"Disenfranchise" Neil Kinnock? How very dare we?

In spite of my best efforts (and several re-readings), I'm not sure I entirely understand the point being made by the Ian Stewart article republished by Wings Over Scotland. There are a couple of possibilities. The first is that the entire UK electorate should have a vote in the Scottish independence referendum - a straightforward repudiation of the principle of democratic self-determination. The second possible interpretation is that the referendum franchise should be extended to several million people beyond the territory of Scotland, but that this would be limited to those with Scottish heritage. However, references to "the Kinnocks of South Wales" suggest that the definition of Scottish heritage would be, to say the least, rather broad. This does seem to have a great deal in common with the school of thought favoured by my delightful Tory chums at PB, who repeatedly tell me that I can't possibly be Scottish because my surname is Kelly, and if you go back a few generations my ancestors are all Irish or French-Canadian.

So perhaps if Mr Stewart gets his way, Neil Kinnock will have a vote on Scottish independence, and I won't.

Let me just run a few points of fact past Mr Stewart -

1) Scots who move to another part of the UK are not permitted to vote in Scottish elections to the House of Commons.

2) Scots who move to another part of the UK are not permitted to vote in Scottish Parliament elections.

3) Scots who lived in another part of the UK were not permitted to vote in the devolution referendum in 1997.

4) Scots, and indeed all British citizens, who have been out of the UK for more than 15 years, are not permitted to vote in any UK elections or referendums at all.

I make no comment on the rightness or wrongness of these rules. I merely note that they were all either set in place by a Labour government, or upheld by a Labour government over a long period of time. So if Mr Stewart has a problem with the franchise for the independence referendum, perhaps he should start by considering the broader framework of UK electoral rules with which that franchise is logically consistent.

Oh, and on a point of pedantry, Mr Stewart's claim that French voters in London have their own seat in the National Assembly is not true. In fact, the whole of the UK is part of a single mega-constituency covering ten countries of Northern Europe. And you thought Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey was bad...

Happy New Year

Just a very quick note to wish you all a happy new year - a year which for superstitious reasons I will exclusively be referring to as "this year", rather than using some arbitrary number that even the Pope recognises has no basis whatever in historical fact. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Furthermore, please note that it's still 2005 in Ethiopia.

Although the referendum is still the best part of two years away, we'll also have to get used to calling it "next year's independence referendum"!

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Best tweet of the year so far, from Mark Graham -

"Fear & doubt! What about Eastenders? You hate England! Predict the future now! Couldnae, wouldnae, shouldnae! #TweetLikeAUnionist #indyref"

Nuclear democracy

On a number of occasions I've made the point that Britain is, at best, a semi-democracy, due to the House of Lords being unelected. Some people react incredulously to that notion, and insist that the power of the Lords is merely to revise and delay - the Commons will always ultimately decide.

But the truth of that statement hangs by one extraordinarily slender thread - namely the Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to overrule the Lords by a cumbersome procedure. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that the Parliament Act literally is British democracy - strip it away, and the unelected chamber has unfettered power to thwart the will of the electorate.

Curious, then, to witness the Telegraph's reaction to suggestions that the government may use the Parliament Act to ensure the elected chamber has the final say on gay marriage. Apparently the Parliament Act is a "nuclear option" that is only intended to be used in "exceptional circumstances". Really? That's a bit bloody convenient for the conservative elite of this country, isn't it? The moment the government tries to "enforce" democracy, it's subject to dark mutterings that it's doing so far too often and not selectively enough.

Sorry, guys, but democracy is not supposed to be a special once-a-decade treat. Time to choose - is Britain a democracy, or isn't it? If it is, then by definition the Parliament Act is not a "nuclear option", but an indispensable tool that ought to be used just as often as necessary. And the Lords, not the Commons, decides by its actions how often that is.

It's extraordinary to recall that one of Michael Forsyth's objections to devolution in the 1990s was that the Scottish Parliament's decisions would not be subject to "revision" by unelected Lords. That complaint sounded funny at the time, but it sounds positively unhinged now.

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I also have a new article in the UK edition of the International Business Times, about the significance of welfare reform to the debate on independence. You can read it HERE.

