Censorship: Time to relax porn laws, says censor

JAMES FERMAN, the nation's film censor, published his final report yesterday and recommended a wide-scale relaxation of pornography laws.

Mr Ferman, who has been director of the British Board of Film Classification for 23 years, has recommended loosening Britain's pornography laws, giving greater freedoms to film-makers in a new "R18" category and rejects giving morality campaigners a right to appeal against censors' decisions.

The report is bound to anger Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, whom Mr Ferman accused of being puritanical and "playing to the gallery" earlier this year.

The Home Office is obliged to present the report to MPs and placed a provisional copy in the House of Commons library on the final day before the Parliamentary recess began. Morality campaigners claim the Government tried to stifle debate about the report by not arranging an answer to a Parliamentary question to alert MPs to its existence.

The Home Office maintains it gave a Parliamentary answer that the report would be laid before Parliament in the same week. The report is published in full today by the BBFC while most MPs are on holiday.

Criteria for a new R18 certificate are set out in the report in detail for the first time. The new category will allow a classification to be given to scenes of homosexual and heterosexual intercourse and group sex.

Mr Ferman also writes that "too strict" pornography laws have created a flourishing black market in violent pornography.

"As we enter a new Millennium," writes Mr Ferman in the report, "we must find a solution to the problem of pornography which will not go away. The law has been applied by police and magistrates in too strict a manner to allow the material the customers want. Thus we are left with a flourishing black market which mixes pornography with obscenity."

The BBFC wants the licensing of sex shops to be tightened while allowing them to sell more explicit material so that the demand for hard-core pornography dries up.

However, Jonathan Bartley, spokesman for the Movement for Christian Democracy, claims the new R18 certificate takes films as far as they can go without breaking obscenity laws. "The R18 criteria allow group sex and virtually anything to be shown," he said.

Adding to Mr Bartley's anger is the report's announcement that the BBFC has decided not to give children's groups a right to appeal about a film's classification.

"Only the film industry currently has the right of appeal," said Mr Bartley. "In March the new president, Andreas Whittam Smith, announced that he was in principle in favour of such a right of appeal. Now it's announced that a panel of children's rights groups will only be able to consult. It won't have any teeth."

Mr Ferman will leave his position as arbiter of British good taste in December after 23 years at the BBFC. He has followed an increasingly liberal line because of his belief that the BBFC's job is to classify, not to censor, if possible.

In the report he maintains that the need for strict controls has lessened since his appointment in 1975. "No subject matter should any longer be taboo," he said. "Times have changed and governments and public authorities must ensure that any remedy is not disproportionate to the mischief it is designed to cure."

Campaigners hoping that Mr Straw will use Mr Ferman's retirement to put a more conservative figure in charge of the nation's censors may be disappointed. Mr Straw had a say in the appointment this year of Andreas Whittam Smith, former editor of The Independent, as president of the BBFC, but Mr Ferman's successor will be appointed by the new president. Mr Whittam Smith showed his liberal credentials earlier this year when he gave a certificate to a new film version of Nabokov's Lolita.