Afternoon:
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My neighbourhood is about to become the strangest red-light district. Instead of housing a brothel or strip club, we are being promised a type of erotic venue the like of which I've never come across before: a sex bistro.
A long-established South American restaurant, across the road from the town hall, and round the corner from the residential streets, has applied for a licence to allow late-night "exotic dancing" by strippers. It will carry on selling Latin American food to diners, as it has done for decades. But to make sure it survives when the recession drives competitors to the wall, it wants to offer buttocks and breasts along with the chorizo sausage and guacamole.
Every woman I know is furious, and they become angrier still when they discover there's next to nothing Islington council can do about it.
Tories get New Labour all wrong when they accuse its ministers of being politically correct. They forget that Tessa Jowell let the gambling industry rip, while her colleagues allowed the lapdancing business to boom.
Three hundred clubs have opened since Labour relaxed the law in 2004. Voters and councillors can no longer say they just don't want a club in their area. They have to show that lapdancing will lead to crime or public nuisance - a next to impossible task. As Islington council put it to me: "We cannot stop the spread of striptease into residential areas."
True, every now and again Labour's feminist side comes out and ministers toy with the idea of making prostitution illegal. They retreat, however, when they realise that the marriages of City financiers to gold-digging bombshells would be over if Parliament decided that it was illegal for men to pay women for sex.
Yesterday an indignant Peter Stringfellow rejected any comparison between prostitution and lapdancing. He told MPs he did not "offer sexual encounters" but "adult entertainment".
Equity, the actors' union, agreed, and said it "absolutely objects" to its "burlesque" dancers being classified as "sex workers".
I'm sure they're not. I am equally sure that consenting adults should be free to do as they wish. But most objectors to Labour's lax lapdancing law are not seeking to ban Soho strip joints or West End burlesque shows. They merely want local government to have the discretion to respond to voters' concerns.
Councils have no discretion at the moment. Under the existing law, Southwark council could not refuse a licence to an owner who wanted to open a strip club next to Southwark Cathedral. If my local South American restaurant pushes ahead, Islington council will not be able to say it cannot hire strippers because there are families living nearby and a school across the road.
Lapdancing is a democratic as well as a feminist issue because it exposes how the centralisers of Whitehall have rendered local government powerless. For if Labour insists that London boroughs cannot even veto a lapdancing club, what's the point in having local democracy at all?
Gordon's monstrous misdeed
I spent some time working in Soho kitchens last year, and fully expected the cooks to loathe the bullying of Gordon Ramsay. Not so. His foul-mouthed thuggery was just an act to please the watching mob, they told me. When the cameras weren't rolling, he was a pleasure to work with.
I can't say the hypocrisy reassured me.
Ramsay has taught a generation of aspiring chefs that the way to become a star is to treat their subordinates like dirt. This seems to me a worse offence than any alleged affair — even an alleged affair with a “professional mistress”.
You're on another planet, Home Secretary
The creeping introduction of ID cards began this week. First the state will fingerprint and scan foreigners from outside the EU, then airport workers, then students, then just about all of us. Civil libertarians are objecting but they are failing to ask the obvious question: what country is Jacqui Smith living in?
It is certainly not a Britain whose economy is in freefall. Even the Home Secretary's optimistic estimates put the cost at £6 billion. Respectable researchers at the London School of Economics say the price could reach £19 billion, if everything that can go wrong does — as it tends to at the Home Office.
As a good Labour politician, Ms Smith should not want to waste money that could help the unemployed into work or keep companies in business. But, like many others, she sees the news but doesn't understand it, and thinks she can carry on pretending that our old extravagant world hasn't fallen apart.
Reader views (11)
Maybe it might be worth your time to look for a less easy target and jump off the bandwagon - lap-dancing clubs can be inspected/visited/checked by authorities, unlike illegal brothels, I mean, 'saunas' and 'massage parlours'. But I guess the girls working there are immigrants (no-one cares then) and earn next to nothing, so who would like to read such a grim story... Just looking busy, pretending to be doing 'something about something', pure New Labour.
