I rise to challenge the hyperbole of the Government Front-Bench team on this particular measure, which will not be a great Act that will bring new liberty to the country. It describes itself as a royal charter presumably in the hope that it will gain the respect that other royal charters have. One effective example is the one under which the BBC operates. At one time in my life, I had duties as a member of the Broadcasting Council for Wales to decide on political balance in broadcasts. Everything was decided on the basis of ensuring that those broadcasters who had air time represented the views of the country—not easy when it came to deciding on Welsh language broadcasts where one party was predominantly represented by Welsh speakers. It had to be done, and we found a way of dealing with the press that was effective and balanced.
No attempt could really be made to impose a political balance on our national press, which was described by Aneurin Bevan as
“the most prostituted in the world”.
We see that that is still true if we look at today’s newspapers and examine the way in which the Daily Mail, for example, devoted six days of front-page headlines, including in The Mail on Sunday, to one subject—to attack the Liberal Democrats. Other things were happening in the world, but day after day we had this political tract seeking to affect the results of a by-election.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) said, we should look at the proprietors as people who have immense power—power without responsibility—so that even elected Prime Ministers pay court to them. John Major, for example, was threatened with having a bin dumped on his desk by the editor of The Sun. Tony Blair flew to Australia to pay court to the empire of Murdoch. We know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) and the present Prime Minister were in close relationships, socially, with editors, and we have been given a very unhealthy revelation about cabals
who are far too close to, and have too much interest in, the press, the police and politicians. That is a worrying situation.
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We are not dealing with any of those problems, but we have a Bill which, as my hon. Friend the new Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) tweeted today, was settled in a way that we should perhaps try to emulate in other contexts. Although we cling to the myth that we decide policy in the House by means of debate and persuasion, we know that most issues are settled by means of deals behind closed doors.
I believe that the worst, the most egregious, objections to the Prime Minister’s proposals have been removed from the Bill, and I find it generally satisfactory, but I think that we must recall the dreadful acts of the newspapers. For 23 years, the loved ones of those who were killed at Hillsborough had to face the foul accusations, described by The Sun as the truth, that were made against their dead loved ones. We know that the agony of the Dowlers and the McCanns, who had suffered the worst possible bereavement and disappearance, was added to by a cynical press who acted with great cruelty.
We are dealing with part of the problem. This is a relatively modest proposal, and it is probably the best that we can have in the circumstances. However, we hope that the press will learn the lesson that the more hysterical and the more partial they become, fewer people will trust them. The trust of the country goes to the organs of the press that are governed by a strict royal charter and which must have a balance politically, and those are the broadcasters.