The Guardian view on Theresa May’s censorship plan: pointless and unprincipled
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Version 0 of 1. If Theresa May has a reputation as a safe pair of hands, one has to wonder what she would have to do to lose it. The home secretary invented a human right to a pet cat in a conference speech, and allowed “go home” immigration vans to be wheeled out in diverse communities, before conceding that the vans themselves had to go home to the garage. Now we learn, courtesy of a leaked letter from her cabinet colleague Sajid Javid, about a wild scheme to censor broadcasters. Mrs May has long mooted a crackdown on the discussion of “extremism”, although the country has not previously glimpsed how far she wished to go. The suggestion that Ofcom should be able to vet programmes before they air featured in an anti-extremism strategy which the home secretary had hoped to publish ahead of polling day. Mrs May was in the habit of blaming Lib Dems whenever one of her draconian plans ran aground, but it is now plain that several coalition Conservatives were uneasy, and Mr Javid, then in the culture brief, intervened in strong terms against turning Ofcom into a “censor”. Pre-programme vetting is such a terrible idea that it is hard to know where to begin. There is half a precedent, in Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to starve Irish Republicanism of the “oxygen of publicity”. This ended in the requirement that Sinn Féin spokespeople appear on the screen while hidden actors dubbed their words. The Day Today soon had a spoof Gerry Adams inhale helium, in order to raise his voice to a squeak and “subtract credibility from his statements”. Poking around with television production doesn’t bring victory in the publicity war against terrorism: it brings absurdity. A generation on, censorship would be more hopeless still. If video clips are luring youngsters towards the jihadis, these will not be from controversial footage on (say) Channel 4 News, but material that fanatics are simply creating and uploading themselves. The Thatcher campaign to clear turbulent Irishmen from the airwaves began with an effort to bully the BBC into dropping a Real Lives show which interviewed Martin McGuinness, and mixed in conversation with a hardline unionist counterpart. The ugly instinct in Whitehall was to thwart understanding about what drove people to the extremes; one can imagine that asserting itself again. But at least in the 1985 case, no official had seen the programme in advance. The row played out between the corporation’s management and its governors, not the BBC and an outside body, and the show did air in the end. No 10 today refused to rule anything out in clamping down on “extremism”, a hazy concept Mrs May herself wants a Home Office unit to define. Who knows, then, how far censorship could go. The Conservative party backed the dogged resistance of many newspapers to the decidedly indirect official influence over press self-regulation envisaged in the Leveson report. It can hardly be consistent with this libertarian stance to begin meddling directly in broadcast. Be thankful that there are still some Conservatives, such as Mr Javid, who can see the contradiction, even if Mrs May can’t. |