Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR PETER
RIDDELL, MR
NICK ROBINSON
AND MR
MICHAEL WHITE
28 FEBRUARY 2007
Q1 Chairman: Mr Robinson, Mr Riddell
and Mr White, thank you very much for agreeing to give evidence
this morning. As you are aware, the inquiries we are conducting
at the moment are on strengthening the role of the backbencher
and making better use of non-legislative time, and those two are
obviously linked and linked very closely. We are aware of the
personal commitment of each of you to Parliament and to the reporting
of what happens in Parliament, you would not have spent so many
years of your life here had you not been. One of the things we
are all aware of is that the nature of reporting of what happens
in this place has changed, certainly in the period that people
like Nick Winterton and I have been here. I am not certain that
the quantity of reporting has gone down and I do not look back
to any kind of golden age, but what is palpable is that up until
the early 1990s all the broadsheets, and actually a paper like
the The Mail as well, had pages for reporting what happened
in Parliament as opposed to the wider politics, and the BBC paid
more attention to what happened in Parliament rather than just
to the politics. There have been, I think, some beneficial developments
which have strengthened the role of the backbencher, which sometimes
people pocket and forget, above all the establishment and gradual
strengthening of select committees and a lot of the reporting
one hears today is on select committees and that is a good thing
not a bad thing. The sense I have is that it is more difficult
for serious journalists to get space, whether it is in the papers
or airtime, about what is happening in the place, as it were,
in terms of information. The balance between that and necessary
reporting about personalities, which is part of politics, as well
as the gossip, which we query, has shifted. I say it is not about
allocating blame because there are external, what Ed Balls would
call "exogenous", factors here. First is the introduction
of televising of Parliament, the second is the 24/7 news coverage
which made a dramatic difference and the third is governments,
and we are as culpable as any for trying to handle the 24/7 news
cycle by sometimes not paying proper attention to Parliament and
parliamentary etiquette, so all of those things are there. One
of the issues is where, certainly, serious newspapers have a similar
interest to Parliament, because I note that the decline in turnouts
almost tracks the decline in the readership of serious newspapers,
so we all have an interest in trying to turn this round. That
is a sort of sketch of where we are and I think what my colleagues
would be interested to hear from each of you at the beginning
is whether you think there is a problem, first of all, about how
this place is reported and the activities, particularly that of
backbenchers and, if there is, whether you think things can be
improved and, if so, how?
Mr Riddell: One factor I think
that has been left out is, of course, the Internet. If we had
been witnesses here five years ago I would have shared the implicit
pessimism in your analysis, that, clearly, there is a decline
in a lot of the analysis of what there is in the papers, both
Mike and I, as veterans, have experience, we agree, but it is
changing and it is changing quite significantly. One has changed
dramatically because what has happened on the parliamentary page
on the parliamentary website has made direct access, whilst these
may no longer be dedicated parliamentary pages, and these are
not in any paper, the access of your constituents to what is going
on here is better than it has ever been, no-one need pay a penny
for it as long as they have got internet access. We know the access
on Hansard, so that is an important point. Also in terms of the
coverage of newspapers themselves, we are all at the cusp, all
developing our online sites and the executives of the papers Mike
and I work for can produce wonderful graphs showing the hits on
the sites shooting up. There is a genuine point there, a serious
point there, that potentially in terms of local coverage—and
I say "potentially" because it has not happened yet
really—there is much greater potential access. The other
point I would make is one between national and local coverage.
I look around the table; I was born in Mr Sanders' constituency
in Torquay, I bet he gets plenty of coverage in his local paper.
I am sure it is a true statement in Leicester, Derby, Maidenhead
and I know straight off it would be in Lancashire. I think you
have got to distinguish between local and national papers but
also the Internet, you have got to put the Internet into your
discussion.
Q2 Chairman: Nick and then Mike or
Mike and then Nick.
Mr White: You go first, you have
more readers!
Mr Robinson: On the one hand,
let me start by agreeing with some but not all of the Chairman's
opening analysis here. The one factor I think you did not mention
was competition, televising of Parliament 24/7, handling of 24/7,
other people call it spin, but it is competition; in other words,
when I became a journalist 20 years ago as a producer of political
programmes, there were four channels. You do keep having to remember
that television was just four channels, we did not worry about
whether people would choose to do something else. Now it is the
daily obsession of people in my business about the loss of eyeballs
from one second to the next, to the point where there is now a
measurement system by the second as to whether people are switching
from our news bulletins to different news bulletins, and I would
love to say that people pay no attention to it but people inevitably
do pay attention to it.
