PRESS FREEDOM AND CENSORSHIP BY WORKERS

HL Deb 10 April 1974 vol 350 cc1290-331

6.9 p.m.

LORD ORR-EWING rose to draw attention to the desirability of an official inquiry or a Royal Commission to examine the manner in which people working in the Press are increasingly exercising censorship on the content of advertisements, comments and news, and to the effect that this has on the freedom of the Press; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity, in the last debate before the Easter Recess, to draw attention to something which is very precious in this House and in our country; and that is the freedom of the Press and the part it plays in our democracy.

I feel that our newspaper industry is sick at a time when democracy, if not sick, is certainly strained and ailing in important quarters. In a true democracy we take the freedom of the Press very seriously indeed, and I should like to draw attention to one element of this which I believe is being eroded and which should be publicised—that is, the increasing tendency for a few of those working in printing to exercise their power over the content of advertisements, caricatures, news and comment. The Prime Minister has said that he might appoint an inquiry to look into the ownership of the Press. That is a view, incidentally, shared by the Left Wing trade union leader, Mr. Briginshaw of NATSOPA. I am sure it is not for that reason that the Prime Minister has expressed this desire. The Leader of the Opposition has urged him also to look at the economic factors now besetting the Press. Everyone of your Lordships will agree that certainly the economics are currently very alarming.

The very steep rise in the cost of newsprint has highlighted the crisis which is developing. The newsprint bill will jump from £140 million to £210 million for the "nationals" this year. This is an enormous increase and burden for the newspapers to carry. I think it is also recognised—and the Economist Intelligence Unit published a report on this in 1966—that pay in the newspaper industry is on the generous side compared with almost every other industry. The figure of £100 a week is not unusual; I think some of the more highly specialised operatives in the Financial Times might be earning £200 a week.

It is also true to say that the Economist Intelligence Unit was right when it drew attention to the degree of over-manning; it reckoned that 50 per cent. more men were employed in the machine rooms above what was strictly necessary, and 50 per cent. more men were employed in the process department above what was necessary; there was also 30 per cent. over-manning in the foundry. Also there is a need to look at the training and entry into the industry. In some areas there has been very little recruitment over many years, and one knows of people of a very extreme age still being employed. There was a recent case of one person who was aged 90 and still working. I am sure that that was exceptional; but certainly the retirement age is not rigidly adhered to as it is in so many other industries.

Also, it is a pity when the finances of our newspapers are under severe strain that there has been almost a Luddite approach to the more modern machinery and modem ways of type-setting on newspapers; the computer type-setting techniques which are used widely in other countries, even in Eastern European countries—Czechoslovakia uses them extensively—have not been adopted here. I believe the Evening Standard tried it for a period of two years but eventually had to call it off. They were not allowed to state that this was due to union difficulties; but I believe that the pay structure was one of the great objections to the introduction of this new, labour-saving technique.

In Holland and Canada one finds women typists operating computer typesetting machines. I have a feeling that unless something is done in this country we shall not get women typists operating and setting our Press in this century. I also noticed, as will your Lordships, that although we now have laws against discrimination in our country it is strange that whenever you ring up a newspaper you always speak to a male telephone operator. I know there is a good excuse, that is, that they are ready to take shorthand notes, but I have never found the female sex either slow in operating telephone switchboards or slow in taking accurate shorthand notes. Most of us have had to live with private secretaries—I am sorry, my Lords, perhaps I should re-phrase that remark!

SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS

Hear, hear!

LORD ORR-EWING

My Lords, many of us have had wide experience of dictating hundreds of letters to outstanding and understanding women secretaries who help us deal with our Parliamentay correspondence.

One of the greatest difficulties for our newspapers is that they are so desperately vulnerable to stoppages; this is particularly so when the first edition is coming up and has to catch trains to all parts of the country. If a newspaper does not catch the distribution network, it is a perishable article which is no use at all the following day. We in industry can try to make up time if we have stoppages and difficulties; we can try to accelerate the production time so that we can catch up and meet the needs of our customers particularly our export customers. But that is not possible with newspapers. If you miss the connection, all the money is wasted, and very often an immense sum of money is involved.

On March 30, the Scottish Daily Express ceased printing in Glasgow. This was sad, and one understands the anxieties locally where unemployment is relatively high. If you look at the stoppages which that newspaper has had to cope with in the last 13 months—and I have a list in my hand—there were no less than 56 in a period of just over a year. Forty of these were truly damaging and only 16 less damaging. How impossible it must be to build up a reputation in a newspaper for punctuality and delivery of communication which so many breakfast tables depend on when you have that degree of stoppage and disorganisation! It is interesting to see that this compares with no stoppages in 12 years at the Daily Express office in Manchester. You have the same newspaper, one in Glasgow with 56 stoppages in a year and at another printing centre, Manchester, no stoppages in 12 years. This is a very marked difference which cannot be entirely through management's fault; there must be a whole host of other reasons as well. I notice that management readily accepts that some of the responsibility rests with them.

On the last edition of the Scottish Daily Express the self-styled Action Committee took a news story off the front page (and I also have an example of this) after this page had been passed by the editor for publication. They inserted their own news. This is surely an unwarranted interference with the liberty and management of that paper. The story they put in said that they were promised considerable Government support if they set up their own newspaper. I hope that the Minister, when he comes to reply, will tell us that that is not a fully justified statement. This was the latest action in union censorship which came about long after I put down this particular Motion for debate in your Lordships' House.

I want to take a few examples which have affected both our national and provincial newspapers over the past years. In the past four years there have been a growing number of instances in which printing union workers have either prevented the publication of material with which they disagree or have allowed its publication only with disclaimers which have to be printed alongside. On May 3, 1970, the Observer published a long report on conditions in the newspaper industry. This was fairly unusual, because newspapers do not normally report very extensively on their own misgivings, anxieties and difficulties.

In the following week the newspaper published a lengthy reply from the father of the branch of SOGAT, which stands for the Society of Graphical and Allied Trade Unions. The Observer received a letter from a printer describing himself as, "a not very proud member of the silent majority who seemed to be content to watch papers bleed and die." The Observer decided to print this anony-mously, as the man wished. He did not want to risk his trade union membership by being identified. While the early editions were being printed, four union leaders demanded that his name and address should be printed, or the letter should be removed instantly. Later workers stopped all production. The editor finally gave way to the unions and the letter was withdrawn. The editor said he did not feel very proud of the action he had been forced to take.

On December 9, 1971, Jak, that well-known Evening Standard cartoonist, drew up a cartoon referring to the power workers' strike. The cartoon appeared in the first edition of that paper. The Federated House Chapel voted to stop production immediately. After negotiation, the editor agreed to a disclaimer from the unions being published. This contained the words: The Chapel most strongly deprecates the cartoon and feels it goes above and beyond the bounds of humour and fair comment. I will now give an example of a provincial paper. In January, 1971, the Bristol Evening Post planned to publish a report of a rally which was held by NATSOPA members to protest against the Industrial Relations Bill. The NATSOPA members objected to this report and refused to produce the paper's last edition. Here is another case of disruptive action.

In October, 1971, the Daily Express was involved in an incident, the first, I think, when journalists supported the stoppage on account of editorial content. The father of the chapel of the N.U.J. objected to a cartoon by Cummings which linked the supply of I.R.A.'s arms and bombs to the U.S.S.R. The journalists voted for the cartoon to be changed. Later, engineers and technicians stopped work, and over 350,000 copies of the paper were lost. The key figure in so many of these is Mr. Richard Briginshaw, who is the General Secretary of NATSOPA. He is acknowledged to be a militant Left-Wing extremist. There were two instances of censorship which involved him personally.

In November, 1970, the Observer published an article concerning the efforts of a small group in NATSOPA to prevent the break-up of SOGAT in which their union then constituted a Division, known as Division 1. Briginshaw threatened to stop publication of the Observer forthwith if the article was published. His action was partially successful, since the article was held back. More recently, Mr. Briginshaw's expression of wrath prevented the Evening Standard from publishing the news that he is a director of an agency through which all clerical vacancies in NATSOPA are recruited. Fortunately this news was printed by a paper which your Lordships will probably study most assiduously, Private Eye, and later in the Spectator. Private Eye of July 13, 1973, reported that when Mr. Jeremy Deeds, of the Evening Standard, referred this to Mr. Briginshaw he got the reply: Mr. Deeds, I would not like to put you into a position whereby the production of your newspaper this evening could be affected. The journalist asked if this was threatening industrial action on the Evening Standard, when Mr. Briginshaw repeated the threat in the same terms.

