Don't row back on pub hours - just ban drunks

On the contrary, he's realised that boisterous Anglo-Saxon drinkers have taken the chance Labour gave them to become more boisterous still. The bingeing isn't all good rowdy fun, as casualty figures from A&E departments show.

Brown has already pretended that Labour hasn't been in power these past 10 years by dropping its plans for supercasinos and undoing his own colleagues' classification of cannabis as a Class C drug. Using the victims of alcohol-fuelled violence as a reason for going back on the licensing laws that Labour itself introduced seems a logical continuation of the PM's attempt to rebrand the party with a touch of old-time Calvinist morality.

Yet I wonder if even a politician as stern as Gordon Brown can put the genie of human freedom back in the bottle. The same people who complain with justice about the state of town centres won't thank him for stopping them buying a drink after a visit to the West End.

Nor is it clear that Britain's drink problem is all about pubs. The rocketing numbers of 11- to 13-year-olds who are turning to drink aren't nipping into their locals. Even if every pub in Britain were closed, they would still be drinking, and adults would still be buying cheap booze from supermarkets or getting it cheaper still from the sheds at Calais.

If beds in your local hospital and cells in your local police station are full on a Saturday night, the best course is not to demand a cut in licensing hours but to insist that councils take control. Landlords and pub chains are not meant to carry on serving until customers are fighting drunk. They are meant to run orderly houses and lose their licences if the task is beyond them and violent drinkers spill onto the streets.

Ben Baumberg, from the Institute of Alcohol Studies, told me that a residents' revolt forced Westminster Council to get tough with delinquent landlords, but that others have been far more permissive.

Westminster is rich, so it can afford to risk the cost of a pub challenging restrictions in court. Other councils aren't so fortunate. More importantly, they are compromised by a conflict between the desire to uphold the law and a desire to replace the small shops the supermarkets have closed in town centres and suburban high streets with pubs and clubs.

Drinkers who are at it all day and into the night compensate them for the lost jobs and tax revenues.

In short, they want money. But they also want votes. Rather than turning back the clock and cheering Brown on as he thinks about taking away a hard-won freedom to enjoy ourselves, we should simply vote out councils that aren't interested in maintaining basic standards.