SECRET
EXECUTIVE BOARD
For discussion on Tuesday, January 21st Export of Periodicals

1. This paper is intended to bring up to date the position with regard to export bans on periodicals which are sent abroad.

2. The onus of recommending the policy of banning certain periodicals was accepted by this Ministry in March 1940 and in April - May 1940 we recommended to the Home Policy Committee of the Cabinet the banning of the export of the “Daily Worker”. Proposals to ban a number of other papers followed.

3. We subsequently on our own authority released certain papers from their bans, e.g. “The Voice of Spain” and “World News and Views”. The Foreign Office has objected to the “Voice of Spain” being released and one or two other papers which are on the banned list have asked why they cannot be exempted.

4. In October 1940 the Ministry as a whole began to review the position in Policy Committee. In accordance with the decision of the Policy Committee of the 1st October letters were written to all Government Departments concerned suggesting the removal of these bans. The replies indicated that for one reason or another there would be strong objection to this proposal from the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Home Office, M.I.5 and the Swinton Committee.

5. On the 14th November the Policy Committee considered the matter again. It was represented that, however our procedure was styled, we were in fact suppressing the free expression of a certain kind of views and opinions; that we were doing this without full confidence ourselves in the policy or any very consistent application of it in our selection of the objects of the ban; and that we were doing by this means indirectly for the Home Office and the Foreign Office something which Parliament under the Defence Regulations had intended, if done at all, to be done by those Departments avowedly and directly. The then D.D.G. was asked to get into touch with the Foreign Office and the Home Office to see whether they were not prepared to take action on their own account.

6. The result of these meetings was considered by the Policy Committee on the 5th December. Briefly it was to the effect that neither the Home Office nor the Foreign Office was sorry to see the ban in practice even by indirect means or was prepared to take any more direct action on its 262 - 2 -own account. At this meeting of the Policy Committee it was represented that the Defence Regulation (Defence Regulation 11) under which the export bans had been imposed was never intended for this purpose; that the bans were of doubtful legality; and that in any event the legal method employed to operate them was little better than a “dodge”. I undertook to obtain the opinion of the Treasury Solicitor on these points before the Ministry decided what action to take.

7. I have since received the opinion of the Treasury Solicitor and discussed the question with him. In effect, he says that there are two things wrong with these orders:

a. technically they are defective because they operate to ban export from the United Kingdom whereas they ought only to ban export from Great Britain: and if applied to Northern Ireland should be regulated by a separate Order;

b. the Orders cannot be used so as to prohibit the export of a named periodical merely by declaring that it is not to be sent abroad. The method that we have adopted of announcing that they cannot be sent except under special permit but that we are not prepared to consider the granting of such a permit is indefensible: and that it is our duty to consider each issue or edition as it comes out and see whether we are prepared to stop it or not. This, of course, is a very different matter since a number of issues may contain nothing that on any ordinary principles is censorable at all. On the other hand, the effect of the bans that we have announced is that generally speaking people do not try to send these periodicals out of the country and therefore they do not go to the Censorship authorities to be looked at.

8. The skein is now a very tangled one and I do not at this stage make any recommendations as to the course that we should pursue, since this paper is primarily a report. It does appear, however, that the present juncture, when a highly placed Committee has been appointed to consider analogous matters, is the time when we should decide firmly on our policy and on the proper machinery to carry it out, in order that the matter may be represented before this Committee.

C.R.

15th January, 1941