any faith or religion in this country. We understand that. However, as the established Church, the Church of England has certain privileges and certain responsibilities. Uniquely, it ministers throughout the country; uniquely, it is guaranteed places in this Parliament. In that context, the Opposition believe that it is right for the canons of the Church to reflect the views and values of the vast majority of members of the Church and of wider society in upholding gender equality. I am delighted that the Synod made the decision that it made in July. I believe that by doing so it avoided what might have been a substantial crunch in the next Parliament.

Let me now deal with the details of the Measure. Clause 2 makes it clear that bishops are not public office holders under the Equality Act 2010. It is a necessary provision, enabling the Church to provide for those who, as a result of theological conviction, do not wish to receive episcopal oversight from a woman.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady says that the clause is necessary, but I do not think that it is necessary at all. It is the one element of the Measure that I think is unfortunate: I think it unfortunate that, at a time when we are advancing equality, we have to amend the Equality Act to carve out a chunk of the Church of England.

[Helen Goodman]

I am, of course, sympathetic to my hon. Friend’s perspective on this issue, but I think that had the clause not been included, it is extremely unlikely that we would be in this place today. I think it extremely unlikely that the Synod would have agreed to the package.

Future of the BBC

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Monday 21st October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

The BBC is an important national institution and I congratulate the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) on securing this debate which has, as other hon. Members have said, come at a timely moment. Obviously, the BBC has special funding arrangements. The licence fee is unavoidable for anybody who wants to watch television. As a consequence, or perhaps in recognition of its very high status, 96% of the public use the BBC in an average week.

However, as other hon. Members have said, a series of scandals have rocked the BBC in the past few years. The most serious was clearly the Savile scandal. It looks now as if perhaps 500 people were victims of this man, and the initial horrors have been followed by wrong editorial decisions. Then there were serious financial problems—£100 million squandered on the digital initiative, and massive executive pay-offs. It was not just the sums of money, but the mismanagement of the agreement to these pay-offs that was criticised. Those massive pay-offs were partly caused by the fact that there was excessive pay at the top of the management of the organisation.

We on the Labour Benches believe that the BBC must get a grip. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) has said that

“it is odd that though the BBC rightly sees itself as different from commercial broadcasters—in terms of how it is regulated and treated in terms of market share . . . they argue that it’s the market pure and simple which should dictate their pay.”

She went on to say that

“they cannot have it both ways.”

The consensus across the House today is that the BBC cannot have it both ways. Hon. Members also referred to the editorial errors in the case of the “Newsnight” descriptions of Lord McAlpine, and the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) spoke about North Korea. I thought she was going to talk about the questionable practices in the documentary about North Korea, which also raised concerns among many people.

All those episodes seem to me to show that the BBC’s management needs to be improved. They also show that its governance has failed, because the Trust did not fulfil its role of defending the licence fee payer. In this situation, we are presented with the question, “What is to be done?” Some hon. Members believe that the model has failed and the licence fee should be abandoned. The Secretary of State has said that she believes that the National Audit Office should have further powers and rights to go through the BBC’s accounts. I hope that she will say a little more about that when she responds to the debate. In particular, I hope that she will explain how she would achieve that while avoiding either the reality or the perception that politicians are interfering with the BBC.

The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), made it clear that he believes that the BBC should be considerably smaller and that there is a question mark over whether it can continue to be financed through the licence fee. My right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Dame Tessa Jowell) proposed a new model for a mutual BBC, whereas my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and the hon. Members for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech) and for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) all seemed far more supportive of the status quo and the current model—

[Chris Bryant]

No.

[Helen Goodman]

I will give way, if my hon. Friend would like to intervene.

[Chris Bryant]

I am sorry, but I am not all that supportive of the current model. I think that the role of the chairman of the Trust and that of the director-general have to be very clearly delineated and separated, which I do not think they are at present.

[Helen Goodman]

I beg my hon. Friend’s pardon, although I must say that is a rather detailed point, compared with the radical proposals coming from the Government side of the House.

