Millionaire dilettante wonders whether rationality is really such a good thing and calls for, er, harmony with grain and soul of nature

Thursday 4 February 2010

Breaking news: the Prince of Wales has announced that he doesn’t like the Enlightenment. ‘We cannot go on like this’, the Elvis Presley of contemporary philosophers lamented at a ‘conference’ at St James’s Palace in London, ‘just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do’.

I look forward to publication of peer-reviewed papers from this top-flight intellectual event. The Prince is a prime example of everything the Enlightenment rightly rejects: inequality, privilege, credulity and sloppy thinking. He’s never said anything of any note and he isn’t even bright enough to recognise the contradictions which characterise his extraordinarily privileged existence.

Voltaire and Descartes versus Charles Windsor? Bring it on.

 

 

Birds of a feather?

Tuesday 2 February 2010

The BNP is facing legal action because its constitution discriminates against black and Asian people. Quite right too.

The Vatican is demanding exemptions in the Government’s Equality bill because it wants to continue discriminating against gay people. The Pope has called on the 35 Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight with ‘missionary zeal’ for the ‘right’ not to employ people the church doesn’t like, even in secular posts. 

I do hope the Pope has scheduled a meeting with Nick Griffin when he comes to London later this year.  

 

 

Terrorism is SO last century

Friday 29 January 2010

Osama bin Laden, eco-warrior? I suppose it’s good that he’s realised he needs to move on, but I worry about whether he’s on top of the science. He was a big no-show at Copenhagen, after all, and his green manifesto doesn’t specify what kind of limits he’d like on carbon emissions. Frankly, I’m not sure he’s thought it all through, but I guess that’s what happens when an organisation moves outside its comfort zone. AQ is going to have to rebalance its departments: watch out for redundancies in Suicide Bombings and big job opportunities in Consumer Boycotts.

 

 

A memory of John Craxton (1922-2009)

Thursday 28 January 2010

There is a memorial service in London next week for the artist John Craxton, who spent much of his life in Crete. I visited his studio in Chania many years ago and was struck by the fact that his paintings were not in fashion, but I liked his use of warm Mediterranean light and themes from Greek myth.

Craxton showed me and my then boyfriend around Chania, taking us to out-of-the-way tavernas where we ate thinly sliced fried potatoes sprinkled with oregano and feta cheese. He was hospitable to two complete strangers – we had a tenuous connection through my boyfriend’s brother – but also displayed a disconcerting sense of humour. A couple of English guests called in advance and asked whether they could bring anything with them from London.

‘Putty’, John said instantly. A painter might have thought he meant artist’s putty, but he had been talking about renovating his Venetian house in Chania and the visitors assumed he wanted to fix the windows. They filled their suitcases with quantities of the stuff and presented it to him when they arrived. ‘What’s this?’ John demanded.

‘Putty’, they replied, puzzled by his reaction.

‘I asked for pate’, John snapped back.

I never found out what he really wanted – or what they did with the unwanted gift.

 

Great thinkers of our time….not

Sunday 24 January 2010

Martin Amis has been thinking about the sexual revolution. He’s also got a new book coming out, which gives him a platform for his views on the whole men-women thing. And what has he come up with after 40 years of reflection? Biological determinism! Women got obsessed with their looks – ‘the mirror, narcissism, the Me decade’ – and left it too damned late to have babies.

‘I know women now full of regret at just not worrying about it until it really was too late,’ he tells the Sunday Times. ‘Three or four friends, who would have been good mothers, but….’ But what? I guess they spent too long fiddling with their hair and having sex, which should have been left to Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kennedy, Warren Beatty (I’m sure you can think of your own favourite male narcissist).

Not that the sexual revolution was a bad thing, you understand. ‘In fact, it was a cornucopia of opportunity. But it is a massive project to rethink an entire gender, and behaving like men was the only model women had. It was never in their interests to be like that. The sex wasn’t in their nature’.

And dinosaurs still roam the earth……

 

 

Apologies, suicide notes and a damned good read

Tuesday 19 January 2010

Somewhere in a drawer I have a letter of apology from Harold Pinter. It arrived by motorcycle courier one day, in 2001 or thereabouts, and turned out to be one of those strained compositions in which someone says sorry while giving the impression that they don’t really mean it. I think I was supposed to be impressed – when I didn’t write back immediately, I got a message that Harold was ‘beside himself’ – but I’d long ago arrived at the conclusion that he was a bully. Several years previously, at a dinner in London for the novelist Sara Paretsky, I watched him pick on another guest and reduce her to a quivering wreck. What struck me was that there were three or four well-known novelists at the table but he didn’t target any of them, going instead for someone who wasn’t famous. Once he got into his stride, he berated his victim mercilessly in his carrying, professional actor’s voice.   

