Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  “So what’s FILM?”

  “Glorified policy and consultative committee. They sat down with the movie and TV industries to see what they could do to make Europe less of a maze in terms of rights, ownership, copyright, legislation etcetera. They came up with the FILM Accord. Everyone’s ratified it except us, surprise, surprise.”

  “And what does it actually do?” asked Nicole, who like most other people in the UK had only heard about it since the start of the week, and then only in relation to Michael Swan and “filth”.

  “Well, lots of itty-bitty boring things to do with ‘satellite foot-prints’ and ‘domestic production quotas’, and some bigger things, like a new, EC-wide co-production treaty, which does away with the old treaties’ pain-in-the-arse obligations to employ a certain amount of cast and crew from each participating country, which resulted in what you call Euro-puddings – dreadful movies full of B-list actors from three different countries with tortuous plot devices to explain away the clash of accents.”

  “Cut to the chase, Jack,” said Sarah.

  “Okay. The FILM Accord would also standardise film and video censorship across the EC. That’s the big one, controversy-wise. At the moment, the distributors have to submit every movie to every country’s censors, then have to re-edit to that censor’s standards to get a certificate, because what gets the equivalent of an 18 in France might still need further trimming for the UK or Belgium or wherever. So it wastes a lot of time and costs an unnecessary fortune; apart from re-cut costs, censors themselves charge by the second. And obviously in some countries – some extremely sad and repressed countries not a million miles away from where we sit – there are things you can’t show at all. So particularly at the 18-certificate end of the spectrum, you can end up with oodles of different cuts of a film floating around. And to do all that re-editing and resubmitting, obviously you’re spending time and cash that might better be used to make more films and therefore more jobs for actors and technicians.

  “The FILM Accord would mean that what’s allowed in one country is allowed in all. So the distributor just submits the one cut of a film across the EC, and each country can say ‘we give that an 18’, or ‘we give that a 15’, but they can’t say ‘we’re banning this’ or ‘we won’t classify it unless you remove such-and-such’. Each nation retains the right to classify a film as they see fit, but what they can’t do is cut bits out. So in this country, the name British Board of Film Classification would no longer be an Orwellian euphemism. It would cease to censor.”

  “But the bottom line is that hard-core porn would be legal in the UK?” said Nicole.

  “The legalisation of images explicitly depicting sex between consenting adults would be a by-product of the legislation, yes,” he said with a wryly false importance. “And that’s something Mr Swan appears to have ‘just noticed’, even though his government – indeed his department – was represented on the FILM committee that drafted the proposals.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Nicole, aware of Parlabane’s arch look.

  “I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if it was his fucking idea in the first place. Or if not, that he was aware of this ramification early enough to have done something about it before now.”

  “And why would he do that, why would he wait?”

  “Because this is the Tories’ last roll of the dice. This is where he raises the banner one last time and hopes the troops stop fighting amongst themselves long enough to rally round before the election. All this Euro-rebel and Euro-sceptic nonsense . . . The reason it did so much damage wasn’t just because it caused rifts in the party, but because it confused and thus bored the arse off the voters. Your Tory-voting Sun-reader doesn’t have a bloody scoob about whether he’s in favour of monetary union or a single European currency; probably thinks the ECU’s that blue and yellow thing Rod Hull used to cart around. The only issue the Tories were able to get them remotely interested in was whether Lizzie’s head would still appear on the notes and coins. So it doesn’t do any good to pose around objecting to Brussels if the average voter doesn’t understand what you’re objecting to.”

  “Well,” said Nicole, “it strikes me that what most of them were really objecting to was the idea of Johnny Foreigner telling Blighty how to steer its own ship. ‘Bloody cheek, don’t they know we used to run this planet’ and so on.”

