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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise for the last-minute changing of a couple of words, on the advice of parliamentary counsel, but in essence this is very much the same amendment as published. This is both a small thing and a very big thing. My noble friend Lord Bragg spoke about it in Committee eloquently and at great length. It is a small thing because the world would manage to survive without this amendment, but it is a big thing because it is an opportunity for the House as a whole to make its view clearly felt as regards the direction of travel we take on the plurality and impartiality of news. I pulled two completely different but fascinating things out of a newspaper today. The BBC strategy review was published earlier in the week. It states that, ""global democratisation of opinion and argument [is not] as straightforward as it appears … Individual plurality may increase but collective, effective plurality decreases—with societies around the world left with fewer reliable sources of professionally validated news. The risk of bias and misinformation and, in some countries, of state control, may grow"." That is paralleled interestingly by a piece from the Guardian online, discussing some things going on in the United States which concern me a great deal and which, I hope, concern the House. It states: ""[Al] Gore has become a symbol of the harsh partisanship that is ripping Washington apart. Graham"—" that is, Senator Graham— ""by contrast, harks back to a better time, when Democrats and Republicans could occasionally work together for the common good. Let’s hope there’s a little of that in our future as well"." I argue that megaphone propaganda damages democracy. The point here is that, as we necessarily migrate into an era in which the difference between what is clearly professional broadcast news and current affairs and what is something that begins to work on the fringes—particularly under the new consortia that have been suggested—there will be a very real temptation to begin to move away from our traditional commitment to plurality and impartiality. The amendment is an attempt to reaffirm this House’s absolute commitment to insisting that that would be a move contrary to our notion of democracy, and an affirmation that there is no way in the world that we wish to move down the road that the Americans have chosen towards ever-greater partisanship and ever-greater megaphone politics. I beg to move.