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BBC NEWS | Education | Toy weapons help boys to learnA new government report urging teachers not to stop boys playing with toy weapons has been sharply criticised by the NUT and the NASUWT. NUT General Secretary Steve Sinnott said that the problem was that toy weapons “symbolised aggression”. Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT decided to play it safe by deliberately misconstruing the advice: “I do not think schools should be encouraging boys to play with toy weapons.” — the government advice is ‘not to stop them’ — which is hardly the same thing.

I have to declare an interest at this point (actually, two interests). As the West Midlands fencing captain, I’m clearly not one of those people who believes that playing with weapons creates aggression. Actually, one of the most common faults in a particular kind of beginning fencer is that they have far too much aggression, and have to learn to focus on control. The other is a story from my childhood. As good Guardian-reading left-of-centre intellectuals, my parents decided that I should not be given a toy gun (my mother tells this story repeatedly to strangers, so I have no qualms about sharing it here). All went well up until the age of two, when the girl across the yard (we were living in Todmorden, West Yorkshire) asked me what I wanted for my birthday. “A gun”, I replied without any hesitation. As of that birthday, our house was never without a toy gun, although my life took a significant upturn when I made a wooden sword for a Sunday School play at the age of five. The sword was immediately taken off me when I arrived for the rehearsal - apparently the instruction that all the players should make and bring their own swords was countermanded by a higher authority - and I was given a cardboard sword with gold paper on it. However, the wooden sword was returned to me, and, when we moved to Stechford the following year, enabled myself and my sister to gain a place in the Rosemary Road cul-de-sac gang of under 10s when we fought off the other children in the street on our first day, all of whom had plastic swords. I digress, though.

The house I live in now contains two epees, six foils, one sabre, and a collection of broken blades which I haven’t yet got rid of. Strangely, neither the gun at the age of two, nor the wooden sword at age five, nor the fencing weapons that lurk in our hallway and odd corners of the house, nor any other toy or sport weapons before or since have ever led me into becoming an aggressive or bloodthirsty person. Competitive, yes. But you can be competitive playing chess, draughts, noughts and crosses or even (as experienced this Christmas) Uno.

The government’s report is actually no more than the common sense which (I can’t believe I’m writing this) readers of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have been urging on us for years. It’s in the same train of thought as last Christmas’s big hit: The Dangerous Book for Boys. “Boys will be boys”, as the saying goes, and there is a level at which they need to be allowed to be.

Don’t get me wrong on this. I’m not going right wing, and I certainly have no intention of taking out a subscription to the Daily Telegraph. But there is a point at which, as liberals and democrats, we need to look again at the politically correct consensus which (perhaps) we ourselves have contributed to: weapons do symbolise aggression. But do they make boys more aggressive, or merely symbolise an innate or natural aggression? The NASUWT suggests that letting boys play with guns is gender stereotyping. Well, perhaps. But it certainly wasn’t for me, as I had no access to the kind of gender stereotypes that promoted guns. There were no guns in the house, no picture books of guns, we didn’t have a television (it was 1968), and I’d never even heard of the cinema.

At the end of the school day, boys slip further behind girls in the UK, and have been doing so year on year for more than a decade. It’s particularly apparent in deprived communities.

On the precautionary principle, perhaps we just need to stop doing the things that stop boys being boys. Or, at least, in a liberal and democratic way, be open to the possibilities.

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK should outlaw paying for sex

After endless amounts of backwards and forwards discussion, Harriet Harman is considering “banning” prostitution. Her reasons are something I applaud - to reduce the sex market, thereby decreasing the profits of sex-trafficking, and moving towards eliminating the modern slave-trade.

Actually, though, ‘banning’ is something that patently does not work as far as what is generally referred to as ‘vice’ is concerned. The American experiment with Prohibition of Alcohol is invariably cited as the case in point. On the other hand, the solution recommended by the English Collective of Prostitutes - to legalise building-based prostitution, as has been done in New Zealand - has also been proven not to work. In Amsterdam and across Belgium, building-based prostitution has been shown as the best of all worlds for people-traffickers. Their victims are out of sight, easy to control.

This sounds like the counsel of despair. If banning doesn’t work, and if legalisation doesn’t work, we are almost at the point of saying that we are living in the best of all possible worlds - and what a terrible world that is.

Some solutions, have yet to be tried. It has been hinted at in radio interviews, but the best solution is to target the clients. Any kind of restrictions on sex-workers invariably results in more pressure by pimps and traffickers on illegal immigrants. The threat of law is used against the victims. What’s more, those involved in semi-consensual sex, which is most prostitutes, can only pay the fines that are currently dished out to them in magistrates’ courts by engaging in more prostitution. Targeting the clients, on the other hand, goes (as the Inland Revenue say) ‘where the money is’. There are at least three kinds of prostitutes: trafficked women, semi-consensual prostitutes, and (most often heard on the radio) prostitutes who choose to do what they do. There is only one kind of client: men who want sex, and are prepared to pay for it. The experience of research in Belgium is that men are unwilling to distinguish between the three kinds. Target the clients, and the market reduces.

However, this approach can only be pursued if routes are created out of prostitution for those who want to exit the trade. This is not only for trafficked women. There are plenty of semi-consensual prostitutes, working to pay for drug-habits, or because their economic situation is one for which they cannot find another solution. We don’t (as yet) have sufficiently integrated paths out of drug-use. Any way out needs to be carefully constructed at a local level to provide drug rehabilitation, dental treatment (almost always essential for drug users), training for employment, social housing, and more. This can only happen if we commit to it as a society: far too often initiatives of this kind are held back because ‘ordinary’ people (or their local political representatives) say that they don’t want public money to go on helping people out of their own bad choices to this extent. It’s the same argument that says that teenage girls get pregnant in order to get housing benefit. True, or not? Hard to say. But irrelevant. In a civilised society, we need to invest in people’s lives to bring them back into mainstream society, no matter how they fell out of it. If we are not willing to pay the price, then we must accept that we will never approach an answer to human trafficking.

Which makes all of us guilty.

Nick Clegg’s victory by a little more than 500 votes out of 41,000 cast demonstrates just how strong both candidates were. Both Nick and Chris ran excellent campaigns, and both put forward strong cases. Nick’s victory is well-deserved, and he will now take the party forward with strength and vitality. He defeated Chris Huhne narrowly, but he stands head and shoulders above the likes of Gordon Brown and David Cameron. With Labour on the run on the back of scandals with donations and the loss of data disks, the ongoing uncertainty around Northern Rock, and with David Cameron suddenly in trouble and looking very vulnerable on his own local-party donation scandal, this is an ideal time for Nick to pick up the ball and run with it.