The club’s local MP urges club owners and the police to work together, not against each other.
Islington South and Finsbury MP Emily Thornberry has lent her support to Fabric, ahead of the club’s licensing review tomorrow (September 6).
In a statement posted to Facebook on Friday, the club’s local MP defends Fabric as having “huge cultural significance to an entire generation – a generation too often ignored and overlooked by politicians and policy makers.”
Thornberry expresses “a strong view” that the “Islington institution” must remain open, explaining that she has met with Fabric’s owners and has every confidence that they are prepared to make the “reasonable and appropriate changes required to mitigate the risks as much as possible”, following the drug-related deaths of two teenagers.
“Of course Fabric is not perfect, and as with every nightclub, it faces a constant battle to contain and minimise the drug taking that is, unfortunately, part of nightclub culture,” she writes, before adding that Fabric is “clearly not alone in facing these challenges, and for many years now it has led the way for other nightclubs in terms of drug prevention measures.”
Thornberry highlights Fabric’s status as “a beacon of best practice”, while stating that although more needs to be done to address the issues facing Fabric and other nightclubs in London, “surely the answer cannot be to simply shut them down and drive this culture underground, into the hands of people organising illegal raves with zero oversight, security or medical support.”
The current Shadow Foreign Secretary also highlights the failure of local police to prosecute drug dealing suspects, “despite being sent weekly reports by the management of Fabric detailing the times, locations and descriptions of those dealing drugs in the area around the club – even when the police have arrested suspects as a result, prosecutions have been dropped.”
Thornberry ends her statement by encouraging people to sign the save Fabric petition, should they want to add their voice to the campaign.
