martinturner.org.uk

BBC NEWS | UK | Harry withdrawn from Afghanistan

Prince Harry is being withdrawn from Afghanistan. But Britain stands a little taller in the world for two reasons. First, he went there - not on a PR visit, or to encourage the troops, but as a soldier. Second, as much as possible, the establishment kept it secret. There was no attempt to harness Harry’s military service for publicity purposes. At a time when, with the Diana inquest running, the establishment might have jumped for some good press (though, in fact, the spectacle of Al Fayed making his accusations has rather neutralised the whole thing), but, instead, it chose to do things discretely, protecting the lives of troops, protecting the integrity of Harry’s mission. Good for him, and good for them.

Anybody who thinks carefully about these issues can find lots of reasons why Harry shouldn’t have gone. It was a risk. It didn’t achieve a great deal, since he was only one officer, it handed a media coup to the papers willing to break the embargo. But forget all that. At an emotional, human level, someone who didn’t have to risk his life did so, because he wanted to. Because he is brave. Because he shares something with his comrades. Because he has the strength of will to go through with what he started.

What a stinging rebuke - all the more powerful for being unspoken, perhaps unintended - to George W Bush, who avoided going to Vietnam when others with less influence were forced to go, but later made great political capital of leading the free world into the endless quagmire of Iraq.

Do you have to agree with war to be impressed by Harry? No, you don’t. Actually, most people, including me, did support going to war in Afghanistan. It made military sense, it was a direct move against the powers that sponsored 9/11, and there were strong humanitarian reasons for doing so. But even if you didn’t support that war, you have to be impressed.

The royal family has been bruised, battered and (I would argue, by the media at least) badly treated in the last twenty years. In Britain we seem to take a savage delight in tearing down our national institutions. Let us all note: they have in them that which still inspires men and women.

Harry is returning from Afghanistan.

Britain stands a little taller in the world.

Let us then, for one week, forget our national cynicism, and give him a hero’s welcome — not because his life is worth more than another soldier’s, but because in welcoming him, we praise all those who risk their lives in far lands on our behalf.

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.

BBC NEWS | Education | Law challenge to Gore school film
A father from Kent is challenging in the courts a DfES decision to send copies of Al Gore’s Oscar winning film on Climate Change to every secondary school in England. ‘An inconvenient truth’ is, by its nature, a political film, but DfES points to a clear scientific consensus on global warming (more…)

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Warming ‘already changing world’
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, due to be published today, will make the case that of 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world, 85% are consistent with a warming world.

I met some Americans recently who put forward the view that global warming was still an unproven phenomenum. They were not trying to advance a political agenda — it was just that this is what they understood to be the balance of scientific opinion.

Ten years ago, it was probably legitimate to say that the jury was still out on climate change — although the likelihood was far greater than that of an asteroid hitting the earth, which was something that NASA was actively investigating at the time. Five years ago you had to be fairly stubborn if you wanted to maintain the view that it wasn’t happening. As of today, it is, in many respects, the most likely thing in the world.

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BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iranians release British sailors

During the Iraq war, amid all the tragi-comedy of Comical Ali and the daily briefings which got further and further from any sense of reality, most of us overlooked something which should have been the key to our Middle Eastern future. It was something very simple: every day Saddam Hussein could take his pick of any one of his ministers able to give a briefing in English. Neither Britain nor the USA was able to put up a single minister or military leader who could brief Al Jazeera or any part of the Arab press in Arabic.
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Today is Freedom Sunday, 25 March 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and the focus of a new generation of campaigners against the modern slave trade. It coincides with the release of the film Amazing Grace recounting the life of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a politician who became an evangelical Christian and then dedicated his life to a programme of social reforms, the most famous of which — and at the time the most unpopular and controversial — was the abolition of slavery.

Wilberforce stands as a powerful example to both Christians and to politicians. But it was not the example of Wilberforce, but direct contact with human trafficking, which brought me into politics.
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Nobody can now claim that any part of the war in Iraq has been anything but a disaster. The invasion based on faulty intelligence, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the inability of Western powers to extricate themselves militarily. The one bright star — for war apologists — was the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein. Echoing Nuremberg, the trial was to demonstrate the absolute justice in Hussein’s removal from power, and, by extension, the rightness of the American cause.

The jury may well still be (paradoxically) out on the quality of justice during the trial. We should not forget the lawyers who were murdered for defending him. Saddam Hussein was certainly an utterly despicable man. This does not justify flawed justice.

However, the manner of his execution, and the subsequent attack by Mr Maliki on Westerners who have dared to question it, has demonstrated that, in the removal of Saddam, we have not advanced Iraq. Rather, we have handed over power from one ethnic group to another. True, Mr Maliki is no Saddam Hussain. But, equally, he has now publicly stated that he does not want to continue in his job, and that he would stop early if he could.

Even in Mr Malki, though, there is a chilling tone of totalitarianism: “The decision was implemented after a just trial which the dictator did not deserve as the crimes he committed against the people, the country and its institutions were disgraceful,” he said. As soon as we deem one class of criminal to ‘not deserve a fair trial’, we have abandoned the most fundamental principle of modern jurisprudence: that all are equal under the law.

