Powerless Press

So as we labor to present our last farewell edition, We say, God help the Government, God bless the Opposition.

Britain's socialist New Statesman and Nation spoke so frigidly last week because it had just been left in the cold. It was one of Britain's five influential highbrow weeklies to become a casualty of the fuel crisis (see FOREIGN NEWS). The Government had grimly ordered the press to cut down on the use of power; and the press's own powerful proprietors' association ruled that all periodicals (but no daily or weekly newspapers) must suspend for at least a fortnight.

Nobody raised a cry for poor Punch, but the letters column in the London Times was full of protests (from Anthony Eden, among others) at the suspension of the New Statesman, Spectator (missing an issue for the first time in 118 years), Economist, Tribune, Time & Tide. If the Government wanted to save power, asked one critic, why not shut down that high-powered thrillmonger (circ. 7,500,000), the Sunday News of the World? The five weeklies, which do much to mold British intellectual opinion, were forbidden such makeshifts as mimeographed sheets.

But several would still have their say. The big national press, moved by generosity and a chance to grab some good features, promptly offered them space. Editor Kingsley Martin's New Statesman would talk to more people than its usual 75,000 in the News Chronicle, the Evening Standard, the Sunday Pictorial and the Sunday Observer (combined circ.: five million), each of which promised to carry one or another Statesman feature. But the offers were not enough to still the hue & cry.

Complained the London Economist, which hadn't been interrupted before since 1843: "So the Economist, the Spectator and the New Statesman must be treated on a dead level with the astrologists, the pornographers and the trashmongers. The daily organ of the licensed victuallers can continue to appear; we must stop ... if the Government's prohibition is maintained, we shall have no alternative next week but to obey it and to concede to Mr. Shinwell what Goring could not achieve."

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