After months of head-scratching, endless policy committee meetings and (no doubt) lots of expensive conferences and retreats at the taxpayers expense, Jacqui Smith our latest "Home Office Hero" has presented plans to further criminalise men who pay for sex.

And no surprise that after all the hoo-hah we find that the half-baked proposals, presented to the public are pretty much exactly like Smith herself; well-intentioned...but entirely unfit for purpose.

After all, this is the Home Secretary who just last week made the gobsmacking not-from-this-planet claim that people 'can't wait for ID cards'. The cards will start to be really pushed on us all from 2012 but Smith said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long." Who exactly? Ed.

So when Smith outlined new legislation to oblige the clients of the sex industry to ensure that the sex worker has not and is not been trafficked, my first thought was: How exactly can this be achieved? I mean seriously, how exactly would a punter go about this? Is simply asking the question: "Are you being trafficked?" enough? Is a written Affidavit required? And how exactly will this be policed? or prosecuted?

Unfortunately, Smith seems to think that the demand created by the punters can be destroyed by a few signatures on a parliamentary bill. If you criminalise the punters she claims, you destroy the demand and solve the problem.

But in true fence-sitting style, Smith and her Home Office "Ho's" have backed away from the Swedish solution (on which they have based their doomed bill), which was to make it illegal to pay for sex...full stop. This has apparently worked in Sweden and at least there is no ambiguity. But Smith has refused to go this far, ostensibly on the basis that the Swedish sex industry is considerably smaller than the UK's and it would be more difficult to police.

But how much more difficult is it going to be to obtain a successful prosecution on the basis of the wishy-washy legislation she is proposing?

I don't think any sane person would argue that human trafficking of any description is a horrific thing and as a (somewhat) civilised society, we are obliged to do our best to eliminate this terrible practice and help protect and support the victims of the trade.

But if history has taught us anything, it should have taught us that you cannot legislate morality. Every time we try to do this, not only do we fail to solve the problem, but we end up making the problem much worse!

Not only is Smith's legislation in it's current form unlikely to help the victims of sex trafficking, it is more likely to harm them further, as tighter legislation forces the trafficking rings further underground, making it's victims less visible and forced by economic imperatives to service the much more sociopathic end of the punter scale. So says the English Collective of Prostitutes, in a BBC article published over a year ago when Jacqui started climbing her political beanstalk.

Frankly, it's no surprise to me that countries with a more liberal approach to the sex industry seem to have a proportionally lower rate of serious sex crime and instances of trafficking. The Netherlands for example has long had a policy of tolerance towards it's sex workers. They can legally operate from brothels, under the watchful eye of the authorities. The workers are required to register, undergo regular health checks and pay taxes. This makes it much more difficult for pimps and traffickers to operate, because the sex workers band together and protect each other. It also offers an equal measure of protection for the punters from blackmail and extortion.

And because the sex industry is more socially permissible in Holland, sex workers and punters alike are not regarded as pariahs within Dutch society and are taken seriously by the police when reporting genuine criminal offenses. This of course encourages victims to come forward, provides a framework to properly protect victims and witnesses, increases trust and helps maintain workable community relations in an atmosphere of goodwill.

So if we seriously want to curtail human trafficking in the sex industry (and we can't avoid the over-riding urge to create yet more legislation), why aren't we looking to restructure our current legislation along the lines of the Netherlands?

One last point to mull over: Jacqui Smith claims that almost 70% of sex workers operating in the UK are being trafficked (a statistic disputed by the English Collective of Prostitutes who claim the figure is much lower). But let's give the old bat the benefit of the doubt for the moment...

How is it that the Home Office is capable of obtaining such allegedly accurate statistics and yet has been unable to use this intelligence to smash the trafficking rings themselves?

Answers on a postcard to:-

Ms J Smith
c/-
New Labour (Detached-from-Reality dept.)
Bullshit-and-Pointless-Spin Division
Houses of Parliament
London

(the first 3 correct entries win a free trip to Hollyrood)

The US election results announced today are a significant milestone in many respects.

