Child victim of Haiti earthquake 2010, image courtesy WorldVision

The impact of an earthquake of magnitude seven is almost impossible to imagine.

Two years ago I went with World Vision, one of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) partners, to Armenia, scene of the devastating 1988 earthquake. Even after twenty years, and hundreds of millions of pounds of international aid, Armenia, previously one of the wealthiest Soviet states, is still in poverty, with much of the infrastructure unreliable, unsafe (to Western eyes), or incomplete. The landscape was littered with derelict factories and abandoned buildings. People I talked to told me that they had simply abandoned the last twenty years, and their hopes were that their children would one day be able to live the kinds of lives they had lived before the quake.

Haiti was, by contrast, already one of the poorest states in the world before the earthquake struck. It has for long been one of the least able to organise even ordinary levels of nutrition, housing and sanitation.

Clearly, everyone must make their own mind up about what they want to do, and each is in a different position financially. However, I want to put my weight behind the call to donate to the Haiti Earthquake Appeal. All the monies through DEC will be handled by well known, well trusted charities, including Oxfam, tearfund, actionaid, WorldVision, the British Red Cross, CAFOD and Christian Aid. It’s simple to donate online, or by phone to 0370 60 60 900, or by cheque payable to DEC HAITI EARTHQUAKE and sent it to DEC HAITI EARTHQUAKE, PO BOX 999, LONDON, EC3A 3AA.

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Today, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has begun a legal challenge to the BNP for its constitution and membership criteria. Speaking on Radio 4′s PM programme, the BNP’s Griffin claimed that his party was exempt under sections 26 and 27 of the Equality Act 2006. However, the Commission has pointed out in its letter the BNP does not satisfy the criteria for a membership organisation which exists for the benefit of its members.

Griffin, I think, failed to register the irony of his remarks. He declared unequivocally that the British National Party existed for the benefit of the ethnic minority English people, who were discriminated against by society. First off, English people are not an ethnic minority. According to the 2001 census, 85.7% of the population are the native ethnicity referred to as ‘White British’, while the CIA Factbook suggests that 77% of the UK population are English. But, rather more ironically, does Griffin’s party purport to represent the interests of English people, or, as the name suggests, British people? If British, then it should surely include all those with British citizenship. Or else he should be required to change its name to the ‘White British Ethnic Party’, since he can scarcely claim that his party is a ‘national’ party, if its aim is to exclude a part of the nation. If he really means only the white English, he should change the name to ‘White English Ethnic Party’.

During his Euro-election night speeches, Griffin suggested that people coming from other cultures to Britain should be required to adopt our culture, or should be required to leave.

Let me therefore replay this challenge to the BNP. Britain is a multi-racial, multi-cultural society with laws protecting all for the benefit of all.

If the BNP is unwilling to adopt our culture and obey our laws, its leaders and members should simply leave the country. I am not strictly sure which countries would welcome them.

But, there’s always Rockall.

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After endless amounts of backwards and forwards discussion, Harriet Harman is considering “banning” prostitution. Her reasons are something I applaud – to reduce the sex market, thereby decreasing the profits of sex-trafficking, and moving towards eliminating the modern slave-trade.

Actually, though, ‘banning’ is something that patently does not work as far as what is generally referred to as ‘vice’ is concerned. The American experiment with Prohibition of Alcohol is invariably cited as the case in point. On the other hand, the solution recommended by the English Collective of Prostitutes – to legalise building-based prostitution, as has been done in New Zealand – has also been proven not to work. In Amsterdam and across Belgium, building-based prostitution has been shown as the best of all worlds for people-traffickers. Their victims are out of sight, easy to control.

This sounds like the counsel of despair. If banning doesn’t work, and if legalisation doesn’t work, we are almost at the point of saying that we are living in the best of all possible worlds – and what a terrible world that is.

