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Licensing laws: what’s all the binge-whingeing about?

Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London).

Mick Hume

Mick Hume
Columnist

Topics Politics

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‘Now that we have somehow survived 24 hours of “24-hour drinking”, I have a sober question. Does anybody seriously believe that Britain’s grotesque old licensing laws were worth fighting over? Or that we are faced with the decline and falling-over of civilisation, because 14 pubs in London have been granted 24-hour licences? (That’s about one all-night bar for every half-million people, which seems a bit crowded even by Central London standards.) So what is all the binge-whingeing really about…?’

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