Q3 Chairman: What is the effect of
that? Is it to bring it down to the lowest common denominator?
Mr Robinson: No, I do not think
it does bring it to the lowest common denominator, but there is
a huge and intense interest in what engages people and what does
not. Often that can be the highbrow. The massive focus on climate
change, which the BBC and other broadcasters have done in recent
times, is because the audience says it is interested and reflects
it and very serious debates in this place as well as between a
scientist will get on, but also it works the other way round,
if there is a sense things are not of interest to people then
it is quite hard to drive those things on. What has happened,
as you say, is an end to what I would call "duty reporting
of Parliament" beyond, let us just stress for the BBC's case
Yesterday in Parliament, Today in
Parliament and the Week in Westminster, you see
their role institutionally as doing that, but on mainstream news
there is no longer a perception that it is our duty to say what
happened in Parliament today. There is a huge interest in covering
what is topical, significant, surprising or dramatic and there
is no prejudice against doing it in Parliament, if that is possible.
The question is, is it possible enough, and the question that
I put to the Committee is how often is the outcome dramatic, how
often is it seriously topical, how often is there a defined outcome
in what goes on as against an adjournment debate where there is
a discussion rather than a defined outcome, how often is it truly
significant. It is those tests that are tests for news bulletins
in a way and there is neither a prejudice in favour or against
parliamentary coverage. A last thought, it seems to me that the
rising coverage of the select committees, particularly in recent
months the Home Affairs Select Committee because of the problems
of the Home Office, has shown that when the Executive is held
to account, that even with a cast list of relative unknowns—and
I do not just mean parliamentarians but witnesses too—because
it is topical, dramatic and significant and the outcome matters,
quite extensive chunks of select committees have found their way
on to mainstream news.
Q4 Chairman: Mike?
Mr White: Since my colleagues
have been optimistic, I shall choose to be pessimistic although
I would have made several of the points which they have made.
Peter talks about the wonderful possibilities, real and potential,
of the Internet and that is all true as far as it goes. But these
are very much niches, and you will not be surprised if I remind
you that MySpace and YouTube get rather more attention, I suspect,
than the parliamentary channel. It is there, it is wonderful,
I am daily astonished by what I can find on the net and, as you
will expect, I am a bit of a hopeless case in these matters. But
the parliamentary site is much improved. Again, on the point of
local versus national, I am always telling parliamentarians
that they should not worry about what appears about them in The
Guardian, they should always worry about their local paper
far more. I know from both observation and experience that many
local papers are under enormous pressure, fragmented markets,
the Internet again taking their advertising. They are owned by
the big chains and editors are explicitly told that politics is
not interesting, politics is boring and the readers do not want
it. So to that extent I would take issue with Nick's proposition
that there is no prejudice for or against parliamentary coverage,
of course there is. In the fragmenting media markets which now
exist there is a battle for ratings and market share, and if you
have only one TV station with only one per cent of the viewers
but only a tenth of one per cent of the costs, you are a much
more profitable proposition than poor ITV at the moment. So these
things are difficult. I am absolutely convinced that there is
a general culture of bias which affects all the newspapers, up
to and including the FT, against politics in the sense
that we knew and reported 20 or 30 years ago.
Q5 Chairman: Why do you think that
is?
Mr White: There are both positive
and negative reasons. One could say that politics vacated its
central role in our national life when in the late 1970s, under
circumstances we all remember, a marketisation of large swathes
of society—economic, political and social activity—took
place under the Thatcher Government. I would even risk saying,
that by and large it has been beneficial rather than malign. Not
a view universally held around the table I expect, but that is
what did it, so politics moved off centre stage at the same time
the media was deregulated. There are only two Members around the
table who were here to vote on the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which
gave a very favourable entre«e into the market of BSkyB,
as it became, 24/7 television; the BBC responded in kind. The
old joke in the media is their slogan is: "Never wrong for
long", and that is a factor. Other factors which deregulated
the market and about the time the Chairman wrote a report on the
collapse of parliamentary reporting, I would think in about 1991,
1992—
Q6 Chairman: 1993.
Mr White: —a very good piece
of analysis stating what was obvious to those who were close to
it but perhaps not to others. I think either the Financial
Times or The Times dropped the old parliamentary page,
which young people, perhaps, Mr Wright, will not remember but
it was a whole page in six point, a sort of pre«cis of Hansard.
It was jolly good too.
Mr Riddell: It was not actually.
