24 Feb 2010 | Comment, News and features, Uncategorized
This article was originally published in the Guardian
An MPs’ report delivers a boost to libel reformers, a severe rebuke to the News of the World, and a final warning for the PCC says John Kampfner
It has become fashionable to give parliament a kicking. Once in a while, however, it is worth singing its praises. Today is such an occasion, with publication of a report that goes some way to defending the once-honourable and now imperilled profession of journalism.
When the culture, media and sport select committee began its work more than a year ago, many feared the worst. MPs gave every impression they subscribed to Tony Blair’s valedictory view that the media were “feral beasts” needing to be tamed. The title of their report Press Standards, Privacy and Libel did not bode well. The initial evidence they heard, particularly from Gerry McCann about the assault on his bereaved family’s reputation, reinforced that view.
Yet the more they probed and the more they heard from organisations defending free expression, the more the MPs began to understand the vital need to distinguish between investigative journalism, a noble cause, and prurient journalism, a less salutary one. Some aspects of the report are disappointing. One that relates to privacy is potentially alarming. On balance though this is an important step forward, giving cross-party support for fundamental change to England’s hideous libel laws.
The committee details the enormous costs faced by publications, particularly small ones, in defending themselves. The report criticises law firms for deliberately stringing out suits so they can ratchet up costs and force people into settling and apologising, even where they have nothing to apologise for. It stops short of reversing the burden of proof, but it does suggest reinforcing the defence in court for brave reporting and making it harder for companies to sue to protect their reputations. The committee’s chairman, the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, says he and his colleagues were eager “to correct the balance which has tipped too far in favour of the plaintiff”.
The MPs denounce the ease with which foreign-based oligarchs, sheikhs and their like have used avaricious legal firms and pliant judges to chill the free speech of NGOs, authors and others – so much so that US Congress has considered legislation to protect Americans from British courts. They criticise Jack Straw, the justice secretary, for not tackling the problem of “libel tourism”, and the damage to the country’s reputation, describing the measures taken by US legislators as “a humiliation”.
The findings are a devastating rebuff to the many voices in the judiciary who insist that the demands for libel reform are overblown. Both Labour and Conservatives held that view until recently. Over the past few months, since Index on Censorship launched its campaign for libel reform alongside English Pen and Sense About Science, the political parties have been forced to change tack as support gathered momentum. During this time we have lobbied in parliament, talked behind the scenes to the country’s top judges, and debated with legal firms furious that their lucrative income stream from rich and powerful litigants was being threatened. Several of our 10 recommendations have now been endorsed by the committee.
A Ministry of Justice working party established by Straw only a few weeks ago is set to report on specific changes. Straw says that in the few weeks left before the general election he wants to implement reforms that do not require primary legislation. He will be held to that pledge. Meanwhile, the Lib Dem peer, Lord Lester, will table a private member’s bill shortly after the election. His proposals are now more likely to be taken up by whichever party is in power.
The flip side to free expression in any healthy democracy is robust, but responsible, journalism. The MPs reserve their most damning passages for the News of the World and others involved in illegal phone hacking. The paper’s royal correspondent and a private investigator were jailed in January 2007, but the committee says many others played their part. For the Guardian, which has doggedly pursued this story, revealing last July that the NoW had paid more than £1m to suppress legal actions, the findings are a vindication.
The MPs say they were “struck by the collective amnesia afflicting witnesses” from the NoW. These “claims of ignorance … and deliberate obfuscation” reinforced the impression “that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred,” the report concludes.
The committee condemns the police, the Information Commissioner’s office and the Press Complaints Commission, for the weakness of their responses. The Labour MP, Paul Farrelly, a campaigner for investigative journalism, says his fellow members toyed with the idea of accusing the police of contempt of parliament in its lack of openness. Farrelly derided the PCC’s suggestion it had not investigated the McCann affair because it had not been asked to by the family.
