Leveson Inquiry

Jim Dowd Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

If I could make some progress, I might answer some of the questions that hon. Members are trying to ask.

This is not about the press coming up with a model that suits its own ends. The day for a Press Complaints Commission mark 2 is well and truly gone. We will not accept a puppet show with the same people pulling the same strings. I will be meeting editors tomorrow to hear how they will take this forward. I say to hon. Members that we must not allow this debate to polarise us. We all agree on the need for a tough and independent regulator for the press, that the suffering of the victims and their families cannot be allowed to happen again and that the status quo is not an option. It is the responsibility of this House to ensure that whatever is put in place is effective. This is common ground. Let us put to one side the politics and turn our focus to the principles.

It is right that we look at the detail of how we deliver those principles in practice. Lord Justice Leveson’s report underscores the importance of protecting the freedom of the press. The Prime Minister and I, and other hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, see that there are clear and practical difficulties in drafting legislation without providing an amendable legislative framework. Many in the House today, on both sides of the Chamber, have a deep-seated and grave concern that such legislation could have a profound effect on our ability to safeguard completely the freedom of our press in the future.

[Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I endorse the Secretary of State’s view entirely; I do not think there is a great deal of difference between many people on either side of the argument regarding the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry. However, if she is to provide the incentives to make so-called self-regulation work, does she not feel that it would be useful to bring forward, at least in draft form, the legislation that she thinks may be necessary should the press fail to live up to expectations?

[Maria Miller]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. He may or may not be aware that we are already midway into cross-party negotiations and discussions on this. We have already agreed with the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham and the Leader of the Opposition to draft such a Bill to see what that legislation would look like. Our concern is that it then provides a framework that could create real problems in terms of safeguarding free speech into the future. I am glad, though, that the hon. Gentleman acknowledged that there is a great deal of similarity between many of our positions, and we should not focus on the differences.

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[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.

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[Mr Lilley]

I am in favour of the press having better standards but the best form of regulation is what we saw—The Guardian exposing the failures of the News of the World; “Panorama” exposing the failures of “Newsnight” —not a regulatory body, whether or not underpinned by the state. My hon. Friend is uncharacteristic. Those who jump to the conclusion that we need state-backed regulation assume that that is always an improvement on voluntary actions and arrangements. Such faith is a triumph of hope over experience and people forget the law of unforeseen consequences. Regulation invariably has unforeseen—but not necessarily unforeseeable—consequences.

[Jim Dowd]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Lilley]

I will not at the moment. Lord Leveson proposes giving a state regulator the power and duty every two or three years to review and approve—or disapprove—the code and how it is implemented and enforced by the regulator. That is either a substantial power with important consequences or a trivial power with negligible consequences. The latter is unimportant so why insist on it? If the power is significant and will have substantial ramifications and consequences for the way the regulator behaves, the content of the code and the way it is enforced, we should look at it very carefully.

I know from many years of studying regulation that one consequence of regulators being given the power to review and prescribe detail is that the regulator—the state supervisor—will at every biennial or triennial review demand not less but more and stricter regulation. Has my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) ever known a regulator demand less regulation rather than more? It is a recipe for regulatory creep and increasingly detailed specification by the state supervisor of what the so-called independent regulator must do.

The other consequence that some fear from a regulatory system that is overseen and supervised by a statutory regulator is that the regulator will nudge the code and its enforcement in line with the prejudices of the Government of the day. I doubt that that would be the immediate consequence, although it could be the consequence in the long term, but the statutory body that oversees how the regulatory apparatus works would follow either the Government’s prejudices or its own. We want to beware of that. If the statutory body is like the regulatory structures we normally set up, we will have a pretty clear idea how it will behave, but by definition it will be outside the direct control of the House, so hon. Members will have no say in it.

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[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

We are having today’s debate because the current system of media self-regulation has not only failed, but failed spectacularly, again and again. I suspect that the majority of Members in the Chamber agree on what now needs to be achieved—in other words, the outcome. Where there are differences, they relate to the method of delivering that outcome. An editor of the “ConservativeHome” website—a vehicle that has been vociferously opposed to any kind of legislation—wrote a few days ago, just before the report came out:

“What’s needed post-Leveson is a settlement that helps…ordinary victims…That’s a new, non press-run complaints body with the power to fine and punish papers—which is, none the less, independent of the state.”