I‘ve been thinking about this and other incidents in the last few days after hearing Antonia Fraser read extracts on Radio 4 from her new book about her affair with Pinter. The book is notable for Fraser’s boundless self-regard and its theme – Harold was utterly brilliant, repeated ad nauseam – couldn’t be further from my experience. So I was delighted to come across Roger Lewis’s mordant analysis of Pinter in his book Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life As It Is Lived (Short Books £12.99), which skewers Harold’s snobbery in a single sentence: ‘I always found it very suspect, the way Pinter would write about oppression in faraway lands and under distant regimes, and yet he’d take it out on waiters and taxi drivers in London’. Roger’s book is worth reading for many reasons, not least the fact it made me laugh so much I almost fell off the sofa; it has moments of comic genius, as well as being a surreal account of the daily frustrations of a writer’s life.

The day Pinter denounced me in public, at an international writers’ meeting, I have to say he was perfectly nice to my face. After lunch I made a speech about the work of the PEN Writers in Prison Committee, which I chaired, and left for another engagement. Over the next couple of days, I got a series of phone calls from shocked friends who had heard Harold tear into me after I left. My offence, I think, was that I’d failed to appreciate that Turkey was the worst abuser of human rights in the world; it wasn’t and isn’t, but Harold never let the facts get in the way of his opinions. His grudging apology arrived a few days later. I don’t know whether he made a habit of sending these things but it certainly wasn’t a masterpiece. Frankly, I’d rather read Roger Lewis.

 

 

Update: Idiots are still entitled to free speech

Wednesday 13 January 2010

In a judgement which places unacceptable limits on free speech, five men have been convicted of using threatening, abusive or insulting words and behaviour likely to cause distress during a march by the Royal Anglian Regiment through Luton town centre in March last year. The men accused British soldiers of being rapists and baby-killers; it was a typical Islamist rant and I’m sure it caused offence. They’re idiots but, as I observed last week, that isn’t a justification for censoring someone. Islamism is such a horrible – and absurd – ideology that I’d rather have it out in the open. Then we can see how silly it is.  

 

 

Forget ‘Mrs Robinson’ jokes: patriarchal attitudes flourish in Northern Ireland

Tuesday 12 January 2010

Obviously I’m not in a position to determine whether God has forgiven Iris Robinson for committing adultery. It’s very convenient to have a direct line to a deity but I can’t help thinking that he (whom Mrs Robinson almost certainly thinks of as He) has been giving her bad advice throughout. There’s nothing wrong in principle with older women having sex with young men, but it makes me a bit queasy when the woman in question has known her young lover since he was a baby. Iris Robinson promised a dying friend to look after his 19-year-old son, accepting a role which put her in loco parentis, and that’s why her behaviour is morally dubious.

She belongs (or did until she was expelled) to a religious/political party with reactionary views on adultery and homosexuality, which makes it even harder to sympathise with her present predicament. Its founder, Ian Paisley, invented a campaign in the 1970s called Save Ulster from Sodomy to stop homosexual acts being legalised in Northern Ireland; initially successful, the campaign failed after a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights forced a change in the law. To this day, abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland, illustrating a depressing fact: patriarchal attitudes flourish in societies where there is civil strife, despite the presence of self-proclaimed radical or revolutionary movements.  

Iris Robinson’s unpleasant views on homosexuality are supported by her husband, who is currently fighting to save his own political career. In South Africa, the ANC has no problem with a leader who is a boastful polygamist, recently marrying his third wife at a ceremony attended by leading figures in the movement. The ANC has less excuse than the DUP, which has never pretended to be anything other than a Christian fundamentalist party, but neither of them has developed a modern, grown-up set of rules for dealing with sexuality. The big question about any sexual relationship is whether it’s abusive, and that’s where Iris Robinson’s behaviour towards a bereaved young man fails the test. Whether God has explained this to her is, I’m afraid, another matter.

 

 

We’re just not that into you, Gordon

Thursday 7 January 2010

I wouldn’t have voted for Gordon Brown to become leader of the Labour Party in 2007 – if you remember, there wasn’t an election – and I wouldn’t vote for him now. But people like me, members of the Party who pay our subs every month and knock on doors during elections, haven’t even been considered in the storm that’s raged since Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt called for a secret ballot on Brown’s leadership.

I think they were right, even though the mechanism – a ballot restricted to MPs – was far from perfect. I also think that the prime minister would have lost, which is why he didn’t respond with confidence and agree to it. I’m not the only person to observe that it was fear of the unknown, combined with pressure from whips and unions, which pushed a lot of people into making public statements at odds with what they say him in private.

I spend a lot of time at Westminster and I talk to backbench MPs, Cabinet ministers and Parliamentary candidates. Most of the people I speak to think Brown should go, even if they don’t always agree with me that he should never have become leader. I said at the time of the handover, back in 2007, that not holding a leadership contest would be a disaster for the Party – an affront to democracy, as well as creating the impression of a degree of confidence in Brown that never really existed. People hoped he’d turn out all right and couldn’t see another viable candidate, but that’s different from positively wanting him to lead the Party.  

