"The winner of the most out of touch idea of the week is the Home Office junior minister Fiona MacTaggart. She has the unenviable task of figuring out what to do about prostitution and her big new idea is mini-brothels that can be populated by three women (two prostitutes and a “maid”, whatever that means). “I do think that very small-scale operations can operate in a way which is not disruptive to neighbours,” she said.
I do not know where Ms MacTaggart lives or who her neighbours are. She certainly has the means to live well. She may be Labour to the core but she also inherited pots of money from her multimillionaire property developer father. She is the second richest Labour MP after Geoffrey Robinson.
I live in a normal street (if there is such a thing) in suburbia and I would certainly be disrupted if a mini-brothel was operating in the house next to mine. There would be an uproar over parking for starters. The net curtains would not be twitching so much as dancing the cancan all day long. "
I have commented on this before, but it is worth repeating. Politicians no longer appear to think through the implications of their policy announcements. They only seem to want a quick favourable headline; never mind if what they are proposing makes no sense in the longer term; never mind if it cuts across policy in adjacent areas. It is as if the most junior civil servant in the department had been given half an hour to come up with a policy announcement for the Minister to make that afternoon.
We will get another example this afternoon when Scotland's culture minister (if that is not an oxymoron) makes her announcement this afternoon.
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