Lap Dancer Wanted: Apply Within

One of those funny little items on the BBC news this evening that on first hearing seems perfectly inoffensive but when you pause to think about it, makes no sense. Some ConDem coalition minister (a Tory I think) has confirmed that Job Centres will henceforth be prohibited from displaying notices of vacancies for performers in lap-dancing clubs. This, we learn, has been decided after a 'public consultation' whatever that may mean. On the six o'clock bulletin on Radio 4 I heard this decision being lauded by a lady (or is it 'woman', 'person' perhaps? Genuinely, I never do know) from the 'pressure group' Object - Object, geddit? She related rather proudly how they had burnt something outside the Brixton Job Centre to draw attention to this very issue. Now the objectives of Object (see http://www.object.org.uk/) are actually rather civilised but this pillorying of the Job Centres misses the point and so does the empty-headed, focus group inspired government reaction. Bear with me on this one because I do have to confess that I am not a recent expert on either Job Centres or lap-dancing clubs - my last call on the former was, I think, in 1982 and my only (unknowing honestly - I was drunk and just followed my host) visit to a strip joint was in Springfield Massachusetts in 1981. I don't think we could dignify that dive with the title of a lap-dancing club but it's as near as I've been. Despite these notable holes in my cv I'm going to have a pop at this subject anyway.

The thing is this. We have to start with the question of whether the government really belongs in the employment agency business. Now since the government sees fit (and quite right too - I'm not that harsh you know) to spend the tax dollar on unemployment benefits I think we must concede that it has a legitimate interest in trying to see people and job vacancies brought together to their mutual benefit. But what the hell business of government is it what those jobs are, provided of course that they are lawful. I can see that 'good explosives man needed for major bank job' would be out of order but so long as strip joints are legal and presumably generating tax revenue why should their employment opportunities be spurned in this way? Because here's the news, being a stripper is not the only type of employment which certain people find offensive. I myself have a loathing of personal injury lawyers of the ambulance-chasing, money-grubbing scum bag school of operation but I do not for a minute think that my prejudice should be pandered to. What else is going to fail the Job Centre taste test? Halal slaughterman? Drayman? Tobacconist? Vicar - just in case Richard Dawkins finds himself on the dole and then gets all uppity about it? Yet again our political class demonstrates its mastery of the empty gesture. Where once there were giants in the hills now scuttle pygmies.