Further to the removal of The Arches' late licence, Dr Iain McPhee of the University of West of Scotland, who specialises in policing and drugs laws, condemned the force for some of the conditions put on the club.
The report in The National (Scotland's independence supporting tabloid) relates that Dr McPhee has concluded that the police are acting unfairly. A source within The Arches (anonymous, of course) reckons they are more like a bunch of gangsters.
“It’s been a sustained campaign against The Arches – and, I suppose, what it symbolises, you know? A pretty renegade, two-fingers-in-the-air sort of venue.”
The accusation of acting like a racket was backed up by McPhee. “In a free and fair society, Police Scotland should not be operating like an illegal protection racket,” he said.
For libertarians, and Robert Anton Wilson, the police are always a gangsters (the state is the biggest robber baron in history): while the suggestion that The Arches is 'pretty renegade' is weak - it's not an illegal shebeen, and electronic dance music is hardly an underground phenomena in 2015 - the possibility that the police have been trying to muscle in on the financial action is... if not yet persuasive, the closest thing so far at an attempt to analyse the meaning of the removal.
At this point, I am far less interested in the catastrophic loss to Scotland's arts scene - although I recognise that this is a concern - than what the process is revealing about the behaviour of the state.
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