May 9. most important case regarding the freedom of the Press has recently been decided in England under the Official Secrets Acts, when the Stockport magistrates fined a reporter £5 under the Act for refusing divulge the source of certain information had acquired. The case was appealed, and the magistrate's decision was upheld, and now the fight has been taken to Parliament in an endeavour to have the Act amended. The! facts of the case are very simple. On June! 17, 1937, the "Daily Dispatch" published a article headed "Frauds on Workers Alleged; Warrant for Man with Scar." The article contained an almost exact reproduction of confidential police document circulated on June 14, by the Chief Constable of Southport to other forces. Mr. S. H. Booth, managing editor of the "Daily Dispatch," under strong protest, supplied the name of the writer of the article, a Mr. B.D. Lewis, and the police then asked him the source of his information. This, in accordance with the traditions of his} profession, the reporter declined to divulge. Police Court proceedings followed, the sum~ mons alleging that Mr. Lewis failed to give on demand information in his possession relating to a suspected offence under Section 2 of the Oficial Secrets Acts, 1911, contrary Section Got the Official Secrets Acts, 1920. Mr. Lewis was fined, appealed against the decision and lost. It has to be emphasized that the Information which Mr. Lewis had, and still has for that matter, amounted to no more than that the police were searching for! particular man against whom there were certain charges, a most ordinary piece of news, involving in no way the safety of the nation—for that is what the two Official Secrets Acts are designed to protect—and an item similar to a thousand and one others which find their way into the press as an ordinary daily recurrence. The decision of the Court of Appeal in this matter is probably a correct interpretation of the law as it! stands at present, but it has to be pointed! out that its application to, the Press was not contemplated by the Government which. succeeded in passing the Act of 1920.
This is clearly proved by a statement of the then Attorney General—now Lord Hewart, Lord Chief Justice—when the Bill was before the House of Commons in that year, He is reported to have said:
May I add one word more upon a particular kind of objection which, oddly enough. has sometimes been taken to this Bill? It is said that this Bill deals with the Press. That is a very astonishing statement, and it is very] Strange that persons connected with the Press should say that this Bill deals with them.
It is quite clear that the Attorney General did not think that the Aet would apply to the Press, and particularly in such a trivial case! as the one which has just been decided, and it is more than probable that assurance, which was then given to the House of Commons, contributed largely to the passage of the measure. But the legislator proposes and the bureaucrat disposes, and, with so widely 'a drawn provision, it has been made possible to apply the act to mere trivialities. It may be true that every official document is a secret of state, That appears to have been the titude taken up by the Chief Constable and' the magistrates and ultimately the appeal court. But if this view is to prevail then an unwarrantable and unconscionable restriction has been laid upon the normal activities the Press, which would, if carried to the logical outcome, enable even minor officials to shroud their work with a vell of secrecy which the bureaucrat so dearly loves. "Much of the information which appears in the average newspaper is obtained from sources which would immediately be closed were the: traditional policy of preserving complete secrecy to be thrown overboard. The Act was designed to protect the interests of the State. It dates from the height of the pre war spy fever, and was intended to protect military and naval secrets and matters. That it should be used as it has in this case to cover purely police information is a monstrous perversion of its original purpose.
It is understood that the government has] been asked to consider the advisability of amending the Act in such a manner as to remove this restriction upon the liberties of the Press, and there is a possibility that if the Government refuses to move in the matter, Mr, Dingle Foot (Dundee) and other members of Parlament will consider the introduction of an amending bill under the 10- minute rule, Obviously something will have to be done in the matter, for, whatever the! original intentions of the Government were, the fact has now been made plain that the Act in question can be applied in a manner calculated to repress the full activity of the press, and prevent that free discussion of public matters which alone can act as an efficient corrective of the present day official trend towards a tight-lipped bureaucracy, the! dangers of which have already been referred to by British judges on more than one occasion the comparative recent past. The duty of the journalist is quite clear. If he comes into possession of information showing that the Security and safety of the nation is being imperilled, itis not only his duty not to refuse to give the necessary information to the appropriate authorities, but actually to volunteer it. On the other hand he should be entitled to refuse to divulge his sources of information with regard to such news as has no special State significance, for as the Birmingham "Daily Mait" very rightly says:—"The craft of reparting—already difficult] enough in this age of continually increasing encroachments on Press freedom—is becom~ ing a bugbear, and to stultify the service which the Press can render to the public is in turn to deprive the public of the right of full Knowledge and free discussion." Whether Mr, Dingle Foot succeeds in getting the Act amended or not, the public may rest assured that the British journalist will insist upon his rights in the matter, even if it costs as much as £5 a time. It is not the first time the Press have had to fight against this form of repression, and it may be readily believed that it will not lose the battle for fear of fighting.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.