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BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Ordered,
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Brandreth.]
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham):
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary for attending the debate on behalf of the Lord Chancellor's Department. I note the presence, among others, of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), who I am sure will be able to help me if I go wrong.
Those are some of the words used by Charles Kinglsey's pupil John Martineau, and they apply as well to journalists and Members of Parliament as to lawyers and others.
We need to respect the law and the role of newspapers and journalists. I know that libel does not apply only to words published by journalists, for which editors take responsibility. The press has a responsibility to make available to all what is known to a few.
There is much in common among lawyers, journalists and Members of Parliament. We each have to take up causes that may be unpopular, and make judgments that may turn out to be wrong. We have to take up unpopular causes for unpopular people, and be prepared to suffer for it. An independent judiciary and legal system, the press and the freedom of Back-Bench Members to raise issues in the Chamber are important parts of democracy.
I do not want to make the debate one on the hourly rates of solicitors or barristers, or give much attention to the pay of journalists or the earnings of star columnists. I want to discover whether we can help, not only through the law but by changing the culture, to reduce the number of times that people make allegations of libel, by removing many of the causes. I do not expect that we can remove them all, but we can reduce their number.
The debate is also about resolving claims of libel, and reducing the impact of cheque books on justice. To find an example of cheque books in justice, we may consider the reasons that newspapers gave for not having pursued Anthony Blunt, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International or Robert Maxwell. If my right hon. and noble Friend Margaret Thatcher had not named Blunt as a spy in the Chamber, thus gaining privilege, he could have sued anybody who wrote about him in a newspaper or book.
Subject to the guidance of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough, we may assume that libel is saying something that is untrue and damaging about someone that is not protected by privilege. The BCCI case involved a most corrupt bank being defended from exposure because newspapers did not dare print what they thought they knew, because BCCI used the law and plenty of other people's money to impose its will on others.
For many of the final years of Robert Maxwell's life, he kept out of court by using the legal process and threatening to make that process too expensive for other people. Most people cannot do that. I must declare an interest, in that I have been involved in a small number of libel cases with the media. I do not claim any merit or advertise any vices and I do not want to go into my cases that have gone to the High Court.
I accept the advice in this week's UK Press Gazette that people who want to make a claim against editors should go to court. That referred to freelance journalists who were not paid. If a journalist who has not been paid £200, £50 or £7.50 is advised to go to court if he has a legitimate claim, someone who thinks that they have been wronged by a libel should be able to do the same.
The problem is with what newspapers decide to print, what they do with complaints and what happens after that. I would like proprietors, editors and journalists to print, as does the BBC, their guidance to themselves. What standards do they themselves want to uphold? I am not talking about the codes of the National Union of Journalists or the Press Complaints Commission, but about the standards by which each paper wishes to be judged. Each newspaper should, as do some local newspapers, say to people, "If you have a complaint, let us know, and if we think you are right, we will put it right."
When I was a junior Minister, one of the things in which I took the greatest pride was answering a parliamentary question with two sentences that fitted into one line of one column of Hansard--"I am sorry. I made a mistake." That is not frightfully difficult to say, but it can get a lot people out of an awful lot of trouble.
I have an example. I rang up a journalist about an unimportant story that appeared in a newspaper a couple of days ago. I asked him whether he had checked the story. He said that he had, and I asked him with whom he had checked it. He said that he wanted to protect his sources. I said, "I am not asking who gave you the story in the first place, but who you checked it with?"
He admitted that he had not checked it, and started to make a bit of a fuss. He said that the story had an unimpeachable source that he had always relied on, and that if it turned out to be a duff story, he would never trust that person again. He did not say in the newspaper next day that he was sorry that he had not checked it and had made a mistake, but went on with his own flannel. That is one reason why people do not bother to take things up with the press. On important issues, how such complaints are treated can matter.
We all know that we must be prepared do risky things. If we are accused--and I do not mean only MPs but members of the public, too--of things can stop us from doing the work to which we have dedicated our lives, there needs to be some redress.
Editors should declare, "When something has been written that is plainly wrong, or so ambiguous that it is wrong in some of its meanings, we are prepared to make it plain on the day of publication, or as soon as we are told that there is a complaint. If we accept that the complaint is right in part, we shall make an announcement to the Press Association, and we shall put it right in our next publication."
There should be no need to wait a week for a Sunday newspaper, or to wait three or four days for a daily. If it turns out that something has been said that is plainly wrong, editors should say so, and admit that it does not meet their standards and apologise. Most people would accept that, even after serious defamation had occurred. If there were also a minor cash settlement, that would be nice, but instant acknowledgment that something was either seriously ambiguous or plain wrong would greatly reduce the fuss, bother, stress and strain.
I should have acknowledged earlier that, in my experience, most lawyers, when consulted on such cases, try to reach a settlement as fast as possible. Lawyers do not set out to run cases on, whether they are consulted by newspapers or by individuals who may want to initiate a case against a newspaper or an individual.
There will always be threats to press freedom. As I have said in the House, the press need to have the right to be wrong. They should not always be able to prove something in court. Nevertheless, they should be able to decide when it is right to say something that they cannot prove but believe to be in the public interest, or their commercial interest, to say.
