ANYONE who followed closely the case of soccer star Ryan Giggs in the British courts must have come to the wholly justifiable conclusion that "the old country" - the so-called cradle of freedom and justice - is not what it used to be

THE OLD MOTHER COUNTRY IS NEITHER FAIR NOR FREE

By John Marquis

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Nassau, Bahamas



THE Bahamas, like all former British colonies, has a legal and parliamentary system based on English traditions dating back many centuries, with rights earned through a long history of warfare and social upheaval. However, the British people now find themselves in a new fight for basic freedoms, with the courts and parliament clashing over what they have a right to know. JOHN MARQUIS reports...


ANYONE who followed closely the case of soccer star Ryan Giggs in the British courts must have come to the wholly justifiable conclusion that "the old country" - the so-called cradle of freedom and justice - is not what it used to be.

There was a time when Britain, its human rights enshrined in the Magna Carta, signed by King John eight centuries ago, was held up as the ultimate example when it came to matters of free speech and personal liberty.

In fact, it was quite touching during my Bahamas years to hear former colonials laud the mighty precedents set by dear old England, traditionally seen by its admirers as a bastion of unshakeable rectitude and infallible judgment.

All former colonies - even America, the first to reject London's rule - conceded that, whatever its faults, Britain had virtues no other nation could surpass when it came to fair play, transparent justice and everyday human rights.

Not anymore.

Giggs, a supremely gifted player who was nearing the end of his glittering career with a squeaky clean reputation and a professional record second to none, is said to have paid a London law firm £250,000 to keep his alleged sexual indiscretions out of the papers. He was shelling out a thousand dollars an hour to lawyers whose specialty is to shield high-profile clients from the prying of the press.

Not only had he taken out a "super-injunction" to prevent exposure of his dalliance with a so-called "TV reality star", he had threatened to sue the social networking site Twitter through the US courts because his name had been "leaked" by several thousands of its users.

In itself, what Giggs allegedly got up behind his wife's back was of little account to anyone except those who find fascination in such matters. But his actions have highlighted one of many gaping flaws in Britain's current laws, and lent his name for all time to an insidious process of suppression which, fuelled by lawyers' greed, seeks to erode people's rights and silence the media.

So serious were the implications of Giggs' actions that judges began threatening parliament with dire consequences if one of its members dared to use the player's name in the Chamber, declaring in effect that even parliamentary privilege could not be allowed to trump an injunction handed down in the High Court.

For historians, this unseemly bust-up between the legislature and the executive was reminiscent of King Charles the First's actions in 1642, when he high-handedly marched his troops into parliament to threaten the people's representatives.

He took the view that, as a supreme ruler with divine powers, he was not subject to the criticism and scrutiny of the rabble and that his own survival and well-being were above all other considerations.

Seven years later, King Charles - after a bitter and bloody civil war - was to pay with his life on the chopping block outside the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, a significant move by parliament in reinforcing the rights enshrined in the great charter signed at Runnymede in 1215.

You would think that, having been through so much bloodshed and upheaval in establishing basic rights over so many centuries that Britain would be hell-bent on protecting itself from the incursions of ruthless, avaricious and deceitful elements in society.

But since the late 1990s, when the most destructive British government of modern times took office for 13 truly awful years of decline, a country once held up as the democratic ideal has surrendered many of its hard-earned rights not only to the evil influence of political correctness but also to a foreign power in Brussels.

In fact, European human rights law is at the root of Britain's present predicament.

While it sounds fine and dandy in principle, this law has led to the spread of privacy legislation which, as interpreted by the London courts, is a dangerous threat to many of the freedoms that Britain and its former colonies have traditionally held dear.

Whatever its supposed merits, the reality is that it is available only to those with very deep pockets who can afford to splash out the equivalent of $80,000 to petition for a judge's decree silencing not only the press but anyone else rash enough to expose the applicant's identity.

It is, in fact, a court-approved shield for those who profit from being one thing in public and something else entirely in private. It is a deceiver's charter, a means of bamboozling the public into believing something that isn't true.

So far, those who have made use of it, generally sports and showbiz personalities, are people whose indiscretions don't amount to much when it comes to the potential impact on the national interest. But you don't have to look far for examples where its implications could be very serious indeed.

Imagine, for instance, the case of the American politician John Edwards, who promoted himself as a down-home family man deeply concerned with the health of his cancer-stricken wife while running for the Democratic party's presidential nomination some years ago.

