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07/27/2008: "The truth about privacy"

The Max Mosley privacy decision is one to be celebrated, not just as a kick in the teeth for Murdoch’s empire of hypocrites, but for anyone concerned that what consenting adults do in their bedrooms are not the proper business of the gutter press.

The only down side of the verdict has been having to read the usual trash from Colin Myler, blaming it all on crafty europeans sneaking in privacy laws ‘by the back door.’ Here’s a more accurate picture.
In 1997, the family of Gordon Kaye - a British actor famous for a corny sitcom called ‘Allo ‘Allo - tried to sue The Sunday Sport. Kaye had been involved in a serious accident that had left him in a coma. A photographer working for the Sport found his way into Kaye’s hospital room and photographed him in his unconscious state, being artifically fed, for the titillation of the people who read that most trashy of rags.

The judge in that case had to tell the family, with great regret, that they couldn’t win because there was no such thing as a right to privacy in English law. Come 1998, the Labour government chose to fulfil their election pledge by introducing the Human Rights Act. Contra the repeated f*cking lies of the f*cking scumbag liars at the NotW, this was not a question of a ‘‘creeping back-door privacy law … emanating from Europe’, but of a law applied by British courts after being introduced by a democratically elected British government. The Act mostly regulates relations between citizens and the state, but it also has a degree of ‘horizontal application’. Specifically in this case, it allowed (or maybe obliged) judges to recognise a right of privacy, not just against snooping state agencies, but against other individuals.

Obviousy, the gutter press hate this, because it means they can no longer sneak into the hospital rooms of comatose, critically ill people and splash their pictures all over their papers. Most decent human beings, it may be assumed, are quite pleased about this state of affairs.
So well done Max Mosley, well done Justice Eady, well done the ‘professionals’ who had the guts to testify, and well done Labour for introducing the HRA (and god knows I get little enough opportunity to say the last in recent times!). When the parasitic pond-slime of our gutter press are so p*ssed off about something, it’s a pretty good bet the rest of us should be cheering about it.