I love pubs. I am, like my dad, a pub person. This is a state of mind, not a measure of alcoholism. I love specific pubs – my local, the ones I always frequent on holiday in Norfolk or visiting my sister in Devon, the one near my friend who is never in when she says she’ll be and so I have to have a place to wait – and I love pubs generally.

I love the peace you find when you go at peaceful times, like mid-afternoon on a weekday, and I love the crescendo of noise and activity that builds every evening and that culminates in Friday and Saturday night chaos. (I don’t then, obviously. I stick to m’quiet afternoons nursing a bitter lemon, though I do still ramp to a half of shandy or cider as the week wears on. I mean I love the fact that the rhythm of pub life exists so reliably that you can confidently play in and out of it as dictated by your age, relationship status and/or extroversion).

I love that on Saturdays and Sundays beer gardens fill with families and that by Sunday night they have emptied and the bar has become a haven for quiet drinkers once more and the cycle will begin anew.

It is clearly non-pub persons, however, who have proposed new rules to minimise “vertical drinking” – ie standing up to have a drink. You can see the divergence in thinking and approach already. This is not “vertical drinking”. This is “drinking”. It is from this standard that all other booze consumption in a pub deviates. “Shall we sit down?” is the question pubgoers ask each other. Not “Shall we stand up?” Now, most people prefer to sit and do. That is not the point.

The point is that interfering in the ability of people to make that choice is to interfere with much, much more than their centre of gravity while quaffing ale or imbibing the grape. It is to interfere with centuries of tradition and to stomp with clodhoppers over a delicate ecosystem. Does this ever end well? No, it does not.

Westminster Council’s draft plans for its new licensing policy suggest that future applicants should aim for “a predominantly seated operation with fixed seating”, waiter service, and restrictions on alcohol consumption while standing. Such was the uproar when the news broke that the council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for growth and planning, Tim Barnes, was forced to assure the public that there is no plan to ban the practice – the draft “is simply about encouraging venues to manage their customers so people don’t pack onto pavements or excessive drinking doesn’t disturb others passing by.”

Again, this is to misunderstand the people the council is supposed to represent. Overall, Britons are Pub People. We don’t mind stepping round the people who have spilled out onto the pavement on a warm summer’s evening (God knows, apart from this year those balmy times are few enough) because we know we’ll be one of the crowd soon enough.

Maybe not here, maybe not today, but soon. Yes, there can be drunken trouble (though I suspect this comes more from people who have loaded up at home and then come out looking for semi-violent entertainment than from pubgoers, especially at West End prices). But there is much more gained in the process of people enjoying themselves, being seen to enjoy themselves, in the air of camaraderie that emanates from a pub and its pavement drinkers than there is lost by the odd – and ineradicable, unless you ban the sale of alcohol everywhere – outbreak of unpleasantness.

On the flipside is how much is lost when bureaucrats overstep their bounds. Trust. Trust is what is lost. When HMRC, for example, as it recently did, begins to make noises about pursuing people who have tiny side hustles making cakes and so on for fellow villagers and roundabout, this does not add a welcome injection of cash into the nation’s coffers.

It creates a surge in animosity and resentment of an institution of which no one is overfond to begin with. See too every story about the police spending months looking into a penny-ante claim of harassment or “hate speech” while nearly three quarters of burglary investigations are closed without a suspect being identified, and predators seem to have licence to roam free because they’re so difficult to prosecute. It erodes the fragile but precious willingness to believe that those in charge do, ultimately, have our best interests at heart.

So too does trying to reconfigure a subculture so that you can control something that doesn’t really need controlling. It reinforces the idea that “They” – the government, authority, unseen influences – are against “Us” and serving only themselves. If people see only a harm being done to their way of daily life, the natural question to ask is – who benefits?

And in answer to that question, people can rush all manner of unhelpful suggestions. Conspiracy theories about which religion or demographic doesn’t like drinking culture. Corporate corruption – it’s the property owners of Soho bribing officials into cleaning up London and making it just a bland, shiny playground for rich men! A general assault on our rights and freedoms! Up the Magna Carta!

And after that, of course, unsavoury politicians and rabble-rousers can move in and appeal to the newly grievance-stricken, and garner further support of the kind that will do none of us any good in the end. God, I need a drink. Mine’s a double, propped against the bar.