[Militant No. 539, 13th February 1981, p. 5]
Just occasionally the BBC’s programme-makers investigate a sensitive, secret aspect of the state power.
But when they do, they are immediately censored by the powers that be!
This is clear from the decision to drop the screening of a special inquiry into the work of the British secret service, after several key scenes had been vetoed by the Director General, Sir Ian Trethowan.
The programme, called “MI5/MI6 – The Need to Know”, was made by the Panorama team, hardly known for its radical journalism. It was approved by the head of BBC1 and the head of BBC Current Affairs.
But “Sir Ian [according to a Press Association (PA) story, not published in many British papers!] banned a number of sequences, including a description of how the Special Branch passed false information to a woman’s employer, and claims from a former agent that he arranged illegal telephone taps for MI6 – something the British government denies takes place.”
There is nothing very “unusual” about these “claims”.
Documents found by the workers at BSC’s Greenwich Reinforcements plant during an occupation showed the intervention of undercover intelligence agents against trade unionists on behalf of the bosses.
Labour leaders like Lord George Brown and Harold Wilson, have themselves pointed to the intervention of the secret services in the labour movement.
The state, however, is clearly determined to cover up as much as possible the unscrupulous activities of the under-cover agencies, which are not subject to even minimal democratic checks. Indeed, Harold Wilson himself once claimed that as prime minister he had no idea what was going on in MI5.
“The programme [continues the PA story] also features the allegations of MI5 involvement in the downfall of a peer, Lord Lampton, a former government minister, in a sex scandal. Other investigations included the Profumo affair and the alleged recruitment of criminals by MI6, highlighted by the Littlejohn affair when two brothers claimed that British intelligence hired them to raid a Dublin bank.”
Not only is there evidence that secret agents were involved in bank robberies, but there is strong evidence that they were also responsible for bombings in Dublin which provided the Irish government with an excuse to rush through extraordinary “anti-terrorist” legislation.
Recently, the BBC also banned one of Ludovic Kennedy’s series on Lord Mountbatten. The sensitive episode revealed the cynical manoeuvres and blunders of the Tory government over the invasion of Egypt in 1956. It included Mountbatten’s admission that the log books of warships and other records were removed, falsified, the put back in order to “cook the history books”.
A little bit of investigative journalism and exposure is all very well to maintain the credibility of the BBC. But when it comes down to the secret intelligence service a line is drawn.
The blatant censorship of this Panorama programme shatters the myth of the “independence” and “impartiality” of the BBC.
On issues like this, the BBC is not a medium of information, but a medium of disinformation and concealment.
By Lynn Walsh
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