The Joy of Six 1519

Roderick Lynch says the Liberal Democrats have a serious problem in urban Britain and pretending otherwise will only make it worse.

"A few months after winning the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer pledged to stop 'powerful people using ... Slapps to intimidate journalists away from their pursuit of the public interest'. But in February this year, anti-Slapp measures were shelved from a civil justice and courts bill, reportedly following interventions from Downing Street." Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy on the government's abandonment of libel law reform – Slapps are "strategic lawsuits against public participation".

"A child living in an illegal care home is being used by an organised crime gang. He may be moving drugs around the country, transporting weapons or laundering money through his bank account. He reaches out for help but the home he’s living in has been infiltrated by the same gang. They refer him to a counsellor – who feeds their conversation back to the criminals controlling his life." Tom Wall has read a new report that sets out the acute dangers faced by children living in unregistered settings.

David Howarth explains what the investigation of Nigel Farage's £5m gift will consider.

"Gianni Infantino arrived at Fifa masquerading as a reformer. Instead, he has gone to great lengths to concentrate and consolidate his power. And yet, despite all the skulduggery, hardly any of the people to whom he ultimately owes his position are holding the Fifa president and his cabal to account." Josimar condemns the Fifa president's attempts to avoid press scrutiny.

Tom Service pays tribute to incomparable Kathleen Ferrier: "Ferrier's voice is still an inspiration, not least because she ought to inspire singers to properly inhabit the contralto register rather than push upwards into mezzo-soprano-dom, as so many singers today think they have to do. But most of all, it's that voice that seems to resonate inside you when you hear it, as if you're physically connected with Ferrier's voice, and which makes everything she sings so direct, so powerful, and so contemporary."

The Joy of Six 1220

"People who are gender non-conforming experience stigmatisation, marginalisation, and harassment in every society. They are vulnerable, particularly during childhood and adolescence. The best way to support them, however, is not with advocacy and activism based on substandard evidence. The Cass review is an opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and place evidence informed care at the heart of gender medicine." Kamran Abbasi has written a British Medical Journal editorial on the Cass review.

Charlotte Tobitt reports that newspaper editors have come together in a bid to improve Labour MP Wayne David's Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation Bill, which has reached its committee stage.

"There’s no doubt that many academics are feeling very pressured, highly anxious, and deeply insecure about their profession and its prospects. For some, suffering perhaps worse than others, a feeling of desperation, of being cornered, is setting in. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it?" Glen O'Hara on the crisis of morale among academic staff in our universities.

Jennifer Gerlach advises us not to try to resolve a conflict by texting.

Taylor Dorrell argues that it was his encounters with Britain’s labour movement that inspired Paul Robeson's socialist and anti-imperialist politics: "The American, who was treated as a second-class citizen by many of his countrymen back home, came to be summoned for a Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace and was befriended by Members of Parliament. It was also in London that Robeson befriended anti-colonial leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Jawaharlal Nehru of India."

"The collected letters also hold human qualities that field notes and published books do not. They reveal humor and uncertainty and, notably, a willingness to discuss ideas with people of many walks of life." Faye Saulsbury hails the transcription and publication of more than 15,000 items of Charles Darwin's personal correspondence.

The Joy of Six 1188

Peter Geogehan reminds us that Michelle Mone is a symptom of a much deeper disease corrupting British politics.

"In the hours after the arrest, pretty much every British political media organization prominently reported the man’s arrest, together with his age, his position as an MP, and his alleged crimes. But while every reporter in Westminster knew exactly who he was, it took more than a year before anybody dared publish his name." Esther Webber explains how British libel law lets bad people get away with bad things."

"I am the only reader present in what’s typically a bustling space. The library’s reading rooms are now zombies. As public service announcements have brightly reported, the rooms are still open for 'personal study'. That said, visitors cannot request, retrieve, or use materials (for the most part), from the library’s vast collections." Carolyn Dever on the strangely unreported cyberattack that has crippled the British Library,

Alexandra Wilson says the idea that the best young academics end up working at the best universities is a myth.

