William Donaldson: Speaking as a man who likes a drink and (a) good crack

According to the Daily Mail, Middle England has yet another worry. After Spanish fishermen and crack-crazed gangstas, it is "illegals" camping in the shrubbery. Now, because of New Labour's intentions vis-à-vis pub opening hours, trim, clear-skinned girls of the sort you see when making a deposit at the Alliance & Leicester will get pie-eyed on Friday nights, falling into the street at 3am and beating each other up.

According to the Daily Mail, Middle England has yet another worry. After Spanish fishermen and crack-crazed gangstas, it is "illegals" camping in the shrubbery. Now, because of New Labour's intentions vis-à-vis pub opening hours, trim, clear-skinned girls of the sort you see when making a deposit at the Alliance & Leicester will get pie-eyed on Friday nights, falling into the street at 3am and beating each other up.

I don't drink, except when I do. I don't read the Daily Mail, and the mere sight of a politician of any party makes me feel faint. When they speak, I have to close my ears. In what follows it will become immediately obvious, therefore, that I don't know what I'm talking about.

This doesn't embarrass me particularly. In disputes about the desirability or otherwise of intoxication - as in disputes about, say, pornography or foxhunting - people are driven by their predispositions rather than by arguments - least of all by those of a consequentialist nature. They simply assert their preferences and vote for what they like.

The upshot is that everyone talks nonsense, unless, of course, you happen to share their disposition. Roger Scruton, in The Meaning of Conservatism, tried to give rational expression to this habit. "Pornography doesn't cause depravity and corruption," he wrote. "It is depravity and corruption."

This sounds impressive, but a quick analysis reveals it not to be a moral argument, or an argument of any sort. It's an aesthetic statement, on all fours with saying that you could live perfectly well with mustard yellow flock wallpaper in your front room but that you preferred not to.

So - the Government, on the one hand, and the Daily Mail (supported by the police, I gather), on the other, have each advanced consequentialist arguments to support their opposite conclusions. Since I don't like drinkers, Daily Mail readers or the police, my predisposition is to approve of new legislation that inconveniences any or all of them and to line up, therefore, with New Labour, regardless of the arguments.

That sounds a trifle glib, however. A review of the state of play might be more becoming. The Government, I'm told, argues that allowing pubs to stay open round the clock will teach the British how to drink in a civilised fashion in the manner of our continental neighbours. That seems unlikely.

Will altered licensing laws cause Harry Redknapp to become Arsène Wenger overnight? Was it because of opening hours that the French had Serge Gainsbourg while we had Jeffrey Bernard?

I think not. Our "Pseuds Corner", bull-necked culture is the unpleasant upshot of altogether more complicated forces, of inherited attitudes too deep to be prised out here - not that I could, even if I wanted to. We'd need George Steiner, Tom Sutcliffe or Jonathan Miller for that. And only in this country would Jonathan Miller be held in lower esteem than Peter Cook. (I got that one off my chest at least.)

No, the Government's motivation must be otherwise - an opportunity to levy extra taxes, I imagine.

Against this, the Daily Mail argues that an increase in binge drinking will be the consequence, with hideous scenes of drunken violence round the clock and not just at 11pm. The police are in agreement here, perhaps because it's easier for them to give people a slapping all at once, and at a fixed time, rather than singly throughout the day and night.

I have to say that the Daily Mail's analysis seems to me to be the more plausible of the two. Pictures in the tabloids of celebrities of one sort or another - Charlotte Church, the portly little soprano; an ex-Atomic Kitten or two; tiny, obscurely infuriated lead singers with Jamiroquai or Harry Wales - reeling out of night clubs at 3am and either beating up a doorman or landing arse-up in the gutter, hardly persuade one that being allowed to drink all night will teach the British how to behave.

It will take more than a change in the licensing laws to bring about that happy state of affairs.

William Donaldson, the humorist, has been variously described as crack-smoker, retired pimp, serial adulterer, genius and national treasure. His latest book, 'Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics', has just been published in paperback (Phoenix, £9.99)