Fresh from her triumph in excluding Britain’s first female Prime Minister from a list of “women in power”, Equalities Tsarina Harriet Harman has decided to take on Britain’s booming lap dancing sector.
Speaking at “a meeting on the sex industry and business” (yes, honestly), Harman declared her intention to press the Treasury to disallow the cost of nights out at lap dancing clubs as business expenditure. Apparently, some companies are in the habit of entertaining clients at such establishments and are successfully clawing back corporation tax and VAT from the Revenue.
Harman’s principal objection to the practice is that it “excludes women in the workplace”, on the basis, presumably, that lap dancing clubs offer few obvious attractions for most female employees. Secondly, however, it is:
“also part of a larger industry of exploitation of women and selling sex, so we have to look at it in both respects.”
Oh yes, of course.
Perhaps Harman should also spend some time reflecting on her own Government’s role in the matter, given that it was its notorious Licensing Act of 2003 that designated the squalid places as “leisure establishments”, rather than near-brothels, as well as providing for the 24-hour drinking culture that has done so much to promote temperance and public order.
The consequence of that landmark piece of Labour legislation is that central parts of the great cities of this country are now poorly regulated versions of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, rather than places of resort for decent people.
Oh, that’s really clever, isn’t it? How long do politicians think it will take a company accountant to get around that one? This puerile drivel is why parliament spends so much time making bad law. Another Dangerous Dogs / Firearms (Handgun) Act in the making.
And as for ‘decent people’: to which version of the pseudo-religious moral code are you referring, Mr Jones? Presumably, you’ll have a plan for when you’ve driven everything underground?
All we get now from political parties is media agenda management married to vote-catching political opportunism. Talentless muppets, the lot of them!
Absolutely; what this country needs is a new ‘agile infrastructure’, designed to deliver a range of integrated, generic IT services that facilitate true customer-focused, business transformation.
I see you’ve mastered ‘cut & paste’ then, David!