Privacy (Younger Report)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 13 July 1973.

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Photo of Mr Alex Lyon Mr Alex Lyon , City of York 12:00, 13 July 1973

No. It has not been the subject of complaint because my right hon. Friend knows that there is no earthly good in complaining. It will do no good. The Press Council will probably take the view that I have taken about it, namely, that complaining will not do any good to my right hon. Friend or to his daughter. The only good will come when the Press feels that it cannot risk cases such as that because there is no public interest, and that will happen only when such action is a breach of the law.

I listened with great interest to what was said by my hon. Friends the Members for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman) and All Saints (Mr. Walden). I do not take the view that surreptitious devices are so inherently wrong that they should be banned on every occasion. I subscribed to the recommendation in the report because that was the overwhelming view of the committee, but I find considerable difficulty in accepting the proposition—and I think that the Home Secretary did, too—that the use of binoculars and telescope lenses on cameras, which are fairly acceptable forms of intrusion for legitimate purposes, should come under the ban. I do not think that one would want to restrict freedom to use those things.

There are two possibilities. One is to say that the intrusion may be legitimate and therefore it is necessary to provide a public interest defence. The other is to say, and thus agree with my hon. Friends the Members for Coventry, North and All Saints, that the means never justify the end, and therefore they must always be banned. I cannot go quite that far. It seems to me that there is no difference between News of the World photographers standing behind a screen in Norma Levy's bedroom and taking photographs, and News of the World reporters standing behind that screen and writing up their report for the paper. Both raise the same principle—that a man thought that he had privacy in the bedroom and he had not. Whether it was right or wrong seems to me to have no relevance to the way in which they acquired their information about it. I am not so frightened by modern technological developments that I would rule them out of court immediately.

I understand the remark of my hon. Friend the Member for All Saints about the difference between the investigating of the Watergate scandal and the approach of papers on this side of the Atlantic. Watergate raises in as good a form as can be found the point that I am trying to make—that, in the end, the protection of privacy and the problem of that protection is a question of the value that is put upon it rather than upon the difficulties inherent in devising the protection.

In the Watergate case, poor George McGovern went around the United States last year declaiming in every speech that Richard Nixon had planned a break-in of the Democratic National Convention. People replied, "Is that not what all you politicians do?" The matter had no effect on the campaign. Nothing material to the major charge has come out since then, either from the investigations of the Washington Post or from those of my old friend Judge Ervine.

The truth of the matter is that we knew the basic structure of the allegation last year. We have found many more details that in themselves are pretty revolting, but last year the basic allegation was known and, so far as I was concerned, was accepted. What was different, what raised the whole issue to a new plane, was when the burglars were brought into court and, after a long case in which no one took much interest, Judge Sirica, in giving his verdict, said, "This is a very serious matter." Unlike the public in the United States or the rest of the Western world, he said, "This cannot be casually passed over as the kind of thing that all politicians do. You will go to prison for a maximum of 20 years." Then, by Jove, the conspirators woke up. Then they began to spill the beans.

It was not the efforts of the Washington Post reporters but the fact that one of the conspirators decided to tell all that put the affair on the map. What caused Congress at last to take such an interest in it and to decide on a full investigation was that a judge had said that the matter deserved a 20-year sentence and that the Attorney-General of the United States, the President, and his chief assistants might all be implicated in a very serious criminal case.

If we only had in this country a case of invasion of privacy which left in the minds of all who heard it such a feeling of revulsion that they felt that something had to be done, then we would get an answer which was much more effective than anything suggested by the Younger Committee and which in the end safeguarded the privacy not just of public figures—that is not what I am primarily interested in—but of the little men, like the man I recorded in my minority report, or like the case which was brought to the attention of the Press Council by my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) and which I recorded in my article in the Sunday Times.

These are the people I want to protect, and they will not be protected by anything that we recommended in the Younger Report. In the end, they will be protected only if we have a full-blooded law of privacy which can protect them in the way I have described and which still safeguards the freedom of expression of the truth that the Press want.

When that comes, the law will change. Until it comes, I have great doubts whether either party has sufficient courage to take on the Press when an election might be pending and to decide that, despite the hysterical outbursts from the Press and despite the defences that I would be prepared to give them, they would then be able to legislate on this topic.