I’ll be circumspect in my comments on this, for reasons that will become obvious in due course, but first I’m going to repost, verbatim, an article by Justin (Chicken Yoghurt) which speak volumes…

………………………………………………………..

The Last Laugh

On Saturday last week, a Guardian article from 1986 was circulated amongst a group of bloggers which related to what Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, may or may not have got up to whilst a right-wing political activist at Hull University.

Being something of a night-owl, Sunny Hundal at Pickled Politics beat the rest of us to the punch and published the article. Early Sunday morning, Tim Ireland, Labour MP Tom Watson and I followed suit.

Shortly after, emails arrived from Paul Staines stating that he considered the publication of the article as defamatory. He demanded its removal from our blogs, stating he had an ‘retraction’ of the article which he would let us see. In a show of good faith, I removed the article from Chicken Yoghurt, as did the others from their blogs.

Paul Staines posted on his blog saying that the post that had appeared on Tom Watson’s blog (and only Tom Watson’s blog) was now gone and bragging that legal notices had been issued. You can no longer read that post because the next day (Monday), it was deleted. You’ll have to draw your own conclusion as to why he might do that.

I have now seen the ‘retraction’ that Paul Staines referred to. I am unfortunately not permitted to publish it. I am not allowed to print the ‘bane’ of the original 1986 article, nor am I allowed to print the ‘antidote’, a personal letter - written four years later - from the journalist who wrote the article, which Staines claims exonerates him. Read that again. The Guardian newspaper did not retract the article. That is why it is still available in the Lexis-Nexis database.

I will leave others to draw conclusions as to the behaviour of a person whose own blog is registered off-shore (in Nevis) in an attempt to avoid British libel laws.

Guido has a mini-corporation behind him, Global & General Nominees LLC of Nevis. If you want to sue the publishers go ahead, the office for service is properly registered in accordance with the law. The laws of the island require that the plaintiff first deposits US$25,000 with the court before commencing action. Guido will defend himself vigorously.

Or the behaviour of a self-confessed libertarian drawing on the power of the state when threatened. Or the behaviour of a gossip-peddler happy to smear with innuendo and the help of anonymous commenters on his blog. Or the behaviour of a person who claims to have evidence exonerating him from allegations but refusing to allow that evidence to be published. Or why he chose to ’serve notice’ on four bloggers and not the Guardian.

At the end of the day, this boils down to money. The libel laws in the UK are a plaything of the monied - you can’t get legal aid to fight a libel action. It’s often said that ‘it’s not libel if it’s true’. That is incorrect. It is, actually, ‘it’s not libel if it’s provable‘. To fight my case would take more resources than I have.

I will take this opportunity to say that, since his attempt to claim some credit in the outing of Mark Oaten last year, I have regarded Paul Staines AKA Guido Fawkes as little more than scum. That he is held as some exemplar of blogging by those who should know better has always struck me as a sick joke. This is not a matter of ‘ideological differences’ or a ‘Brownite-plot’ (you have to laugh) as the witless have tried to make out. This is pest control motivated by disgust.

This blog is now taking a break. I don’t know how long that break will be but hopefully it won’t be a permanent one. I’ll continue to publish my The Friday Thing columns here for those who are interested. They’re my best stuff anyway. I’m also honoured to have been asked to play a small role in the launch of National Service.

………………………………………………………………..

And there you have it, as Justin sees the situation.

Now to be clear, I have seen both the original 1986 article and the letter that Staines describes as a ‘retraction’, and knowing the content of both there are a couple of minor points I feel its worth adding as matters of clarification.

First, and in regards to the original 1986 article, it appears that the strictly factual content of the article is not in question in so far as it describes a particular course of action undertaken by Staines during his student days.

What is disputed, and this forms the basis of Staines contention that the article was/is libellous, is the matter of how those facts could be interpreted and how one interpretation, in particular, might reflect on his character and, crucially, his motives at the time.

Having read the available documentation I have no hesitation is stating for the record that the interpretation that Staines is so concerned about would be both untrue and libellous in as much as it relies on an unfounded presumption of ‘guilt by association’ that categorically does not stand up on the material facts revealed in the article.
However, I would also add that any such presumption would rest solely with the reader and is not made explicit in the article itself and, even without access to the retraction letter, which gives Staines’s alternative account of his motives, it is neither an interpretation of the article nor a presumption that I would have made in any circumstances.

The unfortunate thing here is that in trying to ‘defend’ Staines, some people who do not have possession of the full facts of this matter, have managed to refer, in isolated comments across a number of different blogs, to the very interpretation that Staines wishes to suppress, albeit that they do so in the course of making the specious claim that the re-publication of the 1986 article constituted a deliberate smear on his character.

