Horrors that tiptoe daily into the living room

ONCE upon a time, there was a long and kinky sex act between two individuals. Neither had been famous before, but their sexual practices were considered so extreme and bizarre that everyone seemed to want to know about them. The athletic and unusual pair were profiled and interviewed. Their sex was recreated in a drama-documentary, with slow motion sequences and detailed commentary. It was described in mass-circulation newspapers and broadcast to watching families. Glossy magazines ran features on it.

Absurd, of course. Hard-core pornography is widespread, but both its availability and its customers are limited. Its stars are not national characters; its details are not chatted about openly. We should think less of ourselves if they were. But substitute 'long and savage murder' for 'sex act', and you get the picture. Daily, routinely, with barely a murmur of debate, serial killings are described, conflated, re-filmed, compared. For the latest film to attract attention, the knifing of the girl has to be ever-nastier; the brainpan must be smashed in more realistically; the . . . well, you get the point.

In the censorship debate, we have got censorship of sex and censorship of violence badly out of proportion. The latter is far more important. This is part of the moral background to a hearing due in the High Court today, where the Home Office will argue that a filmed interview with Dennis Nilsen about the murder and dismemberment of six young men should not be broadcast as part of a Central Television film about serial killers. It is a highly unusual case. The disputed material is not violent but only describes violence. The film is a serious one. And the Home Office is alleging breach of copyright.

Copyright, though, does not touch the ethical heart of the issue, which is whether film of Nilsen describing what he did should be censored, or freely available. It is hard to pass sentence on something that (because of an injunction) cannot yet be seen. But, as a good liberal, I have a gut instinct that it should be censored. It is an unusual case. But it is not unusual enough. Our growing obsession with murders and rapes is a far greater threat to our domestic security than, say, the satellite porn channel Red Hot Dutch. Ministers are pursuing that, too. Not Home Office ones, though - satellite porn, believe it or not, is the responsibility of the gents from National Heritage.

It is always hard to judge when an issue is tiptoeing on to the main political agenda, but violent crime seems to be. Cases that once kept the country talking for months now come weekly. The Prime Minister, who devoted a section of his party political broadcast to crime, has clearly been told its political salience is rising. Tony Blair, the shadow Home Secretary, thinks so, too. There is an urgent argument to be had about policing, rehabilitation and criminal policy generally. It is probably about to reopen in a classic domestic policy debate.

The relationship between violence and censorship is mixed up in all this, and is much trickier. It stretches the liberal consensus to breaking point and challenges the potency and will of government itself. The mere existence of satellite transmissions clearly erodes the sovereignty of little bits of land-mass. The global information market has allowed many famous victories for free speech and free thought, from BBC broadcasts into Iran, to the Spycatcher saga. But it also means that national standards of taste are swiftly becoming meaningless. Satellite companies can be regulated, up to a point. But the technology will carry on outstripping national or European regulations.

Technology is not the only destroyer of government, however. Many of the worst examples of violent films have been passed by the British Board of Film Classification, whose views about what constitutes an acceptable level of violence appear vague to the point of meaninglessness. Margaret Ford, deputy director of the BBFC, says she feels depressed about the level of violence in films but could think of only one mainstream film (Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer) whose violent scenes had been significantly cut, and none that had been rejected. She said there was no level or type of violence so extreme that its portrayal would be automatically censored.

Questions about how well a film is made; how much the viewer is drawn into the process of violence; and the geographical location and context of the violence are taken into account by the BBFC, though with little apparent effect. Since most films are quickly available for hire, age restrictions are virtually meaningless.

Given the Government's determination to try to restrict extreme pornography, and the rising worry about violence throughout Britain, it seems odd that it has ignored the pornography of violence - readily available at a cinema near you, today. The coarsening effects of ever more violent media images are becoming a menace; even well-off ministers cannot insulate their families from the results.

There would be clear risks for a party that used to be laissez-faire taking on the issue of violence in the media. It is a complex and many-sided question, involving hard decisions about free speech, art and liberty. It would mean offending voters who had become addicted to film violence. It would mean offending influential international companies. But long-serving, secure ministers who look away from hard issues such as this barely deserve the collective noun 'government'.