D Notices-mystery of British journalism

Abstract

‘A spectre,’ wrote The Times on 16 July, ‘has been haunting the Committee Corridor of the House of Commons each Tuesday morning for the past five weeks as the Select Committee on Defence has taken evidence on the workings of the D Notice system. The invisible presence in Committee Room 8 has been that of Bismarck, the maker of modern Germany.’ The DPBC ( Defence Press and Broadcasting, or D Notice, Committee) consists of four top civil servants and 11 representatives of the British press and broadcasting organisations. Its origins date back to the period before the First World War when, as The Times put it, ‘Bismarck's observation on the help French newspapers had given to the Prussian general staff in discovering the disposition of French troops in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 … convinced the British defence establishment of the need for a system of press censorship’. The Committee issues so-called D Notices giving details of information it does not wish published and relies on the voluntary cooperation of editors and journalists in suppressing the information. Interest in the system, in recent years largely forgotten, was reawakened in February this year by the publication in the New Statesman of a series of articles by Duncan Campbell on such topics as telephone tapping and the activities of the MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies. Admiral Ash, Secretary of the DPBC, wrote to Bruce Page, Editor of the New Statesman, to remind him of the ‘continuing validity’ of D Notices Nos 10 and 11 on the need to protect information concerning the intelligence services. In an exchange of letters with the Admiral, Bruce Page queried the validity of the D Notice system, which Duncan Campbell, writing in the New Statesman on 4 April, called ‘one of the greater mysteries of British journalism’ – misunderstood or ignored by British journalists and considered by their American and other foreign colleagues to be a typical example of ‘peculiarly British placid press complacency’. Many British journalists have, however, for some time now expressed criticism of the excessive secrecy with which the government and the civil service in this country conduct their affairs, campaigning for the abolition of Section Two of the Official Secrets Act ( see Index on Censorship 1/1978, pp 9–14) and for the introduction of Freedom of Information legislation. Prominent among them has been Harold Evans, Editor of the Sunday Times, and Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman. In June and July this year a Sub-Committee on D Notices of the House of Commons Defence Committee held an enquiry into the workings of the D Notice system, with members of the DPBC, as well as other civil servants and journalists giving evidence. Some, including Richard Francis, BBC director of news and current affairs and a member of the DPBC ( see box on p 39), and Windsor Clarke, editorial consultant to the Westminster Press and vice-chairman of the Committee, spoke in favour of continuing the system. It could, said Mr Clarke, be discredited within a year if sufficient journalists criticised it, but that was most unlikely, ‘as the arrangement enjoyed wide support in the press’. In a 20- page submission to the parliamentary sub-committee, Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell argue for the system's abolition. Its inception had coincided with the ‘spectacular increase in the size and power of Britain's bureaucracy, which has continued almost without check until very recently’. The DPBC had increasingly become ‘an outpost of the Ministry of Defence’ losing rather than gaining in independence. Page and Campbell analyse the contents of the existing 12 D Notices, as well as dealing with several which have been abandoned, such as the one issued in 1967 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent The Observer and Sunday Times from publishing the results of their investigations into the affair of the Soviet spy and former British Intelligence officer, Kim Philby. As in some other cases, the New Statesman journalists point out, the information was clearly known to the hostile power in question and would have been kept only from the British reader. Similarly, they describe D Notice No 9 as ‘virtually valueless’, as the British government itself publishes details of all major radio installations and the frequencies they use. ‘It is ludicrous that a D Notice is issued to prevent the British press discussing information which the government furnishes for publication overseas’. Below, we print an edited version of the evidence given to the House of Commons Sub-Committee on D Notices by Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell.