Data Protection Bill [Lords]

John Grogan Excerpts

Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Grogan (Keighley) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes), who characteristically speaks with great clarity without notes, but I shall take inspiration from the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin), the first Back Bencher to speak in this debate, in that I will take a slightly different view from my Front-Bench colleagues on a couple of issues. In particular, I will suggest that there are some flaws in clauses 168 and 169.

When I retired from this House in 2010, I never really expected to be back on these Benches, yet I am now back here representing a different constituency. I missed out on the Leveson report and the subsequent debate about Leveson and the provisions of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. I recognise, however, the tremendous hurt caused by phone hacking and the crimes committed by those involved in it; indeed, two dozen-plus people were convicted of crimes at that stage. I recognise, too, the tremendous sense of violation of privacy that people felt at that time. I am also well aware of the force of the charges our Front Benchers put to the Government; that at that stage they committed themselves to legislation that they are now resiling from.

I am also aware that the history of my party’s relations with the press over the last century has not been untroubled. We have rightly stood up for a feeling that the press has been out to get the Labour party ever since the Zinoviev letter in the 1920s, published by the Daily Mail. However, despite all that background, I still have doubts about clauses 168 and 169, which would have the effect of putting punitive damages on to our press if they were sued, whether they won or lost.

We must be very careful about taking this step. We are already 40th in the accepted rankings relating to a free press. We are not even in the top 10, and we should be up there with Norway, which I think is No. 1. We should be very careful about taking these steps. How would Russia Today react if our press organisations were forced into bankruptcy or felt the chilling effect that Alastair Campbell warned against recently?

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good point. A key concern that I share with him relates to the dwindling number of local titles. In my constituency, the Stirling Observer is the only newspaper left serving the community. It has a skeleton staff with very few reporters and very few resources even though it is part of a bigger group, and it is vulnerable because of its dwindling circulation. Anything we can do to strengthen our democracy must involve encouraging freedom of the press.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Grogan]

Investigative journalism is one of the things that makes me proud to be British. When I was previously an MP, I was lucky enough to be vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary National Union of Journalists group. At that time, the group had only two other officers that I can remember: my right hon. Friends the Members for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). Obviously, their careers have taken a different path from my own, but I am still proud to be vice-chair of that group, and I think it is right that I should be.

Obviously, the press get many things wrong, but they also get some things right. There have been many investigations, including the Daily Mail investigation into the Stephen Lawrence affair. The Daily Telegraph has held politicians to account on both sides of the Atlantic; at the moment, it is exposing the possibility that President Trump was financed by foreign contributions. It has also exposed football corruption. Thank goodness for The Guardian exposing tax cheats and tax avoidance, and thank goodness for the Daily Mirror exposing some of the activities of the tech giants and the more unjustifiable practices of the gig economy. That investigative journalism does not come cheap, however, and I believe that it would be threatened by putting section 40 into law. I have studied the Labour party manifesto very carefully; it is my bedside reading. We are committed to Leveson 2, but I do not think that there is anything in the manifesto that commits us to the implementation of section 40.

I have been looking at the amendments that were passed in the other place, and it is interesting that clause 142, which deals with a potential Leveson 2, is actually more expansive than Leveson 2 in some ways, in that it could affect broadcasters and online services as well as all newspapers. That has to be taken into account when we consider that clause.

I am radical when it comes to the reform of our media and our press. I think that we have forgotten some of the issues on the left of British politics that we used to bring to the forefront. For example, the concentration of ownership in our media is far too great. The right of reply is also something that we should concentrate on, as is the wide variety of issues relating to the power of Facebook, Google and others and their inability to deal with fake news in a convincing way. However, alliances are shifting. This week in The Sunday Times I read the most favourable article I have ever read in that newspaper about a speech by a director-general of the BBC. He was talking about the danger posed to British culture, the British way of telling a story and British journalism by the dominance of the tech giants on the west coast of America.

Some things have changed in the media landscape, but I hope that we in this House will always stand up for press freedom and for the plurality of the media. One of the little things that I do in Parliament is also one of the things that I am most proud of, and that is that I chair a number of groups, including groups on Kosovo, Albania and Mongolia. Those are emerging economies and democracies, and we often discuss press freedom in our meetings with people from those countries. How would it look if this House were to impose punitive damages on our newspapers unless they signed up to a state-supported regulator? I think that that would be very difficult to explain.