From calling Sun readers ‘mugs’ to wanting to ban Daily Mail, sinister zealots behind regulators want to destroy the popular press
If new regulations get through parliament, it will mean the death of investigative journalism, as the press will not be able to finance holding public people to account
WHEN David Cameron launched his Royal Charter on Press regulation in the House of Commons in 2013, he borrowed the sage words of Winston Churchill.
A solemn Cameron told MPs: “A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize — it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.”
Now, in a staggering turn of events, the fate of 300 years of British press freedom could soon be in the hands of a state-approved watchdog known as Impress. It is backed by celebrity-supported anti-press zealots Hacked Off and almost entirely funded by motor racing tycoon Max Mosley, an orgy-loving multi-millionaire with a vendetta against newspapers.
Yet newspapers face being pressured into joining it if Culture Secretary Karen Bradley signs off the unjust Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013.
Any papers which did not join would have to pay both sides’ costs in libel cases, even if they win because they can prove they published the truth.
In 2012 the SSPX’s current leader, a Swiss bishop named Bernard Fellay, described Jews as “the enemies of the Church.”
In October 2013 the Society offered to hold Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke’s funeral after he died at 100 in Rome. The former SS captain had been convicted over the massacre of hundreds of Italian civilians in 1944 and shortly before his death claimed the Holocaust was a hoax.
The Society insisted that as a Christian he was entitled to a holy Mass and funeral “no matter what his faults and sins were”. The funeral was called off only after 500 protestors gathered at its HQ.
The Impress campaign is not the first link between the Mosley and Vernor-Miles families.
In 1934, while Sir Oswald’s British Union of Fascists were parading in black-shirt uniforms, Wilfrid’s grandfather Ernest bought the Catholic Herald newspaper.
While critical of the Blackshirts for their street brawls and crude anti-Semitism, the paper at times failed to condemn outright all that the BUF stood for.
In a 1936 article on the East End, the Herald described Jewish citizens as “an alien element”.
It added: “Once again the crudities and brutalities of the Fascist campaign in East London and other Jewish quarters should not be allowed to blind us to the reality of the problem here. And it was not Fascism that created the problem but the Liberalism that allowed the Jew to become dominant in a then-Christian country.”
In February 1938, a month before Hitler annexed Austria, the Herald reported: “There was great enthusiasm when Sir Oswald Mosley addressed a meeting in Lewisham. He outlined the Blackshirt policy, many points of which are excellent.”
Referring to Nazi rallies in Germany, the paper noted Sir Oswald had said: “The National press is one long stream of lies.” It added: “And this produces such a roar of assent as one thought only to hear on some occasions at Nuremberg.”
Impress insists there is a firewall between it and its main donor Mosley and that “there is no capacity for any donor to exert influence.”
Two months ago Impress was rubber-stamped as a watchdog by a Government quango costing taxpayers £3million over three years.
But no major national or local newspaper group joined. Some, such as the Guardian, London’s Evening Standard and Financial Times, chose instead to regulate themselves.