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.

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.

In defence of hymn-singing atheists

At my daughter's Christmas concert on Monday night, none of the Tamil parents knew the words to the carols, so the Jews had to sing twice as loud. The next morning I read Libby Purves's elegant reproach to the great atheist Richard Dawkins on his admission that he too enjoys belting out Away in a Manger. “How honest is it to sing?” she demanded of Professor Dawkins. “How insulting to those who mean every word of it?”

This made me uneasy about the carolling Jews. True, they absolutely don't rubbish God, but Jews explicitly deny the possibility of Jesus being the Messiah, and therefore presumably ought to worry about causing offence to true believers when singing this, as they did: “Late in time behold Him come/ Offspring of a Virgin's womb/ Veiled in flesh the Godhead see/Hail the incarnate Deity.” You'll recognise there Charles Wesley's own interesting preoccupation with carnality, as well as one of the most famous not quite rhyming couplets in schoolboy history.

Fortunately both Jews and Hindu Tamils were — for reasons of time, I imagine — spared the verse from Once in Royal David's City, where the young Jesus's imagined relationship with his Virgin mother is extolled, continuing: “Christian children all must be/Mild, obedient, good as he.”

The author of the carol was a Victorian Ulsterwoman, C.F. Alexander, the wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, and Mrs Alexander was not averse to supplementing the scriptures when she felt the Spirit demanded it. In the version of Once in Royal David's City that we did sing on Monday, the final verse ended thus: “When like stars His children crowned/All in white shall wait around.” Now, it's been years since I took biblical instruction, but I am not aware of any authority for the exact colour of the clothes to be worn in Heaven by those eternally “waiting around”. Like any songwriter Mrs Alexander had just made it up.

It seems a bit harsh, therefore, to make belief any kind of test for joining in the song. Worse, I would say that anyone who “means every word of it”, given the provenance of many words, has problems much bigger than whether a Professor R. Dawkins denies God.

And it also raises a question over Libby's suggestion that Prof D might be more honest if he stuck to “a verse or two of Frosty the Snowman”. This an interesting parallel, since this, too, is a tale of resurrection, in which Frosty finally, “Had to hurry on his way/But he waved goodbye saying/‘Don't you cry, I'll be back again some day'.” And songwriters Jack Nelson and Steve Rollins had no less supernatural backing for their words than did Mrs Alexander, so one perhaps ought to add that Professor Dawkins may only sing their song if confident that he isn't in the company of those who believe that Frosty the Snowman is real.

Be liberal, but not with the facts

Yesterday, the day on which the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer of Thoroton effectively killed the Government's 42-day detention plan, was also the 43rd day that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito spent in custody in Italy in connection with the Meredith Kercher case.

I mention Knox and Sollecito, neither of whom have been charged, because their situation casts some light on the way the debate on detention has been conducted in Britain. Readers may remember that Liberty recently released a report “carried out by lawyers and academics in 15 countries” claiming that Britain had, in effect, the most draconian detention laws in the Western world. Using the hyperbole routinely deployed on these occasions, Liberty claimed that its report “exploded self-serving assertions about extended detention in inquisitorial Europe”, and made “embarrassing reading for all of us in the land that gave Magna Carta to the world”.

Although Liberty's intervention received the usual respectful attention from the liberal press, it was still pointed out in some places that countries with different judicial systems - as in the case of Italy - seemed to permit detention before charge for much longer periods than even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was minded to call for. Ah, said Liberty, you don't understand, such objections had “confused pre-charge detention with detention pending trial”. A helpful graphic in one paper repeated the Liberty figure for Italy for pre-charge detention as “four days”.

You may notice here what would seem - to the person on the Clapham omnibus - to be a semantic sleight of hand. In Italy you can be held for month after month without formal charge as long as you are understood to be “pre-trial”, during which time sufficient evidence may be found to convict you or, if not, you may be released. And Italy is lauded as being more liberal than Britain for systematically holding suspects for far longer than our Government is seeking to do on an exceptional basis.

How to be a mad dictator

Gordon Brown was right not to go to Lisbon at the weekend, but even so, there was something marvellous about seeing Robert Mugabe being Merkelled in the flesh by the German Chancellor. There, impassive, he was forced to sit while Frau Angela told him, in front of 70 African and European leaders, what a shower he was. Whether it improves anything or not, is another matter, but it felt good.

Four weeks earlier there had been a rather similar moment during the Ibero-American summit in Chile. Hugo Chavez, the populist President of Venezuela, had been laying about him with his characteristic lack of restraint. Jose Aznar, the former Prime Minister of Spain, was, according to President Ch�vez, a fascist, and, he added, “fascists are not human. A snake is more human”. When the current Spanish PM - an opponent of Mr Aznar's - objected to this abuse, Chavez continued to shout. It was at this point that the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, leant forward and told Chavez to shut his big, fat, sloppy gob. My Spanish is poor, but it was something like that. JC's admonition has become a popular ringtone around the world.

This symmetry appealed to me because, though Chavez's Venezuela is not yet anything like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, I cannot help thinking that Mugabe is Chavez's possible future, and that the 83-year-old former liberation fighter is the former general's Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Mugabe, like Chavez, took power after elections that were widely agreed to have been fairly conducted. Over time his governing philosophy came to consist of an economic nationalism underpinning a state socialist system, mobilised by exploiting resentment towards a privileged minority (the whites), treacherous elites (journalists) and interfering foreign powers (Britain).

The Zidane moment of madness

For Christmas I would like a special writer's present. This would be the uninhibited capacity to be able to write sentences about stench and stink and sleaze and about how politics is enmired in corruption, or else about how government is terminally incompetent and useless — and to get this stuff into boisterous print, before the treacherous and debilitating thought occurs to me (as it invariably does), that perhaps there is something more to it all than venal politicos and unemployable public servants. Scruple diminishes the effect of all too many a column.

