As has long been expected the pro-Britain activist Tommy Robinson is heading back to prison as a result of his activism. It’s important to note that Mr Robinson is not going to gaol for any criminal offence but the civil matter of Contempt of Court. That Contempt came about when Mr Robinson repeated claims that he was forbidden to make following a libel case following Mr Robinson’s reporting of an incident in a British school where a Moslem pupil and a non-Moslem one had a violent conflict. Following Mr Robinson’s reporting of the incident, lawyers acting for the Moslem school pupil took Mr Robinson to court and the court found that Mr Robinson had committed libel against the Moslem boy and in addition to damages the court told Mr Robinson to not repeat the libel. By repeating the libel, which he did at a later date, Mr Robinson committed a civil offence under the Contempt of Court Acts and was therefore liable to imprisonment.

Although I’ve argued in the past for a relaxation of some of Britain’s Contempt of Court laws with regards pre-trial reporting of criminal cases in the interests of transparent justice and the curbing of possibly untrue rumour prior to trials, I can see that there is a need for a procedure to allow the courts to enforce their rulings. If courts were not able to enforce their rulings then they would be ignored and that applies no matter what is the particular case in question.

However there is one key point I’d like to address. The first is that Britain’s libel laws are ferocious things, they are so strict that the London courts have become a magnet for the rich and powerful who use the strictures of English libel law to bring cases against their opponents, former employees and associates and to keep unfortunate and embarrassing truths about them out of the public eye. English libel law has a very low bar when compared to libel laws in for example the United States, it’s much easier in the UK than in the US to claim in court that you have been libelled but the financial bar to bringing such a case in the UK is higher than the vast majority of people can get over. Suing for libel in the UK is a game for the rich man or those, such as the Syrian Moslem boy at the centre of this case, who are of modest means but who are backed by activist lawyers and special interest groups.

Mr Robinson has insisted that he truly believes that the information he was given was true but the courts decided that these claims about the Syrian boy at the centre of this case were libellous which meant that not only was Mr Robinson on the hook for both the legal costs of his own case but also that of the claimant as well as being forbidden to republish what the courts had decided was libel.

Those of whom are older may well recall another case that centred around a person’s solid belief that the information that they had published was true but nevertheless the courts decided was libel. The case in question was a devastating libel ruling that occurred in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and which had the effect of bankrupting the person who committed or supported the alleged libel. That case was the one between Lord Aldington, a former Tory MP and later hereditary Peer and Count Nickolai Tolstoy and Nigel Watts. Lord Aldington sued Count Tolstoy and Mr Watts over claims they’d made in a pamphlet that Lord Aldington was a war criminal due to his actions during the Second World War, Count Tolstoy and Mr Watts had claimed that Lord Aldington, during WWII a senior Army officer, had sent anti Communist Cossacks back to Stalin’s Soviet Union after hostilities had ended. The fate of these anti Communist Cossacks was grim and many died on Stalin’s orders. However this knowledge of the horrors that these Cossacks faced is tempered by the fact that these Cossacks had initially sided with the Nazis as a way of fighting back at Communism and Count Tolstoy’s attempt in writing and in court to play down the Cossacks fealty with the Nazis went a considerable way to undermining the defence case.

Count Tolstoy and Mr Watts lost the libel case brought by Lord Aldington and ended up with a bill for £2 million with £1.5 million as libel damages to be paid to Lord Aldington and £500k in legal costs. This bankrupted Count Tolstoy and Mr Watts but Count Tolstoy held off paying any damages by taking the case through other courts including the European Court of Human Rights that judged that the size of the libel damages impinged on freedom of speech. As far as I can make out Count Tolstoy didn’t pay anything to Lord Aldington until after the Peer’s death in 2000 when he made a £52k payment to the estate of the now late lord Aldington. In an interesting parallel with the Tommy Robinson contempt of court case Nigel Watts the co-defendant in the Lord Aldington libel case was later gaoled for 18 months, the same period as Mr Robinson was recently imprisoned for, when he allegedly repeated the libel about Lord Aldington.

