Gagging for it........

A current legal controversy in England would be incomprehensible and constitutionally impossible in the US. This is the so-called super-injunction, or ‘gagging order’ that has been getting massive press coverage here. What has brought it to prominence is that it is being used by footballers to prevent publication of their overly-energetic sex lives. The root is that surgically-enhanced young sluts hire themselves out to these overpaid morons for around £1000 - £1500 a night and then threaten to sell the story to the press unless there is further sweetener. Thus we have the hooker and blackmailer together, although I guess this combination has been common since the beginning of time.

It is rooted, like so much of bad law these days, in the wretched Human Rights Act, another Blair legacy. The issue goes back to the European Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted by the Council of Europe donkey’s years ago. Within this is enshrined a right to privacy. There is also a right of freedom of expression so it doesn’t require much of a leap of imagination to foresee the muddles this would cause. It was never a real problem until the HRA took on board the right to privacy and the European Court of Human Rights got jurisdiction as a consequence.

Interpretation by the Judges in the higher courts in England enables them to grant an injunction against publication of material which would be an invasion of privacy unless overridden by the public interest. And for the avoidance of doubt, ‘public interest’ has nothing to do with ‘interesting to the public’. However, the Judges have taken upon themselves to carry the concept a stage further. The so-called ‘super injunction’ prohibits publication even of the fact that an injunction has been granted.

This is beginning to smell very much like secret ‘justice’; MPs have blown the gaffe on this by, for example, disclosing that Sir Fred Goodwin, he of the RBS debacle,  was having naughties with a member of his staff whilst the bank was  going tits-up. Judges had the effrontery to criticise them for using Parliamentary privilege to by-pass the injunction and suggesting that it should be abolished. Not a smart move. MPs are exceptionally jealous and protective of their privileges and this is a fight that the Judges can’t win – neither should they, of course.

Whether discussing Uganda whilst the bank was going down is a matter of public interest is a matter of opinion; whatever Fred had his eye on, it certainly wasn’t the ball.

The Lord Chief Justice, Judge Judge (yes, really) was being exceptionally and culpably disingenuous when he said that the super-injunction had been legislated by Parliament when it passed the HRA. It did nothing of the sort. The super-injunction was invented by the courts.

The Master of the Rolls, Judge Neuberger, has asked what all the fuss is about since only 2 have been granted since 2010, one for a short period and the other overturned on appeal.

Can this be so? Or is this a careful selection of dates? ‘Private Eye’ says that it has a list of 53 super-injunctions that have been granted since Judges invented them. The HRA was passed early in Blair’s first administration. The first known super-injunction was in respect of Trafigura relating to massive dumping of toxic wastes in West Africa, when Carter-Ruck (of course) was initially successful, but from memory the cat jumped out of the bag in the House of Commons under Parliamentary privilege. But this was only in 2009, ten years after the passing of HRA.

It must be said that the media had it coming to them. I formed a view in the ‘90s that I have seen no reason to change; that they had become so outrageous and depraved in their pursuit of private sleaze that there was bound to be a strong reaction sooner or later, especially as a prime target was the Establishment. Their disgusting methods, such as phone-tapping and ‘doorstepping’ were bound to create a backlash. Some of the  Red Tops have reached a stage where they contain nothing but sport and the doings of ‘celebs’ (high-class tarts with outrageous boob-jobs), complete with pix that in a former age would have attracted the immediate attentions of the Yard’s ‘Dirty’ Squad.

And so we now have drama reduced to farce with a Scottish newspaper publishing the name of the latest celeb to get a super-injunction because it is outside the jurisdiction of the English courts; and there is no way that the Attorney-General is going to have a dog in this fight . We have Schillers, who seem to have stolen the clothes of Carter-Fuck as scourges of the press, trying to sue Twitter (the Californian judiciary will  have a big laugh at that one). We have the social network tweeting and face-booking to their heart’s content. And all that money spent on lawyers’ fees effectively down the Khazi.