It’s not always much fun being an investigative journalist in this country. Friends of mine talk of spending months painstakingly tracking down paperwork, talking to sources and preparing their articles. Then, on receiving a legal letter from an expensive London law firm, they are forced to cut the best parts of their story or, worse still, drop the whole investigation altogether. It’s not that they don’t trust in their reporting – it’s that they literally can’t afford to be sued.
While my friends know that everything they want to publish is substantively true, the UK’s suffocating libel laws require the writer to definitively prove everything they say. This is a high hurdle to achieve. Add to this the glacially slow pace of the British legal system and the huge costs involved (a basic libel case can easily cost more than £1 million in legal fees alone) and you can probably understand why most of them aren’t willing to run the risk. They don’t want to spend the next few years with the threat of bankruptcy hanging over their heads.
What’s even more disgraceful is that, even if they did choose to publish and endure years of anxiety before ultimately winning the case in court, it would be a hollow victory. While the court would make the losing party pay most of their legal costs, they would likely still be left out of pocket. They would also receive no compensation for the time spent or the stress endured. For those trying to expose the truth, Britain’s libel system means that even if you win, you still lose.
It’s worth saying that not all libel cases are about suppressing free speech. Many are brought by people who have genuinely been harmed by lies written about them. There needs to be a system for allowing these people to not only get compensation, but to show the world that what was written about them was untrue. Nonetheless, the cost and time it takes to bring a libel case under the current system often fails these victims as well.
When abused, our libel laws are a key part of what has come to be known by the acronym SLAPP, or strategic lawsuit against public participation. These are a series of legal tools which wealthy people misuse to tie up journalists and activists in legal red tape and rob them of resources. The outcome is to stifle free speech and stop the media from investigating anything they don’t want investigated. It represents, as former cabinet minister David Davis MP warned in 2022, ‘a potentially existential threat to investigative journalism’. It’s not just writers and media organisations which have to be worried. These laws have also been used to threaten and intimidate researchers, scientists, NGOs and universities. There are even reports that some companies have taken libel action against customers who have left negative reviews about them on websites.
The impact of this is not just limited to the UK. Our courts have previously considered cases where the publication being sued was based in another country and which only had limited connections to the UK. The result is that, according to Nik Williams from Index on Censorship, the ‘UK is at the heart of a global movement that enables the public’s right to know to be determined and restricted by the wealthy, powerful and thin-skinned’. The fact that our legal system is being exploited to restrict legitimate free speech in other countries should be a source of national shame.
Fixing our broken libel laws isn’t just about justice and fairness – it’s also a national security issue. Over the last decade, the West has been engaged in a disinformation war with Russia and other hostile states and their agents and proxies. Ensuring that we have a well functioning free press is the best weapon that we have in this war. It should come as no surprise that all of the so-called ‘new axis powers’ (namely Russia, China, North Korea and Iran) all heavily restrict press freedom in their own countries.
One case that illustrates this well is that of the late Russian oligarch and long time Putin loyalist, Yevgeny Prigozhin. In 2021, Prigozhin started libel proceedings against Eliot Higgins, the founder of the Bellingcat investigations website. The basis of this libel action were tweets by Higgins with links to articles by Bellingcat and other publications alleging that Prigozhin was behind the mercenary Wagner organisation.
At the time the libel case was started, Prigozhin was sanctioned in the UK, but the libel action was still allowed to proceed. The case was ultimately thrown out in 2022 and later that year Prigozhin admitted that he was indeed the founder of Wagner. Despite this clear vindication, the experience left Eliot Higgins over £70,000 out of pocket in legal fees with no prospect of ever being refunded. In a social media post about the case, Higgins declared that ‘this legal action was revenge for Bellingcat’s articles on Prigozhin being cited in EU sanctions against him’. In previous decades, dictatorships used paid thugs and assassins to violently silence critics and dissidents abroad. With England’s overzealous libel laws, they can now use our courts instead.
Earlier this year, the Labour backbench MP Wayne David introduced a private members bill which aimed to provide better legal protections for publishers and writers against SLAPPs. This law would have been a big step forward for free speech, and was even supported by the previous Conservative government. Unfortunately, when the general election was called, there was no time for the bill to be passed into law and it was dropped. While Labour supported the bill before the election, as with so many other things, they since seem to have lost interest in dealing with this issue. In a recent House of Commons debate on the subject, the then justice minister Heidi Alexander warned that the Government must ‘not legislate in haste’ and that ‘thoughtful, forensic consideration about how to move forward’ was needed.
The Labour Government should seek to introduce new laws as soon as possible, as well as other measures to protect those looking to expose wrongdoing in this country and abroad. Keir Starmer personally knows how important free speech is – early in his career, he worked pro-bono to defend several activists in a libel trial brought by a large corporation. Now he has the power to act, he should make the real changes needed to not only protect free speech, but to also protect this country.
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