British Board of Film Classification (Accountability to Parliament and Appeals) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He has exposed one of the more worrying aspects of the whole argument: imitation. What concerns me about his point and the point I was making about ““Battle Royale”” is the implication that in such films people are disposable. That denigrates the humanity of the individual and people's basic human rights. I do not want to get on to the appalling problems faced in Bridgend at present in respect of the tragic and awful suicides, but a great many commentators have said that one thing all those poor, tragic children had in common was that they spent much of their life in a virtual world. Much of their life was spent on the web, on Bebo and YouTube, and there may be something in the argument that if people watch and play interactive games and if they see violent films in which people die in enormous numbers—more than 260 people die in the current Sylvester Stallone ““Rambo”” film—human life becomes less valuable. The sanctity of life becomes diluted and people see human beings not just as disposable but as characters in a cast. A button can be pressed at the end of the game and it can be rewound and replayed. It starts all over again; the dead rise from their graves, the battered and bruised bodies climb up from the gutter, the bullets leave the body, the heads return to the shoulders and life goes on. I do not imply that everybody is so stupid as to believe that such a mad dystopic world has a wash-over into reality, but when we are dealing with young, impressionable and, in some cases, disturbed minds, a real danger exists. I return to my substantive point: if our constituents come to us with those valid concerns—as they do, over and over again—what are we to say to them? I do not propose that we set up watch committees. It is a fairly well known fact that when councils originally set up watch committees they had nothing to do with censorship, but were entirely to do with pyrotechnics. Early film was on celluloid, which is highly flammable, so if someone wanted to show a film in a council area they needed a licence. That is why local authorities sat in judgment about whether this or that film could be shown. It had nothing to do with the content of the film, but was entirely to deal with the fire risk, because there was an enormous number of cinema fires, particularly before the first world war. Such licensing was a completely different issue, but it segued into the application of the prevailing morality of an area to limit its citizens' access to films. The case of ““Life of Brian”” in Glasgow is an obvious example and I have already mentioned ““banned in Boston””. The key factor, however, is that the local community had a voice in the process. It is easy to take a libertarian view and to say that nobody sellotapes our eyes open, nails us to a chair and forces us watch rubbish, but there is a question of availability. There is also something else that is very human. When I was a young man there were X, A and AA film classifications, and I freely admit that on a number of occasions I adopted a husky tone, a false beard and an old raincoat to try to get into the Gaumont, Notting Hill Gate to see ““Danish Dentist on the Job””, which, as I recall, was subtitled ““He knows the drill””. Those films were almost paragons of innocence, naivety and—I have to say—tedium and boredom compared to some of the foul, offensive, nasty, murderous, brutal, anti-women and denigrating films that exist nowadays. What is to be the power of the House in such cases? We can tell people, ““By all means, take the law into your hands and picket cinemas””—as has happened—but do we really want the House shown as so impotent that the only access for the voice of the community is to stand outside a cinema with placards. I do not think that is the answer—