Prostitution and safety

Today's piece is rather a grim one. The most unlikely setting, the small city of Ipswich in Suffolk,has become the focal point of the national news because 5 working girls - the conventional euphemism for prostitutes - have been found murdered within the last 10 days. The small Suffolk police force, shocked and overwhelmed, now accepts that it is dealing with a serial killer of,presumably, prostitutes, but every woman in the area is now living in fear. (The picture below shows Gemma Adams and Tania Nicol, two of the murdered girls)



The news compels one to look at some pretty grim statistics with regard to the murder of prostitutes in the United Kingdom - they don't make pretty reading. Since 1992 over 100 girls working the streets of the United Kingdom have been murdered. Compare this to the vice capital of Europe, Amsterdam, where the number of working girls murdered over the same period is 15. Hundreds more women simply disappear off our streets, their fate never discovered.

There are a multitude of reasons for this but many of them boil down to one thing - social attitude. 'The Guardian' newspaper did an investigation into violence against prostitutes four years ago - not just murder, but beatings, rape and the like - and found that the average 'man in the street' doesn't care about the fate of these women. 'Most of 'em are asking for it', 'They've only got themselves to blame' and 'If they weren't selling themselves they wouldn't get hurt' were some of the attitudes - so when a prostitute is reported missing or simply disappears, who cares? The newspapers don't and it would seem that missing prostitutes come pretty low on the police scale of priorities too - until they turn up dead.

It is a strange irony that the home of Orange religious zeal has developed one of the most tolerant and successful relationships with its working girls, granting them tolerance zones where they can work in a reasonably safe environment under limited police protection, compared to the squalid street walking in dark, poorly lit streets that are the domain of Britain's prostitutes, the girls frequently moved on by a police force ever conscious of the need to remove the stigma from our streets.

The girls here are pariahs, with little protection and little sympathy when they get into trouble, and the situation is tailor made for the kerb crawling anonymous sadist and possible killer who can pluck single lonely girls off the street with no questions asked.




My City Council, for once amazingly enlightened, approached the government for permission to open the first vice tolerance zone in England in an area away from residential streets and where the girls would have access to secure accommodation and medical facilities but it was turned down by the Government as 'appearing to encourage immoral conduct'.

One of these days a British government is surely going to have to face up to this issue. Prostitution is as old as humanity itself and will never go away. (There is a nice touch of humour on the board advertising church services at the Oude Kerke in Amsterdam's red light area which says 'We are the second oldest profession in the city') and as long as British society continues to treat these women as social pariahs and pretend they didn't exist, rather than face up to the fact that these are very vulnerable human beings who are exposed to great danger, then we will continue to have working girls murdered, raped, beaten and 'disappeared' at a rate which should shame a civilised country.

Replacing Trident - another victory for poodle politics?

So Tony Blair and his (presumed) certain successor have announced that Britain is to spend up to £25 BILLION (pounds) on a replacement for the Trident underwater missile system which has been the mainstay of our nuclear defence capability since 1980 as a successor to the old Polaris missile system.



One has to ask,regardless of one's particular view about independent nuclear deterrents, why? We cannot launch them without American permission and so any military engagement involving the use of Trident missiles would never go ahead without American active participation. OK well assuming there are grounds for the use of such missiles, we are a poor country compared to the US, so why don't we just allow big Uncle Sam to look after us when such occasions demand and save the bread - its a lot of money for a nation which needs new hospitals, improved social service care and a whole host of improvements to our infra structure - for which £25 billion would go a fair way.

OK I can see the argument against. Because we need to hold our heads up in NATO. Because we have committed to be part of the western alliance shield. Because that means paying our way. Well OK that's a good argument if you accept the status quo.

Frankly I would like to see Britain pull out of NATO, strengthen our European political ties and become a driving force behind a European Defence Force on which we can spend a reasonable amount of military budget on areas which we can justify as being within the European sphere of influence - but it's a pipe dream. It will never happen, certainly not under Blair or Brown.

So what are the circumstances in which such expenditure is justified from within our current political and military alliances, forgetting any personal preferences. Do we see this system being used against China maybe? North Korea? I don't really think so. There is precious little evidence that the Chinese see Britain as a front line target for nuclear attack. Russia? Well certainly President Putin is behaving in a very Imperial fashion at present but I don't see the scenario of another nuclear stand-off as in the cold war days. As Ian Hislop dryly pointed out this week on 'Have I got News for you' it appears that the Russians have developed a more subtle way of spreading radiation throughout the United Kingdom. The situations in which we have been militarily involved in recent years would certainly not involve the use of Trident nuclear weapons and it is hard to envisage a scenario where such is likely.

