UKIP suspends Scouse candidate over sado smut movies

While the Lib Dems may have no qualms about running Anna Arrowsmith, a maker of serious female-oriented porn as a candidate in Gravesham, Kent, UKIP are having some difficulty swallowing the notion that one of their candidates may have been involved at the sharp end of smut-making.

They have therefore suspended the membership of Rob Ager, chairman of UKIP's Liverpool branch, pending investigation of his oeuvre which is alleged to include mock torture, bondage, incarceration and flagellation.

The Telegraph reports that one of his films - The Sex Game (NSFW) - features a half-naked man being whipped and abused by a "dominatrix".

Another - The Victim - features "a duo of deranged sadists" who capture a man at random so that he can be "tortured and eventually killed".

It is not clear, however, whether UKIP were more embarrassed by the films – or the fact that some of his work allegedly promoted the party in the closing credits. According to a party spokeswoman, party officials are now taking a close look at Ager’s films, which contained "serious themes".

She said: "As a result of the evidence that has been supplied to us about Mr Ager, he has today been suspended as the chair of the UKIP Liverpool branch. There will be a thorough inquiry into the matter."

Ager defended his films, saying many commercial productions were "much more sexually and violently explicit".

On collativelearning, a site featuring his work, he writes: "It has been brought to my attention that journalist Guy Patrick of The Sun newspaper is intending to run an article about my fiction films and that he will attempt to sensationalize them as 'offensive'.

"If his article has brought you to this page then I invite you to watch the film below, while bearing in mind that much more sexually and violently explicit films such as Seven, Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist are commercially available in Britain. Such controversial films not only receive advertising space in newspapers, but are often given praise by film critics employed by newspapers."

He also told reporters: "My material is pretty tame. I put a lot of intelligent material into the scripts."

If UKIP do decide to make Ager’s ban permanent, they will only be following the lead given by the rest of mainstream UK politics. Last year, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was publicly embarrassed by the porn-viewing habits of her stay-at-home husband.

However, such prudishness is not inevitable. Ms Arrowsmith expressed her concern at the view that politics should be a sex-free zone. She told the Reg: "I have not seen Mr Ager’s films, so cannot comment directly, although sadomasochistic films are not what I am involved in personally or professionally.

"Obviously I would not condone any material that was non-consensual or unlawful. I also think that promoting a political party at the end of an independently produced film is courting controversy.

With regard to politics and adult films, she said: "The idea that involvement in a perfectly legal activity whose product is enjoyed by half the UK population should not be allowed, is itself nonsensical. The UK has undergone a silent sexual revolution as fundamental as the last one in the 1960s in the last 20 years, and politicians need to take note that attitudes of the vast majority of British people towards sex have changed." ®