This booklet from the Institute of Economic Affairs argues that schools are being forced to teach HIV/AIDS education despite their pupils having no significant risk of becoming infected. These arguments will be familiar to anyone who has followed public debate about HIV/AIDS. They are the same arguments that Neville Hutchinson pushed in the early 1990s in Andrew Neil's Sunday Times - reassuring his editor that HIV did not cause AIDS and even if it did, it could not be passed by heterosexual sex.

There is an unconscious humour in the monograph, from its fogeyish horror that a teacher is using "fact sheets she has picked up on the World Wide Web" to its prurient warnings that those who may be offended "should skip quickly to the next vignette". But underneath this lies some genuinely nasty attitudes and an ineptly constructed thesis which falls apart of its own accord. The false propositions they set up to demolish are already lying flat on the floor.

They argue that, as HIV in the UK is mainly at high rates in certain distinct communities, there is no need for schools to mention it. They are clearly against all sex education but dare not say so. They repeat Baroness Young's trick of quoting material produced for adult gay men as if it is used in schools. And then, as one of the authors is Professor Gordon Stewart who was part of President Mbeki's much-discredited Advisory Panel on HIV, they chuck in some dissident arguments to claim that HIV is not really such a problem in sub-Saharan Africa either.

There is an important discussion to be had about the way that liberal discourse has posited HIV as a neutral threat to everyone and shown limited interest in the groups most severely affected. All around the world, HIV is concentrated in communities that face marginalisation, social exclusion and disruption. But you won't find that discussion here. These authors are very clear - if HIV isn't happening much to white, middle-class heterosexual people, then it isn't happening at all and need not be of concern, least of all in the education system.

Sex education in the UK is poor, hampered by embarrassment and successive governments have been unwilling to properly encourage it. To reduce unplanned pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections, we must change our whole attitude to sex and promote discussion about this normal part of everyone's life. This unpleasant booklet does nothing to help.