You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (22 page)

His plan would have been hopeless, were there not one jurisdiction he could turn to. A legal system that strained its sinews and besmirched its country’s good name to help rich men who thought they could get away with
anything
.

Writing in Stilted English

Nothing destroys clichés about the gentle temperament of the British so thoroughly as reading what the British read. In political journalism, the British pick their side and line up their targets. Right-wingers inflame prejudices against gypsies, immigrants and all public-sector workers except the police and the armed forces. Left-wingers inflame prejudices against social conservatives, Jews, and all members of the upper and upper-middle classes except the public-sector great and good. Both suspect the white poor. The right regard them as scroungers, who steal the money of the middle classes, either by breaking into their homes or by taking their taxes in benefit cheques. The left regard them as sexist and racist homophobes.

The chavs or the toffs, the niggers or the yids – the thuggish British journalist never forgets that hate sells better than sex.

Away from politics, the popular press keeps millions happy with gossip, soft-core pornography, health scares and sport. Its journalists work with the sneer of the sadist on their lips. The
Daily Mail
, whose online paper is one of the most visited news sites in the world, specialises in running cruel examinations of women in the public eye. They can never do anything right. They are too fat or too thin, too old or too young, too pretty or too plain, too fertile or too barren, too promiscuous or too frigid. To find stories on celebrities or anyone else in the news, national papers hacked the phones of their targets. The main player in the criminal enterprise was Rupert Murdoch’s News International, whose quasi-monopoly control of the privately owned media ensured that elected British leaders debased themselves and their country by bending the knee to the tycoon. Initially, the police backed away from mounting a full investigation into the hacking scandal that might have brought the perpetrators to justice. Some officers were frightened that Murdoch’s papers would turn on them, and the suborned politicians would not defend the rule of law. Others were taking bribes from reporters in return for information. Yet more were dining with newspaper executives and looking forward to casual work with the Murdoch press after their retirement. The media company and the police got away with blaming the scandal on a ‘rogue’ royal correspondent of the
News of the World
and a private detective he hired. The police were forced to reopen the case by questions from Labour MPs, and dogged reporting of a story everyone else thought was dead by the
Guardian
– which I should say in the interests of transparency is the sister paper of my employers at the
Observer
. The truth began to trickle out that men in Murdoch’s pay (and the employees of other newspapers) had hacked thousands of phones. No trick was too contemptible for them to pull. They hacked into the phones of the families of dead soldiers, the parents of murdered school-girls and of the victims of the 7/7 Islamist atrocity. When the
Guardian
revealed that they had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a teenage girl who had been abducted and murdered, and deleted voicemail messages that might have helped the police to identify her killer, the public outcry was such that Murdoch was forced to close the
News of the World
to save his wider business interests – which include the publishers of this book, I should add in the interests of further transparency.

The sincerity of the public’s outrage was open to doubt. The
News of the World
had been Britain’s most popular newspaper because it gave its audience what it wanted. When typical British readers tossed it aside to snuggle up with a good book, they did not bury their noses in works of moral improvement. Often they reached for one of the many detective novels that competed to give the nastiest accounts imaginable of the abuse of women. After reading fantasies of men imprisoning, binding, gagging, stringing up, raping, slicing, burning, blinding, beating, eating, starving, suffocating, stabbing, boiling and burying women alive, one critic on a London literary magazine gave up. She refused to review any more crime novels, because ‘each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit’. Popular non-fiction was little different. In the first decade of the 2000s, ‘misery memoirs’ were the surprise bestsellers of the book trade. The purportedly true stories of abuse ‘survivors’ spared the reader nothing in their accounts of bestial violence against children.

Compare today’s prurience with the gentility of the past. In the shock they caused and the voyeuristic interest they provoked, the British equivalent of the Manson murders of 1969 was the ‘Moors murders’ of 1963–65. On 7 May 1966, the morning after the jury convicted Myra Hindley and Ian Brady of murdering five children and burying their bodies in the hills outside Manchester, readers had to stare hard at the front page of
The Times
to find the news. The lead story was a less than gripping piece about the then Home Secretary visiting the US to discover what lessons, if any, he could learn about law enforcement. The second lead was an account of HM Government’s difficulties with the white settler revolt in Rhodesia. Squeezed between them, and filling about half of one column of a seven-column broadsheet, was a curt summation of the case.
The Times
gave no details of the sadism involved. So disdainful was its editor of sensational journalism that he gave equal prominence to a speculative story on whether a ban by the Irish government on the movement of horses might hit the English racing season.

The popular press was more forthcoming, as you might expect. In the frantic search for a scoop, editors hired helicopters to follow the police investigation, and bought the stories of witnesses. But the reporting was restrained, almost refined, and written in better prose than journalists on most serious papers can manage today. The police had found a suitcase Hindley and Brady had hidden in a left-luggage locker, with pornographic pictures of Lesley Ann Downey, one of their victims, and a tape of the child pleading for her life. No one who heard it in court ever forgot the experience. The
News of the World
of the 1960s did not dwell on the horror. It confined itself to saying, ‘There were sixteen minutes of tape with a child – her mother has said it was Lesley Ann’s voice – screaming and whimpering and crying, “Please God, help me … please, please.” And there was a woman’s voice – Myra Hindley’s say police who have heard her at interviews – saying “Shut up or I will forget myself and hit you one.” Throughout these sixteen minutes there was not another sound in the court, not a cough, not a whisper.’

