MP uses parliamentary privilege to ask why Lucy Letby story blocked in UK

This is not the British government blocking a site.

This is apparently the New Yorker refusing to serve a page (with a 404!) to the UK. So they (or a UK distributor or subsidiary I suppose?) have been given legal advice that it would breach a court order banning media coverage, since she has both a retrial on some charges and an appeal in her future and any coverage could be prejudicial to it. Indeed, given the way the guilty verdict was covered in national press, almost certainly would be.

This would not ordinarily be particularly controversial, because it’s the law, it’s commonplace, and it is designed to protect a process.

But I think David Davis (one of the UK’s few longstanding political stalwarts at this point) is making the point that the ban has the effect of making it challenging to discuss wider aspects for an unusually long period of time.

He is also using parliamentary privilege, in effect, to make it clear that a discussion and meaningful counter-narrative potentially in the public interest exists, in a way that newspapers can report without themselves contravening the ban.

This is a longstanding, common application of parliamentary privilege, so it is not of itself newsworthy or radical.

The Conservative MP David Davis has used parliamentary privilege to ask why UK readers were barred from viewing an article in a prominent US magazine about the case of the former nurse Lucy Letby.

He told fellow MPs that the block on the story published in the New Yorker seemed “in defiance of open justice”.