2011 has certainly been an interesting year. I won’t dwell too much on global events in this look back – I assume most of you watch the news from time to time and so know what’s been going on in the world. Instead, a few musings on issues of free speech, free expression and freedom of choice – unashamedly Britcentric – and murmurings about the continuing decline of modern culture.

Sexualisation is a mythical problem that interested parties (newspaper columnists, obscure MPs, religious figures) have been banging away at for a few years, between them working up a ‘public concern’ that bordered on hysteria, even though for most people, it was a non-issue before they were told how bad it was for children to see the cover of Loaded on the shelves of Tesco, or walk past a poster of a woman in lingerie, selling… erm… lingerie. We discussed this at length here.

The Bailey Report was chaired, organised and pre-determined by Reg Bailey, head of The Mothers Union – a Christian organisation that was already campaigning against sexualisation. The resulting report was a prime example of a conclusion looking for an argument, with the ‘research’ based on anecdotes, leading questions posed to a self-selecting panel and half-baked theorising. It couldn’t, in the end, find any actual evidence of harm or even widespread offence, yet this didn’t matter, as Bailey declared that ‘common sense’ – that quality apparently only found in Daily Mail readers – said there was a problem nonetheless, and a major clean-up was needed.

Rather than throwing this report in the bin where it belonged, Prime Minister David Cameron immediately said it would be acted on, and the various censorial bodies jumped into line – none moreso than the Advertising Standards Authority, a self-elected quango who were not exactly liberal to begin with. You can read about their most recent antics here. Thankfully – for now – suggestions that the Internet should come pre-censored seem to have been deftly handled by the various ISPs and shown to be unfairly repressive. Don’t think you won’t hear more about this though…

Cameron, of course, came to power promising to sweep away New Labour’s glut of laws (over 3000 in 13 years), and a much-vaunted Freedom Bill was announced by his Deputy / Monkey Nick Clegg. Predictably, nothing has been heard of this for a while now, as Cameron quickly became as controlling as any other leader before him. Most recently, he’s been demanding a return to 'Christian values' and now wants to introduce minimum alcohol pricing, despite the fact that (a) it won’t make any difference to alcohol-related problems, and (b) is almost certainly illegal under EU law.

Of course, EU rules have long been a bugbear for the right, with police and judges frequently and deliberately misinterpreting Human Rights legislation to undermine it, and as the Euro edges towards collapse, the lunatic fringe of the Conservatives and the BNP-lite UKIP are pushing for the UK to withdraw into (further) isolation.

This year also saw ATVOD – another quango – arrive on the scene. Their job was to regulate ‘TV-like’ content on the Internet, in accordance with EU regulations. For a fee of course. Inevitably, they quickly decided that any website with more than one or two video clips was ‘TV-like’. Given that ATVOD don’t seem to do much apart from collect fees and pass on complaints to OFCOM, the fees are little more than a tax on websites hosting video. Adult sites, of course, are even more restricted, having to have all content hidden behind paywalls.

Not that the left has been quiet when it comes to misguided control freakery. Most recently, a dozen or so feminist fanatics staged a half-baked protest against pubic hair shaving, claiming as ever that the practice is a result of our culture’s ‘pornification’ (another buzzword). Notably, they said little about the concurrent trend amongst men for chest waxing, something that suggests this has less to do with porn directors trying to make breast-enhanced women look like pre-pubescent children (the usual feminist claim) and more to do with a fashion that no longer sees body hair as attractive.

Another war on porn has been dragging on in America, with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation trying to enforce legislation to make all porn performers use condoms. Having forced industy medical centre AIM out of business through lawsuits and harassment, you suspect that the health of porn performers is not really a concern for this organisation, which seems more interested in personal power and moral posturing. Given that HIV / AIDS has had such a minor impact on the adult industry, you have to assume that the methods in place were working well. All that has now been thrown into disarray.

Twitter, meanwhile, has increasingly become the home of the easily offended, where ‘twitch hunts’ are frequently whipped up against anyone who expresses an opinion that the self-proclaimed liberals – in reality, anything but – who dominate that particular social network find offensive. Without bothering to look at the facts, tweeters eagerly join hate campaigns against ‘haters’, the irony of such behaviour being lost on them. Social networks have a lot of positive points, but they are also increasingly closing down debate and discussion, as people simply cluster around the like-minded and become ever more intolerant of dissent.

The SNP in Scotland seems determined to show it can be as controlling and repressive as anyone else, with an ongoing war on booze (minimum pricing, bans on when, where and how you can drink), a raft of anti-porn and anti-striptease legisalation and the banning of sectarian chanting at football matches – a rule that seems reasonable until you bother to look at it in any detail. Restrictions on free speech – even offensive free speech – need to be back up with proof of harm, and a handful of sectarian incidents aside, there’s no such evidence here. Unless you honestly believe that banning someone from publicly saying something will somehow stop them from thinking it… or that the sort of person who sends a letter bomb to a football manager – already an illegal act I believe - will somehow be restrained by such a law.

