Tag Archives: lies

It’s Official! Obama’s Endless War

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Amidst the various sporadic outbreaks of moronitude, people could be forgiven for missing this week’s top story. The Obama administration casually admitted that the US has been running a global, open-ended war since the 9/11 attacks, and it has no intention of stopping any time soon.

During a Senate hearing, Pentagon officials said that the “war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates” could last another 20 years; and claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in order to allow the 2001 attack on Afghanistan was an open-ended authorisation to deploy violence anywhere on the planet. When an Independent Senator pointed out that the Pentagon has “…essentially rewritten the Constitution…”, this was met with a shrug, and “…I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a lawyer of any kind…” from one of the Pentagon officials. Now, I’m not a lawyer either, but I’m aware that “ignorance is no defence” when it comes to lawbreaking.

The Pentagon is apparently aware that it is breaking US law (not to mention international law), and seems to be 100% comfortable with that fact. US democracy is revealed to be a sham when most Democrats loyally line up behind the Obama administration; meanwhile, Republicans, rather than oppose Obama’s shredding of the constitution, would rather pursue three completely fabricated attacks on Obama instead. As we already know, the Republicans are even more enthusiastic about pursuing illegal wars than the Democrats.

The current phase in the “war on terror” involves firing missiles at various targets in Pakistan and Yemen, and in the process killing far more civilians than fighters. Pakistan has just achieved the first moderately democratic transfer of power in its history; the US, in pursuing an illegal war against Pakistani individuals, against the wishes of the Pakistani parliament, can fairly be described as a terrorist entity. Under international law, Pakistan is within its rights to retaliate – though it lacks the power to do so, and any retaliation would only strengthen the case for continued terrorism by the Americans.

Yemen is a very poor country which is experiencing a severe water crisis. For a fraction of what the US spends on bombing the place, work could begin on securing water supplies and addressing poverty. But helping fix Yemen’s problems wouldn’t serve the Pentagon’s interests: in order to pursue endless war, it requires a frightened American population; and that needs an enemy. If American morons were to discover that the “terrorist threat” consists of small, scattered groups of idiots driven by poverty more than anything else, support for the Pentagon’s terrorist campaign would weaken.

Those people who were paying attention at the beginning of the “war on terror” (in which the neo-cons blamed Afghanistan for the actions of a small group of Saudi dissidents), will remember predictions that the war may last a decade; now it’s clear that the strategy is to keep kicking the can down the road. 20 years is a meaningless number. The “enemy” barely exists, yet so long as people believe it does, the war will continue, and create the illusion of an enemy as it does so.

The fact that the entire “global terrorist threat” against America has managed to produce 19 men armed with knives, and two men armed with pressure cookers, over a period of twelve years, would make intelligent people stop and think; luckily for the war machine, there appears to be a great shortage of intelligent Americans (or alternatively the corporate-run media ensures they rarely get heard).

Since the Republicans are doing their best to cover up for Obama’s attacks on the constitution, it’s up to liberals to break ranks. Sure, it was good to have a Democratic president, and even better to have a black one, but any dreams that Obama was any kind of liberal must surely have been shattered by now.

Americans, you are bringing death and destruction to places most of you can’t find on a map, just as you did during the “Cold War”. Billionaire interests are leading your country to destruction, and like sheep, you blindly follow. The more foreign civilians you kill, the more likely that some person, sickened by the death and destruction in their own country, will try to take revenge on you. And it seems equally inevitable that you will crap your pants and allow unelected interests to take even more of your liberty in response.

As one of your great men, Benjamin Franklin, said:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Free Shaker Aamer

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Eleven years ago, a British resident, Shaker Aamer, was working in a school in Afghanistan when he was kidnapped. Since then, he has been illegally imprisoned and repeatedly tortured at the illegal US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. The British government has requested his return, and he has been cleared for release – but is still there. He is reported to be one of the majority of Guantanamo detainees who are on hunger strike, and are being illegally and painfully force-fed.

Anyone who wonders why innocent people are being held and tortured by the US has not been paying attention for the past decade. Neo-cons wanted endless war, and in the absence of a real enemy, they had to create one: “Terrorism”. When they invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they offered generous bounties for “terrorists”, with the inevitable result that gangs of thugs kidnapped and sold people, at random, to US forces.

