The enormous cost of British libel law is a threat to national security. For the sake of enriching London barristers, Keir Starmer is preserving an unreformed and rapaciously expensive legal system that is wide open to abuse by oligarchs and dictatorships. And he knows it.
When he was a young barrister in the 1990s,Starmer represented Helen Steel and David Morris. McDonald’stried to crush the two environmental activists because they had criticised its treatment of animals. The 1997 ‘McLibel’ affair remains notorious as the longest trial in British history.
‘This case shows the absurdity of the libel laws,’ Starmer said at the time.
Now almost 30 years on, he is prime minister, and yet he does nothing to give the people of this country a legal system they can afford to use. Instead, he sits on his hands as, like Russian oligarchs and American corporations before them, China treats the English civil law as a bespoke intimidation service.
It is worth grasping that the scandal around Sheffield Hallam university kowtowing before Chinese power is a legal scandal before it is anything else.
The university ordered Professor Laura Murphy to cease research into allegations that China used the Uyghur minority it persecutes as forced labour.
Documents supplied to the BBC showed that Sheffield Hallam, like so many other universities, depends on fees from Chinese students. ‘Attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the research are now untenable bedfellows,’ its candid administrators admitted.
But a university spokesman explained that the main reason for imposing censorship was fear of the costs of English libel law.
‘The university’s decision to not continue with Professor Laura Murphy’s research was taken based on our understanding of a complex set of circumstances at the time, including being unable to secure the necessary professional indemnity insurance’.
A Chinese clothes manufacturer with customers in the UK had brought a claim for libel, alleging it had been defamed by Sheffield Hallam’s research.
I cannot emphasise strongly enough that it is not the decisions of judges that terrify insurers, universities, publishers, journalists or any member of the public caught in the law’s claws. If a judge finds that a professor must pay compensation to a Chinese firm, then that is wholly legitimate. But it is the colossal costs of lawyers and trials that spread censorship. This puts the thumb on the scales of English justice and tilts it in favour of the wealthy.
In 2022, HarperCollins published Putin’s People, Catherine Belton’s expose of the Russian autocracy. Sources at the publisher told me that if they lost all the cases from Russian oligarchs the book provoked they would face a bill of £10 million.
HarperCollins had the will and resources to fight (not least because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch.)
Pretty much every other publisher I know would have been cowed into silence by wealthy men from a hostile foreign power.
Are we now to be cowed by China too? Does Labour even accept that China is a hostile foreign power? Given the way in which its Director of Public Prosecutions abandons cases against alleged Chinese agents, perhaps it’s happy to see investigators into modern slavery silenced.
I can say with certainty that a radical Labour government would intervene. David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, would call on the Law Commission to find ways to slash the costs of the English civil law and radically reshape our courts on continental lines.
For as it stands, we are wholly out of kilter with the rest of Europe. A study from Oxford University in the early 2000s found that the average cost of libel proceedings in England is 140 times higher than the European average, and no one believes that much has changed since.
A radical Labour government would not tolerate that. It would want to undo the work of Ken Clarke, who showed how bogus his ‘man of the people’ act was in 2011, when he turned the English law into a luxury good for the global super rich, an explicit policy goal of the then-Conservative government.
The then-justice secretary told City lawyers at Clifford Chance: ‘The UK may no longer be able to boast that it is the workshop of the world. But the UK can be lawyer to the world.’
Notice Clarke did not say where making the UK ‘lawyer to the world’ left the actual people of the UK. The answer is with a legal system whose costs terrify everybody except corporations, malign state actors and billionaires.
Ah, say the lawyers, the common folk can retain counsel on a no-win-no-fee basis. But even if you can find a willing barrister, you still have to pay your opponents’ costs that can run into millions..
Ah, say the lawyers, the common folk can always get insurance. But as Sheffield Hallam has found the insurers run away when the Chinese come for them.
I write as if it is obvious that Labour would show radicalism and be on the side of common folk rather than the KCs
But as Labour becomes the party of the professional bourgeoisie that may no longer be true. Before the 2024 general election a poll for the Lawyer magazine found that 53 per cent of the wealthiest lawyers practising at the commercial Bar intended to vote Labour.
Once Labour’s core vote wore flat caps. Now it wears gowns and wigs.
Starmer once knew what was wrong with that. The case McDonald’s brought against Helen Steel and David Morris was every bit as scandalous as the actions of Russian oligarchs in the 2020s.
McDonald’s hoped to crush the activists for distributing a critical pamphlet.
Steel and Morris were able to fight back and turn the case into a PR disaster for the conglomerate because Keir Starmer gave them advice pro bono.
A video has survived from the 1990s showing the young Starmer in his cramped office delivering a warning we should heed today:
‘The imbalance in the libel laws between those that have money and those that don’t creates a real risk that criticism will be stifled purely and simply because those without money cannot afford to stand up and try to prove what they say is true.’
All that has changed since then is that first the Russians and now the Chinese have learned how to exploit our legal system. Like McDonald’s they too can stifle criticism ‘purely and simply because those without money cannot afford to stand up and try to prove what they say is true’.
Is Starmer such a lost soul that he has forgotten how dangerous and unjust this is? Does he seriously believe Labour can survive if it is a do-nothing, know-nothing, status quo party that sits on its hands while injustice flourishes around it? The evidence to date suggests that he does.
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