Beyond that description, there was no attempt to intrude on the girl’s last moments. It never occurred to the paper to run the contents of the tape in full.

Reading the old clippings, I felt an ache for the lost age of popular literacy, when the
News of the World
could fit almost as many words onto a page as
The Times
, and expect its working-class audience to appreciate fine writing. Everyone at some point must feel an equal regret for the loss of British reticence and the coarsening of public life. The foul-mouthed celebrities on the television, the Peeping Toms of the tabloid press, the mob-raising screamers of talk radio and Twitter, and the emotionally incontinent blabbermouths who reveal their ‘secrets’ when they have nothing worth hiding, are representatives of the collapse of the values of the old Britain, which
The Times
and the
News of the World
once held to in their different ways.

The compensation for the decline in civility is the decline of deference. Investigative journalism did not exist in the 1960s. The colleagues of my first editor regarded him as a brave pioneer because he had revealed how detectives had beaten a confession out of a suspect. Local newspapers had never given the police such a hard time before. The rich of the day could operate without scrutiny. Business journalism consisted of bland reports on companies’ results, rather than investigations into whether those results were genuine, while celebrities could present entirely false pictures of themselves to their fans.

Britons’ automatic deference to monarchy, Parliament, Church and peerage has gone, and good riddance to it. We are meant to have become a more raucous and bawdy society, but a more honest society as well. So we are, in all respects except the one that matters most.

At their best, journalists expose the crimes of the powerful, and there were plenty of powerful people worthy of examination in the Britain of the early 2000s. London was awash with money, as it competed with Manhattan to be the hub of global finance. The despots challenged in the Arab Spring channelled their stolen wealth through the City. Oligarchs from around the world flocked to Britain because it offered them the rule of law, protection from assassins, luxury stores, art galleries, Georgian town houses, country estates and public schools that could train their sons in the gentlemanly style. If journalists tried to do what they should do and investigate them, Britain also gave them a further privilege: the power to enforce a censorship that the naïve supposed had vanished with the repressions of the old establishment. Among the many attractions London offered the oligarchs was a legal profession that served them as attentively as the shop girls in the Harrods food hall.

With an aristocratic prejudice against freedom of speech, the judges imposed costs and sanctions on investigative journalism which would have been hard to endure in the best of times, but were unbearable after the Internet had undermined the media’s business models. Instead of aiming its guns at the worst of British writing, the law of libel aimed at the bravest.

The system the judges upheld had its roots in feudalism. Edward I, one of England’s most barbarous kings, introduced the crime of
scandalum magnatum
while he colonised Wales, hammered the Scots and expelled the Jews. ‘Henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish any false News or Tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord or slander may grow between the King and his People, or the Great Men of the Realm,’ Edward declared in the Statute of Westminster of 1275. Although the statute fell into disuse, and was overtaken by the libel law Star Chamber used in the 1630s, an element of the feudal concern to defend the mighty remains in English libel law and the laws of many former British colonies.

Contrary to natural justice and the Common Law, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Once a claimant has shown that the words in question are likely to provoke hatred, ridicule or contempt, the alleged libeller has to prove that what he or she has written is true, or a fair comment based on true information. English libel law, and the laws of Scotland, Ireland and all the former British colonies that take it as its guide, works on the assumption that a gentleman’s word is his bond, and that anyone who impugns his honour must prove his case.

A second archaic quirk makes wealthy litigants appreciate English law all the more. The judiciary treat a gentleman’s reputation as if it were his personal property, the defilement of which is a wrong in itself. Libel and trespass on land are the only torts the law says are actionable
per se
. A claimant does not have to prove that a writer has caused him to suffer financial loss or personal injury, any more than a landlord has to prove that a trespasser has damaged his land. The claimant can still sue even if no one has formed a bad opinion of him or read and remembered the offending words.

‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,’ said John Stuart Mill. The English law does not believe him. A litigant does not need to prove that he has been harmed. It is sufficient that the author has published the offending words in question, and that they
may
make a person or persons unknown think less of him.

The judges invoke a quasi-feudal precedent to justify compensating claimants. The Duke of Brunswick’s Rule of 1849 states that every republication of an offending statement is actionable. It says much about how the dead hand of the past weighs on my country that I need to explain that twenty-first-century law takes its lead from the case of a corpulent and despised German princeling, whom the good people of Brunswick had had the sense to throw out in the revolutions of 1830. In 1849, while living in exile in Paris, the duke sent his servant to the offices of the
Weekly Dispatch
in London to get an old copy of the paper, which contained an unflattering article about him. The six-year time limit on bringing a libel action had long passed. The offending issue was gathering dust in an archive. But the helpful judiciary obliged His Grace by deciding that because his manservant had been able to purchase a back copy of a seventeen-year-old newspaper, the publishers had repeated the original libel, even though the duke himself had instigated the repetition of that libel by sending his manservant to buy the back copy in the first place. No precedent could be more dangerous in the age of the Internet, when readers can access blog posts, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and online newspaper articles afresh with every new day. Because of a case from the 1840s, any one of the millions of people who have published on the Web could be sued for something they wrote years before.

To many onlookers, the law’s biases seem reasonable. If writers produce a character assassination, what is wrong with the law requiring them to justify their words? As for putting a price on the value of a good reputation, who can measure the damage caused by smears and innuendos?