Ladies and gentlemen, your confected moral outrage du jour is….an actor who used to do porn daring to read a book in the same room as some children. Some of the more depressing and scandal-obsessed corners of the web are currently a-buzz over the news that Sasha Grey, a “porn legend” who moved into mainstream film and TV a couple of years ago, went to Emerson Elementary School in LA to read to a class of first-graders. She did so as part of Read Across America, a charity initiative to promote childhood literacy. Parents, predictably, got wind of what happened and complained to the school. The school in turn responded by denying Grey had ever been there, a claim which was somewhat undermined when celebrity gossip-mongers TMZ published photos of the event:

Neither the reactions of the parents at the school nor TMZ’s gleeful reporting of the whole affair are remotely surprising, but both are sad reflections of widely-held attitudes to pornography and to female sexuality in general. Would it have been appropriate for Grey to have gone to the school to talk about her experiences in the porn industry? Of course not. But that’s not what she was doing. She was there to read a book – a children’s book – to children. That’s all. Even if she was still appearing in porn films, it would have no bearing whatsoever on her suitability to do that.

Equally irrelevant are questions about the ethical status of the porn industry as a whole. The porn industry might be damaging and exploitative to women (both those who are performers in the industry and in society at large), but if it is, Grey’s surely a victim of that exploitation, not a perpetrator of it. (And, as an aside, she’s well-known for publicly arguing against the idea that there’s anything particularly exploitative about appearing in porn [link NSFW] – though since she’s clearly been far more successful than most, her experience is unlikely to have been typical.)

What lies behind the outcry at Grey’s appearance at the school is a deeply unpleasant Victorian-era view of sexual morals. In the eyes of both the parents and TMZ writers, because she’s been in porn, she’s now a fallen woman, and as such has no business being around the innocent little cherubs of Emerson Elementary. (This is perhaps best illustrated in the sidesplitting suggestion by TMZ staff in the video above that the book she chose to read was Dr Seuss’ Horton hears a Whore; everyone loves a bit of casual misogyny with their gossip, right?) But a porn actor visiting a school isn’t going to magically corrupt the children she meets. The only people at the school who could plausibly have known how she became famous would be the staff, and you’d hope they’d be mature enough to deal with it. Should Grey also avoid ever having a family of her own, lest the stain of her terrible sin of having consensual sex on camera be passed onto her children?

Practically every adult who’s ever worked with children will have been sexually active at some point. Some of them might even have been filmed doing so, or been paid for it. But so long as all a person’s sex partners were consenting adults, their love life has precisely zero bearing on whether they’re well-suited to being around kids. Claims to the contrary are prudish, puritannical, sexist rubbish, and should be treated as such.

A primary school teacher has avoided being barred from teaching following revelations in the press of her sideline as a dominatrix, the TES reports.

Faith-Anne Lesbirel, a primary school teacher, was exposed by a tabloid newspaper in 2008 as none other than ‘Mistress Saffron’, a dominatrix offering her services for money online.

[Lesbirel] insisted her fetish activities were private and of “no relevance” to her job, that her presence online was anonymous and she believed her identity was not traceable.

Following the newspaper article, Ms Lesbirel took down her website and admitted her activities to her headteacher, Lynn Samwell-Smith, who was “shocked” but supportive.

Mrs Samwell-Smith, who no longer works at the school, told a General Teaching Council for England (GTC) panel there had been disruption after the news came to light. Some parents told her they did not want Ms Lesbirel having contact with their children; others said her private life had nothing to do with her job.

Mrs Samwell-Smith said there was an “adverse impact” on the school and its reputation. Year 5 and 6 pupils asked Ms Lesbirel if she was a “prostitute”. Eventually the teacher, who had given notice before the incident, opted to leave her job early.

[Read the full thing here: http://bit.ly/mLuK4t]

Lesbirel was given a reprimand by a General Teaching Council for England (GTC) panel, which will stay on her record for two years.

It’s encouraging to see that the reaction from parents wasn’t entirely torches and pitchforks. Unfortunately, it is the ignorance and irrational fear of the more excitable parents that is routinely upheld by the GTC (pictured here: http://bit.ly/jzRUOE). The GTC’s code of conduct has been condemned by teachers’ union NASUWT, as it has been used to discipline teachers for attending gay pride events and having bikini pictures on their facebook accounts. (The code demands “standards of behaviour both inside and outside school [for teachers] that are appropriate given their membership of an important and responsible profession”. My emphasis.)

