Leveson Inquiry

Lord Bew Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I shall speak solely on one aspect of the Leveson debate: the Irish dimension, which clearly exists. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter has already referred to it and, even the day before the Leveson report was published, the Scottish First Minister said that the Irish model should be the Leveson model and urged it on the Prime Minister. This showed a rare courage on behalf of the Scottish First Minister as he had spent some years previously endorsing the Irish economic model only to find that rebounding back on him in a rather problematic way.

However, there is no question but that Sir Brian Leveson paid great attention to the experience in Dublin and the regulator in Ireland, the very distinguished historian, John Horgan, came to London to give important evidence. In his speech on the Leveson report in the other place the Deputy Prime Minister referred to this and quite rightly said that it was hard to argue that there was,

“a deeply illiberal press environment across the Irish Sea”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/11/12; col. 471.]

Another Liberal Democrat MP, Mr Tim Farron, also argued that something similar to Leveson was already in place in Ireland. When replying, the Prime Minister had the Irish Defamation Act with him at the Dispatch Box and recommended that Members of the House should study it. I have studied it and it will be at the core of what I have to say.

I wish to argue, first, that the Leveson recommendations are significantly different from the Irish model and significantly tougher. Secondly, I would argue that there are some problems that we ought to at least be aware of when we talk about the Irish model.

Leveson is tougher than the model in place in Dublin in three respects. I refer particularly to the summary of recommendations of Leveson at paragraph 5(d), when he argues that the board of an independent, self-regulatory body should not include any serving editor. In contrast, the Irish press council includes serving editors of the leading Dublin newspapers.

Secondly, again unlike Ireland, Leveson recommends that the proposed press board in Britain should allow people other than those directly affected to make complaints and that the board should have the power to examine issues on its own initiative. Again that is not the case in Dublin.

Finally, of course, it is widely understood that Leveson argues for a maximum £1 million fine on errant publications, while in Ireland the only sanction is to request such publications prominently to publish the decisions of the press council. So the Leveson model is significantly stronger than the model in place in Dublin.

I say that simply for the purposes of clarification. I fully accept that they do not resolve the argument, one way or the other, about the content of the Leveson proposals.

If Leveson is significantly tougher, what are the implications? The Deputy Prime Minister made the point—it has also been made in this House today—that a number of UK newspapers have accepted for their Irish market, so to speak, this light touch regulation. The Deputy Prime Minister was right to say that Ireland does not have a deeply illiberal press environment—of course it does not—but does it have quite the same tradition of freedom of expression of opinion that we are used to in this country? Is it quite as vibrant?

On the week after the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech, the Dublin Sunday Independent, the leading Sunday newspaper in Ireland, noted that,

“The confluence of separate recent controversies around varied issues and the increasingly regular private litigation against journalists has facilitated the evolution of a subtle frost over how freely we can speak”.

There is an argument that all sections of this House and the other place welcomed the report by Sir Desmond de Silva and the Finucane inquiry and welcomed the Prime Minister’s apology about a very grim moment in the recent history of our country, but anyone who knows the history of that inquiry will know that it is extremely unlikely that there would have been an inquiry at all but for the fact that there were briefings of journalists by some sections of the police in ways which Leveson has now set its face against.

It is clear that there has been in many respects a rather disgraceful relationship between the police and journalists in the United Kingdom, but I simply draw attention to the complexity of these issues. This is a case where the House as a whole says, “It is wonderful that we now know the truth”, but does not want to face up to some of the means by which we got to know the truth.

Let me make a final critical point. The Prime Minister referred to the Irish Defamation Act 2009 and Clause 26 reads to me like a transaction in which the press agrees to be regulated but is allowed to offer a public interest defence. All parties here have reached the point where we accept that the press has a right to offer a public interest defence in defamation cases, but not as part of a transaction: we accept that the press has that right. So, again, there is a sense in which the Irish analogy does not quite hold. It leaves open entirely the questions, pro and con, about Leveson. There is no Irish gold standard and there is no model in Dublin ready to be packed on an Aer Lingus flight and flown over to London for our use.