Wretched amendments

Despite the fact Lord Puttnam’s amendments to the Defamation Bill are not likely to pass into law, the damage done as a result of the political gamesmanship looks like being very great indeed says Raymond Snoddy.

David Puttnam, the former film producer is one of the nicest, least pretentious and thoughtful of men. He cares passionately about everything from the environment to education and training and anything he has to say about the future of communications and the responsibility of communicators is usually worth listening to.

Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, the Labour politician, is by way of complete contrast an absolute menace – a naïve, if still well-meaning amateur, at the dirty business of politics.

Just as former Cabinet Secretary Lord Armstrong wrote his own, unfortunate, epitaph by admitting in the Spycatcher drama that he had been on occasion “economical with the truth” so Lord Puttnam will be remembered for his wretched amendments to the Defamation Bill that would have so seriously undermined press freedom.

If he were to get away with it – and thankfully all the signs are that he probably won’t – Puttnam the nice guy would in fact have done more damage to press freedom in the UK than anyone for centuries.

Even weeks later it is still staggering to think what Puttnam, the son of a newspaper photographer, managed to insert into a very necessary bill designed to put an end to London’s reputation as the libel capital of the world.

In seeking to sneak a more extreme version of the Leveson proposals past Prime Minister David Cameron, Lord Puttnam was clearly prepared to countenance a version of prior restraint of the press. Publishers could face swingeing fines in libel or privacy cases if they failed to get “pre-clearance” for controversial stories from an arbitrator.

As many have pointed out this would not only be illegal in the US because of the First Amendment it would also almost certainly be a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights which protects the right to free expression.

Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent has launched a vigorous attack on the Puttnam amendments.

“Not satisfied with prior-restraint alone, the wreckers also wish to punish newspapers that do not submit to state-sanctioned regulation by obliging them to pay exemplary damages if defeated in actions for libel or invasion of privacy,” Luckhurst argues.

Lord Lester QC who has been fighting for libel reform for years has noted that such a state of affairs is only seen in a small number of former Soviet states.

Those Conservatives who supported the amendments included, rather surprisingly, Lord Fowler, once a journalist on The Times and a former chairman of the Birmingham Mail and Post.

Another peer, Lord Skidelsky went even further. His contribution to the debate has been to suggest that a statute-underpinned regulator should be able to ban stories that were true but for which there was “no sufficient reason” to publish.

Who exactly would decide whether there was sufficient reason to publish a story or not and what sense could such a suggestion make in the Internet age?

Lord Puttnam and his supporters have at least managed to demonstrate one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt – just how easy it would be to toughen press legislation on subsequent occasions if David Cameron’s Rubicon were ever to be crossed.

Supporters of statutory involvement in press regulation have ridiculed the slippery slope argument. We have now seen just how easy it could be.

Of course Lord Puttnam and his supporters were probably only trying to express their frustration at the opposition to full implementation of the Leveson recommendations while at the same time putting one over on the Government. Labour has denied that the plan was to hijack the Defamation Bill, though it is clear the bill was being used for a purpose for which it was never intended.

The damage done as a result of the political gamesmanship looks like being very great, even though the Puttnam amendments will not pass into law.

The Prime Minister has been making it clear this week that the amended bill would not now be accepted in the House of Commons, its next stage on the way to becoming law. Instead, an impasse has been reached which could turn into a permanent state of limbo for a bill that has been three years in the making.

Cameron wants the Liberal Democrats to support the removal of the Puttnam amendments. They in turn believe that Leveson issues should be addressed only in all-party talks.

The Defamation Bill would have introduced new statutory defences of truth and honest opinion to replace the much more vague common law defences of justification and fair comment.

And yes we are starting to talk of the past tense here. It would also have removed the present presumption in favour of a jury trial on libel issues and included a requirement for claimants to show that they had suffered serious harm before being able to sue for defamation.

There would even have been greater protection for the operators of websites as long as they complied with procedures to try to resolve disputes directly between the complainant and the author.

It all adds up to an important package of reform that may now be lost courtesy of Lord Puttnam and chums.

You really can cause absolute mayhem and serious harm from the very best of intentions.

The current Defamation Bill row also highlights the mess the post-Leveson world is still in two months after Cameron insisted he would not end three hundred years of press freedom under the law by introducing statutory underpinning.

It is now more than time to push ahead with a non-statutory regulator as quickly as possible and you can be sure that David Cameron has more weighty things to worry about than the future of the press.

To help speed up the process it may be time to thank the Hacked Off campaigning group for its contribution to national debate and end their apparently ready access to ministers. They really have entertained us long enough.