Bill Walker: (Sunday) Heralding trouble?

Most of you will have read today's Sunday Herald revelations about SNP MSP Bill Walker, who has now been suspended from the party and parliamentary group. In a report headlined "Revealed: MSP's history of violence against three ex-wives", the paper's investigations editor Paul Hutcheon draws from a range of sources, including interview material from Walker's second and third wives, to demonstrate that Walker was a serial domestic abuser during his first three marriages. Hutcheon also quotes extensively from court records concerning Walker's divorces, including the grounds cited by his first wife:

"Open files in the National Archives of Scotland, which can be ordered and inspected by any member of the public, reveal his first wife's reasons for divorce."

Is publishing this information problematic? You well might think not - think it positively desirable for the public to know - but the Sunday Herald might well find itself in a bit of legal pickle for splashing it across their front pages this morning. Take a look at the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act 1926, still in force. Enacted to curb the salacious reporting of divorce proceedings, this little piece of legislation lay beyond my ken until Ian Smart pulled it out on twitter, but essentially, it regulates the amount of information the press can lawfully report about divorces, under threat of criminal sanctions being imposed on offending editors, printers, publishers and proprietors.

1 Restriction on publication of reports of judicial proceedings.
(1) It shall not be lawful to print or publish, or cause or procure to be printed or published—   (b) in relation to any judicial proceedings for dissolution of marriage, for nullity of marriage, or for judicial separation, or for restitution of conjugal rights, any particulars other than the following, that is to say:—
(i) the names, addresses and occupations of the parties and witnesses;
(ii) a concise statement of the charges, defences and countercharges in support of which evidence has been given;
(iii) submissions on any point of law arising in the course of the proceedings, and the decision of the court thereon;
(iv) the summing-up of the judge and the finding of the jury (if any) and the judgment of the court and observations made by the judge in giving judgment.

If a newspaper's coverage of divorce proceedings strays beyond these four points of information, and offers more extensive detail about what transpired during a court case about a divorce or suchlike, its editor or proprietor may find themselves liable to a four month prison sentence and anything up to a £5,000 fine. Moreover, public transcripts of these judicial proceedings - such as those Hutcheon presumably accessed to glean his information about the cited grounds of Walker's divorces - are excepted from criminal liability under the s1(4) of the 1926 Act. It may strike some of you as absurd, but according to the law, such material may sit in public archives or in reports of case-law quite legally, while the same information appearing on the pages of a newspaper or a blog would be a criminal publication. What's more, the 1926 Act contains none of the qualified privileges attaching to journalists who reasonably cover court proceedings, nor would the consent of the parties involved in the divorce waive criminal liability for detailed, impermissible reportage about a divorce case.

While the legislation clearly has contemporaneous reporting of divorce proceedings in mind, the Act has no time limit, no statute of limitation, and so engages the Sunday Herald's coverage today, insofar as the paper has reported on the judicial processes that generated Walker's past divorces. The article itself is a curious and muddled mix of references - details culled from the archive about the divorce proceedings, and arguably autonomous evidence from the two women about specific instances of abuse at Walker's hands, some of which also appear to have been cited in their petitions for divorce.

I've no brief for the prosecution, and do not intend to go through Hutcheon's article with a fine tooth comb.  However, once you're familiar with the Judicial Proceedings Act, one question clearly suggests itself. Dramatic though it would be, factoring in the 1926 Act, might the paper be susceptible to prosecution for publishing today's story? It's a possibility. I'm no expert on this piece of legislation. Indeed, it seems to have been exceedingly rarely used in practice and if any fellow jurisprudes wish to chime in or vigorously dissent from the following analysis, all comments would be gratefully received.

