by Nigel Nelson
Hazel Blears has never been seen as a Cabinet big hitter. But she is beginning to emerge as one of Labour’s more thoughtful lateral thinkers – a post hitherto occupied almost exclusively by Jack Straw.
The significance of her assaults on political correctness was largely missed, but in summary her argument is this: if we never risk offending someone, we will fear upsetting anyone. So when we worry about the sensitivities of religions and cultures to little things such as comics poking fun at them, the danger is that the bigger issues go unchallenged.
She cited the examples of forced marriage, female genital mutilation and homophobia. No matter how acceptable they might be in other religious traditions and cultures, they are unacceptable in Britain – and we must be able to use the words to say so.
But this is about more than free speech or whether a nurse should be allowed to pray for a patient or a town hall put up Christmas decorations. The wider question is not whether there should be a line, but where it should be drawn?
The Government abolished blasphemy laws last year and we have yet to see whether the religious hatred ones replacing them will have the same effect as the last successful prosecution for blasphemy in 1977.
The publisher of Gay News, Denis Lemon, was given a suspended sentence for printing a poem about a Roman centurion having sex with the crucified body of Christ. Although not without literary merit, it is a shocking piece of work – as offensive to Christians as the Danish cartoons of Mohammed were to Muslims. But that should not have been enough to ban it. So the line should not be drawn there.
What we need is demonstrable evidence of material harm. Paedophiliac pornography crosses that threshold, not least because children clearly have to be abused to produce it. And its consumers are condoning and fuelling that abuse.
Yet sometimes the line becomes blurred. A photograph belonging to Sir Elton John of two naked little girls by the American artist Nan Goldin was seized from Gateshead’s Baltic gallery by Northumbria police 18 months ago. There was absolutely no question of abuse; the issue was indecency. But one of the reasons given by the Crown Prosecution Service for not taking further action was that “the photograph was distributed for the purposes of display in a contemporary art gallery”.
Does that not suggest the decision might have been different if it had been displayed somewhere else? Or for a more prurient purpose? Does that mean there is one standard for art, and another for pornography? Either the line must be drawn for both or neither, otherwise it is bad law, inconsistent and so full of loopholes it becomes unenforceable.
That’s why we need to think about these things. And why Hazel Blears deserves praise for doing so.
Nigel Nelson is political editor of The People
