Defamation Bill

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

Does the hon. Lady agree that there has to be a sense of realism in relation to the web? If every defamatory comment posted on Twitter, Facebook and so on was followed up with some kind of state action we would need a new Government just to police the web. That would be structurally and practically impossible. There has to be a sense that if a lonely Twitter tweeter with 15 followers were to make an insulting comment, that could not be anything like as serious as its being made by someone with 1 million followers. There has to be recognition of the fan base or platform at which insults are hurled.

Let me make one further point about the internet.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Briefly.

[Zac Goldsmith]

Apologies. Very quickly—this goes back to the point made in the previous speech. When a law is broken and someone is threatening someone’s life, for example, it is incumbent on those who receive such threats to pursue the matter to the maximum possible penalty regardless of whether they are 16, 20 or 25. If they do not, people will continue to be able to inflict that threat and pose real dangers to other people. Even—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. That was a very long intervention, much as it might have been appreciated by hon. Members. If the hon. Gentleman wants to make a longer intervention—it is called a speech—he can try to catch my eye.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention was so long that I cannot remember what he said, but I know that when I was listening I agreed with both his major points.

The solution of notice and takedown proposed by the Joint Committee on the draft Bill is a good, pragmatic one, recognising that although we cannot legislate for the net in exactly the same way as we do for other areas, we can reproduce the rights and responsibilities in the real world. I must say to Ministers, however, that given that the Joint Committee report was produced last October, they ought by now to have got parliamentary counsel to have drafted the regulations, so that we could see them and be confident that they were right.

Clause 10 is extremely welcome. We should probably call it the Private Eye clause. For years, high street newsagents refused to stock the Eye because they thought they might be sued over its potentially litigious content. The clause is welcome, therefore, given that we are all deeply dependent on the Eye for keeping up to speed with what is going on.

As is often the case with this Government, however, the problem is not so much with what is in the Bill as with what is not in it. There is nothing to tackle the lack of access to justice for ordinary people, whether as claimants or defendants. That inequity was demonstrated in the case of Trafigura, which damaged the environment in Ivory Coast, and in the case of Barclays and Freshfields concerning tax avoidance. Those large corporations were able to hide and threaten The Guardian, which was trying to publish stories about them. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) will say more about those cases. When I am told, not by the editor of The Guardian but by the editor of another quality national newspaper, that his major, No. 1 problem is oligarchs threatening to sue his newspaper when he tries to report on them, I know we have a problem that needs addressing. The Libel Reform campaign, which campaigned for the Bill, has called for it to include a clause requiring non-natural persons to show actual or likely financial harm. The campaign is right. Such a clause should be inserted and would be a helpful strengthening of the Bill.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) said, the Government have done nothing to right the wrong of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 through their failure properly to implement the Jackson proposals on no win, no fee cases. The McCann and Dowler families would not have been able to take the newspapers to court under the laws that the Government have implemented. That is a complete disgrace. We want a justice system available to all and a free and responsible press, but we will not achieve the latter without the former.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way for the third or fourth time. I want to talk about an important aspect of the Bill—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman may have read the conventions of the House, which have been re-circulated. An intervention is on a point relevant to the one that the speaker who holds the floor has just made, not a list of abstract points that the hon. Gentleman might want to make. His intervention should be relevant to the point that Mr Buckland has just made.

[Neil Carmichael]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I apologise. The point I was going to make—it is relevant—is that the Bill is not just about defamation and privacy, but about protecting freedom of speech. Does my hon. Friend agree that that must be considered in the debate?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Buckland]

There is an element of crossover, but the Bill does not go far enough in addressing fundamental issues of privacy. Some provisions of the Human Rights Act 1998 give a nod to the law on privacy, but the Act comes to a rather inelegant conclusion by allowing freedom of expression to have a greater priority over the right to privacy. I defend to the death the freedom of expression—that is why I came to Parliament, thanks to the good grace of the people of my constituency, who have given me this opportunity—but we must get the balance right. The Act does not faithfully reflect the reality of human rights: there is no hierarchy of rights, and each right must be balanced against others. Certain rights are unqualified, but most rights have qualifications. There is no hierarchy of public rights—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. This is a very long nod to human rights. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can come back to the Bill.

[Mr Buckland]

I was trying to illustrate the point by saying that there is a fine balance to be struck between freedom of expression and the rights of individuals to protect not only their privacy, but their reputation.

It has been said that reputation is a question of taste, but it is also a question of approach. Some take a very relaxed approach to attacks on their reputation. For example, when in his old age the Duke of Wellington heard about a book that was to be published about his private life, he famously said: “Publish and be damned.” That might well have been because he realised that most of the allegations in the book were true—I can say that only because the noble duke is long gone. Some take Groucho Marxs’s attitude. To Confidential, the infamous magazine published in the US from the ’50s onwards, he wrote:

“If you don’t stop printing scandalous articles about me, I’ll be forced to cancel my subscription.”

Sometimes, however, when there is no alternative, the only reasonable response to defamatory or libellous representations is for the individual to seek legal advice and to take action. That very much depends on the individual, the circumstances and the context. The Bill addresses, as well as primary legislation can, the nuances and the infinite range of contexts within which libel and defamation actions can be brought.

On alternative dispute resolution, to which many hon. Members have referred, no matter what we do to reform the law, the question of the cost of the legal procedure will remain. Like the Ritz, the law remains open to all, to adapt a well-worn phrase. The Jackson reforms were much criticised in the context of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, but they will not serve to change significantly access to justice in libel cases. Legal firms seeking to build their reputation will always be interested in taking the cases of well known individuals who have had their reputations besmirched, such is the way of practice.