The 1926 Act was intended to prohibit the publication of detailed factual information about divorce proceedings, hence the admonition that any reporting of the substantive issues - to avoid criminal sanction - has to be concise and only with respect to charges or counter-charges about which evidence had been given, or refer to the judge's conclusions.  The Sunday Herald's "First Wife's Story" is gleaned entirely from these court records. While the article's reference to "cruelty" is clearly a concise account of the basis for the divorce, the specific details about the assault alleged arguably shade beyond that. The reporting of "The Second Wife's Story" seems more obviously problematic.  Rather than quoting exclusively from an interviewee spouse, asking about her experiences rather than the divorce proceedings, Hutcheon references Walker's legal documentation from that second divorce action itself, arguably straying well beyond a protected "concise" account of the charges and counter-charges about which evidence was given, referencing implements used to carry out assaults, motivations, imputations about the character of Walker's spouse, her disposition, and his own conduct.

While today's revelations will undoubtedly have stark consequences for Walker's political career, one wonders whether the Crown Office won't also be taking a close look at whether, in pursuit of their quarry, the Sunday Herald haven't tumbled over this old, rusty legal tripwire, laid down in the 1920s.

World ceilidh!

Some of you might recall Sunday Herald journalist Paul Hutcheon’s ad hoc fizzily hostile column that appeared in that publication last August. Attacking what he styled “Salmond’s Cod Nationalism”, the piece roved and raved - and at the time, shook up a bees’ nest of comment, critique and reply. Young Malcolm Harvey had a particularly good, section-by-section look (and rebuke) of the argument Hutcheon presented. At the time, I thought to use the vision of nationalism which Hutcheon espoused as a leaping-off point for a bit more detailed, alternative account of the features of my own nationalist inclinations – but the article mysteriously slipped from internet availability and hasn’t migrated over to Herald Scotland. The intention lapsed. Weltanshauung went unelaborated.

These thoughts involuntarily returned to me last night as I watched (and spun) in internationalist Eightsome Reels which hooched into skirling Dashing White Sergeants and blundered into slightly bruised but spry Strip the Willow sets. Folk from across the globe, who I suppose had never been to a ceilidh in their life before, gamely set to. Indeed, there were only a flourish of Scots in the room, stoating about in full kilted fig. Humorous disasters not infrequently followed, but good fun was had by all. All of this fell on the heels of a Burns Night celebration, with its haunting apposite (and for me, invariably moving) refrain, "Its coming yet for a' that / That Man to Man the world o'er / Shall brothers be for a' that." Quite how much of Burns’ immortal memory this event impressed on these (relatively) youthful minds from across the globe I couldn’t say – but there was an unerring sense in the dancing that followed that we were doing ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’, not just mouthing the epithets. Would-be dignity savers stood around gloomy and stiff – for the rest, unbending, there was the brute materiality of grasping arms and hands and fingers, rhythmic inclusion and expression. Although at times I find his peat worrying tendencies a bit wearing, Perthshire folkie Dougie MacLean wrote a song about just this egalitarian, levelling, elevating capacity of communal dance, entitled ‘All Together’. Although the temporarily dissolving social divisions which inspired MacLean were primarily those of class, this finds expression in a humanist lyric which resonates profoundly with yesterday’s curious ceilidh floor.

Anyone who has spent any time in one of the country’s larger universities, particularly at graduate level, will find their social field populated by persons from innumerable nations. This contrasts, almost to comic extremes, with my early childhood, which was spent in the rural West Coast. Certainly, one would encounter the occasional, temporary, isolated adult soul from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand – but all of the folk my own age were white and Scottish. Later, I lived in the Netherlands for a year, often being startled on a personal level when common sense, under-informed humanism on my part thumped into Dutch self-consciousness, their storied and alternative accounts of themselves. In any discussion about nationalism and its merits or demerits, I’m always interested in exploring the speaker’s experiences of other places and peoples. Not in the spirit of a cheap ad hominem – not even because such experiences will justify or defeat a nationalist account of politics – but because they invariable fertilise the human experience underwriting discussion. For my own part, one of the reasons I called this blog (probably unhelpfully obscurely) Lallands Peat Worrier was because that peaty sentiment often underwrites an account of nationalism with which I’m profoundly uncomfortable. Although broadly harmless in folk songs, talk of the love of our land's sacred rights will invariable make me fidget something awful, usually followed by an attempt on my part to hasten the succession to the love of our people as quickly as is possible. In this context, I was particularly struck by a small, largely unnoticed section of the Maximum Eck’s recent Edinburgh Lecture, Choosing Scotland’s Future. Quoting Hugh MacDairmid (writing as Christopher Murray Grieve) in Albyn or Scotland and the Future, Salmond said the following…

