Data Protection Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-05-21
Topic: Civil Rights
Tom McNally (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, like Pavlov’s dog, MailOnline this morning had the headline: "House of Lords to make extraordinary THIRD bid to curb press freedom" Fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime, it has a photograph of me and suitable condemnation of this amendment In defence of the amendment, I refer to the interesting summation that the Minister made in his speech. I will come later to his blood-curdling threats about what would happen if we were to lose the Bill. On the question of historical offences, hands are not tied, nor time-limited. What was illegal then remains illegal now. There is no amnesty. It was worth tabling this amendment to get that on the record as a reminder of where we are on past criminality in this area. What it is not, as claimed by MailOnline, is an attempt to reopen the debate The amendment proposes to amend the Government’s Motion, which gives the Secretary of State the task of assessing the dispute resolution procedure and arbitration schemes, adopted by non-broadcast media regulators every three years. Instead, I propose that this task should be undertaken not by a politician but an independent body—the Press Recognition Panel, which is entirely independent of political, state or industry control. It would have the added advantage of being able to assess the effectiveness of dispute resolution procedures guided by the criteria set out in the Leveson report In moving the amendment, let me deal with a number of accusations levelled at those who sought to amend the Bill to make it Leveson-compliant during its passage in this House. First, we were told that we were hijacking the Bill to deal with matters that had nothing to do with data protection, only for the Government to bring forward their own print media-specific amendments, not least the one on the Marshalled List today. The truth is that the line between print and online is fast disappearing. Where does the Daily Mail end and the MailOnline begin? It is no accident that many of the hundred organisations that have joined Impress are online publishers. I have often thought that if Facebook and others wanted to get ahead of the game and be really smart, they would sign up for Impress and leave IPSO as a kind of dinosaurs’ graveyard of the old print media Then, we had the Minister’s threat that we were putting the whole Bill and the future of data protection in jeopardy by the various amendments because, as he said, the Bill must be passed into law by 25 May. If chaos is not to reign in the data protection world, we have to give a speedy passage regardless of shortcomings. I was a business manager in this House during the coalition, and I worked for the Callaghan Government in the 1970s when they came under various pressures from this House. The truth is—and we all know it—the Government will get their business, perhaps a little bruised and with a few ministerial reputations dented, but the Bill will be delivered on time, and Ministers should stop spreading scare stories and instead treat amendments on their merits Then, of course, there is the Salisbury convention. We have to face the fact that the squalid deal between the press barons and the Tory party to drop Leveson 2 was squeezed into the Conservative manifesto and thus became protected by the Salisbury convention. The convention was given fresh life by the Cunningham committee, of which I was a member. So let us be clear: the Salisbury convention promises that this House will give a Second Reading to a manifesto Bill; it does not protect that Bill from scrutiny or amendment—nor is there anything wrong in asking the Commons more than once to consider this. I think I hold the record: I knocked back the Bill on Murdoch’s predatory pricing of the Times six times, and would have done so a seventh if Len Murray, my chief Labour conspirator, had not told me that enough was enough.