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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Letters

Defining censorship in Gaddafi’s Libya

BRITAIN-POLITICS-CONSERVATIVES
Conservative MP Sajid Javid, who said his ministerial colleague Theresa May's plan to introduce counter-extremism powers to vet British broadcasters’ programmes before they are transmitted would move Ofcom from a regulator 'into the role of a censor'. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

All this fuss over the possible banning of TV programmes that could encourage terrorism uses the term “censorship” too widely (Report, 23 May). When I was seconded by the BBC to help set up Libyan television in 1969, I had a discussion after Gaddafi’s revolution with the Libyan head of programmes about the banning of one of my programmes. “Before the revolution, you complained about censorship,” I said to him, “but you are doing the same thing.” “No,” he said. “Censorship is bad people cutting out good things, but this is good people cutting out bad things.” I had no answer.
Karl Sabbagh
Newbold on Stour, Warwickshire

• I am the mother of an only child. Whenever I encounter the “only one” reaction (Opinion, 22 May), I remember the fable of the fox and the lion. The fox, who has many children, commiserates with the lion, who has only one. The lion replies: “Yes, but mine’s a lion.”
Joanna Kennedy
London

• Little did I think, having left a stagnant Ireland in the 80s, that I would today be making sheep’s eyes from an increasingly illiberal Britain, on the brink of dismantling its Human Rights Act, toward my increasingly liberal homeland as it votes for equal marriage.
Gillian Travers
Harrow, Middlesex

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