Jonathan Liew reports on the dwindling of the London darts scene: "But this is a drowned world now, a lost world. Walk a mile in any direction from Alexandra Palace, where the Professional Darts Corporation hosts its world championships, and the rich darting heritage that birthed a worldwide phenomenon exists only in ghosts and whispers."

"Before the movie played, however, viewers were invited into a mocked-up American motel room, with a garish pink and blue neon sign blaring outside the window. A young chap with an electric shock haircut and a leather jacket sidled in to talk a little about Robin Hardy’s picture and the season of outsider films for which it marked the beginning." Richard Luck celebrates Alex Cox and Moviedrome.

The Joy of Six 1095

Sian Norris and Daisy Steinhardt on the call on Britain to act on Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation: "SLAPPs are often used by wealthy and powerful individuals and organisations to silence journalists and civil society organisations from exposing wrongdoing, and have a chilling effect that allows for wrongdoing to flourish in the shadows. The UK is particularly vulnerable to SLAPP lawsuits, including litigation against journalists not even based in the country, due to the country’s libel and defamation laws."

Restore Trust presents itself as a grassroots organisation of National Trust members, but lawyers claim it is funded by powerful, hidden sources. Charlotte Jansen investigates.

During the second world war the Palace of Westminster was home to a munitions factory, reports Zoe Crowther.

"Over much of the globe, night has been cancelled. The night sky in Hong Kong is 1,200 times brighter than the unilluminated sky. Millions will never see the constellations so central to the stories humans have told about the cosmos." Charles Foster mourns the end of the night.

Neil Fox celebrates the 20th birthday of Michael Winterbottom's film 24 Hour Party People: "Tony Wilson was a postmodern figure. He infiltrated capitalist spaces with a rakish charm and a rebellious streak, believing in the power of art to nearly the same degree he believed in self-narrativisation and mythology. He believed music could change the world, or more specifically, he believed Manchester music could change the world."

Past Tense takes us on a radical wander down North London's longest aqueduct.

How an 18th-century chimney sweep's boy helped Coleen Rooney win the Wagatha Christie case

I suspect it was that too-conveniently lost mobile phone that did for Rebekah Vardy.

As the Guardian report says:

The judge was highly critical of the loss of key communications in the case. She said it was not believable that Watt accidentally dropped her mobile phone in the North Sea shortly after a legal request was made to search its WhatsApp messages.

But then:

There was widespread mockery in court of the loss of potentially crucial evidence by Vardy and those around her. Rooney’s lawyers invoked a legal precedent from 1722 to argue that, in the absence of evidence, the judge should assume the worst.

And if you follow the link to find the 1722 precedent, you arrive at this:

Owing to the absence of direct evidence, Rooney’s legal defence has relied on a 300-year-old court ruling, Armory v Delamirie, involving a young chimney sweep who found a piece of jewellery while cleaning a fireplace. When the sweep had it valued, a jeweller surreptitiously removed the gems, leaving behind a number of empty sockets.

The 1722 legal ruling set a precedent that if the court can tell that evidence is missing, then the assumption should be that what is missing is of the highest possible value that would fit. 

This, I believe, is one of those cases, like the one with the snail and the bottle of ginger beer, that all law students learn.

It's real importance lies not in the assumption about the missing stones, but in the assumption that the finder of property has a legal claim over it until a better one comes along. So the sweep's boy Armory may have been an unlikely owner of jewellery, but he had a better claim to it than the jeweller (in fact it was his apprentice) who filched the precious stones.

Much is known about "Delamirie", who was in reality Paul de Lamerie, who has been described as "the greatest silversmith working in England in the 18th century".

But what of the boy Armory?

A website maintained by Professor Eben Moglen of  Columbia University quotes the legal historian A.W. Brian Simpson:

I’ve tried to find out more information about [Armory v. Delamirie], but so far I’ve got nowhere. I’m still trying. But the trouble is that if the people in the case are poor, they tend to leave no trace in historical records. 

