Crispin Aubrey

Guardian Double Campbell raises journalism official secrecy danger

charlesfosterLeave a comment

Guardian IMG_3736 900px

Those of us of a certain vintage have waited more than 40 years to see the double photographic byline shown above, which appeared on 20 July in the print edition of The Guardian. (The byline can also be seen in the online edition here, although disappointingly the pictures are missing.)

The two Campbells are both Scots, the older (born 1944) from Edinburgh, the younger (born 1952) from Dundee. Their paths crossed in the 1970s when the older was news editor of Time Out, which in those days employed several of its own reporters as well as giving work to a number of freelances. One of these freelances was Campbell the younger, already a specialist in writing about communications and the secret state. It was he who, along with Time Out staffer Crispin Aubrey, went to interview an ex-army corporal John Berry about his service in the Royal Signals. All three were arrested after the interview had finished, and charged with offences under the Official Secrets Act.

The ad hoc group of friends, families and other supporters which came together to defend them became known by their initials, the ABC campaign. It won a significant victory in getting the most serious charges under Section 1 of the act dropped. At their trial, all three were eventually found guilty of Section 2 charges, after the judge indicated he was not considering custodial sentences.

Now Campbell and Campbell are writing together to alert readers to the latest danger posed by this most illiberal of UK governments, whose sights are now set on journalists merely doing their jobs. As the pair point out:

The Home Office now wants harder and more extensive secrecy laws that would have the effect of deterring sources, editors and reporters, making them potentially subject to uncontrolled official bans not approved by a court, and punished much more severely if they do not comply. In noisy political times, a government consultation issued two months ago has had worryingly little attention. Although portrayed as countering hostile activity by state actors, the new laws would, if passed, ensnare journalists and sources whose job is reporting “unauthorised disclosures” that are in the public interest.

These proposals are markedly different from those proposed by the independent Law Commission published last autumn. The commission recommended that “a statutory public interest defence should be created for anyone … including civilians and journalists, that they can rely upon in court”. Journalists and sources should not be convicted if it was in the public interest for the information disclosed to be known by recipients. An independent, statutory whistleblower commissioner “should be established to receive and investigate allegations of wrongdoing or criminality”.

The current “gung-ho, authoritarian approach of the government could allow press freedom to be clamped into silence” warn our Dynamic Duo, unless editors and others worried about press freedom and an open society do not highlight the dangers and call a halt. Well said, chaps.

Advertisement

Aitken and the ABC case

charlesfosterLeave a comment

[L-R] Tony Bunyan, Duncan Campbell and Sarah Kavanagh speaking at the Arnolfini in Bristol, an event organised to mark the 40th anniversary of the ABC Campaign

The event in Bristol a couple of weeks ago to mark the 40th anniversary of the Aubrey-Berry-Campbell official secrets case was a good chance to catch up with many people I hadn’t seen for a good number of years. I was also quite surprised by the large number of bits of ephemera which I designed for the campaign. Stickers, posters, badges, the ‘souvenir programme’ which we produced for the 1978 Old Bailey trial and a few more I had totally forgotten about. The product of many nights Letrasetting headlines and pasting up artwork, and there they all were, projected onto the backdrop behind the speakers in a never-ending slideshow.

One was for this Conway Hall meeting, held in April 1977, an event I remember well.

Some people might be surprised to see Jonathan Aitken’s name as a speaker at this meeting, given that he is most famous now for being convicted of perjury following the collapse of the libel case he brought against the Guardian in 1995. However, he had himself been on trial in 1971 for breaching the Official Secrets Act, along with the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, the newspaper itself and a retired army colonel who had been an observer in the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s. All the defendants were eventually acquitted on all charges. (The best summary of the case that I could find online is actually from the New York Times.) The judge told the court that the Telegraph’s report did not contain ‘a word affecting our national security.’ and that the result should make the Government consider whether the broad terms of the act had ‘reached retirement age and should be pensioned off.’ The case against Aitken was brought by a Labour government and Attorney-General, and it was the same combination who brought the 1977 prosecution against Aubrey, Berry and Campbell. That might have been the party political reason for Aitken speaking in support of a campaign which had previously only been backed by left-wing Labour MPs (such as Neil Kinnock, Jo Richardson and Robert Kilroy-Silk(!)).

