On Sunday 2/4/2017, The Mail on Sunday Newspaper (editorially independent from the Daily Mail) published a very lurid front page article using emotive terms like "blood money", complaining about a video by Joerg Sprave on You Tube's "Slingshot Channel" in which Mr Sprave demonstrated the weaknesses of a kind of stab vest which is being sold to private citizens in Germany who are concerned about being attacked, whether by muggers or terrorists.
The article also appeared on the "Daily Mail" website, which is a third editorially independent entity, which publishes material from both Mail newspapers as well as many unique articles which are biased towards American readers. When the author of this blog searched the site this afternoon, it produced a list of several articles mentioning Mr Sprave in a non-defamatory way, but Sunday's article was not on the list.
The text of the article was highly biased and defamatory and accused Mr Sprave of deliberately helping terrorists. It claimed that the stab proof vest he tested was the same type as worn by the late PC Palmer, who was murdered at the Palace of Westminster by Adrian Elms. Mr Sprave was astonished by this claim, as his object in making the video had been to establish whether the stab vest being sold to the general public, actually offered any protection against being stabbed, and his findings were that it was useless. He refused to believe "that Her Majesty issues this crap to policemen." The claim does not, in fact, appear to be true: the two stab vests are different. Someone at the Home Office would deserve to be sacked if they proved to be the same! It is obvious from PC Palmer's death, however, that the stab vest he was actually wearing was equally ineffective, but in a different way, and that hard questions do indeed need to be asked of Home Office officials and very senior police officers. The Mail on Sunday's article could fairly be seen as an attempt to divert the public's attention from asking such questions.
The Mail on Sunday also filed a "Community Standards Strike" against Mr Sprave, which resulted in You Tube taking down his video and threatening his right to post any more. You Tube did this without apparently examining the video in any depth at all, or they would have realized that the Mail on Sunday were lying.
Mr Sprave tested the stab vest by stabbing it, not at a weak point, but in the middle of the chest, where the protection includes a flat aluminium plate, using a dagger which he had made himself. Making an effort, as if he were a terrorist seriously trying to hurt somebody, he was able to pierce the aluminium plate three times. A previous video had shown Mr Sprave testing various weapons against a polycarbonate riot shield and visor, as used by the German police, and he found that these successfully resisted all the weapons, including a very powerful Russian crossbow, that he had been able to buy without a firearms licence in Germany. He was able to pierce the riot shield and visor only by using an improvised airgun of ridiculous power which he had built himself. He concluded that German police riot gear was pretty good and would protect officers from any distance weapon that rioters could readily lay their hands on.
His speculation about the stab vest, was that perhaps it could be improved by using a polycarbonate plate rather than an aluminium one. On this point it is important to note that when polycarbonate is used in armour type applications, it is specially toughened, using a process first devised by ICI during the troubles in Ulster. The sheets of stock polycarbonate sold by industrial suppliers like RS Components have not been toughened: partly to keep them cheap, but mainly to make it possible for users to actually bend and form the sheet into whatever it is they are trying to make. For everyday uses, the virtue of polycarbonate is that it bends.
The same may kind of thing may be true of the aluminium plate in the stab vest that Mr Sprave consumer tested: stock aluminium plate is often supplied in an untreated or even annealed form, to make it easier to shape it into a product. Heat treating it for hardness is best done when all the cutting and shaping is finished. The plate in the stab vest was very shiny and betrayed no obvious signs of heat treatment. The toughness of aluminium can be roughly doubled by a pressure treatment process, where shaped and otherwise finished objects are placed in an argon-filled pressure vessel and heated to near the melting point of aluminium whilst being subjected to very high pressure. This is how aluminium turbofan-engine fan-blades are made tough enough to actually work!
The US Army's new Advanced Combat Helmet Generation II is made of a toughened form of high density polyethylene, which is lighter than Kevlar but just as strong, and which can be moulded into fairly complex shapes, as in the helmet. This material might enable a new generation of stab vests to be made, which offer protection to body joints and other places where flat aluminium plates offer no protection at all. The key question about the Advanced Combat Helmet is "what happens when troops come under artillery fire using white phosphorus ammunition?" which could be very pertinent in combat with with the forces of North Korea or even Russia, which are likely to bombard US Army rear areas with white phosphorus shells by the trainload. Chunks of burning phosphorus are likely to burn through any helmet made of toughened polyethylene; indeed, they can burn through car roofs, so they might even burn through old fashioned steel helmets.
Firstly, he should use the You Tube appeal process, such as it is, to challenge the Community Standards Strike, which threatens his right to make and post videos on subjects which will entertain, inform and in some cases protect, his viewers.
He should resist well meant advice to sue for libel, as this is an expensive and unwieldy instrument. Success in a libel court doesn't actually prove that the defamatory material was untrue, either, and it is therefore completely useless for clearing your name in the public eye. "Reform" of the libel laws means that a libel claim can now only be heard at the High Court, where costs are astronomical.
A claim of "Malicious Falsehood", while being harder to prove (though perhaps not in this case!) would, if successful, establish for the record that the Mail on Sunday article was actually untrue and designed to harm Mr Sprave. The Sun newspaper was successfully sued for Malicious Falsehood a few years ago: it can be done. (The Plaintiff couldn't afford the cost of a libel claim.) The blog author believes that this kind of claim can still be dealt with in the County Court, where costs are more reasonable and cases dealt with faster. It is worth taking legal advice on this, though, because the Cameron government tampered, heavily, with this area of the law, mainly to please the billionaire Max Mosley.
Perhaps the best course of action would be a complaint, which does not need expensive legal representation, to the press standards body which the Mail group newspapers have agreed to be bound by, which is the Independent Press Standards Organisation or IPSO.
IPSO only accepts complaints from the injured party, not third parties, but the process is designed to be reasonably swift and fair. Pertinently, its rulings, unlike a libel ruling, will generally say whether an offending article was true or untrue! They can fine the offending newspaper up to a million pounds, which should sting adequately.
There is another press regulator extant, "Impress" which is solely funded by Max Mosley and which is boycotted by nearly all British newspapers. There is no point whatsoever in complaining to Impress, when there is an independent regulator that the newspapers all recognize and have signed up to and have agreed to be bound by. Impress will probably be wound up soon.
Update:
While this article was being written, You Tube agreed to remove the Community Standards Strike against Mr Sprave and he is going to lightly edit and re-upload the video which The Mail on Sunday objected to. That leaves the matter of the false and defamatory Mail on Sunday article to be resolved.
Update:
While this article was being written, You Tube agreed to remove the Community Standards Strike against Mr Sprave and he is going to lightly edit and re-upload the video which The Mail on Sunday objected to. That leaves the matter of the false and defamatory Mail on Sunday article to be resolved.
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