Three Strikes And Out?

Oh look. Labour's one-woman MEP stand-up comedy show Hairy Moneyball, having been humiliated by Iain Dale first, then shot to pieces by experts in the sex industry earlier this month, has now been busted for being plain barking a third time on a subject about which she professes to possess knowledge. The latest, deliciously, by the Guardian.

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

I suppose we shouldn't be too hard on the dozy bint. She has a track record for believing any old junk shite thrown in her general state-sponsored direction. She is a classic case of the lazy, money-grabbing, intellectually-challenged, confirmation biased politician.

She is costing us in the region of £350,000 pa, but still wasn't alert enough to notice how a figure of 71 was massaged by quangoes, fake charities and the Labour party, into a widely reported 25,000 (I'll use snippets, but read the whole thing, do).

And I think we've seen this kind of artful socialist lying in pursuit of Stalinist idealism before, haven't we?

Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic

They spoke to specialists, studied news reports and surveyed police, who reported that 71 women had been "trafficked", whether willingly or not, during 1998.

At the very least, they guessed, there could be another 71 trafficked women who had been missed by police, which would double the total, to 142. At the most, they suggested, the true total might be 20 times higher, at 1,420.

"It can be estimated that the true scale of trafficking may be between two and 20 times that which has been confirmed."

Fake charities turned this rough estimate into a base.

Chaste took the work of Kelly and Regan, brought the estimate forward by two years, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and declared : "An estimated 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 2000 for the purposes of constrained prostitution."

Not big enough, it would seem.

Three years after the Kelly/Regan work was published, in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.

Enter the Labour Party.

The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" ... [and] "should be regarded as an upper bound".

No chance. In June 2006, before the research had even been published, the then Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ... [declared] to an inquiry into sex trafficking by the Commons joint committee on human rights: "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims."

Misleading? Lies? From a party steeped in integrity and truth? (stop shouting WMDs, Lisbon, and the smoking ban - I can barely hear myself think FFS) Surely not.

The Salvation Army went further: "The Home Office estimated that in 2003 ... there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem."

Still. It's not like 4,000 is a big exaggeration, perhaps we can let that pass.

In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, [Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister Denis] MacShane announced that "according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain."

There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.

Voila!

And Honeyball no doubt nodded in righteous agreement at every stage of the manufactured lie. Hence why she has top-lined a petition against the abolition of the Met Police trafficking unit which was planned to cost £3.7m over two years.

Because that is obviously value for money in a recession according to Moneyball, yes? Just to re-iterate, this is to tackle a problem that the Guardian headline thus ...

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

Give it up, love, you're not helping, as detailed in a damning denouement which shows how very damaging wimmins rights fucknuckles can really be to the women they purport to protect.

Repeatedly, prostitutes groups have argued that [Labour anti-trafficking legislation] is as wrong as the trafficking estimates on which it is based, and that it will aggravate every form of jeopardy which they face in their work, whether by encouraging them to work alone in an attempt to show that they are free of control or by pressurising them to have sex without condoms to hold on to worried customers.

Honeyball, you've been shown up as a tedious, selfish, feminism-obsessed, dictatorial, dogma led moron with no fucking clue even in areas where you choose to specialise.

Three strikes, you are out. Piss off down the local Brussels curry house, dribble cannellini bean korma down your dungarees, and stop wasting our money on your personal prejudices, cunt.

Or, as Obnoxio puts it.

How many people will spend their lives worse off because of your grandstanding?

I hope you all rot, painfully, to death. And that your children burn you in effigy every day thereafter.

And then some.

H/T Tim Worstall


UPDATE: There is a further examination of the falsehoods behind trafficking figures by Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, a guest at Charlotte Gore's blog.