Robert Hampton

Those fine upstanding moral guardians at the Daily Mail are crusading against internet pornography. Misogynistic, sleazy, and liable to cause harm to children, the Daily Mail has a circulation of almost 2 million.

Porn did not begin with the internet. I remember the breathless excitement among some of my classmates in school when a top-shelf magazine was smuggled in. Ladies! With no clothes on! It was less exciting for me, as there were already early indications that my interests lay… elsewhere. Nevertheless, the explosion (bad choice of words) in sexual content online means that it is more easily accessible than it ever was before.

Now, the Mail has had enough. It wants internet providers to BAN THIS SICK FILTH, by blocking internet pornography. At the moment some ISPs will block sexually explicit web sites, but most will only do so if the customer specifically requests it, the “opt-out” system. The Mail wants it the other way round – porn blocked by default with the user having to specifically opt-in to be able to view it. Despite warnings from experts that the plan is unworkable, the Government has taken up the idea and is due to launch a consultation.

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Tomorrow, Liverpool (or at least, the percentage of the electorate that can be bothered) goes to the polls to elect a mayor.

The campaign has been a fairly rum affair. One candidate pulled out the day after announcing his intention to stand, citing “dirty politics”. Two candidates have been arrested. One lives in Wrexham and is only eligible to stand thanks to a shed he rents in Wavertree. A showpiece mayoral debate at the University of Liverpool was cancelled because of fears that trouble would flare between rival sets of protesters outside the hall. Another debate became farcical after one of the candidates was thrown out.

With all that in mind, it’s hard not to sympathise with independent candidate Liam Fogarty when he calls for an end to “politics, Liverpool-style”.

The campaigning has been complicated by the fact that voters don’t seem to know what the new mayor will actually do. Fogarty, interviewed by Sevenstreets, said that the people on the street are expecting an “ambassador” for the city. That is one aspect of the job, but there is much more to it than that. He (and it will be a he, as shamefully none of the parties could find a female candidate) will have sweeping powers over a number of aspects of city life, with powers being devolved from central Government to the mayor’s office.

What powers the mayor will actually get, however, is not entirely clear. Liverpool City Council’s web site is vague on the topic. Polly Curtis, writing on the Guardian web site, points out that the Government has suggested that the powers will be “tailor made” for each area, and that it is for the mayors themselves to make the case for devolved powers. Cities minister Greg Clark told the Echo, “it will help propel the city’s economy and attract international investment.”

One thing Liverpool will definitely get is a new £130m investment package. According to Liverpool City Council, having an elected mayor was a requirement to obtain this funding. In other words, we were bribed/blackmailed (choose whichever one of those loaded terms fits your world view better).

I’m in favour of elected mayors, but this past month of politicking has not been as inspiring as I hoped it would be. At least we can be grateful that it hasn’t turned into a vacuous battle where personalities are prioritised over policies. Surely no great metropolis would stoop to such levels?

Once more I have stared awkwardly at the camera while talking.

Last month, when the Government launched its consultation on equal(ish) marriage, I predicted “three more years of unpleasant rhetoric from opponents of equality until the law is passed.”

I’ve been proved right, but I didn’t expect it to get this unpleasant this quickly. I’ve previously mentioned Cardinal O’Brien calling gay relationships “grotesque”. We’ve also had a Kent MP claiming that Shakespeare’s plays will have to be rewritten, and the Daily Mail screaming that terms like “mother” and “father” will be replaced by “progenitor”(?!).

The campaign took a new twist on 3rd April, when gay rights group Stonewall relaunched their “some people are gay, get over it!” ad campaign on the back of the current push for equal(ish) marriage rights. The advert is on 1,000 of the capital’s buses, ensuring that the equality message is brought to every community of London.

A response came today from the misleadingly-titled Anglican Mainstream, a Christian organisation which claims to support “traditional” teaching on the family (and you know what that usually means). They booked a smaller ad campaign on 26 London buses, claiming that sexual orientation can be changed with therapy. The ads, which were due to appear from next week, were a spoof of Stonewall’s design and slogan: “NOT GAY! EX-GAY, POST-GAY, AND PROUD. GET OVER IT!”

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Alan Davies is in trouble after making comments about the Hillsborough disaster on a podcast. He criticised Liverpool for refusing to play matches on the anniversary of the tragedy. A clip is on YouTube here, if you want to judge his choice of words.

I don’t for a second think that Alan Davies is an offensive person. But get a man to talk about football, and for some reason common sense goes out the window and angry nonsense seems to be the default level of conversation (check out the comments on the YouTube video I linked to, which make normal YouTube comments look like the Frost/Nixon interview).

I kind of get the nation’s obsession with football, but there are lots of things I don’t get. For example, I don’t understand why rivalries get so nasty and personal. I don’t understand why Liverpool and Everton fans are such a volatile mix that police feel it necessary to enforce segregated pubs in London for the FA Cup semi-final on Saturday.

I don’t understand how a stall in Clayton Square Shopping Centre thinks it’s amusing to sell baby-grows that say (paraphrased) “I’ve only just been born but I hate the red shite”.

I blame Sky Sports for hyping up every match they show as being the most important event in the world ever (clip below is a David Mitchell spoof, but scarily close to the real thing).

I don’t understand. Someone explain it to me.

When David Cameron told the Tory Conference in October 2011 that he supported marriage rights for same-sex couples, I wonder if he expected the reaction to be as vociferous as it has been? He didn’t just open a can of worms; he put the can in a microwave, programmed it for full power, and watched the sparks fly.

