Police confiscate football fanzine
Mick Hume writes on Spiked:
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) took the unprecedented step of impounding thousands of copies of a magazine on the street on Saturday morning. Was it hardcore porn? Did it contain bomb-making instructions?
Hardly. It was a football fanzine on sale outside Old Trafford before the Manchester United / Liverpool game.
A chief superintendent in the GMP decided that a satirical joke image on the back cover was ‘potentially offensive’. Because of that, police impounded every copy they could find and warned that anybody caught selling the magazine or ‘provocatively displaying the image in public’ would be arrested and prosecuted.
It seems the GMP has now taken on the role of comedy police, and assumed the authority to decide the acceptable level of satire in its city.
2 comments:
To be fair, it was the 'Red Issue' fanzine, and they could have probably prosecuted for insulting the intelligence of anyone (who had any in the first place) who read it ;-)
I'm very supportive of the efforts of our law enforcement agencies but confiscating a magazine is silly. It's like they're taking away somebody's right of freedom of expresssion.
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