Those who are claiming that the sentence dished out to Mr Robinson is unprecedented are wrong. Nigel Watts got the same sentence for repeating a libel against the orders of a court. We can argue that it is unfair or unjust and that Mr Robinson has been particularly targeted by the Establishment for his views, which I believe that he has been, but sometimes, as the old Billy Bragg tune ‘Rotting on Remand’ said, courts are not ‘courts of justice but a court of law’ and English libel laws are ferocious.

Maybe the key takeaway from this case is that there is a need for the reform of libel laws and greater protections for freedom of speech, even I must say the speech of those with whom I disagree and that the only restrictions on freedom of speech should be gross libel, such as claiming person Z is a paedophile when they clearly are not or credible and immediate incitement to violence, in other words the situation as exists in the United States. Libel laws of the type that we have in the UK and the threat of and fear of having a libel case brought against do in my view place an impediment on freedom of speech as the standard of proof and the large amount of evidence that is required for a person to defend themselves against libel is daunting.

There must be thousands of unpublished potential newspaper stories that were and have been not published because of the fear that the story although broadly true, might not stand up in a libel court where the ball is all too often in the plaintiff’s end of the playing field. I used to work in media and I recall when I was doorstepping politicians and for the British newspapers decades ago being grilled heavily by one paper’s legal team as to whether I was absolutely sure that the person whose image I’d taken was, as it was in this particular instance, really coming out of the building occupied by a lady who wasn’t his wife. They wanted the case to a big splash headline and therefore be watertight and leave no chance that the politician in question could challenge the fact that he was seen leaving his mistress’s building. Half of the UK media and about the same of Westminster probably knew that this politician, who I still can’t name for fear of libel as they are still alive, was cheating on his wife whilst playing the happily married statesman act in public. Some may say that publicising a person’s marital infidelities is not in the public interest but what if that person’s infidelity is signifying of a broader untrustworthiness? It’s messy morally but I’d rather have a messy free press than a controlled press or a press that is cowed by fear of libel actions brought by the powerful and rich.

It was also libel laws that back in the mid 1980’s prevented the crime journalists I knew at the time when I was a court reporter from publishing rumours they’d come across about Jimmy Savile and his alleged penchant for necrophilia, which although was not technically illegal at the time was rightly still extremely ‘ick’. From what I could recall of that time the risk of libel was a major factor in this story getting nowhere. The rumours had corroboration allegedly from those with first hand knowledge of Savile’s proclivities but it was still not enough to defend against a potential libel action. At the time those like Savile were considered as ‘national entertainment treasures’ and ones with the extremely deep pockets needed to afford the best libel lawyers that could be found. Even if witnesses could have been found to Savile’s alleged actions, the sort of libel lawyer that the journalist and their witnesses would have faced would have made mincemeat of them. It would only take the lawyer to create doubt in the minds of the jury about the veracity or motivation of the witness or doubt about the practises of the journalist to financially ruin the journalist, the publication that ran the story and probably the persons who made the initial allegations to the Press themselves. Maybe if a paper could have, without adverse fear, run a headline in 1987 that said: ‘Savile Shags Stiffs’ then Savile might have been swiftly ostracised from public life and therefore have less opportunity to negatively affect others. It could have also been the case that those who feared Savile for various reasons and were silent about what he had done to them might have found their courage to speak up following the publication of a hypothetical ‘Savile Shags Stiffs’ story?

There is a need in Britain for libel law reform. Access to the ability to bring a libel case is at the moment almost totally the preserve of the wealthy or those backed by the Establishment or other well resourced groups. The normal everyday man on the Clapham Omnibus might one day find themselves libelled but be unable for want of resources or the risk of losing, be unable to bring a case against those who have libelled them. They could be, for example, a conservative minded Jew who is continually called a ‘Nazi’ by members of the far left both online and off but is unable to protect his reputation or refute false claims because they can’t afford the cost of a libel case. However those with vast amounts of money can use that money to silence others, especially those who may have genuine grievances against certain wealthy individuals and hide information that is damaging to the reputation of those with a lot to lose. I don’t know how this reform could be carried out, I’m not a lawyer, but the way that the libel laws are used and abused by the powerful whilst giving very little succour to the ordinary man in the street, does leave a very nasty taste in mouth. In any event I can’t see libel law reformed in such a way until Britain legislates for freedom of speech and gives Britons the same level of free speech protections as enjoyed by the citizens of the United States of America.