Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Richard Drax

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 15th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

This is an absolutely dreadful amendment and it should be thrown out, rejected and sent back to the House of Lords. It is fundamentally wrong. It seeks to punish those who might be innocent and to fine them for telling the truth and for saying things that people in power do not like. This amendment goes to the heart of our free press, and it should be thrown in the bin. IMPRESS is already an organisation of ill repute, founded, funded and paid for by somebody who is known to us only because of his misdeeds. A degenerate libertine has provided all the money for IMPRESS, which only the most junior newspapers will sign up to. It is a dreadful body.

We should maintain the freedom of our press to help us with our liberties. We have only to look at the policeman who went to prison a few weeks ago. He successfully sued the press in the 1990s, but it turned out that he was in fact a child molester. Whenever we put constraints on the press, we help the powerful to get away with misdeeds. This House should stand up for freedom. It should stand up for liberty and it should reject the unelected House of Lords trying to prevent scandal from being reported freely.

[Richard Drax]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who was most eloquent. I have a disadvantage in following such eloquence with a short speech. I believe that I have just a few minutes left. I must declare an interest in that I was a journalist for 17 years. Perhaps I saw a little bit of the worst, but most of it was good. It is the local and regional press—the majority of our press today—that I am concerned about. It simply will not be able to take the risk of reporting at local level, albeit accurately and fairly, lest it should incur a costly exercise in court, and that is not acceptable.

In the first week of my career, the editor called me in and said, “Richard, you cannot go far wrong if you report fairly and accurately.” I agree with other hon. Members who have said that the message to the editors must be that they should report fairly, accurately and truthfully. Truth is the biggest sword of defence for the press. As my editor said: if in doubt, leave it out. I implore all editors who want a free press, as I and many other hon. Members do, to behave honourably, truthfully and in good faith. If they cannot report something that they long to report because they know it will result in a huge sale of newspapers, I suggest that they delay publication until they have the facts.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Richard Drax

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I want to focus on several aspects of Lords amendment 15. First, I want to focus on what it is designed to do, in which I think it is fundamentally wrong-headed. It provides for an increase in the penalty that will be applied to newspapers where an accusation of phone hacking is made in a case that is brought against them. That is difficult, because in the ordinary course of events, a newspaper will want to protect its sources. A newspaper that tried to protect its source for a story would not be able to prove the negative that phone hacking had not been involved, even when it had not been.

The immediate risk will be that newspapers will be reluctant to print investigative stories because they will be unable to avoid the double penalty of extra costs, even in the event that their story was true. The particular outrage of amendment 15 is that the press could report a story accurately, fairly and honestly but still find that, if they were taken to court by an aggressive litigant, they would have to pay the litigant’s costs. That is an absolute charter for the very rich to bully the press into not publishing stories about them. It will not help the poorest in society, who will not be able to afford the initial fees to get a case going, but anybody with any funds will be able to use it as an opportunity to bully the press into not printing anything disagreeable about them.

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, as always. Does he agree that the regional press, which does not have the necessary resources, will be particularly vulnerable to such claims by the people he has described?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The regional press and local newspapers will simply not be able to print stories that are critical of almost anybody. Perhaps MPs do not want any critical stories to be printed about them. We would be able to bully the local papers in our constituencies by saying, “We will bring a court action against you, and, by the way, we think that you might have been hacking our telephone,” and they would risk double costs. That is absolutely ruinous to a free press at a local and national level, because such costs run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Even the biggest newspaper groups find that level of cost very difficult to absorb. The amendment will therefore get rid of the free press. Our press will be afraid to go after the rich and the powerful. It will be afraid to go after leading politicians whose friends can lend them the money to start a case off. It will be a supine press.