The imperial delusion lives on

The SNP's Angus MacNeil and Labour's George Foulkes found some rare common ground a few days ago in condemning the Queen's 'silent' participation in a cabinet meeting, on the grounds that it breached a "vital separation of powers". Personally, I'm all for stunts like this - anything that undermines the ludicrous mythology of a monarchy that is "above politics" can only be a good thing, and means that the debate about the sort of Head of State we want in future will at least be marginally more clear-sighted. In a democracy, people who wield power are held accountable for their actions - or at least that's the theory. I look forward to Prince Charles being subjected to a long-overdue Paxman sneerfest one of these days.

No, what took my breath away was not the Queen's cabinet appearance, but the naming of a part of Antarctica in her honour. We know all about the extent to which individual Tory politicians lack self-awareness, but this is the clearest example yet of an institutional self-awareness problem on the part of the entire Tory/Lib Dem government. This is an administration that wants the world to believe that its upholding of British sovereignty in the Falkland Islands is not about imperialism, but self-determination. As I've said many times, that's a perfectly defensible position, because the Falklands are not an empty land - they contain thousands of people who want to retain the constitutional link with the UK, and who are the only stable population the islands have ever had.

But to ride roughshod over Argentina's Antarctic claim - which is no more or less legitimate than Britain's, because Antarctica really is an empty land - will send a powerful signal to the whole world that Britain's actions in the South Atlantic are in reality driven by the old, unreconstructed imperial impulse. Just how moronically insensitive can they get? Why not rename somewhere in the UK after the Queen? Or why not give her a beach in Pitcairn, if for some reason it really had to be an overseas "possession"? Oh no, that's not good enough for imperialist Tory governments - nothing but a continent will do for their monarch.

Yup, it's true - Cameron thinks he's Benjamin Disraeli. With a bit of luck, that delusion might just be taking a slight knock in 2014.

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I feel slightly queasy. I can't stand Piers Morgan - but he's currently running rings round the American gun lobby quite brilliantly, and speaking vital truths to his adopted country in the unapologetic way they need to be spoken.

All the same, though - Piers Morgan. It's a bit like discovering that Political Betting's Plato is my local SNP candidate.

And on that downright disturbing note, I'll wish you all a very happy Christmas!

In wake of Newtown, Baker goes sinister

Question : If you were an American libertarian blogger who had spent almost every waking moment over the last decade advancing the fantastical notion that a gun free-for-all has made your country safer, how do you think you would react to this latest horrific gun massacre in Connecticut? Would you a) take a step back and quietly reflect on whether you might, after all, have been missing something, or b) boast about how right you've been all along, and then make a blood-curdling threat about what you and like-minded folk will do if anyone tries to take your guns away?

Long-term readers of this blog who can remember Mr Kevin Baker will probably be able to guess the answer. Here are his latest constructive musings on his favourite topic -

"Newtown, Connecticut is not Dunblane, Scotland"

This is true. There are two key differences between Newtown and Dunblane -

1) Only 18 people died in Dunblane. 27 died in Newtown.

2) Lessons were actually learned after Dunblane. When even President Obama is so cowed by the gun lobby that he authorises his press secretary to make the extraordinary observation that "today is not the day to have a debate about gun control" (when is, for pity's sake?) it seems highly probable that the equivalent lessons will not be learned as a result of Newtown, and consequently these entirely avoidable tragedies will continue to happen - perhaps with increasing frequency, as gun control laws are perversely loosened in some parts of the US.

"Yes, 27 people and one creature are dead, eighteen of those dead people are small children - first-graders. Yes, it's horrible, senseless, inexplicable.

And no, the guns were not at fault."

No, the guns were not at fault. They were all too effective. Just how 'inexplicable' is it that a man with a gun was able to kill far more people in a short space of time than he ever would have managed with his bare hands, or with the proverbial cricket bat?

"Let me just say again for the record:

I won't license.

I won't register.

I won't turn them in.

If you want to make me and several million other law-abiding, tax-paying citizens into felons, beware what you wish for. You may get it."

That does sound disturbingly like code for: "If we don't get our own way, we'll create a bloodbath, and then blame it on everybody but ourselves". True enough, the guns won't be entirely to blame for that either - the other key factors will be the sense of victimhood on the part of the perpetrators, and their failure to take responsibility for their own choices and actions. Those are the typical hallmarks of most 'senseless, inexplicable' massacres.

It should be remembered that the process of turning a "law-abiding citizen" into a felon is a remarkably simple one - it consists of that citizen making a conscious decision to no longer obey the law.

