Political Plate Raises Censorship Issues

Without wishing to add to the oxygen of publicity recently given to the odious BNP councillor for sporting, apparently coincidentally, the registration NA51 ZCY, one has to wonder at, and even sympathise with, the government's unenviable task of policing the issue of number plates.

Almost since the dawn of the original system, the opportunities for mischief have been rife. The most famous early example being the notorious 'BF' prefixes, which were almost immediately replaced by 'FX' in deference to prudish sensibilities.

Subsequently, some 40 or so dubious two- and three-letter combinations were spotted from inception and simply not issued. Most are too obvious to warrant illustrating here and range from the mildly amusing to just a handful of clearly offensive words.

It cannot be beyond the wit of a manual system, let alone a computer program, to monitor such simple potential offenders. The problem is on what basis to draw the line. The splendidly lavatorial 'BOG', 'BUM' and 'LAV' were originally withheld (although, much to the delight of Pimlico Plumbers, later made available at auction) whilst, incredibly, 'PEE' and 'POO' were completely overlooked.

Of course, any debate surrounding language depends entirely upon contemporary usage: The innocuous 'LOO' would almost certainly have fallen foul of the arbiters had it, indeed, have been part of the Edwardian vocabulary.

Acronyms present an added complication: Anyone's innocent initials may at some stage acquire an unsavoury interpretation but, once a registration series has been issued it could prove highly impractical to withdraw it.

As the opening subject illustrates, the real anomalies occur, however, where words are inferred by conjunction with adjacent characters. As a result, literally thousands of 'schoolboy howlers' have slipped through the net, perhaps the most notorious being PEN 15. But, again, any computer programmer worth his salt and armed with a dictionary database should be able to isolate the more contentious examples.

The comparatively modern argument, "So what. Who cares?" is, perhaps, not so straightforward as that which could be applied to wider censorship issues: The authorities' dilemma is that, number plates are, necessarily, on public display and cannot, consequently be ignored or 'turned-off' by those suffering real or imagined offence.

Conversely, since the very function of vehicle registrations is to render them unique and distinctive then, surely, the more memorable, the better. This view embraces a wider dispute over intentional mis-spacing - a practice which can, ironically, only increase the chances of recognition.

Hindsight reveals that a wholly alphabetic format would have made the vetting process far simpler. Moreover, it doesn't take a mathematical genius to conclude that this system would easily have provided combinations (even less the 'naughty' ones) sufficient to have avoided the need for successive revisions.

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