A Spectator's Notebook
MR. MICHAEL FOOT is one of the best liberal controversial- ists in England, but in the letter in our correspondence columns this week he seems to have misinterpreted Mr. But- ler's Bill, which more or less adopts the more popular part of the Wolfenden Report, and to have fallen for the case which has lately been propagated by various women's organisations. 'The law is to be made even more asinine than it is already,' he writes. 'The slender proofs of annoyance now required are to be dropped and . . . the woman has merely to be labelled "a common prostitute" by a policeman to be convicted,' A man who dis- likes hypocrisy and cant as much as Mr. Foot should applaud the abolition of the need to prove annoyance. This part of the law has been a sham and a fraud—people are not usually annoyed by being solicited—and by recommending its aboli- tion the Wolfenden Report was merely making, as it were, an honest woman of the law. And a woman can only become 'a common prostitute' after she has been officially cautioned; and if she pleads not guilty the policeman will have to give evidence that she was soliciting. Mr. Foot is not justified in saying that 'the whole operation is to be guided, not by any known principle of law, but by the good sense of the police and the courts.' It is the present, system, under which prostitutes are arrested by rotation (those whose turn has not yet come round being blatantly ignored by the police) and plead guilty to an offence they have not committed (soliciting to the annoyance of the public), that is guided not by known principles of law but by the good sense of the police and the prostitutes. The proposed reform should, in fact, make the whole business much less a matter of whim and much more a matter of law.
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