Leveson Inquiry

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I have a registered interest, including in respect of News International. My family are in receipt of damages from News International, and I am also a key witness in a forthcoming trial. I have been a victim, but I will not go through the details tonight, because anything I experienced was as nothing compared with what happened in the very high-profile cases involving missing children and the death of children, and it would be unthinkable to draw any comparison. In any case, I have eschewed making any remarks publicly about what happened to me in order not to rerun what happened, for the sake of the people who were involved and were closest to me.

Suffice it to say, on a slightly lighter note, that in more than 50 cases I succeeded in getting retractions, and I was able to get some limited redress. However, as Lord Leveson pointed out, that was because I could afford to go to law. In most cases, I was unable to get any redress through the Press Complaints Commission. On 20 August 2008 The Guardian published a diary piece which said my lawyers were the fastest in the west and mentioned Sky TV, Mirror Group and News International, all major media organisations with which I have had dealings over the last eight years, and which have had to apologise or cough up in one way or another. None of what happened was edifying, however, and I would not want anybody to go through what I went through.

In some respects, what happened was more to do with morality and decent professional standards than with regulation. As well as all the print newspapers, I had a right time with Channel 4 over More4. Ofcom was equally useless. I had a real problem with the BBC, too, which reported that guns and drugs had been found in my house—the story was not about me at all, of course—and that I had been partying with a high-profile woman all night who then attacked her husband, when in fact I had left her at 6.15 after having had a cup of tea.

All of us in public life face such situations, of course. What we are now trying to do—and what I hope we will be able to do—is achieve something very much better for people who do not have the same opportunity of redress that I had, or who have never stood for public office or put themselves on the line in that way.

I want tonight to address what happened pre-Leveson and where we should go post-Leveson, about which I have not spoken since Thursday afternoon. As has been said, pre-Leveson there was some hyberbole, and many things were said on all sides that upped the ante. The Leveson recommendations are different from what people expected, however, and so much so that as Shami Chakrabarti moves one way, I am moving the other. On hearing her this morning, I was slightly confused about quite where she was, and I was also confused tonight about quite where the Secretary of State was.

I think that those who have taken different sides on this matter are so close together that if we take a step back, we will find a way forward. The Secretary of State has indicated that if the media do not accept in full the Leveson principles in respect of the establishment of the independent regulator—the board—the Government will be prepared to act. I presume that means that the Government will take legal steps. If they are prepared to do that, and as the official Opposition and the minority coalition partner have already indicated that they would be prepared to act, we appear to have, across the coalition and the Opposition, a stated principled position that when media representatives meet the Secretary of State tomorrow, they will have to agree to the full Leveson principles in relation to the new independent regulator.

That brings us not so much to underpinning as to oversight, because not only do we have to establish some way of providing the panel that will appoint the independent regulator, which could perhaps be done through the Commissioner for Public Appointments—a key recommendation—but we then need to translate whatever that panel might be into an oversight recognition body that will actually be able to take the annual report from the independent regulator and assess whether that regulator is standing up to its own laid down code and standards.

I am against that oversight body being Ofcom, partly because it is a regulator. I was trying to work out in my head over the weekend how to ensure that we do not have a regulator of a regulator, because otherwise we will have regulation. Ofcom is a regulator, so let us try to find another mechanism as an oversight and recognition body that is so light touch that not even the most vehement opponent of what Leveson was supposedly going to say could now believe that Leveson’s actual requirements and recommendations take us down the road of the statutory regulation of the press. Clearly, they do not.

There are major issues around data protection which I am sure can be negotiated, with solutions found. If we can get to a point where everyone is agreed on the principles that have been laid down for the independent regulator, which is actually independent, and on a mechanism for getting the membership of that body in place, we can then ensure that we have the oversight that is necessary and that people in this House seek. There would then be a chance that we might have cracked it.

I do not have a final answer; as the child said, “Mother, if God made us, who made God?” I have been struggling with that question ever since I was a Methodist in Sunday school, but we are going to have a find a solution to it, one way or the other. I think it is possible to do so with good will, but there has not been a lot of good will. I have been as careful as I can in what I have written and spoken about, and I am now convinced that we can avoid underpinning through that oversight. However, that will take people sitting down in the next few weeks and being prepared to bury the hatchet and put behind them what was said prior to last Thursday. If we can do that, we will have achieved a great deal, and not on our behalf and not in terms of revenge. Looking back over our shoulder and seeking revenge is not like sending an e-mail; it actually rebounds on us. That is why I have not, in any way, been bitter about what has happened to me, because we have to get on with life, rather than constantly reflect on the past.

At the moment, we live in a emotional, retro society, where we are very much looking over our shoulders to the misdemeanours and catastrophes of the past. I am therefore simply making a plea tonight that we pick up Leveson, deal with those things we can agree on and move on to the future. We will thus retain an independent, vigorous, sometimes extremely aggravating and sometimes unpleasant media, but we will do so with the kind of oversight that will protect people, by their own code and their own lights, from the kind of horrors that have been demonstrated in front of the Leveson inquiry.