If you talk to the old lags who used to do that, most of it was
duty reporting and it was extremely boring and a very inefficient
use of space. Taking the Chairman's point, the trouble is there
has not been a substitute. I totally defend the decline of most
of the old gallery reporting; the trouble is it has been filled
with lots of stories which do not appear in Mike's or my papers,
because, underlying Mike's point, is there is a sense that the
convention among media executives, because of competition, is
that politics is boring. I think you will find that in any of
our papers, there is an exception to that on the front page of
The Guardian, but, on the whole, a health story will always
trump a political story.
Mr White: That is partly a marketisation
point. You experience in your own professional lives the idea
of consumerism, again it is back to the point I made five minutes
ago, health is an issue because it is a consumer issue. I do not
know how accurate The Times lead is this morning, I do
not know how accurate ours is either, but they drift in a different
sort of way, they are speculative stories about what might be
rather than what has been. I do take issue with Peter about The
Times report. He may have got up at five in the morning and
had a special vellum copy of Hansard delivered to his home and
read it. He is the only person I would believe that of, but let
us give him the benefit of the doubt. A pre«cis of Yesterday
in Parliament found in The Times and had a quick canter
through it.
Q7 Chairman: Before I call Nick in,
my last question is there was a great debate towards the end of
the 1970s about television documentary reporting. I remember this
because I worked for World in Action, which was the butt
of the criticism, and it was said then that story journalism represented
a bias against understanding and that broadcasters particularly,
as well as serious newspapers, had "a duty to inform".
I thought there was something in that and I think there is something
in that now, is there not? Is it pretty mixed? Mike's point on
this culture of bias, there is a bias against understanding but
what you cannot get out of newspapers at the moment is an understanding
of the political process which might be slightly less central
than it was, but it is absolutely fundamental to the nature of
our society because all those changes, Mike, about marketisation
took place as a result of a decision by the British people to
elect a different government in 1979.
Mr Robinson: Let me just clarify
my point about there is no bias against Parliament because Mike
took issue with it. My point was at one level a trite point, which
is if Parliament happens to meet my test of significance to find
out whether it is topical or dramatic whether, frankly, it be
the eviction of Shilpa Shetty from Big Brother, Parliament
will get on the television. Now you may say that is a pretty low
bar to cross, but it is worth saying. There is not a feeling that
if it happens here it will not get on, it will get on; now accepted,
that is a low bar. The point the Chairman makes is whether there
is a bias against the process; I think yes, there might be but
not, I would argue, against understanding. If you look back at,
say, the debates on tuition fees, foundation hospitals, the war
in Iraq or the NatWest Three, once they had built to a significant
pitch there was a rather extensive explanation. If I may, I am
here for the BBC, I used to work for ITV and defend ITV and commercial
broadcasters, a huge amount of intellectual effort is made by
commercial broadcasters as well as the BBC, by bright people sitting
around saying, "How do we make this clear to people? How
can we make them engage?" Where I think you have a point,
though I do not think it is a point that is instantly resolvable,
is that there is not day-to-day education about the process because
there is not a day-to-day view that institutions, per se, should
be reported simply because they are there. There is a perception
that until there is, as it were, war and recession and, funnily
enough, I think wars and recessions would make people rapidly
more interested in politics, I happen to think disinterest in
politics is related to whether apparently it affects people's
lives directly—
Q8 Chairman: What Galbraith calls
"the politics of contentment".
Mr Robinson: Sure. There would
be an effect. But what has gone is that day-to-day sense of what
was the process in Parliament today and I think it has gone for
a good reason because it does not matter very directly to people's
lives and I do not know if people would watch it.
Q9 Sir Nicholas Winterton: It appears
to me, Chairman, that Nick Robinson of our three distinguished
witnesses today has a slightly different role from either Michael
White or Peter Riddell. Nick is head of BBC political news, so
really his duty is to report, hopefully, without any slant on
the reporting; Peter Riddell and Michael White are in a totally
different position. What worries me is that the media, of which
you are all a very important part, is doing less to report and
putting much more slant and reporting tittle tattle, gossip, relationships
and personalities rather than reporting news. Parliament is now
going to have to spend millions of pounds on setting up education
centres, websites and everything else to do what historically
I believe that the press as a whole—that is the visual,
written and sound—has done in the past. I think Michael
White is right in his assessment of what has happened. Can I really
put specific questions, that was really an observation, to which
I am sure you may wish to respond. What worries me is the increasing
lack of engagement of Members of Parliament with what happens
in the Chamber of the House. Is that because really, other than
in exceptional circumstances, what happens on the floor of the
House is predictable? People are prepared to spend much more time
in their office, they can see what is going on in the Chamber
because we now have televisions in our respective offices, of
course we have News 24, so really what goes on in the Chamber
is so predictable and the chances also of Members getting called
to speak is pretty slight. Therefore, the importance of the Chamber
as the forum for national and international discussion has gone.
