The Financial Times leader today cuts right to the heart of the debate about privacy sparked by Sir Fred Goodwin seemingly bizarre injunction, which it is alleged prohibits the press from identifying the former RBS chief as a “banker”:
Super-injunctions, which forbid journalists from reporting that they have been granted, as well as preventing disclosure of the information that is their subject, have become increasingly popular. They are a menace to democracy and should be scrapped.
It is clear that there is a balance to be struck between the right of an individual to a private life, and people’s right to be appraised of matters that are of public interest. But of late, driven by a series of rulings based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the pendulum has swung too far in favour of greater privacy.
Sections of the press have done themselves no favours by intrusive reporting of private matters whose disclosure is not in the public interest. That is regrettable. But it does not alter the fact that the public has a right to be able to make informed choices about those whose actions make an impact on their lives. Information is the life-blood of democracy. Too often, super-injunctions are a tool used to thwart this, protecting the rich and powerful by enabling them to gag the press
The piece goes on to suggest the need for a properly drafted privacy law. Of course, the fear could be that a statute privacy law could be even harsher on the press than the current situation is.
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Why ‘seemingly bizarre’?
The injunction is (presumably) not in place simply to prevent mention of the fact of the guy’s erstwhile profession, but rather to prevent the association between (i) some private details and (ii) him as the protagonist. It seems obvious that this is a ‘DFT’ order intended to prevent jigsaw identification. You deride a ‘Banker!’, I think Fred the Shred. If there was any significant public interest in the story then the injunction would almost certainly not have been granted.
Of course, its very easy for the gutter press and others to focus on the seemingly anodyne ‘banker’ detail, and thereby to suggest that this must be ‘another’ instance of ‘divorced from reality’ judges getting in the way of the valiant fourth estate. In fact, what we’ve been hearing today is the venal grunt of tabloid hacks bumped out the life-mangling trough by judges standing up for privacy.
And by the way, of course this law is used more by the rich than by the poor. The former tend to be the focus of tabloid excess. Pity the less-than-well-off when they suffer the gall-dipped pen. But only a twisted logician could spin or buy that – step forward John Hemming MP – as a justification for permitting routine havoc to be wrought on the lives of private individuals just to flesh out the bottom line of a Desmond or the like.
If one actually reads the judgments handed down in these cases, its clear that the image painted of ‘heads-in the clouds’ lawyers and of democracy stalled is vanishingly far from the truth. The FT leader calls for ‘a balance to be struck’. The fact is that this is exactly what is being done – and done well – in the courts.
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