God Save Our Gracious Judges

I found it hard to keep down the contents of my stomach this morning reading and viewing the nauseating hypocrisy and egotism pouring out from media and politicians alike over the injunctions issue.  
 
It is absolutely crystal clear that the private life of a soccer star has absolutely nothing to do with the public interest. 

It is equally absolutely crystal clear that the fact that anyone can read all the details on the web does not mean that the judge should remove the injunction so the media can jump on the bandwagon.  Tweeters are in it just for the hell of it.  The media are in it for the money, and it is their money that fans the flames and causes people to seek to sell for massive profit and with increasing frequency private information in which the public interest is 100% prurient. 

Media whining about freedom of speech, and about it's being only the rich and famous who can afford protection of their private lives by the courts, is just so much hyprocritical guff.  It is only the rich and famous who need the protection of the courts.  The media are not interested in the private lives of the poor and obscure precisely because there is no money in it for them.

Parliament has created laws, or acquiesced in their creation by the EU, which require judges to protect citizens from breaches of their privacy except where such breaches are necessary in the genuine public interest.  If Parliament thinks judges are misinterpreting those laws it can and should legislate to change them. For a peer and an MP to second guess a judgment behind the shield of parliamentary privilege is just totally shameless attention-seeking revealing egos the size of barns and total disregard for the Rule of Law which is the vital foundation for all our freedoms.


Nor is this confined to soccer players.  Publication of information about someone's sex life, whether extra-marital or not, can be justified if the person concerned has preached publicly against such activity, or has invited people to vote for him on the basis of public statements condemning such activity by others.  In virtually no other circumstances can its publication be justified - and I include in this the Goodwin/RBS case; you have to be pretty dim to think his affair could possibly have had any bearing at all on his decision to buy ABN Ambro and thus bankrupt RBS.  If you believe some of the guff being written about the Goodwin case now you would have to believe that John Major's pension should be docked because his affair with Edwina Currie may have caused Black Wednesday.