Talk:Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955

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Supposed Royal Mail prohibition on "horror comics"[edit]

In did previously tag this, but that seems to have been misunderstood as a request for confirmation of the penalty, rather than the prohibition itself. The page currently claims:

"Section 4, the only section of the Act that applies to Northern Ireland, prohibits the importation of harmful publications into the United Kingdom. The prohibition also applies to "any plate prepared for the purpose of printing copies of any such work and any photographic film prepared for that purpose." Section 4 is the origin of the Royal Mail prohibition against mailing horror comics and the matrices used to print them.[1] To contravene the section is an offence under the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979, punishable with up to 7 years' imprisonment.[2]"

The first problem is that the first reference is to the USPS rather than the Royal Mail's website, and is in fact out of date, pointing to the page for Greece, while the GB & NI page is now here. This, though, makes no mention of horror comics at all, but we can contrast it with archived earlier versions, which did include, "Horror comics and matrices." It looks like that was removed from the USPS page some time in September 2013, at it appears in the version archived on the 1st of the month, but not the one for the 28th, which saw extensive changes. There appears to be no mention of the provision on the Royal Mail's own website, so it seems unlikely that it is still in force.

Clearly at one point the Royal Mail did prohibit "Horror comics and matrices," but this no longer appears to be the case. Nick Cooper (talk) 09:29, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]