After the case, Aitken wrote a book, Officially Secret, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 1971. I have a copy of this, which I see from the stamps inside that I bought from a LB Hackney sale of withdrawn library stock in 1986 for 25p. The cover was designed by Craig Dodd, who also worked on covers for other publishers in this period. (See these posts on Existential Ennui: The Dame, The Right Stuff and The Shooting Party.)

There is another link between the Aitken and ABC cases. One of the defence counsel in both was Lord Hutchinson QC, who died yesterday at the grand age of 102. In his obituary in today’s Guardian, Geoffrey Robertson QC (who was a junior counsel in the ABC case) recalls how Hutchinson found out about the jury-vetting in the latter case, in a story which he also told at the Bristol event:

On the opening day of the ‘ABC’ trial in 1978, Jeremy discovered by chatting to an incautious Old Bailey clerk that the prosecution had made a clandestine application to a subservient judge to ‘vet’ the jury panel. This practice had been secretly used in ‘political’ cases and Jeremy’s advocacy blew it up into a national scandal. A pupil barrister (now Mr Justice Nicol) was dispatched post-haste to the LSE library to borrow a copy of Bentham’s Elements of the Art of Jury-Packing, which Jeremy used as the basis for a blistering attack on the weak Labour law officers who had approved this obnoxious form of secret policing.

By the time the ABC case came up for trial, I was working for the National Council for Civil Liberties as its publications officer. The very first item I produced in this new job was a pamphlet called Justice Deserted, written by one of NCCL’s legal officers, Harriet Harman, and LSE professor John Griffith. The foreword was by EP Thompson, no less, and I recall having to ring the great man himself to give him instructions as to where to post his text. Heady days indeed.

The ABC case: forty years on

charlesfosterLeave a comment

L-R: Duncan Campbell, Crispin Aubrey and John Berry, pictured after their arrest in 1977. Pic: Crispin Aubrey Legacy Fund

It’s hard to believe that it’s more than 40 years since two journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, were arrested outside the North London flat of ex-soldier John Berry. All three were then charged with various offences under the Official Secrets Act.

I became a fairly active member of their defence committee, which was also supported by the National Union of Journalists and civil liberties groups. A first trial at the Old Bailey in September 1978 collapsed after one of the members of the jury was identified as a former officer in the Special Air Service. A second trial opened on 3 October 1978. The prosecution admitted that much of the information was in the public domain, and charges under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act were dropped on 24 October. All three were finally found guilty on 17 November 1978 of the Section 2 offences, but received non-custodial sentences.

Crispin Aubrey died suddenly of a heart attack in 2012. His family set up a fund in his memory to continue his work and carry on the campaigns with which he was involved. The fund is organising a public discussion in Bristol on Friday 3 November to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the case, and all are invited. Among the speakers will be John Berry and Duncan Campbell. The invitation explains:

Every post-war generation has had its own whistleblower who has tried to expose the extent to which governments monitor public communications. For the 1970s it was the ABC trial. This shone a light on the darker corners of state surveillance and sparked a ferocious attempt by the government to criminalise journalists. At this special event, hear from those involved and the contemporary relevance in our post-Snowden world. This unique panel discussion will look at the events from those involved and consider how much has really changed and the threats to journalists and whistleblowers today.

The event is free, but a £5 donation to the Fund is requested in order to continue its work. Get tickets in advance here.

Duncan Campbell’s own site has many items of interest to do with the case and trial.

