Our nanny government seems to enjoy nothing more than protecting us from ourselves by banning stuff, so doesn’t it do something useful this time and ban amplified music in pubs?

Times: The louder the music in venues, the faster you drink

Loud pop music in bars makes people drink more and down it more quickly, a study in France has shown…

The results, published online in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, show that the louder the music, the more swiftly the drinkers finished their beer, ordered more—or left.

It is entirely possible, Professor [Nicolas Guéguen, Professor of Behavioural sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud] admits, that they just found the atmosphere uncongenial, so accelerated their drinking and left.

Remember when you could actually hold a conversation in a pub? It’s getting increasingly harder to do so. It’s time to reclaim our bars from the alco-pop-sipping teenagers who only go there to get blind drunk. An amplified music ban would help achieve this—and protect us from ourselves by decreasing our alcohol intake.

Come on, Gordon, you know you want to!

And, in related news:

Liverpool Echo: Cains owners: We’ll fight to save our beer

… The Toxteth [Cains] brewery yesterday admitted its future as a going concern was in jeopardy after a “perfect storm” conspired against the 158-year-old business…

[Y]esterday their six monthly figures made for painful reading: £4.6m losses; higher raw material and energy costs; and the effects of the smoking ban all took their toll.

My emphasis added. Let it not be said we didn’t see this coming. For the record, Cains is one of my favourite pints.