Nobody has more contempt than me for the House of Lords or for cronies of Tony Blair. But I shall not join in the pillorying of John Sewel over his private life. If he wants to take cocaine and spend time with prostitutes that is entirely his own business. Britain’s periodic outcries over private morality are contemptible. There is no legitimate reason why the activities of consenting adults in their own homes should be of concern to the rest of us. Not the least unpleasant aspect is that those journalists and politicians who whip up such witch hunts are for the most part hiding secrets about themselves. That in 2015 we still have not come to terms with the most ordinary sexual desire or formulated a more rational policy response to use of narcotics, is unfortunate.
I expect if I dug around I could find a lot of things to dislike Sewel for, in terms of the policies he has supported. But to attack political opponents over their private lives – assuming the necessary factors of adults and consent – is low.
Thanks for standing up for the rights of sex workers, Craig. There are plenty of SWs everyone here can talk to on Twitter – and organisations worth following like ScotPep* – and they all support decriminalisation.
Criminalisation only pushes the work underground, making it less safe. Only radical feminists, religious zealots and other prudes support criminalisation, and on purely ideological grounds. Criminalisation of SW has zilch to do with “safety” or else SWs in the U.S. would be safer than those in New Zealand, where SWs have taken their managers to employment tribunals and won.
*http://www.nswp.org/members/europe/scot-pep-scottish-prostitutes-education-project
I’ll try again: Sewell is a distraction, to keep us from scrutinising what little we have on the child abuse cases, the files mysteriously appearing only the day after Leon Brittan died, etc., etc. The fact that the Kincora files will only be investigated from Stormont, by a governmemtally impotent investigator who will have no impact on Parliament, where most of the perpetrators come from. Pathetic.
Craig
26 Jul, 2015 – 3:20 pm
“It is an extraordinary urban myth that anything but the tiniest minority of prostitutes are forced in to it.”
………………………………………………………………………………..
You make that statement Craig as if it is fact. Where do you get your information from? I think perhaps you are being a bit naïve.
I got to known scores of prostitutes while working in the “red-light” district of Leeds, West Yorkshire in the 70’s and 80’s.
I can tell you that the vast majority were forced onto “the game” by circumstances beyond their control such as poverty; abusive parents (with alcohol or drug issues) sexual attacks by fathers, step-fathers or the mother’s boyfriends (the mother being a prostitute herself).
Physical beatings and an early introduction to drugs also feature in the mental development of these young victims.
Many of the prostitutes I knew left school without any qualifications – they were the last in the queue for jobs but even then their untreated mental health issues made them unemployable.
Along comes the “pimp” (usually an aggressive and abusive man) to take control of the “business”.
Choice doesn’t come into it in the majority of these women’s lives Craig.
So now this upstanding member of society will, obviously, divorce his wife, or will she divorce him?
Tomorrow morning he will be invited to help police with their inquiries, will he not?
I would have rather seen a proper debate now about the long overdue decriminilisation of all drugs, random drugs testing for pilots, bus/train drivers, drug education at school, the test and grading regulations, the vetting and application of once illegal drugs in the NHS health sector, the adding of these new commodities to the tax regime, George Osborne knows all about Drugs and so does the PM, so expect the tax issue to be discussed first…. generally a debate that does talk of minimising the harm caused by the law and its institutions, a society who has a two faced attitude to drugs must wake up and learn to live with them.
Cocaine deposits have kept banks busy during the banking crisis, according to Roberto Saviano’s new book ‘zero,zero,zero’, his research into the international drugs trade and banking, the extend to which they went to hide/launder billions of pounds.
And by god their traders felt busy and happily blasee about loosing millions, as if they were on cocaine themselves…
Sewell has been shafted, hauled up by his own petard, I have no doubt that the security services have known the whole sting.
He should be fired, not allowed to resign, not for having his private life exposed, but for the sheer hypocrisy of his position, his job and its objectives. Its like the Houses of Parliament are the whores for allowing this two faced regime to exist in this country, for not changing the vast waste of money that is the war on drugs, by not admitting that they have failed on all counts.
I’m with Martha Fernbacks mother who wants drugs to be legalised so we can actually control them, stop people accidentally taking overdoses with a proper education. Martha died due to inexperience, she accidentally took five times the amounts of a normal dose of ecstasy, because she did not know any better, and she died.
I found the Lords attitude to Asian women repulsive, but we don;t know much about the poor man, he probably does not get enough/ no sex at home.
Doug Scorgie: firstly, some sex workers are indeed uneducated, but many aren’t. I know of former SWs who are Oxbridge graduates and have PhDs (Roz Kaveney & Brooke Magnanti are two examples). Secondly, what’s really the best solution to violent pimps – is it a) to make SW illegal, like the heroin trade, meaning that all dealers are criminals & rogues by definition or b) to introduce licenced, regulated brothels where SWs get to take their employers to employments tribunals if unhappy, as in New Zealand? I know which option actual SWs would choose!
