When the Womble On Tour Revolution starts to take hold, one of the first to the wall will be the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
The latest activity of this particular branch of the government's Thought Police is to rebuke a Hollywood studio for putting up posters at Stockwell tube station advertising the film "Righteous Kill".
The posters bore the slogan "There's nothing wrong with a little shooting, as long as the right people get shot."
The problem for the hand-wringing ASA was that the posters appeared during the De Menezes inquest. The ASA said that given their location the posters "had the potential to cause serious offence". Well, quite; what doesn't, these days ?
I've blogged about the ASA before. I didn't like them then, and I don't like them now. They're a bunch of righteous prigs.
Perhaps something else that narked them in this case was that actually they were beaten into second place in the Great Banning Race by London Transport, who demanded that the posters be taken down. All the ASA could do was to issue an admonishment, which isn't half as much fun as a ban.
So, to sum up. The State's henchmen make a complete balls of identifying a terror suspect and end up killing an innocent man on a London tube station. The State (via the coroner) decides that that's absolutely fine and can't possibly be considered unlawful. But a movie poster on the same station is banned (and therefore deemed illegal) by the State because it makes a reference to people being shot.
Hello ? I mean, seriously...Hello ?
2 comments:
Bizarre isn't it?
I still feel like curling into a ball and weeping when remembering that the only punishment the Police suffered over the De Menezes shooting was a contravention of Health & Safety laws.
H&S seems to have also spawned this 'offended little flowers' mindset.
When did Britain first lose its spine?
Post a Comment