Bit of an epic, I'm afraid, but bureaucrats have the turning circles of oil tankers, so things do get dragged out.
Cheers
Brian

Overturning a Ban on Drinking In Public

Introduction
For Killjoys to succeed ….

… all it takes is for the rest of us to do nothing.

When, in late summer 2007, St Albans Council told the licensees of my local that their customers were no longer allowed to stand outside their pub drinking beer because “The White Swan is in an alcohol-free zone”, I could have done nothing. I could have assumed what they said was true and sat inside supping my pint or moved to a pub with a beer garden.

The multicultural make up of London was something that all the main candidates in the recent mayoral elections were keen to sing the praises of and rightly so. London today is a vibrant and cosmopolitan capital city that benefits from the input of people from over the world. Air travel, in particular the growth in cheap air travel over the last 20 years, has aided this transformation. Transport links and mobility are central to the growth of any city and certainly a city that aspires to premier international status.

I've written a comment against the booze ban, ie on the impending ban on drinking alcohol on public transport in London. A few of us are going along to a party/protest on the Tube on Saturday night (31 May), the last before the ban comes in. Email me if you'd like to join us.

Dolan

The presentation of entertainment and art has always been policed by both central and local government in the UK. If you’re a band, a performer, a film-maker and you want to put on a gig or a show and charge the public for seeing you’re work, you have to apply for a license under The Licensing Act 2003. Why?

Smoking was banned in London’s public places on July 1st 2007 because of the alleged health risks associated with passive smoking. Despite some organisations finding no link between passive smoking and cancer at all, the ban went ahead, following in the footsteps of other European cities.

We should be critical of the smoking ban, not only because there is limited evidence that smoking poses any health risks, but because not challenging the ban legitimises the steps that the government has taken in defining social etiquette.

For a modern, not sustainable, Venice.

Sustainable policy making has meant Venice has become stuck in the past, instead of being able to build on its unique history and geography to become a great city again.

Venice has become an international example of a sustainable city since it was examined as a special case study at the 1992 United Nations Rio conference. In a contribution to the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) publication 'Venice: a Future Capable System' (2001), Davide Dal Maso summarised how Venice symbolises sustainability:

London is a city of endless possibilities. Yet for families with young children, life is often confined to the suburbs, with parents channelling hard-earned wages into scarce, inflexible childcare and having little time or money left over to explore the parks, zoos or galleries, or wander the streets of the West End.

Legal limits on drinking hours were introduced in Britain and several other countries during the First World War, bringing a measure of military discipline to civilian life. The subsequent, disastrous experiment with complete prohibition of alcohol in the US between 1920 and 1933 was also born of a desire for social control, albeit justified in moralistic rather than militaristic terms. Even today, licensing laws constrain the public’s freedom. The one sensible restriction on the supply of alcohol – preventing its direct sale to minors – is a clue to the problem.

What kind of public library do we need in our towns and cities?

There is something very quaint about being asked to draft a policy for a new city, rather like writing up the ‘future for steam power’, or ‘what next for patriarchy?’ The truth is that British people do not live in cities, but suburbs. Over time, better roads, cars, trains and trams have increased the distance people travel to work. That in turn has let them spread out over the countryside. The effect is quite marked. Population densities have fallen over time, so that most of us live much less close to our neighbours, than our grandparents did to theirs.