Oh yes, we can live with it. It just won't be much fun for anyone. In practice it will turn out to have all kinds of unsuspected outcomes, as badly drafted legislation always does.

I doubt if a standard application that would cover all the different kinds of venues that would need a licence under this law, for all the different types of activities which are defined as registrable entertainment is actually possible.

Conceivably one specifically for public houses which only want to allow a bit of live music off in a corner might be possible. But even there I'd doubt if a standard form which would be equally viable in city centre pubs and pubs out in the wilds would be practicable. And of course with different local authorities.

A limited range of standard applications in any single geographic area is probably as far as it's possible to push standardisation.

I think getting an overarching exemption to coincide with the promises that have been made is actually more realistic.

Talk about this as a cash cow assumes that the standard range of licence fees will be vastly greater than the figures which have been announced - they'd need to be a hundred times greater at least to be of any real significance. I can't see that as the root of the trouble. I'd say it's much more likely to be about power and control and self-importance.

Kim Howells strikes me as someone who is ambitious, and who believes, probably with some truth, that he is more intelligent than most of his colleagues, a bit of a chancer who likes seeing his name in the papers. And he is probably a bit lazy, and doesn't like being told he is wrong. If he becomes aware that his senior colleagues are starting to see him as perhaps not a safe pair of hands, he will come up with amendments quick enough.