I notice, my Lords, that he is due to retire shortly, and David Wilson, of the Observer, discovered from him that he would not spurn a peerage if it was offered to him. He went on to explain that one attraction was that he could fight for the abolition of the House of Lords from within this Chamber. I hope that we shall civilise him (shall I say?) if he does appear among us and point out how much we value the newspaper industry and freedom in our democracy.

I now turn to what instigated my action, and that was an advertisement which I have in my hand and which appeared in The Times, on Friday, the 27th. Your Lordships may have seen it under the heading."Banned—The Threat to Press Freedom." That was an advertisement sponsored by Aims of Industry. This organisation was convinced that in most cases the difficulties they met in placing this advertisement arose from the print unions. They met their first difficulty over an advertisement attacking the extreme Left of the trade union movement. This came in the Sunday Express where there was difficulty with the workers, and where the paper was forced to carry a notice from them disclaiming the advertisement. The paper also offered free advertising space the following Sunday to Mr. Ray Buckton, the Left Wing Leader of ASLEF. He did not, in fact, take it up.

Then there was also an effort to publish advertisements in the Daily Mirror. Later on the I.P.C. announced that all Aims of Industry advertisements were banned in that paper, both the anti-extremist ones and those attacking Labour's nationalisation plans. There were two sets of advertisements. One was attacking the extreme Left Wing of the unions, and the other was attacking the nationalisation plans by the trade unions—

LORD ARDWICK

My Lords, did the noble Lord say that the Daily Mirror announced this?

LORD ORR-EWING

No, my Lords. If I said that, I did not mean it: I was speaking very carefully. Initially the Daily Mirror published advertisements, but later the I.P.C. announced to Aims of Industry, as I understand it, that Aims' advertisements were banned. They had a very healthy response from those advertisements. I think that 17,000 of the very large readership of the Daily Mirror wrote, and a great majority of these letters approved the tone of the advertisements. The noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, is going to speak next in this debate. Since he is one of our great experts in this House in this field with a great deal of experience, I am sure he will throw light on this particular subject.

The Sunday Times accepted their anti-extremist advertisement. But when it appeared, so did another, on the opposite page, from the joint NATSOPA chapels. This attacked the Conservative Government and carried pictures of Mr. Heath and all the other Tory Leaders. I do not know whether the pictures were flattering or not, or whether during a General Election campaign the Representation of the People Act was near being broken. Aims of Industry then decided to try to press for a Royal Commission on the freedom of the Press and on broadcasting, and it took full page advertisements in The Times and The Guardian to say so. I will show noble Lords that advertisement. The Times lost production while a disclaimer was being agreed. This disclaimer said: The night printing workers of The Times, while disagreeing with the content of the Aims of Industry advertisement on page 11, are proving their belief in the freedom of the Press by printing this advertisement. Well, my Lords, I do not think we object to that. But if it is always a condition that you stop the Press while you are organising a disclaimer, it is certainly an interference, and it is certainly damaging financially to the Press affected.

It is sad when I think that in the last two decades we have lost many newspapers with a hundred years of tradition. The News Chronicle has gone; The Star has gone; the Daily Sketch has gone; Reynold's News and others have gone. The Prime Minister has said that there might be an Inquiry into ownership, I think your Lordships will agree there is certainly a need for an examination into the economics of our national papers and our local papers. I hope that this Inquiry will be broadened to look also into the organisation of those who make their career in our newspaper industry. We in this House must be especially vigilant whenever democracy is at risk. I feel that if urgent action is not taken, there is imminent danger of some of our national newspapers collapsing. This would be enormously harmful to the whole fabric of our democracy.

My Lords, if these words are not printed fully, and without a disclaimer at the side, in tomorrow's newspapers, you must draw your own conclusions, and I would hope that my own case for an Inquiry covering all these aspects would be fully made out. I beg to move for Papers.

6.27 p.m.

LORD ARDWICK

My Lords, I am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, for introducing this important subject. He and I have taken part in most of the debates on communications in recent years, and we have always shared a good deal of common ground. He has taken the debate today rather more widely than I had expected from the Order Paper. He has gone into the economics of the industry, which is extremely relevant, but I will not follow him into those paths today. I think that we should have a debate on that aspect of newspapers in the near future.

I have always shared a certain amount of common ground with the noble Lord, and I do so today. I hope the noble Lord will not be disappointed—I am sure he will not be surprised—if I also express sharp differences from him. First of all, let me emphasise our ground of agreement. What we both believe is that it is wrong, and dangerous, for the staffs of newspapers to censor their content. This is not just a personal view that I personally am expressing. My union, the National Union of Journalists, is opposed to all newspaper censorship, whether it is imposed from outside the newspaper office or inside a newspaper office by one of the Chapels, that is by the trade unions inside that office. Another organisation to which I am proud to belong, the International Press Institute, is equally adamant in its belief that an editor's freedom to edit must not be shackled by the staff, or indeed by anybody. After several incidents—including the incident which the noble Lord has recounted this afternoon, incidents in which newspaper production had been impeded or threatened by the staff because they found something in the newspaper which they were producing was unacceptable—I myself took part in a deputation from the British Committee of the Institute which discussed these problems with the Newspaper Publishers' Association. The noble Lord, Lord Goodman, presided at that meeting and I regret that he is not here to participate in the debate this afternoon. The threat to the production from—

LORD WINDLESHAM

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord. We listen to him with the greatest interest and respect on subjects of this kind, but it would help to clear my mind, and perhaps the minds of other noble Lords, if he could just declare his interest. We know what his interest is. Particularly since one or two of the newspapers with which he is connected have been mentioned in the debate already, it would be helpful to have it on the Record at this stage.

LORD ARDWICK

Of course, my Lords; certainly. I was coming to that but I was reserving it until I came to the particular point of criticism of the newspapers which I serve. But it is as well to say that I work for the Mirror newspapers, one of the groups of newspapers which the noble Lord has criticised, although he has criticised that group, I think, rather gently.

As I was saying, threats to the production from newspaper staffs are a fairly recent development. There were dim memories in the industry of something terrible that had happened from the compositors of the Daily Mail during the General Strike, but there was no repetition of this kind of conduct until quite recently—at least, I never heard of it. Well, what has happened? What has changed? There are several interlocking causes. First is the sharpening of the industrial climate in an age of demoralising inflation; next is the contemporary passion for instant, direct action when you have a grievance; and the third is the new candour. In the newspaper industry we used prudently to report our own internal industrial troubles briefly and formally, preferably taking a kind of non-partisan, rather uninformative, formal paragraph from the Press Association. Then the young men in the industry, particularly the young journalists, began to accuse us of cowardice and suppression, and this became a rather fashionable thing to do. But now, of course, whenever a newspaper reports the troubles of its own industry as zealously as it does the troubles of other industries it is always open to the charge that management is using it as an organ of propaganda in the struggle. That is how I think one of the incidents of which the noble Lord has spoken this afternoon began.

Certainly, editors and newspaper managements have given a lot of thought to this problem over the last year or two, and I think there is now a kind of consensus, although there is no formal agreement, about what should be done in these circumstances. If the staff rightly object to an item as inaccurate I think the general feeling is that it should be corrected, just as one would correct any other inaccuracy in the paper. Sometimes a compositor comes to you and says: "Look. I live there. You've got the name of that place wrong"; and you correct it. In the same way, if there is an obvious factual inaccuracy in something you are dealing with, you put it right. If they object, however, that the side of their case is inadequately presented, then I think the general belief, the consensus, is that they should be invited to state it and to print it as soon as possible in a responsible way, which is probably in the next issue. But what editors and management must never do is to withhold an item at the request of the staff simply because they dislike it and they threaten to stop production. Editors and management must be prepared to risk a stoppage rather than to submit to this kind of shop floor censorship. So I think we are agreed so far on this matter.

