IT'S a great shame to have to agree with anything the Daily Mail has ever said about anything, but there's a first time for everything.

Back in the day when the 24-hour drinking laws were brought in, the more sanctimonious of the national papers warned that it would bring only death, doom and destruction to the country, sending us to hell in a handcart even more quickly than we had been travelling. In fact, the very fabric of society would change for the worse, and there was hand-wringing aplenty.

There were many of us who thought that instead it would just mean that you wouldn't have to rush home from work and bolt down your tea in order to have a Friday night out, and that it would calm everything down. We naively thought that if you treated people like adults, they'd behave like adults.

Sadly, it seems we were wrong and the so-called moral majority were right. It seems to have brought more problems than it solved, and not left us in a better place.

This hit home when we learned this week that the Broadwalk in the middle of town wants to open until 5am to benefit from the increasing number of Poles who now drink there. This licence application comes at a time when trouble at the pub is on the rise.

The police aren't keen on the bid because they say that trouble is at its worst just after 2am already, when the force is understandably stretched.

And then there's the Angelo's question. It's emerged this week that the club's going to appeal the decision to make it shut for two months, which was made after Swindon Council's licensing panel decided that there was too much trouble there.

The management maintains that a lot of the fighting is nothing to do with the club itself, and is linked to Angelo's purely because the people hang around near there waiting for taxis and the like - and so in effect Angelo's is more of a landmark describing where the trouble is rather than the cause of the disturbance.

This may well be true, but the problematic point here is that this volume of trouble between 3am and 5am on a weekend morning exists anyway. Looking at it dispassionately, there's no point in serving booze late into the night if this is the result.

Without wanting to sound melodramatic, I think we had the chance and blew it. The promised café culture shows no sign of arriving - either locally or nationally - and instead, whenever one heavy drinking bar closes another springs up in its place.

While the Licensing Act may have put a lot more transparency into the system - it's great to be able to know exactly why a pub is up before the authorities and what they've done wrong - it seems that it's the customers who have got it wrong.

More drinking hours have just led to more drinking, not more clever or adult drinking.