See what a high band reads like.

P1Few questions in democratic theory are as persistently uncomfortable as whether states may legitimately restrict what artists and writers can express. I believe censorship of films and books is occasionally justified, but only within extremely narrow conditions, and that the bar currently applied in most countries is considerably lower than principle demands.

P2The case for some degree of censorship rests on the proposition that free expression, however fundamental, is not absolute. Content that provides operational instructions for extreme violence, that sexualises children or that is specifically designed to incite hatred against an identifiable group represents a category where the expressive interest is trivial relative to the harm it enables or causes. Even the most liberal constitutional traditions, including the United States, which has the most expansive free speech protections in the democratic world, recognise these as permissible exceptions. In these cases, restriction is not a betrayal of artistic freedom but a recognition that some content falls outside its proper scope.

P3The danger lies in the notorious elasticity of the concept of offence. When governments are empowered to suppress what they deem offensive, the tool is almost invariably turned against the most challenging, most necessary voices: political satire, religious critique, sexual frankness, representations of historical atrocity. The history of censorship is, almost without exception, a history of authority protecting itself rather than protecting citizens. Works now considered foundational to their national literatures, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, The Color Purple, spent years on banned lists, their suppression a measure not of their harm but of their inconvenience to prevailing orthodoxy.