Already this year's 60th anniversary celebration of European peace and love - Eurovision - has pulled off a cunning and super smart move. It has invited Australia to participate.
I know, I know, normally accidents of geography would ordinarily preclude the Aussies from entering. Then again, who in 1955 could have thought the contest would eventually end up being won by a bearded lady?
As far as I'm concerned, this is a master stroke. And as everyone knows, All That Is Solid ... is the only leftwing pro-Eurovision blog there is, so of course I'm going to endorse this move. Eurovision's audience in Australia is larger than many European countries. Depending on who you take as good coin, between 2.7m and 2.9m viewers down under tuned in to watch Conchita Wurst steal hearts and votes of the Eurovision-voting public. And lest we forget that there was a lovely little skit about Australia dragging itself across the globe and planting itself on Europe just so it can enter.
This is brilliant fan service, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. However, it's pretty clear that it's going to be an anniversary one-off (well, until the 70th, the 80th, the 90th, etc.). The only problem - what happens if Australia wins?
It's reds under the beds time! Or rather in the newly insurgent Green Party. According to today's Mirror, "hard left activists" have flocked to the Greens. Natalie Bennett has been forced to deny that significant numbers of former Socialist Workers Party members have been signing up, though the paper notes "her own partner is an ex-SWP stalwart". They omit to mention that his membership ceased well over 10 years ago. It also notes with shock that the Greens are now taking a leaf out of Syriza's book - "the anti-austerity message seems more important to the party than its green roots these days – Ms Bennett barely mentions the environment once in our interview". How dare the Greens not conform to the tree-eating, muesli-hugging stereotype! In all, if this was a red baiting attack then the party comes out of it rather well.
I don't know, red baiting remains an occasionally-spotted beast in our declining press. The Daily Mail (who else?) are its main exponents, using Marx to smear the CofE (and Ed Miliband), attack the UN's special rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, and - again - Ed Miliband. The question is ... why bother?
Generally speaking, British attempts to whip up McCarthy-esque hysteria have always fallen flat. No matter how scary the Cold War got, being a card carrying member of the official Communist Party was not always a barrier to "getting on" in life or the labour movement. Indeed, in some workplaces it was a positive boon. The CPGB for much of the post-war period fostered a network of militants, conveners, and trade union full-timers. Workers prepared to follow their communist conveners out the factory gates, or to support CPGB-endorsed candidates in union elections were hardly convinced of the burning necessity of socialist revolution or, as per the party, The British Road to Socialism, but they knew communist trade unionists tended to get the job done. They were backed because in many workplaces they were the best fighters for workers' interests. That and few would forget the terrible sacrifices made by the Soviet Union in our wartime alliance against the Nazis. Red baiting tended to cohere anti-communist solidarity among sections of the bourgeoisie, bits of the small business-owning class, and various bits and bobs of middling layers. The great mass of workers were indifferent because for all the baby-eating that went on at CPGB Sunday afternoon socials, party activists were very handy when it came to securing wage rises and getting your job back.
As the labour movement withered and declined, the CPGB evaporated into pressure group irrelevancy. Yet for many hacks, like the ignorant unfortunates that penned the above, British newspaper audiences remain studiously stubborn in the face of red baiting. And that's because it belongs to the past. It's been nearly 25 years since the Soviet Union consigned itself to the history books and, later, Wikipedia. The preeminent bearer of the red flag these days is China, a country better known for capitalism with Chinese characteristics than anything else. Cuba, whose sun, sand, and socialised medicine has helped evade any attempt to make it into a credible bogeyman; and these days few in the media bother branding the grotesque monarchy of North Korea "red" or "communist". Indeed, for it to work it depends on the general population having a political understanding of a certain level. As well over a third of those living right now on this sceptered isle were either too young to remember or weren't born while the USSR was still knocking about, it's not likely to have much of a purchase here. Indeed, some might venture that socialism's starting to look a bit sexy again thanks to Greece and the association of the Greens and SNP with anti-austerity here. Red baiting, which has never worked anyway, is all set to be entirely counter-productive too. So if you think you're helping Labour, Daily Mirror, just pack it in.
