Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
MPs' attempts to ingratiate themselves with yoof culture may have given the impression that the teenager's clumsy and often unsightly attempts to express himself are now to be celebrated rather than frowned on. But it is not true that teenagers now enjoy a more liberal regime than their parents did.
When punk rockers, safety pins dangling from their noses, first appeared in public in 1976, they were treated to much derision from old folk at bus stops, tut-tutting about how men had died to preserve their freedom, but I don't remember anyone seriously proposing to outlaw the practices of punk.
That is something that has been left to our touchy-feely, supposedly more tolerant, 21st-century Labour party. David Chaytor, Labour MP for Bury North, has launched, along with ten of his colleagues, a campaign to prohibit body-piercing among the young. Should Chaytor have his way, only adults will be allowed to dangle safety pins from their nasal quarters or insert studs in their tongues.
The excuse for this prohibition is, needless to say, a concern over health: the Bury and Rochdale health authority has discovered that badly pierced skin can lead to potentially fatal infection — and therefore, like smoking, it is something that should be permitted only for adults, who, having been bombarded with the correct government advice, still insist on abusing themselves in this way.
For all Labour's supposed commitment to multiculturalism, attempting to outlaw body-piercing among the young shows an implicit distrust of other cultures. Body-piecing has a long and respectable history among African and Indian peoples which, with due respect to the Bury and Rochdale health authority, does not deserve to be wiped out by a few bad experiences with dodgy back-street piercers in Lancashire.
It all makes you wonder whether the tut-tutters of old weren't really the tolerant ones: at least they acknowledged that freedom was something worth
defending. Ross Clark
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