In censoring the press, the police have dangerously overreached

When major parts of the country’s busiest motorway are forced to close by deliberate sabotage for four days running, that is a news story of national importance. If you were caught up in those closures – perhaps with tragic consequences like missing your father’s funeral as Tony Manbury did – and then read or heard nothing about them in the news media, you would think it bizarre or even sinister.

You might begin to suspect that there was an active conspiracy to conceal a plot or an official embarrassment (which may not be far from the truth as it happens). For this kind of systematic, illegal disruption to be carried out in full public view without receiving any coverage should be inconceivable in an open society. But the Hertfordshire police were apparently prepared to think the unthinkable.

While attending one of the sites of this lunatic delinquency on a busy section of the M25 last week, they formally arrested not only the Just Stop Oil brats but a broadcast journalist who was covering the incident.

Charlotte Lynch, a reporter from LBC radio, was a considerable distance from the protesters desporting themselves on the gantry, and was in possession of an accredited press card that a five minute telephone call would have verified.

Nonetheless, she was apprehended by officers on “suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance” and imprisoned for five hours. That is to say, she was potentially to be charged with precisely the same offence as the protesters would be.

Nobody so far as I can see has actually suggested that the arresting officers believed her to be part of the demonstration or even supportive of it. This is where the explanation of the arrest by David Lloyd, Hertfordshire’s police and crime commissioner, becomes really alarming. He did not defend it on the basis that his force made a mistake: that they believed wrongly that Ms Lynch belonged to the Just Stop Oil troops.

What he did say was much more far-reaching and political than that. He advised journalists generally to “think about how we as a society… ensure that the oxygen of publicity that Just Stop Oil is seeking is moderated, so that we don’t end up with people doing this and really they’re only doing it because they know it’s going to be reported”. The syntax may be garbled but you get the point.

Let’s give the benefit of the doubt here and assume that the police in Hertfordshire (and presumably elsewhere) have not simply become so embarrassed by news coverage of their ineffectual attempts to shut down these pestilential climate protests that they are taking it out on any reporter they can get their hands on.

But, where exactly does it lead if we take Mr Lloyd’s statement as an absolutely sincere and wellintentioned plea to the media to “moderate” its coverage of these incidents (which is to say, not to cover them) because they are designed to get publicity and providing it will encourage more of them?

Does Mr Lloyd see news reporting as a form of free advertising? Would he advocate a news blackout on any activity (or opinion) that he regarded as potentially dangerous or destructive because he thought it might benefit from the publicity?

The danger in the police making such a declaration should be obvious to anyone familiar with the traditions of totalitarian countries. It is not for the police – or any agency of the state – to enforce rules about what actions and opinions are permitted the “oxygen of publicity”.

However obnoxious and absurd you believe JSO’s activities to be, the fact that they are doing what they do – with the consequent effects – must not be unreportable. You cannot ignore or edit visible reality in a free country.

Yes indeed – when the police say these things, we can see the shadow of the Stasi loom quite clearly before us.

But almost identical sentiments are now dominating areas of national life that have generally been assumed to be dedicated to the preservation of free thought and uncensored debate. In fact, it is within the social circles inclined to support extreme climate protest that you are most likely to find approval of such censorship.

What Mr Lloyd advocated is nothing more than yet another species of cancel culture. Put succinctly, it is now a received truth of Left-liberal orthodoxy that if you see views or activities that you believe to be harmful being promoted in your society, it is your moral duty to suppress them or prevent them from being promulgated. That is pretty much precisely the philosophy that Mr Lloyd is espousing.

Yet, I somehow doubt that the academics and directors of cultural institutions who enthusiastically arrange the cancellation of gender critical feminists, or apologists for Britain’s imperial history, would see it this way. I am quite sure, in fact, that they would excoriate his statement and the actions of his officers as (their favourite pejorative) “fascist”. (I must declare an interest here: as a veteran of the original student revolution, which proudly titled itself the Free Speech Movement, I am flabbergasted by these developments.)

There is no doubt that the priorities and ethical decisions involved in news reporting can be difficult and contentious. I – and many others – believed that the uncritical prolockdown campaign run by the broadcast media during the Covid pandemic was ethically dubious and professionally misjudged.

Those of us who criticised it did so on the grounds that such coverage had ceased to be news at all: that the broadcast organisations had turned themselves into an arm of government and were effectively now propagandists.

But no one seriously suggested at any point that such relentless fearinducing coverage, or the criticism of it in the print media, should be banned or prosecuted. Whether it’s a pandemic, a climate crisis or sexual identity we are talking about, we need to open up the arguments not close them down. That’s the whole point of journalism.

The arrest of a reporter at a Just Stop Oil protest should alarm all who care about free thought and uncensored debate

It is not for any agency of the state to enforce rules about what actions are permitted the ‘oxygen of publicity’