The dishonest campaigning which took place prior to the UK’s EU membership focussed on cheaper food, cheaper wine and hassle free travel for a foreign holiday. They were very careful not to be too precise about what ‘ever closer union’ actually meant, just as they never explained that our laws would be subordinated to laws made abroad.

Another thing about which the authorities kept quiet was the eventual opportunities the Federation would have to indulge in secular moralising about prostitution. It would have been much more honest if the Common Market had been presented as the Common Everything or if the public had been told that they should vote for one big new country called Europe.

We are living in the same world as where Cameron says everyone should speak English and then cuts ESOL funding… 😦

I have to differ from Mary and say I prefer the NZ arrangements. As with Prohibition, criminalisation is a gift to organised crime. If is far better to have strict controls and address the well-being of then workers.

Also what are you trying to say with your Googling Stockholm and Escort-that you think there must be nearly 5m prostitutes in Stockholm? That you think the strategy of criminalising Johns has caused prostitution to increse? I’m a little confused by that.

Prostitutes should not be criminalsied at all. They already are working in dark alleyways at great danger of violence by thier ‘clients’. They should be helped and offerd drug counselling and training. The men who use them should be criminalised. You mention Wright and Sutcliffe. They were both regular visitors to known red light areas and were known to the police. If they had been locked up they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did to those women.

Even if women in prostitution aren’t directly trafficked and held at gunpoint, many of them do not choose to do it and the men who exploit their desperation should be called out-the stigma should be all theirs whereas at present it is all the prostitutes’. The age-old double standard.

Despite the issue of trafficking being forced to the top of many agendas in recent years, only 127 persons were confirmed by SOCA as trafficked in the 18 months leading up to last September 30. Of these, only 68 were on sexual grounds, or rather less than four per month across the whole UK. This compares with a sex worker population generally estimated as well into five figures, usually around 80,000. This would be the legislative equivalent of prosecuting all supermarket customers on the basis that some of products were sown, harvested or processed by trafficked workers.

All research points to the fact that attempts by the legislature to impose its mores on the sexual decisions of adults are ineffective and very expensive to the state in terms of criminal justice resources. When determining whether or not to have sex with another consenting adult, whether or not this involves the exchange of money, there is, alas, a general tendency not to refer to the statutes. Stockholm + escort = 4,780,000 results in 0.12 seconds.

Then, of course, the laws are positively dangerous, driving sex workers into the dark alleyways where they are more vulnerable than ever and where the Stephen Wrights and Peter Sutcliffes of this world can do their worst. This will be just as bad, whether it is the sex workers or their clients, or both, who are prosecuted. Except, of course, there are far more clients, so it will presumably require far more criminal justice resources.