  “Yeah, but they couldn’t actually come out and say that. But now, now Michael’s giving the punters something they can really get their teeth into. Jesus, forget cows. That was obviously desperation, any excuse, no matter how embarrassingly ridiculous – I mean cows for Christ’s sake – to unite us glorious Brits against a common foe. Mooo! And it was an own-goal of Terry Butcher proportions, because even the fucking tabloid-readers knew the whole farce was Britain’s fault. But this? This is manna from heaven. Dirty foreigners trying to force filth into decent, British, Christian homes. This way he’s calling in the xenophobic vote, the moral-majority vote and the religious vote. Thus giving the disillusioned Tories out in the shires a common enemy to struggle against, a real cause to fight for.”

  Sarah was shaking her head. “Sneaky bastard.”

  “He’s also giving himself the role of champion,” continued Parlabane, “plus a stoater of an aunt sally to be seen battering.”

  The term rang a bell for Nicole, her dad talking about his own disillusionment with the current state of the party. An aunt sally: a dummy to throw things at, so that you can vent spleen and act the hard case without actually taking on a real opponent who can hit back. Her father had been muttering about Michael Howard.

  “All this talk of longer sentences and harsher regimes,” he had said. “The man knows perfectly well it’s unlikely to change anything. Probably knows it’ll never be implemented, either – too bloody expensive. But he gets to look like a man of purpose, gets to do some tough talking, and I’m sure it does impress certain people. But that’s what’s depressing me about the way the party’s going, Pepper. We used to be about ideas, not waving big sticks. We used to go after the ABC vote. Now it seems we’re relying on the LCD vote.”

  Single mothers. Asylum seekers. Aunt sallies all. Punch-bags to bash, a threat to exaggerate, with the correct sexual, moral and ethnic make-up to fit the demonology that would elicit maximum response in the Tory heartlands.

  But pornography, thought Nicole, hard-core pornography, well that was one threat that wasn’t exaggerated.

  “It’s not exactly an aunt sally, though, is it?” she said.

  Parlabane gave her the sort of grin that would scare psychiatrists.

  “I understand your reservations, Nicole, but believe me, it’s the biggest one there is. It’s the queen of aunt sallies. It’s a cheap politician’s wet dream. Christ, these days, nobody in government wants to suggest or implement a policy that won’t deliver a return before the next election – or even before the next opinion poll. But this? It’s video nasties all over again. Not just something you can blame, but something you can ban. So that you can show the electorate that you’re Getting Something Done. Thatcher’s lot did it back in ’83, to distract attention from the fact that crime was going through the roof and there was rioting on the streets. They brought in the Video Recordings Act, which blamed it all on a few cheesy B-movies and banned, among other things, hard porn.

  “Then in ’92, after the Jamie Bulger killing, you had another uproar. David Alton, for whom the irony of being nominally a ‘Liberal’ never quite chimed in, sniffing for votes by Getting Something Done, demanding that video censors be given powers that they . . . er, already had, since the Video Recordings Act in 1984.”

  “But this isn’t Child’s Play 3 or Reservoir Dogs, Jack, this is hard porn,” Nicole protested.

  “Wooooh! It’s the bogeyman, isn’t it. All dark and scary. At least that’s what Mikey-boy’s relying on. But think about it, Nicole. Rape, sexual violence, misogyny, these things have been around since we came down from the trees. Pornography hap
pens along at the arse-end of the twentieth century and it’s suddenly the cause of it all? What, does it work retroactively? Do wankmags travel through time? Perhaps Stephen Hawking could investigate.”

  Nicole felt unsteady. The feeling of erosion of a trusted foundation was unpleasantly reminiscent of certain discussions with Rob, but the difference was that Parlabane wasn’t trying to replace it with anything. In fact, it felt less like he was eroding the rock she stood on than that he was revealing it to be a hologram. Either way, though, it wasn’t comfortable. She needed to balance herself.

  “But you’ve still got to admit,” she said, “we’re talking about some material that is highly offensive to women.”