“Grieve’s examination of Scotland's future from the perspective of 1927 is interesting for revealing both where progress has been made - and where it hasn’t been made. For example he complained that, quote: ‘A passenger bridge and vehicle bridge across the Forth is refused to Scotland by Englishmen, but Scots must contribute towards the £7,000,000 or £8,000,000 granted for a bridge across the Thames.’ Time moves on.

Now of course, it is not an Englishman but a Scotsman in Downing Street who is hindering us from financing the Forth Bridge development in the most effective manner through long term loan finance; and, indeed, someone, as a Scot, in Downing Street who believes that the London Olympic Games should be financed by the whole United Kingdom, but the Glasgow Commonwealth Games should be financed by the Scottish Government and City of Glasgow Council alone. But that underlines how the debate about Scotland's future has nothing to do with nationality or antagonism. It has everything to do, in my view, with achieving sensible constitutional structures that will lead to sensible decisions.”

Interesting also to see here where the Eck (Maxissimus Mirabile Dictu) deviated and fiddled with his script on the hoof, when the spoken remarks are compared to the issued text of the speech. In particular, the surprising section – nothing to do with nationality – reads in draft ‘And that underlines how the debate about Scotland's future has nothing to do with antagonism towards other nations.’ Of course, what constitutes a ‘sensible’ decision is subject to deviating preferences, but in the shadow of the Chilcot Inquiry, we need not strain mental sinew to begin composing our list. To that we may quickly add the continuing detention of children following brutal raids that come with the dawn. For an extensive (indeed, very impressively thorough) account of the cares which ought to animate seekers after a more virtuous Scottish republic, have a read of Power and Its Minions’ interesting Scots colony theory. This is justice in small places, close to home. Although the essential human, reeling and laughing in a world ceilidh compels, and I'd say, imparts an important lesson - the workmanlike unities of the nation remain indispensable (at least for the present) and a potent, pragmatic basis on which to ground our aspirations for a just republic.

On rejecting nationalism exhaustively (the prequel)…

Blogging tends to begin in medias res. Folk may note their particular party affiliations, reveal their intellectual orientations in brief and make (relatively) plain their views on particular issues. Out of this speeding river of emerging opinion, splashes of insight are gleaned into the individual commentator’s broader conceptual commitments and political ideas, their world view and their reasons. Our first principles repose deep, deep in the luminous gloom beneath our rushing surface characters. It is easy, generally, to grow to love our labels. It reduces life’s complexity, makes for neat categorisation, and generally obscures more than it illuminates. A Labour blog, we may insist with confidence, Green Party opinion, we crisply characterise as if this told us everything about the writer and what he or she believes.

Of course it doesn’t – sensible folk would recognise that – but the deeper, determining principles are obviously matters of some curiosity. Indeed, if you squint into exchanging arguments, it is generally at this implicit, conceptualising level that the real basis for the disagreement dwells. As it happens, I’ve been considering writing a post outlining in personal terms the reasons behind my own Scottish political nationalism and membership of the SNP. Helpfully and by way of providing me with something to respond to, Paul Hutcheon has a polemic in the Sunday Herald this morning on what he styles “Salmond’s Cod Nationalism” which he thinks obscures the “bigger picture”. Read it, reflect on it – and I’ll hope to have something written about it during the early part of next week.