PRESS AND BROADCASTING FREEDOM (Hansard, 13 December 1966)

§ Mr. Jasper More (Ludlow)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to give great freedom to the Press and to broadcasting authorities by clarifying and amending the law relating to contempt of court, official secrets and defamation. Journalists are born free, but everywhere they are in chains. Of all the countries in the Western world, that, to our shame, is true as much in our country as in any other—[Interruption.]

§ Mr. Speaker
Order.

§ Mr. More
To a large extent, Parliament bears the responsibility for this state of affairs. As long ago as 1889 an Official Secrets Act was passed. It was, perhaps, not a very clever Act, because it did not cover the offence of spying. Twenty years later this country was in the throes of a spy mania and nobody went to bed without first looking under the bed to see if there was a German spy there. We also had at that time a new Government, purposive and gritty—in fact, a Liberal Government. They decided to bring in a new Bill. It was launched, curiously enough, considering the date, in another place—[Interruption.]

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. If hon. Gentlemen wish to stay in the Chamber, they should listen to the debate.

§ Mr. More
It was brought to this House on, of all dates in the year, 18th August. Reading these things, one feels that there are worse things to live under than a Labour Goverment. Hon. Members will remember the appalling heat of the summer of 1911. Remembering the heat of that year and the date on which the Bill was brought in, perhaps it is not surprising that the Bill was passed through all its stages in this House in less than one hour.
That Act is with us still, but it was made worse by another Act in 1920, when we still had a Liberal Prime Minister and a Liberal Attorney-General. Those Acts were not well drafted. They were very rapidly widened from their original purpose. The judges found themselves bound 257 to interpret them so widely that almost everything official automatically became secret.
There are, as we know, many ways round this situation. Ex-Ministers, if they are sufficiently eminent, can write their memoirs and collect handsome royalties. Ministers in office can indulge in leaks. Government Departments like the Foreign Office can lose their copies of the Munich Treaty and the Hoare-Laval Pact. The Leader of the House can leave secret documents in a fashionable restaurant. None of these things seems to lead to prosecutions. But this does not help the Press. The threat of prosecution is always there.
I turn to the law of defamation. In spite of the very great improvements brought about by the hon. Member for Manchester, Cheetham (Mr. Harold Lever), in his Defamation Act, 1952, the law of defamation still abounds in anomalies which inhibit free reporting. I will take only one example which many of us in the House remember from the debates three years ago—the Rachman case. I am informed on good authority that the details of that case were well known to journalists long before we were debating it here and that they could have been fully reported if the libel laws had not made the risk too great.
All these things have been considered and reported on by a joint working party drawn from a society of lawyers known as "Justice" and from the British Committee of the International Press Institute. The Bill which I ask leave to introduce will embody some, though not all, of their recommendations. These are recommendations which I would have hoped would have struck a responsive note on the Government Front Bench. 258 For example, after a celebrated official secrets case involving my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Sandys), it was emphasised in a speech in the House that these measures should not be used to handicap opposition, to stifle criticism and to cloak incompetence in high places."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 5th December. 1938; Vol. 342, c. 914.] Those were the words of the present Solicitor-General.
Yet the present Government, confronted with these recommendations and with a demand to take the initiative and put these matters right, reply that there can be no question of legislative time being found in this Session for a reform of this branch of the law. This is a reply which, in view of some of the rubbish the Government have been introducing, it is difficult to comment on in Parliamentary language.
It is in these circumstances, that I ask the leave the House to introduce my Bill in private Members' time.