BY PAUL T HORGAN
Twitter has once again shown its contempt for libel law, just as it showed that the social media site could ignore superinjunctions and name Ryan Giggs as an adulterer. Users of the site knew the name hours after The Sun broke the story on the basis that the BBC Presenter had been absent from an advertised appearance on a prime-time show with no explanation provided by the show itself, while the BBC had also stated that the Presenter had been taken off appearances. I will not be naming the BBC presenter as his identity, while now known, is not the subject of this article.
The naming of the BBC Presenter in a statement from his wife took place on the afternoon before he was likely to be named in the House of Commons using Parliamentary privilege. The issue that MPs would have used to name him would probably have been concerns that a privacy law was being evolved in the courts by unelected judges, and thus without any involvement by our elected representatives on a issue concerning freedom of expression. The irony is that human rights law was being applied to curtail freedom of expression.
Privacy laws are not necessarily a bad thing, but in Europe it did permit Socialist politician Francois Mitterrand to conceal from French voters while he was running for President that he had a secret second family. This was not revealed until Mitterrand had died. Voters also had to wait to discover that Edith Cresson, France’s first woman Prime Minister who was given the job by the late President, was at one time one of Mitterrand’s mistresses. Mitterrand’s secret family eventually lived at taxpayer expense in an annex of his official residence, the Elysee Palace. French taxpayers would reasonably have had a right to know on what their money was being spent, and this could hardly be classified as a state secret or even the French just being the French.
So a balance has to be struck between protecting the vulnerable, and the concealment of legal wrongdoing, or indeed criminality. It was newspapers’ fear of Britain’s libel laws that permitted Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Jimmy Savile to put their vile private desires into practice at numerous state-run institutions with the tacit cooperation of state employees.
The Sun newspaper, which broke the story about the BBC Presenter, has had long experience of UK libel laws. The most striking example of this is when the paper was successfully sued twice by Elton John over allegations about his private life. Elton John has also won damages from fellow News International paper The Times. This probably explains the risk-averse manner in which the story was broken.
However The Sun has been on the receiving end of hostility for its conduct, and this is following the time-honoured left-wing formula of Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender, or DARVO for short. There is the denial. Nothing illegal was done. The teenager who provided pictures to the BBC Presenter did so when they were above the legal minimum age for disseminating pictures containing the alleged content, which allegedly included nudity. The attack involves accusations that The Sun is backtracking on its original allegations. But the most interesting aspect of the darvoing has to be the attempts to reverse victim and offender.
It is now a criminal offence to make and disseminate nude sexualised images of a person under the age of 18. But this was not always the case. In the 1980s the age limit was 16, the age of sexual consent, but two years before the legal age of majority, and The Sun were at the time legally entitled to have a topless photograph of 16-year-old Samantha Fox as their Page 3 Girl.
At the time, one of the selling points of numerous tabloid newspapers was publishing one or more photographs of women in various stages of undress exposing their breasts. This was actually a direct consequence of the permissiveness championed by Harold Wilson’s Labour government of 1964-1970, which saw numerous standards, values, and laws swept away as censorship regarding sexual content was relaxed due to changing attitudes of the urban middle classes following the collapse of deference in the early 1960s.
A prime example of this cultural revolution preceded Wilson in the outcome of the trial of Penguin Books over its publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book that had been banned in the UK since it was first published in the 1920s. So all The Sun was doing was taking advantage of an issue that had been championed by left-wing progressivists who had attached themselves to prevailing public sentiment. Few people today know that the Daily Mirror followed suit with its own photographs of topless women and girls, only abandoning the practice around the time Robert Maxwell bought the paper.
However these progressivists also hated The Sun. The newspaper had originally been called the Daily Herald and had been founded by the Labour movement, as well as being financed along the way by Bolsheviks, but by the 1960s found itself owned by the same company that owned the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror. Faltering sales led the Daily Herald to being sold off to Rupert Murdoch, who rebranded the paper as The Sun and took the paper downmarket using titillating images and sensationalism, as well as sports coverage to build up a predominantly male working-class readership.