- Katarina, manchester
My council can get very difficult about my dustbin, can thump me for a lot of dosh for a couple of minutes of illegal parking, but cannot do anything about sex clubs. Good to know they've got their priorities right, and that my kids are growing up in a nice neighbourhood. It's like living in a banana republic. Is there anything one can think of, about which one can say 'that was great', that's happened in the last ten years?
- John Problem, Hackney Wick, London, UK
I don't know if it will help support your argument, but my ex flatmate was a 'lapdancer' in exactly the same type of set up you describe, a restaurant til 11pm and then lapdancing. She was pretty, athletically fit and had an amazing body. She could barely make any money because the illegal immigrant girls would take lesss. Also, implicit in the job is prostitution and unless the girls agree to 'party' with guys they meet in the clubs, they don't make their £40 entrance fee back. Also, she told me that the girls frequently broke the rules by allowing men to touch them and also touching the men (this is forbidden under the licence) and that drugs were rife in the club - in fact you can't really do the job without drugs to perk you up. The manager was constantly on the look-out for potential Environmental Health workers so he could tip the place to 'clean it's act up'. The clubs share information and CCTV footage of inspectors so they know who to look for. Also, in the time my friend 'worked' there, she earned very little indeed, barely covered her expenses, would have been better off doing a babysitting job or stacking shelves. In three years, the club got raided twice and was charged with breach of regulations. Not a pretty picture. The licencing conditions are not 'silly' at all - this is a very dangerous job for young women and I don't think they understand the level of risk they put themselves at.
- Real, London
It's amazing how even the most liberal minded get all uppity when an establishment such as this opens in their own post code. It's Nimbyism, pure and simple.
- Paul, London
Islington council CAN stop exotic dancing at your local South American restaurant because there are families living nearby and a school across the road. We have just been through a similar process in West Kensington with a lap dancing club trying to open next to our library - thanks to the hard work of a core group of locals and the support of our Cllrs and MPs the application was refused. At the moment unfortunately residents have to do all the work to show that venues such as these do not promote the four licensing objectives thereby allowing licensing panels to rule against these venues which despite Peter Stringfellow's assertion DO offer sexual titillation, and, as you say, DO NOT belong in residential neighbourhoods. The taxpaying electorate in local wards must have a voice regarding this issue.
- R Marlowe, London
Nick Cohen seems to have missed that the ID card is going to be available, as of January 2009, at the bargain basement price of £30 for the piece of plastic and an estimated £30 for the iris and finger print data. That's £60 until 2010 when the price could go up.
That's £300 for my wife and I and our 3 children. It will also act as a European Union travel card. To go to Norway, Switzerland, Turkey or Morocco will necessitate a full passport/ID card at £100 plus or £500 plus for the family. (Instead of the £100 cost in 1997!)
This is a poll tax on identity with the poor paying proportionately more than the better off. How long before it becomes an annual fee like the TV license and council tax?
- Paul Lettan, Old St Pancras, London
These clubs should be allowed to ebb and flow with demand, like everything else. The only possible explanation for their existence is sufficient people who want them to make them viable.
As soon as you interfere with the market, either nationally or locally, you make existing clubs more valuable and able to charge higher prices to both the customers and the girls (who pay to dance in them). You also preoccupy council officers in enforcing silly licensing conditions when frankly they’ve got better things to do.
- Stephen Paterson, UK
in Wakefield, yorks., in the 70s a popular Fish and chip restaurant, very close to the cathedral, featured strip dancers at lunch-time. this was very popular but usually restricted to 2-3 days a week. Pub strippers were a feature in parts of london at that time usually at lunchtimes. Most of these venues were in residential areas.
- F.Norris, guildford england
All Labour care about is collecting tax revenues.
These businessess are profitable and can be taxed,there is no morality involved.
- Eric, London UK
Nick, I suggest you visit this exotic stripper club and lighten up a bit. You are starting to sound like a mixture of Melanie Phillips and Mary Whitehouse.
- James Hennessy, london england
I D Cards-lets get one thing staight-ID Cards are not about terrorism. They are Labour's means of getting a grip on benefits fraud, as is the national criminal data base and the National NHS Data base. However its impossible to see how all this totalitarianism will make any difference when Britain has no real control over its borders.
- Jeremiah, London
