War in Soho
Tony Craig
War had been declared in the tea-room at County Hall. As we munched cream cakes and poached eggs on toast the:campaigners painted a lurid picture of Soho's evil and avaricious merchants of porn, who had had life easy for far too long, and who were about to meet their come-uppance. Sex films and strip clubs, nude posing parlours, topless bars, massage parlours, sex shops and hostess clubs — none of them would be the same after the Greater London Council had done its work.
And two days later Judge Lord Dunboyne surprised almost everyone by giving the tea-room campaigners an unexpected victory in their first battle. He dismissed an appeal by the proprietors of a tiny sex cinema in Soho against the GLC's refusal to grant them a licence to run their X-film club, showing such films as Hardcore Sex and Classroom Capers, as a public cinema.
The council does not have any powers over cinema clubs, and the effect of Lord Dunboyne's decision, hailed as 'a great vic • tory for all those who want to see a clean-up in the sleazier parts of London's West End', will be to ensure that instead of the aptlynamed Cinema X in Piccadilly being restricted to showing films approved by the British Board of Film Censors or the GLC, with a requirement to maintain certain public safety and sanitation standards, it will continue to operate as a club, titillating those who are willing to pay three pounds and stand outside in the rain for ten minutes to qualify for membership.
It will still show films of naked men and women grunting for an hour or two, and will still advertise its wares with explicit posters outside the entrance. I couldn't find a plot running through Hardcore Sex, but the man at the door — 'We don't admit anyone who admits to mental sickness or a criminal record' — assured me: 'A sex film's a sex film. They're all the same.'
Mr Bernard Brook-Partridge, the GLC's law and order' man and a barrister to boot, was nonetheless exhilarated by Dunboyne's judgment. 'We are out to gun these buggers down,' he told me over the third celebratory pint, choosing his words with less than usual circumspection. 'We have a licence to kill, and within the law we propose to use it.' His jubilation was understandable. The GLC had not expected to win its case. Indeed, in a quite unprecedented move, three councillors had had to give evidence for the council because the appropriate officers had declined to do so. Victory was the sweeter. The GLC's case had been that there were already twenty seven public cinemas in Soho, all restricted to X-certificate sex films. Enough was enough, and twenty seven was too many.
But what is the GLC really trying to do? The campaign to stamp on the lucrative activities of the porn merchants is being led by Mr Bryan Cassidy, who had told me in the tea-room that the GLC would make full use of its licensing powers 'to ban all publicly visible pictorial publicity for X-films, strip clubs, sex shops and the like', which is not at all the same thing as 'gunning down the merchants of porn'. Indeed, while deprecating the fact that to dine in Soho you had 'to run the gauntlet of sordid sex shops and cinemas, carrying lurid street displays for pornography', Mr Cassidy maintained that his 'clean up London' campaign was not designed actually to stop the operations of the various sex establishments which, after all, did provide a service to a particular market.
Mr Cassidy had to go abroad while the case was still in progress, and the GLC prepared alternative draft press releases hailing the court's decision as 'a great victory' or 'a great disappointment'. They stated that Mr Cassidy was 'leading a campaign to clamp-down on sex cinemas and clubs'. The GLC, however, is nothing if not cautious before it issues a press release (which is why some of the council's more individualistic senior members prefer the tea-room and by-pass the press office altogether), and at some stage in the consultation procedures, during which draft releases have to be approved by some four or five different people, a significant alteration was made. The Cassidy 'campaign to clamp-down on sex cinemas and clubs' became a 'campaign to clamp-down on displays for sex cinemas and clubs' and, in its final form, a 'campaign to clamp-down on publicity displays for sex cinemas and clubs'. Equally, a quote from Cassidy that the GLC was determined 'to do all in its power to curb sex films, strip clubs, sex shops, topless bars, massage parlours and the like' became a quote from 'gun the buggers down' Brook-Partridge that the council was determined 'to do all in its power to curb obtrusive displays for sex films, strip clubs' etcetera.
Leaders of the campaign certainly want to get at the street advertising. They also want the government to give them more power to control the scope and extent of the sex industry, with powers to licence private clubs, perhaps in the same way as the Gaming Board has the power to limit the number of casinos operating in any area. Mr Sandy Sandford, who chairs the council's Central Area Committee, complains that while the GLC can control the change of use of a place from a restaurant to a fish and chip shop it cannot prevent the same restaurant from becoming a sex shop. But BrookPartridge believes the council may now refuse to renew the licences of perhaps half Soho's existing public cinemas.
But as yet the council, as opposed to the campaigners in tea-room, has not even discussed the mters, and although some of the GLC's more liberal-minded members lost their seats in the elections in May there will be opposition as well as support on both sides of the chamber. Certainly under Labour the council had been particularly liberal, its Film Viewing Board granting X-London certificates to a number of films turned down by the British Board of Film Censors.
If the council is now to seek greater powers from the government it must first ask itself whether its aim is, in fact, to be the limited one (which could well command public support) of restricting indecent street advertising, the more general one of restricting the nature and scope of sexfor-sale in Central London, or the more extreme clamp-down on the merchants of porn which would follow from BrookPartridge's determination to 'gun the buggers down'. If the aim is to be the latter, both the GLC and the government would do well to ponder the consequences of prohibition in the United States, and concentrate instead on prosecuting the gangsters into whose pockets so much of the profits of sex in Soho are now going.
Previous page
