David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

A green light for red-light areas

If you're male and well endowed, then the next time you're in Stockholm Mimmi would like you to call. “I'm an elegant sexy Swedish woman,” she tells visitors to her website, “that [sic] is turned on by seducing men...” The rate for each seduction is €560 per hour, so the large bulge needs to be in the region of the wallet.

I know what you're thinking. Didn't you read somewhere that Sweden had made the purchase of sex illegal, and that so successful had this policy been that the British Government was contemplating similar legislation in this country? Mimmi, therefore, shouldn't exist, let alone boast a blog in which you can see her completing the Gothenburg half-marathon dressed in lacy underwear. Mimmi, however, understands the law. “I am not selling sexual services,” she reassures would-be, er, friends, “but offer company and intercourse. Since it is very difficult to prove what two people are doing when they are alone in a room, meeting with me is relatively safe...”

In January 1999 the Swedes made it illegal to pay for sex (but not to sell it). The punishment for the crime of obtaining casual sex for compensation could be as high as six months in Scando-clink, though a fine would be more usual. The sex can be any kind of sexual act involving contact and encompasses homosexual as well as heterosexual encounters. To prosecute the (usually) male clients successfully, the Swedish police must produce evidence of a prior agreement for compensation - which need not be financial. The word “casual” here leaves open the intriguing possibility that men or women who pay their spouses for sex are deliberately exempted.

Mimmi's invitation indicates one kind of problem with the law. But the Swedish authorities are, nevertheless, evangelical about their unique policy; their representatives claim massive reductions in street prostitution since 1999. One often-used statistic - repeated in this country - is that by 2004 Sweden had only 500 street prostitutes, while Denmark, which is half the size, had between 6,000 and 8,000. And it could be, with the opening yesterday of the Suffolk murders trial and the current concern over human-trafficking, that the British people might support measures that would lead to such a reduction.

The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Kingsley Amis's son has always had plenty of people to hate him. His imagined patrimony, his early success, his implausible virtuosity and his fearlessness have ensured that many who weren't actually offended by him were envious.

It was probably inevitable that Martin Amis would attract the bitter dislike of the more ideologically policed section of the liberal-left intelligentsia. In the past couple of years there has been a slow excommunication from the broad church - with good reviews turned into bad in the London Review of Books - and then last year, the full auto-da-f� - conducted principally in The Guardian, with members of the round-robinocracy, led by Terry Eagleton, waiting their turn to add a faggot to the flames.

Amis's apostasy was not, as it was with others, over the Iraq War. This collection of writings mostly from newspapers on events since September 11, 2001, reminds readers that he always opposed the invasion. In March 2003, he gave warning that the “intellectually null” George Bush, “a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas” was leading his country into a disastrous trap, ineluctably provoking, inter alia, “an additional generation of terror from militant Islam”. If Amis is open to any criticism over Iraq, it is that he explores Saddam Hussein's science-fiction bloodiness - as he does in the short story In the Palace of the End - without the slightest realistic notion of how it might be brought to a conclusion.

The proximate cause of Amis's being run out of Lib-town was an interview that he had given to Ginny Dougary of this newspaper. In it he examined his own emotional and political reaction to the London bombings and confessed to a punitive urge - “don't you feel it?” - to somehow force the Muslim community to get its house in order. These were the sentiments described by Eagleton as being appropriate to a “British National Party thug”.

White woman v black man. One's got problems

By late tonight (Iranian gunboats permitting) Barack Obama could be the surf-away leader for the Democratic presidential nomination - carried there not so much on a wave, as in a gush. How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics - either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.

Mr Obama, wrote the usually super-sour Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, offers Americans “a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent West Wing sort of president”, and the struggle between him and Hillary Clinton is a battle between Love and Hate with Mrs C representing the other thing.

Andrew Sullivan, a well-known US-based liberal-right blogger, opined post-Iowa that “sometimes, elections really do come down to a simple choice: change or more of the same?”. In his view Mr Obama “has what Reagan had in 1980 and Clinton had in 1992: the wind at his back”. “A man who pardons the original sin of the slave and who holds up a mirror to America in which she is beautiful, multiracial and pragmatic,” commented a French newspaper.

Other writers projected into the Iowa caucus victory nothing less than an end to the “culture wars” and now tedious conflict between the opposing strands of the baby-boomer generation: the Haight-Ashbury hippies and the Rush Limbaugh rednecks. One usually sober Britisher seemed to suggest that the responsibility for the hatreds that have divided Americans socially rested almost entirely with two families: the Bushes and the Clintons. Now, with the help of galvanised youth, Mr Obama could transcend all this.

The Year in Ideas: It’s all about Iran

Towards the end of 2007, in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, the authorities put to death a young man of 21 for the crime of sodomy. The importance of this act of judicial murder was not primarily that the man had been a boy of 13 when the “crime” had been committed, nor that had Makvan Mouloodzadeh been born a citizen of most other countries in the world he would still be alive. It was that a nullification of the sentence as unIslamic by the Iranian Chief Justice was then overturned by a group of judges convened as the Special Supervision Bureau of the Iranian Justice Department.

In 2008, this divided administration, with its wildly competing understandings of what is and isn’t Islamic, will be continuing a programme of enriching the uranium necessary for the creation of a nuclear weapon while continuing to refuse access to the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the same year, the international community will have to decide whether it wants to intensify its attempts to prevent this, or to give up and allow the gradual development of an Islamist bomb – 2008 will be the year of Iran.