The inexorable march of censorship in New Labour Britain
Iam enjoying writing my latest book Creators because it is taking me into strange areas. It is, in essence, a series of essays on people of genius or great originality, chiefly musicians, writers, painters or designers. I don’t think the creative process can be described or explained. But it can be illustrated, and that is what the book does. I have just finished the chapter on Louis Comfort Tiffany, which involved learning all about the 5,000-year-old business of glassmaking, one of the most mysterious processes known to us, for no one has yet produced a satisfactory definition of what glass is. In Tiffany’s day they were beginning to understand it scientifically, and he employed a team of chemists to help him develop new kinds of glass, just as Andrew Carnegie, at the same time, was using experts to investigate what happened inside a steel-furnace.
Since then I have done a chapter on Balenciaga and Dior, the two men who dominated the fashion industry when I worked in Paris in the 1950s. That, I thought, was familiar territory. But I am learning a lot about the making of specially luxurious textiles, for Balenciaga in particular liked to sculpt his clothes and was always demanding new materials for his visions — getting them, too, for manufacturers bent over backwards to develop completely new varieties of silks, satins and cloth especially to suit his voracious appetite. No one in the whole of history ever made such superb garments, and that is all the more extraordinary in that Balenciaga was himself a spoiled priest. He was never happier than when designing a new chasuble for a parish priest, or a First Communion dress for one of his nieces or, above all, elaborate garments for the plaster statues of saints in one of the churches he patronised. His maison in the Avenue George V was like a monastery or, as Marie-Louise Bousquet used to put it, ‘like a convent for aristocratic nuns’. It reminded me of Farm Street in its golden age; that is when I could get into the place, for access was closely guarded by two dragons, Madame Vera and Madame Renée, fierce creatures of a Parisian kind now extinct.
My next, and probably final, chapter will be on Picasso and Walt Disney, to examine which of these two remarkably creative fellows had the bigger influence on the visual arts (in the broadest sense) in the 20th century. Although I knew Picasso a bit, it is one of my greatest regrets that I never met Disney, an astonishing innovator in moving line, especially in a musi cal context. I shall never forget seeing his first feature-length movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, when it was shown in, I think, the early summer of 1938. Nobody talked about anything else for weeks and it dominated the vision of us children. The headmaster of the day school I attended said he would beat severely any boy who missed school in order to see it, adding that the movie was ‘sorcery’, so ‘boys who disobey will be beaten in this world and go to Hell in the next’.
The movie was an extraordinary work of commercial art, new in so many ways as almost to defy description. But of course it could never be made now, a measure of the creeping censorship which is gradually eroding artistic freedom and will in the end overwhelm it. The enormous success of the movie depended essentially on the dwarfs, and their delightful relationship with Snow White. No movie, play or opera centred on dwarfs could possibly be made today. No writer would dare compose such a screenplay, no studio would film it, no New York bank finance it. The very word ‘dwarf’ is already almost as taboo as ‘nigger’ and will soon be unlawful, even if it is not already so. Among the dwarfs there is further unacceptable offence, notably Dopey, who (it could be argued) is mocked as mentally defective or retarded, though in fact surveys taken at the time showed he was easily the most popular of the seven. Sneezy and, still more, Sleepy would be ruled out too, as making fun of medical conditions. Grumpy and Bashful would be marginal cases, and in today’s climate of cowardice in the face of censorship, official and (still more) unofficial, I suspect neither would be allowed to get into the script. And Snow White is an unlawful racist name.
As a writer I know that the number of no-go areas involving unknown risks of prosecution increases almost daily. I would now never dream of writing an article on immigration, racial problems of any kind, homosexuality or sexual deviation, or anything involving Islam. Labour is apparently anxious to do a deal with the Muslim community in which, in return for their votes, Islam will be protected by law from any criticism. This is the chief aim of the law currently going through the parliamentary rubber-stamp process. In the meantime, Labour is urging chief constables to be vigilant — not that they need any urging — on ‘race crime’. It’s not so long ago that the chief constable of North Wales demanded that someone be prosecuted for making a tiny and wholly innocuous joke about the Welsh on the BBC. Whether you are still allowed to say anything critical of homosexuals is unclear. As recently as the early Sixties, the police were persecuting homosexuals with extraordinary cruelty and ferocity. Now anyone who objects to their behaviour is liable to be threatened with arrest, as happened to an unfortunate man who complained to a policeman about what he had just seen take place in a public lavatory. We have not yet got to the position in Sweden where a Protestant minister was recently sentenced to a month for preaching a sermon saying that sodomy was sinful, but we are certainly heading that way.
In the Sixties everyone hailed the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the result of the Lady Chatterley case as the final end of official censorship. In fact there is now more censorship in Britain than at any time since the early 19th century, if not before, and it is increasing rapidly. The old law on blasphemy is now discredited and is obviously not being enforced — otherwise the director-general of the BBC would have been charged for a plainly blasphemous programme which brought 50,000 letters of protest from outraged licence-payers. But the new law replacing it will be much more severe on every aspect of religious comment and many other matters. It has already been pointed out that a cottage owned by the National Trust which is let only to Catholics will make the Trust liable to prosecution. I suspect, however, that this infamous new law, drafted in haste and for crude party-political purposes, will prove an illustration of what Karl Popper called ‘the law of unintended effect’. England has a very peculiar and precarious religious settlement, set up in the early years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in 1559, and complicated by additional statutes like the Royal Marriages Act. It may be that the whole established Church and its consequences, the Protestant throne and the ownership of our mediaeval churches and cathedrals, will be thrown into irreparable confusion by this new statute. I certainly hope so.
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