Do you think that this is a pity? Do you think that the fact is
there is too much legislation, the outcome of which is predictable
in most circumstances, and too few, what I would call, "debates"
when people can actually express an independent view? Do you think
all these things have led to a disengagement which I think has
made the Chamber of the House almost irrelevant except for a few
very attractive speakers, and you might say that there are maybe
a dozen out of 651 in the House? Someone like—I am going
to mention his name, if he speaks people will come in and listen—Mr
Galloway, an extremist in many respects but a most fantastic orator,
people will come in and listen, and there are a few others who
people will come in and listen to. Why is there this disengagement?
Why do Members no longer believe that their presence in the Chamber
is important?
Mr Riddell: On your earlier observation,
I think there is a danger of golden ageism in politics.
Q10 Sir Nicholas Winterton: But you
are part of that golden age.
Mr White: He is the golden age!
Mr Riddell: Parliament in many
respects is much more effective than it has ever been. One of
the problems is myths are allowed to grow up about both this Chamber
and the Lords, many of which are completely wrong. We seldom had
a more effective second Chamber and a seldom more effective first
Chamber, in my view. If you look back to the 1950s, a lot of rubbish
was talked then. Do you know there were two sessions in the 1950s
when not a single government backbencher voted against the whip,
and that was the period of Suez, so your predecessors—before
you were elected, Sir Nicholas, indeed possibly your predecessor—were
perfectly content to have no scrutiny of any kind at all apart
from ritualistic. The substantive answer to your question is partly
related to what we said in our first round of replies, the changing
nature of the media, but it also reflects particularly the criteria
that Nick laid down, which I agree with, of topicality, relevance
and decision, that a lot of the procedures in the Chamber have
no relationship to normal people's lives. People do not go and
hear sermons any longer, therefore the idea of lengthy speeches
is completely alien to most people's understanding. There is a
number of procedural changes you can make of having short, sharp
topical debates. I was a member of the Newton Commission which
the Hansard Society organised which reported just after
the 2001 election. One of our ideas was to copy the Australian
model of having short, quickly-arranged topical debates. That
was suggested by the Chairman's predecessor, by I do not know
how many, Robin Cook, and was examined by him at the time but,
of course, the Government whips squashed it because it was too
awkward. That would get interest, if you had short, sharp topical
debates like that you would get lots of interest, and also recognising
that some of the conventional lengthy debates are a waste of time,
they are ritualistic. They do not achieve anything at all, you
might as well read it in the record. That applies as much to your
colleagues, all right we ignore it, but so do your colleagues
ignore it too. When I hear people say, "Let's have a debate
on a select committee report", I say, "Okay, tell me
who, apart from the minister, the shadow spokesman, and possibly
a crank, is going to be there apart from members of the select
committee", and the answer is zero, as we all well know.
Shorter, sharper things, moving away from ritualistic debate,
it is just a suggestion.
Q11 Mrs May: Peter just branched
into the area I wanted to talk about, first of all, which is topicality
and whether there are any other ideas from our three witnesses
today about how Parliament can make itself more topical and therefore
presumably more interesting to people outside. I also wanted to
pick up on Nick Robinson's tests of being surprising and dramatic.
We are looking at strengthening the role of the backbencher. You
are all saying in the various comments you have made that, from
your point of view, being surprising and dramatic makes the news
or talking about local issues so that we can get into the local
paper as a backbencher. I would like to explore that because there
is a tension between that and the backbencher making a full contribution
here, in this House. There is certainly a need for more topical
debates but, also, for debates which look at issues rather than
just debate constantly legislation. Where do you see the balance
lying now, between your desire for surprise and drama and the
need for the backbencher to be making serious, solid contributions
in this House that develop into good legislation?
Mr Robinson: Forgive me, surprise
and drama were two of my tests, and they do not always have to
apply. Significance is a test. I mean, nobody has to be surprising
or dramatic on the day we are about to go to war: it is significant,
it gets on anyway. And a defined outcome. Let me give you an example.
When there was a debate—a political debate, rather than
a parliamentary debate—about whether the Government had
given adequate time to debate Iraq, I found it almost impossible
within the confines of a news bulletin to explain to the audience
whether the Government had or had not done so. It was a debate
in Government time. Did an adjournment count? Did an opposition
debate count? Did Question Time count? What about a statement
from the Prime Minister? There was no way to answer, as it were,
your mum's question: "Has the Government given time for a
proper debate on Iraq?" because of some relatively arcane
procedural points about this place. Which was the debate about
Iraq? Which of them had a possible outcome for people? I challenge
Members: I give you not just the minute and a half I normally
get to explain things but five minutes to explain it on a news
bulletin, and my suspicion is you could not. It would be too complicated
in order to convey that. If you hit those hurdles, that is a problem.
