OK, so it's a bit on the tasteless side, but hasn't Harriet realised yet that however much she dislikes the concept of prostitution it's been around for a lot longer than she has and isn't going to go away? Has she been talking to Jacqui Smith, whose Policing and Crime Bill sought to transfer blame from prostitutes onto clients and as such was widely attacked by feminists, women's rights groups and prostitutes (the latter surely being the experts in these matters) who believed it would lead to an increase in violence towards prostitutes as punters took more aggressive and violent steps to hide their activities, while at the same time making it harder to establish and run lapdancing clubs so that women with no alternative way of making a living would be forced to turn to prostitution instead?
Harriet Harman - has appealed to the Terminator for help in getting rid of website Punternet.Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 licence.
Harriet, who in also being able to call herself Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Labour Leader, Party Chair of the Labour Party and MP for Camberwell and Peckham has almost as many titles as Count Mandelson of Transylvania, told the Labour Conference that the website is "degrading." Of course, it's not really any different to a site which allows people with faulty cars to look at user ratings for various repair firms - somebody supplies a service for a price, people want to know they're going to get a good deal. It's seedy, but not especially degrading - certainly far less so than being forced to sell yourself, putting yourself at high risk of contracting any number of diseases, risking violence and murder every day just to be able to support yourself and feed your children or your drug habit. Perhaps it might be better to have a long, hard look at society and see if there are any ways that we can help the women and men who are forced to live like this? Like, maybe, free childcare so women with young children can get jobs, benefits that pay enough money to actually live on or drugs made freely available on the NHS for users who agree to attend programmes designed to help them kick the habit?
Oh, maybe not - that'd be expensive, wouldn't it? Plus we'd run the risk of being forced to stop pretending that our society has opportunities for all, or perhaps we'd discover some very big and costly-to-repair holes in the welfare net, holes that allow thousands of people to fall through, vanishing from society forever in some cases? Or maybe there'd be no choice but to increase the rights that immigrants - such as those thousands of illegal immigrants who have to sell sex because they're nor permitted to get proper jobs and enjoy the sort of protection that mere, simple humanity seems to suggest we ought to offer them; and that's going to really stir up the Daily Nazi/Scum-reading hordes that Harriet's failing, falling government so desperately needs if they're to survive the coming General Election intact (which appears to be all they can hope for - they've long lost all hope of winning it). There's even a chance that the population might cotton on to the belief that our current system of Government and partisan politics has made a bit of a hash of things and dear old Blighty is looking a bit, well, shit as a result - and we can't have that, can we? We might have to change. Perhaps it's best to just throw a blanket over the whole sordid thing instead and pretend something has been done about it - that's a far cheaper way to try to scrape back a few votes.
Punternet is registered in California, which is a bit of a problem for Harriet because the United Kingdom Government has no say in what goes on in the USA (unlike the other way round - the US Government can demand all sorts of things, such as the extradition of naive UFO buffs suffering from acute learning difficulties). So she can't do a lot about it.
But she knows a man who can, or might at the very least - Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and has contacted him asking for the site to be shut down. "It won't be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate Punternet," says Harman. "If he doesn't, I'll be back."
You what? Harriet, please - just shut up and fuck off.
Note: We're not back yet. We just couldn't resist an opportunity to tell Harriet Harman to shut up and fuck off.
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I guess she shot it down with good intentions, but people often direct their energy wrong. The problems related to prostitution will not be solved there. Anyhow, yes it is on the tastline side and tells me something about those men but the freedom of speech is more important.
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