Johann Hari

This week, I discovered I have been living beneath a brothel. The sweet, skinny Brazilian girls I have chatted to in the lift for the past two years were busted by the police on Saturday night. Today their flat is empty and they are facing charges handpicked by the police from the 32 scrappy regulations covering sex work in this city.

I keep picturing their skinny, emaciated frames – did I guess they were addicts? – and the broken grin they would offer when a man actually asked solicitously how they were. In London, the sex industry is all around us, but most of us never peer into the crevices where London’s 50,000 prostitutes work. We do not see the look in these women’s eyes.

A fortnight ago, it was revealed that two teenage girls were flown in from Lithuania and ‘auctioned’ to pimps for £3000 outside the Costa Coffee in Gatwick Airport. There are an estimated 5000 sex slaves like this within the M25 area. Were those Brazillians trafficked and terrorised? Or were they ‘normal’ prostitutes – and what does that entail?

I decided to walk round the corner to find the PVC-clad women who totter up and down Commercial Street most nights – the route walked by Jack the Ripper’s victims a century ago. Linda is 27 but looks much older. We walk to a café and her biography comes out in fragments between gulps of caffeine and something stronger from a bottle she keeps in her bag.

Like 70 percent of English street prostitutes, she went through the "training ground" of childhood sexual abuse before slumping onto the game. "My stepdad began using me when I was eleven," she says as I notice the yellow tinge to her teeth and the coldsores around her mouth.

"So I ended up in care and when I left I had a [heroin] habit," she explains. Today she is working the streets to pay for her habit and her "boyfriend’s" – nobody talks about pimps any more, I am told – and she needs to get back to find her sixth client of the night. Before she goes, she explains that London’s sex trade has changed since she began eleven years ago. "Back then, most women wouldn’t do anal or unprotected [sex]", she says, "but now there are so many trafficked girls who are forced to do anything that we all have to. Everything has become normal. It’s like, the barriers are gone and the prices are lower."

Most men like to picture Belle de Jour or Pretty Woman, but the Brazilians I knew – can they have been older than 18, 19? – are the reality. 60 percent of this city’s prostitutes are from bitterly poor countries. London’s message to the world today is: give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free – and we will use them as depositories for our semen.

It’s back! My favourite cinema – the Renoir on Brunswick Square – is about to reopen after an agonisingly long refurbishment. It’s a gloomy, brooding concrete bunker, right in
the middle of University-Land. While most of our cinemas are being UCI-ed and Vue-d to death, serving up nothing but processed Hollywood pap, the Renoir remains militantly highbrow and militantly internationalist. It’s the cinema where Trotsky’s ghost hangs out.

Ken Livingstone recently described London as “the whole world in one city”, but the Renoir goes one better: it’s the whole world in one cinema. From its threadbare seats I’ve seen female genital mutilation in an African village, a dying French President discussing Balzac, and Motenegran gypsies growing vegetables. (Okay, that last one wasn’t so hot). If you can’t afford a ticket to the world this week, get a ticket to the Renoir: it’s a glorious second-best.

What’s wrong with Trevor Nunn? He has become addicted to cramming his slick, quick theatre productions with aggravating technical gimmicks. Last year, when he directed the trilogy of Russian plays by Tom Stoppard (or "God" as I think of him) at the National Theatre, he insisted on setting the action against a huge video-screen that provided pixely graphics: a swirling ocean, a Siberian landscape… It was more like playing Doom than watching Chekhov.

This week I checked out his production of Richard II at the Old Vic and it was just as grating. The action is punctuated with pointless video clips of the poll tax riots and an endless loop of the "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England" speech. Please – somebody track down Nunn’s Innovations catalogue and burn it.

Young black and Asian men in Birmingham hack chunks out of each other in a self-described "race war", while the government's education White Paper quietly prepares the ground for a massive expansion of faith schools. At first, these seem like disparate, disconnected news stories - headlines passing each other in the night.

But in reality, the fact that Britain has 7,000 expanding faith schools - Muslims to the left, Christians to the right - is feeding the Balkanisation of Britain's towns and preparing the ground for one, two, three Birminghams.

After every Brum-style race riot in Britain over the past decade, there has been a government inquiry - and every time, the sober professors in charge issue the same warning. Segregating children according to their parents' superstitions is a great way to create a volatile, violent town where ethnic groups glare at each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension. As Bradford cleaned up after its own smash-and-crash race riots in 2001, the council woke up to the fact that its city had hardened into racial ghettos. It boldly decided to create shared social spaces, starting with infants because a four-year-old is more open to making their first white, black or Asian friend than a 40-year-old. But there was a problem. David Ward, the Bradford council member responsible for education, explained that the Government's obsessive humming - "You gotta have faith/ faith/ faith" - made it impossible to build mixed schools. "You feel as if you are fighting with two hands tied behind your back," he said. "We are trying to desegregate in Bradford but we are powerless when we have schools dictating their own admissions policies."