What’s clear is that Labour’s constitution has given the Party a severe case of constipation. It takes 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party to force a contest, and that’s an unreasonably high bar for the rebels to surmount. It leaves the rest of us entirely in the hands of the PLP, which is why Hoon and Hewitt came up with what was technically an unconstitutional device in the hope of persuading MPs and the Cabinet to act.

They flunked it, but the repercussions will continue. Key members of the Cabinet gave the prime minister late and lukewarm endorsements, and the central problem – Brown’s character – has not changed. Not long ago, a member of the Cabinet observed to me that Labour was doing a little better in the polls, despite the prime minister’s efforts every day to lose the election. That’s how little respect some of his closest colleagues have for him. Don’t be fooled by the protestations of loyalty: yesterday’s events are a product of profound instability at the top of the Party, not a cause of it.  

 

 

Idiots are entitled to free speech

Tuesday 5 January 2010

Anjem Choudary has form. He was one of the organisers of a march on the Danish embassy in London four years ago, when demonstrators dressed as suicide-bombers and carried placards threatening anyone who ‘insults’ Islam with death. He praised the 9/11 bombers as ‘magnificent martyrs’, refused to condemn the 7/7 suicide-bombings which killed 52 people in London and has said he would not tell the police if he knew that a terror attack was being planned. He is an associate of the banned cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, who formed the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, and Choudary later became one of the leaders of its successor organisation, al Ghurabaa.

Not a nice guy, in other words. But if he wants to make a fool of himself by parading through Wootton Bassett with his followers, I really can’t see any reason to stop him; on the contrary, I love the irony that he is able to exercise his right to free speech in this way when he so clearly wants to deny it to the rest of us. North Wiltshire MP James Gray has dismissed Choudary and his supporters as ‘foolish people making a silly point’, and he’s right. These people are idiots, and Gordon Brown shouldn’t inflate their self-importance by denouncing the proposed march as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘offensive’.

 

Sorry, Dave, I thought you could handle it….

Monday 4 January 2010

Is this a record? Politicians are often accused of changing their minds but they don’t usually have three different policies in a single day. After my attack yesterday on the Tories’ absurd plan to give tax breaks to married couples (see Blonde Columns on this site), David Cameron has had second and indeed third thoughts today, exposing himself and his party to justified ridicule. First he wasn’t committed to it, then he changed his mind and said he ‘definitely hopes’ to do it and finally – as of six pm, which leaves room for a bit more wriggling before the day is over – he said he was definitely committed to it.

 What is Cameron’s problem? Either he didn’t cost it properly, calling the Tories’ financial competence into question, or he fears the consequences of dropping a dud idea. My guess is that the Tory leader made a rash promise and doesn’t know how to get out of it, as he did when he promised to leave the mainstream European People’s Party in the European Parliament. That was an avoidable disaster in anyone’s book, leaving Tory MEPs sitting with some unsavoury allies, and the fact that Cameron couldn’t get out of it suggests he isn’t as smart as people think.

Now we have today’s fiasco, and more red faces in the blue corner. I just hope Labour pays as much attention to my columns as the Tories seem to, and is about to announce that civil partnerships will be extended to anyone who wants one.

 

    (c) Joan Smith, Westminster, Thursday 31 December 2009

 Happy new year 

 

Not lies but carelesslness: it was regime change, stupid

Monday 14 December 2009

I never believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I thought the Bush administration was out for revenge for 9/11, didn’t much care where they got it, and Saddam was an easy target: dictator, torturer, unpopular with his neighbours, weakened by wars and sanctions. Tony Blair always seemed to me a different case; I thought he wanted regime change in Iraq for perfectly decent reasons but didn’t believe he could carry public opinion with him. So he talked up WMDs, and has been dogged ever since by accusations that he’s a liar.

I’m still not certain that’s the right accusation. I don’t think he paid much attention to the evidence about WMDs, assuming that the invasion would be successful and popular and people would have short memories. I wasn’t against getting rid of Saddam but I opposed the war because I didn’t think Blair was being frank with the public. I thought that would be a disaster, not just in Iraq itself but because it would limit the possibility of future interventions against dictators and mass murderers - a very similar position to my friend Robin Cook, I think. 

Blair’s curiously-timed admission at the weekend that he would have gone to war anyway, even if he knew that Saddam didn’t have WMDs, feels like the truth emerging at last from a mass of obfuscation. It seems odd that Blair set so much store by moral imperatives but didn’t have the confidence to make a principled case for humanitarian intervention. We can now see that this avowed Christian tried to do good by stealth, ruined his own reputation and tore apart the Labour Party.

