The Longford Report was well worth while

WHEN Lord Longford first set up his private committee to investigate pornography, many of his friends, myself included, doubted the wisdom of the venture. We felt that by drawing spectacular attention to the availability of pornography in this country, he might in fact arouse the curiosity of many, including young people, who had not yet sampled its wares; and our fears were confirmed by some of the initial publicity he received. Indeed, I still think that the net effect of the committee's activities, which have received enormous coverage in the media, has been marginally to increase the sale of pornographic material.
But then Lord Longford was perfectly well aware of this risk. Against it had to be set the positive value of the investigation and the report—in exploring the mechanics of the pornography industry, in analysing the existing safeguards against it, in probing the opinions of experts and the public on the adequacy of legal controls, and ultimately in recommending whether, and if so how, those controls should be strengthened.
As my wife, Marigold Johnson, has played a major part in assembling the evidence and in the actual writing of the report, I have become very familiar with the problem in recent months and conscious of the serious difficulties, both in method and in the organisation of the material, which faced the committee. By no means all the problems have been solved, and in some ways this 500-page report is a rag-bag collection of varying quality.
Nevertheless. I think the effort has been worth while, and Lord Longford's venture has come off. 1 suspect that this report is a more valuable document than might have emerged from a Royal Commission, which would have been bound by stricter rules of procedure, and whose members would have been drawn from a more limited spectrum of society. There arc times when an informal, amateur approach pays, and this is one of them.
Certainly, all those who care about the problem—and members of public authorities, those who work in the media, teachers and, above all, parents, ought to care— should have a look at this document. Nothing like it on the subject has ever appeared before. It contains in its texts and appendices a mass of factual information, gathered together for the first time, and a first-rate analysis of the confused legal situation. Here, in one paperback, is most of the essential material on which public debate can be based.
Hence, we must pay tribute to Lord Longford who, in the face of much unfair and some abusive criticism, had the courage to persist in his efforts. Like that great 19thcentury reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, he sometimes makes mistakes, but he has a similar energy and pertinacity in pursuing the course he believes to be right.
The report has some major weaknesses. The section on books is unimpressive. The committee rightly rejects the idea of censoring books, but its conclusions would carry greater weight if it had provided a more thorough survey of the disastrous effects of censorship, now and in the past. True. the novelists Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard contribute a well-argued essay on the use and abuse of specific sexual detail in fiction; but their recommendation—that books should have a classification system like films—seems to me clumsy, unworkable and, in any event, unlikely to receive much support.
Equally, the broadcasting section fails to carry the debate much further. It includes a spirited and characteristic diatribe by Malcolm Muggeridge; but this is angrily refuted by his colleague, Frank Gillard. And in the course of their exchange. it emerges that the methodology of the Broadcasting Sub-Committee was quite inadequate.
The views of committee members clash lin other sections. Thus, Sir Frederick Catherwood and Peregrine Worsthorne, both writing on the approach of Christianity towards sex and censorship, reach diametrically opposed conclusions based on mutually exclusive historical analyses.
Indeed, it appears throughout the report that committee members share the disagreements and confusions of the public on why pornography is harmful and which forms of it do most damage. If, for instance, the harm lies in the stimulation of sexual desire, as many committee members think, must not Mr. Amis and Miss Howard be wrong in arguing—as they do with great force—that sexual detail in fiction kills the imagination?
Moreover, there is one key aspect of the problem which the committee dodges completely. Hitherto, pornography, in all countries and in all ages, has been the exclusive preserve of the well-to-do. They have always been able to buy the means to circumvent censorship.
Now, for the first time, pornography—along with decent food, wine, good clothes, cars, travel and a multitude of other amenities—has become available to the masses. The huge spread of pornography is part of the problem of affluence.
It has never been possible to stamp out pornography by censorship. All that society could do and usually has done, was to confine it to the rich. The question the report does not ask is this: should we now, by the use of massive fines and so forth, restore the old pattern, make pornography much more expensive, and so deny it to the working-class (and children)?
This is the traditionalist and class solution. It may well he the Christian one also, for the rich will corrupt themselves by one means or another in any case; why not, therefore, simply concentrate on protecting the rest from temptation? I daresay most members of the committee would privately agree with this approach, but they lack the courage -and I don't blame them — to suggest it openly.
Nevertheless, what they do recommend is likely to have the same effect, for if the production of pornography .is made more difficult, and dangerous. its price will rise, its volume will fall, and its audience will contract.
The committee's proposed changes in the law concentrate on two issues. They reject the present legal criterion of obscenity as "likely to deprave and corrupt" as highly unsatisfactory and wish to substitute "outrage contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large." This will strike most people as a distinct improvement because it removes the onus on the prosecution to demonstrate actual corruption of specific individuals. because it makes clear allowance for changes in public attitudes, and, not least, because it brings obscene violence firmly within the law's scope. Whether the courts would find it easier to administer is a matter of fine judgement. The committee includes two very distinguished lawyers, Professor Anderson and Lord Justice Edmund Davies, and the handling of legal issues throughout the report is impressive. But this proposal ought to be examined by a wide range of people with experience of the present law before it is taken any further.
The second issue is exploitation, particularly of actresses. models and prostitutes. What, in effect, is proposed is to extend the present law of "living on immoral earnings" to cover explicit or repulsive sexual acts in the visual media. Personally, I would have preferred to see a draft Bill covering the whole subject of exploitation of people's bodies for gain. But this would have raised radical issues involving the philosophy of law. The solution adopted is ingenious. and may command sympathy even from those who find any form of control objectionable.
Whether either of these proposals will receive political support is another matter. M,P.s nowadays are rightly very chary of moving into the field of public morals, recognising that changes in taste are more powerful than Acts of Parliament.
I should like to add a further note of caution. In this sphere, legislation always has unforeseen effects. The Betting and Gaming Act, designed to remove legal anomalies and protect the law from contempt, in practice led to a significant increase in organised crime and public corruption.
An even more striking example is provided by Walpole's Theatre Censorship Act of 1737. By depriving Henry Fielding of his livelihood, it forced him to turn, eventually, to fiction—and so led him to create the modern realistic novel.
This opened a new epoch in European literature, to the incalculable benefit of humanity. It was also a decisive milestone in the growth of the permissive society, for there can be no doubt that it was the novel which first prised open the floodgates of pornography.
There must, therefore. be a long and searching debate before we decide whether, and if so how, to change the law. This report will certainly stimulate argument and, more important. help to make it fruitful. I also hope it will contribute to an improvement in public taste—a far more effective guarantor of social health than any statute. * Pornography: The Longford Report: Coronet Books. (Hodder and Stoughton 60p).