My Lords, I thank the Minister and Members from all parts of the House for their good wishes about my health. I went into hospital yesterday morning for a procedure on a long-standing back complaint. It went very well and as I left, the doctor said, “Oh, you might find a bit of discomfort once the painkillers wear off”. Always listen to your
doctor. I was really touched to read today’s Hansard. There were good wishes that you usually have to die to get in this House. I feel rather like Tom Sawyer in that respect.
The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is right—I am only going to speak to the amendments to Clause 50—as the notes issued by the House on the wash-up period state:
“The wash-up period allows a Government to enact essential or non-controversial legislation”.
Whatever else this is, Clause 50 is neither of those things. We all know it has been put into the Bill like a sore thumb, to fix a deal between the Conservative Party and the major newspaper proprietors. That is the wicked world in which we live.
Having served in government and in this House for well over 30 years, I cannot get excited about wash-up. George Woodcock, the great trade union leader of the early 1960s, said that good trade unionism is a series of squalid compromises; so is wash-up, I am afraid. I understand what we are doing today. If we did not have this rather crude end to a Parliament, even a general election period of six weeks would be eaten up by both Houses debating Bills. It is not the end of the world; there is another Parliament coming.
I can see that the noble Lord, Lord Black, is in his place. Like Don Quixote, he is ready to charge at the windmills of state control of the press. That has never been any part of Section 40, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, explained in quoting the expert on the situation, Lord Leveson. I was the Minister in the Ministry of Justice who had responsibility for trying to put forward a solution to the problem of how you square the circle of press freedom and the power of big money in the press. I find it ironic that, at the end of this Parliament, we are being asked simultaneously to help the titans of the press to escape the bullying of SLAPPs—that is the use of big money to curb freedom—and at the same time those same press bodies are resisting attempts to give the ordinary citizen the protection from big-money press that they are asking for.
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We know how it works in trying to curb that in so many individual cases, so I am really pleased that a number of my colleagues have put down amendments that could and should have been a way forward, but I do not see that in anything that the noble Lord, Lord Black, has said recently, or any of the other supporters. I do not see the noble Lords, Lord Faulks, Lord Black or Lord Hunt, as in any way on the other side of the fence. We are all in favour of press freedom; I resent very much the idea that those of us who have sought to find that balance, over many years, are still waiting for a move from the press itself.
In an earlier debate, I quoted David Mellor: it is nearly 30 years since warned the press that they were
“drinking in the last-chance saloon”
yet they are still there. All that I can say to my friends on the other side, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Black, is that I know how wash-up works. We are probably not going to win, even if we forced any of the compromises, because that is the sordid compromise
to which the two sides have to come to get the business over. But it is not the end, because we all know that there will be another scandal by a press that still feels that it is immune from any controls.
I just wish that those on the other side can see genuine attempts on all sides of the House to find a way forward on this, and that there will come a time when they regret not picking up the offers that were on the table. As I say, the public outside do not see this as an attack on press freedom; they see it as an attempt to bring a section of our public life within the realms of decency, and that fight will go on.