Proscription order avoidance

Unconfirmed reports have begun to appear that the recently proscribed European service Extasi has simply changed its name to Xstasi thus neatly sidestepping the proscription order. Ofcom and the Government will presumably now have to jump through another series of legal hoops in order to get Xstasi proscribed and you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to figure out what’s likely to happen after that…

Despite all that has been said about allowing adults to make up their own minds about what they watch and the new ‘deregulated’ environment that we live in, Ofcom still think it’s necessary to roll out the old regulatory proscription order blunderbuss, which on this occasion has backfired. Ofcom should take stock and listen to their own advise. In particular the need for honest and open debate on this issue which is currently non existent.

It may be that we now simply have to accept that adults are allowed to make their own decisions over what they watch and that in some circumstances the regulatory role is at an end. In this case proscription orders should simply be abandoned. Alternatively there may be firm evidence that shows that a lack of censorship in this area would lead to serious harm and that freedom of expression can be rightly overruled. If this is true then people need to be properly protected from such harm and the evidence needs to be published.

What is abundantly clear in either case is the urgent need to update all of the censorship laws and regulations to make them consistent, proportionate, and inline with life in the twenty first century. The Government needs to spend more time considering the really important issues that face us today like prevention of terrorism and fundamental changes to the constitution and less on fox hunting and pointless proscription orders. Ofcom could could do much good for citizen-consumers by pushing the DCMS to make such changes.