I come now to a different but related problem: the problem of political advertising. The editorial view was put sharply ail succinctly by the Guardian in dealing with the Aims of Industry problem. On October 19 the Guardian said: Unless political advertisements are factually inaccurate or are misleading, we do not refuse or censor them. It would be wrong to do so. Freedom of the press applies as much to advertisers as to editors. Well, of course it does not really, but, still, it was a rather useful general statement to make. It gives a broad picture of the position. But what is "inaccurate" in political advertising? What is misleading? What indeed, as Pilate asked, is the Truth? One of the dilemmas in this matter is that some aspects of politics are not mere matters of opinion; they are also matters of moral conviction and so they are not arguable; they are absolute. I would myself refuse any political advertising with a racial content, even if it were within the law. I would not have accepted, as The Times did, after very deep and anxious thought about it, I believe, an advertisement which pleaded for a change in the law relating to drugs.

Another dilemma is that an editor must always take care not to outrage his readers. One of his constant preoccupations is the tone of his newspaper. His readers are unique. They are special to him. They are his readers; they are nobody else's readers and he cannot be bound by the rules that guide other editors with other readers. For example, frank and vernacular accounts of sexual experience, which may delight the readers of my old paper the Guardian, or of the Sunday Times, might well horrify the readers of a popular newspaper. Certainly they would not be allowed to appear in any of the popular newspapers for which I have worked. Or an editor who has a powerful cartoonist on his staff may find it necessary to reject, perhaps two or three times a year, a cartoon because it goes beyond the bounds of acceptability. It would outrage too many readers. It would outrage common sense and decency. Cartoonists are like that. They are very brave men. They see things in black and white. And every cartoonist sometimes, once or twice a year perhaps, has to be held back by the most liberal of editors. Sensibility to the tone of his paper, and feeling for the susceptibilities of his readers, is an important aspect of an editor's qualification for his task.

So an editor is under no obligation to print every advertisement which comes to him, even if he cannot fault it as inaccurate or as misleading. He may think it morally indefensible or that it will outrage his readers. I would not expect, for example, the editor of the Catholic Herald to print those lively, provocative advertisements on birth control and venereal disease put out by the Health Education Council. There is a further dilemma, although it is a pretty rare one. What are the effects of the things he is going to print likely to be on the behaviour of readers? Words may restrain or words may incite; they may heal or they may inflame, and their power will depend upon the prevailing public mood.

Now I come to the advertisements devised by the Aims of Industry. Do not let us think of this as a kind of high-minded body which is concerned solely with the political education of the citizens of this country. These, my Lords, were not pieces of well reasoned political philosophy. They have even got that pompous pretence of seriousness that you get in what is now called prestige advertising. Some of them were as arresting and as shocking in their way as are the advertisements of the Health Education Council. They were in fact the most sensational political advertisements ever put out in this country in my recollection. And they were not just a flash in the pan. It was not just a question of the odd advertisement being put in the odd newspaper. They were part of a great and powerful campaign. Aims of Industry collected half a million pounds—so it was said in the newspapers, and it was never contradicted—to buy newspaper space, to print posters and to distribute "literature" on two main themes: the perils of nationalisation and the perils of allowing extremists to take over the British trade union movement.

These themes were the precursors of what were to be two of the main themes in the election campaign of the Party opposite and for that reason—and that reason alone—they were chosen. It was part of a political campaign. One of the advertisements was headed: "Don't be fooled out of your freedom", and it showed a picture of that tyrant and that man of blood who has (thank God!) been dead for twenty years—the late Joseph Stalin. Of course he was denounced by his successors. But this advertisement said, "The Communists who figured so openly in recent industrial disputes are making no secret of their real intentions: they want to destroy the system under which we live. This is their reason—the only reason"—I repeat, my Lords "the only reason"—"for causing dislocation in industry and the maximum of hardship for everybody".

Surely I am not being absurd when I draw the implication from that advertisement that the Aims of Industry were trying to put forward the idea that all recent disputes were caused by Communists; that they were not really industrial disputes, but were part of a revolutionary attack to destroy the system. These advertisements seem to me, and I think to many other people—at least on my side of politics—to make all militants look like Communists and all strikes to look like political strikes. It reminds me of a story about the McCarthyite days in the United States of America, when a little man got up at a meeting and said: "Look, I hate Marx, I loathe Lenin, I detest Trotsky and Stalin and the whole Communist Party, but I must say that I think we are paying too much rent". I think that is the situation that one gets into if one does not watch out. If you take this kind of thing too seriously everybody with a grievance looks like a militant and every militant looks like a Red.

I should like to give two more examples. First, "Are there Reds under the bed?" This was one more of the advertisements in the series. "Is there a plan to wreck our economy in order to change our political system? Does the Communist Party plan to take over the trade unions in order to dominate the Labour Party? We believe the answer is 'Yes'." So do I, my Lords. They have been trying to do this all my life. This is why we have been proscribing their front organisations; this is why we have denied them access to our political Party. Of course they have not succeeded, and they will not succeed. Of course the militants have a field day at the moment when inflation is raging as it never has done before. Inflation raged under the last Government and then of course the rank and file became desperate and reckless and very susceptible to the propaganda of the militants. But the remedy is not a subscription to the Aims of Industry; it is not an advertising campaign; it is a successful counter-inflationary policy, and let us hope to God that this Government manage to find one. As the present Chancellor of the Exchequer has said, inflation is inconsistent with the continuance of our democratic system. That is the enemy; that is the villain. Indeed, the campaign of the Party opposite during the Election died on their lips round about February 15 and when, a day or so later, Mr. Barber appeared on television with a programme rather in the mood of the Aims of Industry advertisements, the nation, and quite a number of the members of the Party opposite, were horrified because he had totally misjudged the mood of the nation, which was much more serious, and more concerned with deeper things than those which Mr. Barber chose to speak about in his programme.

The course of the Daily Mirror—the paper I work for—is well known in this matter. The Daily Mirror published one of the Aims of Industry advertisements before the industrial situation had become so tense. I think the first publication was on December 29, which was when the three-day week was nominally operating but did not appear to be operating because we were still covered by the Christmas and the New Year holiday. Later the Daily Mirror refused advertisements on the grounds that at a time of national emergency they were tendentious and divisive. It does not mean anything to us and it is not regarded as criticism, at least in the Daily Mirror office, that certain newspapers, such as The Times and the New Statesman, printed those advertisements which we did not think suitable. It depends upon your readership. The Times is not the favourite newspaper among members of the National Union of Mineworkers, and, so far as I know, it is not handed eagerly from hand to hand in the factories at Dagenham. But later on the Daily Mirror, when approached by the director of Aims of Industry, did publish an advertisement which was felt to be less divisive, less contentious, though quite a bold and brave and forthcoming advertisement which dealt with nationalisation. Mr. Michael Ivens, the Director of Aims of Industry, has publicly admitted that the Daily Mirror never excused itself for its action on the grounds that its workers would not print the advertisements. They were rejected for what was considered to be good editorial reasons at that particular moment in British history.

Perhaps an inquiry is needed but not, I think, into the freedom of the Press; rather into the freedom of quasi-political organisations which try to spend half a million pounds just before and during a General Election campaign in the hope of securing the defeat of one Party. There is no suggestion that Aims of Industry went outside the law or defied the law. The object of the inquiry (if ever there is one) should be whether the law of elections is in need of amendment. What that body aimed to do, the way in which it was operating and the money it was using, was against the spirit of British election law, that vast wealth should not be used to distort the electoral process.

6.48 p.m.

LORD DRUMALBYN

My Lords, what interested me about the first two speeches—I congratulate my noble friend on having introduced this debate to-day, and we have listened with the greatest interest to what the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, has said—was that there was an underlying agreement on the basic point of what my noble friend was saying. If I took down correctly what the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, said, it was that it was wrong and dangerous for staffs of newspapers to censor their content. I think this is the acre of the whole thing. The noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, accused my noble friend of going a little wide—and my noble friend did so, I think quite rightly, in opening. If I may say so, the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, also went a little wide towards the end of his speech because he was speaking about the responsibilities of an editor and where an editor would be justified in accepting or refusing an advertisement. Nobody would dispute an editor's entire right to accept or reject any article, any report that he received from any of his journalists, any comment that he received in the form of a letter or any advertisement. Nobody doubts that this is entirely the responsibility of the editor, but surely the point is that the editor is trained to exercise this responsibility. He knows how to do it. He wants to keep his paper open to various expressions of opinion and he does that through his columns. He judges news on what is newsworthy—or I suggest he should do so, but that is a point I shall come to a little later—and he accepts advertisements in general because they add to his revenue. But he is free to reject any advertisement, indeed he is required to reject them when they do not conform with the Code of Advertising Practice.

