ANNEX I
MEMORANDUM FROM MR. R. BARRINGTON-WARD
SECRET
MAY 30. 1940

The remarks which follow are only concerned with the paragraphs under the heading “Newspapers”. They would, however, bear equally upon a proposal to omit section (b) of paragraph 1 under “Photographs, Films”.

(1) The scheme propounded in these regulations would, in my opinion, be disastrous if adopted. The effect is to prevent the press from publishing any but official or agency news on a range of subjects which cover three-quarters of the present contents of a daily newspaper,

(2) The newspapers would he virtually reduced to uniformity as purveyors of Government announcements or propaganda and of news shared in identical terms by the whole press and by the B.B.C.

(3) The effect on the public mind of suppression on this scale would, I am convinced, be shattering. It would recruit listeners by the million for foreign broadcasts in English and, in particular, for German and Italian radio propagandists.

(4) The effect on foreign opinion would be extremely serious. The virtual suppression of the special news services, home and foreign, maintained by The Times and other papers would compel the more important foreign correspondents in this country to restrict themselves to services, which are often of indifferent quality, supplied from the news agencies, though indeed this agency news reaches their own countries independently of them in any case.

(5) The limitations proposed go far beyond the control of dispatches and ordinary news. Comment would be hamstrung. It would in effect be put beyond the power of the Press to secure changes in the Government such as were secured in 1916 after the shells scandal and indeed as recently as the first week of this month.

(6) Within these regulations it would be impossible to report a Parliamentary debate on the matters under control. A grave question of parliamentary privilege is plainly involved.

(7) I attach a copy of another memorandum bearing on the subject which was prepared before I had seen the draft regulations. It contains a number of comments which are relevant to them.

(8) I do not believe that the Press would object or have reason to object to a compulsory censorship of war news in the spirit of the present censorship. That is to say, the foregoing contentions could be met if the following paragraph (d) Were added under paragraph 2. “Any material submitted to, and passed by, the censor before publication”.

(9) If it is imperative to establish a compulsory censorship, the question becomes one of machinery only and no difficulties in the provision of machinery should be allowed to justify a course which is otherwise indefensible. Greater flexibility in the censorship, if necessary, could conceivably be procured by the establishment of a censor in each of the offices of daily newspapers, which are the only section of the Press into whose operations the time factor really enters and therefore the only section immediately concerned with these regulations. This arrangement could be so contrived as to meet the case whether offices were, as now, chiefly concentrated in one area or scattered, as they subsequently might be.

(10) In the latter event it is not hard to imagine conditions which might dislocate the work of the censorship by cutting local censors off from their headquarters and from the receipt of daily directives. Clearly this might hold up the flow of news from sources other than those central source[illegible] which the regulations propose to authorise. Such dislocation would probably be no more than temporary. It is in any case a risk which newspapers might reasonably be asked to accept.