The Press
Big Brother Censor
Paul Johnson
Anyone who cares about freedom of publication in this country should be deeply worried by the organised and in- creasingly frequent efforts to use trade anion monopoly power to impose an un- official press censorship. The self- appointed chief censor appears to be Wil- liam Keys, boss of the print union Sogat. So far as I can see, the procedure is as follows. NGA compositors inspect political copy given to them to set by national
displeasing and, if they judge it likely to be uisPleasing to the Left, send it to union
headquarters, with duplicates to Sogat. Keys then decides whether or not to pass it. If he decides against, the local chapels of the newspaper concerned demand 'the right of reply' (that is, the insertion of left-wing material) and/or the suppression of articles, headlines or photographs to Which objection has been taken. If the editor refuses to submit to censorship, he risks the paper not appearing at all; in any case, in the negotiations which this cen- sorship procedure involves.,precious time is wasted, the presses run late and often hundreds of thousands of copies are lost. Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Tines, has told me what happened on Saturday 1 September, on the eve of the Trade Union Congress. Among other day's dealing with union affairs, the next
uay's issue included articles by Peter Wal- ker it,' mP, Joe Ashton MP (the latter sup-
Porting the striking miners), and an extract from a book by Frank Chapple, retiring leader of the Electricians' union. The Walker and Chapple articles were deemed WOnhy of censorship by local union offi- cials, and the matter was referred to Keys, and Tony Dubbins of the NGA, down in Brighton. r Neil himself first got wind of trouble about four in the afternoon. There was a
good deal of to-ing and fro-ing between
telephoning room and machine-room, and telephoning between London and Bright- The articles were :eferred by union rficials to Arthur Scargill and he demand- ed the right of reply in the same issue. At „. P.m. Neil was told that the presses would not start until Keys had heard from ccargill about the article he proposed to lorce the Sunday Times to print. Neil sent Keys a message: there was no possibility of such an article being printed. The union censors then changed their ground. They demanded that the paper print a statement signed by Scargill and his two associates on the NUM, Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield. The time was now 8.30. A deputation of Fathers of the Chapel trooped into Neil's office, where they were told there was no possibil- ity of the paper carrying such a statement either. Neil drew their attention to the Ashton article, and he pointed out that, for the past month, a standing invitation had been given to Heathfield for the NUM to put its case in the Sunday Times, but he had not troubled to avail' himself of it (Scargill's article in the paper last Sunday was a belated compromise).
At 9.45 the presses were still waiting and the men in a chapel meeting. Neil sent a message that, unless the presses were working by 10 p.m., the issue would be scrapped and the building cleared. The remaining men would not be paid, and those who had already been paid would be docked their pay the following week. He had had enough. As he put it, 'Here was Bill Keys attempting to edit the Sunday Times from 60 miles away in Brighton.' The threat of losing pay did the trick and the presses rolled. The paper appeared uncensored but with 300,000 copies lost.
There is plenty of evidence that cen- sorship is now being organised and co- ordinated by the so-called 'Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom', an Orwellian 'Newspeak' body financed by left-wing unions. At a meeting it held in Brighton last week, another Sogat official, Brenda Dean, claimed that on no fewer than four occasions already this year the print unions had carried out this type of censoring of national newspapers, and she exulted: 'What all this demonstrates is that the principle of the right of .reply has been established as something which is accept- able.'
Threats are no longer confined to news- papers; there is also a growing tendency to direct them against individual journalists. There was a typical' incident during the TUC debate on the coal strike, when Keys rushed to the rostrum and furiously de- nounced Robert Taylor, the much re- spected Industrial Editor of the Observer. , Taylor's crime, it appeared, was to mutter sotto voce, 'What about freedom of speech?' when the Electricians' leader, Eric Hammond, was shouted down by the Left, and to remark of Ron Todd, the Transport workers' leader, while he was pledging undying support to Scargill, 'He can't even get his lorry drivers out.' Taylor was later told, 'Keys is out for your blood', and he confessed to me that he felt 'intimidated and threatened'.
No one who listened to the TUC debate on the media last Thursday afternoon can have been left in much doubt that a future Labour government would introduce offi- cial control of the press in some form. Motion 104, embodying the censorship campaign policy, was passed unanimously, and Alan Sapper, speaking on behalf of the TUC General Council, was quite open about future intentions: 'We need a statu- tory Communications Council' (a Ministry of Truth?), so that 'one day we will have a national media we can be proud of. That, he added, 'is what Motion 104 is working towards'.
In the meantime, the unofficial cen- sorship efforts of the print unions will, I believe, be intensified, and it is time MPs, and indeed the Government itself, took an interest. 'We must not continue to allow a few private individuals to blindfold and gag the nation.' That, ironically enough, was Keys talking about newspaper proprietors. His words apply far more accurately to the censorship activities of himself and his cronies.
It is my belief that some kind of statute dealing with the media is now inevitable. Ministers and Tory MPs must recognise that the Left's campaign to censor the press is fed by genuine grievances. The press in Britain is much hated and with reason. The Press Council is useless, especially now it has chosen to wallow in the gutter itself. Broadcasting complaints bodies are equal- ly ineffective. Members of the public ought to have a statutory Right of Reply. More important, in my view, certain invasions of privacy ought to be made an offence punishable by heavy fines and, in extreme cases, by imprisonment. But such curbs on irresponsible or evil journalism, whether in the press or on TV, should be accompanied by statutory protection for newspapers and TV companies, which are highly vulner- able to attempts by monopoly unions to exercise censorship. I want to see the sleazy 'investigative journalist' in the dock; I want to see the arrogant union censor there too.
Previous page
