Tory War on Democratic Rights!

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The rights of the press, the right to strike, the rights of immigrants and the right not to have your phone: tapped have all been dramatically curbed in one seven day period.

The stripping away of traditional democratic rights is escalating week by week under the Thatcher government-testimony to the fact that a government bent on destroying the organisations of the working class must take many "bourggeois democratic rights along with thein.

Imprisonment

Granada TV has been told that executives will face a fine or imprisonment if they do not reveal the name of the person who gave them an internal, British Steel Corporation memorandum during the steel strike.

The memorandum was usnd by the World in Action team to prove that the government lied when it said it was not 'intervening • in the strike, and inal the pay offer had been deliberately pitched lower than BSC had wanted.

The Law Lords have upheld a Court of Appeal ruling that the name of the informant should be handed over.

The Court of Appeal itself had justified its scandalous ruling by saying that the programme had not treated the chairman of British Steel with sufficient deference, and that the document had been 'mutilated' before it had been handed back (identifying marks had been cut off).

The ruling is a warning to all nnwspapers whose journalists consider that they have certain freedoms: the state will not hesitate to axe these in defence of capitalist property relations.

Attacked press

Lord Scarman, one of the law lords who made the judgement, even attacked the. press for hostile comment on the ruling-saying that comment should have been suspended until the Lords publish their reasons in a couple of months time!

Granada, meanwhile, have been given seven days to hand over the name.

A further attack on the rights of the press came in a Parliamentary statement from Sir Michael Havers, Attorney General, over the BBC's right to report events in Northern Ireland-a right which, it must be said, is hardly exercised by Published by Foliose 1 Registered as a newspe the BBC.

Havers told the Commons that future interviews with terrorists' would face a tougher government line.

"If similar incidents take place again l could take a stricter view, and those who had participated would be warned that, subject to the evidence and the circumstances of the case, they risked criminal proceedings under the Prevention of Terrorism Act"

He was referring to a BBC Tonight interview with a member of the Irish National Liberation Army and to the filming by a Panórama team of an IRA roadblock at Carrickmore.

Havers said he was confident: that the INLA interview had been in breach of the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

In deciding not to prosecute he underlined the fact that there are no rights to a free press which the government cannot "I was determined that my decision should not be interpreted as a licence to journalists to have responsibility to the public, but outside the legal restrictions which operated on all others. There is no such licence, and that must be clearly understood."

Preparation

In a letter to the BBC lavers had already said that the reparation for such an interiew was a breach of Section 1