I’m not particularly interested in what the footballer and the model did or did not do, wherever they did or did not do it. And I don’t really understand why so many people apparently are interested in the salacious detail. But the case does serve to underline the difference between matters in which some of the public may be interested, and matters where there is a public interest – they are not the same thing at all.
The judges have been doing what judges have always done in English law – trying to interpret what parliament actually meant when it passed legislation which contains inherent contradictions, such as the right to free speech and the right to privacy. That’s not to say that the judges have got it right, but they are at least recognising that such rights cannot be absolute, but most be constrained when they infringe the rights of others.
There are three aspects of the incident which do concern me though.
The first is that, whilst in theory we all have the same rights, access to the law is differentially distributed – there is one law for most of us, and another for those with enough money to use the power of the law. That cannot be right or fair, but that doesn’t mean that undermining the rights of the well-off is the right way to resolve that inequality.
The second is about parliamentary privilege. There is no doubt that the concept of parliamentary privilege has been a powerful safeguard over the years, and it is with reluctance that I suggest curtailing it. But surely, parliamentary privilege should not be so absolute that MPs and Lords can flout the law with impunity and undermine the rights which parliament has legislated for others to have, as well as undermining the legal processes themselves.
And the third is the concept that the internet has now become so globalised and ubiquitous that any privacy law becomes unenforceable. It appears to be a true statement, but there’s something akin to mob rule at work here which worries me as a precedent.
It’s always been the case – even if the law doesn’t explicitly say as much – that government depends on the consent of the governed. If the governed, or a sufficiently large proportion of them, withdraw that consent, then government becomes impossible. Faced with tyranny or dictatorship, the courage of the governed to say ‘no more’ has often been the factor which leads to change.
But the power of globalised electronic communication is doing something else here – it is allowing a determined if disparate set of individuals to make democratically determined laws unworkable. In pursuit of what greater good, exactly?
It’s a genie that cannot be returned to its bottle, but I wonder where it will end.
Posts
