I hope you have not been put off by the title above and that you will read a little further! There is only a little bit of history to come but last week we may have seen a significant event to rival the attempt by King Charles I to arrest 5 sitting MPs by storming into the Commons Chamber with armed soldiers.
Frustrated by Parliament’s refusal to grant him money and irritated in particular by the speeches of the members, the King tried to arrest John Pym, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, William Strode, John Hampden and Denzil Holles in the Commons Chamber, an event which helped to trigger the start of the Civil War in 1642. News of the King’s intentions had filtered through to the five who had long since fled the Chamber by the time the King arrived.
No monarch has entered the Chamber since and, as we all know, the King lost his throne and his head in 1649!
In recent weeks we have seen numbers of headlines and articles on the subject of a so called super injunction. In case you missed it, the case involved a secret report on how a Dutch oil trading company called Trafigura dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The report had been commissioned after the incident and found that the dumping would have been illegal under European law. The company went to Court in England to try and stop its publication after a leaked copy of the report found its way to the Guardian newspaper.
Now I have not seen the report nor the terms of the injunction but it was reported that, as well as wanting to prevent the publication of the report, the company also wanted to prevent the fact that a Labour MP had tabled a question in the Commons relating to the Trafigura affair from becoming public.
The company succeeded initially. In effect, it obtained an injunction which prevented anyone from reporting the fact that the injunction had been sought and obtained, from reporting the fact that a question had been placed on the Commons order paper, AND from reporting that those two things had happened! Presumably, in this Kafkaesque fashion, it also prevented anyone thinking about reporting the two facts from doing so! Thinking about them or reporting them I mean!
Fortunately, the Twitterati saved the day! Users of Twitter, presumably in fewer than 140 characters, managed to tell the world about the existence of the question on the Commons order paper and about a website where the report could be read.
Once that happened, the injunction was lifted.
This was a significant victory for the users of Twitter in the same month that the court allowed the first injunction to be served by Twitter (see The Last Straw, 6th October). I would go further and say it was a significant victory against the so called super injunction and the ever-present trend towards unwarranted secrecy in our national life.
Given the current furore about MPs’expenses, I must say here that MPs and Parliament have a lot of fence mending to do but, nonetheless, the tweeters have achieved a welcome affirmation of the principle that Parliament must be allowed to go about its business without fear or hindrance from anyone, be they ever so mighty.
Was this not what the Civil War was all about?