Gagging the News Letter

By AM Thursday, September 4, 2014

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An editorial by the News Letter in which the daily paper called for powers over the allocation of social welfare to be stripped from Stormont and made subject to direct rule from Westminster has prompted more than just an angry response from Sinn Fein. The party has moved to curb the paper’s ability to express an opinion not approved by itself and has lodged a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission.

The editorial that has thus far generated a censorial flurry rather than a frenzy could easily have come hot from a printing press in Dickensian London. It all but spelled out in plain language its haughty characterization of West Belfast as a new manifestation of the underserving poor.  It ventured the opinion that: 

A key tenet of [welfare] reform is that disincentives to work must be eradicated. Most people outside of lavishly taxpayer-funded republican strongholds such as west Belfast see this.

Arrogant class disdain standing on the shoulders of economic orthodoxy, it amounted to a shake of the reactionary colonel’s swagger stick in the direction of the disobedient natives; right wing posturing, graced only by refraining from making the call for the British military to be returned to the streets of West Belfast to force the denizens into workhouses. The author could actually have benefited from the more cerebral editorial in the Guardian two years ago which pointed out that this:

most unhelpful of distinctions ... the attempt to distinguish between different categories of the poor is almost as old as the modern British state ... (it) reinforces the view that there are a whole category of people who are responsible – and thus to be blamed – for their own misfortune.

This is what tends to happen when the Daily Telegraph rather than the Guardian is perused over morning coffee to get the day started. The notion would never occur to DT readers that a society which:

cannot cap the income of the undeserving rich ... but is quite happy to cut off funds to the poor is a society that has learned nothing from its own history.

Having been a resident of West Belfast for many years, and having availed of them, it is impossible not to have realized the extent of dependency on benefits. This was not because people embraced a disincentive to work ethos. The constituency probably more than most, given its history and difficult relationship with the state, is susceptible to a form of structural exclusion within the economy. The urge to get something for nothing is probably no more pronounced in West Belfast than in other areas including the middle class ones where the scammer wears a business suit and might vote UUP or Alliance rather than Sinn Fein. 

To blame it all on Gerry Adams as Robin Livingstone once did, or the sitting MP, would be a fanciful resort to fiction. True, on the watch of Adams the need for benefits was not alleviated and employment did not come in, but there are a myriad of reasons as to why this might be so other than the MP being a lazy good for nothing.

The current MP Paul Maskey is hardly encouraging benefit culture when in a bid to bring jobs in went as far as to welcome the Israeli terror friendly Caterpillar company to his constituency. Think of that as we will but it is anything but evidence that he is sitting on his jaxie telling people just to draw the dole.

Sinn Fein is taking the right position in its refusal to push the Tory assault on welfare even if it is a short term move aimed at projecting a radical image to the southern electorate. At the same time, if the News Letter wishes to echo the sentiments of the obnoxious Iain Duncan Smith it should be free to express its view on the matter without the Sinn Fein MP for the area throwing a hissy fit. His party, perhaps emboldened by the memory of winning an embarrassing apology from the Andersonstown News a number of years ago for the "hurt" caused after the paper’s editor excoriated the then MP Gerry Adams, claiming his record of delivery in the constituency was abysmal, has flexed its muscle and demanded that the News Letter retract and apologise. Given that in the wake of the hastily delivered apology the Irish News exercised bragging rights via a cartoonist slagging the Andersonstown News off as a West Belfast grovel sheet, the News Letter is most unlikely to be forthcoming with a similar retraction. 

The North's censor lawyers have grown obese because of an unhealthy appetite there for muzzling opinion. Its political class has sought to frustrate the extension of the libel reform law from the UK. Peter Robinson has called for a boycott of the Irish News because he did not approve its line of legitimate questioning. Gerry Adams recently tried to gag the Irish Independent because he took umbrage at its coverage of his handling of a rape case involving his brother. In the Irish News the SF columnist Jim Gibney called for more regulation of the press so that the only stuff we might read is the dross he churns out with alarming regularity. 

West Belfast, if it can remove the stifling hand of censorship that causes some to submit their work to Sinn Fein prior to publication, is more than capable through its own writers of standing up for the constituency and taking the News Letter to task. Sinn Fein censorship of the News Letter is as welcome as the Tory welfare reforms and should be pushed back just as vigorously.