This game is getting too easy. A few days ago I was bemoaning the neo-puritanism that appears to have afflicted British politics with the announcements of the reversal on the super-casino plans and the review into the classification of cannabis, together with Tory plans to bribe people to marry, but only a little.

And I thought that a rash of statistics and stories about the effects of drinking and twenty-four hour licensing might prefigure an announcement about a review of the changes made only a couple of years ago now to allow the selling of alcohol round the clock. So it comes as little surprise to find that that is indeed the agenda, covered in all the news today:

Brown orders review of 24-hour drinking

· PM acknowledges increase in arrests

· Home Office to consult police and councils

Patrick Wintour and David Hencke

Tuesday July 24, 2007

The Guardian

Gordon Brown yesterday burnished his moral credentials further when he ordered a Home Office review of legislation permitting 24-hour drinking.

The review, which is expected to report later this year on the impact on health and disorder, follows the prime minister's surprise decision not to go ahead with a super-casino in Manchester, and to consider whether cannabis should be reclassified. Mr Brown revealed the review at the first of his regular press conferences as prime minister in which he also faced questions on flooding, cash for honours, faith schools and the Middle East. His aides insisted the 24-hour drinking review would not necessarily lead to major changes.

I hope his aides are right. Whilst there are problems with the fact that many Britons appear not to have adjusted to their new freedoms sufficiently to have become the "cafe society" that reformers naively wanted, it would be a retrograde step to go back to arbitrarily set rules restricting those freedoms.

Public drunkenness, however, has always been a problem, sometimes even celebrated in the annals of history as an expression, particularly in Britain, of how we had the freedom to get drunk, but more often chastised and with attempts made to control it. We are told that at the moment one problem is that people have little hope, especially in the housing market, and so spend their increasing salaries on nights out and getting drunk because there is nothing more responsible to do with their money.

Regardless though, it points once again to somewhere where, as Bishop Hill's blog called it last week, "Harsh Liberalism" can offer an alternative to the tendency, worryingly re-surfacing, to introduce more restrictions and curbs on our freedoms. Here is an opportunity to find ways to be tough on people who abuse their freedoms to cause harm or distress to others going about their legitimate lives sharing the same public realm. Public drunkenness is a problem, private indulgence in more restricted intoxicants far less of one. We should be freeing up the latter and clamping down on the former with the savings made from not raiding peoples' homes.

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