Several articles in this week’s issue of the Spectator are worth the cover price alone. We’ll be flagging them up on Coffee House over the weekend. To start with, here is Rod Liddle on the row over pornography:
‘The Co-operative stores, with all the high-handed self-righteousness of the political movement to which it is paying obsequy, has demanded that henceforth publications such as Nuts and Zoo and Front must be displayed in plastic bags which disguise their front page. The front page of these mags usually consists of a young woman in a state of partial undress — but no nipples on display and certainly nothing from the really naughty region, that famous neck of the woods below the waist and from which babies emanate. The shop has argued that it is inappropriate for children to see these images — i.e. the image of a woman in a bikini.
This is cant, and you can tell that it is cant because the Co-op has gained the immediate approval of the Lib Dem minister Jo ‘Taleban’ Swinson, and almost everything that woman says is cant. She also agreed that ‘lewd pictures that portray women as sex objects is not appropriate’. And there you have it — the whole thing is nothing whatsoever to do with children, it is to do with the proto-Islamicism of a certain tranche of the bien-pensant feminist left. And I suspect that this creeping censorship, in which I would include the government’s determination to make watching pornography on the internet more problematic, is a case of political expediency.’
Subscribers can read the rest of this funny and provocative piece here. Non-subscribers can mend the error of their ways by taking advantage of our spectacular summer deal below.
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