When state censorship was used to silence Irish voices, it backfired.
Maybe it’s because I’m an Irishman that the proscription of Palestine Action took me back to the bad old days of the Hurd broadcasting ban. (“What was that?” I hear anyone under the age of 35 asking.)
In 1988, determined to “deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity”, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had her home secretary Douglas Hurd introduce a ban on the general public hearing the actual voices of anyone representing four loyalist and seven Irish republican organisations, not all of them proscribed as terrorists.
This presented enormous dilemmas for broadcasters trying to keep the public abreast of the political and military turmoil. They were expected to police their own output, and inevitably self-censorship crept into editorial decision-making. Chants from the terraces at televised Celtic football matches were muted, and songs by the Pogues and Paul McCartney thought to be sympathetic to the Irish were not played on the radio.
Since 1969, which saw the birth of a civil rights movement in the six counties of Northern Ireland, Catholics had been demanding equality with the Protestant unionist majority. When so-called loyalists began burning Catholic neighbours out of their homes, British troops were sent in, ostensibly to protect the Catholic minority. Militant defence of their communities swiftly escalated into a battle between the forces of the British state and a republican movement demanding a united Ireland.
Sectarian policing and a requirement by the BBC’s senior management, wary of the organisation being branded as an apologist for the IRA, that controversial items be ‘referred upwards’ to unionist-dominated BBC Belfast and beyond ensured that republican views were rarely aired.
Bristol film-maker Colin Thomas remembers the difficulties faced by those attempting to cover Irish issues evenhandedly at the time:
“In 1978 I was a member of staff at BBC Bristol working as a director on a series of programmes about Ireland. After the programmes had been shot and edited, fellow directors and I were told that a number of changes were required before transmission. When I learnt that these included a sequence of a mother putting flowers on her son’s grave, including a close-up of the headstone ‘In loving memory of Kevin murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday’, I resigned from the BBC.”
He believes several of his programmes were censored in the aftermath of the “thermonuclear explosion of rage and spleen” Labour’s Minister for Northern Ireland Roy Mason launched at the BBC’s board of governors in 1976 over its coverage of Northern Ireland, as recorded by Jean Seaton in her history of the BBC.
Colin was not the only one. In our book for the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, Interference on the Airwaves: Ireland, the Media and the Broadcasting Ban, Liz Curtis and I listed the circumstances under which some 150 programmes and news bulletins were censored or removed from the schedules over two decades.
Broadcasting unions, including the NUJ, were united in opposition to this state censorship. There were marches, brief strikes and walk-outs, and Britain was made to looked foolish when oppressive regimes like the apartheid South Africa approved of the ban.
At first broadcasters introduced subtitles, but then hired actors with northern Irish accents to lip-synch the words of banned politicians. Satirists had a field day. As part of the NUJ’s Right to Know campaign, I went to Belfast to see how journalists were dealing with the restriction on the ground. They could quote Sinn Fein members about non-political topics, but not about anything directly related to ‘The Troubles’.
A significant criticism of the ban was the use of executive powers to forbid citizens from expressing political views that ran counter to government policy. Sounds familiar? Opponents were encouraged to hold public meetings and screen films banned from the TV. I spoke at one event in West Belfast and several here in Bristol, where we screened banned films at the Watershed.
If the leaders of this country and their advisors are unable to recognise what is happening daily in Gaza and the West Bank as genocidal, they relinquish the right to be taken seriously. If they don’t see that supplying arms to Israel or using RAF planes to conduct surveillance on behalf of Israel lays them open to charges of complicity, they must expect criticism at home and abroad.
They deserve to be ridiculed and taunted if they do not see the sinister implications of requiring two million Palestinians to submit to security checks from their occupiers before being consigned to the ruined city of Rafah, sandwiched between the Morag Corridor to the north and the Philadelphi corridor on the Egyptian border. But then Britain knows all about concentration camps.
However, more than a thousand brave protestors so far are facing the prospect of 14 years in jail along with Palestine Actionists for making their voices heard about the situation in Gaza. The government may need to speed up its prison building plans.
Meanwhile, perhaps we are meant to be reassured by the words of Bristol North East MP Damien Egan, Vice Chair of Labour Friends of Israel: “While Palestine Action is now a proscribed group, the Government has confirmed that any organisation has the right to challenge the decision through the correct legal channels. The Government have also made clear that this decision will not affect the right to protest. People have always been able to protest lawfully or express support for Palestine.”
So that’s alright then.
When censorship threatens, it is all the more important to hold the powerful to account and that includes the arms industry that is playing an ever more important role in Bristol’s economy. We must expose any effort to clamp down on dissent. What matters is that we keep turning the spotlight on Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians. And, with regard to the recent arrests, it is vital that journalists keep a close eye on what is happening in the courts, and remember that they may report anything said during proceedings unless expressly forbidden to by the Bench.
In the week when Israel bombed Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, the British government considered it appropriate to play host to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog who has signed missiles aimed at Gaza where he believes no Palestinian is innocent. At the same time, hundreds of silent, sitting protestors holding signs condemning genocide have been arrested.
There are still some voices the government doesn’t want us to hear.
Excellent. Thank you Mike.