I don't know if you can be an unrepentant ex-anything, but by way of a foot note I am an unrepentant ex-Trot. My four-and-a-bit years in the Socialist Party taught me loads about campaigning. I also learned a great deal about how not to do things too, but overall it was a positive experience and helped make the Stakhanovite hero of socialist erudition I am today. Those experiences are part of me and I will never apologise for them, nor should any socialist whose been to Trotland and back. The Mirror is wasting its time trying to "expose" green lefties - stick to the Tory bashing and the Slender Man/black-eyed children stories.
Regulars round these parts know I'm not a fan of Tony Blair. I don't think much of his record in office, though I do recognise his legacy was more complex than Iraq and neoliberalism with a smile. Nor was I too enamoured of his new year interventions, which were widely read as a pop at Ed Miliband. If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all in my humble opinion. Well, a month on and there's been a bit of a volte-face. The Observer this morning reported on a reconciliation between the offices of the former and current leader, with Blair apparently happy to do whatever the party requires of him in the general election campaign.
Most fellow lefties would probably say thanks but no thanks to that, but there are still plenty of Labour Party members and supporters that do like him. Whisper it, even a few trade unionists do too. And outside the lefty echo chamber and the frothing comment boxes of The Graun and Telegraph, there are still some people broadly supportive of Blair in the real world. Tory journalists might scratch their heads with faux puzzlement as to why Labour's most successful leader makes many party members come out in a rash, but there will be voters who don't follow the ins and outs of politics who could well be thinking the same thing. For every vocal anti-Blair hater, there is likely to be a few more quiet folk happy to give him time.
Making use of Blair in the election campaign, of weaponising him, might therefore not be as daft as it sounds. But how? Former leaders are always tricky to deploy. They threaten the reopening of old controversies, and could grab the limelight from the current leader. It's always best to keep them in the background in a supportive, auxiliary role. At least so goes the received wisdom. The participation and handling of Blair however is doubly complex and tricky. Labour's immediate problem is not the drift of its voters over to the Tory camp as per "normal" elections but the fracturing of its coalition, as per Scotland and, to a lesser extent, the Greens. Blair's not likely to assist with the job of winning softer voters among these groups back to Labour. The same goes for bits of the working class vote that abandoned Labour before 2010 and are now happy to vote UKIP.
How to make use of Blair? By treading very carefully. Were I in charge of the campaign, there are three possibilities that come to mind. The first would have him do various pro-business-type events already on the campaign grid. Again, the claims Labour's manifesto will be anti-business is idiocy straight from the 1992 Tory playbook. Nevertheless, there are some centre/centre rightish voters who aren't necessarily politically clued up that might be swayed by nonsense of this sort - I'd draft him in to support Chuka Umunna on occasion, and front the odd business-focused fundraiser. Having Blair publicly endorse Labour's Keynes-lite policies could help out in the odd marginal and rebut this silliness. That brings me on to the second. This depends on the whims of the media of course: setting up interviews where Blair puts the Blairite case for voting Labour. These would be moments in the campaign, talking points for commentariat, and are bound to attract wider coverage. They're not without their dangers, however. He might go off-piste and a savvy interviewer could use it to score points/open controversies. Best get Andrew Marr in, then. Lastly, Blair should hit the campaign trail, but only in specially selected constituencies. A few south east marginals, perhaps the Scottish borders, the odd seat that turned Labour in 1997 and only went back to the Tories in 2010, here a bit of Blair visibility might assist and win over the waverers.
This begs the question, why does Blair want to help? According to wiser heads than I, this is all about positioning. Alan Milburn and John Hutton caused a minor stir with their comments about Labour's NHS policy last week. I'm all for retro and nostalgia, but their prescriptions for more markets - sorry, "choice" - were something of an unwelcome throwback not at all related to Milburn's post-Parliamentary career as a private health consultant. Understandably quite a few Labour people were peed off, not least in the leader's office itself. Therefore Blair's return, if it can be called that, is a way of throwing off any stigma of disloyalty by mucking in. That way any post-Miliband leadership candidate most associated with the Blairist tradition, which is looking increasingly like Liz Kendall should we not win come May, will not be tarred by the treachery brush.
Maybe that, or perhaps Blair as a party member would just like to see Labour win.
No, the blog hasn't been hacked. That really is the headline.