The people thrown into Guantanamo Bay, and other US “dark” prisons, were described by the Bush Administration as the most dangerous people on Earth. This helped frighten ordinary Americans, as well as whip up a climate of Islamophobia. It allowed both the Bush and Obama administrations to attack civil liberties in the US, and carry out a series of illegal wars and assassinations abroad. Shaker Aamer, and thousands of people like him, had their lives destroyed as a “necessary” part of this campaign. Almost all of these “most dangerous people on Earth” have been quietly released without charge; Shaker is the last remaining British victim of Guantanamo.

You can read more about Shaker Aamer here, or watch the video from his campaign below.

Ann Coulter and the Return of the Bell Curve

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Before 9/11, when Muslims suddenly became to blame for everything, there were still morons; it’s just that they believed different myths back then. Right-wing Americans, who hadn’t yet been fed the “Islam is evil” myth, needed somebody to hate; and in general they chose to hate black people. White Supremacy, which went quieter after 9/11, and quieter still after Obama’s election, was the right-wing American moron’s prejudice of choice.

I spent a lot of time online in debate with some of these people. They had rehearsed their arguments well, but once the cracks in their reasoning were exposed, the whole edifice crumbled quickly. Their fundamental claim was that black people were genetically inferior to whites. This was old orthodoxy that had survived unchanged since the same argument was used to justify the slave trade, centuries earlier.

The racists made good use of a 1994 book called The Bell Curve, which examined both genetic and environmental factors in intelligence. However, noticing that intelligence is partly dependent on genes isn’t the same as noticing significant differences between races – something the authors themselves made clear, although the racist morons chose to ignore this point. They also made use of IQ test scores which showed black populations in America significantly under-performing whites. Claims of “white supremacy”, however, were dented by the fact that Chinese and Indian IQ scores were above those of whites. The poor supremacists were forced to accept Asians as their intellectual superiors, as the price of “proving” that blacks were their inferiors.

The argument was fairly easy to dismantle. IQ scores have been steadily rising since the tests were invented over a century ago, demonstrating that education is a major factor in IQ. In fact, the gap between today’s white people and whites a century ago is far wider than the gap between any two racial groups today; to claim that modern whites are genetically much different from their great-great-grandparents would be nonsensical. Additionally, black IQ scores are rising faster than white ones. Again, this rules out a genetic factor.

The race-based arguments are further undermined by breaking the racial groups into smaller subgroups. For example, in the UK, black immigrants from Africa educationally outperform those from the West Indies; and Indians do better than those from Bangladesh.  The arguments are old and thoroughly discredited.

So imagine my surprise when I was informed this morning that racist far-right American nut-job Ann Coulter was tweeting about a study about Hispanic “inferiority”.

This claim just happens to come at a time when a debate about amnesty for illegal Hispanic immigrants is raging. Which is convenient.

Ann is a genuine moron, but falls into the small group of morons who are just smart enough to make a good living from scaring those even dumber than themselves. She regularly pops up in the right-wing media to make racist and otherwise stupid comments that are calculated to get morons all hot and excited. The fact that she is blonde, and could be described as attractive (externally, rather than in her dark soul), if you like that sort of thing, certainly helps her win TV appearances and viewers. No doubt, Kleenex sales rise in Bible Belt states whenever she appears and calls for some country to be nuked, or calls Arabs “ragheads”. Or whatever.

I wish Ann was a little more considerate. Now she’s sent those tweets, my timeline will be filled by morons repeating the claims for the rest of the day. Sigh… and I was hoping for a quiet Friday.

Who Bombed Boston?

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Something HUGE happened on Monday. A multiple bombing, resulting in fatalities and many injuries, which received saturation-level media coverage. The bombs in Nasariyah, Kirkuk and Baghdad killed at least 31 people and injured over 200.

Only joking. Monday was, of course, the date of the biggest bomb attack on US soil since 9/11. Some moron (or morons) planted home-made bombs, killing three innocent people and causing many serious injuries to others who were simply taking part in a marathon for charity. On Twitter, I was accused of a “lack of empathy” for even daring to raise deaths in Iraq or Pakistan, on the day that Americans were killed. Americans! Somebody doesn’t know the meaning of empathy, obviously.