Despite its target market, The Sun supported the Conservatives, defied the gangsterish print unions by firing them en masse, triggering an industrial dispute that the unions lost, and also slandered Liverpool fans in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster all of which attracted the ire of the left. In the 1980s The Sun was the most popular newspaper in the UK and it was widely believed that its stance could decide the outcome of elections, earning the snobbish disdain directed towards it that now goes to the Daily Mail. To this day, Labour always blames the Murdoch press every time it fails to gain office. It is not an understatement to say that The Sun is hated by the British left.
The progressive movement whose advocacy gave birth to The Sun did not want to stop at its creation of the permissive society as it stood by the end of the 1960s. While homosexual acts were decriminalised, paedophile acts weren’t, and this was the next target for some progressives, and these gained traction in the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, now called Liberty). Some of the people who worked for the NCCL at the time the organisation was defending paedophiles went on to become Labour MPs in safe seats and to have major influence in British politics from the late 1990s to this day.
When a person thinks of pornography these days, they usually associate it with the hard-core variety involving sex acts of varying intensity that is available on the internet with the touch of a few icons and links. But there is also the soft-core version which just involves nudity and sexual display of a single individual, as epitomised in the 1970s by magazines such as Playboy, Mayfair, and Men Only to name but three publications that graced the top shelves of newsagents up and down the land. These were also seen as acceptable to be sold to the public by W H Smith, although the practice was stopped in the late 1990s, just about the time that Internet porn was beginning to take off and compete with the printed version.
In the late 1970s there was a moral panic in the UK about the distribution of child pornography. The government of the day published the Protection of Children Bill in response to explicitly criminalise such content, especially indecent pictures. In response to the bill, before it became law, the NCCL suggested the following:
“The Bill is based on the word “indecent”. But case law defines “indecent” as highly elastic […] We therefore suggest that the term “indecent” be qualified as follows:- “A photograph or film shall not for this purpose be considered indecent (a) by reason only that the model is in a state of undress (whether complete or partial); (b) unless it is proved or it is inferred from the photograph or film that the making of the photograph or film might reasonably be expected to have caused the model physical harm or pronounced psychological or emotional disorder.” [this author’s emphasis]
Consider the import of these words. While in the 1970s, the heyday of the Page 3 Girl, it remained a criminal offence to display sexually suggestive nude images of a person below the age of 16, the NCCL wanted there to be no lower limit if the child did not appear to be suffering. The NCCL appeared to be looking to legalise soft porn featuring Playboy-style poses of children below the legal age of sexual consent so long as the children were smiling while being photographed. At the time, the NCCL was also working with an organisation, the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), that sought to relax laws on child sexual consent. Of course, it may be that the NCCL may have just wanted to decriminalise non-sexual images, but then the definition of what counts as “sexual imagery” may have become the next term to be described as “highly elastic” by the NCCL had it succeeded with redefining “indecent”. It didn’t and the Protection of Children Act was made law without much, if any, reference to the NCCL’s or PIE’s deepest desires.
What the BBC Presenter did does not seem to be unlawful, and neither did Fred Goodwin, the disgraced CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland whose driving his bank into the ground did not prevent him by law from receiving a substantial pension from what had become a state-owned bank by 2009. This did not stop Labour’s then-Deputy Leader Harriet Harman, from stating that while Goodwin receiving his pension was legal, it was “not enforceable in the court of public opinion, and that is where the government steps in.”
The BBC Presenter seems at present to have been found wanting in this chimeric court. Progressives wish their perennial enemy The Sun to also be in the same dock for something that was legal many decades ago. Given that the leading lights of the progressive movement once wanted to go even further than The Sun, perhaps one or more of these leading lights should also be held to proper account by Harman’s favourite court.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.