Defamation Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I support government Amendment 14. The recollection of the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, of the committee’s discussion of this matter is entirely fair, in that this discussion has moved on over the 14-month period. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, we discussed at various times our view of the checklist approach, as was embodied in the Reynolds defence which will now be abolished. We heard quite a lot of evidence that it was not working particularly well, but it was not radically unworkable. On balance, it has not been working well enough. There were real issues with the ways in which certain newspapers were working or not working with it. I accept completely that, in the main, the discussion has moved on over the past 14 months, and the evidence was clear that it is not working well enough. I balk slightly at the idea that it was absolutely unworkable.

I think that we are doing the right thing. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lester. It is not his wording, but we all know how much work he and the noble Lord, Lord McNally, have put in on the rather neat formulation before us today.

I am slightly surprised that an unintended implication of what we are doing has not been picked up on thus far. Listening to the debate in the other place on the Leveson inquiry, much reference was made to the Irish model. Indeed, some Members of the other place obviously thought that there was a great similarity between the Irish model and what Lord Justice Leveson is recommending. There is one respect, at the heart of what we are doing today with Clause 4, in which it is quite important to note that that is not so. It appears to be the opinion of all parties in both Houses that we need this public interest defence. It is not part of a transaction. The Prime Minister recommended that Members of both Houses read the Irish Defamation Act 2009. There is an implicit transaction in Section 26 of that Act: the newspapers agree to regulation because, by that means, they are more likely to be able to offer a defence of this sort of public interest defence.

It is apparently the forming view of Parliament that this is not a matter of a transaction. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, referred very eloquently earlier to the fact that the public interest defence ought to be available. There is no transaction there at all. We are doing the right thing, but I simply make this comment because people are talking a little too easily about transferring the Irish model into our affairs. The Irish model is constructed on a different principle, and we are going ahead on a different basis.