We learned, again, that three is greater than 31. Or than 300. Or than 3000. There is huge empathy around the world for the people who were killed and injured on Monday in Boston, but also huge frustration at the total lack of empathy for the deaths occurring around the world – deaths for which Americans have blood on their hands. While Pakistanis have to suck up the fact that 50 civilians die for every “terrorist” killed in drone strikes - perhaps over 4,000 deaths so far.

Because Americans are real people, and Pakistanis… well, they’re not really, are they? Except they are. You have our empathy, America. Where is yours?

Now, of course, the predictable Muslim-baiting begins. The hate dollar is big, and Americans are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Hate sells in America. You may have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the last decade, but playing the victim is way more fun than feeling, somewhere deep down, a little bit guilty. The usual suspects – those people and businesses who know how to play morons for the hate dollar – are out in force; and morons are buying.

So far, Fox News guest hater Erik Rush wins the top moron award for wanting to kill all Muslims in response to Boston. Generalising hate towards a quarter of the planet’s population at least means you avoid mistakes – like bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen when you are attacked by a small group of Saudi militants on 9/11.

But who bombed Boston? Fascists on both sides of the Atlantic think they know, and have wasted no time in telling us “it was Muslims”. Never mind that they have repeatedly called it wrong; they know that morons will forgive them getting it wrong repeatedly, if they only get right once. Who remembers now all the morons that blamed the Oslo bombing on Muslims? It was done, of course, by a right-wing “patriot”. Was there a witch-hunt of blond, right-wing patriots? No – acts of individuals are only blamed on groups when they’re brown-skinned.

I don’t know who bombed Boston, but I’ll stick my neck out – and unlike the fascists, I’ll use facts to make my best guess.

We know that from 1980 to 2005, 6% of terror attacks in America were carried out by Islamic extremists. We also know that extremism among far-right Christians is on the rise. The Oklahoma bombing was not a one-off: the Southern Poverty Law Center provides a long list of far-right and Christian plots that have taken place since. It’s easier to be scared of brown-skinned, Arabic- or Urdu-speaking foreigners than it is of the white “loner” who lives down the road, but statistically, the Boston bombing is far more likely to be the work of a Christian than a Muslim.

There’s a good chance that I’m wrong; there are Islamic terror groups that would no doubt like to target Americans (in fact, there are a lot more such groups than there were when the “war on terror” began in 2001). We’ll have to wait and see.

[UPDATE: as you probably noticed, the bombs were not planted by far-right Americans. I called it wrong. However, I called it less wrong than many media pundits are calling it, even now. The two Chechen murderers are variously described as anything from a "cell" to a full-blown Islamic plot to destroy humanity. The reaction has been breathtakingly moronic, even to a seasoned moron watcher. More to come shortly.]

One prediction that I’m sure of: morons always win from violence. Fear will grow; Obama will get more support for his attacks on US civil liberties; the military machine will thrive on the fear, get increased funding, and kill more brown people; the NRA will sell more guns; Glenn Beck and Pamela Geller will sell more of whatever they sell to morons. This cycle will keep on turning until Americans finally spot the pattern, and decide enough is enough. That’s all it needs.

Why Maggie Won’t Have a Respectful Send-Off

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Perhaps the United States once really was “the land of the free” – but I see no historical evidence that it deserves this label (unless it refers simply to the freedom of white people to grab land, in the early, pioneer days). An illustration of the power of US corporate propaganda is the way in which Ronald Reagan, a global terrorist and domestic criminal, who redistributed large chunks of the US economy to the super-rich, is today seen by many Americans as a hero; or at least, a nice old man. He even has a provincial airport named after him. This Stalinist-style rewrite of history is an American speciality. The truth is dead – long live the propaganda.

Reagan’s loyal sidekick, Margaret Thatcher, died last week, and the right immediately tried to begin another rewrite of history; the media has pushed a largely establishment view, and the old lady has been given a state-funded funeral, with military escort, to take place this Wednesday. The British establishment is trying to airbrush one unfortunate fact out of history: Thatcher is widely loathed by much of the British public – probably by more people than ever supported her. Unfortunately for the Conservative party, right-wing media and wider establishment, the British people have less of a tendency towards amnesia than our American cousins, and, it appears, less of a tendency to lie down and let the state roll over us.

Thatcher, I commented on Twitter, was the most hated Briton of the 20th Century. I only received one dissenting reply, which suggested Ian Huntley (the murderer of two young girls) as an alternative. Perhaps he was right – but reaching for a child killer underlines my point rather than destroying it.