Here perhaps I should declare an interest, as I am the Chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority. This is splendid. No one can criticise in any way an editor for not accepting an advertisement. I would not criticise the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, or the Daily Mirror, or anyone else for not choosing to accept particular kinds of advertisement. I think myself the noble Lord went a little far in criticising the manner in which Aims of Industry seeks to get its views known. After all, what other manner is there in which it can get its views known? The noble Lord may say, "But there was an Election in the offing", but to all intents and purposes that Election might not have been in the offing for 18 months, so it would not have been fair to say that Aims of Industry tried to get its views known when an Election was on the way.

My Lords, surely it is right that all shades of opinion and all types of views should be able to be made known. The other essential point we have to face is that we have all known of instances where it is not a case of the staff saying, "You cannot print that", but it is a case of a general fear (and we have heard of this in many instances) that if certain facts were printed it would cause offence to readers, or would be to the disadvantage of the staff and so would not be acceptable to them. This is one of the underlying fears that exist. There is on the one hand pressure that arises through industrial action not to print an advertisement, not to print a letter, or not to print an article, and so on, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. There is the underlying fear that if such-and-such a story were printed, it would cause an adverse reaction from the readers' point of view, or it might provoke the staff.

One hears examples of stories not printed. One even hears it said: "It is no use our trying to print that story. We would never get it through." We also hear it said by journalists," If I were to print that story, I would never get any further information from the trades unions." We have heard these things said. This is the sort of censorship or fear of censorship that exists in many quarters.

My Lords, I believe that truth has many aspects. Equally, I believe it is entirely wrong for me or for anyone else to insist on only the facet of truth that I wish should be printed, and nothing else. If the facet of truth that I would want to print if I were editor differs from what others wish to see printed, than I would be happy for my part that the others should express their opinions too. But I cannot accept the intolerance that is exemplified in the kind of industrial action which prevents stories, letters, or even advertisements from being printed. I support my noble friend in this. This is something which ought to be included in any kind of inquiry carried out if we are really going to maintain the freedom of our Press. I do not know how others view this, but I think I might end this short speech by quoting the very well-known words of Robert Burns: Here's freedom to them that wad read; Here's freedom to them that wad write. There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard But them wham the truth would indict.

6.58 p.m.

LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY

My Lords, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, has assisted the House by introducing this debate, because it enables us to air some matters which have needed to be publicly aired. I think we are not wrong if we take the debate a little outside the terms of the Motion, as most noble Lords have done so far, because there are a number of matters which interlock. I am intervening in order to make two points—rather distinct ones. I have already apologised to the noble Lords who will be summing up for the fact that I may find it impossible to stay to the end. I apologise also to the House, although at the rate we are going at present I may be able to stay to the end.

My Lords, I thought my speech was not going to be controversial. In terms of the proposer of the Motion and the attitude which the major Parties will take, what I have to say is not controversial, but I find myself with very great timidity crossing swords with someone as experienced and knowledgeable as the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick. I have been a journalist of a kind for some time. I have had quite a lot to do with editing small magazines, never anything other than small magazines, and compared with the noble Lord my experience is virtually nothing. But at an early stage of my career I came to the conclusion that there was something like an absolute duty to publish any advertisement. I think the Guardian was right in what it said, as quoted by the noble Lord. I do not think it has an absolute right. To begin with it has an absolute duty. It is governed by the law and it is governed, I accept, by the Code of the advertising industry, but I do not think it is governed by the fact that advertisements will not necessarily be liked by its readership.

My Lords, I take the view—and I accept what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick—that one's readership is an entity with whom one is carrying on a dialogue. One has a particular kind of people in mind. Obviously the editor is the person who decides what should go into the paper in the ordinary editorial space. Access to the general public is limited. Access to anyone or anybody who wishes to talk to the general public is very limited in this country. If they are to be denied paid access to some of these media because their views are popular or too bluntly put, this is not right. Everyone should have the right to publish advertisements which are not inaccurate, against the law or against the Code of Advertising. Of course, I can think of extreme examples. I did some thinking about whether I, as an editor, would refuse advertisements. I think the New Statesman was quite right to accept the Aims of Industry advertisement. I think it was quite right some time ago to accept the advertisements from South Africa House, which very much annoyed many of its readers. I think the papers who do this are right on the whole, and that wherever there is a question of doubt, it should be resolved in favour of access to the media.

My Lords, some of the more cynical of your Lordships may say that that is a very convenient doctrine for a newspaper owner or editor, or for someone who wishes his paper to make a lot of money to take, that "We all like to get as much money as we can and, to hell with the moles!". But it does not always work quite like that. One of the points implied by the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick (and he will correct me if I am wrong), was that in fact one may well suffer financially by putting in advertisements which are not liked by the readership. Certainly when I had a small magazine called New Christian, which I know one or two of your Lordships have read, the kind of advertisement for the marriage bureaux and those to do with mental health, and so on, which we accepted on the back page were disliked by many of our readers.

I have never been able to weigh up whether or not we gained more revenue from the adverts than we lost in subscriptions, but it must have been a fairly near thing; so it is not always just a matter of it paying. I think that point is in fact one that should be more widely accepted in the newspaper industry than it is: this duty, in a civilisation where we do not offer all that much access to the public, of taking advertisements wherever it is possible. I entirely agree that I dislike a society where a body like Aims of Industry can collect half a million pounds to produce this, and (as I heard from murmurings behind me) if it is said the trade union can produce the same amount to advertise, in fact big business has more money than the trade unions have. I do not like the kind of society where people with the big purses, whether trade unions or big business, can have access to advertising denied to other people. But that is another matter, a matter of the kind of society we live in, and it is not a matter for an editor or newspaper owners.

I move to the second point. It seems to me that the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, was absolutely right to bring into the question of overmanning and the economics of the newspaper industry, the question of—I will not say overpaying, because we should all wish everyone to have as much pay as they can have, but the relative overpaying of people in the newspaper world. I myself would not think that this is at the moment very important at all, but I think the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, initiated this debate because he fears it is something which must grow, and if it did grow then it would become important. I think part of the reason why it could become dangerous is this basic problem of the monopoly position of unions in a small industry, where, it has been said, they can do much harm very quickly if they should so judge. This is the reason why the industry is overmanned; this is the reason why the industry is overpaid; this is the reason why, if the unions decided they wanted to start exercising editorial control or control over advertising, it would take great courage and great stamina from the papers to stand up to them. This is the reason why papers are going broke.

I think we must get down to the basic problem. I beg your Lordships not just to write it off as an opportunity for me to plug what is a bit of my own Party's deeply-felt industrial policy if I say that the only way I see of solving this problem is through an examination into the ownership of the newspaper industry, and, incidentally, through an application of the ideals of co-ownership and co-partnership. I do not want to replace the irresponsibility of the Press Lords—and, thank goodness! these days they are, most of them, extremely responsible; I mean irresponsibility in a technical sense—by the irresponsibility of a workers' co-operative, which may be just as irresponsible.

I should like to see a framework for all industry, but I think it is particularly important in the industry of the media—where there is a co-ownership, co-partnership of capital and labour—so that the industry is not threatening to cut its own throat, as it is at the moment and so that there could be a working together for the good of all. I believe that if we solved the financial problems of the industry and if we managed to tackle some of the more fundamental problems in regard to the unions in the newspaper industry, then much of what we have been talking about would drop into place, would not rear its head so much, would not increase.

This would be a way of tackling many of the ills at their very roots. I think there is no easy way round the problems raised by the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing. Part of his analysis I think we all accept. Except by changing the whole atmosphere in this particular industry and revolutionising it, if any noble Lord can find a better method than the one which I have outlined, which is deeply rooted in my Party's philosophy, I would be glad to hear it. But so far it is the best idea I can think of.

7.6 p.m.

LORD AUCKLAND

My Lords, I join with others in thanking my noble friend, Lord Orr-Ewing, for allowing us to discuss this very topical matter. Unlike most noble Lords who have spoken, I have no connections of any kind with the newspaper industry. I speak very much as a greenhorn here, one who is an avid reader of newspapers, but with, I must confess, little knowledge of the background of newspaper organisation. But I think anybody who has taken part in election campaigns—and I have spoken in some five election campaigns—will perhaps have been conscious of the fact that the reports in some of the newspapers of what goes on in the constituencies may well vary from what one has found, leaving aside one's own political beliefs. This is perhaps why there is a certain scepticism now towards the communications media.