So if you do a case involving fairly wealthy people, you often find information. It’s easier to find information in the nineteenth century, because there are extensive newspaper reports. They often give very detailed accounts of litigation, so you get a lot of information from them, but the further back you go, the more difficult it gets. . . 

It’s such a strange case. I mean, here’s this chimney sweep boy, they were the lowest of the low, somehow suing – who paid for his lawyer? He’s suing the most distinguished silversmith of the early eighteenth century. The defendant’s work now sells for a million dollars an item. And yet we don’t know anything about how the case happened . . . 

I’ve [tried to get information on the case] intermittently for years, but I haven’t gotten anywhere. History is sometimes just hopeless. Sometimes you just have to give up.

But whoever Amoey was and however old he was, Coleen Rooney owes him her deep thanks.

The monstrous silence of Nick Clegg

Britain in 2013.

The police detain a journalist's partner under anti-terrorism legislation in what look likes an attempt at intimidation. The police supervise the destruction of computers on the premises of a national newspaper.

And what does Nick Clegg have to say about it?

Nothing.

The longer his silence continues, the harder it becomes not to share the conclusion of Liberator's blog: Nick is abandoning the party's traditional concern for civil liberties in order to make it easier for him to continue his coalition with the Conservatives after the election.

But, I hear you protest, Nick once vowed to go to prison rather than carry a compulsory ID card.

The trouble is, as I pointed out in April when writing about his failure to support libel reform, Nick has previous:

This pattern seems all too well established. Nick courts an interest group with almost exaggerated language - think students or civil libertarians who oppose secret courts - only to let them down when he gets the chance to do something about it in government. 

I do not think people would mind being let down quite so much if Nick had not originally been so good at convincing them of his support for their cause.

Sir Edward Garnier wins Liberal Villain of the Week

Each week the thinktank Centre Forum chooses its Liberal Hero of the Week and, more sporadically, its Liberal Villain of the Week.

And this week's Villain is none other than my own MP, Sir Edward Garnier QC MP. He wins the award for his attempts to thwart reform of Britain's libel laws.

Considering how often Centre Forum makes a Conservative MP its Hero, this is condemnation indeed.

Lib Dem snooper's charter victory is great, but we must be vigilant

The news that Nick Clegg has vetoed the Communications Data Bill - or snooper's charter - as currently drafted is hugely welcome, and together with this week's reform of the libel law, has done much to restore my faith in the Liberal Democats as a liberal party.

It is particularly welcome if you read the briefing activists were given on this bill a year ago. I find I said at the time that:

My first impression was that it had been produced by a child who had been allowed too much Sunny D. Random phrases are underlined or rendered in bold and some get both treatments.

There does seem to be a pattern here of progress being made only after Lib Dem activists have risen against their leadership.

Think of libel reform, where only 10 days ago a "Liberal Democrat spokesman" was blithely telling the Independent:

"Unfortunately we are in a Coalition and this was one of those areas where we could not get our Conservative colleagues to agree with us."

After that poor Tim Farron was monstered on Twitter, Julian Huppert went to work and substantial reform of the libel law was secured - though I never quite grasped why we didn't simply vote for the full reform package in the Commons to begin with.

And this patter predates Nick Clegg's leadership. Donnachadh McCarthy has an article in the current Liberator recalling how Charles Kennedy was effectively bounced into opposing the invasion of Iraq.

The wisest comment on today's events I have seen is this tweet:

Important thing about #snooperscharter is that it isn't a Tory bill, just as its predecessor wasn't Labour bill. It's a Home Office bill.
— Heresiarch (@Heresy_Corner) April 25, 2013

And that means that the danger has not gone away. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and all that.

At least it is encouraging to read the comments below the Conservative Home article by Michael Ellis, the Tory MP for Northampton North. He relies on much the same arguments as the original Lib Dem briefing and they are little better received by that blog's readers.

