Politics
He was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1983, knighted in 1995, and created a life peer in 1997, as Baron Puttnam, of Queensgate, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. In 1998 Puttnam was named in a list of the biggest private financial donors to the Labour Party (UK). In 2002 he chaired the joint scrutiny committee on the Communications Bill, which recommended an amendment to prevent ownership of British terrestrial TV stations by companies with a significant share of the newspaper market. This was widely interpreted as being aimed at stopping Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation from buying channel Five. When the government opposed the amendment, Puttnam brokered a compromise — the introduction of a "public interest" test to be applied by the new regulator Ofcom, but without explicit restrictions.
From 2004-2005 Puttnam chaired the Hansard Society Commission on the Communication of Parliamentary Democracy, the final report of which urged all political parties to commit to a renewal of parliamentary life in an attempt to reinvigorate representative democracy. In 2007, he chaired the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill. Puttnam is currently a trustee of the think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Read more about this topic: David Puttnam
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
“In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“From the beginning, the placement of [Clarence] Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means. The full story of his confirmation raises questions not only about who lied and why, but, more important, about what happens when politics becomes total war and the truth—and those who tell it—are merely unfortunate sacrifices on the way to winning.”
—Jane Mayer, U.S. journalist, and Jill Abramson b. 1954, U.S. journalist. Strange Justice, p. 8, Houghton Mifflin (1994)