In the scrub where the bodies of murdered women lay in Suffolk this week, two lines intersected. Each showed us the same truth, an ancient truth, a truth we somehow never learn. The truth is simple. It is that the law may declare and the law may punish but there exist things that the law cannot stop. Prohibition skews and perverts: it drives some things into other channels.

Drug addiction is one of them. Prostitution is another. They are old friends. And it is laws, our laws, that keep their friendship strong. It was the law that had pushed them into each other’s arms in Ipswich this month, where they met fatally in a dreadful place. It was our laws that had sent them there.

Legislators who bray about the “messages” their prohibitions “send out” should accept authorship of more than good intentions, but of the misery — the collateral damage — that is the natural and predictable consequence of misfiring statute. Those corpses in the Suffolk scrub, and those tens of thousands of women still living who, as you read this newspaper, are preparing to return fearfully to their wretched kerbside pitches across Britain tonight, are not just tragic accidents, or accidents waiting to happen. They are in some measure the inevitable result of the laws we make and the way we enforce them.

If you doubt it, consider this. A handful of women in Ipswich are planning to go back on to the streets even while they know the killer is still at large. We can identify them. They will be there tonight. The police can find them. Everybody knows these women face a real risk of death within the next few weeks. We wring our hands.

But we needn’t. The Suffolk Constabulary could offer them protection tomorrow. Secure for their use an empty house; give them an assurance that they will not be harassed by the law if they take their clients to an address where they will never be alone or beyond help. I know that not every street prostitute would take advantage of a safe house; not every vagrant on a cold winter’s night will take the shelter we may offer. But to know that the offer was there would be to know we had done something we could. Getting into a stranger’s car would not be — as tonight it is — a prostitute’s only recourse.

The Suffolk Constabulary will make no such offer. It cannot. It is against the laws that Parliament has made.

Or consider this. We could approach these women and tell them that if they will register as drug addicts then in a clean and orderly place they will be administered what they crave; and offered treatment too. So the need to go on to the streets for money for the drugs they are desperate for will simply disappear. Again, I know that not every addict would take up or benefit from such an offer; but again we would know we had done something practical to help the many who would. I have seen such facilities working effectively in Rotterdam.

But we cannot offer them here. To do so would be against the laws that Parliament has made.

And so we come back to the law and Parliament. When I was a young MP, placed on the standing committee working on a criminal justice Bill, I teamed up with a cross-party handful of sympathetic colleagues to ask the Home Office minister if the Government would insert a clause abolishing imprisonment for prostitutes. The Government (Conservative) would not, but did not block us from pushing the amendment ourselves. They were curious to see what response we got.

Others warned us not to touch the laws on sexual offences. “You’ll get a reputation for yourself, lad,” a kindly whip (in the Labour Party) had counselled me. “The Daily Mail will have your guts for garters,” one colleague said. “Whatever will your constituents in rural West Derbyshire think?” said another, “there are no prostitutes in Matlock” (there are). “The British public don’t like this kind of thing,” was the general view.

Well, we went ahead anyway. And the response? Hardly a peep. A couple of snide paragraphs in reactionary newspapers, one — just one — complaint on the constituency doorstep, and that was it. I doubt I lost a single vote. The measure was passed. Today it is under threat again from local authorities who try to use a broken ASBO as a route to imprisonment.

In Parliament I resisted the use of law in the area of consensual sexual offences. I resisted the new laws on kerb-crawling, and the idiotic 1950s legislation on male “importuning”. “But we’d be opening a Pandora’s box,” a colleague said to me, “if we didn’t criminalise importuning. Homosexuals would be bothering people all over the place.”

That law is still in place, but the police have lost interest in it and today the number of prosecutions in London is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago. There is certainly no more public nuisance than there used to be; probably less. There is no public outcry.

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