by Unity

Kevin Arscott of the ‘Angry Mob‘ blog is a reasonably well-known figure in the British blogosphere, one of several bloggers who specialise in tracking and exposing some of the worst excesses of tabloid and mid-market newspapers.

This morning, a bit of a kerfuffle has broken out on Twitter after Kevin received a nastygram from the Daily Mail’s lawyers threatening him with a libel action if he didn’t remove a two-year old post from his blog.

Kevin took down his post, but it can still be read via Google’s cache.



Its worth reviewing some of the text of the letter that’s been sent to Kevin:

It has come to our client’s attention that a page on the website at http://www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/43-somethingmademeangry/805-paul-dacre-must-die is being used to publish material which is seriously abusive and defamatory of Mr Dacre.

We’ll come to this in a minute, but as a matter of opinion I doubt very much that Paul Dacre must be overly concerned about any abusive remarks made by Kevin given his reputation for verbally abusing his employees which, according to the book Flat Earth News, has led to his own staff giving the paper’s daily editorial meeting the name ‘The Vagina Monologues’ as a result of Dacre’s habit of calling everyone a cunt.

Please take this communication as formal notice of this defamatory and abusive publication.

Now a rather important legal point.

When giving a notice preparatory to action in an alleged defamation case, the complainant – in this case Dacre/Daily Mail – is required to specify precisely which statements they consider to be defamatory. A general claim which does not specify which statements they intend to treated as defamatory is just not good enough, not even for an attempted take down notice targeting a hosting provider, which is what this letter appears to be.

Please confirm urgently that the above-mentioned defamatory material will be removed within 3 business days. Otherwise our client will have no option but to include you as a party to the proposed legal proceedings for defamation.

A statement to which the only honest response should be either ‘Bite Me!’ or a citation of Arkell vs Pressdram.

This brings us to the original blog-post.

Yep, Kevin was angered by a fairly standard migrant story which, as matter of opinion, could easily be considered to be racist in its tone and intent but which has been carefully written to sidestep the law as it related to the incitement of racial hatred.

Let’s be clear, our own right-wing tabloid and mid-market press are extremely adept and well-practiced when it come to pushing the racist buttons of their readers without stepping over the line of what is and isn’t deemed to be unlawful in this country, and this particular Mail article is a fair example of the ‘not racist but’ genre of news reporting.

Kevin wrote then:

When you read this Daily Mail headline – and if you dare, the whole article and comments – it is easy to forget that Sue Reid – the author of this disgusting piece of hatred journalism – is actually talking about the lives of sick babies – something supposedly sacred. Here they are described as a ‘strain’ and used as an example of ‘the changing face of Britain’. Personally I celebrate the fact that ‘The 243 mothers are from 72 different nations. They include Mongolia, the remotest regions of Russia, Japan, Africa, South America, swathes of Asia, Australasia and even Papua New Guinea’. I think it speaks volume about the value that we as a nation place on human life; that we are in the majority a nation who doesn’t worry about the nationality of a child that might die but instead save it – regardless of whether we can wring the money out of the parent. I just pretend that none of my taxes go to treating a single sick Mail reader. And I consider them all to be sick for wanting to enrage themselves with such hateful bullshit each day, and for treating the lives of a few sick children as a burden which we must get rid off.

What we have here is, on the face of it, an extremely wealthy media organisation trying to bully a lone blogger and his hosting provider just because – two year ago – he said something about a newspaper editor that the editor has taken umbrage with.

What this does, however, neatly illustrate in the context of reforming our libel laws, is that the lack of protection afforded to web hosting companies continues to be the weak link in the chain, one that desperately needs to be addressed.