The Online Safety Bill and the spectre of “press regulation via the back door”

The version of the?Online Safety Bill?that passed through second reading and has now reached committee stage was designed to grant special protection from online censorship to “content of democratic importance and journalistic content”. The fact that the clauses in the Bill that protect such content cannot be overridden by secondary legislation suggests the government is taking great care to avoid a?de facto?system of state regulation of the press once the Bill reaches the statute book.

These forbiddingly technical points made an appearance in the popular press this week, after it was revealed that Labour MP Kim Leadbeater had put forward an amendment to the Online Safety Bill stating that safeguards in the legislation protecting online media content from being removed should only be open to those newspapers which are “a member of an approved regulator (as defined in section 42 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013)”. Her reasoning, as quoted by the?Times, was that “the bill as drafted has far too many loopholes and risks granting legal protection to those wishing to spread harmful content and disinformation in the name of ‘journalism’”.

For the?Mail, this was little more than a “cynical plot to put free Press in peril” (also see the?Times?leading article on 14th May). As the paper went on to explain, the amendment was making a clear allusion to “one of the most controversial aspects of the Leveson Inquiry into Press standards”, namely, “the demand that newspapers should sign up to a state-approved regulator”. All major national newspapers have of course steadfastly refused to sign up to a state-approved regulator on the basis that it would give the government a way of controlling the press.?A state-approved regulator, Impress, was set up after the Leveson inquiry, but as the?Mail?reminded its readers, no major national newspaper is part of what it described, with a wonderfully condescending turn of phrase, as “this set-up”. Instead, most papers have opted to sign up to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), “a regulator which is neither controlled nor funded by the State”. It was in this context that Iain Duncan Smith described the amendment as “a Labour attempt to bring in [press] regulation by the back door, and the Government must stand very firm against it” (quoted in the?Mail).

Apparently, they did. “Ministers sink threat to free Press” declared the headline to a follow-up piece in the?Mail?the next day. “Ministers yesterday saw off an attempt to introduce State regulation of the Press by the back door”, the article continued. Maybe so, but later on in that article one finds the following, rather less settled description of the current state of play: “Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, the MP for Batley and Spen, agreed to withdraw the amendment to allow more discussion on the issue.”

Incidentally, one of the points Toby made in his piece in the?Critic?about the Bill is that it would only need the slightest of tweaks to usher in state regulation of the press – and he described exactly the risk that materialised in the form of Leadbeater’s proposed amendment. One of the great dangers of this Bill is that even if the current Government stands firm on this issue, it has signposted a simple way for a Labour Government to bring in Leveson by the back door.