Driving through the streets of North and East London late on a Saturday night, we were everywhere confronted by the same depressing scene: the pubs were all closed, dark and apparently deserted. If there is indeed a problem with our late-night drinking laws, it is that many of us, on the rare occasion we get out, still cannot enjoy a pint after midnight at the weekend. That's what I call antisocial.

How much has the introduction of “24-hour drinking” two years ago extended average opening times on a feverish Saturday night? The grim truth revealed this week by the Government's official review is: 21 minutes. Twenty. One. Minutes.

More than 60 per cent of licensed premises still close by 11pm on a Saturday, a further 24 per cent shut by midnight, and only 6 per cent open past 1am. The Truth About 24-Hour Drinking is that it does not exist. Excluding hotels (which could always serve guests all night) and supermarkets, just 470 pubs, bars and clubs have 24-hour licences - about one per 100,000 adults, a bit of a squeeze.

These known facts confirm that, as some of us soberly cautioned, the new laws were always measures of regulation, not liberalisation. But things look different in the fantasy worlds inhabited by both critics and champions of the revised law.

There are the hardcore prigs and political troublemakers, wearing “reverse beer goggles” that make everything look uglier around drink. Ignoring the review's findings of a dip in alcohol consumption and violent crime, they seized upon and wielded the one weapon to hand - a reported increase in offences between 3am and 6am, a sleepy time that accounts for just 4 per cent of night-time trouble.

Then there are the ministers and their supporters who believed, with all the naivety of teenage drinkers, that tweaking the law could create a “continental-style café society” in the UK, and are now disappointed that “the overall reduction in alcohol-related disorder...has not materialised consistently in all areas”. Like kids who imagine that alcopops give them superpowers, they truly believed that they could make everybody behave by changing the official bedtime for grown-ups.

They maybe shocked to learn that, even in 1970s suburbia, where it often seemed hard to find any pubs open, we youngsters enjoyed getting drunk and into trouble - and you could always find a late drink if you knew where to knock. Yet somehow civilisation survived.

But for how much longer, if all the pubs close down? This week the Beer and Pub Association reported that Britain is losing almost four boozers a week - 1,409 called time for good in 2007, up from 102 in 2005. Strangely, that 14-fold increase made few headlines. Perhaps they will all soon be converted into gated blocks of tiny flats that few can afford or want to live in. Then we can be a nation of not so much 24-hour party people as 24-hour security people.

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