I agree with that absolutely, and I am sure that most other Members do. The question is: can we achieve that without legislation? I do not think that we can.

I question some elements of the Leveson report, which I will come to in a moment, but I do not accept the hyperbole emanating from those media commentators who are opposed to change. Nor do I think it responsible for otherwise serious papers to imply that those MPs who advocate some form of regulation are motivated by self-interest. I think we can all agree that The Daily Telegraph was scraping the barrel when it accused my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind)—who is not in his place at the moment—of taking revenge on the media because he had been criticised for supporting the poll tax in 1990. I do not know my right hon. and learned Friend particularly well, and there are many issues on which we disagree, but it strikes me as unlikely that he would harbour a grudge for 25 years over something so routine.

We have been told that any form of legislation would irreparably damage the ability of the press to do what it does best—uncovering corruption, exposing hypocrisy, holding the elite to account—and that our democracy would be impaired as a result. However, no serious commentator, and no MP, is advocating any measure that would weaken the scrutiny of elected representatives or hand them any control over the press. At most, some MPs are calling for statutory recognition of an independent regulator. We want something that looks like the Press Complaints Commission but that is not controlled by the very people it exists to regulate—in short, a PCC that is independent of the media and of politicians, and that has the power to impose fines and demand apologies.

None of this is inherently new. There is nothing new about fines—the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror were both fined this year for contempt of court—and the principle that journalists and newspapers should abide by a code of practice is well established. It has been accepted by editors and proprietors for decades, since the editors’ code of practice came into being. The difference is that a new code might be more than simply a fig leaf.

Some commentators argue that a new statute would provide a greater opportunity for a future authoritarian Government to gag the press. That is an illogical argument. A statute can be drafted to prevent amendment other than by fresh primary legislation, which would leave a future Government in exactly the same situation as the one we are in today. Regardless of that, however, it is a basic fact of democracy that with enough votes, any Government can pass any law they like, as the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) pointed out earlier. I suppose that that is one of the downsides of any democracy, as well as one of the upsides.

[Jim Dowd]

One of the principles of this place is, rightly or wrongly, that Parliament is sovereign, but is it not an act of the grossest deceit and vanity for any Member to claim that, magically, we are noble but that those who come after us might not be?

[Zac Goldsmith]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; I agree with him.

A new statute to make independent regulation effective would improve investigative journalism, if it included express public interest defences. It would ensure that when the ends were in the public interest, the means would be justified. The example of The Daily Telegraph has already been cited, but I will give it again. The information that led to the expenses scandal was illegally accessed, but it was so obviously in the public interest that no one has ever challenged the newspaper. Theoretically, it could have been challenged. We now have an opportunity to protect journalists engaged in that kind of activity.

Let us not pretend that the state does not already influence the media; it does. There are countless laws relating to the press, a number of which—defamation and contempt, for instance—bear directly on the content of newspapers. What is more, despite arguing vigorously against any form of state intervention in the media, Lord Black and Paul Dacre have both advocated the use of legislation in their own submissions to Leveson. Both advocated a tribunal that could hear defamation and privacy cases and protect newspapers from high legal costs and damages, and both acknowledged that that would require statute. It does not follow that legislation would inhibit journalism. For example, Finland, which has been No. 1 on the world press freedom index in eight of the past 10 years, has a system of independent press regulation backed by statute. In 2003, it passed a law that gave people a right of reply and gave publications a duty to correct.

Television has a far higher level of regulation than anything I—indeed, most people in the Chamber—would endorse for newspapers, but it is worth noting that, no matter what survey we choose to look at, we see that television remains the country’s most trusted medium. Neither is television journalism cowed. Every Government, more or less without exception, have taken issue with the BBC, fought with the BBC and actively disliked the BBC. In addition, many of the recent high-profile exposés—for example, of Jimmy Savile, Winterborne View, of “The Secret Policeman”, racism in Polish football and so on—came from television.

Those who oppose any form of legislation have genuine fears, and I absolutely do not seek to discount them or pretend they do not exist. Good regulation would, I believe, improve our newspapers without inhibiting any public interest journalism; bad legislation would do immeasurable harm. There is room here to get it very wrong.

