Free speech in the UK is under attack – not through state censorship, but via the legal system itself, writes David Hooper for CapX. Wealthy individuals, corporations, and states are weaponising Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) to intimidate journalists, campaigners, and whistleblowers into silence. These lawsuits aren’t about winning, but about making legal threats so costly and stressful that critics back down before reaching court.
SLAPPs thrive in the UK due to claimant-friendly defamation laws, where the burden of proof rests on the defendant. Even truthful reporting becomes prohibitively expensive to defend. Powerful figures exploit libel, data protection, and privacy laws to suppress investigative journalism, forcing journalists and publishers into self-censorship.
London’s reputation as the ‘libel capital of the world’ has made it a hub for international reputation launderers. Oligarchs, fraudsters, and politicians use the UK’s legal system to quash dissent, targeting both British and foreign journalists. So why has Labour delayed action on anti-SLAPPs legislation?
Here’s an extract from David Hooper’s article:
The UK is the destination of choice for SLAPPsters and reputation launderers. The burden of proof is on the publisher and it can cost millions.
Not only have Russians, often with prison records, as well as Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Swedes, Greeks, Germans, Maltese and Chinese brought or threatened SLAPP claims in this country, but England has exported its libel expertise. As the Foreign Policy Centre reported, the UK ‘is by far the most frequent international country of origin for such legal threats’. When Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in Malta in 2017, she faced 42 libel and 5 criminal libel claims, often from English solicitors.
Some 33 US states have anti-SLAPPs laws. In April 2024 the EU passed an anti-SLAPPs directive requiring implementation within two years and the Council of Europe (46 states and 675 million people) adopted recommendations for setting minimum standards and a regime for tackling SLAPPs. Canada has in place the most effective anti-SLAPPs laws, and has recently published statistics about their operation.
The UK is lagging behind. An anti-SLAPPs law was belatedly shoehorned into the Economic Crimes and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, but restricted to economic crimes. The definition of economic crimes and SLAPPs have the hallmarks of a legal beanfeast. Wayne David introduced a private member’s bill to remedy these defects, but it foundered with the July 2024 election.
There was no anti-SLAPPs act in the King’s Speech. Although Keir Starmer says Labour will introduce anti-SLAPPs legislation, in November 2024 Heidi Alexander MP, then Minister of State at the MoJ, indicated it was not a priority. The government wished to review the operation of the new civil procedure rules enabling SLAPP claims to be dismissed and to await the report of a SLAPPs subcommittee in early 2025. The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee complained in its Future of News report: ‘the absence of political will to deal with this issue reflects poorly on the government’s values and commitments to justice’. The committee felt such a law should be prioritised and that the Solicitors Regulatory Authority’s fining limit of £25,000 was ‘a peashooter against a tank’. They wanted solicitors not only held accountable for the actions of private investigators and PR consultants they hired, but also to inquire more closely into their clients’ background and the source of their funds. In early February, the Government declined to change its position.
There needs to be a fundamental reassessment of SLAPPs. We should learn from mainland Europe how libel claims are dealt with swiftly and at a minute fraction of the cost here. The public interest defence in libel claims should be reviewed. It all too often focuses on the quality of the journalism. Rather a balance should be struck – as happens in Canada – between the public interest in the freedom of speech and the right to information against the claimant’s need to bring a libel action The excessive cost of libel actions favours the wealthy but excludes the less well-off.
Worth reading in full.
The paperback of David Hooper’s book ‘Buying Silence. How Oligarchs, Corporations and Plutocrats Use the Law to Gag their Critics’ is published by Biteback on 20 March.