The comments of the GTC committee that questioned Ms Lesbirel are extraordinary in their contempt for basic ideas of residual freedom and their assumption that it is the Council’s right to police teachers’ private behaviour.

‘You promoted services of a sexual nature via a publicly accessible website that you instigated and you maintained a profile on the “Informed Consent” website, where you say in your written submission you also offered your services as a dominatrix.

‘Anyone could have gained access to these websites. [Children in Years 5 and 6 are accustomed to seeking out dominatrix services online, it seems.]

‘It is clear that the reputation and public standing of the profession was placed at risk by your choosing to initiate and run such a website and indeed the exposure of this did in the event damage the school and the profession. [This information was released, remember, by a tabloid newspaper].

Public trust and confidence was affected.’

[Quoted here: http://bit.ly/mcrTph]

Teachers in this country increasingly bear the brunt of our social and political ills. Pay is being frozen, while funding is cut. Creative and dedicated educators are forced to teach to the test, rather than attempt to inspire, to meet meaningless targets. Teachers are abused and harassed daily by children brutalised by urban squalor and inequality. And now their private conduct is subject to scrutiny from an unelected quango of puritans. Why does anyone sign up for this job?

The anti-smoking ban campaign group, Save our Pubs and Clubs are holding a competition to find the pub with the best smoking area. I can think of a few, but the ones I like best are, I believe, a little in breach of the law so perhaps, in their interests I will hold my peace.

Pubs that have managed to carry on creating a hospitable environment for smokers are, in a certain sense, accomodating to the ban, but they are also resisting it. This is because the ban was not really about passive smoking but, rather about making smoking a more uncomfortable experience so as to push people into stopping.

One thing you will find these days is that politicians of all stripes will profess their desire to support pubs. Doing so is good politics. It’s a nod to British tradition, and to (understandable) nostalgia for a more communitarian epoch. But we are entitled to ask what kinds of pubs they wish to support. Judged by their policy, the political class seem to approve of pubs only insofar as they don’t let anyone smoke, don’t get too noisy and don’t encourage too much drinking. In other words, pubs transmogrified into beer serving starbucks outlets are what they are willing to support. And this is hardly the kind of environnent that will induce people to pay a premium over the prices in ASDA – and so its no surprise that for all the verbal publoving from our politicians, the industry is still in decline. If we want to save our pubs and clubs then we cannot simulltaneously dragoon them into being part of the public health set up.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

With  broadband dominated by a few giant firms, it is easy for the likes of Ed Vaizey to leap-frog parliament and to regulate what we see.

A few weeks back, the communications minister Ed Vaizey began leaning on broadband companies to block porn to all households other than those that proactively “opt in”. In doing so he reignited well established debates about online porn. Yet perhaps more striking was not what content he intended to block, but the means by which he intended to do so.

Adult pornography is legal, and Vaizey is not putting before parliament any legislation that would regulate its availability.  At the same time, his actions cannot  meaningfully be described as an attempt to achieve self-regulation. Vaizey has not gone to the broad community of people involved in providing online content – or indeed adult content – and asked them to come up with a plan. Rather he has held meetings with the handful of corporations that connect us to the internet via broadband, and can therefore act as gatekeepers.

This approach is the equivalent to regulating the newspapers by striking a deal with the printers. That,of course, would be pretty much impossible, considering that anybody with a relatively modest amount of capital can set up there own printing workshop. The architecture of the internet, however, is different: just 6 firms control 93 per cent of all broadband connections, upon which websites rely for the distribution of their content. Though the opposite is often asserted, the infrastructure of the web is perhaps ideally set up for unofficial regulation.

In many ways, Ed Vaizey’s approach to regulating the web is more pernicious than straightforward censorship. Yes, households will be able to opt in should they wish to view regulated content. Yet in an age in which content spreads virally, any website blocked from  a significant number of households will find it very difficult to flourish. Official, legal censorship – undesirable though it is – is at least dependent on the will of parliament.  On the other hand,Vaizey’s method depends merely on the acquiesence of a few executives. Perhaps more importantly, official censorship is, at least in theory carried out according to the rule of law: law which specifically sets out what is and isn’t permitted, and which determines when the power to ban can be exercised.

