Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR PETER
RIDDELL, MR
NICK ROBINSON
AND MR
MICHAEL WHITE
28 FEBRUARY 2007
Q20 Chairman: They are daft. Madness.
Mr White: That is another story.
Long debates/short debates? Yes, there are lots of different ways
you can adapt procedure roughly within what exists at the moment
but there is no substitute for topicality. Private equity was
raised at the Prime Minister's press conference yesterday and
he gave a very unsatisfactory answer.
Q21 Mrs May: And it has been raised
in Prime Minister Questions before now.
Mr White: It is a scary one to
have to answer. You do not want to destroy markets.
Q22 Mr Wright: Could I pick up on
two things which have been covered already. I agree with your
analysis that the media is fragmenting. People are chasing increasingly
competitive and shrinking markets, as it were. I am astonished
how well-informed some of my constituents are. I would give two
examples. A woman e-mailed me and said, "There's a debate
in Westminster Hall about financial inclusion—a half-hour
Westminster Hall debate. Are you going to be there? If not, why
not?" That sort of accountability is fantastic. Only this
weekend, I had a massive amount of e-mails from people urging
me to sign EDM 926 about people being sent back to the Democratic
Republic of Congo. Again, unbelievable. And then, the day after
I had signed it, people e-mailing me to thank me. The amount of
people who can hold you accountable is quite remarkable.
Having said that, I think that is a very narrow part of my constituent
base. I am trying to marry the two up now but it is very difficult.
Given that you go down the personality route—because people
can get information elsewhere on the Internet, on theyworkforyou.com—do
you still think you have the duty to inform which Jack mentioned
before? Do you think you have it right? Do you think there is
a correlation between the way in which Parliament has been covered
and voter turnout and supposed voter apathy?
Mr Riddell: I think there is a
very slim correlation between coverage in the narrow sense of
the term and voter turnout. You could argue lots of broader things
about political culture, to which the media is a part. The fact
that there is no longer a dedicated page in The Times,
or two pages in our tabloid format devoted to Parliament, I do
not think has made any difference at all to voter turnout. I think
there are broader changes with what Mike talks about as marketisation
and broader changes to do with culture, and also the fact that
we have had a number of elections with foregone conclusions has
probably had an effect on turnout. I make the safe prediction
that turnout will be five per cent higher next time with or without
postal voting. So I do not think it has had a significant impact.
The examples you give I think are fascinating. Fifteen or 20 years
ago, if you go to before Peter Mandelson's time when Ted Leadbitter
was the MP, he was not having people, apart from your local UN
Association, worrying about things in the Congo because he could
not access the information. They were not getting Order Papers.
I am sure you have a terribly good Smith's or whatever the local
newsagent is but no one was getting Order Papers. Now they can
get them instantly. They can look it up. I think there is a massive
gain in that aspect of it.
Q23 Mr Wright: But that is a very
narrow base.
Mr Riddell: There are lots of
narrow bases. That is the point. There is a whole series of narrow
bases. There are people concerned about education. There are people
concerned today, as you know, about what is happening in schools
and whether they are going to get the school of their choice.
There was this Brighton thing last night. There are lots of different
ones.
Mr Robinson: That is the point.
On the one hand, we all have to be careful—the media are
currently obsessed with phone-in and text and so on and so forth—that
we are not talking to a tiny group of people who do this. There
is a great danger of that. I do a blog and I am told that it is
less than one per cent of the people who read it who respond,
yet it is tempting to take too seriously the people who respond.
Peter's point is the right one. There are all the cliche«s
about the RSPB having more members than in political parties.
People belong to things in their constituency and nationally about
their passions, where they could be better informed as to how
Parliament affects their interest, and my point is that you need
to take it beyond, as it were, the obsessive activist who worries
about an EDM on the Congo and find ways of saying to people who
are worried about school selection: "This very issue has
been— or will be—debated at this time in this place
and you can see it on your screen. Here it is." The Internet
gives the capacity for Parliament to do that.
