Fisking Littlejohn is even less rigorous than taking on a Sun-article, but by God if today's piece isn't the most despicable little rant from a little man that I've read in a long time:
Let's get the caveat out of the way from the off. The five women murdered in Ipswich were tragic, lost souls who met a grisly end. I sincerely hope whoever killed them is caught, charged and convicted.
That's nice of you. Why is this so reminiscent of the infamous: I'm not a racist, BUT..
And I know this might sound frightfully callous in the current hysterical, emotional climate, but we're not all guilty.
We do not share in the responsibility for either their grubby little existences or their murders. Society isn't to blame.
It might not be fashionable, or even acceptable in some quarters, to say so, but in their chosen field of "work'=", death by strangulation is an occupational hazard.
That doesn't make it justifiable homicide, but in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.
In a sense, Littlejohn is right. For those of us who have never experienced drug addiction, or had to sell our bodies in order to obtain the money to feed that addiction, we can't even begin to enter into the mindset of those who do it every single day of the year. Instead, we block it out. These people aren't human. They don't exist. If the women had been murdered over a period of years, for instance, rather than in the space of one or two months, and in different ways than through apparent strangulation, then the national media wouldn't so much have touched the case. It might have merited a local TV news report, or the odd paragraph in the local paper. It's easier to pretend these things don't happen. As soon as the word "prostitute" is mentioned to describe the person who has gone missing, they're written off, especially when there are cases of young, attractive, white women who have been killed or gone missing to report instead, who might not so much have sucked a dick, let alone been paid to do so.
This is what Littlejohn is suggesting. Rather than every life being equal, the fact that these women were paying for their drug habits through sex work instantly lowers them below the tragedy of a "normal" person being killed by a serial killer. As some have suggested in recent days, it was only once Peter Sutcliffe had attacked "normal" women that the public really took notice. That this has changed is to be celebrated. Instead, comfortable right wing hacks like Littlejohn are given pages to try to turn back the tide.
They weren't going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur. The only kind of missionary position they undertook was in the back seat of a car.
No, and neither are the vast, vast majority of the population of this country. Is Littlejohn suggesting that their deaths would also be "no great loss"? No, this is just a conceit so that he can get a crude joke in.
Of course their friends and families are grieving. That's what friends and families do. But they should also be asking themselves if there was anything they could have done to prevent what happened.
If you discovered your daughter had gone on the game to feed her heroin habit, wouldn't you move heaven and earth to get her off it?
Well, surprise surprise, Tania Nichol's parents didn't know she was working on the streets, so whether they knew that she was also on drugs is doubtful. Neither did Gemma Adams', and they had tried to help her, but apparently failed. Anneli Alderton had been on drug treatment programmes but failed in her attempts to get off. Paula Clennell's father didn't know she was "on the game". Annette Nichols' cousin had tried to get her off prostitution and drugs, but had also failed.
All of which underlines just the kind of place which street prostitutes find themselves in. They end up there because there usually is nowhere else for them. Their parents may have disowned them, or have similar problems themselves. They may have tried to help but failed. For Littlejohn to just dismissively complain that they should have done more is insulting. By their own nature, most prostitutes are ashamed of what they are reduced to. They often don't want the people who are closest to them, especially relatives, to know what they do.
Frankly, I'm tired of the lame excuses about how they all fell victim to ruthless pimps who plied them with drugs. These women were on the streets because they wanted to be.
We are all capable of free will. At any time, one or all of them could have sought help from the police, or the church, or a charity, or a government agency specifically established to deal with heroin addicts. They chose not to.
As noted above, it looks as if some of them did have help, or attempted to get some. Any person who has battled nicotine addiction will know how difficult it is to give up. Crack cocaine addiction is almost certainly far worse. In a study on monkeys, even when starving and with food in the cage, they would instead use the drug.
Littlejohn is right though that they were on the streets because they wanted to be. As interviews by the media have made clear, they have almost no alternative to doing so. The sad fact is that unless any of those organisations that he mentions had been willing to get any of them straight away onto programmes, then they would have just walked back out. The funding is simply not there, and waiting lists are long, as they are in the prisons as well. Unless treatment becomes as plentiful as the drugs are, the situation will remain the same.
The tortuous twistings of the sisterhood over the past week have been a joy to behold. The 30-yearold Spare Rib T-shirts have been brought out of mothballs and we've been treated to the All Men Are Bastards/Rapists/Murderers mantra from assorted Glendas who ought to be old enough to know better.
As opposed to the Taxi Driver/White Van Man stereotype that Littlejohn lives up to. Besides, at least one Glenda, Carole Malone, has already been out following the line of Littlejohn, rather than the "sisterhood". It also may be something to do with the fact that male commentators, such as AN Wilson, Simon Heffer and Leo McKinstry have already been out blaming the liberals and political correctness.
We've heard the well-rehearsed arguments for legalised and regulated prostitution, as if we were living under the Taliban. The fact is, we've already got de facto legal brothels on every High Street.
They're call saunas or massage parlours.
As I remarked when the Labour MP Joe Ashton was once caught in a Siamese "sauna" in Northampton, he must have been the only man in Britain ever to go to a massage parlour for a massage. It doesn't get much more glamorous than that.
All of this depends on the local police force and local council. Some inevitably turn a blind eye, while others are a lot more hardline. Besides Mr Littlejohn, how is it you know so much about this?