Had British-style privacy law been available to him, he would have been able to stifle in advance the National Enquirer's revelations that he was having an affair with a woman photographer during his campaign.

Thus, his own carefully coiffed image as a straight-talking regular guy who cared deeply for his wife would have prevailed over the reality, which was that he was a two-timing deceiver unworthy of the public's support.

In the Bahamas, it would, of course, have had serious implications in the much-publicised friendship between then Immigration Minister Shane Gibson and the American starlet Anna Nicole Smith in 2006 and 2007.

While nothing untoward was ever suggested in this instance, the closeness or otherwise of Mr Gibson's friendship with Ms Smith was extremely pertinent to the granting of her residency permit.

Theoretically, Mr Gibson would have been able to apply for an injunction to prevent The Tribune or any other newspaper from divulging that he was apparently a much closer friend than he claimed to be.

Even more disturbingly, had he got wind of those famous photographs showing him embracing Anna Nicole on her bed at her Nassau home, he would have been able to apply for their suppression through the courts.

There is, in fact, a "public interest" provision built into British privacy law which enables the courts to overrule an injunction application if it is felt that it would not serve the public good.

Hence, the footballer John Terry failed in his attempt to secure an injunction against a newspaper that wished to publish a story about his affair with a colleague's former girlfriend because the judge felt he was merely trying to protect his sponsorship arrangements.

As I write, there is widespread discussion of the impact an alleged illicit affair might have had on a senior banker whose judgments and decisions led to his bank's subsequent meltdown.

As the bank was rescued by a taxpayer-funded bailout, there is no doubt that his state of mind at the time of its financial troubles was of great interest to those whose money was being used to fund the rescue.

However, a London lawyer admitted to me that it was "conceivable" that a judge could rule in favour of a complainant whether media exposure was in the public interest or not.

Given that the term "public interest" is open to wide interpretation, it is easy to imagine circumstances in which a judge might support a fellow establishment figure over the protests of a media outlet.

What's more, history has shown that British judges of the past have not exactly been free of their own peccadilloes, depravities and perversions, and might well have benefited from the availability of privacy laws when up to their out-of-hours shenanigans. The bordello queen Cynthia Payne spoke often of the judges and senior barristers who turned up at her door seeking sado-masochistic lashings from her leather-clad good-time girls.

Having the legal means to keep the hoi-polloi's prying instincts at bay is an attractive fall-back position for those with the money to buy silence through the courts. What emerges is an impression that privacy law encourages an "us and them" situation in which the law can be manipulated by wealthy figures to keep the public in the dark.

Poor Ryan Giggs, whose many years as a Manchester United star have rendered him an extremely rich and revered public figure, would have had no idea when he set out to secure his injunction that the result would have been massive and prolonged exposure of his alleged misdeeds, public ignominy of the worst kind, deep disappointment among his many fans, and total destruction of the pristine image he had spent a lifetime burnishing in soccer stadia around the globe.

Until his cosy world of relentless adulation exploded in his face, the keenest of his supporters had been conducting a website campaign for him to be offered a knighthood in recognition of his undoubted contribution to his sport. It will be interesting to see now how long it takes for the campaign to suffocate under a barrage of ridicule.

While London's myopic legal fraternity were naively believing that one word from a British judge would ensure universal silence for eternity, lesser mortals like the rest of us - not, alas, earning a thousand dollars an hour - were well aware that the Internet has now become the world's great leveller, democratiser and liberator, and that Giggs' campaign of secrecy would be blown apart by the bloggers.

While British "justice" was seeking to uphold a wholly indefensible law, it was always unlikely that the online marauders would be frightened into silence by a man in a wig sitting in a London court. Instead, the more the judges brandished their rubber sabres, the more vocal Internet users became.

One defiant Twitter fan simply ran the name "Ryan Giggs" over and over again while others used unseemly soccer terminology

to describe what may or may not have gone on between him and the alleged object of his affections. Towards the end, more than 75,000 Internet users had exposed Giggs as the man behind the super-injunction.

The more purple-faced with rage Britain's legal establishment became, the more defiant the Twitterati proved to be, declaring - with more than ample justification - that the old country's legal pretensions and pomposity might have counted for something in 1890, but in the age of cyberspace they have less significance than a public pillory or a ducking stool.

The final, farcical development in the Giggs case came when his lawyer appeared on television to declare that he was planning to sue Twitter in the Californian courts.