 

Are bankers human? Bonus culture versus the minimum wage

Tuesday 8 December 2009

A long time ago, when Labour proposed the introduction of a minimum wage, it caused an outcry. Employers and the CBI warned that companies couldn’t afford to pay the pitifully low amount under discussion – ten years later, it’s still less than £6 an hour – and accused the government of ruining the British economy. In fact, it turned out to be something else entirely – the lunatic risks taken by some of the highest earners in the City – which was silently propelling the country towards recession.

It’s worth remembering this piece of recent history as the government struggles to come up with a policy on the huge bonus payments demanded by the financial sector. The argument that the people who were implicated in creating the mess in the first place are best-placed to get us out of it is obviously dodgy, but it points to the fact that one thing about the wealthy never changes.

Unlike the poor, who will just go on working even if they are paid a pittance, the well-paid are a fragile, sensitive bunch. So talented that they could work anyway – I’m not convinced by this, but it’s what we’re always being told – they need not just huge salaries but generous bonuses which are quite unrelated to performance. Oh, and you can’t raises their taxes (don’t even think of it) because they’ll get upset and move abroad.

The board of the publicly-owned Royal Bank of Scotland has been accused of being out of touch for threatening to resign if they aren’t allowed to pay big bonuses, but I suspect they know something the rest of us don’t. The rich really are different: they need endless incentives or they’ll be too tired and stressed to do their jobs. I just wonder why that doesn’t apply to the millions of people struggling to survive on the minimum wage.

 

 

Libraries need readers, not empty slogans

Tuesday 1 December 2009

Culture minister Margaret Hodge says libraries must move with the times. Ominously, she points out that libraries have more branches than McDonalds or Boots – thank god for that, some of us would say – but ‘sweeping advances in technology, increasing standards of living and higher expectations of service mean that they must move with the times to stay part of the times’.

Does anyone know what she is on about? I love the idea of Jane Austen having to provide higher levels of service; if only she weren’t dead, she could be sent round to people’s houses to read her novels aloud. Hodge says she isn’t talking about ‘comfy couches and coffee’ – well, Borders tried that and look what happened to them – but wants libraries to offer ‘a modern, relevant and popular service’. What exactly is a ‘relevant’ library service? Being able to get books when you turn up rather than a Big Mac?

You might expect to get a clue from the title of the consultation she announced this morning, but I’m afraid ‘Empower, Inform, Enrich’ is as empty a collection of buzz-words as I’ve heard in a while. Incidentally, Hodge thinks good libraries should have a ‘buzz’ about them, and there’s an explicit threat that if they don’t shape up they will be a target for spending cuts.

What’s so depressing is how defeatist all this is. Ministers seem to have despaired of being able to persuade more people to read books and are trying to lure them into public libraries for some thus-far unstated purpose. It’s a desperation I see mirrored in publishing and the newspaper industry, which share the assumption that old-fashioned reading is a lost cause in the age of the internet and eBooks. (Which I heard a digital publisher defend last week, by the way, on grounds of portability. You can take them anywhere, she said. Er, like books?)

Anyway, my point is that we didn’t always have a reading culture in this country. We created it through education and public libraries and proselytising by popular authors like Charles Dickens. In Sierra Leone, where literacy levels have fallen to between 20 and 30 per cent, NGOs are working hard to rebuild the reading culture which existed before the civil war; people of all ages need to get used to books, to handling them and discovering the pleasure of reading. One way of doing it, in this country as much as West Africa, is to have reading hours in schools. Children should be encouraged to read a book a week as part of the national curriculum, and be taken on visits to public libraries. What’s the government’s alternative: ‘Consult, Cut, Close?’

  

Illegal file-sharing threatens the creative industries: why I support the Digital Economy bill

Thursday 26 November 2009

Next Wednesday the Digital Economy bill begins its progress through Parliament, and its headline proposal – restricting or cutting off internet access for people who persistently share illegal files – is controversial. The aim of this section of the bill is to prevent piracy but I’ve already seen it denounced as a backdoor attempt to regulate the internet and an attack on free expression. I don’t think it’s either, which is why I’ve made two speeches on the impact of digital media in the last week; one was in Newcastle to Las Tertulias, the annual meeting of British and Spanish politicians, business leaders and journalists, and the other was at Westminster when I gave evidence to the all-party Intellectual Property group of MPs and peers chaired by Janet Anderson.

On each occasion, I explained that I was speaking as someone whose living depends on two industries which are in crisis. I have been a journalist for more than three decades, I published my first book 25 years ago, and I have never known a time when it was more difficult to survive as a writer. Newspaper circulations are collapsing, leading to big cuts in staff at papers like the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and the Guardian, and freelance journalists are struggling to survive.  Publishers’ advances, which used to share some of the risk between authors and publishers, have all but disappeared unless you happen to be one of the celebrities whose books (often ghosted by someone else) dominate the market. Research published by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society two years ago concluded that writing is ‘a very risky profession with median earnings of less than one quarter of the typical wage of a UK employee’. The report confirmed that a bad situation was getting worse, with ‘the earnings of a typical writer….deteriorating in real terms’.

