"an image will be illegal if it looks non-consensual"

So he's consented to being tied up and asked the mistress with the big strapon to do it, and to gag him while she does it...

...that appears non-consentual if photographed but is actually completely consentual.

Well, bugger. Pun oh-so-very-much intended.

The Scots parliament should be looking as to how they are going to pay the English back for bailing out their reckless banks. So much for Celtic financial sobriety.

Just had some late news:

Max Mosely has just cancelled the purchase of his Scottish weekend retreat

My coats the long leather one with the whip in the pocket :)

Thanks for keeping us informed!

I also wish to wish CAAN Scotland great success with their efforts.

Paris, because she looks like she's keeping an eye on things, too.

... to visit www.adultsheepfinder.com

But from now on I'll be going to Wales, not Scotland, for my Gary-Glitter-tourism

Anyway, who are the nation who invented Irn Bru, razor gangs, drunkeness and deep-fried Mars bar to lecture anyone on what's good for us? Ginger skirt-wearing pillocks, the lot of them.*

*Yes, Charles Kennedy, if the cap fits...

Thanks for the thought (Oliver Mayes). As I wrote that line, I was first of all not intending the slightly awkward fnaar fnaar content in considering porn south of the border.

But as far as silent films go, it did strike me as a fruitful vein for further exploration. Not just black-and-white porn...bring back the cinema organist. Oh, darn...fnaaar fnaar again.

Or even the tinkly pianist.

Isn't there a wonderful scene in an early Chaplin where the villain is trying to throttle some damsel in distress...quite violently, too, I seem to remember. And Charlie's answer to this is to keep kicking said villain up the behind?

Hmmmm. Better not watch that sort of thing nowadays, if it turns you on.

Paris...cause she remembers the joke about the six-inch pianist

Cool. I'm going to go around and report anyone who has taken a pictures of a family meal showing people eating sausages and then report them for fellating dead pigs. Sometimes there may even be children present... why doesn't anyone ever think of the children?

But seriously WTF??? This is insane.

So you decide to recreate the crucial scenes from the Jodie Foster film The Accused. The original film is safe because it has a BBFC rating. But your home movie depicts non-consensual activity. And so the thought police strike again.

As with the legislation south of the border, I'm not the only one perhaps to detect a method in the poor quality of this law. The more confusing and ill-though-out it is, the more people will feel that they should police themselves. If they were serious about helping those who wish to remain law-abiding, they would issue a list of 'approved' sites, images or something. As with England, the agenda here is to generate confusion, one suspects, and an instinct to self-censor. On both sides of the border, these are laws that cry out for judicial clarification. The trouble is, some poor bastard's life will have to be ruined for that to happen.

Anyway, well done to The Reg for keeping the pressure up on this issue.

So is it now illegal to document illegal mutilation of genitals in order to try and stop the process/prosecute the offenders?

I fear the law of unintended consequences more than sad people it is supposed to target.

Way to go, only a handful of comments and already the petty jingoistic trolling has started, oh goody!

Speaking as a fan of pornography (seeing as you felt it necessary to point out that you yourself are not), I would just like to point out that it isn't just males that view porn, in fact, I think you will find that there are even entire genres that are produced without the male audience in mind.

My opinion on the matter is simple: Pornography is part of people's sexuality, and Governments should have not say in any matters relating to the sexuality of the individual.

(Yes, they should intervene when abuse is involved, but that is never about the persons sexuality, it is about the fact that the person has or has tried to physically abuse someone else).

Heart, because we all need more love. Especially government ministers.

Would it be a good idea for the governement to host a number of pictures on a website (or links possibly) to pictures, with a caption of 'Ok', 'not Ok', '5 years for this', 'fine unless the tomato is removed' and the like.

Obviously the more pictures the better since sampling a larger data set gives more accurate results and all that.

That way we would all be educated on the sort of things that we are now allowed.

Of course, they couldn't show us the really naughty pictures, so maybe they could use stick figures or something.