Some solutions, have yet to be tried. It has been hinted at in radio interviews, but the best solution is to target the clients. Any kind of restrictions on sex-workers invariably results in more pressure by pimps and traffickers on illegal immigrants. The threat of law is used against the victims. What’s more, those involved in semi-consensual sex, which is most prostitutes, can only pay the fines that are currently dished out to them in magistrates’ courts by engaging in more prostitution. Targeting the clients, on the other hand, goes (as the Inland Revenue say) ‘where the money is’. There are at least three kinds of prostitutes: trafficked women, semi-consensual prostitutes, and (most often heard on the radio) prostitutes who choose to do what they do. There is only one kind of client: men who want sex, and are prepared to pay for it. The experience of research in Belgium is that men are unwilling to distinguish between the three kinds. Target the clients, and the market reduces.

However, this approach can only be pursued if routes are created out of prostitution for those who want to exit the trade. This is not only for trafficked women. There are plenty of semi-consensual prostitutes, working to pay for drug-habits, or because their economic situation is one for which they cannot find another solution. We don’t (as yet) have sufficiently integrated paths out of drug-use. Any way out needs to be carefully constructed at a local level to provide drug rehabilitation, dental treatment (almost always essential for drug users), training for employment, social housing, and more. This can only happen if we commit to it as a society: far too often initiatives of this kind are held back because ‘ordinary’ people (or their local political representatives) say that they don’t want public money to go on helping people out of their own bad choices to this extent. It’s the same argument that says that teenage girls get pregnant in order to get housing benefit. True, or not? Hard to say. But irrelevant. In a civilised society, we need to invest in people’s lives to bring them back into mainstream society, no matter how they fell out of it. If we are not willing to pay the price, then we must accept that we will never approach an answer to human trafficking.

Which makes all of us guilty.

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The Birmingham police deserve every congratulation for facing up to the situation and taking action. But there is far, far more to be done.

The UN estimates that 5 million women and children are trafficked each year. This means that every three years, as many people are sold in slavery in the modern world as were sold during the 315 of the Atlantic slave trade. Nobody knows how many are trafficked in the UK each year — itself a damning indictment of our failure to begin to tackle the problem.

Key factors in the growth of sex trafficking in Britain include the following. First, in tackling prostitution our legal system has tended to penalise sex-workers while failing to go after pimps, and doing little to discourage the clients. Secondly, the growing tolerance for building-based prostitution creates an environment where traffickers can easily control their victims. Third, the UK heavily penalises people who are illegally in this country, even where they are victims of human trafficking. Chillingly, in yesterday’s raid, several of the girls are being held by police while their immigration status is checked. However, the most important factor is a failure by local authorities and central government to take the issue seriously.

While working for charity I was involved in counselling and assisting victims of sex-trafficking in Belgium. It is a long and depressingly fragile process. Belgium has a bad track record for its toleration of this industry. But it has developed some effective support mechanisms for victims, which we would do well to emulate in Britain. There are systems in place for victims to gain immigration status, and help mechanisms to assist them into social housing, language learning and the social security network. All these are missing in Britain.

Ultimately, the Belgian approach is based on the acceptance that sex-trafficking is a crime perpetrated on the victims by Belgian society. It is therefore for Belgian society to redress it.

For as long as we continue to penalise victims, with the occasional foray against the perpetrators to salve our conscience, we in Britain will continue to nurture the conditions which make this trade flourish.

And that is sickening.

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The nation mourns as the predicted death toll from yesterday’s bombing is expected to reach fifty.

And yet, and yet. The atrocity has failed to scar our national psyche. The government is not set to fall. The stock market closed at barely below the limits of normal trading. London is coming back to life. Hospitals were able to cope with the situation.

We are shocked, but we are not terrified. We mourn, but our national resolve is strengthened.

The terrorists have achieved nothing of any worth to themselves. Instead they have revealed that their reach is shortened, and their planning weak. They have done nothing to disrupt the G8 summit. All they have done is to unite the leaders and raise Tony Blair’s reputation as a statesman. They failed to capitalise on the moments of national celebration %u2014 Live8 and the Olympic Games %u2014 where they might have done so much more damage.

