Dear Sophie...

Sophie Bridger of the Liberal Democrats on Twitter a few hours ago -

"Dear Nats, please stop turning every single argument into one on Scottish independence. Love, Scotland"

* * *

Dear Sophie,

Admirer of your talents though I am (see Exhibit A), I'd suggest that a woman who sees no irony in her conviction that she 'speaks for Scotland' might want to double-check which party it was that got 45.4% of the vote in May, and which party it was that got 7.9% of the vote. Just a thought.

Love,

James

A free choice to make the 'right' decision?

Remember Sophie Bridger, the young Liberal Democrat candidate in the Inverclyde by-election who made the soon-to-be-MP for the constituency look about two feet tall in one of the TV debates? Well, I just happened to stumble across a blogpost of hers from a few weeks ago, on the subject of the Icelandic bans on strip clubs and the purchase of sex -

“'I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale.' It’s hard not to be won over by such emotive words from Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an Icelandic campaigning organisation against sex work. I would love to live in a country without strip clubs, lapdancing or prostitution...

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that legislation of this nature is illiberal. Whose rights are being infringed by a cheap lapdance? Not the buyer – he’s paying for a service. If the lapdancer is providing that service willingly, and not being coerced into her work, then she’s not having her rights infringed either. There are sex workers who do it because they enjoy it – not because they are being coerced, or to pay for a drug habit. So why should we prevent them from doing their work?

It’s not that simple, of course. People are being forced into prostitution, through trafficking and addiction and that is not acceptable. But criminalising prostitution will just push it underground, putting already vulnerable sex workers in danger...

...Liberalism means letting people make their own decisions. All we can do is ensure that those who engage in sex work do it because they want to, not because they have to. I hope that one day, I will live in a society without prostitution – not because it is illegal, but because women have decided that they are not for sale."

I think the last point is naive and unrealistic - giving people a free choice, but ultimately expecting every last one of them to exercise that free choice in conformity with the values of just one section of society, is a contradiction in terms. Human beings are made differently from each other - and the fact that many people find prostitution incomprehensible or morally objectionable is neither here nor there to the minority of women and men who take the opposite view and make a free choice to become sex workers. By the same token, there are many other much more 'legitimate' jobs that, if we're honest, a lot of us would never dream of doing and wouldn't want members of our families to do - but the idea of wanting those jobs to literally cease to exist on the basis of those subjective feelings is silly.

However, I agree with the main thrust of Sophie's argument. The current Icelandic government is the first majority left-wing administration the country has seen in its history - and it's a great shame that such a welcome development has almost inevitably been accompanied by the customary pigheadedness of the Nordic left in relation to sex work, refusing to see the industry in its true complex form, and instead reducing everything in infantile fashion to 'male exploitation of women'.

UPDATE (12:50pm) : A final little flurry in the Total Politics Awards - this blog has been voted the 95th best political blog in the UK (having failed to make the top 300 last year), and I've been voted the 143rd best political blogger. Thanks again for all your support.

Labour's Inverclyde candidate fails to learn the lessons from the first debate

Although Iain Gray didn't exactly sparkle in any of the leadership debates during the Holyrood campaign, he never quite repeated his finger-jabbing low of the first STV debate, which suggested that he had at least analysed what had gone wrong and learned from it.  Sadly, the same can't be said for Labour's Inverclyde by-election candidate Iain McKenzie, who made an idiot of himself in the first debate by trying to shout down the 20-year-old Lib Dem candidate and failing, and who in the second debate yesterday simply tried yet more of the same.  Having spent much of his own first answer lambasting Anne McLaughlin of the SNP without any interruption, it looked absolutely ghastly when he reacted with such fury to McLaughlin returning the compliment that he instantly boomed "I'LL NEED TO STOP YOU RIGHT THERE".  It also didn't look great when he later tried to shout down the moderator Isabel Fraser when she was admonishing all the candidates for speaking over each other - McLaughlin, by contrast, looked completely in control of herself and just smiled mischievously at the collective telling-off.  Angus Macleod suggested on Twitter that McKenzie's agitated performance may be a sign that Labour are worried about losing the seat - I've no idea if that's true, but you'd certainly be forgiven for suspecting that.

McLaughlin had also very cleverly prepared a "heads I win, tails you lose" trap for McKenzie - she again asked her question from the first debate about whether he, as the head of the Labour-Tory coalition on Inverclyde Council, could guarantee that there would be no compulsory redundancies.  If he had repeated his non-answer from the first debate, the implication would have been obvious - as it was, the fact that he gave a completely different answer this time and offered a firm guarantee allowed McLaughlin to claim a first success as a prospective MP for Inverclyde.

A quick word about Sophie Bridger of the Lib Dems - I thought she had improved markedly from Thursday, although her hesitant response on the question of whether the operational life of Hunterston should be extended gave the impression once again that she simply hasn't done her homework on the local area properly.  Her best moment, ironically, came when Isabel Fraser challenged her on her agent's comment that the Lib Dems couldn't win - Bridger refreshingly didn't try to flannel her way out of a sticky question, but instead smiled and admitted her agent had been foolish to say it.  David Wilson of the Tories, by contrast, after a reasonably impressive first debate, came across as insufferably smug this time.

Overall verdict - another clear win for Anne McLaughlin, but this time without anyone laying a glove on her.

Anne McLaughlin (SNP) 9/10
Sophie Bridger (Liberal Democrat) 7/10
David Wilson (Conservative) 5/10
Iain McKenzie (Labour) 4/10

The moment the Labour candidate for Inverclyde was made to look two feet smaller

The Politics Now debate between the four main Inverclyde by-election candidates was considerably more entertaining than expected, albeit mostly for the wrong reasons. At least three of the four candidates had mildly excruciating "I really wish you hadn't asked me that question" moments, and for all that she won the debate hands down, it has to be said that the SNP's Anne McLaughlin was one of them. Yes, it was monumentally pointless for Bernard Ponsonby to persevere with the questions on defence policy when she'd more less put her hands up and admitted she didn't know the answers (Andrew Neil is similarly petty in asking his guests complex economic questions he knows perfectly well they can't answer), but all the same this sort of thing has happened so often that you'd think the SNP high command would by now have got everyone together and made sure they know the detailed proposals for an independent Scotland's defence capabilities off by heart.

The undoubted highlight of the evening (and a rare case of me finding myself cheering on one of Clegg's mob) was 20-year-old Lib Dem candidate Sophie Bridger's hugely satisfying slap-down of Labour's Iain McKenzie. He'd been quite simply refusing to let her complete her answer to his question about why she didn't support mandatory prison sentences for carrying knives (that old favourite), repeatedly interrupting her with the moronic and faintly patronising line "don't take that on the doors of Inverclyde, Sophie". Eventually she paused, fixed him with an icy glare, and asked him : "are you going to lecture me or are you going to let me answer your question?". The effect was extraordinary - McKenzie fell completely silent and instantly looked about two feet smaller.

That masterstroke couldn't, however, disguise the fact that it was otherwise a very patchy performance by Bridger, who herself looked utterly panic-stricken when the Tory candidate David Wilson asked her a question she didn't have a scooby about. Understandably, he decided against letting her off the hook at that point - she'll clearly have to brush up on the indispensable art of the non-answer as a matter of urgency. And when the tables were turned and she had the chance to grill Wilson, her efforts to get him to admit that the Lib Dem contribution had made the coalition government "fairer" were swatted away with ease, as he on four separate occasions gave her precisely the opposite answer to the one she was clearly anticipating!

As if that wasn't enough, Bridger was also skewered by Ponsonby when he asked her what the coalition's biggest mistake had been. Wouldn't he rather hear about all the good things the government had done, she implored? "No" was the rather foreseeable answer to that one. Then the subject turned to Lib Dem MPs voting in favour of higher tuition fees. Now, if you thought Tavish Scott's stock line during the Holyrood election of "for heaven's sake go and ask them about that" had been weak, Bridger surpassed it with ease with her astounding "I...wasn't...an...MP, I...can't...comment". So let's get this straight - we're not allowed to ask the Scottish Lib Dem leader about the way Scottish Lib Dem MPs vote (including his own deputy) and we're not allowed to ask a prospective Scottish Lib Dem MP either. Is there anyone who actually is available to comment? It's starting to remind me of the old joke about Gerry Adams, when he makes a series of detailed demands of the British government, the Irish government and unionist politicians, but when asked if the IRA should disarm he indignantly replies "well, it's not for me to tell the IRA what to do"!

It wasn't just Bridger who had repeated dodgy moments. Iain McKenzie tied himself up in knots when pressed about Iain Davidson's charge that the SNP are "neo-fascists". McKenzie stressed that he wouldn't have used such language himself because he didn't want to drag politics down to "that level", but when asked if it had been gutter politics he replied : "it's not gutter politics, it's Iain's type of politics". OK, so Iain Davidson is not a gutter politician, but he is, it seems, very much at "that level" of politics. Not to worry, Mr McKenzie - I'm sure no-one will have spotted the implication, let alone found it side-splittingly funny.

Anyway, here is how I scored the debate -

Anne McLaughlin (SNP) 8/10
David Wilson (Conservative) 6/10
Sophie Bridger (Liberal Democrat) 5/10
Iain McKenzie (Labour) 4/10