I may not entirely agree with the centre Left commentator Nick Cohen although his book ‘What’s Left?’ was instrumental in me finally cutting my ties with the Left, but a recent article he wrote for The Critic magazine sent shivers up my spine.
In this article, which is very carefully written to avoid any legal problems, he talks about a book that he can’t legally review for fear of legal action from anyone named in the book which is about Russian President Vladimir Putin and those who surround him. What’s disgraceful about this article, entitled ‘The Long Arm of the Chekists’, is that the legal threat comes not from courts in Russia, but from the English courts and their very liberal, in the sense of being seemingly pro-accuser, way that they interpret libel laws. Libel shopping has become a known problem with wealthy individuals choosing to fight cases in the UK against publishers and writers on the grounds that fighting the case in the UK carries a greater chance of the alleged libel being seen as such and of punitive damages and costs being awarded.
Nick Cohen said:
You must understand that I am not giving this book a good review, or a lukewarm review or any kind of review. I am reviewing a book that cannot be reviewed. Libel lawyers tell me that, if I recommend that you read it, I could open this magazine and myself to court action. Not in Russia where the judiciary has been the loyal servant of the Kremlin since the early 2000s, but here in England, a land we once assumed possessed a modicum of freedom.
I have been over each word in this piece and worried about how a barrister enjoying the refresher fees of a Russian billionaire might interpret it. Honestly, it takes far longer not to review a book than to review it. The struggle to purge the text of anything that might be construed as critical of the litigious takes days.
Putin’s People is more than an account of the decline of Russia into sinister decadence. It has become an apt metaphor for the state of freedom of speech in modern Britain. The UK opened to oligarchical wealth from Russia and all over the world in the 1990s. The result is we cannot write in our own country about a book on oligarchical wealth without risking legal action in what we naively assumed were our own courts. The UK would have done better to have kept the freedom and lost the estate agent commissions on Mayfair property sales and boosts to partners’ profits in London law firms.
This is an article well worth reading and tells us a lot about the sad state of freedom of speech in Britain. Maybe if Britain had the equivalent of the US First Amendment and less draconian libel laws then the situation that Mr Cohen describes would not be happening?
