….but beware the double-edged sword.
Rupert Murdoch’s past behaviour suggests that he prizes monopoly ownership far higher than press freedoms. Indeed, it is the horrible reality of having so much of the press in the hands of shadowy characters that brings with it the danger of censorship. The Newscorp/Murdoch mentality has always been ‘do what it takes to get the story’. You can’t have off-limits press freedoms with that kind of ‘no limits’ ethic: that’s why we need to get Roop and other unelected exiles out of our media lives. The cruel irony is that failure to do this will give an excuse to the elite – both political and judicial – to introduce draconian publication limits with the cheery admonition, “Remember Newscorp”.
As The Slog has posted previously, the elite that stood by looking the other way while liberal journalists and right-wing blog writers nailed this scandal would not even blink at the hypocrisy of doing such a thing. So top marks to The Guardian (and in Slogger’s Roost, we don’t say that very often) for starting right now to highlight the danger. Given Britain already has disgraceful restrictions on Court reporting in some sectors – a disgrace compounded by New Labour’s unwillingness to change that state of affairs – the last thing we need is grubby ambulance chasers with yet more flimsy excuses to protect their powerful clients.
The Guardian’s piece looks at the super-injunction trend, and gets LibDem MP John Hemming (who is launching an inquiry into possibly unlawful secrecy) to go on the record about a new type of super-dooper injunction designed to gag investigative journalists.
Hemming said the new breed of gagging order – used in relation to a case in the high court in London last week…anyone know which one? – meant journalists could face jail simply for questioning innocent victims of illegality. “It has the effect of preventing journalists from speaking to people subject to this injunction without a risk of the journalist going to jail. That is a recipe for hiding miscarriages of justice,” said the MP, “It puts any investigative journalist at risk if they ask any questions of a victim of a potential miscarriage of justice … I don’t think this should be allowed in English courts.”
Having been a victim of these myself in following up a case of judiciary paedophilia, I’d say it shouldn’t be allowed in any court anywhere. It is rare to read such understatement from a LibDem backbencher, especially given that the legal profession has been pushing its luck of late – I refer to the Constitution of our nation, which is still waiting for someone to write it down. When some crummy silk feels he can bully the nation’s Sovereign body, then we are in precisely the same position as with the TUC in 1985, which had reached the point of supporting the block vote to unseat an elected Prime Minister.
The more obvious contemporary parallel is the investment banking sector. As you may have noticed, Barclays CEO Bob Diamond spent a two hour stretch last month looking down his nose at an MPs Committee (he was right to – their performance was awful to behold) before deciding to cut out the monkeys and simply threaten the organ-grinder in Downing Street. Gordon Brown has also, via his usual leaking communication through acolytes on earth, ‘not denied’ that Murdoch rang him directly to try and get the cops called off over Hackgate. It’s all the same thing really. We used to call it treason when I was younger. Now the bright young things call it lobbying.
But before we add all Lawyers to the bonfire of insanities, we should pay heed to that minority of the profession who do the dirty work for which the Law was originally designed: the protection of equality before any Court in the land. The power of Unions, moguls, gangsters, banks, oilcos, Prime Ministers and mining conglomerates to bully, bribe, frighten and generally pervert justice in the UK has been apparent since God was a girl, but it has become far more rife since the mid 1990s.
When Jemima Khan’s dad Jimmy Goldsmith tried to bankrupt Private Eye (and imprison Richard Ingrams) in the 1970s, only the spirited Goldenballs campaign for financial support stopped him. But at the time, it was a sensational cause celebre which, although Ingrams refused to take it seriously, was seen as a one-off. Today such methods are routine procedure in the Chambers who believe nothing honest should ever dare speak its name. Whether it be Newscorp silencing the Indie or Michael Silverleaf talking money with Sienna Miller, the secret civil servants, industrialists, new-earth miners and other assorted pimples are at the business of hiding the truth 24/7 these days. Perhaps they always were, except that now it’s legal. Nobody can be sure.
In that context, The Independent interviews one of the silkettes in the white hats today. To quote directly, because I think this is a great example of succinctly powerful reporting, ‘Charlotte Harris, a partner at the London law firm Mishcon de Reya, has for the past three years been representing clients who believe their privacy was systematically invaded by Mr Murdoch’s News of the World. She says the phone-hacking scandal raises profound questions about who is in charge of the country: newspapers, and in particular those owned by the world’s most powerful media baron, or the police who should be curbing their excesses, and the public.’
What I especially like about this extract from Martin Hickman’s piece is that he doesn’t include politicians in the list of people supposed to be in charge of the country. In this sense, he is clearly a man ahead of his time. Ms Harris, in turn, sounds determined and voluble:
“”This is about power and about thinking that you’re above the law and about who we can trust, and fundamentally this is about whether we live in a democracy, or a Murdocracy dictatorship that I never voted for.”
Good for you Charlotte: that is precisely what this case is all about. It is what any and all cases like it should be about in a civilised nation. And while I sense from some of this woman’s views that we are some way apart politically, it is one of those occasions (rare to the point of near-extinction these days) when the principle is more important than the Party allegiance: getting rid of those who fancy being above the law should always be above politics.
David Cameron blundered when he failed to see this in hiring Andy Coulson. He blundered in writing off the scandal as left wing agitation. He blundered by firing Coulson too late in the day, and giving him a glowing reference in the media. He blundered in pretending it had nothing to do with the BSkyB bid. And he continues to bluff his way through a mess that, as predicted here all those many months ago, is not going to go away. I’ll leave the last words to Charlotte Harris: they seem to me entirely accurate:
“”The information will come out,” she says. “We’ll have witness statements, we’ll have cross-examination, we will be examining them on the disclosure. When we get to the trial that is going to be the big showdown, that’s when when we’re going to find out what’s happened. There will be no more hiding.”
The Slog 
