Let's all calm down a wee bit and think about this........
I'm still as worried as the next punter about the Edinburgh saunas, especially as they seem to be the only option for a decent, reliable punt.
But... to be fair to the polis, they were being accountable in not really going after the saunas to close them while they were licenced by the elected council. The nasty undemocratic bit was to force the council to stop licensing them, which they succeeded in doing.
Saunas were, are and will be (if still open) brothels and running a brothel is illegal and has been for a long time. So, they couldn't enforce that law while they were licenced, hence the push to get that stopped.
Now, the question is; will they enforce it now, or in the near future?
Maybe I'm being optimistic but the resources needed to gain enough evidence may mean they won't. The stushie about their previous tactics and the obvious arguments against closing them may also have got through to them. They may use their discretion to define any owners' "immoral earnings" as coming from exploiting drug habits and using forced/trafficked girls, so that any sauna that's clear on these fronts will be tolerated.
It's not just baseless and self-interested optimism-my understanding from discussions with well informed sauna girls was that the police had agreed a deal with at least some of the remaining saunas, just as the licences expired, that the police would be voluntarily granted entry to check for drugs/trafficking etc. and that that's the kind of stuff they were really interested in.
So maybe that's why the recent LSS "raid" hasn't been in the papers and why they seem to be carrying on as usual. If the police were serious about closing down the saunas immediately, two or three months of throwing evidence gathering resources at a test case would probably be enough and we'd have seen arrests, press releases and blanket news coverage in the last few days.
Of course, on the other hand, if they tolerate "clean" Edinburgh saunas what's to stop them opening up again in Glasgow, so all the above may, in fact, turn out to be baseless optimism and I'm totally wrong.
But, on the evidence so far, it doesn't look like they're going all out for the saunas...at least for the moment.