The lights are going out all over Britain. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. Or possibly ever. To paraphrase the British foreign secretary on the eve of the first world war might seem over the top, but we are facing a threat to the British way of life that I consider vastly more important than the existence of Belgium.

The British pub is under threat. An institution adored and envied all over the world is disappearing before our very eyes and with it our national drink, beer, as the nation that invented jingoism succumbs to its terminal preference for anything foreign.

It says as much as our football players’ performance on the pitch – or the number of foreigners in the Premier League – that the England team are sponsored by a Danish brewer. And how do we greet tourists from the Continent arriving at our magnificently refurbished St Pancras station? With a bar selling fizzy French wine at £8.95 a glass.

Vive la différence – the difference is that it’s twice what you’d pay in France.

According to figures released by the British Beer and Pubs Association (BBPA) last week, beer sales in pubs are down by 14m pints a day, or 49%, from 1979 levels. Nearly 60 pubs each month shut their doors for good.

This at a time when the alcohol abuse lobby, fifth column of the nanny state, is complaining about a binge drinking culture fuelled by 24-hour drinking.

Have any of them tried to find a pub in central London that is still open after 11pm on a weekday? It’s not easy. According to the BBPA, just a tiny number of pubs have added more than an hour to their opening times and that only at weekends.

The binge drinking culture is there – look at any town centre on a weekend – but it is built on people getting tanked up on cheap supermarket booze at home before going out to hit the bars and clubs that always had later licences anyway.

It revolves around vodka chasers, tequila slammers and overcarbonated imitations of continental lagers, produced by big corporations that pour millions into advertising them.

A quiet pint overlooking a cricket game on the village green is an iconic image of English identity, yet in rural areas particularly, rising property prices and fewer pub-goers mean inns that were once at the heart of communities become private “period” homes. Then the people who move into them wonder why there’s nowhere near to have a half on a Sunday and what happened to their rural idyll when nobody knows anybody any more.

A crucial element in encouraging the rot was the arrival of the alcopop in the mid1980s weaning an entire generation onto alcohol as a sweet fizzy drink. Restrictive licensing – keeping children out of most pubs and closing at 11pm – meant they grew up on alcohol bought (by an older mate) or shoplifted from supermarkets and drunk in bus shelters. As soon as they were old enough they gravitated to the bars and clubs that sold the same sort of drinks and didn’t send young adults home hours before bedtime.

Hence the modern prevalence of “second generation” alcopops – drinks such as WKD, heavily advertised, quirkily coloured vodka mixes, and vodka itself, a cheap, easily made spirit hyped by packaging and a hefty dose of prime-time telly.

If the government and the antidrinking nannies were serious about hitting binge drinking they would ban all alcohol advertising – listen to the television companies squeal! – restoring a level playing field for the small producers of traditional ales.

An acquaintance of mine, a retirement-age senior partner in a Midlands accountancy firm, boasts of never going out to the pub as if it is a sign of social advancement from his working-class roots to prefer to “sit at home of an evening with a glass of wine”. Snobbery, as ever, the telling British vice.

Yet not at the top. Young’s brewery still treasures its photograph of the Queen Mother pulling a pint. Prince Charles’s “the pub is the hub” campaign was right on message. It’s just a pity that the poor bloke rarely gets the chance to go down his local: most of his other ideas are the sort of thing you hear people come up with all the time after a couple of pints.

British beer and the British pub are joined at the hip, intermingled like no other alcoholic combination. British ale bought in a bottle is a fine but different product from cask ale drunk in a pub. Traditional real ale is a labour-intensive artisanal drink made with natural products and producing a rich range of flavours.

My local, the Pear Tree in Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, is blessed by being owned by the village’s brewery 150 yards away – which still delivers locally by horse-drawn dray – but we are well aware how lucky we are and terrified that we might be living on borrowed time.

Regulars include a jobbing gardener, a carpenter with a degree in earth sciences, the drayman who looks after the brewery horses, a nursery school teacher, a builder, a software writer, an optician, a lorry driver and one of the brainiest blokes I know who refills cigarette machines. Very few of us would know each other if it weren’t for the pub.

So stop reading this and get down to your local. Buy a pint. Talk to somebody, get a life and save a British institution.

Your country needs you!

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