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| In what's becoming an all too regular development, another legal notice has been issued to a Welsh blogger for defamation. (Pic : via Jac o' the North) |
It was somewhat inevitable, but Royston Jones's Jac o' the North blog – easily the most popular blog and investigative news site in Wales - has finally come to the attention of solicitors; more from the ever eloquent Y Cneifiwr.
I can't repeat what was said (because doing so would put me at risk of legal action too), but he made a number of allegations against a Pembrokeshire-based housing association and its subsidiary companies. Some of what he posted was wrong, and as a result of a notice served by Hugh James Solicitors he decided (correctly) to remove the posts.
Coincidentally, Royston posted a definitive round-up today. I wouldn't have done that without getting my own legal advice on the content (as a precaution). Both he and his many supporters needn't throw petrol on this as it's a bit different to keyboard warriors and phantom police investigations.
Housing associations are state-backed not-for-profits that rose in prominence as local authorities transferred the ownership and management of their council housing stocks. Most of their funding comes from taxpayers, whether in housing grants, housing benefit or other forms of capital expenditure.
As they provide an essential service, most of them have turnovers in the tens of millions of pounds and sometimes have a monopoly on social housing provision in a given area. They're significant players in the Welsh state but are stuck in a limbo between public and private sector and are exempt from Freedom of Information laws.
Royston has, by himself, often been left to do a job that our mainstream media and politicians are supposed to do but don't. The main reasons Jac o' the North is so popular are that Royston (usually) does his homework in a manner that would shame most CIDs and he doesn't mince words. Though after ruffling more than a few feathers along the way, it's no surprise he's come under the close attention of solicitors and has been caught out - particularly where he's been left to speculate in the absence of quality information (or lack of transparency) by public organisations; a risk and a legal trap.
It's not my place to say whether what he published was defamatory because I don't know. What I will say is I doubt it's morally right that an organisation that exists primarily on public funding should initiate legal proceedings against someone holding them to account. Refute or demand a right to reply, yes.
Formal procedures are deployed surprisingly often in Welsh political disputes. I wouldn't say that's an exclusively Welsh phenomenon, just disproportionate – particularly when you consider how small the blogosphere and political bubble is; there's perhaps, at most, a dozen people who blog regularly.
Jacqui Thompson's ongoing dispute with Carmarthenshire Council under two different administrations is the ur-example.
If you want to go further back, there's Chris Glamorganshire's dispute with the Welsh Government (not libel, but related). Cllr. Mike Stoddart's Old Grumpy blog was investigated by the Local Government Ombudsman in 2010 (and cleared). In 2014, Thoughts of Oscar (The Aberconwy Funnel-Bebb Spider) was hounded off the internet following a dispute with Guto Bebb MP (Con, Aberconwy).
There've been various investigations into social media comments, while Michael Haggett's (Syniadau) expulsion from Plaid Cymru is an example of an internal/extralegal dispute along similar lines.
It doesn't stop at the internet. Mohammad Asghar AM (Con, South Wales East) won a bitter and long drawn out libel case....but ended up having to pay the legal costs of three of the accused who were cleared. Neil McEvoy AM (Plaid, South Wales Central) made a costly personal mistake by pursuing, and subsequently withdrawing, his own libel case over something most people would consider Juvenalian satire than defamation.
I'd imagine the only people happy after all of this are the lawyers when they look at their bank balances.
Professional journalists have some measure of protection. They're usually trained to work within libel laws. They're also, crucially, considered reliable sources of information. The powers that be rarely go after journalists, lest they be accused of clamping down on freedom of speech or freedom of the press.
Those unofficial protections don't extend to us plebs. That's something all of us would do well to remember before posting anything.
Blogging – more pretentiously dubbed "citizen journalism" - isn't recognised as journalism, more a cottage industry staffed by hobbyists. A blogger's word carries no more weight than anyone else and blogging is, at heart, no better than standing in the street with a loud-hailer.
The bind we have in Wales is that if you want detailed investigative reporting or more in-depth coverage and commentary on Welsh politics in English, you have no choice but to – BBC and occasional Western Mail output aside - read blogs or use social media. It fills a gap in a Welsh media which remains in a slow, grinding, but not-quite-yet terminal decline so blogs are more important than they otherwise would be (Groundhog Day : Auditing the Welsh Media).
The Daily Post are withdrawing their only reporter at the National Assembly. Most of Wales' major newspapers will be owned by a company whose main online portal publishes stories like Top 11 Places To Take A Dump In Wales (I thought I was taking the piss, but turns out I wasn't). Twitter and Facebook are tribalistic echo chambers and increasingly hard to take seriously, while local newspapers shy away from detailed scrutiny of local government as their sales continue to plummet and advertising revenues are replaced with state advertising/official notices.
Wales has a catty and fundamentally broken political culture where people on the inside can't move for fear of losing patronage or crossing the wrong person at the wrong time. They're not used to being rigorously challenged because there are too many reciprocal relationships, so when egos are bruised or accepted truths are questioned the tantrums start.
A Welsh equivalent of Camila Batmanghelidjh, for example, would never have been questioned or put under as much pressure as the real one was in Westminster....and I'll bet you would only read about them on Jac o' the North.
Even senior people in the "Bay Bubble" are criticising how some aspects of government and the Assembly work (Seeing through the Senedd), while local government and state-backed bodies – like housing associations and Third Sector organisations – continue to operate at public expense with very little scrutiny or accountability at all.
I'm usually careful about what I write. That's why I stay away from "investigative" stuff until there's as much hard evidence as possible and after "reputable sources" have published the same thing. I just do it in a bit more detail and a bit later than everyone else.
I've been told things in confidence that could damage reputations and I always know more than I let on, but it's a sometimes irresistible temptation as a blogger to publish suspicions and opinions as fact to get as big an audience as possible. Freedom of speech should give us the right to be an arsehole, the right to say things that people might find offensive and, indeed, a right to tell someone to shut up if we disagree with them....as long as it's true or honest opinion.
If you get it right you become a legendary whistleblower. If you get it wrong you could wind up homeless....and you only have to slip up once.
My choice to err on the side of caution makes for a dull blog, but means I can keep a roof over my head and stand little chance of being served a notice or visited by the police. One day I could write something that hurts someone's feelings to the extent that it could happen, and to defamation lawyers bloggers are like wildebeest to a lion.
It's when stories aren't published - when they're in the public interest - for fear of legal action that things take a darker turn. Despite living in a nation state that supposedly considers itself a liberal democracy, all bloggers need a friendly reminder that free speech in the UK is neither free nor absolute. There's a lengthy list of terms and conditions that usually only the legal literate understand.
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