The Press: Censorship Grows Bold

“I do not like the Daily Mirror. I never have liked it. I do not like that form of journalism at all. . . . I don’t find it necessary to indulge in that form of pornography.”

With these words Britain’s Laborite M.P. Aneurin Bevan (not to be confused with Labor Minister Ernest Bevin) last week went to the defense of freedom of the press in Britain. In the same debate in the House of Commons many another pungent word was spoken, for the fact was—and Britain was awakening to it—that wartime freedom of the press in the English-speaking world was now actually, openly and seriously threatened.

In the House redheaded Minister of Information Brendan Bracken announced a new censorship on news exported from Britain: instead of limiting censorship of dispatches sent overseas to military information, British censors are now empowered to kill anything “calculated to create ill feeling between the United Nations or between them and a neutral country”—including matter that has been published by the press in Britain. For some time U.S. censors have been guilty of censoring outgoing press dispatches on a similar basis, but last week the U.S. went a step further and also ordered the censoring of U.S. periodicals sent out of the country (including TIME Air Express).

These two new kinds of censorship, whether wise or unwise, do not affect freedom of the press within either Britain or the U.S. But they came simultaneously with a broad attack on press freedom by the Churchill Government.

Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, who threatened fortnight ago to gag the London Daily Mirror’s caustic criticism of the Government (TIME, March 30), instead of backing down under the fierce drubbing which was administered to him by virtually the entire British press and a good part of the House of Commons, returned to the attack, under an even fiercer drubbing.

To a tempestuous House, Cockney Morrison announced that he would “take any action in my power against any newspaper which conducts itself in such a way as to promote opposition to the successful conduct of the war. . . . If that newspaper [the Mirror] goes on with the pernicious line it has conducted, I tell the House it will be suppressed and the Government, having done that, will submit itself to the judgment of the House. . . . If the House has a division on such an issue and I go down, I will go down—and out.”

No one accused the Mirror of divulging military information (hitherto the sole topic of British censorship). The crime of the Mirror was in criticizing the Government, the productive effort and the efficiency of the Army—criticizing it continuously, bitterly and intemperately. (Sample attack on the Army by the Mirror’s “Cassandra”: “At the top you have the military aristocracy of the Guards’ regiments with a mentality not very foreign to that of Potsdam. In the center you have a second-class snobocracy and behind it all the cloying inertia of the Civil Service bogged down by regulations from which they cannot extricate themselves.”)

Despite recent bumbling in Hong Kong and Singapore—which remained military backwaters on the other side of the world—the British army as a whole has had a vigorous overhauling to elevate able young officers, regardless of social background. The great majority of honest observers regard the Mirror’s attacks as sensational and irresponsible journalism. So the case of the Mirror raises the issue of freedom of the press in its most poignant form: men are called upon to defend the right of a paper to publish opinions which may be, and probably are, grossly unfair.

To suppress the Mirror, if it did not mind its tongue, Secretary Morrison threatened to use Section 2D of the Defense Regulations (which allows the Government to suppress a paper without warning or trial), a law that was passed by a slim majority in the invasion-threatened summer of 1940—passed with the express statement by the Government that it would not be used except in case of dire peril. Liberal M.P. Wilfrid Roberts drew cheers when he recalled these facts.

Herbert Morrison had some supporters, among them Humorist A. P. Herbert, who said of the Mirror’s attacks on brass hats: “By God, that particular passage about the Army is a damned disgusting blackguardly thing.”

But Laborite Bevan, who declared that he never had liked the Mirror, really put Herbert Morrison on the spot. He casually pulled a bundle of clippings from his pocket and began reading from articles that Morrison himself had written for the Mirror before he became a member of the Government. One said that “the people want less muddled advice from the top”; another, that War Minister Hore-Belisha had been ousted by the brass hats because he wanted to democratize the army.

“Could there be any more seditious suggestion,” cried Bevan, “at the very time when the British Army was in France facing the enemy . . . undermining confidence in the High Command just as much as anything the Daily Mirror has printed since?”

Morrison, ordinarily a jolly, cocky man, blanched visibly. But he did not back down. It seemed clear that he was acting on instructions from the highest authority.

Speaking to the Conservative Party the same day, Winston Churchill had said: “I cannot allow, while I bear chief responsibility, a propaganda to disturb the Army, which is now so strong and solid, or to weaken the confidence of the country and the armed forces in the quality and character of our devoted corps of officers.”

Evidently Churchill, believing in the righteousness of his efforts, had made up his mind to sacrifice freedom of the press if he thought it necessary to preserve morale and confidence—for a censorship that once gets a broad charter to preserve morale can proceed ruthlessly to suppress press freedom. (Said London’s Times bluntly: The purpose of censorship “must not be to maintain morale—not because morale should not but because it cannot be maintained by suppression. The lesson of France on that point is final.”)

With the Churchill Government already wavering in popularity, it looked as if the question of free press might possibly decide its fate—either by suppressing criticism of its efforts or by costing it still more popularity.

Significantly, at week’s end, the Mirror’s biting Columnist “Cassandra”—burly, 32-year-old, Irish-born William Neil Connor —announced he was quitting to join the Army. Britain’s most detested, adored, vastly read gadfly thus said farewell: “I am still a comparatively young man and I propose to see whether the rifle is a better weapon than the printed word. Mr. Morrison can have my pen—but not my conscience. Mr. Morrison can have my silence—but not my self-respect.”