Michael Meacher MP

If there is one thing which should unite all political parties regardless of ideology, it is surely stamping out sex trafficking.   Slavery was officially abolished in the West in 1836, but in the form of trafficking in the twenty-first century, given the sheer scale of this enforced domination of victims for commercial gain, it still lives on.   At its peak in the 1780s the slave trade involved the transportation of 80,000 slaves from Africa to the Americas, but now ten times that number of women are trafficked across international borders.   Yet, inexplicably, the UK coalition government has now refused to endorse an EU directive aimed to cordinate European efforts to stop the sex slave trade. (more…)