The Roxy

First off let me declare a personal and prejudicial interest here as I have known Gary Robinson for nearly 20 years.
That said I think that I can still have an opinion on the way that the Roxy is being taken to task over the anti social behavior of some people who roam the streets after closing time. I have no doubt that for people who live close by it must be awful, and I can understand that they are angry about the weekly disturbances, but they do live in the centre of town.
What I fail to understand is why the police cant deal with this, surely if the only place which is open at 3am is the Roxy then that's where they should be. Although I'm told that the police are there but are unable to do anything about people being noisy! This is ridiculous, but I'm sure it's true, you see it's just young people out having a good time and they cant arrest them for that.
So what do they propose to do to stop this problem? Well they are going to ask the licensing committee at SLDC to put some draconian rules onto the owners of the Roxy. No entry after 11pm, and closed at 1.30am. As very few customers arrive before midnight, or so I'm told, this will in effect kill it off.
This is just one of the stipulations that the police are asking for, there's another dozen that I can't remember.
At a recent Town Council meeting the concerns over the Roxy were on the agenda. There was nobody there to counter the views of the police and the neighbors and so the Council endorsed these proposals. In my view I think that the council should have invited the owners to give their side of the argument but they hadn't done this. I suppose they would say that as the council agenda was pinned on the notice board inside the town hall, and it was posted on the councils website that the owners of the Roxy should have been aware of this debate coming up. But that's a bit like the episode from Hitch Hikers guide to the Galaxy where the Vogons had displayed the plans for a super space highway on alfa centaura for the last 100 years, saying that earth was going to have to be demolished, and if we couldn't bother going to see them then there was nothing they could do.
But seriously, I think that we must acknowledge that our town has a large number of young people who are part of our community, and they have every right to expect our town to have somewhere where they can go and the Roxy has filled that void that for too long has been absent. OK so they're gonna disturb people, but hey that's life, lets not just jump all over it just because we don't have enough police to deal with it.
Lets not kid ourselves, if the police get their way, endorsed by the Council, then The Roxy will close down with the knock on effect of the closure of the Laurel and Hardy museum, and perhaps the cinema. This will mean about 20 peoples jobs but more so we will take away a great venue for our young people, one that will not have been given a chance to flourish. I think we do need to address the issues that are in need of sorting out but the venue has only been open 6 months, lets find another way to do this. This is the proverbial sledge hammer to crack a nut.