My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships would not want the Bill to pass without hearing some squeak of protest and dissent from those of us who have spent so many days and weeks arguing for the interests of privacy and free speech, to which the Bill remains a very serious and major threat.
Before I come to those remarks, I associate myself with what other noble Lords have said about what a privilege it has been, for me personally and for many of us, to participate over so many days and weeks in what has been the House of Lords at its deliberative best. I almost wrote down that we have conducted ourselves like an academic seminar, but when you think about what most academic seminars are like—with endless PowerPoint slides and people shuttling around, and no spontaneity whatever—we exceeded that by far. The conversational tone that we had in the discussions, and the way in which people who did not agree were able to engage—indeed, friendships were made—meant that the whole thing was done with a great deal of respect, even for those of us who were in the small minority. At this point, I should perhaps say on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, who participated fully in all stages of the Bill, that she deeply regrets that she cannot be in her place today.
I am not going to single out anybody except for one person. I made the rather frivolous proposal in Committee that all our debates should begin with the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam; we learned so much from every contribution he made that he really should have kicked them all off. We would all have been a great deal more intelligent about what we were saying, and understood it better, had we heard what he had to say. I certainly have learned a great deal from him, and that was very good.
I will raise two issues only that remain outstanding and are not assuaged by the very odd remarks made by my noble friend as he moved the Third Reading. The first concerns encryption. The fact of the matter is that everybody knows that you cannot do what Ofcom is empowered by the Bill to do without breaching end-to-end encryption. It is as simple as that. My noble friend may say that that is not the Government’s intention and that it cannot be forced to do it if the technology is not there. None of that is in the Bill, by the way. He may say that at the Dispatch Box but it does not address the fact that end-to-end encryption will be breached if Ofcom finds a way of doing what the Bill empowers it to do, so why have we empowered it to do that? How do we envisage that Ofcom will reconcile those circumstances where platforms say that they have given their best endeavours to doing something and Ofcom simply does not believe that they have? Of course, it might end up in the courts, but the crucial point is that that decision, which affects so many people—and so many people nowadays regard it as a right to have privacy in their communications—might be made by Ofcom or by the courts but will not be made in this Parliament. We have given it away to an unaccountable process and democracy has been taken out of it. In my view, that is a great shame.
I come back to my second issue—I will not be very long. I constantly ask about Wikipedia. Is Wikipedia in scope of the Bill? If it is, is it going to have to do prior checking of what is posted? That would destroy its business model and make many minority language sites—I instanced Welsh—totally unviable. My noble friend said at the Dispatch Box that, in his opinion, Wikipedia was not going to be in scope of the Bill. But when I asked why we could not put that in the Bill, he said it was not for him to decide whether it was in scope and that the Government had set up this wonderful structure whereby Ofcom will tell us whether it is—almost without appeal, and again without any real democratic scrutiny. Oh yes, and we might have a Select Committee, which might write a very good, highly regarded report, which might be debated some time within the ensuing 12 months on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. However, we will have no say in that matter; we have given it away.
I said at an earlier stage of the Bill that, for privacy and censorship, this represents the closest thing to a move back to the Lord Chamberlain and Lady Chatterley’s Lover that you could imagine but applied to the internet. That is bad, but what is almost worse is this bizarre governance structure where decisions of crucial political sensitivity are being outsourced to an unaccountable regulator. I am very sad to say that I think that, at first contact with reality, a large part of this is going to collapse, and with it a lot of good will be lost.