  “No,” he insisted. “We’re talking about material that some women find highly offensive. There’s a difference. But bollocks to all this liberal introspective navel-gazing. You want to retire to a quiet room with a VCR and a box of hankies, fine with me. I’ll even recommend an optician. That’s not your scene, cool with me too. The moral debate is not relevant here. What we’ve got to concentrate on is Swan’s con-trick, because it’s one of the best there is.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s simple. Right,” Parlabane now sat forward in his chair, eyes shining through their bloodshot tiredness. He was clearly impressed with Swan’s cleverness, and therefore more impressed with his own for sussing it. “When asked whether sexually explicit material should be legal in the UK, most people say yes it should. Ask the same people if hard-core pornography should be legal, and they all say no. So you ask them to define pornography, and they say: sexual material that is perverse, depraved, corrupting, Offensive To Women, yakka yakka yakka. Who the fuck’s going to say yes, let’s legalise that? Nobody. But it’s completely meaningless. There’s no imperial scale of depravity, no universal standard of what is Offensive To Women or to men for that matter. It’s entirely subjective. And this is Swan’s coup. That’s why pornography, like it or loathe it, is the greatest aunt sally in politics. Back Swan, vote against porn, and you’re voting against whatever you individually disapprove of, your own personal sexual demon. Nobody knows what they’re really objecting to, because nobody’s ever going to see what this material is that they’re banning. But in the voters’ minds it’s whatever they don’t like. This fine upstanding man is fighting for them, against whatever they don’t like.”

  “The LCD vote,” said Nicole quietly, mainly to herself. “So they don’t just rally to the Tory banner, they rally to a man and a party who are once more saying exactly what they want to hear. Or think they want to hear.”

  “Yes,” said Parlabane, laughing. “And never mind uniting the Tories, it’ll wreak havoc on the Left. Labour won’t know where to stand, with Clare Short and her sisters on one side, and the anticensorship, civil liberties lobby on the other. And while they’re dithering, Swan is hoping all those dischuffed voters who were pondering whether it might be time for a change will come flooding back, because only the Tories are going to Get Tough on Porn.”

  Nicole rolled her eyes. “The Guardian leader-writers won’t have a clue what to say,” she said. “I suppose it’s a liberal-lefty nightmare. When does censorship become PC.”

  “Yeah, but the right-wing press will be a bit more resolute,” Parlabane mused. “The Sun will of course condemn this filth in the strongest possible language, next to Kurvy Kathy and an advert for an ‘adult products’ catalogue. While the why-oh-why lot on the Daily Mail might actually die from their collective apoplexy. At least, let’s fucking hope so.”

  “I thought they were all dead already,” offered Sarah.

  “Of course, the Voss papers will be interesting,” he added with cheerful malice. “It’s always fun to watch them tiptoe round the subject. Their silence is usually deafening.”

  “Why?” asked Nicole.

  “Well, because . . .” Parlabane’s eyes seemed to glaze over. He seemed to be staring, unfocused for a moment, like his surroundings had disappeared and he was alone somewhere. He looked back at Nicole, as if she had suddenly appeared in the room, or he had.

  “Because what his papers were always conspicuously reticent about was that Roland Voss was one of the biggest publishers and distributors of hard-core pornography in Europe,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “It’s hardly common knowledge in this country, but it’s true. That’s how he made his money back in Holland in the Seventies, with wank-magazines. It was his first publishing interest. He got into newspapers once he had the cash, but the jazz-mags were what really stoked the fire, and what bailed out a few of the fuck-ups he made at first, too. When home video came along in the early Eighties, he was well placed to move into that. And nobody would have been better placed to expand into the UK if the FILM Accord legalised hard-core over here.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, eyes wide in realisation. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a motive.”

  “Swan?” gaped Sarah.

  “Voss owned Swan,” he said. “Christ, he owned half the government, but Swan was one of those closest to him. Swan always got big licks in the Voss papers, otherwise the wee nonentity would still be on the back-benches, throwing paper aeroplanes. It’s all very cosy. Then the FILM Accord comes along, and Swan is Heritage Secretary. Voss sees the Accord as yet another licence to print tenners. The soft-core market in this country is astronomical, and Vosshas never made a move on it, ostensibly because his hypocritical British image is to disapprove, but really because Raymond and Sullivan have it already sliced up between them. However, he knew fine that the punters really want a bit more than striptease. I’m sure he was aware that the competition would also be quickly ready to deliver a harder product. But Voss had fucking warehouses of the stuff, ready to roll. He’d have the jump on them; he’d be in first. And so what if it’s in Dutch or German, nobody’s buying it for the dialogue.”