It's there because I'm going to have a bit of a moan. This did the rounds among fellow lefties on Twitter the other day:
Ho, ho, ho. What a hoot! Isn't Sarah Palin utterly stupid? No wonder the Republican Party is fucked, etc.
Funny ha, ha, indeed. Except it's bullshit. An exemplar of the moronic degeneration of the American right to be sure, but she didn't say it. 30 seconds with your search engine of choice would have established that. As Snopes notes, this is from a "satirical" website that churns out wannabe memes of right wing blowhards mouthing lunacy about vaccines, guns, Obama's secret Muslim/communist conspiracy, etc. This stuff then gets picked up and circulated as good coin. After all, no one any more can be arsed to do basic fact checking, even if we risk getting it wrong.
Then there is this one which circulates every time a #webackEd/#CameronMustGo-style Twitter storm takes off.
This, again, is utter bullshit. IBS is particularly loathsome because he dresses up his Dickensian social security policies in the garb of Christian concern for the poor. The quiet man is also a spiteful and mean-spirited little man. Yet he didn't punch the air when Dave announced a freeze on welfare payments, his fist hit the sky with the announcement of the raising of the 40p income tax threshold. Don't take my word for it, here's IBS doing just that at the 25:49 mark.
I can understand why people would happily pass this meme off as good coin. It would be entirely within the Tory character, that thinks a princely dole handout of £71/week and not lack of jobs causes unemployment, to do so. Yet someone went to the trouble of going through Sky's footage of the speech, taking the cap, and giving it that lying spin. I suppose it's safe to assume that whoever did is not a Conservative, and chances are they're somewhere on the left. Just because the Tories are awful and have caused much suffering in their self-defeating class war doesn't mean we should be lying about out opponents.
Lefties lying is a real bugbear of mine. Whether it's fibs bits of our movement tell ourselves, like Left Unity/TUSC are on the verge of doing a Syriza, that Blair won in 1997 because he was uniquely gifted, that Stalin was merely misunderstood, misrepresenting the positions and distorting the arguments of opponents ostensibly on the same side, lying about comrades and/or yourself to make you look good/advance yourself, or weaving great big fat ones about the words and deeds, personalities and policies of political enemies, it's irritating and counter-productive. Maybe I am naive. I expect the right to lie because their bottom line is defending the indefensible: entrenched privilege. The left, from the weakest pink to the deepest red, doesn't: it's about something else. Whether your perspective is limited to a few reforms that make life better or expansive enough to envisage the root and branch change of entire societies, your case cannot be built on falsehood. Whether a simple reform or something more ambitious, politics rooted in the labour movement are about building things. Prosecuting the interests of our people requires a politics constructed from sturdy materials. Anything less is a recipe for disillusion, or the path to you're-just-like-themism.
Remember that next time you tweet a dodgy-sounding meme, or about to spin a lie for whatever political purpose.
Yesterday we talked about a specific example of catastrophe. Today I want to discuss something else, so open the Book of Revelations and settle down to some heavy doom: we're talking what Mark Carrigan calls the sociology of civilisational collapse. For Mark, what is absent from political discourse and social commentary is a sense of our collective mortality. We are imbued with a sense of our biological finitude (despite the best efforts of some), but "officially" society expects to live forever. Governments and institutions plan for decades in advance. Even the quaint habit of sinking time capsules into the foundations of buildings betray a sense that someone will be around to open them in centuries to come.
Sociological readings of apocalyptic scenarios abound (here's me on zombies. And again), but as Mark notes popular cultural texts, and even less sociology, deal with the descent into decay itself. Books/films/TV like The Stand and Outbreak see the evisceration of humanity by plague. In the former it's what plays out after that matters whereas the latter has Uncle Sam's lab-coated finest saving the day. In The Terminator series human societies disappear under CGI mushroom clouds. Breakdown scenarios, of society sliding into formlessness are around, such as the original Mad Max and the upcoming Walking Dead spin-off set during the emergence of our brain eatin', flesh rottin' friends, but all too often social dislocation and disintegration is identified with outright criminality and lawlessness. It's always the return of the Hobbesian repressed, of the nasty and the brutish.
