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No reason to shield readers from political advertising
• TOM Foot’s report (Newspaper raises temperature as advert sparks political row, April 17) on the small protest surrounding the appearance of a BNP advert in the Ham&High was very fair, though he should expect a letter of complaint from the protesters themselves.
Their view, as communicated to me in letters and on the steps of our offices where I met them, is that it would be better if no stories concerning the BNP were printed.
This view is also supported by Labour GLA candidates Jennette Arnold, Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi who wrote objecting to “any publicity” concerning the party in the run-up to the elections.
I was particularly interested in former editor Matthew Lewin’s view that the advert should not have been accepted because “its policies and activities are morally and socially unacceptable to the vast majority of people in Hampstead’’.
Of course they are, but suggesting that the eyes of our readers must be shielded from political advertising is an insult to their intelligence.
What really caught my eye, however, was the extraordinary statement by Howard Hannah in the associated article (How the angry eight fought to keep racism out of their paper).
Howard writes: “In 1974 a National Front rally in Red Lion Square resulted in the death of Kevin Gately, a 21-year-old anti-fascist student – the first demonstrator to be killed in the UK for 55 years.’’
On January 30 1972, 13 people were shot dead by British troops in Derry during a political demonstration.
Perhaps I remember this event because I was there at the time, but it’s still astonishing that an informed journalist so obviously concerned with civil rights and the death of one demonstrator in London, could forget the awful events in another part of the UK which resulted in the deaths of so many in similar circumstances.
I can send him their names if it helps avoid a similar memory lapse in future.
It’s also interesting that in Mr Hannah’s description of a Press Council hearing held more than 30 years ago, he remembers Lord Shawcross proclaiming: “I don’t agree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it’’.
No one at the time could recall who wrote that, but it was in fact Voltaire, the great French enlightenment writer and defender of civil liberties.
It’s a quotation most journalists are familiar with, and one which is as relevant and instructive today as it ever was.
Geoff Martin
Editor, Ham & High
• Howard Hannah writes: Geoff Martin can be forgiven for thinking I’m a dunderhead.
I should have said that Kevin Gately was the first demonstrator in mainland Britain to be killed for 55 years, and I apologise for that error.
As for the quote which he correctly identifies, we too knew it was Voltaire and so did Shawcross. (That was part of the joke, you see.) But marvellous though Voltaire is, we can’t live by epigrams alone. That day at the Press Council, we thought about that quote, of course, but then we had to think some more – about the relationship between racist propaganda and racial violence; about the Holocaust; about how racist brutality can and did become a respectable part of everyday politics. And now, we think about former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur.
I hope he thinks again about taking and advert from such an organisation when neither he nor his management are under any legal obligation to do so. The fine newspaper he edits and its readers deserve better than that.
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