By contrast, Vaizey’s approach – of hobnobbing with broadband executives  - could be used  to alter and limit our experience of the web on a purely ad hoc basis. For now its pornography that will, if he gets his way, be made “opt-in” material. But what’s next is anybody’s guess. After all Vaizey justified his move on the same “think of the children” grounds  that have been used to justify all too many campaigns for censorship. It would not be a great shock to see broadband companies, in future, pushed to act “responsibly” in relation to “extremism” – and all the varied material stuffed into that uselessly elastic category.

Not everybody shares my militancy for free speech. People disagree as to what, if any, limits ought to exist. But where I think we can agree is that websites should not distribute their content subject to ministerial or corporate whim. If online content is to be further regulated – and I hope it is not – this absolutely should not to be done from the back room.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

As you might have noticed,   my piece a while about Gareth Mead – the social housing manager suspended and humiliated over his  sex life – has been getting quite a few comments lately. The reason being is that it was the piece I wrote was mentioned in Inside Housing – the social housing trade journal – during an interview with Gareth Mead.

The interview is well worth a read. It makes clear that Gareth – who has now been thrown into unemployment – has spent his life working to support the most vulnerable. Before going into social housing he worked support people HIV. That a clearly very competent public servant should have been been ruined by some worthless, scandal chasing excuse for journalist – and by the cowardice of his employers – is saddening and infuriating.

It’s well known that Allistair Darling is a regular visitor to The Third Estate, and with Labour’s budget due tomorrow I thought I would hit him with a last minute plea. For the sake of millions of low earners, cut the smoking tax now.

It does not need repeating that the tax raised by smoking far exceeds the cost to the NHS. What fewer people know is quite how hard the smoking tax hits the poor. The poorest 20 per cent of households spend 3% of their disposable income just paying the smoking tax. (See Office of National Statistics data – flick to p12)

As things stand a cut in tobacco tax is not only fair: it makes good economic sense. The dilemna currently facing the  government is this: on the one hand they need to keep taxes relatively low so as to stimulate demand in an economy with 8% unemployment. On the other hand they need to find ways to start paying down the national debt. What they need, then, is need to maximise the bang they get for their buck – to stimulate demand as much as possible for every pound that people don’t pay in tax.

The point is that equivalent tax cuts on different groups don’t necessarily provide the same stimulus to demand. This is because some people save a higher proportion of their incomes than others. Cut tax on the super-rich and much of that will be saved. On the other hand the poorest spend a much higher proportion of what they have and save less – try living in London on £200 a week and you will see why. As such a tax cut on tobacco – which will predominantly flow to the poorest – will be a fiscally efficient way of stimulating demand.

Right now the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange is calling for a 5% increase in the smoking tax. It’s doing on the back of some dodgy stats that put the social cost of smoking at £13 billion. The total includes:

the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion); loss in productivity due to smoking breaks (£2.9 billion); increased absenteeism (£2.9 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of smoking-related fires (£507 million); and the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers and passive smokers (£4.1 billion and £713 million respectively).

Let’s start with the easy stuff: smoking related fires. There are around 10 million smokers in Britain and ever year around 4,000 fires. In other words every year 0.05% of us will cause fires by smoking. It is absolutely ridiculous to present this as a general cost of smoking. You might as well tax people for owning cookers.

Meanwhile the idea of taxing people for their lost productivity, and the loss of labour power that derives from their early deaths is disturbing and frankly feudal. Many things I do potentially limit my life time productivity. I  sometimes drink a little too much and I do not eat all my greens. The approach of policy of policy exchange appears to be that every citizen, by virtue of being born, owes the state/business his maximum possible labour power, and that he should have to cough up for anything that limits that - including dying young. It treats a persons potential life time labour power not as something that he or she may sell but something that they owe.

As for me, I will soon be off to complete a two hour holiday in Belgium, where cows roam and baccy is cheap.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Tonight a man’s life and livelihood hangs in the balance. He has been savagely denigrated in the national press, and the most personal details of his life laid bare. And tonight he is suspended by his employer and looks set to be sacked. His crime? To engage in the wrong kind of sexual role play with consenting adults.

Yesterday the Mirror made a splash. It revealed that Gareth Mead – head of social housing and homelessness at Fulham and Hammersmith council –  had a kink for Nazism . And what’s more he engaged with other men who shared his fetish. Somehow the Mirror managed to get hold of some of the more intimate text messages that he sent, and have thus given us a window into the kind of roleplay in which he engaged.

Except they haven’t quite reported it like that. In yesterday’s big splash Mead was presented not as a nazi fetishist but, in their words, as a “secret nazi”. Though the roleplay context is blindingly obvious – he met the men through a fetish site, not stormfront – the Mirror insisted on taking his Nazi-related intimate pronouncements at face value.

