Blocking delivery of The News in Portsmouth must never happen again - comment

Every so often, and these days it is more often, we are reminded what a fragile principle it is.

On Sunday night, thousands of copies of The News were knowingly prevented from distribution from our print plant.

The grounds were spurious. With environmental protests in full flow nearby, the route our delivery drivers use was closed by what was purporting to be a ‘strategic’ group of police and council bigwigs. But there appears to be no strategic thinking in a decision which saw petrol tankers and grocery vehicles being allowed free use of the road while our vans were kept in their bays.

It is frightening that those police and council thinkers of the Strategic Co-ordination Group (SCG) came to a view so instinctively that the delivery of our newspaper was not seen as ‘priority traffic’.

As they tackled the protest into the early hours of Monday morning could their minds not recall that, during the pandemic, newspapers were considered by the government an essential service and journalists were granted key worker status as the purveyors of life-saving and accurate information?

That they were ignorant of that says much about the leadership of this group but more alarmingly indicates how easy it would be to direct those in authority to silence the media at someone's else's volition rather than their own.

Thankfully, we are no longer in the grip of an international emergency. But a time when politicians have lost much of the public's trust and social media platforms spew out misinformation, a reliable press has never been more essential.

We will not rest until we have answers from those in authority on how this was allowed to happen and how we can ensure it will not happen again.