When we consider the future of the BBC, it is interesting to look at what the director-general said last week in a major speech. He said that he wanted to see public service at the heart of the BBC and promised leaner management and further cuts of £100 million. It is true that some of the recent mistakes have been phenomenally costly, so a “right first time” culture would be incredibly helpful. He spoke at length about the possibilities for the BBC of technical innovations, including improvements to iPlayer, a BBC store and iPlayer radio.

The director-general also spoke about the significant contribution the BBC not only makes now, but can make in future, to the creative industries generally in this country. I think that is something we would all applaud. The fact that we put a 25% quota on the BBC to commission externally has turned out to be an extremely useful way of promoting and supporting other creative industries, and indeed exports, in this country. His proposals for a partnership with the British Library and a digital space with other institutions were extremely positive, as were his proposals for increasing the number of apprenticeships and the amount of education for young people in new technology. He mentioned something that I think we have all agreed with over the course of today’s debate: the importance of seeing more investigative news reporting. He also wants to strengthen the BBC’s global news presence, which will be facilitated through the incorporation of the World Service.

Although the director-general made a number of important statements about the BBC’s content and the possibilities for technology, he said less about the management. That has been a major concern in this debate and I think that it would be helpful if the BBC paid significantly more attention to it. In addition to the issue of top pay, we will obviously look at governance in the process of royal charter renewal. Rather than leaping to some new model, I think that it would be more helpful to have a proper royal charter process that includes consulting the public. As my right hon. Friend said, the fact that the governance arrangements did not work in the Savile episode, for example, does not prove that the model is broken; it demonstrates that the individuals did not fulfil their roles as well as they could have done. I urge caution before we tear up the current model and move into a whole new world—I am pleased to see the Secretary of State nodding in agreement.

It is also worth considering the future of the BBC in relation to the other large media organisations and the importance of maintaining media plurality in this country. The position of Her Majesty’s Opposition is that we should of course include the BBC in the overall understanding of the shares when measuring media markets, but that does not mean that we should apply the same remedies to the BBC as to other media organisations, and that is because of the different governance arrangements. I am not saying that those arrangements or transparency—the point made by the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan—cannot be improved, because I am sure that they can, but I think that all Members of the House must acknowledge that the BBC has a very different place from the private commercial operators.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Monday 9th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I have been campaigning for a very long time to get rid of the entirely mendacious private Member’s Bill process and to replace it with a system that works better, but I do think this Bill would be better advanced on a cross-party basis without Government-Opposition divide and on the basis of practical experience of how the industry actually works. There is a danger that we will introduce bad legislation here, and we may well—irony of ironies—have to resort to the House of Lords to try to improve it because the Government nearly always have a majority on any legislation in this House.

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is making his case rumbustiously, but I just wonder whether I could bring him back to the problems of definition and the limitations of this Bill by giving a couple of examples. I spent 16 years as a Treasury civil servant, and we were subject to highly formalised lobbying every year before the Budget from the Scotch Whisky Association, the tobacco people, the cider people, the motor manufacturers and so forth, and in the case of the UK offshore operators, we had a whole joint committee between the industry and the civil service in order to work out the north sea fiscal regime—

[The Temporary Chair (Mr Martin Caton)]

Order. That was a very long intervention.

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, but it was a very good one, because it does make the point. I do not think my hon. Friend was the permanent secretary or the Minister—although she was a Minister later on. At that time, however, she was just a humble—

[Helen Goodman]

Lowly.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend was a lowly—although perhaps not a very humble—Treasury official, and the point is well made.

Media Regulation

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and we must distinguish between occasions when the press pursues the public interest or public good, and occasions when it does not. When the DPP produces his guidance, however, I do not think that he will define the public interest. If, for example, I were to say that the public interest includes uncovering crime and corruption, or demonstrating hypocrisy by people in high office, the problem is that it would be difficult to encapsulate everything. Therefore, if we were to go down that path, we would have to think about including everything else as well. I am not convinced that the public interest itself needs to be defined, although we do need greater clarity in the way that the test is applied.

