Let there be no moaning at the bar...
says Andrew Varley

The class war is over, said Tony Blair at the Labour Party Conference, and there is little doubt about who won. The pubs of Great Britain once neatly defined their customers' position on the social scale by a subtly graded hierarchy of bars.

Nowadays, the victory of the liberal middle class is proclaimed by relentlessly egalitarian toping.

According to a survey by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), the public bar is fast disappearing. Camra does not share the Prime Minister's triumphalism but blames the decline on the brewers' search for increased profit rather than on the end of the class war.

One of the factors in this change is praised by the campaign. Pubs now cater for families much more than in the past and have abandoned the smoke-filled, spit and sawdust image. Nevertheless, Camra says that some pubs risk alienating customers by effectively barring those wearing manual workers' clothes. Soft drinks bring as much profit as pints of mild.

More than 4,600 pubs in England, Wales, and Scotland were surveyed in the latest Good Beer Guide. In Greater London, it emerges, only 12 per cent of pubs have a public bar and of the 32 most central alehouses, where the beer was of a standard to gain an entry in the Guide, none had a public bar. In Scotland and Wales 36 per cent and in the English west midlands 32 per cent of pubs still had one. Other results were 28 per cent in the east midlands, 26 per cent in the north-west, 22 per cent in the north east, 21 per cent in Yorkshire and the south-east, and 19 per cent in east Anglia and the south-west.

Roger Protz, the editor of the Good Beer Guide, said that the decline had "nothing to do with brewers or pub owners wanting to see stevedores rubbing shoulders with stockbrokers, and everything to do with maximising profits".

Opening up the interiors of pubs into one bar meant that landlords could charge saloon bar prices. Mr Protz is, of course, primarily concerned with the quality of beer and with its traditional method of production, but he puts his finger on one of the main problems with the retail of alcohol at the moment. Whilst all businesses quite rightly operate to make money, the brewers seem willing to sacrifice everything to this motive. Pubs have often served wider purposes than drinking and, when embedded in the community, performed useful social functions of control. Changing drinking patterns have put an end to this. By far the greatest customer group nowadays consists of young people under 30 and the habit of bingeing is encouraged by the lamentable growth of the theme pub, happy hours, and other gimmicks (see "What's in a name?", Alert Issue 1, 1999).

The youth angle is not lost on Mr Protz. He says that the problems are made worse by so many bars aiming at young people's custom - bars where anyone above 25 was made to feel unwelcome, or, at best, geriatric. "Pub is short for public house," he said. "All sections of the public should be made to feel welcome. Brewers should preserve public bars for those who wear working clothes or who want to sup a pint of mild a few pennies cheaper than the beers in the lounge."

The Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association suggested that the days when "working class steelworkers went into one bar, and toffs into another" were over. "There is a much more egalitarian atmosphere now," said its spokesman, Tim Hampson, disingenuously. "People want to go in family groups, or have a meal. That cuts across the idea of separate bars." However, Mr Hampson pointed out that anyone "looking for a public bar won't have to walk past too many pubs to find what they are looking for. The notion that, every time a pub is refurbished, it is gutted and turned into a one bar pub, is quite wrong."

Whatever the protestations of the brewers, the traditional pub will disappear forever if the drive for profit dictates.