Public Confidence in the Media and Police

In practice, in those circumstances, it probably could not have done. My only regret is that I listened too much to the Conservative Opposition. It is not a mistake I will make again. On press regulation, I listened carefully to what the Prime Minister had to say. His formulation of independent regulation is a sensible one, if I may say so. As I wrote in an article in The Times on Monday, which was a synopsis of a lecture I gave last week, it is important that we do not frame the debate about press regulation in terms of four legs good, two legs bad, so to speak—between self-regulation, which is apparently good, and imposed regulation, which is apparently bad. We must have a balance between the two. The press will always be subject to the general law—the law of defamation, the law of copyright, and the emerging law of privacy. That is entirely correct. It is also the case that there should be a high degree of self-regulation, but self-regulation, as we now know, cannot operate by itself because ultimately self-regulation is self-serving. The best proof of the failure of self-regulation is the fact that the Express newspaper group withdrew altogether from the Press Complaints Commission structure in January this year, rendering any possibility of sanction by the PCC nugatory. So there has to be a statutory framework, but I suggest that that statutory framework can strengthen the freedom of the press if it is properly imposed. An independent press commission should be established, which should have a duty to protect and enhance the freedom of the press, as well as to protect the rights of individuals, particularly in respect of their privacy. The membership of that body should not be appointed by Ministers or by Parliament. Instead, what should be established by law is an appointing committee at arm's length from both that, in turn, on a formula, would appoint the independent members of that committee, and the majority of those members ought to be independent, not media representatives. As we have heard, the powers of that commission should include powers of investigation, powers to require a retraction and, in extremis, powers of financial penalty. I profoundly disagree with my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Kinnock. There is not a parallel here between the broadcast media and the print media. That is a profound error. The broadcast media have to be statutorily regulated—apart from anything else, there is a shortage of spectrum and a high value on it. Of course, it has to be regulated, and in our culture, that regulation is subject to a requirement of balance. However, it would be antithetical to a democratic society to place a requirement of balance on the print media. Doing so, in turn, would also require newspapers to be licensed, which would be anathema. Instead, we need the commission to establish these high standards. The Government should do what neither the Labour Government nor previous Governments going back more than 40 years did: follow the recommendations of the Younger commission and the late Sir David Calcutt's committee in 1991 and put in place a tort of infringement of privacy, in addition to the development of a privacy law under the Human Rights Act 1998. Many will think that a slightly technical point, but it is of great importance. Each of us as citizens has direct rights if we are defamed or if our intellectual property rights to what we write are transgressed, but we do not have direct rights if our privacy is invaded. We should. The reforms that I have suggested, which I think can command support across the House—by the way, I am glad that the Press Complaints Commission said in The Times yesterday that it supports them too—could provide a basis for this House to make strong recommendations to Lord Leveson's inquiry about the way forward.