Public Order Bill

Mistakes are made; people are arrested wrongly. The police find acute problem-solving solutions when everyone else talks about “in six months’ time”. Someone has to make a decision; sometimes they make the wrong one—they happen to be human beings—and that is a problem. There is no general defence of being a journalist to any criminal offence. There is protection of legally privileged material, including journalistic material, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act provides quite proper protection for that. However, that is not the same as providing a general defence for criminal behaviour to a journalist. In my view, that is what this proposes.