After the recent Election campaign I think almost everybody, politicians and all others, tended to say "Well, we have had enough of politics on the media. Let us get back, for Heaven's sake, to normal viewing". And yet, taking the Motion a little wide for the moment, one has also to accept the fact that there are a number of disabled people and elderly people who cannot get out to the hustings, and must therefore obtain their political information from the media, from television, radio or the newspapers. I join with others in deploring the fact that some of our longstanding newspapers are no longer in existence. My noble friend mentioned the News Chronicle, a paper which, to my mind, epitomised all that is best in journalism, reporting which struck me as being absolutely fair, even when I and others perhaps disagreed with their views. But we are in an age where takeovers are in evidence, and we must perhaps expect certain newspapers and other communication media to go to the wall.

This is where I believe local newspapers play a very vital part. Where I live in Surrey we are fortunate in having a high standard of local journalism, although sometimes one sees in the correspondence column an editor's comment that "this correspondence is now closed". If this is on a national issue this may be justified, but if it is on a local issue then one wonders whether perhaps the editor has not taken rather too much power into his own hands, because there are certain local issues, particularly in any rural part of the country, where newspapers have a very vital role to play.

We all recall the thalidomide tragedy. As one who has particular interest, though not a financial one in the National Health Service, I followed, as did ether noble Lords, the articles and pictures in the Sunday Times on this matter. I believe that the Sunday Times did an admirable job in getting over the publicity on this dreadful matter. I am not a lawyer, and it may well be that legally they were threatening to overstep the bounds. If this is the case, and if it is the law of the land, then it may well be that there had to be some curbing of what they said. But I hope that if a Royal Commission, or any other body, is set up, it will look into such vital matters as the thalidomide tragedy, or any future tragedy of that magnitude, should it by some misfortune occur, so that the maximum publicity can be given, provided that it comes from responsible journalism, without undue censorship taking place for legal reasons.

The position of mental hospitals and other such places is a difficult one when it comes to journalism, because there is a tendency among some newspapers to exaggerate conditions in these places and to give the public outside the impression that the staff are behaving inhumanely. I am sure that this is unintentional, but it gives the wrong idea, particularly to relatives of people in these places. This is another matter that I think comes within the ambit of this Question, and would clearly have to be looked into by any review body.

The question involved here is one of enormous difficulty. The problem with the terms of reference of a Royal Commission, as I see it, would be to give them teeth that would bite without giving too much power. An inquiry may well be needed into the more blatant forms of malpractice, such as deliberate misquoting. But having said that, and when one looks at the newspaper industry in many other countries (and they have their problems), with all the faults of our industry it is surmounting many of its problems most ably.

7.14 p.m.

LORD GAINFORD

My Lords, I too rise to support to the fullest possible degree the Motion of my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing. I have attended this debate not only with the purpose of speaking but in order to listen, because we have been hearing about the activities of trade unions in the Press, and the vital work that a Royal Commission or any official inquiry would do would be to bring to light some of the dangers which exist in the trade union movement. I, for one, am longing to hear something good about trade unions. The noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, has given us some encouraging words about this matter. I speak from a layman's point of view, and I speak also as a worker. I have a form of trade union, a staff association, and I have seen it work with very favourable and happy results in obtaining cordial relationships between management and employees. The stories that we read in the Press, see on television, or hear on radio, are such that hardly a day goes by without us hearing of some trouble being stirred up somewhere. So much so that we begin to believe that the two words "trade union" mean only one thing, "trouble". I repeat, I want to hear something good about trade unions, and I am sure that I am not alone in saying this.

One hundred years ago there were virtually no trade unions at all. An employer had such power that it came to be almost a matter of life and death over his workers. The originators of the trade unions were very brave and courageous men. Workers trying to form a trade union, advocating its formation, or considering joining one, were regarded with the gravest suspicion, as if they were people who might undermine all society, just as some of the militant trade unionists we hear about now are regarded. But the courage of those men was rewarded. They won against great odds. They transformed for the better the way of life of this country. Nowadays, even the most hard-hearted, grasping employer would not try to recreate any of those old conditions. Even if he had the power, he would not dare to do so.

Trade unionists won one very great victory, and a lasting one, but it looks as though they are still trying to fight the battle. Trade unions to-day are applying to certain industries such pressures that somebody who employs anybody else must sometimes think that he is committing a crime. If one believes all that the public are allowed to see on television or read in newspapers, or hear on the radio, one wonders whether an employer is really such a terrible person that he has to be fought until he has to give way to what are referred to as "pressures", but in some cases come down virtually to outrageous blackmail.

Are we living in a world that is madder than it really needs to be? Are these pressures being applied against a section of the community, or to the nation as a whole? Do workers really expect to get more money for less work? Do they really think like that? I certainly sincerely hope not. If there should be any truth in that then there must be lurking somewhere in the background a very sinister, ominous force. With more pressures being applied to employers by the employees, not only will the employers be ruined but the workers will be throwing away their jobs and their incomes, and, more important, the very heritage of the British worker.

We all know the phrase, "Workers of the world, unite!", but there now seems to be going up the cry, "Workers, cut each other's throats! Every man for himself! Never mind where the money comes from so long as we get it! "Are these the conditions for which the early trade unionists struggled and gave up so much to bring about'? One feels that if the situation gets any worse there will be a rumbling in the ground as of earthquakes, caused by those pioneers' revolving at high speed in their graves. Where does this sinister power exist? It seems to be in some secret centralised place.

Here I come to another aspect of the subject, which is centralisation. The cry by unions, local government and industry is for autonomy; and yet there is more centralisation. It will not be too much away from the point if I give a couple of examples. First, I now find that when I want to renew my driving licence I do not have to go to the local office, but have to send away for it to somewhere in Wales. Secondly, for the first time for many years I was recently off work for several days which entitled me to sickness benefit, but instead of going to my local office I had to send for it to a place in Aldershot.

There is centralisation of the Press and the unions, which is natural because Fleet Street is the great centre. But, alas! the newspapers are using very old-fashioned methods which is why the question of over-staffing has arisen. In other counties, type-setting can be done by women working on a typewriter connected with a computer. I do not know much about the working of this sort of machinery, but if it can do the job properly it can bring about great efficiency. Our main newspapers are making slow progress towards becoming more efficient and trade unionists, through ignorance more than malevolence, are the cause.

If the number of main dailies is to be reduced, is it possible to turn to the country's local newspapers for an enjoyable variety of reading? The local newspapers have lower costs and smaller staffs; they use smaller print, do not go in for big headlines and can print more stories. Some of them are even going ahead with national type-setting. Transport is getting faster and in a short time a London morning edition can be on newsagents' counters hundreds of miles away. Is it possible to reverse the process and let some of the local papers come to London? I should very much enjoy reading the world news or the local news in papers printed in places where I have lived, worked or visited. My boyhood was spent in the region of Darlington and I should love to get a regular supply of the good old Northern Echo. Many millions of people who now live and work in London would also, I am sure, welcome seeing some of their old newspapers again.

Let us try this evening to give a lead to the trade unions, and let our message be, quite simply, "Watch it, or you will ruin your jobs, and one day you may wake up to find, all too late, that the power and freedom you had is in the hands of other people, who will limit that power and freedom so much that there will be hardly any left."So let us have our official Inquiry, and may all connected with the Press—editorial staff as well as workers—come forward without fear to air their grievances and tell of their successes for the benefit not only of the Government or Parliament but also of the public, who want to know, as is their right, the true facts.

7.27 p.m.

THE EARL OF ONSLOW

My Lords, the Press and the media arouse very mixed feelings among ordinary people. This seems to be reflected in the twin reactions of, first, no sympathy whatsoever for politicians, of whatever Party, who claim that they have been hard done by, and, secondly, the whacking great libel damages which are given by juries. I am sure that this debate will be even less reported than are most of the debates in your Lordships' House. One gentleman in the Press Gallery has been gazing fixedly at a stained glass window. There seems to be a reluctance on the part of the Press, which is quite understandable, to report its own facts. There also seems to be an agreement between the media that they should not report their faults either, because if one started to report the faults of the other we might get the true situation. There is a strong element of, "Dog must not go anywhere near any other dog and eat it."