In an article in the Sunday Times on 18 June 1995, in an article headed "Method in the madness of the great libel lottery", Andrew Neil wrote:
We should not hide the fact that running a newspaper is a great commercial enterprise. I do not want to take away from newspapers either that calculation or what they consider to be their duty, in which I support them, to alert the public to potential dangers from crooks and other types of wrongdoing. There will be times when newspapers feel that they must settle although they believe that they have been right--and there have been examples that have shown them to be right.
My prejudice is to try to avoid laws that apply specifically to journalists or to newspapers. The law should apply generally. One may sometimes want to give a newspaper a public interest defence, but one should not try to introduce a "corrupt practices for journalists" Bill that does not apply to private detectives or commercial concerns, or a "right to privacy" Bill that applies only to what journalists do and not to what private detectives do, or a "right to reply" Bill that applies specifically to journalists--although I am slightly dubious about my interpretation of part of the Defamation Bill in another place, which may appear to take from judges a power that was probably implicit in the draft Bill. One should not impose on newspapers the duty of balance that is applied to broadcasters.
I do not say that journalists and editors should not have to face criticism. We have unlimited privilege in the Chamber. Members of Parliament are limited in what they say and do by the opinion of those around them--social pressure, exposure, argument, criticism, debate--rather than by Mr. Deputy Speaker putting his hand up and saying, "You are not allowed to say that, because it is illegal." Editors are like Back Benchers, but obviously with greater access to the media.
There is room for argument, debate and criticism. We need to ask whether broadcasters should consider more often what the press do. I am not saying that most of what the press do or say is wrong. Considering that a newspaper may contain 700,000 words in a day or a week, it is surprising how few facts newspapers get wrong. I find it surprising how seldom they make unfair comment in a general sense, let alone unfair comment in a legal sense.
There are times, however, when newspapers slip into bad habits. They must make judgments.
Let me take some examples that did not go to law. I was once the subject of allegations by broadcasters and the press that I was involved in drug smuggling. I thought
that that was laughable, but they did not at the time. It was only when Private Eye obtained the information that it turned out that a hoaxer had got half the British press staking out a motel in Basingstoke for a week or two, waiting for me to come along with the money to swap for the drugs.
More recently, there was a time when some of the media had seriously considered that there was a story that I had accepted free flights in America from a commercial concern, and I had to say that the only time I remembered accepting a free flight was in Richard Branson's helicopter getting away from Silverstone when there was a traffic jam after the British grand prix.
Stories can grow up and develop a momentum of their own. In 1989, a fair part of the press had become involved in swallowing a story about me that, if they had bothered to check, they would have known to be untrue.
In general, people should not sue, and we should continue to emphasise that, but costs are a factor. Having acknowledged that the press may be intimidated by BCCI or Robert Maxwell, one must consider the impact that their resources can have on other people. If a newspaper group budgets to spend £200,000 or £1 million a year in legal costs and damages in libel cases, or if it has taken out libel insurance above a certain level, does that create a lack of balance?
Does that not start to deal with the present tendency to ask why, if personal injury compensation is at a certain level, someone's reputation is worth more or less? The answer is that most people are able to sue on personal injury and are not confronted with the probability of incurring the massive costs of the insurance company or the person defending the claim.
In libel cases, even if the plaintiff wins, wounded pride or some other feeling--assuming that excessive damages are not awarded by the jury--may lead to an appeal, which would reach the Court of Appeal a year later. If that succeeds--it may be on the judge's summing-up or some other issue--the plaintiff must go to the High Court again, with not the slightest prospect of obtaining anything extra, and the possibility of having to carry the costs for others.
When the House considers the Defamation Bill, we should try to discover whether there is some way to cap the costs of a successful private plaintiff, even if, on a point of law, for some reason a defendant wants to go off and establish some other precedent.
The last subject that I shall mention is slightly beside the main subject of the debate. That is what I call printmail.
At the moment, if someone thought that they knew something about me, and came to me and said, "Unless you give me £20,000 I shall tell a newspaper," I could take that person to the police, and they would probably be charged with blackmail; and, regardless of whether they were convicted, I would retain my anonymity.
However, suppose that a person cuts out the middle stage and answers the type of advertisement that one reads in some newspapers saying, "If you have any information about a Member of Parliament, please ring 0171-782" and so on, that person cuts out the blackmail stage and proceeds straight to publication. If the journalists pay £20,000, rather than the victim paying £20,000, the position is different. I have no answer to that, but it needs open debate. I say to the Minister and to the House, we should try to find out what is going on.
That, at the sitting on Wednesday 28th February, the Speaker shall, notwithstanding Standing Order No. 14B (Proceedings under an Act or on European Community Documents), put the Questions on the Motions in the name of Mr. Secretary Forsyth--
(i) relating to Local Government Finance (Scotland) not later than Seven o'clock, and
(ii) relating to Housing (Scotland) not later than one and a half hours after the commencement of proceedings on the first such Motion.--[Mr. Brandreth.]
7.12 pm
"Live pure, speak true, right wrong".
"Such are the competitive pressures--and the financial rewards for scooping the opposition--that editors would more often be inclined to publish and take the risk of having to pay the libel cost, which would be factored into the calculation."
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