Clearly the test of a debate ought not to be whether it gets on
television or radio; the test of a debate is whether it is good
for democracy. But if you ask me as someone who works for television
and radio and the Internet: "How are you more likely to get
those things on?" topicality, surprise, significance and
a defined outcome are obviously the tests. One last thought on
that: the role of a backbencher in the view of many people outside
will be to hold the Executive to account. That can be done by
interventions. I see far too few, in my view, backbenchers seeing
their role as to intervene on a minister, to challenge a minister
on a point—in a sympathetic, not necessarily aggressive
way. It seems to me that would have an effect. It was striking
that when the NatWest Three debate came, the urgent debate that
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, managed to secure, this was
regarded as some sort of freak rarity. That was something that
was part of the national debate, of huge significance to relations
between Britain and America and yet it was regarded as a surprise
that Parliament could find a way to debate it. I would just suggest
to Members that that might be a bit odd.
Q12 Chairman: I understand that entirely.
We have to do a lot more to be topical. It is a real issue.
Mr White: I would certainly endorse
that last point. I also am wary of the myth of the golden age.
When Members of Parliament say to me, "You lot are never
in the press gallery," I always reply, "We tend to be
in the press gallery when you are in the Chamber"—which
is, alas, these days, for Prime Minister's Question Time! Alas,
again, only once a week! I did not think one 30-minute session
for two 15-minute sessions was a very good trade in terms of the
public interest or the accountability of the Executive branch.
I take issue with Nick, in the sense that explaining the point
he raised about Iraqi debates is too difficult to explain to the
public. It is no more difficult than the offside trap, or whether
or not the ball was handled in the penalty area, for which we
have 84 action replays discussed by four learned retired professional
footballers at prime time. I am glad to see it hits their ratings
when they do this sometimes. Again, I use that as an example reinforcing
my view that the commitment to informing, as distinct from entertaining,
the public in television and also newspapers has atrophied in
recent years. Peter says that the voters do not want to hear sermons.
Of course they do. They just hear them in short, three-minute
sound-bytes on the Richard and Judy Show or from Archbishop
Paxman or the Reverend Humphrys! Parliament, coming back to the
point about topicality, has to adjust to a degree—it is
not Parliament's job to compete with the Richard and Judy Show—to
a world which moves much faster. The NatWest case is a
fascinating one. We all turned up for that debate. My younger
colleagues do what you all do, I suspect—which is to sit
in your rooms, handling the voluminous self-generated correspondence
from your constituents with one eye on the telly, keeping an eye
on what is going on in the Chamber. If you are really quick, like
Sir Nicholas, you get downstairs to hear George Galloway—heaven
knows why, but he is a marvellous speaker—but you are doing
other things. We do that too. I say to the younger colleagues,
"You can't know what's going on in the Chamber by watching
the telly. You not only have to see the speaker, you have to see
the reaction to the speaker."
Q13 Chairman: It is like being at
the game or watching it on the television: there is a big difference.
Mr White: That is right. But that
is a lost art.
Q14 Mark Lazarowicz: Michael, you
just mentioned the fact that we do get a lot of correspondence—and
there is obviously a lot more now with e-mails—but the way
in which the media is fragmenting means that five years ago there
was a local newspaper and a local radio station on which I did
most of my stuff and now there are about 10 different local newspaper
formats and various free sheets, and six or seven radio outlets,
just at a local level. I have to manage my time to ensure that
I do play a reasonably active role in the Chamber and obviously
I have to stay involved in local issues because that is important
in terms of keeping contact with the public and keeping my profile
up there. Maybe I should not be so worried about spending too
much time in that kind of area. That in itself is a reflection
of the change in the way MPs relate to the public and, maybe,
rather than worrying too much about how we get the Chamber more
interesting and more exciting again, we should be changing our
mode of operation here so as to relate to the fact that there
are now many more ways of interfacing with the public at local
and national level. Rather than looking at debates and the length
of time of debates and so on, we should be looking at the whole
way we relate to the public in terms of online dialogue and that
type of structure of what we do here.
Mr Robinson: There is, if you
will forgive me, a middle position here to which the Internet
gives the possibility. It is not technically difficult for you
to send your constituents a video of your speech in the debate.
