When Sir David Calcutt produced his second report in 1992, he was damning in his criticism of the lack of serious progress made by the Press Complaints Commission in the previous two years. We in Parliament as well as the press are now reaping the whirlwind of that collective failure. In the intervening years, the Conservatives and then Labour failed to grasp the nettle of press standards. As Lord Justice Leveson makes clear, standards have fallen, not risen, in many, although by no means all, sections of the press. What the McCanns, the Dowler parents, J. K. Rowling and thousands of others have been subjected to should never happen in a society that prides itself on its freedoms, for all these victims have been deprived of the most basic rights of family life and justice to which we are all entitled.
I say to the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) and the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) that it is not the case that the problems we are dealing with are simply breaches of the criminal law which have not been investigated. Sir Brian Leveson states in his report:
“There have been too many times when, chasing the story, parts of the press have acted as if its own code, which it wrote, simply did not exist.”
The Prime Minister established the Leveson inquiry at the behest of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition because he knew there had to be major changes to end the intrusion and abuse the PCC and the many previous attempts at self-regulation had failed to end. If the Prime Minister deserves credit for setting up Leveson—and indeed he does—he has, I am afraid, undermined that by his extraordinary and impetuous decision to rubbish, within 24 hours of receipt of the report, Leveson’s key recommendation that there must be some statutory underpinning of a much-enhanced system of independent self-regulation.
I am sure that the Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for Maldon, has looked in detail at the fourth volume of the Leveson report, so he will have seen that what is proposed there by way of statutory underpinning includes providing
incentives, such as in respect of costs, for the members of the press board—membership of which would be entirely voluntary.
Instead of a serious study of the Leveson report, the British press have produced some of the most extravagant comment I have witnessed from them. That includes Mr Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun, who claimed that Members of Parliament would risk
“looking like Putin or Beijing”
if we had a new press law.
We are all against any semblance of state control of the press. Sir Brian Leveson could not have been more emphatic about that. He says, in terms, that his proposed press board
“should not have the power to prevent publication of any material”
by the press. Instead he proposes a light-touch regulation system.