You have to watch the House of Lords carefully these days. Whenever a Bill on some fairly general subject, like crime, is passing through it, pressure groups regularly intervene and slip in their own pet amendments. This week it is the turn of a legal ginger group called Art not Evidence. They have got sympathetic peers Shami Chakrabarti and Doreen Lawrence to put forward an amendment to the otherwise fairly unexciting Victims and Courts Bill. This amendment would prevent any ‘creative or artistic expression’ from being used as evidence against a criminal defendant unless its literal meaning directly implicates them in the crime charged. 

Still none the wiser? There is, as you might imagine, more to this than meets the eye. This innocent-sounding proposal is not a simple high-minded call to protect artistic freedom. It is an intervention in favour of one particular art form: the form of rap music called ‘drill’, as overwhelmingly patronised by a very particular sub-class of urban black youth.

The supporters of the Lords amendment should also be careful what they wish for

Drill music, typically brutal and disconcertingly violent in its imagery, is often used as a kind of subcultural lingua franca, with particular tracks........

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