Mr White: We worry a lot in different
ways about the inequalities in our society and one of the growing
inequalities is information inequality, so I welcome Mr Wright's
vivid description of that EDM. That is terrific. The opportunities
are enormous. Voters are better plugged in and deeply disrespectful
and less deferential and forelock touching than the way they used
to be but do not kid ourselves that that is a major reassurance
on the points we have been discussing. I imagine one should register
here to go and see the launch of the new website by senior parliamentarians.
But, inasmuch as it is a disagreement, before we do, I would register
the thought that I do think the media has contributed more than
marginally, if that is what Peter Riddell meant, to the alienation
of the public and the disillusionment of the public with politicians
and the political process and I regret that. It is known as "John
Lloyd's thesis" in the trade. There is a book by John Lloyd
which some of you may have seen—which overstates its case,
like all good journalism—that certainly makes that point.
Chairman: When I sent around, following
my 1993 report, to talk to editors Peter Lambert and Peter Stothard
at The Times, and others, Peter Preston from The Guardian,
and asked, "Why are you reducing the coverage of Parliament
in this way?" they did not really have much explanation,
except that they were being pushed by their young turks because
it was fashionable not to report Parliament.
Mr Sanders: During my lifetime I have
observed a fundamental shift from newspapers reporting events
that have happened, to all journalism trying to predict what is
going to happen, often based on opinion pieces. That does not
necessarily inform the public. As a Member of Parliament who every
week will receive little press cuttings from newspapers from members
of the public, normally opinion pieces, saying, "This is
outrageous. What are you going to do about it?" you then
have to engage on the process of explaining to them that this
is an opinion piece, it has not actually happened. I think the
petition on the Prime Minister's website is a classic case in
point of people not fully understanding what the process was that
was being undertaken in relation to road pricing.
Sir Nicholas Winterton: They did.
Q24 Mr Sanders: No. I do not want
to get into a debate on that but the petition was about surveillance
and road pricing but it became a petition on road pricing. There
are people, like myself, who are against surveillance but in favour
of road pricing. There is that danger, that it is changing from
reporting to opinion. I would like your observation on that. I
have a second question and it is related to backbench MPs. Our
access to lobby journalists is not as great as the frontbenchers'
access to lobby journalists. Would a reform of the lobby system;
that is, stopping these quotations of sources close to So-and-So
and having to go on the record and have your name attributed to
a quote, help enhance our standing and transparency in this place?
Mr Riddell: The last is fantasy.
Everyone says the American press is wonderful. I read the New
York Times as I came in earlier this morning and it is full
of non attributable quotations from senior administration officials.
There has always been a relationship between journalists and newspapers.
In my own paper's case, Palmerston used to plant wonderful stories
with the great Times editor Delane, normally when they
were riding in Richmond Park—I think the process has changed
a bit now—and it was ever so. It depends which journalists
you trust. On your first question, it is not just opinion. You
say we do not report the fact that it is preview. I will let you
into a little secret. The current Chancellor of the Exchequer
often has people who ring us up and say, "The Chancellor's
going to make a speech tomorrow, do you want a little bit of it
before?" Exactly the same is done by the Shadow Chancellor,
exactly the same is done by the Leader of the Opposition, and
it used to be done by the Prime Minister but he has now retreated
defensively. If we are told "x or y is going
to be said tomorrow, launch this thing," are we going to
say in chaste virtue: "Oh, no, I'm not going to touch this"?
Sin lies everywhere.
Mr White: That is part of the
24/7 news cycle, where the cycle eats up news all the time. Somebody
said that it is a bit like the stock market: it moves on rumour.
In a way, the technology drives a lot of this and the one thing
we have not discussed is the extent to which we are all victims
of new communications technology of an ever faster and more predatory
nature. What Peter describes is true certainly about the United
States, which is nowhere near as interesting a system. Nor is
Congress—which is never reported, incidentally, in the American
papers, and that was true 20 years ago—as effective as it
thinks it is. It failed in the great crises of the 20th century
persistently and consistently and it is still doing so. We must
not think others have a better system. Off-the-record briefing
exists in all systems. Dare I say, and even make a partisan point:
even among the Liberal Democrats it does happen a bit. I think
we had a leader replaced by a non attributable briefing quite
recently.