There will be lasting repercussions. Families are without fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children. Colleagues will look at empty chairs, and remember. Lives have been cut off short. Survivors will face weeks, months, years or a lifetime of injuries.

Let the murderers take these on their consciences for the rest of their lives.

But in terrorising Britain, they have failed.

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My next door neighbour was an Auschwitz survivor. His name was Abraham, and in the camp he was put on the night shift of forced labour. He survived – he said – because the guards were too tired to beat the prisoners. At one point he was so hungry that he climbed a refuse pile to steal a rotten apple. The punishment beating he was given for this crime was so severe that he suffered from back problems until the day he died.

Abraham was one of the lucky ones. He survived. Every other member of his family was killed.

It’s easy for we who were born years later to think of Auschwitz as something very distant. From time to time people even express irritation about Jews ‘banging on about the Holocaust’.

Perhaps it would be time to forget if we had — as a world — learned the lesson of history. But we have not. After the Holocaust there were the Gulags. The Killing Fields of Cambodia. Rwanda. Kosovo. Darfur. In hope, we still sometimes look back to the Holocaust and say ‘never again’. But it would be truer to say ‘never before’. Because the Holocaust did not end something, it began it.

We may have a UN convention on genocide, but we have not eradicated it. If anything we have institutionalised it. ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ has entered our language.

My friend Abraham died ten years ago. Like all those who endured such things, he could not forget.

As long as such endure, we must not forget either.

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This is a disaster unlike others. Vast in scale, an enormous human catastrophe. Television, the internet and world travel bring it very close to us. For many of us, friends lost their lives, or saved them but lost friends and colleagues.

The enormous public move to donate to disaster relief reflects well on us. The undignified spectacle of governments clambering over each other to prove that they led the way in relief does not.

But even our public compassion raises questions. Why do we not respond in this way to the AIDS disaster in Africa? Why do we not respond in this way to civil war in Sudan, or in Congo? Why — as a nation — are we promoting heartless policies towards asylum seekers, presuming them guilty unless they can prove that they are innocent?

In those three minutes, we will be brought face to face with ourselves.

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It was in August that Tory spokesman David Davis took a potshot at human rights legislation. He claimed that it was responsible for the ‘compensation culture’ which was growing up in Britain. Lord Falconer is today to weigh into the debate by at – one and the same time – denying that the compensation culture exists, and simulaneously threatening legislation if ‘No-Win, No Fee’ companies don’t voluntarily clean up their act.

Lord Falconer is merely echoing the ‘Better Regulation Task Force’ which in May dismissed the notion of a Compensation Culture as an Urban Myth, while at the same time presenting evidence for it. The story about the school that made pupils wear goggles to play conkers is merely amusing. But the large council that actually spent more than £2m of its £22m roads budget on tackling compensation claims in 2003-4 is proof positive that the compensation culture is no myth. Claims against schools have risen to £200 million a year, enough for 8,000 new teachers, while claims against the NHS rose to £477 million, the equivalent of 22,700 extra nurses. And then, of course, there is the rising cost of insurance premiums.

Both Wrong

Lord Falconer and David Davis are both wrong – but Falconer is on the right track.

Daytime TV – and the less popular satellite channels – are full of advertisements trying to persuade us to take our bosses to court. Then there’s the youngish people who hang around shopping centres with clip-boards asking anybody who will give them the time if they have had an accident in the last three years. None of these ever mention the human rights act, so it’s acutely unlikely that people who sign up with these companies are doing so out of a sudden desire to test out the limits of new legislation. Sorry, Mr Davis.

At the same time, given the amount of evidence, both in terms of companies that make their money by it and the hard facts of claim costs, to say that it is all just an Urban Myth seems a bit far-fetched. After all, if it is, who is paying the advertising costs? I suppose Lord Falconer doesn’t watch daytime TV and so the question has not struck him in that light.

