Fuck Business

Aside from those obliging fillies who are hired to keep the members up at snort-and-snigger gatherings, the Conservative Party does not generally approve of prostitution. Everything else may be for sale, from the prime minister's time to the National Health Service; but prostitution implies the double dangers to civilisation of extramarital sex and working women. Any imputation that government policy might be forcing women onto the game must naturally cause insult as well as injury to the sensitive souls at the Department of Whore Promulgation. Hence a recent memorandum to the work and pensions select committee shrugged off the idea that the Government's filleting of the social security budget was forcing women into sex work, and instead blamed drug addiction, the internet and the European Union, in accordance with traditional Conservative Party wisdom. However, a flunkey has now been dispatched with an apology, so perhaps someone in the Cabinet has been briefed about women, even fallen women, getting the vote some little time ago. Similarly, last month's report by the UN rapporteur, which went so far as to imply that taking resources away from poor people tends to make them poorer, has been faintly praised as "factually correct" by the senior civil servant responsible for depriving children and families. The outraged screeching with which Amber Rudd greeted the report was merely the measured and justified response of a sensitive soul to "the political interpretation of what's happened," namely the ludicrous ideological dogma that Her Majesty's Government might somehow or other be responsible for the consequences of its own policies.