The point of most of the protests, blogging and anger is deadly serious: to prevent Thatcher from getting the Reagan treatment. It’s important that the long series of tragedies that marked the Thatcher era is kept in the public memory. Even the combined might of the right-wing media has failed to hide that Thatcher is hated by millions of people.

Some clever person thought up a way to reveal the extent of Thatcher-hate: by suggesting that people buy the Wizard of Oz song, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead. The single rocketed up the iTunes chart to number one (before mysteriously settling back to second place in the hour before the count closed on Saturday night); the right, still failing to comprehend the truly mass nature of the anti-Thatcher feeling, tried to replace it with a pro-Thatcher song, “I Love Margaret Thatcher” (which was actually satirical – there are no known pro-Thatcher songs). This effort was promoted by the right-wing media – and still flopped dismally, reaching a pathetic 35th position. Despite what the media was telling us, there was no groundswell of pro-Thatcher feeling to rival the anti-Thatcher feeling.

The BBC and Capital Radio both decided to censor the charts. You see, it’s fine for the mass media to tell people what tunes to buy, but when the public choose the top single for themselves, to make a statement? That’s dangerous sedition. We now have an established precedent: when a fact (in this case, the extent of hatred for Margaret Thatcher) is inconvenient to the British establishment, the media can and will impose censorship.

Anti-Thatcher banners were displayed at football matches. Plans for a minute’s silence at stadiums were shelved, because football fans would have refused to stay silent. Every attempt to paint a picture of a nation in mourning failed.

The right resorted to snivelling: “An old lady has died… Think of her family.” But then why is such a hated woman awarded a state-funded funeral that is bound to generate anger and protest? Why is there a military presence, and why are the chimes of Big Ben to be silenced? Because then future generations can be taught that she was a national heroine; that her vindictive and deliberate destruction of Britain’s social fabric was actually done in the national interest. The fact of the funeral itself can be used to write history – how different is this from the state-sanctioned worship of North Korean leaders? These tyrants can prove how “loved” they are by showing videos of cheering, flag-waving crowds. Tomorrow’s event is made-for-TV. The pictures will show the burial of a loved woman, not a hated one. Millions can express their hatred for Thatcher on the streets, online, at football matches, by buying singles; but the final story that the establishment wants to tell is a different one altogether.

This is why the protests this week have been important. This is a battle for memes: a struggle to control which version of history goes into the history books. Because for all the praise over Thatcher’s legacy, the British people have not forgotten:

  • Thatcher’s “economic miracle” never happened: British GDP has grown in line with Germany and France - and this happened at the time of a North Sea oil boom in the UK.
  • Thatcher therefore didn’t create wealth with her policies – she merely redistributed it, from poor to rich, as shown by the Gini coefficient.
  • And the long-term economic legacy? According to Thatcher fans, we now have a country of opportunity for hard workers. Yet Thatcher actually made it harder to succeed – social mobility fell, and is among the worst in Europe, with only Portugal lagging behind us. This fact, more than any other, destroys the central myth of Thatcherism.
  • Thatcher’s one true economic achievement was to turn London into a global financial centre; but this happened at the cost of losing Britain’s position as a manufacturer, leaving Germany to soar ahead; and the 2008 crash showed that the City boom was far less valuable to the nation than had been previously assumed. It had been built on sand.
  • Some “libertarians” have declared Thatcher a fighter for individual liberty – these people clearly don’t remember the most authoritarian regime of the post-war era, probably even beating New Labour’s control-freakery after 9/11. The police were given a blank cheque by the Thatcherites: as a result, police corruption and violence soared. Deaths in custody were ignored. When young people turned away from politics and embraced rave culture, the police were even there to stop them dancing in fields. Thatcherism did not approve of dancing. “Free” people must consume, not dance.
  • Despite the rise in brutal policing (or more likely, because of it) violent crime rose throughout the 1980s, peaking in the mid-90s before starting to fall again (see “Trends in Crime” graph in this BBC article).
  • Thatcherites spread the myth that privilege is now about hard work, not birthright; yet when Thatcher’s moron son Mark attempted to engineer a coup in Equatorial Guinea and was arrested, strings were pulled on his behalf, and he was fined and released.