It’s been a year for dissent – some serious, some cynical, some criminal. While the Arab Uprising hasn’t exactly led to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East – and who naively thought it would? – it has at least seen some interesting political shifts across the region. How it will all finally end up is anyone’s guess. But with Gadaffi and bin Laden both killed this year, the West definitely has an opening for a new Islamic bogeyman to distract from their own problems. I dread to think who will step up to the challenge.

In Britain, the August riots have been justified for assorted reasons by various commentators, though never entirely convincingly, and when the Sony warehouse was torched, destroying the stock of almost every indie record and DVD label in the country, it was a major blow. We’ve also had protests (some violent, some not) and more recently, the Occupy movement that spread from Wall Street to London to hundreds more increasingly confused camps (Occupy Nottingham? Why?). One location not being occupied is Buckingham Palace, despite being the home to Britain’s unelected rulers, a family of vast unearned wealth and power – the 0.1%, if you like. Then again, who can blame the protesters for avoiding it? Reactions to those who didn’t follow the ‘rejoice, rejoice’ line for this year’s Royal wedding - false arrests, police harassment – gave a small hint of what we could expect should the nation ever rise up against the Monarchy. Protest against the government all you want – threaten the Monarchy and the army will crush your skull.

The backward steps of the BBFC, that began with the heavy cutting of A Serbian Film in 2010, continued this year, with two films banned. The Human Centipede 2 situation was later resolved with annoying cuts (and we’ve covered it extensively), but The Bunny Game remains banned outright. Neither case was justified, but if there is a lesson to be learned, it would seem to be not to shoot your edgy, extreme horror film in black and white. There were other cases of extensive cutting, often for dubious reasons, as the BBFC continue to fight the increasingly pointless fight against ‘dangerous’ material that has never been shown to cause any social harm, and which people can download at the click of a mouse.

If any case shows how arbitrary the BBFC’s decisions are, it’s the uncut release this year of In The Realm of the Senses. This film had previously been reframed to remove a shot of a woman tugging on a small boy’s penis – this was in accordance with the Protection of Children Act, as a scene of indecency involving a child – something the BBFC’s lawyers had said was the case. The law hasn’t changed, and if anything, public attitudes have hardened over the years; yet now it’s uncut. Go figure.

TV has continued its downward spiral. Most viewers with a couple of brain cells to rub together will have long given up on mainstream channels, with their continual barrage of reality crap, talent shows, celebrity garbage and general inanity, but of course it’s impossible to ignore it all entirely, because it’s thrust down your throat from all directions. So you don’t have to watch the crap to know who won X-Factor, or that the Christmas number one went to a Daily Mail-approved choir of military wives. And as the authorities sweep away anything challenging in the name of the children, we’re left with nothing but crap comedians who think they are edgy by saying ‘fuck’ or ‘ironically’ mocking, say, the disabled, bland chat shows, dull dramas and hours and hours of sport. Too many film fans, meanwhile, continue to think that only theatrical releases count, cheerfully trotting along to whatever crap is playing the local multiplex while ignoring the more interesting stuff sitting on the DVD shelves (seriously – if you thought the first two Transformers films were shit, why pay money to see a third one?), and the music industry is ever-more dominated by manufactured tat that the media pretends is somehow at the cutting edge. 2011’s biggest seller was Adele, and the breakthrough artist hyped by the BBC and others was Jesse J. Awful, isn’t it?

The main cheerleaders for more laws, more control and more censorship in Britain have always been the newspapers. Happy to invent facts, ignore evidence and stoke up public hysteria, all our newpapers – tabloid and broadsheet – are a disgrace. So it was good to see their years of misbehaviour come back to bite them in the ass this year, as the outrage over phone-hacking – fine when aimed at publicity-hungry celebrities, rather less palatable when done to murder victims and their families – culminated in the closing of the loathsome News of the World, a newspaper seemingly staffed entirely by the worst examples of humanity ever to have walked the Earth. The ongoing Levenson inquiry and relaunched police investigation (the cops having been complicit in the antics of hacks for years) may well see more high profile job losses, closures and even imprisonments. Fingers crossed. However, most of the press seem to be hoping that, like so many of their own manufactured outrages, this will go away when a fickle public are distracted by reality TV or the Olympics. Especially as shortly before the scandal broke, many of these 'outraged' members of the public were gleefully breaking 'super-injuctions' on Twitter, outraged that they were not allowed to know every intimate detail of celebrity private lives.

So that was 2011, and good riddance to it. Unfortunately, 2012 doesn’t look too promising – with the afore-mentioned Olympics, football championships and a royal jubilee all in one year, rampant nationalism – sorry, patriotic fervour – will grip Britain in general, England in particular and London especially. Still, let’s not dwell on the negative. Things might improve. Fingers crossed, eh?