Leveson Inquiry

Lord Judd Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I believe that perspective is essential in our considerations of this matter. It is essential that we pay a warm tribute to many fine and courageous journalists and to excellent parts of the media, who provide invaluable service to society even when we at times get very upset by it. I am totally convinced by the courageous work of Lord Justice Leveson and think that we should fall behind him and quickly implement his emphasis on regulation, which must be independent of government and involve the media themselves. I also believe, as we have heard convincingly argued in this debate, that it must be underpinned by statutory authority. I am very glad that my noble friend Lady Liddell laid emphasis, rightly, on the importance of governance in the media.

I believe that the crisis in the media is a symptom of a deeper crisis in society as a whole. We are obsessed with quantitative rather than qualitative considerations. The increasing reality is more and more of a sad absence of ethical and value dimensions. There is now an emphasis in education from the youngest children to postgraduate studies onproducing efficient, operational people to feed the economic machine, less and less matched by an equal commitment to producing citizens who think, evaluate and challenge in the context of a search for truth and with the ability always to ask not simply what is happening but why it is happening or why it has happened. That is the key word—“why”.

Of course, we desperately need efficient management and highly professional competence, but for what? Where are we going? What is it that really matters? Historically, there has always been a tension in a pluralist free press between commercial success and fulfilling the high and demanding calling of being the essential life blood of an informed and imaginative democracy. This is, of course, complicated by arrogant love of power by some. Democracy cannot be better than the quality of the information on which it functions.

Whether we be of the left or right, the issue of ethics applies to us all. Adam Smith was first of all a teacher of ethics. He approached his economic theory in the context of being a highly ethical and somewhat dour, I suspect, Presbyterian. He took the ethics for granted. We now want a free market, and all the rest, but not the ethnics. When the Berlin Wall fell, Lord Soper made a debate-stopping intervention. He said that it was not a question of socialism having been tried and failed but of socialism having demanded an ethic of which humankind has so far proved itself incapable. So whether we are on the left or the right, that struggle to see the ethical dimensions has pride of place and must always be there.

The issue with which we are now dealing reflects the pressures in the machine that constantly push downmarket to ensure sales, circulation and advertising. Other absolute principles have to be present all the time, such as truth, responsibility and integrity. These should be basic to, and inherent within, the culture; it is no good for them to be present simply because they have been imposed by a regulatory body. They have to be internalised in all that is going on.

The media themselves have a key part to play in tackling all this. Education, not just the training of journalists, matters desperately. That is why the humanities such as history, philosophy and the creative arts are so critical in our educational system. It is sheer short-sighted foolishness to undermine their primacy in our educational system.

The repeated disturbing events which made Leveson necessary must raise questions about the prevailing or developing culture among too many journalists—though not all, by a long chalk—their sense of responsibility and how far any inadequacy is the inevitable outcome of the state of our society. To take Leveson seriously demands a fundamental look at ourselves, society as a whole and the quality of our educational system. If we are really to live up to the challenge of Leveson, we urgently need to promote a nationwide debate about the values of our society.