There has been a lot of praise of Lord Justice Leveson today, and I am afraid that I am going slightly to divert from that, because to some extent prolixity has been mistaken for virtue. Verbosity is possibly part of the problem of his report, which not only goes on for much too long, but fundamentally has missed the bus. I say that because it was not set up to deal with the internet. Indeed, Lord Leveson says on page 169 that
“most blogs are read by very few people. Indeed, most blogs are rarely read as news or factual, but as opinion and must be considered as such.”
However, we discover from Saturday’s Financial Times, a very good source of information and not one that has been involved with any of these problems, that 82% of the UK population receive news online, compared with 54% who receive it from newspapers. So the report is about regulating yesterday rather than dealing with tomorrow; it should make King Canute feel proud,
because at least he was going to deal with the tide that was coming in, rather than a tide that had receded some years before.
I am delighted to say that Lord Justice Leveson has used online content himself; it was reported in The Sunday Times that he was caught by a spoof on Wikipedia and said that The Independent was founded by one Brett Straub, who apparently is a Californian student and had no association with the founding of The Independent. So, on the one hand, not much notice is taken of the internet, but, on the other, it has actually been used in putting together this report of almost 2,000 pages.
I listened with great interest to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), who said that we should always be very cautious when people say that the status quo is not an option as self-evidently the status quo is always an option. As a Conservative, I would often like the status quo ante, but I shall not dwell on that point. A good deal of the report accepts the status quo. On page 1496, Lord Justice Leveson states that
“I do not recommend that any change is necessary to the substantive criminal law.”
On page 1508, on the civil law, he says that he does not want to go over the ground of the Defamation Bill, because that has already been dealt with, and on privacy he says:
“It does not appear that legislative intervention will do other than generate…litigation”.
On defining the public interest in law, he states that:
“I do not recommend a statutory definition.”
In the criminal law and the civil law, we will maintain that terrible thing, that awful spectre, the status quo. That is rather encouraging because it means that the law of the land as is working and has been doing its job.