After hearing this from dozens of people, Lord Ouseley's report into the riots warned: "There are signs that communities are fragmenting along racial, cultural and faith lines. Segregation in schools is one of the indicators of this trend. There is virtual apartheid in many secondary schools." After the riots in Oldham, David Ritchie - chair of the investigation - issued the same warning, saying that faith schools are "contributing institutionally to divisions within the town."

Bradford, Oldham, and today Birmingham - it's like a screeching song playing in a loop. Only you don't need to wait for the inquiry this time. As recently as this summer, Birmingham's head of education, councillor Les Lawrence, was issuing this eerily familiar warning: "Separating pupils on the basis of religion for the purposes of education is not the best way to develop social cohesion." He said no more faith schools should be added to the 96 already dominating Birmingham, and said "where the opportunity arises, reduce the number of faith schools that already exist." Nobody listened then - and today, as blood is washed off Birmingham's streets - still nobody listens.

Of course, faith schools claim they promote "tolerance" - but the evidence hardly backs them up. For example, at a state-funded Muslim school on the outskirts of London, a student wrote in the school paper that "Jews and Christians" will "burn in furnaces", and another said non-Muslims are described as "doomed in this world".

So why did the Government decide to make it even easier to build faith schools in the very week Birmingham combusted? The White Paper had an excellent proposal to extend bussing to make sure schools have a fertile mix of rich and poor kids. So why are they trying so hard to prevent a mix of Christian, Muslim, Jewish and atheist kids too?

The reason is simple: the Government believes faith schools achieve better results. At first glance, this seems true: look at a league table of the highest GCSE and A-Level scores in the state sector and you'll overdose on Saint this and Holy that. So, Blair says, would you really have me dismantle some of the best state schools in Britain?

But look again. The right-wing think tank Civitas - expected to back faith schools with table-thumping vigour - decided to study the figures, and found something surprising. Faith schools get better results for one simple reason: they use selection to cream off middle-class children - all kids bright and beautiful - and to weed out difficult, poor or unmotivated students who would require more work. They gave the game away last year when the Government suggested church schools educate more children who are in care, and they recoiled in horror. John Hicks, governor of St Barnabas' Church of England school in Pimlico, snapped: "We know children in care must be educated but it can be detrimental in schools that are oversubscribed." Or, not on our league tables, baby.

Civitas found that actually - once you factor in the fact they take brighter kids with far fewer problems - it turns out faith schools underperform compared to other schools. This is hardly surprising since they dedicate hours of school time to non-academic religious pursuits. The Welsh National Assembly commissioned a study that found the same thing. So the sole credible argument for faith schools is as mythical as the Christian belief that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and burped out, alive and well, a month later.

And it's not only Britain's race relations that Tony Blair is sacrificing in pursuit of this misplaced faith. Most religious schools preach one chunk of reactionary morality or another, all causing terrible harm to children. One friend who was at a Catholic school in Leicester until recently explained: "We were given no sex education, except for a lesson in which we were shown a video of an evil woman having an abortion and the foetus being chucked in the bin. We weren't even told about tampons because they believed they interfered with the hymen." This "don't come, all ye faithful" attitude pervades faith schools, ramping up Britain's teen pregnancies. Some of the new evangelical city academies - models for the new faith schools - openly admit they are "anti-gay" and urge gay pupils to "choose another path". There is a real risk that, having abolished Section 28 by the front door, the spread of homophobic faith schools reintroduces it by the back door for thousands of schoolchildren.

The British people can see how crazy this is. This is one of the most irreligious societies on earth, thank God (or the void). Only the French are less likely to attend a religious ceremony than us. That's why the building of new faith schools is even more unpopular here than the poll tax or rail privatisation, with 80 per cent declaring it wrong in an ICM poll. Some 64 per cent of us believe existing faith schools should be forced to ditch their superstition or go into the private sector. So next time a major British city erupts into race warfare because our children are being divided up according to religion and taught to oppose each other, remember: it's not our fault. Tony, we told you faith was a lousy basis for education.

If any of you are massochistic enough to watch...

At last! The three-in-one vaccination programme is complete, and millions of British people are immune, immune, immune. There's only one problem: the contagions we are now resistant to are not Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR). They are science, rationality and evidence.