So Thatcher’s death is being used by conservatives to reinvent her life. Don’t these people have any respect for a frail old lady who has died, or for her family? Despite a torrent of media lies and censorship; despite the police acting to prevent peaceful protest; despite the tabloid wailing about “leftie extremists”, the British people have acted to stop history from being rewritten. The British love of free speech wasn’t given to us from above; it’s deep in our culture, and it’s the people who claim to defend it who most want to take it away.

Posing As Progressives

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Gail Dines: The New Mary Whitehouse

Gail Dines: The New Mary Whitehouse

It’s been one of those weeks when I fall out with some of my, usually friendly, followers. When you’re a leftish political blogger, there are safe things to write about, and things you shouldn’t mention. Social equality, fairness, child poverty, saving the NHS, racism against non-whites, attacks on women’s rights, climate change, corporate power; these are all things that I know I can tackle without dissent from others on the left. There will be, of course, attacks from the right, but those are bread-and-butter. We can all unite and enjoy rebutting those. Career tip: if you want to become a Labour parliamentary candidate, and you write the occasional column, but don’t want to ruffle feathers? Stick to these subjects (no names mentioned).

Then, there are the subjects that confuse many on the left – so they generally don’t mention them, for example: racism by non-whites, domestic violence against men, use of the word “cunt”. And of perhaps most of all, sex. Sex, being the subject that raises the most primal feelings in us – whether negative or positive – divides all parts of the political spectrum. The left has a series of simple check-boxes to guide it through this minefield: Gay rights? Approved. Abortion rights? OK. Rights for sexual fetishists? Erm… Union rights for sex workers? Sounds of left-wing heads exploding.

Now let’s turn things around for a moment. If you were a social conservative ideologue, in Britain, in 2013, how would you go about popularising your ideas? This would be easy enough in America: you say that public nudity is immoral. Because the Bible says so. You say that Muslims are bad because… well, they’re not Christians are they? But things aren’t so easy for the British reactionary. The British have largely abandoned religion – at least, the type you actively believe in. So what would you do? You’d do what clever reactionaries do: adopt progressive camouflage.

Both sexual morality groups and racist bigots have successfully adopted this approach, and in doing so, have blended into the liberal mainstream. The last well-known sexual morality group was Mary Whitehouse‘s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now known as Mediawatch UK). This made some headway in the 80s, before being laughed off-stage in the more relaxed 90s. Taking note of this, the new moralists took a leaf from an American lawyer called Catharine MacKinnon. MacKinnon came from impeccable right-wing stock – her father was a right-wing Republican Senator. In the 1980s, MacKinnon (with her sidekick Andrea Dworkin) took a sexual conservative message, wrapped it in superficially feminist language, and succeeded in fundamentally splitting the feminist movement in two – a divide that has existed ever since. The MacDworkinites did more damage to feminism than any misogynistic man ever could.

The MacDworkinites are going from strength to strength. MacKinnon’s natural successors are Gail Dines – a deeply reactionary anti-sex activist who campaigns for media censorship and a ban on sex work using feminist and Marxist language, and a number of conservative groups, self-labelling as “feminist”. The best known MacDworkinite groups in the UK are Object and UK Feminista – who will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. The latest to appear on the scene is the current campaign against the topless photo on Page 3 of the Sun.

It’s amazing what a small shift in vocabulary can do. Because the MacDworkinites refer to themselves as “feminist”, then anyone who opposes them must be against feminism, right? It’s sad that sections of the left are so easily fooled, but indeed, the strategy has worked impeccably. Are these groups actually a conservative offshoot of feminism, or conservatives who have infiltrated feminism from the outside? It doesn’t matter – that’s a simple matter of classification. You can call them anti-sex feminists or anti-sex “feminists” – either way, they are reactionary. The early second-wave feminists implored women to abandon their bras. These new groups beg women to put their bras back on.

The same methodology has worked wonders in demonising Muslims in secular Europe. Far-right pundits like Pat Condell attack Muslims – not from a religious perspective, but from an atheist one. Muslims are, (they say) “less civilised” than we, secular European are. They chop off heads and run kebab shops in London (of course, the Muslims cutting off heads aren’t the same ones selling kebabs to drunk Brits – but who’s counting?)

