Skip to main content

Day: 27 February 2012

Student prostitution: an increasing concern

Written by mo cheriet on . Posted in News.

Student prostitution is estimated to have increased as a result of the rising costs of attending university. The English Collective of Prostitutes claim that calls from students seeking help doubled in 2011 while concerns over student prostitution in Wales has initiated a £500,000 investigation by Swansea University into the matter.

Supposedly, a combination of factors has lead to increased sex-work activity among students.  Higher education is becoming more costly at a time when youth unemployment continues to rise.  Though student prostitution is not a new development, it has seen a spike in activity following the announcement of higher university fees.

It may seem absurd to fellow students with more conventional jobs that someone should choose sex work to raise the funds for their education, but those that do it will argue that the financial incentives are too difficult to resist.  The infamous Brook Magnanti, author of The intimate adventures of a London call girl, worked as a prostitute for an escort agency and made £300 an hour doing so.   To put that into perspective, Brook made in one hour what the average bartender would make in 50.

Some students desperate for the cash have taken an unorthodox method of prostitution by offering their virginity to the highest bidder.  A struggling student in New Zealand fetched up to £20,000 by advertising her virginity for sale. In Belgium, a 21-year-old student sold her virginity in an online auction for a staggering £45,000.

Despite how immoral such behaviour sounds, evidence suggests prostitutes can stand to make a lot of money, which begs the question – why is prostitution a low skill but high paying profession?

In a published paper entitled A theory of prostitution, economists Edlund and Korn conclude that “prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone-marriage market earnings”.  In other words, prostitution pays well because prostitutes must compensate for compromising their access to a shared income pool that comes with marriage.  This theory could explain why the age bracket where escort wages peaks (between the ages 26 and 30) coincide with the most intensive marriage ages.

Whether financial reward alone is enough to justify prostitution is another matter entirely, but the increase in student prostitution is the by-product of an economy in bad shape coupled with a worrying lack of education and advice on the matter.

Nick Clegg is right – we need a new look House of Lords

Written by Paul Adair on . Posted in Opinion.

Having been a cornerstone of Liberal Democrat policy for some time now, it seems very likely that Nick Clegg will succeed with his plans to dramatically modify the composition of the House of Lords, ushering in a new – and seemingly more democratic – era for British politics. However, recent events suggest that the apparently urgent need for reform to our upper chamber is less clear cut than previously thought.

In the past few months, the unelected members of the Lords have been doing at least as good a job of expressing the will of the British people as ours MPs have. Spurred on by a substantial Twitter campaign, it was the House of Lords which voted against seven different parts of the government’s bill to reform the welfare system, before subsequently voting down the Coalition’s controversial NHS reorganisation bill in its entirety. Add to these defeats the somewhat unlikely passage of the Legal Aid bill, and it is clear that the Lords is acting as a quasi-independent check House of Commons as opposed to merely providing the formality of a rubber stamp.

Yet not all of their collective decisions have been consistent with public opinion. Components of the welfare bill have been defeated numerous times in the Lords, despite their relative popularity with the public at large; a poll for The Sun showed that over 70 per cent of the public support the government’s plans in this area. Instead, it is the cuts to legal aid and the reorganisation of the NHS which have seen the Lords on the right side of popular opinion. A recent YouGov poll showed that a mere 18 per cent of voters support the proposed changes, with almost every major medical organisation – including the influential Royal College of Surgeons – standing firmly in opposition.

Unfortunately, the upper chamber’s admirable opposition to a government determined to railroad its programme through Parliament is virtually meaningless. The government was able to the defeated parts of the welfare bill back to the Lords within a week, preventing any further scrutiny by attaching a finance label to the bill. If the government is truly determined to push through its NHS reforms, it will do so easily. The House of Lords must be reformed – not only because its members have no public mandate, and therefore negligible legitimacy, but more pertinently because they can only provide minimal resistance to the government for that very reason. Only reform will enable the Lords to exercise a clearly defined set of powers, providing them with genuinely democratic legitimacy to fully exercise said powers.

‘Militant secularisation’ has not gone far enough

Written by Catriona Watson on . Posted in Opinion.

Baroness Warsi’s recently-expressed fear that religion is under threat from a campaign of ‘militant secularisation’ is wildly overstated. From the hundreds of thousands of children across the country educated in faith schools, to the disproportionate number of bishops in the House of Lords; religion, the Church of England in particular, continues to play a huge role in British public life.

Even if Warsi were right, the departure from religion in public life should be seen as good news for everyone, religious or otherwise. Considering the proliferation of a multitude of religious faiths in the UK, to give them all an equal share of the public platform would be utterly impossible. By virtue of tradition, Christianity currently dominates the media and parliament. But despite David Cameron’s protestations that “Britain is a Christian country”, and “we should not be afraid to say so”, this over-representation is outdated and unfair. The only practical way for the state to avoid favouring one religion over another is to ignore them all.

