"(1) It is an offence for a person to be in possession of extreme pornographic writing."

Hahaha...
Englands best living author was JG Ballard until his obituary appeared in the Times last year . So I take it a book about fucking a flesh-wound would be considered 'extreme porn' and thus a criminal offence? Yet the DVD is sold as suitable for 18 year olds, so even illiterate deviants can get their kicks.

My favourite of those three is Crash so I'll let the perverted lawbreakers here search for the other two examples of possibly criminal material and let JG Ballard describe his own work:

"
Crash would be a head-on charge into the arena, an open attack on all the conventional assumptions about our dislike of violence in general and sexual violence in particular. Human beings, I was sure, had far darker imaginations than we liked to believe. We were ruled by reason and self-interest, but only when it suited us, and much of the time we chose to be entertained by films, novels and comic strips that deployed horrific levels of cruelty and violence.

In Crash I would openly propose a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity. It seemed obvious that the deaths of famous people in car crashes resonated far more deeply than their deaths in plane crashes or hotel fires.

Crash would clearly be a challenge, and I was still not convinced by my deviant thesis. Then, in 1970, someone at the New Arts Laboratory, in London, contacted me to ask if there was anything I would like to do there. It occurred to me I could test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars. The Arts Lab offered me the gallery for a month. I drove around wrecked-car sites in north London and paid for three cars, including a Pontiac, to be delivered to the gallery.

The cars went on show without any supporting graphic material, as if they were large pieces of sculpture. A TV enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up a camera and closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch themselves as they strolled around. I suggested we hire a young woman to interview the guests about their reactions. Contacted by telephone, she agreed to appear naked, but when she saw the crashed cars, she told me she would only perform topless – a significant response, I felt at the time.

I have never seen the guests at a gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring. Nobody would have noticed the cars if they had been parked in the street, but under the unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, the topless girl was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later wrote a damning review headed “Ballard Crashes” in the underground paper Frendz). A woman journalist from New Society began to interview me among the mayhem, but became so overwrought with indignation, of which the journal had an unlimited supply, that she had to be restrained from attacking me.

During the month the cars were ceaselessly attacked, daubed with white paint by a Hare Krishna group, overturned and stripped of wing mirrors and licence plates. By the time they were towed away, unmourned, all my suspicions had been confirmed about the unconscious links my novel would explore. My exhibition had been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed. I suspect it’s no longer possible to outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone. A psychological challenge is needed that threatens one of our dearer delusions, whether a stained sheet or a bisected cow forced to endure a second death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling about the first.

In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all this entailed.

Two weeks after I had finished, my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found the doors had been jammed by the partly collapsed roof. The car lay in the centre of the oncoming carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true of Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.

Crash created little stir when it first appeared in Britain, but 25 years later, when the country was supposed to have liberalised itself, a preposterous storm in the largest teacup When it finally opened there were no copycat car crashes, and the controversy at last died down. Cronenberg, a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, was completely baffled by the English reaction. “Why?” he kept asking me. “What’s going on here?”

After 50 years, I was nowhere nearer an answer.

Fleet Street could find showed just how repressed and silly a nation we could be. David Cronenberg’s film of Crash was premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1996. The controversy continued for years afterwards, especially in England. Desperate Conservative politicians attacked the film in an attempt to gain moral credit as the guardians of public decency. One cabinet minister, Virginia Bottomley, called for the film (which she had not seen) to be banned.

The Cannes festival is an extraordinary media event, in many ways deeply intimidating to a mere novelist. I took part in all the publicity interviews and was deeply impressed to see how committed the stars of the film were to Cronenberg’s elegant adaptation of my novel. I was sitting next to Holly Hunter when we were joined by a leading American film critic. His first question was: “Holly, what are you doing in this shit?” Holly sprang into life and delivered a passionate defence, castigating him for his small-mindedness and provincialism. It was the festival’s greatest performance, which I cheered vigorously.

In England the film was delayed for a year when Westminster Council banned it from the West End, and a number of councils up and down the country followed suit.
"

We should ban Agatha Christie novels as well. If people read about murder they may be encouraged to try doing it themselves.

