Must England censor the world?

The Lowdown 17: SLAPP BACK! How the rich abuse British courts with lawyer & author David Hooper

Greetings,

This week’s podcast is about a long-running scandal: the power of the English law to threaten freedom of speech all over the world. You can listen on Apple, Spotify, (see below) Amazon, Android and all other podcast hosts

The UK has become a global censorship capital. While Paris and Milan offer high-end fashions, London offers high-end lawyers providing a luxury service to the plutocracy. Get on the wrong side of the super-rich, and you will be threatened with years and years of legal action. You can be sued for libel, breach of privacy and breach of data protection rules – increasingly, all three, Private detectives will search for dirt on you. PR firms will pump it into the press. And the cost will be enormous. You risk losing everything you have if the courts find against you.

I know people whose lives have been taken and destroyed by English law. For nothing, really.  The publication of David Hooper’s Buying Silence: How oligarchs, corporations and plutocrats use the law to gag their critics ought to be a major event.  David shows how not just British writers and activists, but people from all over the world are threatened in London.

As David said in his interview with me, 

Libel actions are so expensive here, and that plays into the hands of the plutocracy. A defendant just runs out of money. And the other thing one has to bear in mind is that we know about some of the notorious libel actions that have been brought. But they are the tip of the iceberg. Under the surface thousands of people saying, we really better not write about this corrupt oligarch because he'll come and sue us."

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a kind of reckoning, which in my small way I helped hasten. I and others pointed out that for years we could not write in the UK about Russian power in the UK, even though Russian  was a self-declared enemy of the UK. I will rerun that piece below, and then explain why the government's attempts to reform the system are likely to prove wholly inadequate. First, here is how I highlighted the issue in the Observer in February 2022 as Russian tanks moved into Ukraine.

Putin has used British rich man’s law to avoid scrutiny, at a crippling cost to us all

Truth is meant to be the first casualty of war, but in Britain the ability to tell the truth about Russia was gunned down before Putin ordered his armies to advance.

You need to write about Russian power to fully understand the anger and shame plutocratic censorship brings. Anger because Britain is our country, and claims to be a free country, and yet foreign oligarchs can manipulate the truth here as surely as Putin can in Russia. Shame because we cannot perform the first duty of journalists and speak in plain English without our newspapers accepting the risk of staggering legal costs.

In the safe space of the House of Commons, Labour MP Chris Bryant quoted from leaked government documents, which stated Roman Abramovich should be watched because of “his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices”. God help anyone who says as much outside the Commons, where the writ of the libel law runs. 

Bear the costs of challenging wealth in mind when you wonder how London became a centre of corruption. Anglo-Saxon law brings class justice rather than real justice. The verdicts of individual judges are not to blame – whatever their faults, they do not take bribes. But the price of reaching a verdict is so high few dare run the risk of being left with the bill. A system can be rigged even if the people in charge of it are honest. There is institutional prejudice in the English justice system in favour of wealth that is as pervasive as institutional racism in the police.