Porn; or, the CPS - keeping you safe from ...yourself?

It's been pointed out to me that my blog, while well written, could use some search engine optimisation. That's why I'm going to write about Porn. Steamy, dirty, nasty porn. The sort of thing you might buy in this wonderfully named shop in Soho:



If you're not a fan of Porn, please feel free to not read this article. Instead, you can click on this link - it leads to a video of a baby panda sneezing. (Honestly. It really does. You do trust me, right?)

Of course, if you're not a fan of Porn, that's statistically unlikely.

Porn isn't a small business. It's a major industry. Pornography - particularly on the internet -is now estimated to generate around $14bn worldwide, roughly the same amount as Hollywood's US box office receipts. The US leads the world in pornography (USA! USA!); about 211 new films are produced every week. The Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and most of those in the trade are perfectly respectable citizens. Admittedly, they tend to have more surgery & fake tan than most, but they pay their taxes, and are citizens just like everyone else. As are the consumers of their products.

It's not just an American phenomenon. In the UK, we spend more money at strip clubs than we do in the West End, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined.

Of course, there's all kinds of other sexual stuff on the internet that you don't have to pay for. Indeed, one of the people I used to work with on Bizarre magazine used to say "you aren't a real pervert if there's a pay-site for what you're into".

On websites like deviantart and in chatrooms like mIRC, you can find pretty much any fetish you like. While working my stint at Bizarre, I did see some stuff that made even me blanch - from women who liked to have sex with men dressed in werewolf costumes, to men who were unaccountably attracted to balloons. There are even whole websites devoted to people who find Sarah Palin attractive.

People who are into this sort of thing are, by definition, perverts. But is that a bad thing? Sadly, the UK's CPS prosecutors seem to think so, and don't worry, they are "protecting" us. Mostly, it seems, from ourselves.

Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it illegal to use the internet to send or receive a message or communication which is any of the following:

- grossly offensive
- indecent
- obscene
- menacing
- annoying
- inconveniencing

Yes, saying annoying things on the internet is illegal in England.



I'll just give you a second to digest that. Just have a quick flip through the Guardian Comment is Free while you think about it. Then call the Police, and have the writer of this article arrested.

Of course, I don't really want him arrested. He's wrong, not a criminal. Free speech anyone?

Clearly, the people who framed this law should probably not spend five minutes on any internet forum, or read the comment pages of any major newspaper - indeed, reading the speeches of contenders in the Labour leadership contest is probably an absolute no-go area for most people, as in many ways, offence is in the eye of the beholder.

Of course, this could just be an obscure law no-one cares about - there are plenty of those on the statute books. But the CPS are pushing this one to the hilt. For example, this year a clearly jokey tweet was held to be "menacing" under this act, and the tweeter was sent to prison. Ridiculous.

However, an even more egregious case has come to my attention.

The saga began last summer when, following an anonymous tip-off, police raided Andrew Holland's home looking for indecent images of children. They found none, but they did find two clips, one involving a woman purportedly having sex with a tiger, and one which is believed to have depicted sado-masochistic activity between consenting adults.

Holland's was charged with possessing extreme porn, and denied access to his children as a result, despite the fact that there was no suggestion anything paedophilic was involved. Would this happen to a Burglar? To a fraudster? No, of course not - but once a "crime" is defined as sexual, all rights go out the window.

In a first court appearance in January of this year, the "tiger porn" charge was dropped when prosecuting counsel discovered the volume control and at the end of the 7 second clip heard the animated tiger turn to camera and say: "That beats doing adverts for a living" - it was an cartoon spoof of Tony the Tiger from the Frosties cereal adverts.

The clip was therefore deemed to be "unrealistic" and out of scope as far as extreme porn legislation was concerned. The court then turned its attention to the allegedly more serious clip involving adult interaction.

In March, following advice from his legal team, Holland pleaded guilty to possessing one extreme porn clip and was stunned to be told that he might face a prison sentence. Holland then spoke to members of Consenting Adult Action Network and sexual rights organisation Backlash, who put him in touch with their legal adviser, Myles Jackman of Audu and Co in King's Cross, London.

