 Rydyn ni'n ei wneud, mae'n ddweud yn wneud bod eich bod yn yw'r ffordd ydw i'ch gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweld i'n rhan o'r ddweud, bod y mor ond y dyfodol yn yr unrhyw ffordd, mae'n meddwl i'r rhanoedd yr American Film Studio. Ond yn y gweithio, rydyn ni'n gweithio yn rhan o'r dda i ddweud ddweud rhai ddefnyddio ond rhaed i'r hynny, ddweud yr American Film Studio, iddyn ni'n ddweud i'r Rhan o'r American Film Studio. It is a genuine pleasure to be asked to address you this morning, most particularly alongside the minister and the commissioner and many other distinguished guests. I apologise in advance if what I'm about to say is somewhat aglocentric, but there's been so much going on, it seems not a bad testbed to talk about. Because it has been a fairly historic week in the UK. In fact, depending on your point of view or maybe your paycheck, it's either been the end of 300 years of press freedom or an early but significant victory in the battle to ensure a free and fair media, media that genuinely serves the interests of citizens and the development of an ever better informed democracy. On Sunday night, an agreement was reached by all three political parties to create a royal charter that would in effect both underpin the regulation of the British press and guarantee its independence from government, broadly following the recommendations of an independent inquiry led by a judge, Lord Justice Leveson. Now go back a little under two years, and I think it's fair to say that few people in Britain and indeed elsewhere could possibly have imagined when the news became public that a missing gold phone had been hacked that the result would be a horrifying and long drawn out exposure of important sections of the UK media, one which has at times beg a belief in its descriptions of criminal behaviour by those who for many, many years have been thought of as being all but untouchable. Here were a relatively small but immensely powerful clique of people who appear to have acknowledged no rules other than those that accelerated their personal and political ambitions. The sheer hubris reminded me not only of the movie Citizen Kane, but also of the story told about General Franco, who in the last days of his life fell into a coma. A very large crowd had gathered in the platter outside the presidential palace of waiting for the inevitable outcome. His family waited in an anti-room in the palace while his daughter fluttered about the bedroom watching the signs of life. Suddenly the Generalissimo's eyes flickered open. What's all that noise? said Franco. What noise? replied the daughter, relieved and delighted at his apparently miraculous recovery. That noise from outside in the platter. Oh, that father is a vast crowd of your people who've gathered to say goodbye. Really, said Franco? Where are they going? In the UK, it quickly became evident that the problem wasn't simply an out-of-control media, let alone a single-road reporter. No, the problem was a systemic behavioural pattern clouded in pragmatic self-justification that had leached far deeper into civil society, into the police, into politics, in fact into just about every nook and cranny of British public life. The media hysteria that followed Lord Leveson's report representing his recommendations as the end of press freedom, as we've known it, was taken straight from the Joseph Goebbels playbook. Frightened people with a big enough lie and then repeated often enough and it develops momentum and eventually credibility. Continue to repeat it and the guilty party begins to look like the victim until their interests would appear to have become your interests and the truth has in effect been turned on its head. 26 journalists are currently waiting trial in Britain. That would seem to me to be something worth discussing. Somehow or another, it's been off the agenda for the last few weeks. In this particular case, arguments relating to the public interest have become hopelessly conflated with the dictates of self-interest. Now a few years ago, when I was travelling around the world as UK president of UNICEF, I found myself in countries where the notion of democracy, certainly as we in Western Europe know it, was to put it mildly something of an abstraction. At the time, I'd concluded that so long as a nation could develop a reasonably well-trained, honest and impartial judiciary, it would eventually manage the incredibly difficult and sometimes painful transition to a fully functioning nation state. However, the trail of deception, as it began to emerge from the levers inquiry, made me begin to question that assumption. I was forced to come to terms with the fact that once the media, politicians and the police begin to collude with each other or discover a shared agenda that's neither transparent nor in the best interests of the public at large, at that point even the finest judiciary in the world is rendered effectively powerless. The toxic triangle of a needy and fragile politics that believes itself dependent upon or simply enthralled to an element of the media, an element that in turn has managed to infiltrate the very highest levels of law enforcement, once those relationships have become corrupted, the game is effectively up for the rest of us. I understood perhaps the first time that taken together these seeming pillars of society form an intricate and interrelated ecology and that the development of malign intent in one leads almost inevitably to the corruption of the others. I've not even brought into this equation as similarly irresponsible to the point of reckless financial community, not least here in Ireland, seemingly contemptuous of every political and regulatory system that's been set up to keep it in check. Now, this is a world in which words get distorted and mangled to a point at which they begin to lose all meaning, words like fair, respect, kindness, sacrifice and value. This is a world in which once money's involved, shame and embarrassment appear to have ceased to be any kind of break on what I'd describe as conscious less corporate behaviour. I was sorry a few weeks ago that Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln failed to win the Oscar for best picture. The sheer ambition of the enterprise was thrilling and the world badly needs to be reminded of political visionaries like Lincoln. Now, I mention this because I want to quote from an incredibly prescient letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote shortly before his death. He said, Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money