Maybe they could host it at porn.gov.uk or similar.

only a thought.

ttfn

Well done Scotland. Good to see at least one nation wishes to support decent morals and to help promote them. The rest of the UK is allowing morals to slip away and on almost any street you can see disgusting images of semi-naked men and women.

Hopefully the rest of the UK will follow Scotland and tighten up its laws to ban all this filth. Perhaps then we can further the morals set out in the Good Book and engage in a just, fair and decent society; without all the disgusting deviant forcing their views on the rest of us.

Can a melon consent? Or a blow-up doll?

Just as in the UK parliament, the feminist writ runs large in the Scottish legislature and with the same deadening effect. The very concept of criminalising possession of an image, any image, is "one giant step for mankind" - backward into medieval darkness.

The complete absence of any rationale behind the proposals betrays its origins in the finely honed mind of the chief bigot herself, the hapless Jacqui Smith. For example, what is the purpose and desired outcomes that this law is meant to achieve? It certainly won't improve the scandalously low conviction rate for rape crimes or protect one single child from being the victim of real, actual, sexual exploitation. Maybe the real intended beneficiaries of this piece of horse-manure are all the dead animals who will be saved from the unwelcome attention of necrophiliacs. .

MSPs who endorse this kind of infantile nonsense should be publicly flogged through the streets of Edinburgh.

I recently saw a film where a guy shagged an apple pie, I take it that as a depiction of non-consensual sex that this is now illegal?

Getting me coat...

Which "Good Book" are you looking to for moral guidance? The Bible?!?

I suggest you actually go read it. Including all those wacky passages

on rape, slavery and sex with children.

Don't forget that it's perfectly acceptable to allow your virgin daughters to be raped to protect your guests according to the "Good" Book...

Still, if the Scots actually have the guts to throw out this stupid law, then it means only we English can't be trusted to act sensibly if we look at this stuff, so obviously Scottish morals are better than ours...

Could you please expand on your views regarding pornography? I would very much like to know why you think of it as deviant and disgusting.

Personaly I find pornography (That is, imagery of a sexual nature, not limited to depictions of people having sex) arousing and uplifting (in a smile-on-my-face after seeing a woman with a very nice bottom walking down the street sort-of-way, not the next plane of existence sort-of-way), but not in any way deviant or disgusting (unless of course you argue that sex itself is a deviation, but I think we have proven that one wrong through quite a few generations of sticking with it).

Remember, there is no correct answer, only opinions :o)

Answers on postcard please, no arousing pictures on the front ;o)

I41 etc...

"Damage... in a pornographic context" - so, er, e.g nipple rings (etc.) are out, the nipple being a) a priori part of the breast and b) damaged? (BTW - is a depiction a rendering or a record of a scene, or both?)

However, on the upside I think the trend is generally in the right direction... soon, no doubt, "depictions" of poverty and greed "in a financial context" will be outlawed, on which topic (whoa boy! too late...) I don't recall any news of a global Greed pandemic in the last few years so I rather assume that bankers are/were just as "greedy" as they had always been... in which case (not that I applaud them for overlooking the severe mathematical limits on the applicability of a certain rather important formula) why pick on the poor bankers alone...

wasn't HMG equally greedy for its tax revenue insofar as it was equally content to overlook the not-unknown technical risks?

Having been HMG's bitch far too long I would be rather relieved to be able to bin my impoverished bank statements in accordance with the Law.

But still... Are we not at War With Filth? We should all fight "the evil depicting ones" and remember - if you deed a depicter or you fund a depicter - you're a depicter... it's so much easier than actually dealing with abuse per se.

more true crypt required, and a forgetting of the password if there is a <ahem> problem...

what a complete load of bollocks, maybe labour would like to kiss my ass - at least no one will be taking a photo of it.

... has problems with the idea of freely-given consent meaning you are not the victim of a crime. Recall the R v Brown, Operation Spanner case?

No doubt our Calvinist establishment think we should be grateful that we don't live in Saudi Arabia where consent is *never* an issue, since all sexual activity is either a serious crime or at the discretion of an identifiable male authority figure.

