Media Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire]

Interesting. The hon. Gentleman obviously appreciates the importance of tidying up.

Sadly, I fear that the importance of children’s TV has been lost in the Bill. There has been a dramatic shift in the viewing habits of young people, particularly children over the age of 7, as increasingly parents no longer control viewing. Coupled with the long-term reduction in commissioning of original UK content for children, I am concerned that the Bill does not go far enough.

The Government must ensure that the next generation does not miss out on the high-quality, culturally relevant storytelling, such as “The Wombles”, for which our generations are so thankful to our public service broadcasters. I think I will develop a Wombles theme now. These programmes have a powerful influence on a child’s development. They provide role models—I am sure the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) is an assiduous tidier up as a result of what he watched as a child—inspire ambition and encourage social inclusion. They engage participation in national conversations and develop a child’s understanding, valuing and ownership of what it means to be British.

Children’s TV also makes a significant contribution to the economy and provides quality jobs. It is a key part of our soft power too, promoting tolerance, logic and fair play to children all over the world. The Government must consider the wider consequences for public service broadcasters if children are not consuming as much content as they used to. It is unhelpful for the long-term interests of our public service broadcasters if a generation has little experience of their content. Will the Secretary of State think carefully about how she can work with public service broadcasters to get more quality UK-made children’s content and, crucially, make sure it is as accessible as possible to them?

The Bill is designed to allow current public service broadcasters to fulfil their obligations by taking into account their online delivery platforms, but children also spend a massive proportion of their time on Disney+ or on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. I urge the Secretary of State to speak with those platforms about how they can provide more quality public service content produced here in the UK.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

There seems to be an excessive amount of advertising on commercial programmes aimed at young children, to the extent that it sometimes seems almost subliminal within the programme. Does my hon. Friend think that area needs to be looked at, because those programmes are using children as a commercial pressure on their parents or guardians?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

The right hon. Gentleman will be aware of work done by the Children’s Media Foundation and I am pleased to note his point. A great concern of mine is that all children’s television and broadcasting ought to be of the highest possible quality. In our country we have that tradition of making great children’s TV.

I am also concerned about the talent pipeline that PSBs rely on. For the past 13 years, successive Tory Governments have failed to understand the importance of creative education for economic growth and jobs. We get announcements with no follow-up, which means they have not taken the issue at all seriously. Government adverts patronised creatives, suggesting that ballerinas should retrain in cyber.

Complementing the aims of the Bill, Labour will back the next generation of creative talent that we know our PSBs need if they are to fulfil the promise offered by the Bill. We will equip the workforce with the skills, knowledge and understanding needed to sustain PSBs and the wider creative industries, which are so necessary to fulfil the pipeline. There will be a broad and balanced education for every child, who will have access to high-quality arts, culture and creativity under a future Labour Government.

I recognise the unique and vital role of the independent sector, as set out in the Bill. As MP for Bristol West, the home of BBC Wildlife, some Channel 4 studios and many creative industries that supply and work for them, I know how important PSBs are, or can be, for driving inward investment into communities across our country. I have seen for myself in my patch how that can stimulate the supply chain and the resilience of the local economy, but I want more for this industry across the country from this Government.

Finally, I welcome the measures in the Bill to give S4C, the Welsh language broadcaster, more flexibility in the modern world, and I welcome the comments that my hon. Friends have made about that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I welcome this debate, and I strongly welcome the departure from the idea of selling off and privatising Channel 4. It has been a very good channel that continues to do a lot of innovative things. That it can develop its own content can only be a good thing, as it shows the importance of public service broadcasting.

We should reflect that the Bill is going in the direction of proper regulation of the media, while recognising the value and importance of public service broadcasting. We should compare that with the United States, which, since the second world war, has systematically defunded public service broadcasting and has ended up with news values essentially dominated by Fox News and nothing else. We should value the principle of public service broadcasting.

I am particularly pleased that Gaelic and Welsh-language stations are not only protected but supported by the Bill, as they have greatly increased the speaking of Gaelic and Welsh, enhancing and developing the culture of both Scotland and Wales.

