The price we pay to see the suffering

By insisting on immediate payment of libel damages and costs, ITN have forced the magazine LM into liquidation, something the head of ITN, Richard Tait, seems to regard as a victory for the freedom of the press. It is perhaps only because I have been the editor of a small circulation magazine frequently threatened by libel action brought by fellow journalists that I feel outraged. Nobody else seems to be that bothered.

There has, it is true, been some little debate in media circles about the way in which emotive horror pictures can be used for propaganda purposes. Yet there is unlikely to be any change at a time when television uses such pictures in a fairly cynical way to spice up the news.

One day last week the BBC led its Nine O'Clock News with a report from Jeremy Bowen in Baghdad, about the resignation of a German UN official distressed by the suffering caused to Iraqi civilians by British and American sanctions. This report was accompanied by distressing film of sick and dying children in Baghdad hospitals.

Such things have been seen before on the BBC and as usual I ask why is it always children that we are shown and could children be deliberately deprived of medicines and perhaps allowed to die so that they can be used by Saddam for propaganda purposes? It is not out of the question; for example, the Iraqi dictator personally shot dead a health Minister who complained of lack of funds.

Again, is it true that there are plenty of hospitals in Baghdad equipped with the latest technology and well-stocked with drugs? Would the BBC be allowed to film these hospitals, or, for that matter, the vast palace Saddam is building in Baghdad while his children are dying?

The viewer who remembers only the faces of the dying children is unlikely to ask these questions. Nor will they be told what concessions the BBC has to make in order to keep their man in Baghdad.

Now we should march

There ought to be a call for reviving one of those great British institutions which has disappeared from our national life, the Aldermaston March.

Those of us old enough will remember from the Sixties the traditional scenes at this time of year when a huge and happy band of pilgrims, many with beards and guitars, set out from Aldermaston in Berkshire and walked, rather than marched, all the way to London where they held a huge and generally peaceful demonstration in Trafalgar Square.

So long as the Cold War lasted I felt little sympathy with these CND marches. If the Russians maintained a huge arsenal of missiles, mostly aimed at us, it seemed like a good thing to do the same. And in the end it was the arms race that brought down the Communist system and brought the Cold War to a welcome end.

But now, when the question of why do we need nuclear weapons seems to have some relevance, it is not one that seems to bother many people. Even Ken Livingstone, who once professed concern about the nuclear issue, seems more interested in promoting gay marriages.

However, now that the Ministry of Defence is about to hand over Aldermaston to a consortium which includes BNFL, whose running of Sellafield in Cumbria has been called into question, it might be time for a change. The official line would seem to be: we don't trust BNFL to do the reprocessing so put them in charge of making nuclear weapons.

If people are going to march again, this would seem to be as good a pretext as any.

Reefer madness

As things stand, we allow the sale of two powerful drugs - nicotine and alcohol. But there are now quite a lot of people, including some police chiefs and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, who believe we should add a third, cannabis, to the list.

If the authorities agree, as sooner or later they probably will, the same arguments now being used to legalise cannabis will be used in a few years' time for cocaine and ecstasy. And so it will go on.

In all the debate no one ever likes to suggest that one way to stop the spread of illegal drugs might be to encourage the use of legal ones.

Indeed, a climate has now been created which maintains that illegal drugs like cannabis might actually be preferable and even safer. This was the view I heard expressed by a Labour Party spokesman, Dr Brian Iddon, the member for Bolton South East, when asked about it on Channel 4 news. The doctor appeared to be ignorant of recent findings, which, for example, prove that cannabis, quite apart from other health risks, is actually far more carcinogenic than tobacco.

In the meantime both alcohol and tobacco are being made even more expensive while the restrictions on smoking have been taken to absurd lengths, most recently by Great Western Trains which has banned all smoking on their HSTs.

No such ban will be placed on mobile phones which are far more anti-social, and, I believe, pose an even greater health risk to their users than cigarettes.