It wasn’t just us that warned about it either, Feargal Sharkey did:

It is a sad indictment of society when something as innocent as singing sea shanties in a pub is banned. Yet when James Purefoy and fellow actors were relaxing in a London tavern after a hard day’s filming some months ago, they were asked to stop singing traditional folk-songs because the pub was not authorised to have live music. The landlord risked losing his alcohol licence.

The irony is that those actors had been making a film based on the true story of the Fisherman’s Friends, Cornish fishermen and their friends, who received a million-pound record deal and chart-topping success after a holidaying executive heard them singing songs of the sea in their village pub.

That warning? From 2007:

The singer Feargal Sharkey asked of the Licensing Act 2003 that regulates live music: is it really necessary that old men should be stopped from singing folk songs to each other in a room above a pub? Stopped unless they apply for permission to do so?

The essential guiding principle of anything even approximating to a liberal society is that consenting adults can be left to working out and organising such things themselves. Permission from the State is not necessary nor a system which insists upon it desired.

Perhaps we should return to that idea then, be liberal as England used to be?