A cacophony of opinion broke out across the weekend’s literary pages, all of it eloquent and entertaining.
On Thursday, Nick Cohen will publish his anticipated account of England’s pernicious libel law, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Cohen condemns the legal establishment that values deference to the mighty above freedom of speech. Yesterday’s Observer carried an extract from the book. The excerpt merits reading in full, but here is a typical paragraph to warm you on this bitter morning:
‘With an aristocratic prejudice against freedom of speech, the judges imposed costs and sanctions on investigative journalism that would have been hard to endure in the best of times, but were unbearable after the internet had undermined the media’s business models. Instead of aiming its guns at the worst of British writing, the law of libel aimed at the bravest.’
You are unlikely to find an apology for libel law in a newspaper, which distorts the public debate. But, generally speaking, the judiciary readily concedes that the status quo is unsatisfactory. Lord Phillips, Britain’s most senior judge, has long held that technological advances have made the law increasingly hard to interpret and implement. Meanwhile, the Leveson inquiry has been considering the introduction an arbitration system to reduce the costs of defending libel actions; this would theoretically encourage newspapers to defend themselves and break the hold of the superrich on legal instruments that impede free expression. Leveson has also been examining rights to privacy (which the European Court of Human Rights has recently adjudicated on too); it is a very ill-defined area of law that would benefit from, so many lawyers say, parliament providing new statutes.
The question of whether judges or politicians make the law cannot be settled until parliament readily participates. In the autumn of 2009, Denis MacShane MP told a meeting of PEN and the Index on Censorship that Fleet Street could not expect parliament to reform defamation law until they got off MPs’ backs over expenses — MacShane is under criminal investigation in respect of his expense claims. MPs have since discussed privacy reform and the issues arising from it, such as the notorious super-injunction and parliamentary privilege, but no legislation has yet been introduced. Cohen’s book emphases the shame that libel law heaps on Britain’s renowned justice system; perhaps it will cajole Westminster into action.
Roger Scruton’s book, Green Philosophy, continues to provoke ire and adulation in abundance. Louise Gray of the Telegraph was broadly supportive of Scruton’s view that the environment should be the natural territory of conservatives; although she disputed his ‘nasty’ moments, such as the contention that effective conservation policy is incompatible with mass immigration. The counter-point to Gray’s often emotive account was provided by Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, in the Independent. She was analytical, conceding that Scruton’s argument was valuable and deeply considered, but she challenged his view that a sustainable future can be brought about by the ‘little platoons’. Lucas may have strayed into caricature with that conclusion. Scruton described his philosophy in an article for the Spectator’s Christmas double issue. He wrote:
‘If the intellectual class is talking of conservation, stewardship and the duty to future generations it could not be long, I felt, before its members would see the point of Burke’s argument, that society is not a contract between the living only, but a bond between the dead, the living and the unborn.’
Scruton’s conception of the social contract is a little more complicated than being diligent about the recycling — encompassing art, philosophy, literature and culture. It is a completely novel addition to this pressing debate.
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