Such gullibility on the left saddens me. Both left and right have become riddled with conservatism, and well-meaning people have swallowed this reactionary propaganda. Meanwhile, Object’s attacks on women sex workers continue – supported blindly by middle-class women who think sex work is common and icky. And atheist fascists like Condell convince atheists that attacking minorities is OK – if it’s done in the name of Enlightenment.

The alternative is what I’ve labelled Social Libertarianism: social democracy combined with an unshakeable commitment to free expression, free speech, freedom of religion and sexual freedom, and an equally tenacious opposition to all forms of censorship. It’s not new – it’s what the left used to stand for.

Blaming Women For Rape

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The skirt is no excuse to rape - neither is porn

The skirt is no excuse for rape – neither is porn

This blog recently carried an article by Edie Lamort on the current moral panic about pornography; here’s another article on the subject. This is no accident – most people will have noticed a sharp rise in scare stories recently about porn, nude imagery, strip clubs and “sexualised” imagery in the media. The stories are the result, not of actual problems or any evidence of harm, but of widespread, well-organised campaigns by authoritarians to increase censorship of the media, and in particular of the Internet.

I won’t revisit the evidence here – but in summary, there is no solid evidence that erotic imagery leads to harm against women or children: in fact, the reverse is true. This, of course, doesn’t deter the anti-sex, pro-censorship campaigners in the slightest. They have no interest in whether porn is in fact harmful to women – their end goal is for censorship and control of sexuality, and in particular, female sexuality.

You may remember the birth of the Slutwalk movement about two years ago. This was triggered by a Toronto police officer who suggested that, in order to avoid rape, women should avoid dressing like “sluts”. The outrage that this victim-blaming caused led to the birth of Slutwalk in Toronto and then globally. A huge, young feminist movement took to the streets proclaiming the right of women to be sluts, without either being judged or raped.

I was a great supporter of Slutwalk; not everyone was though. The anti-sex feminist campaigner Gail Dines, for example, thought that women were misguided in trying to reclaim the word slut, and said this would “make life harder” for adolescent girls. This was typical of the clashes between the anti-sex and the sex-positive wings of feminism.

Today, another policeman tried to avert the blame for rape away from the rapist and onto women. This time though, unlike in the Toronto case, he was strangely applauded by some women. In a Daily Record article entitled More women will be raped if online porn isn’t tackled, Assistant Chief Constable Malcolm Graham made an explicit link between porn-viewing and rape.

This, of course, is victim-blaming; but it’s a little more subtle than the Toronto variety that launched Slutwalk. Instead of saying that a rape is the fault of the woman who is raped, it claims that a rape is the fault of women who appear in porn, and thus incite men to rape. In both cases, women who dare to bare flesh in public are being blamed for the act of a rapist.

This logic is the same as that used by orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim sects, especially the Wahhabi Muslims, who cover women’s faces with niqabs “for their own protection”. The logic, whether blaming a woman for her own rape or blaming porn stars, Page 3 girls and strippers for another woman’s rape, is identical. The very sight of female flesh, we are told by the policemen, conservative feminists and religious fundamentalists, incites men to be rapists.

I’ll repeat: there is no evidence that this is true; indeed, evidence from studying rapists shows the opposite: that rapists tend to have repressed sexualities. Rather than enjoying porn, they are likely to find it disturbing. An article in Psychology Today entitled Sexual Repression: The Malady That Considers Itself The Remedy makes this point well: sexual repression, far from being blamed for sexual problems, is touted as the solution: Lengthen that skirt! Ban Page 3! Porn leads to abuse! Strips clubs lead to rapes! In every case, women are blamed for rape, and men are considered stupid creatures who, having seen a nipple or a vagina, cannot stop themselves from attacking someone.

So let’s remind ourselves: when a woman is raped, it is not her fault. Nor is the fault of the girl who appeared on Page 3 that morning. Nor is it the fault of the woman who chose to make a living by having sex on camera. It’s the fault of the rapist. The fact that a police chief has chosen to lead a morality campaign against porn is very disturbing. Police in free societies should have nothing to do with the consenting sex lives of adults. Stalin, Hitler and other dictators carried out conservative morality campaigns against their populations. Women did not benefit from these.

If we want to remember what pre-porn Britain was like, just look at the emerging facts from the Jimmy Savile case. Is that an innocent, “unsexualised” world that we should return to?