Much appreciated, m'am.

"If your idea of a good time is remaking "The Accused" then I think this law is a good thing."

Really? So what is the difference between the consenting people at home making a personal home movie, image, whatever, and the writer of the accused, the producers of the Accused, the actors in the Accused, the cameramen of the Accused, the make up artists from the Accused, the crew of the Accused, the people who give the broadcasting certificates for the Accused, or all those people who watch this on tv, cinema, video, DVD?

Talk about time for people to plain 'grow up'.

Hmmmm. At risk of condemning myself to a week of grammatical hell...I shall have to take slight issue with our esteemed moderatrix.

A lot of feminists are against this legislation. That is true. Organisations like "Feminists Against Censorship" - the clue is in the title - have taken a valuable stance on behalf of the liberties lobby.

But I think its too easy to distance feminism entirely. Just as christianity contains within it the seeds for, on the one hand, pacifism and total acceptance, as well as the Inquisition...so feminism contains all manner of viewpoints that are described as "feminist" and in some respected quarters accepted as such.

I don't mean the facile argument "God told me to do it" ergo the Yorkshire Ripper is a bad argument for christianity: more the buying-in to a particular point of view (whether anti-gay or anti-porn) by a recognised set of what are, in both cases, quite broad churches.

I've written elsewhere about the roots to New Labour's anti-sex agenda. In part it has to do with the way they switched questions in 1997. Prior to New Labour, a serious debate was taking place in the legal establishment about consent. The question under discussion was the limits of consent: that is, where was it right for the state to draw a line. Tattoing. Religious flagellation. bdsm. Rugby.

On New Labour's arrival, the question shifted to one about where it was ok for an individual to withdraw consent. They shifted the ground from positive consent (when was it OK to say yes) to negative (when to say no). Both are valid questions: but the emphasis was significant.

The shift in emphasis co-incided with the creation of the Sexual Offences Review Team at the Home Office... a group widely regarded as radical feminist in its inspiration.

Of course, it would be unfair just to pick on the feminist elements. Blunkett also made a crack about how nice it was to work with so many of the same religious bent. I think he meant catholics, but not entirely sure.

So the shift in attitude under New Labour, like all such shifts, has complex roots. Some feminist. Some religious. Some - I'd get back to another time - in the Police and in the somewhat puritan ranks of New Labour. Never under-estimate the degree to which New Labour just find sex and related topics "icky".

To blame all that on feminism is wrong.

To seek to exonerate feminsim entirely is just as wrong.

Its what comes of being a broad church.

Paris, cause she's secretly a card-carrying radical feminist. No. Honestly.

So a UK-issued DVD copy of The Accused (or whatever) would be absolutely fine, but if you happen to have a non-UK issued copy of the same film - as a download, or as a Region 1 DVD - without that little bit printed on the packaging... <shudder>

Is this all just a very clever anti-grey-import, anti-piracy scheme dreamt up by the Pigopolists?

Why don't they just get on with it and outlaw any sex act unless it is purely(?) for procreation and performed fully dressed, masked and with a partner you find unattractive, and ban ANY erotic depiction including this?

We'll obey that law just as much as the Extreme Pr0n.

Pathetic interfering weirdos!

Paris, because I look forward to the MAD-style folding pictures of her we'll be seeing in the future.

Note of caution, for Telegraphers ascribing this to NuLabour motives and values.

The current Scottish government is an SNP government, and consequatently about as far away from the middle-left, middle-class, stakeholding, focus-grouped Labourites of Downing Street as you can get. This has nothing to do with Brown, or Blairites; from the perspective of British political ideology, it is a fundamentally disestablished administration -- and consequently MacAskill is never going to be the lackey of Jackboot Jacqui.

Indeed: were you to make ardent claims of NuLabourism in such a Holyrood bill within earshot of that parliament, doubtless the main chamber would ring to peals of laughter.

Mine's the one with bells on.