Why the Northern Ireland demographic shift does matter

Ten years ago, the results of the Northern Ireland census were greeted with a not inconsiderable amount of unionist gloating. All the expectations had been that there would be evidence of a significant demographic shift towards Catholics, heralding the potential for the ultimate irony - a Catholic majority in a Frankenstein statelet created with the sole intent of entrenching Protestant dominance over as wide a geographical area as possible (including two counties that were Catholic-majority even in 1921). But those expectations were confounded, and the 2001 census showed the Protestant population maintaining a substantial numerical advantage.

The story this time, however, could hardly be more different. The Protestant population has shrunk 5% to a 48% share, with the Catholic population's share now just 3% behind at 45%. A similar "swing" in another ten years' time would comfortably tip the balance. And yet, curiously, the unionist reaction is that it "doesn't matter". Why? Because polling evidence supposedly shows that even a majority of Catholics want Northern Ireland to remain subject to London rule. Yet this begs the obvious question - why the gloating last time round if the demographics quite literally don't matter?

There are a couple of explanations. Firstly, it's not all about the constitution for unionists. In their heart of hearts, they must know that these figures make a Sinn Féin First Minister an all-but-inevitable outcome in the medium term (barring some kind of improbable political realignment). Under the power-sharing arrangements such a development shouldn't be regarded as important, because the First Minister and his deputy are equals in all but name - their legal powers are literally identical. But the reality is that the symbolism would be unbearable for a great many.

Perhaps more to the point, though, is that polling on constitutional preferences needs to be taken with an even larger dose of salt in Northern Ireland than in Scotland. There is an extraordinary level of community cohesion in votes cast for NI political parties, and it seems highly likely that much of that cohesion would transfer to a constitutional referendum, if one is ever held. The only scenario in which that might not be the case would be if the SDLP changed its constitutional stance. But the chances are that both Sinn Féin and the SDLP would campaign for a united Ireland, and that most of the nationalist vote would prove to be solidly behind them. It's called the nationalist vote for a good reason.

All these grounds for optimism make it all the more baffling that Sinn Féin were content to place the sole power to determine when or if a referendum should take place in the hands of...the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Surely if the consent principle so beloved of unionists (known to the rest of us as self-determination) is to mean anything, there has to be an automatic trigger by which the electorate can actually express its consent, without requiring permission from the quasi-colonial overlord?

John McTernan has a butler, or the kitten gets it

A couple of years ago, I did a brief round-up of the more unusual search engine queries that had led unsuspecting surfers to this blog. I thought it was high time for a more comprehensive list, although believe it or not this is merely the family-friendly edition...

Annabel Croft hates Greg Rusedski

Deadly weapons big breasts

Do 81% of North Sea revenues belong to England? (Er...no.)

Does Alex Salmond have a personal trainer? (Again, my guess would be no.)

Giraffes AV Prescott

Have you got the guts to vote SDP?

How do I get the best sexual experience with an escort in Indianapolis?

I hate First Buses

If Scotland goes independent who pays there unemployed

Is it wrong I payed a cleaner for sex?

Is Annabel Croft a homophobe

Is Barry Manilow a democrat

Is Scotland more violent than us

James Kelly MSP not doing so well

Johann Lamont Krankie

John McTernan does he have a butler

Ku Klux Klan unicycle fairy

Muscular women popping

Naked Goes Pop

Naked News with Jim Kelly

Naked pictures of women from Wick, Caithness

No2AV kittens

Or the kitten gets it

One million Scots to crush

Painted toenail experiences in public

Rambling topless

Say er er er er er say la la la la la

Scottish are inferior to English

The SNP should be banned

Tom Harris moderator on Labour Hame? (Surely not!)

What is the meaning of tae in tae think again

Who is Plato from PoliticalBetting? (Answer : As a "libertarian with a fiscal conservative twist", Plato has the distinction of being Britain's most representative "floating voter", and is someone who Labour must "win back" to have "any chance" of winning the next general election. She is also noted for "never reading" this blog, contrary to the grossly misleading impression given by her familiarity with the contents of this blog. She has done 248 jobs in her relatively short working life, and has naturally signed the Official Secrets Act. Were you really expecting a name?)

Why don't people go to the moon

You allowed on Facebook with electronic tagging?

Alex Salmond English can leave our country alone haggis

Our Head of State for 2060 has just been selected...

