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Don’t like banging your head against that brick wall? Why not try banging it even harder?

The BBC reports that the Metropolitan Police have backed a campaign to have the drinking age in Hampstead raised to 21. Their article (in their slightly frothy magazine section) quotes “psychologist Colin Drummond” in support of a general move in that direction, and reasonable noises from Alcohol Concern and the Portman Group in opposition. The reason – having the limit at 18 isn't preventing people under 18 from drinking.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that this ban has absolutely no chance of ever being enacted (18 year olds can vote, after all), and it’s a lovely case study of how failing legislation can be pushed into failing harder by people who can’t think outside the box.

Incidentally, I used to live near Hampstead, and something tells me that any ban is probably related more to the socio-economic group of its inhabitants rather than its non-existent status as party capital of North London.

Jimmy Swaggart has threatened to kill any man who looks at him funny. Are you callin’ uz a poof?

Today the House of Commons votes on the banning of hunting with hounds – the fox hunting ban. The arguments on both sides have been rehearsed ad nauseam over the last few years, and the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance are currently (early evening) winding up a large rally in front of Parliament, protesting at the ban.

The Government have said that if the House of Lords reject the ban – as seems likely, given their previous record on this issue – that they will force through the ban by means of the Parliament Act.

Fox-hunting (and farming and countryside issues more generally) have been taken up strongly by the Tory press, notably the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. The irresponsible end of that spectrum, the Mail and the Express, have used this issue as another example of the perfidy of Labour’s crypto-communist campaign against all that is good and holy about British society. The leftish press, particularly the Guardian, have presented it as the last hurrah of the landed Establishment.

The class colouring of the debate is misleading, however. For the people who are going to vote on it this evening, it seems mostly to be a matter of animal welfare versus the right of people to carry on doing what they have always done. For all the rhetoric of the Mail, that something has always been done is no reason why it shouldn’t be stopped.

We shall see what happens when the ban comes into force, which may be several years away. The Countryside Alliance promises widespread civil unrest, and (echoing the Sinn Fein of old) insist that anything bad that happens will be the Government’s responsibility. Noteworthy was one small incident from the paranoid fringes: the leg of an electricity pylon in Cumbria was sawn through by a group calling itself the Real Countryside Alliance – a name echoing the Real IRA, and hence facile and offensive at the same time.

Are we going to see a rebellion of the Establishment? If so, when is the Prime Minister going to declare victory over the scattered forces of conservatism?

Update: It’s already begun!