  “So he could have leaned on Swan to ratify the Accord?” said Nicole. “Swan being his man at the heritage ministry. But it would be political suicide, wouldn’t it? To be the man who legalised – or failed to stop – hard-core pornography. It would be a vote-loser of unprecedented effect. Never mind his cabinet career, there wouldn’t be a constituency party in the country that would re-select him. How could Voss force him to go through with something like that?”

  “Voss made him,” said Parlabane. “Who knows what juice he might have on Swan, what control he could exercise. But there’s a huge conflict of interest. Voss stands to make yet another fortune if Swan does as he’s told, but to do that, Swan wouldn’t just be giving up what he’s already got, but what is so close to his grasp. By opposing the Accord that would further enrich Voss, Swan’s got the chance to be the man who turns the tide back in his party’s favour. To be the hero of the hour and the new darling of the Right. And who knows, maybe even to be the one who leads them into an election, now that he’s the one who made it winnable.

  “It’s an old, old story. Voss is Mephistopheles, Swan is Faust. He gives him his heart’s desire and then asks for his political soul. Except there’s a twist to the tale this time that Goethe never anticipated: Faust murders Mephistopheles before he can collect.”

  “Is she okay?” Parlabane asked, lifting his head from the pillow as Sarah came back into the room and took off her T-shirt.

  “Yeah, I just had a look,” she said, pulling a thick handful of long, red hair out through the neck of the nightie she had slipped on. “She was asleep already. Must have gone out right away. I suppose she’s less used to sleep deprivation than us junior doctors and paranoid hacks.”

  “Well, it’s not every day you crack a major government conspiracy. I’m sure she was very tired.”

  Sarah climbed under the duvet and wrapped both arms and one leg around Parlabane, resting her head on his warm chest.

  “Jack,” she said quietly, “are you sure about this? This government thing, I mean. It’s just that, well, I’d have thought if the government wanted someone out of the picture, t
hey’d have just done it and no-one would ever hear about it. You know, that it would be less . . . I don’t know, complicated.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said with a quiet whisper of a laugh. “Just because it’s a total farce and they’ve left smoking guns lying everywhere, you think it wasn’t the government? Come on, they’ve made a complete arse of absolutely everything else they’ve turned their hands to. The health service, education, transport – what makes you think assassination would be any different? In fact I’m feeling a bit stupid myself that, with all the mess, fuck-ups and general incompetence, I didn’t recognise it as their MO earlier.”

  Sarah giggled. “Yes, I suppose the only thing they’ve ever been any good at is lining their own pockets.”

  “Hmm,” he muttered. “I’d bet they’re not even particularly efficient at that, either. It’s just the only thing they’ve really been committed to, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good at it. I mean, I bet the Germans would be much more organised and industrious at skimming the public till. The Japanese would manage it seven days a week, 24 hours a day on a shift system. And I’m sure Alex Salmond would insist that in an independent Scotland, the opportunities for governmental corruption and scamming would be far greater than as part of the Union. That’s if he can find an irritatingly couthy Scots phrase to crowbar into his soundbite, of course . . .”

  Sarah placed a hand over his mouth.

  “Go to sleep, Jack,” she whispered, and gave him a soft kiss.

  Ken Frazer sat back in a chair and watched the slight, bespectacled figure of Angus Gilmore pour two large measures of Springbank 21-Year-Old from a bottle on his desk. Through the large windows of the editor’s spacious office he could see across Princes Street Gardens to the Scott Monument and the empty shops on the other side, along to the Mound and the museums, little movement to catch the eye but taxis buzzing occasionally back or forth. They said it was the most delicious whisky in the world, but he knew it could as well be a shot of some cheap blend and it would still taste like nectar, because it was the moment that was so sweet.