We don't have a clue about his or her personality, talents or intelligence, but we're absolutely certain that he/she will be just the chap/chapess for the job.

Democracy and rationality at its finest.

Open questions

Leaving aside the obvious jibe that 'Open Unionism' is a contradiction in terms, my eye was caught by this article of the 'anyone to the left of Enoch Powell is a Marxist' variety -

"It became more and more obvious that many of the people who were attracted to the SNP were attracted precisely because they were disappointed former Labour party voters. They now considered the Labour party to be a party of the right. Independence for many of these people was thus a way of bringing about “Socialism in one country” leaving world revolution for another day!

There are clearly people in the SNP with a variety of political viewpoints, but if supporters are declaring that the present day Labour party is a party of the centre right, then it must be that the SNP is a party of the centre left in a different sense to that in which most people understand the term. Moreover, they must be on the centre left in a different way from other European centre left parties."

Hardly. In fact, I would suggest that the SNP are understood to be centre-left in precisely the way that most of the social democratic parties of western continental Europe are, and Labour are understood to be centre-right in precisely the way that most of the conservative parties of western continental Europe are. It's no coincidence that Tony Blair's closest allies on the continent were not Schroeder or Zapatero, but rather Aznar and Berlusconi. Labour may have made a marginal move back in the correct direction since then, but that isn't saying much when you bear in mind where they were starting from.

"I never understood the almost universal SNP opposition to nuclear weapons until I realised that they truly were a left-wing party. What have nuclear weapons got to do with independence?"

And it could just as easily be asked - what has opposition to nuclear weapons got to do with being left-wing? As the author of this piece has already raised the spectre of 'socialism in one country', it should be noted that Stalin himself wasn't exactly short of the odd nuclear weapon. If Stalinism is being presented as the pinnacle of leftiness, surely any party that does the opposite of what Stalin did must by definition be 'sensible, moderate, compassionate conservatives'?

Alternatively, it could just be that 'Open Unionism' is missing the point somewhat.

Response to Rhoda Grant's consultation on criminalising the purchase of sex

Having got into the swing of responding to consultations earlier in the year, I thought I'd have another go with Labour MSP Rhoda Grant's consultation on criminalising the purchase of sex (ie. the Swedish model). I was particularly motivated to take part given that the last consultation on this subject, conducted by Trish Godman, was such a complete joke from beginning to end.

* * *

I am resident in Scotland, and I am responding to this consultation as a private individual. I am a political blogger, but I do not represent anyone other than myself. I am not a sex worker, and to the best of my knowledge I do not know any sex workers. However, given that much of the impetus for the proposed law change comes from women who themselves have little or no knowledge of sex workers, and who primarily see the potential Bill as a means to advance ‘gender equality’ in broad-brush terms (as opposed to improving the lot of individual sex workers in a real-world setting), it seems reasonable to suppose that many of the responses to the consultation will be from women who are as detached from the central issue as I am. There will also undoubtedly be many responses from rather more knowledgeable women, keen to explain how misconceived and counter-productive the proposal is from the point of view of their own gender. But what may well be largely missing is the voice of men. That is deeply ironic, given that the most direct impact of the legislation would be on men, not women. The intention is simple – to criminalise and shame men, and men only, for indulging in a certain type of consensual sex. Given that this disgracefully discriminatory use of the criminal law would be directed against our gender, I feel that it is vital that as many men as possible speak out in opposition, regardless of whether we would be personally affected by the legislation.

It’s important first of all to identify the precise rationale for the desire to discriminate against men. Your consultation document repeatedly uses language that is suggestive of a crusade against slavery in a literal sense - “sexual servitude…a commodity to be bought and sold”. But we know that you cannot be referring to literal slavery, because payment for sex where coercion or trafficking is involved is already comprehensively criminalised and severely punishable. The proposed law change can therefore only have consensual paid sex in its sights. In which case, how can your use of language be justified? Are we supposed to infer that sexual servitude is a self-imposed phenomenon?

Although you don’t spell it out, the answer is of course that you buy into the fantastical ideology that underpins the Swedish law banning the purchase of sex. In noting that the bulk of sex workers are female and that the majority of their clients are male, you discount the obvious explanation of biological differences between the genders, and instead see a manifestation of systematic exploitation and oppression of women by men. It doesn’t matter that many female sex workers believe they are making a free choice, because this is a type of ‘false consciousness’ caused by the economic constraints that women live under in their state of oppression.

