I have listened carefully to what hon. Members have said. I have no strongly formed views on what is being proposed that I cannot change in most respects. I listened carefully to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and believe that there is room for considerably more compromise than we have seen in the first few days since the Leveson report was published. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) pretty much summed up my approach to the whole business, which is that I would really like us to avoid statutory legislation. My instinct is that the distinction between statutory underpinning and statutory legislation is pretty much angels dancing on the head of a pin, regardless of what learned Members of this House might say.
Confining myself to a narrower matter in the report, one thing that struck me was paragraph 72 of the executive summary, in which Leveson states:
“What would the legislation achieve? Three things. First, it would enshrine, for the first time, a legal duty on the Government to protect the freedom of the press.”
Yesterday’s edition of The Observer referred to that as being much like the first amendment to the US constitution. Of course, it is nothing like it. There is no real comparison. Any party of Government in future could readily change a law. It could scrap it or, more worryingly, tighten it up with a simple whipped majority if it was unhappy with how it stood. The first amendment is set within an entirely different constitutional structure, as changing it would require the support of 75% of the state legislatures and a two-thirds majority, so there is no possibility that a constitutional amendment could be overturned as readily as could a statute underpinning press freedom in this place. Indeed—let us be absolutely honest—there are Members who would say that if what we do now is not to our liking, when we are in government we can do something different.
Therefore, it is no more meaningful to compare such legislation to the first amendment than it is to compare it to anything else; it is simply inaccurate. I was surprised that The Observer, a newspaper for which I otherwise have great respect, published that yesterday, because it over-blows the proposal. I was concerned that Lord Justice Leveson hinted knowingly at the overblown idea that his proposals are like the first amendment, because that has implications for how we sell the idea of a free press to nations abroad. I have had quite a lot of contact with countries—not all of them heinous and hideous non-democracies—where the press and its relationship with government is fairly complex. Press freedom is very fragile in these places.
We have heard from learned Members of this House that statutory underpinning is very different from statutory regulation. The Leveson report said that ultimately the regulation of the regulator would be done by an organisation that is described on its own website as the office of the independent regulator. Of course this is about regulation—the clue is in the name. Whether it was arm’s-length regulation or direct regulation—which Leveson allows for in the case of organisations such as The Spectator, which has said that it would not sign up to the voluntary option—we would have, to all intents and purposes, what people in fragile democracies abroad would see as state regulation.
If this does not sound too grand, it is worth my saying what I think about the nature of freedom and how Leveson, with great respect to him, refers to it. When papers such as The Observer compare his proposals to the first amendment and say that they are about protecting and enshrining the rights of a free press, they make a fundamental mistake. In the UK, we do not have a written constitution. We do not have politicised Supreme Court judges; they are appointed by political leaders because it is acknowledged up front that some judgments will be politically based. In the UK, we can do anything we like provided that it is not illegal or unlawful. If I want to go walking or climbing in Scotland, I have complete freedom, within the constraints of some aspects of criminal law and trespass, to do that. If someone said they were going to pass a piece of legislation to enshrine my right to do it, I would be somewhat
sceptical and look at what the imperatives were. In some people’s eyes, it might be perfectly legitimate to legislate to reduce the number of deaths on the hills or to protect the environment. Whatever the circumstances, such legislation would ultimately be directed at making a compromise about my freedom and my access to the hills, because that is what we do when we legislate.
If we choose to legislate where there is no existing legislation on things that we are free to do, as the press is free at the moment, we have to accept a compromise. I believe that Leveson is proposing statutory regulation, however light touch, by Ofcom—again, the clue is in the name—or perhaps another organisation of the great and the good. We hear a great deal about the great and the good being impartial and apolitical. I have big questions about their values and the fact that they do not intervene in what they have themselves decided, but that is a different matter. Fundamentally, if we want a free press and choose to enshrine that freedom in legislation, as Lord Leveson has suggested, then we have to accept a compromise, just as we do when we make any legislation that constrains our freedom to do what we want provided that it is not illegal or unlawful.
7.3 pm