Don’t back ‘abhorrent’ Mosley on Press curbs, Rees-Mogg tells MPs
MPS who vote to back tighter Press regulation would be supporting Max Mosley and his ‘abhorrent’ views, Jacob ReesMogg said last night.
In an impassioned speech, the Tory MP said it was a ‘scandal of our time’ that peers had passed a bill pushed by one of the most ‘disreputable figures in British public life’.
He said MPs who ‘believed in freedom’ should vote to remove two clauses added into the Data Protection Bill in the House of Lords. His comments – including a plea to MPs not to become ‘snowflakes’ troubled by criticism in the Press – were made during a debate on the bill in the Commons.
Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said the ability of the Press to properly scrutinise should not be undermined by the peers’ vote for tighter regulation.
He argued for the removal of two amendments made by peers which seek to dragoon the Press into state-sponsored regulation and force the government to launch yet another inquiry into Press standards.
Mr Hancock told MPs the legislation would introduce a right to be forgotten, whereby data must be deleted unless there are legitimate grounds for retaining it. But Mr Rees-Mogg asked: ‘Can we be certain that this right to be forgotten will not impede freedom of speech? I’m thinking obviously currently of Max Mosley, and the information that came out of him, as to what he had to say in 1961, which is relevant and pertinent to current debates.’
Mr Hancock replied: ‘I wholeheartedly agree. And he might be aware of amendments that were made in the other place on exactly that issue which are supported by some in this House, notably some who are also supported by Max Mosley.’
The debate came after a Mail investigation uncovered a racist pamphlet in Mr Mosley’s name, saying ‘coloured immigrants’ spread diseases.
Mr Mosley spent millions bankrolling the controversial Press regulator Impress, which has been shunned by all national newspapers, after his notorious German- themed orgy was exposed in the newspapers. Mr Rees-Mogg said: ‘A free Press is one that cannot be regulated by the state. And so quite understandably no serious newspaper of the Left or of the Right has been willing to bend the knee to Impress and nor should it.’
He added; ‘I say to members opposite: Any of you who go through the division lobbies at a later stage to vote in favour of those clauses are voting to support Max Mosley and his abhorrent views and his money.
‘Those of us who believe in freedom vote them down.’
He said the Mail had ‘exposed the murderers of Stephen Lawrence in a way that required them to say things about the murderers that until double jeopardy laws were changed could never be proved in a court’.
‘What if this law had existed then? And those people we now know are guilty of murder had sued the Daily Mail for saying something that was true and [the Mail] had to pay the costs of murderers? That is what the noble Lordships have put into this bill.’