Before I came to your Lordships' House this afternoon, I wanted to get myself informed upon this subject so I called upon two senior and very able journalists, who said, "For heaven's sake! don't say which paper we come from." One added, "I shall get 'the chop'", while the other said, "All my copy will be blacked." They even said, "Don't say whether we are from an evening paper, a daily paper or a Sunday paper." I should like to give your Lordships some of the salient facts which they produced for me and which I hope will be of some interest. Before I do so, however, let me make it clear that I do not mean to say, and do not want to be interpreted in any way as saying, that nobody should not be paid the maximum amount possible. Presumably that is what everybody works for. But within the print unions there seems to have been a certain desire to kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs. This happened in the United States, especially in New York where there used to be three daily papers and today there is only one, all because of the demands for money which simply could not be met out of revenue.

The noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, will obviously correct my figures if I am wrong, but I have been lead to believe that a Linotype operator gets between £120 and £180 a week for a four-day week, with seven weeks' annual holiday. A lady wrote to one of the papers to which I have referred, and which I am not allowed to say is an evening paper, a daily paper or a Sunday paper, to complain that her husband was unemployed and that next door there lived a gentleman who worked for a national newspaper and was earning £120 a week for a four-day week and drove a lorry for the rest of the time. She said, "This is not fair." I know that it is not fair, but the paper would not publish that letter.

The firing and hiring of workers in the print room is totally under the control of the unions concerned. They have manning scales which, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, are anything up to three times bigger than they need be. If those manning scales are not fully met, the wages of the men who are not there are split between the men who are there, up to a third of whom can be hanging about doing nothing. It is a waste of talent, time and money. Then there is the system of the "Blow", which I believe, if I have it right, is known as the rest period. It can be organised so much that a print worker can work up to, say, 11.30 on the Daily Express and from 11.30 to the end of the production period of another daily newspaper at the same rates of pay. In an overmanned industry, this cannot possibly be right. The Economist Intelligence Unit also commented on the fact that workers' standards slipped badly from 11 o'clock to about 12.30 or 1 a.m. This may not be completely unconnected with the fact that pub closing times are about 11 o'clock.

Then there is the difficulty we can foresee coming of the journalists' and print unions' differentials. The journalists have been saying, "We do a more skilled job and we want more money because the print unions are getting too much". So there have been work-to-rules and labour stoppages by journalists. What happens if journalists get their money? It is the old, old story of differentials. The print unions will say, "We used to get more than the journalists and we now want more differentials established again". My Lords, this cannot be right.

The present troubles of the Daily Telegraph are due to the fact that when the paper was increasing the number of pages it wanted printed it agreed to pay print workers more money for more pages printed: the greater the number of pages, the higher the wage went up. Now, because the paper is reducing the number of pages it is printing, the unions say, "We will not accept a cut in our money rate". This, in my view, is an element of "wanting to have your cake and eat it". But I suppose we all want to do that. However, what we have not seen is any report in any newspaper as to why this wages/labour interruption is going on. If the coal mines or the shipbuilding industry were concerned, there would be investigation teams producing full details about them. But, as I said before, the Press, completely understandably, are saying absolutely nothing about their current problem. On the radio this morning I heard, "You will not get your copy of the Daily Telegraph in London because there has been a printing dispute".

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, spoke, as we should expect, very clearly. When he attacked the Aims of Industry advertisements, saying that they were divisive, one is entitled to draw his attention to the headline of the Daily Mirror on Election Day, 1951, saying, "Whose finger is on the trigger?". I do not think that showed the balm of human kindness and love of your opponent: That is "putting the boot in" as hard as you can; and that, I assume, is what the noble Lord would call "divisive".

LORD ARDWICK

My Lords, I hope that the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, will forgive me for intervening. I think that Sir Winston Churchill's lawyers "put the boot in" on us and we had to pay considerable damages. I may be wrong, I speak only from memory, as I was not there at the time.

THE EARL OF ONSLOW

My Lords, I was being perhaps a little selective and was not saying that Sir Winston Churchill's lawyers did "put the boot in" and did get damages, as I knew perfectly well they had done, but there still was an element of divisiveness in this; and I accept that the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, does not deny that.

He also spoke correctly about the fundamental freedom of an editor, which we must all uphold. But I thought, with the greatest respect to him, that he was ducking the issue of censorship by the print workers' union. I think the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, made the point that Aims of Industry were only trying to do what the T.U.C. were trying to do; and surely this is sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander. It would be wrong to say that one can do it and that the other cannot. It is essential that the trade unions should have their freedom to support which Party they like, just as it is essential and fundamental to all of us that other groups should have the same freedom. This seems to be an unnecessary thing to say, but as we are having a debate on censorship perhaps it ought to be underlined.

The noble Lord, Lord Auckland, said that some of our newspapers had carried out marvellous investigatory journalism. But if this investigative journalism is to go on, what will happen if censorship, of which we have had several instances to-day, affects some of their interests so that much of this investigatory journalism cannot go on? This must be worrying to people who believe in freedom. After all, we have in this country, I think, some very good newspapers. One could say that The Times, the Guardian, and even the Daily Mirror, are papers of which any country could be proud. I think Voltaire summed it up best when he said: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. That seems to me what freedom is about. It is what we are discussing at the moment, and it is on this that we ought to concentrate our attention.

7.38 p.m.

LORD DENHAM

My Lords, towards the end of this extremely interesting debate on my noble friend's Motion, most of the things that could be said on the subject, and quite a few things off the subject, have already been said, but it would be right for me to set out briefly the views of the Opposition. We believe, as most noble Lords have expressed their beliefs, that it is extremely important that the editor should be the final arbiter as to the content of his newspaper. His is the responsibility, and his must be the judgment, very finely balanced at times, as to what is right to include or to exclude, both in the way of editorial and advertisement.

These are the sort of decisions that must be taken by one man; they could never be taken adequately by a committee and the editor should not be unduly influenced from either side. I think that most responsible managements in Fleet Street realise this. Admittedly the management appoints the editor in the first place and presumably when they do so they choose a man who could be expected to carry out his responsibilities in a particular way. The noble Lord, the late Lord Beaverbrook, used to claim that he never influenced his newspaper."But it is remarkable," he said, "how frequently my editors' views coincide with my own". Admittedly the Press has been dominated by great ruling families, each perhaps with their own idiosyncracies. This system has many faults, but they are newspaper people through and through. They are prepared to stand up against commercial or political pressures and what influence they bring to bear on their papers is brought by people with the interests of the newspaper world primarily at heart. I think that most of their employees, both journalists and technicians, recognise that fact.

If it should be felt by some people that a particular union might have as much right as a particular management to influence the content of a newspaper, it should be remembered that instances, such as have been described in your Lordships' House this afternoon, have been prompted by completely outside interests, political or personal, having no connection with the Press at all. This, we are all agreed, is wrong.

My noble friend suggests a Royal Commission as the means of clearing this problem up, but I do not go so far as that with him. I feel that all such an inquiry could do would be to establish that newspapers are in a perilous financial situation; that they are very highly over manned; that managements leave a certain amount to be desired; and that unions exercise a certain amount of undue pressure, all of which facts we know already. I think that by far the better solution for these abuses is that they should be brought out into the open so that the influence of public opinion and public disapproval can be brought to hear, and in this particular direction my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing has made a very valuable start this afternoon.

7.41 p.m.

LORD HARRIS OF GREENWICH

My Lords, I can begin by agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, on at least one of his propositions and I think that every single Member of your Lordships' House who has spoken this evening has agreed on this proposition; that is, that I, like them, am opposed to censorship in any form. I do not believe that it should be exercised over the content of advertisements, over comment, or over news. However, I must confess that I am a little puzzled about why the anxiety the noble Lord expressed this evening appeared to be, if I may say so with the greatest possible respect, rather selective. I understand entirely the views of those who say that they are against censorship of any form, imposed by anyone. But the noble Lord's position is rather different. By the terms of his Motion he wants not some form of inquiry into the general question of censorship, but only that practised by, to quote the Motion, "people working in the Press".

It is, I should have thought, a rather curious limitation to impose on any inquiry—an inquiry, if I may say so, for which there seems to be a high degree of enthusiasm, although the noble Lord who preceded me did not go so far as to commit himself or his Party to this, because both Aims of Industry and Mr. Briginshaw are calling for an inquiry or Royal Commission or something of that sort, and as the House is aware, the Prime Minister has indicated in another place that the Government are now considering this proposal very seriously So far as the noble Lord is concerned, the inquiry which he seeks is, apparently, to be asked to investigate the threat of censorship, but only if it can be shown to be directed to people working from within the Press. As I hope to show, the issues he has raised are rather more fundamental than that.

