Why Can’t We Stop the Spread of Degrading Adverts for Sex??????????????

A while back, the line: ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, nicked from Life of Brian, was a gag much repeated by Blairite grandees irritated by an electorate that never seemed properly cognizant of their benevolence. How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth was its ingratitude for Sure Start. And the minimum wage. Not to mention taking on Andrew Gilligan. But they’re right. Surveying Blair’s promised land, it’s all too easy to overlook reforms so familiar that they now seem no less than oak trees, a venerable and unchanging part of the British landscape. Ministers for Women, for example. How often did you come across one of those pre-1997? Ditto strippers. With typical ‘What have the Romans …’ mean-spiritedness, we rarely credit New labor with the extraordinary flowering of strip joints or, as they prefer to be called, gentlemen’s table-dancing establishments, even though this advance has lifted so many deserving young women out of poverty. Tessa Jowell in particular has been too modest to advertise her own, crucial contribution, as the perpetrator of the Licensing Act 2003, in placing strip clubs in the same, easily licensed category as cafes and karaoke bars (rumor has it that one popular gentlemen’s lap-dancing club, the Whited Sepulchre, is actually named after her). But perhaps she regrets her act’s continued failure to reconcile market and family values, with no sign in any of the new clubs of, even, healthy snacks for the kids or somewhere for mum to practice her pole dancing. She should not beat herself up about it. Even Rome’s mighty Crassus fell to the Parthians. Besides, ineffectual though they usually are, regular protests and petitions against the opening of yet more lap-dancing clubs (their number having doubled since 2004) confirm that Jowell probably went as far as she could at the time, with her challenge to old-style feminists. Even in today’s go-ahead London, a poster for a new For Your Eyes Only table-dancing club, which promises both ‘exclusive style’ and ‘fully nude and topless dancing’, recently attracted 28 complaints from the public, most of them according to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) objecting that ‘the ad was offensive and unsuitable for display where it could be seen by children’. I confess I had not noticed when I made my complaint about this poster, a gigantic, soft porn-style image featuring a heap of predominantly naked women, that this collective come-on was glued to a hoarding opposite a sixth-form college. In fact, watching the traffic lights, I might not have noticed it all had it not been for a 10-year-old in the car who was about to receive an early introduction to that very New labor career option, undressing in front of drunken strangers. Apparently you can earn as much as £10 (topless) or £20 a dance these days, although this must be set against the fees strippers pay the clubs for the privilege of stripping.