Power and the press

That the House of Lords has survived as an unelected chamber is largely down to the Salisbury Convention, which holds that peers do not vote down government bills on matters which appeared in the governing party’s election manifesto. It is a doctrine under attack as never before, partly as a result of the Lords’ votes against the government’s Brexit plans but also as a result of the Upper House’s battle of attrition against the government on press standards.

It is bizarre to see an issue of such little importance to the public taking up so much parliamentary time. For generations, freedom of the press was regarded as an essential British liberty — the sort that people entered parliament to defend. Now we see Ed Miliband making passionate speeches against it, as if seeking revenge for the not-always-reverential way in which he was treated in the run-up to the 2015 general election. The same goes for Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, who is seldom written up with much affection. In a previous era, politicians who disliked newspapers would have decided not to read them. Now they call them to heel.

Perhaps the most concerning proposal heard in parliament is for newspapers — and magazines — to be forced to pay the legal costs of anyone who sues them, whether successfully or not. This is an extraordinary proposal for any democracy. In any other context it would be seen as an act of simple persecution: choose a victim, then deprive them of basic legal rights.

The same MPs who quite rightly criticise Viktor Orban’s behaviour with the Hungarian press, then vote for policies that would make Orban blanch. To have the House of Commons even consider it is a sign of how many MPs either don’t understand what they are voting for or don’t value the liberties they’re supposed to protect.