Beyond the obvious landmarks such as Barrack Obama's ethnic background and the strong shift in voting trends from Republican to Democrat, today's events herald a resurgence in many of the fundamental ideals and beliefs that the US has purported for many years, but has failed to live up to. Concepts such as freedom and liberty have throughout most of the post-war years been subverted by a series of administrations for the purposes of US hegemony, to the detriment of people the world over.

And the result has been that those of us living and working outside the zone between the big apple and the big orange have increasingly viewed the foreign policies of successive US governments with a growing level of distrust and cynicism. In recent years especially, we have often heard the US government use words such as "freedom" and "liberty" in situations where the actions that follow those words are the diametric opposite of what is claimed.

The Bush administration has been particularly guilty of this type of hypocritical spin; whenever Dubya used these words, you just knew that he and his Whitehouse cronies were about to perpetuate another crime against these concepts, such as the Iraq war, Guantanomo Bay and the infamous Patriot act.

But Dubya and his cohorts are still merely the latest in a long line of US administrations who have talked the talk and then done exactly the opposite. Most previous US presidents have been much the same, waxing lyrical about freedom while implementing foreign policy that suppresses countries, cultures and governments who are not willing to bend their beliefs to favour the business interests of corporate America.

But as with any democracy, the ultimate faults of the leadership are (at least partly) the fault of the voters.

Someone once wrote: "We get the government we deserve". This has been particularly true in many of the G8 democracies in recent years, where a combination of self-interest, media spin and voter apathy has resulted in leadership which rarely reflects the interests, hopes and aspirations of the many and instead provides a system for the filthy rich to get richer...and always at the expense of the rest of us.

The election of Barack Obama therefore represents something more fundamental and noble than a mere shift in the political status quo or the fulfillment of important aspirations of African Americans. It represents a desire and hope by the millions of voters who have been disenfranchised by the likes of Bush and the big business lobbies, to make the long-held US ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy mean something more than just empty terms trotted out by grey-suited government mouthpieces.

Obama's campaign pledges include:-

• Closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention center, rejecting the Military Commissions Act and adhering to the Geneva Conventions.
• Withdrawing US troops from Iraq in a controlled manner.
• Removing the political factors influencing the US intelligence network, which directly led to the Iraq war.
• Properly safeguarding all nuclear material under US control within four years, stopping development of new nuclear weapons and strengthening nonproliferation treaty legislation.
• Increasing regulation of the financial industry, reforming the bankruptcy laws and improving consumer credit protections.
• Acknowledging the impact of climate change and committing to begin moving the oil-addicted US economy to more sustainable alternatives.
• Implementing policies to ensure that key government posts are filled, based on experience and expertise in the applicable field, instead of political affiliation and cronyism.
• Restricting the power of special-interest lobbyists, bringing an end to no-bid government contracts and disclosing contractor lobbying publicly.
• Fighting for an independent watchdog agency to oversee the investigation of congressional ethics violations.
• Working to make sure China plays by international rules.
• Providing universal health care to all Americans who need it.

Mr Obama certainly has his work cut out for him; he will shortly inherit the heaviest national debt in US history, a faltering economy with spiraling unemployment and poverty and keeping even a good portion of his pledges may prove difficult or even impossible. Still, with a Democrat majority in Congress and a Republican-controlled senate with a fairly narrow majority, it may very well prove possible for the Whitehouse to push through many of the proposed reforms...

But the mere fact that the pledges are being made (and supported by the voting public who turned out in record numbers) is a very positive sign.

For the first time in years, there appears to be a ray of hope that the US will start to move away from it's doomed policies of unwarranted political and military interference, Ivy-League cronyism and commercial usury and start moving back to the kind of nation that it's founding fathers and presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy had the vision and foresight to commit their lives to.

In his book: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, Noam Chomsky argued that the last surviving obstacle to the total domination of repressive regimes is public opinion.

I reckon he was right.