Jubilate! The Defamation Bill recieved Royal Assent yesterday. It is now the Defamation Act 2013.
Watching the legislative process up close has been fascinating. It fills me with confidence that candidate laws are put to such detailed and rigourous debate.
To give a sense of how a Bill changes as it passes through both Houses of Parliament, I have created a Defamation Bill (Tracked Changes) document. Download a PDF [223 KB] or a Word Document [49 KB]. It is based on the successive Bills and amendments found on the Houses of Parliament website. In the document, you can see how some clauses were tweaked, with the alteration of a word here or there. In other places you can see where whole clauses were added and then removed, as the House of Commons disagreed with the House of Lords. Continue reading
Category: Diary (Page 91 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
There’s a little bit of confusion over what happened during the Defamation Bill debate in the House of Lords yesterday afternoon, and today in the House of Commons. This is understandable, as the ‘ping-pong’ process is confusing, with ‘motions to agree amendments’… and amendments to those amendments.
The only issue at stake was was hurdles should be placed before companies wishing to sue. The pre-exising law allows corporates to bully critics with libel threats and a legal ‘reputation management’ industry has emerged, with websites and bloggers receiving threats unless they remove critical content. Which?, the consumer magazine that reviews products, often receives a legal threat after they give a product a poor rating!
In an earlier parliamentary debate, Labour succeeded in adding a significant clause to the Defamation Bill. It introduced a permissions stage for companies (you can’t sue without leave of the court) and asked them to show financial loss. It also extended the Derbyshire principle, so private bodies delivering public services could not sue when they are criticised by citizens questioning how taxpayers money is spent. Three measures in one clause.
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Do you remember the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony? You know, that show directed by Danny Boyle at the start of the sporting fortnight? You do? Well, in that case, you will be fascinated by this video from Fifty Nine Productions, detailing their role creating the film and video elements of that show. Continue reading
No, not a day where we pick someone to defame. Instead it is the final parliamentary debate on the Defamation Bill.
Following this process has been a great way to watch how law-making really happens. In this case, the Government published a draft Bill for consultation. The proposed law was then debated on the floor of the House of Commons, then by a smaller group of MPs in a Public Bill Committee (days 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), then again in the House of Commons. A similar process took place in the House of Lords, with a more generalised debate preceding detailed scrutiny in a Grand Committee (days 1, 2, 3 and 4), followed by more debates.
Now, the amendments made to the Bill by each House are being debated and accepted by the other. Today, the House of Lords have one final aspect of the Defamation Bill to consider, which is the limits that should be placed on ‘non-natural persons’ (i.e. companies and associations) that wish to sue.
The Government have already agreed that a corporation must show financial loss if they want to claim that they have suffered serious harm, but is still dragging its feet on what access private companies delivering taxpayer-funded services should have to the libel law.
Currently, central government and local councils cannot sue their citizens! This is established by the common-law Derbyshire principle, which protects unhibited criticism of democratically elected institutions and their agencies. However, the trend towards contracting out public services to private companies means that this principle has been undermined. For example, you can criticise a publically run prison, or a local council’s waste collection service… but if you criticise a private prison or a sub-contracted bin collection service, then you run the risk of a libel threat!
With the reforms to the NHS meaning more services will be commissioned from private companies, this loophole will only get bigger. Imagine if your healthcare was managed poorly, and a blog or a tweet about it prompted a lawyers letter!
This afternoon, the House of Lords will be debating this issue and hopefully they will vote to fix it in the Defamation Bill. I will be watching the debate online on the Houses of Parliament website.
https://twitter.com/kamilashamsie/status/323866322901553152
So yesterday, Granta announced their once-a-decade list of the Best British novelists under 40. I’m pleased for English PEN deputy president Kamila Shamsie, who was featured on the list.
But I’m also delighted to the inclusion of Taiye Selasi, whose novel Ghana Must Go has recently been published. Taiye is the author of my favourite piece of prose published in the LIP magazine, a magazine project I worked on from 2003-07.
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