It is clear that many members of the public don’t know or care. They say they can get what they want free on the internet, so why should they pay for online news, articles, music, films, televised football matches and so on? I’ve even heard a politician boast that he hasn’t paid for a newspaper for ten years, getting all his news on the net and dismissing as irrelevant the anxieties of journalists who depend on paying readers for a living. His view is based on a very common misconception, which is already eating into the heart of the ‘creative industries’: threatening the survival of writers, musicians, film-makers, even football clubs, and denying talented young people the opportunity to become creators in their turn.

The misconception is the idea that content is and should be free. It’s on the web in the form of news, music, film or live feed from a big football match, and people don’t give any thought to how it got there. They download music without payment and share it with friends without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that someone has written, performed and recorded it in a studio at considerable cost; it doesn’t even occur to them that each member of the band has to pay rent, mortgage, council tax, transport, buy food and equipment, and may have children or other family members to support. They read an article online (increasingly it won’t just be an article but an entire book) and send it to friends or reproduce it on their own websites, never thinking about all the time and work which has gone into producing it in the first place. As I told MPs and peers this week, my journalism is stolen in this manner all the time, often by people who probably imagine they are paying me a compliment or doing me a favour. I don’t think they even realise they are breaching my copyright, denying me income I am legally entitled to if people want to re-use my work.  

In this instance, I am talking about personal losses in the region of a few hundred pounds, but for the film and music industries it runs into hundreds of millions. One of the other speakers at Westminster this week was Paul Hayes, construction manager at Leavesden film studios, where the Harry Potter films are made; he said that the loss of income caused by illegal sharing of films is already having a visible effect on the industry, reducing the number of new films going into production. The same thing is happening in the music industry and in professional football, according to Huw Jennings, director of Fulham FC’s football academy; he told MPs that illegal sites offering televised access to football matches is hitting clubs’ income and therefore the sums they are able to invest in nurturing young talent.

I don’t think the general public understands these connections or the damage done by illegal file-sharing, which is why a campaign to educate people about how the creative industries work is desperately needed. At present, stealing other people’s work is regarded as a victimless crime (if it’s seen as a crime at all) and the general public needs to understand how much damage illegal access is doing. Members of the public who flout the copyright laws are directly harming people whose work they admire, making it harder – in some cases impossible – for them to earn a living. Indeed the assumption underlying the present business model of some legal sections of the creative industries – that consumers are entitled to free access to whatever they want – isn’t sustainable in the long-term. ‘Free’ access to newspaper websites, for example, is paid for by two revenue streams which are in sharp decline, namely advertising and the cover price of paid-for paper copies. That’s why so many journalists are out of work or struggling to survive on reduced incomes, while newspaper budgets are squeezed to the point where it’s not easy to provide a consistently high-quality product.

The Digital Economy bill is an important step towards tackling some of these urgent problems, but it needs to be accompanied by a revolution in the public’s understanding of how creative people work and survive. Some big names in publishing and the music industry have already declared their support for the bill, but I’d like to see a huge education campaign to get a simple message across: using people’s work without payment or permission is theft. Most members of the public wouldn’t break into their neighbours’ homes and steal their possessions, so why are they doing it to the musicians, authors and film-makers whose work they claim to love?

  

BBC needs to get serious about news

Thursday 19 November 2009

Can nothing be done to save Radio 4’s PM programme? It used to be essential listening, an update on the day’s news stories with features which filled in the background that isn’t covered by hourly news bulletins. Now the news is squeezed between whimsical items and a love-fest between Eddie Mair and listeners’ emails. I want informed reaction to the day’s news, not instant responses from people whose only qualification is that they know how to send an email. The BBC doesn’t seem to care that another good programme has been ruined.

 

 

Children’s charity calls for action on trafficked children

Tuesday 17 October 2009

A new report from Barnardos suggests that hundreds of British children are being groomed by older men and trafficked internally for sex. Whose Child Now? describes how vulnerable teenage girls are being targeted by men who pose as boyfriends, showering them with gifts, when their real purpose is to sell the girls to other men. ‘It has become apparent from our work with children using our services that some young people are moved around the UK, or from town to town, by adults for child sexual exploitation’, the report says.

In what has become a familiar story, Barnardos says that the true extent of such crimes is difficult to establish because victims are too frightened or ashamed to make a formal complaint. In some cases, the charity says, they have been groomed by their abusers not to recognise themselves as victims. It suggests that the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which introduced specific offences to tackle grooming and trafficking, isn’t being used as often as it should – a long-standing concern of mine.

In 2007, there were only 27 convictions for sexual abuse of children through prostitution or pornography, and 25 for trafficking of children for sexual exploitation. But Barnardos says a snapshot survey of 21 projects last month showed that the charity was working with 609 sexually exploited children, 90 of whom appeared to have been trafficked internally. Barnardos works on sexual exploitation in only 20 of the UK’s 209 local authority areas, and argues that it is likely that hundreds of children are being groomed for sex nationally. In 2005, research by the charity suggested that 1,000 children were at risk of sexual exploitation in London alone.

