Extreme pornography is next on Labour’s Christmas ‘outlaw’ list – what next?!
Dear Jack Straw,
At first, I thought Andy Burnham’s desire to control everything and everyone on the Internet only managed to squeak through onto the front pages because there was no other news around. Now I’m not so sure. All of Labour’s recent covert activities, it seems, are coming to light over the Christmas period and forming something akin to a Christmas ‘outlaw’ list containing things that Labour are desperate to ban. First came banning “offensive” material on the Internet – now we have a ban on ”extreme pornography” that will come into effect on 26th January 2009.
The new legislation will forbid the possession of “an extreme pornographic image”. Overnight, this will criminalise thousands of people who have a harmless taste for unconventional sex. Personally I have no idea how these people can enjoy what they get up to but that really is beside the point. To introduce a law that criminalises owning an image and condemns the owner to a maximum of three years’ imprisonment is insane. Let me remind you that images of bestiality and necrophilia (two words which I never thought I’d type on my blog) are already illegal so there is no need for additional legislation in that area. Yet again, civil liberties are forced to one side in Labour’s desperate scramble for more votes. This new law was passed in early 2008 following a mother’s emotive campaign after her daughter was killed by a man who claimed he was addicted to violent porn. The police didn’t ask for this law, the public didn’t ask for this law – the bloody Daily Mail brigade have effectively managed to strong-arm the government into demonising the private behaviour of thousands of law-abiding citizens.
Not only is this a gross intrusion into people’s private lives, this legislation – just like Andy Burnham’s definition of what constitutites “offensive” on the Internet – is worryingly vauge. An image will be deemed ‘extreme’ if it “is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” and portrays in any way an act which threatens a person’s life, or which results or appears likely to result in serious injury to someone’s genitals or breasts. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would find some acts by members of the BDSM (bondage, domination and sado-masochism) community disgusting – in fact, I’m probably one of them – but what right have I got to decide what two consenting adults keep in their bedroom? How can anyone find someone else’s collection of pornography “offensive”?! Many people, if surveyed, would consider bondage “obscene” at some level but that does not give you or the police the right to know what people keep in the bedrooms. Even completely fictional violence and some forms of artistic photography could ’appear likely to result in injury’.
Campaigners are planning to burn their pornography collections outside Parliament. Sadly, I’ve become a bit too attached to my offensive, disgusting and obscene extreme pornography collection to set fire to it but I’m right there with them in spirit. Myles Jackman, the campaigner’s legal adviser, rightly pointed out that ”ultimately it will be up to a magistrate and a jury to decide what constitutes extreme pornography but the wording is so impossibly vague it could constitute anything. Take the phrase ‘life-threatening’. There is, I understand, a genre of porn known as ’smoking pornography’ which you could argue combines pornography with a potentially life threatening act.” Just one month before the legislation comes into force, the Association of Chief Police Officers has still yet to draw up any guidelines on how it is to be policed because they have no idea what will constitute an illegal image. What an unacceptably intrusive and pointless mess.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
“Just one month before the legislation comes into force, the Association of Chief Police Officers has still yet to draw up any guidelines on how it is to be policed because they have no idea what will constitute an illegal image. “
No, it’s because they haven’t been told exactly who is the new enemy, against which this is to be used…
Ha, some more backroom smoke-filled-room meetings needed.
I can see how this will be thrashed out. Lots of closed-door meetings with smoke filled rooms (or suitably legally compliant gazebos!) in which the lads, for it will be lads, pass around mucky pictures and decide ‘would you or wouldn’t you?’.
Prosecute, that is. What else could I mean?
Lol!
“the bloody Daily Mail brigade”
There’s the other thing I thought I wouldn’t see casually littering the Tory blogs!
Miller, there are very few things in British politics that I hate more than political correctness and sucking up to voter complaints instead of standing up for some basic principles.
Unfortunately few (if any) politicians have the guts to make a stand.
It’s so vague that it will be used to target people the police/CPS/Government want to prosecute but who haven’t actually committed a proper crime.
I wouldn’t worry too much, there’s no chance it’ll stand up in court.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights covers it. No court in the land is going to convict anyone with this law.
I can’t remember where I read it but there’s a wonderful description of a play that should be banned if this kind of thinking takes hold:
It has underage sex, drugs, forced marriage, gang warfare, violence and murder… Ban it!
Oh wait… that’s Romeo and Juliet.
Perhaps on 26th January we should all turn up at Police offices across the country and hand over our DVDs of porn and ask if we’re breaking the law by watching them.
The coppers will love it, millions of hours of porn to plough through to check who’s a criminal.
Why is it that in the dying year of every government they take some kind of collective stupid pill?
This is actually a fairly normal law by the standards of New Labour.
Undoubtedly there is some pretty vile stuff out there. Even the most committed libertarian must find it difficult to argue in its favour. Whereas that would once have been quite difficult to locate and hence inherently quite restricted in its circulation, Google et al mean that it is now but a few clicks away.
So in their desire to ban the genuinely extreme stuff that most would (probably) agree should not be generally available, New Lab make their two most common mistakes:
(i) Ignore the existing legislation and pile another layer on top. What is wrong with the Obscene Publications Act that could not be cured by suitable adjustment of its terms?
(ii) Draft a definition of the naughty stuff that is deliberately wide enough to catch anything naughty, without giving any thought as to what else is caught in that definition. If anyone points this out, explain that the new law “obviously” won’t be enforced against non-naughty stuff. Omit to mention exactly why this is obvious.
patently,
When the internet kicked off the government (by that I mean a team of civil servants) decided the policy should be not to enforce the Obscene Publications Act in relation to any act between consenting adults. The test they used was ‘if it’s legal in The Netherlands we’ll turn a blind eye to it over here’.
The argument was that there is only so much money in the pot to deal with vice and whatever is there can then be used in it’s entirety to investigate child porn. The only alternative was to put a filter on the net like China and some other countries have.
There is still a finite amount of money in the police budget to deal with pornography, so any that they spend taking action against adults who are into hardcore BDSM is money they could be spending investigating online paedophilia and child rape.
No, Stevent, the idea is to gain control in principle of internet content by filtering. Porn and kiddie fiddling are the thin end of the wedge, the bits its hardest to argue against regulating, but its clear from other statements from the Blears and Burnhams of the world that they want regulation (i.e. control) over many, many forms of expression on the internet and the lesson of this ZaNuLab crowd is that when they have legislated their sledgehammer, no nut will be safe.
And since they’re printing money (er, quantitative easing), resources for their Chinese/Australian style intervention will be less of a problem.
StevenL, I’m sure you’re right, but my point was that New Labour habitually introduce new laws when existing laws already sufficed. Sometimes this is even done explicitly, in order to “send a message” (presumably that the crime concerned is now twice as illegal as it used to be) and sometime it is done because the safeguards present in the old law meant that it was “difficult” to enforce (an argument that is beyond parody).
Your comment does of course strengthen that criticism by showing that the OPA would have been enough on its own.
If you ask me, New Labout introduce all these laws because their ministers are by and large imboseles.
At least they’ve lost the votes of all the kinky people – check out what they are all saying about NuLab here:
http://www.informedconsent.co.uk/boards/activism/