I want to point briefly to what I believe is a mistake made by Lord Leveson. The same “ConservativeHome” editor I cited earlier made a statement that I thought risible at the time. He said:

“Essentially, they”,

meaning advocates of legislation,

“want to create a climate of opinion in which, for example, doubt can’t be expressed about whether global warming is driven by human activity.”

Having read much of the Leveson report, although I admit not all of it, I have some concerns. Instead of confining himself to protecting the victims of newspaper smears and malpractice—Christopher Jeffries, Milly Dowler and so forth—I believe Lord Leveson has strayed beyond his brief. Let me quote directly from the report:

“Overall, the evidence in relation to the representation of women and minorities suggests that there has been a significant tendency within the press which leads to the publication of prejudicial or pejorative references to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or physical or mental illness or disability…A new regulator will need to address these issues as a matter of priority, the first steps being to amend practice and the Code to permit third party complaints.”

The rumbustious, politically incorrect and sometimes irresponsible—and, in my view, occasionally, appalling—approach of the tabloids is not to everyone’s taste, but in an open society, it is part of the rough and tumble of free expression. I know I am not in a minority on either side of the House when I say that we must never make it possible for lobby groups with their own political agendas to suppress free speech. Unless there is an individual victim with a legitimate grievance, the regulator has no business interfering.

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[Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), who made what I thought was a cogent and clear statement of the case. Although I did not agree with the conclusions that the Secretary of State has reached—let us hope, pro tem—I strongly share her view that there is not that much between most Members about what needs to be done about the conduct of the press. I agree most strongly with the views expressed by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) who said that if there is a conflict between the victims of the press and the owners of the press, this House must come down clearly on the side of the victims.

Members have spoken from their own personal experience—I, too, have had my private life dragged through the pages of the tabloids. As a holder of public office—I was a member of Lewisham council for 20 years before I came to this House 20 years ago—I might be regarded as fair game, but other members of my family and my friends did not stand for public office, and none of my election literature ever featured any of them. It was not because I was ashamed of them, but because I was not asking anybody to vote for them. I was asking people to vote for me, and the wise people of Lewisham repeatedly did so over the years.

I am prepared to take a bit of rough and tumble myself, but one of my daughter’s friends had her school staked out by journalists from one particular tabloid, which I think is absolutely unforgiveable. People in that situation need not just our sympathy and warm words but our protection, and we need to formulate a system so they can obtain it. I disagreed in a number of ways with the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley). We do not need just a punitive system, but a preventive system—not one where people can get redress, but where they are protected in the first place from having to undergo these traumas.

Let us not forget where the origins of the Leveson report lie. Most Members will recall the famous publication by a chap called Peter Burden—“Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings”, a story about the News of the World. In one part of the book, he recounts a conversational exchange with one of the journalists at the newspaper. Let me stress, however, that anybody who believes that the News of the World was a one-off and that the problem has now been solved is living in a dream land. This shows the way the tabloid press behaves. The conversation culminated with a Mr Greg Miskiw—currently, I believe, before the courts, awaiting trial for illegally accessing telecommunications—saying:

“that is what we do—we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”

That is clearly the most damning statement in the book, but it goes on. A particular reporter left the News of the World, it says, but

“nothing changed. Over many years the paper has set out deliberately and without compassion to destroy other people’s lives in order to sell newspapers. The supreme discomfort of others is meat and drink to the paper, and the extent to which they hurt people concerns them only as far as the cost of any damages that might subsequently be claimed. Cynical judgements are made about the price of knowingly committing some actionable offence, assessing what a likely settlement would be, and balancing that against the anticipated increase in sales.”

That is the morality of tabloid journalism—and it is and has been rife throughout the industry.

I will say that those excesses have been curbed to some degree in recent years—or certainly in the most recent year. Since the establishment of the Leveson inquiry, there has been a marked improvement in behaviour, but only because of what Leveson might bring forward. If they can get round this hurdle, they will go back to doing exactly the same again in the future.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

My good friend raised an important point when he quoted Peter Burden. Does he agree that perhaps the most extreme example is the case of the late Princess Diana? We will all welcome the news that the Duchess of Cambridge has announced that she and Prince William are expecting their first child. Do we also think that the press should observe their recent conversion, and give the couple the privacy that they deserve in the early days of the pregnancy?

