The New Thing – State Noninformation

Every now and again, one small item of information (or in the modern context, “malinformation” since it is truth that questions government policy) makes a large number of mysterious things plain. This piece by citizen journalist Silver Fox does that for me.

Briefly, it explains that the government and intelligence community here in Britain changed the regulations on “D-notices” a little while ago. The D-notice system was introduced in 1912 to put a lid on press stories that might jeopardise national defence and security. The government would send such a notice to newspaper editors (and later to broadcast media) not to publish a particular story. Although compliance was voluntary (as befits a free society), editors nearly always complied (as befits a patriotic press).

The video doesn’t specify, but the changes to the system may be those of 2017 (according to Wikipedia), which amongst other things roped counter-terrorism and public order into the system. Whether the legal changes occurred at that time or not, the interpretation seems to have taken a new turn recently, and in retrospect over the last tyrannical five years.

Silver Fox points to the way in which all news about the Southport mass-murderer, including obviously newsworthy interviews with witnesses and parents and, of course, information about his possible Islamist ideology, have not only been quashed in Parliament with vague mumblings about contempt of court, but virtually ignored by the mainstream media. It seems plausible that the government has slapped D-notices on the media about the whole affair firstly to throw a blanket over counter-terrorism activity, and secondly with the excuse that the truth might make the public angry and disordered… which is another way of saying “treat the people as cattle, not citizens.”

He also points to a veritable torrent of strange events on the margins of the news since that time: the murder of a military officer outside an army camp (by whom? Why?), the beheading of a man in Edinburgh by an invisible bus whose driver can’t be traced, the closure of Gatwick airport, and Euston and Kings Cross stations, over “suspicious packages,” and the stabbing on Westminster Bridge that became a heart attack and has dropped into the memory hole despite several arrests and the alleged confiscation by the police of the phones of everybody who filmed it. There are no doubt more events that some of you will remember.

The use of D-notices to prevent public disorder would also neatly explain why large demonstrations of the “wrong kind” seem to have become completely absent from the press, and to have been so since the large demonstrations against lockdowns, unreported or minimised, back when COVID was a thing. We can’t have such protests against human rights abuse spreading everywhere, can we?

Just consider how invidious it is for an elected government – or worse still unelected intelligence services – to keep a democratic citizenry, supposedly with a free press, in the dark about a widespread campaign of terror, in order to prevent justifiable unrest. And consider how even more invidious it is to suppress, legally, news of that justifiable unrest in order to prevent further unrest. That is sheer totalitarianism. A couple of scenarios should make this clear.

Suppose that the government of the day were to use riot police, or the army, to break up a rally by a popular movement, or even by an opposing political party like Reform, thus quashing political dissent by violence. Suppose that the suppression was of the same order and scale as what happened in Tienanmen Square in 1989? A quick D-notice would prevent this being carried in the media, as it might disturb public order should ordinary people discover such an atrocity. And if public order seemed insufficient grounds for the complete news blackout, then one could always label the rally as an insurrection by far-right terrorists – which, you will notice, has already become the norm not only for the post-Southport protests, but for Tommy Robinson’s London rallies. Counter-terrorism measures are subject to D-notices, and popular dissent is fascist terrorism, according to the self-appointed trustees of truth against disinformation and misinformation. And so the official truth becomes simply noninformation.

Any editor who broke the story would, by definition, be aiding and abetting terrorism, and so subject to prosecution under the Terrorism Act, our equivalent of the US Patriot Act. Any such editor would, by the very nature of the atrocity, realise that his own end would be swift and unpleasant.

Or, to let imagination run riot (or in today’s world, simply to speculate about the near future), imagine a campaign of Islamic terrorism involving thousands of young male jihadists, kept from the public by D-notices to the media, overwhelming the capacity of the authorities to control it. Those same authorities have already indicated that they are sympathetic enough to the Islamist cause to foster illegal immigration, propose blasphemy laws, and favour Hamas mobs over lone Jewish flag-wavers. Suppose the political calculus of the government was that, with Islam now the largest religion in Britain, it is better to go with the flow and keep the blood off the streets. And so the D-notices would proliferate even beyond what we see now, creating a sea of mysteries, a sense of foreboding, and political impotence for the people.

Why, one can imagine that the first media news Joe Public would get about the matter was the announcement that Britain was now a Caliphate, and that Parliament is now voting on the replacement of Common Law, the ECHR etc with Sharia. Or is that too far-fetched, being that we have the BBC and a free press to protect us?

The Powers seem not to have understood that, long before then, the pressure cooker would have exploded, because the news media are only a small part of what constitutes information.