Power to the People’s Press

charlesfosterLeave a comment

HPP87 loresFrom 1974 to 1985 I was involved in a collective of people who produced a monthly community newspaper in Hackney, the Hackney People’s Press. At the time, it was the most important thing in my life, and I devoted an inordinate amount of time to it. One whole weekend every month was devoted to its layout – typing the text on an IBM golfball typewriter, rubbing down headlines in Letraset, pasting the whole thing up on large sheets of white card. These were delivered to the printers on a Tuesday, and we would then collect finished papers from them on the Friday. The following Saturday would involve driving round various Hackney newsagents, leaving a few copies on sale or return, and collecting the meagre income from the previous month. The next morning, Sunday, a group of three or four of us would meet up on either the De Beauvoir or Holly Street estates, and sell some more copies door to door.

The Centerprise bookshop was far and away the best outlet – some months we would sell 150 or so copies there. Altogether, we might sell a few hundred of each print run, so the paper never broke even. We were just about kept alive by a few ads, the occasional donation and the unpaid toil of a small but dedicated group of people.

Although we were nominally a collective, rotating duties every month, I had the most print production expertise, and so I took on for myself a lot of the design and production decisions. When I first got involved, Crispin Aubrey was the mainstay of the group and he did all the business of liaising with printers and paying the bills. In those days, the paper consisted of a series of backed up A3 sheets, held together with three staples on the left hand edge. The sheets had to be collated and stitched by the collective, which meant another production session after the printing had happened and before we even got onto the streets.

Crispin stood down sometime in the summer of 1975. After a few months, I got together with two or three other people (Hi Andy and Marilyn, wherever you are these days!) and we decided to make an attempt to bring the paper out on our own, using it to look for more people to join us. We decided to give up on the A3 size and produce the paper in A4 format. Although we still had to collate and fold the sheets this was easier than the stapling method. I designed a masthead and made the other design decisions such as what Letraset typefaces to buy.

We continued in this way for a couple of years, and then I found out about a new firm of printers in Morning Lane. It was Turkish-owned and had some sort of tie to a Turkish left group – exactly who, I never found out. But for much the same price as we were producing a 16ppA4 publication, which we had to fold ourselves, we could get an 8pp A3 newspaper, all folded and finished. It was, as people say nowadays, a no-brainer. I designed another masthead, and invested in sheets of Letraset Futura Extra Bold Condensed, which I reckoned was a more authentic font for the headlines of a tabloid size newspaper.

The final change to our production methods came when we moved over to cold-set web press production, and were able to use a red spot colour on the front and back pages. We first went to the SWP’s printer, Feb Edge, just off Hackney Road. A year or two later, the Militant’s printer nearby in Cambridge Heath Road approached us and offered us an even cheaper price, which we were happy to accept. (No room for comradely inhibitions about poaching clients between these two species of Trots.)  Both outfits were pretty paranoid about their security. Their presses had impressive grilles on their windows and you never got closer than a locked front office when delivering artwork or picking up the printed copies.

Quite why the paper stopped in 1985, I’m not sure. We produced an issue in June of that year, but then nothing afterwards. Normally I would have phoned the key members to arrange a meeting to plan the next issue, but for some reason I didn’t. And… no one seemed to notice.

A year or two after this, I broke up with the girlfriend I had been living with through all this period. I took a big pile of back copies when I moved out of our house to the other side of Stoke Newington. Ten years later, married and with two small children, I dumped many of the duplicates into the recycling bin just before we moved to Ireland. And tidying up again, over the years since, I have now pruned my collection down to just one copy of each issue. Back in 2013, I was able to donate an almost complete set of papers to John from the excellent Radical History of Hackney website, and I did an email interview with him, which you can see here. People occasionally still get in touch with me to ask the odd question about the paper, and I am happy to help.

Crispin Aubrey, mentioned above, died suddenly in 2012 at the age of 66. I hadn’t seen him for years, but even then it was a terrible shock. He had been a real mentor to me in my early HPP days, and I used to look up to him with real admiration. His family have set up a fund in his name which helps journalism students at the University of the West of England. Further details here.