Word: mirror
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Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, who threatened fortnight ago to gag the London Daily Mirror's caustic criticism of the Government (TIME, March 30), instead of backing down under the fierce drubbing which was administered to him by virtually the entire British press and a good part of the House of Commons, returned to the attack, under an even fiercer drubbing...
...tempestuous House, Cockney Morrison announced that he would "take any action in my power against any newspaper which conducts itself in such a way as to promote opposition to the successful conduct of the war. . . . If that newspaper [the Mirror] goes on with the pernicious line it has conducted, I tell the House it will be suppressed and the Government, having done that, will submit itself to the judgment of the House. . . . If the House has a division on such an issue and I go down, I will go down...
...accused the Mirror of divulging military information (hitherto the sole topic of British censorship). The crime of the Mirror was in criticizing the Government, the productive effort and the efficiency of the Army-criticizing it continuously, bitterly and intemperately. (Sample attack on the Army by the Mirror's "Cassandra": "At the top you have the military aristocracy of the Guards' regiments with a mentality not very foreign to that of Potsdam. In the center you have a second-class snobocracy and behind it all the cloying inertia of the Civil Service bogged down by regulations from which they...
Despite recent bumbling in Hong Kong and Singapore-which remained military backwaters on the other side of the world-the British army as a whole has had a vigorous overhauling to elevate able young officers, regardless of social background. The great majority of honest observers regard the Mirror's attacks as sensational and irresponsible journalism. So the case of the Mirror raises the issue of freedom of the press in its most poignant form: men are called upon to defend the right of a paper to publish opinions which may be, and probably are, grossly unfair...
...suppress the Mirror, if it did not mind its tongue, Secretary Morrison threatened to use Section 2D of the Defense Regulations (which allows the Government to suppress a paper without warning or trial), a law that was passed by a slim majority in the invasion-threatened summer of 1940-passed with the express statement by the Government that it would not be used except in case of dire peril. Liberal M.P. Wilfrid Roberts drew cheers when he recalled these facts...