Censorship in the UK has a touch of 'gentleman's agreement' about it rather than 'by decree'. If the British government want to ban something outright then the

Censorship in the UK has a touch of 'gentleman's agreement' about it rather than 'by decree'. If the British government want to ban something outright then they can issue a 'D-Notice' to the press. Notionally the 'D-Notice' system is 'advisory', i.e. a paper could publish if they wanted to. The British government can also rely on self-censorship, disinformation, misinformation, spin, the art of burying bad news under a mountain of trivia and setting the news agenda. So, on the surface there is the 'never assign to malice what can be attributed to incompetence' way of seeing it, you have to remember that these are politicians we are dealing with. They know what they are doing.