The films that have been mentioned as possibilities for censorship under the new law above, ‘Ichi The Killer’ and ‘Irreversible’, both containing long and harrowing scenes of sexual assault. The BBFC will automatically refuse to consider any film containing a scene of this nature for R18 certificate, since R18 is for erotic works only, to be sold in licensed sex shops, and they are obviously concerned with not allowing rape to be seen as erotic.

Since the new law is only aimed at pornography, and these works are not considered pornograhic, they are very unlikely to fall foul of the censors scissors. The area of pornography where the problem lies is in the BDSM area, where non-consensual acts are depicted, although consensually made. The Melonfarmers have more.

Oh, and for the record, yes, this law is hateful and illiberal.

This isn’t true. The obvious refutation is that it isn’t a crime for a 16-17 year old to have sex, but making/possessing a photograph of such an event is (unless they are your husband/wife).

"Pseudo-photographs" have also been established to be illegal (this gets strange, you can posses a photograph of your 16-17 year old husband/wife, but possessing a pseudo-photograph of a non-existant 16-17 year old person is a crime). The law is based on a depiction of someone who appears to be under 18 (not their actual age, to avoid having to prove the age of an unknown person in court).

This is one of those cases where everyone would agree with the aim and intent of the law, but the actual legislation is totally daft.

As for how similar or different our politics may be, don’t assume that because I support hunting I follow the standard Countryside Alliance/Daily Mail agenda. The Countryside Alliance isn’t a sinister rightwing lobby. It’s a comedically useless lobby. The people who run it are by and large arrogant talentless cretins who misrepresent the very people that they’re supposed to defend. Still, they’ve taken their sweet f***ing time about it, but they’ve finally appointed someone genuinely good to run them: Kate Hoey, anti-Blairite-illiberalism freedom fighter.

I maybe overstated my position on foxhunting – in so far as I could give a shit, I responded on that instinctual, class basis to the anti-hunting argument because I saw – and still see – a diverse, but sinister, rightwing lobby which will never be reconciled to a three-term Labour Government – even one as disgusting, immoral, rightwing as this one. And it was good to see them have to suck cock for once in their lives, metaphorically speaking.

I think the assumption is that if a film is being considered for the R18 category in the first place, then it’s already effectively been judged to be primarily pornographic – which is why Lynch’s films (and Gaspar Noe’s, and Takashi Miike’s) wouldn’t need to be run past those guidelines.

That said, Miike’s Ichi the Killer was severely cut for sexual violence, and eyebrows were raised in several quarters when Noe’s Irreversible got through unscathed. But I don’t think it’s currently illegal to own a copy of the uncut Ichi – though whether this will remain the case indefinitely is a moot point. (I don’t, for what it’s worth – the only Miike film I’ve seen, Audition, was quite enough for my taste!)

As a follow-up, I emailed many of those MPs (including the aformentioned Salter) calling for a ban on the websites – that were said to have inspired Graham Coutts to commit his crime – to ask how such a ban should be enforced. Needless to say, those who deigned to reply had no idea. The technical, moral and societal implications hadn’t occurred to them in their kneejerk rush to ban a phenomenon they didn’t understand. They wanted a ban, everthing else was Someone Else’s Problem.

Coutts was a freak whose background had contributed far more to his makeup than extreme websites. However, an eyecatching ban on said sites has been judged far much more edifying than trying to pin down the more complex environmental factors that produce murderers. Witness the fuss over the killers of Jamie Bulger when it was posited they had watched video nasties when really it was the fact that we live in a society that is sanguine about psychologically damaged children living in deprivation that should have had people up in arms.