MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Vigorous debate, not censorship, is the way to correct ... trends now

MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Vigorous debate, not censorship, is the way to correct ... trends now
MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Vigorous debate, not censorship, is the way to correct ... trends now

MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Vigorous debate, not censorship, is the way to correct ... trends now

Is what we think or say any business of the Government? Certainly not. For while incitement to violence or other crimes is rightly a crime itself, the simple expression of opinion cannot be limited by the State, and should not be.

Good policy results from free debate, not from censored rigidity. It is regimes such as Belarus, or Putin's Russia, that reach for the censor's blue pencil, or worse, if their orthodoxies are challenged.

In the pre-Blair era, this good old rule was widely understood in Whitehall and Westminster. Governments might try quite hard to stop us finding out what they were doing, and may not always have answered questions fully. 

But the idea that the State should try to influence opinion, let alone monitor it and help its suppression, would have been regarded by most civil servants as intolerable.

(File Photo) Good policy results from free debate, not from censored rigidity. In the pre-Blair era, this good old rule was widely understood in Whitehall and Westminster

(File Photo) Good policy results from free debate, not from censored rigidity. In the pre-Blair era, this good old rule was widely understood in Whitehall and Westminster

Since the New Labour Government, there has been a growing tendency to meddle in such matters. Tony Blair said in 1997 that his party was 'the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole'. 

This amazing claim inaugurated a new style of government in which the whole idea of opposition was undermined and dissent actively marginalised.

His Government sent out spin doctors, determined to push and promote its case rather than simply provide information. But, as The Mail on Sunday reveals today, this has gone a dangerous stage further – and under a Tory Government too.

Fear and panic make fools of us all from time to time. We

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