pair of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I don't believe any country in Europe today can claim to be utterly immune from that possibility. Almost 13 years ago, in May 2002, I was asked to chair the UK's government's scrutiny committee on the then communications bill. This committee composed of representatives from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords was charged with making recommendations to the government on how an extremely complex piece of media legislation might be improved. Without wishing to sound immodest, I think it's now widely acknowledged, certainly in the UK, that our work represented a valuable input into the process of shaping what became the 2003 Communications Act. The then UK government had set itself three objectives for reform in advance of publishing the bill. These were to make the United Kingdom home to the most dynamic and competitive communications of media market in the world, to ensure universal access to a choice of diverse services of the highest quality and to ensure that citizens and consumers were safeguarded. Now, what our committee tried to do in a way that was entirely consistent with our remit was put forward evidence-based considerations of policy. Among these was the policy for relaxing the rules of ownership on UK television, which is where most of the media attention at the time was quite naturally focused. But the committee's principal task was the creation of a new organisation, OFCOM, as a genuinely powerful and effective regulator for the UK's broadcasting and telecom sectors, replacing what had in the past been a whole multiplicity of agencies. And it's here I believe we made a most valuable contribution. We became, I think, unanimous in the belief that Britain had, up to that point, failed to develop the type of vigorous and confident regulatory culture that from time to time is necessary to prevent the assumptions of the world's dominant market-based economies from getting entirely out of hand. I think one of the most important things we did was insert a public interest test in the case of mergers and takeovers in this particular space, and that certainly Steve Barnett knows only too well, has had a remarkable, if unintended effect over the last 10 years. But the point I'm trying to make is this. All businesses in the United States operate within a particularly aggressive commercial environment. I know I've spent many years of my life working there, and the level of competition you face can honestly make your head spin. Yet it's also an environment which knows itself to be subject to extremely robust regulation, regulation that's designed to prevent the abuse of power. American regulators are well resourced. They're legally furnished with sharp teeth, and historically at least they seem to have been prepared to use them, even when the president of the day finds himself relatively uncomfortable with the direction things are taking. Here in Europe, in most countries, regulators do not have the same powers at their disposal. And even when they do, as often as not, their nerve appears to fail them at exactly the moment it seems most needed. One of the consequences being that a tremendous amount of media power has accrued to a few individual conglomerates. News Corporation in the UK and Media Set in Italy are two obvious examples. These are concentrations of power that have now become only too clear that they are profoundly unhealthy for both the competitive ethos of business and more importantly the vibrant functioning of informed participatory democracies. In the end, as a commissioner said, this is an argument about principles. It is not about single sectors or single individuals or even single issues. And it's an argument that runs right across the whole of Europe's media. If we're remotely serious about that attractive, if somewhat overused mantra, diversity and plurality, then we can't just leave the fate of our democratic institutions to the marketplace or even for that matter to the government of the day who may well be guilty of their own set of preferences. No, the public interest must be actively defined and protective if we are to develop a full understanding of what might accurately be described as a cornerstone of freedom in an ever more complex world. During the past month, I've been travelling in South East Asia and the United States and that trips allowed me a fair amount of time to re-evaluate some of the turmoil of the past decade. And once you get past the fog and excitement of the recent events, a few fundamental issues emerge or re-emerge, which seem somehow to have got lost along the way. There are, as I see it, a number of common problems that affect the whole of our media spectrum, all of which have at some point to be addressed and wrestled to the ground if we're to ever move beyond what I see as this potentially self-destructive phase of our historical development. The first is the issue of media plurality. The situation in the UK, as in Italy, continues to be utterly insupportable, yet somewhat like serfs, we seem resigned to shrugging and suffering it as if no serious alternative could possibly exist. Allow me to offer one example. The free cash flow that would be generated by Beast Guy B over the next few years will unquestionably make it the dominant media player in the UK and possibly across the whole of Europe's content, acquisition and distribution business, with all the implications for plurality and choice that necessarily go with it. In my view, that will remain the case despite the potential of new entries and the power of Apple in technological hardware, Google in search and Facebook in social media. None of those companies is, for the foreseeable future, seriously interested in challenging Beast Guy B on its home turf, that being buying, distributing, aggregating and increasingly making premium content, especially sport, which is the key driver of the company's revenues. And thanks to the failure of UK competition authorities to address issues of creeping market dominance, BT and others who might like to be serious players in this space could do a little more than nibble away at the edges. It's also the case that only a fool would conclude that news corporations' designs on Beast Guy B have been forever abandoned. All the more so given the imminent split between its entertainment and print assets and the fact that very strong growth in the US cable networks makes the former unit more powerful than ever. Almost exactly 100 years ago another US president, Woodrow Wilson, warned that the