Billy Tompson: Superinjunctions: How the rightwing media makes the political personal

They moralise about privacy, but our press barons' real agenda is to spread the poison of envy, anger and hatred

Alarm bells should ring when the nastier press baronies gang up to protest that any limit on their freedom to strip bare private lives is a threat to democracy. Day after day the Murdoch press, the Mail and others have bellowed out their right to break court injunctions, ignore "judge-made" law and to do whatever they damn well like.

Wondering if he was standing like Canute against the tide, the judge in the footballer injunction case rightly stood his ground yesterday. There is, he said: "No solid reason why the claimant's identity should be generally revealed in the national media ? The answer is as yet in the negative. They would be engulfed in a cruel and destructive media frenzy.

Sadly, that may become unavoidable in the society in which we now live but, for the moment, in so far as I am being asked to sanction it, I decline to do so ? It has not been suggested that there is any legitimate public interest in publishing the story."

Twitter or not, the law is clear. This footballer is as entitled to privacy as every other citizen. There is nothing brave or admirable about an attention-seeking MP or a show-off journalist breaking that law: that's mob rule. However, the attorney general said no, there would be no prosecutions. Governments are considerably more afraid of the press on a rampage than of judges. Yesterday Cameron said a joint committee of MPs and peers should examine privacy law.

The argument runs that superinjunctions are stifling the great British free press because out-of-touch judges have taken leave of their senses and decided to stop the common people from knowing about the peccadilloes of the elite, the rich and famous, threatening the Magna Carta itself, and so on. This is mostly self-interested bunk.

The report last week from the judicial committee headed by law lords found there had been only two genuine superinjunctions since January 2010, one lasting seven days, one struck out on appeal ? but there was a creeping tendency to grant injunctions. However the judges are not making up law as they go along, but interpreting law made by parliament. All that has changed is the difficulty in enforcing it. The hurricane blowing in from the internet means service providers far beyond British jurisdiction let people to break our laws easily ? as with the copyright of films and music. So do we just give up, roll over and abandon the law as a lost cause?

Supposedly free spirits who whoop with anarchic delight at the internet's freedom to let everything rip and thumb a nose at judges may celebrate. But few, apart from WikiLeaks' Julian Assange perhaps, would want everything exposed.

The strict injunction against anything being said about defendants in the Stephen Lawrence case is to stop the case collapsing: the media pushes the outside edge of contempt in many cases. Many injunctions about private lives are blackmail cases: to reveal the names of victims taking out injunctions would do all the damage the blackmailer intended ? a blackmailer's charter. If privacy is dead, what's wrong with News of the World phone hacking anyway?

The naturally amoral press spits blood at Twitter revealing secrets they cannot. But as the judicial committee said, ways "would be found to curtail the misuse of modern technology". Those who first leaked and re-tweeted names that broke injunctions could indeed be prosecuted ? preferably not sent as press freedom "martyrs" to jail, but fined mightily.

Child porn on the net is censored, and its users prosecuted. The Human Rights Act, with its occasionally contradictory right to free speech and right to privacy, was drafted with strong press involvement, ensuring the privacy clause was precisely in line with the press code that is written by editors and ratified by the Press Complaints Commission. If the PCC were not a spineless industry body that turned a blind eye to practices like phone-hacking, privacy would be protected, since its own code says: "Everyone has a right to his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence including digital communications."

Never mind that the spirit and often the letter of the code is broken almost every day of the week, the fact remains that the HRA enshrines the British press's own code on privacy. Now they write editorials justifying breaking that code on the grounds that almost anyone, one way or another, deserves to have their private life exposed.

Footballers or the Formula One boss "should be role models", as should any minor star, or often bystanders dragged into the periphery of some news story. And of course ordinary people should have equal access to privacy laws with legal aid. But these papers eagerly quote the granting of an injunction to Trafigura to stop the Guardian revealing its toxic waste dumping ? oddly, at the time those papers barely covered that injunction: no sex, no celeb.

The Mail's editorial yesterday as usual blamed the judges: "Enough! Judges must stop defending the indefensible and start putting freedom of expression and the transparency of justice ahead of the 'human rights' of wealthy celebrities to keep their philandering hidden."

That's the culture: if anyone has the temerity to become even slightly or briefly well-known, they deserve to lose any right to ordinary legal protection. They are asking for it ? and they get it.

Envy, anger, hatred, desire to destroy are a poison poured into the ears of a public, while urging celebrity fixation. Put new celeb up, knock them down, often within days: the public is invited to join a steel-toed kicking, as if grouped around the playground bully. That's the price of fame, say the hideous mob of paparazzi hounding celebs to madness.

Maybe. But the greater social price is that we are made complicit. All of us are spectators in this brutishness, willy-nilly. Once the gossip is out there, we all get to know it, contaminated by its prurience and nastiness. The phoney moralising and loathing of rich stars comes from newsrooms where editors like Paul Dacre are paid millions, and whose politics decry high taxes or curbs on top earnings.

Spreading jealousy taps into the social dysfunction of extreme pay inequality. Pressing everyone's nose up against impossible lifestyles, editors like to stir envy, while diverting political impulse to personal revenge.

Polly Toynbee

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