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

I am coming to that. One of the things that I really like about the hon. Gentleman—he mentioned our friendship—is how he rightly, in some respects, ascribes an enormous amount of power to me. I loved his asking whether, ““I would give Parliament the power.”” Believe me, I will consider it. [Interruption.] The next review of the guidelines will take place in 2009. Guidelines change in terms of our cultural context. It is interesting to read the BBFC's current guidelines, which contain a caveat about scenes that might ““glamorise smoking””. Smoking is another thing that the hon. Gentleman and I used to have in common. Can one imagine a British Board of Film Classification in the 1920s, 1930s or even the 1960s having a caveat against glamorising smoking? Anyone who watches a pre-1960s film will see virtually every member of the cast with a cigarette in hand. Thus, the guidelines constantly shift. As I exercise the power invested in me by the hon. Gentleman, I must tell the House that I have an enormous amount of sympathy with the view that Parliament should have some kind of say. However, I again caution against giving it a formal power to approve or disapprove the guidelines. It would not be beyond the power of this House for the Culture, Media and Sport Committee—I see my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford in his place—to conduct its own inquiry into the guidelines every four years as part of the consultation process on them. It would be perfectly within my hon. Friend's power to constitute his Committee at the beginning of 2009 in order to examine draft guidelines from the BBFC and present a report. One of the most interesting and perhaps ironic facets of this debate was the fact that the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), a Labour party member, constantly cautioned the House about increasing the scope of its powers and my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury, a member of the Conservative party, sought to extend this House's jurisdiction into an area where previously it has not deemed it necessary. The hon. Member for Bath touched on the penalties that my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury seeks to increase through his Bill. I am in sympathy with the hon. Gentleman's remarks, in the sense that I have not seen any evidence that tougher penalties would act as a deterrent. I agree with him that enforcing the existing law might be the way forward. The link involving the increasing violence and sexual content in video games and films is at the heart of what we are debating. There is no doubt that there is an enormous amount of concern about this in the country as a whole; it is a feeling that perhaps standards are slipping and almost that anything goes. It is important for this House to take a step back and to reflect coolly on matters of this nature. Interestingly, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury said that the UK sits somewhere between Australia and America in terms of a free-for-all. He sought to make the point that there may be a correlation between Australia's tighter regulation and its having a lower crime rate than the UK, although he was careful to say that that was obviously not the only reason. I would make a counter point. One of my constituents, Mr. Ian Wright of Didcot, who is watching this debate on TV there, sent me a note. He wished to make the point that when he had taken DVDs and videos that he had bought legitimately in other European countries to a charity shop in Didcot, he had been told that it did not want to put them on display because although he had bought them in Europe, it was not thought that they were appropriate for Britain. I hope that I have not mangled that and got him into trouble—I am not saying that they were illegal or obscene. They were perfectly normal videos, but the ratings shown were lower than they would be in the UK. In a lot of European jurisdictions, a film that we would rate as an 18 is rated as a 15, and one that we would rate as a 15 is rated as a 12. Interestingly, those European countries seem to have a lower crime rate than we do, but a more liberal approach to classification. I caution hon. Members that if we open the can of worms of the classification of films, we might find that the Government trot down to the Chamber and announce that they are handing the whole thing over to Europe. The Opposition are the only party in the House to stand proud and firm against further European integration, and we do not want inadvertently to give the Euro-federalists who populate the Government the opportunity to pass over this important aspect of our lives, which remains firmly under the control of the United Kingdom's citizens—[Interruption.] It does—not even Parliament controls it. We do not want it to be passed over to the Eurocrats and Euro-federalists who populate the Government Benches and the offices in Brussels.