The following article is testament to the British state and its "support" for freedom of the press. The press being handed a script by the state officials of what to write about an incident rather than the reporters reporting what actually happened. To think that this couldn't happen today is rather naive in the extreme, though perhaps the need now is less since all the major media outlets are owned by strong supporters of the state and the established order. So will load their tales in accordance with their views and will not rock the boat too much.
Forward was a socialist newspaper published in Scotland from 1906. The founding editor was Tom Johnston, who was one of two main shareholders, alongside Roland Muirhead. It was associated with the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party and the temperance movement. It was committed to socialism and reported on these issues.
In 1915, the paper was closed down for six weeks on the order of Chancellor David Lloyd George, for reporting a meeting where he had met a hostile crowd.
“When Lloyd George got up to talk, according to Forward, he ‘was received with loud and continued booing and hissing ... Two verses of “The Red Flag” were sung before the minister could utter a word.’ The meeting ‘broke up in disorder’ and reporting of it was restricted, with newspapers told to reproduce a press release stating that Lloyd George had been given a sympathetic hearing.
Forward was shut down for six weeks, under DORA, after publishing its uncensored account of the meeting, though Johnston had been careful, as he thought, not to print anything that contravened it (William Beveridge, assistant secretary at the Ministry of Munitions, found it correspondingly difficult to make a case against him). Johnston wrote in his memoirs that Lloyd George ordered the police to remove copies from every newsagent in Scotland, and ‘had the police search the homes of known purchasers’.”
Three men were arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act and charged with published material “calculated to cause mutiny, sedition or disaffection among the civilian population and to impede the progress and restrict the production of war material.’ Lloyd George’s actions were debated in the House of Commons on the 4th and 10th January 1916.
Editorship of the Forward newspaper was passed to Emrys Hughes in 1931, George Thomson in 1948 and Francis Williams in 1957.
It ceased publication in 1959.
Find out more about our newspaper collections in our "Breaking the News" exhibition in the Mitchell Library on the ground floor.
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