Spinning the war on the UK’s sex trade
Comment The British Government plans to make it illegal to have sex with a prostitute if said tart has been trafficked, or is being controlled. Nor will this crime will be limited to offences committed in the UK - it will apply to what British men get up to wherever in the world they may be.
Now I'm a classically liberal type, and I'm naturally against the criminalisation of something that no society has ever managed to extinguish. But leaving that aside, I think this is a great example of how law is now made. Stir up a fuss, lie repeatedly, change the definitions and then do what you wanted to in the first place anyway. Just as they did with passive smoking and pubs.
Start with a certain view of human sexuality, that all male purchases of sex from women are part of the oppression of women. Thus this is an activity which must be made illegal, or as illegal as the society at large is prepared to allow us to make it. While most don't go as far as I do in lauding the liberties of consenting adults, most are also aware that it can be the very illegality of an activity which causes some of the problems associated with it. A straight ban (aha, aha, for the way the law is drafted it doesn't cover male from male or female from female purchases) simply wouldn't gather the number of votes needed to pass, so something else is required. What could that be?
