The difference between the free speech rules in the UK and the US have been thrown into sharp contrast recently when Californian courts found calling someone a paedo was acceptable if you are the boss of Amazon but that in UK common law it is defamatory for a blogger to describe someone as "nasty", a "bully" or a "vicious bully"! Given the sort of stuff that shows up on Twitter every minute of the day the English/Welsh Courts at least look set to be very busy with claims - especially where trade unions and others with the powder and shot wish to close down bloggers and others who comment on their activities.
In James -v- Saunders the GMB trade union is funding the Claimant who is one of their representatives against a local blog, "In The Public Domain", more popularly known as "The Sandwell Skidder". The blog exists solely to comment on the doings of Sandwell Council and is, therefore, a niche publication read my those with interest in local affairs. The Claimant is also an employee of the Council via a facility time arrangment.
The blog is hard-hitting and has taken many scalps. It is forthright and sometimes scatalogical but has been running for six years without other legal challenge. You can find it at:
http://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com/
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The Skidder is considering forming "SLAB" - the Society of Local Authority Bloggers - to discuss matters of common purpose and to try and seek some protection in numbers going forward. If you are blogger writing on local government issues and are interested please email Jules (Julian Saunders) at thesandwellskidder@gmail.com
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In 2015 the Claimant wrote to an unknown person in the Council saying, "yes, he [ie the blogger] needs stopping and we [ie the GMB] are going to do it." Now the GMB are now spending in excess of £100,000 costs and seeking damages of £50,000 to this end and say they will seek an order for sale of the blogger's matrimonial home of 35 years if he doesn't pay up.
The case continues but in a recent reported hearing the High Court in London considered descriptions of the Claimant as being a "bully", "vicious bully" and "nasty" (a phrase used very frequently by Donald Trump no less!) These were contained in various blogposts (although the Claimant did not bring actions in respect of earlier posts) and in a single tweet.
The Defendant alleged that in 2014 the Claimant did, in fact, viciously bully him so that the epithets were true. He recorded details of the actual incidents in a blog post. When using the various terms he sometimes included a hyperlink to that original post. In other cases he did not.
Justice Steyn made a recent preliminary ruling in the High Court that the words are, indeed, defamatory. The Learned Judge seems to have found that (a) perhaps surprisingly, not everyone would have assumed that the description of the alleged 2014 incident and sequealae was actually evidence of vicious bullying etc; (b) therefore anyone who did use the hyperlink (where used) may have still been none-the-wiser as to the meaning of the original post; (c) people may not have used the hyperlink (where used) in any event and so would have been left with an understanding of what was being said just from the natural and ordinary meaning of the words the blogger used and (d) the hyperlink was omitted on two occasions so that, once again, the reader would be left with just an interpretation of the meaning of the ordinary words used. This, Steyn J said, led the reader away from considerations of the Claimant's alleged behaviour in 2014 so that the imputation was that the Claimant was/is habitually engaged in bullying and nasty conduct and that such an allegation IS defamatory at common law.
The moral of this story (so far) for local authority bloggers and journo's is that precision is everything. If you intend to describe a person as, for example, a bully you need to be absolutely specific as to the (true) reasons why. If you repeat the allegation you must be extremely careful to particularise the exact reasons why you are making the allegation on each and every occasion. The repetition may not look great stylistically but is absolutely essential.
The case continues......
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