Ironic, huh? In trying to defend Staines, some of his supporters have succeeded only in perpetuating the very ‘libel’ he wishes to suppress and have given it all the character of the very same kind of rumours that Staines peddles via his own blog, putting him in the position of a choice of allowing those ‘rumours’ to fester without challenge, scouring the blogosphere in an effort to secure their removal or ‘coming clean’, a course of action that would release those of us who know the full story from any further constraints on publication.

For the record, my own interest in this article, and that of others with whom I have been in direct communication over the last few days, was never in the specific events that took place in 1986, but more generally in Staines’s background as a, specifically, libertarian right-wing political activist, the ideological views he held at the time and the extent to which those views, many of which we believe he still retains, inform and direct the nature of the content that he publishes in the guise of ‘Guido Fawkes’. None of this has any bearing whatsoever on the ‘interpretation’ Staines is seeking to prevent reaching the public domain, which is entirely unrelated to his own political views.

As Justin notes, the ‘retraction’ for all its stated length (400 words or so) does not actually retract any of the material facts of the original story and was not published by the Guardian Newspaper as a formal retraction of the story in its entirety.

It is, rather, a personal letter to Staines from the journalist who filed the original story in which the journalist in question recontextualises the events refered to in the original story, having become acquainted with Staines some years after the publication of the original article. In doing so the journalist accepts a different account of Staines’s motives for his actions at the time, one that was advanced by Staines at the time, but which the journalist has originally rejected.

Nothing in the letter suggests that the journalist came to accept Staines’s account of his actions on the basis of being provided with further evidence or documentation that was not available to him at the time. Rather the journalist had, by the time this letter was written, got to know Staines well enough to reassess his original judgment as to Staines’s motives and character and had come to the view that is his original assessment had been too harsh, not least in failing to accept the veracity of Staines’s explanation of his actions.

However, the journalist does indicate that the he still, even at this point, considered Staines’ actions to have been unwise and the product of youthful folly - which seems a very fair and generous assessment to me.

With regards to Justin’s comments on the events of this week, they stand as read.

Everyone who published the original article withdrew it, in good faith, on being made aware of Staines’s ‘concerns’ about its content and a number of others, including myself, held back from commenting on this matter while various matters were played out behind the scenes.

So far as that ‘behind the scenes’ activity is concerned, the most pertinent events of this week concern an interview given by Staines to Sunny Hundal, which will appear on Pickled Politics in due course.

Sunny will, I’m sure, tell the full story as he sees it and deserves the credit for getting the ’scoop’ but what I prepared to say on the record that this interview was undertaken at Staines’s own request, that in requesting the interview he requested a ‘fair hearing’ and claimed that he would set the record straight and tell his side of the story and that Sunny, and the rest of us, took Staines at his words and accepted this ‘offer’ in good faith.

What we then discovered last night, after talking to Sunny, was that Staines’s side of the story amounted to nothing more than ‘Lawyer says no comment’ and that this was subsequently followed up by further threats of litigation including an assertion that he would seek a high court injunction to prevent publication of the 1986 article and the 1990 ‘retraction’ letter.

On the evidence of the last few days, ‘good faith’ would seem to be a concept that has never fully entered into Staines’s philosophical lexicon.

That is, I think, a fair and measured accounting of this matter and, read in conjunction with Justin’s comments, covers most the ground I wish to cover - although no doubt, if Staines considers any of this to be unfair or too revealing then I will receive one of his ‘notices’ in due course.

I will, if you will excuse me, refrain from adding any further commentary on my opinion of him, in light of recent events, however I will say that I consider that the better course of action in this matter would have been for him to take the ‘offer’ of a fair-hearing - which he actually requested - and give his account of this matter.

Had he done so, I would certainly have challenged certain aspects of that account, in so far as I understand his contentions from the documentation I have to hand, but not in respect of the interpretation of his actions that he wishes to avoid becoming public knowledge. Suffice to say I have my own views as to how that article should be correctly interpreted and while these do not entirely coincide with Staines’s preferred account, they do not support, in any way, the interpretation that he considers libellous.

My last word on this is a more general point but echoes comments made in Justin’s article. That we have been unable to bring this story into the public domain is solely a function of this country’s pernicious and one-sided libel laws, which in application contrive only serve the wealthy as a means of privatised censorship.

If, as bloggers, we are genuine in our belief in the importance and value of free expression, then one of the key tasks ahead of us must be to overturn the existing laws on libel and defamation and see them reconfigured after the fashion of those in place in the United States of America, where, were we all US citizens/residents, this material could have been published without fear of legal repercussions.

After all, very few of us have the luxury of hiding behind an offshore company, the rest just have to make do with standing, or falling, on their reputation and honesty.

Endnote:

As with Justin and other’s who’ve commented on this issue, comments will not be allowed on this post, not because there is isn’t much more that could be said but simply to avoiding providing the litigious Mr Staines with cause to issue any more of his ‘notices’.

Posted by Unity on 14 Feb 2007 at 13:01 pm

News & Current Events

Trackback This Post |