Lord Salisbury used to conduct scientific experiments as a hobby while Harold Wilson understood statistics and in the days

Lord Salisbury used to conduct scientific experiments as a hobby, while Harold Wilson understood statistics and, in the days before the pocket calculator, enjoyed demonstrating his mastery of the slide rule. Winston Churchill would have called in his sinister scientific familiar, FA Lindemann, who would doubtless have come up with some crackpot scheme.Unfortunately, Lady Thatcher did not interest herself in the matter Mr Major does not understand it He could not answer Mr Blair's question. But who could? It is not whether it is safe to feed the brains of diseased sheep to herbivorous cattle, which common sense and humanity alike should have told us it was not. Above all, there was the extreme but routine brutality towards animals, especially horses.

Black Beauty is no myth, and a liberal soul of today who could somehow walk down a busy city street in 1896 would be reduced to tears of rage and horror within half an hour. It is true that Dunblane and Hungerford belong to our own times, as "Me Massacres" typical of an epoch when individuals act out their rage against their own lack of significance; they are not Victorian episodes (though I am not so sure about the Wests of Gloucester). But a hundred years ago, gratuitous physical brutality was not always called "violence", which was not yet a distinct category although it was almost omnipresent. The point is that our great-grandfathers used fists, whips, sticks and stones with a freedom that we cannot now imagine.Fathers belted sons, teachers lashed and caned pupils, husbands punched and kicked their wives, street traders fought over stalls, petty-officers flogged midshipmen, boys daily gave one another nosebleeds or black eyes in the playground. Yeats wrote that "Even the wisest man grows tense/ With a sort of violence/ When he must encompass fate ..."This change of usage helps to explain why it is a platitude to say that "violence is increasing" - and why the platitude is plumb wrong. as `spreading' or `increasing', or to `unacceptable levels of'."In the old days, "violent" meant something like "forceful", but the force might be physical or moral.

You could offer violent resistance to an arresting policeman, commit robbery with violence (which might not mean physical force against persons), hold violent convictions about the Trinity or fall violently in love. If Gustave Flaubert were still alive, he would enter it in his Dictionary of Received Ideas as: "VIOLENCE: inappropriate in demonstrations, revolutions, marriages &c Always refer to V. The long-term effect would be to increase the gap between fussy, concerned homes that could afford the V-chips, and unconcerned homes that didn't give a hoot what the children watched and preferred to use spare cash in other ways. The latter are supposed to generate more crime than the former.

If television violence plays any part in that, and we still do not know whether it does, then the V-Chip would make no difference.The word "violence" is, in any case, rotten with propaganda in its modern usage. Somebody on Radio 4 pointed out that when the new V-Chip-protected set was delivered to the living-room, the old unprotected set would migrate upstairs to the child's bedroom. If he had to leave home, he always unplugged the family television set and took it with him in his car, in case wife and child were tempted into unsupervised viewing while he was away. It was easy to see that he was really a modern Crusader locking his wife into a chastity belt before heading for Palestine The V-Chip is in the same category.