It appears not to be widely known that the Sexual Offences Act 2003 introduced specific offences of buying or attempting to buy sex with a person under the age of 18. Anyone who pays for sex with girls or boys below that age, whether they’re working as prostitutes or have been trafficked internally by the kind of criminal gangs Barnardos has identified, is breaking the law. As with rape, which also has a scandalously low conviction rate, laws to protect potential victims are in place. The big question is why are they so under-used?  

 

 

Labour and Tory women unite over safety of MPs

Monday 9 November 2009

Sitting MPs of both main parties have signed a letter to today’s Times, repeating concerns I expressed on this blog ten days ago (Women are entitled to safe working conditions – and that includes MPs). They highlight the risk to women MPs if Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposals are not amended, point out that there is cross-party consensus about the need to get more women with young families into the House of Commons and call on the leaders of their parties to reaffirm their commitment to making Parliament a friendlier place for women.

Of course their concerns apply to many of their male colleagues, who will not relish returning to their constituencies late at night with an eight am (or earlier) turn-around to get back to Westminster the next morning. You can read the letter at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article6908727.ece

 

The Afghan crisis is about leadership at home, not war aims

Sunday 8 November 2009

Fighting a war in Afghanistan is difficult but not impossible. The arguments for British troops remaining there are powerful, despite recent losses: what the country needs is civil institutions in place of the corrupt and competing factions which exist today. The presence of NATO forces is the best hope of achieving that; working alongside Afghan units, they have already prevented a return of the Taliban on the scale which allowed Sunni extremists to take over the country in the 1990s and provide shelter for their allies in al-Qaida. NATO’s political leaders have made a mistake in failing to identify and encourage better leaders in Kabul – Hamid Karzai is their biggest disaster - but hundreds of thousands of children have been able to return to school in areas previously controlled by the Taliban, and are getting an education which will help the country emerge from poverty and tribalism. Many of them are girls who would otherwise be condemned to a life of illiteracy and domestic servitude.

These are goals worth fighting for, and make it less likely in the long-term that the country will provide training grounds for foreign terrorists as it has in the past. Casualties are bound to make people in the UK ask questions about whether the conflict is worth pursuing, but the argument is winnable if the government shows convincing leadership. That’s just what we haven’t got as Gordon Brown’s leaden rhetoric has shown over the last couple of days (and the less said about the current Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, the better).

In that sense, calls to pull British troops out of Afghanistan address the wrong crisis. Withdrawing now would halt progress towards civil society and allow Sunni extremists who hate the West to take over large areas of the country. It would also mean snatching away the hope of a better life from the country’s children, who are its future. I believe those things are worth fighting for, and I wish we had a prime minister who could articulate them in more than platitudes.  

 

 

Victory in House of Lords for campaign against sex trafficking and forced prostitution

Wednesday 4 November 2009

Last night the House of Lords approved Clause 14 of the Policing and Crime bill, which makes it an offence to buy sex from a person controlled for gain. During a long and thoughtful debate, Lord Morrow quoted figures from the Police Service of Northern Ireland: in March this year, a senior officer revealed that 11 trafficked women had been rescued from sexual slavery in the previous 12 months, and since then another six had been rescued in Belfast and Londonderry.

Lord Morrow quoted the assistant chief constable, Drew Harris, who said that traffickers were targeting women from sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe or the Far East with the promise of a far better life. He said: ‘When they are actually brought here they are forced into prostitution … We can expect that this will be a continuing problem for us because the profits involved and the criminal networks that are involved see this as a very lucrative business … People could have a brothel quite close to them and they should be aware of that, that it could actually be one of these brothels with women in it in the most awful circumstances in sexual servitude”.

 

Tories: see Lisbon and cry

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Just because the Conservatives are ahead in the opinion polls, it doesn’t mean they’re ready for power. Now that David Cameron’s last hope of fulfilling his promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty has been dashed, we’ll see the Tory Europhobes out in force in all their babbling, paranoid, lunatic glory. If Cameron faces them down, he risks losing votes to UKIP at the general election. If he doesn’t – and Euro-scepticism is deeply wired into his personal political make-up – he risks confirming that his party’s default position remains parochial and anti-modern.

Cameron has already stumbled badly over Europe, failing to extricate himself from a rash promise to withdraw Conservative MEPs from the mainstream European People’s Party despite having three years to work out how to do it. That suggests he’s not the adroit politician or party manager he needs to be with a general election only a few months away. I’m tempted to say ‘get over it’, but Tory schisms over Europe are always such fun.