As the prospect of a mass vaccination of the British people against avian flu hovers over us like a flock of sickly seagulls, we can't pretend the past five years haven't happened. We have just lived through an unscientific (and potentially deadly) backlash against one of the safest and simplest vaccinations in medicine. For five long, lethal years, the British press manufactured a controversy about whether there is a link between MMR and autism. They were armed with nothing more than the views of one maverick doctor who is now facing misconduct charges before the General Medical Council, and a horde of confused, grieving mothers pining for a meaning to their pain. But with these weapons, they gave the bogus impression of there being a fierce debate. The result was that more than 400,000 children who should have been given the jabs were not, and Professor Raymond Tallis says only "extreme luck" will prevent a measles outbreak and a cemetery-full of dead children now.

Last week, yet another scientific study found definitively that the link is a myth - but the headlines reporting this soothing truth lasted for a day. For anybody who cared to see, it was always clear from the very first day of the "row" that the link was unproven and probably fictitious. In 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield launched the question when he wrote an article in The Lancet. It was based on a tiny pool of infants, most of whom were in the study because their parents believed in the link and wanted to sue for compensation.

The article was - by its own admission - speculative: that's why The Lancet ran a responsible editorial stressing the need for much more detailed study before any conclusions at all were drawn. But Wakefield rushed to a press conference that day, calling for the complete abandonment of MMR. The rest of the medical profession was astonished he would draw such a drastic conclusion from such anorexic evidence, but it was too late: the "controversy" had begun.

Studies conclusively disproving Wakefield's speculations came quickly: a study of 1.8 million randomly-chosen children in Finland (as opposed to Wakefield's hand-picked 12) found that autism rates remained stable after the introduction of MMR. Even more startlingly, it was found that when MMR was suspended in Japan due to production problems, autism rates held steady - but 90 extra children died of measles. This evidence was waved away by much of the press as difficult and indigestible; they preferred to focus instead on brain-dead trivia such as whether Leo Blair was given the jab.

There's an old, obvious lesson here about the press having - as Stanley Baldwin put it - "power without responsibility". But there was a darker, less obvious trend revealed by the anti-MMR scandal: a populist contempt for basic science and evidence.

During the MMR row, the British public were encouraged to be suspicious of a distant, arrogant "medical establishment". Instead of arid studies, parents were prompted to fall back on their "common sense": in your gut, does it feel right to inject your baby with three vaccines at once? Similar appeals to non-rational instincts have also been behind the surging popularity of witchdoctor potions marketed as "alternative medicine".

This softening of the brain can only happen if you wilfully suspend the lesson of the past three centuries of human progress. Before the 1750s, everybody relied on instinct, intuition and superstition - the things that prevented you from giving your child the MMR - to guide their health care. All medicine was "alternative". The result? They were all dead before the age of 40.

The rise of modern medicine - the greatest achievement in human history - has been based on the destruction of common sense as a way of understanding illness, and its replacement with a commitment to rational, evidence-based study.

Ever since modern medicine was born, there has always been a strong counter-movement claiming to defend The People and their innate wisdom from its supposedly cold and impersonal rationality. When the British government introduced compulsory vaccinations to eradicate diphtheria, polio and smallpox from this island in the 1860s, thousand of populist anti-vaccination leagues sprang up. They claimed germ theory was "unproven" and waved placards of the children "murdered" by the vaccines. They even said it defied (you guessed it) "common sense" to inject small children with a small amount of a disease to ensure their immunity against it. Hundreds of thousands of parents agreed, relied on their gut - and buried their children as a result. If they had prevailed, those diseases would still be scything through our population today.

We shouldn't feel smugly superior. The MMR row showed once again how emotion and fear can steamroller scientific fact. Mothers of autistic children who blamed MMR for their children's plight were repeatedly wheeled into the news studios to attack the "medical establishment" and praise the "heroic" Dr Wakefield. I saw one mother shout down an MMR defender on TV before being asked - softly, politely - if she knew anything about science. "I don't need scientific qualifications. I am a mother and I know my son," she replied. She was clearly distraught and looking for something - anything - that would turn her child's disability from being a meaningless twist of nature into a crusade for justice. But against her - and because of people like her - there may soon be hundreds of mothers who have needlessly lost their child to measles.

We could engage in a grisly Grief Olympics, with people hurling their damaged or dead children into the field to justify their competing claims. But it would be smarter to admit that there is no equality between emotional instincts, however intense, and science.

In the MMR row, it is not the "medical establishment" that has behaved with arrogance. The arrogance has come from the handful of grieving parents who put their need for a heroic narrative above the public's health, from the lone doctor who pandered to their grief in defiance of the facts, and - most of all - from a sensationalist right-wing press who took them seriously.

If a measles epidemic comes, they will have to answer for their actions. In the meantime, we may all have to depend on medics to protect us from avian flu. This time, we should respect the scientific method, not drown it out with our panicked screams.