The BBC is reporting that a number of UK MP's want to expand laws that ban reselling tickets for the Olympics and British football to cover a variety of other events -  Wimbledon, the Grand National and the Six Nations Rugby. Sharon Hodgson a Labour MP, is heading the charge and has corralled a number of other politicians to join her campaign. Hodgson apparently would also like to see the secondary ticket industry  banned at cultural events, and music festivals. She also wants websites that resell tickets to be regulated more tightly, so that they would only be able to charge the face value on a ticket plus a fixed price for re-selling it - similar to legislation being proposed in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

 John Rentoul, blogging at the Independent Online, today pulled out a classic slice from an article written back in June 1987:

What better example of the “enterprise culture” could one find than the ticket tout? He is a classic entrepreneur. He has identified a market gap for a particular service – the supply of tickets for sporting and cultural events to people who have more money than patience, foresight or contacts.

As long as the ticket he sells is genuine and he has come by it lawfully, the transaction is honest. Not everyone has the time to queue; not everyone leads a well-regulated life that enables him to book for an event months in advance; very few people know privileged insiders who are prepared to give away tickets they have received as a perquisite. By contrast, everybody to a greater or lesser extent has money. If a person wishes to devote an apparently disproportionate amount of disposable income to see something which is disproportionately attractive to that person, why should anyone else care?

Yet we learn, coincident with the beginning of the Wimbledon fortnight, that a Labour MP, Douglas Hoyle, wishes the Government to legislate against what he describes as “this ever mounting scandal”. Mr Hoyle seems to believe that the touts are ruthless exploiters whom no civilised society should countenance.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The tout offers a genuine service and takes real risk of loss in the pursuit of his frequently modest profit. If rain interferes with play, he may have to accept a substantial loss.

The tout is not protected by the government-sponsored intervention buying or so-called orderly marketing agreements. He is a man of enterprise, a new Elizabethan – if the Queen knighted touts rather than civil servants she would do more for economic growth than all the Government’s departments and quangos put together.