What's the phrase? "As you sow, so shall you reap"

Me too. Tried to find a tasty bible quote but failed.

Hmmm. While this guy is clearly a prize cunt, I'm can't wholeheartedly join in the general schadenfreude, and not just because Jerry Springer- The Opera took up two of the unfunniest hours of my life.

It does seem to confirm that people without great wealth cannot expect to have recourse to law against powerful public and business interests without the risk of being squashed and bankrupted.

Just to be clear, the man is a tool and his case was laughable. But this sort of thing has its effect on much better people than him.

QUOTE:
It does seem to confirm that people without great wealth cannot expect to have recourse to law against powerful public and business interests without the risk of being squashed and bankrupted.

You missed out the words 'frivolous and incorrect' between 'have' and 'recourse'.

Signed.

I accept that the rules are biased in favour of the rich, but I can't support some kind of carte blanche to bring private prosecutions with no financial risk, even when against legal advice. Civil suits are another matter.

Can you not insure against this sort of thing, anyway? (provided your case isn't mental)

The original attempted prosecution was described as "verging on the vexatious" by the judge, because Green had brought it a full two years after the broadcast, and had allowed the play to run in the West End for three years without taking any action. The implication, I guess, is that Green wanted to be sure to give the producers and the BBC enough rope to hang themselves.

That "almost vexatious" character of the action didn't form part of the grounds for the original rejection of leave to proceed, but it might well have formed part of the grounds for the order to pay the costs of Green's subsequent appeal.

Let's be clear about this. This wasn't a civil lawsuit, it was an appeal against a refusal of leave to bring a private criminal prosecution. In other words, the judge took the view that there wasn't even a prima facie case against the producers and the Beeb.

Green chose to contest that. Anyone could have told him how ill-advised that was. Are people really saying that this is the kind of legal action that should be cost-free to the litigant?

Signed

I've just tried to access the Christian Voice website on my work PC and a message came up saying that access to this site is blocked because it falls under the category "Intolerance and hate". It's the first time I've had one of those access blocked messages and actually thought "fair dos".

I've got some sympathy for Green, perhaps. While I disagree with the blasphemy laws strongly, they are still with us. Clearly, the chance of success was low because they don't get used much. But on what basis? That he's probably an annoying twerp who we don't want clogging up the courts and making us look stupid?

Prima facie, wasn't the thing blasphemous? If the government isn't going to be brave enough to repeal the laws, I can't blame him for having a crack under them.

It wasn't prima facie blasphemous, no. As the judge in the "leave to proceed" case made clear.

The test is a very stern one, thankfully: the alleged libel needs not only to offend Christian sensibilities, but to do so in a way likely to, for example, endanger the safety of the State. Now, that the show had been running for three years, largely without incident except for protests orchestrated by Mr Green's own organisation; this made it clear that no such harm was being done.

We can argue about whether that ought to be a the test: it does potentially risk blaming publishers of religiously sensitive material for the extremism of their detractors. But that is the test, and Mr Green's case was thrown out at stage 1 as a result of it.

I didn't know it had to endanger the safety of the state- that at least stops this sort of thing. Nonetheless, it's hard to see that the cases that had succeeded did that either. I recall one from the eighties about Jesus being gay or something.

Well, it's common law rather than statute, so it's all a bit vague. But both public opinion and legal interpretation have changed a lot since 1977, and there's also been the Human Rights Act. The offending poem, which as you rightly say was found to be blasphemously libellous when published in Gay News in 1977, was read out in Trafalgar Square in 2002 (on the anniversary of the case, I think) and no prosecution resulted.

This all seems to go up and down a bit. There seems to be a judgement from 1917 that says that the "fabric of society" must be shaken, and Lord Denning called this law a dead letter in about 1950, on the grounds that it wasn't any longer possible to shake the fabric of society by being rude about Jesus. But then Scarman said that it wasn't a dead letter in '77, and a looser standard was applied then than people had generally expected.

The crux, though: prosecutions under this law are incredibly rare, and successful ones rarer still.

The judge in the "leave to proceed" case also took the view that the show satirised the Springer programme (by applying its relentless vulgarity and nastiness, in a dream sequence, to sacred subjects) rather than mocking Christianity itself.

If only the Romans had clamped down a bit more effectively :-(

Hmmm.