The problem is that the press has ignored the law and the police have not enforced it. Another major problem concerns the inequity that exists in this country when people deal with the press. A person on a low income can go to the Press Complaints Commission, but it can offer them only a published apology or perhaps a letter. Wealthy people, however, can go to court, which is why we have seen them receiving big payouts. People have said, “There seem to be an awful lot of celebs at the Leveson inquiry”, but that is because celebs can afford to pursue their cases, and those are the stories that we know about. We do not know about the victim of domestic violence whom I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, or about the child involved in the criminal justice system, because they have not been able to pursue their cases.

[Chris Bryant]

People who do not have a lot of money—I do not have a lot of money—have been helped by the conditional fee agreement, which many would refer to as the no win, no fee arrangement. Such agreements worked particularly in cases of privacy and defamation because the amount that a person might eventually receive would be so low—£60,000 at most, and in many cases £20,000, £25,000 or £30,000—that they could not possibly pay all their legal fees. The danger with the Government’s changes to conditional fee agreements is that it will be the poor who are unable to get justice. Would it not make sense to have an exemption for privacy and libel cases?

[Helen Goodman]

I was going to ask the Minister whether he will go back to his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice and address the clauses in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which is currently before Parliament. It would be good if Ministers from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport took seriously their responsibilities and got Ministers from the Ministry of Justice to shift their position.

We have briefly discussed the fact that we need a free press that pursues the public interest. Just like books and magazines, newspapers have a VAT exemption which, I understand from questions that I have asked of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, is worth £150 million. It seems to me that the public expect to get something for their £150 million—namely a responsible newspaper industry.

Everybody who contributes to this morning’s debate will say that they favour press freedom. There is, however, sometimes confusion about what we mean by that. I just want to tease out some distinctions in relation to that small phrase. Of course, everyone agrees that we need freedom of expression in a free society. If, after this debate is over, people want to say, “The Member for Bishop Auckland made a terrible speech and I didn’t agree with a word of it,” that is fine by me; they are free to do that. However, I do not think that that freedom of expression extends to a licence to ride roughshod over both the law and ethical considerations in order to pursue stories.

We need to be very clear about the distinction between freedom with respect to the content of what is written and freedom in terms of the process that the media use to acquire stories. If we take seriously that distinction between process and content—Onora O’Neill wrote a very interesting essay on this before Christmas—we will find it very helpful. I say that because when we look at the systems that apply—the PCC and whatever we would like to succeed the PCC—we are looking at systems that address the processes, not at systems that control what people write. No Opposition Member and, I am sure, no Government Member has any interest in standing in a newsroom with a big red pen. That is not what we are talking about.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Debate between Helen Goodman and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

During the Prime Minister’s statement, several hon. Members, especially those seated on the Government Benches, asked whether this really matters. Let us face it, there are many other issues that are probably far more pressing and significant to our constituents, including jobs, the economy and the state of the national health service. For some, I admit, that list might also include Europe, although in my experience, Europe tends to be a long way down the list of things that really matter to my constituents. Crime is normally at the top. However, the tendency to downplay this issue over the past few years has fed into the cover-up that was originally done by News International, and that was a mistake. I fully understand why it has happened on occasion. Boris Johnson was very foolish to say that this was

“a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour party”

for party political gain.

In the end, we have seen the two most senior police officers in this country lose their jobs—one of whom, I think, was falling not on his own sword but on the Prime Minister’s. We have also seen some very senior journalists and company executives lose their jobs, and serious questions have been asked about the way in which the police operate. This has called into question the integrity of the police, which in turn strikes at something that really matters to our constituents.

Earlier in the year, the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) was a little more sceptical about much of this, when he was questioning me and others about it. However, I think that he has seen, over the past few months, that the evidence from senior officers such as Assistant Commissioner Yates has been risible, and has not met the standards that we expect of a senior police officer in charge of counter-terrorism. I had never meet Andy Hayman until I saw him in the Home Affairs Committee the other day, and, frankly, I was shocked that someone of that calibre—or rather, lack of calibre—was in charge of counter-terrorism in this country. The heart of this matter is therefore probably not the original criminality, which undoubtedly was extensive but was in one sense relatively minor, in terms of the criminal law; far more significant is the cover-up that has taken place. I very much hope that people will not feel from yesterday afternoon that we have got to the bottom of what went on at News International.

