The following is a speech given in the House of Lords on May 13th by Lord Fowler, former Cabinet minister and former journalist. He speaks of the ‘barrage of black propaganda’ put out by newspapers, notes that the public is behind change and calls on the Government not to delay the implementation of changes already approved by all parties in Parliament.At the heart of any debate on constitutional affairs and equalities is parliamentary democracy and the importance of respecting that democracy. We in this House have an important role. We can advise, but it is the elected House that decides. It has the authority that comes from being the elected House-the authority that comes from the people or the citizen. It is in that respect that I want to test just two measures that will be debated in Parliament over the coming weeks, although neither was specifically mentioned in the Queen's Speech.The first is the proposed royal charter on the press. To be frank, I thought that that debate was over. No one thought that a few weeks later we would be asked to consider a rival royal charter put together by a number of big newspapers-a rival royal charter that, in the words of the respected media analyst Claire Enders, is,

further away from what Leveson recommended than anything that has gone before.

On 18 March, we should remember, there was a debate in the other place on the Government's royal charter proposals. Everyone agreed that it was a compromise, but it was a compromise agreed by all three major parties in Parliament. A final line had been drawn, or so we thought. The Prime Minister said:

My message to the press is now very clear: we have had the debate, now it is time to get on and make this system work.

For the Labour Party, Mr Miliband said:

Today represents a huge moment for the House. We are doing the right thing. Politics has failed to grasp this issue for decades, but today politicians have come together to put the victims first.-[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/13; cols. 636-37.]

And for the Liberal Democrats, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

Today we turn a page on the mistakes of the past and, finally, establish a proper independent watchdog to serve the British people while protecting our free press.-[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/13; col. 640.]

Therefore, there is no conceivable doubt about what the leaders of the three parties intended. They had agreed a way forward that protected the freedom of the press but which also sought to protect the public from the abuse of press power. No objective observer looking at what had been revealed by the Leveson inquiry could fairly argue that they were overreacting. The agreement followed the worst set of scandals to affect some of the national press for the past half century. The private details of phone conversations, not just of celebrities but of ordinary people, had been revealed. Great harm was done to individuals – to citizens – in this country. The scandal forced the closure of one high-circulation and profitable newspaper because of the action that had been taken. Journalists and quasi-journalists have been arrested-about 100 to date-and 24 have been charged.As Leveson made clear, the knowledge of what was going on was not confined to one or two rogue journalists or one or two junior executives; it went much higher than that. That is the answer to those who say that as phone hacking is a criminal offence no further action is required because the criminal law will look after all that. The point is that the culture of newspapers, where phone hacking was allowed and the results published, had to be changed. It was for such reasons that the Government proposed their royal charter. Even more important, that was why the House of Commons supported them. When it came to the crucial vote on damages, 530 Members of Parliament voted in favour of the Government's proposals and 13 voted against. The next day the Times had the headline on its front page, "Press deal divides parties". Divides parties? A vote of 530 to 13? Just imagine the Whips going into immediate crisis talks on that, or those nice people at the National Theatre who put on that excellent play, "This House", based on Labour's voting problems in the 1970s, immediately asking for a sequel.There is a much more serious point. The Government's royal charter of March has been subject to a barrage of black propaganda from the newspapers that eventually produced their own royal charter. No issue has been too small to build up an attack. An affair between two people at the inquiry is portrayed as invalidating the whole painstaking Leveson inquiry in spite of Lord Justice Leveson's assurance that there was no effect whatever. The poor old Hacked Off campaign is portrayed as a deeply sinister organisation with unlimited funds to do damage to the British press. If anyone had any doubts about why the Government's course was best, we had only to look at the tactics employed by newspapers whose self-interest is utterly clear. The truth is that this has been a David and Goliath struggle, and the Goliath has been the big national newspapers, which have had the resources to place deeply misleading and untruthful advertisements in their own papers and to instruct their reporters to get any story that might cast doubt on the Government's proposals.I very much hope that no one in the special adviser group, which seems to surround this Government just as it did the previous one, believes that if further concessions are given to the newspapers that are proposing their own royal charter, that will be to the benefit of the Government. Bluntly, it will be seen as a defeat, and it is not healthy in any democracy for Parliament and the Government to be defeated by an outside group, however powerful that group may be. We did not allow it with the trades union barons and we should not allow it with the press barons either.The basic question I want to ask the Government is very simple: why have we paused? Why, to use the Prime Minister's words, are we not getting on with it? The public are on the side of the Government and will remain so as long as the issue is fought with strength and consistency. The public are not fools; they know that newspapers are not innocents dressed in white. They do not want to challenge press freedom, but they to want to challenge the blatant misuse of press power.(Lord Fowler went on to address separate concerns about the progress of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill.)