Nick Clegg's outspoken opposition to libel laws as deputy prime minister

Yesterday I wrote a post contrasting Nick Clegg's opposition to our current libel laws with this week's partial retreat on reform.

If you were Nick's defence counsel you might argue that since becoming deputy prime minister he has found that these matters are more complicated than he once thought. After all, the article I quoted was written back in January 2010.

But this evening I came across an article that Nick wrote for the Guardian in March 2011 when he had been deputy PM for almost a year.

And if anything, it is more outspoken still:

These are laws that tip the balance in favour of vested interests, that allow journalists and academics to be bullied into silence, to be kept quiet by the fear of ruinous legal battles with big business or wealthy individuals. 

London is the number one destination for libel tourism, where foreign claimants bring cases against foreign defendants to our courts – even when the connection with England is tenuous at best. It is a farce that has prompted Barack Obama to legislate to protect his citizens from rulings in our courts. 

These laws make a mockery of British justice. They kill debate and smother scientific inquiry. They undermine our moral authority as we seek to promote the values of an open society in other parts of the world. 

And it is ordinary people who really suffer: protecting their interests means ensuring corruption can be unearthed and charlatans exposed. Of course, individual citizens must be able to protect their reputations from false and damaging claims, and we cannot allow companies to be the victims of damaging, untrue and malicious statements. 

But from the humble blogger to the consumer watchdog, corporate whistleblower, medical researcher, or roving reporter, public-spirited voices must be heard.

I am genuinely puzzled by Nick's retreat on civil liberies and, in particular, puzzled at how he imagines he appears to the voters who care about such issues. As I argued yesterday, he once went out of his way to attract their support.

Once again, backbench Lib Dem MPs are doing honourable work trying to limit the damage to the law and to the reputation of the party. But we need leadership on these issues, and Nick Clegg appears to have gone missing in action.

Libel reform: Nick Clegg lets down another group he previously courted

Nick Clegg on libel reform in January 2010:

"Libel tourism is making a mockery of British justice," Mr Clegg will say. In one case, a US academic was successfully sued for £130,000 by a Saudi businessman in an English court, even though the defamatory book sold just 23 copies in Britain over the internet. 

"I am deeply concerned about the stifling effect English libel laws are having on scientific debate," Mr Clegg will say. "Scientists must be allowed to question claims fearlessly – especially those that relate to medical care, environmental damage and public safety – if we are to protect ourselves against poor research, phoney treatments and vested corporate interests."

From the Independent website this evening:

The Government is to block plans to reform Britain’s “chilling” libel laws and to prevent large companies from silencing their critics with the threat of being sued.

The attempt by ministers to water down the Defamation Bill when it returns to the House of Commons tomorrow was condemned by academics, scientists and libel reformers. They warned it would allow big companies to continue to “hound” their critics with the threat of crippling libel fees and cement Britain’s reputation as the defamation capital of the world... 

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said the party would be instructing their MPs to vote with the Government. “Unfortunately we are in a Coalition and this was one of those areas where we could not get our Conservative colleagues to agree with us,” he said.

This pattern seems all too well established. Nick courts an interest group with almost exaggerated language - think students or civil libertarians who oppose secret courts - only to let them down when he gets the chance to do something about it in government.

I do not think people would mind being let down quite so much if Nick had not originally been so good at convincing them of his support for their cause.

Why I shan't be writing to my MP on libel reform

Robert Sharp, the head of campaigns and communications for English PEN, has a good post on Liberal Democrat Voice about a new threat to the prospects for reform of the law of libel.

He says:

No sooner had the proposed law been liberated, after being taken hostage by Leveson negotiations, than Conservative MPs have begun messing with crucial free speech provisions.

One has tabled an amendment seeking to remove a crucial clause from the Defamation Bill that places limits on corporations’ use of the libel laws.

