BANNING RUPERT'S JOURNOS
The press: Paul Johnson
discusses the Labour Party's selective accreditation policy
REMARKABLY little protest has been evoked by the decision of the Labour Party (in addition to the TUC) to ban the four Rupert Murdoch papers, the Times, Sun- day Times, Sun and News of the World, from its conference, in the sense of denying them accreditation. The four papers made their own arrangements to cover the event nonetheless, and are not keen to draw attention to the restriction. Their rivals have obviously not made a fuss. The BBC tries not to publicise news damaging to its Labour patrons. The NUJ actually favours limitations on press freedom imposed by the Left.
But some comments are in order. First, it says a lot for the weakness and cowardice of Neil Kinnock as leader that he allows the trade union bosses to dictate which journalists he should see or not. I cannot conceive Clem Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell or Harold Wilson knuckling under to this kind of veto. Even Jim Callaghan is pub- lishing his memoirs through a firm in which Murdoch has a major interest. Of course Labour leaders are continuing to see Mur- doch journalists secretly. But in public at least they cower dutifully beneath the syndicalist lash.
Second, it seems to me characteristic of the modern Labour Party that it should accept and operate such a ban almost without a word of discussion, let alone debate. In the old days there would always have been a few Labour MPs with the guts and orneriness to cry foul at this attack on press freedom, which is also, of course, an attack on the rights of the public. But Labour today is so deeply anti-creative, so organically and instinctually lacking in any positive impulses, that it actually likes banning things or people, for its own sake. Its motto is: accentuate the negative. To ban, to boycott, to embargo, to exclude, blacklist, close down, shut up, silence, censure — these are the things which now come naturally to it, perhaps the only things it really knows how to do.
Third, there is the legality of the Labour Party banning a large section of the press because of an industrial dispute to which it is not a party. The assumption that the ban is lawful rests on the proposition that the Conference is a private event, and that Labour has a perfect right to invite, or not to invite, anyone it chooses. But in what sense can the policy-forming meeting of the principal opposition party, which claims it is about to take over the govern- ment of the country, be called private? By what precise right or authority has a political party the unfettered power to impose these restrictions on people whose employer it happens to dislike? I can imagine several Common Law and statu- tory rights which may thus be infringed. I can see why News International, which still hopes to get a negotiated settlement of the Wapping dispute, is not anxious to take the Labour Party to law. All the same, I think it is a pity that the opportunity had not been taken to have what is, prima facie, a plain infringement of press freedom, tested in the courts.
It is worth noting that such a ban would not have been possible in the United States. In the first place, no political party would conceivably have dared to impose it. In the second place, it would almost certainly have been declared unlawful. Under the First Amendment, the media have constitutional rights, and if they are infringed the courts are open to its mem- bers. This is one of the many ways, we should remember, in which the United States is a much more free and democratic country than our own. The federal courts have always been ready to put down the kind of high-handed behaviour of which the Labour Party, at the command of the union bosses, has been guilty. The British media has an incorrigible habit of sneering at the American way of doing things. But America is the only country in the world where the institutional structure is geared to taking press freedom as seriously as the journalists do themselves. When an Amer- ican journalist is arrested by the Soviets, the whole establishment, from the Presi- dent down, pulls out all the stops. The Daniloff affair is regarded as an affront to the entire nation. You can't see such a reaction here, where the Foreign Office treats a journalist as a nuisance, and not even a necessary one.
One final point that strikes me about the Labour ban is that the four Murdoch papers missed an excellent opportunity to accept the wishes of the Labour Party and stay away from Blackpool altogether. Its four editors went to considerable trouble and expense to provide all the coverage they would have produced if properly accredited. (I may say that, at the TUC, the Murdoch papers contrived to have two reporters present throughout, one of whom, it is said, took part in an important vote). Admirable tenacity, no doubt, but is this not to accept the media fiction that party conferences are of earth-shaking importance and deserve all the column- inches and air-time they get? Of course they produce news, or rather 'news', in the sense that news expands to fill the space and time that have been allotted to it. As I pointed out at this year's TUC, party conferences and the like fit in well with journalistic habits of inertia and lack of enterprise. It is easy, ready-made stuff. If a paper sends six reporters to Blackpool they will produce six conferences stories every day, but that does not mean any is of the slightest importance.
Americans, quite rightly, do not have these annual ranting-weeks, and when they hold a party convention it actually does something decisive — picks a presidential candidate. Over here, the conference held by the party in power clearly has some significance because senior ministers ex- plain what they are doing and often make policy announcements. But it is a purely British media convention that the yearly get-togethers of opposition parties merit premium news treatment for an entire week. I have been attending these gather- ings, gritting my teeth, for 30 years, and I believe they are less and less newsworthy. Increasingly I see them as media events, rather than real ones. The truth is that, since 1979, nothing of real consequence, with the exception of the founding of the SDP, has occurred in British politics. The party conferences are a stale rehash of stock fodder. If the Murdoch papers had ignored Labour's altogether they would have deprived their readers of nothing that matters — and teaching the comrades that two can play Abominable No-men.
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