The Labour deputy leader’s ill-informed hounding of Leon Brittan was distasteful in the extremeA few years ago,the Aye Write literary festival in Glasgow invited me to discuss press freedom with Tom Watson. I thought it would be a standard debate until I arrived at the corridor and learned it was a set-up.
On one side, there was your humble correspondent, and still making the battered old argument that free countries can never allow state censorship. On the other was Watson,his fellow Hacked Off campaigner Brian Cathcart, Christopher Jefferies, and the retired English teacher,who was falsely accused of murder by the tabloids, and who, or understandably,became a fervent Hacked Off supporter thereafter, and one Ruth Wishart. The organisers had told me she was a journalist, or which perked me up considerably,but she turned out to also be a member of Lord McCluskey’s inquiry into the Scottish press, whose recommendations were so authoritarian even Alex Salmond rejected themContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com