The only problem, of course, is that this is bunkum. Men are just as likely to find themselves under the type of financial pressure that drives some women to become sex workers, but the difference is that women may feel they have one additional option open to them. Indeed, one of the papers you cite quotes women who make clear that they do not regard sex work as the only option they have been left with, but simply as an option that is preferable to all the others –

‘What job pays £60, £100 a night? Sometimes you can earn £100 in an hour if it’s busy. You know where you’re well off, don’t you?’

Like you, I come at this issue from a left-of-centre perspective. I can allow myself to imagine a utopian society in which it might be considered a desirable thing that virtually no man has access to consensual paid sex, for the simple reason that no woman feels driven by financial considerations to offer it. But in that utopia, no man or woman would do any other type of work that they would not choose to do if free from financial pressures. Very few people would choose to be cleaners in that scenario, for example. What confuses me is that your party is keen on that (essentially Marxist) utopian ideal for the sole purpose of eliminating sex work, but loathes it in every other context. All forms of potentially unpleasant work other than sex work are not only deemed tolerable, but are considered morally virtuous. Indeed, during the Blunkett era, we were told that work – any work – was an all-purpose cure for sickness, depression and suicidal thoughts. The end result of this bizarre example of doublethink is that you would seek to force many sex workers into another unpleasant job that pays less and that they prefer less.

To put it mildly, that is not a laudable goal in a supposedly liberal society. Until and unless utopia arrives, we ought to be clear-sighted about sex work as being just one more imperfect – but legitimate - option in a world full of imperfect options.

It’s also worth pointing out that a significant minority of the clients of sex workers are disabled men seeking sex for therapeutic reasons, men seeking sex from other men, or women seeking sex from either men or other women. The idea that these individuals are the malevolent drivers of the Great Male Oppression of Women is, I would hope, self-evidently ludicrous enough to illustrate the nonsense of the ideology that lies behind this proposal. In respect of disabled men, some surveys have shown that female sex workers are concerned that they are exploiting their more vulnerable clients (for financial gain), rather than the other way round.

I will turn now to the specific questions contained in the consultation document.

Q1: Do you support the general aim of the proposed Bill? Please indicate “yes/no/undecided” and explain the reasons for your response.

No, for the reasons stated in my introduction. I also want to challenge some of your own reasons for reaching the opposite conclusion.

“For example 75% of women in prostitution in the UK became involved when they were children…”

That statistic appears to be pure invention. The study you cite questioned only street prostitutes who started work before the age of 18. By definition, therefore, 100% of that sample became involved in prostitution when they were children, not 75%! The 75% figure is the percentage of the sample who reported that they were still working at the time of the study. How you get from there to the claim that 75% of all female prostitutes (not just street prostitutes) started when they were children is something of a mystery, and to put it mildly, this calls into question the credibility of the evidential basis for your proposal.

“The buying of sexual activity is sexual exploitation and is recognised as a form of violence against women.”

Recognised by whom? Your statement may be literally true in the sense that some people (for ideological reasons) regard all paid sex, no matter how consensual, as “violence against women”. It would also be literally true to say that the moon landings are “recognised” as fake, in the sense that some people devoutly believe that to be the case. In neither example is there any particular reason to suppose that this represents the consensus of opinion. Most people, I would submit, expect actual violence to be present in an act of “violence against women”, and not just the incorporeal type of ‘violence’ you are somehow able to discern in consensual paid sex.

“International and Scottish evidence based research suggests that men who have purchased sexual activity believe that a number of consequences including legal penalties, financial penalties or public exposure could act as an effective deterrent if effectively enforced.”

Placing men, and only men, on the Sex Offenders’ Register if they cheat on their wives would also be a highly effective deterrent against the committing of adultery. But it would still be a very silly, illiberal, and discriminatory thing to do.

“The study also indicated harmful and violent attitudes of men who buy sexual activity:

32% stated that rape happens because men get sexually carried away; or (34%) because their sex drive gets “out of control”;

12% said that the rape of a prostitute or call girl was not possible; while 10% asserted that the concept of rape simply does not apply to women in prostitution.”

