30th November, 2011.

Your Lordship,

I am a candididate on the ballot to be DGS of the NUJ. I am also an editor, and publisher of Science, People & Politics, and I became a journalist on graduating from the University of Leeds in 1980.

I wish to protest against the formal line taken by the NUJ at your inquiry in the matter of providing evidence in private, or in any way confidentially, and to do so before election, if I am successful, might make public disagreement with the General Secretary appropriate.

Appendix A of our rule book, ie that of the NUJ, says:

"A journalist: At all times upholds and defends the principle of media freedom, the right of free expression and the right of the public to be informed."

Nothing in our rules endorses us to invade the privacy of any individual for any reason. The General Secretary, or the National Executive Council, can provide you, as a courtesy, with copies of our rules, if they have not already done so.

Source protection is the responsibility of the individual journalist. We are not police, nor private investigators. If we overstep the bounds of a public interest defence in pursuit of market share or byline acquisition we cannot fall back on source protection or confidentiality as our get out clause. We cultivate sources to build relationships of understanding. If money is spent for some reason other than that with a source then there is a lack, I think, somewhere else in the system, and that lack led to need for the expenditure. I was reminded at a hustings I attended in Dublin on Monday of the case of thalidomide. I urge you to make no arrangement to hear evidence from any journalist in private, and to resist all efforts to turn you inadvertently into an industrial relations tool. We are an organised union able to do our own job.

To remove our individual responsibility as journalists for the task of source protection leaves the NUJ open to charges we, as a Union, sought to subborn the power of the State's institutions. I think if we make arrangements to pass private information to you we might incriminate ourselves in the matter of obstructing the course of justice at some future date, and in a manner which ought to have been forseeable.

I urge you to hear no evidence from any journalist, current or past, in private.

If you see a need to move in camera, you do not need us to tell you. Our job should be opposing you by all lawful public means.

I also protest against you giving the NUJ core participant status. We have no need of that status in an open inquiry.

Finally, I urge you to make as few recommendations as possible, though I think we all might benefit from a judicial essay sketching the lineaments of a debate about libel versus censorship.

Yours sincerely,
Helen Gavaghan.
165 Longfellow Court, HX7 5LG.
http://www.gavaghancommunications.com

The above is the edited version (edited by myself) of my letter to Lord Leveson's inquiry. I sent the letter via the general inquiries email on the inquiry's website, submitting by the deadline. I copied text simultaneously to appropriate NUJ officials. Those officials being the Northern and Midland's Organiser of the NUJ and the General Secretary. The letter was copied to my fellow journalist, co-editor and co-director, Mr Fred Pearce, and to the north eastern elected lay officer on the NUJ's National Executive Committee, Mr Adam Christie.