Censorship
From Professor Antony Flew
Sir: I read with a shudder of foreboding the story in The Spectator (May 10) of ,how the Director was prevented by trades union action from publishing an advertisement already accepted and approved by its Editor. For like many philosophers I had a week or so ago received a circular letter from the Editorial Board of the Yugoslav liberal marxist journal Praxis, explaining why they had had to cease publication: "Quite recently the printing house in which the Yugoslav Edition of. Praxis has been printed since its first issue sent us a written notice saying that the political activists and the governing body of this Organisation of Associated Work have taken the decision that in the future the service of printing the journal Praxis should be discontinued'. Accordingly we have no other choice but to state that further publication of the Yugoslav Edition of the journal Praxis has been rendered impossible."
As Mr Michael Foot is of course gleefully aware, and as the professed liberals and moderates in the Labour Party are now trying so hard not to know, left-wing socialist censorship in Britain will, as in Yugoslavia, work through the unions rather than, as in the USSR, through the official state machinery.
A. G. N. Flew University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading
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