Q25 Mr Sanders: It might have been
where I was coming from.
Mr White: I beg your pardon. We
have moved a little way from reporting what happened. I was very
struck last week in all our papers how little what Mr Blair said
about the troop withdrawal from Iraq got into the paper, compared
with the larger context: people opinionating and people being
asked in the streets of Basra and Blackburn of what they thought
of it, as distinct from what Leon Brittan once called "mere
words".
Q26 Sir Peter Soulsby: All of us
share your regret in the decline of the Chamber, its attendance
and its coverage. Is it not really the case that it is pretty
irreversible now? Even with the greater topicality, the short
debates and the other suggestions that have been made, why would
a backbencher spend many hours perhaps waiting in the Chamber
to be called for a 10-minute speech and perhaps a couple of interventions
in the meantime when they can get at least as much and keep on
top of the e-mails by signing an EDM, doing a news release on
the back of it and appearing on regional television and doing
some interviews with a local paper? Is that not inevitable now?
Is the future of effective scrutiny in fact going to be select
committees?
Mr Riddell: Yes. Unless you care
passionately, devoting five to six hours of your day to a speech
which will be ignored— Unless you do, as Nick says, and
then podcast it out to your constituents. That is almost the only
relevance of it.
Q27 Sir Peter Soulsby: Even then,
they are not going to be enormously impressed that their contribution
was made in the Chamber as opposed to made in some other way.
Mr Riddell: No, exactly.
Mr White: The Chamber does work
sometimes. On the Iraq war there have been occasions. We all remember
18 March 2003. A lot of people disputed the outcome but it was
a real event and everybody watched and the people we worked for
were interested in reporting it. They, of course, think they know
what is going on because they can watch it on television. That
slightly undermines our sacerdotal role, but, as you say, that
has all changed. Social policy, currently, in a way that it did
not when I was a whipper-snapper here, attracts enormous exorbitance.
For what you may call "issues of personal morality",
whether it is assisted death or fox hunting or sexual mores, the
Chamber is full and there is an interest. So it has not completely
gone. Again, one of Peter's points: I imagine that Winston Churchill
made his great speeches in defence of proper defence in the 1930s
from the backbenches to an empty Chamber. But they were still
there.
Q28 Chairman: Martin Gilbert, Churchill's
biographer, makes that clear. On one of the things, if I may say
so, Peter, I do not agree with you. There was not a golden age
when attendance was full. My maiden speech was made at eight o'clock
on a Wednesday to a near-empty House, despite the fact that we
were all thrusting youngsters then. Overwhelmingly now you have
full-time MPs. Even when Nick and I came in, it was the exception
for people not to have other jobs. Many, many MPs rolled up, were
not there for questions, questions often collapsed and so you
had to go in to the next department in the Order. Many, many fewer
questions were put down and debates were less well attended. The
big difference was that if there was something interesting there,
people had to go in because they could not see it on the television.
I subscribe strongly to Mike's point of view, as a minister, but
when I write my little book about how to survive as a minister,
at least for a little while, "Pay attention to the Chamber"
will be at the top of the list.
Mr Robinson: It seems to me that
Sir Peter has put his finger on something that you as a Committee
have to address, which is the length of time it takes you to contribute
to a debate. It seems to me that a problem for a Member of Parliament
is that you can fill your day, I imagine, every single day with
this sort of self-generated: "We respond to the papers, they
respond to us, we e-mail, they e-mail us" and it is permanently
full. I am not sure it would pass my making-a-difference test
on any single day, let alone every day of the week. It may be
the problem with having Blackberries and phones is that we have
to think: What have I done on this that has made any difference
and was actually worth doing? It is hard to prioritise your time.
