Clive Ponting
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Clive Ponting (born 1947) is a British writer and academic. He is the author of a number of revisionist books on British and world history.
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[edit] General Belgrano
Formerly a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Clive Ponting achieved notoriety in July 1984, when he sent two documents to Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, about the sinking of an Argentine naval warship General Belgrano, a key incident in the Falklands War of 1982. The documents revealed that the General Belgrano had been sighted a day earlier than officially reported, and was steaming away from the Royal Navy taskforce, and was outside the exclusion zone, when the cruiser was attacked and sunk.
[edit] Official Secrets Act
Ponting admitted revealing the information and was charged with a criminal offence under Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act. His defence rested on two issues:
- that the matter was in the public interest, and
- that disclosure to a Member of Parliament was privileged.
Although Ponting fully expected to be imprisoned – and had brought his toothbrush and shaving kit along to the court on February 11, 1985 – he was acquitted by the jury. The acquittal came despite the judge's direction to the jury that "the public interest is what the government of the day says it is". He resigned from the civil service on February 16, 1985.
[edit] Right to know
The Ponting case was seen as a landmark in British legal history, raising serious questions about the validity of the 1911 Official Secrets Act and the public's "right to know". Shortly after his resignation, the Sunday Times newspaper began to serialize Ponting's book entitled The Right to Know: the inside story of the Belgrano affair. The Conservative government reacted by tightening up UK secrets legislation, introducing the 1989 Official Secrets Act and removing the public interest defence which Ponting had successfully used to avoid being convicted.
[edit] Academic
Ponting served as a Reader in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea until his retirement in 2004.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] About the case
- Norton-Taylor, Richard. The Ponting Affair. Cecil Woolf, 1985. ISBN 0-900821-73-6
[edit] By Clive Ponting
- The Right to Know: the inside story of the Belgrano affair (1985)
- Whitehall - Tragedy and Farce (1986)
- Breach of Promise - Labour in Power, 1964-70 (1989)
- A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (1993)
- 1940 - Myth and Reality (1993)
- Churchill (1994)
- Armageddon - the Reality Behind the Distortions: Myths, Lies, Illusions of World War II (1995)
- World History - A New Perspective (2000)
- Thirteen Days - Diplomacy and Disaster, the Countdown to the Great War (2003)
- The Crimean War - The Story Behind the Myth (2004)
- Gunpowder - The Story (2005)
