THE PRESS
Private lives
BILL GRUNDY
You will all doubtless remember the story of the group of students of the Sceptic philosophy who saw their tutor drowning in the ditch. They listened to his cries for help, but then, with a devotion to his teach- ings which I am sure he did not much appreciate, they declined to pull him out because they could not be sure that, on balance, any good would come of it. It has always seemed to me that this story provides one of the best justifications for idleness any- one can want—that the results of doing anything are never exactly, and sometimes very far from, what one intended.
It applies in politics. One of the best argu- ments against passing legislation is that it never works out the way you want it to. Prohibiting a man who likes porridge for breakfast from advertising for a Scottish cook was not, I imagine, uppermost in the minds of the promoters of the Race Rela- tions Bill, but that's what they ended up with.
It is for this reason I am glad to see the Press Council and most of the papers band- ing together against Mr Brian Walden's Private Member's Bill on the Right of Privacy, and am sad to see that 'Justice' and the National Council for Civil Liberties appear to be all for it.
There is no doubt whatever that there is a need for some protection against the in- vasion of privacy modern technical develop- ments have made possible. Mr Walden, Mr Smythe of the NCCL, the authors of the study by 'Justice', and the authors of the Press Council report condemning the Bill, all agree with this, as does just about every news- paper in the land.
But it isn't enough to talk, as the 'Justice' report talks, about providing 'a civil remedy for any substantial and unreasonable in- fringement of any person's privacy, while fully safeguarding the interests of the com- munity, and especially the needs of the press as a guardian of the public interest'. It isn't any use talking like that because various ingredients in that sentence may be mutually exclusive. It is easily possible to think up an example where a substantial infringement of a person's privacy might not conflict with 'the interests of the community and especi- ally the needs of the press as a guardian' etc.
Last weekend, the Sunday Tinter listed one or two examples in a very interesting piece by the legal adviser to the Times newspapers, Mr James Evans. For instance: 'The Daily Clarion starts inquiring into a motor insurance company on a tip-off that it is financially shaky. Employees and in- surance agents are interviewed. No defence of "public interest" is given to inquiries (as opposed to publication) and the insurance company obtains an injunction forbidding the Clarion from intruding into private affairs. Six months later the insurance com- pany goes bust, leaving thousands of motor- ists without cover'.
Now if someone can invent an incident like that it's fairly certain that life, forever imitating and then surpassing art, will come up with something better. And it's no use saying, as Mr Smythe said the other day, that 'the Bill does not set out to curb the freedom of the Press, to protect wrong-doers, to suppress the truth, or to limit fair report- ing'. It's not what you intend that matters, It's what you achieve. We all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
Mr Evans, in the Sunday Times, makes the point by saying that 'many of the terms in the Bill are highly subjective and it is anybody's guess how juries, by whom privacy actions will often be tried, will identify the difference in meaning between "in the public interest", "of public concern", and "for the public benefit", three phrases which occur in one section of the Bill.'
A leading article in the Times on Friday last week reinforced these fears: The Bill is studded with expressions like substantial, unreasonable, public interest, reasonable grounds for belief . . . It is true . . . that this is the way the law proceeds in the analogous domains of defamation, nuisance, negligence and trespass. But these are torts of immemorial record, hedged about by dis- coverable case law. The proposed tort is in English law an innovation; with no ante- cedent case law, the discretion given to the courts and the uncertainty in which litigants would be placed are both excessive. If Parliament is to provide remedies of an entirely new kind it must accept responsi- bility for defining much more closely their scope and effect'
Well, that's all a bit high-flown for me, so I turned to the populars. The People declared that the job 'of MPS should be to do down the intruders into private life—but not newspaper reporters exposing public mischief.' The News of the World thought that the best thing Mr Walden could do 'would be to write in a clause to prevent his Bill applying to newspapers at all.' The Sunday Mirror summed it up in three sharp sentences: 'Certainly the rights of the in- dividual should be protected. Certainly individual privacy should be respected. But not if the price is also the protection of wrong-doing and of unwarranted secrecy in public affairs.'
And if you're still a bit unsure, I recom- mend the end of Friday's leader in the Times: 'This Parliament has a bad record of social legislation without the benefit of preparatory inquiry commensurate with the importance of the issues involved. This is not any occasion for repeating the mistake' You can say that again. All of us who can't now have our porridge prepared by a Scotch cook know just what the Times means. And we're all positive that when it comes to rather more important matters, such as possible conflicts between privacy, the press and the public interest, there's all the more need for a full-scale inquiry before passing legislation we may live to regret.
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