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Posted on Nov. 11, 2009 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

An article on trafficking into the sex trade has been written by the investigative reporter Nick Davies, whose reputation will lend authority to it – although it is a hugely selective piece of reporting of the available research.

The article purports to show that so few women are trafficked into the sex trade that the policy, services and funding focus on it is completely misplaced. The debate on trafficking is bedevilled by the lack of credible data – but the parallels are not with the weapons of mass destruction case, as Davies suggests, which was ultimately verifiable, but with other subterranean issues such as domestic violence or rape. The widely accepted statistic that one in pearl jewelry four women experience violence, for example, is based largely on anecdotal evidence and extrapolations from local surveys. It could be similarly taken apart by anyone who wanted to assert that the case was overblown, because ultimately the numbers are unknowable.

The piece opens with a clever piece of sophistry that suggests trafficking does not exist. Davies claims that "The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution" – which seems to suggest that prostitution is generally a voluntary activity, an argument developed in the rest of the piece. However, it is actually saying that it failed to find traffickers. I have interviewed police officers who say it is extremely difficult to use the trafficking laws to bring people to justice.

Peter Spindler, the police officer who headed Operation Paladin, a three-month investigation into unaccompanied children entering the country through Heathrow, has talked about the difficulties of obtaining convictions for trafficking. "We've got all the offences, but they are so complicated to prove. We have had a number of convictions for facilitation where organised criminals have been paid to bring children in. The problem with trafficking is that you've got to prove exploitation," he says. In spite of these problems, we discover from a parliamentary answer from Alan Campbell in June that 267 people have been prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which led to 109 convictions, a remarkably high percentage. This fact does not appear in Nick Davies's article, despite his extensive research.

There are other notable absences: there is no mention of the report into trafficking by a home affairs committee, published in May, which gave an estimate of 5000 trafficked women and children in the UK, based on an aggregation of the figures provided by those working in this field. Nor does the article make a distinction between smuggling and trafficking. When Davies refers to the conviction of criminals for "transporting willing sex workers" he is talking of smuggling, where the smugglers and those smuggled in are equally guilty before the law.

On this basis, prostitutes were regularly criminalised and deported before trafficking legislation was brought in to safeguard women who had been coerced into the work. The European convention on action against trafficking in human beings, in its limited way, shifts the focus from criminalisation to the protection of women. It is self-serving and reckless for the biwa pearl sex workers' lobby to argue against trafficking legislation simply because recognition of the scale of the problem undermines a central plank of their argument: that prostitution is freely chosen.

Davies quotes only those sex-worker groups who feel that their right to work as prostitutes is under attack from anti-trafficking initiatives. A recently formed group of ex-sex workers, Esso, believe that only 2% of women freely choose prostitution. Their leaflet declares that they are fighting, "for a world where females are not bought and sold like commodities; our orifices just another currency, our labour and lives and sexuality expendable". Fiona Broadfoot, an ex-prostitute, who set up the Exit project to help women in a similar situation, said they "couldn't put one foot in front of another without taking £400 worth of crack". Even outside the debate on trafficking, there has to be a much more nuanced approach to choice and compulsion. Many women are deliberately addicted by pimps so that they stay on the game in order to finance their habit, while others report that they cannot get through a working day unless they are drugged to their eyeballs.

The UK government's actions are part of a concerted European attempt to tackle trafficking. If sex trafficking is a chimera, then not only the UK but the EU has been duped. To challenge the scale of the problem in the UK, you have to challenge the Europe-wide response. Women are often pushed around various parts of Europe. "Natasha", a 17-year-old Russian girl I met, was taken to Brussels and made to work there before she was sold on to a trafficker in London. Her pimp was convicted and imprisoned for seven years, but only because she finally agreed to the harrowing experience of giving evidence against a man who had terrorised her. Women like her already face a "culture of disbelief" among immigration officials keen to reduce the number of women who get leave to remain in this country on the basis of their experiences. Articles such as this will only make things worse for them.

To get governments to part with resources needs a robust, evidence-based case. That is how the Poppy project for trafficked women got started: trafficked women were being deposited on their doorstep (because their parent organisation Eaves provides housing for other vulnerable women) and there was no expertise or funding to deal with them. There is a akoya pearl snide attempt to discredit Poppy by implying that their Home Office funding gives them a vested interest in inflating the figures. However, Poppy's 25 bed spaces has recently been upgraded to 54, and they still have to turn women away.

generation and transmission

Posted on Nov. 11, 2009 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

If you are a minister in a government that spent its first 10 years in office talking on and on about the merits of energy efficiency and renewable power, but actually doing very little about it, then conjuring up a programme of nuclear power as a "get out when all else fails" sort of makes sense.

