Are you ready?

Here goes: They’re still in power for another 6 months.

It would be a mistake to assume that the role of Home Secretary is to.. er.. wait, what do they do again? They’re the public face of the Home Office, responsible for immigration (stopping it), citizenship (preventing it), policing and national security (pretending we have it).

It also happens to be Labour’s flagship ministry, the crucial plank of their electoral positioning – redistribution, big public sector and “in touch with” the tabloid sentiments on the subject of law and order. That’s what New Labour is all about – reconnecting with the working classes by being pants on head wibblingly mad.

Yesterday Alan Johnson, the latest in a long line of Labour MPs to turn into Authoritarian Super Cocks upon entering the Home Office, sacked an advisor for giving scientific advice which contradicted their policy goals – the goal of Looking Tough no matter how stupid, ineffective, cruel, pointless or evil those particular policies might be.

Drug Prohibition doesn’t work? Sorry, wrong answer. You’re fired. It works perfectly well when it comes to showing how tough Home Secretaries are, so sling yer ‘ook you mad man! Yes, see, the advisor is called, “Nutt” so, obviously, it’s perfectly fair to suggest that he’s a “Nutter”, a mental, and laugh at him.

I blame Dimbleby. He asked Jacqui Smith what was the point in having scientific advisors if you then ignore them – clearly someone in Number 10 nodded and agreed enthusiastically.

We’re told we shouldn’t confuse scientific advice with policy. Alan, sweetie, I promise you, it would be very difficult for anyone to confuse your policies with something suggested by anyone with a brain.

So Mr Sharpe feeds me this on twitter:

“A Libertarian, A Totalitarian and an Irishman go into a bar…”

Here’s what I came up with. Feel free to do better (not hard).

“The Irishman says, ‘are you lads up for a bit of the old drinking competition?’ The Libertarian says, “Yeah, okay – just let me finish my spliff.”

The Totalitarian looks disgusted. “Right,” he says. “First of all, if that’s really cannabis you’re smoking there it’s illegal and you’re going to make me go schizophrenic because of passive smoking it. No thank you. I demand you put it out at once.”

The Libertarian rolls his eyes, then puts out the spliff in the palm of his hand, before blowing his nose on a £50 note.

“Second,” says the Totalitarian, “you’re both going to go over your recommended weekly allowance for alcohol units if you have a drinking competition, so I absolutely insist that we use Non-Alcohol drinks.”

“Get fucked, you stupid yoke!” says the Irishman. “Who’d you think ye are? A fuckin’ priest?”

“You do understand the point of drinking competitions, don’t you, Totalitarian?” asks the libertarian, while juggling three solved Rubik’s cubes and checking stocks and shares on his Blackberry.

“I believe simply finding out who can hold the most fluid in their stomachs is a much safer and fun activity, don’t you?” says the Totalitarian.

Just then a policeman appears. “What’s going on here?” he asks.

“Ah, well he’s smoking drugs, but I told him to stop it, and they were going to do some anti-social binge drinking, but luckily I put a stop to that too” says the Totalitarian, beaming with pride.

“No,” says the copper. “I mean, what are you lot doing in here? This pub shut down 6 months ago.”

Sigh.

Mark Littlewood needs to resign from the Liberal Democrats in order to take up his post as head of the Free Market think-tank, the IEA.

Mark is a former Head of Communications for the Liberal Democrats, and a proper classical liberal. He was director of Liberal Vision, a think tank that campaigns for low tax, small state and greater personal liberty within the Lib Dems.

His great strength is in his media nouse and contacts. During our last party conference, Mark was able to get considerable air-time for Liberal Vision.

Personally I’m happy he’s going on to bigger and better, and I’m sure the IEA will be happy with the media clout they can get from Mark. At the same time though, what next for Liberal Vision?

The possibility that it will take on a more traditional Lib Dem structure (with an elected executive and all that sort of thing) has probably increased, and that’s probably a good thing. Liberal Vision needs to be much more than a think tank if it’s going to make a real difference to Lib Dem policy.

I am privileged to present a guest post by Dr Belinda Brooks Gordon, whom I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with about a month ago. She had done incredible work doing research and studies on the sex industry, and is here exposing the Government’s figures on Trafficking for what they are.

While Harriet Harman was sneering in her Labour Conference speech at women who model topless, some of us were quietly going through the statistics used to back up her more disproportionate and dangerous policies1, and now her latest whim: the termination of Punternet.

Trafficking figures are used by Harriet, the Home Office, and prohibitionist groups like Eaves/POPPY or OBJECT to support the criminalisation of punters:

“In 2003 a Home Office study on organized crime markets estimated that there were 4,000 women in the UK who had been trafficked for the purposes for exploitation” (Equalities Office Press Release)

The same figure of 4,000 trafficked women is now popping up everywhere, being used to support prohibitionist arguments, even in the recent Joint Committee on Home Affairs.

This seemed a suspiciously large figure given the evidence from the majority of academic, medical, health outreach sources. Given the vested interests in ramping up the trafficking figures, by organisations on the government’s trafficking payroll, by the government itself to hide poor immigration housekeeping, and most insidiously for the seizure of sex workers’ hard-earned assets, I was sceptical.

