I am particularly pleased to see Lady Brittain among the guests whose husband, the late Sir Harry BrittainSir Harry, that sprightly centenarian, had the vision which led to the founding of your Union sixty-six years ago.
Since accepting this invitation to open the Commonwealth Press Union's 65th Annual Conference, Britain has overwhelmingly decided to continue her membership of the EEC. Something we have accomplished with the wholehearted consent of the Commonwealth.
I have never subscribed to the view that British entry into the EEC would cause fatal weakening of Commonwealth links.
I have always held that Britain's active participation in Europe could strengthen Britain. It could strengthen Europe and it could strengthen British and European co-operation with other parts of the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth is a marvellous historic and unique association of thirty-four sovereign nations bound so loosely yet so effectively. [end p1]
President Nyerere of Tanzania described the Commonwealth as “people meeting together, consulting, learning from each other, trying to persuade each other and sometimes co-operating with each other, regardless of economics or geography or ideology or religion or race” .
Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, once put it this way: “We understand each other better than any other group. We use the same diction and concept. We are all evolving and discovering our own personalities.”
And last year Mr. Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, said of it: “We have rich nations and poor; our politics range from the libertarian through the authoritarian to the incredible—though you will understand that protocol prevents a specific identification of the last.”
But despite our long established relationship we still seem to know so little about each other in the Commonwealth. I am not of course thinking about those folksy sometimes comic and usually affectionate touristic images of maple syrup and Mounties, Ned Kellys and Eskimo Nells, city-bred cowboys, buskers and bagpipes.
No, what I have in mind is that lack of instinctive rapport readily found among friends. Perhaps an erosion of what has in the past been taken for granted as a posture of inter-dependence.
What or who is to blame? It is easy to blame the news media. Easy but only occasionally justified. More often it is just glib and fashionable to do so. And so it has been down the years ever since newspapers began.
John Ruskin for example ussd to pillory the “hireling scribes who daily pawn the dirty linen of their souls for the price of a bottle of sour wine and a cigar” .
Samuel Johnson described them as being “proud of the hourly increase in infamy—and intent only to outdo one another in the falsehoods and slanders by which they aid and abet their masters.”
Against such a background of almost perpetual vilification many in the media might be inclined to shrug and respond like Hillaire Belloc used to do. [end p2]
When asked how he felt about harsh review notices of his books, he would reply: “Well, I comfort myself with the thought that had these same critics been in the Holy Land two thousand years ago, and had they been privileged to observe the Good Lord walking upon the waters, they would have turned up their noses and complained ‘Dear me, there he is, at it again, walking on the waters.’”
Journalists and politicians have a duty to serve the cause of freedom. Having achieved it for our countries, we must pass it on to our people.
If our countries are to succeed in this, the people themselves must be involved in our great endeavour. Today we have the means at hand for that involvement in newspapers, the radio and television.
In years gone by, our rulers had reference to their own stores of wisdom. Perhaps it may have been the rites and practices of ancient religions. Perhaps they had a great body of written or remembered customary law. Perhaps they were equipped by deep study of the classics, philosophy and history, to apply the lessons that men have learnt in past centuries.
Those not so learned were the uncommitted majority of our peoples. It is the great triumph of the Commonwealth that the principles of elective Government have been inscribed in all our constitutions. Today the voice of all the people may be heard.
The communicators of our various nations must learn to serve the people as the old accumulated wisdoms served our ruling fathers.
The force of religions has waned, the old ways of wisdoms [sic] no longer sway the younger more impatient generation.
No longer is it a small group of informed and privileged people who follow and control the affairs of our businesses, parliaments and nations. [end p3]
Today to a greater or lesser degree each citizen can bring his influence to bear. But what shall influence him? Is he to be a victim of easy demagoguery and modern reason? Or can you and your colleagues ensure that the questions at issue are explained in a way all may understand?
