Leveson Inquiry — House of Commons, 2018-03-01
Topic: Law and Crime
Tom Watson (Labour, Centre-left): As I have said through you before, Mr Speaker, timing is everything in politics. If I am looking a little breathless and fatigued this morning, it is because I have been carrying a heavy load in the past hour, lifting weights in the gym and visualising Paul Dacre. For the increasing number of colleagues who do not read the Daily Mail any more, I refer them to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests With your indulgence, Mr Speaker, I shall take the Mosley issue head on. If I had thought for one moment that he held the views contained in that leaflet of 57 years ago, I would not have given him the time of day. He is, however, a man who, in the face of great family tragedy and overwhelming media intimidation, chose to use his limited resources to support the weak against the strong On this issue, I would like to thank the Secretary of State for giving me advance sight of his statement, not just in the last half hour but over and over again, year after year. This announcement, conveniently timed to be buried under a flurry of snow, is a disappointment, a breach of trust and a bitter blow to the victims of press intrusion, but it is not in any way a surprise. We now know for certain what we have suspected all the time. When a Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, joined the other party leaders to say that he would keep his promises to the victims of phone hacking, he and his party were acting not out of conviction but out of weakness. For a brief period of time, and for the first time ever, our political parties had more to gain politically by standing up to the tabloid media than by bowing down to them. When every Conservative MP who was then in Parliament backed this policy, including the current Prime Minister and the present Secretary of State, they did not really mean it. They were waiting for the wind to change and for the fuss to die down. They were waiting for a time when they could, as quietly as possible, break their promises, and today that time has finally come We already knew what the Conservatives really thought, when successive Secretaries of State refused to implement section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, the part of the Leveson system that would provide access to justice for ordinary citizens while offering protection to journalists and newspapers that signed up to any Leveson-compliant self-regulatory body. The papers, absurdly, caricatured it as state regulation, and pointed instead to the independence of their alternative, non-Leveson-compliant regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The Government were too scared to make the case for their own policy, and finally, today, they are formally capitulating The Government are also capitulating on the question of whether to complete the investigation into how phone hacking happened and what is happening now. Underlying the phone hacking scandal, we saw one of the biggest corporate scandals and one of the biggest corporate governance failures of modern times. The Secretary of State says that the terms of reference of Leveson 2 have largely been met, but I do not agree. Here are some of the things that Leveson 2 was supposed to investigate: to inquire into the extent of illegality at News International; to inquire into the way the police investigated allegations relating to News International and other newspaper groups; to inquire into whether the police received corrupt payments and were complicit in suppressing the proper investigation of complaints; and to inquire into the extent of corporate governance and management failures at News International and other organisations. None of those questions has been answered, and by betraying the victims of phone hacking in this statement today, the Secretary of State is trying to ensure that they never will be. I ask him this question: if it is revealed that the criminality that took place at the News of the World extended to other newspapers, will he reconsider his position The last thing the Murdoch empire, the Rothermere empire, the Barclay brothers’ empire or the Mirror Group wanted was an inquiry into their dirty laundry, with powers under the Inquiries Act 2005 to obtain documents and compel witnesses to appear in public. The last thing any of the newspapers wanted was more attention being paid to their methods at a time when it may well be revealed very soon that other papers, not necessarily the ones at the centre of the scandal in 2011, were also involved in criminality. They have been lobbying hard for today’s outcome. They will give the Secretary of State—a man who enjoys favourable headlines—plaudits in tomorrow’s leader columns. We already know that Paul Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay brothers approve of his statement—after all, they helped to write it. The Secretary of State could have chosen to do the right thing, but instead he chose not to stand up to the tabloid-style newspapers that are propping up the Prime Minister and this Government, and that could pull the rug from under them whenever they choose Let me close with the words of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, to the Leveson inquiry in June 2012: "I will never forget meeting with the Dowler family in Downing Street to run through the terms of this Inquiry with them and to hear what they had been through and how it had redoubled, trebled the pain and agony they’d been through over losing Milly. I’ll never forget that, and that’s the test of all this. It’s not ‘do the politicians or the press feel happy with what we get?’ It’s ‘are we really protecting people who have been caught up and absolutely thrown to the wolves by this process?’ That’s what the test is." The Secretary of State will prosper politically from his statement today, but he has failed that test.