What Mark contends then is "if some general philosophical propositions (the epistemology of civilizational collapse) could be explored through an analysis of fictional representations (the representation of civilizational collapse) to shed more light on the character of social processes (the sociology of civilizational collapse)?"
There are a huge load of questions that must preface a venture into speculative sociology, however. What, for instance, constitutes a civilisational collapse? Nazi Germany on the one hand was the collapse of civilisation considered in Enlightenment terms, and yet there were plenty of social continuities with what went before and after. Did the demise of the Soviet Union constitute a collapse, despite (especially) the continuity of elites between the old system and the restoration of capitalism? Wherever individual freedom is tightly circumscribed at present and in the future, is an excess of authoritarian collectivism, be it concentrated in the state as per 1984 or dispersed as per The Borg congruent with collapse? Or does a civilisational collapse require the physical liquidation of social relations via the deaths of large numbers of people? Even then, that in itself is no guarantee. Consider the awful 2012 for instance: billions die but civilisation persists thanks to mega arks stuffed full of the super rich and their hangers on. Or how, in societies that have suffered catastrophe, such as the collapse of the state in Somalia, the Rwandan genocide, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, the collapse of institutional order doesn't necessarily mean the collapse of social order.
Therefore theorising about collapse has to take into consideration is the durability of social relations. At certain levels of abstraction, sociology assumes the durability of social relationships because they have proven to be just that. There is social change, but the - on paper - precariously balanced division of labour with its innumerable interdependencies has not just survived, but has thrived economic shocks and world wars, and has spread itself across the globe. The social substance is elastic and tough, I'd wager, because on the one hand capitalist societies are constituted in their production and reproduction by irreducibly antagonistic relationships, and on the other human beings cannot be anything but social, meaning-making beings in the Goffman mode who, in turn, constitute/reproduce social structures as per Giddens and Bourdieu. It's also worth noting that crisis tendencies are organic to capitalism, that each of its myriad points of tension are pregnant with destruction and creation, of enculturation and barbarism. In other words, while there are precedents from history of civilisations coming and going, none have attained the level of social complexity and productive prowess as our own. Fundamentally speaking, the Romans, the Mayans, the Hittites, and the Babylonians were static societies. The advanced capitalist, industrial societies of today are dynamic and fluidic. They have momentum that might carry them through a huge disaster, or allow them to adapt to real and imagined threats posed by climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and so on.
Where then has this exercise got us? Declinism, disorder, and threat are dialectically inseparable from their opposite. We are a society that lives among its ruins while throwing up the new. It's nigh-on impossible to isolate trends toward a collapse when, at anyone time, they stretch in all directions and are constantly rewritten, overwritten, strengthened/weakened/abolished/renewed. Existential threats present themselves not as portents of doom but profit-making opportunities as cultural leitmotifs to be exploited, and technical challenges to be met.
None of this is to say that a sociology of civilisational collapse is a waste of time. Why should the forecasting of social trends be left to science fiction, conspiracy-types, and apocalypse junkies? Yet our thinking must always be prefaced with the durability of relations, the fact they always carry the seeds of crisis within them, and the irreducibly social character of human beings as a species.
As an ex-Trot, I've got previous when it comes to looking at reality and laughing in its face. I've been running through those memories ... hope that the far left might work together constructively ... that a new workers' party was a go-er ... that the paper I used to sell was improving ... in preparation for the much-trailed Ashcroft polls of select Scottish constituencies. And? Put it like this. I chuckled at the numbers his fieldwork has turned up because the alternative was sticking my head in the oven.
They are bad, really very bad. Of 14 Labour-held seats polled, the party is set to lose them all bar one to a SNP tsunami. We're not talking marginals here either. Take West Dunbartonshire, which is typical of the Ashcroft sample. At the 2010 general election Labour's Gemma Doyle romped home with 25,905 votes, or 61%. The SNP trailed far in second with just under 8,500 to their name. Fast forward to 2015 and it's carnage. If the poll findings were replicated on election day Labour would slump to 38% and the SNP surge to 47%. That's practically unprecedented. Let's wallow in some more misery. Look at Coatbridge, Chryston, and Bellshill. The Labour incumbent Tom Clarke has represented the constituency and its predecessors since a by-election in 1982. In 2010 Labour support in the seat increased giving him a majority of almost 21,000. Yet on the basis of the polling, it's as if it never existed. Labour are presently on 43% while the SNP have powered through to a 47% reported share. Across the board the SNP support is not just in double figures, we're talking monster swings in the 21%-27% range. It's almost obscene.
