Oh no, now I have to agree with Harriet Harman!

Though only up to a point, so that's all right, more or less. She is of course quite right that the buying of sex should be illegal. And quite wrong that the sale thereof should not be. Are women morally and intellectually equal to men, or not?

Also, no one should be deemed capable of committing either of these offences below the age of consent (which should be raised to 18 anyway). Or is the hysterical feminist war against teenage boys (whose mothers cannot even be admitted to women's refuges - did you know that?), even above all their many other designated enemies, to be waged on this front, too? Those who ordinarily insist on treating teenage girls as grown women and teenage boys as small children (if that) somehow insist on reversing the arrangement in cases such as this.

It would take a lot to persuade me to give up my three remaining affiliations to the Labour Movement, two of which carry votes in the forthcoming Leadership and Deputy Leaderships Elections. But Harman's election as Deputy Leader might just do it. She embodies, and that in a particulary virulent form, one of the overlapping ideological positions, based entirely within (psuedo-)academia and the media but with no popular following, that do not have anything to do with either the Left or the Right in this country or anywhere else, yet somehow managed to take over the apparatus of one or the other (in this case, the Left) in the Seventies and Eighties, and from that base to take over the other one as well from the Nineties onwards.