Sarah Tisdall and the law

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- but that the fact that someone had leaked irrespective of the material.

'Whether or not any harm has been done on this occasion, the next may be different. It is no answer to this threat that the editor of the Guardian is a patriotic and responsible citizen. The responsibility for deciding what information shall be treated as classified and what shall be released into the public domain is not his or that of any individual civil servant applying his (sic) own criteria.

''The maintenance of national security requires that untrustworthy servants in a position to mishandle highly classified documents passing from the Secretary of State for Defence to other Ministers shall be identified at the earliest possible moment and removed from their positions, This is blindingly obvious.

By delivering the judgement so brutally Donaldson at least left Peter Preston in no doubt about the issues at stake.

Depressed

There followed some soul-searching among Guardian staff in "a depressed and melancholy atmosphere" • The three choices (to be made within an hour and a quarter) were -defy the court and destroy the document; defy the court and keep the document while appealing to the House Lords; or hand it • over.

It was at t his moment of sharpest crisis that the true colours of the politics of the Guardian were revealed. Peter Cole writes:

•The battle between the National Graphical Association and Mr Eddie Shah was on at the time, and we had before us an example of the capacity of the courts to fine huge amounts for contempt. We knew that if we stuck to our resolve not to return the document the inevitable outcome would be the loss of all our assets and the closure of the paper ...

Superior

But there seemed to the small group discussing the matter a superior issue to that. The Guardian is, and had stated in court that it was, a law abiding newspaper. Only that week in its own editorial columns, it had expressed the view that it was not for the NGA to take the law into its own hands simply because it did not like the law.

'The Guardian advocated campaigning to change laws of which it disapproved, not selective breaking of them. It would have been inconsistent with the Guardian's regularly published views of these matters to break the law then.

"It would weakened have paper's authority in the future, and made it very difficult for the Guardian to argue against the selective breaking of laws which others found disagreeable."

That was the whole matter in a nutshell. The Guardian could not act in defence of its own interests, because it did not wish to damage an ideological attitude to other groups - particularly the trade unions and councils like Merseyside considering illegal budgets.

Peter Preston left the office sti" not knowing what he would do. A detached observer could have told him he was on his way to hand over the document which led Sarah Tisdall to her six month jail sentence.

The reaction inside the NUJ has been to blame Preston as an individual. He was to blame and deserves the criticism. What must be tackled, however, is the ideological stranglehold which allowed him such free rein.

Muscle

The Daily Mirror chapel has since used its muscle to force its editor to refuse to hand over the name of a source to the courts. The courts then ruled that the name did not have to be handed over - so the resolve of the staff there was not ultimately tested.

The NUJ has its code - it must now fight for chapels to insist that it is put into practice.

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Socialist ORGANISE Soci ORG NO COAL co

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FIGHTER MOVE CLASS Police out of the coalfields! IN HARRIS 1A CB JOHN HARRIS

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Şocialist Organiser no. 172 March 29 1984 Page 8

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THE MINERS SUPPORT THE MINERS

Published by the Socialist Organiser Alliance, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. Printed by Laneridge (TU). Registered as a newspaper at the GPO, Polic Ollerton Collery