Criticism — reproach, even — comes easily enough; satisfying condemnation, however, I tend to reserve for actions, statements or falsehoods I couldn't readily have made myself. I somehow just can't slaughter someone just for messing up, because I also mess up, and in circumstances far simpler than those faced by prime ministers or generals. Was Wendy Alexander, Labour's Scottish leader, attempting deliberately to subvert the law for the sake of £950 from a chap in the Channel Islands? I doubt it.

Sometimes, however, there is a kind of messing up that goes beyond my understanding. And you think: “How on God's green Earth can that have happened?” Two of the Government's recent debacles fit into this uncomprehended category: the case of the lost discs and the affair of the general secretary. Let us take them in reverse order.

No real sex please, we're ironic

Later today the luminary authorities who run the magazine The Literary Review will — for the 15th time — announce the winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The original object of this prize was to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. Clearly this is a long-term project because, as I write, those who are threatened with receiving the unwanted gong in front of a sniggering audience include the novelists Iain Banks, Norman Mailer, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson, as well as Ian McEwan for his detailed descriptions of various low-key sexual fumblings in On Chesil Beach.

Allow me now to draw a line of connection — one that is going to seem tenuous. Just last Friday the Health Protection Agency reported on an important aspect of non-fictional sex. This was that, in 2006, the number of sexually transmitted infections (or STIs) rose to 620,000, up by 2.4 per cent on the previous year. It estimated that 73,000 people in Britain live with HIV, one third of whom are unaware that they even have the virus. Nor is this, as some like to imagine, about African migrants; among gay men there were 2,700 new diagnoses of HIV in 2007. Naturally, young adults accounted for a high level of infections, including genital warts (the virus for which is linked to cervical cancer), gonorrhoea and chlamydia.

It's possible, of course, that the greater effort put into screening is partly responsible for the year-on-year rise. Even if this is the case, we are still left pondering a British paradox: how does it come about that there is so much sex in the culture and yet so little knowledge of how to prevent oneself getting or passing on this life-threatening virus or that unpleasant germ? Since this is my column, I will dispense peremptorily with the eternal lobby that links disease with “too much” sex education and argues that if we knew even less about sex, then we'd be less likely to do it so often. They would not apply such logic to any other realm of human existence.

Tony Blair: The war? I believed in it, I believed in it then, I believe in it now

Months ago, when I knew I would be interviewing Tony Blair for a series of programmes on BBC One, I would ask friends, politicians and other journalists what questions they most wanted put to the former Prime Minister. Reduced to its essentials, the answer would almost invariably be the same one, “Why, really, did you go to war in Iraq?” Today this, as far as I can tell, is what happened.

When Tony Blair became Leader of the Opposition in 1994, he — like Margaret Thatcher — knew little about foreign policy. What he did have was a series of instincts about how the Major Government and the international community had handled affairs in Bosnia, and he wasn’t impressed. Ever the anti-fatalist, once in office he was inclined to see such problems as requiring a solution. And passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction. “We cannot let him get away with it,” he told Paddy Ashdown that November.

Although military force short of invasion was used several times against Iraq in the following years, the first killing ground was to be the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999. When a campaign of airstrikes against Milosevic’s Serbia seemed to be getting nowhere, Blair began to agitate for Nato to threaten the use of ground troops and eventually persuaded a very reluctant Bill Clinton to agree to such a line. Two days later Milosevic backed down. The lesson that Blair took from this, he told me, was that the credible and united threat to use force could succeed where all else failed. In fact he didn’t believe that Clinton would have carried out the threat.

As the Kosovo crisis developed, Blair had delivered a major foreign policy speech in Chicago that spring. This address outlined a doctrine of liberal interventionism, arguing that there were circumstances when, though its interests were not directly threatened, the international community might intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The speech singled out two major villains: Milosevic and Saddam. One critic of Blair’s foreign policy activism was — I was reminded by a senior Blair aide — then an academic at Stamford, Condoleezza Rice.

Why ditch Blairite foreign policy?

There is much to admire about David Cameron: the hair, the skin, the sticking to the task when the going was hard, the job-creation schemes for John Redwood and Boris Johnson. I attend gatherings full of Labour nervousness or Tory optimism and note that, among the trendies at any rate, shares in Brown are at Northern Rock levels and Cameron, in bright Bermudas, surfs the political rollers.

Mr Cameron has done well. And insofar as we may discern a Cameroonian ideology, it could be said to be Blairism sans Blair. This is sensible, because the former Prime Minister, while outstaying the patience of the political classes, was always located by voters as the politician whose instincts were closest to their own. So Mr Cameron is big on academies, big on choice, big on tolerance, big on “leadership”. He has done well.

It has been interesting, then, to see the most obvious aspect of Tony Blair's leadership legacy — his foreign policy — subtly disowned by the Tory leader. Three weeks ago, visiting Germany, Mr Cameron gave a speech outlining his new principles of conservative action abroad. His first principle was that “to help protect international security, any state must put its own national security first”. “Every good military commander,” Mr Cameron opined, authoritatively, “understands that no campaign will succeed unless you secure your home base first.” The 7/7 bombers, he declared by way of evidence, were British citizens, not Iraqi agents.

Consequently we had to beef up the “four types” of domestic security — institutional, cultural, economic and physical. We had to have a clearer and more confident national identity like, er, India (his choice, not mine, though China would have been a more honest example), we had to promote national cohesion, bear down on those who threaten said cohesion and strengthen our border protection.