After 9 months and 2 FoI requests the Home Office finally sent this report ‘The impact of organised crime in the UK: revenues and economic and social costs, and criminal assets available for seizure’. It relies on three sources. The first is a 7yr old article in The Times, a report by Eaves/POPPY called ‘Sex in the City’. The third is Punternet’s British cousin McCoys British Massage Parlour Guide.

The Home Office report is based on such flawed methods as to be worse than useless, most of the figures are fabricated. While the authors use an apologetic tone and many caveats to excuse the poor data and high margins of error, Ministers, MPs and prohibitionists have seized upon figures as if they’re based on reality.

It makes me wonder if Harriet can read and write. It is beyond parody. It is like “Carry on Criminology”. If it wasn’t so tragic that women’s lives and savings are raided as a result of it, the poor methods would be funny. Now Nick Davies has taken up the cause, with his excellent piece on Prostitution and trafficking.

Why is it so bad?

1. The Home Office report states The Times article “reported an estimated 70 walk-up establishments” (p16). The article doesn’t mention walk-up establishments at all, let alone 70 of them. Rather, it states that: “Albanian gangs control about 75% of prostitution in Soho”. The Home Office report then takes its fictitious 70 and multiplies it by 6 on some wild assumption that 6 people are working in every walk-up. (The most I have ever seen in 15 years researching the sex industry is 2 – with one working, one maiding).

2. The report makes wild guesses:

“where reliable reporting not available it was necessary to use ‘best judgement’ to form assumptions” (pii).

No mention of how the judgement made.

3. It takes the flawed document Sex in the City, which relies on hoax calls to parlours, to be the most reliable evidence it could find! Yet a similar report by the same organisation had already been discredited by academics and practitioners in an Academic Critique of Big Brothel (one that had Ms Harman’s office telephoning in panic for authors to remove The Equalities Office from the critique).

4. Not only are hoax calls ethically problematic, they do not give brothels a chance to clarify misunderstandings so are likely to yield inaccurate information.

4. Wholly unrepresentative estimates are based on London before being ‘scaled up’ by the Home Office to rest of the UK. London is markedly different to small towns like Worthing. Scaling down would make more sense.

5. The Home Office uses patently untrue statements and then bases figures them. For example, it assumes that everyone foreign working in a walk-up flat is trafficked:

“Assumptions concerning flats, saunas and massage parlours are based with CO14, and researchers assume that all foreign workers in walk-ups are trafficked”.

This is not only racist but, if that were the case, why didn’t the police at Charing Cross (where CO14 is based) remove every foreign worker from every walk-up in Soho like they did in Pentameter operations?

6. Using McCoy’s Sex Guides and the Punternet website is a poor method of counting – it is the equivalent of trying to count the number of books in circulation using publisher’s adverts and literary reviews. But even their methods are more sensible than Eaves or the Home Office. (see also Anthology of English Pros http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/exposed-the-home-office-dodgy-dossier-on-sex-slaves/#more-321)

7. Sex in the City claimed that 25% of women were from Eastern Europe and 31% from the UK and Western Europe yet coded women from Italy and Greece as coming from Eastern Europe. This would artificially boost the Eastern European percentage. Gross errors in data entry meant that some ‘ethnicities’ were coded as ‘mixed race’ or better still ‘exotic’. It admits that: “erroneous nationalities/ethnicities were identified across 33 London boroughs.” (p17). The funniest bits in the Eaves’ study is a graph on ethnicity spikes at ‘International’ as the commonest ethnicity!

As one campaigning sex worker put it when she read the Home Office report:

“Let’s face it, the only hard data in the entire discussion about trafficking EVER are the Pentameter figures of 255 trafficked people (TOTAL including domestic labour) and some cases aren’t through court yet, AND the revenue streams recorded in Eaves’ online accounts”

Ordinary sex workers are equivocal about punter sites, some think the sites useful so punters know the business is genuine and they are as far from trafficking as things can get. Others are not so keen, one sex worker put it.

“I get a great deal of business from Punternet… and buying into the Harman theory that the provision and exchange of punting information must be intrinsically bad is simplistic and blinkered in the extreme. But I don’t agree that so long as you good business from Punter sites, then telling the world what whores get up to sexually is ok and simply marketing. I don’t like reviews simply because I don’t like men who think it’s ok to brag about how good/bad their shags were for all to know. It’s tacky, degrading,  and  most often a breach  of trust. After all, we whores don’t write ‘reviews’ on clients. What we offer is confidential – so why not expect and demand same confidentiality back?  That’s what we did 10 – 15 years ago. Before PunterNet. And somewhat we survived and did good business then too.”

Rather different reasons from Harman’s.

My own view, in the Price of Sex is that criminalising clients is wrong in principle and dangerous in practice. For all her frothing at the mouth over ordinary punters, Harman will not listen to ordinary (ie active) sex working women and to my knowledge has refused to meet with any of the real sex worker organisations so far, preferring second hand information from those who have received money from her department.

While I respect Harriet Harman in other ways, it is well known by academics and grassroots organisations IUSW and ECP that she is pursuing the criminalisation of punters with a missionary zeal unrivalled by Tony Blair in the rush to invade Iraq, and making ordinary sex working women’s lives a misery.

1Try clauses 13 to 20 of the Policing and Crime Bill, for starters