Many of us often criticise journalists, but we very much value the idea of a free press and a free media, which we do not always appear to have. We should think a little more about the multiple ownership of different media outlets across TV, newspapers, radio and so on.

The Bill is also about trying to keep up with changing technology and a changing media landscape. There was a time when radio was one thing, television was another, social media had not been invented and newspapers were completely separate from all of them. All of those are now essentially merged into one, in some way or another: radio interviews are televised and newspaper articles appear on websites, often with videos. That is not a bad thing—it is often a good thing—but there is a universality to the media, and many people get their information from online sources.

However, we should be slightly cautious because we, in this Chamber, are all media obsessives, I suppose. We probably read newspapers and listen to current affairs programmes more than anybody else in our society, so it is easy to forget that a significant proportion of the population does not watch very much television, has no access to smart phones, does not know how to use a computer and is completely lost in a digital divide. Those people are increasingly isolated and left behind. The Bill does not pretend to give an answer to that. I am not sure there is a simple answer, but we should recognise that a growing proportion of the population—not huge, but significant—often loses out on all kinds of information as a result.

I will briefly address the question of news values. I believe there is a high degree of bias in the way that a lot of news is reported in our media, notably international reporting on global affairs. If something happens in the USA, Europe or whatever war is being followed at that time, be it the horrors of Gaza or Ukraine, that is news, but if something happens in much of Africa, Latin America or south Asia, it is simply not reported at all. The huge conflict going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo receives almost zero coverage in any of our written or broadcast media. The problems of, say, indigenous communities in Ecuador receive no coverage either.

We need to think about how we can encourage all our media to have a more global view when they report globally. The BBC has cut back on its global coverage significantly. It cannot afford to have journalists all around the world, so it puts them in the best known places—Brussels, Washington and so on—and has cut back on many other places. The only global channel that currently tries to report on the whole world is al-Jazeera, which is funded entirely by the Qatar Government and royal family. We need diversity in broadcasting as well as in the way in which the news is chosen. That applies to many other issues as well, including the reporting of environmental affairs and debates about global warming.

Commercial media is driven by the need to make money to survive, so it has no great incentive to do anything other than entertainment, because that is what brings in the audience and advertising. It does not necessarily provide information and education for the population. I realise Ofcom has to do a difficult balancing act, but we should be aware that the majority of the population no longer looks at the two alternatives most of us in the Chamber grew up with—the BBC and ITV—but at a whole plethora of different news outlets. Therefore, those people have a wide variety of news issues thrown at them.

A number of colleagues have raised issues about local journalism and local papers, which also appear heavily online. I once worked in a genuinely local paper—it was printed on the same site where we wrote the stories and it was part of the community. It then became part of a bigger group, then another bigger group and then an even bigger group. Local papers across the country are actually not local at all. They are owned by a media group in a distant place and, if they are lucky, there are one or two journalists in the town in question and they live largely by press releases.

My friend, the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), quite rightly commended the West Highland Free Press for its work. I remember that it was set up because of a lack of local reporting. There was a very serious determination by those who set it up to ensure that it was a genuinely independent paper that covered a huge part of Scotland and that was able to build community strengths and links with it, and I think that the paper has been very successful in doing that.

A long distance away and in a completely different kind of community, the Camden New Journal group, which also includes the Islington Tribune and other enterprises, is, again, a wholly independent group set up by the journalists who worked on the paper when the previous owners essentially walked away from it. It is independent, it is local, and it is co-operatively run. It is also very, very successful, because it concentrates completely on the news and stories within the local community and tries to bring them forward.

Having newspapers and radio stations that cover all languages is also very important. We have talked about Scotland and Wales, but there is also a plethora of communities in this country who want to hear stuff in their own language. I remember speaking in this House, probably from this very spot, in the 1980s, trying to defend London Greek Radio, which was set up as an independent Greek-speaking radio station. It was raided 74 times by the Post Office and all its broadcasting equipment was taken away—goodness knows what happened to the 74 items of broadcasting equipment. Eventually the station was given a licence, and it is now a very successful Greek language radio station. There are many other language radio stations all across the country, which is important. It is important for people growing up in bilingual communities to be able to listen to things in their own language, and for young people to feel that sense of belonging to the Greek, to the Turkish, to the Somali or to any other community, as well as being able to communicate in English. That to me is the great value of local radio stations.

