Previous | Next :: 20000 Die in NHS Hospitals Unnecessarily : Press Freedom to be ended : Any Correlation Discuss | March 16, 2013, 7:18 pm

The current British Prime Minister quoted a former British Prime Minister on Thursday when speaking about "freedom of the Press' ....... David Cameron quoted Winston Churchill....... Churchill definitely understood something about defending an open society..... Afterall he led Britain in it's fight against Nazi tyranny : “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny… Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish, and the loudspeaker and the film to become more important. But where free institutions and indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”

And yet 60 years on the British Parliament is it appears about to adopt one of a range of schemes all of which contain some element of government sponsored coercion about what it is correct to publish and some level of government registration scheme for publications themselves forcing them to publish apologies and retractions etc through a legally binding government apointed regulator. They will all be voting to end what has been a proud tradition of Britain having a free press that has existed for hundreds of years.

I don't think Britain needs to end its open system of having a free press. But a moral panic has been raised about the activity of Britain's newspapers in society partly because of some famed law breaking by a few reporters that listened in on private mobile phone messages...... but particularly in regard to reporting the truth of the private lives of celebrities like Hugh Grant....... politicians are now goading each other to act.

The 'Conservative Party' policy proposed by The Prime Minister David Cameron is like the other proposals in that it would be the end of a 'free press' system...... but is the least worse option on the table. He is not requiring the system to be written into the law of the land but wants a system that should have some pretense at not being directly government controlled through making it a "Royal Commission" weirdly answerable to the Queen. Unlike what is proposed by 'The Liberal Party' and 'The Labour Party' they are proposing to create an alliance to change the law.... to have actual legally binding state control of the regulation system but again built into the fig leaf Royal Commission.

Tragically it really is over for a free press in the UK. There are no proposals to be put before Parliament by any political party just to just leave alone the proudly free and irreverent trouble making British Newspapers. The same proud irreverent trouble making newspapers that Winston Churchill understood to be the backstop of a free and open society in Britain.

Cheers Jez

PS............ The picture above I shot in a public Hospital ........ without me going through the official hospital PR arrangements ............ it was used repeatedly in numerous magazines and papers to show the real conditions in a massively under funded NHS hospital .............. today a statistician claimed 20,000 people died unnecessarily in British hospitals since 2007 and that it has been hushed up ........ I wonder how much of that kind of thing will be reported once proper press control laws have been established....... its hard enough to get that kind of information even now ......... and once those press laws have been properly strengthened to make sure only the correct approved official PR messages from state hospitals....... and the correct approved official messages from Hugh Grant's publicist are printed in the properly constituted and approved officially sanctioned State Newspaper.... by then it just might be really hard to actually know what is really happening .......

D-Day for a free press............ The Sun