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Ms Eagle: Will the Secretary of State answer a question that was asked earlier? If we opted for the V-chip, how would live programmes be classified?
Mrs. Bottomley: That is a good point. The question of classification, which was also raised by the right hon. Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham), would cause considerable difficulty.
Mr. Alton: The Secretary of State should kill two points once and for all. First, I cannot think of an instance in which a V-chip would be relevant in the context of a live programme. We are talking primarily about films, many of them part of the Hollywood culture. Secondly, I think that the Secretary of State will accept that classification already takes place. She has just mentioned the watershed; how can we have a watershed unless someone is classifying the material?
Mrs. Bottomley: As the hon. Gentleman will know, viewers are increasingly warned about the likely content of a programme, and responsible broadcasters frequently say that a programme contains material that may be offensive to some. On the other hand, reservations have been expressed by Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers and Listeners Association in relation to the danger of a perverse effect. Channel 4 tried to identify programmes of a particularly unsavoury character, only to find that the audiences for those programmes increased. I am afraid that the rating identified by the hon. Gentleman can have a perverse effect. I anticipate that, as the years go by, alerting and informing parents and the public will become more widespread, but the point is that it is not appropriate today to require that as a matter of primary legislation.
I hope that the House will feel that the Government take television violence seriously. The responsibility must be shared between regulators, broadcasters, parents and the public in general. I believe that the Bill provides enhanced powers for the safeguarding of standards and the protection of young people. While urging hon. Members not to support the new clauses, I assure them that I will make it my personal responsibility to follow up all the proposals contained in them with those directly responsible--and I am one of those directly responsible.
Mr. Austin Mitchell:
It is interesting to note that massive changes affecting the whole structure of television and its ability to sustain quality are being passed in a more or less empty Chamber, but that, as soon as we come to an emotive issue such as violence, the Chamber begins to fill up. As the right hon. and learned Member for Putney (Mr. Mellor) pointed out, it is interesting that it is violence this time rather than sex; but I suppose that we are all tired at the end of a long Session. Chamber rage has built up, and we are turning our attention to violence.
Most of the discussion of violence on television strikes me as irrelevant. Violence is part of life, and therefore it is part of television. The problem, when it comes to public perceptions, is the generalised denunciation of violence--violence in the news, for instance. It is sometimes necessary to show violence in news broadcasts. Had the first day of fighting on the Somme, 80 years ago today, been shown on television--20,000 were killed on that first day--would the British generals and Field Marshal Haig have been able to continue to sustain the deaths of wave upon wave of British youth under the machine guns' ragged rattle for months until the rains started in October or November? It might be necessary to show some violence in such circumstances. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) said in his admirably balanced speech, it is sometimes necessary for artistic purposes--in performances of Shakespeare, for instance.
The case becomes enormously emotive and exaggerated, but there is an argument behind it. There is a problem that extends beyond the Chamber. The problem is that violence has become almost a quota of productions--part of a formula that is necessary for the making of a successful second-rate, or third-rate, television programme. The formula involves getting a big-name actor or attractive actress--preferably one who will take her clothes off--and to include a certain element of violence and a car chase. Violence thus becomes built into many of the factory-produced television programmes that we watch, produced by the great production house in California.
That means that the quota can increase, and people can bid higher and include more violence to maximise audiences. Unless we control it, we may end up with casts of thousands tortured, dying or murdered. If that becomes part of a culture--as it has on television--people will be inured to violence. It leads to an acceptance of violence as a natural response. The drip-by-drip conditioning to violence, which is a real danger, produces the kind of concern that we have heard expressed tonight. It is a conditioning process which we should be able to control and stop.
Two basic propositions need to be stated. The first is that we should have the power to decide for ourselves what comes into our houses. If the V-chip did that, it would serve a useful purpose. As part of that power, we should have the information on which to decide. That is what one of the new clauses in this group seeks to provide.