As Ashcroft himself notes, he's not saying this will apply uniformly across Labour's Scottish seats. He after all picked out Labour heartlands where the Yes vote was at its highest. He's also not in the business of forecasting. As he says, it's a snapshot, not a trend. Speaking of which, how is that looking?
Unless the entire SNP is implicated in a huge scandal, or are seen to be doing dirty deals with the Tories it's very difficult to see how Scottish Labour can pull enough irons from the fire. This is despite the Herculean campaigning efforts of Jim Murphy and his attempted shake-up of the party.
This, of course, has been a long time coming and it's not a uniquely Scottish problem. Too many constituency parties have become rotten boroughs beholden to awful cliques of mutual backscratchers. These have been the party to - and occasional victims of - stitch-ups, internal ructions, incompetence and, in some cases, criminality. The key difference between Scotland and the rest is the process is even more accentuated. When you have Scottish Labour MPs seriously thinking having fewer than a hundred constituency members isn't a problem "because we win anyway", then they are the problem. (At this point, it's worth remembering the Prince That Never Was, David Miliband, bequeathed his successor a contact rate of 0.5% - still think he'd do a better job of steering Labour through extremely choppy waters?)
Activism is not a magic bullet, but it does help enormously because regular campaigning narrows the distance between politics and people. Politics matters more, however, and Scottish Labour has long been a basket case. As Labour in England and Wales took baby steps toward a more recognisably social democratic policy platform - one many times removed from what is needed, but still infinitely preferable to the Tory alternative - Scottish Labour was stuck in a time warp. From at least Wendy Alexander on the party was frozen in time. The suits, the policies, they were all a bit 1997. The election of Johann Lamont, who ran as a quiet leftist, saw the nonsense redoubled. The Blairite common sense of the perennial unpopularity of "traditional" Labour politics saw Labour triangulate to their right, as if a left-tacking SNP insurgency would go away simply because their dogma said so. This culminated in the absolutely awful Labour-led Better Together campaign. I don't think it was Alastair Darling's readiness to share platforms with Tories that did for Labour (and I'm not saying that because I have a soft spot for Ruth Davidson) but rather the fact the campaign was almost entirely negative and self-serving, offered Scottish voters nothing but scare stories, and were seen to be lining up with the Tories to screw Scotland in the event of its independence. Would you want to vote for a party guilty of that?
This doesn't happen in a vacuum. This was only possible because political parties generally speaking have been emptied of the people that once animated them. With the labour movement defeated in the 1980s and systematically ground down by Tory and New Labour governments since, it's small wonder that Labour appears remote from people's lives, that much of the politics on show are antithetical to the interests of those the party was set up to represent, that people from working class backgrounds are underrepresented in Parliament, and the state of the left in Labour is shocking. The only consolation is the Tories are in an even more advanced stage of decrepitude.
What can be done? Labour generally and Scottish Labour cannot be fixed before the election. Options are limited. On the plus side Labour is slowly growing, though we're not talking the Green surge, and its troops are out and about. Even yours truly has been hitting the doors in the marginals. Yet what we need is politics. Jim Murphy pretending not to be a unionist isn't going to fool anyone, but shifting emphasis to the left not just on the NHS but on the living wage, education, tuition fees, housing, and employment rights under the theme of security in everyday life might just prevent Scottish Labour from being fatally wounded, and help us recapture some softer Green, SNP, and - yes - UKIP votes. You might suggest I would say that anyway, but I also have YouGov in my corner.
For Labour, these are the worst of times without them being the best of times. The Ashcroft numbers do look incredibly daunting, and with the constant drip-drip of anti-Labour shit-stirring and nonsense in the media it might discourage and demotivate those prepared to go out and help. Which is exactly what Ashcroft and co wants. His numbers are methodologically sound, but they are also an episode in the election battle for hearts and minds. Our job is to note them, adjust our strategy accordingly, and carry on.