Robert explains:

Such a law would have discouraged the crippling libel cases brought by Big Pharma against Dr Peter Wilmshurst and Dr Ben Goldacre. It would have helped Simon Singh. It would stop the costly ‘lawfare’ waged by the extractive industries around the world against human rights groups like Global Witness. It would stop scientists and doctors from having to decide whether to speak out for their patients and risk selling their house in order to pay legal fees… Or keep their mouths shut. 

The clause is an entirely sensible provision that was recommended by the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, and the pre-legislative scrutiny committee, chaired by former Tory Party chairman Lord Mawhinney. 

Crucially, it is Liberal Democrat Party policy, and was in the 2010 manifesto that elected 57 Lib Dem MPs.

He goes on to urge Lib Dem activists to contact Nick Clegg and ask him to "stand up to the corporate libel bullies" and deliver a policy on which the general election campaign was fought. He also hopes they will contact their MPs, asking them to oppose Sir Edward’s attack on the Defamation Bill.

Robert is right. Libel reform is long overdue. More than that, granting rights to corporate bodies has always seemed to me the worse kind of Hegelian romantic nonsense - just the sort of thing good Anglo-Saxon jurists should be sceptical about.

And even if you do think it is a good idea, Robert assures us that the clause the Tory MP wants to remove does not bar corporations from suing entirely: it just asks that they show financial loss before they do so. He describes it as an objective and measurable test for companies, who "after all do not have feelings".

Sadly, there is little point in my writing to my MP on this matter. Why? Because Sir Edward Garnier QC MP, sometime leading libel barrister, member for Harborough and thus my MP, is the man behind the amendment which Robert so deplores.

A guide to libel for bloggers

There is a new irregular verb in widespread use at the BBC:

I recuse myself
You step aside
He/she/it resigns

It seems to have caught on in Leicestershire too, as last night the ruling Conservative group on Leicestershire County Council announced that its deputy leader David Sprason had decided to "step aside".

Of course, we all wanted to know why. And my old friend Simon Galton, now the leader of the Lib Dem group on the county, tweeted as follows:

I understand the Leics mercury will report tomorrow that the latest scandal involving a member of @leicscc_cons is about porn!
— Simon Galton (@SimonGalton) November 21, 2012

I was about to retweet it when I realised that I did not know if it was true. I was pretty sure that someone as sensible as Simon would not tweet in this fashion unless he knew what he was saying was true, but I did not know it was true.

So I retweeted something else by Simon that mentioned the resignation but not the porn. Mind you, I reasoned that anyone sufficiently interested in the resignation would look at Simon other tweets and find the porn story for themselves.

The furore over Lord McAlpine, I suspect, has made many bloggers more aware of issues of libel. And today in the day job I come across a useful and approachable guide on the subject: So you’ve had a threatening letter. What can you do? by Sense About Science.

I recommend any blogger who aims at being controversial, particularly in the current climate, to read it.

As it turned out, the porn story was true. As today Leicester Mercury reports it:

The deputy leader of Leicestershire County Council has stepped down while an investigation takes place after it emerged a pornographic DVD was found in his council computer. 

Councillor David Sprason is now to be investigated by Tory party whips. He told the Mercury he made an "error of judgement" when he watched a movie entitled She Likes It Rough in his county council PC and voluntarily stepped down while the matter is looked into. 

The DVD was found on the CD drive of Coun Sprason's computer in 2007 when he returned it to IT officers at County Hall after it broke. 

The matter came to light after a copy of a confidential letter sent to Coun Sprason by former council monitoring officer Elizabeth McCalla about the DVD was passed anonymously to the Leicester Mercury.

My usual response to such stories is to say that if only councillors bought their own computers, as the rest of us do, then they could watch as much pornography as they like.

However, I was talking to a Labour councillor on another authority today. She explained that councillors are warned that if their own laptop is stolen, and it has confidential data on it, then they will be held legally liable. So it safer to use an encrypted machine paid for by the taxpayer for council business.

