"A bolus of wankers" posted by Richard Seymour

Alan Clarke's famous description of his fellow Tory cabinet members about sums up my feeling for this government - except that it doesn't go nearly far enough. Let me try and evoke it for you.

Imagine you are a young Russian woman, drawn to a location in Western Europe by what appears to be a job offer. When you arrive, you are kidnapped, taken to a private room, beaten by several men, then gang-raped. Not once, but repeatedly. Then, broken, you are pimped out by the same men on London's streets. You escape, or are rescued - only to discover that :

"The UK is apparently one of only two countries unwilling to sign the measure, which includes requirements to provide a 'reflection period' of 30 days ... for victims to recover, figure out their next move and decide whether to help authorities prosecute, as well as a temporary but renewable residence permit."

The reason? The Home Office is concerned that women may decide to fake it, an interesting concern in itself. They seriously contend that "women ... 'may falsify stories of sex trafficking as a way of seeking asylum', or that they 'may actually use sex trafficking as a method of gaining entry'."

The misogyny would be obvious except to a hard core of club-clutching troglodytes, which presumably tells you a great deal about who runs the country. This is in roughly the same vein as the various asylum scare stories that emerged a few years ago, with one Sun story reporting that Roma women were offering sex to men in Kent for potatoes. People believed that shit, by the way, which is also telling. What did they imagine - that some pimp was taking the spuds off them and handing back a couple of chips each time, with the plaintive words: "I gots expenses, inni?"?

But if one expects an infantile pot-pourri of racism and prurient misogyny from the Sun, the British government could at least be expected to shield its inhumanity from general view. The fact that they did not in this case is, as I say, suggestive.