What to do about prostitution? To all intents and purposes it remains banned in England and Wales, though an individual sex worker can work out of a property at any one time. More than one and they fall foul of prohibitions against brothel keeping. The situation in Scotland is slightly different as the campaign to make the purchasers of sex criminally liable has made headway but not made it into law, whereas in Northern Ireland such an offence comes into force from June this year. Despite the raft of laws and sanction against it, sex work counted for £5.3bn in 2013 (and contributed to a higher-than-expected EU membership fee, much to the government's annoyance). There's the law and there's the money. There is also the abuse and exploitation of women. Anecdotes abound of young girls and women being forced into prostitution by violent gangs of rapists/pimps. For many women involved, theirs is a bleak experience of being used and exploited. For anyone disposed toward the decriminalisation of prostitution, which is a position I lean towards, we need to look to where this has already happened.
The Mega Brothel, which debuted on Channel Four 7 last night, shines a spotlight on Germany and the Paradise chain of brothels specifically. Prostitution was legalised in 2002. Today, around 400,000 women in Germany - most of them migrants - contribute to a sex industry worth some €18bn/year. The documentary focused on the biggest of Paradise's establishments. Their Stuttgart branch can host up to 150 sex workers at a time and boasts a full complement of kitchen staff, bar workers, and cleaners. It also contains a sauna, jacuzzi, a porn cinema, and rooms decked out in BDSM paraphernalia for clients with more "specialist" tastes. This self-consciously high-end establishment has 50,000 customers a year and follows a core business model similar to that found in so-called gentlemen's clubs. The punter pays a €79 entrance fee exclusive of food/drink and sexual services. For their part, the women are less employees and more independent contractors. Everyday they pay the same entrance fee and, if they wish to stay the night, a €23 bed and board charge. This insulates the brothel from risk. Whether the flow of punters is good or bad, there is a core complement of women it can make earnings from regardless. In addition, each sex worker has to pay the state a €25 flat tax, meaning each woman is €104 down before she starts working.
What is life like working at Paradise? The documentary followed two young women. Josie presented herself as a sassy, good humoured veteran who had done four years in the sex industry. She was attracted by the money she could makes, which is much more than the McDonald's job she held down previously. She considered a "good day" as having 20 clients, but to do that usually requires pulling a 12 hour shift. Josie planned on studying Criminology in her life after brothels, but acknowledges that it's very difficult to do a normal job afterwards because of the money. It's also reveals that she was sexually abused as a child, which she admits makes selling sex easier, and that she has no permanent friends. The documentary leaves her after a three week stint as she departs to look for work at another brothel.
Felicia is a migrant from Eastern Europe and appeared to be tied to Paradise than some of the other women - the cameras follow her around Stuttgart Folk Festival during a rare day off. However, unlike Josie you can tell the work has deeply affected her. At one moment boasting that it is possible to make €800/day if you're clever and canny, at another she's talking about how much she doesn't like sex and that her nerves have been frayed. Felicia grew up in a children's home and was trafficked into prostitution when she was 15 by her cousin. While it appeared this was no longer the case, the film left her in the brothel, seemingly trapped by the debts accumulated to the house during the down times.
The documentary shows us the brothel-keeping side too. The proprietor is Jurgen Rudloff, a well-to-do man approaching retirement age with a nice big house and equally sizeable car. Yet the prosperity masks a big problem. While Paradise is a chain of five outlets, Germany's liberal laws have allowed for a mushrooming of brothels - they're not an uncommon sight in villages. This competition is constantly eating into revenues and putting the business at risk. A great deal rests on their new shop. Sited in Saarbrücken a stone's throw from the border, Jurgen and his manager, Michael Beretin, hope that moves afoot in the French legislature to penalise the purchasing of sex with a fine will tap into a ready market of risk-averse men. However, probably because the Senate backed the passage of the proposed law at the last moment, business turns out to be less than brisk.
If that wasn't bad enough, four of Paradise's five premises are raided by police clamping down on trafficking and pimping. Jurgen denies that any of "his girls" fall into this category, and claims to be hurt by accusations that he exploits women. Yet when we catch up with Tatiana, an anonymous woman trafficked from Eastern Europe, she says many workers, including some who worked at Paradise, were manipulated into sex work by their "boyfriends" who take a cut of their earnings. The brothel is legally sanctified and apparently above board, but it's a screen used by pimps with or without the owners' connivance. And of this there is a question mark. The documentary ends with the news that Michael was among the handful of people arrested during the raid for pimping and trafficking.
