Right, things to try.....

We are not alone. Many other local arts groups and cultural events are going to suffer. Get on to your local arts council - at town level, and find out what other groups there are. I phoned round some local amateur dramatics people last night and it was news to most of them. Even if it doesn't affect them personally, they may well care enough about the principle to get letter writing. Currently story telling, sports and the like are largely free from this but some are going to get nobbled by the new legislation, make sure they know about it.

If writing to your MP is a non-starter - Labour MPs seem unwilling sometimes to challenge fellow party members, and if you have one of them (I suspect I do) find out who your conservative candidate is and ask them for help - they should be able to get some local media attention and will probably be delighted to have an opportunity to gripe about the 'nanny state' and to show their labour MP up.

When you write letters, don't talk about folk, talk about 'arts and cultural events in the community' - we aren't alone, and folk isn't sexy in the eyes of politicians.

If your club is likely to fold when/if the legislation goes through, write to your local paper and tell them so.

Write letters to the editors of national newspapers. We need media attention, and letter writing might get us a journalist or two willing to really look into it.

The other thing I thought of, I am not sufficiently clued up to be able to try. Is there anything in the European laws on human rights that we could use here? Anything about rights to freedom of expression? There will be laws about freedom of speech, and I suspect this bill would make it very hard for a load of people to gather in a public place and sing protest songs.

There doesn't appear to be an exemption for hospitals, so this will harm the music in hospitals initiative. It will also be an issue for gigs in nursing homes, old people's homes, sheltered accomodation and the like, so see if you can round up any protesters from that quarter. The more exemptions they have to write in, the less viable the bill becomes.

Given his comments, I believe Kim Howells has a personal aversion to live music, there's no point trying to appeal to the man, he has a prejudice and an opportunity to experss it.