Harriet Harman: royal charter for press watchdog an unknown quantity

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jan/23/harriet-harman-royal-charter-press-watchdog

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Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, has said government proposals to create a royal charter for a new press watchdog are akin to Dolly the sheep, the first animal to be cloned from a cell.

Speaking at the Oxford Media Convention on Wednesday, Harman also said Labour was not ruling out agreeing with the government's plan to introduce a royal charter for the newspaper regulator in conjunction with a statute to ensure the charter cannot be tweaked by a future government.

But she said the problem was no one knew how a royal charter would work in relation to the press. "It's a bit like Dolly the sheep, it might look like a sheep, but we do not know if it will do all the thing that a sheep is supposed to do," she said.

She was speaking as it emerged that David Cameron's chief policy adviser, Oliver Letwin, is preparing to circulate final version of his proposals for press regulation backed by a royal charter to newspapers, the campaign group Hacked Off and the opposition parties.

Harman said the Labour party, which wants the Leveson report recommendation for statutory underpinning for a new press regulator to be implemented, said it would force a debate and "if necessary" a vote in parliament in February if there was no agreement on the matter by then.

She added that if the royal charter, which the Tories have conceded must be accompanied by some form of statute, achieved the same goal as the Leveson report, then the government should just admit that route is the more "straightforward" way and come over to Labour's way of thinking. "The point about the statute is, we know the nature of the beast," she said.

However, it appears there is wiggle room in cross-party negotiations, which have been going on since Lord Justice Leveson's report was published on 29 November.

Asked if she would rule out agreeing to a royal charter, she said: "We are in discussions. We do not want to rule things out."

She revealed that the Labour party has also written to culture secretary Maria Miller to set up a review of media ownership rules.

Harman said the domination of press barons such as Rupert Murdoch had, in the past, given them "a sense of impunity from complaint and a feeling of invincibility".

"Rupert Murdoch owns too many newspapers – 34% of national circulation, two of our biggest daily papers, and two of our biggest Sunday papers – is too much," she said.

Turning to the BBC, she said the Jimmy Savile abuse was "shocking", especially because the nation's children were brought up "in partnership with auntie". But she said it was time for "cool heads" and hoped the incoming director general Lord (Tony) Hall would steady the ship.

But she said Hall had to address executive pay and questioned the argument that senior BBC employees have used in the past that they should be paid on a par with the private sector.

"When you work for the BBC – paid for by the licence-fee payer – you are making a choice not to work in the private sector and to get the huge benefits of working at the BBC," she added.

Harman also attacked the government for abandoning broadband targets.

Rural areas are almost 50% less likely to receive broadband of at least two megabytes per second, she said, citing a town in Wales where a quarter of premises have no fixed-line broadband.

In Teesdale, in the north-east of England, some farmers have to make a 50-minute round trip to an internet centre to file their online cattle returns, she added.

"Had Labour been in power, almost all of those 2.6 million households would have had access to basic broadband," said Harman.

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