My final point is about social media. When I go to meetings, I often ask people how many of them ever buy a newspaper. If the audience has nobody in it over the age of 50, no hand goes up. Younger people simply do not buy newspapers at all—they have no relationship with them. They rely completely on social media for their news, information and ideas. We all access social media. We are all driven in social media by various algorithms, some of which are owned by people far away, who have patented those algorithms. They follow us, they follow our interests and they decide what news we ought to have. It is hardly a free media when we are directed to the news that somebody wants us to hear. It is not simple. It is not simple to regulate on what algorithms do, but we should be extremely well aware of it.

We should also be aware that it is possible to set up a radio station—unless I am wrong about this Bill—that is purely online. There is no regulation of it whatsoever, other than the basics of libel law and things such as that. That is an area that will grow. It is an area that is increasing, and some of the online radio stations have very large audiences indeed. Some of them are very good, and some of them less so, but we must be aware of that and the need in the longer term for further regulation and control of the behaviour of algorithms and how they can influence opinion—politically, socially and commercially—and everything else in our lives.

We should just take a moment to think of the bravery of many journalists around the world, including those who have been killed in Gaza over the past few weeks; those who are in prison in Egypt, in Russia and in a number of other countries; and those who risk everything in order to try to get the news out. They need support and protection in every way possible.

I would also like to put it on record that we should reflect quite seriously on the situation facing one of the world’s best-known investigative journalists—that of Julian Assange, who has now spent almost five years in a maximum security prison for revealing uncomfortable truths about Iraq and other places. Journalism at its best tells us the truth. At its worst, it is propaganda for somebody else and somebody very, very powerful.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

I agree with some of the comments of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), in particular his comments about the bravery of journalists covering conflict around the world today.

It is very doubtful that there will be a Division on the Bill this evening. We have had something of a love-in, with contributions from all parties saying that they support the Bill. I do not want to shatter that consensus, but I am going to do so. Although it is clear that the Opposition are not going to divide the House on Second Reading, I must say to them that, had they chosen to do that, I would have supported them. I would have done so purely because of the strength of my feelings about clause 50, which repeals section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. I believe consistency in this place matters, even though it might sometimes be elusive. The truth is that section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act was part of a Conservative-drafted compromise following the Leveson inquiry. It was a compromise in which I had a hand, and I am not about to vote against it, today or at any other point.

The reason I supported the thrust of the Leveson proposals at the time was not despite my being a Conservative, but because I am a Conservative, and true Conservatives believe in accountability. It is true Conservatives who, throughout history, have faced down powerful vested interests and it is true Conservatives who will always look out for the underdog, whatever the consequences might be. The Leveson inquiry followed decades of failure on the part of the press to engage seriously with self-regulation, and the craven failure of this House over 70 years to act on the findings of no fewer than seven inquiries and Royal Commissions set up during that time.

It is often the case that we never quite know when something that is known to be a problem will become a big story—a running story, as we call it in the media. It was the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl, that made this House decide to act. Therefore it was a Conservative Prime Minister at the time who condemned the Press Complaints Commission as wholly ineffective. It was a Conservative Prime Minister who set up the inquiry. It was a Conservative Prime Minister who chose Lord Justice Leveson to lead that inquiry—in part because Lord Justice Leveson was recognised as somebody who respected the press and believed passionately in the freedom of the press, and could therefore be relied upon to come up with a sensible set of proposals.

It was a Conservative Prime Minister who wrote the terms of reference of the Leveson inquiry and a Conservative Prime Minister who said that that inquiry should make policy recommendations to the Government. When that report came back, it was a Conservative Prime Minister who stated on the Floor of this House that we could not just say, “Let’s have one last chance saloon for the press again.”, because we had done that. When that report landed—all 1,800 pages, in four volumes—my noble Friend Lord Cameron, then Prime Minister, asked Oliver Letwin to work out a way to implement the proposals of the Leveson inquiry.