Predators

Regulating the claims industry is not the path to take. Falconer is a lawyer, and sees this as a blight on the legal profession. A better approach would be to go back to daytime TV and ask the question ‘Who is being targetted by this kind of advertising?’ It doesn’t take much analysis to work out that the target audience is the same as for high APR car financing and consolidation loans. The message is a simple one: ‘you may not believe that there’s a large pot of money out there waiting for you, but there is and all you have to do is to contact our company’.

The outcome is also the same: people who are financially unsophisticated sign away their rights or future earnings to companies who will make disproportionate profits on the deal.

It is this kind of predatory commerce, which make its money by preying on the hopes and fears of the financially vulnerable, which needs our attention. The combination of hard sell advertising, bullying sales tactics, and an unfair division of either risk or winnings makes these particular companies unwelcome in our economy.

We can regulate on a sector by sector basis forever. In doing so we penalise genuinely beneficial legal and financial services alongside the sharks. It is time for government to turn its attention to the whole unpleasant spread of businesses that trade on false hopes and real miseries. And we should not be regulating these people. We should be eliminating them permanently from our economic life.

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We don’t negotiate with terrorists. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. We don’t negotiate with terrorists… In these days of internet MPEG downloads, there has to be a new metaphore for what used to be called a broken record.

Sharon’s opponents – previously his allies – have argued forcibly that to pull out of Gaza would be to give the terrorists what they want. It would prove that Israel was weak. That Israel could be worn down.

The mood of the moment is to be tough on the terrorists. War on terror, as George W has put it.

Haven’t we been paying attention for the last two hundred years? As Buffy the Vampire Slayer put it, ‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them in summer school.’

We all recognise that no-one yet has the right answer to terrorism. But we should at least have learned what some of the wrong answers are. In any community that feels itself oppressed, there are a range of opinions. Some people want to make the best of the world they are in. Some want to work to improve the lot of all the oppressed. Some will want to protest peacefully. Some will resort to direct action. Some may resort to terror.

‘Getting tough on terror’ sounds fine in principle, but it usually results in getting tough on the whole population. ‘Surgical’ strikes kill more bystanders than they do terrorists. War on terror solidifies opinion. It pushes the whole population towards resistance, direct action, terror.

‘Getting tough on terrorr’ sounds fine in principle. But it is the wrong answer. And, knowing this, it is time that we realise that we need to peal off moderate elements, encourage them, negotiate with them.

This is a hard thing to do if you have taught your population to believe that they are all terrorists.

Sharon has taken a brave step. His allies – formerly his enemies – have done well to put the past behind to support him.

We can all learn from his example.

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An election is coming up. By all accounts it will be on May 5 2005. So we now face the cyclical clamour of the Tories and nearly-new Labour trying to prove that they are tougher on crime and kinder on health. Usually this comes down to promises for building more prisons, giving more money to the police, short, sharp shocks, and other repackagings of the same old solutions.

But this time one-careful-owner Labour has surpassed itself. Juries in trials for theft and for child sex abuse will soon be told of the offender’s previous convictions.

Mm. Interesting choice, that. Theft and Child Sex Abuse. Why not Car-jacking and Internet Scamming? There’s a strong whiff of which crimes the public is most cross about in this policy decision. More government by polling, but we will let it pass.

We will let it pass, because the core of my complaint against this particular popularity stunt is not that it is a typical second-hand Labour random act of policy, but that it is tinkering with the core of justice itself.

Figure it any way you like. If you’ve been fingered before, the police will already have you marked as a potential suspect. Fine. This is necessary for proper investigation. ‘Form’ as the coppers say. But when juries are told as well, your past convictions are, as it were, fed into the system twice.

If there is genuinely reasonable doubt about the evidence presented in a trial, the accused should go free. This is fundamental to justice. Can the quality of the evidence be improved by providing details of previous convictions? Surely not. But the jury’s mind might be swayed. Suddenly we are looking at a system where other considerations are influencing the jury’s mind about a question of fact.

And suddenly we are staring at the face of a completely different kind of justice.

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