FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19889, 7 March 1928, Page 11

FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

BROADCASTING IN BRITAIN.

BAN, ON CONTROVERSY REMOVED. A. and N.Z.-Sun. LONDON, March 5. The Prime Minister, Mr. Baldwin, stated in the House of Commons that the Government had decided forthwith to remove the conditions under which the British Broadcasting Corporation had been prohibited from broadcasting statements involving -matters of political, religious and industrial controversy. The Government had asked the corporation to use discretion in utilising the power thus experimentally entrusted to it.

The removal of the ban finds everybody delighted. It is regarded as the greatest change in the history of broadcasting in Britain. Keen discussions have been aroused of late by the frequency with -which announced broadcasts were cancelled at the eleventh hour, either because the corporation objected to the views about to be expressed, or because the speakers refused to be officially shackled.

The strongest critics of the ban have been the Earl of Birkenhead, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald and Mr. G. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Churchill said the ban was absolutely idiotic, because controversy was the soul of British life. Mr. Shaw, who has not lost a single opportunity of tiiting at the corporation since it banned his speech on his 70th birthday, said.: "The Prime Minister, Mr. Baldwin, with the general election in the offing, pretends to have discovered what I found out every time I spoke, namely, that it was controversial. I hoped the Postmaster-General, Sir W. Mitchell Thomson, would send a brigade of Guards to stop me." The decision suggests an era of brighter wireless in England.