“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” Henry Louis Gates Jr
The music industry has a long history of songs being banned but these are largely one-offs.
Currently UK Drill artists are being stifled by injunctions and silenced by the wholesale removal of their work from the Web at the request of the police.
The lyrics might be explicit and vicious but establishment blaming this movement for gang violence can appear rather like blaming Trainspotting for drug usage.
However, on a second look, the landscape is a complex one with the potential for unintended consequences, though there is no getting round that Drill artists have lost their rights of expression.
Radicalisation is another more recent concern and the 2015 theatre work Homegrown by Omar El-Khairy never reached the stage.
In a risk-averse move, amid police concerns surrounding its contentious subject matter, the production of this play was abandoned by the management of the National Youth Theatre whilst the company was in rehearsals.
Of course, the police have not taken over the role of the Lord Chamberlain but their remit to uphold law and order can put them in the position of censors.
Julia Farrington, Associate Arts Producer at Index on Censorship, has worked closely with the police on how its forces may collaborate more effectively with the arts sector to avoid police intervention resulting in the cancellation of work.
Julia Farrington:
"Their solution has been to remove the provocation in order to dispel the protest and that seems like pragmatic policing but it isn’t good policing.
"The police have an obligation to support artistic freedom of expression; the problem is one of perception. I don’t think they see artistic activity as having any worth or importance or weight and therefore they don’t apply their core policing principles to art and artists.
"There's a lot of pressure on them and they are often under-resourced so until someone comes back and bites them for doing what they do they will continue to short-change the arts because they have many other things they have to get on with."
So, setting aside that elected police commissioners will inevitably be guided by their political ideology, the reality is that in cash-strapped times avoiding trouble is more cost effective than dealing with it.
The pre-emptive censorship of sensitive material, in the case of Homegrown youth radicalisation, has an alternative: for the police to charge all arts producers for providing their services when needed.
The threat of a big invoice is as significant a deterrent as the risks of going against police recommendations and, at its extreme, being arrested for not following police directions.
Thanks in part to the media 'bigging up' the more provocative elements of Behzti, Bhatti's 2010 satire on censorship, Behud, was approached with caution.
Coventry's Belgrade Theatre faced meeting the additional security costs of staging Behud, the police eventually waiving their initial proposed fee of £10,000 per day.
This example illustrates a more malign aspect to the idea of policing fees, since any charge by the police makes the playing field disproportionately uneven with those producing the challenging art required to pick up the bill whilst the offended party can exercise its right in law to protest free of charge.
"I think where you have to pay for police services is a critical point," says Julia Farrington.
She continues:
"The problem with the theatre is it is perceived to be a profit-making organisation, probably based on the commercial theatres in the West End in London. In the case of Behud, the police did their risk assessment and went to their only guidance which was for football matches and music festivals, not realising how small the income of a studio space in a subsidised theatre would be."
A recent report from the Centre for Economic and Business Research, commissioned by Arts Council England, revealed the art and culture sector contributes £10.8 billion to the UK economy.
This is more than the agriculture industry and more than double the contribution of the Premier League.
Add to that UNESCO member states have a "duty to protect, defend and assist artists and their freedom of creation", so doesn’t this goose that lays a golden egg deserve to be defended against the foxes?