#FreeThePress

by Brendan O’Neill, from facebook:

I want to tell you about an incident in English history which is little known, but which helped to make your life freer and better than it might otherwise have been.

In Ipswich in the 1630s, a strange and tense war of words broke out between the local council and the local bishop. The bishop and his lackeys sought to curb the council’s decision-making power and to govern more closely what it could do and even what its members could say and publish. The local people reacted angrily, and at one stage there were “armed riots against the bishop’s officials”. The council was a fairly radical, Puritan affair, while the bishop’s office was more traditionalist, so this was in many ways a prototype of a conflict that would define England for the next few decades.

The Puritan controversialist, William Prynne, wrote a newspaper-style pamphlet about these events, titled ‘News from Ipswich’. He was stingingly critical of the bishop and his men, in particular of their old-fashioned religious sentiments and their attempts to control public discourse, which was in keeping with the Star Chamber of the time and its power to say what could and could not be published. “Nothing may be said that is not licensed”, complained Prynne. For writing ‘News from Ipswich’, for giving his take on these events, he was dragged to the Star Chamber in 1637 and charged with seditious libel. He was fined £500, publicly whipped, put in the pillory, and then both his ears were cut off and his cheeks were branded with “S” and “L” for seditious libel. Ouch.

To the horror of his persecutors, Prynne became a hero. People made pictures of him. Copies of ‘News from Ipswich’, this most seditious news sheet, were being published in Holland and then smuggled into England. One smuggler and distributor of ‘News from Ipswich’ was John Lilburne, a 23-year-old London apprentice and troublemaker, who would later play a key role in the Leveller movement in the Civil War of the 1640s. Lilburne was a fantastic contrarian: one observer said he was “of so quarrelsome a disposition that if there were only John Lilburne in the world, John would quarrel with Lilburne, and Lilburne with John”.

Lilburne was soon arrested for distributing ‘News from Ipswich’. In 1638 he was fined, publicly whipped across his back with a three-prong cord, and put in the pillory. But he wasn’t having it. As he was being put in the pillory, he took copies of ‘News from Ipswich’ and other pamphlets from his pocket and “tossed them among the people”. When he was out of pamphlets he started reciting from them from memory. So his torturer violently gagged him (“blood did spurt from his mouth”), but then Lilburne “stamped with his feet” and as one witness to these events wrote: “The people understood his meaning well enough: that he would speak if he were able.” Mercifully his ears were spared.

Lilburne became a hero too, of course, and more famous than Prynne. And he went on to argue, with the Levellers, against the licensing of the press and against any kind of church or state involvement in publishing. These radicals insisted that “an unlicensed press is so essential unto Freedom, as that without it, it is impossible to preserve any Nation from being liable to the worst of Bondage”. These arguments later inspired the American revolutionaries who made press freedom the organising principle of their new republic, and they also contributed to the eventual ending of press licensing in Britain, in the 1690s.

Thanks to contrarians, shit-stirrers, pamphleteers and publishers of what we would these days call “alternative news”, thanks to people so brave that they suffered torture and branding for their right to publish what they believed to be true, the press was released from government oversight. And Britain became a freer, more democratic nation as a result. What’s tragic is this: nearly 400 years after Prynne had his ears cut off for reporting the “news from Ipswich” as he understood it, moves are afoot to bring officialdom back into the world of the press. Under Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, publications would be financially pressured to sign up to a system of press regulation approved by Royal Charter and enforced by IMPRESS, a regulatory body staffed by people who despise the tabloids, who today clutch their pearls over the Daily Mail calling judges “enemies of the people”, and who 400 years ago would have clutched their pearls over Prynne calling the bishop in Ipswich a “wolf”.

This ain’t a game. We can’t let it stand. People were whipped and jailed and killed in the struggle to free the press from the state, and now we’re going to hand the press back to the state because Hugh Grant and John Cleese and Steve Coogan don’t like it when the Sun or Mail slag them off? No way. Click below and do your bit for press freedom. It will take you a minute. And you won’t lose your ears.

https://freethepress.co.uk