When is a sex establishment not a sex establishment?
When is a sex establishment not a sex establishment? When it’s a lap dance bar.
Celia Barlow, the Labour MP for Hove & Portslade, has a good article on this on the New Statesman website about the issue of strip joints. Unfortunately, they have been classed along with cafes and ballet schools as a result of a loophole in the 2003 Licensing Act. They are emphatically not the same. This is an issue of local democracy and accountability; given the objections raised to them and the evidence that they are linked to violence and other forms of criminality, particularly against women, local councils should be able to license them. Just to be clear, that means preventing them from opening, enforcing some standards and closing them for breaches of those standards.
I hope that her campaign does well.
xD.
