Madam, – I have no appetite for the Hunky Dory ads, neither their crisps nor, these days unfortunately, the pneumatic contents of their posters. I do, however, find it distasteful that the complaints of relatively few objectors and the disapproval from an otherwise worthy State-funded body appear to have effectively curtailed the freedom of other citizens to choose what they read or view.
One doesn’t have to be a middle-aged political historian to see worrying similarities between the highly disputable arguments of the hypothetically malign influence of such images, and those used a generation ago by the un-elected groups censoring books, films, and sexual practices for threatening the “public good” and offending “public morality”.
What with the new laws on blasphemy and the growth of other insidious petty restraints on freedom of expression for fear of what is essentially offending the feelings or beliefs of another, we should perhaps remind ourselves of John Stuart Mill's argument On Liberty. The fundamental principle protecting the civil and political rights of every individual in a democratic state is that regardless of how offensive one may find another's tastes or opinions, unless there is a clear, almost certain, need to prevent them harming others, then no government, agency or individual has the right to coerce anybody to subscribe to their moral standards; and certainly not over an ad for a bag of crisps. – Yours, etc,