Have you heard the one about the Footballer and the MP?

By Darrell Goodliffe

Ryan Giggs has, allegedly, been a bit of a bad lad. So, what has this got to do with LabourList you may well ask? Well, had Giggs kept his litigiousness to himself and not sought a ‘superinjunction’ to prevent the publication of the allegations about him being made public the answer would have been the sum total of nothing. However, it became a hot political issue the moment John Hemming MP took it upon himself to name Giggs as the party involved in Parliament. Labour representatives cried foul and suggested Hemming was guilty of ‘an egotistical act of opportunism’. Sadly, it is these representatives that are guilty of the opportunism at least, if not necessarily the egoism.

Wider issues exist than the fate of Hemming. Twitter has collapsed in on itself and made it clear that the details of all users who Tweet the names of Giggs and Thomas will be passed to the authorities. Giggs and all those other avenging celebrities lining-up to sue all and sundry are frankly, pathetic. The idea that our courts should be packed to the gills with these cases is an outrage. I’d much prefer them to be used to prosecute real criminals and I’d like to think the public would agree. Yes they have a right to a private life but they trade that off to a certain degree when they assume their status and I dont see many complaining when the cheque from Hello for the latest full-colour splash arrives. My sympathy is therefore limited. Yes, they are people too but they are people who have made a choice with consequences that they would have to be fantastically naive not to be aware of these.

Hemming was perfectly correct when he said:

“With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter it is obviously impracticable to imprison them all and with reports that Giles Coren also faces imprisonment…the question is what the government’s view is on the enforceability of a law which clearly does not have public consent?”

Labour seems to have been quick to forget as well the much more sinister uses of the superinjunction – illustrated perfectly by the Trafigura/Guardian case. I would be dismayed if the same logic, right to privacy, was extended from the sexual failings of a footballer to the right to conceal allegations of toxic waste dumping.

Yet , sadly, it would not surprise me to hear exactly that from some quarters of this party which seem determined to be the law and order brigade even when the law is clearly an ass. It concerns me deeply, and should all party members, that Ed Miliband’s response to the controversy seemed to be to suggest that the real problem was that the laws are not tight enough not that their whole premise and purpose is to protect the rich and powerful from scrutiny, and therefore they should be scrapped and started from scratch.

Freedom is often a messy and contradictory business but before we leap to snap decisions we need to ask ourselves some serious questions. Does the right to a private life extend to protection from the consequences of your own misdeeds simply because you have money? Is Twitter really protecting freedom’s frontier by threatening over 70,000 of its users with jail for doing what many people do at the pub or corner shop – retelling gossip? I think not.

Furthermore, we need to really question if Labour has learnt the lessons of government and can talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to concepts like freedom and liberty. Our response thus far suggests we still have a long way to go.