The miracles of electronics make this possible even for those without the skills of reading or writing. It is a heavy responsibility for every man and woman in the field of our communications. They must see that the people know the whole truth. We may be constrained from acting in a particular way because of influences in our education or special knowledge. Other people may not have the benefits of such a corpus of knowledge by which to judge. What an abuse of freedom it would be if we were not to share it with them.
To see our fellow men on television, in their homes, half a world away, shrinks not only the world but the differences between us. Often we know one another only in this way. How important it is that we know more of the whole truth about one another's lands.
If the Commonwealth is one of the greatest forces for disseminating information then you must be the voice of that force.
I do believe that a communications gap exists. But it is not one about which we need to despair and it is one which is constantly being narrowed. I do not think it applies to the flow of information within trade and technical periodicals; or to medical, scientific, legal, economic and other professional journals, where the traffic is probably as strong as it has ever been. [end p4]
Nor should there be cause for concern about the comprehensiveness of the data services provided for the financial institutions, the commodity brokers, investment analysts and so on. Indeed, thanks to the new technology of computerised display systems and data retrieval—in which Reuters have played a prominent part—they can have instant access to a very wide range of market moving news and up-dated statistics from all over the world.
Ceefax—which is I understand being demonstrated at this conference—and its twin Oracle are major developments in communications technology and techniques.
No-one reading the Commonwealth Secretary-General's latest Report can fail to be impressed by the energetic efforts to increase consultation and the spreading of information throughout the Commonwealth.
More than fifty conferences, meetings and seminars—to do with Youth Affairs, Food, Finance, Education, Law of the Sea, to mention a few—took place in London, New Delhi, Kingston, Nairobi, Lagos, Accra and other national capitals over the past year.
I commend the CPU's own Fellowship Scheme under which I am told that since 1961 more than 140 journalists from 25 Commonwealth countries have been brought to this country to attend courses and be posted to various newspapers and news organisations and learning how we in Britain do things.
If you have contact or perhaps even influence with these young people, I implore you to counsel them that though there is much to be gleaned here in the way of straight and investigative reporting there are also some tricks it is better not to pick up.
The issues of the day are really much more important than the personalities and although I know it is possible to interest people in the former by use of the latter it is a pity that so much attention is paid to the latter and that very little is said about the former! Nor is politics entirely about confrontation. Indeed, very often as you know, it is about compromise and negotiation. [end p5]
Victory and defeat are rather stark terms in which to try to depict the day to day events of our political lives.
On a broader front may I say how much I admire the objectives and the achievements and the day-to-day contact and liaison work which your Union is doing. It is one of the oldest and most important of those rather loose organisations that make up the lattice-work of the Commonwealth and its contribution to strengthening the Commonwealth association is a substantial one.
Clearly you recognise the nature of the problem and its ever recurring urgency. You will be debating “The problem of communicating between Government and People.” You are fortunate to have taking part in such a crucial discussion men with experience of both worlds—in Bill Deedes, now one of you and until recently one of us, and likewise Lord Ardwick who has one noble foot in Fleet Street and one in Parliament. In these recent months I have been grappling with that same problem. I have had to deal with press and television all over the country and abroad to make myself better known to the electorate.
It has made me even more conscious that the arguments of emphasis and direction between party and party, or Government and Government, must not divert us from the end we all seek to achieve.
Let us pledge ourselves to serve this end—the cause of freedom in our own lands and in the world. Let us all speak, write or report, on that whole truth which alone must serve freedom.
One hundred and fifty years ago, De Quincey in his Suspiria de Profundis uttered a prayer for “blessings descending from Heaven by education and accelerations of the Press.” Undoubtedly we have affected marvellous “accelerations” . Although one may not call them altogether blessed, these accelerations, which modern technology will assuredly speed up further still, have undoubtedly made for kindliness, good feeling and greater freedom in what Sir Walter Raleigh called “a commonwealth of many families.”