Before I go any further, perhaps I might briefly mention two issues. First, is the current situation in the newspaper industry to which a large number of noble Lords who have participated in this debate have alluded No one in the House can fail to be aware of the serious problem now confronting the industry. The Scottish Daily Express has closed its printing plant in Glasgow and the Evening Citizen has gone out of business altogether. Only London now has two evening newspapers; and many other newspapers in this country are facing significant financial difficulties. One noble Lord referred to the difficulties in New York which followed the industrial disputes in the newspaper industry there, and indeed there were massive closures which threw many people, both journalists and printing workers, out of work. I hope that the example of New York will be considered very carefully by everybody in the newspaper industry in this country. In my view and in that of the Government, the type of situation that now confronts the industry is of such crucial importance that unnecessary industrial disputes should be avoided in the industry. Nothing could more gravely jeopardise the future of several newspapers. It is a time when everyone who cares about the future of the British Press should exercise the maximum degree of restraint.

Secondly, there is an altogether different issue. The noble Lord this afternoon referred to the refusal by some newspapers to publish advertisements from Aims of Industry. I think it is not going too far to say that he implied that this was an act of almost unique wickedness on the part of those newspapers. But I must tell him that this is simply not so. Let me give him two examples. I should like to draw his attention to the Order Paper of another place where in January a number of my honourable friends tabled the following Motion: That this House being mindful that freedom of the Press is freedom for the public to obtain full information on all issues of public concern, deplores the refusal of the Western Mail, the South Wales Echo and the South Wales Argus to publish an official advertisement from the National Union of Mineworkers and calls on the newspaper concerned to exercise greater fairness in their presentation of the miners' case. What the noble Lord cited today therefore was by no means an isolated example. But there is a further example of what I am saying, and that is the case of the Evening Star in Ipswich which refused to publish an advertisement from a trade union, A.S.T.M.S. In their adjudication the Press Council said that the newspaper appeared to accept a firm booking by giving the union a proof on April 23, 1971, without any suggestion that the advertisement was subsequently going to be refused or rejected for any reason. The function being advertised was to be held on April 29, 1971, and the complainant was relying on publicity, said the Council, in the newspaper of April 28. I must emphasise this particular point to the noble Lord. The Press Council said that a newspaper is entitled to refuse an advertisement. However, on this occasion they said that it was unfair of this particular newspaper to tell the union on the afternoon of April 27, the day before the intended publication, that the advertisement would not be inserted. In the circumstances, the complaint against the Evening Star was upheld. So here are two cases where trade unions were making precisely the same complaint as the noble Lord did this afternoon. If, like A.S.T.M.S., Aims of Industry feel aggrieved and I have no doubt that they feel aggrieved—and feel that they were unjustly treated, they should take their case to the Press Council in precisely the same way as anybody else does.

I now return to the general question of censorship. Anyone, like my noble friend Lord Ardwick—whose experience in the industry is extremely substantial—and me whose experience is of a far briefer duration until I arrived rather suddenly in your Lordships' House—have had in our careers, I am sure, the experience of attempted censorship of newspapers. That is the lot of anybody who works in the industry. Very rarely, however, I must tell the noble Lord and others who have spoken in this debate, does this come from people in the printing unions—the precise point that was made. So far as my own experience is concerned I have never had personal knowledge of this, though I do not in any way deny that the episodes of which the noble Lord complained, and I entirely agree with him in the complaint he made on this particular point, took place. Sometimes, from time to time, the pressures come—and I have known of it myself—from advertisers. And if a newspaper is in any sort of financial difficulties and there is pressure from an advertiser, and that pressure is supported by the management of the newspaper concerned, frankly it is difficult to resist and sometimes it succeeds. I do not say it happens day after day in national and provincial newspapers, but it is not unknown and is extremely damaging and dangerous to the industry when it occurs.

There are other examples of attempted censorship. My former editor, who was a Member of this House, the late Lord Francis-Williams, tells in his biography of the habit of Sir Winston Churchill, when Prime Minister during the war, of reading all the newspapers before going to bed. It is from personal experience an extremely bad thing to do, particularly if one reads anything disagreeable about oneself just before going to bed. But this was his habit, and sometimes when he did not like what he read he would complain bitterly to his Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, also later a Member of this House. And when he could not get hold of Lord Bracken he would telephone the Ministry of Information. When he did so, Lord Francis-Williams said, the conversation would invariably be the same: "I understand you are Controller of Censorship, Mr. Williams," Sir Winston would say. When Lord Francis-Williams admitted the charge, Sir Winston would continue, "Then can you explain to me, Mr. Williams, why you are allowing the Daily Mirror"—I regret to inform my noble friend Lord Ardwick that it was normally the Daily Mirror although Lord Francis-Williams adds sometimes it was the Daily Mail or the Daily Herald, of which my noble friend also has some personal experience—"to criticise the Government in unbridled terms tomorrow? Am I to assume", said Sir Winston, "that you agree with these grave charges?" Lord Francis-Williams said he would explain to the Prime Minister that censorship was confined to facts and had no control over opinion, but this Sir Winston would never believe. "If I told him that under the powers of censorship bestowed by Parliament it was impossible to stop what he wanted to be stopped, he would say, 'Impossible! Impossible! I have no patience with the impossible. You talk like a bureaucrat, Mr. Williams '. Or", said Lord Francis-Williams, "if he was in a sunnier mood he would say, 'Nonsense, Mr. Williams. You are a man of influence. Pray use it!'".

There are, of course, other examples, not all of which took place during the war. One of the more notable (this came out in the debate in another place on the Royal Commission's Report on the Press) was given to a reporter on a Northcliffe newspaper in Newcastle in 1931. The instruction was a very clear one: Every line you write must be aimed at strengthening Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's candidature at Seaham and increasing his majority. Nothing which can adversely affect Mr. Macdonald's candidature is to be allowed. I think it is only fair to say, as a member of the working Press, that I think we have moved some substantial distance since then. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Shinwell himself corrected the matter only four years later.

Sixteen years later the position had not improved a great deal, although, as I say, it has done now. As the House may recall, there was a critical by-election in the Gravesend Division of Kent in November, 1947. The contest took place at the nadir of the then Labour Government's fortunes. It was sharp, and it was bitter. By this time the Royal Commission was sitting, and in its Report it analysed the coverage of the campaign by the Press, in particular the degree of selective censorship that had been experienced on this occasion (and I think the noble Lord would agree by his definition) by people working "within the Press" against their political opponents.

The Royal Commission's conclusions upon the matter may be of some interest to your Lordships. They said: (i) With the possible exception of The Times. there could be no doubt in the reader's mind as to which side different newspapers supported. (ii) News and comment were inextricably mixed in the `news' reports and special articles on the campaign. (iii) In reporting election meetings it was general for each newspaper to suggest that the speakers belonging to the party which it supported were received either in awed silence or with thunderous cheers, whereas the opposing speakers were constantly heckled and booed. (iv) There was little attempt, in the majority of newspapers, to give an adequate presentation of the views of the party to which the particular newspaper was opposed. (v) In the Gravesend election"— and I think the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, will have some personal experience of this particular problem— where there was no Liberal candidate, the newspapers on both sides attempted to suggest that the Liberals supported the Party which the newspaper favoured. It may be that the House may take the unflattering view that the influence of the journalist in the reporting of news or in the writing of editorials is not all that significant, and they may agree with Humbert Wolfe that: There's no reason to bribe or twist The honest British journalist. But seeing what unhribed he'll do, There's really no occasion to. Certainly one has to admit that some of our most powerful newspapers have got things wrong with a degree of regularity which would have driven any politician in a democracy out of office. To take one example, just as the submarine war was getting under way in late 1939 the Daily Express published the following truly remarkable editorial: The public should revolt against the food rationing system, that dreadful and terrible iniquity which some of the Ministers want to adopt. There is no necessity for the trouble and expense of rationing merely because there may be a shortage of this or that inessential commodity. It is admitted everywhere now that butter is plentiful, and full supplies are coming in, and the sinking of ships in the North Sea will not interfere with them seriously. The shortage of bacon will only be temporary. Of course the Daily Express also assured its readers that there would be no war in 1939. It told them later that Mr. Nehru would be quite incapable of running India, and that the Egyptians would not be able to pilot ships through the Suez Canal. On almost every single political issue of the last 40 years, not only has the Daily Express been on the wrong side but every one of its central campaigning issues has ended in disastrous failure.

