My Lords, I speak in favour of Amendment 11. We need it because we need the Leveson cross-party agreement on press regulation and because we need a raucous, unfettered press, but one that does not prey on the vulnerable and the innocent. I believe that we have achieved this balance through the proposed royal charter, and we have achieved it with all-party consensus, thanks in part to the persistence of my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister. As part of that, the three parties agreed proposals on exemplary damages and costs designed to provide incentives for publishers to join the independent press regulator, as set out in these amendments.
I have been disappointed, if not surprised, by the response from some sections of the press to the cross-party agreement. In our debate on Monday, my noble friend Lord Fowler referred to that great practitioner of investigative journalism, Sir Harry Evans, and to a speech he made recently in which he abhorred the negative response to the Leveson report, in particular the suggestions that it was an attack on the freedom of the press. The freedom of the press is, as he said,
“too great a cause, too universal a value to a civilised society, to be cheapened as it is in the current debates. Every year upwards of a hundred journalists, broadcasters and photographers die in the name of freedom of the press”.
My great friend, Marie Colvin, was one of them. She died because she so passionately believed in making public the stories of the forgotten. In the case of her last despatch, it was the people of Homs. She knew about state control of the press and experienced it in East Timor, in Chechnya, in Sri Lanka and, finally, in Syria where the state targeted the media centre she was working from and killed her.
The royal charter and its independent press regulator, properly underpinned—to use that very unhappy term—will mean the end of unethical work practices and achieve a proper environment for journalists to ply their important trade. It protects both the freedom of the press and the rights of the individual.
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