There have also been numerous studies and surveys showing very similar results among the general male population. It could well be that if a sample of television repairmen were interviewed, 12% of them would also say that the rape of a call girl is impossible. Would this mean that the repairing of televisions contributes to harmful and violent attitudes? Of course not. It would simply mean that television repairmen are representative of the male population at large.

It’s perfectly conceivable that there may be a correlation between paying for sex and harmful attitudes about rape, but the figures you cite utterly fail to establish one.

Q2: What do you believe would be the effects of legislating to criminalise the purchase of sex (as outlined above)? Please provide evidence to support your answer.

Given that your proposal is essentially identical to the laws already in force in Sweden and Norway, the best way of predicting the effect is to examine the Scandinavian experience. This shows that your law will entirely fail to have the desired effect of literally ‘ending’ demand for paid sex. It will in turn fail in its secondary objective of leaving women who suffer from ‘false consciousness’ (those who ‘erroneously’ think they have made a free choice to sell sex) with little choice but to abandon their work. There will still be many potential clients for sex workers, and therefore sex work will continue. However, the profile of the potential client base will change in character. With ‘nicer’ clients most likely to be deterred by the change in the law, prostitutes will increasingly be forced to take their chances with more violent and abusive clients if they want to maintain their livelihoods. They will also have little choice but to assist their clients in evading detection by the police, leading to the abandonment of vital safety precautions.

As far as women who are not sex workers are concerned, there is some evidence that draconian legislation on prostitution increases the rape rate –

“In the multiple regression model the rape rate was shown to be correlated with the homicide rate and anti-correlated with the availability of prostitution. Both relationships were at above the 95% confidence level. It is estimated that if prostitution were legalized in the United States, the rape rate would decrease by roughly 25% for a decrease of approximately 25,000 rapes per year.”

In a nutshell, your proposal will increase the risk of actual - as opposed to metaphysical - violence against women.

Q3: Are you aware of any unintended consequences or loopholes caused by the offence? Please provide evidence to support your answer.

It’s impossible for me to judge the extent to which the harmful consequences I’ve listed above are unforeseen or ‘unintended’. Some apologists for the Swedish model openly acknowledge the increased trauma that has been caused to thousands of sex workers, but regard that as a price worth paying for the prize of a largely symbolic law. I would hope that forms no part of the thinking of proponents of the Scottish proposal, and that they regard the real-world welfare of sex workers as more important than the pursuit of ideological purity, but the wording of much of your consultation paper leaves me with grave concerns on that point.

Q4: What are the advantages or disadvantages in using the definitions outlined above?

I would suggest the disadvantage is not the difficulty in working out what a reasonable person would construe as “sexual”, but rather the difficulty in working out what constitutes a reasonable person.

Q5: What do you think the appropriate penalty should be for the offence? Please provide reasons for your answer.

Obviously I do not think there should be any penalty at all. However, I am aware of the absurdly extreme suggestions that have already been made by some respondents to this consultation, such as lengthy jail sentences and public shaming in newspapers. I would simply note the grotesqueness of applying such penalties to, for example, a vulnerable disabled man who spends a large percentage of his disposable income on a high class escort. They would, I presume, constitute his ‘punishment’ for an act of ‘violence’ against a woman who cheerfully pockets that money and uses it to help fund a life of considerable luxury.

Q6: How should a new offence provision be enforced? Are there any techniques which might be used or obstacles which might need to be overcome?

Q7: What is your assessment of the likely financial implications of the proposed Bill to you or your organisation; if possible please provide evidence to support your view? What (if any) other significant financial implications are likely to arise?

On both questions 6 and 7, I would refer you back to the serious concerns identified by the Association of Chief Police Officers in their submission to Trish Godman’s consultation.

Q8: Is the proposed Bill likely to have any substantial positive or negative implications for equality? If it is likely to have a substantial negative implication, how might this be minimised or avoided?

Your proposal will have profoundly negative implications for gender equality, for the very simple reason that it is intended to. Female sex workers and their male clients will no longer enjoy equality before the law when they enter into a consensual paid sex transaction. Both genders will suffer harmful consequences – men will be less equal than women in respect of the criminal law, but women will be less equal than men in the perception of a society that has deemed them incapable of making free, rational decisions and being held responsible for them.

There is no way of ‘minimising’ these negative implications. They can be avoided by not enacting the proposed Bill.

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You can read Ms Grant's whole consultation document, and find information on how to submit a response, by clicking HERE.