If you are chief executive of a large energy company in a country where the regulatory system does not permit you to make much money on your renewable investments, and no money at all from selling fewer electrons (to increase efficiency) rather than more, then taking a punt on a couple of nuclear reactors definitely makes sense. All the more so since you can pretty much guarantee that the government will pick up the tab for anything that goes wrong.

If you're a citizen of that country and increasingly concerned about climate change and the need to find alternatives to fossil fuels in order to pearl jewelry cut emissions of greenhouse gases, then you might reluctantly conclude that there's no alternative but to replace nuclear reactors that are due for decommissioning.

If, like me, you are the former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, which battled in vain for years to persuade the government that there are far better ways of meeting objectives on climate change, then all these pretexts for resuscitating our moribund nuclear industry remain utterly unconvincing.

The commission came to that opinion after nearly two years of research. We reviewed all available data on costs, waste, uranium, emissions reduction, safety, proliferation, security risks, and the impact of any new reactors on energy options. As dispassionately as we were able, we highlighted both the benefits of nuclear power and the disbenefits in each of those areas. The majority of us (with two of 18 commissioners dissenting)came to the conclusion that the disbenefits clearly outweighed the benefits.

A lot of it comes down to who you believe. For those with long memories, it's still difficult to attach much credibility to the promises of the nuclear industry. Two years ago it was the consensus view that companies bidding for new reactors would require no subsidy. Six months ago that bold (and some would say preposterous) assertion was put aside with a much more honest acknowledgement from E.ON, EDF and others that substantial amounts of public money would be required after all. Indeed, the case was made that the government would have tobiwa pearl stop subsidising renewables in order to prioritise nuclear.

This change of heart may well have been influenced by the fiasco at Olkiluoto in Finland, where the new reactor is already massively behind schedule and over budget. This is the same reactor design that will apparently be rolled out here in the UK. Even the staunchest advocates of nuclear power concede that it's extremely difficult unearthing the true story about its cost. We do know, courtesy of the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, that UK taxpayers face a bill of at least £70bn over the next 20 years or so for cleaning up the legacy of our existing nuclear facilities. Faced with that kind of reality, as we move into a period of inevitable austerity, it remains incomprehensible to me that the Treasury has now set aside its traditional scepticism about nuclear power.

For me, nuclear power is the lazy option. Stick up a few more reactors, don't say too much about costs per kilowatt hour (let alone costs for each tonne of CO2 abated), dump the responsibility of dealing with the waste on future generations, and don't worry too much about the state of the grid or the impact on renewable energy.

I can't deny that the alternative course of action (reducing total energy consumption by at least 40%, massively ramping up investments both in large-scale renewables – including the Severn barrage – and small-scale microgeneration, making a proper go of Combined Heat and Power and "Energy From Waste" schemes, and relying on combined-cycle gas turbines for base load generation) is the harder option in terms of the quality of leadership required. But those still wavering about the balance of pros and cons should not underestimate the knock-on effects of any commitment to new nuclear. It will undoubtedly slow investment in new renewables. It will reassure politicians that they don't have to do the heavy lifting required to put energy efficiency at the heart of any strategy. It will weaken efforts to move towards localised distributed energy solutions (why else do you think the industry and pro-nuclear civil servants fought so hard against feed-in tariffs for so many years?), and it will "lock us in" to today's hugely inefficient generation and transmission system for the next 40 years or so.

And the tragedy is akoya pearl it won't make much difference anyway – even if the reactors do eventually get built after inevitable delay. If every OECD country follows this route, instead of pursuing the alternative mapped out above, then emissions of greenhouse gases will keep rising at a dangerously fast level, average temperatures will soar, the Greenland ice cap will melt far faster than anticipated – and all those shiny new reactors will be several metres under water. Oh, for a little bit of realism.

For me, nuclear power is the

Posted on Nov. 11, 2009 at 4:57 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

That is qualitatively different

Posted on Nov. 11, 2009 at 4:55 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

More evidence of our great American divide arrived last Friday in the form of some focus group studies undertaken by Stan Greenberg (Bill Clinton's pollster in 1992) and James Carville. They oversaw conversations with a group of hard-shell conservatives in Georgia. The fascinating results explain a lot about my country's political tensions and shed light on the question of what makes contemporary American conservatism – well, unique, let's call it.

They found that conservatives "stand a world apart from the rest of America" in terms of how they view Barack Obama and how they see politics. There is a continuum, in other words, in US politics, running from those on the left who've already concluded that Obama is a sellout, to mainstream liberals who are basically happy with him, to moderates who are approving but with reservations, to centre-right folks who are unconvinced but pulling for him to succeed, for the country's sake if nothing else.

