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Anti-Slavery Day Bill

The issue is simple. If we stopped people in the street today and talked about human trafficking, a great number of them would not know what we were talking about and a great number more would say, "Oh, it all finished years ago." In other European countries, ideas are even vaguer. The whole approach in Europe, starting here today, should be that we are not going to have modern-day slavery. What Wilberforce did in the 19th century is what we need to do in the 21st, and we must apply it to a new kind of slavery involving human beings who are victimised, treated cruelly and abused for the sake of money for the traffickers. We have to do that today. Parliamentary draftsmen, for all they are worth, will find a reason to make the Bill meaningless, so we must not necessarily take all their advice.