For the much-lampooned PCC this is the last opportunity to show that self-regulation can work and that free expression means more than editors defending their own and moguls doing as they please. In one area, the committee has got it dangerously wrong. Its proposal, albeit fudged, for prenotification of stories is designed to protect the privacy of individuals where no public interest is at stake. Yet this is likely to chill the investigative work of NGOs and others who will find themselves at the mercy of the injunction – the tool of choice of individuals and corporations with something to hide. This is a serious step back and will reinforce the determination of Max Mosley, who is taking his campaign for prior-notification to the European court of human rights. This ruling, if enacted, would put the UK on a par with a number of semi-authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union.
On the various thorny issues surrounding privacy, the MPs have not been sure-footed. The committee does call for a modernisation of procedures to reinforce the rights of parliament, after the Trafigura debacle last year. However, it disappointingly says little about the rise in super-injunctions – the most draconian of all measures which prevent anyone even mentioning that an injunction has been secured.
Yet for all the concerns, perhaps the most heartening aspect of the report is a categorical affirmation of free expression, which over the past decade has come under threat as never before. It is too early to celebrate, and there is a huge amount of work still to do to render good intent into good legislation. But there are signs that Britain may be emerging from its big chill.
John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship
13 Oct 2009 | Uncategorized
In what seems to have already turned into one of the greatest own goals in the history of the legal profession, solicitors Carter-Ruck won an injunction yesterday, forbidding the reporting of a parliamentary question put by an MP, regarding another injunction.
It cannot be overstated how utterly contrary to democracy this development is. Representative democracy depends on the concept that parliamentarians can speak without fear, and the public can listen to and read what they say, whether sitting in the gallery or through print, broadcast and online media. Democracy, perhaps even more so than justice, must not just be practised: it must be seen to be practised.
That a judge should glibly overturn this concept, even temporarily, puts us truly in GUBU territory. This is, to quote the late Conor Cruise O’Brien, grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented.
The Guardian newspaper goes to court today in an effort to overturn this travesty. Anyone who believes in a free press, free expression and democracy must support their efforts.
Update: it didn’t go to court
20 Jun 2009 | Uncategorized
The Life and Death of Democracy, by John Keane, Simon & Schuster, £30
Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty, by Peter Kellner, Mainstream, £25
The other day, as I was waiting to meet someone in the House of Commons, an old-school MP accosted me. “Isn’t it terrible, all that’s going on?” His implication was that the expenses scandal had unjustly dragged this venerable institution into the mud. “No, it isn’t,” I replied. “It’s marvellous.” Horrified, he skulked away. I am not in the habit of making sweeping utterances such as these. Perhaps it was more than a dozen years of disdain for the Westminster village that had been reined in, and could now be unleashed as I no longer considered myself part of the club.
That club, which contains MPs, peers, political journalists, advisers, lobbyists and other assorted hangers-on in London SW1, had until recently operated under a strict but unspoken code of conduct. Criticise MPs and parties as much you like but do not call into question the magnificence and munificence of parliament. We may dodge and weave a bit; we may wage illegal wars from time to time, we may not be very adept at scrutinising our executive, but when it comes to those perfidious foreigners, what a great story we have to tell.
From the moment I returned after being a foreign correspondent in the mid 1990s and entered the world of men in strange clothes and old habits, I was dispirited by the state of our politics. Thus it was with some anticipation that I delved into two erudite works on the history of democracy one covering the world, the other the UK. John Keane’s global anthology is a gargantuan feat of erudition. He moves deftly from ancient Greece (not the great citadel it is held up to be, apparently), to Machiavelli, to America’s founding fathers, who, the author argues, were originally wary of introducing representative democracy. Keane quotes one delegate from New Haven, Connecticut, opposing “election by the people” because they lack information and are “constantly liable to be misled”.
The author is at his most persuasive in knocking down easy assumptions. He points out that consultative assemblies flourished in the Islamic world from the beginning of the 13th century until the demise of the Ottoman empire. These assemblies, called meshwerets, were highly effective. He states that, contrary to “some old-fashioned, devoutly British, accounts”, which assume British birthright for parliamentary democracy, the venue for the first working parliament was actually northern Spain. He tells the compelling story of King Alfonso IX, a man whose fits of epilepsy earned him the nickname “the dribbler”, and who came up against the determined opposition of the local nobility. He sought to go over their heads, to convene a larger group of “good men”. And so “it was in the walled, former Roman town of Leon, in March 1188 — a full generation before King John’s Magna Carta of 1215 — that Alfonso IX convened the first ever cortes, as contemporaries soon christened it.”
