| However, in 2002 the girlie magazines
started arriving again. By December 2003, and by now having returned
the offending magazines seventy times and having phoned WHS on fifty
occasions without response, Hamdy threatened legal action against
the company claiming that they were in breach of contract and ‘in
breach of Human Rights Articles 8 and 9’. Eventually, WHS’s
Managing Director apologised and offered Hamdy compensation. As
he had already incurred costs amounting to more than this, Hamdy
was in no mood to accept this ‘insulting’ offer and
he took his case to an industry regulatory body, the Industry Standard
Service Agreement. Although the agency found against WHS, they told
Hamdy he should accept the compensation offer, on condition of his
agreeing to confidentiality on the matter. Hamdy refused to accept
this judgement.
As WHS has a monopoly over newspaper and magazine deliveries in
Stoke Newington (‘there is no choice but to remain with WHS’),
he approached the Monopolies Commission and the Office of Fair Trading
but received little joy. In February this year, he was incensed
to receive seven copies of the Sunday Sport (not what I would describe
as ‘pornography’, but Hamdy sees things differently)
and once again contacted the WHS head office, which he describes
as ‘incompetent and unprofessional’. WHS refused to
increase their compensation. Hamdy is fighting this, and he insists
that the matter is now about ‘justice’, as he will donate
any money he receives to charity.
The issue now appears to have become as much a moral crusade as
a business dispute, with Hamdy recently having meetings at the House
of Commons with local MP Diane Abbott and others about introducing
legislation to make it illegal to sell adult magazines to under-18s.
Surprisingly, unlike alcohol and cigarettes it is not illegal to
sell such material to minors, and he told me he has Diane’s
backing on this. Clearly there will be problems with this complex
issue, such as the age of consent being sixteen, who decides what
constitutes ‘pornography’, and so on, but Hamdy is determined
to push this as hard as he can.
I asked him why he took such a firm line on adult material and
if he agreed that, unless the magazines involved physical or mental
coercion or were clearly illegal, that adults should be allowed
to read what they wish. ‘Reading pornography is entirely up
to individuals, so long as it cannot be accessed by children’,
he replied. ‘It’s my choice not to sell pornography.
If other shops want to sell them, it’s down to them. I will
not sell under any circumstances any top-shelf material’.
Well, if WHS started sending him, say, gun magazines, would he react
in a similar manner? ‘If I think personally that a magazine
is a particular danger to the area and the community in general,
I will not accept it’, said Hamdy. Indeed, in the past he
has sent back the legendary punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, and
he has refused to accept deliveries of Tippex thinner (think sniffing
glue) and the Class A receptacles, plastic ‘button’
bags. He stocks ‘lads’’ mags such as Loaded and
Nutz and reads them closely before putting them on his shelves,
and he deplores the violence of some games in computer mags, although
he also sells them.
If he had the power, would he ban pornography? ‘I’ll
be stupid. I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think so.
It’s been around for centuries. It’s only natural’.
But it’s certainly banned from his shop. ‘We’ve
lost a lot of money’, he concluded, ‘but gained respect.
I have to be responsible as a retailer’. Respect he certainly
seems to have, given that the majority of his customers appears
to support his stand, and his shop could hardly be any busier. And,
whether or not you agree with Hamdy’s definition of ‘pornography’,
he deserves respect at the very least for his dogged and principled
refusal to accept the seemingly intransigent and dismissive demands
of corporate capitalism.
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