The arguments for regulating and legalising prostitution also go a lot deeper than this, as he well knows. The Observer at the weekend reported that Blair vetoed the attempts by Blunkett, in one of his only sane moves, to introduce regulated "red light zones", which have worked in the Netherlands and Germany. No prostitute has been killed in such zones which have been introduced overseas. Such regulated zones could also be useful in cracking down on human trafficking, meaning that modern day sex slavery could be almost entirely avoided. Littlejohn dismisses all these various suggestions and plans in one swipe of his pen, or tap on his keyboard.
These five women were on the streets because even the filthiest, most disreputable back-alley "sauna" above a kebab shop wouldn't give them house room.
Again, not necessarily. As the pictures of the women have also shown, none of them were the stereotype of a hard-faced, drug-battered old prostitute which so many have of street girls. Diane Taylor has also reported that the police attitude towards prostitutes in Ipswich was not among the most liberal. Really though, this is just Littlejohn attacking the women for being the lowest of the low, an attempt to make the reader feel contempt for them rather than sympathy. They weren't even good enough to work in a mangy brothel, don't you get it?
The men who used them were either too mean to fork out whatever a massage parlour charges, or simply weren't fussy. Some men are actually turned on by disgusting, drug-addled street whores. Where there's demand, there'll always be supply.
Or that some would rather go to an area where it's less likely they'll be caught by someone they know. Most "saunas" are now in areas of high-level CCTV. Down by Ipswich's Portman Road stadium there was none, as the police have found to their disadvantage. Men will always go where they know the working girls are. For some, sex is just sex. It doesn't matter what the woman looks like. Men can also get stung in massage parlours, some of which resemble places like those in Soho where the naive get trapped. Those working on the street are often more honest. As above, this is just another swipe at the women involved. Notice how the men are only insulted for being mean, while the women themselves are "disgusting".
This wasn't a case of women going on the game to put bread on the table, or to look after their "babies". That's what the welfare state is for. They did it for drugs.
No shit? I thought you were meant to tell it like it is, not state the obvious.
The gormless Guardianistas simply refuse to confront this blindingly obvious reality. They would rather deify celebrity druggies such as Kate Moss and Will Self than face the truth that hard drugs wreck lives.
Ah, now we get down to insulting the liberals. It's the gormless Guardianistas that are responsible for these women being on smack. The tabloids which Littlejohn has worked for never so much as cover the lives of celebrity smackheads like Pete Doherty, do they? Besides, this is a false argument. What kind of person looks up to Doherty for being a drug addict? They might for his music, not for the way he's killing himself. How many young people would have even heard of Will Self? "Drug chic", if it does actually exist, which is far from proved, is more evident amongst the celebrity mags and gutter press than it is among the the liberal Guardian and Independent readers. The chattering classes that read the Daily Mail and love their dinner parties are similarly likely to regard cocaine use as aspirational rather than something to look down upon.
Contrary to Littlejohn's liberal insults, as has been noticed, it's been the attitudes of the tabloids towards both tolerance zones and towards treatment programmes that mean they often don't see the light of day, so we don't know whether they would work or not. When Howard Roberts, deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire police earlier in the year suggested giving heroin to addicts, he was jumped on by the same people who have now jumped to blaming liberals. They want to blame and decry at the same time, without offering any solution themselves other than the current one which is so evidently failing.
What I find most objectionable about all this is the attempt to make us all feel responsible for the murders. There is a nasty whiff of Lady Di about the enforced mood of mourning, with even the Old Bill coming across like hand-wringing archbishops.
This is nothing to do though with the women themselves, or the "liberal" media; it's been the tabloids and TV that have been driving it, as they always have and always did. It's a case of great public interest, and when five young women have been killed, everyone wants the perpetrator to be found, and quickly. The police have learned their mistakes from their past, in the way they dealt with Peter Sutcliffe, and the tone struck by them has been just the right one. This is nothing like the huge, mindless gnashing of teeth that followed Diana's death, which was genuinely enforced mourning on a grand scale.
At Ipswich Town's home game on Saturday, there was a minute's silence. We were supposed to believe that this was a true reflection of the community's sympathy.
I don't buy it. Most people went along with it in the spirit of emotional correctness and through fear of getting their heads kicked in if they didn't.
I'd agree if it had been at football grounds across the land, but this was at Ipswich Town's stadium, very close to the area from where the women disappeared. I heard the minute's silence on the radio, preceded by a moving prayer from a local minister, and it was observed impeccably, with everyone applauding when it was over. The population of Ipswich might know their mood better than a gor blimey hack who probably only read about the silence, rather than heard it.
There was only one thing missing, but don't bet against it.
When Blair gets back from saving the Middle East, don't be surprised if he turns up at the funeral of one of these unfortunate women to deliver a lip-trembling, tear-stained eulogy: "She was the People's Prostitute".
There we go, the obligatory Blair insult. The cherry on the cake of an offensive, heartless piece, a true reflection on the writer himself.Labels: prostitution, Richard Littlejohn, Suffolk murders
Oh, and I've been memed (ugh). I'll find a way of fitting that in when I do my masturbatory post on the best/worst music of the year in a couple of days. Until then, have a happy Christmas. I'm sure I won't.
Oh, and I've been memed (ugh). I'll find a way of fitting that in when I do my masturbatory post on the best/worst music of the year in a couple of days. Until then, have a happy Christmas. I'm sure I won't.