 

The courage of someone else’s convictions: Labour needs to be honest about drugs

Saturday 31 October 2009

I like Alan Johnson. He’s intelligent, funny and more relaxed than some of his predecessors as Home Secretary. So I’m shocked and disappointed by his decision to sack the government’s advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt. It’s reactionary and anti-science, and it suggests that Johnson is more concerned than I’d have expected about headlines in the Daily Mail.

Professor Nutt is an expert on the effects of different drugs, which is why he was asked to serve as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He doesn’t say that cannabis (the focus of the current row) is harmless. But he’s come up with a ranking of likely harm which ranks it below two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. He isn’t arguing for legalisation, but he is saying that it should be a class C drug rather than class B.

Scientists are outraged by the spectacle of an expert being sacked for saying what he thinks, and so are many people like myself who believe there’s a great deal of hypocrisy about social attitudes to different drugs. My father never used cannabis, LSD or ecstasy (11, 14 and 18 on the list of harm) but he used a legal drug – tobacco, number nine – and died of lung cancer at the early age of 63. Some politicians admit privately that tobacco and alcohol would be dealt with very differently if they’d just come on the market, but logic is notably lacking in public discussions about drug use. Professor Nutt’s argument that cannabis is harmful, but less so than drugs in class B, and that young people should be given accurate and credible information about it, is sensible and responsible.

Ministers say he is criticising policy, which is their area not his, but they’ve ended up looking stubborn and foolish. Sadly, Professor Nutt’s sacking confirms that the government lacks confidence not so much in its advisors as its own ability to stand up to irrational and reactionary arguments. Labour needs to do better than this, and I’m sorry to see the Home Secretary behave in a way which seems out of character as a politician and a human being.

 

Women are entitled to safe working conditions – and that includes MPs

Friday 30 October 2009

On Monday and Tuesday evenings, there are often 10pm votes in the House of Commons. The voting process is slow, especially if there’s a three-line whip, and it’s not unusual for MPs to be unable to leave the House until 10.30 or 10.45.

Say you are a woman MP with a constituency outside London. Under leaked proposals from the Kelly inquiry, it seems likely that you will in future be expected to return home every night if your constituency is within an hour’s train journey of London. Trains are slower and less frequent in the evenings, and some stations unstaffed.

One of the first pieces of advice for women concerned about safety is to avoid travelling late, alone and using dark stations where they might be at risk of assault. I hope we’ll find out next week that whatever Kelly is proposing, the safety of all MPs who have to travel late at night is at the forefront of his mind. Does the public really hate MPs so much that they don’t care if one is mugged or raped?

  

Pumping up anxiety

Thursday 29 October 2009

Sometimes you just can’t avoid the big questions. Should we be in Afghanistan? Is there a God? Would you dare to wear flat shoes?

According to the Daily Mail, which specialises in inventing new things for women to worry about, we’re fretting about flats this autumn because we’ve seen ‘models and celebrities’ wearing them. ‘Brogues, pumps, loafers – flats have never been trendier. But how will YOUR ankles look in them?’

Fine, thanks. To be honest, I’m more worried about global warming and whether the Labour Party will ever get rid of Gordon Brown.

 

Sex trafficking does exist, says Guardian – in America

Tuesday 27 October 2009

Just a week after the paper published a broadside against the notion that sex trafficking is a problem in the UK, the Guardian reports today that the FBI has rescued 52 children from prostitution rings in a three-day nationwide operation against child sex trafficking. It says that almost 700 people were arrested, 60 of whom are described as ‘pimps’, after a surveillance operation of children sold for sex via the internet, in street prostitution, and at casinos and truck stops.

The raids are part of a national initiative launched six years ago to combat child sex trafficking in the US. So far, 510 people have been convicted for child sex crimes and almost 900 children have been rescued, according to the FBI. The US Justice Department says there is an ‘epidemic’ of commercial sex activity among homeless children and more than half of street girls are involved in prostitution, starting between the ages of 12 and 14. Most of the children rescued in the latest operation are teenage girls, although one is only ten years old.

‘Child trafficking for the purposes of prostitution is organised criminal activity using kids as commodities for sale or trade. This is 21^st century slavery’, says Ernie Allen, who runs the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

I wonder if the paper is still convinced that sex trafficking is a myth?

 

BNP row shows there’s more than one way of getting it wrong

 Saturday 25 October 2009

So the BBC avoided one trap last week and fell straight into another. Nick Griffin is presenting himself as a martyr, complaining that Thursday evening’s Question Time departed from its usual format and wasn’t fair to him. To anyone sympathetic to the BNP – and the TV audience was bound to include many people who don’t normally watch the show – Griffin would have seemed the underdog, harried for trying to express views that don’t suit the ‘liberal establishment’.

This is a disastrous outcome, and it raises questions about both the BBC’s editorial judgement and its ability to handle the difficult issue of free speech and extremist parties. If the row has achieved anything, it has at least highlighted the absence of serious political debate on the BBC now that programmes like Question Time and even Newsnight have been dumbed down. It’s as if the Corporation has developed a terror of being serious, compounded by an obsession with audience participation which sometimes amounts to no more than presenters reading out fatuous emails on air.

