Double Think on Freedom of Speech

Looking through one of my favourite blogs ‘The Diary of a Legal Eagle’ (and one wonders why lawyers are not precluded from blogging, as Magistrates are?) I came across an interesting bit of double-think.

In the 2012 case of Chambers v DPP (a case brought under s.127 of the Communications Act 2003), the Lord Chief Justice no less said in judgement for the plaintiff

"The 2003 Act did not create some newly minted interference with the first of President Roosevelt’s essential freedoms – freedom of speech and expression. Satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level, quite undiminished by this legislation."

A pity the Senior Presiding Judge, and the Chairman of Council of the Magistrates’ Association, didn’t have those words in mind when formulating their recent ban on Magistrates blogging.

As to the question I asked at the top of this post, it would seem that barristers, officers of the High Court, can publish blogs highly critical of certain decisions in the Magistrates’ Courts, going so far as to name the particular benches, a move quite likely to, in the SPJ’s words “damage public confidence in their own impartiality or in the judiciary in general”. 

They, the lawyers, can make such comments without risk of censure, is that because judges such as the Senior Presiding Judge are ex-barristers themselves, that all lawyers must stick together but Lay Magistrates are just ignorant little people to be controlled.

Surely not, for that would be an exhibition of extreme prejudice, and quite unthinkable.