The article “Mariana Popa was killed working as a prostitute. Are the police to blame?“, News) is a turning point in getting senior officers such as Chris Armitt to admit that criminalisation puts women at risk: “It would be good to allow a small group of women to work together, otherwise… they are working away from other human support.” It has taken 40 years of campaigning to get this truth out. From the trial of Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 women, many of them sex workers, to the Ipswich murdersin 2006, we have complained that the police hound rather than protect sex workers.
Ms Popa was Romanian. The 2012 police raids in Mayfair targeted Thai and Romanian women, the swoops in Harrow Roma brothels. The Soho raids last December, under the guise of freeing trafficking victims, dragged handcuffed eastern European mothers in their underwear on to the streets.
Is it surprising, then, if violent men target a woman such as Mariana Popa? Yes, the police are to blame. And so are feminist politicians, who lead calls for further criminalisation. Having refused to listen to sex workers, will they listen to Chris Armitt?
Niki Adams
English Collective of Prostitutes
London NW5
My report, Shadow City, found that police received £500m to tackle trafficking prior to the Olympics. They found no more trafficking cases than the year before – four – but did raid a huge number of brothels. This meant sex workers were displaced and became more vulnerable to violence. The laws on prostitution need to change. Until they do, we need to change dramatically how we police sex workers.
Andrew Boff
Conservative Londonwide Assembly member, leader of GLA Conservatives
London SE1
Don’t ruin another London gem
The threat of “development” to the Cork Street area of London’s West End is cultural vandalism (“Art galleries forced out of historic London home“, News). The proposed plans will probably go a long way to ruining the character of an area that attracts tourists to galleries that show a wide range of artworks. Many tenants will be forced to move by high rents and it will lose much of the atmosphere that made it attractive in the first place.
Shirley Hughes
London W11
Have a little grace, Mr Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi states in Robert McCrum’s fascinating article about him that after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia he was “a little overwhelmed at the number of cheques that turned up at my council flat” (“Every 10 years you become someone else“, New Review). Hanif was not in a council flat but a flat provided for him by the W14 Housing Co-operative (of which I was then chairman) on the grounds that he was near broke and close to eviction. Now it’s my turn to be “overwhelmed” to read he was knee-deep in cheques at the time. The W14 Co-operative in those days had its own drama group, which encouraged him to put on one of his earliest plays, The King and Me, about Elvis Presley and the experiences of accompanying me while I canvassed for the Labour party on the Fulham council estates. One man I remember told us to stay at the door as his dog was trained to go for “coolies”. It must certainly have inspired his later film London Kills Me. It would be nice if for once in his many press interviews Hanif acknowledged the help he obtained from the Co-op in that crucial period of his career.
Colin Lovelace (Dr)
Anglet
France
Frightening face of fracking
In the excellent article by Paul Stevens (“Fracking has conquered America. Here’s why it can’t happen in Britain“, In Focus), the answer to “Is it bad for the environment?” uses the words “providing the process is well regulated”. There are no regulations in place that deal with the fracking part of the total process. The new Office of Unconventional Gas and Oil has no staff with any engineering expertise.
All the indications are that the government has no intention of dealing with these issues. Lancashire county council, the planning authority for fracking, has to find savings of £300m. Council tax from fracking is estimated at £1.7m. Policing costs for Salford already exceed £300,000. Fracking has been done once in the UK – at Preese Hall in Fylde. The returned water has between 1.4 and nine times the level of radioactivity permitted. There are processes for removing this radioactivity. Such treatment is likely to be costly.
Mike Turner
CEng FIMMM
Lytham St Annes
http://www.theguardian.com/uk[:mk]The article “Mariana Popa was killed working as a prostitute. Are the police to blame?“, News) is a turning point in getting senior officers such as Chris Armitt to admit that criminalisation puts women at risk: “It would be good to allow a small group of women to work together, otherwise… they are working away from other human support.” It has taken 40 years of campaigning to get this truth out. From the trial of Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 women, many of them sex workers, to the Ipswich murdersin 2006, we have complained that the police hound rather than protect sex workers.
Ms Popa was Romanian. The 2012 police raids in Mayfair targeted Thai and Romanian women, the swoops in Harrow Roma brothels. The Soho raids last December, under the guise of freeing trafficking victims, dragged handcuffed eastern European mothers in their underwear on to the streets.
Is it surprising, then, if violent men target a woman such as Mariana Popa? Yes, the police are to blame. And so are feminist politicians, who lead calls for further criminalisation. Having refused to listen to sex workers, will they listen to Chris Armitt?
Niki Adams
English Collective of Prostitutes
London NW5
My report, Shadow City, found that police received £500m to tackle trafficking prior to the Olympics. They found no more trafficking cases than the year before – four – but did raid a huge number of brothels. This meant sex workers were displaced and became more vulnerable to violence. The laws on prostitution need to change. Until they do, we need to change dramatically how we police sex workers.
Andrew Boff
Conservative Londonwide Assembly member, leader of GLA Conservatives
London SE1
Don’t ruin another London gem
The threat of “development” to the Cork Street area of London’s West End is cultural vandalism (“Art galleries forced out of historic London home“, News). The proposed plans will probably go a long way to ruining the character of an area that attracts tourists to galleries that show a wide range of artworks. Many tenants will be forced to move by high rents and it will lose much of the atmosphere that made it attractive in the first place.
Shirley Hughes
London W11
Have a little grace, Mr Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi states in Robert McCrum’s fascinating article about him that after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia he was “a little overwhelmed at the number of cheques that turned up at my council flat” (“Every 10 years you become someone else“, New Review). Hanif was not in a council flat but a flat provided for him by the W14 Housing Co-operative (of which I was then chairman) on the grounds that he was near broke and close to eviction. Now it’s my turn to be “overwhelmed” to read he was knee-deep in cheques at the time. The W14 Co-operative in those days had its own drama group, which encouraged him to put on one of his earliest plays, The King and Me, about Elvis Presley and the experiences of accompanying me while I canvassed for the Labour party on the Fulham council estates. One man I remember told us to stay at the door as his dog was trained to go for “coolies”. It must certainly have inspired his later film London Kills Me. It would be nice if for once in his many press interviews Hanif acknowledged the help he obtained from the Co-op in that crucial period of his career.
Colin Lovelace (Dr)
Anglet
France
Frightening face of fracking
In the excellent article by Paul Stevens (“Fracking has conquered America. Here’s why it can’t happen in Britain“, In Focus), the answer to “Is it bad for the environment?” uses the words “providing the process is well regulated”. There are no regulations in place that deal with the fracking part of the total process. The new Office of Unconventional Gas and Oil has no staff with any engineering expertise.
All the indications are that the government has no intention of dealing with these issues. Lancashire county council, the planning authority for fracking, has to find savings of £300m. Council tax from fracking is estimated at £1.7m. Policing costs for Salford already exceed £300,000. Fracking has been done once in the UK – at Preese Hall in Fylde. The returned water has between 1.4 and nine times the level of radioactivity permitted. There are processes for removing this radioactivity. Such treatment is likely to be costly.
Mike Turner
CEng FIMMM
Lytham St Annes
http://www.theguardian.com/uk