Secondly, we should have the power to penalise violence as a production feature and, therefore, reduce it and cause the producers of routine programmes for television to discount it. On both those grounds, there is a case for the new clauses before us today. I am not enthusiastic about them. New clause 7 is impractical. New clause 10 would not do what the hon. Member for Liverpool, Mossley Hill (Mr. Alton) said that it would. It asks for an inquiry, but if that inquiry produces the verdict that the V-chip is acceptable, all new television sets will include a V-chip. There is no choice in that.
The V-chip is a doubtful piece of equipment. It is almost science fiction. It is a pity that the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) is not here. He gets hooked on the science fiction of technology so he should be speaking on this matter. I am doubtful. There is general concern. For those reasons, and in the spirit of Blackburn--not as a reservoir dog but as a Straw dog--I am prepared to support the new clause.
Mr. Brooke:
Contrary to what the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) said, I believe that the concern of the nation on this subject is such that it reflects well on the House that the Chamber is fuller for this debate than it was for earlier debates. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Putney (Mr. Mellor) that Parliament cannot abdicate responsibility for these matters to researchers, although I would disagree with him if he were to argue that research was not helpful to our understanding of the problem.
I was grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Alison) for sending me the report from which he quoted. I know that he will forgive me if I say that I found the report somewhat parti pris. My intervention in his speech was partly intended to make sure that the evidence was accurately quoted. I was worried because some of the evidence was somewhat dated. The New Zealand report that he quoted was drawn up in 1976--now 20 years ago. The children in the United States watching scenes of violence on television were studied at least five years ago. The report was written in such as way that one might have thought that Professor Comstock had done that research, although if one looks at the report closely, it is clear that his views are separate.
Like my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Putney and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, I have had some responsibility for these matters myself. I can remember bringing the broadcasters in. I am delighted that the monitors now report some evidence of a reduction in the incidence in violence.
We as a nation are good at spotting precipices and avoiding going over them. The hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Dafis) quoted Greek tragedy in his scholarly opening speech. It was a convention of Greek tragedy that violence took place off stage and that messengers reported the violent events as part of the drama.
As the exchange between my right hon. Friend the Member for Selby and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State underlined, common sense sees a link between these events, whatever that link may be. Personally, I hope that I do not take a Panglossian view, but I have confidence in the combined good sense of the nation. The nation clearly has a view on these matters. Broadcasters are just as capable as the rest of mankind of reading the nation's concern and the nation's evidence. It is important that we maintain up-to-date research, but no one in the nation will let us lose sight of the problem.
Ms Eagle:
I wish to register a few notes of caution, particularly around the use of the phrase "too much violence on television", and to emphasise some of the problems with the V-chip that many hon. Members have brought to the attention of the House in this extremely important debate.
Every hon. Member is extremely concerned that we should properly debate the issues around violence, and whether violence on television is a cause of more violence in society; and come to some reasonable assessment.
Likewise, we also have a duty to remember that it is easy to blame television violence for the violence in society. There was a great deal of violence before broadcasting began, and there are all kinds of causes of violence. We do our debates no good at all if we try to put all the blame for the violence we see in society on the broadcasting media. It is a bit like blaming witches for crop failures, which used to be a favourite practice in mediaeval times. It was much easier to blame witches for crop failures than to blame the weather or an incompetent farmer.
That fact may explain the difference between the large percentage of public concern quoted by the right hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Alison) from his research and the figures cited by the Secretary of State of the low number of complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Council about violence in television programmes.
How much easier to blame something appalling like the Dunblane tragedy on a television programme or the influence of television violence than to have to look into the nature of humanity and try to search for the reasons for that kind of tragedy within and among ourselves and the society we have created. How much easier to blame television violence than to take some difficult and hard-nosed decisions about the state of our society.
In future, I hope that some important decisions will be made about the banning of handguns, so that we minimise the chance of such a tragedy recurring. It is important that we should not just make a scapegoat of the broadcasting media and try to blame them for all our problems.
New clause 7 refers to
"the aim of reducing the amount of violence depicted on television."
As hon. Members may have been able to gather from some of my earlier questions, the new clause makes no distinction between different kinds of violence or the context in which that violence is portrayed. Surely it is different to depict violence in television news when it is an actual event, albeit portrayed, we hope, responsibly.
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