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | ‘No Saddam link to Iraq al-Qaeda’
Finally, three years after the events, the US has admitted that there was in fact no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Bush’s axis of evil is now proved to be what we have said all along: nothing more than an axis of Bush family unfinished business.
Nobody would deny that Saddam Hussein was a bad man.
Nobody is denying that the Iraqi people would probably have been better off without him.
But, equally, no-one can seriously claim that our and the American’s adventure in Mesopotamia has done anyone any good.

Saddam Hussein is now standing trial for the deaths of 100,000 Kurds in 1988. By 31 August this year, the campaign group Iraq Body Count put the total number of reported civilan deaths in Iraq at between 39,171 and 43,846 (Iraq Body Count). But even by October 2004, a study in the Lancet suggested that there were 100,000 extra deaths in Iraq. Both the UK and US governments have admitted that the chaotic situation in Iraq makes it impossible to gather information accurately.

39,000. Or 44,000. Or 100,000. Or more.

What price freedom?

See BBC NEWS | World | Europe | World marks Auschwitz liberation

My next door neighbour was an Auschwitz survivor. His name was Abraham, and in the camp he was put on the night shift of forced labour. He survived - he said - because the guards were too tired to beat the prisoners. At one point he was so hungry that he climbed a refuse pile to steal a rotten apple. The punishment beating he was given for this crime was so severe that he suffered from back problems until the day he died.

Abraham was one of the lucky ones. He survived. Every other member of his family was killed.

It’s easy for we who were born years later to think of Auschwitz as something very distant. From time to time people even express irritation about Jews ‘banging on about the Holocaust’.

Perhaps it would be time to forget if we had — as a world — learned the lesson of history. But we have not. After the Holocaust there were the Gulags. The Killing Fields of Cambodia. Rwanda. Kosovo. Darfur. In hope, we still sometimes look back to the Holocaust and say ‘never again’. But it would be truer to say ‘never before’. Because the Holocaust did not end something, it began it.

We may have a UN convention on genocide, but we have not eradicated it. If anything we have institutionalised it. ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ has entered our language.

My friend Abraham died ten years ago. Like all those who endured such things, he could not forget.

As long as such endure, we must not forget either.

See: Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Police chiefs say no to red light ‘toleration zones’.

Red light toleration zones seem such a good idea. After all, they have them in Amsterdam, and everyone knows that the Dutch lead the way in a happy, liberal society with low teenage pregnancy and freedom for all. What’s more, any discussion about sexual politics always ends up with someone pointing out that things get worse if you drive them underground.

But myself, I couldn’t agree less. You see, I’ve lived in Holland, and I’ve worked with victims of people trafficking and the sex industry.

There is simply no way of organising the sex trade that makes it anything other than sordid. Although it’s always possible to find individual sex workers who boldly proclaim that they chose their career themselves and wouldn’t have it any other way, the broader facts speak all too clearly.

Statistically, you are far more likely to find your way into prostitution if you have been in care as a teenager, or if you have suffered child abuse. Among other studies, background to this is available in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation / NSPCC study Choice and Opportunity Project: Young women and sexual exploitation. In that study of 55 13-18 year old women, 39 had been in care or looked after by the local authority.

A very high proportion of people who are trafficked in Europe (read ’sold as slaves’) end up in the sex trade. Street prostitution is dangerous and humiliating for those who practice it, but building based prostitution is the real power base of sex traffickers - it is simply so much easier to coerce, intimidate and imprison in those circumstances. Legalised brothels in Amsterdam, and tolerated establishments in Belgium, have merely given the traffickers a safer and more defined market. A particularly disturbing report into the trafficking of children into the UK can be found here: Children - what the professionals know

But tolerance zones for street prostitution don’t help either. The control mechanisms that pimps use don’t depend on the legality of what sex workers do. The Home Office estimates that 95% of people working on the streets are using heroin or crack. The introduction of tolerance zones will not benefit these workers.

But what are the alternatives?

The Association of Chief Police Officers vice strategy, published today, is especially to be welcomed because it favours setting up safe houses and exit schemes. This is perhaps surprising coming from police chiefs, since in local situations it is often the police who favour Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and other penalty based approaches to tackling prostitution. From a police point of view, legalising brothels and tolerance zones would get the problem off their books. Exit schemes are a much harder — but better — approach to take.

Their new strategy perhaps reflects the realisation that the current practice of fining girls for soliciting only puts them back on the streets with a need to earn more cash fast.

But there is one legislative approach which has met with some success where it has been tried. Instead of fining the girls, fine the customers. One of the subtle and insidious degradations of the UK sex trade is that while sex workers are seen as dirty, cheap, and reprehensible, their clients are often able to continue respectable lives as business men, politicians, even senior policemen. Who has the most to lose by the threat of the courts? The clients. Who do financial penalties most put off repeat offending? The clients. Who is most threatened by their names and pictures appearing in local papers after a successful conviction? The clients.

It is a reflection of the nasty double standards that persist in the UK sex industry that this approach is often rejected at the local level. It appears that key figures veto it without giving any reasons.

You don’t have to think about it for very long to work out why.