In response to Caroline's call for UK residents to contact their MP, I wrote an email to my MP asking him to oppose the proposed changes.
The substance of his reply was as follows:
...The acts of buying or selling sex will remain legal but new measures aimed to deter people from paying for sex, in order to reduce demand will be brought forward. The Government plans to create a new offence of paying for sex with someone who is under the control of another person who will profit financially. New measures would also allow kerb-crawlers to be prosecuted for a first-time offence. My concern, however, is that new legislation is not the answer and that the Government’s proposals will not protect the most vulnerable victims. I believe that the Government has a duty to uphold existing legislation more thoroughly, before it introduces yet more legislation.
The number of people convicted or cautioned for the existing offence of kerb crawling has dropped from 1,998 in 2002 to 1,431 in 2006 whilst convictions for trafficking for sexual exploitation fell by 40 per cent last year, from 30 in 2006 to 17 in 2007. Indeed, former Home Office Minister, Fiona Mactaggart, warned that the new offence will be unworkable in practice.
In particular, we [the Conservative Party] would introduce a number of practical measures to deal with the problem of women trafficked into prostitution:
- Establishing separate interviews at all airports for women and children travelling alone with an adult who is not a parent, guardian or husband, to identify potential victims;
- Ensuring that each police force and local authority has a strategy for dealing with suspected victims of trafficking;
- Focusing on maximising the use of places in safe houses for trafficking victims, and revising the regulatory framework so that 16-18 year olds can be admitted to the Poppy Project.
I think there have been very few times in my life where I could say that I think the Tories are onto something. I despise the Conservative Party and just about everything they stand for, but I do respect my MP as someone who takes seriously his job as a representative of the people in his constituency. It is certainly encouraging to see that the wrong-headedness of the New Labour policy is understood by MPs.
I am stunned. I was reading the MP's response and nodding along and gasped when it came to the bit where it said "We, the Conservative Party". Like you, I despise the tories, but wow, what an eye opener that they may be on to something here.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I filled in [the Conservative Party] because my MP is a Tory and it seemed like this was a statement of Party policy (compared to his previous 'I' comments). I am used to seeing copy-pasted policy statements in MP's replies, so it seemed logical.
ReplyDeleteHate to say it, but this is why I've always been a Tory.
ReplyDeleteCaroline: it's worth remembering that it was the Tories who in 1979 dumped the Williams Report into sexually explicit media because it made the radical recommendation of not banning any of it, just restricting it to adults-only viewers. They don't exactly have a great tradition of upholding sexual freedoms either: for example, the Conservatives voted against the repeal of Section 28 (which banned schools from teaching homosexuality as acceptable), they voted against recognising transsexual folks as their acquired gender, they voted against allowing same-sex couples to adopt.
ReplyDelete(Incidentally, my MP actually rebelled against the majority of Conservatives on the first two - his personal record on gender and sexuality issues is quite good)
This is why finding them on the sex-positive side of a debate is actually quite surprising to me and Sakura.