RATHER by accident than design on my travels this week, I've found myself in both Wigan and St Helens town centres.

And with Good Friday and the Wire-Widnes derby upon us, for once I took heart in being a drinker in Warrington.

Because in their infinite wisdom, the Greater Manchester and Merseyside constabularies have taken a rather more prescriptive approach to any potential disorder in their environs.

In Wigan it takes the form of a county court injunction, giving powers to punish anyone being drunk and disorderly, or gathering in a menacing fashion, inside a given zone.

Meanwhile on the Scouse side, a dispersal order has now come into play for anyone daft enough to be either (a) in St Helens after dark and (b) being an idiot. One false move and you're heading home.

Each piece of prohibitive legislation would also have an impact on persistent beggars and other potential miscreants but it's clearly the problem drinkers who are in their sights.

The thought of these crackdowns caused my mind to wander to Lower Bridge Street and the perennial balance to be struck between the demands of the night-time economy and the forces of law and order.

Just coincidentally Warrington's name had come up at another licensing hearing I had to endure, in another Lancashire town, which had problems with round-the-clock drinking and scrapping.

(Another triumph for Tony Blair, former leader of the former working men/women's party, whose attitude to the masses was not dissimilar to the 'beer and bingo' mentality of today's Tories.) One leading licensing barrister claimed, at my meeting, that WBC was seeking an 'early morning restriction order' with the agreement of town centre licensees, rather than having one imposed by the courts.

The idea, where pubs are told to shut by a given hour to enable the street sweepers to hose out the gutters, was rejected by Warrington's licensing committee last October, after an approach by Cheshire Police.

Recently a similar bid by the authorities in Blackpool, where the unrest caused by non-stop drinking must surely trump anywhere in the north-west, also fell on stony ground.

Town hall officials in Warrington assure me that a number of alternatives are still under consideration, not least a 'late-night levy', designed to make licensed premises fork out if they want to open extra-late.

But like many I'll be watching with interest over the summer to see how this issue develops, if only so Warrington can avoid its annual 'boozy teens' beasting at the hands of the Daily Mail and Cheshire Police.

* Elsewhere this week, I've been gripped by the courtroom drama of an alien and lawless world. Not the murder trial of Oscar Pistorious in gun-happy South Africa but former Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans and our eye-opening insight into what happens after-hours in the Westminster bubble.

I've known Nigel, in a journalistic capacity, for several years, and always found him to be one of the north's most erudite and clued-in political characters.

And as the legal case around him splintered, I wasn't overly-surprised at the not guilty verdicts (though whether he manages to maintain a career in frontline politics is a thornier matter).

In the wake of his trial though we've had an avalanche of MPs and peers questioning whether the affair should ever have reached a jury.

I've not sat through the bulk of the evidence and can only offer a qualified judgement - but such sex cases have been ongoing involving ordinary folks for months and years.

If it wasn't for police and prosecutors' persistence would the horrors of Greystone Heath and the sexual abuse at other Cheshire institutions have come to light eventually?

Only when it impinges on one of their own do the great denizens of Parliament suddenly fling themselves on the bandwagon and suggest that something might actually be amiss.