Thus, after the worst crash since 1929, and with the world economy in crisis, people who know what went wrong and why it went wrong are too frightened to go public.
If their fear does not make the case for reform of the libel laws on US lines, I don’t know what will. We should have free debate on matters of public importance, as long as writers are not malicious and do not display a wild disregard for the truth.
But where is reform to come from? Conservative lawyers tell me that Tory leader David Cameron is struck by the keenness of the judiciary to find in favor of Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern petro-billionaires who, to put the case against them at its mildest, do not have the best interests of British democracy at heart.
I accept that you should not put your trust in promises from Tories, as the Conservatives are also known, particularly when they are trying to woo journalists in the run-up to an election. But I have watched a parade of grotesques from around the world marching out of English courts with fat checks and gagging orders in their pockets and accept that at least some Conservatives have come to believe that the libel law is a threat to national security.
The attitude of the liberal-left is more ambiguous. In theory, liberals ought to believe in freedom of speech. In practice, Labour ministers have yet to meet campaigners for law reform and wider liberal society has yet to overcome a way of thinking that stops it reconnecting with the best parts of the liberal tradition.
Singh and the mathematicians are now living with the consequences of the human rights movement of the late 20th century.
Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s repeated election victories convinced British liberals to try to win in the courts what they could not win at the ballot box. The trouble with the strategy has always been that British judges, like judges across the EU, do not believe in freedom of speech. They are illiberal liberals who will defend all rights except the most fundamental right of a citizen of a free country to make his or her case without fear of the consequences.
“Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it,” John Stuart Mill said.
But the average British judge does not believe that free debate in the marketplace of the mind will expose “wrong opinions and practices.” He believes they must be suppressed because he retains the fear of the old European aristocracy that the masses cannot see through dangerous ideas and bad arguments.
To speak plainly, if I may, the judiciary has an elite suspicion of democracy and the price of its elitism is becoming too high for this impoverished country to bear.
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