I fear that Theresa May is deluded about modern slavery

As I noted yesterday there's a disturbing campaign going on to make the purchase of sex illegal. The argument being, the false argument being, that there's some appreciable amount of slavery among sex workers and that this is the only way that we can deal with the problem. That the original proposal came from the usual suspects worried me a little. That we then get ths from Theresa May which is much worse:

Modern slavery is an evil which is happening around the world today – including here in Britain. Across this country in restaurants, shops, brothels, nail bars and on illegal drugs farms are women, men and children, being held against their will, and forced into a life of slavery and abuse.

As I pointed out yesterday we have absolutely no evidence at all that there are any slaves, modern or not, in any brothels anywhere in the land. Indeed, when we actively went looking for such we couldn't find any. And the reason for this is actually quite simple. There are sufficient people entirely willing to sell sex at the prices currently on offer for it not to be worth the bother of trying to enslave someone to do it.

So, given that we don't have slavery happening in brothels we do have to wonder why Ms. May is so ill informed here. And we can diagnose that, at least in part, from something else she says here. That's that reference to "nail bars". Which is a ludicrous scare story that started here:

But it turns out that there may be another, far darker reason for the rise of the affordable manicure in the UK of late. A report by the Sunday Times (paywalled link) this week presented evidence about nail salons staffed by illegal immigrants, specifically from Vietnam. According to the report, industry insiders estimate that there are 100,000 Vietnamese manicurists working in the UK, despite only 29,000 Vietnamese-born migrants officially being registered in census data. [Questions raised below by commenters over these figures have been addressed in our Reality Check blog – see footnote.] It alleges that some of these illegal migrants are victims of "what appears to be a human-trafficking network" and that they are sometimes forced to work as prostitutes as well as manicurists.

"Industry insiders", may, possibly, allied with just entirely insane numbers do not proof of anything make. For a start there's estimated to be only 80,000 prostitutes in the country: we are really not going to start claiming that all of them are enslaved in Vietnamese nail bars, are we? Or that one in 200 women of fertile age in the country are in fact working illegally out of Vietnamese nail bars, or are Vietnamese themselves? This is actually such an absurd set of numbers that The Guardian itself had to investigate:

According to the latest statistics from January to March 2013, it is true that Vietnam is one of the top countries of concern, having the highest number of NRM cases after Albania, Nigeria and Poland. While even one case of human trafficking is one too many, the raw numbers do cast doubt on the implication that there are thousands of Vietnamese victims in the UK – 32 Vietnamese nationals were identified as potential victims in those three months.

32 people being abused is of course 32 people too many. But it's a rather different figure from 100,000.

At heart our problem here is simple. We've all cottoned on to the fact that the Socialist Calculation problem is intractable. It's simply not possible to have sufficient information to be able to plan the economy. But what we've not quite grasped, as yet, is that ths is not just a matter of economics. As above we've a scare story running about the country being infested with nail file wielding Vietnamese tarts and the government is proposing to legislate based on this most absurd of stories. But the information that the government is proposing to act upon is simply untrue. Obviously, clearly on the face of it, garglingly nonsensical. We simply do not have more Vietnamese women enslaved into prostitution than we do the total number of prostitutes in the country.

So what on earth is Theresa May doing? She is, God Save Us All, after all the Home Secretary. She has an entire department of people to tell her what is what, whch pieces of information are correct and those which are the fabrications of campaigners with an axe to grind. Why in heck isn't she listening to them?