But just before we despair about the Chamber, I am thinking of
what I have had to do in recent months and years: tuition fees,
foundation hospitals, the 90-days debate. I did on television,
for an audience of, I guess, five million people, explain what
parliamentary ping-pong meant and how the House of Lords could
affect the outcome of the House of Commons. When it happens and
it matters, we do make the effort to explain it. There is a bit
of a test as to how often it happens and how often it matters.
Mr Riddell: I am looking forward
to your report in exactly a week's time on the series of votes
on the House of Lords reform. We will all be tuning the television
in to that, Nick.
Mr Robinson: I have to confess
I did give up on the Chairman's voting system as a way of explaining
on that.
Q29 Mr Knight: I accept what Nick
has said. I think the Press have always covered our processes
when they have been unpredictable. We had far more coverage of
debates during the period 1995 to 1997 when John Major had no
majority because you did not know and I did not know who was going
to win the vote. A recurring theme in your answers has been topicality,
that we should have more topical debates or short, sharp debates.
How do you persuade the Executive that they should embrace topicality?
It seems to me that they see only the risk and not the gain. There
is this view that you would be putting a Cabinet Minister out
on an unpinioned wing with a brief that may be inadequate for
this new emerging subject in which everyone is interested. We
came very close to getting topical debates when Robin Cook was
Leader of the House because I was asked by my chief whip to broker
a deal with him. We put on the table some of our opposition days
and we were willing to trade them in return for a number of short,
sharp topical debates. It floundered because the government whips
did not like it and a number of Cabinet ministers felt it would
be too risky. How do we get over that hurdle? I suspect that if
my party wins the next election we will take exactly the same
attitude.
Mr Riddell: It has to be awkward
for the Executive. I think two things on that: one, there is already
the power of the Speaker to grant either the emergency question
or, as happened with Nick Clegg on the NatWest Three, the emergency
debate. That can already be used more. There must be greater willingness
to do that.
Q30 Chairman: SO No. 24.
Mr Riddell: Which used to happen.
But also to change procedures, which is what your Committee exists
to do, so that the Chairman gets a lot of rude remarks from his
Cabinet colleagues. That is the only way progress is made.
Sir Nicholas Winterton: Surely, until
the Standing Orders of the House are put back in the hands of
the House as a whole you will never get these changes.
Chairman: I am not sure about that.
Q31 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Seriously,
Chairman, the fact is, as Greg Knight has said, that the opposition
when they become the Government will not want Members to make
things more difficult for them in the Chamber. The Government
of the day does not want to make things more difficult. Robin
Cook lost a vote which was supposed to be a free vote, when your
Government was actually at the doors of the lobby saying, "This
way." This was to do with appointments to select committees.
The Government whips blocked the proposed appointment procedure
to select committees, which would have taken it away from the
Selection Committee which is dominated by the whips into an independent
committee under the chairmanship of the Deputy Speaker.
Mr White: But Parliament, Sir
Nicholas, is master of its own fate if it so wishes to assert
itself.
Q32 Chairman: Yes, by pushing.
Mr White: You were the victim
in losing your chairmanship some years ago by precisely the sort
of thing you are complaining about of the current Government but
it was done by your own government. A great compliment to you,
I thought, but it happens. Mr Knight may care to know that when
the lobby system was reformed—it was opened up and put over
at the Foreign Press Association in about 2001—it was initially
proposed that the minister would come several times a week and
take the lobby session and give the journalists something proper
to report instead of this tittle-tattle you are all complaining
about. He would brief on the great subject of the day—perhaps
rail pricing. It happened, I think, once. The minister's agenda
was put aside and he was given a duffing on whatever the topical
issues of the moment were and it did not happen again. It was
too risky.
Q33 Chairman: I do it once a week,
and I reinstated that.
Mr White: As Leader of the House.
Q34 Chairman: Yes.
