“And that’s why South Park is wise. At the end of the Scientology episode Tom Cruise shouts ‘I’m gonna sue you, I’m gonna sue you in England!’” Ben Goldacre tells Varsity when he refers to the ludicrous state of British libel law and how it is against credible journalism. Goldacre lectured in Cambridge as part of the public 2010 Darwin lecture series (taking place from the 25th January until the 5th March); he talked about AIDS denialism, UK journalism, the ludicrous state of British libel law and being sued.

Ben Goldacre has become a media champion for “unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks” via his notorious ‘Bad Science’ column in The Guardian since 2003. It has spawned Bad Science, the book which has sold 180,000 copies and reached number one in the paperback non-fiction charts.

South Park jokes aside, Goldacre is more than happy to discuss his own experience. “I got sued by Matthias Rath, the vitamin pill salesman from Europe and America who went to South Africa and started taking out adverts in national newspapers saying that anti-retroviral drugs would kill you, that they were a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry and that the answer to the aids epidemic was here and it was vitamin pills. I pointed out the danger of this, especially within the context of a country with an AIDS denialist president, Taibo Mbeki, a country where around 350,000 people died unnecessarily because of AIDS denialist policies pursued by the government. When I pointed out the foolishness of that, he sued us.”  He continues “and that is not the important part of the story; the case ran for nineteen months, he failed, it cost us £535,000 to defend the case and we only got £365,000 back. That means the cost of successfully defending a libel case that is brought against you is 170 grand and that is roughly the same as an average-priced home in the UK.”

Whist the Matthias Rath case has been well publicised, he is keen to point out this is something which affects all journalists in the UK, he refers to Peter Wilmshurst, a cardiologist, who is currently being sued by a medical device company and Simon Singh, interviewed recently by Varsity, a science journalist, who is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association. “What that means is with the costs being so high the ultimate end product of that is that people do not write challenging stories and if you don’t write challenging stories then the public don’t have access to information. This isn’t about journalists wanting to be able to write about stuff, this is about whether the public have access to information and at the moment the British libel laws deprive people of that.”

British libel laws are so bad that people are coming to England just to sue. “There are newspapers in America that are talking about pulling out of the UK market and not distributing papers in the UK and blocking UK web access because they are concerned about our libel laws and they’re right to be. There is a Tunisian Sheikh who sued an Arabic TV station based in Dubai, broadcasting in Arabic, not in English and he sued them in London. When a Danish newspaper writes about an Icelandic bank, they get sued in London.”

Court cases aside, does he think British journalism has improved with respect to accurate reporting?

“No, absolutely not, nothing has changed in British media news reporting. British news media coverage of health is in many cases so bad that it poses a serious risk to public health. You need to make sure people know that they can’t trust what they read in the papers and I think anybody who argues against that is frankly irresponsible.”