It seems to me that is where there is a real, exciting possibility
of the Internet. The great problem of the mass media is that there
are many people interested in a topic but then we find many more
people who are horribly disinterested in the topic and the temptation
is therefore not to cover it in a competitive age. The Internet
finds the way through that. You can identify without having to
know them by name, or gather their list: everybody who is interested
in green issues; everybody who is interested in care homes. Instantly.
At the drop of a hat. There is the capacity to have a debate in
this place and to communicate not by simply saying, "Let
me give you an interview" but "Here is the clip of my
speech. This is what I said when I intervened on the minister
at Question Time. Here it is as an extract and I will send it
to you" and to use organisations, pressure groups to facilitate
that for you, so that you inform, let us say, the pressure group
on better care for the elderly, of what has happened in this place
about that and they disseminate that to their members and pressure
groups. Rather than substituting for what happens in the Chamber
with interviews and press releases and blogs and the rest of it,
find ways to extract what already happens and get it out there.
Mr Riddell: Could I supplement
that with: all of the above, but one of the problems is that I
think MPs have become very, very good in dealing with their constituents.
It is a world which we do not really see. I see how my local MP
performs, as a voter living in north London.
Mr White: And we admire that enormously.
We know Members who are not big stars in this place who are good
constituency Members.
Mr Riddell: Yes, but I am saying
that all the evidence shows of satisfaction: the amount of work
and the amount of e-mails you get and letters has shot up over
the last 20 or 30 years. The result of that has been to squeeze
the activities of Members of Parliament nationally here. When
I was on the Newton Commission, we had on that commission Tom
Sawyer, who was Labour General Secretary in the run-up to the
1997 Election. He was behind the target seats process and we were
discussing it and Tom Sawyer said this publicly. We were talking
about scrutiny and he said, "It's a strange thing, we had
all these target seat MPs and we had a lot of discussion with
them about constituency service and all that aspect, we did not
mention the word "scrutiny" once." I think one
of the problems is that when people become MPs they are very tuned
to servicing their constituents—and a good thing too, and
they are much better than their predecessors were—but there
are no incentives to be good at scrutiny. Often it appears a bit
baffling. I know the authorities of the House lay on facilities
but let us say it is never all that high priority for the whips
to encourage people to be good scrutineers at all. Also, because
the ambitions of Members are such that they want to get on the
frontbenches first, and very quickly, in a sense, within a year
or two, if you are really ambitious and you are not on the frontbench
you are not doing your job. That is the myth. Sir Nicholas is
shaking his head.
Mr White: He is a special case.
Mr Riddell: Yes, but I am saying
that is often the philosophy of a lot of people and there needs
to be more training and explanation of scrutiny for new Members.
Q15 Ann Coffey: MPs have got a lot
better at communicating with their constituents. I have seen a
huge change in how parliamentary material has been used since
I came in as a Member but, even then, you are only corresponding
with a sort of minority of people. Really if you are going to
try to make this place connect, we have to look beyond that interested
minority we can service very well by the methods that you outlined.
Newspaper readership is falling and, as it falls, newspaper headlines
become more outrageous in order to attract attention. People are
voting in less numbers and it appears, sometimes, that you are
almost in a situation of a newspaper headline: you try to do something
outrageous to catch the public's eye. I do not know if they are
connected. The things you mention which aroused attention were
all very contentious issues, all issues that gave rise to conflict
and drama—as, indeed, PNQs are. A lot of what happens in
this place is not drama. The scrutiny that some MPs are very good
at is not dramatic, it is mind-bogglingly boring. It takes place
in Committee rooms and does not get coverage. Obviously we have
some responsibility for that as MPs but do you not think there
is a kind of wider issue out there and does it not worry you that
in a world which is very difficult and very challenging—you
know, very complicated—in which people are going to have
to make decisions about who represents them, in the middle of
profound and complicated problems that cannot be reduced to a
40-minute dramatic conflict? Does it not concern you that we are
where we are, both in terms of media coverage and issues in this
place? Do you not think both of us have a responsibility in that,
and that is even more worrying in the context of that competitive
news environment that you described?
Mr Robinson: I think the answer
is yes, it concerns me, but I have long past thinking that you
can offer viewers, listeners and readers their greens and tell
them to eat what is good for them. We can all sit around being
concerned about it but it is an illusion to think we can offer
them their greens. We have to find different ways to make it appealing.
