As you say, you do not listen to arguments from experience, knowledge, reason or logic. Instead, your knowledge of this subject derives from when your mother dipped your soldiers in your boiled egg at breakfast.

Go away and talk to some prostitutes. Ask Metje Blaak how many of the prostitutes in her association are really coerced into being prostitutes. Consult adultworld.co.uk and read the blogs – how many of the women there sound as if they are compelled to sell their bodies? make a few appointments and chat a la Gladstone. Try learning from experience rather than from what your mummy told you.

I know this is futile because you are not interested in evidence or reality but as long as people like you drive policy, the Tory party is doomed.

Those who assert otherwise are simply demonstrating how little they know of women in general and prostitutes in particular.

There is no shortage of women who either enjoy whoring or for whom it is a minor inconvenience compared with the revenue it brings in.

Sad from the point of view of the Christian Taliban I’m sure, but no less a fact of life than the Labour party always raising taxes and always being chased out of office during an economic crisis.

Nothing can eradicate prostitution and legalisation and light regulation is the only moral, pragmatic and Tory course.

I have few problems with the legalisation of prostitution. It is, afterall, a transaction between two consenting adults. It should be regulated to make it safer for both the prostitute and the punter.

You are confusing this with peoples’ desires to avoid regulation and state intervention which is presumably what is causing the problems in Amsterdam etc…

If it is her free choice to become a prostitute, then I have no problem with her doing so*. I just don’t believe that it ever is, beyond a de minimis number of exceptions.

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*although I would be very disappointed if she was my daughter

If you are addicted to heroin and selling your ass to feed a habit, that’s not a free choice. If you are dirt poor and unable to get a real job and you’re selling your ass to feed yourself and your children, that’s not a free choice. If you get sold on street corners because your pimp/trafficker will beat you to death if you don’t, that’s not a free choice.

To my mind the goal should be to try and create a social and economic order where those factors don’t conspire to coerce people into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t choose to. Were that accomplished, my guess is not too many women would choose a life in the sex trade…

Shaun, nice to have you back again. Glad you agree with my argument that incentives can go horribly wrong. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be used at all because in some situations they can certainly be effective, but in the wrong hands they can wreak havoc on the policy agenda.

You seem to regard criminalising prostitution as pointless, in which I would agree with you. You also support measures to offer help to prostitutes to enable them to escape the destitution which has driven them into the trade.

LFAT seems to be concerned that directing help specifically to prostitutes would make it more attractive to become a prostitute in the first place, in order to receive the assistance. Serial episodes of short-term prostitution could become quite tempting, in fact. He seems keen to address destitution more generally (rather than just destitution amongst prostitutes), in which regard I would agree.