Jackman, a solicitor specialising in extreme pornography offences (I bet that is a great business card), advised Holland that contrary to previous advice, there were grounds for pleading not guilty. On this basis, Holland took the unusual step of applying to the court for permission to "vacate his plea". This is a technical device whereby an individual may go back on a guilty plea at any time before sentencing.

In May a judge granted Holland leave to vacate his plea from guilty back to not guilty. Holland was therefore due to stand trial again. The CPS, however, declined to offer any evidence on the day (yeah, fucking it up for free as usual), and the matter is at an end - at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer. The CPS has not yet commented on this matter, or on the fact that on each charge, it was not until the day of the court appearance that they decided the evidence to hand was inadequate.

I assume putting out a statement saying "Basically, we are really, really incompetent" is just too humiliating.

Of course, had Mr.Holland not contacted Backlash in the first place he would have been sentenced for an offence which other people have not only escaped prosecution for, but in fact have made fortunes over in the Libel courts. Yes, I'm thinking of you, Max Mosely.

Why should we criminalise relatively odd porn if we don't criminalise the sex acts themselves? Of course we should criminalise some sex acts; but if the acts are legal (or impossible), why is it right to criminalise seeing images of them? I just don't see a harm to it; certainly not one which justifies spending a fortune and hugely limiting liberty. Fortunately, Mr. Holland has since be reunited with his children.

Other cases have not ended so well. For example, Kent Police are in the process of using the Obscene Publications Act as a means to prosecute an individual, Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe for publishing obscenity in respect of a log of a private online chat he had with another individual. This case marks an extension of the law into an area that its originators could never have envisaged – text chat. Most internet users would regard it as person-to-person conversation.

The legal principle at stake here is whether internet chat constitutes "publication" in the ordinary sense of the word, or can be treated as private conversation. If the former is the conclusion, then anyone with even a passing interest in unusual sexual fantasies may need to be very careful in respect of any online conversations they have in future.

IRC will no longer be quite the refuge of the bizarre and the outlandish it once was. In my opinion, that's a shame. There's a case for the state to legislate to outlaw some things - but private conversation and private, harmless fantasies should not be one of them.

So, in short, we live in a country were the CPS are willing to prosecute a man for being a bit kinky, but not willing to prosecute a man who beat someone to death. Not for the first time, I do worry about the country.

CPS Pusillanimity, Police Brutality & the future of Demonstrations

A few weeks ago, when the story broke in the Daily Telegraph about a senior CPS prosecutor being bribed £20,000 to throw a case. As a former criminal barrister, I cynically remarked "I wouldn't have bothered; in my experience they normally fuck it up for free."

Sadly, I have been proven entirely right by the CPS's absolutely farcical handling of the Ian Tomlinson Case.

There are three problems here - the way Police forces have become corrupt, the deeply unbalanced way the CPS is handling cases, and the impact this has on demonstrations.



Above: The TSG engage in some modern community policing.

Police Brutality

There is a huge problem with the Police - particularly with the Metropilitan Police's Territorial Support Group (TSG), the "elite" unit trained to deal with "Domestic Extremism & terrorism". The conflation of these two things under Ian Blair, Labour's favourite Policeman - legitimate civil disobedience and protest mixed with terrorist outrage - has turned this unit into a self-righteous bunch of thugs.

This poison has seeped into other police forces too, as the TSG provide training to other forces to deal with this sort of incident.

According to The Job, the Met's in-house magazine, TSG officers - who are known as the 'tough guys and girls' of the Met - can be identified by a "U" on shoulder epaulette numbers.

Of course, the question is, can you identify them? When a police officer hides his face & removes his identification number, how can you tell who is who? Speaking off the record to people I know in the Met, there is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy - that the TSG are regularly instructed by their immediate superiors to systematically hide all identification.

Of course, it's not the people behind desks giving these "orders". It's sergeants, the people actually going out in the vans, with the batons and the riot gear. It reminds me of my father telling me that in Northern Ireland, the "policy" was to always shoot first, and then everyone in the platoon would "confirm" you gave the mandated three warnings.

This is creating a huge problem for civic society. Not since the Life on Mars days of the 1970s have we seen Police corruption on this scale. Policing doesn't work unless people respect and support the Police - and increasingly, the actions of the TSG are turning more and more people against them.