My contention to you is that when something really does matter,
when there is something genuinely at issue, the mass media in
this country still does rather effectively have that debate and
inform people. I am willing to accept that from day-to-day, between
those moments, it will seem often more trivial, more sensationalist
in parts of the media, so the question is what you do to ensure
those moments, and what you do with the places we know people
are willing to come, like the Internet, for more to do it. It
is of no use me despairing. Jack used to work for World in
Action, and I used to work for Panorama at a time when
we competed with World in Action for audiences of eight
million. The fact is they are now competing for audiences of around
four million but we cannot do anything about it. Believe me, if
there was a simple way of doing something about it, it would be
done. We are constantly running to keep up with the competitive
tastes of the audience and their desire not simply to have what
is good for them. But I would say to you, again, that on something
like climate change, when David Attenborough makes programmes
for the BBC about the threat by climate change, millions of people
will tune in for that. It is wrong to despair. It means the things
we did before are not necessarily the things we have to do in
the future.
Mr White: Nick says we cannot
force the viewers and readers to eat their greens. Of course Lord
Reith believed in forcing them to eat a great deal of greens.
Mr Robinson: No, he did not. He
believed in entertainment as well as information. The notion that
there has ever been an age, the age of Morecambe and Wise tap
dancing, in which people were forced to listen to things they
were not interested in has gone.
Mr White: Let me finish. I think
we now say, "And over to you at the studio, Mike"! It
seems to me that in the marketised circumstances in which we all
operate there has been and there is a far greater degree of pandering
to what the metropolitan elite has backed. Unlike poor Mr Lazarowicz,
with his website backed by public funds, we have tended to pander
much more than we did and for every absolutely mesmerising David
Attenborough series which we do all watch, there are 50 which
are not what they were.
Mr Riddell: If you think of your
younger constituents: they are not reading the newspapers—
yes, sure—but they are going on the web. Do not ignore that.
If you look at the graph of what is happening to newspaper sales,
they are kind of flattish and soggy—and we give away DVDs
and all that stuff—but if you look at online it is just
shooting up. Therefore, do not underrate that factor. Journalistically,
we are at the cusp of knowing how to deal with that. In many respects
I think you probably have the wrong witnesses, with respect to
myself and my friends. If you had the newspaper executives in,
you would get some very interesting answers—not necessarily
comfortable ones, but interesting ones, on precisely those questions.
Mr Robinson: The thing that is
exciting about the Internet is that it allows people to go on
a journey. In other words, they can taste at first and say, "I
might be a little bit interested in that" and, once interested,
it takes them on a journey to more and more detail, more and more
information and more and more of what Mike and I jointly would
want to see. But they go on that journey voluntarily in a consumerist
age; they are not just presented with it.
Mr White: It is a very odd audience,
a lot of it on the Internet. On specialist sites you get a really
interesting interaction. I guess Members get this too. We all
blog, and the level of vulgar abuse you get if you adopt a vaguely
unpopular position (for instance, defending the political classes)
is horrible, and generally vituperative and ill-informed. Whereas
if you go to a specialist site (pollsters discussing the nuances
of polling), it is rather like being in a senior common room at
Riddell College, Oxford. There are a lot of self-referential things
on the web and it is not community discussion in the public sphere
in the sense that politics is.
Q16 Mr Burstow: Could I come back
to the theme we have heard a bit on, which is the idea of a fairly
ritualistic House, perhaps, where rhetoric is to the fore; not
a decision-making House, in a sense. Progressively over time the
Executive controls more procedure. You in some ways have already
referred to the SO No. 24 which secured that debate on the NatWest
Three. There are very few of those sorts of opportunities within
procedures within the Standing Orders of the House now to secure
debates in that sort of way. I was interested in these tests and
particularly the suggestion that one of the key ways in which
we are more newsworthy is to have to find outcomes. Obviously
topical debates provide something, but they do not necessarily
provide a defined outcome. I am wondering if there are any other
specific things we could do. One suggestion is, for example, that
we should have more debates on substantive motions if there is
something very clear on which the House is forming a view or taking
a decision, or, for example, more opportunities for non-governmental
legislation to be introduced, not just the sort of ghettoising
of a Friday, where private Members' legislation may or may not
have a chance to come through, but other opportunities. For example,
in the Irish Parliament there are specific allotted time periods
for legislation for opposition parties to be introduced.
Mr Riddell: If I can steer clear
of legislation—which is a topic all of its own—I think
there needs to be greater opportunity for 45-minute discussions.
