THE Swindon licensing committee plans to consult the public on the regulation of ‘sexual entertainment venues.’ “Sexual entertainment venues’ is apparently the official term for strip joints, lap-dancing places and those shops with the blacked-out windows where mucky books and terrifying pieces of equipment are sold.

What the officials are talking about is the possibility of making such places apply for special licences with conditions tailored to prevent unlawful doings and nuisances.

Nobody should fault the committee for wanting to do something about the issue or keep an eye on what sort of venue springs up where. After all, the last thing anybody wants is, say, a mucky bookshop springing up in the midst of a quiet neighbourhood and attracting a clientele from miles around.

There you’d be, popping out for a paper or some cat food, only to be confronted by some seedy bloke carrying a stack of magazines that could double as medical textbooks.

Or perhaps he’d be carrying some weird thing with a 12,000-watt motor that you’d mistake at first for the machines firefighters use to free people from wrecked cars.

Having said that, I don’t think anybody needs to worry about mucky book shops for much longer, as they’re a relic from a bygone era. The number of pervy folk without internet access diminishes by the day, and the internet offers enough free mucky images to wreck the eyesight of even the most dedicated enthusiast.

And their hearing, come to that. And make them walk funny.

The internet also boasts online shops selling a far greater range of those weird things I just mentioned. All of them deliverable to your own home in plain packaging with complete discretion and no need to hire a Transit or an engine hoist. So I’m told.

Perhaps the best option would be for us to wait until there’s only one mucky book shop left and then pledge to protect it on account of its historical significance. After all, that’s as good as a death sentence for just about any old structure in this neck of the woods.

As to lap-dancing places and whatnot, I don’t really see how they might be regulated any further. I admit I’ve never been to one, as I don’t generally like theme bars unless the theme is ‘Drink,’ but I’ve seen people going in and out of them and they seem to fall into only a few categories.

Roughly speaking these are: (a) Young lads on a night out, perhaps celebrating some landmark event by seeing how many colours of the rainbow they can be sick in; (b) Older blokes, often out-of-towners attending a business convention and boasting about ‘delivering solutions,’ ‘thinking out of the box’ and ‘expecting 110 percent from their people’; (c) Rather furtive, unhappy men of a certain age who scuttle across the threshold like hunted creatures with a view to committing mental adultery, and (d) eyewateringly drunk people who turn up on the off chance of being served.

I don’t know about you, but I reckon anything that keeps these folk away from ordinary people out for a bevvy with their mates or their nearest and dearest can only be a good thing, so I’m not sure extra regulation is a good idea.

I only wish some innovative person would open a Lapp dancing club, where customers would get to have a knees-up with fully-dressed people from northern Finland.

  • It's not a mystery

WE’RE all horrified by the catalogue of alleged child abuse and other foulness committed by MPs and peers, as exposed by crusading politician Simon Danczuk.  

One thing puzzles me, though. National newspapers and TV channels keep referring to certain incriminating papers having ‘mysteriously’ disappeared, but I don’t understand why.

There’s nothing mysterious about their disappearance, just as there’s nothing mysterious about the disappearance of some disgusting material supposedly seized from a politician at one of our borders many years ago. If we all know exactly why something happened, it can’t be a mystery, can it?

Nor is there anything mysterious about the fact that there’s to be no proper inquiry and no insistence on important witnesses giving evidence under oath – thereby risking jail if they’re found to be lying.

Finally, there will be nothing mysterious when we’re eventually reassured that the abuse was perpetrated only by a few individuals who are now too dead or too near death for anything to be done about the crimes they committed.

Jailing a few showbusiness beasts is one thing, but we can’t have the truly rich and powerful answering for their actions, can we?

  • Target them

A BURGLAR called Alan Aldous, who has more than 20 such offences on his record, was jailed for a couple years last week.

Maybe you read about it in the Swindon Advertiser. In April, he’d appeared in court for another burglary, only to be allowed to stroll free after a judge said jailing him would be unjust.

Four weeks later, he was caught trying to get into the house of an elderly man who was in hospital. What effect such violation would have had on the victim when he returned from his treatment doesn’t bear thinking about.

Something I have been thinking about, though, is the ways in which we might make judges think twice before unleashing serial violators of homes on communities of innocent people.

One idea might be for a new rule to be put in place: whenever a judge sets a burglar free, that burglar is issued with a piece of paper bearing the judge’s name and address and details of when their home will be empty over the next few months.

If that happened, I suspect there wouldn’t be a single free burglar anywhere in England.

  • And another thing...

SWINDON, according to the Great Britain Tourism Survey, is lacking a magnet attraction and a broad range of accommodation for holidaymakers.

Hmmm, I wonder why that could be – unless it’s because, even though we have more than our fair share of interesting things to show visitors, we’re not actually a holiday resort.

Nah, that would be too obvious.