THE UK’s press regulator has defended its chair after he publicly opposed the recognition of the state of Palestine.
On Thursday, The Times first reported that 40 members of the House of Lords, including seven KCs, had called on the UK Government to change its plans to recognise the state of Palestine in September unless Israel agrees to certain conditions.
The peers claimed that rules on state recognition laid out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which has 17 states parties in the Americas – many of whom have already recognised Palestine – would block the UK from legally doing so.
One of the KCs to have put their names to the claims is Edward Faulks, a former Tory minister who now serves as the chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), which regulates the majority of the UK’s print media.
However, asked about Faulks’s public position on the state of Palestine, Ipso defended him, saying he was “entitled” to make statements on political issues.
“Ipso is independent of government, Parliament and publishers. Lord Faulks is a senior member of the legal profession and a legislator. In those capacities he has expressed a view on a matter of international law, as he is entitled to do,” a spokesperson said.
“Ipso has in place processes to manage conflicts of interest. Should the occasion arise, any conflict or apparent conflict would be managed appropriately and transparently.”
Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie told The National it is “deeply concerning that people at the highest levels of the UK media industry can watch a genocide being broadcast right in front of them, and think the appropriate response is to find legal technicalities to prevent long overdue action by the Government”.
“This is also a reminder that Ipso is a weak parody of regulation,” he went on. “It is controlled by the very industry it’s supposed to regulate, which has so much influence over what we all see in newspapers.
“The UK failed to create meaningful regulation following the scandals that led to the Leveson Inquiry, and Ipso is in no sense a regulator with the ability to view events clearly or pass judgments on the actions of the industry.”
A report by the Press Recognition Panel in 2024 found that Ipso had “never issued a fine against a publication, launched a standards investigation, or imposed significant sanctions on any publishers despite serious breaches of the Editors’ Code of Practice”.
It further remarked that Ipso “performs no better than its predecessor, the pre-Leveson Press Complaints Commission, and acts predominantly as a complaints handler and not a regulator”.
Faulks has been the chair of Ipso since 2020, being reappointed for a second three-year term in 2023. He now sits as an independent peer in the Lords, but served in David Cameron's Tory government as a justice minister.
