a little freedom
IN these lean times, anything you can get for nothing is worth hanging on to. Take speaking. Talk is cheap, but speech is free. Or so we’re told.
after all, in the days when soap still came in boxes! Mark, Lenin and Engels all vented their spleen here, and there used to be other Speaker’s Corners in Kennington, Clapham and Hackney too. (It has been argued, notably by Clare Short shortly after she became an ex-member of Tony Blair’s cabinet, that we’re free to say whatever we like because the government doesn’t bother to listen. Two words: ‘Iraq War’
as we used to quip in Ancient Rome.)
off newspaper magnates.
is ‘the freedom to receive and impart information and ideas, without interference by public authority, and regardless of frontiers.’ Nevertheless governments and plutocrats, from Ukraine to Iceland, flock to English libel courts to silence their critics. One unfortunate
was sued for accidentally inventing a character who resembled a real person. The real person sued. The publisher paid up, and the book was pulped.
won a similar case, but didn’t get his costs back. ‘It would have been cheaper if I’d just stabbed the fucker’ he said.
to clobber everybody else. By 1372 it was already ‘tolerably frequent’, apparently – I guess that depends on your definition of what’s tolerable. The grand tradition continues, with the result that, according to a study by Oxford University, it’s
more expensive to sue for libel in England and Wales than the European average.
battling to raise the money just to carry on doing its work.
(Did you know there was a special English for people working in the tourist industry? And no, ‘I’m on my break’ isn’t part of it)
(with a degree from Hebrew University) was sued in London (by a Moslem sheikh, but I am NOT jumping to any conclusions here) over allegations in her book, ‘Funding Evil’ (ooh, I wonder what that was about?) – of which only twenty-three copies were even in the country. The lawyers still took the money, and the courts heard the case. Now the Americans have had to pass their own laws, defending their own citizens against the effects of our justice system, operating thousands of miles from where they are.
was not genocide ; in Turkey for saying it was. But at least those countries only prosecute people who made the allegations on
We’re not so squeamish here.
free sheet, or an underground zine. And if that anybody doesn’t like it, they can come down pretty hard and fast. Two more words: ‘China’ and
It’s a mess, and one thing is sure; sorting it out can only mean more money for the lawyers.
care that as a result, only one in four people in this country now thinks it’s a real problem? So much for all the government’s painstaking work to build public support.
And does the Daily Telegraph really believe that it’s the MPs who destroyed our faith in politics, when under all the shouting, their venality averages out at a head? Might the newspaper itself not be a teeny bit responsible, when at the next election even more people think, ‘What’s the point in voting?’