Lord Soley
Main Page: Lord Soley (Labour - Life peer)Media: News Corporation
Lord Soley Excerpts
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, as the noble Baroness says, it is indeed correct that the convention of the House is that if one is not here at the beginning of the debate, one should scratch. However, there are mitigating circumstances. Although I appreciate that people should be here long before the start of a debate, it is difficult if one is told that it will be an hour and a half later. I therefore suggest that rather than noble Lords who were not here at the beginning of the debate giving their full speeches, they should limit their speeches to two minutes. I have been speaking to my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, who asked if she might speak in the gap for a couple of minutes. Personally, I would find that acceptable. I am not a Whip, but I put that forward as a way through this matter.
Lord Soley
Before the noble Lord responds, perhaps I may clarify that part of the problem was the uncertainty yesterday about the start time of this debate, when we were being told by people on the government side that it would start at 12.30 pm. I missed the first few minutes of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, which was not very long, but it was primarily because I had a delay elsewhere. I want some guidance on this. One problem with the House is that we do not have clear start times. It would save everybody a lot of problems if we did. My view is that in a debate of this nature, we should let people speak.
Lord Soley
My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, who has a long and distinguished record, on what he has been doing recently. To repeat what I said earlier, my apologies for missing some of the opening comments for the reasons I explained. Let me come to the heart of the issue. I do not think at this stage that I want to address the issue of what we do about the Press Complaints Commission. As an investigation has been set up into that, today we need to identify some of the key questions that have been asked over time and need to be answered.
The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, will recall that in 1992 he chaired an official committee of the House of Commons on my Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill. We took evidence, which was highly publicised by television, radio, and by one or two newspapers but hardly any of the others. The whole record of that committee is now in the House of Commons Library and, I think, the House of Lords Library and it gives the full details. In that Bill, I tried to balance the freedom and responsibility of the press. One of the things that the Sun used to say at the time was, “This is really just about stopping the press from publishing” and it attacked me for what it claimed was trying to close down and to limit the press.
The trick in this is to get the right balance between freedom of the press, which we all want, and the responsibility which we know has gone badly off the rails. It is possible to have a statutory model, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, indicated, is the model of the electronic media, television and radio. But there is also the Advertising Standards Authority, which has a statutory back-up through Ofcom if it is necessary.
One of the first questions that an investigation has to answer is: should we have a statutory or a non-statutory body? It is a difficult question. I think that statutory regulation can be done without losing press freedom. It is perfectly possible to do it, although there is an argument about desirability and some of the issues around what is a newspaper and what is not a newspaper. There is a problem in that area.
We have been faced with unaccountable power by large media groups. This applies not just to News International, but to other groups too. What has been happening is not new. One of the reasons I stress this is that when people say that politicians did not fight this issue, actually, a lot of us did. A lot of us got a lot of flack for doing so, as many people will know, in the other House and in this House at times. Certainly, I have had things happen to me which should not have happened by a decent press, but, curiously, at the end of the day, I did not feel intimidated. Why? It is because I am a fairly experienced politician and a fairly experienced public figure, and at times you shrug your shoulders. But you do it about things that members of the public should not have to shrug their shoulders about. If my kids are photographed over the garden wall I can deal with that in my own way with the journalists involved but an ordinary member of the public cannot do that, which is something we need to emphasise.
On privacy, a key question for the committee concerns the balance between the need to know and the desire to know. Do we want to leave it to the courts to decide the balance between Articles 8 and 10 of the European convention—privacy and the right to free speech—or do we want a separate privacy law? That key question must be answered. I have referred to the power of the press in this House and in the House of Commons on previous occasions. I have publicised all of this and it has been in the public domain for some time. I mention again the case I took up against the then editor of the Sun, Stuart Higgins, and the gross harassment and bullying that was happening at the Sun. I have to say to people who work for News International that I do not believe that it was not known; I do not believe that it was not known to Rebekah Wade; and I do not believe that it was not known to Rupert Murdoch. Why do I say that? When it happened I got convincing evidence from a senior member of News International, whose confidentiality I will still respect. I had already spoken to two of the people who were most dramatically involved and had suffered a lot. One of them, a woman, is still under an injunction from News International not to talk—and this from an organisation that complains about injunctions from people in public positions.
I shall read a letter from Olswang, the solicitors for the victim at the time and now, of course, the solicitors representing News International:
“The lady concerned was completely without fault”.
This is what News International claimed, but at the end of the day the editor was the person who made the publisher a vast amount of money per week and he ran his own show. Therefore,
“the editor’s staff were disposable”.
That is exactly what happened at News International last week. When I wrote to Rupert Murdoch asking how much was paid, I was told not by Murdoch but by other people that it was half a million pounds. That is a lot of money and you do not get it for having your bottom pinched. There was then some argument about whether it was as much as that, but of course a lot of the expenses were also paid. I still do not know the figure. Did I get a reply from Rupert Murdoch? No, I did not. I wrote to Rebekah Wade, who replied immediately to say—this is how the intimidation can work—“Tell me, Mr Soley. How many cases of sexual harassment did you deal with when you were chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party?”. The answer, incidentally, is that I did not get any complaints. But you can see the mode they operated in; it was immediately to try an attack on me without answering the question. But how can you pay out large sums of money without the owner knowing, let alone the editor? I then got another letter from the human resources manager who simply said that he was going to close the correspondence with me.
I turn to the power of the press. The press will often say, “We are here to hold power to account”. I agree with that, but of course it immediately raises the other question which the committee will have to look at: who guards the guards? If they do not report what I was doing on my Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill, and if they do not report it when I run that story, which was reported on the BBC “Today” programme, by the Guardian and the Independent and then died, you have a real problem on your hands.
I want to end on two points. Ownership is an issue as is the issue of the link between politicians and journalists. Let us remember that in the 1970s an elected politician could expect to be reported in the Times. I do not want to go back to such simple methods, but when that stopped, what happened instead was that newly elected people like myself realised that we had to make links with journalists in order to run a story. That is not going to stop, but even with the new media which will change the nature of this argument considerably, we will need to look at how journalists and politicians work together to run a story.
I want briefly to mention the issue of post-publication. Any controls on the press, whether voluntary or not, need to recognise that they have to be imposed post-publication, not pre-publication. I hope that that will be taken into account. It is also clear that the issue of payments made to the police must be taken into account. The other very difficult matter the committee will have to consider is that if we are to have a body, either statutory or non-statutory, that can impose punishments on the press, those punishments, again, must not inhibit the freedom of the press to report. There has been a long history of this and I have had a long involvement in it. For the first time for 20-odd years I feel that we are getting somewhere. It is not before time.