The news that Alan Jones, Australian radio's most pilloried provocateur, has extracted a £6 million defamation payout from a news corporation is not merely a legal footnote. It is a resounding indictment of the Anglo-Saxon world's intellectual cowardice. Jones, a man who has made a career of saying what polite society dares not whisper, was judged to have been defamed by an article that called him a 'vicious bigot'. Cue the violins for the press, but save your sympathy for the corpse of public discourse.
Britain's libel reform debate, flickering back to life like a wounded moth, is the real story. For years, the chattering classes have demanded a 'chilling effect' on speech. They got it. The Defamation Act 2013 was meant to be a bulwark for freedom of expression, but it has become a quagmire. Jones's victory shows that the law still favours the wealthy litigant who can afford a Queen's Counsel to parse the nuances of 'serious harm'. The result: a golden age for lawyers, a dark age for robust debate.
Let us be honest. Jones is no saint. He is a shameless self-publicist. But the principle is older than the Magna Carta: you cannot have a free society if every insult carries a price tag. The Victorians understood this. They relished a good character assassination in the pages of Punch. Today, we sue. We censor. We self-flagellate. The Jones verdict is a mirror held up to a Britain that has lost its nerve, a Britain that prefers the quiet hum of the libel lawyer's fax machine to the raucous shout of the public square.
The reform debate must now seize the moment. We need a 'public figure' defence that makes it near-impossible for the powerful to sue. We need costs that do not bankrupt the defendant. We need a return to the days when the answer to offensive speech was more speech, not a writ. If Jones can walk away with millions for being called a bigot, then the system is not broken. It is rigged.
One can almost hear the ghost of John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century champion of press freedom, tearing his wig off in despair. 'Liberty,' he thundered, 'is the right of every man to say what he thinks.' Today, that right has a price tag attached. And it is not cheap.