What The Mega Brothel does is dispel any libertarian notion that legalisation will automatically transform the buying and selling of sex for the better. On the one hand the women appear to have an ostensibly safe place to work. Particularly in Paradise they are relatively safe from abusive clients as well as police harassment. Yet the expansion of the industry has created a significant market for traffickers and criminal gangs looking to pressgang young women into prostitution. Pimping hasn't stopped because the law on selling sex has been relaxed. There's also a couple of wider associated problems. The effect it has had on the standing of women in German society has likely to be similar to the baleful effects of decades of Page 3. In particular what effect will it have on the attitudes of boys and young men to women? The second is the state now has a definite interest in carrying on. Not simply because of the tax revenues paid over by the hundreds of thousands of sex workers, but should prostitution be recriminalised and the paying of sex similarly proscribed Germany has an instant increase of 400,000 sex workers and those in secondary employment onto the unemployment rolls. Who wants to be the politician seen to add that many to the dole? All of a sudden German capitalism doesn't seem that rosy.
What are the lessons? I am firmly of the opinion that criminalising the buyer buries prostitution even further underground. It may mean less women get caught up in it, but it also puts those already involved even further at risk. As a socialist, politics is about empowering people and making them masters of their own destiny. Criminalising the women who sell and/or the men who buy removes agency from the women and treats them as victims. For this reason I think the best starting point is that favoured by The English Collective of Prostitutes who favour legalisation but, crucially, the right for sex workers themselves to control their work and provide pathways out of prostitution for those who wish it. For example, rather than the German route of creating a market that attracts capital and criminal gangs, there is no reason why a model based on worker-owned cooperatives can't predominate. Will it solve all the problems? No. Will criminal gangs try and find a work round? Of course. And yet this route empowers the workers themselves - they are not chattel bonded to brothels to work off accumulated debts, or as atomised individual contractors competing with one another as per the German case.
This story caught my eye as I was preparing to teach earlier today. The science behind three-person babies is exciting and interesting, and holds the promise of banishing mitochondrial disease to the medical history books. The science, which I don't properly understand as I spent GCSE science tippexing natty doodles on my biology folder, involves removing mitochondria from an egg and replacing it with that from another donor before it is fertilised. Any babies born from this technique effectively have genetic material from three people.
You can understand why the Church of England and the Catholic Church in England are in a tiz about it.
Children are born from a union of a woman and a man, bound together in holy matrimony. Sex is a necessary evil to make babies that can only take place after a church has sanctified a relationship in the eyes of God. Just as same-sex relationships are abominations in traditional/literal readings of the Bible, and sex outside of marriage is also something Very Bad Indeed. Stands to reason that babies made from three parents, of being born not of one woman but two, falls foul of the holy screed.
And yet what's interesting are the grounds the CofE and CCE are choosing to oppose the draft legislation due before Parliament tomorrow. The BBC quotes Rev Brendan McCarthy, the CofE's adviser on medical ethics saying ,"We need to be absolutely clear that the techniques that will be used will be safe, and we need to be absolutely sure that they will work." Then comes a line about having the necessary ethical debates. In what looks like a bit of coordinated messaging, Bishop John Sherrington of the Catholic Church is quoted as saying "No other country has allowed this procedure and the international scientific community is not convinced that the procedure is safe and effective ... There are also serious ethical objections to this procedure, which involves the destruction of human embryos as part of the process."
This is very smart positioning by both churches on this debate. By leading with the scientific uncertainties around the process they make the inevitable theological follow up a bit more palatable. True enough, there are unknowns associated with the procedure - even though the genetic contribution from the "third parent" is a minuscule 0.2% of the resulting embryo's genetic make up. That said on the balance of that figure and a review of evidence so far, the balances of probability of abnormalities resulting from this procedure have to be vanishingly small.
