"Honk if you like kinky pictures!"

Sadly, I wasn't able to be at the protest in London yesterday, but considering it was organised in less that 2 days, the eventual turn-out of 30-40 people was pretty impressive.

The people who were there say it was successful, with a lot of the general public showing an interest and the "Honk if you like kinky pictures" placard proved very popular!

There was also a tableau set up in which one woman "appeared to threaten the life" of another woman, who was handcuffed with fluffy pink handcuffs to the railings outside the Houses of Parliament, to demonstrate exactly how absurd the proposals could be.

(More photographs available here)

There was a small amount of press interest (but still impressive given the short notice) and in particular, Radio 1's Newsbeat programme showed up. They had also recorded an interview with "Lucy", a kinky single mum who talks openly about her kink life, and the resulting article is available online.

There was another article published last week by the BBC in their magazine about the same issues: "When does kinky porn become illegal?"

A Canadian documentary film maker, "Nomad Films", emailed me for more information after reading my posts on this blog and said they might send a crew down to catch the book-burning at the British Library, but so far I haven't heard whether they were able to get their crew organised in time to do anything. [ETA: it looks like they never made it, so that opportunity went begging]

It is disappointing that the media interest has arrived so late in the day - the bill today receives Royal Assent and becomes a part of the legislation in this country. The "Dangerous Pictures Act" part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act will come into force at a time of the Secretary of State's choosing (the BBC is projecting January for the start of the new law being in force). We really needed this interest a year or two ago, when it might have made a difference. Still, we can hope that the government will find that it is suddenly politically inexpedient to enact the law...

I'll just add one more pic, possibly my favourite of the collection: