Be honest. If Labour were to propose something like this, would it really be a surprise?
Song lyrics found to be vulgar, violent, or in otherwise poor taste are now facing removal from Chinese Web sites, the Chinese Ministry of Culture has announced.
Starting December 31, every piece of music on Web sites hosted in China needs to be approved by the Ministry of Culture before it can be made available to the public. Even songs which are not in Chinese must be translated and submitted to the government.
Why not? Perfect meddling for the nightmare scenario fourth term. To protect the chiiildren, natch.
8 comments:
I guess this ones right out then
If Labour don't the Tories would be just as likely to. They love a nice bit of censorship, do the Tories. Plays well among the faithful, the War On Filth, oh yes.
Good point, Ian. The Tories banned Straw Dogs, The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the mid-80s IIRC.
Funny you should say this today Dick. Having time on my hands last night (waiting for you bloody bloggers to write something for me to read) I went on iplayer and watched Storyville: How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin.
The preamble said:
In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world.
Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life.
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The lengths that the kremlin went to to stop the youth of that era from listening to the Beatles mirrors NuLabour's Britain.
If your readers have 58 minutes you can watch here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ml582/Storyville_20092010_How_the_Beatles_Rocked_the_Kremlin/
Why do I get the feeling we are going back in time to some other countries history?
Dick, you may enjoy my posting at Counting Cats on the subject.
"Good point, Ian. The Tories banned Straw Dogs, The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the mid-80s IIRC."
Not the tories, the BBFC and especially James Ferman who had been given the job in 1975.
The tories had some interesting differences. On the one hand, they always had their swivel-eyed christian wing who loved censorship and Mary Whitehouse and would vocally complain about movies.
On the other hand, the first attempt to legalise hardcore pornography happened quietly under John Major, and was subsequently overturned by Jack Straw
Not the tories, the BBFC and especially James Ferman who had been given the job in 1975.
The BBFC were "given the job" in 1912 as a classic example of "we'll regulate ourselves to avoid the "state" doing it", thus the movie industry imposed strict censorship upon itself. It had no statutory role until 1984, when it was made the official state censorship quango by the Tories, with the Video Recordings Act, as described in the posting I linked to.
On the other hand, the first attempt to legalise hardcore pornography happened quietly under John Major, and was subsequently overturned by Jack Straw
Not sure what you mean by this. Hardcore was entirely illegal until the BBFC took its own appeals board to court, and accidentally got forced into allowing most hardcore, in 2000. I still remember reading the sober press release on their website saying how they would now pass films featuring "penetration by penis, finger or dildo". There certainly wasn't any hardcore legally available from 1984 until then.
Come to that, I still remember the odious Victoria Bottomley triumphantly declaring with eyes a-swivel to a rapturous Tory conference that she'd just banned the sale of satellite decoder cards that allowed people to watch nasty foreign porn.
"If Labour don't the Tories would be just as likely to. "
Seconded.
And if the Lib Dems were ever to gain power, then...
*slap*
What was I thinking...
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