Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that libel laws in the UK boil down to putting the two sides on front of an extremely wealthy and connected judge who decides which between the complainant and the accused is poshest, then makes the other one apologize.

You can be so posh that you accuse the current PM of raping a dead pig's head in the widest circulating tabloid and face absolutely no consequences.

View on HN

>You can be so posh that you accuse the current PM of raping a dead pig's head in the widest circulating tabloid and face absolutely no consequences.

I was under the impression that there were no consequences because it had actually happened?

There doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe it did: the authors of the book don't even back up the anecdote particularly strongly.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2015/oct/0...

"The thing to point out about that story is that there is no need for burden of proof on a colourful anecdote where we’re quite upfront about our own reservations about whether to take it seriously."

There were no consequences because the Prime Minister didn't sue, both because Prime Ministers generally have more important and less embarrassing things to be doing that testifying in court that they never stuck their penis inside a roast piglet for a funny photo during their adolescence (even if they didn't!), and because the authors knew how to word rumours and innuendo so that it probably didn't fall foul of libel law, and that a PM they knew personally would go all "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response" in response rather than spend the next few years pursuing a vendetta against them.

An alternative explanation for him not suing which I just made, is that the Prime Minister was part of a Black Mirror marketing campaign.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_(Black_M...

No official consequences , but he did come down with a sudden serious and moderately rare illness immediately after making that claim, which interfered with the book launch that the claim was related to.

I'm not saying it was a conspiracy, but I am saying that it's the kind of plausible deniability I'd aim for if I was writing a story about the British Government wanting to get away with an exo-legal punishment.

Exo-legal? Maybe extra-legal? As in outside the law.

(Exo-legal punishment sounds like something from the 40K universe :) )

Yeah, but to me "extra-legal" sounds like "very legal".

Odd example. No case went to court.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com