{"id":504,"date":"2006-01-18T11:42:28","date_gmt":"2006-01-18T10:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2006\/01\/18\/bigots_intimidate_with_no-fee_lawsuits"},"modified":"2025-10-10T22:17:52","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T21:17:52","slug":"bigots_intimidate_with_no-fee_lawsuits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2006\/01\/18\/bigots_intimidate_with_no-fee_lawsuits","title":{"rendered":"Bigots intimidate with no-fee lawsuits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The British train drivers&#39; union <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aslef.org.uk\/\">Aslef<\/a> was recently sued for libel by a member of the British National Party after a Virgin train driver was called a racist in Aslef&#39;s magazine, the Loco Journal.  The plaintiff, who stood for the BNP as a candidate in the London borough of Bexley in 2002, called himself &quot;pro-white and pro-British&quot;; the British far right have stopped bashing Jews now that they see a few more votes in attacking Pakistanis instead.  Aslef ended up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/farright\/story\/0,,1684437,00.html\">paying out \u00a330,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Today, a representative for Aslef&#39;s legal firm writes that Aslef were not in fact &quot;defeated&quot;, but paid out because it would have cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds to defend the suit, which they could not have recovered from the plaintiff because of the &quot;no-win, no-fee&quot; arrangement under which he sued, an arrangement not available to defendants.  This means that the cost of defending a libel action can run into the annual salary of 100 journalists, meaning that these writers have to find &quot;tame descriptions&quot; of the BNP&#39;s policies.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The BNP did not defeat us\" href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/comment\/story\/0,3604,1688904,00.html\">The Guardian: The BNP did not defeat us<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The British train drivers&#39; union Aslef was recently sued for libel by a member of the British National Party after a Virgin train driver was called a racist in Aslef&#39;s magazine, the Loco Journal.&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-far_right","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-88","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42621,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions\/42621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}