MEMO
MEMO from the Editor Banned in Britain The December issue of Harper's magazine has been banished from British newsstands by official decree of Her Majesty's Government—a development that should...
...m pleased to announce that Betty Medsger, who chairs the journalism department at San Francisco State University and who has contributed outstanding articles to this magazine and many other publications, has accepted our invitation to join The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...edition, direct quotations from Cavendish's work were blanked out after the Thatcher government threatened contempt action against the British publisher...
...We've reported before on the struggle to preserve First Amendment rights in shopping malls, whose owners seem determined to keep ideas out of the marketplace...
...MEMO from the Editor Banned in Britain The December issue of Harper's magazine has been banished from British newsstands by official decree of Her Majesty's Government—a development that should astonish those who know Harper's as well as those who know, or thought they knew, Britain...
...Mall security guards stopped her from questioning passers-by and, in effect, placed her under arrest, detaining her in a mall office until she agreed to leave...
...the mall owners insist that even asking questions in a shopping center is an infringement of their sacred property rights...
...Now it turns out that the proprietors of these stale-air facilities don't just object to citizens who try to express their views by passing out leaflets to shoppers...
...The potential consequences for British democracy are another matter...
...But in Britain...
...Constitution without recalling centuries of Anglo-Saxon tradition and quoting the wisdom of John Milton, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill...
...Cavendish declined, and the Thatcher government, citing the Official Secrets Act, barred the book from distribution...
...Who can invoke the rights affirmed in the First Amendment to the U.S...
...And last fall, when the literary magazine Granta published an article about the book in its U.S...
...Now Harper's, too, has fallen victim to the Thatcher government's passion for official secrecy, which closely resembles the policy pursued by the Reagan Administration for the past eight years...
...Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade journal, reports that in Bellingham, Washington, Diane Dietz, a reporter for the Bellingham Herald, went to a local mall to interview shoppers about the Pacific National Exhibition in nearby Canada...
...See "Just Shut Up and Shop," by Keenen Peck, October 1987, and the Editor's Memo in the same issue...
...Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has charged that Oldfield, who died in 1981, was a homosexual whose "fondness for young men" resulted in breaches of security...
...It's conceivable that Harper's might, for one reason or another, be banned in Bulgaria or Chile or South Africa...
...Things are tough all over for freedom of speech...
...The book, primarily a defense of Sir Maurice Oldfield, the former director of M.I.6, Britain's counterintelligence service, has also been banned in Britain...
...When The Times of London obtained a privately printed copy, the newspaper, too, was enjoined from publishing excerpts...
...When the mailing of America is complete, with nothing but a solid mass of shopping centers from Maine to California and from Florida to Bellingham, Washington, the First Amendment will be off limits everywhere...
...Harper's is, after all, an old, established, widely respected, and, well, sedate publication...
...Harper's has announced it will challenge the ban in the courts...
...It rarely makes waves, nor does it usually publish the sort of stuff that sets censors to sharpening their blue pencils...
...John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's, notes that this is "the first time the Thatcher government has extended the Official Secrets Act beyond the borders of Britain to censor an American publication...
...The offending article in the December Harper's consists of excerpts from a book, Inside M.I.6, by Anthony Cavendish, who retired from the British secret service more than thirty years ago...
...Since the magazine only sells about 200 copies a month on British stands, the outcome isn't likely to inflict lasting damage on the American magazine...
...When Cavendish completed his book several years ago, he submitted his manuscript for government review and was told that most of it would have to be deleted...
...And Britain is, after all, the fountain-head of freedom of speech and of the press...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
