Jacqui Smith is not interested in the welfare of prostitutes

 Telegraph.co.uk

By Rowan Pelling
Last Updated: 4:16AM GMT 01 Mar 2009

There are many aspects of prostitution Miss Smith failed to mention

These are desperate times for the Labour Party, and desperate times call for policies born of utter desperation. Thus our Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is tough on brothels and tough on the causes of brothels. The causes being punters - the nasty, low creatures! - rather than, say, poverty and pragmatism, or lust and loneliness.

Prostitutes and their clients make an easy target, and the world of commercial sex supposedly has no interface with decent, hard-working, middle-class voters.

How quickly we forget Cynthia Payne and the Luncheon Vouchers! So Miss Smith gets to portray herself as a feminist superhero, swooping in as the saviour of fallen women, who are all too drug-addled or oppressed by wicked men to have any say in the matter.

But here are some inconvenient truths the Home Secretary didn't mention. Britain's 80,000 sex workers are a very broad church.

Their numbers include highly paid dominatrixes of the sort who featured in the Max Mosley court case and an increasing number of students who find themselves victims of Labour's underfunded higher education policy and soaring living costs. Women trafficked from abroad account for only 1.1 per cent of the sex trade.

There are also thousands of male and transsexual prostitutes, but you won't hear nanny Smith banging on about them because they're harder to label as "vulnerable".

Nor are punters necessarily the pervs of cliché. One recent study found that they tended to be unmarried, employed men who were in dire need of human contact and were no more likely to have criminal convictions than any comparable cross-section of society.

If the law is changed to give councils greater powers to shut brothels, more women will be forced on to the street and down the dark, dangerous alleyways where their customers won't fear arrest.

Furthermore, the criminalising of kerb-crawling "as a first offence" will, in effect, create a new "Sus" law whereby police can apprehend men on the slightest pretext. Members of families of the murdered prostitutes in Ipswich do not believe this is the best way forward; nor does the English Collective of Prostitutes, or the International Union of Sex Workers.

They believe we should adopt New Zealand's model, which enshrined sex workers' human rights and protected them from exploitation. But then their main concern is not pandering to the vox pop, but the safety of sex workers.

• Jacqui Smith (yes, her again) was outraged that Conservative conference delegates have been sent a booklet promoting Birmingham that included a discount voucher for one of the city's lapdancing clubs. She said: "I'm a proud West Midlands MP - and believe me, Birmingham has a lot more to offer than that."

Yes and no. Two years ago I found myself on a weekend conference in Birmingham and there wasn't a lot to do. The city lacks the fabulous waterscapes and visionary regeneration that have lent other British industrial cities glamour.

We were all feeling glum and there was just one last chance to save the city's honour. So a Brum native spearheaded an expedition to, er, Spearmint Rhino.

• One way to inject magic into a city is to commission a mechanical Chronophage (a fantastical time-eating beast with the teeth of an anglerfish and the body of a voracious locust, since you ask) that sits astride a vast golden clock. This is what Corpus Christi College, in its wisdom, has done for Cambridge.

Last Saturday my family and I sat on the pavement on the corner of Benet Street and King's Parade with 50 or so other spellbound onlookers. Oxford may have fictional magic with CS Lewis, Tolkien and Pullman, but we in Cambridge have the real thing.