I’m with Doug, on the whole. I’d like to see the demographic breakdown between university-educated nice whores and uneducated ones from disadvantaged backgrounds and very little option. I suspect it would be biased, even more than the population at large, towards the latter.
Someone mentioned the good-ol’-days in Soho and the nice old granny counting the takings between knitting and feeding her cat. Sure, the background machinery wasn’t visible. Especially invisible were the Richardson gang, Jewish and Maltese concerns, and the police. Who were notoriously paid by the gangs for their inaction. Until Operation Countryman, one of whose officers I much later knew, and confirmed this. Westminster City Council had little say in the matter.
Why do yo find it weird?
==========
The number of comments that point to repressed and dysfunctional sexuality are telling of the general psycho sexual problems that are apparently/evidently of endemic proportions.
five percent of undergraduates are engaged in prostitution to supplement their income, in addition to student grants!
Does the gubiment take any responsibility for promoting prostitution?
There is a huge amount of “disinformation” about this subject, which is rooted in closing the options of men and forcing them into a corner, to marginalize them because of their genetic coding.
I met a girl whose attitude towards sex was phenomenally empowered, she was more promiscuous than many men I know, and she saw no problems with her conduct. The fact that her boyfriend and others had difficulty in digesting her openly promiscuous conduct only proved the inherent chauvinisms of the so called entitled circle she was moving in.
The oligarchs and plutocrats evidently are not content with keeping we the people on the bread line and busy working 24/7 for pittance, but they want to police our nether regions too, in case we get more fun than these shriveled dick tossers whom need to play games and dress up as well as taking potions injections and nostrums to get a kind of an erection!
I’ve been trying to stay on topic, but some things are more important. Here’s Jeremy Corbyn speaking this evening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECPn36iqPQ
Poor old Sewel – no more responsible for his alloted station in life than he is for his unfortunate name. It’s the usual dirty tricks department at work again – pay attention to this, not that; it’s the sleight of hand practised by magicians and illusionists since time immemorial to earn their crust.
Who sleeps with whom and what, how often and under what circumstances is really not the point. It has nothing to do with someone’s idea of morality.
But how and why Lord Tom Noddy and his ilk gain and maintain power over the rest of us is very much our business, especially when they are part of the legislature that govern the rabble – some of whom may be very up-standing sheep-shaggers, drugs mules and members of the “hard-working families” we hear so much about. And as Craig says, these more probing questions are never explored.
Corbyn speech this evening, Part Two…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktZINnuWxwA
Corbyn speech this evening, Part Four (not sure what happened to Part Three)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bg_ZcE_-zc
Apparently, chimps were discovered before bonobos.
Chimps, though intelligent, can be quite violent, domineering and nasty.
It was assumed we’re a bit like them.
Then bonobos were discovered.
They’re more intelligent than chimps, but cute and lovely.
They enjoy nothing more than regular rumpy pumpy with all and sundry, using it even in greeting.
Maybe relevant. Maybe not.
Anyway. They’re dying out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va02Y5uI9g8
I don’t care about private lives but if someone is being paid and in a privileged position to ‘serve’ ha ha the public then their behaviour will always be under scrutiny and they know that. If someone is a footballer or a playboy or a model it doesn’t matter.
Philip Cross is one of the editors involved. Didn’t he play about with the entry for Craig?
Mary- it seems very likely that ‘Philip Cross’ is a pseudonym for the Murdoch journalist and retired hedge funder Oliver Kamm-
http://neilclark66.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/wally-of-week-philip-cross.html
As for the debate on forced prostitution, there is plenty of evidence that the statistics on the numbers involved have been massaged-
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails
In the aftermath of the enquiry Nick Davies referred to in the link above, one of Craig’s favourite neocons, Denis MacShane, was justifiably roasted by Paxo and the English Collective of Prostitutes on Newsnight for disseminating wildly exaggerated statistics on this allegedly common phenomenon-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtaEdI3aiwg
Prostitution may be a potentially unhygienic and dangerous occupation, and many prostitutes may have tragic personal histories, but the idea that most foreign prostitutes working in the UK are ‘trafficed’ here against their will is rubbish. As Craig rightly points out-
The large majority of prostitutes picked up by the authorities are brought in on immigration grounds. They know very well that the most advantageous line for them to take is immediately to claim to be victims of trafficking.
Oliver Kamm falls on his slimy arse.
Simply beautiful execution.
The great Norm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usdGgR8cI1Y
====================================
Anyway. That’s two hits on Britain’s great and good in successive weeks.
What’s Murdoch up to.
Wasn’t it much better in the old days when difficult choices & decisions were made on our behalf by royalty, aristocrats & the landed gentry? Since it was such a small group, you could at least rely on a quickly arrived at consensus, especially when members were diplomatically coerced with dukedoms, earldoms, baronies & a fixed tax income from tenants with lots of windows.