Keane’s particular contribution to the debate is to emphasise the global, rather than the narrowly Anglo-Saxon, roots of democracy. His grasp of the present and his prescriptions for the future are less sure-footed. He reminds us that “democracy is not the timeless fulfilment of our political destiny. It is not a way of doing politics that has always been with us, or that will be our companion for the rest of our history.” He coins the term “monitory democracy”, suggesting that political engagement and emancipation are now expressed far more widely than through elected chambers, through the Internet, direct action, NGOs, the media and other bodies. He argues that political liberties and economic prosperity have little in common, but he develops neither this thought nor the many other questions that the past two decades of globalised capitalism have thrown up. Just why have so many people around the world willingly given up certain liberties in return for the promise of prosperity or security?
Peter Kellner’s account is specifically British. As a long-time surveyor of the political scene, he has an uncanny ability to convey the complexities of politics to a wide audience. His book is more of a compendium of historical moments, in which speeches or documents highlighting the successes of, or perils facing, democracy, are listed. The study is compiled chronologically, stretching from Athelstan the Glorious (c. 930) to Paul Dacre (the editor of the Daily Mail, 1998). Students of politics may quibble over some of the choices made from particular years or eras, but Kellner’s selection is invariably apposite, charting the great debates from the emancipation of slaves, to the Corn Laws, to the Irish independence movement, and closer to home, from Roy Jenkins’s proposals on electoral reform to Margaret Thatcher’s myopic Bruges speech.
Yet underlying Kellner’s account is an idealised assumption that we should be proud of our institutions. “The evolution of liberty in Britain has been appallingly slow,” he writes. “But once basic principles have been established, they have tended to stay established.” Perhaps the very fact that Britain has faced so few ructions has instilled in us a complacency that has dulled our sense of the inadequacies of our political system.
That system is now rightly the object of public derision. Yet I fear that derision could lead to a further weakening of our representative democracy, discouraging people from standing for parliament, leading to a new crop of MPs even less talented than the present group. Pride of place in Kellner’s anthology should surely go to Oliver Cromwell and his speech on 19 April 1653 dissolving the rump parliament.
“Ye sordid prostitutes,” he begins. “Have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.”
As I write, in the week after the European election results, I marvel at the protector’s prescience.
This article was originally published in the Guardian
13 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Chandeliers, moats and tennis courts. Who ever imagined it would come to this? With the current controversy over expenses, parliament is at serious risk of inflicting damage upon itself that could take a generation or more to repair.
Of course there are always security issues to be considered whenever data is stolen. And while MPs may have only limited claims to privacy, and none at all where expenses are concerned, they certainly have an unrestricted right to personal safety. Equally, it’s obviously troubling if bank details and passwords are being passed around. Yet at a time like this it is hard to avoid the conclusion that reaching for the police is the worst possible option: in truth we are far beyond that.
A scandal that has been exposed by free speech on the front page of a newspaper cannot be undone by attacking the human right that dragged it out into the daylight. It is painfully obvious that instead of being persuaded that open comment is the crime here, the public will take recent events as the best possible argument for protecting it at all costs.
In trying to keep their expenses secret, parliamentarians fell dangerously out of kilter with an electorate who now feel thoroughly vindicated by the horrors visited upon them. It would be dangerous indeed if the idea got around that Westminster’s most telling response to public anger was an ill-advised attempt to lash out at the gleeful messenger. This may be rough justice, but a little more transparency a little earlier on might have brought us a happier regime less threatened by curious eyes.
The public’s right to know should be engraved on the heart of every legislator. Life would be so much easier for them if they all understood this. It would be especially easier for the rest of us if their Speaker did.
