Elixir, Indeed

“Reform mayor under police investigation for alleged cyberflashing”? Follow the link and praise the Lord. Reform UK has two directly elected Mayors, and it is this one, not the other one. Be grateful for small mercies. So to speak. And newly resigned from Solihull Council, Jamie Campbell remains one of two directors of Elixir Dream Ltd. Resident at the same address, the other is a Thai national who rejoices in the name of Supaporn Campbell. But enough of this frivolity.

As a 49-year-old ex-con, I thought that I had heard it all. But I became aware of the strangulation genre only because of a recent storyline on Coronation Street, and the other two categories of pornography that were about to become illegal, one depicting incest and the other in which adults pretended to be children, are altogether new on me. In all three cases, I am thoroughly bewildered that these were not already illegal, and mightily disturbed that, not being so, they were apparently common enough to require specific legislation. What a time to be alive.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

For example, pornography is now being legalised in Ukraine to pay for the war. It had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union, but post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform has picked its side, the same side as the Green Party on this as on the war. Both in Britain and in Ukraine, the terrible fate of the United States beckons. Except that by banning three types of pornography, the Government has proven that it was possible to ban them all. Let that be done.