Instead of trying to redress the balance, tipped so heavily in favour of the Anglican Church, the Prime Minister has made no secret of his desire for a “return to Christian values”. Cameron attributes the fact that secular countries like France are often accused of more religious intolerance than the UK to “the tolerance that Christianity demands of our society”. Baroness Warsi’s comments serve to reignite the debate over the role of religion in public life, and to what extent the decline in religious belief has played a part in the alleged moral collapse of our society which has seen us descend into ‘Broken Britain’. Yet it seems unlikely that giving religion any more space in the public sphere than it already has will solve any of these problems – and a government that focuses on what divides us, rather than what we have in common, is going to find it difficult to combat intolerance.

A more secular society does not mean a more intolerant one. Separating the state from matters of religion can only give religion (and religious people) more freedom, and will only impact negatively on the privileged position that the Church of England occupies in UK politics; for all other religious groups, this is surely good news. The very fact that it was the removal of Christian prayers from an official council agenda, rather than a call for the banning of faith schools, the burka or religious symbolism in public life suggests to me that, on the contrary, these so-called militant secularists are not being militant enough.

My Political Hero: Jimmy Carter

Written by Cat Hanson on . Posted in Uncategorised.

Jimmy Carter really ought to have been considered the perfect US President. Morally firm like a church pastor, yet as neutral as Switzerland and polite as a Canadian, his sheer affability was an asset to both domestic and international politics in a world suffering at the hands of despotic maniacs and crippled by currencies collapsing to the value of a used Kleenex. Wearing extra jumpers to save on heating in the White House, installing solar panels and recognising the futility of threatening the Soviet Union, Carter was mind-bogglingly considerate. For four years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, this was America’s compassionate, gentle and ever-supportive parent.

Wise, unassuming and undervalued, President Carter possessed an extraordinary ability to simultaneously empathise with the religious and non-religious, peacemakers and the military, public servants and entrepreneurs, rich and poor, intellectuals and politicians – because, quite simply, he had been all of them. Relinquishing a successful Navy career in order to support his family’s ailing peanut farm, Carter turned his fortunes around by kick-starting the business, before being sworn in as Democratic Governor of Georgia in 1971. Six years later, he was President of the United States, and the most powerful man in the world. Though determined to share his experience and knowledge with the masses in order to attack a complex myriad of problems, the world was not always ready or willing to sit up and listen.

His incredible Presidential achievements are many and varied. Firstly, the Camp David Accords saw Carter preside over the signing of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979. That’s right, peace in the Middle East – your eyes do not deceive you! Secondly, and most controversially, he returned the Panama Canal to General Torrijos in 1977; the United States, Carter clearly felt, had more than its fair share of canals in its own territory. However, his greatest triumph was surely the dignity and humility he displayed in his fight for extended human rights and overarching good will. Unlike his successor, President Reagan, he recognised that yelling, “tear down this wall!” would hardly make Mr Gorbachev better disposed to doing so. Unlike some of his predecessors, he understood that ground troops and tanks are not generally welcomed by natives with open arms and crumpets.

Instead, he took a practical approach to diplomacy, engaging in face-to-face talks and identifying that the United States was far from perfect. Carter ceased to overlook human rights abuses in friendly territories, campaigned tirelessly against the abhorrent death penalty and highlighted the previously sidelined issue of gay rights. Republicans often sneered at his supposed weakness; on the contrary, Carter was a pillar of great strength in the face of a belligerent world.

His inspiring work continues to this day, having won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize and campaigned tirelessly for low-income Georgian families. He has spent the best part of the last decade persuading Senators and Congressmen of the hypocrisy of Guantanamo Bay, attempting to assuage the religious right and promoting clean energy in the face of idiocy. A record like Carter’s should be celebrated, published worldwide, bottled and sold and textbooks festooned with his teachings.

Alas, his insight appears to have been ahead of his time. Living up to his parental role, he gave one simple warning in his televised message of 1977. He outlined the degeneration of society into raving materialistic lunacy, “worshipping self-indulgence and consumption”. This wasn’t Marxism or collectivised peanut farming – this was absolute common sense. Of course, no one listened, but Carter knew that one day the message would sink in. “Owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” he said. As I sit surrounded by my laptop, TV, iPhone and (albeit Primark) clothing, I can’t help but think – no, know – that he was right.

“We need to be painting big bright colours rather than writing in shades of grey”

Written by Andrew Williams on . Posted in Opinion.

Considering the events surrounding his turbulent 18 month spell as one of the most powerful figures in the Labour Party, culminating in a departure from his job which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of The Thick of It, Peter Watt has remained remarkably loyal to the organisation which chewed him up and spat him back out in November 2007.

As General Secretary, Watt was the fall guy for the ‘Donorgate’ scandal, a controversy surrounding the issue of third-party donations and one which threatened to envelop the Prime Minister unless responsibility was shifted elsewhere. Initially, Watt understood that it was necessary to relinquish his job in an effort to bury the story once and for all. “This had happened on my watch and I wanted to do whatever it took to put it right, so if it took me resigning to be the lightning rod, then I was prepared to do that”. It was to be, as the old cliché goes, for the good of the party.

