This week’s libel debate organised by Inforrm and the Media Standards Trust was a reminder of how complex the issue is: five speakers aired their views and there was hardly any overlap between the topics they addressed. From libel tourism to conditional fee agreements and from tabloid excess to defining public interest, the ramifications go on and on.
Two politicians, Evan Harris and Paul Farrelly MP, had an interesting exchange, which I think was really about the difficulties of delivering the reform legislation that the coalition government is promising. In crude summary, Farrelly pointed to the challenge of ensuring access to justice and Harris replied that if the law got the principles right then access should be easier to sort out.
It certainly feels as though any attempt by parliament to get all the ducks in a row when they legislate would mean long and possibly indefinite delay. Access to justice is a maze in which the cost of lawyers’ fees and After The Event (ATE) insurance are mixed up with corporate abuse and questions about levels of damages. In principle at least all of this seems distant from the issues of freedom of speech, chilling and redress which I suspect most of us think of first in connection with libel reform, yet as Farrelly suggested there isn’t much point in getting the principles right if no ordinary citizen can afford to invoke the law.
The other big complicating factor, vividly described by Kevin Marsh of the BBC, is the question of what to do about irresponsible journalism. Far too many journalists tell far too many lies at the moment, even with our apparently harsh libel laws; if we have more sensible libel legislation, won’t those journalists exploit the opportunity and tell even more lies?
For the public as a whole, which has so little love for journalists, any legislation that appears to do them a favour without requiring better behaviour in return will probably be unattractive. Among MPs, most of whom appear to loathe and fear the tabloids in equal measure, it will surely be doubly so. Put bluntly, passing a sensible libel law would probably make it easier for the Daily Mail and the News of the World to maul and abuse MPs; why would they vote for that?
They might, if some effective form of press regulation existed, but it doesn’t. On the one hand the Press Complaints Commission refuses to be more than a low-key complaints service (and the Desmond papers have just opted out of it) while on the other the phone hacking scandal raises considerable doubt about whether even the Metropolitan Police are prepared to stand up to the tabloids.
These are very big, interlocking problems. Harris may be right, and the best approach may be to get a good, basic law in place and then see what else needs to be done afterwards, but the politics will surely make that a hard sell.