They quote an unnamed moron anonymous source as telling them:

“What he was texting was really too much.

“I could not believe that he had such extreme views while he is earning a lot of council taxpayers’ money paying lip service to multi-cultural political correctness.

“The pictures showed just how far he had gone with the whole thing. He had all the bits to go with the uniform. He even had a gun in one picture laid out on a Nazi flag.”

Seriously, what an idiot. How stupid must you to imagine that what a man does for sexual thrills offers a serious indication of his political opinions. Are we to believe that anybody who chains up their boyfriend or girlfriend without first acting out a court scene believes in imprisonment without due process?. Most ridiculously the Mirror go on to say “in recent years the housing policy has been likened to “ethnic cleansing” for discriminating against poor and ethnic minority tenants”. Obviously its because the man in charge dresses like a Nazi.

Now if Hammersmith and Fulham council were decent employers with a bit of spine they would:

a)  Treat this gossip abut a man’s sexual proclivities with the contempt it deserves.

b) Offer some support to an employee who is probably traumatised by having his most private feelings cruelly paraded in the national press.

But instead they have suspended him pending a disciplinary, and apparently intend to sack him. An anonymous council source told the standard “Once we saw the pictures there was really not much else to say – he was not going to stay in his job much longer after that”. That a council figure should communicate such a foregone conclusion to the press prior to any disciplinary hearing represents, in itself, a disgusting contempt for this mans rights.

So, readers and fellow bloggers, will you join me in a campaign to defend this man?

We could write to the council, make a noise, and much else. As of now I am going start tagging #DefendGarethMead on twitter and ask you to aswell.

Because this does matter. This is about the rights of workers to have a private life, and about the rights of individuals to do what they want with consenting adults – even if it makes a few narrowminded peasants feel uncomfortable.

The irony of this situation is 50 years ago Mead might have been hounded out for being gay. While great progress has been made in this regard, the current government really has really tightened the screws on more marginal sexual minorities. Today a man or woman potentially be imprisoned for possessing adult BDSM sexual imagery.

So I submit to you that this is a battle worth fighting.

Defend Gareth Mead #DefendGarethMead

A collection has been set up by Old Holborn to help Hogan who is jail for non-payment of a huge fine. To donate click here.

Pub landlord Nick Hogan has been jailed  for 6 months over the smoking ban. Basically he was lumped with costs and fines totalling more than 10k after several breaches – including a mass smoke in on the day the ban came in. After declaring himself unable to meet the £500  month payments he has been jailed. As somebody who has stood up and paid the price he deserves the support of all of us who oppose the smoking ban (if you don’t oppose it yet read on). I am about to donate to the fund set up by old holborn  and suggest you do to. (yes he’s a righty but he’s correct on this!)

Anna Racoon explains more:

“Nick was actually jailed for non-payment of the fine originally imposed for a ‘mass smoke-in’ on the day the ban came into force in 2007 in his pub, the ‘Swan and Barristers’ in Bolton. He no longer has that pub. He was fined again when council inspectors walked into his present pub and discovered a group of customers smoking – Nick wasn’t even on the premises.

His wife, Denise, is now managing their present pub in Chorley  herself.  Their trade is so low that they don’t even bother to open the downstairs bar. Nick is bankrupt, and had gone to court intending to argue that he could not afford the £500 a month payments demanded by the council towards their £10,000 bill for prosecuting him. He has already paid off £1,600. The court gave him a six month sentence instead, and he is currently in Forest Bank prison in Pendlebury, unable to help to earn the money which would ensure his release.

Denise has not even been able to speak to him since he was sentenced. She has merely been told to phone the prison on Monday to enquire when she might see him. She is confused, frightened, and feeling very lonely.

Denise has just said to me ‘all the people who disagree with the ban – where are they now? – and my Nick is in prison’. Quite.

If all the people who disagree with the no-smoking ban contributed a few coppers, then Nick would be released. If you can’t afford £1, then at least drop Nick a line and let him know he is not forgotten – not surprisingly, he is feeling very depressed.

Denise has no idea how to use the Internet, she has no idea how many of us are against the no-smoking ban. Let’s show her.

£1 each – just 10,000 of you – let’s see if the blogosphere can do more than merely rant in unison. Once the amount received totals the outstanding fine, they have to release Nick.”

