There are advantages to having a Lower House of 650 or so members. The greater number means greater diversity and the more change of far-left and far-right odd-balls to turn up to cause great distraction and amusement.
One of these is George Galloway, the Labour Member for Glasgow Kelvin, or the Member for Bagdad Central as his detractors call him.
Galloway caused distraction and amusement this week after The Daily Telegraph revealed that its reporter in Bagdad had turned up what the reporter alleged were documents showing that Galloway had siphoned off about $900,000 a year from the UN-run Iraq oil for food program and the Iraqis had allowed this in order to buy influence. The Iraqis were obviously unaware that the influence of one maverick MP was perhaps not worth the money.
Galloway denies it and has issued a writ for libel against The Daily Telegraph. He says the documents are forgeries and it is all a plot by a pro-Zionist right-wing newspaper to discredit the left and the anti-war movement.
Galloway has visited Iraq half a dozen times in the past few years. He set up the Mariam Appeal aimed at helping Iraqi children with cancer said to have been caused by depleted uranium shells used in the first Gulf War. The financial affairs of the fund are secret. Galloway denies he took any personal profit from the fund or Saddam’s regime, but he has been photographed with Saddam and there is video footage of him saying to Saddam: “I salute your courage strength and indefatigability.”
The distraction will last a few days, but the libel action, with any luck, might have some lasting effect and illustrate how outdated the libel law is in the information age.
Galloway has already settled or won 20 libel actions totalling $500,000 – mostly stemming from his way-out far-left views and extravagant lifestyle. He rejects the label armchair socialist and calls himself a Bollinger Bolshevik.
Many in Labour have long wanted him disendorsed and the latest revelations might help them. However, the libel threat might change that.
Bizarrely, one member of the National Executive Council of the Labour Party, Mark Seddon, was quoted as saying that the libel writ would make any action by the NEC to discipline Galloway sub judice, so it could not go ahead. Other commentators – including an editorial in the Independent — have concurred, and said further that the courts were the best way to test the allegations against Galloway, and that until they were tested he was entitled to the presumption of innocence.
These are very out-dated views in this information age. Still, they are fairly widely held, including by many in the legal fraternity in Australia.
A libel action, these days, should be no reason for everyone to stop comment on the issue or to put aside further investigation or action against the person against whom the allegations have been made.
The Labour Party has every right to take disciplinary action against any of its MPs irrespective of any libel action. Similarly, a doctors’ or lawyers’ professional body should be able to take action against one of its own irrespective of any libel action. Were this not so, anyone could delay action being taken against them by the simple expedient of issuing a libel writ.
This sub-judice nonsense was partly scuttled by the thalidomide case when The Sunday Times stopped injunctions against their publication of allegations against the drug company that made the deformity-causing drug. But The Sunday Times had to go to the European human-rights court to get a House of Lords ruling against it overturned. Britain, as a signatory to European human-rights conventions, has enacted law that allows European human-rights rulings to be enforced domestically.
The House of Lords has now changed its tune. It recently cited the European Convention on Human Rights with approval in knocking out a lot of anti-publisher technical rulings on whether material can be protected as fair comment.
The Galloway case, if it gets to court, could be one to stretch the case of free speech further.
Normal libel law requires you to prove the truth of everything you publish and assumes the plaintiff is of spotless character – a reverse onus of proof.
By what was the Daily Telegraph reporter supposed to do upon being led to the documents in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry citing a request from Galloway for even more money? Ignore them? If what the reporter and his editor say is true, they have behaved responsibly. They put the allegations to Galloway. But Galloway did not respond to them.
Even in criminal law, a blank silence can be used to draw inferences. Not in libel law. The heavy onus stays with the publisher to prove the truth of the imputations in the matter published or that they were a fair an accurate report of parliamentary, court or other proceedings.
Two modern developments suggest a change is needed. In an information age, there are mountains of information around: computers, faxes and other devices churn it out. And then we have spin. After some allegation is made; some policy promoted; or stand taken, the political spin doctors (who these days far out-number journalists and are better paid) go to work to show that black is white or at least grey. They are so successful that the average media consumer has no idea who or what to believe.
In this environment, the sting of allegations is less serious than in the past when a whiff of scandal meant indefinite ostracisation. In this environment, the test of truth should be replaced by a test of reasonableness of conduct by the publisher – stressing the requirement to put allegations to those concerned and to give them a proper opportunity to reply. The failure to take up that opportunity should then speak volumes.
Further, in existing libel actions the plaintiff gets to set the ground rules. The plaintiff pleads the defamatory imputations which the publisher must either say do not arise or prove are true. Cases, often take years to resolve and often come down to technicalities of pleading that have little to do with the broader public questions.
With this artificially, it is silly to wait for a court case to be resolved before anything further happens.
In the Galloway case, key questions will not get answered, such as the details of the expenditure of the Mariam Appeal and how Galloway’s trips to Iraq got funded.
The days of the libel stop writ – which Galloway and others have exercised so profitably — should be over. In their place should be requirements for fairness and reasonableness by publishers.