So on what rationale was this decision reached? Tony Blair promised last year that the whole issue would be debated in Parliament before any decision was reached, then hey presto, on Dec 4th Blair announced that the Trident system would be replaced and that the decision had been made. This is not the first time Blair has misled the British people but presumably this decision was made after the recent trip to Washington when the Americans told him that he could consult all he liked but the British would continue to pay their nuclear way, like it or lump it.



The truth is that Britain is so dependent on American good will that we are in an unbreakable noose. British Prime Ministers can waffle on all they like about independent deterrents and free and open debates but we are tied to the American nuclear programme for as long as the Americans want us to be.

'Ethnic minorities' - as discredited a term as 'coloureds' ?

Matthew Parris, a writer I admire, made a good point in yesterday's 'Times', that the term 'ethnic minorities' is used in the UK as an 'acceptable' way of grouping together all those who are non-white. In that way, he argued, it is a 'nice' way of justifying the compulsion to group all non white Britons in one statistical bag. Because it is a twee and convenient tool of government and the media it is just as offensive, in a covert sense, as 'coloureds'

After all when used to describe social problems here it doesn't usually refer to the Poles, Alabanians, Romanians, Australians and other groups of caucasian racial type who live here but to the Afro Caribbeans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and black Africans who make up maybe 10% of the population of our inner cities. It is a term based on colour and not on genuine ethnic diversity.





And so Parris is right. It makes little sense, except as a polite tool to avoid accusations of racism, to continue to encourage the use of this term. The needs of people from an Afro Caribbean culture are vastly different from those from the Asian sub continent - and within that area, different religions and cultural observations apply and thus different requirements for each community.

As part and parcel of nation building, lets start calling all these people British and stop this breakdown into whites and others no matter how neatly we parcel it up. Certainly if something report worthy happens which for which a person's cultural background plays an important part then its probably fair to mention it in the press.

I would like to see Government documents stop referring to our 'ethnic minorities' as a catch all and either, if it is deemed necessary, pinpoint the culture to which the report refers or better still, refer to us all as 'British'

Blowing a dangerous raspberry!

The super story of the day is of the American Airlines flight which had to make an emergency landing at Nashville Airport after the smell of sulphur burning was detected in the cabin. It transpired that a woman passenger, embarrassed because she had 'broken wind', tried to hide the ensuing smell by frantically lighting matches - presumably, in her distress, forgetting that smoking is banned on flights these days.

How awful that must have been for her and it made me think of the social stigma we attach to the perfectly natural act of farting and the lengths to which people, particularly women, are driven to avoid the embarrassment of such things.

There is an apocryphal tale of the young lady who, full of nerves before a big date, realises that her stomach is full of gas just as her boyfriend rings the doorbell. Unable to remedy the situation before her mother has let the boy in she resolves to hold on desperately until he ushers her into the passenger seat then, with perfect timing as he slams the door, let fly with a ripper and thus ease the problem. She thinks, inside the darkened car, that her plan has worked perfectly until her boyfriend gets in and draws her attention to the two friends sitting in the back seat!

Such stories are legion and it makes one wonder whether, in this modern era of social graces we may not be doing ourselves some gastro intestinal damage by worrying too much about about this sort of thing. Maybe we would be better going back to the days when wind at both ends was the sign of a healthy exhaust and to hell with what the neighbours thought!

A gay day for 'The Archers'

Britain's longest running radio serial, 'The Archers' has long been thought of as the solid heartbeat of the nation. Broadcast now for an unbelievable 55 years every night of the week, clocking up an incredible 15,000 episodes, it always reflected everything that was 'good and decent' about British values, somewhere that the population could retreat to as an escape from the world that was rapidly changing outside.



When I was a child my mother listened avidly to 'The Archers' - termed then a simple everyday story of country folk. The main characters were farmer Dan Archer and his loyal wife Doris and their son Phil - now the oldest surviving character. When his story-line wife Grace 'died' in a fire in one of the episodes way back in the 50s, the BBC was taken aback by the emotional response. Hundreds of wreaths were sent by listeners to the 'funeral' and it was the first time that the BBC chiefs realised how closely and personally listeners identified with the happenings in the show and how easy it is to blur fantasy and reality.

Its theme music, called 'Barwick Green' has been played, virtually unaltered, since episode 1 and is recognised by every generation of Britons as 'The Archers' music even if they have never heard the show.

Three years ago the Archers broke new and very risky ground. The programme introduced a homosexual couple into the show, a relationship which, of course, would have been illegal all those years ago when the show began and something which the scriptwriters would never have dared attempt without some clear idea that the attitudes of its once deeply conservative listeners had changed.

Next week, new ground is broken when the show features its first gay wedding, the episode on 14th December celebrating the civil union between the two men.