The classic one on which all parties should give their views now
is the private equity issue, which is very topical. All the papers—to
reinforce Nick's point—have done an excellent job of explaining
what it is. They have done a really good job but it has not come
up here. It may do. Let us see what happens at noon. But that
would be an example. I think it is an interesting balance between
what opposition parties get formally and what backbenchers are
allowed to do. One of the things which has gone wrong in the last
20 years, which I am sure Sir Nicholas would agree, is that opposition
parties still have their days on opposition days but the demise
of the backbench order motions—apart from Westminster Hall,
which is important—
Mr White: Private Members' motions
and things like that.
Mr Riddell: Yes. It would also
give private Members the opportunity to raise a topic for short
discussion. Some of this could be done within existing procedures.
I think the Speaker has the power to do it more often but, in
a sense, this is going to annoy the Government whips in doing
it, in saying "Okay, you might lose two hours. Tough"
but there has to be a greater willingness to do that. I think
we also need procedural changes, like in the Australian Parliament.
Legislation is in a slightly different category and I think the
whole private Member's bill thing needs to be looked at and how
rational the hurdles are on that. I certainly think, both for
backbenchers and opposition parties, there should be more scope
to raise topical matters but not in the context necessarily of
lengthy debates.
Q17 Ms Butler: We have talked around
the topicality issue quite well, as to how we bring what is happening
in the outside world, if you like, into Parliament and how we
can facilitate that. The other thing I wanted to look at—and
you have touched on it a little bit—is not only the role
of the backbenchers but the role of your individual MPs. You talked
about how you might admire an MP because they are quite well known
and quite well-liked in their constituency but not that well-known
in Parliament. How do we balance that? Because I kind of feel
that if we had a list of your perfect backbench MP and a list
of your perfect personal and individual MP, the two would not
marry, or that it would be almost impossible to fulfil that role
and I wonder what would be your list of your perfect MP and your
perfect backbencher. Nick, your idea of podcasting and putting
that on your website is something that we are doing. Part of the
problem which we do not often explain is that to be in the House
and to contribute to a debate you basically have to allocate the
whole day. It means that you could be there for five or six hours
before you are called and that means that you would not be able
to fulfil your list of your ideal MP because you are busy trying
to fulfil your list as your ideal backbencher. How would you see
the two marrying?
Mr Robinson: Let me answer that
in a slightly different way from the way you put it. I guess the
test we all have is: What difference did I make today? What difference
did it make that I existed or I was elected? My fear, to pick
up on a point Peter made earlier, is that MPs have got much, much
better under pressure on them from the whips about sending 10,000
letters out. The question is: What difference on the floor of
the House? If you want to be reported, what difference did it
make that you were there? What intervention did you make, what
point did you raise to attention that would not otherwise have
been mentioned? It seems to me that if political coverage is not
just to be about ministers and their opposition, if political
journalism is not just about ringing special advisers and press
officers, if television coverage is not just about existing star
names, that has to be the test: What difference did you make?
How did you hold somebody to account who would not otherwise have
raised a point which should have been made previously? I appear,
and will do this lunchtime, regularly on the television coverage
of Prime Minister's Questions and the e-mails we get are of despair
from viewers: "Why on earth was that question raised? Why
on earth was this question that we are all worried about or are
talking about not raised?" Peter raised private equity. Will
reform of the stock market, which is today worrying people about
the future of their jobs, be raised today on the floor of the
House in half an hour of Question Time?
Q18 Ann Coffey: It will now, I suspect.
Mr Robinson: Or will there be
a question saying, "I would like to congratulate the Prime
Minister"—or attack the Prime Minister—"on
the following"? Do you look in the mirror, forgive me, as
well as look at the media?
Q19 Chairman: I accept we need greater
topicality and greater control of the House by backbenchers. But
do not forget there are plenty of occasions where these things
may well have been raised but they do not get reported at all.
It is frustrating—it has been a frustration for me for 18
years, and I am sure it is a frustration for Theresa as a frontbencher
now in opposition—the opposition raise all sorts of issues
in short debates, not long ones, in opposition time. They do make
a difference, put the minister on the spot, but very rarely do
they get reported.
Mr White: But being reported is
not the same as making a difference. You are here to make a difference.
You are being reported in order to assist you getting re-elected,
in an instrumental sense. You can make a difference but you do
not have to be reported whether it is a backbench intervention
or anything else. You are seen by your colleagues and hopefully
feared by ministers who think, "Oh, damn, it's him."
Reporting is not, it seems to me, the primary criterion. I agree
with my colleagues: lots of things have happened in the last 20
years which have enabled backbenchers to do things in a more effective
way, to hold the Executive to account—which is what they
are there for—although I tend to have a view that the family-friendly
hours reforms have also given a lot of instruments to the whips
and to the Executive branch.
|