Let us be clear about what happened. In the criminal case that was brought against Goodman and Mulcaire, both pleaded guilty. We already know that Mulcaire’s fees were paid by News International, even though he was not a full-time employee of the organisation. I presume that Clive Goodman’s legal fees were also met by News International, and that it encouraged them to plead guilty because it did not want this to go to full trial. It did not want all the evidence to come out into the public domain, because then, what the judge said at the end of the process might have been proved: that this was probably just the tip of a very large iceberg, and it certainly did not want the rest of the iceberg to be seen.

The reason why News International continued to pay Glenn Mulcaire’s legal fees, until this afternoon, as I understand it—I thought it was bizarre that James Murdoch still did not know whether it was paying them yesterday; anyway, today he said that it is not paying them any more—was that it wanted to keep control of the case and to make sure that he did not say anything additional that further incriminated other people at the newspaper, or in the wider company.

When the civil cases were brought, there was the next part of the cover-up. News International would have had to provide full disclosure of all the e-mails, all the transactions within the organisation and the whole way in which the scheme was put together whereby Mr Mulcaire engaged in all this activity. I believe that News International was absolutely desperate to make sure that that never came into the public domain, so the most important thing for it to do was to make sure that that never went to trial.

Yesterday afternoon, James Murdoch said that his lawyers had advised him at the time that they had to offer £700,000 to Gordon Taylor—I repeat, £700,000—because they were advised by their lawyers that if the matter went to litigation and the court found against them, they might have to pay £250,000 in damages, and in addition, they would have the costs of having run the case. However, James Murdoch must surely know—unless he is using really bad lawyers—of the part 36 procedure. Under it, when an offer is made—of £200,000, let us say—it is put into court and if the court itself does not offer more, the claimant has to pay the legal costs subsequently incurred, which in this case would have been the greater part of £500,000. I am afraid that Mr James Murdoch yesterday was either extremely poorly briefed on the legal situation, or, frankly, he was still dissembling. I believe that in practice, what they were doing was paying £700,000 to Gordon Taylor—and also to Max Clifford—expressly to maintain the cover-up.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I do not know whether my hon. Friend noticed that James Murdoch used in his evidence a very ambivalent phrase that has a particular meaning in law and another in common parlance:

“Subsequent to our discovery of that information in one of the civil trials”.

That reinforces exactly the point my hon. Friend is making.

[Chris Bryant]

Absolutely.

Then there were the subsequent civil cases, which could only be brought once The Guardian had run its story suggesting that there were many more victims of phone hacking. Some people started writing in to the Metropolitan police and then suing the police to force them to give them the information, so that they could then take action against News International and get full disclosure from it. It is only as a result of those cases that the cover-up has effectively been smashed apart.

There remains this issue of the material that was gathered and put into a file in 2007, including various e-mails and other pieces of paper, and given to Harbottle & Lewis. Only this year, it was shown to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, who said that, within three minutes of looking at it, he could see that there was material relating to the payment of police officers that should always have been given to the Metropolitan police. That seems to me a far greater criminal offence than the original criminal offence of phone hacking. That is why my concern is about the cover-up at the heart of this.

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch was asked whether he was responsible and he said, “No,” but I am afraid that in this country we have to have a much stronger concept of responsibility. It is not just about whether something happens on one’s watch—that is ludicrously broad. If someone has taken all due diligence steps to try to ensure that criminality has not happened, then of course they are not personally responsible. But if someone’s argument is, “Our company is so big that I could not possibly be expected to know whether my journalists were being arrested for criminal activity or whether I was paying out £2 million in hush money,” one must question whether they have a proper corporate governance structure or system in place to make sure that the same thing does not happen again next year or next week—or even that it is not happening now.