Vic,

You're dead right. This is one of those proposals which sounds great on paper. But I live at the back of a pub, and you wouldn't believe the grief the locals got from it vis a vis the noisy disco, the drunks, the fights, and the brewers who quite happily lied through their teeth to the magistrates and the licensing panels.

The 2003 Act made it a hell of a lot easier to control errant pubs, but now that we've got this one roughly under control, it looks as though they're going to take that particular safety net away.

This isn't being done to cut local authority costs, but to facilitate the brewers who traditionally do so much to fund the tory party.