Anyone acquainted with the fundamentals of American law knows that the first amendment of the constitution is absolutely paramount when it comes to freedom of speech. Under US law, a public figure has no chance of success in defamation actions unless he or she can prove malice, which most seasoned lawyers dismiss as nigh impossible. To imagine that an American court would uphold a British injunction guaranteeing a celebrity's anonymity was just sheer fantasy.

Since then, Giggs' predicament has got worse, with his sister-in-law alleging to the tabloid press that she fell pregnant to the soccer star just a few weeks before she married his brother. At his request, she alleged, she underwent an abortion.

For the long-suffering British public, the Giggs debacle has come as a refreshing reminder that bad law usually comes a cropper somewhere along the line. An added tonic has been the realisation that the star's high-priced lawyers, for all their grandstanding hubris, were powerless and hopeless when pitched against the growing might of the Internet.

So what should the Bahamas glean from the Giggs case? Most importantly, that all the old notions of British justice should be cast aside. The much-reviled New Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, probably the two worst prime ministers in British history, transformed the old motherland into what many consider to be virtually a police state. It is literally true to say that many British people are now scared of discussing certain issues openly for fear of falling foul of what George Orwell would have described as Thought Police, unofficial snoopers who make it their business to report indiscretions on subjects now deemed out of bounds.

"We can't say that nowadays, can we?" is a comment I have heard with frightening frequency since returning to Britain two years ago. In fact, it has occurred to me many times that the Bahamas, despite the fear instilled by the 25-year reign of Sir Lynden Pindling, is a much freer society than Britain in many important respects.

Homosexuality, immigration, ethnicity and gender are now extremely delicate topics considered off-limits for many people in Britain. Anyone making a stand against the gay lifestyle, for instance, leaves themselves open to carefully orchestrated persecution by a virulent lobby of homosexual activists who more often than not get the full backing of the law. Meanwhile, so-called political correctness outlaws meaningful discourse on immigration, which is now posing a major threat to British culture, and thwarts widespread condemnation of muslim extremism, which poses a genuine threat to the nation's security.

Traditional assumptions that Britain is a "free and fair" society are, frankly, laughable.

The brutal truth in the eyes of many Brits is that the nation's political class, whatever its party stripe, is a self-perpetuating cabal of nonentities whose twin objectives are retention of power and continued suppression of the masses.

The Giggs case exemplified its growing belief that political correctness and gagging laws can between them stifle free speech in all those areas where it might prove inconvenient.

Admittedly, Prime Minister David Cameron has been making the right noises of late, highlighting the "unsustainability" of such a law, and a Liberal Democrat backbencher was smart enough to drop Giggs' name in parliament, in spite of m'luds' dyspeptic spluttering.

But the proof of Cameron's apparent good intentions will come when this inexcusable law is repealed.

Until then, the casual observer is left to ponder just how much more of Britain's freedom will be eroded in the coming years.

If there is anything to be learnt from the Bahamas' old colonial master, it is that silence among the good encourages the bad into taking further liberties with our rights. Like Bahamians, the British are reactive rather than proactive when it comes to protecting their own corners.

In fact, the British - noted for their never-say-die courage in the face of foreign enemies - have proved pathetically supine in their attitude to overweening authority at home. Now they are counting the cost.

It is unfortunate that Ryan Giggs, a working class lad with sublime gifts in his field, will now become synonymous with all those who have the money and power to hide their misdeeds behind a camouflage provided by the courts.

Had he held up his hands and confessed, the story would have been no more than a two-day tabloid wonder.

As things stand now, his name is likely to crop up every time the subject of press freedom erupts in the media. He must be thinking his £250,000 in legal fees could have been better spent.

On the bright side, his lawyers' lamentable failure to secure him the anonymity he craved will cast a bright unforgiving light on the unsustainability of a disgraceful law which casts a blight on everything the Magna Carta stood for and besmirches the memory of all those who have died over the centuries to win the freedoms we have come to take for granted.

It seems almost unbelievable that, while British soldiers are being killed every week to protect freedom in foreign lands, the liberty of their own

countrymen back home is being trashed in the London courts.

Until it is scrapped, this law will mock Britain's increasingly forlorn claim to be a free and fair society.

Not only is it elitist, unjust and intimidatory, it is - thanks to the Internet - hopelessly and ridiculously unworkable. The sooner it goes the better.

August 09, 2011

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