Mr Robinson: My attempt at a direct
answer to Greg Knight's question: How would you persuade the Executive,
that in the end, it is going to happen anyway? Sparing the Chairman's
blushes, his advice to ministers is: If you are in a hole, go
and give a statement in the House of Commons because you get dragged
there eventually anyway. I think quite a lot of the younger ministers
are learning that when in a hole the idea of running away from
a camera as you get into your car, failing to answer a question,
and refusing to go into the House of Commons never does you any
good. Therefore, it may only be that process of brutal education
that says: "You'll end up there anyway, you might as well
do it and you will get credit for doing it"—
Mr White: Perhaps we should not
say any more. That is a terrifically optimistic thing to say.
We should stop.
Mr Robinson: It is a bit optimistic.
Chairman: Of course there is going to
be a debate which Greg and Nick have raised within government
about whether you want to strengthen the procedures of this place.
Building on what the other Nick has said, when we had the proposal
for very greatly strengthening the committee stage of the public
bills, my answer to my colleagues, who in the end signed up to
it, was to say, "If as a government 10 years in we appear
to be frightened of parliamentary scrutiny, we in a partisan way
will lose out because the public will get the message." What
I say to my colleagues is, rather, enlightened self-interest.
Not narrow self-interest. Narrow self-interest says do not be
accountable to anything ever—but you get found out about
that. Enlightened self-interest says you strengthen levels of
accountability. It is also a way of sorting the wheat from the
chaff, to be perfectly honest.
Q35 Mark Lazarowicz: One of the themes
from today on which there has been agreement around the Committee
and from yourselves is the importance of select committees and
how that is going to be the future. But I think it was Peter who
also pointed out how when select committee reports are debated
the Chamber is almost empty. There is hardly anybody there except
those who have written the report in the first place. I wonder
whether one of the things we could do, which would both improve
our role of scrutinising the Executive but also make things more
interesting, would be to have a much clearer relationship between
what committees do, the outcome from a committee, and how it relates
to the Chamber as a whole. Instead of having a report perhaps
eight months later, when the thing is no longer topical and having
a debate which does not result in anything happening, we should
have committee reports which are debated much more quickly, after
they have been produced, with the opportunity to have some decision,
some vote, on what the Committee is saying, rather than this disappearance
into the ether from which they may possibly appear sometime in
the distant future.
Mr Riddell: My answer to that
is: it is less the Committee reports being debated. On the whole,
it is much more that they inform general debates on other subjects.
I think that is more relevant. When there are debates on the select
committee reports, they tend to be terribly incestuous. Having
observed it for 25 to 30 years, I think it is much more to do
with select committee practice and having more topical sessions.
It is not necessarily producing reports all the time but having
topical questioning sessions: "There is an issue at the moment,
get the person in to question them." That will get coverage.
I remember there was a very good example just before Christmas
when the Foreign Affairs and the Defence Select Committees had
a combined session with Margaret Beckett and Des Browne, and the
CDS as well, discussing Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. It was
packed out with journalists and members of the public. It was
in one of the big rooms over in Portcullis House. It was a very
good session indeed, very interesting, discussing what was happening
on troop deployment. I think it is as much having evidence sessions
which are topical, as producing reports—although reports
obviously have a role. It is also having a mixture of long reports
and short immediate studies: "An issue has come up, right,
we will get this bloke in next week." Sometimes the timetables
for select committees are too inflexible.
Q36 Mark Lazarowicz: The Committee
will produce recommendations 1 to 26 which are never discussed.
Perhaps we could have some way in which a committee has proposed
to the House that recommendations 1 to 3 are agreed and implemented,
and there is some way of voting upon that. That is what normally
happens in committees in other organisations: they have a report
and recommendations. Perhaps we could do something like that.
Mr Riddell: That might be okay
for short debates, I think.
