"I'm posting this here, as I'm sure I'd get my head bitten off if I posted it at Mudcat."

Is it biting Ed's head off to say that that is just nonsense? Disagreeing with people isn't "biting their head off", and the tone of discourse on this has always stayed pretty courteous towards each other, if not always toward Kim Howells.

Anyway, I'm posting my reply here because I can't remember my password for folk info off the top of my head.

Obviously they aren't likely to use the full £20,000 and six months jail on us, but the fact remains that as the Bill currently stands, if we play or sing in any place which doesn't not have a music licence we are committing a criminal offence, and that is the maximum penalty for that criminal offence. Of singing or playing a musical instrument.

And no Kim Howells isn't a demon in human form. He is a cynical politician who has found that shooting his mouth off can get him media attention.

Having made a specific and direct promise that sessions and singaround will not need to have any kind of licence cover he has refused to incorporate this in the law, and so ensured himself further press coverage. "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Well, there is, but annoying us doesn't constitute it.

If there are really only ten pubs in the country where there have been any problems, as Ed suggests, it strikes me as strange that two of them are within a few miles of where I live.

No hysteria, quite right. But firm determination to make them change the bill so that instead of making things worse it makes it better. Which is what the bloody thing is supposed to be doing!

And remember, what matters is not what Kim Howells says the law means, but what the Act itself says; and, in a way even more important, it isn't so much what the courts might decide that matters, it's what the brewers and the landlords and the people running coffee bars and so forth might be worried that the courts would decide.

Under the existing law very few cases have actually gone to court, people just roll over when threatened, understandably enough given the possible penalties. We have to have whatever exemptions we need written into the Act if music is going to be allowed to extend the way it could.