Showing the Red Light

Apparently the Vicar of Downing Street wishes to help the harlots and publicans precede him into the Kingdom. "I'm not tolerant of the view that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world and there's nothing we can do to reduce it," said the Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart. Ministers, we are told, "want better access for women to health checks, drug treatment and housing and to make them safer from violent attacks;" but the colleagues of David Cameron's new speechwriter and other voices of the people are unlikely to tolerate for very long the idea of taxpayers' money being pumped into the support of women of ill repute. "The police are expected to be encouraged to set up safe houses and other schemes to help the women involved get out of the trade." The Home Office has no authority to do more than encourage, it seems - at least when it comes to helping rather than punishing. Mactaggart told the Guardian newspaper that "it was wrong to regard those involved in prostitution as sex workers". Wrong, doubtless, in the sense of immoral as well as that of incorrect. Since there is little doubt that prostitutes are involved with sex, it must be the word workers that causes the problem. Prostitutes cannot be workers, because sex for pay, unlike every other activity done for pay, is not work. "Prostitution blights communities," so it cannot be work. Work - real work - is praiseworthy, desirable and profiteth one and all. A cabinet minister or other advertising executive is a worker. A prostitute is merely a blight. The reason for this is simple. Prostitution equals vice equals drug trafficking: "The Home Office estimates 80,000 people are involved in the vice trade and 95% of those working on the streets are using heroin or crack." Therefore, "Men who choose to use prostitutes are indirectly supporting drug dealers and abusers." Well, men, women and children who choose to wear certain brands of clothing are indirectly supporting slave labour, but I am not aware that the Home Office plans to outlaw designer labelling. It seems a little paradoxical that the party which has sold itself to Rupert Murdoch and its country to the Project for a New American Century has suddenly developed a "zero tolerance" itch to cleanse the streets of a particular type of commercial transaction. Tough measures are needed to tackle the markets for prostitution, it appears. It isn't often that New Labour decides to get tough on a market, but in this one it has picked a worthy adversary. Rather than pander to mere modernity by overhauling the country's half-century-old prostitution laws, the male sex instinct and the female business instinct are to be amputated forthwith and laid chastely upon the altar of post-Blunkett moralism. Anticipating the May elections, in which Labour can presumably expect another pounding, the minions of St Anthony have discovered a new abstract noun on which to wage yet another Murdoch-propitiating war.