[Jim Dowd]

I am hardly likely to disagree, am I? [Laughter.] Good luck to them, and so say all of us. I am taken aback by the sheer irrelevance of the question. If I may, I will get back on track, and return to the subject of the conduct of the press.

The Press Complaints Commission has never been a natural arbiter or umpire in these matters. It has always been the creature of the newspapers and their proprietors, year after year, but it has not always been so staggeringly ineffective. Examples that I have heard in the recent past of the sheer ineptitude and incompetence of its leadership indicate that any future statutory body, or whatever we call it, should not include anyone who has ever been connected with it. It has betrayed the British public by pretending that it can police the excess of the press and failing dismally to do so, and by failing so dismally, it has encouraged the worst excesses of the tabloid press.

After last Thursday’s statement, my good friend—although not in political terms, as he sits on the other side of the House—the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, and I attended the same event in the City. We spent the best part of 20 minutes arguing animatedly about the Leveson report and our responses to it. The hon. Gentleman and I have different views, but most of those 20 minutes were occupied by an argument that is one of the features of this place and the Members in it: we were arguing over whether he agreed with me or I agreed with him. We were both seeking to achieve the same thing.

As others have said, legislation will result from Leveson, and so it should. This is the first of many debates on the subject. We need to apply ourselves, with the best of intentions, to describing exactly what that legislation should be. As others have already declared, it should be minimalist but also robust. It should give and guarantee freedom to the independent press regulator, and also enable it to do its job.

The idea that the press can be trusted is a strange one, because all the evidence has shown that they cannot. Not only do they believe that they should be left to their own devices—that they are above control and regulation—but they openly flaunt the fact that they believe that to be the case. Last week, The Spectator—a magazine which, I am led to believe, is much read by Members on the other side of the House, although I have to say that I have read it myself on occasion—stated:

“If the press agrees a new form of self-regulation, perhaps contractually binding this time, we will happily take part. But we would not sign up to anything enforced by government. If such a group is constituted we will not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces.”

However—and we can all be grateful for this—

“We would still obey the (other) laws of the land.”

How very generous! How very kind! How very noble! Perhaps we should ring The Spectator once a week and ask, “Which laws do you want to abide by this week? Which laws do you want to abide by next week? Which laws do you not care for and will have nothing to do with?”

The Spectator went on to say:

“But to join any scheme which subordinates press to parliament would be a betrayal of what this paper has stood for”

in all the 15 years

“since its inception in 1828.”

I added the bit about the 15 years—it is not actually there—but, by Spectator standards, it is not much further forward than that.

What those people are basically saying is that they are above the law. This Parliament and the British people can say what they like, but if it does not meet their approval, they will not abide by it. That is the calibre of the people with whom we are dealing, and we cannot trust them to act in the public interest.

[Eric Joyce]

I suppose that what The Spectator and its editor meant was that they would not take part in that whole structure, and so they would then be regulated directly by Ofcom as per the recommendations of Leveson.

[Jim Dowd]

They cannot possibly have meant that; otherwise they would not have alluded to all the “other” laws of the land. They meant that this would be a law of the land, and that they would not obey it.

Why do we have the rule of law? What is the purpose of this place? As far as I am aware, everyone in this place is united in believing in the rule of law, but what does the rule of law do? Predominantly, it protects the weak and not the strong. If there were no law, the strong would always get their way, by force if necessary. The weak are defended by the law. It provides the only way in which they can seek any redress, and Lord Leveson’s report—certainly in terms of its advocacy of a new method of dealing with the press—is empowering to those who currently cannot obtain the justice that they deserve.

Given what the rule of law does, it is no surprise that the strong—in the shape of the press barons, media moguls or whatever we wish to call them—are demanding that there should not be a law, because they know that it will curb their power. I do not mean their power to observe and comment as they see fit; no one is talking about a commissar to sanction every single item that goes into a national or a local paper. We are talking about regulating the way in which those people conduct themselves, and, more particularly, the way in which they treat the other citizens of these islands.

As I said earlier, if there is a dispute between the rich and powerful and the weak and powerless, it is the duty of this House, and certainly of those on this side of the House, to stand up for the latter.