Posts Tagged ‘Jacqui Smith’
STREETS BEHIND: What happens with UK kerb crawling law
IN THE WEE hours of the morning here in the UK at present, Channel ITV3 hosts a programme known as ‘Nightwatch with Steve Scott.’ On at least two occasions recently, this has featured the strange shenanigans of the Nottingham vice squad, as they chase around after street prostitutes and punters for loitering and so-called ‘kerb crawling’ in the city’s red light district.
As an example of unctuousness, Scott leaves little to be desired, the whole series being an unquestioning, uncritical endorsement of the fine actions of our boys and girls in blue.
Two police officers – Andy Coles and his partner Dav Singh – steal the limelight in Nottingham, lying in wait in plain clothes in their cars waiting for punters to strike up liaisons with the ladies of the night, then following the couples to catch them in flagrante in parks or down back alleys and render their coitus well and truly interruptus.
“That’s outraging public decency!” they cry, above the sounds of hasty rezippings and background traffic, before blinding their embarrassed captives with references to sections this and that of whatever Act.
This, then, is how Nottingham’s police officers spend their time. And it may go some way to suggesting why this city, once renowned for its lace, is now regarded by many as the crime capital of Britain, recently ranked No 1 in England for murders, burglaries and car crimes by action group Reform.
It has twice the violence of the English average, four times the burglaries, and some three times the sexual offences and car thefts, a position that has predictably left the authorities there in a state of denial.
So let’s ask a few questions that need asking – (as Steve Scott would be the last person on earth to think of them). Read the rest of this entry »
Home Office unites feminists in condemnation of itself
IT WAS a collection of people one would not normally put together unless one aimed to start World War III.
In the one corner were representatives of the English Collective of Prostitutes and the UK Network of Sex Projects, in the other the Poppy Project (which rescues London’s ’sex slaves’) and ‘Object’ - the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells etc’s campaign against lap dancing clubs. All of them females, I imagine all feminists, together epitomising the division in feminism over something the rest of the world knows as prostitution, but which, even with UN help, they could not possibly get as far as even agreeing the terminology for.
That was the scene for the first session of the parliamentary committee inquiring into the Home Office’s latest perpetration, known as the Policing and Crime Bill. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Smith’s New Plans Won’t Work – Criminalising the Clients (Part 1)*
As you may have read, UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has laid out new plans aiming to “tackle the demand” for prostitution in the Government’s new Policing and Crime Bill, the Second Reading of which is due on January 19, 2009.
Centrepiece of a variety of measures is a plan to criminalise clients of prostitutes ‘controlled for gain’ by a third party with fines of up to £1,000, ostensibly in a bid to counter Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation (HTfSE). A ’strict liability’ offence, ignorance by punters of prostitutes being controlled will be no defence. What you may not have read is that merely arranging a booking will be an offence – no sex need to have occurred.
But there are good reasons to believe the scheme will be counter-productive to Smith’s intentions, and constitute the latest in a line of Home Office own goals in the area of prostitution stretching back nearly 125 years. In this case, it will further endanger genuine HTfSE victims by making their discovery far more difficult. Read the rest of this entry »