Shows like 'The Archers' do more than any Government polls or statistics to determine the changing views of a country because the BBC keeps an anxious eye on listening figures and listener reaction to any sudden shift in social attitudes. Hardly anyone has complained about the relationship, 'The Archers' is still the most listened to serial on radio and nearly 3/4 million people listen to it over the internet. The scriptwriters have been brave enough and bright enough to infuse new and challenging social dynamics, rather than allow the programme to fester as a Britain of bygone dreams - and more power to their elbow for doing so!

Ya want spies with that?

Next week the United States is to launch its latest addition to the War on Human Rights by allocating a secret code to every air traveler to the U.S. The ratings which will be used to subject people to further interrogation and maybe even arrest - with no evidence of any wrong doing - are to remain secret for 40 years, cannot be challenged by the people under surveillance and cannot be even viewed by them.

The new scoring system, called the Automated Targeting System is the latest brainchild of America's Department of Homeland Security and gives even those of us who love our friends in the United States the distinct impression that, with regard to security, the U.S. is becoming paranoid to the point of wacky.



Among the elements used to allocate a 'score' to people who, remember have no criminal convictions and no history, include their travel records, where they are from, how they paid for their tickets, their car records, their seating preference, past one-way travel and what meal they ordered.

I can see the regular tourist flights from the UK to Orlando being a lot of fun in future.

"Hey, Marvin, we got some real baaad shit goin' down here. Send some backup. There could be trouble! We got a guy scored zero"

"What did the guy dooooo? Why he only sat through the whole goddam flight wearing a straw hat, a Hawaiian beach shirt and those ugly shorts the Limeys wear, that's what he did! He's gotta be a terrorist. Like Jeez man no real Brit has THAT much bad taste!

"No, no that ain't all! He ordered a chip butty! I mean like fuck, thats some Islamic crap ain't it? Whaaaaatt?? OK OK smartass so that's a chapatti. Well shit, man they sound the goddam same!

"Then when the flight attendant refused to serve him any more lager, he slapped her on the ass and yelled 'Bloody 'ell - two ferrets in a sack!'

"Thats gotta be some terrorist code right? I mean shit, its obvious theres two guys waiting and they're up to no good, right- ?"

...and I fear that the interminable queues to get through US Immigration will become so interminable that the end of your vacation will arrive before you make it past those first grim faced officials who welcome you so enthusiastically to the United States and kick your holiday off with that nice warm glow! Personally I think I'll go to Blackpool next year!

The greatest sporting challenge - and how to survive it.

OK I'm English and I'm biased but I have always felt that the greatest raw sporting challenge, the greatest test of character and of 'bottle' that man could ever face is in the white hot arena of a 5 day cricket test match ...and no other conflict matches the atmosphere of the biennial Battle for the 'Ashes' - the historic series between England and Australia - as the supreme example of that. A test not just of ability, but of patience, stamina, mental toughness. All these qualities have to be displayed to get the edge, to drive home the psychological advantage. Two nations with a love/hate relationship going back of course to the founding of Australia as a prison colony and the consequent reminders of that by Englishmen to Aussies ever since. Fortunately the 'hate' part usually confines itself to the sporting arena when a nation of charming wonderful people suddenly leaves Dr.Jekyll behind and becomes Mr.Hyde, players, supporters and particularly the Australian media pouring scorn and derision on everything English.

Cricket is not the nice, afternoon stroll that non participants sometimes fondly imagine - not at the supreme professional level anyway. Australians, particularly, are past masters at the art of psyching out an opponent, playing mind games, unsettling the opposition even before the game starts.

There have been some colourful characters in the game over the years and one legendary fan was a a guy named Steve Gascoigne, a passionate Australian, known to the locals on his favourite 'taunting spot' the Hill at Sydney Cricket Ground, as 'Yabba'. He had a loud and well projected voice and his favourite occupation was to taunt English batsmen. There are many comments attributed to 'Yabba' but one of his most famous is when a celebrated English batsman was struggling for form against an Aussie fast bowler, playing at and missing the ball regularly. 'Yabba' was heard to shout in a big booming voice 'Oy Ray, chuck the bastard a grand piano. Lets see if he can play that!"



If its tough for the players what about the armchair fans? Especially when you are in England and the series is played in Australia. The games start at midnight and continue until 6.30am UK time. Its a nightmare. How can any true fan go to bed while this gladiatorial contest is being played out live on his television screen?

I have discovered half an answer -though its not totally satisfactory and leaves me feeling drained in the morning. Sleep for a couple of hours before the game starts then watch from Midnight to 2am or 2.30am - the lunch break in Australia. Catch another hours sleep and come back fighting for another 2 hours, then have another nap and repeat the dose until 6.30. Over the last leg you need plenty of hot coffee!

At least England has started this game better than it began the one in Brisbane. Lets hope its not a false dawn and the result is still the same embarrassing shambles. Whatever, this stiff upper lipped Englishman will be there in front of his TV set, eyelids propped open with match sticks, foaming hot coffee at the ready, cheering our lads on!