Prostitution

Harriet Harman wants to make prostitution illegal. Her reason is that it is impossible to get rid of the traffic in girls while there is prostitution.

This in many ways encapsulates New Labour, without doubt the biggest threat to our liberties since the war. There are three glaring problems here. The first is that she cannot distinguish between legal and normal (woman, a free agent, is happy to have sex in return for money) and the illegal and immoral (girls being sold into and held in illegal incarceration where they are forced to have sex with the customers).

Second Harman does not see how this is a denial of freedom to sex workers as well as their clients. What else will they do for money?

Third, like the rest of New Labour (eg Tony Blair on 'handguns') she thinks she just has to pass a law and the problem will go away. Just as it became impossible to own a pistol and so the supply of pistols was driven underground (you can buy one for £50 in an inner-city pub, more than ten years after Tony's brilliant legislative stroke) so prostitution will be driven underground. It will still go on, just as people still have pistols, but since everyone involved will be a criminal, there will be little or no distinction between what we used to call 'working girls' and trafficked slaves. So it will get worse.

It seems incredible that this woman can't understand this. She is presumably hoping for a quick PR fix after she was exposed for accepting illegal donations; or ducking away from her responsibilities in stopping the illegal traffic in women.

Harman is hoping men will be too proud to defend prostitutes. I hope someone does.