Westminster's prudish Tory censors appeared to have no problems with soft-porn Hollywood-style - in "Showgiris' woman's right to choose have gone alongside increasing censorship of the arts museums have been threatened with withdrawal of federal funding for showing exhibitions of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe or critical works on the history of native americans.
Abortion
These events have their echoes here: the Labour Party leadership is just abour holding the line against demands from the Catholic Church to change policy on abortion rights, but with Blair moving opal or more or less every policy area, there is no guarantee that this demand will not be successful. And sections of the Catholic church are calling for a ban of some pop records on the grounds of satanism!
Once accepted, censorship will spread from sexual and/or violent images to political expression. Al. ready TV films or documentary programmes on Ireland are subject Jordan's film "Michacl Collins' was attacked for being 'pro-IRA', just as Oliver Stone's work ("Born on the Fourth of July', JFK) has been slated for its exposure of American injustice. Real violence and sexual abuse against women and children will be again swept under the carpet of moral hypocrisy.
This Christmas Channel 4 was under pressure to pull Rory Bremner's satire on the Queen's Xmas broadcast - Princess Di doing a parallel one.
Opposing censorship does not mean passivity in the face of sexist, racist or homophobic images or texts, nor that we in any way defend them. As socialists and feminists we have a good deal to say about the way women, black people, lesbians and gay men, disabled people are represented on our TVs and in film, in magazine adverts and on hoardings.
Everyday images
In many ways the images of ad. vertising and mainstram TV promuch more pernicious, because more everyday, than pornography. But they remain all of them 'representations'.
Incy may tellect fealty and re produce ideology but they are not real. Nor is there any serious evidence that it is such images that produce or even encourage violent Even sexual images of children, on the Internet or elsewhere, perhaps the most difficult area, while subicct to pouncal chuguc did ca posure, should not be subject to censorship. First of all there are other laws which can be used to prosecute people actually abusing children, but more importantly, accepting some element of censorship opens the door to the censoring of images which we do want to be avaitable -isolan and ray imazes, sex manuals for teenagers, films about croticism and sexual desire, warch explore tac links between sexuality and vio lence - it will be these things which suffer the censor's knife, not the grotesque violence of the films of To call for censorship is to hand over power to people who have no interest in the rights and liberties of ordinary people. Just as we do not call on the state to police fascist and proto-fascist political groups and in the face of reactionary cultural imagery, we should organise educa tional conferences, hand out Icaflets and demand discussion - but not a ban.
A new moral plague behind these calls for censorship is against lib. erty and mie, and wromatcry ajanst women and the oppressed.
All authoritarian goveruments use censorship as a form of ideologi. cal control. From Hitler's Germany to today's fundamentalist Iran, who and what is seen or read has always been a question to be decided by the authorities.
Hitler
Hitler put on a special exhibition of modern art, 'Degenerate Art' in 1937, so that there could be no confusion about what was 'good and what was "bad' art. The fact that not seen as a problem, after all he of Nazism.
Today we could use the analogy with what happened in Nazi Germany: first they banned pornographic images of children and I did not object, for I did not use them; next they banned pictures of lestian sex and I did not object, for I was not a lesbian, tach uncy bannica sado-masochistic sex and I did not object, I did not engage in such activity; later they banned teenage sex manuals and I did not object, for 1 was not a teenaser: then they banned representations of heterosexual couples and I did not object, for I did not like nudity; in the end they banne sex outsiac of matte and i wanted to object - but there was no-one left to support me.
Calling for censorship of words or images is a dangerous and slippery slope: we should not take even the first siep.