I worked with a director at the BBC who exposed lots of the Police Corruption in the 1970s. At its root, he explained, there was always a conviction that amongst the Police that they were doing the right thing. They felt they knew who had done it - who the villains were. That all they had to do was beat a confession out of this scumbag, plant some evidence here or there and justice was done. That attitude was ultimately what lead to the murder of Blair Peach, by the fore-runners of the TSG.

That is exactly the problem with the TSG. They consider themselves an elite; they are almost certainly opposed to everything the protesters stand for. They don't consider any of this to be wrong. The reason they keep doing it is not because they are evil - it's much worse. The reason they keep doing it is because they think they are right. All these petty things like displaying badge numbers, the IPCC and so on, are just lefty-liberal concepts that "get in the way of justice" in their eyes.

I know many police officers and have a great deal of respect for them - they are doing a dificult job. However, like others in positions of trust such as teachers, doctors or catholic priests, 'rogue' squads of police officers leave a terrible stench - especially when the establishment closes ranks to protect them.

I say rogue, but this attitude goes right through the Met - it has been rotted to the core by Ian Blair's tenure. You only need look at Blair's own statements about Jean Charles de Menezes - that he would not revoke the shoot to kill policy, his assertion that the Brazilian was the 53rd victim of the 7/7 bombers & his statement that if Mr. de Menezes had been a terrorist, his men "would have got medals".

This is madness of the first order. Firstly, if Raoul Moat's victims had been Hitler, Goering & Ming the Merciless, then he too would have got a medal. This does not change the fact that instead of those individuals, he shot innocent people. Just like the Met's officers did. The refusal of the high command to accept they did anything wrong is absolutely damning, and sends a terrible message to the rank and file.

The very least that should happen now is that the internal police enquiry should find a reason to sack this officer without compensation or pension, and while they are at it they should look at all the officers who removed their ID and take action against them.

The Metropolitan Police Website says "All employees of the MPS, whether they wear a uniform or not, are in a position of responsibility and trust. As such they should be law-abiding citizens with proven integrity." It is about time the started acting like that.

One law for them, One law for us.

There are countless cases where the CPS has taken decisions quickly, in equally confusing circumstances. For example, in this case involving a similar set of facts.

But the CPS seems to take leave of its senses when it comes to prosecuting the Police. How can it be fair for Sergeant Delroy Smellie walk free after savagely beating someone without cause while a 19 year old dental student with no criminal record gets 2 years in jail for throwing an empty plastic bottle at the Israeli embassy.

It defies belief that bungling in this case has led to a criminal getting off scot-free. A corrupt police force needs to be taken to task; clearly, the CPS are not up to the job, having serially dropped the ball.

Protesting in the Future.

As I mentioned above, the Ian-Blair-inculcated attitudes of the TSG have spread far and wide, through the TSG being deployed as trainers to other forces. They have led to minor incidents, like this young man having to stand up to his rights to more serious issues, such the police covering up a massive overspend by pretending 70 officers were injured by protesters at the Kingsnorth power station, when in fact all the "injuries" sustained were totally preposterous - for example, "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured by seatbelt while sitting alone in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".

These injuries were trotted out to try to justify a massive police presence. All of the apparatus of anti-terror surveillance was trotted out.

This is all down to a wilful attempt, aided and abetted by the previous government, to define all dissent as "domestic extremism".

The term "domestic extremism" is now common currency within the police. It is a phrase which shapes how forces seek to control demonstrations.

There is no official or legal definition of the term. Instead, the police have made a vague stab at what they think it means. Senior officers describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups "that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process." They say they are mostly associated with single issues and suggest the majority of protesters are never considered extremists.

It has led to the personal details and photographs of a substantial number of protesters being stored on secret police databases around the country. In this era of enhanced CRB checks, anyone who goes on a demo not only risks their health from thugs with batons, but also risks their future career in any sensitive area. Anyone who wants to be a teacher, a criminal lawyer, to serve in the forces, or to join the police, is taking a chance if they stand up for what they believe in.

This is a disaster for civil society in the making; by adding barriers to protest, you confine protest to only those willing to suffer serious penalties. You create a culture of demonstrators expecting violence and mistrusting the police.

You push the right to demonstrate out of the hands of legitimate protestors into the hands of extremists. As citizens, that is something worth marching against. Even if we do risk being attacked by thugs or recorded on databases.