You Can't Read This Book by Nick Cohen

This review appears in today's Liberal Democrat News. There are three more points I would have made if space had allowed.

• Secular politicians can find it useful to deploy the concept of religious offence. Pussy Riot, whose real crime was surely to attack Vladimir Putin, were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" - a charge that manages to combined elements of Soviet and Tsarist tyranny.
• Nick Cohen quotes the observation of Chris Dillow that those who are convinced that a secretive centralised state is bound to be inefficient are nevertheless convinced that style is the best way to run a private company.
• Even if we Liberal Democrats expect less from the Coalition than we did even a few months ago, it is vital that the bill to reform libel law promised in the last Queen's Speech is passed.

You Can’t Read This Book

Nick Cohen

Fourth Estate, 2012, £12.99

Whether it is a collection of columns or original work like this, a new book by Nick Cohen is an event. During the Blair years his journalism made him the most effective critic of Labour’s assault on our liberties and accommodation with right-wing populism – so much so that it was a little hard to understand his outrage when the British people decided to vote for other parties at the last general election.

You Can’t Read This Book deals with the threats to free expression in the modern world. Cohen looks at the conflict between religion and free expression, the power of the wealthy to silence their critics and the determination of dictators to persecute dissidents.

The threat to freedom of expression posed by religion is fuelled by the concept of ‘offence’. Causing offence is one of the few sins that secularists still recognise and, as Cohen explains, much modern journalism consists precisely in manufacturing that offence:

We come across a fact we suspect will outrage a pressure group/political party/guardian of the nation’s morals. We call the pressure group/political party/guardian of the nation’s morals and ask, “Are you outraged?” “Yes we are,” the pressure group/political party/guardian of the nation’s morals replies, allowing us to generate the headline “Pressure Group/Political Party/Guardian of the Nation’s Morals Outraged by …”

Cohen is rightly hard on the many Western intellectuals who found excuses for not supporting Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses and he deals with less well-known cases such as that of Maqbal Fida Husain, the Indian artist who had an exhibition in London cancelled because of protests from Hindu activists.

You Can’t Read This Book goes on to look at the way British libel law insulates the rich and powerful from legitimate criticism. That law reverses the usual burden of proof and it has been used, for instance, against people raising legitimate questions about the claims made by ‘alternative’ medical practitioners. Above this, the generous interpretation that judges here make of what constitutes publication in Britain means many foreign oligarchs pursue their critics in our courts. The result is that a number of books on the financing or terrorism that are freely available in the US cannot be bought in Britain.

Cohen’s third theme is the power of the state, and here he is critical of those who think that those social media have fundamentally altered the balance of power in favour of the individual citizen. He asks why this should be the case with Twitter and Facebook when it was not with the printing press.

One thing these three threats have in common is that they are exercised in an almost random way. We are not living in a totalitarian world, but individuals can suddenly find their lives have been wrecked.

It is impossible to know in advance if a work of art will arouse the ire of religious extremists, while a libel action – which could lose you everything you own – is a worry for many more of us in a world where so many of us now publish our thoughts through blogs or social media. And Cohen likens this tactic to the way that authoritarian states periodically treat minor critics with extreme harshness to make every other dissident nervous. 

One final point… It is good to see Nick Cohen citing John Stuart Mill, but there is much more to On Liberty than the ‘harm principle’. Mill’s great work is a hymn to individuality – something that would fit Cohen’s theme in You Can’t Say That very well.

The Libel Reform Campaign

To Index on Censorship and English PEN it has become increasingly clear that English libel law and the use of ‘super-injunctions’ are having a profoundly negative impact on freedom of expression, both in the UK and abroad.

Writers such as Simon Singh, and respected current affairs programme Newsnight, have found themselves facing defamation suits, whilst human rights campaigners are often forced to edit and retract articles in the face of potential libel action.

We need to persuade politicians from all the political parties to commit to reform of our unjust libel laws.

Now visit their website.