What the churches have done is to seize upon the presence of a third genetic donor and - misleadingly position them as if they're an equal party to the process when they're not. They're relying on the wider public, including MPs due to debate the bill, who are interested/exercised by the ethical questions around fertility and genetic medicine to not be as equally well-informed by the actual science underpinning it. In other words they're spinning a story, quite adroitly, that appears to take up the science but uses that as a draw bridge for the theology to march across. That's fine, the churches are part of public life and should freely voice their opinions on public issues. It's just a shame they feel the need to bear false witness to do so.
Shiver me timbers, a billionaire businessman provides the party for billionaires some much-needed succour by attacking Ed Miliband and Labour as a 'catastrophe for Britain'. Stefano Pessina, the chief executive of Boots says a Labour government would “not helpful for business, not helpful for the country and in the end it probably won’t be helpful for them”. Why's that Stefano? "...." Silence. Nothing. The comment is undeveloped. If the Telegraph were reporting something off the cuff, or a line from a press release, that's just about excusable. This however was a full interview. The hacks pressed him to elaborate but refused to be drawn on specifics. Stefano thereby wasted his opportunity to wound Labour's pro-business creds in favour of unspecified ad hominem. You might say he Pessed his chance up the wall.
To spare his blushes, the hacks were forced to embellish this not-so-useful idiot's comments themselves. "It is exceptionally rare for a business figure as senior ... to be so outspoken so close to a general election." Erm, it's standard. "His intervention is a serious blow for Mr Miliband’s election strategy." How? And there's the standard two penneth worth of nonsense from George Osborne: "This is a clear warning from the head of one of Britain's biggest employers about the economic catastrophe the UK would suffer if Ed Miliband’s policies were put into effect." Funny how a supportive quote is available even before the comments were made public. It's as if the Telegraph's news office and CCHQ are working hand-in-glove.
Who then is this Stefano Pessina and why the hell should anyone listen to him? He inherited the family's medicine wholesales business in 1977 and was able to steer it through various buyouts and mergers to what it is today - the Walgreens Boots Alliance, which comprises of the USA's largest drug chain, Boots, and the Alliance Healthcare wholesaler and distributor. For this his official website modestly describes himself as a "entrepreneurial and visionary leader". What it also fails to mention is that Pessina has a history of what might euphemistically be described as "tax efficiency". As an Italian citizen he has lived in Monaco for decades, created a holding company for the family business and a parallel French venture prior to merging with this British Unichem in 1997. This later merged with Boots, giving him a 15% stake in the firm before another merger with Walgreens. In the process, and following the example set by its boss, Boots has also become a tax dodger by moving its head office (at least on paper) to Switzerland, with supporting holding companies set up in the Cayman Islands and Gibraltar.
Why would a serial tax-dodger who owes the exchequer over a billion quid's worth of tax be suspicious of a party that wants to do more to clamp down on his ilk? I'm stumped. If the Tories want tax-avoiding people like Pessina to back them up then I'm all for it.
In truth, it's stuff and nonsense to claim Labour's policies are "anti-business". Expecting billionaires to pay a little more tax on their income and property, capping energy prices, and attacking some companies for predatory behaviour, you could be forgiven for thinking Red Ed has just announced a state monopoly on foreign trade the way the Telegraph, the Tories, and Pessina are carrying on. Unfortunately, we can expect plenty more tiresome pish between now and the big day.
Most read last month were:
1. Class and Ideology in Sex Party Secrets
2. Top 100 Independent Tweeting Bloggers 2014
3. Why Labour Should Adopt the Citizen's Income
4. Benefits: Too Fat to Work
5. Notes on the Green Surge
A few reflections on that documentary about elite sex parties rose to the occasion, as it were, and pulled the audience numbers in. You're a mucky lot. Yet what's also gratifying is seeing some proper posts looking at ideas and analysing things do especially well. In fact, so well that January 2015 was the busiest month ever for people popping by and having a read. The lesson there to myself and aspiring bloggers is if you write about things readers want to know about, then the rewards will come. The only problem now is my overbearing superego is demanding every month now be the best one ever. Yikes.
As ever a couple of shout outs to posts that didn't make the grade. As the papers are full of a fresh round of attacks on Ed Miliband today, it's worth remembering who the weakest politician in Britain really is. And for the keen watchers of the Stoke-on-Trent political scene which, of course, is all of you, there's my dissection of the City Independents' election manifesto.