I will admit that – while I wasn’t surprised by the reaction of certain religious leaders – I was surprised that their views were allowed to dominate the debate, especially on TV and radio (that politically correct liberal media at work again, I guess). I was also surprised – shocked, in fact – at how vicious some of the anti-marriage commentary has been. Some comments have been reminiscent of the nonsense that comes out of the mouths of the religious right in America. I naively hoped that Britain would be above this kind of thing.

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Today’s Daily Mail ignores minor issues such as the phone hacking scandal and massacres in Syria, instead devoting a big chunk of its front page to the RESURGENCE OF MARRIAGE.

You may have thought that marriage had never gone away, but you’d've been wrong. Don’t worry about that though – marriage is now back! According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of weddings rose by 3.7% last year, after 40 years of decline. And the Mail has enthusiastically embraced the findings, to the extent that their usual scepticism for academia has been temporarily removed. They say:-

“All available academic research has long shown that married couples are better off and healthier than others, and that their children too are healthier and do better at school.”

All well and good, but if the Mail truly believes that marriage makes you happy, isn’t it rather cruel of them to support an anti-gay marriage campaign and deny that happiness to a group of people?

A lot of anti-gay people have come out of the woodwork since David Cameron announced his support for same-sex marriage. One tolerant Tory MP branded the idea “nuts” during a rant in the Commons. Meanwhile, celebrity reality show star Ann Widdecombe wants the proposal to be put out to a referendum – because letting the majority vote on the rights of a minority is always a splendid idea.

It’s important not to let these voices dominate the debate. At the very least, please sign the anti-anti-gay petition at Campaign for Equal Marriage (and then follow them on Twitter). Even better, watch out for the launch of the consultation and voice your support.

The tech world is getting excited about Raspberry Pi, a new low cost computer, which has launched today after several years of development. For under £30 you can have a simple but capable computer – just add a keyboard and plug it into your TV, then boot it off an SD card.

The Pi has been created with educational purposes in mind. The device’s creators want to get it into schools, so kids will have something they can tinker with to their heart’s content. They will be able to write their own programs and, hopefully, learn that there is more to computing than Facebook and cutting and pasting Wikipedia articles into their essays.

In many ways, this is an attempt to turn back the clock to the 1980s and the heyday of hobbyist programming. The computers of the day were very different beasts – turn on a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro and there were no fancy icons or windows to click on, just a text prompt and a flashing cursor. To make it do something useful you had to type something.

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The Daily Mail claims that Christianity is under attack because of two recent court rulings.

In the first case, the Christian owners of a guest house in Cornwall lost an appeal against a fine for discriminating against a gay couple who were refused a double bed. The hotel owners claimed that they did not allow any unmarried couple to share a bed and therefore the discrimination was not on the grounds of sexual orientation, but the Court was not convinced by this argument.

I’m pleased that the original ruling has been upheld. It is not fair or right that a gay couple going on holiday should have to phone ahead and check whether the hotel owners approve of their sex life. The law reflects this, stating that no service provider can discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation. Incidentally, there are also protections for religious belief. Can you imagine the outcry if the situation described above was reversed and a gay couple turned a Christian away from their hotel? That would not be acceptable either, and there are laws in place for that reason.

The second case involved Bideford town council, who are at the centre of a row over the prayers held before council meetings. An atheist councillor, with the support of the National Secular Society, launched a court action, claiming that forcing councillors to attend prayers was a breach of human rights. Earlier this week the Court ruled that prayers are unlawful.

There was an outcry from Church leaders, and Eric Pickles took time out from lunch to condemn the ruling.

Again, I can see no problem with this outcome. Prayers now cannot form part of the formal council proceedings, but there is nothing to stop prayers being held before official council business begins. Surely this is a reasonable compromise – unless, of course, the Christian members of Bideford council feel the need to force their faith on everyone else, like it or not?

Leaving aside the issues of the above two cases, it is hyperbolic in the extreme to claim that Christianity is “under attack”. Last time I checked, there were churches in villages, towns and cities across the land, and Christians of any denomination could travel to any of them without impediment, to worship as they wished. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has a long list of countries where Christianity is banned entirely or subject to severe restrictions. For the Daily Mail to claim British Christianity is under attack is an insult to those Christians worldwide who live in fear of government-sanctioned persecution or even death because of their faith.

Some good old fashioned anti-gay opinions were spouted at the weekend from a senior figure in the Church of England, because there is apparently no more pressing social issue in the world today than two men kissing. This time it was the Archbishop of York, who said in a newspaper interview that, while civil partnerships were OK, gay marriage should not be introduced in the UK:-

“I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just [change it] overnight, no matter how powerful you are,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

“We’ve seen dictators do it in different contexts, and I don’t want to redefine very clear social structures that have been in existence for a long time and then overnight the state believes it could go in a particular way.”

Dr Sentamu fled Uganda during the rule of Idi Amin, so you’d think he’d be a bit more careful about comparing people to dictators. If the Church wants to stick to its narrow definition of marriage, I think it is wrong, but in a free society it should be free to do so. However, it cannot enforce these rules against the wider population who are not bound by the Bible (or specifically, Dr Sentamu’s interpretation of it). They should be free to marry whomever they want.

I agree with David Cameron on very little, but I hope he pushes forward with the gay marriage consultation in the face of a backbench revolt. Or should that read “revolting backbenchers”?