I wrote last weekend following comments made by Peter Bone MP in the light of the appalling campaign by the Home Office using advertising vans. Yesterdays World At One on Radio 4 once again reflected on this campaign, partly because it now seems possible that the Home Office could role this out nationally. If this is serious I think that the sort of reaction to these vans will bear similarities to the response to fracking equipment in certain communities, albeit on a smaller scale. I hope that the politicians concerned are also prepared for a political backlash with similar vans being used to advertise other issues that they might find a great deal less comfortable. One suggested alternative was illustrated in my earlier blog here and there is another example below.

All that to one side, and back to yesterdays WATO. Peter Bone was speaking alongside Herman Ousley who was the Chief Executive of the Commission for Racial Equality from 1993-2000 and someone who understands about these issues. Peter repeated the same sort of comments he had made on the PM programme the previous  Friday that people who have been trafficked into the UK will see the vans and be inspired to give themselves up to get out of their captivity. When he spoke about this last week I had presumed he might have been confused regarding the issue under discussion. This time there can be no excuse for his stupid comments. It is clear that Ministers such as Eric Pickles haven’t pretended that this is about trafficking, Eric Pickles speaking on yesterdays PM programme is claiming this is an antidote to Labour’s so called open door immigration policy and so clearly not about trafficking.

Peter Bone should in theory know what he is talking about as he was the Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Trafficking. People Trafficking is a crime committed when someone is taken, against their will and transported to another place in order for the Trafficker to benefit financially in some way from this. This could be for them to be used as domestic slaves, or in prostitution or to run Cannabis farms or any one of a number of activities. These activities may not be illegal in themselves but the trafficking itself is illegal. This is not the same as people choosing to travel somewhere where they have no right to be. It is believed that People Trafficking is the second most lucrative crime after drug smuggling. People who are held captive, irrespective of how they are held in place are unlikely to see passing vehicles and if they do it is hard to imagine that these messages will inspire them to hand themselves over to a uniformed official to be whisked back home to the place where they were first kidnapped or sold into slavery! They are also unlikely to be worried that they will be arrested, bearing in mind how they got where they are and what indignities they have already suffered. If this pathetic campaign was about Trafficking it is likely that the vans would make reference to trafficking and perhaps state something like ‘being held against your will, then……’. Several organisations are actively alerting residents across the UK to the signs of trafficking and how to help end it. I am certain that if the Home Office had approached an organisation such as Stop the Traffik requesting suggestions as to how to reduce this terrible activity that they would have been given a number of suggestions for their £10,000.

BBC Radio 4 has now twice given Peter Bone a chance to speak about this campaign and twice he has sought to confuse the public, if this is not stupidity then he is trying to mislead the public for political advantage which is probably much worse. We have heard enough of this nonsense. It is time that the BBC took seriously a terrible crime that impacts communities across our country. Could the editors on Radio 4 now please do the decent thing and invite Stop The Traffik or one of the other human trafficking campaigns on to one of the various programmes to explain to people what trafficking is all about and why it is too important to be used as a political football by people like Peter Bone.