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:
“In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.”
—Cecil Parkinson (b. 1932)
“Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Of course, in the reality of history, the Machiavellian view which glorifies the principle of violence has been able to dominate. Not the compromising conciliatory politics of humaneness, not the Erasmian, but rather the politics of vested power which firmly exploits every opportunity, politics in the sense of the “Principe,” has determined the development of European history ever since.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)