However, he was utterly unprepared for what was to happen the day after his resignation. “I was in the back of the cab listening to Gordon Brown’s press conference on 5 Live”, Watt recalls, “and as we turned the corner to go to the Electoral Commission, Gordon actually said that I had broken the law. There was no police investigation, there was no criminal investigation at that stage, but Gordon told the world that I had broken the law”. It was a stomach-churning moment for a man who, only the day before, had been promised by senior colleagues that he would be looked after – it was an unwritten rule that he would be supported, rather than condemned, until the furore died down. In stark contrast to being supported, “the Prime Minister of the country [was] standing up and saying, ‘a crime has been committed, he’s guilty as sin… and at that point everything had changed. I said to someone I was with ‘they’re going to throw everything at me now’.”

This was a shameless piece of political manoeuvring – an attempt to scapegoat a man who had already paid with his job in order to shield the big players from the spotlight of the scandal. Watt is in no doubt as to who was the architect of this strategy. “It was a very Gordon thing to do – you find someone to blame and you blame someone hard, you keep blaming them… apportioning blame was a huge part of his approach to politics”.

Perhaps, he reflects with hindsight, the events of late 2007 were a blessing in disguise. His wife, who felt that the job was taking over his life, had threatened him with an ultimatum just months beforehand – it’s me or the job – and Watt admits that he would certainly have been divorced had he continued as General Secretary. “There’s no trade off at all – it’s basically the party or nothing, the job or nothing, so there’s no trade off… I would have stayed, and I would have rationalised it, it would have been for the good of everything else. I would have been doing it for entirely altruistic reasons – I would have been lying and deluding myself, but that’s politics.” It’s a startling insight into the insularity of the ‘Westminster bubble’, “a very, very strange existence in which you’re obsessed with things that the vast majority of the population just aren’t obsessed with at all”. This is one of the more keenly-felt components of Watt’s critique of 21st Century politics, and his shoddy treatment at the hands of senior Labour Party figures clearly rankles with him to this day. There understandably remains residual bitterness towards those who had promised to protect him, especially Gordon Brown, for whom he “hugely, massively” lost respect.

Having been cleared of any wrongdoing by the CPS in 2009, Watt had the opportunity to set the record straight. His book, provocatively subtitled My Story of Cowardice and Betrayal at the Heart of New Labour, caused something of a stir on publication just months before the 2010 general election. A damning indictment of a Prime Minister whose popularity amongst the electorate had all but vanished, he was “absolutely pilloried by party loyalists for the timing of it”, but has no regrets. In terms of revelations about the complete breakdown of the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Watt accepts that whilst he was, “the first person from inside to actually say it”, he had merely, “confirmed what people knew but had always denied”.

Nonetheless, Peter Watt remains a passionate supporter of the Labour movement, and talk turns to the future. As someone with considerable experience at the heart of the party, he is uniquely placed to consider where a party in the doldrums with an ailing leader must go from here. But there are endemic problems within the party which need to be overcome before there can be any talk of winning elections. “I think we are a split party… there is a real schism in the party about the future direction that the party needs to take, and the policy implications for that”, he argues. Moreover, there is some scepticism as to whether or not Ed Miliband is the right man for the job. Watt voted for David, not Ed, during the leadership election, though he insists that he can foresee a scenario in which we have a Prime Minister Ed Miliband by 2015. In order to achieve this, however, Miliband must first overcome his presentational difficulties. “I think what Ed finds it difficult to do is to connect emotionally with the electorate… he just can’t make a speech. He’s very wooden and unimpressive, but when you see him on a one-to-one or talking to an audience he’s very impressive, and quite natural.”

Far more crucial than presentation, Watt argues, is that Labour regains a sense of what it stands for, of its core ideals. He is unequivocal that, “you just can’t win an election from the left”, and is sceptical of the Labour leader’s apparent efforts to redefine the centre ground of British politics. Instead, Watt is convinced that Miliband’s chances of overhauling the Coalition government in three years time lie with him having the cojones to take tough decisions and set out a vision for the future.

“What Labour has got to do is send some really strong, powerful and unambiguous signals about its general direction of travel. So for instance, we say we are in favour of welfare reform and making work pay, but we’re going to vote against everything the government’s doing on welfare reform; we accept the fact that the deficit is too large, but actually we don’t agree with the government’s cuts and we wouldn’t make them, but if we win the next election we accept the fact we can’t reverse them.”

“We’re not being really big and bold and saying, that’s it, there’s the line, that’s what we believe in. And that’s all we need to do at this stage. We need to be painting big bright colours and we don’t, we just keep nuancing and writing in shades of grey.”

Peter Watt’s book ‘Inside Out: My Story of Betrayal and Cowardice at the Heart of New Labour’ is out now