And they were always such a polite clique, even when threatened by neighbouring empires, sovereign states & dictators. Indentured labour meant that everyone had a commercial interest in the success of exotic crop plantations & north American textile commodities.
They even guaranteed pressed ganged young spivs with merchant naval skills which would become tactically useful, especially during the Napoleonic wars. Indeed many starving peasants were transformed into smart columns of matching cannon fodder for their own good.
Sadly, the encroachment of liberalism, workers rights & the democratisation of political power has made the business of electing some of our representatives a clumsy, fraud prone & futile exercise.
Thankfully, traditional British values prevail in the House of Lords from which members continue to trade tax payers’ money for slightly more modern commodities such as cocaine, directorships & grand sounding titles which allows them to appear more knowledgeable than people who don’t have a title, especially when they are respectfully requested to divulge their inherited wisdom on the BBC.
Well remembered, OldMark.
But shouldn’t that be: “the disgraced Denis MacShane”
Still, it distracts us from asking what’s happening (and why) at Kenneth Clarke’s prosecution of Ben Fellows..
“Why do yo find it weird?”
A major part of the fun, is the ritual of conquest. I just don’t understand the appeal of purchasing a body as if it were a tin of baked beans.
Good find Old Mark. It all comes back to me ref Kammy. A nasty piece of work as are so many of the scribblers to whom Murdoch has given employment.
Murdoch is a cancer as Denis Potter said before he died.
‘I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I’ve got too much writing to do…) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it’s an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.
“The Long Goodbye,” The Guardian (6 April 1994); the quote is from Potter’s final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dennis_Potter
~~~
A lot of puerile anti Corbyn ‘jokes’ on Kamm’s twitter.
https://twitter.com/oliverkamm?lang=en
Sources are describing the women as “£200 a night”. Surely they mean £200 an hour. An escort would usually cost £1500 – £2000 a night.
If it really was £200 a night he must have dragged her off the street a few miunutes earlier.
Sewel is one of those family names I remember from my bookbinding days as associated with Jamaica and the Slave Trade. Also a name I have encountered as a current surname of Caribbean descendants of slaves.
So I looked it up: http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/sewell-robert-1751-1828
Lord Sewell descends from an Embarrassing Past.
Vaguely relevant, as the Sewel shock horror is invariably reported with a mention of his ennobler, Blair:
I’ve said for some time that it looks as if Blair has been an unacknowledged catspaw for our Government as well as an acknowledged one for a variety of equally unsavoury concerns. Confirmed here;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/investigations/11764487/Tony-Blair-given-sensitive-Foreign-Office-papers-before-business-trips-to-China.html
The former prime minister has been provided with briefings, including diplomatic cables, by Foreign Office officials for regular visits to Beijing and Shanghai.
Unsavoury link:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6561462/Lord-Sewel-slags-off-Prime-Minister-other-bigwigs.html
In coca veritas?
Thank you Rose for making me smile your description of honorable sheep shaggers just broke the Monday morn’ cool.
@ Herbie
Those always shagging Bonobos you mentioned, are an even closer relative than Chimpanzees, which explains our activities, they use their sexual activities to regulate their social life’s, discrepancies and misunderstandings.
Comparing them to us, we might get a little more relaxed and less violent if we are more sexually active, who knows, I’m not a behaviour specialist, it just sticks out.
Old Sewel is spot on about Cameron (“the most facile, superficial prime minister there’s ever been”…”He just shoots from the hip. He is false. He makes one-off commitments and cannot deliver.”) and on Boris (“a joke” and a “public school upper class twit”, adding: “He plays well in London because they like a cheeky chappie. Can you present Boris Johnson in Preston, in Burnley, in Manchester? No, they just think he’s an a—hole.”)
Alex Salmond, the Blairs and the Labour leadership candidates also came into his comments.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11764638/Lord-Sewel-is-pictured-in-orange-bra-as-he-brands-David-Cameron-superficial-and-facile.html
As per Craig’s initial post and so many in the comments train really heart felt pertinent well made points about how the wife of Spencer should now somehow manage to cope given the “private” activities of her Noble high brow hubby. Thank you Craig and Co for all these valuable insights! Woops I do believe I’ve made a small error anyway who cares its all just grabage innit Craig!
Old Sewel is spot on about Cameron
From the clip linked to he’s pretty much on the money about Boris,Blair And Bush as well!
I quite agree, though it’s really not ‘mob morality’ at play. it’s a certain sort of Christian morality that’s being invoked by the gutter press. A discredited morality based on ‘obedience’ to certain religous strictures; a morality that’s outraged at any form of sex that’s not subordinate to the purposes of reproduction. I don’t think the public really care.
There’s only one, consistent moral objection to Sewel. He’s an unelected legislator, and that’s simply unconscionable.