Roy Beers: Why pubs are becoming the licensed trade's Betamax

This won't be a surprise to anyone who has followed the long and weary debate about whether or not the major leasing pubco players offer a deal which gives the average tenant a reasonable chance of making a good living.

If things were even half as bad as painted by many in the trade a year or so back then the cumulative effects of fresh challenges - not least the Licensing Act here in Scotland - guarantee they must be a damned sight worse now.

We now know for a fact (courtesy of irate English publicans, in large numbers) that the hubris which had us believe that the smoking ban would be good for business was the nonsense we all surely knew it to be all along.

Many pubs managed to alleviate the downturn by bringing in a significant new food offer, as more or less ordained by pro-ban enthusiasts who had never run a business, but a fair proportion of these found either that the market was suddenly over-subscribed - how many bar restaurants does one average street really need? - or that the increased staff and running costs made it hardly worth the effort.

There have been winners too, of course - attractive bar-restaurants with commodious smoking areas can still expect to do well (witness the Republic bars here in Glasgow) - but any business which aims to keep operating on a "trad" basis must now be relying very heavily on customer loyalty to stay afloat.

And despite or maybe even, to some extent, because of the credit crunch, people still seem as determined as ever to eat out - whether it's straightforward pub grub or something more ambitious.

However according to figures for Scotland a not insignificant number of licensees surrendered their licences ahead of reapplication for the country's new licensing system, throwing in the towel in advance of the legislation and its associated costs (and exponential hassle).

That's a trend that can surely only accelerate as licensees who gamely soldiered on begin to absorb a wave of extra costs, expected and unexpected.

I don't know how rural areas are faring in any detail, but again the picture was bleak where wet-led bars were concerned anyway, and local newspaper reports across the country appear to confirm the general slide.

The West End of Glasgow, arguably Scotland's liveliest quality bars area, is maybe indicative of the trend. No less than three pubs in the space of a couple of hundred yards have radically repointed their offer to become "café bars" offering bistro-ish Mediterranean-inspired food. To be "a pub" is no longer good enough.

Some would argue it's a thoroughly positive development - perhaps particularly people who never visited pubs, suspecting them of being mere drinking dens - but for the rest of us there's perhaps a feeling that we're losing a valuable element of social culture which isn't replicated anywhere in the world: at its best, the traditional bar is an unbeatable refuge and community forum - one which can't be replicated among the clattering crockery and clinking wine glasses of the bar restaurant.

The general trend is remorseless and irreversible. New challengers have included a coffee shop brand, Pico, which allows you to bring your drinks in while serving hot food till late evening, a concept which appears to be winning recruits among younger customers who have no inbuilt regard for the concept of the "boozer" of blessed memory.

Why, then, all the fuss about binge drinking and allegedly pub-fuelled disorder? It's an unpalatable fact that we're still bedevilled with the late-week/weekend "bevvy session", in which drinkers, and by no means just the 18 - 30's, cram a week's worth of drinking into one intemperate splurge before reeling noisily home.

It's hardly something you can legislate for. In Italy (I've seen it myself) when people talk about going out for "a drink" they generally mean just that. In Scotland they often mean "a good session", and if it's Friday or Saturday the accepted norm is still a spree: it's called "vibrant nightlife" in promotional tourism literature, but generally speaking it's not a pretty sight.

Good weather, as over the past week in Scotland, is good for business and good for a more civilised sort of vibe. People like sitting at tables outdoors, and don't seem to get carried away in the same way as the crowd which pack the bars in Sauchiehall Street or off Argyle Street on a Saturday night, when the "out on the town" dynamic common to every major conurbation in Britain inevitably kicks in.

But we're left with the prospect of a licensed on trade many of whose customers either arrive in dribs and drabs for a bite to eat and the odd half pint during the week, or pack the bars to chuck it down late at night over the weekend: it's either café society or Hogarth's Gin Lane, contemporary style, with no happy medium.

But the politicians simply don't "get it" where traditional bars are concerned. At a wild guess I'd say two thirds or more of the better trad bars are so long-established and well-practised at running their shop that little or no additional legislation was really needed. They're the sort of bars which are "self policing" courtesy of decent regulars, and don't suffer the random outrages which regularly afflict more amorphous and anonymous branded bars, where most of the customers are strangers.

Their staff actually talk to the customers, and even show an interest in the drinks they are serving. The better ones appear to be successful at gaining new recruits among younger drinkers, despite the myriad challenges from newer and trendier rival entertainment offers.

But these are also the pubs taking the full brunt of the sort of legislation which brings with it masses of time-consuming paperwork as well as costs. Hardly surprising that some independents are tempted to sell to a leasing pubco to fund a well-earned retirement sooner than they'd originally planned.

We could be looking to a future where solid bars on classic lines - say, The White Hart in Edinburgh or The Trades House in Dundee - will be unusual enough to stay the course, and become one small and heavily regulated but relatively healthy sector within an overall market dominated by bar-diner brands and bistros.

And the big irony, I'm convinced, is that none of this will have the slightest effect either on drink disorder (centred on offsales, on the one hand, and town centre drinking strips on the other - the two often combining in a single drinking night out) or alcohol abuse in general. This is fuelled by cheap off trade offers but is thoroughly ingrained within mainstream Scottish society anyway.

Many of our best pubs are withering away simply because it's the governmental fashion to sock it to them in any way possible, without regard to how they're supposed to stay afloat, or whether they're good or bad - or what we'll be losing when they're gone. That's a crying shame.