It Never Drew Honey

BBC Two's documentary on Thalidomide was excellent. Do look it up.

I have just finished a post-Question Time viewing of what had been shown at the same time as that documentary, but on BBC Three.

I am not much of a viewer of that channel, which of course is not aimed at the likes of me.

But this featured the 18-year-old actor Tyger Drew-Honey, and it was on the subject of pornography. His parents are apparently legendary in that field.

There was some criticism, and at the end young Tyger, who is intelligent and articulate, was very much in two minds about the whole thing.

Yet there was nothing like this.

The driving force behind human trafficking is the pornography industry.

Buy into pornography, and you are buying into human trafficking. You are in the same position as the attendees at a market run by Boko Haram.

I am not at all convinced that all, or even most, teenage boys are as comfortable with pornography as it is fashionable to imagine.

That is true even if they find themselves using it from time to time, never mind if they do not. 

Very few indeed would be comfortable with it if they knew the facts of the matter, in the way that the small minority of illegal drug users would be even smaller if there were proper information.

Who is speaking for them?

Who dares to say that there cannot be a "free" market in general but not in drugs, prostitution and pornography, or (so to speak) vice versa?

In the same way, there cannot be unrestricted movement in goods, services and capital but not in labour, i.e., in people. Or vice versa.

Margaret Thatcher may never have intended to replace Toryism with a de-Christianised version of her father's Edwardian Liberalism, and Tony Blair may never have intended to replace Labourism with the result of that.

Nevertheless, such has happened. Who is going to put it right?