government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. Until July 2011 I believed that was precisely the situation that had embedded itself in the UK, which leads quite neatly to the implications surrounding foreign and non-domiciled ownership. The social and political impact of the national media being something very very different from that of, for example, the automobile industry. And yet here again we've been lulled into accepting some bizarre form of commercial equivalence between the ownership of an automobile company and the ownership of a media group. In the UK we've allowed a situation to develop which would be wholly unacceptable in the United States as well as in the vast majority of other Western democracies. I had personal experience of this. I argued in 2002 maybe 2003 that it was absurd to go along with the present situation we had with the United States where no British or European company could own, have a serious ownership of the American media and that they could own us. I was absolutely assured by the government of the day, the Blair government, that conversations were actively taking place in which reciprocity would become the out turn. Ten years passed and of course the way things are in politics you get to talk to quite a lot of people who might well have been involved in those discussions. There was a discussion with the Americans. The discussion lasted 30 seconds. It was put to them that reciprocity was a nice idea and it was dismissed utterly out of hand. So I was strictly speaking told the truth that there was a discussion and I was quite clearly told an untruth that it was any possibility that this ever happened. So this being the case any failure to agree on the nature of a transparent and genuinely independent regulatory nature to structure for the press in a situation in which self-regulation has evidentially failed would have been nothing less than a catastrophe in the UK. But already some media groups are hinting that they'll boycott the new system because it allegedly breaches human rights and this I would point out from the very same media companies who have devoted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of words over the past few years to systematically rubbishing the European Convention on Human Rights. They've suddenly rediscovered it as a very useful weapon. Allow me if I may to try a new thought out on you. Over the past decade or so a great deal of thinking is developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. This is principally focused on obvious areas such as our empathetic response to the elderly and the infirm, to children and young people, to our service personnel. But it seldom has ever extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of democracy itself. To the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed participatory democracy. And all you think about it, the stranger that is. A few months ago I had the pleasure of being in the north-east of England opening a brand new, a beautiful brand new school in Durham, just outside Durham. As I walked through this, the atrium at the centre of the school, up in front of me in very, very, very big letters was Marcus Aurelius' injunction, you'll remember. He said, if it's not true, don't say it. If it's not right, don't do it. I stood for a moment and I said to the headmaster who was escorting me around. That's amazing. He said, oh, that's our school motto. And I pondered on the train going back to London. Can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple statement as being a minimum expectation of public policy? What is so difficult about if it's not true, don't say it, if it's not right, don't do it? So we need a starting point. And here's my thought. Should our developing concept of a duty of care not be extended to care, a care for our shared but fragile democratic values? After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can amount to accusations of negligence. And that being the case, can we really be comfortable with the thought that we're being in effect negligent in respect of the health of our own democracies and the values that underpin them? I am convinced that we're experiencing a moment of extraordinary change, not just in the communications industries but in the communication of ideas and that the pace of that change is far more likely to speed up and slow down. That being the case, I find myself in agreement with Alexis de Tocqueville when at the beginning of 1848, that momentous year in European history, he observed, I believe that right now we're sleeping on a volcano. Can you not sense by a sort of instinctive intuition that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel the wind of revolution in the air? Now even if that's only half right, surely the means of information through which we make our judgments have to become more important than ever. Yet there are those and they've tended in the past to come from the right of the political spectrum who hold the view that news and information are essentially a commodity like any other. These are often the same people who regard support and commitment to any nation's cultural identity and integrity as synonymous with protectionism. As the son of a journalist and the child of the cinema, you'll be unsurprised to hear that I profoundly disagree with that analysis. I'll go further. The day the present commoditisation of entertainment is extended across the whole spectrum of the information media is the day that I have been declared forever redundant. It will signify the total triumph of the Belosconi era in politics and the Murdoch era in information. In effect it'll be a Marx Brothers ending to everything that I and many many like me, many of whom are in this room, have spent our years, our entire lives working for. Every scrapper professional experience tells me that television programmes like newspapers shape attitudes. They create conventions of style and behaviour and in doing so they reinforce or indeed they undermine many of the wider values of society. So how we sensibly and sensitively regulate our communications industries will have a profound impact on the plurality and the diversity of voice that inform, educate and entertain us. I can only hope that this debate here today will recognise this level of importance and reinforce the belief that regulation of the media entirely independent of government and backed by appropriate powers of civil enforcement is one of the fundamental guarantors of a healthy democracy in the 21st century. Thank you very much for listening to us.