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Video Recordings Bill

My Lords, I am not breaking any rules by intervening in the gap but I am certainly breaking the conventions of the House, and I apologise for that. I was not able to be here for the beginning of this debate or to hear the Minister on this subject. However, I remember the passage of the Video Recordings Act 1984 because Douglas Houghton and Hugh Jenkins—Lord Houghton of Sowerby and Lord Jenkins of Putney—and I carried on a three-man fight against that nasty little piece of legislation until the early hours of the morning. I remember calling a Division once and counting the House out at quarter past one in the morning. I do not suppose that we could do that sort of thing nowadays in the tamed House that we now have. The Video Recordings Act was nasty; it was introduced as a Private Member’s Bill by Lord Nugent of Guildford. In effect, it applied the rules of a public cinema or public display to people’s video recordings in their own homes. In other words, it created censorship in individuals’ homes where no censorship had existed before, and it made a difference between what you have on your video recording machine and what is on your bookshelves. Douglas Houghton, Hugh Jenkins, and I thought that that was deplorable and I still think that it is utterly deplorable. It was characteristic that at the time the British Board of Film Censors, which was a classification body, was renamed the British Board of Film Classification, which became a censorship body. George Orwell would have been proud. I see that the Long Title talks only about repealing and reviving provisions, and I am sure that any substantive amendments to the original Act would not be accepted by the Table. I regret that very much. I am pleased that the Act has been out of operation for a time, and I wish that it were not being revived now.