Westminster City Council has probably "banned" more films than it has allowed to be shown... though seems less keen to ban fraud within its walls.

As, I remember it, Crash screened all over the rest of London, and as usual in these matters, the Westminster-embargoed film screened in Central London on Tottenham Court Road which is Camden Borough. So the film wasn't 'held back a year'.

Despite a witchhunt in teh Daily Mail, the film was only blocked ("banned" is disingenuous when it only takes walking across a road or catching a bus to see the film) in four other councils (Cardiff, Kirklees, Walsall and North Lanarkshire), of which Cardiff was only one likely to have geographically inconvenienced anyone wishing to see the film.

 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Eph3leyfK2kC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=westminster+city+council+banned+films&source=bl&ots=y93vFQk500&sig=vco3kAz-fXobKKMXK_8iuvu3-94&hl=en&ei=3ItQSp-uHI_MjAf_lOivBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2

In the late 90s, failing Kings Cross cinema cum live music venue the Scala screened A Clockwork Orange as an act of opportunistic defiance as it faced commercial certain death.

You may be amused to know that the ban on screening of Life of Brian have just this last week been lifted in Glasgow.

And then there was the case of the Derek & Clive videos being seized by police before they made it to market.

I remember the Tory government banning 'video nasties', which seemed to have been the biggest boost you could have given at least the video pirates, as it make it a matter of principal to every schoolkid in the country to seek out 'Driller Killer' & 'I spit on your Grave' as quickly as possible... both being utter trash petulantly elevated to cult status by patriarchal government. Clockwork Orange being another example of dreadful output revered because of a ban (though this time the authors).

The bigger hypocrisy of the whole cinema censorship is that in cinema it was all pretend, but at the same time you could (and still can) buy LPs from a real-life (well, now dead) serial sex offender like GG Allin.

And on the topic of books; wasn't Hubert Selby Jr's 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' the last commercial fictional work to have been banned in the UK? Of course there have been ex-spook books canned too, and AR manuscripts...

Technically banning books is a breach of the Human Rights Act, but like all Western Humanitarian Law it's so shot full of 'national security' & 'public order' caveats & escape clauses as to be a chocolate teapot.

So the concept of 'extreme writing' isn't so much a dramatic u-turn but rather 'business as usual' after a brief lull in suppression.

Noone else is reporting what this poisonous old homophobe said, but it is timely for Sean to report this given the Conservatives are denying they are a homophobic party just now. She must be under the impression that the Marquis de Sade invented Sadism and popularised it through book-clubs.

She is seemingly pro-incest, having proposed in 2004 that family members who live together should have the same rights as gay-couples because 'they can't get married either'. It wasn't reported whether the Baroness wanted to marry her grandfather, father, uncle, brother or son, but you can can be damn sure it wasn't one of her female relatives, she would take offence at that.. In 2002 the 'damaged adult' Baroness O'Cathain argued against adoption by unmarried couples, while defending her stance against homosexual marriages:

"Damaged children need both male and female role models, a mother and a father. Homosexual adoption would deliberately place some of the most damaged children in a home without either a father or a mother. Is that in the interests of the child? Is it right that we should forget about the interests of the child in the interests of political correctness? These children know that they are different anyway. Do we want to make them feel even more different? How would they feel if their friends knew that they had either two dads or two mums? It is likely that they would be mocked and made to feel even more different. Of course that is not right, but should we put damaged children in this position?"

And just two years ago:

"Noble Lords might like to note that they can put up a sign saying "No heterosexuals" and Regulation 13 will protect their right to do so. I do not criticise that, I only note that on this point it rather puts into perspective the somewhat overemotive arguments that we heard when we considered the equivalent regulations for Northern Ireland in this House on 9 January."

It is interesting that a Tory peer opining about the morality of homosexual sex in Northern Ireland is a Limerick Catholic, because no matter how many films the presbyterian councils of Westminster, Aberystwith and Glasgow have banned, it doesn't compare to the number of books on the Vaticans list of banned books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum). That banned books by Jean Paul Sartre, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and someone called Saint Faustina Kowalska. Tellingly though, the Vatican never banned Adolf Hitlers 'Mein Kampf'.