Nothing "Local" About Lap-Dancers

After the lap-dancing club in Consett, there is now to be one on North Road in Durham. The “free” market in action, of course: is there still anyone out there who imagines that capitalism is conservative?

I could go on at enormous length about the evils of this sort of thing, but instead I simply want to question one of the claims that those who would or do profit from it characteristically make, namely that it provides jobs for “local girls”. This strikes me as wildly improbable. Members of the local community strike me as the very last people who would wish to work in such a place, precisely because it will be patronised by other members of that same community. Who would wish to be seen so performing by her neighbours? Or by her workmates? Or by her brother? Or by her dad?

These women will have been trafficked into this country, with everything that that entails. Anyone who so much as pays the fee on the door, or puts up a poster advertising this venue, will be morally complicit in that trafficking.

Furthermore, this whole situation is the fault of the existing political class. In Consett at the next General Election, and both in Consett and in Durham at the next European Election, people will at last have the option of voting against that class, and so of voting against both the “free” market’s lap-dancing and the “free” market’s people-trafficking.