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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the Minister. I found the last two groupings very interesting. I had great sympathy with the earlier amendment about returning the news system proposed by the Government into private hands. Anything that concretes a system into the public domain is not that healthy, and when we return to the matter at Report I should like to talk at more length about it. There is a middle way and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, is on to something. Amendment 235 is crude, but the truth is that £250,000 when the Act was passed is £210,000 today. The Government should have a view on what direction of travel they want to be seen to be travelling in. In effect, the maximum fine is less today than it was at the time of the original Bill. However, I am certainly happy not to press that amendment. In withdrawing Amendment 234, I make one point. I am the son of a journalist and was brought up in an environment in which all newspapers clearly differentiated between opinion and news. The Daily Telegraph in particular used to have it on the masthead. That has become a great rarity today. Most front pages of most newspapers contain opinion, not news; you have to seek the news, having got past the headlines which are essentially opinion. That is the status quo—we are not going to change that. But to allow our broadcast news to slip into that type of norm and for that to become a condition into which broadcast news is allowed to drift would be catastrophic for us as a democracy. Again, we will return to that on Report, and I hope that the whole House will be prepared to endorse the broad thrust of where we are trying to go. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 234 withdrawn. Amendment 234A Moved by