I have already expressed my opposition to the smoking ban here and here.  Quite simply thisis about pluralism, and the defence of civil society. Public houses are not public services. They are not town halls. They are places of entertainment which people choose, or choose not, to attend. They need not be acceptable or desirable places for everybody.  They are places where groups of men and women voluntarily associate for the purposes of leisure. As such  it is widely accepted that pubs and clubs may simply refuse you entry. They can simply say no, you’re not our kind of guy (or in my case “no you look like you are coming in to keep warm”). Yet if they say that you can come in, but only on condition that you accept certain rather minor risks (passive smoking) then, according to the government, your rights are being  trampled on. Bollocks.

One man has stood up for pluralism and choice in the social sphere and has been beaten with a very big stick for doing so. The least we could do is help him out.

Homage to Hogan and Other Smoking ban Heroes

The proposed equality bill has generated much debate – in particular the question of whether churches should be banned from discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation. Yet what strikes me is the sheer hypocrisy of these measures, from a government which has actively institutionalised such discrimination.

Under laws that went into force last year, the new Independent Safeguarding Authority has the power to ban people from working with children, or to throw them out of their jobs if they are already doing so. People can be banned from working with children simply on the grounds of ‘unsuitability’, regardless of whether they have broken the law. Over on the ISA’s website you will find the list of criteria that case-officers use to decide whether somebody is unsuitable. Under the guidelines, people can potentially be banned from working with kids on the basis that they have an interest in violent porn, even if the material they possess doesn’t reach the threshold for criminal prosecution. Apparently, while discrimination against gay people should be illegal, discrimination against the BDSM community is not only fine but necessary.

Equally officers are expected consider whether the subject displays signs of a “concerning paraphilia”. This is a phrase so vague that it should frighten any freedom loving person. A “paraphilia” refers to any form of sexual desire that departs from the “normal” . What makes a particular paraphilia “concerning” is anybody’s guess. The important thing is that 40 years ago homosexuality could reasonably have been placed under this category. Most people DID find it concerning. Such a guideline potentially rules out anybody whose tastes are odds with prevailing social and sexual norms. Thus, while the government harps on about equality, it continues to support an institution which can ruin people’s lives on account of nothing more than their sexual orientation.

OK I will admit it. The study I cited a few days ago – investigating the social costs of “passive non-smoking” – was not entirely factual. In fact you could go as far as to say that it did not exist and there is in fact no Professor Wyfman. What has however been recently released is a study into the trade in illicit tobacco, and particularly its effects on kids. It was found that 30% of young people had bought illicit tobacco, and alleged that ‘tab houses’ – informal premises at which illicit tobacco is sold – are creating the next generation of smokers. Unlike bona fide shops, it is impossible to impose an age limit on who illicit suppliers sell to.

If the analysis is correct, then this represents a spectacular policy failure by the New Labour government. The reason that so many Tab Houses exist is simple and obvious. Quite simply the taxes on smoking are obscene. Raising £7 billion pounds a year – most of which is paid by the poorest members of society – this particular sin tax creates a huge incentive for suppliers to enter the black market, which in turn makes tobacco easily available to kids of all ages.

It is high time the tobacco tax was repealed or at least substantially reduced. The 7 billion that it raises far exceeds the cost of smoking to the NHS. In fact, as some critiques of recent studies have illustrated, the actual financial burden of smoking on the NHS might be close to zero or indeed negative. Put simply, this is because everybody dies of something. People who die of lung cancer potentially save the NHS a huge amount of money by not getting older and dying of dementia. Yet even taking at face value some of the (well critiqued) highest estimates, the public purse still makes a substantial net gain from the smoking minority.

And this is wrong in so many ways. It is wrong because the tax on smokers is extremely regressive, with the poorest 20% of households spending 3.4 per cent of their income just paying the smoking tax. And it is wrong because tax should be a means of providing public services and redistributing income, not policing personal lifestyle choices. If the government want to punish people for smoking – and that’s what this is – they should have the bollocks and the democratic decency to put a law to that effect before parliament. Needless to say they would lose. And so they tack this piece of coercive social engineering onto a budget bill – a bill ostensibly concerned with raising money to fund the state.

And finally, even if, unlike me, you believe that it is the place of government to police people’s personal lifestyle choices, then the smoking tax is a completely ineffective way of doing so. Demand for tobacco is price inelastic – increases in price have very little effect on demand – which means that the smoking tax effectively fines people for their habits while doing nothing to change it.