Q37 Mrs May: To what extent do you
see your role as leading or initiating public debate and to what
extent is it simply following it? The private equity example is
an interesting one because it has been raised in this House but
obviously it had not been picked up, but now that it is being
talked about and you are saying, "Why isn't Parliament responding
to it?" The more you have talked about competitive news,
and we accept all that, and consumerism, and we accept all that—we
are all having to live in this new world—to what extent
do you see your role as raising issues when they are raised here,
even though the public have not thought about them as key issues?
To what extent are you guilty of just responding to the great
public focus group?
Mr Riddell: A bit of both actually.
Mr White: Yes.
Mr Riddell: I regard my role as
trying to inform, divert and—judging by some of the responses—annoy.
I do regard it as informing, for busy people, as showing an angle
on politics. It is also Michael's new role. He has been doing
it. You provide an angle and you hope to inform readers, certainly,
to provoke some response in them. The balance between you being
responsive to events and leading is a complete mixture and it
is bound to be.
Mr White: You do your best but
the one element you have left out of the equation is that any
of the three of us have to persuade the man in a suit with his
jacket off, sitting at a desk, down a telephone line that what
we are trying to interest them in is interesting or important.
If they have not read about it in the morning papers or on the
Press Association or on the 24/7 news then you have a job persuading
them. We are paradoxically very conservative about news: we like
news we know already; we are a bit more at home with it. One of
the tricks of the trade is that when we see something on 24/7
which you have been trying to sell all day, you send a note in
pretending you have not sent a note earlier and you get a sale.
They say, "Yes, we will take 500 words on that, as a matter
of fact." And you pretend that you do not know that the reason
they have said yes when they have previously said no is that it
has just been on the Six O'clock News or on 24/7.
Mr Robinson: Michael in his more
bitter moments greets me in the morning as The Guardian's
news editor and I reply that he is all too often my news editor
as well because we are reflective in that way. I want to give
a specific example but may I generally say that I think this debate
would hugely benefit from committees looking for very specific
examples of news stories and saying, "Well, why was that
not a particular parliamentary occasion?" If you engaged
in a very detailed conversation with journalists I think you would
break through a lot of generalisations that we have all made about
the last 20 years. But my specific example is on the House of
Lords. The debate we then had was, given that an outcome was unlikely—it
was unlikely the House of Lords would be reformed—was it
worth three minutes' prime time airtime to debate the procedures
by which this House would discuss something that might well not
reach an outcome? The decision on that particular day—and
I was not particularly proud of it because I had got my brain
round it and would quite have liked to do it—was: "Probably
not but we will return to it if an outcome seemed likely."
That is the sort of conversation I think we inevitably have: "Is
it going to get anywhere this? If it is not going to get anywhere,
why are we detaining our viewers with it?"
Q38 Sir Nicholas Winterton: How much
coverage did you give to the Joint Committee on the House of Lords
Conventions? Did you give any coverage to that report?
Mr Robinson: You have to distinguish,
Sir Nicholas, between radio news, where it did get quite a bit
of coverage. I would be very surprised if it got on a mainstream
television news programme.
Mr White: You cannot film a convention,
Sir Nicholas!
Q39 Chairman: Picking up on what
Mike said, this relates to the primacy of print media still in
setting the news agenda. I was struck 30 years ago, when I was
working on Granada and coming up with all sorts of bright ideas
about stories we should do which came out of my head, that I could
not convince very bright editors that these were good ideas unless
I could find a piece of paper where someone else was talking about
this. If somebody else had written about it, then they felt reassured.
Although I accept entirely what you say, Peter, about the Internet,
is it not still the case that the news values are set by the print
media because those guys have been making a judgment about what
goes on the Net and so on and what goes into your programmes are
feeding through the print media because it is so much easier there?
Mr Riddell: Up to a point. I agree
more with Michael. I think it is much more a self-feeding process
between all of us and what is on the Today programme. Exactly
as Mike says, it is a news editor who does not know much about
politics. You will have heard Nick say this morning, while doing
his slot on the Today programme, "That will feed through
to my news editor talking to my news colleague today."
Mr Robinson: A little example
of course is the road pricing petition, which did emerge from
the new media.
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