There followed a series of compromises to accommodate some of the concerns of the press. First, while Lord Leveson had recommended that there should be a statutory body, preferably Ofcom, that would act as the recognition body, that was seen to be problematic by the press. So Oliver Letwin came up with the rather ingenious idea of establishing a Royal Charter for the self-regulation of the press. The press then raised concerns that a future Government might be able unilaterally to change the terms of that charter simply by bringing forward Orders in Council. We accepted that that was a very fair concern. Paradoxically, the press then asked whether Parliament could safeguard the integrity of the Royal Charter by ensuring that it could be amended or removed only if there were a super-majority of both Houses of Parliament and, in addition to that, a super-majority in the Scottish Parliament.

Finally, there was a lot of discussion about the editors’ code and who should hold the pen. The media felt that existing editors should always hold the pen on the editors’ code, which was contrary to what Lord Leveson had suggested. Again, however, to carry the press with us—as it had said that it would work with us if we made the concessions that it wanted—we made that final concession to ensure that the editors’ code would always be written by the newspaper industry, not by any other independent body.

At various stages during those multiple concessions, Oliver Letwin asked me whether I would help to broach conversations with the Opposition parties with a view to forming a cross-party consensus on the matter, and I did so in good faith. At this point, I pay particular tribute to the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who was at that time the shadow Secretary of State, and to the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who was then the Leader of the Opposition, for the way in which they approached the issue. The easiest thing for any Opposition to do is simply to oppose everything for the sake of it, but on that issue, they recognised the importance of trying to arrive at a consensus in Parliament for the good of civil society.

I hope that you will not mind if I pay tribute to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, in your former guise as Opposition Chief Whip. I remember attending one meeting where it was somewhat presumed that I would be able to turn up on the night with 70 Conservative rebels to defeat the Government. You probably saw the anguish on my face at the daunting prospect of having to do such a thing. You made everybody else in the room aware that Whips’ Offices can, when they put their minds to it, be pretty good at burning off opposition.

It is true that the victims of phone hacking were quite concerned about the level of compromise that politicians were making on their behalf. I remember Hugh Grant being particularly sceptical of that. We got him in and said, “Trust us; we are going to do this. This is a cross-party consensus: all parties are signed up to it. It will happen.” It is disappointing that, a decade on, Hugh Grant is being proved right because of the Government’s actions through the Bill.

Some months after we had put in place the royal charter for the self-regulation of the press, I met Sir Alan Moses, who was the first inaugural chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the industry’s own regulator. I remember saying to Sir Alan, “IPSO is making good progress. It is an improvement on the PCC. It wouldn’t have to do a great deal more in order for it to be a recognised regulator. Why doesn’t IPSO simply seek recognition?” He said, “George, I completely agree with you. However, my contract of employment forbids me from saying so publicly.” How is that for the freedom of speech that we hear so much about? Sir Alan Moses, the inaugural chairman of IPSO, was subject to a gagging order, no less, that prevented him from saying what he believed to be true.

Let me turn to the specifics of section 40, which put in place one of the key provisions of Leveson’s recommendations: the creation of incentives for an industry regulator to seek recognition. That is often misunderstood, for the provisions of section 40 are symmetrical: not only does it protect innocent people who want redress and access to a process of arbitration, but it protects publishers from people with deep pockets who go to lawyers such as Carter-Ruck or Schillings and threaten litigation—through so-called SLAPPs—to intimidate and bully publishers and prevent them from publishing things. Had we put that in place and commenced section 40, if a Russian oligarch, for instance, had said, “If you print that, I will see you in court,” and all sorts of injunctions came forth from various lawyers, a publisher would have been able to say, “No, you won’t. We will see you in arbitration.” That would have protected genuine investigative journalism in a way that has never been done before.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a most interesting speech. He must be aware that the laws relating to libel and so on are completely misshapen, in that it is totally a rich person’s game. Anyone without resources gets threatened with libel and is silenced immediately. They have no recourse to legal aid and no other way of dealing with the situation other than either to accept something they believe to be wrong or to make themselves bankrupt trying to defend themselves.