Then there are committed conservatives. They're off the continuum, in three basic ways. First, they fundamentally question his legitimacy as president. Second, they believe that a successful Obama presidency would destroy the country and are "committed to seeing the president fail". And third, they think he is "ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to pearl jewelry bankrupt the US and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism".

Big deal, conservatives will say to liberals. You people loathed George Bush. What's the difference? It's a fair question. But I think there is a difference. It doesn't repose in the character of either set of partisans – that is, I'm not saying liberals are better or fairer-minded than conservatives are. Rather, the difference has to do, I think, with the different ways liberals and conservatives define their relationship to their country.

On the first point, liberals questioned Bush's legitimacy, too. There is little doubt of that. Of course, there were solid empirical bases on which to do so. His campaign stopped the vote recount in Florida, and the supreme court, not the voters, put him in the White House. Around Obama's victory there were no such vexations. And the questions that do exist about Obama's legitimacy – his citizenship and religious affiliation – are fantastical fabrications. Be that as it may, let's be generous and acknowledge simply that legitimacy issues have been raised on both sides.

It is also true many on the liberal-left wanted to see Bush fail. We wanted him to fail at a lot of things. To some degree that's just politics. Matters get trickier when one discusses Bush's wars, because that raises questions about whether wanting to see him fail crossed the line into wanting to see America lose a war, however illegitimate that war might have been in liberal eyes. Most Bush opponents tried not to cross that line, but I can't say it was never crossed. So let's be gracious and call this one a wash too.

The third point is where the difference enters the biwa pearl picture. As much as liberals despised Bush, people never thought (except maybe on the fringes) that he was secretly out to destroy the US. We felt some of his administration's principles weren't American as we understood the concept (the arrogation of executive power, or the approval of torture). But there was none of this Manchurian Candidate business. Liberals assumed that Bush was doing what he, his team and their supporters believed was the right thing based on their understanding of American values and needs.

Conservatives do not believe this about Obama. Clearly some of this has to do with his background. Greenberg and Carville stress that race was not a factor in their all-white Georgia focus group, and while I would agree that conservatives' problems with Obama are far more ideological than racial, I have to believe that race is a subliminal factor of some sort. But it also has a lot to do with history.

One often hears conservatives speak of how Obama is destroying "my country". They use the "my" because conservatives tend to feel a type of ownership regarding the country that liberals don't. They are certain that they represent "real" American values, and that liberals represent alien values.

There's a long history here, which is bound up in everything from the two sides' different definitions of patriotism – "my country right or wrong" versus "I want to improve my country because I love it" – to religion to militarism to cosmopolitanism to a thousand other things. Every American presidential campaign, on some level, is about the Republican trying to frighten people into believing that the Democrat doesn't share "your values" and the Democrat trying to reassure people that he does. So, for conservatives, Obama is not just a guy whose views they vehemently disagree with. He's an ideological Typhoid Mary, a carrier of unknowable and barely comprehensible infections.

That is qualitatively different from liberal hatred of Bush. It is also, to be blunt, paranoid – because it's rooted in metaphorical narrative far more than in akoya pearl fact. And that means facts can never win an argument. Obama could leave office in January 2017 with the capitalist economy roaring and American power and security enhanced and these voters would still believe we'd escaped state ownership of everything and one-world government by a whisker. It's been part of the psychology of the American right for decades, and it sure won't be dissipating as long as Obama is in office.

through an overdraft facility

Posted on Nov. 11, 2009 at 4:53 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The regulator is also clamping down on interest-only mortgages. In recent years growing numbers of homebuyers have turned to these as a way of freshwater pearl affording high property prices, because this type of loan can be significantly cheaper than a traditional repayment mortgage.

The FSA said it was "concerned" about interest-only deals because it was aware that some people opted for these because they could not afford a repayment mortgage. It has therefore lumped them into the "high-risk" product category, along with self-certified mortgages and loans for people with black marks on their financial records. They will not be banned, however. Instead, the FSA wants lenders to assess the affordability of interest-only mortgages using the cultured pearl jewelry figures for an equivalent repayment mortgage.

Some will be surprised to see that Offset mortgages – deals that allow people to use their savings to reduce the interest they pay on their home loan – also feature on the FSA's high-risk product list. Some offset/flexible mortgages offer an overdraft-style facility, where borrowers can draw funds up to their credit limit. The regulator said it was concerned about this type of deal because "debt can increase above affordable levels through an overdraft facility".

But the regulator ruled out a ban on controversial 125% mortgages, or jumbo loans of five or six times an individual's salary, which it said would be freshwater pearl pendant a "blunt tool". It found no automatic correlation between high LTVs and higher default rates. In 2008 only 5% of households with 90%-plus loans defaulted, compared to 14.5% of self-certified and buy-to-let loans. "Standard mortgages of 95-100% appear less likely to default than self-certified mortgages of 75-90%," it said.