It may be said that the Daily Express is in a class by itself; that the influence of the rest of the Press is powerful, and that in a difficult industrial situation such as that experienced recently it is understandable, if regrettable, that people in the industry should take action if they believe that that power is being unfairly or grossly misused. I think that on this matter the trouble is that the nearer people are to newspapers the more they tend to accept newspapers' sometimes inflated view of their own political importance. There is no evidence from either side of the Atlantic that newspapers wield this degree of power. In 1932 the overwhelming majority of the American Press supported Mr. Hoover and opposed Mr. Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt won decisively. In 1936, after four years of the New Deal, the American Press were even more bitterly opposed to Mr. Roosevelt. He won by a landslide. In 1948 Mr. Truman had less Press support than any President in living memory. He was written off. Yet he won. And in the recent General Election the Labour Party received less backing from the Press than in any Election since the war. Yet my right honourable friend is now Prime Minister.

But, of course, it is impossible to go to the opposite extreme from this and to argue that newspapers are totally without influence. Over a prolonged period they can certainly influence public attitudes on a wide range of issues, including politics. Yes, restricted though the power of the Press may be, it is clearly right that they should accept the same legal limitations over their conduct as the rest of us during a General Election campaign—and of course they do. Any advertisement aimed at securing the return to Parliament of a particular candidate has to be authorised by that candidate's agent, and only then will the newspaper accept it. And the agent, of course, has to include the cost of that advertisement in his return of Election expenses.

But on the occasion of the recent General Election (and if the noble Lord who introduced this Motion to-day will forgive me for saying so, he tended rather to skate over this particular problem) something of a very different character occurred. One large and powerful organisation, Aims of Industry, decided to flout the spirit and the intention of the law. They decided to exploit a loophole caused by the Tronoh Mines case of 1952. In that case, as the House may recall, brought by the then Attorney-General, the company was accused of publishing a political advertisement in The Times during the course of the 1951 General Election without the authority of the Conservative agent for the Cities of London and Westminster. The only reason why this constituency was chosen was because The Times was published within it. The court held that because the advertisement could not be said to have been exclusively directed towards securing the return of this particular candidate the charge would have to be dismissed. Since then the law has remained uncertain. The intention has certainly been clear, and both major political Parties have accepted that they must behave strictly within the intention of the law.

LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY

My Lords, will the noble Lord give way? I cannot let this go by. I have listened with great interest to the noble Lord's verbal pyrotechnics and red herrings that he has dragged so attractively across the trail; no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, will deal with them. But when we come to this question of the Representation of the People Act and the Tronoh Mines case (and I hope the noble Lord will forgive me for intervening on this without my notes, because I had not realised that this matter would be raised) I had to deal with this to a very large degree during the last General Election. He will remember—and it may be that he has the judgments on this and related cases with him—that the judges tended in these cases to say that Parliament could never possibly have intended the kind of thing that he is saying they did intend. The judgments are very clear on this; the law is not uncertain. The fact that it has suited the Conservative and Labour Parties to say that it is uncertain, and therefore not to allow general advertisements or themselves to produce general advertisements in the papers, is another matter. The law is perfectly certain since the Tronoh Mines case, and the judgments on these matters are extremely clear.

LORD HARRIS OF GREENWICH

My Lords, I can understand, if I may say so, the sensitivity of the noble Lord, because the Liberal Party, in whose General Election campaign he took a leading part, unlike the Labour and Conservative Parties, continued a political advertising campaign during the General Election. So I am sure he would be particularly eager to have this point explored on a future occasion, as I think it must be. But I repeat that since the war both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party national poster and Press advertising campaigns have ended as promptly as possible after the announcement of a General Election. So far as the Conservative Party are concerned, that is exactly what they did on the last occasion. Therefore when, on February 7, the right honourable gentleman, the now Leader of the Opposition, announced the General Election, the Conservative and the Labour Parties behaved as before. National advertising was stopped and local poster sites became the responsibility of the local agents and had to be charged against Election expenses. If I may say so with great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, he referred to the Aims of Industry campaign as having been introduced with an Election in the offing. But if one looks at the trend of their advertising campaign and the sort of advertisements which have been discussed in this debate this afternoon, one sees there was an enormous growth of Aims of Industry advertising as soon as the General Election was announced. Their campaign, far from being cooled off, was intensified: large display advertisements appeared in a number of national newspapers from February 11 to 27. The copy was of course carefully prepared. They did not include the name of any candidate. If one had been included of course he would have been unseated by an Election Petition.

I am a little surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, made no reference to this aspect of the problem which he identified in his speech this evening. Is there not to be a single word of reproach for the men who decided to behave in this way? I must tell the noble Lord quite bluntly that although the Government are totally opposed—I repeat, totally opposed—to any industrial action directed against the content of newspapers in any circumstances whatever, it is hardly surprising, in the feverish atmosphere of an Election campaign, that the behaviour of Aims of Industry caused serious trouble in some newspaper offices. It was not just one small and unimportant campaign. On their national campaign alone, I understand that Aims of Industry spent, after the announcement that there would be an Election on February 28, a sum of money equivalent to the maximum expenses allowed to no less than 40 Conservative candidates in the last General Election, and their total resources, as my noble friend said, were far greater than that. Everyone involved in British politics, including, if I may say so, the Liberal Party which on this occasion also engaged in a national advertising campaign, has a clear interest in maintaining the tightest control over expenditure in our campaigns. We have only to look at the recent history of the United States to see what happens when there is inadequate control over political campaign expenses. Having myself spent six months in the United States in 1972 studying their system of Presidential Primaries, I know how much the overwhelming majority of members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives respect our system of tight legal controls over the expenses of candidates. In the recent General Election in Britain, for the first time in our modern political history a deliberate attempt was made to run a large political campaign outside the strict controls imposed by the Representation of the People Act. It failed in its objective.

LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY

Not outside the controls; inside the controls as established in the courts and the law of this land.

LORD HARRIS OF GREENWICH

My Lords, I can understand why the noble Lord takes a keen interest in this matter. I do not in any way use the point over-greatly against him. He had a leading part presumably, in the decision of the Liberal Party to behave as it did, and I am saying that that behaviour, and also the behaviour of the Aims of Industry, in my view makes it necessary to review matters very carefully in the future. That is what the Government propose to do. I think it is highly desirable that in these circumstances the Government and all political Parties should review the matter. The present state of the law and its imprecise character, if the noble Lord will forgive me, in my view requires review.

8.5 p.m.

LORD ORR-EWING

My Lords, I am most grateful to all those who stayed back from their Easter Recess to take part in this debate and make it a very useful one. Good views have been expressed from all parts of the House. We all very much enjoyed the Minister's wind-up speech, particularly the early part. I enjoyed the reminiscences of the wartime very much, but I think we all recognise that many freedoms do have to be given up to win a war. I do not think that those freedoms we gave up were in any way wasted, and we tried—in fact I think we succeeded—in the ten years that followed to restore all those freedoms which we jeopardised in order to win the war.

The noble Lord has drawn attention to what he believes is a need for some reform in the electoral laws. If this is so, his Party, his Government, were in power from 1964 to 1970—in fact they could have gone on until 1971 if they had wanted to. They had seven years to put this right if they believed there was an injustice. Still a belated conversion is better than no conversion at all. I was very glad to learn, before the noble Lord sat down, that they are now going to examine this matter among other matters. I particularly drew attention to the fact that over the last four years there has been an increasing number of examples, which I quoted, where I thought there had been some form of censorship by those working in the newspaper industry. If there has been a similar number of examples on the trade union side then I welcome this inquiry. I am not seeking to make it one-sided at all.

I just feel that it is not right that there should be a form of censorship which is not outwardly known in our democracy. If there is any form of banning then perhaps the inquiry will look into this and evolve some solution to the problem. I would point out that two wrongs do not make a right. The noble Lord quoted trade unions; I quoted other organisations with another viewpoint. I am delighted to learn that the Government are going to examine this and I hope that they will take into account all the matters which have been raised in this debate. It is no good curing this small anxiety, and I think an emerging anxiety, if the economic conditions and the conditions under which people work in our Press drive them all into bankruptcy. We shall be wasting our time. I am glad that the inquiry will be more widely based as a result of our deliberations. I am delighted he has accepted the idea which will include this particular aspect of the problem. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion standing in my name.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.