It’s incredibly frustrating for anyone who takes ideas seriously, and makes me long for the calm, courteous, rigorous interrogation of politicians that the BBC used to be so good at. 

 

Feet are a feminist issue

 Wednesday 21 October 2009

I just love these magenta suede boots by Pura Lopez. I tend to wear shoes more than boots – ankle boots are the exception, obviously – but these are something else. I’m wearing them with a classic silk-jersey wrap dress by Diane von Furstenberg, black and white with splashes of the same pinky-red. Divine. 

 

 

Guardian gets its moral panics in a twist

Tuesday 20 October 2009

Sex trafficking is mostly a myth, says the Guardian, got up by an ‘an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners’. Rumours that a team of investigative reporters is currently combing archives, searching for pictures of me and Julie Bindel in our Salvation Army uniforms, may be unfounded. But the headline on today’s front page is unequivocal: ‘Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution’.

Goodness me! Did this inquiry visit British prisons, where they could meet (for instance) Viktoras Larcenko and Luan Plakici, two of the most notorious traffickers ever convicted in this country? Don’t take my word for it: four years ago, the Crown Prosecution Service reported the successful conviction of Larcenko for conspiracy to traffic in prostitution and conspiracy to launder money. It described him as ‘the last member of a gang convicted for smuggling girls from Lithuania in 2003 and forcing them into prostitution with threats and violence’. The five-member gang included his sister Rita, aged 20, and they were sentenced in total to 51 years in prison.

The Plakici case is even more notorious. It attracted a great deal of media attention, not least in a respected national newspaper which just happens to be the Guardian’s stablemate. ‘The money to be made from human trafficking was revealed in 2003 when an Albanian, Luan Plakici, was jailed for 10 years after trafficking up to 60 women from Moldova and Romania’, the Observer reported. ‘Plakici had over £200,000 in the bank, several palatial homes and drove a Ferrari’. [His sentence was later increased on appeal.]

The Observer went on to say that ‘many trafficked women are either impoverished, without families or already victims of sexual violence when they leave their country of origin. Most have come willingly with their traffickers, believing they are being smuggled, not sold into bondage. The truth is completely different’.

It certainly is, according to today’s Guardian, which dismisses such claims as a ‘moral panic’. The paper grudgingly acknowledges that ‘some prosecutions have been made’ but cites statistics showing that many people arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking have been released or charged with unrelated offences. This is true but the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, in its report entitled The Trade in Human Beings: Trafficking in the UK, draws a rather different conclusion.

‘Because of the brutality of many traffickers, victims are terrified about giving information’, it observes, and goes on to list the many other obstacles to successful prosecution, not just in sex-trafficking cases: ‘As a result of these difficulties, by spring 2008 there had been no prosecutions for the trafficking of migrant domestic workers, no prosecution for forced labour (in the four years since a specific offence was introduced), and no successful conviction of anyone for trafficking an African child’.  There had been ‘more than 70 successful prosecutions for sex trafficking’ but ‘many of our witnesses expressed disappointment at the low rate of prosecutions and convictions for trafficking’. The Committee noted that because of the difficulty of obtaining successful prosecutions, the police and CPS ‘often resorted to joint or alternative charges such as rape, sexual assault, blackmail, coercion, violence, false documentation and money laundering’.

Does anyone seriously believe there are no cases of domestic workers brought to this country illegally and held against their will? That there is no forced labour or child slavery?

What’s happening here isn’t just an argument about statistics. It’s inspired by opposition to the Government’s Policing and Crime bill, which I wrote about last week on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog (‘Tackling Abuse in Prostitution‘, archived on the Blonde Columns page on this website). Sex-trafficking exposes many of the myths about prostitution, which is why we are going to see a rash of stories minimising or denying its existence in this country.

This agenda benefits from what’s been called the ‘Al Capone’ approach, which means prosecuting traffickers for whichever offences seem most likely to lead to a successful conviction.  According to the Home Affairs Committee, ‘the comparatively low rate of prosecutions for trafficking as such adds to the confusion about the incidence of trafficking in the UK’. One likely result, the MPs say, is that some authorities may ‘underestimate the severity of the problem’.

Quite. You’ll have to excuse me now, but I’m late for my radical feminist evangelical Christian anti-sex prayer meeting.

 

 

Forensic examination of BNP leader Nick Griffin? I don’t think so

Monday 19 October 2009

The BNP’s vile views need to be exposed, say supporters of the BBC’s invitation to the party’s leader to appear on this week’s Question Time. Obviously they haven’t watched the show recently. What used to be a heavyweight current affairs programme is now an exchange of noisy soundbites – perfect for the BNP’s populist slogans. The BBC is providing the media-savvy Griffin with a priceless platform, so no wonder the party website is counting down the minutes to his appearance on Thursday evening.