Orwell and Harman - the odd couple
An unlikely couple you might think. But together they featured in Salieri’s Christmas and helped him to understand a little more about the world according to New Labour.
One is of course a well-respected figure in left-of-centre circles…while the other is married to Jack Dromey. But, cheap jokes apart, Salieri was reading a brilliant collection of Orwell’s journalism for Tribune in the 1940s - buy it here - when Harman came on the wireless suggesting that prostitution be made illegal (by the device of making it a criminal offence for men to purchase sex from women). Report here.
Orwell first, though. Apart from being a consistently good stylist, what characterizes his essays is a readiness to acknowledge the limits of his knowledge, compassion about human nature, the belief in improvement that went with the grain of people’s lives rather than against them, and a salutary skepticism about coercion as a means to social improvement.
Orwell could be wrong of course: his confident statement that the press should and would be nationalised by the then Labour government was not only unfulfilled, but seems alarmingly at odds with his vision of the controlling Ministry of Truth in 1984. And he could also be a little bit batty, devoting a column to the idea that laundries should come under state control and developing a strange obsession with the idea that rooms should have curves rather than corners to make cleaning easier (how, exactly?). But on the whole he shines as a human voice in the chilly austerity of the post-war period.
So how, Salieri thought, would Orwell have viewed Ms Harman’s proposal? Certainly he would have agreed that the existence of prostitution was a moral and social wrong, and looked forward to its abolition as a result of a fully-socialist state and economy. But - in the absence of that earthly paradise he expected – he might also have been inclined to look at the evidence for, and consequences of, moving directly to criminalising the sale of sex in a modern capitalist state. So let us try to be Orwell.
Any discussion of this subject is generally ruined by prurience and the near-complete lack of evidence from the people who know about it – working girls and their customers. But we can at least ask some questions.
On what basis should the freedom of prostitutes to ply their trade be curtailed? If moral, then would this apply also to male prostitutes (gay and straight), to women providing sexual services which do not actually include penetration (e.g. to lap-dancers and dominatrices), to escort agencies?
If this is a legal issue connected with human trafficking and forced prostitution, why are there so few cases brought before the courts? Wild statistics are often quoted by campaigners and politicians on the basis of a few well-publicised and genuinely horrific examples. But it is likely that the massage parlours of the UK are staffed with forced labour? It does seem very odd that women who are being held against their will in appalling conditions apparently never take the opportunity to tell any customers about it. But if there are reasons for that (terror, mistrust, psychological subordination) then kidnapping is already a crime. Ministers should send the police in to raid a sample of brothels and tell us what they find.
If the concern is about the impact of prostitution on neighbourhoods, then the most visible examples are currently controlled. Kerb-crawling and soliciting are already offences. The effect of the Harman proposal would be to bring largely invisible off-street prostitution into this net.
And, finally, what would be the wider consequences of implementing the proposal? When the lives of working girls come to public notice – sadly usually as a result of crimes like those of Peter Sutcliffe or the recent spate of Ipswich murders – we learn that many of them have dependent children. What would be the effect on them? Others have drug habits to support. Presumably if the law were to be enforced comprehensively, they would turn to other forms of crime to fund these. Put crudely, do we want fewer prostitutes to have more muggers and burglars?
One suspects that what really riles Harman about the sex industry is a puritanical feeling that it’s just not very nice. When topped up with a dollop of New Labour’s obsession with coercing people into behaving like model citizens then she has made the case for herself without any regard to the evidence and to the lives of the women she professes to care about.
Orwell would have taken her to one side and told her to deal with the causes of the problem instead of indulging in silly political stunts.